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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
July 5. Last night was the annual blow shit up holiday, and I wonder, what is it about humans that they can never get enough stimulus? If there's reincarnation, in my next life I'd like to be a tuft of bunchgrass in an obscure canyon, just to get a rest.
Related, from the New Yorker, The Case Against Travel
And a good Reddit thread, What is something that has massively improved your mental health?
July 3. This blog has not been a high priority for me lately. I've been putting more mental energy into writing fiction, making music playlists, making custom spirits for Spirit Island, and what I'm going to call "altered state of consciousness exercises".
The other day I picked up the classic 1969 book Altered States of Consciousness, and opened to a section on meditation. Everyone knows that you're supposed to "be here now". But be here now with what? A suggestion was to be here now with whatever you turn your attention to, when someone asks "How are you?"
If you succeed in being present, you can ask yourself this question: What's more troubling? That this moment will be completely forgotten? Or that it will never be forgotten? I'm sure people will answer both ways. The point is that it has to be one or the other, and neither one is something we go around thinking. And either one, if taken as true, will bring your mind into the present moment, whether to appreciate it before it slips away, or because you don't want to look bad in the Akashic records.
June 29. Stray links. A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past
Place Mushrooms in Sunlight to Get Your Vitamin D
The Cloud Appreciation Society
And since we're halfway through the year, this is my favorite song of 2023 so far, and it's more chill than most of what I listen to: Beach House - Holiday House
June 26. On a tangent from last week's subject, I mentioned trying to change my mental state by pretending I'm in a video game. This raises the question: Why do video games feel better than normal life?
I can think of four reasons, and I'll list them in order of increasing difficulty of getting over them.
First is novelty. Getting over novelty is inevitable, and happens with all technologies. Radio was magical when it was new, and now it's mostly boring.
Second is that games have flashier quests. Killing zombies to save the world is more interesting than walking to the store to buy cilantro. But appreciating life's little quests is something we can practice and get better at. And they're usually less stressful.
Third is a denser reward structure. In a game, you're constantly unlocking benefits and upgrades, or at least getting a clear message that you've done something right. How often does this happen in real life? I think this is why people get obsessed with money, because money is a quantitative reward that's at least sort of related to the quality of your actions.
Finally, I don't see any way to get over the fact that games are much easier. How long does it take, in a game, before you understand how stuff works and you feel like you know what you're doing? Minutes for an easy game, and maybe a few weeks for a hard game. In life, even after decades, you're still unlocking new levels of your own incompetence.
This why a good answer to "What is the meaning of life?" is learning. Unlike being happy, learning is something you always have plenty of room to do.
June 25. Don't usually post on Sunday, but I want to polish off the meditation/enlightenment subject with this comment from unwashed mendicant, condensed from a longer email:
Awakening or Buddha-mind isn't some mystical force, esoteric knowledge, or way of beating your mind into submission. Have you ever had a friend come to you with a problem, and you realize it's so fucking simple and obvious, but you know they wouldn't listen even if you told them, so you just keep quiet? It's like that. It's like someone tells you a joke, and you laugh at first but then on your way home you realize the real punch line you laugh so hard you crash your car.
You still think awakening will give you super powers. It's more like learning you've been wearing your shoes backwards the whole time. Except sometimes you forget and you put your shoes on backwards again so you have to remind yourself.
But also once you open the box you can't get mad at anybody or even yourself anymore, because you realize on an intuitive gut instinctual level rather than a cerebral one that you, your best friend, your worst enemy, Miles Davis, Donald Trump, the sun, chocolate cake, and orgasms are all corn kernels in the same dog shit, indivisible and united for all eternity.
June 23. Some nice feedback from the last post, including a recommendation of the Stream Entry subreddit, and from Chris, this comment:
I have been meditating 15 minutes most mornings now for the past couple months, and I have to say I think I finally "get it". It's not about beating my mind into silent submission. It's about cultivating patience with my own hectic thoughts, strengthening the muscle by which I calmly return to a place of intentional equanimity when I notice my mind going astray. And then, just as you say, I carry this muscle with me into the world.
Also, I did three posts on this subject two years ago. And earlier this year I wrote this:
"Mindfulness", broadly defined, serves at least two goals -- and the same goals are served by psychedelics: mental health, and understanding the mysteries of creation. The second actually works against the first. If you seek esoteric knowledge without a firm grounding in mental health, you're asking for trouble.
For me, knowing the true nature of reality is like having a billion dollars. While it sounds exciting, that's a lot of responsibility for something I might not actually enjoy. What I really want is less anxiety and more motivation. I'd like to glide smoothly through life instead of using force of will to drag myself around. And I'm making slow progress through the practice of centering myself in the present moment as I go through the day. My goal is to go an entire day without doing anything clumsy, and if I can do that, my next goal will be to go an entire day without forgetting where I put something down.
New subject. The latest Whippet has some good stuff, including why ghosts wear sheets, a fun story about "shrimps is bugs" tattoos, and a discussion of the Oxford comma. I didn't know this, but anti-Oxford comma is a strawman. Personally, I ignore rules and treat every sentence as its own puzzle, where the goal is smooth diction and clear communication. Lately, I've even started to like comma splices, I just did one and it's absolutely incorrect, but sometimes it flows better than a period or semicolon.
June 21. I've been critical of normal "meditation", in which you sit still, focus on your breath, and attempt to empty your mind of thoughts. If I spend half an hour playing piano, not only do I have a good time, but I make clear progress in whatever little thing I'm working on. Not so with meditation, a tedious chore with no obvious benefit. But I've come to appreciate a subtle benefit, which is that I become nicer at correcting myself.
As a beginner, you're not going to go three seconds with a blank mind, before you slip back into thinking again. Maybe it takes another three seconds to notice and try again. Do the math: that's ten times a minute, or 300 times in half an hour, that you're correcting yourself. It's impossible to get mad at yourself that much. Inevitably, you're going to learn to re-center yourself without making such a fuss. And this is going to rub off on all kinds of other things, not only mistakes you make, but annoying things the world does, like pop-up windows and traffic lights.
Surely some Buddhist already said this a thousand years ago: Paradoxically, the less talented you are at meditating, the faster you learn the skill that's actually useful.
I've said that "enlightenment" is not a thing, but a word that points to many different things, none of which is that impressive by itself. But suppose there is one big thing, that's not too far from what people imagine the word means. Mike Snider has compared it to seeing a magic eye image, where all of a sudden, all of reality reveals a hidden dimension.
I imagine it's similar to a mental state I can achieve by vaping a bit of weed, putting a good playlist on headphones, and going for a walk. This moment, and every mundane detail in it, feels charged with meaning. It's like I'm the POV of a video, or this is the scene that plays over the closing credits of my life.
So I try all kinds of tricks to achieve that mental state sober, and completely fail, but the process is still interesting. I pretend that I'm in a video game, or that I've just noticed I'm dreaming, or that I'm some kind of dimension-shifting traveler, and my normal neighborhood is actually a strange world I've just popped into.
June 19. Today, some cool science. Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes. Either cosmic rays are somehow causing earthquakes, or when Earth is getting ready to have a quake, its magnetic fields change, changing the cosmic rays detected on the ground. Either way, this is a robust correlation whose causal mechanism has yet to be filled in. Lots more discussion in the Hacker News thread.
Landmark study challenges century-old neuroscience paradigm: Brain shape might trump connectivity. "In other words, ripples in a pond may be a more appropriate analogy for large-scale brain function than a telecommunication network." I wonder if this has something to do with the mysteries of musical taste, or misophonia. Something comes in your ear, gets turned into brainwaves, and bounces around in just the right or wrong way.
Related: Scientists Say A Mind-Bending Rhythm In The Brain Can Act Like Ketamine. For now, this trick requires electricity to be applied inside the brain, so it will be a while before it's available to the general public.
June 15. Continuing from yesterday, I got a few replies about why people might keep wanting more money. What it comes down to is, at every level of wealth, there's always some new comfort or benefit available, and then it's easy to feel like you need it.
And it occurs to me, these are also reasons that an unconditional basic income would not lead to a nation of people moping by on the minimum. It's just a more honest and efficient safety net. And the knowledge that you could get by on the UBI would lead to more risk-taking, and a more interesting economy.
On the subject of a million dollars not being enough, Cormac McCarthy wrote his best novel on a fellowship of $236,000. I think there are thousands of people out there, maybe millions globally, who could produce something equally good if they were able to give all their time to it.
One more note on McCarthy. I wrote this in 2008 about the ecology of The Road:
It's important to remember that he's not trying to be realistic. Just as some authors write about wizards and elves, and some authors write about faster-than-light spaceships, McCarthy writes about hard men walking bleak landscapes where strangers are likely to kill them. In The Road, he has pushed bleakness into the realm of fantasy by creating a world where nothing at all lives but his two protagonists and the dying or murderous humans they encounter.
In reality, if there are dead trees, there will be grubs and insects eating the wood, and if there are dead humans, or living humans leaving shit, there will be flies, and if there are insects, there will be birds eating them, and feral cats eating the birds, and coyotes eating the cats. If there is enough sunlight to scan distant cities with binoculars, there will be enough for plants adapted to living in dense forests. There will be mosses, lichens, beetles, earthworms, and crows. McCarthy has excluded all these creatures for purely literary reasons.
June 14. On a quick loose end from yesterday, both Erik and Matt mention Cory Doctorow's concept of Enshittification. That's an essay from earlier this year where he goes in painful detail through the whole process of how money ruins platforms. Matt summarizes, that it "isn't just the result of extractive capitalism, but a middle-man business model in which tech companies create chokepoints between customers and content creators -- whether the creators are musicians or journalists or advertisers."
I'm still more interested in the psychological angle. Why don't these middlemen retire on their first million and chill out, like I would? Where does the mental state come from, that no matter how much money they have, they're not satisfied? I don't know, but I think the cure is to practice appreciating every moment, and that's something we can all work on.
By the way, Cormac McCarthy has died, and I'm not a fan of his bleak and violent world-view, but wow is he a good stylist. Above is my favorite sentence from his best book.
June 13. So much for taking a week off from blogging. This morning I woke up early, full of words about the death of Reddit. Actually, when this all blows over, Reddit will go on to make a lot of money for people who already have a lot of money, while being an increasingly unsatisfying platform for its users.
Orin comments: "I'm unaware of a 'solution' to this sort of trend where online communities get eaten by... capitalism?"
I think capitalism is the right word. Reddit is preparing itself to go public, to go on the stock market, and everyone knows that stocks do better when the business model is indifferent to the user experience, safely top-down, and in the case of tech stocks, set up to maximize data harvesting. For financial reasons, Reddit has to force users onto its own clunky app, even if that means half the users quit, because the half who stay will do their jobs to keep the system working properly. We're taking longer to get there, but the result is the same as Soviet communism: citizens trudging cynically through their duties.
I don't think this is some kind of natural cycle, like the aging of organisms or the change of the seasons. Google and Amazon and Reddit aren't doomed to become evil -- they become evil without being doomed, through completely optional tragedies of human error. The main error is optimizing systems for the leveraging of power into more power, rather than for human well-being.
Taking a step back, what is it that makes people who already have enough, want more? Personally, if I had the choice of getting half a million dollars, or a billion dollars, I'd take half a million, because I don't want the responsibility, the lifestyle, or the power over others that comes with a billion dollars.
Some people say they're trying to fill the emptiness inside. I don't know what they're talking about. I have exactly the opposite problem: trying to empty the fullness outside -- seeking shelter from the outside world's exhausting barrage of demands on my attention. Now I'm going to go take a nap.
June 11. I was already planning to take a week off from blogging. Conveniently, this coincides with the Reddit blackout. That's the explanation on the ELI5 subreddit, and here's the explanation on my favorite subreddit recently, Ask Old People.
I use Reddit through Firefox on my laptop, but a lot of people use it through phone apps, including independent apps that work better in many ways than the official Reddit app. From ELI5: "Third Party Apps or TPAs have been on reddit for a decade. Reddit gave them 30 days notice of the introduction of a pricing structure set so high no one can afford it."
In protest, many subreddits are either going private or preventing new posts, as of tomorrow. This page, Reddark, is keeping track of them. If the mods of r/ranprieur choose to participate, I support that. And if Reddit doesn't back off from this policy, I might stop using it. This reminds me of the Digg debacle, when they made sweeping interface changes that killed Digg and sent everyone to Reddit. But this time, there's nowhere for people to go, except off the internet, which is probably a good idea.
June 9. For the weekend, drugs and music. This psychedelic cryptography contest challenged people to make videos with a message that can only be seen if you're tripping. All three winners work by using tracers, the visual phenomenon where you keep seeing something for a moment after it's gone.
The Subjective Effect Index "is a set of articles designed to serve as a comprehensive catalogue and reference for the range of subjective effects that may occur under the influence of psychoactive substances and other psychonautic techniques."
And a cool Reddit thread, What can you do better when you're high?
I knew if I kept saying that there has not been one great song on the Billboard hot 100 in this century, one would turn up. Peaking at number 39 (and number 1 in UK singles), an absolute banger from 2008, The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name.
I continue to tweak my Spotify playlists, and I've added two similar songs to my already too long 2010s playlist, Stealing Sheep - Shut Eye and one that's not on Spotify, Cat's Eyes - Face in the Crowd.
June 7. A few psychology links. Helplessness Is Not Learned. There have been a lot of experiments that seem to show learned helplessness, but neuroscience has discovered that helplessness is actually the default. Whatever it is, your brain starts with the assumption that you can't do anything about it, and then learns the sense that you can do something about it.
The top comment in the Hacker News thread is about learning that you can control the clutter in your home. But I'm thinking about the opposite: things that stress us out because we feel like we should do something about them, when we have basically zero influence. This includes everything ever covered on TV news.
Artists must be allowed to make bad work, a short blog post arguing that social media is harmful for creative work, because everything people do is in the public eye, and they're afraid to take risks.
The Proteus effect "describes a phenomenon in which the behavior of an individual, within virtual worlds, is changed by the characteristics of their avatar." The obvious direction to go with this, is that our behavior in the physical world is also heavily influenced by what we look like, and what behavior other people expect from someone who looks like that. So, if someone changes their look, it's probably because they want to act like that kind of person would act, and it's easier if they look like that.
June 5. Good news links. Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
A paywalled article about Mississippi schools. Through a set of reforms, they've gone from worst in the nation to above average.
Two PubMed science articles. Ariadne is a non-hallucinogenic analog in the phenylalkylamine chemical class of psychedelics, so it has the therapeutic effects of a good psychedelic, but you don't trip. Personally, I'd rather get the therapeutic effects and also trip.
A Simple Exercise to Eliminate Gastroesophageal Reflux: practice swallowing upside down.
And a thread from Ask Old People, What's a food that was common when you were growing up but you see rarely if ever nowadays? Some of these are good, but most of them are terrible: chicken ala king, jello with marshmallows, chop suey, salisbury steak tv dinners. So this is one way the world is getting better.
June 1. Stray links, starting with doom. Microplastics are falling from the sky. "The predicted downpour will range between 40 and 48 kilograms (88 and 106 pounds) of free-floating plastic bits blanketing greater Paris every 24 hours." Inevitably something will evolve to eat this, but it may take a million years without our help. The sci-fi scenario is that we bioengineer something to eat microplastics and it also eats plastics that we like.
'Farming good, factory bad', a belief that George Monbiot disagrees with, arguing that "storybook farming" cannot feed the world without terrible ecological destruction. Permaculturists would surely argue that super-intensive farming would still work, but Monbiot's solution might be more realistic: "a shift from farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) to farming unicellular creatures (microbes)."
Good news on urban design, Federal Zoning Bill Would Preempt Local Parking Mandates, and another article on the same subject, This little-known rule shapes parking in America. The rule is that new construction has to have a certain amount of parking. Killing that rule is something both the right and left can get behind, the right because then property owners can do whatever they want, and the left because what they usually want is less parking, which leads to denser and more walkable neighborhoods.
Something fun for the weekend, The Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movies of the 1970s, where underrated means not Star Wars. I've seen more than half of these movies, and this article is right on about how interesting they are, despite their flaws or because of their flaws.
And a ridiculous goal by my favorite footballer, Morgan Weaver. The bigger the moment, the better she performs, and she'll eventually be a key player on the national team.