Ran Prieur

October 30.

2023-10-30T18:20:09Z

October 30. Three links about doing nothing. The Joy Of Being A Spiritual Loser is a video about how the modern values of productivity and striving have influenced spiritual practices that are supposed to be about relaxing and letting go.

A blog post, Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom.

And an article about desert island tourism, which sounds like a lot of work and money to get something you could get for free, a quarter mile off the highway in any national forest. People sometimes ask me about Chris McCandless, and while I like the general idea of what he was trying to do, he could have just done it in Montana or something. It was the culture of striving, which he failed to escape, that drove him so deep into Alaska that he couldn't go for help.

On a related subject, I've been thinking about the question: What do Americans boast about? We never boast about being rich, unless it's in the context of boasting about how much poverty we climbed out of. And we don't boast about luck -- if someone says they're lucky, they're being modest, saying their success did not come from being better than other people. I think luck is a real thing that can be cultivated, but when Americans say "I make my own luck," they mean something completely different: that they don't believe in luck so they succeed through hard work.

"Hard work" is the main thing Americans boast about. But who counts as a hard worker? A CEO who does nothing all day but make snap decisions? A fanfic author who puts in a lot of hours for a tiny audience and no money? Surely a full-time janitor is a hard worker. How about someone who spends the same amount of time cleaning stuff, but unobserved and unpaid? What about a chain gang worker, also unpaid, who breaks the biggest rocks? Who's a harder worker, someone who works in a munitions factory, or someone who puts in the same hours building bombs in their garage?

People will answer these questions differently. But I think the general consensus is that "hard work" is a social activity, a performance of obedience to the dominant system.

Another thing Americans boast about is self-discipline, by which they mean internalizing the dominator. "When I was a kid, parents and teachers forced me to do stuff I didn't feel like doing. Now that I'm grown up, I force myself to do stuff I don't feel like doing." I mean, this is a necessary skill to not end up a homeless addict. But I don't think it's something to be proud of, I think it's a tragedy. There are eight million species in the world and only one has this problem, and only recently.

October 25.

2023-10-25T13:30:41Z

October 25. Continuing on the lack of voluntary mutual aid groups, Devon writes:

I grew up Seventh-day Adventist, a Protestant religion that is more organized than a lot of other denominations.... I can go to almost any church in any state and find someone who has a mutual friend or knows some of the same people I do. Even if I don't find anyone with a mutual acquaintance, I can generally get a free meal, place to stay for the night, help if I needed it.

And Adam writes:

I've been a sober AA member for about eight years, and exactly what you described is a major facet of the program's culture.... I find attending an AA meeting in another location I am visiting to be my favorite experience on trips. The fact that I am an AA gets me immediate welcome in any meeting anywhere. On my recent visit to Ireland, I went to a meeting and was treated like a special guest by strangers. The cool thing to experience is the immediate "tribal" recognition and welcome you get or give, and this transcends so many other cultural or socioeconomic differences that typically separate people.

It's interesting that both of these groups encourage belief in a higher power. I'm reminded of this post from 2019, and the posts that follow, where I wonder why there are no secular monasteries, and grapple with the definition of religion.

The word "religion" points to a lot of different things, and I'm increasingly thinking that one of them is important for our mental health: to see reality as something other than selfish rational agents in a meaningless physical universe. "Secular" is not a clean neutral ground, but an active way of thinking that can be bad for us.

Two books I'm reading right now that are helping me on this subject, and are surprisingly similar despite coming from completely different angles: Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and Physics as Metaphor by Roger S. Jones.

October 23.

2023-10-23T23:10:20Z

October 23. Continuing from last week, Matt comments:

I'm sure a lot of communes have failed simply because they try to be all things to all people in some fixed location, and it's rare for humans to meet all their needs through a single community and/or place.

Which made me think about Indigenous Americans and clans. I don't know a lot about the clan system, but I know clans extended beyond tribes and nations. So you could leave your tribe, and maybe nation, and find someone else belonging to the same clan -- and bond with them through that affiliation.

This reminds me of something I read in a zine in the 90s, where a young traveler explained why she dressed like a punk, because anywhere she went, other punks might give her a ride or a place to stay; but if she dressed normally, normal people would not help her.

I wonder if there's anything like that now, where a chosen identity will get you help from strangers. There are immigrant communities, and also communities based on race and gender, but all of those are like tribe/nation, something you're born into, and not something you can choose. I think this lack of voluntary mutual aid groups is peculiar to this fragmented time, and one way or another, there will be more of them.

October 20.

2023-10-20T20:40:13Z

October 20. Picking up from the last post, it's an interesting question: Our ancestors got all their needs from the local environment for a quarter of a million years, or four billion if you count nonhumans. If we're so much better than them, with all our technology, why can't we do it?

One reason is the landbase. They were nomadic, or lived in extremely fertile areas. Now the land is depleted and carved up, and we're stuck on whatever sketchy acreage we can afford to buy.

At first I was thinking that tribes work better than individuals, and certainly there's less risk with more people. But whatever you think the optimal tribe size is, you can find a back-to-the-land commune of exactly that size that failed. And from the other side, a fascinating article on feral children.

This is a clue to the main reason we can't do it. Humans are extremely adaptable at birth, not so much later, and now we're all adapted for modern society. It's not just that we lack technical survival skills, or that we expect certain comforts. Our whole way of being is tuned to modern living, which is why when we go "back to the land", through a series of completely reasonable decisions, we end up basically as remote suburbanites.

October 18.

2023-10-18T18:20:16Z

October 18. This blog is definitely slowing down, but today I have a rant on progress. I was reading an article arguing that climate change is not that bad, because it will only slightly reduce global GNP per capita. Of all the ways that human quality of life is commonly measured, nothing is dumber than measuring the amount of money flying around. If you want to read the best thinking on this subject, check out Tools for Conviviality or Toward a History of Needs by Ivan Illich.

Imagine you're living in a little house you built yourself, drinking water out of a stream, and you've got some fruit trees and a garden that provide all your food. Don't actually do this -- for complicated reasons, homesteading is really hard. But we all have ancestors who lived happily on zero money. And then someone comes along and dams the stream and sells you the water in bottles refined from oil drilled by wrecking your garden. Your trees are cut into lumber, you have to work in a terrible factory to survive -- and every one of these changes grows the money economy, by gobbling up stuff formerly outside the money economy.

This is the history of colonialism everywhere. It's true that rising GDP is good for the third world. But before people can be made happy by money, they first have to be made miserable by destroying their ability to live without money.

Money is not the root of all evil. Extending the metaphor, if there is a tree of all evil, its roots go much deeper. But money is definitely on that tree. It's a way to make people do stuff they would not do except for the money, which they turn around and spend to make other people do stuff they would not do except for the money, in a giant global carnival of extrinsic reward.

The world is currently going to hell, unseen by economists, because the void in intrinsic reward is being filled by tribalism and opioids. I should also say, my life is really good right now. But I understand that this is because of luck, and if tomorrow I get caught up in some disaster, I'll know why.

October 13.

2023-10-13T13:30:44Z

October 13. A few notes from Port Townsend. The other night we went to see our first theater movie since before Covid, and there's a common assumption that the main difference between theater and home is the size of the screen. Personally, if the movie is any good I get so absorbed that I lose track of the context. I think the main difference, by far, is that a theater movie can't be paused. That gives the show an element of ritual and makes it more immersive.

Today we went on a whale watch cruise, a three hour tour on Friday the 13th with a new captain on his first run. I was so disappointed that we didn't end up on Gilligan's island. Anyway, when we found the whales, there were several other boats gathered around, maybe 200 humans who paid a lot to watch five orcas cavort. We've come a long way in a short time from when humans would be trying to kill or capture the whales.

At the same time, the local islands were packed with houses so new that the streets didn't show up on google maps. While human ecological consciousness is higher than ever, so is our ecological footprint.

A phrase I hear a lot lately is "retail therapy". For me that means, spending money is so painful that I have to think about my own death to make it tolerable. I think about the Hieronymus Bosch painting, Death and the Miser, and the Talking Heads line, "Into the blue again, after the money's gone".

October 8.

2023-10-08T20:40:34Z

October 8. This week I'll be in Port Townsend without my laptop, so little or no posting. I wrote this before, but can't find it in the archives, a thought about cults. Post-apocalypse fiction is full of cults, as if the ruins of a complex society are fertile ground for charismatic leaders and fanatical followers with crazy beliefs.

That fertile ground is right now, during a still-standing complex society that is losing the ability to motivate its citizens. Fanaticism fills the void of meaning. If a society gets to the point where it can't feed its citizens, that's worse, but the dangerous groups will be less culty and more pragmatic, less wild-eyed and more steely-eyed.

New subject: What Plants Are Saying About Us, a careful argument that plants are intelligent without brains:

If cognition is embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, and ecological, then what we call the mind is not in the brain. It is the body's active engagement with the world, made not of neural firings alone but of sensorimotor loops that run through the brain, body, and environment. In other words, the mind is not in the head.
...
"Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness -- those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It's the whole organism that's conscious, not the brain that's conscious. It's the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it's not the location of it."

October 5.

2023-10-05T17:10:57Z

October 5. When something is too hard, the obvious move is to make it easier. But sometimes it works to make it harder, if that difficulty unlocks your magic powers.

Every couple weeks I bicycle up Pine Street, from downtown to the top of Capitol Hill, to get groceries. Because my bike is a singlepeed, and I'm not athletic, I only ride it up the least steep streets, and otherwise push it.

On top of that, now I've got a sore quadriceps tendon, the thingy just above your kneecap. To not re-injure it, I can't put any weight on my right leg when it's more than a little bent. (We're all more than a little bent.) On a bicycle, that means my right leg is only good for one shove at the bottom of each stroke, while my left leg has to work twice as hard. It turns out, exactly twice as hard, because yesterday I rode up steeper streets than before the injury.

Back to my favorite subject lately, better living through altered states of consciousness, another thread on r/psychonaut, What was the most profound insight you learned on psychedelics that helped you in your life? Lots of good stuff, including a surprising interpretation of "life is the trip": that the things you do to make a trip better, like eating well and avoiding stress, are the same things you do to make life better.

Psychonauts are always talking about the importance of love, with little explanation beyond that vague and non-controversial word, and just the word you'd expect from the intersection of feeling good and "we are all one." But this comment by logicalmaniak explains it really well:

Like, what's a game of football? Just humans chasing a bag of air. It's nothing at all. But what's a game of football with your mates? It's communion, bonding, positive competition, fun, and so on. The love makes the not real thing a vehicle for transmitting the real thing.

October 2.

2023-10-02T14:40:26Z

October 2. Not feeling smart this week, or maybe just less interested in words. Here's a fun thread on Ask Old People about Donald Trump in the 80s.

Another negative link, Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave, because it releases microplastics.

Another health link, Individuals drinking 2-3 cups of coffee per day have the lowest risk of depression and anxiety. I wonder about causation vs correlation, because 2-3 cups seems pretty normal, with weird people drinking more or less, and also being more prone to depression and anxiety.

A nice thread on r/psychonaut about talking to plants. I don't see how plants could use language, but I sometimes get a sense that trees are superior beings who only show us a narrow slice of what they really are.

And a thoughtful blog post, It's okay to make something nobody wants. "If everyone made things they really liked, we'd have a lot more cool stuff."