Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

How does one flow through life and not get snagged up with suffering? How is the art of living learnt?

Art is both creative and meaningful. Art is also a continuous process of mastery. Meaning, creativity and mastery are the three interlocking pieces of living the good life. Each piece complements and reinforces the other. 

Broadly speaking meaning, creativity and mastery can be applied to both the mental space and the material space. Perhaps above all what makes a human human, is the ability to think; together we can outsmart any animal with this ability. But this ability can run away with itself and cause us great pains. 

We are also animals however, and our physicality and material space is very important to how we live our lives. We have physical needs such as food, water and a decent place to live and other people - indeed those things can't be neglected or we die. The fear of death is a constant in our lives and is a core part of the art of living. The closer we see ourselves to death, the more suffering we have to endure. Suffering is not there to torment us, but to motivate us to act to remove the cause of the suffering. But it's not a fool proof system. We can be in seeming double binds, unable to act, or we can be immature, not knowing that we can act.

Mastery is closely linked to maturation. By rehearsing, gathering knowledge and experience, refining, we learn how to act in our lives. This gives us freedom to escape many types of suffering, and a confidence that allows us to flow and get what we want. This can happen passively as we get older, by sheer weight of having tried many things over and over again. Mastery can be more active however. We can choose to concentrate our efforts into activities we value. Also, mastery is reflexive: one can master mastery itself. The greatest amount of leverage happens when we master our own minds and when we master our own biology and environment.

What about creativity? You might not think of yourself as creative, but we are all very capable of it. We can constantly generate new ideas and solutions to our suffering. We can also be creative for its own sake and use it as an antidote to mundanity. Life is long and very repetitive, and can be very mundane and uninspiring; there is this inbuilt drive for novelty which is part of the human make up and being blind to it can cause suffering. The process of creativity can also be mastered through practice, and creativity is often need to master something new. Kids creatively play constantly just for the purposes of mastering being adults. Mastery can also take the brakes off creativity, by allowing us to flow and not get stuck in minutiae.

Together creativity and mastery can lead to a meaningful life. By flowing constantly around suffering and avoiding death, that is valuable to us. The things we value in our lives are the things we find meaningful. 

The art of living is to constantly work on all fronts: physical, mental, creative, mastering, finding meaning - and to never let up.

[LastThursday]

Life is matter with a name. Are you alive? Sure. The difference between you and the wind is that the wind doesn't care about death and stillness. Every mote of your being wants to live; on every level and dimension. To live you must know yourself intimately. For if you didn't entropy would soon scatter you to the four corners and you would forget who you were. This knowing of yourself is deep, it's the miracle of your form and your function and your most intimate thoughts.

Look around you at the cactus you nurture, the cat you stroke, the mosquito that bites you. All that aliveness is of the same kind. A cactus yearns for heat and light and water so that it can keep knowing it's a cactus. You are connected directly to that first notion of self knowing that sparked all those billions of years ago. That first knowing has never stopped knowing itself, it became a cactus here, a cat there, you right now. Everything that lives is only one thing: the tendrils of some great unfathomable creature enveloping our home planet. It splits itself off, eats itself and argues with itself.

For matter to know itself it's not enough to be around a long time. A rock formation may have survived the excesses of entropy for a billion years, but that's blind luck. Life knows its extents and constituents and actively maintains them. It must seek matter and energy to constantly replenish its identity, and eschew the parts that are no longer "me". In this way a constant flow and pressure is maintained between itself and everything else both alive and dead. Life is a mirage because it is never static, it is in a constant struggle to keep remembering itself. A creature is not the matter it is made of, but an idea that dynamically sculpts matter and energy to its own ends. Is that idea of self knowing separate from the dead matter it animates?

That billion year old rock formation never got to know itself: it eventually weathered and crumbled to dust and stopped being rock. It didn't care or remember, it constantly forgot who it was moment to moment.

Self knowing requires self correction. When communications are sent they need error correction, or else the static of reality erases the message over time and distance. Our bodies must constantly self repair and flush out broken bits of itself or the toxins that damage the identity of its cells and DNA. It's clear that matter and energy has the ability to correct itself and maintain an identity: it's just a mathematical trick. But the first life had to bootstrap this ability, proto-life was self correcting. To self correct, there must be a self to correct: as soon as matter erased its own errors it acquired a knowing of itself.

Proto-life had to be more than self correcting to become life itself however. Remembering is never perfect. An identity that perfectly maintains itself is not resilient. Entropy is infinitely creative and can't be easily escaped. Proto-life had to adapt to different regimes or risk death by entropy. Once it had an identity and a self, it had to allow itself to change its identity over time. It had to evolve. The result is a cat and a cactus. Change is death, to change from a proto-cell to the spiritual primate you are, life had to die a billion times. The first life had an imperfect sense of self and it still does. That is why you will die. Your body's self correction is imperfect and accumulates errors over a lifetime, until finally entropy has its way. Reproduction is imperfect and is what drives the process of evolution itself.

Imperfect though it is, the act of knowing in itself is perfect. That is why the giant multi-faceted organism that is life persists. Being alive is perfection.

[LastThursday]

I've been listening to new old music. It's a bit like living in a town for years and then discovering an alley you've walked passed a million times, through which lies another part of town undiscovered.

I only know Ultravox from Vienna and Dancing With Tears in their Eyes. I like the energy and of course the familiarity of the sound:

I was just that much too young to investigate music for myself at the time, and getting hold of music was far harder when I was a kid. Cassettes and records (vynyl) it was and radio and TV only for the popular stuff. I didn't get pocket money.

I only know Golden Brown from the Stranglers. But you can hear how good they are, even if it's of its time: I like The European Female, catchy.

 

[LastThursday]

The story of my life:

The guy is hilarious.

[LastThursday]

My dreams can be weird. I had a whole slew of non-sequitur dreams just before I woke up today. In one a demon "baby" had been deliberately trapped in muddy water under some sort of wooden planking, and was creating angry havoc by using telekinesis on people in the vicinity. In another my sister was performing some sort of ritual to exorcise something from within her and it wasn't going to be pretty - I was outta there! I remember distinctly thinking if I was "far away" enough not to be affected by it. In another an artist with very long hair, was trying to sell me her artwork which seemed to comprise of maps, which I was well tempted with. But one of her side projects was making "goodbye" art. She also seemed to be part of an entourage of older erotic artists dressed in black.

Phew.

I like the idea of "goodbye" art. 

There seems to only be a few situations in which we formally say goodbye, and the rest of the time we just wing it, not really knowing what we're doing. In order of severity I can think of funerals, good luck cards and parties when people leave jobs, and just plain saying "goodbye" or "goodnight" to friends or colleagues at the end of the day.

Why even do it? Personally I like to think I've never much been bothered about goodbyes. Either, in the sense of the niceties of saying goodbye, or being able to actually let go. I've always felt that most goodbyes are provisional and in some way a pointless activity. As I've got older so much stuff has passed that having said goodbye to every single one of those things would have been overwhelming - indeed there's still ambiguity over whether some staff has passed or not. When is the right time to say goodbye to people or places that change slowly over time?

And yet, there's something deeply meaningful about saying goodbye and formalising it into some sort of ritual. With a funeral it marks a definite and fairly condensed boundary after which things are different. It's very similar to a wedding except that is a "hello" ceremony. A funeral is about the process of letting go of a whole bunch of stuff associated with someone close to you. Funerals and weddings are also about mutual acceptance and agreement around a new state of affairs. So it appears that saying goodbye, is both about planting a marker to indicate change and a mutual agreement to that fact. Fundamentally it's a psychological exercise. Without it we're left with ambiguity and uncertainty, both of which can cause suffering and perhaps an inability to let go of things that have passed.

I think that we could make goodbyes into an art form. I find good luck cards you give work colleagues a bit crass even if the sentiment is correct. When I say art form, I don't mean a commercialised lowest common denominator art form. Maybe we could create art for ourselves mostly or those close to us and mark the passing of all that stuff that comes and goes in our lives. Art doesn't have to be drawing, but in any media and in any way that suits us at the time. Maybe even it's just a ritual that's done, perhaps marking the end of a day as the sun goes down. Or writing a short goodbye poem about someone you used to love and never let go of.  Perhaps getting friends together and officially marking the fact that I'm no longer young and saying goodbye to youth. 

There are so many things we have to let go of and we ought to let go of. We should get good and comfortable at saying goodbye, and make it into art.

[LastThursday]

I keep having a recurring philosophical thought that bothers me. It goes something like this:

There are an infinity of numbers. What is this infinity? To dumb it down completely, imagine putting down a pair of underwear. Then imagine putting down another pair on top of that, and then another, and then another. Ok you get the picture.

This type of infinity is then actually a process. It is the process of stacking a tower of ever higher underwear. If you ignore the need for a never ending supply of underwear and the need for all that time to do it in, you're left with a process that repeats without end. The process is made of a repeating block, i.e. the action. So what bothers me?

What bothers me is precisely this bit: "Ok you get the picture". This is because it is essentially materially impossible to carry out the task, you have never seen it done nor will you ever see it done. You know there is a finite supply of underwear and your life is finite. So how is it possible to understand what the phrase "Ok you get the picture" is actually referring to? How is it we can imagine a process without end, let alone communicate that fact, when we have never in fact ever seen a process without end?

I don't have a clear answer to the conundrum. If our imaginations are based in material reality, then it shouldn't be possible to talk about anything that carries on indefinitely. And yet we have a word like "indefinitely". Maybe we imagine a process which carries on for a long time and use that as a proxy for infinity? But I don't think that's the case. We all seem to know perfectly well what "do this forever" means and it definitely has a different sense from "do this for a very long time".

Could it be perhaps that we have a native conception of infinity within our imaginations? The more I think about it, the more I lean that way. I don't know if we're generally very conscious that we have it, and it mostly comes out when using language. But I don't think we need language to "access" infinity within our imaginations: it's not a product of language. We can easily imagine stacking underwear forever without talking to ourselves about it!

So that begs the question. If we have infinity natively built in, then does or can that infinity have structure? Or are we only able to grasp a purely platonic conception of infinity stripped of any texture whatsoever? Questions questions. If that infinity were to have structure, then we essentially would be able to create and hold in our imaginations entire universes, in one shot, so to speak. Of course to explore that infinity would take the finite parts of our imaginations an infinite amount of time.

The whole thing really is a Pandora's Box and it bothers me.

Edited September 14, 2023 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

One thing I'm constantly striving for when I do my work is a certain aesthetic quality. For outsiders, coding for computers seems inscrutable, like trying to understand what surgeons are doing with their knives and blood and unrecognizable body parts. Indeed even though us coders share a common language, our own creations can be difficult to digest even for our peers. And mostly, only the surface of our creations ever get exposed, those guts often stay permanently hidden and un-inspected.

You would think that under such circumstances that coding would lend itself to being an anarchic process, in the knowledge that nobody else will ever examine our anarchy. After all, aren't we more prone to mischief when not being watched? And so it can be. Big IT projects are notorious for failing to deliver either on time or at all. If you're unfortunate to have a team of anarchists converge in your organisation, then you're probably doomed. Most coders don't care about aesthetics other than providing lip service to "coding standards". They just want to get the job done and get paid, their mistakes and inadequacies and chaos hidden forever inside a mountain of logic.

I think that once a certain level of mastery is reached in any discipline, one can't help but let beauty into their process. It starts to become jarring to be lax and ugly. That's not say that imperfection is not allowed. Mastery can be about using imperfection to convey "realness" and "character" and even to deliberately play with it. But that is still using imperfection as an aesthetic (and beautiful) device. Rookies are imperfect through ignorance, masters imperfect on purpose.

There are many ways in which code can be beautiful. Like anything else simplicity is often key. Coding has a strong tendency towards chaos and complexity. As ever more things are thrown into the mix, each new thing interacts with every other thing. Like using paragraphs and chapters in a book, code is nearly always split into distinct units, which are then strung together into a working program. But coders are free to compartmentalise their code any way they see fit, and some ways are simpler than others. Often jet engines are designed with many moving parts, where a simple crank handle would suffice - usually to justify time and money spent.

Not everything is simple however. Software can be monolithic and super complex. There's nearly an infinite regress of turtles resting on turtles from what the user sees and interacts with to what the CPU and hardware is actually doing underneath. It's layers and layers of translation from a human-oriented view of the world, to one dominated by electrons imprinted with information. Most coders sit squarely in the middle of all that: they need to be good with both understanding people and what they want, and understanding what computers can actually do. We need to understand it all, and be fluent in all that complexity.

There is a tendency towards subtlety within mastery. If conciseness is simplicity and that is beautiful, then programs written by masters can often look simple but belie their complexity. Even masters have to keep themselves in check when writing code. Computer languages nowadays provide complex operations with very simple lines of code, but sometimes it is more aesthetic and easier to understand to write things out the long way. Showing your working can lend a helping hand to those that have to look at your creation - especially if they are less experienced.

Comprehension in code is a high aesthetic and often overlooked. We coders can have a hard time putting ourselves in others' shoes (it's a common trait), which means we find it difficult to appreciate that those 1000 lines of code need to be understood by others. Often and more importantly, code needs to be understood again by ourselves five years into the future. Sometimes we have to scrap incomprehensible ugly code and start again from scratch. Code can be made easier to read from the start, and code formatting is important and luckily this is largely automated nowadays. More important is consistency of style. Every coder has their own style and foibles; one can often tell who wrote which patch of code. Some coders are undisciplined and chaotic in this respect, without a consistent style. Some (like me) are nearly OCD about how code is presented, even if no-one will ever read it except the one who wrote it.

More important still is being able to understand what a piece of code is actually doing. There are a huge number of algorithms (i.e. recipes) that can and are used in computer programs. For example one such algorithm is to sort a list of words or numbers. A decision often has to be made on whether to use a standard "off the shelf" algorithm or roll your own. Most opt for the latter because it's more flexible and things can be tailored to fit the circumstances - but often the former is the better solution. Coders will write their bespoke algorithms, but not explain themselves at all! Most of the life of a coder is sunk in trying to understand others' bespoke solutions, often without the original coder being available to ask questions of.

My work is cryptic and non-sexy to most people, and even to myself sometimes. But I still strive for some level of beauty and aesthetics and the satisfaction that comes from it.

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Goodbye art. Putting the hay in the horse's mouth (spin an idiom why not?):

 

Your gentleness became part of me,

Your cheeriness my infection,

Kiss kiss secret, became:

Today's introspection.

A hug, a blush,

A funeral,

And another,

Your absence

Forever is my absence.

 

L. I'm so sorry.

[LastThursday]

Sometimes thoughts bubble up and like a dream and if I don't get them down, they can be gone forever. 

The thought was about negative spaces or that's what I've labelled it as. The hole in a doughnut is a negative space, in that case the "negative" space is defined by the "positive" space around it - the body of the doughnut. There are a million more examples of this: the silent pause in a piece of music, the space created by the walls of a room. Ever more esoterically: the solidity created by a mime artist, the absence of a loved one, the structure of the atom, religion. 

There is a sense in which negative space as well as being defined by the positive space around it, is a kind of space of potentiality or possibility. Negative space is also about inference, on which the whole of science sits. Science deals with the positive space of experimentation and the "world out there" and conjures up the negative space of theorems and relationships. We also do science (with a small s) on a day-to-day basis.

We're masters of dealing with negative spaces. We can so strongly believe in negative spaces that it's hard to even realise they are negative spaces, we make them our reality. For example, when we read a novel that is entirely made up of negative space, which we can get lost in. The space in a novel is negative because it is based on the positive space of real people and real places and words written on a page. A novel can't be understood without reference to the positive space of the world around us. In that way, the context of a negative space is always that of the positive space around it.

You're looking at a negative space right now. This is not a person you're looking at, but pixelated glowing letters. But the illusion of negative space is strong. You attribute aliveness and agency to this negative space, by referencing the positive space of people and world around you - it is no different from the example of a novel.

Where do people go when you're not looking at them, when they've gone away from you? They seamlessly slip from positive space into negative space. Their existence has to continue as they transition from one space to another. But the nature of their existence also changes from positive into negative space - we mostly choose to ignore this. Once someone has slipped into negative space, we must infer everything about them and conjure up a story of potentiality on their goings on and lives. Somehow negative spaces are fluid: the negative space of a room can be filled with many different things in many different configurations. Your inference of the negative space of @LastThursday is just this. I inhabit the positive space of Guillermo, but you in turn inhabit a negative space in my experience.

So is negative space just projection? Projection, inference, science, gods, a good story, it's all the same. 

Is there an absolute positive ground for anything? I'd say yes, but it's impossible to get at this ground with the mind. The context for everything is always right there in front of you, that is the positive space, a unified unbroken whole. But all the rules and structure of reality create negative spaces in which we inhabit. Even the very walls of the room are made of negative space, defined in relation to other walls and our ideas of what a wall is and should do: is a window a wall?

Should I prefer doughtnuts with holes in or jam? Hmm...

 

To get at the positive space of me, read the above with this music:

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I feel kind of listless today. It's some combination of cabin fever (I work from home), not wanting to work (I haven't and the morning's nearly over), mildly sleep deprived (my sleep pattern has been drifting ever later), wanting to be anywhere but here and now, wanting to be someone else. It's making me feel combative and unable to put up with bullshit. It'll pass.

I have a fantasy sometimes of being washed up on a desert island. The surroundings are beautiful, the sand soft, the weather clement. I learn to be self-sufficient, use my hands and body and wits to survive. There's plenty enough food. Sometimes the fantasy is to be alone, sometimes to share it with one other in some sort of adventurous beautiful union. I'd probably be the sort to go insane without realising it if I were by myself, I like solitude, but it doesn't like me.

Part of the appeal is the shedding of all the weight of "stuff" in my life. So much stuff is needed to just stay alive, and to be some semblance of happy. I've always had a minimalist perspective on life, enthralled by the small but useful; the simple things. The problem with stuff is that it requires keeping track of, curating, thinking about, emotional investment and all that attachment. And so it is with people I find also. The introvert in me finds it all very tiresome.

Yet I yearn for connection, and for intimacy, something sorely lacking in my life. The extravert in me is excited by people of all kinds, wanting to be part of a collective for a shared cause, sharing ideas and gratitude. I hear my being calling, but I choose to be deaf to it, for fear of all that it entails: the letting go of certainty, the potential of obligated commitment and the spectre of poverty in all its forms. I want to stop living inside my mind for just a month or a year or more, and just let reality take me over and to be fully connected with it.

Another fantasy I have, is to live in a stone cottage on a dusty hillside, surrounded by orchards. Somewhere mediterranean. I want the smell of the herbs to fill the air, and to stroll out in the warm comforting mornings and suck in the beauty of my surroundings. Again, there's an air of solitude and quietude. And when needed I can call upon friends to gather and celebrate each other, and them me. Not just celebration however, working together, solving problems together, living together.

I can sit and weep, thinking about where my life took wrong turns, and why my life is so disconnected from my fantasies or the vision of what I really want. I do, and I have. I'm listless because of it. I've tasted my collectivist fantasies, been part of a circle of intimate friends, sat on golden beaches all to myself, holidayed in stone cottages, been to orchards and olive groves. Those are all the places my fantasies came from.

But I do know that this period of dessication and disconnection, has moulded me into someone more resilient, self-sufficient and wise. It was tough medicine to swallow, but it's made me nearly well enough to start another phase in my life. I'm listless because I should feel excited that I'm well, but all I feel is apprehension for abandoning the castle of comfort I've built up around me. I know within me, it's not time yet to leave. There's yet more medicine to take before I can do that.

I thankful, I'm grateful.

[MuadDib]

 

On 04/10/2023 at 9:40 PM, LastThursday said:

Another fantasy I have, is to live in a stone cottage on a dusty hillside, surrounded by orchards. Somewhere mediterranean. I want the smell of the herbs to fill the air, and to stroll out in the warm comforting mornings and suck in the beauty of my surroundings. Again, there's an air of solitude and quietude. And when needed I can call upon friends to gather and celebrate each other, and them me. Not just celebration however, working together, solving problems together, living together.

I hope you don't mind me commenting, but a part of me yearns for the Epicurean bro life as well as the Thoreau solitude and minimalism.

 https://youtu.be/Kg_47J6sy3A?si=ZBgfNN3YUBxWZGFr

[LastThursday]

Where do I sign up for the Epicurean bro life? I'm in.

I'd say Western society or specifically the society I live in isn't geared up to this sort of life. Unless you have a strong extended family it isn't going to happen by itself. It seems that everyone is hived off into their small family units and mindsets of individualism, and along with wage slavery, conspire against the Epicurean way of being. I can even understand why some folks throw themselves into work life: they just want to be part of a collective and working towards common goals. I've always rejected the idea of throwing myself into work, because I never feel like I have a stake in what I'm doing, I'm just a replaceable cog in the machinery.

Edited October 8, 2023 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Why do I hate washing dishes?

It's a point of contention with my landlady. My mini dishwasher is on its last legs, leaks a bit and constantly gets blocked. She can't seem to find a replacement in that size and therefore has done nothing about the problem. I can fix the blockage but it's a process to unbolt and extract the dishwasher every time. I can't fix the slight leak.

When I was a teenager my parents began to ask to me and my sister to help with washing dishes. I always resented being pulled away from whatever I doing (normally coding) to do something so boring and mundane and utterly pointless. As soon as the pain was over, I would go back to whatever I had been doing before. In the way only teenagers can be, I never understood why my parents (basically my mum) couldn't just do it themselves, they did everything else anyway! My sister had a knack for getting away with not doing the dishes, and I resented her for it.

During and after university I had a lot of practice with washing dishes. It was often a kind of Mexican stand off with flat mates as to who would fold first and do the dishes. At one point I decided to take decisive action and start hiding dishes and cutlery over time just to force a resolution. Eating out was often the only and best option.

Even when I entered a proper relationship after university and became a fully fledged adult, my girlfriend and I would roster the dish-washing, alternating each day along with cooking food. Nobody actively choses to do dishes.

Now I live by myself and I'm forced to wash dishes at least once a day. They tend to live on the side, draining for most of the day. Even when the dishwasher was functional, I would often just pluck dishes to use out of the dishwasher and only occasionally put everything away. It's my way of rebelling. When I have visitors to stay, I feel inclined to behave and pretend as though I keep an immaculate flat, with dishes living where they should be. It's an image I wish to maintain, a white lie to entertain, my mask. Part of me also, nominally, abhors clutter.

Doing dishes is a metaphor for everything in my life I have to do, but would not do if I had a choice.

However.

Repetition and mundanity does have something to teach me. It's that the pain reduces over time. I know in the back of my mind that washing dishes is essential for my health and that I don't like the visual noise of disorder. It's also something that actually doesn't take too long. It's pain is amplified in my mind's eye. It shows me that many things I find painful in my life are overamplified by my mind. Also, instead of just playing lip-service to my so called minimalist outlook on life, that actual minimalism is simply a lot of repetition and mundanity: after all not having appliances at all is minimalist. 

I could go into all the Zen like meditations on washing dishes, but honestly I don't meditate doing dishes, everything but. My food cooks, my radio blares and I try and get it over and done with as quickly as I can. Fuck dishes.

 

[LastThursday]

Again I'm in that funny zone with work, where I have much stuff to do, but no interest in doing it. It's just a game a play with myself really. So instead I'm propping up my journal.

What's the gossip?

Well, I went on a blind date on the weekend. It went well. Except, that I can get on with most people, and the entire experience was more like speaking to a friend than a potential lover. She wasn't quite attractive enough, not quite exciting enough. I'm going to have to let it slide, but it's going to have to be me that does it. You'd think it'd be easy with my verbal skills - lol. But I have to do it today or it goes into awkward zone. It was  all arranged through/by friends and I just kind of agreed to it! Unfortunately, that creates an expectation and excitement. So I'll be letting many people off the hook so to speak. Ah well.

I've been away on holiday for a week. I always love going away with these particular friends, we just know each other well and are easy around each other. This is how real relationships should work, neuroticism be gone! I don't have any more room for neurotic relationships in my life. My mum's style was mostly this and it's something I've always abhorred in people, I don't deal with it well.

The converted barn we stayed in had its own indoor swimming pool, which I used daily. I'm no great swimmer, but the novelty was fun and it beats a shower for waking me up. Strangely the swimmer in the group used it less than me. But I guess for her its less of a novelty.

We stayed in the same place about seven years ago. It was a good mental exercise to compare how things had changed from then to now. Mostly, it went by a lot more quickly this time.  One of our group, I'll call her A, seemed a bit distant. She set up her art stuff in the kitchen and painted most of the time. She was with us, but not. The last time we had stayed up talking together into the wee hours. Being older perhaps we can't take it any more. The rest of us played card games (a lot of Big Two) and drank. I took no photos this time. Despite bringing my fancy camera and promising some competition - just a few snaps on my phone - I just wasn't feeling it. 

I enjoyed this country house walled garden. A secret garden if you will:

The roads of Devon (county) are narrow car-widthed affairs and I managed to prang my rear bumper reversing back down one of these lanes. Life throws crap at us and we have to deal with it. Philosophically speaking, I've never been one for having to deal with crap I don't want to deal with. I'll procrastinate and then do it begrudgingly. I sort of admire people who just get on with it. I'll fix the bumper eventually. Just in the same way I'll fix all the broken things eventually...

Right then. That's out of my system. Now to work and rejection.

 

[LastThursday]

I've been fighting with messed up sleeping patterns lately and I'm feeling tired because of it. 

When it comes to stuff like this I often intuitively know what's up. I often see other people struggle with understanding where their problems arise from. Bad sleeping patterns is a big factor in mental health issues (and general health) and one can influence the other, often in a detrimental way. I don't believe that's the case for me here though.

First things first, having had a week's break, that itself disrupted my normal sleep routine. I wasn't wearing my blue-light-blocking glasses whilst away and I was drinking alcohol most evenings. I didn't have a fixed sleeping schedule and timings drifted around a lot. Like pushing a swing in the playground, going to sleep and waking up at the same times everyday actually conditions the body to expect the pattern. I would say I naturally need about 8.5 hours of full sleep to feel ok. I often sleep with less, probably eight hours, and catch up on the weekend probably 9 or 9.5 hours on occasion. I seem to need more sleep Friday/Saturday, but think this is because I work out with Badminton on the Friday. I don't use an alarm on weekends.

The next is that the clocks have changed to GMT, and the weekend straight after my break. I thought I would be clever and just maintain BST anyway and go to sleep and get up an hour earlier. This seems to have backfired, but it's hard to work out why other than having had a disrupted sleep routine the week before. I tried my best to maintain eating times as well and keep everything shifted an hour earlier. This shifting is relatively easy for me to maintain working from home.

I've basically found it really hard to actually get to sleep, when before the break things were easy. The result is that the length of my sleep has yo-yoed for the last few weeks. I'd lack sleep one night, only to sleep longer the next night, but then find I was too "awake" to sleep quickly the next night and so on. 

There could also be a problem with bodily temperature control as the outside temperature has dropped fairly quick over the last few weeks. I generally don't heat my flat (too god damn expensive in the UK), so getting into bed can be cool, but I think as I'm drifting off I'm heating up too much and it's keeping me awake again. Shifting from summer mode to winter mode in terms of thickness of bedding is tricky to get right. I'm variously experimenting with different duvets, clothing etc. But doing this whilst trying to nod off, is not conducive to good sleep. I also seem to get a spike of increased temperature around 5-6am, and if I wake up during this it can also affect my sleep. I often have to get up just and walk around just to cool down - annoying!

I've also been taking St John's Wort mostly as an experiment. I took it back in the day to improve my mood when I was going through stuff and it helped immensely. I've done about a month's worth and from experience its effects kick after about three weeks. I wanted to experiment and see if I felt any different on it - so far not much difference. But I do wonder if it's affecting my sleep (it didn't before), as I'm taking the pills just before bed. I'll switch things up and do it when I wake up instead. Sometimes pills have other active components that can affect sleep (especially with caffeine for me).

The upshot is that I'm just giving in to GMT, and back to my old sleep schedule of 12 to 8. I did that last night and seemed to drift off relatively quickly. I'm hoping that things will stick and I can go back to feeling normal and not so tired.

The implication is with a little bit of thought and detective work you can also work out the source of your problems - and fix them.

[LastThursday]

Running through the tall yellow grass

Ghosts of past whisper and glisten in the dew

Listen! 

Can you hear it?

Walking beyond on the wooded path

Miracles of present grip and sway gently in the breeze

Stop!

Can you feel it?

Over hill running over stream over and over

Futures rush through and fizzle in the noon

Go!

Are you not it?

 

[LastThursday]

I should write love poetry for a living ha! Anyway:

I took your smile and put it in my pocket. Your glistening lips pinned on a loop of memory.  Sniff sniff, that perfume soaked into my very being. Every idle wandering thought ends at then. All those partitions in time paper thin but impenetrable. Even if we returned we would forever be disjoint-strangers. Would you even remember me? Should you even remember me?

[LastThursday]

Some random thoughts today.

I was chit-chatting to a work colleague last week. We were on the tube in London going to a work's do. She mentioned that after going to university she'd racked up an £89k debt (loan). I was gobsmacked. I didn't get the impression that she was profligate, it was just the cost of doing education nowadays. I imagined myself at 22 and having to pay back a debt for a large part of my life. The thought fleetingly crossed my mind of giving her my savings so she could be debt free - it would make more difference to her than it would to me. It's disgusting that this is what the UK government is doing to their future workforce. (rant mode off)

I definitely had some wild dreams over night. In one there were two diseased rabbits lying on the floor, one dead, one barely alive. Between them my sister was lying in some sort of box or something. Despite not actually seeing her, I thought she was dead. My parents were around and I tried to explain the situation, I even began to cry but they seemed cold or non-understanding. I looked around and realised that I could see my sister on the floor curled up and noticed she was breathing. I felt a strong sense of relief. I think I better contact her...

In a different dream I was on a push-bike and looking for a place to park it. I turned left onto a busy road, unsure of where I was going. I then had to go uphill, but realised there was water gushing down the road, it looked like a ladder of weirs going all the way up. But somehow I found it easy to peddle up and I even bunny hopped over the weirs. I woke up.

I have been thinking about time. Specifically about entropy and degradation. Hypothetically if I had a lump of matter, say something with a rigid crystal lattice (a crystal perhaps?) and was inert, would it experience time? The thought was that if none of the crystal's constituents got disrupted in any way, then even if it's constituents (atoms) jiggled around it would keep its identity indefinitely. In other words it would be immune to increasing entropy. Of course nothing is ever completely immune to its environment, but during the time a lump of matter is not "interacted" with, it would in effect be outside of time itself. You could argue that the thermal motion of atoms in the lattice act like little timekeepers, being as they are subject to the speed of light. But taken as an average over all atoms you couldn't actually tell the time with them, although time may sneak in because the thermal motion has an average speed. However, the thermal motion can be changed by increasing the temperature of the lump of matter and the average speed would be higher. The upshot is you can only use thermal motion to mark time, if you know the temperature, but you can only know the temperature if you "interact" with the crystal. All temperature gauges work by waiting for the thermal equilibrium with your measuring device, and so all temperature measurements affect the system they're measuring. It could be argued that you could use thermal imaging to gauge temperature, but then photons would have to be given out by the crystal, but I'm not allowing that because the crystal is completely inert: it does not radiate. In practice everything radiates photons. All this is a long-winded way of saying time=increasing entropy. 

Edited December 11, 2023 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I've been on this forum a long time now. Originally, I was just watching Leo's videos and I couldn't get enough of them. At some point, I believe around the time "What is Islam?" video came out I pretty much ran out of steam and stopped. I think soon after that I discovered the forum and I just lurked for a long time. Then something must have piqued my interest and I started to post. I find it amusing that even Leo himself seems to have run out of steam with his videos.

I see my relationship with the forum in kind of the same way as I had with my relationship to smoking. I smoked because I was addicted and out of habit. But the benefits and reasons for doing so were hard to pin down - but I felt there were some. I stopped smoking in the end, but other than to my health and pocket, I feel the same as I did then. In other words smoking had a net-zero effect. I like to call this "empty calories".

There are a lot of activities which are empty calories, but we do them anyway. We do them to fill time, or because we believe it's doing something for us, but the actual benefit is always hard to pin down. Now, the activity may actually have good or bad effects, but they are side effects. So I call smoking empty calories not because it had no effects, but because the main reason for actually smoking was hard to pin down.

Being on this forum is also empty calories for me. There are side effects yes, like improving my writing, getting things off my chest, interacting with people and on and on. But it's definitely hard to pin down why I'm on here. If I stopped (which I have in the past) it wouldn't make much difference to me in the long run. 

There's definitely something here which I've yet to explore more deeply in my own psyche. I think a lot of my malaise is to do with the notion that everything I do is "empty calories". It's like I'm eating, but not getting full. It's hard not to compare myself with my peers and they seem to "get full" on what they do in their lives, which I'm envious of. But my envy isn't really about what they have but the fact that they seem to be satisfied by it. I can't get no satisfaction - and even thinking about that makes me emotional and frustrated.

To swing it back to forum. I see a lot of questions being asked and a lot of answers, but very little dialogue and exchange. Often an OP will ask a question, get ten different disjointed answers and that's that. The OP has seemingly no interest in replying to the answers, and the answerers have no interest in each other's viewpoints. Often the OP has to be goaded into replying. There is also often an absolutist sense to a lot of the answers: "this is the way it is", rather than a more nuanced and relative standpoint: "what if it was like this?" and exploring that.

I think this really comes from several places. First, that people really don't know how to converse properly especially on a digital medium. People are so brainwashed in to posting "status updates" that other ways of communicating seem alien; a lot of answers are in the style of a status update: this is what I think and that's that. Second is that there isn't any amount of deep thinking going on, but it is often dressed up as that. The upshot is that people (often aggressively) defend views that are shallow and illogical or just taken verbatim without much thought. I'm guilty of this, but what gets confused is that I'm not coming from an absolutist standpoint, my views are generally subject to change and really are about "what if it was like this?", but I'm forced to follow the implicit forum style. I want dialogue but I don't get it and it's empty calories.

Lastly, there is a lot of immaturity in the forum. To me it's blindingly obvious (because I'm older and more mature), but you can't blame others for not knowing what they don't know. I very often feel for others because I have experienced the same things when I was younger (especially anxiety and stress and social problems), and I want to get hold of them and say "honestly, it's fine, it will work out in the end". To that end I try and impart my knowledge but it often goes over people's heads; there's only so much that can be done via text.

I need to be satisfied and full and consume real calories in my life. I just don't know how or what that should be. Until then I'll carry on as I am.

Enough rambling!

[MuadDib]

Choo-choo-choom! All aboard the yummy-grumpy-tummy express ... open wide.