Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

I need to get myself a cook, both metaphorically and in reality.

[LastThursday]

Lately I've been doing a lot of retrospection. It seems to just bubble up at times. The sensation is somewhat like looking through binoculars. What I see seems so close and very familiar, but the view is constricted to a small circle of light. I remember and re-feel stuff clearly, but I can't fully re-enter that old reality again, so much is lost. And, when I stop looking through the binoculars I'm suddenly sucked back to where I am, and I realise how far away things were and how irrelevant all that stuff is to me now - and yet all that stuff is just there should I wish to look again.

What I feel is that a lot of what makes "me" originated back then and also got left behind then. I got to re-invent myself along the way both consciously and unconsciously; there's a lot to like about my new self and my new circumstances. But I'm feeling untethered. Back then I was tethered to my family and my surroundings in a deep way and I didn't question it: I felt I was part of the fabric of my lived-in experience. Along the way that sense of being integrated got exploded, mostly because the family I belonged to was dysfunctional and eventually crumbled. It was a painful awakening for me, I felt lonely, more and more disconnected and betrayed by the people who were supposed to love me. I was cast out at sea with no life support. And nobody came to help. The 80's wasn't a soft time, not a time of support groups and mental health help and space for neurodiversity: you dealt with the roughness alone. It's made me hard and defensive at times, I know how to survive. But my nature should be/is a soft loving joyful optimistic person.

I haven't been the same since. Repeatedly, I feel like I lost a big part of myself back then. I'm mostly just winging life like a kite being buffeted by the wind of circumstance, I'm not in control of it. I'm living my life in reverse, I had to become an adult early and take on responsibilities I didn't ask for. Now I don't wish to take on any more responsibilities, I want to take back that lost time and be the teenager I should have been. Unfortunately and ridiculously, I'm 51 in a couple of days, and I can't live a topsy-turvy existence; I can't both be a responsible adult and unresponsible child. But my aversion to taking control and the pain that goes along with it is strong. I'm just doing the bare minimum required to keep on flying. 

I want to resolve the conflict and the melancholy and resentment. I want to flourish and stop floundering. I want to re-connect to the fabric of my existence. But all that old connection is gone forever and I can't re-connect to it again, I have to try a different way and as a different person. I have to re-learn to be an adult, but the right way this time.

Winter blues? Drama? Possibly. 

[LastThursday]

For the first time in many months I started playing piano (electric) again. I've been wanting to learn how to play a version of Autumn in New York, basically this one:

Thing is there is no sheet music for it. I've tried to work things out by ear, but the bass notes elude me. But yesterday I found a way to turn the music directly into Midi format:

https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/

And amazingly it was actually ok. Not a fast service by any means, but it works. There's a couple of missing or too many notes (I think), but it's good enough for me.

The next thing is, do I actually have the skill to play it? Just about, with lots of practice, the end of the piece sounds tricky though. I also think my hands are not big enough to do some of the chords spanning over an octave, so I'll have to make do. The hardest bits will be the accentuation, smooth playing and getting the general "jaunty" feel of the rhythm.

I always think it would be so cool just to casually sit at a piano somewhere and knock out a few jazz numbers and impress my audience. I've done this before, but I only really know classical pieces which is not to everyone's taste. Although I do know a few of the more popular ragtime pieces.

 

[LastThursday]

Before I even knew this forum existed, I used to religiously watch Leo's videos. At some point I just stopped, mainly because the topics didn't seem relevant to me or it didn't feel like anything new was being said. But I decided to watch Leo's latest video for the first time:

Some of the things Leo covered in this video touched a nerve and I have to admit to myself that I am immature is a number of ways. Without going into it too much, a lot of the malaise and lack of purchase on my life I feel is due to aspects of my immaturity. So I'm immature? What to do about it? It's all a bit chicken and egg. I need to do in order to mature, but I need maturity in order to do. This seems to be a general rule in life and probably why people can be immature, they simply never learn to mature because... they're not mature. Personally it hurts, because I've always striven to be as mature and as "good" a person I can be. But at least I have an inkling of what needs to happen.

Aside from that, I'd like to make a case for the general genius in Leo's videos. What eventually switched me off from Leo's videos is in fact what makes them good. Just simply having a talking head with no other distractions such music and a whirlwind of graphics and cut scenes, makes you pay attention. Leo's also very good at just enumerating all the different facets of a particular topic: his videos really are just primers on each of the subjects he covers. But a primer is very useful just like a reference book is useful, it's the bare facts without the fluff. But also, that makes his content direct and often there's no hiding from some of the repercussions of what he's saying for your own view of yourself, and some of it sticks and irritates enough that you take action to "fix" the problem. His videos raise your level of awareness and that can only be a good thing. He is also comprehensive and has covered a huge range of topics, there is bound to be one that resonates and affects you personally.

More than anything else Leo's done, I'd say that his videos are what most people would identify as his brand. It's understandable that he has a life and wants to try other things out and life changes. But if I were to give him advice (from my super mature self) then it would be that he should maintain his brand even if it's at a subsistence level. Obviously this is good from a business point of view, but it's also good from an altruistic point of view and simply just spreading his god given genius for this sort of thing. I might even watch a new video if it were to come out....

[LastThursday]

When is enough, enough? 

I read an article in New Scientist recently about a phenomenon called languishing. The top result on Google says:

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/languishing#what-are-the-signs

This fits me to a T. In retrospect the rot set in around 2009 or so although at the time I didn't realise what was happening. I'd come out of a relationship of three years, which I was definitely sad about at the time, but it wasn't overwhelming and I moved on. But even at that point I began to realise something major had or was about to change. 

In those intervening three years, I felt like the bonds and social capital that I had with my close network of friends had evaporated. One of those friends had been an ex who I had been with for 11 years. There was (and still remains) an awkwardness between us that we never really worked through. She married and had a kid - I feel genuinely happy for her, there's no resentment or envy on my side. The result of all this was that I began to feel unanchored and I didn't really to know how to resolve those feelings. During that time I had met up again with some old school friends through Facebook and interacting with them regularly kept me sane. I fell in love with one of them. 

I desperately needed (at the time) to feel anchored in something again and over time my feelings intensified and I thought naively that the person I had fallen in love with was the answer. We had a very on-off relationship, and in the end it just wasn't going to work. I felt frustrated I couldn't get what I wanted, lonely and increasingly frustrated with myself for not being able to resolve my situation. This resulted in a kind of prolonged mid-life crisis (which I've written about extensively here) and I went to some dark places.

I decided to move away from where I had lived and the network of friends I'd had, it just wasn't working for me any more. Originally, I wanted to move closer to the person I'd fallen in love with - before it fell apart - and I'm still here all these years later. But more than anything I just wanted to escape myself and my mid-life crisis. Very slowly over time I came out of all that funk. But fundamentally I never regained what I'd had before, that dark place I'd been in for years had turned into the grey place I'm in now, languishing.

What to do? Instead of looking back for an explanation in the hope that somehow that's where the answer lies, I need to look forwards. Somehow I need to wrangle the unwieldy beast of my psyche so that I move towards a happier place. I would say at the moment I could continue with the set up of my life indefinitely, I'm neither sad nor particularly happy, I have enough money to live on and do what I want, I have a handful of friends that I see semi-regularly and family that I interact with semi-regularly. 

I think someone looking into my situation might say things like "what do you want?" and "you need to take action" and maybe "get therapy". In terms of taking action, the very obvious things that come to mind are; change jobs, change house, find a girlfriend. But I'm old enough to realise that doing more of the same is not going to resolve my situation, i.e. I've already done those things and it didn't help - I've done a lot of things in my life so far. What I'm after is an emotion or sensation, literally to wake up every day and to feel excited about it instead of dread. I'm also after that warm fuzzy feeling of being connected to people and working together for a common purpose.

And therein lies my problem. What I want are emotions, but I have no sense of how to get there, no concrete physical plan of action. I'm motivated by the things that excite me (emotion) not by the things I think about (reason). Any physical action I take towards the emotions I want to feel, will involve me having to move away from the homeostasis I find myself in, i.e. it will involve emotional and physical labour to move my setpoint and there's no joy in this process. I may even be less happy in the interim whilst I reconfigure my life and all the while I get ever older.

But, enough is enough. 

[LastThursday]

Are you stupid? Do you like the smell of paper?

I found the following video totally fascinating. Here's a young woman who's deciding that she's had enough of being stupid - and her process for becoming less stupid.

From a philosphical point of view in many ways we're all stupid. Although, ignorant or inexperienced might be better words. But how is it that we can get to know something that is unknown to us? It's like being parachuted into an mysterious land and then trying to work out what to do with little or no prior information. How do we bootstrap ourselves? The fascinating part of the video is exactly that process of bootstrapping being explained. But she also explains why it is that she (thinks she) is stupid.

From a personal perspective, it's interesting to get an insight into the thought processes of a person who is the antithesis of me. I've always been driven by curiousity and never been afraid to learn stuff, complex stuff, difficult stuff. Largely, I think I've been lucky to have always had that drive. Who would I have been if I hadn't had that?

To a degree my sister is like the woman in the video, she was always afraid of or shied away from academic learning, despite her intelligence and talent; it was an identity she clung on to. With some coaxing from me, my sister did start a first degree in languages and sociology in her later years. She never finished it, but nevertheless I think it made her realise that she was more than capable of "not being stupid". Fundamentally, I think she didn't complete it because it directly confronted her deep seated identity with being anti-academic and in a way anti-learning. I hope it loosened things up for her. I would caveat that being academic is not the only way to be intelligent (!).

The real process for not being stupid starts with awareness, awareness that something is off and needs to change. But I do think the trigger for that awareness is ultimately mysterious. Yes, you could be told directly "you're stupid", but that may not trigger awareness to do something about it: it's quite natural to just think "no am not!" or "yeah whatever" or "I'm naturally stupid, why bother changing it's impossible?". There's great intelligence in that awareness and that is the seed needed for bootstrapping yourself.

In some ways this video speaks to my directly. I have a strong awareness that I myself need to bootstrap my way out of my current situation. But I'm stupid and have no idea what needs to be done. I need my equivalent of learning to read books; to enjoy the smell of paper!

[LastThursday]

I missed the aurora borealis here in the UK the other night. I'm up on the second floor and I have a decent view of the sky from my windows. I also normally sleep by midnight, so the the thing would have been in full swing before I went to bed. 

A friend of mine was ill with a bad cold and he couldn't sleep that night. He chose to while away the hours playing chess on his mobile (he's addicted). He too missed the aurora happening outside his bedroom window.

A few friends posted pictures that they'd taken and it looked breathtaking.

I feel kind of gutted to not have seen it, it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for where I live.

Amazing things are happening all around us all the time. Many times I've been with people and noticed things myself that the people around me have been oblivious to. But it seems obvious to me that I've also missed many things other have noticed too. 

How is it possible to be me more aware of what's going on around us? How can we not miss out on life? 

One way it to be informed. Simply knowing where to look and when to look can open up amazing experiences for us. Being informed does require a constant curiosity and active research - it can be done passively, but then you are at the whims and biases of others; I don't follow the news actively for example. Instead I follow my nose and read up and investigate stuff that interests me. Not everyone is like me, but a stronger sense of curiosity can be cultivated.

Another is simply to be more present. By this I mean being less distracted and having your focus pulled tightly. We seem to live in a society that constantly wants to pull our focus this way and that, but more perniciously it wants to constantly narrow our focus on to this way of thinking or that particular product. Instead we should actively fight against this narrowing of focus and regularly do things that open up our focus. This can be from doing things which are out of our normal routine, to actively paying attention to things we don't normally. Meditation can help, even if just to quieten our minds and bring us back to the here and now more often. But it also helps to train our attention so that we're in control of it.

Lastly is to see the bigger picture. We sit at the centre of an immense infinitude of stuff constantly happening to us and around us. It is possible to become more aware of the interconnectedness and magic quality of everything; that you are part of it. When we are more integrated and aligned with that immensity and we expand our focus outwards we'll notice a lot more once-in-a-lifetime events.

 

[gettoefl]

a small social media presence helps too, i follow about 80 accounts on twitter and sub to some good reddits like r/askUK to keep up with the daily buzz ... combined takes me little more than an hour per day to read, i don't post anything typically

love that you follow your nose rather than the news, me too ... and best of all the nows 

this is an awesome journal to read, thanks for all your posts 🙌

[LastThursday]

Hey @gettoefl I appreciate you for saying that.  It makes me feel happy that someone gets something from what I write, whatever that may be.

As well as being more informed, I forgot to include that also saying "yes" to more things will open up unique experiences. I think many of us hold ourselves back out of fear of the unknown, inexperience or going against conformity. Get out there!

[LastThursday]

I feel as though I should not let myself off the hook. That is I feel a compulsion to get my life fixed. I don't really know what this fixing entails, but there is a definite constant nagging anxiety that isn't going away. However, the sensation is complex.

I've always been a "fixer". As a kid I loved to take things apart and sometimes put them back together again. I was curious about the mysterious stuff inside mundane objects: TVs, alarm clocks, computers, washing machines and on and on. And of course when stuff broke, I could sometimes fix it, because I wasn't afraid of that complexity inside stuff.

What's inside me? Well, it's definitely not cogs and levers and wires and components. The last ten or more years I've had an insatiable appetite to understand people in the same sort of way as I understand a toaster say. Naturally, understanding people is really nothing at all like understanding a toaster. In a way understanding people is completely alien to my way of thinking, and yet I have an itch to scratch. Some of it is the fault of my Dad who has been into the people thing a long time. Early on in my teenage years I started to absorb this stuff by osmosis - NLP and models of behaviour and improving communication and personal development - but I never really cared much for it.

Anyway. My modus operandi has always been that if I have a problem, I fix it. Until that problem is fixed I feel a constant nagging anxiety. This is one of the traits that makes me think I'm on the spectrum. It's both a blessing and a curse. When it comes to myself however, it's quite possible that I'm working from the wrong paradigm. It's possible that in fact I don't need to or can't really "fix" my life as I would fix a toaster. No doubt there are low hanging fruit and if I paid enough attention those things, it would be easy enough to resolve in my life: girlfriend, buy a house, live somewhere I want to. Those things are "fixable" even if they're not particularly minor.

When it comes to fixing ordinary objects it's really a matter of assessing the problem and then reducing the problem to its components. It's then a matter of identifying which components are faulty and fixing those one-by-one. There are components to my life but the difference is that they're all intimately connected to each other and bleed into each other; changing one thing here affects everything else. So I get this sensation of overwhelm whenever I think about fixing or changing any part of my life, there's too many variables and subtlety going on.

One thing I feel strongly about myself is a dissonance between the parts of my life. For example if I were to stop doing the job I do tomorrow, I would not miss it all or the people I work with. That lack of emotion tells me that I am in fact doing the wrong thing. I spend an inordinate amount of time pandering to something I couldn't care less about - and yet it is keeping me alive.

I spend a lot of time following my interests which are hugely varied. One reason I'm attracted to this forum and to Leo's stuff in general is because of the polymathic nature of it. I've been the same since I was small. Again my Dad is a bit of a polymath, but I've definitely surpassed him in that department! My sister too. Being this way excites me, there's so much stuff to learn and get to know about. I find very few other people are this way, it's kind of a sad and so I tend to not share my interests, people honestly just don't care. I try on occasion but soon give up. Sometimes people are even suprised by my depth of knowledge on a subject, people that know me well.

Another component is precisely the people in my life. I half heartedly maintain a set of friendships. I find inserting myself into their lives difficult, that is to say that they are less flexible than I am. If I give it any thought it's a strange dynamic I have with my friends and my family. I think the source of that strangeness is me (this is another trait which makes me think I'm on the spectrum). I can find people exhausting and difficult to handle, my introvert nature shining through there. And yet a lot of the time I feel most relaxed, happy and connected when I'm with people. I also spend a lot of my idle time watching people via YouTube for example. In that sense I'm fairly extroverted. So there is a constant tension I have to navigate between these two poles. (It's not lost on me that I should do an NLP parts integration process here, as I've suggested to someone else on this forum.)

That self imposed lack of connection to people is causing me sadness and it's ridiculous. When I went travelling all I did was spend time with other people, albeit with the odd bit of me time, and I was happy on the whole. I love my friends, but they are super conventional and normal. I've ended up being super conventional, and yet I'm 51 not married, no kids, no pets etc. Again I feel a very strong tension between wanting to be super conventional and not being conventional at all. I blame my parents (why not?). My Mum married a foreigner and moved to another country, my Dad is 78 doesn't want to retire and wants to go live in China (FFS). Anyway, these shenanigans by my parents have rubbed off on to my way of being. In some way, I'm playing pretend at being conventional when my very being is rebelling against this. Some of the reasons I'm standoffish with my family is that their unconventionality irks me (very big LOL here). My sister married an American and lives in Delaware and left her three kids in the UK with their father (grrrr).

Another polarity in my life is that between my mental and physical self. I'm very much thought heavy in my being and this is strongly connected to my introversion. I get a lot of enjoyment out of thinking and learning, by myself. But I do also like to use my body, I hike, I play some sports, I play musical instruments - and it gives me a lot of joy too. I feel a strong imbalance however, I'm very much in a sedentary mental space most of the time. The balance needs to be redressed. In an odd way I also associate being physical with my more extroverted side.

So.

Some of the things I need to fix are all these bloody opposing tensions in my life, they're exhausting and keeping me in limbo. Some of things are to do with purely re-aligning things: the way I earn money should be connected to the things that make me happy: people and polymathy and physicality.  But I feel I also need to live somewhere that allows me to express those things more easily, a rainy cold country such as the UK is not conducive to going out and being physical or wanting to go outside the home; it doesn't fit my more extroverted nature.

I need to escape this conventionality, lack of alignment and disconnectedness it's killing me slowly inside.

Edited May 20 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

It's hard not to take the (my) conscious experience personally. It's all so very real isn't it? Deadly serious in fact. I seem inseperable from it too like the very notion of me is actual consciousness itself. Conventionally and according to others I end and begin between my head and my toes. However the closer and closer I look the less so it seems like that - others are wrong - it just simply isn't my experience.

If I put on coloured glasses then the world seems yellow, no matter where I look. Likewise everywhere I look, touch and feel, the world is tainted and tinted with my essence. Maybe it's all the time I've spent in my own experience without others to tell me where I am constantly. It's allowed me to expand outwards and ooze into everything - where I always was - and I have resettled somewhat back into my natural state.

The question naturally arises: is this world of my own doing? If I'm diffuse and absorbed into the very fabric of (my) existence then I must be existence iself. Like a nearly forgotten dream I remember the first time I became aware of this world, the first thing I saw was my mother. I strongly suspect I was the last person she saw before she passed away. The world I see around me is one of beautiful reflective symmetry. People and places, sounds and memories keep reappearing reflected in uncountable ways and juxtapositions. What makes this world familiar, and mine, are those reflections. They're all from that first image fractured and splintered indefinitely. That first image was always me.

I often idly wonder what it would be to play a practical joke on a friend. One day in idle chit chat I stop time itself - only for me and him to still be animated. What would be his reaction? Would it occur to him that I was source of reality itself, or would he think some lesser thought?  Would I terrify him for ever more and fracture his reality. Would he think me the best thing since sliced bread, some sort of trickster or angel. Why him? Because he is the most atheistic person I know. Idle daydreams only. I would only be terrifying myself in the end, and so the world keeps having its order and balance - whilst I keep up the prim pretense that I'm only in the world and not of it.

If the tables were turned and I was approached by Jesus himself would I likewise point and call him a trickster or worse an imposter or simply just wrong?  What if all this were a trick of the light and I was invented by this so called Jesus because he is the sole progenitor of my reality? Surely I'm deluded: I have no powers to speak of, other than to type with my fingers and create worlds that way only. There is no proof I am reality itself.

It's possible there will be a break in this continuity of reality and when I finally die, this reality will die with me, only to be replaced with God knows what. Only then will I stop being intertwined with reality and the new reality it can go its own way.

[LastThursday]

Some thoughts on consciousness.

I periodically philosophise about this sort of thing. For me it's an odd exercise much like trying to paint a scene without being much of an artist. But much like an artist I have my cherished set of paints and brushes and my own style. Nobody else is any different in this respect, that is to say nobody can explain consciousness. And yet infuriatingly there it is in your face 24/7.

My own particular style revolves around some heuristics I've stumbled upon over time. I'll cover the main points briefly:

The word consciousness is just that. It's a placeholder for something that is actually indescribable. Much like using the word "river", most folks think they know what it means, but the actuality is not the word, nowhere near. In fact I can probably bet with high certainty that "consciousness" will mean different things for different people.

It seems to be impossible to know if other people are conscious. Even if you could telepathically communicate or "see the world through their eyes", this would be no different from talking to someone. You would still be perceive their world through your consciousness; if you didn't then it would no longer be you. But all of this is moot, reports of this actually happening are zero. Say "I" became person X for a period (and I somehow went into some weird unconscious stasis), and then regained myself, I still could not prove the consciousness of person X. Even if I had person X's memories, they are now mine.

It seems possible that there is only one conscious experience: mine. I alluded to this in my previous post. This also sort of follows from the previous paragraph as it would provide a solution to the paradox. In which case it's possible this is all for my entertainment.

It also seems possible that consciousness is uncountable. What I mean by this is that counting implies subdivision, but conciousness itself is probably indivisible. One is in contrast to two and so on. So saying there is one consciousness doesn't have a logically sound base. So what then? Indeed. The upshot is that consciousness must be everything. If it is indivisible then it must represent some sort of totality. If there is another indivisible thing out there that isn't consciousness then it must be completely unknown to consciousness - and is itself another totality.

Maybe consciosness is divisible and there are many versions of it. This would square more with our intuitions about what's happening here. Every person is (or living being perhaps) is conscious in some way to different degrees and aspects. In which case it's very hard to define what consciousness is, because it could be cheese to Mary and chalk to John. In fact may not even make much sense to have a word like "consciousness" as everyone's experience could be incompatible and utterley incomprehensible to anyone else. This seems counterintuitive, but could be true.

Is the content of consciousness separate from consciousness itself? That's a tricky one. I believe, no. If consciousness is a totality, then even the content of consciousness is consciousness. Maybe consciousness is just content, much like the painting of the Mona List is just brushwork. This would make it nearly square with materialism which is just about content. Except materialism throws the baby out with the bathwater: it believes measurement and maths is the content. There is no observer and observed, they are redundant.

Is there anything that is not consciousness? If it's indivisible then no there isn't. If it's divisible then potentially yes. Maybe you are not conscious, because what you call "consciousness" is no part of my consciousness, i.e. they are orthogonal and only interact through bodies. Maybe there is some sort of Nexus between what you have and what I have, which we both call the real world.

If consciousness is insepearable from content, then is everything that could be recognised as content in fact a different thing? Is everything to the left of my field of vision a different consciousness to everything to the right? Are all these types of consciousness co-existing and interacting with each other? Is hearing a different consciousness from seeing?

Could it be that consciousness is "tuning in" reality? This would be like getting a radio signal from all the static, i.e. finding structure and order in chaos. Maybe consciousness is that organising factor that cherry picks order out of the chaos of reality. Earth and people and animals and nature and all this could just be the organised parts of chaos that have coalesced from that original spark of whatever consciousness actually is. Everything else in that chaos has been "tuned out" and essentially doesn't exist, save for the occasional glitchy intrusion. Dreams are very much more in the realm of chaos and nebulosity: consciousness de-tuned.

 

[LastThursday]

It's a dreary wet summer morning in Blighty. I was thinking about school assemblies when I first came back to England. This would have been in 1979 (fuck that's a long time ago). I think the headmistress - a woman in her sixties with short grey curly hair and thick glasses - wanted to instill some culture and love of music into the local working class brats. Music would be broadcast over the tannoy and we'd file in sensibly for assembly. We'd then sit down on the dusty hall floor in rows and face the piano at the front. The head would get out her music book, sit down and we'd sing along to "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes" or "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?" and my favourite "Daisy, Daisy".

What was played over the tannoy I hear you ask?

The last one is interesting, the Sting version is three years after my assemblies, but this is exactly as I remember it!

More rain. Humph.

Edited June 15 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be on another world. Especially to see the Earth itself rising above the horizon, and how mind blowing that would be. Only a very few people have had that privilege. The last of which splashed down in an ocean somewhere the day I was born. It was a full moon the day after.

At least I got to watch it on TV in 2024:

 

And way before the internet James Burke was on TV explaining everything for you. Even at that age I beginning to get hooked on this stuff!

 

[LastThursday]

18 minutes till a work meeting. How much can I get down?

How would a polymath (say me) follow their muse and actually live off their polymathy? First things first, is polymathy a hobby or a way of being? For me it's both. People do hobbies that for one reason or another they find interesting. I would say though in general there are probably one or two hobbies that people might have. I have many: computers, art appreciation, spirituality, stem subjects, languages, music, transport, design, you get the picture. I'd say that my central hobby is computing, it's the one which I find myself engaged in most outside of work - the fact that my work is also computing is more by accident than design. 

13 minutes.

That broad range of interests makes it difficult for me to focus in any one in particular, I do have a favourite child, but I still love all the others. Maybe synergy is the way to go, but I don't see how music and transport can go together. But there is a linking hobby and that is precisely computing. Computers can do anything and could be involved in all my interests in one way or another: creating music, sharing ideas about spirituality and so on. But that use case is only using computers as a tool for synergy, not as the end in itself which is the thing I'm actually more interested in. One of the reasons I'm so disappointed with my career is that computers feature as tools not as the end itself; I'm less interested in creating a fancy spreadsheet that will solve my company's problems, than I am creating a new type of programming language say. It's like being a blacksmith but being asked to hammer nails all day - albeit in a variety of ways. Ultimately very unsatisfactory.

7 Minutes.

The other question is that if I'm creating value for others (that's the only way to make money), then I will be at the beck and call of others' whims. That immediately butts up against my need for autonomy and to "follow my nose". The main joy I get from my polymathy is the organic path I can take from one area of interest to another and learn new information on the way. If however, I am beholden to constantly provide value for others then I am forever restricted in that way - and some (or all) of the joy is zapped from the process. In reality up until now I've kept my polymathy very separate from everything else in my life for exactly that reason: protectionism and freedom.

Ultimately, I have the right make up to be entrepreneurial. I'm very self motivated when it comes to my own interests. But I am far far less interested in providing value, except where they may overlap with my interests, and I'm definitely not interested in the administrative side of running a business. The ideal being that someone else would do the admin and planning.

0 minutes. 

[LastThursday]

I was thinking about localisation. Here are my half-chewed thoughts about it.

Whilst we go about our everyday activities the one thing that seems undeniable is that we have a limited effect on the on the world; both limited in scope and locality. By locality I mean that we affect things in our vicinity or a proxy for vicinity. For example, if I put down a mug of coffee on my table, then the only thing I have affected is the position of my mug in space and more importantly that mug is in my vicinity, it is not a mug on a table in a different country say.

It may seem obvious if we're talking about things you can affect physically: our bodies are localised in a small amount of space, so the things within our reach is small. We can move our bodies to a different location, but it's a slow process and we can cover miles at best without aid. The subtlety is that even if we move our bodies that is still an insignificant amount of space and material we can affect compared to the whole. But what we affect is still localised in small pockets of space.

We can augment greatly what we can affect by using machines of one type or another. With a machine we could dig a huge hole in a few hours for example, or we can send a message to a person in another part of the world and affect them that way. We could ask that person a thousand miles away to put a coffee mug on a table and we have effectively become more delocalised. Although, still, relative to the whole we can only affect very tiny amounts of stuff and in localised pockets of space, even if those pockets are spread far apart (that is what I mean by proxy for vicinity).

But does reality really work this way?

If everything is affected by everything else (think butterfly effect), then surely our effects are greatly non-local and non-linear? The coffee mug heats the air around it and the table it's sitting on. One of those hot molecules of air may go to warm up an insect which helps keep it alive just long enough to infect a person miles away and on and on in an infinite chain of cause and effect. However, most of those side effects will not be meaningful and are so miniscule as not to matter to us directly. Indeed, the mug can warp the fabric of space itself via gravity and this has unbounded reach.

The closer you look at the world the more interconnected it appears. If it is the case that reality itself is a unity, then everything must affect everything else... eventually. Science has discovered however, that the speed of cause and effect cannot be faster than the speed of light. So even if localisation is untrue (we affect everything), then localisation is true over finite time periods (we affect everything only eventually). Like the ripples in a pond our actions spread out forever. Quantum mechanics says that there is ''spooky action at a distance'', i.e. non-localised correlations, but no information can be exchanged instantaneously - there is no instantaneous cause and effect.

Is there something possibly outside of time and space that is not bound by its limitations and laws? Is it possible for us to affect stuff non-locally? Scientists don't think so, but I'm not so sure. Anecdotally, I have experienced coincidences, synchronocities, guiding events through thought or thought-transference that just seem too uncanny to dismiss. Perhaps the unity of reality is a lot deeper than mere cause and effect, and much happens non-locally. It's as if reality had a mind of its own co-ordinating the entire universe in all its mind-boggling detail. Scientists will never find a particle transferring thoughts from one person to another, because the mind of reality doesn't work that way.

Edited July 9 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

One of the biggest parts of my Shadow is the dynamic around inclusion/exclusion and being a lone wolf. It's hard for me to parse its entirety as there appears to be so many parts to it. Let's start somewhere, it may be incoherent lol.

When I was young I felt secure and content in our family unit of four: my sister and my parents. We regularly and one way or another saw extended family members also. Our unit had its own way of being and dynamic and I felt comfortable in that. My mum was the nurturer, my dad everything else. My sister was like an extension of myself - and it stayed that way until our teens. I always cherished the times I would spend with my dad, and he would provide me with the mental stimulation I craved.

But even then there was an undercurrent of "otherness" which I felt. My dad was accepted by the Spanish side of the family, but I was very aware that he wasn't "one of them". On the occasions when my British family would visit Spain I became aware of how different they were. The same dynamic bore out with my mum when we lived in the UK for a short while before Spain and before my sister was born. My mum never learned English and so relied heavily on my dad for everything: she was very obviously "other" throughout her life.

I think that's were this Shadow first started. I embodied that sensation of being something "other" than the people around me - even if this wasn't true in actuality at the time. This wasn't a problem in my early years, because I did fit in within my immediate family unit. Even when I started going to school in Spain I didn't feel like I didn't belong (although I had other problems there). In general, the Spanish were more accepting than the English.

Moving to England and London in particular, was a different world. In retrospect the culture was casually racist and in particular my British grandparents were. We lived with them initially crammed in like sardines in their small council flat. That wasn't a recipe for happy communal living, however my grandparents were openly hostile towards my mum. There was definitely an undercurrent of racism there, and their inability to communicate properly with each other didn't help. There was a lot of shouting. The absurdity of the situation is that both mum and grandmother dealt with the each other in exactly the same way, by getting emotional and lashing out.

I think when you're young, you don't have a very strongly defined sense of self, it's kind of spread out into the people you identify with. Those attacks on my mum felt like direct attacks on me. How is it I can be both loved and hated at the same time? It makes for strong cognitive dissonance. This very sensation has stayed with me all my life. In the end and fairly recently I made the following vow which goes something like: "if you don't show me love then fuck off". It may seem extreme, but the only way for me to break that dissonance is to not accept it. I have learned to detach from hate. I have often been openly hostile to people who haven't respected me, and sometimes to my detriment, but I have to stand by it.

This feeling of "otherness" has made me needy over time. Again, when I was young I very much looked up to my dad. But he was mostly distant and absent; it started off well in the early years but he got progressively more distant as time went by. You see my dad provided the kind of stimulation and attention that my mum could never provide. It's the reason I am the way I am, he is the reason for my curiosity and intellect the two things I hold most dear in this life. That diminishing lack of attention from dad and inability to get the attention I needed from my mum, has deeply affected me. Both my sister and me suffered in the same way - albeit with differing outcomes. That need for attention would drive my behaviour quite strongly later on in my teens.

Despite the wranglings between my mum and grandparents in England, I was fairly well integrated in school and had good friends. Although, even then I still had the occasional bit of racism directed towards me from other kids - more ignorance than malintent. And out of school I would play outside most of the time with the local kids and that was fine also. That street smartness and needing to defend myself and sister made me hardy and independently minded.  A lot of my need to do things my way and my own self-assuredness comes from those times: and this has largely counterbalanced my Shadow all along.

When I went to secondary school at age 11 things got worse. Already I had installed within me this feeling of being different, and I think I really stood out to the school bullies for this reason. I wouldn't say I was odd or strange, but just different enough to stand out. I would fight back and stand my ground when I could, but the size and strength difference meant I couldn't always do that. I found it soul destroying, but not enough for me to get depressed by it, I just wanted it to stop. But it did reinforce that feeling of being different, that people could make your life a misery for sport and for the crime of being "other".

In the end I largely withdrew. I stopped playing outside. I kept myself to myself in school and just mechanically went through the motions day by day. Then my parents split and to this day I resent my parents for the way they simply expected me to pick up the pieces of the aftermath. The ultimate "we love you" but you're now responsible for your mum at 14. To that I still say "fuck you" both. I don't think my dad even now understands that pain he put me through. I talk about this because that conditional love from people is part of my Shadow.

Over time I've fought with the strong need to withdraw and insulate myself from the nastiness and "otherness" the world's imposed on me, just so that I can breathe and be myself in private. On the other hand, I yearn for communality and to be integrated into the lives of others and be a proper part of something: so I can breathe and be myself in public. But I haven't found my people yet, and I don't think I ever really will. The strongest bond I ever had was with my sister, but that dissolved many decades ago. I really am adrift and I want to stop being someone other.

 

[LastThursday]

More purging.

I've never been one to get angry at life, my default emotions are more frustration, disappointment and dejection. I do know how to get angry, but I worked out early on that that emotion never served me well. Anger has its place however and I well know how to portray strong irritation if nothing else, it's good enough.

One thing that bugs me about life is that I don't feel like I've ever been good enough. That not being good enough is inextricably linked to being "othered" that I journaled about above. If you're labelled as "other" then you're automatically not "good enough", not good enough in many different ways and senses. Given enough time that sort of thing can eat away at your confidence and self esteem, and to a degree it has in my case. It's been a long and sometimes hard slog to build those things up again, and I'm still doing it, and it's tiresome.

As a form of protection for not being good enough, I've built up a kind of "I don't give a fuck" demeanour, specifically towards the people who "other" me. What better form of defence than that? I could have got angry instead and very visibly shown my disdain for being "othered" but, I chose the more subtle path, the less stressful path. I real issue is, is that I actually do give a fuck. I've felt pain every time I've been excluded from anything. 

The problem with IDGAF is that it can create a vicious cycle. In a workplace setting that means that I will get purposefully overlooked at times. You see a decent manager would think like this: "What makes Guillermo tick? How can I motivate the guy to be more productive?", but what happens in reality is more like "Guillermo doesn't give a fuck, we'll give the work to someone else who does". Although, in the case of work, I actually don't give a fuck, I work to live not live to work, and maybe that comes across just a bit too well?

I remember a few years back, having a sort of mini competition at work for producing a mock up of an app. The company produced betting products, the app would have a kind of roulette wheel with different wins on it. There was a limited time of a couple of hours to mock something up. I was the only guy there that was able to complete it, despite my skills not being in CSS and HTML design. My fellow developers acknowledged my brilliance, the management? not so much. Whatever vibe I give off, managers have never liked it. The app idea was quietly dropped eventually, I wasn't nominated for employee of the month.

And that's it in a nutshell. Despite my self-assured brilliance in many things, nobody wants to acknowledge it in any meaningful way. Personally, it makes me feel frustrated and trapped, how is it I can prove to people that I'm worthy enough of their praise? But eventually I realised that it's really not me that's the problem, it's everyone else, and I've learned to feel some form of pity for them.

The bottom line is that people will only give you praise, awards and other goodies, if you provide "value" to them, that's it, nothing else. Personally it makes me sad the world works this way, but it is what it is. And the converse is also true, that if you're a pain in the arse (or seen as not part of the group), you will get overlooked, shunned and ignored. It's actually a very easy equation, but a very hard lesson. Brilliance does not trump value. And, value does not always trump being "one of us".

So I take solace in the fact that I know I'm good at a lot of things, and extremely good at some things specifically. It would be nice to receive praise and recognition for my talents, but I've mostly given up on that by now. And anyway, that need for recognition (aka love) whilst natural, can also become neurotic and is often a sign that inner work needs to be done. Still, just sometimes, please tell me: Guillermo you're good enough and we love you.

 

Edited July 15 by LastThursday

[MuadDib]

On 15/07/2024 at 8:24 PM, LastThursday said:

Guillermo you're good enough and we love you

 

[LastThursday]

@MuadDib thanks man.