Chaordic Mind

(Re-post of an item on January 2007)

I like the word juxtaposition, not just because it sounds nice, but also because it compares two extremes side-by-side. Life is chaotic enough that many times the shades of grey are too intense to see through the fog of events. When you juxtapose two items you increase the contrast to better see them individually. It is the difference that makes their existence so crisp.

If you know me, then you know I love to use analogies — for better or for worse. But I do this because it provides a vessel for translating concepts into high contrast conceptual forms and ideas.

Most areas of knowledge elude the majority of the population, for a variety of reasons.  We are accustom to reading summary reports and hearing processed news reports with only a few seconds of the actual event.  Our ability to navigate the world and our experiences in rooted in our ability to process large amounts of data while only focusing on a small number of items at once.  While driving down the road you see many things but your eyes and mind will only focus on a handful of them.

The less contrast in life the more things begin to string together.  As we get more stressed the contrast between the important tasks and the unimportant ones becomes blurred. We loose focus because there is nothing to focus on.  This is why I say to, “Increase the Contrast”, because that is what it takes to really see life and maximize your ability to experience it fully.

(Re-post of an item written in June 2007)

The mind offers protectionism against our fears, but this can sometimes lead to stagnation. It’s not a voluntary act, but more a learned experience. The government is an expert at this art. The information security community leverages it to impose their will on the masses. They even have a term for it: FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

But better than any social experiment, our mind is a master of illusion and perception augmentation. We can see this easily in the movies we watch. Anyone watching a scary movie knows the point at which fear enters the picture. The camera closes in on a character leaving the viewer unable to see anything but their face. This triggers a reaction in the viewers mind about the infinite number of things that could befall this character. Out mind is almost trained to enumerate the fearful possibilities and recite them to ourselves.

Left unchecked, this fear can be debilitating. In its best forms we call it complacency and in its worst we call it insanity. So we build structures against such fear. We arm ourselves with weapons such as hope, faith, and through the lives of our heroes. Some religious groups will literally say they are “putting on the full armor or god” in order to do battle with the devil, for which fear is a material or mental manifestation.

One of these protective structures is permanence. We believe… we must believe that some things are permanent, even if just in the short term. We believe that we will live past tomorrow, or else people would do erratic things and chaos would ensue. We believe that we will grow old, or else we would never prepare for something we call ‘retirement’. We believe that strangers on the street will not randomly attack us, or else we would quickly become a society of roaming fear mongers. Society works because fear is contained and fed to us in only small and predictable doses. Fear can sometimes even make one feel safe and provide a central theme to unite a group of people.

What would happen if there was ever a loss of our beliefs or a fracture of the permanence that we so carefully rely on? Some might argue that chaos would follow and thus the argument for keeping people feeling safe and secure. But what about those things that cannot be controlled? The smaller things, that based on their very nature, no government or society can contain?

Things like a relationship break up, death in the family, divorce, pain, solitude, shame? The list goes on and on. These are things that cannot be controlled and thus cannot offer permanence. These are the things that Reinhold Niebuhr thought of when he wrote the Serenity Prayer.

accept the things I cannot change,
have courage to change the things I can
and have the wisdom to know the difference

I couple this with the quote from Fight Club that says, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” Fear exists within us all and it’s only when you free yourself of it that you can ever accomplish the things you imagine and desire. It’s only after you know, not just acknowledge, that some day things will change. You will no longer like chocolate, you will want children, you will learn that you always wanted to be something you were not, and then you will die.

It’s only after we confront our fears and take action that we can ever move beyond our current state of mind. It’s only after we step out into the abyss with our eyes wide open that we can ever evolve into something more than we currently are.

Oscar Levant is quoted as saying “there is a fine line between genius and insanity.” I do not believe this means that genius is close to insanity, but that insanity can remove the barriers in ones mind and enable them to see beyond their current static form and imagine the impossible.

My favorite quote is that “nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes longer.” To say this and believe it is one step closer to deweaponizing permanence, and for me one step closer towards happiness.

(Re-post of an item written in May 2008)

Writing is hard.  More specifically, character development is hard because at the start of the book you need to assume that the character does not have all of the experience and knowledge that the writer has now.  The writer must write about a character that is young, rash, and still learning about the harsher side of life and love.

This is difficult, for some writers, because in order to write about this you have to think of the world different than you do now.  You have to imagine what you (or your character) would do if you were rash, stubborn, and unwilling to compromise.  I’m not saying we are all perfect in our ways, but you have to imagine someone who is so stubborn they let an argument turn into a fight that turns into a divorce.  They have to be so stubborn they hit rock bottom before they realize their life needs to change.  Some writers can draw upon experience, but most of us humans live in some form of middle ground.  Our lives are not too soft or hard, not too joyful or brutish.  We live in a state of balance that we manicure until we are content.  To write a good character requires us to unsettle the balance and unweave the fabric of life we try so hard to keep in check.

To assist the main character a writer can either take the path of a “sage guide” or let the character bumble along and learn life’s lessons the hard way, through experience.  Yoda was the sage guide in Star Wars.  Although Luke Skywalker had to learn life’s lessons on his own he always had the sage advice of Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi ringing in his ears.  Many writers take this path and many blockbusters were born out of this very theme.  Splinter was the sage guide to four brash, young, and inexperienced Ninja Turtles.  He taught them lessons they later learned to be true.  This approach towards writing seems to be a guaranteed winner in all media forms.  Perhaps this is because people want to believe in a hero – one that can be both mortal like them and then turn into a better person or being.  They want to believe that if this can happen to a turtle then certainly it can happen to them as well.  As a culture we are drawn towards heros who start from humble beginnings.  We want to imagine a magical path to enlightenment.  But reality proves otherwise.

I believe that punctuated equilibrium of personal development is the alternative to the sage guide.  These are stories usually written as memoirs or tales of personal development through hard learned experience.  They could just as easily become blockbusters but more often take the form of independent films.  These are stories of people, human like us, with all their faults who gain it all and then loose it all just as as quickly.  These characters go on with their lives until they are forced to change out of necessity.  They do not always change for the better, as one would under the sage guide approach.  Instead they usually change one aspect of their personality or interactions and then another.  Each time a change in their character is punctuated by a life experience that says to them, “this path you have been taking is no longer acceptable or working out – we need another option or path.”

I think this is why I prefer memoirs, because it is easier for me to relate to small punctuated changes than it is to imagine a life changing event that shakes and alters the core of my being.  Cynics will say that I have simply not experienced a potentially deadly car accident or the warm embrace of religion, but I have and both were short lived.  Perhaps they did not leave the mark on me that they do on others.  But I have found that for most people who live the middle ground of life, it is only those critical events that cause them to alter one aspect of their being.  Perhaps they become safer drivers, or more open to spirituality.  Perhaps they become more willing to accept other alternatives and become more patient people.

We all experience these things to one degree or another and do not need writers to document them.  Also, books are finite and thus we need to skip the in between parts.  The sitcom Friends (or Coupling if you live in the UK) would not be interesting if it was a reality show.  What excites us is the careful stringing together of these inflection points in a way that suspends our sense of disbelief and also draws us in to think, “that could be me” or “I could do that.”

That’s the hard part.  The careful craft of skipping the in between in a way that enables us to experience the deep sadness and then joy of life.  To think it could be us.  To think we still have hope.

(Re-post of an item written in June 2008)

Many people ask the question, “Why use Twitter?”  It sometimes seems the future is too fast for many of us, and we stop to question why, when making these declarative decision tree choices.  My friends ask me why I would ever use Twitter, because nobody wants to hear about when you use the bathroom or stub your toe.  But the reality is that from the moment we get up in the morning until the moment we go to bed, thousands of social network users are engaging in the neural network conversation that is the future of media.

The tricky part to why social networks work has a little to do with the question, “What are you using it for?” and “What do you want to accomplish with it?”  Much like helping someone decide what computer they need, you don’t want to talk about processors and RAM; instead you want to ask, “What will you us the computer for?”  A social network is simply a framework for interaction – a set of tools, options, system calls.  It is useless without the focused intent of thousands or millions of users.

For me I use social networks for different things.  I use LinkedIn for managing work and professional related contact.  I don’t update or check it often but it’s a quick reference for me to look up work, track, and and host work related contacts.  I know I can always google a name + “linkedin” and will get back the work history of anyone.  I also use Facebook for managing social contacts, and work contacted in a social setting.  It’s the equivalent of hitting the bar after work.  I can see what people are up to and where their interest lie.  Sometimes I can tell their political affiliations, see photos, and track their social connections.  But even this is still a static medium.

I use Dopplr to track my travels and correlate them with those of my friends.  It’s also nice, as my schedule changes, for others to see and reflect those changes.  It’s a static site that I don’t visit often, but like many other networks – does one thing, but does it well.  I also use Flickr for storing my photo lifestream and keeping up on others.  This provides me an insight into their travels and whatever they find interesting at the time.  Dopplr nicely ties into Flickr allowing people to see my photos per trip.

Finally, I use Twitter to keep hourly tabs on the lifestream updated of my friends as well as my contacts.  It takes very little time to type out or key in 140 characters whenever I am doing something of note or interest.  It enables me to know about the more mundane aspects of the lives of my friends.  The things you forget in the day to day and would not bother to mention even in daily conversations.

But all this socializing sounds like nothing more than XML tagging of your life.  The key is that social networks rely on the participation of many people.  If I joined each of these networks as the only member the information I stored there would be of no use.  The reason I care and even engage these systems is because they change with the input of others.  I can watch, monitor, and even search through these for ways to leverage the collective mind share of others.  On LinkedIn I can read feedback people have had in working with others.  On Facebook I can see who is connected with who.  On Twitter I can search for events in a city or place I am visiting.  We use these systems because any one person can leverage the collective stream of data from the others.  The more we add the more any one person can take away.