The urge to consume and the resistance to create

 Its no new topic- Its perhaps my favourite and least favorite thing to write about- I carry it like a disease I despise, yet have lived with it for so long that its become a part of my identity. Its the online content consumption. 

And its deadlier cousin- consuming content about overdose of content consumption, how you can reduce your content consumption etc. Its a real spiral I tell you. 

Anyhow as a part of my resolution to become more mindful I ahve strated to notice my urges to consume stuff. I cant seem to be in a room by myself. I feel like I am wasting time if I am not listening to some podcast. However this thought doesnt seem to come when I am cruising down some useless rabbithole middle of teh day. The worst bit is that not doing something useful feels guilty when it doesnt have to, and doesnt when I absolutely should be feeling guilty. 

Detox is what everyone suggests but I want a way to integrate this in my life without having to resort to extremes. I have realised I dont do any activity without being distracted. Even in the middle of this post, I took a break to send something to a colleague ( that I was supposed to send yesterday, btw). 

Forgetfulness, followed by feeling ashamed. Its crippling. 

Post death

 Uploading your brain to a system and becoming immortal digitally has been an endless fascination of mine. Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson have touched on these and  I have consumed those with great interest. My personal stance on this always was that I dont want that for myself. I want to live in my physical body and then disappear. 

I had not considered what is the fate I would prefer for my friends. 

I was reflecting that for a few of my closest friends - I have spent more time with them digitally than I have in person. They live in different countries and we barely meet once a few years. But even if we dont meet at all, the quality of our friendship hasnt come down- perhaps due to the strong foundation of knowing each other fully well or that we are used to living a lot more of our life digitally that this has become a part of life. 

Should one of them be faced with an early death, would I not love for them to live in a system, so that our friendship can continue? Am purely talking from my perspective- not theirs. To me I think it wont make any difference- we hardly see face to face, an emoji is enough for me to figure out what they are feeling, and most importantly I would love a world where they exist, than one they dont. 

But then there would surely be overpopulation- my solution to that is the digital one too expires at an agreeable age- Say 80/75 or whatever. This is only a solution for early/natural deaths.

Its not you Murphy, its me

 Somedays everything goes wrong. And its not some stroke of ill luck or a hilarious montage of things going wrong in impossible ways. Its more like a heavy burden that slowly keeps growing in weight and pushing you down. Yesterday was one of those days. It felt like I can do nothing right. I seem to have the anti-midas touch. Every potentially golden thing I touch, i burn to ashes. 

I pushed through it, not really recovering, but just surviving. Today that feels a bit distant. I am still the same underacheiver, but I feel like I can do maybe a bit more today. Today is a new day and my failures of yesterday wont matter. 

I dont know if they wont, I just hope they dont. 

I have to find focus else nothing will happen. I have to build in productive slack to recover, recharge and get insights. Not timewaste slackery thats useless. 

Trapped priors

 A very interesting article by Slatestar codex about LSD bringing back lost sense of smell due to CoVID and the possible explanations for it. While that is quite interesting in itself, what stayed with me was the concept of a trapped prior/a prior state which leads to all sorts of problems. Like you get sea sick because you are not used to it, but the sea sickness stays even after you have got on land. Chronic pain is supposed to be similar- you have been in a state of pain for so long that even after the original reason for the pain has healed, your brain is still receiving pain signals because your nerves are expecting it to be there anyway.  Its fascinating. 

This can surely be extrapolated into the non-physical bits of life too. Say you have worked in a place that you consider uncreative, full of politics and not your type and you get on a certain lazy routine of coasting along helped by caffeine and funny websites. You get a job in a different place with different people but you cant seem to get out of your funk. Or in many cases a boss may have been a certain way- lets say he gets the feedback and changes his style . But you continue to act as if he was the old asshole. 

The phrase trapped prior is beautiful because its just so appropriate. Full disclaimer- I havent read the article on trapped prior yet so am not sure if he means only this as trapped priors. 

Is knowing you are in a trapped prior enough to get you out of one? The brain is way too complex for such simplistic answers 

No phone spaces

In my never ending quest for de-addiction from phone  I thought of implementing a simple thing during the day. Three times during the workday, once before and once after, I will spend some time away from my phone, just thinking. Maybe I am thinking about work, maybe I am not, but I will get those pockets of spaces just to get a sense of the day passing by. Am not fixing a time to it, but yeah it mostly happens when I have a call in say 15 minutes, and I am unable to focus on my current task. Or I have just finished a long call and I am trying to process it. 

I feel like I have a lot of ideas, I just never let them come to the surface because of the algae/lotus leaves of Social media. Who knows what riches lie underneath? These spaces are a chance for me to glimpse through the thick layer on top - maybe I will see flashes of brilliance or maybe it will be dark and terrifying. 

I also wanted to have spaces as in physical spaces that are no phone, but thats proving a lot harder. 

post mid life

 I was thinking the other day that I may have lived half my life. I dont know where the days went, my life slowly changed and was suddenly nothing like what it was 5 years back. 

I have heard that this is how you feel when you are 65, so what is teh way to stop it? Do new things? Have new experiences? Be mindful of whatever experiences you are having anyway? Stopping to note the passage of time? Accumulating great memories? Reliving those memories to ensure they dont disappear? 

Ken Liu makes me think

 All his short stories have something that make me want to stop reading the short story and just think about it. 

The most recent one was where society reaches a level where we buy armors from trolls. So AI helps you not see trolls and their vicious judgements you buy software that prevents you from seeing them. Because you cannot stop trolls, platforms cannot manage this censorship business, the smartest way seems to be to shield yourself from it. 

Ofcourse trolls then figure out a way to break the armor and then its just a full fledged evolutionary arms race. But the idea that instead of trying to figure out a way to make the trolls stop, we need to figure out a way to not see them, made me think. Maybe its really basic, but tahts pretty muhc how humankind has dealt with everything? 

Bad weather? Build homes and protect yourself. Thorny paths? Wear a shoe. Going by that logic this does seem to be the future.