Conversation

 As a way of solitude and deep thinking. 

I remember reading an article long back about how facebook and other instant messaging media deprive us of real conversations and deep friendships. This was before "The Shallows" and before it was fashionable to deride social media. The article spoke about how important it is for us to cultivate solitude to better understand ourselves. Counterintuitively the article also suggested that conversation with a friend can also give you the same kind of understanding and richness, as solitude does. 

I could relate to it, since I have/had a couple of friends with whom those kind of conversations happen. With almost any good friend, conversations leave you feeling wholesome but with some people, conversations lead me to understand things about myself that I may not have been fully aware of. It is rarely anything groundbreaking, more like having a fuzzy idea snap into focus, or something hazy from the background coming to the forefront of my conscious. 

It is very rare for these to happen in group settings, on video calls etc, though I remain hopeful that we will soon develop tools that enable almost an in-person feel even through tech. 

Understanding the other

 Its really easy to bunch a group of people who disagree with you and label them as idiots. Thats what most of us do. Its far more difficult to understand why they have reached this stance. Maybe they dont have the in-depth knowledge of the subject as you do, maybe they have had an experience that has let them to believe that the un-truth is the truth. In a lot of cases it may also be that the information diet they consume presents a different world view than the one you consume. 

Mainstream media and liberals sometimes take a condescending view of trump supporters as racists and idiots. Partly from a desire to be contrarian and partly from curiosity I try to figure out why Trump supporters /anti vaxxers are the way they are. Surely they arent a group of low IQ individuals, surely the spread of good people and bad, super smart and super not-smart people is the same in that cohort as any other large group you take. What then leads an average person to be so rabidly anti-vaxx? Its personal experience or what they have heard growing up( that they havent found enough evidence against, to invalidate). 

I got a small insight into that recently. Anti-vaxxers strictly believe that pharmaceutical industry is out to get everyone. While that seems like standard anti-capitalist, I have always wondered where this mistrust stemmed from. And why just this industry? Surely every indsustry is out to get everyone? 

While reading Empire of Pain- the history of the most abused prescription Oxycontin, I got a vague understanding of why this perception might have built up. One of the most succesful pain-relievers, it ended up being the most abused drugs because it developed a dependence even with low doses/low frequency of usage. And the company continued to advertise and push the product even as evidence was mounting against it. Thousands of normal people with minor injuries who were prescribed a simple pain killer ended up addicts.

The company specifically targeted suburbs in certain areas where family physicians were common, where people tended to trust doctors and would not question them. This I suppose ties in nicely with the traditional Republican states, which tended to have more veterans, ( and thus more injuries,disabilities and pain) and were target areas for the company. 

In a small city, when anyone dies abnormally everyone feels it, as if it were one of their own. Oxycontin abuse deaths would have reached a level where everyone knows someone who lost their lives to addiction. The fact that the company exhibited no regret and continued promoting the products, is enough for everyone to decide that Big Pharma just does not care. A mistrust in one company extends to the entire pharmaceutical industry and the fear manifests itself as a general mistrust of everything they do. 

Of course, people with other agenda feed them misinformation that they beleive because it aligns with their world view, but the basic reason for this mistrust is not stupidity but simply that it is a different world for them than it is for us.

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.