“It’s weird you’re allowed to be hateful in America as long as you’re not specific. Isn’t that weird?
If you’re like ‘I hate Mexican people’, everybody is like, ‘Oh my god, what a bigot, prejudice.’
But if you’re like, ‘I hate people.’ Everyone is like, ‘Huh, fuckin’ right.’”
Do you hate people?
Happiness is not deep
“We think of happiness as something deep and profound but it’s often as simple as keeping the good things “top of mind”.”
We're brainwashed to notice the inadequate. There is no grand scheme conspiracy, we're just awash in a sea of media that remind us what we don't have and what's available for purchase if you just act now.
There are no commercials to remind us to breathe and be grateful. You need to do that on your own. As often as possible.
It's simple but not easy - remember to be happy.
Source: https://time.com/120425/how-5-post-it-notes-can-make-you-happy-confident-and-successful/
The Internet never forgets
“Because when you talk about the Internet, when you talk about deplatforming, when you talk about humor - as you said, people are going back and they’re looking at your jokes, they’re putting them in quotes as a different context, you’re being attacked by it. Something you’ve said looks bad.
There’s things that you’ve said, things that I’ve said, things that the person listening right now have said that they believed, that they meant, that they said ten years ago, that they said one year ago, that they said three weeks ago, that they no longer believe. That they’ve abandoned, they’ve been persuaded otherwise, that they’ve changed their mind on.
And this was one of the central themes in the book, Permanent Record. We are no longer allowed to forget our worst mistakes. They are there. They haunt us. They’re used against us, they’re weaponized. And this society has become aware of this.”
Impossible colors
Imagine what it would be like to see colors you couldn't describe. It would be somewhere between a curse and a superpower. it wouldn't get you into any nightclub, but it would suggest that there is literally more than what meets the eye.
This happened in 1983. Scientists published results in Science of an experiment where they overrode the opponency mechanism in their human test subject's eyes. I'm not sure I fully understand how the eye perceives color, but these scientists were able to manipulate the subject's eyes so they could see color they could not describe with a simple "green" or "red". The edges between the differences in colors blurred.
Sindha Agha compares this phenomena to how the pandemic has altered our sense of time ,and how we don't have a great vocabulary to describe the strange experience of floating along. We can say something felt "fast" or "slow" and that's about it. We accept that time is not something to hold down, but we try anyway.
“It kind of embarrassed me - Humans taking the unfathomable expanse of time and refining into hours. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, who are we to assert the importance of a minute?”
"We simply didn’t care enough to stop them."
Buzzfeed obtained an internal memo sent out by a former Facebook data scientist Zhang explaining how the company failed to act against accounts influencing multiple global political conflicts, namely Honduras and Azerbaijan.
What I took from the story is the immense quantity of fake accounts Facebook has to deal with to make sure these conflicts aren't influenced by bad actors. In some of the networks Zhang was able to take down, she noticed how quickly fake accounts and trolls could return weeks later.
We practice distraction
We're asked to concentrate in this world without ever really being taught how to.
Instead, we are experts at distraction. It's not just our technology; our mind is frantic with thoughts. And most of the time, we're not even aware of how distracted we are. That's the idea. If we don't practice observing those thoughts, we're just living through a spontaneous slideshow of colors and sounds and sensations dragging us along.
As the Hindu priest and entrepreneur Dandapani explains in this TEDx talk, we allow other people to direct our awareness all the time. We pay money to watch movies where the director and producer and actors and everyone else guide your awareness through a story (assuming you don't check your phone several times in the theater).
But if we don't sit with ourselves, observing our own spastic mind, we can never develop concentration.
Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk.
Laura Shapiro writes in the Atlantic about the state of the modern American diet.
Whether it’s potato chips or air-popped organic corn puffs, “smart” frozen entrées or conventional frozen versions, these products are doing way more good for the companies producing them than they’re doing for us. I’m not trying to force the exhausted women in Pressure Cooker to start massaging fresh kale for salad, I promise. We’ll always need shortcuts, takeout, and convenience products to fall back on. But junk food, plain or fancy, stopped being a convenience a long time ago. Today it lives right in the house with us, greets us on the street, finds us at work, and raises our children for us. Our relationship with food, wholly transformed since the ’60s in ways both heartening and horrifying, has lost touch with a truth none of us can afford to leave behind: Cooking isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill.
The Life of The Poet
“I’ll take the life of the poet, the ones and the tens, those screaming, blistering tens and those fuckin’ heart-wrenching ones. Yeah, for sure, I’ll sign up for that. What else are we gonna do? Try to just ride out the middle ground. That’s just less interesting to me.”
"Life is a marathon, unless you get hit by a bus."
What are human beings anymore?
“I’ve let go of judging people around things that I don’t agree with because I reckon I don’t know everything. I’m this. My morality is about how I behave.
And if people said to me, “I’m thinking about going hunting” I go, “Well, these are my feelings about it, however, though, I just heard that hunting does contribute, apparently, to the survival of some species and there is an argument that it is quite natural and indigenous and it’s probably a way of getting into contact with who we are, originally, as hunting people, as an important part of our anthropological history and possibly a lot of the condemnation of hunting is part of the rejection of who we used to be, as we’ve become over-civilized and more and more detached from what it is to be human, whether that’s sacred or pragmatic. We don’t know what human beings are anymore. We reject our own sexuality. We reject our own bodies. We’re trying to turn ourselves into these sort of cyborgs, these emotional, sexless, meaningless creatures. Where is our passion? Where is our connection with the sacred?”
They would go “Hold on, I only asked you about hunting. When are you going to stop talking?”
Never! You gave me an in. I will pummel you with my belief system on all things.”
Adam Conover on identity protective cognition
“If the fact that is being debunked is literally part of your identity, like if it’s something that you believe really, really deeply, it’s incredibly hard for you to disbelieve it.
[…]
Let’s just say somebody whose made their whole career on “Climate change doesn’t exist”. All their friends are in the anti-climate change community. They met their wife at an anti-climate change fundraiser. They make their money, they write a new anti-climate change book every year.
Now, climate change is real, right? There’s no evidence I could present that person with that is going make them take the social risk of ending all their relationships, changing their whole life, right? Because if they were to say, “Okay, you know what? Actually, I’m convinced. Climate change is real,” they would lose all their friends, their wife would leave them, they would lose their revenue stream. They can’t possibly come to that conclusion. And so they fight back so super hard.”
Hitler was great at parties
Carlin: I’m optimistic when I meet individuals, when you talk to one person. People are great one at a time cause you get in and you see all the beauty, all the potential for this species, but as soon as they get in groups, Larry, I get scared. Two people, even, they change. They say, “I like Bob, but not when he’s with Linda.” You ever notice that?
Three people, five, ten, they start having hats, little armbands, slogans, and an agenda - stuff they want to do.
The bigger the group, the worse it is, Larry.
Give me people one at a time and I’m an optimist. Put ‘em in groups of four hundred or ten thousand or ten million and I get scared.
Larry: So each German may have been alright in World War Two?
Carlin: Well, Hitler was great at parties, they said. And great with children.
Defining success > achieving success
Quoted from “Who the fuck am I?”: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Values”:
“But it bugs me a little bit because I think satirizing Hitler’s incredible productivity and influence perfectly embodies a point I’ve long made about the self-help world: achieving success in life is not nearly as important as our definition of success. If our definition of success is horrific—like, say, world domination and slaughtering millions—then working harder, setting and achieving goals, and disciplining our minds all become a bad thing.”
On Getting Things Done as an art
“It’s really kind of an art, the art of how do I manage the flow of life’s work and my commitments, and that whole inventory. You don’t end that. How good can you get at parenting? How good can you get at cooking spaghetti? How good can you get at playing the flute? There is no end to any of those. There is no end to this either. I’m still tweaking, refining. As my life changes, then how do I manage the flow of that change in life? That never stops.”
Kat Koh on creative perspective
“I am a ghost, driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust, riding a rock, hurtling through space.”
Koh shared this cosmic gem in her Medium piece How to Overcome Creative Paralysis. She playfully reminds you to step back and realize that your work doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it can’t be.
You need to chill out to get creative.
Jason Silva on transforming your consciousness
“If we don’t really get a direct experience of reality anyway, if reality is being mediated by the processes in our brain, perhaps we can exercise creative agency over those processes and give ourselves the experience of reality that we wish. So this is where science becomes about us taking creative control over our experiences.”
Climax: a dance film on acid
I should have known what I was setting myself up for.
Gaspar Noe makes intense movies. That’s the best word for them. Irreversible unfolded in reverse chronological order with a ten-minute rape scene that doesn’t cut away. Enter the Void was a three-hour psychedelic journey from a swirling, floating birds-eye view.
When I bought the ticket, as you do nowadays, I already knew Climax was the story of a French troupe of dancers who drank acid-spiked sangria and devolve into monsters. I suppose I was hoping for more, but maybe I’m missing something.
It’s still certainly a film like no other. It felt like Gaspar was highlighting how human beings are capable of some extraordinary things, both good and bad. We can perform mind-bending dance numbers, together, in limb-swirling unison, or we can destroy one another. Sometimes for untold reasons. And that’s what I saw.
And like good film tends to initiate, I’m still thinking about it.
Be a threat to the world
I’ve been trying to find more time to write each week, but often a full day can seem like it’s already decided for you. It can take it out of you.
Work has to get done. You have to get coffee and squeeze yourself into a speeding bullet. You need to cook something with the slightest bit of nutrition and get some exercise because you don’t at the office.
When the sun goes down, sometimes, I just want to down some Queer Eye from the softest part of my couch.
But I found a bit of fight in Tim Ferriss’ 5 Bullet Friday email last week. It was a line from Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby:
“Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
You need to fight for your own time. Or else the world will tell you what to do.
Will Stephen’s TEDx talk is a perfect tongue-in-cheek companion of smart-sounding nonsense. Stephen says, “I’d like it to seem like I’m making points, building an argument, inspiring you to change your life, when in reality, this is just me… buying… time.”
P.S. - The joke is on Big Brother because I don’t have an appendix.
Sometimes you need BBQ and sometimes you need ice cream
The weekend was a bit too much fun. My good buddy Rob joined me at the Waverly Diner on Saturday morning for eggs and meats and dozens of coffees. Sunday, we hit Hometown BBQ in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and followed it up with some Ample Hills ice cream across the street. The rest of the weekend was spent splayed out on my couch in sweats.
It makes me happy to know there is no such thing as being completely healthy, and AJ Jacobs wrote a book about it - Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Jacobs tried to use every bit of research and advice he could to be the healthiest person in the world. And, as the title of his TED talk jokes, it nearly killed him.
He tried to apply sunscreen constantly, as recommended by dermatologists. He wore a helmet walking around the house. He threw his desk chair aside and walked over a thousand miles on a treadmill while writing the thing.
It was a nice reminder for me that the world doesn’t want you to be healthy. We are a danger to ourselves. If we wanted to be healthy, we wouldn’t sit at desks and let our blood collect in our butts. We wouldn’t enjoy whiskey or cocaine, and we probably wouldn’t live in cities. We wouldn’t drive around in cars, or be around large crowds, or blast Sugar Ray in our ears on the way to work every other Tuesday.
Health is a negotiation. A losing battle. Between you, your mind, your body, and everything around it. And even if you bought a custom-fit bubble suit and did your online research, worms will still eat your brains.
I can almost see why smoking is like meditation. You can take a drag of something you know is bad for you but provides that oh-so-necessary peace of mind. A deep inhale to remind yourself that you won’t always do it right, and that’s okay. Sometimes you need BBQ and sometimes you need ice cream.