Out of Time

This is it.

As promised over a year ago, this will be the final post for this blog. The reasons for this are primarily:

1. I think it has reached a point where I am saying many of the same things over and over, only differently. Not useless, but less than ground breaking.
2. It is time for ME to move on, which has been one of the underlying themes as well.

I figured the last day of the year would be a good time to make the change, but one thing led to another, and I couldn’t get it done. So here we are. It is not easy. I like doing this, but, in addition to the reasons above, I don’t really have time for it anymore.

My plan a year ago was to work through all of the posts I had in a draft state to get them online before signing off. I failed. Just like what happens in life, time caught up and I didn’t get everything done I wanted to do. There are dozens still sitting incomplete. I have decided to let them go. I’m not a big fan of symbolic actions because I think they ultimately don’t work. We know we’re doing it symbolically, which belies our sincerity and speaks as much to a need for drama. Show business can be powerful, but the power is often fleeting. All of that is true in this case as well. So…I’m not suggesting I will not write again. Only that it’s time for this blog to rest in peace.

On the occasion that I go back and read previous posts I am at once astounded and proud of how good and insightful some of them are, and also disappointed at how incomplete or lacking in any innovative thinking others are. To the astute reader, I have revealed a lot here, about myself, and human nature in general.

It was never for anyone but me. I never promoted it or cared how many people looked on. It’s simply my art, and started as a way to get some basic thoughts down. Something about writing things down codifies them, forcing the writer to think rationally in complete sentences and to ground statements and feelings. A worthy exercise, and one I think I got better at over the seven years of posts.

It evolved, as I knew it would, though I found myself surprised at how it evolved. I don’t know how obvious it is, but there was actually a turning point in the nature and presentation of the subject matter. It would be interesting to bring someone in to read through it all to see if that stands out. It’s blatantly obvious to me when I read many of the posts before and after that time. It happened over a number of months, but began here (not coincidentally, that post is the most linked to throughout the rest of the blog, barely beating this one.), and began to get momentum here. Life changes, sometimes in ways that there is no undo button for.

As a sort of farewell gift, I offer up my top 50 favorite posts (not already linked elsewhere in this one), which was an agonizing process that probably wasn’t worth the time it took, especially since the list would likely be different if I did it again next week. I hope that for those who come along later, this might get you started with what’s behind the scenes here. In chronological order…

1. Common Sense
2. If the Voltage Gets High Enough…
3. Boundaries
4. Start by Doing a Good Job
5. Religion and Politics
6. Hierarchy of Money
7. Science Has a PR Problem Too
8. Policies
9. Brass Tacks
10. Battle of the Unknown
11. Compromise
12. Love Will Find a Way
13. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
14. The Curse of Perseverance
15. Love and Trust
16. I See Dead People
17. Serendipity
18. Dedication
19. The Drain of Friction
20. The Value of Images
21. What Life Really Is
22. Ideal World
23. The Chosen Ones
24. Forgive
25. A Metaphor for Life
26. The Result of Answers
27. Creativity
28. In the Flesh
29. Move Past Go
30. The Pretty Girl Gets Kissed
31. A Beautiful Story
32. Hope is Not a Strategy
33. Morality
34. Caged
35. Free Will is Fake
36. Burning Ships
37. Blind Spot
38. Delusions
39. Why Love Wins
40. Strength
41. One Step
42. Trust, the Hidden Part
43. Probability: Facts, Statistics, and Reality
44. Changes
45. Pride and Face
46. Comfort
47. Atheism: Instrumental versus intrinsic
48. Reasons or Excuses
49. New Information
50. The Opposite of Success
51. Bonus: the whole Happiness series

 

And here are a few random facts.

• The most visitors to the blog in one day was on 1/6/2015, after this post.
• 2015 was the busiest year for visitors, with 2011 close behind.
• 2015 also has the most published posts, at 81.
• Nearly 2,000 unique people visited the blog throughout 2015.
• After the United States, Germany had the most visitors.
• The most viewed page, by far, was the home page.
• The most looked at post was this one, followed by this. It appears traffic to the site was more influenced by my use of a couple of popular terms people search for than the actual content of the blog. Humbling, though not surprising.
• The longest time gap between when an entry was started and when it was actually completed and posted was 56 months.
• There are almost 1,000 comments posted across the 493 blog entries.
• There are over 22,000 comments not posted, as they marked as spam. Unfortunately some of those are/were legitimate comments. I never got to sorting them all out. Sorry about that.
• There were 520 images posted over the course of the blog. The images are very important, and often contained additional information/meaning.

To quote a friend, “It’s time.” I could drone on about all that I’m thinking as the final letters get typed, and the unused material gets trashed, but it’s a frivolous delay of what I have decided.

It’s a lot like life. Time runs out while we still have things on our to do list.

I do have another potential endeavor in the works. If anything gets going on that I may return here to leave a trail of bread crumbs to it.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

All the best,

David Stewart

 

 

 

 

Conservation of Energy

In physics, the law of energy conservation states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant. It can’t be created or destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another. Our understanding of the universe relies on this principle.

It often (not always) applies to people and relationships, too.

If you escalate (cut off in traffic, angry at the gate agent, frustrated at your boss), you’ve just added (negative) energy to a conversation.

If you escalate (enthusiasm, a hug, encouraging words), you’ve just added (positive) energy to a conversation.

Once the energy is added, it has to go somewhere. Often, the person you’re engaging with throws it right back, or even increases it. The problem with taking offense is that it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it after you’re done using it. Better to just leave it on the table and walk away. Umbrage untaken quietly disappears. A talented, mature person might take your negative energy and de-escalate it, or even swallow it and permit the conversation to calm down or end. But don’t count on it.

You can ‘win’ a conversation by overwhelming your opponent with energy they can’t handle. But of course, they’re not your opponent and you don’t really win. Being aware of the energy you add or take from interactions is a sophisticated technique that radically changes the outcomes of the conversations that fill your day. Add the good stuff, absorb the bad stuff and focus on the outcomes, not the bravado. Winning isn’t the point.

Two Kinds of Argument

Scientific -vs- the other kind. The scientific kind relies on what the facts say. The science can be proven wrong by better science. The other kind relies on what emotions say or pride.

If you need to convince someone who refuses to act like a scientist (listening to facts), making better science isn’t going to help you very much. The person you’re arguing with (who might be a scientist during the day, even, but is merely being a person right now) is not going to be swayed from a firmly held opinion by your work to make better science. It’s more likely that it will take cultural pressure, shame, passion, humor, connection and a host of unreliable levers to make your point.

The easy way to tell the two varieties of argument apart is to ask, “what evidence would you need to see to change your mind about this?”

Don’t argue about belief, argue about arguments. The essence of a belief is that we own it, regardless of what’s happening around us. The key to making a rational argument is that your assertions must be falsifiable.

“I believe A because of B and C.” If someone can show you that “C” isn’t actually true, then it’s not okay to persist in arguing “A”. The statement, “All swans are white” is falsifiable, because if I can find even one black swan, we’re done.

On the other hand, “Aliens are about to take over the world with flying saucers,” is not, because there’s nothing I can do or demonstrate that would satisfy the person who might respond, “well, they’re just very well hidden, and they’re waiting us out.”

If belief in “A” is important to someone’s story, people usually pile up a large number of arguments that are either not testable, or matters of opinion and taste. There’s nothing wrong with believing “A”, but it’s counterproductive to engage with someone in a discussion about whether you’re right or not. It’s a belief, or an opinion, both of which are fine things to have, but it’s not a logical conclusion or a coherent argument, because those require asserting something we can actually test.

You can’t argue with feelings. The key question is, “is there something I can prove or demonstrate that would make you stop believing in ‘A’?” If the honest answer is ‘no’, then we’re not having an argument, are we?

Before we waste a lot of time arguing about something that appears to be a rational, logical conclusion, let’s be sure we are both having the same sort of discussion.

Choosing Battle

I enjoy playing and watching sports, particularly basketball and football. I enjoy the skill and competition, though I could live without the macho testosterone driven parts. Nevertheless those moments when things really heat up can be revealing.

I remember watching an NBA game one night where the Timberwolves’ player Kevin Garnett, whom I love, and is a respected battler on the court, found himself facing off against a player on another team (I don’t even remember who it was anymore). Kevin’s unintentional body language in that moment revealed even through a wild swinging punch he threw that he did not want to be engaged in that fight. It was so obvious to anyone tuned in to that sort of thing. But of course he had a reputation and pride to uphold, so he went through the motions.

Character is revealed in the heat of battle. Do we really want to be there, or would a quiet escape suit? Do we push through and do our duty, in spite of the risk and fear?

Examine your internal monolog as you read and think about this. My guess is it’s probably coming from a moral orientation. You see failure to step up to the plate as morally wrong, and a shortcoming.

That can be true, but if we get off of our moral high-horse for a moment, we can also understand that everyone has certain things worth fighting for. We just don’t all have the same ones. Sure, some have a higher predisposition toward fighting, but every man can be a coward if he doesn’t believe in either the cause or his chances of winning, or at least saving face.

It’s too simplistic to view character through the polarized lens of black and white, of you have it or you don’t. Character is more nuanced. What is a person’s character telling him or her is the right thing to do? Amazingly, someone could be doing a thing that we feel is immoral, but is actually consistent with that person’s character and view of the world or situation, and not wrong.

Oh, but it is so hard for us to accept this, because we’re so programmed. And we have our own agenda.

 

Passion

You have to have passion for what you’re doing if you want to be great. If you don’t love it you’ll quit before you get there. This we’ve all been told or read a number of times before.

The struggle we sometimes find ourselves in is when we try to make something great, even though the passion isn’t there. Or, said another way, we struggle trying to invent or re-ignite passion.

It’s a shame that we put this pressure on ourselves. Because passion, by definition, isn’t very controllable. It’s an emotion. It can be modulated to some extent by our actions and mindset. But like most of our emotions, we don’t have direct access to it. Emotions are driven in part by our intellect. We know the situation we are in, and we know how we feel about it. We can observe much of that taking place and understand it academically, but controlling it is a lot to ask. It’s unreliable, at best. Hard to fight our human nature.

The reality is…we sometimes keep trying to find a way through even when the passion isn’t there. This manifests to different degrees I can summarize into three categories:

1. Apathy – Giving up. No longer trying. One step away from quitting altogether, which could be the right thing to do once one reaches this point.
2. Mailing/phoning it in – This has most of the appearances of trying, but it’s usually more for the benefit of all the onlookers than anything. Sometimes we do this for a while, waiting/hoping for that spark (spark) of inspiration to strike.
3. The Struggle – The gallant effort. Continuing to push and work hard, in spite of evidence that it isn’t doing much good. In spite of that dull, nauseating feeling of discontent. The tricky thing is, when we try hard, we usually do get some results. Often it can be enough to keep us engaged for a while. But in the end we usually know the truth.

Without that intangible thing called passion driving us, it’s virtually impossible to do our best for an extended period of time.

And so…things change. Some people experience more of this than others. Some are better at fighting through and ignoring the underlying feelings than others. I would humbly suggest that no matter which side of this you are on, judging what another person is battling  and how it may be manifesting, is probably a misguided waste of emotional energy. Your passion, your common sense, your background of obviousness is unique to you.

When the fuel tank reaches empty, the car can usually still coast for a while, especially when the wind is favorable, but in the end you gotta’ find something new to be passionate about to really get going and get somewhere.

I’m sorry if this is not the answer you may want.

Organization’s Effects

If you take a group of people, a subgroup of the larger population, and expose them to focused messages again and again, you will start to change their point of view. If you augment those messages with exposure to other members of the group, the messages will begin to have ever more impact.

We generally tend to align ourselves with those we’re around. We don’t fully understand why. There is a lot of psychology we know, and then other stuff we can’t explain. Yawning, for instance, can be statistically shown to be contagious. It has been studied for years, yet we don’t know why it happens.

Once a group starts to become aligned, and starts acting like a tribe, the messages of the tribe will become self-reinforcing. When someone is born into that tribe, there is a very high probability she will never know the difference. It is simply her common sense about the way the world works.

Programmed.

Are You Really Sure?

What if the speed of light isn’t constant? You don’t have to think too far into that question to surmise that it would break a lot of what we think we know about the universe.

VSL (Varying Speed of Light) is a real theory that has some traction, but is considered out of mainstream physics. It does resolve a few very sticky problems in our current understanding of the universe. For just one example you probably aren’t aware of…the cosmological expansion we often hear about actually appears to be accelerating, which in current (constant speed) thinking would imply that on a large scale gravity is repulsive. The science we accept is not at all iron clad.

There are two ways to look at this:

1. What can we be sure of? The answer, truthfully, is not much. Everything can be questioned.
2. When the prevailing science gives us a solid answer that remains stable for decades, we can be sure enough that it’s true to go ahead and act on it. That’s being practical.

There is always going to be that shred of doubt. It’s usually nothing, but sometimes a universe can be found there.

Okay, it’s mildly interesting to entertain these thoughts, but really, what difference does it make? It doesn’t impact that I have to go to work tomorrow, or take out the trash. Does it? Well…first, you don’t really have to do any of those things. Second…it gets to the religious question, and that changes potentially everything about what we’re supposed to be doing.

The more you learn about these subjects, the more you discover that “we” (as in the human race) know a lot more than “we” (the individuals) are aware of. We really do know and understand a lot about how the universe works. At the same time, you begin to see how many problems and mysteries there are within and around all of these things we think we know, which makes the mysteries all the more profound and troublesome.

As I have written before, it takes a bit of a leap of faith either way.

The more fundamental (to me) question is…what makes us leap one way or the other? Why do some look up at the sky and see God, whereas others look up and see only physics? Really think about that question for a while. What tips the scale one way or the other for an individual?

Coin Sides

There are almost always (at least) two perspectives through which any situation can be viewed. Anger and hurt are two sides of the same coin. And…

• Passion and Hubris
• Endurance and pain
• Perseverance and stubbornness
• Envy and Jealousy
• Reward of good versus avoidance of guilt
• Trust and faith
• Influence and Manipulation
• Us and them
• Structure and regulation
• Character and reputation
• Provided or Invented boundaries
• Intentions and outcomes
• Form and function
• Facts and spin
• Ignorance and confidence (or skill)

They all have a degree of double-sided logic to them – an obviousness heavily influenced by perspective and context.

As you can see from the numerous links above, this has been an underlying theme throughout the soon ending timeline of this blog. So much of what I have written about reveals my personal view that what we see is a reflection of who we perceive we are.

• Perception and reality

Most points I have made along the way could be used to further some agenda I may have, or could just as easily be used to combat it. I have seen and understood this from the beginning, even though some have felt the need to point it out as if I am blind to the underlying implications (I welcome the engagement anyway). Over the next two days I will offer another example in two posts that show an issue from two vantage points. Nothing at all special about them. Pretty mundane actually, but want the readers to see them in that context from the get-go. There is usually a kind of truth that emerges, even though it looks different from the two vantage points.

The point is…we’re going to see and do things according to what makes us feel good. Or the least bad.

• Have to. Want to

It’s entirely subjective, and a part of our programming, so debating over nature or nurture is almost a moot point, because it’s all just a form of programming really.

And even once we realize that, there still seems to be no escape. It is what it is. Or is it?

And this leads to another prevailing theme of this blog (I will spare you the numerous examples). What if we somehow muster the courage to make a leap? To do something so audacious it seems crazy. Then, from the new space of possibilities we created for ourselves as a function of living in the new paradigm, would our perspective change, at least a little bit?

You bet it would.

For the better? Would we be more happy or fulfilled? It’s really the wrong question. The question really should be, will we have learned something in the process that helps us hone in better on what’s right for us?

You bet it would.

And what of the risks? They exist anyway. Most people looking back say they wish they would have risked more, not less. There is some wisdom for you. Besides, you’re not totally alone. There is help around, but yes, in the end it’s pretty much up to you, which is why it takes courage, and the will to get over yourself.

• Pride and face

Make the leap.

 

 

 

 

Cloudy

Our moods cloud thinking and judgement. It’s usually somewhat nuanced, but without a doubt we know that certain decisions and reactions are impacted by emotions, which are partially triggered by moods, which are impacted in a variety of ways.

Cloudy days…just don’t feel the same as the bright, sunny days. Our bodies, and ultimately our psyches react to these conditions in ways we don’t fully understand or have control over. Further, moods affect our perception of the relative cloudiness.

It’s possible the tipping point of perception driving an important decision would differ depending on whether it’s cloudy or sunny outside. It has implications into the element of chaos or seeming randomness in everything that happens.

Fascinating how we are cognitively (emotionally…spiritually?) connected to the earth and environment in these ways, and in how much dissonance we produce by ignoring or resisting it.

Is Truth Relative?

It depends on what you mean by “truth.”

There are only about three possible scenarios for how the universe works.

1. There is an objective reality that exists, but not one human in all of history has ever witnessed it. Everything, EVERYTHING, is processed through the human system of perception. Our perception is our reality. It has been proven time and time again that our perceptions, and therefore the beliefs that stem from them, are faulty. We are easily fooled or tricked into believing things are real or accurate, when they can be shown not to be. We also have tons of evidence that shows similar individuals in similar circumstances perceive things differently. They may resemble reality to some extent, but there are many – perhaps an unknowable number of – flaws or discrepancies between what we see and believe is going on and the way the world “is,” versus the objective reality that may actually exist.
2. There is no objective reality at all. There is merely the sum of our thoughts and beliefs, and all that we invent therein, which add up to something that seems objectively real to us. Taken to the extreme, this theory goes toward painting us as ‘only’ a consciousness. Seems far-fetched to me, but we have to admit it is possible.
3. There are many objective realities. Each one existing in its own universe, with its own history and distinctiveness. There is evidence to support that these different universes occupy the same space, but are simply out of phase with each other in a way that allows them to overlap without interacting. In any case, the embodied consciousnesses that occupy each one of those may or may not be able to process their relative realities the way they actually are. Certainly, in the universe where we exist, there is ample evidence to show that we at best perceive a facsimile of our surrounding reality.  See #1.

So, truth? Yeah, my truth and your truth can be a bit different. Or a lot different. The answer to this is almost certainly not knowable by man, at least until maybe we might possibly someday transcend into some other, much more enlightened state.

What do we do about it? Nothing. As far as my perception can tell, we can’t do a bloody thing, and the exercise itself is nearly pointless. We have the lives we have and the perceptions we own that go along with them. That is the reality we must work within. We simply have to do the best we can there, because anything else would appear to defeat any possible purpose or joy in life for us. And it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

But, be mindful of what this normally concrete term really implies. Your truth, no matter how iron-clad it may seem to you, is absolutely faulty (i.e. wrong) in some ways. May we all learn to operate within the humility of that reality. Minimally that means being cautious about what you think, feel, believe, and remember. More profoundly it means questioning it down to the core of who you think you are, and why you are that way. These are extremely tough questions to genuinely grapple with, in part because it’s all tied up in perception and our programming. Any conclusions you may come to are suspect.

Since it’s not really knowable, does that mean that we’re just as well off with whatever makes us feel good? Probably. And that’s awesome for those who don’t get wrapped up in the doubts or can just feel good enough about whatever they believe. Some people are naturally able to hold their beliefs in a way that to them seems nearly iron clad. What is the answer for those who don’t? Modify our beliefs? Yeah, how exactly does one go about that without some satisfying justification (i.e. compelling evidence)?

How do you convince yourself? I asked a qualified friend once if hypnotism works. Her answer (paraphrased): “It can if you believe it.”

Damn.