Too busy to notice

Meditation is incredible. Or so I'm told.
I forget to meditate most mornings.

It's not a lack of time. I have plenty.
It's not that I don't want to. I do.

But the fact is most of us can't be bothered to sit still and breathe. We can't fathom not participating every waking second. We wouldn't dare forget to brush our teeth, but can we stand to try and silence our own mind? No thanks!

Everything around us says, "Keep this narrative going". We have responsibilities. Be in the office by nine. Meetings and deadlines. In between there are text messages and dates and exercise classes and food to hunt down. And so many good shows to catch up on.

Until our heads hit the pillow. Another day flies by.

We're afraid to notice just how wild our minds can be. It only takes five minutes to feel like you're crazy. Is this what my mind is doing all the time? A tornado of reactions in a kaleidoscope world? Never able to find your footing?

But the cosmic joke is it's worth it. There have been studies to suggest just sitting and breathing can reduce anxiety, depression, stress and even blood pressure. It can increase pain tolerance, improve memory and boost empathy for others.

Where everything around us forces us to pay attention, our mind just sits and waits for us to do the same. And, most of the time, we're too busy to notice.

Fighting our evolution

I've been trying to lose a few pounds lately. Summer makes it too easy to grab an ice cream or a beer whenever you want. And I thought the smoothest way to start the shredding would be to start weening myself off of sugar. I don't eat entirely too much but it's too easy to find a way to consistently reward yourself for surviving through another day. A little bit too much every day adds up.

To learn a bit more about the whole process, I found myself watching a short Slate documentary called A Brief History of Fat, and Why We Hate It. Biochemist and physician Stephen O' Rahilly dropped this bomb: "Nothing makes sense except through the prism of evolution."

Fat was never an enemy, it kept us alive. In times of scarcity, we needed fat as energy to keep our bodies active and awake. But in an ironic twist of fat, our ancestors helped create a world where we can easily get what they always needed, and we hate what it's doing to us. We're just living in a different world, fighting our own evolution at every turn.

Chasing whimsies

Just as the news burned out of Elon Musk smoking a joint on my favorite podcast, it was announced that Space X would send someone to the moon.

Elon Musk is a man among us literally shooting for the moon.

You have to admire the ability to chase what he wants to do. It was clear for me only minutes into the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. When Rogan asked Musk where he got the idea to sell a flamethrower, Musk did not fail to deliver:

“I’m a big fan of Spaceballs the movie and in Spaceballs, Yogurt goes through the merchandising section and they have a flamethrower in the merchandising section of Spaceballs and “the kids love that one”. That’s the line when he pulls out the flamethrower.”

When Rogan pushes him on liability and what kind of maniacs would want to buy a flamethrower, Musk joked, "Yeah, its a terrible idea."

But this terrible idea netted 10 million dollars in 4 days - selling 20,000 at $500 each.

Another terrible idea? Digging tunnels in Los Angeles. Musk said it might be one of the worst places to dig tunnels simply because of the paperwork. So why there? Because he lives there and because no one else is doing anything to solve the problem of L.A. traffic.

It's invigorating to watch someone unabashedly chase down their dreams. After all, the big question remains: why are we here?

I don't know if we can know the answer, but Rogan had another guest get close about five years earlier. - Jersey-born filmmaker Kevin Smith. It's still one of Rogan's longest podcasts to date at more than 4 hours. But a single eight-minute bit still continues to stick with me. Smith shares the uncomfortable truth that his father "died screaming" and what that means for his life philosophy.

I typed it here but it's worth hearing the whole story from the man himself:

“And the notion of my father dying screaming changed my life cause I was like, even a good man in this world - you play the game, you play it straight, you play it by the rules, you do everything you’re supposed to - you’re gonna die screaming.

And at that point I was like there is no point in not trying to accomplish every stupid fuckin’ dream I’ve got, even if it’s dumb shit, like, “Oh my god, I’ve always wanted to collect this many Wayne Gretzky cards in one fuckin’ binder” or if it’s like “I want to make a movie” or if it’s like “I want to put on a podcast” or “I wanna do a TV show now” or “I want to write a book”. Chase it all down. Chasing whimsies is what I’ve been doing for the last few years. Just smoking weed and chasing whimsies.

Any time I’m like back in the day I’d have a good idea, something I really wanted to follow through on, and all of a sudden you get scared you start thinking about what some motherfucker’s gonna say and be like, “Oh its stupid.” “Why would you fuckin’ do that, fuckin’ why why?” Lot of why people in this world. I try to surround myself with the Why Nots, motherfuckers who you’re like “I want to try this” and they’re like “Why not? Lets go. Lets give it a shot.”

You got to be game. People help you achieve your dreams and shit, so for me the last few years Ive just been trying accomplish every dopey dream. The big shit, the little shit, you gotta do ‘em all. You cant just do the climb every mountain shit. Sometimes lay the bar down and step over it and be like ta-da, so you feel accomplished. But chase it all and do it all cause we’re all gonna die screamin’.”

Is technology a good thing?

In a New York Times Opinion blog, We Are Merging With Robots. That’s a Good Thing, professor Andy Clark outlined some of the realities of this technological world. The first bullet point had me thinking:

“Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend.”

Artificial intelligence can be alarming because we can barely comprehend it. Our brains are magical in all sorts of ways but we just can't compete with artificial intelligence when it comes down to board games.

But most of the time we forget the world itself is more complex than us too. The world can outperform any individual person. We constantly create and use things we barely understand. Why isn't this alarming? Is it a good thing, always?

We show up where we don't belong

I made a great decision to watch Demetri Martin's new standup special The Overthinker. As always, he offers a ton of interesting observations fired out in a stream of one-liners - sometimes accompanied by song, sometimes by drawings.

One of my favorite bits was right upfront where Demetri explores the weirdness of human beings and how we treat other animals:

“We probably seem the craziest of all the animals, from their perspective, when they look at our behavior. We show up places we don’t belong. I don’t feel like any other animal really does that but we do that. Like scuba diving. I’m sure fish swim by and are like, “What the fuck are you doing here? Look at yourself! Those are not your feet; get the hell out of here! You’ve got all the land - really?’”

The recipe for anxiety

Underneath this need to amuse ourselves to death is the fear of missing out. We want to know all the things right now. But Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of the project management software Basecamp, said (on the Tim Ferriss Show) that we can avoid all that by reading, of all things, the newspaper for news.

“For the most part I’m not trying to find out what happened an hour ago. And that, to me, is actually the real advantage to something like the newspaper where you simply cannot find out what happened an hour ago. Because what happened an hour ago in most cases doesn’t matter.”

Fried recognizes there could one day be an urgent need for real-time info, like, for example, a natural disaster near you and your family, but the information treadmill can't be justified 24/7 for something that could possibly but probably not ever happen any time soon. 

“To say that I need to be informed in real-time about anything that could possibly happen any time because that one thing might happen once, that’s just a recipe for anxiety and I try to avoid that at all costs.”

Be useful to be happy

I like the idea of being skeptical of happiness. It feels good, in a weird way, because it's so the opposite of the bullshit we're sold constantly. With that being said, whenever someone challenges the idea that happiness is the ultimate goal, I'm bound to pay attention.

This morning, I stumbled on Darius Foroux's article The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness. It was published back in October 2016 which goes to show you how timeless this challenge can be. 

Forget the last few years, though, Foroux digs into the archives to understand the meaning of life when it's boiled down to happiness. He found an answer in a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Happiness as the only goal in life often ends up being a razor-sharp selfish pursuit. Unless you make an effort to be useful to others, you're chasing fleeting squirts of dopamine with little around you to show for it. As Foroux wrote, "I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct of usefulness."

This is the existential side to the concept of idea sex. You're one piece of the infinite puzzle, one cell in the collective brain. If cultures exchanging ideas helps the world progress in magical ways, why wouldn't you add your life to the great pursuit of inching forward? The world has been here way before you and, with some luck, it will be here way after you're gone. Give what you got.

One of my best friends, Rob, gave back today of all days. It's his 32nd birthday. And instead of celebrating his day, he asked others to consider donating to another friend's favorite nonprofit - Comfort Zone Camp, a free-of-charge bereavement camp for children that have lost loved ones. 

Besides the ask, Rob has made something beyond his time volunteering with the Comfort Zone Camp too. Rob wrote and published Whale Fall, a children’s book designed to facilitate conversations about loss. Happiness wasn't the goal that made the book, Rob just did it to help. But I know it made him happy to do it too.

That's the idea of this blog. I could ramble on and on about things that make me happy or a whole range of feelings, just by looking at them, but if I could offer up something we both find useful in this weird experiment of life, why not find happiness there too? 

If you need a way to do something and find happiness today, consider purchasing Whale Fall or donating a few bucks to the 2018 NJ Grief Relief 5K for the Comfort Zone Camp. It will make all the difference.

Some reminders to focus on

Most of this evening, I spent researching Parisian and Portuguese hotels. I'll be going on holiday in less than two weeks and it needed to get done, so time ran out to write something good.

So here's just a few good reminders that attention is required for ideas to grow:

“If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

— David Foster Wallace

Lava lamp security

I don't know why lava lamps went out of style. They're still pretty cool in my book.

I've been thinking about getting my own and then I stumbled on another cool reason the hypnotic decoration is worth it. The web security company Cloudflare uses an array of lava lamps to to keep hackers away:

“Computers, relying as they do on human-coded patterns, can’t generate true randomness—but nobody can predict the goopy mesmeric swirlings of oil, water, and wax. Cloudflare films the lamps 24/7 and uses the ever-changing arrangement of pixels to help create a superpowered cryptographic key. ”

Share your attention

A few friends were kind enough to demand I started sending weekly emails.

I've been so focused on writing I forgot to share enough. The priority was keeping the chain of a daily blog going. I didn't want to get ahead of myself like I've done before.

Just like how idea sex has divvied up the responsibility and the fruits of labor, our attention is constantly sliced up into an infinite pile of pieces. Responsibility falls on your shoulders to find the right balance of what to explore.

And because we can interact with so much, it means that much more when you give someone the time of day, uninterrupted.

We should take notice. Appreciate it. Work meetings with no one checking a phone. Dates where eyes only flirt with the person across the way.

And it's the same with writing. I wanted to make this blog worth it before I made the effort to share. I didn't want to be another vampire begging to be let in. To drain some strangers. I wanted to arrive with gifts. And now my invitation has appeared.

Whether you like my writing, or you stumbled here accidentally, you can sign up here for a weekly message, offering one man's insights on a world where ideas have sex.

The spirits in idea sex

Idea sex can easily feel like a celebration of all things human progress. The problem is it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Economics is not always a pure, innocent human transaction. Some suffer, and even some you might not think about.

In a Wired article titled Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not, Joi Ito states:

“The Western concept of “humanity” is limited, and I think it’s time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we’re human and they are not.”

It's a big pill to swallow for Americans, but, as a Japanese person, Ito explains that in the official religion of Japan, Shinto, "there are spirits in everything." Right down to your toaster.

And in a way I think that makes Shinto feel parallel to idea sex. It takes the contributions of millions, right down to the plastic and metal bits, to make a pencil or a toaster or the internet. If you think about it, there is a little bit of human beings in a lot of this world. Zoom out even further and there is even more of robots, nature, and everything else. It's an interconnected world.

And it's a wholesome concept, giving life to the formerly lifeless. But there are still deep roots in American capitalism that make me think this mental switch might be far off.

In a new TED talk, The nightmare videos of children's YouTube — and what's wrong with the internet today, James Bridle breaks down the bizarre world algorithms and ad revenue has created. Without spoiling the complexity of a very eloquent and disturbing talk, Bridle explains that "within a dozen steps, you can go from a cute video of a counting train to masturbating Mickey Mouse."

We are far from spiritual robots. But Bridle offers a solution to consider:

“We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems, but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are, so we can start thinking about them properly and start to address them.”

On all of humanity's problems

While studying idea sex and the wonderful ways our exchanges with strangers better the world, I stumbled on Zat Rana's thoughts on nothingness and solitude in a Medium piece titled The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You.

Rana introduces the thoughts of mathematician Blaise Pascal, and, in particular, this quote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Amen, brother. It's Saturday and, like almost every weekend I spent with a bunch of free time, my mind is left to ramble.

As much as I like to sit on my couch and read or write, Rana and Pascal would note that I'm not quite alone. The world is more connected than it has ever been. And even though our connection and contributions to one another might possibly be the best thing for us as a species, we might equally need to step back as individuals and explore that void, that boredom, without one another and without distraction.

Like plenty of problems in life, they don't disappear when they're out of sight. Rana offers the straight-forward solution:

“The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear — like any fear — is to face it. It’s to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self. That’s when you’ll hear yourself think, and that’s when you’ll learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction.”

[...]

“You learn that there are other things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface. Just because a quiet room doesn’t scream with excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a movie or a TV show doesn’t mean that there isn’t depth to explore there.”

Pseudo-spiritualistic purchases

As I'm reading through The Rational Optimist, the concept of idea sex has the ability to weave through anything else I'm wrapping my mind around. I think that's my thought when it comes to this daily blog.

In an early passage, Ridley points to evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller's explanation for why someone, in a world of endless choices, would purchase something as big, loud, and unnecessary as an Hummer H1 Alpha:

“Because, he answers, human beings evolved to strive to signal social status and sexual worth. What this implies is that far from being merely materialist, human consumption is already driven by a sort of pseudo-spiritualism that seeks love, heroism, and admiration. Yet this thirst for status then encourages people to devise recipes that rearrange atoms, electrons or photons of the world in such a way as to make useful combinations for other people.”

Ridley's hint at pseudo-spiritualism sounds like an interesting answer to Dan Gilbert's question about why we consider synthetic happiness inferior to a sick-ass whip. Synthetic happiness sounds nice, but nailing down social status and sexual worth has worked real well for human beings so far.

But, as Ridley notes, there is more than one way to signal you're a worthy mate. Where we can benefit is in the diversity of choice. Everyone wins a little bit more when it comes down to idea sex.

The surprising science of happiness

I've been trying to meditate again. And it's funny how easy it is to drop into new habits, but the idea of sitting still for five whole minutes, training your mind not to do the thing it's done just about all of your waking life is still so rough.

In thinking about the mind as a trainable muscle, I found myself back on Dan Gilbert's 2004 TED talk, The surprising science of happiness. It's one of my favorites. And even though I've seen it a dozen times, something about the lessons really hit me today. I think I finally understood more about the power of subjective, synthetic happiness.

Gilbert put it in perspective with the scale of the world:

“What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

Why do we have that belief? Well, it’s very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don’t want stuff enough.”

Being happy without the desires of our consumer culture seems to clash with the wonderful progress our society has done doing our work. Without the need to buy things, we'd definitely have less of a need to work on things. It's a weird balance that no one can put their finger on.

While reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, I know I'll get to the idea of the collective brain. Something about our progress and idea sex with one another is making the world a better place by tons of markers, but to what end? 

I like to think we don't know and we might not ever. The idea could be just to be. And it makes me think of Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week, and a quote that always calms me down when I think I need to figure out some grand purpose:

“The truth is this: those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia that you protect could hold the cure for cancer. ”

Malthusian comedy

One of my best friends, Rob, told me to look into Malthusianism after reading my last post. I know I've heard the concept thrown around before. The term has been rattling around in my head all day and I couldn't place it until I did some research.

Wikipedia told me Malthusianism was born out of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus' 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population. It is the idea that certain "checks" need to occur to keep the population stabilized and sustainable. Some "checks" make sense for a number of reasons, like access to contraception, while others border on or dive right into the darkness.

A Malthusian catastrophe is, according to Wikipedia, "a prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production – that there will be too many people and not enough food." It could be a condom or it could be war, starvation, or a plague. 

Later I realized Malthusianism is the best way to describe one of my favorite stand-up comedian's recurring bits of population control. Enter Bill Burr:

Overpopulation is no problem

It's easy to complain about overpopulation when some tool is head-down with his smartphone and you can't get up the subway stairs fast enough . Or when you consider climate change and the swirling Pacific Coast Garbage Patch choking seagulls and fish with plastic straws and shampoo bottles. 

But, as it turns out, overpopulation is not the problem you think it is. As a matter of fact, time has told us that as the world gets more populated, we benefit more from one another.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, a fantastically colorful and scientific YouTube channel, offers an explanation for the world's population spikes called Demographic Transition. It is a four step process:

1. Bad living conditions (sanitation, diet, medicine) force people to give birth more than they need because babies die too often. 
2. Eventual economic progress and better living conditions fuel a population explosion.
3. Fewer deaths mean fewer babies are born, and population growth slows.
4. Finally, the population growth settles and ends.

What might be surprising to some is that most of the world's countries have made it to the fourth stage. And Kurzgesagt makes a great justification for re-thinking the "problem" of more people:

“No matter what your motivation is, whether you dream of a world where all people live in freedom and wealth or you just want fewer refugees coming to your country, the simple truth is that its beneficial to you personally if people on the other side of the globe can live a good life.”

We are Great Abbreviators

From Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.”

Not all idea sex is good

In his most recent book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier presents his case as a Silicon Valley veteran with a dream for a better technologically connected future.

I think it's easy to make the leap that if the exchange of ideas, the idea sex, is the vehicle for human progress than social media might be the best thing yet. But Lanier would argue that the incentives are not in the right place. Remember, social media companies are some of the largest corporations in the world. When there are stakeholders in a boardroom somewhere, time has told us that people are going to get fucked.

The magnitude of social media corporations means no one knows who is driving this thing.

Not Zuckerberg. Not Larry Page. Not even Trump. 

Lanier writes:

“The algorithms are rarely interrogated, least of all by external or independent scientists, in part because it’s hard to understand why they work. They improve automatically, through feedback.”

But if no one is driving, the least we can understand is the road we're on. The algorithms are "improving" to sell us ads and our attention. It might be time to find something new, and just maybe delete our social media accounts.

Adore the technologies of our time

In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, media critic Neil Postman proposes that while the world worriedly anticipated Big Brother of Orwell's 1984, we should have been better prepared to fight Huxley's Brave New World.

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell wants that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

It's hard to argue that modern technology is without flaws. I wonder, probably too much, how I'll feel on my death bed (or some futuristic equivalent), cursing how much of the years where my knees still worked I binged away on Netflix.

But it might just be unreasonable to suggest we need everyone to think in the same ways their parents or grandparents might have.

It could be the dawn of a new weird time. It could be idea sex has the capacity to give birth to an endless amount of innovation if we're able to keep rubbing up against one another.

What is idea sex?

It's been a week and this daily blog is consistent and all over the place. It's easy to blab about things that move me, but it makes more sense for both of us if I pick something and stick with it. Consistency and commitment.

In searching for direction, I returned, as I often do, to Sarah Peck's article Why Starting a “Blog” is a Terrible Idea. Instead of a blog, Peck recommends committing to a project of small steps, declaring to yourself and others: “I’d like to talk about x topic in 4 posts, within the next two months.”

The timeframe doesn't matter, the focus does. You need to start somewhere and it's better to have a direction than an explosion.

I'd like to talk about idea sex in 3 posts within the next two months. 

What is idea sex? That's probably a good place to start on post numero uno. But I started to learn about it through Matt Ridley's TED talk When ideas have sex.

It's worth the watch and if you like it, be sure to come back for more.