[me, after being tired and listless all day, then getting riled up over internet Trump discourse and channeling the newfound energy into creative writing]: was … was that a lifehack?
Predictably (in retrospect), the “why did people vote for Trump?” discourse is an anxiety minefield for me. (Vast uncertainty with great moral and political weight attached – I really don’t know and I SHOULD know and not knowing makes me a milquetoast liberal or a sheltered coastal urbanite or both and more, I SHOULD be opening my ears and heart to Trump supporters OR fighting fascists in the streets OR PROBABLY SOMEHOW both at once)
I already said some things to this effect, but I am going to actively avoid talking about the Orange Man on this tumblr blog. I may blacklist “trump” also. (I am still going to be hearing plenty about the subject without tumblr’s help, anyway)
I will be trying to avoid the news and the national conversation for the next while, and focus on the things I can do within my own little sphere, the skills I want to learn and practice.
That means data science, which I am planning to get a job in soon, and also the last steps of my dissertation, which I hope to finish by the end of the year and defend in January. But it also means working on Almost Nowhere. Staying creative is important; having a creative project is a way of generating ongoing enthusiasm that comes from inside and is relatively impervious to outside influence. (Creative work can even be fueled by negative emotions about the wider world, sometimes; I can’t heal the world but I can put something new in it that wasn’t there before, and shape that new thing according to my own passions, impotent as they may be elsewhere.)
For, er, Historical Reasons, any interaction with my father in which I appear even temporarily incapable of performing some mundane task will tend to make me feel like complete shit
The twist here being that in interactions like the one I just had, I already felt pretty bad and that was why I couldn’t seamlessly do the thing without even a moment to collect myself and so then of course I ended up feeling much worse, making me even more visibly incapable and thus etc.
Fuck positive feedback loops, man
Was just going through some thought loops about 2014 (not my best year) and then remembering how long it’d been since I’d even had the same thought loops, much less the experiences they refer to. First things fade into the past, and then they do a second fading into the past, from the part you think about to the part you don’t
Funny (?) story about me that’s also highly relevant to that post I made last night about “requirements”:
When I was a kid (like around age 10-12?) I found Dungeons and Dragons interesting, and I liked paging through the rulebooks. I wanted to play it at some point, but I took the word “rule” literally and assumed that “the game of D&D” was defined collectively by all the rulebooks – including all of the obscure/supplemental ones – and that you had to own all the rulebooks and know the whole vast system by heart to actually play it. (Otherwise, I assumed, it’d be like trying to play Monopoly or something while only knowing half the rules.)
I knew that lots of people managed to play D&D, and I never really thought about how they did it. I do remember talking to a friend-of-a-friend and mentioning some obscure “NPC encounter result table” I’d been looking at and he was like “oh yeah, we never bother with any of that shit, we’d just play,” and I nodded but was inwardly very confused – which of the rules did they follow, then?
(Oddly enough, when I was a slightly younger kid, I loved being the GM [though I didn’t know that term] for freeform RPG-like activities with friends, and I referred to this as “playing D&D,” although I knew that wasn’t strictly what the phrase meant. I also spent a lot of time developing rules and worlds and character sheets for games modeled on RPG video games, and sometimes would GM these, which was a different beast because I envisioned them as person-to-person simulations of video games – with predefined characters and restricted action sets – rather than role-playing games per se. None of this ever came into mental conflict with my belief that “actual D&D” was this byzantine thing you had to effectively get a college degree in before playing it)
Something I have been learning about myself recently: if someone says I am supposed to do some specific thing, or that that thing is a requirement – that sort of hard and fast language – then I will tend to do that thing if I can manage it, no matter how difficult, tedious, or pointlessly overkill it seems
It turns out that in the real world (or at least many parts of it), no one works on this basis. People who give strict-sounding instructions assume that when they say you “have to” do X, almost no one will actually do X, and most people will do part of X and not the whole thing. They then scale up their demands to anticipate this. Often, when someone says “you must do these 10 things,” and you actually do all 10 things, they will act impressed but a bit scared and perhaps ask concerned questions about how much sleep and free time you’re getting
This is baffling to me! The reason is that if I meet the stated “requirement,” I know I’m safe. I did what was asked, and the asker / the world can’t complain, or rather they can complain but not about that aspect of things. If I’m supposed to decide on my own how much to violate the stated rule, how the hell am I supposed to know what is the “right” amount of non-compliance? When you say “10,” do you mean “3 is fine and 5 would be great,” or do you mean “5 is perfectly sufficient but 3 will make everything explode,” or “most people will do 5 to 7 but I’m keeping my eye out for the really great productive people who do 9-10,” or …
I don’t have a cost function! Just tell me the cost function! What am I supposed to do, make one up? You’re the one who knows what your standards are based on, not me!
So then realistically you get these cases where people casually say “oh yeah you have to do this absurdly difficult thing, have it on my desk tomorrow morning” and I know that even if I could do it, I can’t just blow all my time and energy and stress-credits on every suspicious request like this that comes along, and so I do a half-assed job of 40% of the thing and then am left in a state of anxious uncertainty until I get a response. Did I embarrass myself? Did I heroically go above and beyond the call of duty? Who knows?!?!
Meanwhile there are apparently people who just do the 40% (or 20%, or 80%) and think “yeah, that seems about right” and feel perfectly fine with that assumption? I guess? How??
I was thinking about humanities-STEM culture war type stuff again after reading an interesting post by @tanadrin (see also their follow-up post from a blistering takedown of the mentioned claim about the Dark Ages).
I know this sounds like reflexively moderate “everything is the same” smug nonsense, but I really do feel like I’ve seen lots of dismissive people on both “sides” of this thing, with the least dismissive people typically being the ones that avoid the whole “conflict” or aren’t aware of its existence. IMO, the big problem here isn’t with any given methodology or scholarly culture but with that thing people do where they identify “this is new and confusing (and perhaps knee-jerk repellent) to me” with “this is what happens when people don’t See The Light of my own intellectual orientation.” Sometimes it’s “this is what happens when people don’t do numbers” or “this is what happens when people don’t read books,” but in either case there’s the same phenomenon where “this” can be anything the speaker has never heard of, or anything that strikes the speaker as bullshit on a very cursory inspection, etc. And that’s bad
I admit to being more pissed off by the humanities version of this, which is no doubt due largely to my own biases + having a smaller sample of “humanities people” etc. But I think I’m also pissed off because, in the context of this “war,” the humanities “brand” is supposed to be about not doing this; about knowing that we in 20XX are sitting on top of a an indigestibly convoluted mess of baggage, much of which would shock or confuse us, that your knee-jerk sense of “what is and isn’t dismissible” comes from a tiny little status quo bubble you are in, which you did not choose and whose origins you are not fully aware of, that before you just “draw the obvious conclusion” you should look into the baffling antics of your numerous obvious-conclusion-drawing forefathers, etc., etc.
And this is a good thing to do, and some people are able to do it without collapsing into passive inert relativism, and that’s great. The problem is when people identify their particular book-learning with this process itself – when in fact their book-learning, “the humanities,” and all that are themselves historically conditioned and all that stuff, as much as anything else.
You have to internalize the critique. Take it another step. I used to hear all these laments (in sales pitches for liberal arts colleges, say) about how, in our fast-paced information-saturated world, we must retain a connection to the classics, the time-tested texts of the past, which sounds great except that our naive sense of what that means is itself just another part of the status quo that we can’t take on faith. Reading “the ancients” won’t tell you why you’re sitting there now in 20XX and reading them instead of some other interesting ancient writers who didn’t end up being “the ancients.” If your idea of what it means to be hip to historical conditioning comes from Foucault, it is likely that you live in a place and time when Foucault was popular for that purpose. Remember when Hegel was such a big deal? If your professors aren’t asking you to see things through a Hegelian lens, do you know why not?
what is it like to believe in stuff and not doubt everything deep down when you think about it
the closest i can come is maybe?? those brain episodes where everything gets sort of transcendentally glowy, but that’s not even a concrete “belief” in any specific principle or idea or proposition, it’s just an overpowering sense of interconnection/everything being important/all manner of thing shall be well, which, for all i know other people feel that way all the time and it only seems mystical to me because i don’t
or i guess when you love another person very intensely it’s sort of like that because it’s irrational but you still…can’t help but feel that this person or that person means more than other people. that it’s important you stay with them, that…i don’t know. there’s hope in that.
but i cannot get my head around what it would feel like to Actually Believe in anything. i don’t mean like thinking “well, my own experiences/common sense/convincing arguments tell me this is probably true so i’m going to go with it as truth unless and until something changes my mind” or “well, reason tells me this thing is fake, but i am going to conduct myself like it’s NOT fake because i’ll be a better human being if i do, or because stubbornly arguing for its fakeness won’t solve the problem at hand” or “i am having a panic attack and so my gut instinct is that i’m literally about to die and i know that’s nonsense and i keep telling myself so and i believe me kind of but my autonomic nervous system don’t”. obviously i am familiar with all of those, as i think most people are.
i mean like….::gestures::
you know what i mean like
i figure this is probably not something that can be explained to people who don’t experience it, but i wonder
TO BE CLEAR:
- i am not just, or even mostly, talking about RELIGIOUS belief here
- i mean, belief in general
- believing that something– anything– is inarguably “real” or “true” or “correct” or “right”
I’m basically with you here, and have only experienced what I think of as Actual Belief while in altered states of consciousness
But on the few occasions when I have experienced it, it’s like the thing feels “as obvious as whatever the most obvious things are” – like, it conceivably could be false, but if it is then all bets are off. Thinking “what if it’s false” feels like thinking “what if Descartes’ evil demon is deceiving me and actually I don’t have hands and the demon is just about to stop pretending that my hands are real hands, so there’s no reason to try to touch anything,” or like “I’m hungry, but how do I know that eating has any chance of making me less hungry, yes it has in the past buuuuut…” It’s on the same level of “I could doubt this kind of thing, but then I’d end up sitting in a chair doing nothing, so why bother”
This is similar to “common sense tells me this is probably true so i’m going to go with it as truth unless and until something changes my mind,” except … I’m not sure how to put it, but there’s a certain … set? complex? of interconnected ideas, about stuff like your basic interface with physical reality, that is so basic that it is actually hard to doubt it, it takes effort to maintain doubt for any amount of time. Like I can seriously entertain, say, the possibility that the room around me right now is an illusion – that specific idea – but meanwhile I’m taking all of this other stuff for granted, I’m thirsty so I have this reflexive urge to grab my water bottle and drink, which not only involves assumptions about the bottle but also about my mouth, assumptions that because the feeling of thirst seems to be “located in my throat” it in fact has a physical connection to my throat, and that if I “tell” my arm to move, that signal will do the thing I expect and not, I dunno, levitate the couch I’m on while not moving my arm at all … I don’t know if I’m describing this well, or if it even makes sense, but there’s stuff that is really hard to doubt except on this abstract “what if Nothing Is Real, Dude” level which immediately feels like pointless bullshit when I try to do it (“OK, sure, I guess, have it your way philosophy dude, now please let’s get serious again”)
… and anyway, sometimes that whole thing happens with other, very different sorts of ideas, and that’s what I think of as Actually Believing them
I just watched the Black Mirror episode with the social media numbers and now I’m feeling guilty again about how rarely I get insulted on tumblr dot com relative to some other people I know and like (say @philippesaner on the dash right now), because it clearly means I’m hiding my true, evil self or smth
(The actual answer is probably that I’m not angry/passionate enough about any particular issue, which is due somewhat to temperament but also in part to my pretty comfortable current position in life; I’m privileged enough that I can afford to be un-problematic)