Month: October 2020

Feelings first, thinking second – it’s how we choose our people.

And it’s why elevating mood is everything.

It’s the root of all legit social skill and the ultimate goal of all good interaction.

It’s what draws one to another. Fuels all friendship and romance. It’s even important for professional growth (which is weird since that’s supposed to be where a logical, businesslike focus wins).

Think about the best, most-alive times of your life. What do you remember most about them?

How you felt.

Making feeling makes meaning. And getting better at it’s the fastest way to a better, more meaningful existence.

Much of life is maintenance – mundane shit required to keep the lights on. Necessary, but not compelling. We spend more than enough of ourselves living for logistics – burning our precious free time talking about them is a sad, sad waste.

So don’t do it. Instead, focus on making people feel more, stronger, better feelings. Stimulate, comfort, challenge and intrigue – it’s the most direct step we all can individually take towards making the world a better place.

Whenever I hear someone blurt out the phrase “I’m multi-tasking!” I instantly lose respect for them.

It’s proof their attention’s spread too thin to handle all they’re taking on. That they’re over-booked and over-stimulated, which means they’re over-confident and under-delivering. Which… sucks.

The sad truth is that most people aren’t all that attentive or detail-oriented. If someone doesn’t give something their full attention, it’s just about given they’ll miss key things. And they’ll miss more with each splitting of their focus (even when they insist otherwise). It doesn’t take many splits (often just one) before quality suffers and things stop working well… or at all.

“Multi-tasking” is euphemism-ese – a shiny way of saying they’re doing a lot of things less-well than they should be done. It’s a sacrifice of quality for quantity.

And even with the very few people who can multi-task well, it’s like them burning a candle at two (or more) ends – they can only do it in bursts before they fuck up, break down or burn out.

Right now this happening on-scale. Perpetual distraction means the moment we’re actually living gets only fragments of our focus. Attention shapes reality – and not focusing on the moment creates a shitty reality.

Someone “multi-tasking” while you’re waiting on them, after they’ve agreed to be in your presence, is wrong. They want to hang out… but not enough to pay attention to you? No. It’s disrespect and a breach of human decency that shouldn’t be tolerated. Next ‘em and instead invest in people who show they value your company – not ones who hold it hostage.

Having lots of things going on is fine… but doing them while others are waiting on you is not. At all. It’s a vicious passive-aggression that embodies ego, entitlement and greed. It’s bad humanity.

Sure, some allowances should be made – there are times in life when multi-tasking’s unavoidably necessary (especially with legit emergencies). You don’t want to chuck a long-standing partnership out the window if someone occasionally needs a minute to finish up a conversation.

…But this should be the rare exception, not the rule. Multi-tasking’s born of bad – of bad luck, bad planning, cheapness, desperation, uncalibrated ambition, over-excitement, the list goes on. It increases stress while decreasing quality. It’s never desirable – you do it when there’s no other choice.

Dedicated focus and clear, full communication are keys to bettering things. If you commit yourself to something, give it all of you. The world will be better for it.

.

Most people tend to have teeny, tiny lil’ attention spans.

They only can take in bits and clips of things before they get bored or distracted by something else.

Part of this is basic human limitation. Most people can’t process or contextualize much before their brains overload and tap-out.

But on top of that things now are moving so fucking fast that even the sharpest can’t adequately process them. Combine inherent limitation with this furious speed and you have a perfect storm of social disease…an attention span epidemic.

What’s worse, many people, driven by hubris or dark magic I don’t know, use that dime-deep exposure to then confidently share their un-nuanced, largely-ignorant judgments about what’s “right” with the rest of the world.

…WTF?

No.

These are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[Fist-bumps Shakespeare, then tells MacBeth to lighten up]

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion… but that doesn’t necessarily make those opinions any sort of realistic or valid.

New Rule: If someone TL;DRs (“Too Long/Didn’t Read”s) something but then adds some kind of opinionated comment to it, that opinion doesn’t count.

Yeah I said it.

TL;DR as a standalone comment is valid. Brevity is the soul of wit, and over-writing is a common flaw of authors. Saying a piece of writing needs to be streamlined is fine (and probably true). Saying the most with the least is writing’s true art.

…But if you can’t be bothered to at least read all of something before making your thoughts on its contents available for everyone to see, you have less than no business making your opinions of it public.

Until you fully-read and at least legitimately try to understand something, shut the fuck up about it. Seriously. You’re an insult to thought and evolution.

Let’s up the quality of public discourse. Its lack is stoking moral absolutism and destroying civility. Like I said, a social disease – one which typically leads to bullet-based problem-solving.

Let’s stop the devolution.

A predatory tactic for “winning” arguments is the aggressive interruption of the other person before they can finish their thought (or sentence). This is commonly followed by an emotionalistic, childish badgering of them into submission, disengagement or hostility.

Use of this tactic means that the conversation isn’t actually a conversation – it’s rhetorical bullying. A dark-age show of psychological force meant to manipulate and dominate. A non-physical form of violence which creates the need for its physical form.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The disturbing frequency of aggressive interruption reflects an ongoing degeneration of dialogue… and by extension of civilization in general. Fueled by a perfect storm of epidemic immaturity, unjustified confidence, inadequate attention to detail and a fanatical/nigh-psychotic competitiveness, the stage is set for something truly terrible.

Interrupters by their very nature cannot be wise or right any meaningful portion of the time. Their childish over-excitability causes them to consistently miss critical masses of information that would otherwise allow them to have any sort of complete, contextualized, enlightened understandings. Their interruption of others marks them not only as socially-diseased, but as some of the last people in the world anyone should ever listen to or take seriously.

People who argue by interruption are and need to be recognized as socially dysfunctional. They should be isolated from society and matured, educated in the tenets of listening, patience and reciprocity. Until that happens they represent real, fundamental threats to social stability and ultimately evolution itself.

These are the people who need cancelling. This is behavior we need to grow out of ASAP to create a better world.

New rule: if someone is constantly interrupting and badgering the person they’re in a discussion with, their opinions are invalid and the discussion is over until they calm down and grow up.

Most of our fun and authenticity comes from the stuff we’re not supposed to be doing.

Standout memories rarely revolve around responsible, “smart” things like studying hard, paying bills, working long hours and using logic. They’re born of envelope-pushing, risky, emotion-stirring things. Most of what makes meaning and shapes us as people happens when we’re outside the box, pushing limits… not doing the safe, sensible, “smart” thing.

It’s weird because society constantly shouts at us that this sensible stuff is what “wins” in the end. That if you’re “smart” you’ll preempt life by trying to get out in front of it. That by sacrificing enjoyment of the present to improve your potential future things will eventually just all work out on their own, and when they do you’ll end up better off than most. That this thinking is somehow wisdom – the natural end point of maturity after enough life experience.

…But not really. That’s one-dimensional thinking. It’s not that it’s wrong per se… but it’s not really right. It ignores stage of life context and skips a lot of important steps – the ones that create a fully-realized individual who’s more than simply the sum of their work and knowledge.

The sensible approach is great for the logistics & requirements parts of life. Obviously you gotta take care of business to pay the bills and fuel the fun. But this stuff is merely life’s enabler. It sets the stage, but it isn’t what delivers the performance.

There’s a legit danger here. Only having your business handled without delivering the performance = boring = social death. This is the sad fate of millions who’ve made the mistake of over-emphasizing the logistical parts of their life. They’ve checked every box society’s told them to, so on-paper they’re great. Yet often something’s just… missing.

What’s missing is their ability to be truly present in the moment. The realness and depth that viscerally draws other people to you regardless of wealth or status. The street cred that comes from walking on the wild side.

The real value-add of a person to most other people is their ability to create fun and stimulation at any time, in any place and under any circumstances. This usually comes from the accumulation of entertaining stories and a deep, honed social skill set resulting from the fun experiences that created those stories. And most of these come from vice-fueled adventures.

Think about it: Would you rather go to a dinner or party where people talk at length about their jobs or logistics like errands and home maintenance? Or a dinner/party where people are talking silly-but-mood-elevating nonsense and interspersing it with crazy stories that involve emotion-stoking, thought-provoking details?

Exactly.

There’s a reason a majority of characters in media are colorful, flaw-focused characters. Media’s produced by the entertainment industry, and the core purpose of all forms of entertainment is to elicit emotion. Good, safe behavior tends not to do that.

So goes social value in real life.

Most of us are trying to do way too much, way too fast.

So much of our lives are spent frantically jumping from one obligation to the next, just trying to keep all our plates spinning. There’s little (if any) room in this for reflection or enjoyment – it’s all we can do to get our shit done. It consumes the best of our time and attention.

There seems to be some sort of weird societal fetishism for this kind of frenetic busy-ness. A warped “understanding” that always being in motion and constantly trying to do more are somehow implicitly noble things that automatically signal you as worthwhile and make your life better.

Bullshit.

Being THAT busy is a problem. A serious one.

Productivity’s one part of life… not all of it.

People need free time and calm to reflect on themselves and their lives. Time to play back events to see if they come to different (and better) conclusions than they did in the moment. Time to ponder who they are in relation to what’s happened. Time to breathe and actually enjoy the fruits of their labors (or else figure out why they aren’t).

Time to hear themselves think… and feel.

You’re not going to meaningfully grow as a person living life late for the next thing. That’s juggling – light-touching a bunch of things without paying quality attention to any of them. Your focus is always distracted by what’s coming, so it’s never fully in the moment. Quality and presence in the moment are what give life meaning.

Living like this isn’t living. It’s existing.

Your relationships will suffer. You won’t be able to meaningfully evaluate what happens to you. The only thing that’ll get your quality energy is your work – and work without greater context makes you a hamster on a wheel. An indentured servant.

Make good time for reflection. Make sure you live… not just exist.

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

Yeah…no.

Not at all.

And, interestingly, directly contradicted by the same man who said it.

The wrongness of that thinking empowers the wicked while hamstringing their victims – it makes being bad OK as long as you go first. It’s the proactives of bad that need more scrutiny and judgment… not the reactives.

Whenever someone does something bad to another, the canned “wisdom” is something along the lines of “don’t stoop to their level, don’t retaliate…just be the ‘bigger’ person and let it go. Just you wait: people like that get their comeuppance/the universe tends to unfold as it should/blah blah blah.”

First, that’s blatantly untrue. Some assholes get their comeuppance, sure, and gosh darn it does it make for inspirational storytelling. But many, many more not only get away with bad behavior, but are richly rewarded for it. Human history would look very different (and a lot better) if this weren’t the case.

Second, the “logic” of this statement is self-defeating.

It says to not retaliate against someone who’s wronged you because one of their past misdeeds will eventually come back to haunt and make them pay for their bad behavior. But that means that one of the people affected by the shitty person’s bad behavior will decide they’re not OK with just letting it go – that they’re going to take action to punish that bad behavior by channeling the anger and frustration it’s forced on them back onto its original source.

…Which means the entire crux of the strategy is that one of the aggressor’s other victims eventually WON’T the “bigger” person. 🤔

Following the “wisdom” of just letting it go when wronged forces a victim to internalize the resulting frustration and anger, making bad feelings that aren’t their fault their responsibility. And it forces this undeserved, ongoing pain onto the wronged while protecting their aggressor(s). It’s toxic – like not removing a burst/septic appendix.

Worse, if that undeserved pain and frustration don’t get constructively vented (and they rarely do), they build up to a point where they hurt too much to keep bottled up inside, eventually exploding onto an innocent bystander. This leaves two innocent victims confused and damaged… again while the original source remains unredressed.

This is shit rolling downhill in the worst of ways – the equivalent of telling the wronged to swallow acid and smile. It’s backwards morality – wrong, counter-evolutionary thinking that’s the opposite of what it should be.

Forgiveness may be divine, but it often makes the world worse.

Mind the gap.