Opening Statement
The idea here is that it's better to do something badly at first, than to not do anything at all.
What should be here is highly specialized insightful commentary, and maybe a description of what I'm doing with my art.
Because there are other things that need attention right now, I'm only going to drop in a few placeholders.
There's so much that needs to get done!
Pretty soon, I want to talk about:
- Software Testing (specifically of the buccaneer variety)
- AI and the exploration of ideas through overlapping models found in one field over another.
- Conceptual frameworks, their limitations, and the need for plasticity, as well as control over *direction* of modalities in processing information.
- The prerequisites for meaning and value.
- Branching models of reality, and the ways in which repetition of relationships between specific branches allow for meaning-making, and the ways in which the assignment of alternate perspectives allow for branching networks to appear to have meaning due to consistency with internall held structures. I may throw in something there about how the repetition of the primacy of certain perspectives pressures individuals to align themselves with structures as represented "out there in the world" and how the direct abrasion of misalignments cause deep communication issues that are almost impossible to detect.
- MBTI and Enneagram models along with compartmentalization of responses to inner and outer phenomena.
- Meditation and the classification of "nothingness" or "emptiness" as "that which does not readily reveal itself to the senses"/falsifiability/anattā/śūnyatā
- The process process — the decision to deliberately call to mind various options of what to do and then the act of actually doing them.
- Process philosophy/Whitehead/panpsychism.
- Pomodoros, efficacy, alteration and augmentation of existing methods.
- Painting — Value and the windmill method/ How digitization and digital alteration informs options
- Black and White ink drawings — How they might be used for exploration of ideas.
- The purpose of art.
- Modes of approach to a concept via augmented cartesian coordinate plane.
- Types of thinking available through writing by hand vs. writing by typing vs. "in the moment"
This is a concept dump for things I've been thinking/writing about, and want to explore more formally later.
Some of the ideas here are applicable through alternate formats, so there may be limited exposure here.
Low effort blog attempt. 12/29/19
On happiness and the generation thereof
The things we do that would propel us forward also make us unhappy from time to time.
The power to make ourselves slightly happier is also the power to eliminate those things that propel us forward.
These things have a limit.
That is, the use of the ability to make ourselves happier eventually peter out and cease to make us happier.
So, the implicit threat is that one day, you will be put into a situation where you will need to be unhappy for an extended period of time. You won’t have control over that which makes you happier.
At that point, you may wish that you had access to those things that made you happier, but you will have used them up.
So knowing this, the correct strategy is to direct yourself intentionally into unhappiness, when you have the ability to make yourself happier.
The risk of being showered with greater unhappiness when you don’t have control will be great, but it is worth it because—
As time goes on, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to dramatically increase your future happiness. This means that when your capacity to dramatically increase your future happiness will have significantly lesser effect, and it will make less and less sense to even budge in the direction of temporarily increasing current unhappiness for the sake of dramatic future increases of happiness.
—
So far, I’ve only talked about increasing personal happiness.
The happiness of the group is always a consideration, because there are various stressors that impinge upon those that surround you. This causes a bit of distortion of your goal of increasing personal happiness. It might, for example, appear that your increase in personal happiness is having a direct impact on their ability to be happy. So long as this is believed, they will experience things this way, and so you will actually impact their happiness negatively.
This impact will send shockwaves through the community, causing the net gain of your personal happiness to decrease, making the expenditure less and less worthwhile seeming.
The correct strategy when faced with this reality is to find those ways that increase your personal happiness that directly impact the personal happiness of the community.
As our society becomes more and more interconnected, those that provide happiness directly and immediately will be regarded as having greater value than those who take a longer time to produce happiness effects, and those for whom the happiness effect is generated through the crawling through Byzantine pathways.
Caveat:
Abstention or refraining from those things that give pleasure directly can be conceived of as virtue.
Engaging that “muscle” does not always result in greater future happiness.
There may be, for example, happiness generated in the plotting of your next novel. This pleasure is not necessarily bad in and of itself. We, who have been trained by our world to refrain from activity unless it is clear that the world around us will respond positively and immediately, may cause ourselves great damage by not engaging when we have the opportunity.
—
It was easier when I was younger.
When the punishment for being foolishly tired was lesser.
When I could throw myself into a machine of my own making, risking instability on the following day where criticism by those who loved and cherished the machine out there could be immediately dismissed.
