A hundred years ago I listened to this lecture, and wrote down the following incomplete thoughts on it:

-If I have no interest in something new and looming (i.e., the transformation of social order or whatever it is that is heralded by online avatars/identities), is it because I am old and have no vision, or is it legitimate for me to be bored or uninterested in such things?

-Normally your appearance and affects are not true expressions of yourself, but constrained by conveniences and accidents – you don’t have the time or money to dress as you would like, to decorate your apartment as you would like, etc. To some extent this has truth, but on the continuing theme of true signaling, I feel it’s slightly inaccurate to distinguish your True Self as something not integrated into your entire context and environment. In some ways, appearing other than perhaps you would ideally want can be a sign of your priorities or your past priorities or history; in other ways it’s easier to distance responsibility or blame from yourself and say that it’s purely a result of the accident of your circumstances/surroundings which you did not choose, but again, you are not a wholly separate entity from the world and time into which you emerged.

-I guess I have the complete and utter pessimist’s view of humanity – I feel alarmed at the prospect of the sum total of people’s desires, since more and more I am finding everyone to be shallow and short-sighted and otherwise lacking.

-Relatedly, sort of, I find myself continually slipping into a repulsion against the excitement of the freedom and creativity of Second Life, how it allows you to be more like the you you want to be, find out what people do without monetary restraints, etc, because I feel like it fosters a division into the real world, where you have to deny yourself, and the fantasy world, where you can be free. Of course there are myriad desires and so forth that cannot practically be fulfilled in reality once the needs and rights of others are taken into account, not to mention limited resources. And there are also things a person may want to try out or experience or do in fantasy but not in actuality. But since I react this way to it, maybe I’m not the only one who then assumes that the constraints that exist now are somehow inevitable. I don’t know if it’s that I worry that people will be distracted from transforming the real world into as close to this vision of freedom as possible, which may not be a legitimate concern, but let me say that if we are excited about this freedom, we should not only funnel our energy into enjoying this virtual freedom but in recreating it in the real world. Maybe eventually the two worlds will not be so different, but right now they are. I do recognize that it's not as if by spending time manufacturing your freedom online you automatically do not or cannot also contribute to the increase of freedom offline, and it's not always or necessarily the case that our technology and standard of living are made possible by the exploitation of others. I just want to try not to forget that my own personal, intellectual, and political freedom to fully express myself and examine my individuality etc, is only one priority out of many, some of which may be quite dire.

I’ve been gradually picking up some conservationist habits: cloth grocery bags, bringing my own coffee mug or thermos, carrying a washcloth for hand drying or napkin use, etc. Just small things that I try to make my default whenever I notice an area in my life where I’m throwing away a lot of stuff, so that it is the exception rather than the rule when I have to dispose of something. I’m not sure how much of an actual environmentalist I am. I have a difficult time discerning what is so obvious as to be idiotic not to believe, unlike, it appears, many or most people. The pseudo-middle ground I’ve heard most often of late is that the Earth is fine, it’ll recover from us no problem, but we may very well not survive as a species. I’m ready to believe it, if ever I were to bother to look into the support for it, but it can certainly seem plausible both ways. Life is pretty awesome and robust, yes, so something could survive, and the entire ginormous planet itself of course, but it’s not inconceivable that we could wreak unprecedented and irreversible destruction with our unprecedented technologies. And again, due mainly to my own lack of initiative to actually look into who’s saying what and how reliable they seem, it doesn’t seem inarguably true either that we are going to run out of resources, period, or that we’ll figure out something genius like always and come through as a civilization whatever sort of sustainability practices we begin or maintain right now.

But whatever the truth about the extent of Earth’s resources, or whatever the argument, or belief, besides just playing it safe, my main motivating factor is more of a self-centered or personal-psychological one. It just seems to me that resource-conscious habits are just a feature of being sentient and aware of more than just your own inner dialogue. It does take time to move through stages of sentience, and I’m not sure what sort of upper limit there might be; if I would or could, potentially, reach a point in my life at which I have maximized my potential ability to be conscious. Enlightenment, I suppose. But there is certainly much more beyond just that time around age five where one recognizes the fact of other minds, and can begin to imagine others’ points of views. That ability does not just spring into full action in a child and that’s that. There are many degrees of facility with this simulating of another’s mind, as it’s a fairly difficult exercise and probably, in practice, impossible to ever fully achieve. Merely because a child can now play at lying, working with their increasingly intricate theories about what another sentient being believes, that certainly does not result in a nine-year-old regularly stepping out of their own needs and context and seriously considering what might actually be important to that other being. Or a 22-year-old, or a 65-year-old. It takes a long time for one to not only be capable of taking other minds and views into consideration, but to actually make a consistent practice of it in everyday life and behavior.

But so the more I struggle to learn to not remain the solipsist I was born as, the less I am able to float through the world as though I am the main character and everything I encounter is just a feature of a separate, background universe for me to utilize. Napkins and plastic wrap do not just spring into existence, fully formed and ready for me to use once and dispose. They, and everything else I use and interact with, man-made or not, came to exist through some sort of process that did not involve me, but that was a part of the universe that I am also a part of. I can no longer maintain an illusion of my own separateness, with all these devices and objects here solely for my needs.

Now, it’s true that most things I might use and potentially, eventually, dispose of, were, actually, created solely to be conveniently used. And I truly appreciate that, and I like living in a society and civilization that allows me these luxuries and conveniences. I don’t particularly want to give them up, and I don’t necessarily think I have to. But they came from somewhere, were made or gathered or transported by someone, most likely went through some arduous process to manifest itself for my use. And once I am aware of the fact that I am not some dualistic entity inhabiting some separate habitat that provides for my needs, but just one piece of the universe without anything in particular dividing me from everything else around me, I can no longer thoughtlessly allow objects to fall into and out of my hands. I am not sure how strong my feelings are about the sorts of habits I am beginning to take up; I certainly don’t feel I can put forward a strong argument that any one action I take, or even one sustained habit I maintain, can actually matter. This seems like perhaps an argument for proselytizing or other attempts to turn my individual acts and habits into a large-scale movement, where it can actually make a difference. But my willingness and ability to wag my finger at others until they do what makes sense to me is weak to nonexistent, and that is not even particularly representative of my own motivation. In a large way, it is merely that I no longer can simply be unaware of my actions and their potential consequences, or the resources and processes that make them possible. Of course, I am still hugely ignorant of almost everything that happens to allow me to live as I do, or at all, and I don’t particularly pursue that knowledge. This means that nearly every habit I have and action I take are done largely in ignorance, thoughtlessly. But once in a while something will come to my attention, one way or another, and then, once that particular facet of ignorance is shattered, it is difficult to continue exactly as before. I am hoping that this slow and undirected process will over time result in a somewhat reasonable mode of living, although if I were an actual good or conscious person I would probably put in a concerted effort to help it along. And almost definitely have to live in a different country.

Recalling the giant pile of physical photo albums I possess, I was violently forced to make the comparison between it and its ilk and the photo albums one now finds everyplace online. Looking through one's photo albums seems primarily a social activity; yet when they are placed online, on facebook or wherever, when someone looks at them, they do so alone, while trying to find something interesting on the internet, or facebook stalking a friend, precisely because they are alone. When paging through a physical photo album together, the viewer can ask questions, the owner of the album can tell stories, and it is more of a bonding process, of getting to know a person. You do certainly learn about the person whose photos you are viewing online, but it is not personlized to you, and you do not bond or get to know each other together. Of course, almost nobody I currently know has actually sat down with me and paged through my 12 or 15 photo albums, or even expressed the remotest interest in ever doing so. So if the goal of the exercise is to achieve eyeballs having passed over your photographs, then online is the way to go. But it's less important to me, personally, that I have any particular person, or any large number of people, actually see any photographs, than it is that we have this opportunity to share things about ourselves with each other, and spend time together telling stories that may not have come up otherwise. Someone clicking through my online photo album in the middle of the night while I am nowhere around does little for our friendship.

People complain about what social networking and the internet are doing to social relations and I don't want to jump on the bandwagon, because I *like* having an easy way to contact and keep in touch with my friends, particularly since most of my favorite people do not actually live near me. But to counter the joyous welcoming of these things as ways of staying connected, the question I think that needs to be asked is not whether it *can* function to keep us closer, as that seems to clearly be the case, but whether it *does*. I can maintain a constant and involved relationship with a distant friend by frequent emailing, texting, and facebooking, but the problem arises when the need to be frequently checking my phone or computer or device detracts from the person I am presently with. Insofar as the foundation of a friendship is more strongly based in the physical presence of the two people together, the time you spend in person with someone is more valuable than equivalent time spent in online communication. So when that in-person time is punctuated with the distractions of keeping up with another friend, you are potentially detracting from at least one if not both friendships by trying to multi-task. There's a wide range of opinions on the rudeness of texting or the like while with others, and I can see merit in most of them. Personally, I like to feel like my friends who are not currently with me are still a part of my experience wherever I go, and so I am one of those who texts in the middle of an activity, although I do try to restrict it mostly to the bathroom or at least moments where I'm not involved with anyone else anyway. But it remains true, regardless of whatever technology exists, that having your mind and attention on someone not present means you are less fully connecting to the person who is.

I very much value many aspects of what the internet offers in opportunities and abilities to keep in contact with people, and do not consider that just because this is a new, unfamiliar way of doing things, it is therefore bad. However, humans developed their need for social interaction and methods of achieving and performing it over millions of years without the option to do so long distance, and my concern is that we are still only emotionally prepared to handle things the old way, and so if we try to replace too much of it with the new way it will be unsatisfying, or if we go about it unwisely with little thought about how we actually function and what the effects actually are, then the problems that all the wailings and bemoanings of the critics are about actually can crop up. I can't come down conclusively on how inherent in the structure of using the internet these problems are, but I do feel as though they are for the most part not inevitable, as long as we are able to be conscious and deliberate in our actions. Like many problems, they arise out of the fact that many people are not very aware of what happens when they act in a certain way, or think that their choices are more limited than they in fact are. If one doesn't think about the different effects of interacting online and in person, or thinks that they are handed down a set of rules of how to use facebook without any choice in what obligations they are beholden to, then it can easily become something harmful rather than beneficial. And the more people act in a nondeliberative way, the more the problem seems to be the tool or technology, rather than the fact that people are making poor choices. Shit, I'm moralizing again. Just to be clear, I make terrible choices all the time, I just recognize that it's my fault and not the fault of society or Mark Zuckerberg.

I figured out, I think, that sometimes when someone says that something is "good", what they really mean is "familiar". This happens to me as well. For example, for a lot of songs, particularly rock songs from, say, the 70s or 80s that get a lot of radio play, it took me until I was quite old to realize that I didn't actually like them, and there are probably plenty more that I still suffer under the illusion of enjoying. When such a song would come on the radio, I would perk up, feel this spark of pleasant anticipation, which I would then mistake for actual pleasure and enjoyment. "Oh, I love this song!" I would think. Then one day, for song after song, that event would occur, and as I was listening to it I would realize that no, actually, I don't, particularly. That little charge of excitement I was experiencing was recognition. And there are a lot of pleasant aspects of recognition, because familiarity is comforting, because oftentimes things that are familiar are pleasant, often for good reason. Perhaps that is why you keep encountering them. Because you choose to, or because they are otherwise beneficial, and that's why you or your family or society has made them common.

But whatever the trick is that can make almost anything seem pleasantly nostalgic, just because it is a thing you remember, that's what's going on here. I already mistrust most people when they describe some media parcel to me as "good", and this here explains at least part of that. A lot of "comedy" works this way. It's not that it's actually funny, it's that it invokes familiar tropes - "Wives nag their husbands, I've heard or encountered that idea before, therefore, hilarious!" When you think that movie or tv show or book or toy you loved as a child is still good, it's not the thing itself you're thinking of, it's associated feelings of nostalgia. Even if you come back to it with fresh eyes, it's hard to realize that it's not holding up over time, it's just that you're still being affected by the comforting feelings it evokes. This probably happens with a lot of people as well, sadly enough. Like how you can love your family members but not particularly like them? Or old friends, or even just acquaintances that you encounter frequently enough over a long enough period of time. That's how you end up one day realizing you don't actually like your friends, but somehow thought you did all this time. You weren't actually enjoying them, you were just enjoying their familiarity.

I guess I'm not all that certain about what the standard social acceptability of littering is, but in general I feel as though it's not expected practice of cognizant adults. If you saw someone, fully aware, just drop their trash on the ground, you'd probably think, 'What a douche.' It may not be the most serious offense, but my impression is that the socially acceptable and expected practice is to at least make an effort to throw away your garbage in an appropriate place.

So it's somewhat interesting to me that this norm does not seem to fully apply to cigarette butts. You can make arguments about them being made of plants, putting them on par with fruit peels and other biodegradable objects that are roughly ok to throw into the bushes, but they are certainly saturated with chemicals and are more obviously a man-made product and thusly garbage. Yet to my estimation, the average person, upon seeing a cognizant adult, with full awareness, toss their cigarette butt any old place they please, thinks nothing of it. It would only be serious environmentalists or those particularly disgusted by smoking who might take issue with such behavior, and so I imagine a negative response would seem a bit eccentric. I'm not sure I've heard anyone make a complaint about the careless discarding of cigarette butts, either in a specific instance or as a general problem. I'm sure it's happened, and there are plenty of people who care about making ashtrays available in more places to reduce the problem. But it just seems such an integral part of the practice and culture of smoking that I don't get the sense that people even categorize it as littering. Somehow it's different, because it's more difficult or less convenient to always have a place to dispose of your cigarette butt, and you need to be able to smoke anywhere, anytime, regardless of the availability of a suitable ashtray. It's an example of the cultural role of a habit or practice channelling our perception of it, our categories being defined more by our priorities than by the characteristics of the object itself.

I heard some blurb on NPR yesterday where some congressman or spokesman or something commented on how defunding the mission in Libya would send a "bad message." I know that sending messages is pretty much the basis of politics; it's the essence of avoiding conflict, as any perfunctory glance at animal interactions will tell you. This is still a little disappointing to me, what with my neurotic obsession with being overly sincere. But what I find strange about it is the open talking about what sort of message to send. Not that I'd really ask for everyone to discuss their political strategy in secret; but it seems that when you stand up and make a press statement about what sort of message you're attempting to send, that becomes incorporated into the message that is sent. Maybe they just don't expect whichever political leaders they're trying to nonverbally communicate with to listen to our domestic news services, since most people don't, but it's entirely possible for them to hear the same things I do, especially if it's relevant to their situation. So it seems like if you're broadcasting your opinions about what message you're sending, the message you're sending is that you're trying to craft the perfect message to send that will be most advantageous to your country. Which is a message that doesn't need to be sent, since it should be taken as pretty much a starting assumption.

I think physics envy and physics ego are a problem in the sciences. Physics is always presented as the model for the scientific method, and the history of discovery and theory in physics has been recapitulated so often that any admiration I could possibly have once held for its pioneers has long since drained away. In physics, it's relatively easy to set up a well-designed experiment that leaves out all extraneous factors that would interfere with the interpretation of your results. These experiments can be controlled and repeated with little disruptive variation, and almost everything can be expressed quite exactly and clearly in numerical terms and equations. This makes it the "purest" science, the ideal to which all scientists strive. This, combined with the complexity of the math required and the difficulty of grasping the nonintuitive conclusions it has generated, creates a sort of physics ego, shared by the physicist and non-physicist alike, that considers other sciences, and their member-scientists, to be lesser in a variety of ways. You have to be really smart to be a physicist, everything else is just hand-waving.

Well, let me tell you, physics is a bed of hand-waving, inexactness, and approximations. Everything is considered only to first order, or by disregarding almost all but the most immediately relevant factors, or by replacing one term with another term that is not quite the same but close enough, and that makes your equations prettier or easier. Without having a library of tricks and lies with which to force your way toward the conclusion you are hoping for, one can very quickly become intractably stuck without a way to proceed, regardless of intellectual capability. And the idea that repeated instances of the same experiment, even in physics, are invariant is more of an a priori assumption than anything proven. It's a lot messier and less pure than it's often made out to be.

But seeing how difficult it is to predict, analyze, simulate, compute, model, or otherwise accumulate a thorough explanation of even the simplest situations in physics, it seems to me as though the idea of physics being what the smart people do is pretty weak. I think it's already being recognized by many that other areas, like bioengineering or molecular biology or computational something, are where today's supposed smart people are focusing, but the elevation and respect for physics remains. And it's not that it's not true. It's just that it seems like the soft sciences, like sociology, psychology, history, biology, etc, which are viewed with the disdain of being, well, soft, and for people not smart enough to do the hard sciences, which essentially means people who are afraid of math, are actually quite difficult. I guess it's just another example of defining one extremely restricted view of what intelligence is and entails, and devaluing the validity of other "types" of intelligence. But to make psychohistory into a predictable science is just so much more incredibly difficult than that of predicting the path of a single particle. Sure, there's a lot more room for people to bullshit their way through it, and yes, I am still holding it up to a pretty rigorous standard of verifiable experiments, but I think that the soft sciences are incredibly complex and require at least as "much" intelligence as the hard sciences, if you are to do either one well.

I plunged into a web of introspective, articulately aware, modern young writers about the problem of being human and emotional connection and alienation this weekend. Well, mostly Tao Lin. The sort of terror of not living a meaningful life, of being alone and unconnected, of not becoming the person you think you wanted to be, any sort of person at all, of being sort of muddledly trapped in the act of moving from moment to moment, at an extremely slow and plodding pace but somehow still unable to stop long enough to look around, assess, be aware, have a clear vision of your self and your life and how to live and be that would not fulfill all those dreads, that would not be painful or lonely or shameful and disappointing - this is the resonance I feel in these sorts of stories, which makes me think that the writer is good, that they've really captured, expressed, reacted to something, that they've made something real or important.

Yet I always have this nervousness, this suspicion, this muffled emotional paranoia that I'm both taking these psychological profiles too seriously, and assuming too much of a difference between myself and them, or that there is one between the author and the character. It seems so believable to me, so in a sense I buy it as a real or accurate reflection of modern human psychology. Yet I feel as though I am not, at least all the way, like that. I think I am getting some insight into how it is to be the people around me, and yet I do not want to be that way and think that I am not and can remain that way. And so I turn my suspicions to the author. He may have the same shared fears and connections to some aspects of these characters, but at the same time it seems as though in order to write such a story or profile, one has to be unlike the characters, has to have more clarity and awareness. And so the question is always, how much can I believe these stories? Is it just another example of fabricating unfounded theories to explain people that I do not understand? It seems that as far as I am not the same as them, I am furthering the gap by believing in this fantasy of what people are like. It feels judgmental, it feels condescending. As if, in trying to sympathize with them, I make the situation worse.

Another thing that I think about, more specifically in relation to the post by Justin Wolfe that I also read in this binge, but by youngish authors in general that I find to be particularly astute or insightful about people or the current age, is I wonder what the flavor of wisdom that their generation will evolve into in old age will be like. I feel like there's a kind of wisdom in old people who, say, grew up during World War II, that is wise, but very particular to their shaping forces. The perceptive attitude of people living now is not going to contain all the same conclusions as people from another time. There's a way in which I can appreciate some attitudes and wisdoms of old people, but still find it to be unsatisfactory, or inaccurate, or somehow inapplicable to the way that I view life to be. And so as we develop what we think is the best philosophy with which to view the world, we are developing it in relation to the society and age we are living in, and so what may seem like timeless acuity, is still quite partial.

Knowing my anathemic reaction to being asked, “What do you do?”, as in, “What is your job or main occupation?”, you’d think that I have a more favorable response to being asked about my hobbies. One can (and I certainly do) make many arguments about the problems in defining a person by their job, particularly in the way our particular society and economy is set up, and therefore it may seem to follow that the way a person chooses to spend their free time, their leisurely interests, are much more informative. But my attitude toward being asked about hobbies may be even more baneful, probably because I don’t have any. I have this impression of the human race that, when left to their own devices, a member of it will have something that they choose to do. Some sort of activity, something they will make or focus on, and trivial or peculiar or specialized as it may be to anyone who does not share the interest, they acquire some level of expertise in some small field.

I feel like there are a lot of kids’ shows and books that address this. The trope is that the kid feels shame and despair about some situation, talent show or whatever, where they’re expected to be good at something and they run through the list of all the things that all the other kids are good at. Manuel can do math, Susie is great at baseball, Mary Lou draws like a motherfucker, even that asshole Lionel builds a mean kite. But poor little Dakota-Taylor-McKenzie has nothing to show for herself. And then it turns out that the obscure frog-puppeteering that she spends all her time on, which she never would have imagined had any use or could possibly result in anything, demonstrates that she really DOES have some kind of great talent, and allll the other kids are really fascinated by it, and she was the star of the class and everyone wants to know more about it, and her sense of self-worth is validated and she’ll be able to devote the rest of her life to creating her own FrogPuppet.com startup and winning at life.

These stories are always in my mind as I feel myself sinking into the pit of despair at being a completely empty and useless person. I try to examine the things that I actually do, with an eye to not being blind to the hidden talents and abilities inherent in frantic mouse-clicking and card-sorting. But it seems as though I always end up coming up short, that I really don’t actually spend my time on anything. It's not that I never play a video game, or go for a bike ride, or take some photos, but there's pretty much nothing that I actually DO. I just sit around. There's no way for me to fill up the gaping void of small talk about how I spend my time that doesn't feel like a losing battle to justify myself. And yet both the job and the hobby questions are the bulk of what comes up in most situations. And at times it's the sort of thing where when you're in your own little microcosm, singing to yourself and performing your complex daily rituals, and it makes sense to you until someone walks in and you look at yourself from the outside and have that strange shift in perception and become painfully aware of your own insanity. I feel that almost every time I have to meet a new person, or engage in a minimum of small talk, or write a "personal statement", or interview for a job or something, or even just conversation practice in learning a foreign language. I just can't seem to answer these questions. To some extent my intense anxiety is self-inflicted and excessive, since people don't particularly care about the answers to these questions, or I don't particularly care if they do. But it does stem from my endorsement of the *importance* of the answers to these questions - I seem to actually believe that it's shameful to be as completely empty and useless a person as I am. Otherwise I wouldn't feel so terrible trying to defend myself against the onslaught of basic human society; I have no viable defense.

I am currently reading both "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman and "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. This is a lot of scifi for me of late, since I haven't had the opportunity to do much fun reading, and what I have done just hasn't happened to be scifi. But so these two seemingly unrelated books have collaborated to bring to my attention two points.

Firstly, I finally managed to articulate a problem I have had with visions of the future. It's not so much that the predictions of technological advance are unbelievable; it's that very often the adoption of new technologies is assumed to be universal. I'd have to see some convincing evidence in order to believe that there's almost any invention of the past thousand years that is universally implemented. Possibly even a longer time window. Maybe it's because science fiction stories that have the social changes resulting from technology focus on urban areas, and those are the places where new inventions are most rapidly integrated. But to envision that so many years down the road all education will take place digitally, or whatever, seems a little optimistic when a lot of schools still don't have the modern conveniences of the last twenty or thirty years. I do recognize that high tech does pop up in places one might not expect, but I still feel as though a lot of scifi has a pretty naive estimation of the uniformity of adaptation of new inventions. It probably even was Sterling who said the thing about the future not being evenly distributed. Or Stephenson. Whomever.

The other thing was that, oddly enough, in both books was an indication of some sort of fundamental distrust of, or at least initial uncomfortable reaction to, a person who wasn't born, but hatched or grown in a tube, or whatever. Maybe because I'm younger enough than both authors, but I have a hard time really feeling sympathetic to that. It just doesn't seem like a big deal at all, which may or may not reinforce their prediction. Perhaps people older than me, such as these authors, will feel such a reaction since test tube babies are something that they learned about after a certain point in their development, whereas for me it feels more established. But the thing I realized wasn't about the gut reaction to people who weren't born in particular. It's that it occurred to me that upon much contemplation and deconstruction, I very likely could begin to understand this emotional response. And that seems like a thing that could happen in a lot of situations - I don't have the initial, intuitive reaction to a situation that many people do, and don't particularly understand it, but upon examining all the social and biological theory behind it, could not only come to intellectually comprehend why a person would react that way, but possibly even convince myself (accidentally) to feel it too. This seems a little worrisomely backwards to me, but I bet if I were clever I could find a way to use it to my advantage. As in, to trick myself into having normal human emotional responses instead of remaining the robot that I am.