inersphobia

Leaves

2011-08-21T19:37:00.001-07:00

Where am I? Where have my books gone? No, the first question. No, not no. Have to wedge myself forward, so no dead ends. Don’t say no, it won’t help. First, first question. I am in bed. …Not in bed. Why? Too hard. Why else? I can’t see any light. There is a sodium lamp outside my bedroom window. Where am I? I don’t know. That doesn’t help. Am I in my car? No seats. Could I be in my car, w/ the seats removed? No carpet. In my car w/ the carpet removed? …What is there? What is this I am feeling? Feels like linoleum. …Am I in my old apt. across the hall? What’s that noise? Why would I be in my old apt.? I want to watch porn. Is there some way to not want to watch porn so often? Not as easy to tell a psychologist that you think you watch too much porn as it is to say you’re depressed or you are afraid of being arrested for a crime you didn’t commit and put into prison. Why am I thinking about that now? Because I can’t move. Why is that? I’m not sure. But why? I just… I don’t feel like it.

Where am I now? This is a snowy field. I am walking around in circles. There is a car beyond the field, in a parking lot that looks as if it holds about 20 cars. There is a road past the parking lot. There are woods. I am in the armpit of woods. I am walking around in circles. I have to stay awake. I keep

Where am I? That is a breeze. It is pushing leaves. There is a differential. Everything is mostly empty, just magnetic fields…it only looks like stuff is there because our eyes are designed to see a certain frequency of waves. The leaves remind me of home. Why do I feel this way. There is stuff…it’s just that the stuff is phenomena…energy interacting.

Why haven’t I been asking more questions? Isn’t that how you figure things out? Start w/ what you know, logically deduce what you don’t?

Why haven’t I been feeling my way through things? Asking questions and then squeezing my eyes and see what I see, and then asking why I see that, and then wedging my way toward an understanding?

Why haven’t I been practicing some skill, so I could effortlessly move my way somewhere else? Why am I always forgetting?

Wrong Days

2011-08-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

Q1What do you know about math?

A1Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, primes, whole #’s, integers, rational, real, complex #’s.

Equations, variables, exponents, prime factorization.

Properties: associative, commutative, identity, identity, symmetrical, substitution, inverse.

Cartesian coordinates. Graphing points. Linear and quadratic equations. Factoring.

Unit circle, sine, cosine, tangent, csc, csn, cot. Complementary angles, solving for a missing side of a triangle.

A2 Years less than I should know.

A3 So little I feel like a non-person, vaguely homeless, nonexistent.

Q2 Why don't you know more?

A1b I already covered this briefly in my post on questions.

Q3 But since then, why haven't you caught up?

A1c I've been doing it slowly, intermittently. I still feel unequal to the task. And it feels cold and distant often, like something that should feel personal to me, inviting like a friend, but does not, and I feel ashamed for it not.

Q4 Why do you let this interfere w/ your learning it?

A1d Because other things are easier.

Q4 Why do we end up where we are? In a dumpster, or alone, or sitting comfortably, regretting ~12/13^th of our life?

A1e Because the reasons for this not being the case are insufficient.

When should you do your best? Why?

2011-08-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

A1 Rarely, as doing so causes indigestion, heart burn, acid reflux, and, consequently, chronic hiccups, which makes life miserable. It makes you arrogant. It makes you want recognition for your work, makes you desire rewards that often are not good for you, are unlikely to occur, or end up undoing part of the work for which you are rewarding yourself; it increases the turbulence of your life, and necessitates more work. The trick is to stay calm, act with reason, and not overachieve. Doing your best almost inevitably contributes to anger at others for not doing their best; you ask yourself why they do not, and no answer satisfies you, and you become embittered; you begin to feel superior to others, and you become frustrated when others do not to recognize that you are working harder than them and that they should respect you for this. This anger can be consuming and ruin relationships. When you work in a team, it can make your team less effiective; when you lead the time, it can make you less effective.

A2 When you want good results. If you are distracted, it is hard to know how distracted you are; you need to monitor it--which leaves less attention to the first task (the thing you are distracted from) and the distraction itself. This makes it more likely you will make a mistake, which could distract you further, and give you more work to do. If this is opaque to you, try to recall cooking something complicated while distracted, or filling out a tedious form. The work I do is very unforgiving of mistakes; there are a lot of batch records and steps; one mistake can cause hrs of work to correct it.

A3 Whenever you have a goal. Make doing your best the norm when you have a clear goal so that you can minimize the emotional vicissitudes and over-corrections mention in A2. Basically, if doing your best is required when you want good results, then you handicap yourself by not practicing daily to try your best and becoming used to the feeling of trying your best. The arrogance, or desire for reward, or rest, or recognition, which could be disproportionate to the actual quality of job that you did, especially since, if you are not always trying your best, you may not have developed exceptional skills at the task you were performing, is only exacerbated by the irregularity of your practice. And, in the scenario of you only occasionally trying your best, your feelings of arrogance are exaggerated, because of the relative novelty of your having tried your best--you went out of your way to try your best, rather than just doing what is normal for you.

A4 Always. Doing your best is not just about focusing on an internal image of a desired outcome, and obsessively going after it, delaying all gratification and peace of mind until you reach it. This is what causes the aforementioned stomach trauma. This is the confusion. Doing your best is about doing your best to make reality in the present what you decide it ought to be. A huge part of that is approaching a goal (a desired future state [and one of the best mental tools is imagination, the ability to hold an image of what you want, while working toward it]), but if in doing that you cause more problems, you are not necessarily doing your best. You must adjust your idea of what doing your best is, so that it is sustainable. Doing your best means searching out your ignorance and educating yourself, always asking how you can improve, what are the problems, what are you ignorant of. It means understanding yourself and enough psychology so that you know to reward yourself, take breaks, update your sources of motivation (marshmallows), and, as Epicurus talked about, thinking about your life, and evaluating your plan, so that it makes sense to you. You can even, if you are extremely comfortable w/ a task, decide to do it while thinking about something unrelated, but this must be a conscious decision, and then you should do your best at this--performing the task, while thinking about something else. You have to ask yourself what you should do, who you are, what your best is, .

Questions

2011-07-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

Q: Why have you often failed to be curious and ask good questions, and why are you failing less often recently?

A1: I tried but the answers and the questions felt frail, scripted--not strong and authentic.

A2: My father was an avid consumer of self-help material (books and audio); I picked up the habit. I consumed this stuff like candy, and I received answers w/o having to have first asked questions. They tell you how to live w/o revealing their first principles. The questions they ask are often rhetorical or otherwise shallow. When I asked questions (is it really good to be spending all this time scheming to make myself more successful, what's the point) it led quickly to uncomfortable thoughts, which led me to think I shouldn't be listening to this material, and these books and tapes promised so much, and I enjoyed listening to them (I love listening to people talk). So, I got in the habit of not questioning them unless they said something that hurt my head. A lot of it I tuned out because it did hurt my head.

A3: I wanted to be a journalist before I could read or write, but movies too often cast them as creeps, so I became disenchanted, and so I figured I'd just be a writer, maybe a novelist. I loved prose stylists. I loved the poetry of prose. I became enchanted w/ translating vague feelings into vignettes. I did not need to ask questions to do this. Plus, the thinking that is personal, the thinking where I try to understand what I think, and what my opinion should be, is different from the kind of thinking I do when I am creating a product of words; in the latter, all I need to worry about is what someone else will think, what questions they will ask; and then I adjust what I am saying so it will answer their questions. It is performative.

A4: Unstructured time (I was homeschooled but mostly just left-alone-schooled), a laziness, a genetic tendency to want to please people by performing hard work in front of them, but slacking off when they weren't around, depression, severe escapist tendencies, and both soft and hard addictions picked up early in life, all made it so that even when I asked myself questions, I did not have the Will to live out the answers (like Rilke said), so it was easier to just not do it.

A5: My father had the habit of periodically interrogating and berating me for hours, long into the night. Much of my thoughts throughout the day were refutations of what he had said, defenses for myself, that I never said to him.

A6: Similarly to A5, I developed the habit early on of defending myself against mental interrogators, who would ask what I was doing, why I was doing it, why I wasn't doing something else, etc. Never was curiosity part of this. It was just a reflexive preparation for defending myself against an often drunk and irrational person.

A7: Having a low self-esteem but being moderately intelligent, on the occasions when I would ask myself a sincere question, and try to answer it, I would always imagine counter-arguments to my answers, and these counter-arguments were from imaginary other people, not myself, and I could not always defend my answers against them. This was frustrating, and I did not know how to debate these fantastic debaters, so I gave up, and assumed I wasn't smart enough to come up w/ answers to questions.

A8: Similarly, I tacitly developed the vague opinion that there were no answers to most of the questions people would bother asking, just positions.

A9: Being a lover of prose style and fancy language, I loved hyperbole and blustery language. This isn't good for curiosity and reasoned thought.

A10: One thing I would sometimes be curious about was my own thoughts and feelings, why I was having them. I seem to have come to the conclusion early on that it was delusional to think I could really put reasons to feelings. I imagined it something like this: your feelings are your body under a blanket. You, the thinker, are standing above the you lying down under the blanket. You experience the feelings by seeing the shape of the blanket while the feeling you beneath the blanket writhes around (knees and elbows, hips, a head, going up and down, twisting). So, you can draw a map on top of this blanket, call this raised up portion fear, that one guilt, and say they have this connection--that they are mapped out this way in the geography of your brain, and that this geography corresponds to the real world, to events that happen in your life...but, that did not match my experience. I saw randomness, arbitrary markings, and the fog of anxiety covering so much terrain. I could explain thoughts and feelings one way one day, and differently the next day. I fell in love w/ evolutionary psychology in my twenties, and was intensely curious about that, and thought about it a lot. I still like to think about evo psych, even if my initial enthusiasm as waned, but that's for another list.

A11: I am lazy. My brain loves to stall, stare, sulk, or otherwise just go slowly. It does not believe that its effort is usually fruitful. So I could rev it up to write attractive prose, or make an argument w/ myself, or obsessively worry...but thinking--asking questions, guessing at answers, probing those answers to see where they come from, how they might be right, how they might be wrong, how you could test them, on and on, is hard work, and takes confidence and stamina.

A12: When I would write for myself as a kid, asking questions and trying to come to answers, usually about what was wrong w/ me and how I could change, I would sometimes have an epiphany about how I was supposed to act, what I was supposed to be, and it was exciting, but then I would come back later and read it, and it was not exciting. I could not understand what had made me think it was so great. So the value of answers eroded.

A13: One of the above mentioned soft addictions was Internet Relay Chat, from around the age of 12. I was a very lonely kid. I loved acting smart. I knew tons of big words, I was very argumentative, and could break down arguments others made easily, and show why they were inconsistent and foolish. Who needs curiosity and real knowledge, when you can appear smart w/ much less effort? Plus, when you ask people questions, they answer in such dull and predictable ways.

A14: I had questions all the time about my dad. None of them made sense. I didn't know how to go about answering them. It made me sick.

A15: I was homeschooled. Math interested me, but I was very skeptical. I always looked for exceptions to the rules it laid out. I felt that the rules I was being presented must be shallow versions for something deeper that was going on, and I wanted to test them to figure out what was really happening. But, I never got very far. I became frustrated, and I never found satisfying answers. Whenever I asked my mom for help, she was baffled by my confusion. She thought, I later learned, that I was just being stubborn, refusing to accept the rules of arithmetic as they were given to me. Maybe I was; it was a long time ago. But, anyway, she did not what I was asking. It was a mess. I was very curious, w/o any means of satisfying it, and so I grew suspicious of math, and, again, disappointed w/ questions.

A16: One of my earliest memory of questions in a book were in Bob Jones University text books Explorations in Literature, they would have questions for conversation at the end of each story. I remember trying to answer the questions. It infuriated me. There was no one w/ whom to have a conversation. I was alone. The questions seemed stupid to me. It makes me angry today just thinking about. I hate rhetorical questions. This is a big mark against questions for me to this day.

A17: Similarly to A4, if I asked myself something like, what should I do today? it was just a doomed question because I was alone by myself so much, and I was such an escapist, w/ such bad habits, that I would answer myself naively (I should clean my room, and wash laundry, and study math for three hours, and, and, and) and then I would get on Dalnet and waste as many hours as I could before logging off in time to hide in my room before my dad's truck pulled up our gravel drive way, the sun setting behind it. Should I do this, should I do that? Who cares. I'm just going to do what I feel like doing, anyway, until fear and anxiety prod me to do something else.

A18: Also as I mentioned in A4, I have always had a tendency to perform actions. A memory from when I was 9 or 10 was my mom asked me to watch my infant brother, who was crawling on the floor. My father was in the room for some reason. I felt very awkward staring at my brother, so I just faced him, not really watching him, instead feeling myself being watched by my father, whose face I could not see in my periphery. My little brother crawled over to the heat register on the floor. My father yelled at me. ... If I'm changing lanes, I perform the action of looking over my shoulder, because that's what one does. I am so often perfunctory, whereas true goal-oriented, purpose-guided action is like answering a question (when will I be done, what will it take to be finished, how will I know when it is finished, what will the completed job look like, am I done yet, is there a car in the next lane?), and that was just never the norm for me. I was usually somewhere between wanting to die, and hoping I could somehow change myself into a person I could like.

A19: Forgetfulness. One major theme of my life through my late teens and early twenties is having and forgetting epiphanies. I used to act quite bipolar. I would have epiphanies. The lights came on, and I knew how to live, what it felt like to live correctly. I would hope so hard that I could hold onto that new frame of mind...but it would slip away. What's the point in asking questions, if you're just going to forget the answer, anyway? In a way, I was quite often, w/o realizing it, asking the question, how can I be different? How can I be someone I like, and other people will like? And I always thought the answer was a feeling. I felt better when I read self-help books. They described activities and ways of living which, while I imagined them, made me feel good; I performed better when I felt good; performed worse when I felt bad; so, I always assumed it was holding onto a certain feeling that was the necessary answer for how to live my life.

A20: My dad wrote me lists like: 1: Look at what you are doing. 2: Think about what you are doing. 3: Do what is right. 4: Keep your head out of the clouds. These are answers to an questions I wasn't asking. They do not encourage curiosity. They are rules to be memorized, chanted.

A21: For years I was obsessed w/ developing my ability to use my left hand, w/ being smart, creative. Strange ambitions, frustrating, often vague. Questions I would ask myself usually had unsatisfying answers. I knew a bit about prose style, about how good writing looked; the answers to questions like, Why am I obsessed w/ being left-handed do not look good on paper. And for years I wrote obsessively--much of my thinking was on paper.

A22: My dad would periodically tell me I wasn't going to make it in life if I did not change myself significantly. This raises the question, what am I supposed to be like? But, again, I didn't have the tools to change myself, so the question grew stale, and made me sick of it, and questioning in general.

A23: Until very recently, I did not know the basic process of asking a question, making your best guess, then concentrating hard & seeing where your guess landed, how close it might be to the answer, what might be wrong about it, what right about it, what prompted you to guess at it, how that might prompt a better guess, how you could test the guess, how you would know when you got the right answer, how you could tell it's the wrong answer, so on, and so on. One experience that was deeply satisfying and novel for me was trying to recall the name of the comedian Mitch Hedberg at work one day. It took me a couple of hours. I was determined to not get frustrated, but to enjoy the challenge. I thought of baseball (pitch). I thought of Michael Knight (first name starts w/ M). I thought of a vegetable...that was green...and sort of like broccoli...maybe because it was round...ish (iceberg lettuce--hedberg).

A24: Feynman talked about the discomfort of confusion, of not knowing the answer to things.

A25: Slowly, over the years, I built up experiences that encouraged me to be curious. Someone called George Bush "incurious", and I didn't want to be that. There was this bartender in Katz's who did not write down orders, but memorized them. I noticed the look on his face while you made the order. It was this face of curiosity. I loved the way it looked, and realized that you could learn things more quickly, and remember them longer, if you asked questions about them before you learned them, that answers to questions you were not asking don't tend to stick as well. I went through a few months of being obsessed w/ the concept of the question itself, as a mental tool, to promote curiosity.

A26: So many questions we see from others are rhetorical, or leading, or otherwise insincere. Or people ask us questions the answers to which bore us, daily questions at work. Or we ask people questions about boring daily things. It is easy to come to hate questions. And people.

A27: One intro I had to questions was a friend telling me that in many instances in life, when one asks someone else questions, they are assuming a position of authority.

A28: That same person told me about emotional intelligence. I understood it as understanding yourself, why you felt and thought what you did. (See A10). In addition to A10, I felt that emotional intelligence was for wimps. I thought it would rob my creativity. It sounded feminine. I thought emotional drive came from deep, unknown impulses, and if you came to understand them, you disarmed them, and also your drive.

A29: Because I have always seen myself as a fiction writer, nearly every time I would try to write something non-fiction, whether or not it was to answer a specific question, and I would have trouble w/ the facts or the details of the non-fiction I was trying to write out, I would swerve into fiction, into fanciful writing, and that was fine, because I write fiction.... Later I learned that good fiction answers the question, What If? and that it should be self-consistent, and you can't escape the problems I thought I was escaping.

A30: I hate the sound of my inernal voice. I spent ~ 5 years wanting and trying to think visually, to become skilled at math and drawing, to develop mechanical aptitude--all things nonverbal. Words seemed effeminate to me.

A31: So often when I would ask a question like, What should I do now? the conversation in my head would swerve off into first principles. Why should one do anything? What is goodness? What does it mean "should"? I got tired of it quickly.

A32: As soon as I started reading, I wanted to know what words meant, of course, but I took it more seriously than the average reader. I looked up every word I did not understand, and my standard for understanding grew higher, so that I wanted to be very confident that I knew the definitions to words. I had index card boxes full of written out definitions; my dictionaries were full of torn sheets of paper, which I would insert a definition interested me. I memorized definitions. I think this replaced curiosity to some degree. Feynman talked about this as well, of course.

A33: This is my final answer. This answer has to do w/ how I have become more curious. I had known for a couple of years that one of my worst habits was explaining things to people in my head, rather than thinking for myself. By thinking for myself, I don't just mean doing my own thinking, but doing it simply so that I can understand something, w/o necessarily needing to explain it to someone else. I have understood for years that one reason I worry about understanding things just for the sake of explaining them to others, is that I feel weak and powerless, so I hope to influence other people's opinions, so that they will do what I feel I cannot. I saw that when I did have questions the answers to which I would search, it was because one of those mental interlocutors had made an objection I found troubling, and that if I would get rid of the imagined other, and just ask myself these questions, I would proceed much faster in understanding. So, why didn't I develop this habit of thinking, so that I could understand things more thoroughly, so that I could beat the interrogators? Probably habit. I felt lonely doing the thinking w/o the other person. Since most of the time I end up not having a real person to talk w/ anyway, it did not pay to delay my gratification, so I had made up the person to argue w/. Because, again, in many respects I did not care about understanding, partly because I did not believe it was possible (A8), and partly because knowing and doing were so disconnected (A4).
So, I moved out when I was 18 because I saw my brother take a different path, and I hated it. I went to work because I saw my father do it, and didn't feel I had a choice. I didn't go to school because I did not know how. Then a friend told me how, and I did it, not knowing what I would do after that. I went through different jobs, hoping to hate them less, until I landed one I liked, and I still have it today. I work hard enough to continuing advancing because I don't like it when people think I'm not a good worker. I have on and off done some volunteering because I don't like to feel lazy or indifferent. I picked an education path because I found a major I felt the least uncomfortable w/; it felt masculine enough but also interesting enough, and something that I could get a job w/ in our economy. And then one day someone at work, while I was arguing w/ her about free will and how much people really make choices in their lives, and the relationship between those choices and the outcomes in their lives, and suddenly, based on the arguments I was making, she tried to sum up my position, first by saying, "Oh, so you're a sheep," and then, "Oh, so you're just lame," and finally, "Oh, so you're a pussy." I kept arguing, ignoring her insults, and the argument fizzled out, and we went back to what we were doing. I still think my arguments were stronger than hers, but I kept thinking about them. And then, a couple of days later, I heard on the radio a story about a kid being tortured by being beaten w/ a rod every day until he died. I had for years been interested in Tibet, and had contributed money to that, as well as to other causes, but it had always been perfunctory. In this instance, I asked myself, "What is worse than this? A kid being beaten, daily, w/ a pole, locked in a cell, until he's dead. What is worse than torture?" I thought about it for days, and I couldn't think of anything. Not murder, not global warming and the end of our species, not genocide...all these things are terrible, but I don't see how any of them are worse than making someone's life just about as painful and miserable as you can. And w/ this I realized that this was my opinion. It could change, but it for now it was mine, and I did not need to tell anyone else about it; I did not try to convince any imagined interlocutors. I talked w/ myself about it. I read about it. I asked my own questions. And, the pattern of my life--realizing, forgetting, realizing, trying, giving up, trying again--continues, and I now spend more of my time trying to understand things than trying to explain them, and, for now, I feel that my life is valuable enough that should bother to think through my own opinions, that I do not need another person to justify my own mental effort. I realized that my understanding of the horror of torture directly affects what I do to try to stop it. My opinion matters in this sense, and it matters right now. Before I have a degree, before I change careers, before I have a million dollars in the bank account, or have published a book. My opinion is important right now, and could help other people. And so I am, as always, trying to think for myself. I have been doing it my whole life, and I will keep doing it my whole life. I started off very dumb. I still am very dumb. I will die very dumb. But I will keep trying.