Ideas & Opinions People Watching

Dante · May 3, 2021

To Be A Parent
I love psychology (as a point of interest rather than study) and a big root of human psychology is parenting, the bumbling "throw everything at a wall and see what sticks" method of programming the minds of the next generation with selective micro-traumas mixed in to keep them straying to back behaviours, but the more I have thought about parenting (not being a parent myself I can only observe others for this) the more I have come to 4 very specific conclusions:

1) Not every good person will be a good parent
My parents are arguably good people, my mum is a little self centred and a complete moron, and my dad is somewhat difficult to spent TOO much time with in 1 go, but both honestly care about people, and my dad especially will go to great lengths for the people he cares about, and yet my experience growing up was quite horrible in places, and my sister was traumatised quite effectively, so how did this happen? Well, my mum was emotionally abusive (mainly to my sister, using her infant daughter as her confidant for her relationship issues and dieting buddy) and my dad physically and emotionally, abusive and so on. The specific pressures parenting puts on you are intense, I dont need to be a parent to know that, but not everyone who has kids are capable of withstanding those pressures. Both my parents slowly broke down over the years meaning each child got a progressively worse experience as they broke down and (in their own terrible ways) vented that pressure RIGHT back onto us.

Now, my mum is not going to in any intelligence contests against small children, but she still does seem to care, and my dad, now that he doesnt have to raise kids is back to being a really good and generous man (as long as you dont have to live with him long term, FUCK he is a mind-destroying kind of annoying) So JUST because your parents are good people doesnt mean they were good parents, and just because they were bad parents doesnt mean they arent (at a base level) good people. All this means is that some people just shouldnt have kids because attempting to do so will only cause them, one way or another, to hurt any kids they create.

I am not excusing abusive parenting of any kind, Im just saying that it isnt as simple as that, we all break down in different ways not all of us in good ways, so if you are the kind who breaks down in an outwardly destructive way, perhaps give parenting a miss.

2) Kids aren't less than you.
I have heard this described in many ways, but none quite so succinctly and the idea quite so crystallised as in the TV show Castle. Ad-libbing a bit he says that "kids are just people who havent been around as long as we have and its our job to guide them until they can take care of themselves."

All the most effective parenting styles and methods I have seen have treated kids as simply smaller adults who have MUCH to learn, they have respect, gentle guidance and a firm hand only when needed, one thing my Dad did which I thought worked well was to let us experience life early but in controlled settings, he would let us sneak into films too old for us at the cinema (by only 1 age rating) and let us try alcohol at home, in this way we got our fill, discovered there was no romance or rebellion to be had in these things and quickly lost interest.

I have seen perhaps the most effective parenting of all, the kids came out like little angels, so virtuous even into adulthood... it would be creepy if it wasnt so impressive, and their style seems to be mutual respect and guidance. So if a parent has to raise a hand to a kid, yes you should be allowed to in moderation (I speak as someone who was on the receiving end of a lot of that), but if you have to resort to that, it is a failure on your part.

3) Having a kid is a committment... duh.
Its funny how so many parents dont seem to figure this out until too late. If you are going to create a human being from scratch here is what you are agreeing to, and if you cant, then dont have a fucking kid!
1) To support and help that child to become their own person, not who you want them to be.
2) To keep your shit to yourself, they are not equipped to handle your shit yet.
3) Accept that a large portion of your life belongs to them now, and that you CHOSE this.
4) To maintain support for the child until they they turn 18 or finish college/university whichever comes later.

Its about the principle of the thing, whatever mistakes you make will form that human and will inform their conduct when making more. Any mistakes you make could have repercussions generations down the line. It is important. You start a job as important as making a human being, you damned well do it properly and see it through to the end, think about if you're able to make that commitment, and if you cant, then dont start, another thing so few seem to think about, they get caught up in the family image and forget the very serious responsibility they are accepting.

4) Becoming a parent at all is giving up your life.
In movies and TV and books and any other media you care to mention there is a much loved theme of self sacrifice, of people giving their lives for others, and one common category for that is parents giving their lives for their kids. We like this idea in fiction, the thought that our parents love us SO much that they would even die for us, the loss of a parent coupled with that profound show of love gets us every time, but parenting itself is a sacrifice, and in a way on the same level as this. A parent is committing to being bound to a little human, to spend the next 20 years of their life, the remainder of any youth raising, paying for and protecting another person, and on top of that there is no real expiration date to being a parent. These people are accepting that the course their lives would have taken is well as truly dead, and that their child's life comes first, in a way they are sacrificing the life they would have had. If your parents are trying then they have already committed to giving up their lives for you, raising you IS their grand sacrifice, and to all those parents out there who go back on those commitments:
You already gave up your life for your kids, its too late to turn back now, WAY too late.

Dante · May 8, 2021

The Grand Reboot
I had a blog once, but like so many things I did, I lost interest and abandoned it after a while, I suppose this has become my new one? So I will reiterate one of my favourite observations on people from that blog.

I dont know how society originally started, it was probably very gradual and predates us as a recognisable species, but lets imagine a HUGELY oversimplified scenario to help get this point across shall we? In this scenario a group of men (yes men, if it were women we would be living in a matriarchy) sat down together, perhaps around a fire cooking the kill of the day, lets call them Alan, Bob, Carl and Denis. Denis is eating quite well because he clubbed Alan over the head and took his kill from earlier, Alan is unhappy about this but is not as strong as Denis so has to put up with it. Bob likes Alan more than Denis so is also upset about this and being the strongest person in the group feels confident enough to say the following:
"Denis, Alan caught that food earlier, and if you keep taking his kills he will leave the group, and so will I, so how about we all agree to let whoever kills something, keep it, OK?"
Unknown to the group this is a historic moment, the first rule of society: "stealing is wrong". Of course Im guessing at which rule was the first but this one is as good as any for this scenario. Alan liked this rule, Denis didnt, but understood he had no choice, Carl learned he liked watching people argue and is the type of person who will eventually end up binge-watching reality TV... Carl is a dick. This first rule was so successful that Denis then asked everyone to agree for Carl to stop looking so happy when others argued, it made them feel bad. Carl agreed because Bob is MUCH stronger than Carl, so he tried to not look happy when others were not.

Over the coming hours and days and weeks the group sat together many times and made many rules and it smoothed out the group dynamic nicely, they even made rules for their woman to follow which helped their whole group, spouses as well, come together in a newfound harmony. In that time Eric, Frank and Greg joined. Frank liked to try to stick his... ahem... inside Eric, Eric did NOT like this, and as soon as this was brought up with the group they all agreed (except for Frank) that no man would ever be allowed to to that to a man again, and it was added to the "this is wrong" list. This was also a historic moment, the birth of Homophobia.

As the years pass this little campfire gathering grows into a small community Carl is kinda unhappy because he doesnt get to enjoy his love of people's arguments as much as he used to, and Frank is also unhappy as he doesnt get to... ahem... "express himself" the way he used to, but on the whole this is fine because in such a small group they are the outliars and there is no safe and responsible outlet for those parts of themselves, so it is best to keep them supressed for the good of the group

As centuries passed and the rules spread and grew, thousands upon thousands of rules were added from basic hygiene to specific ways to talk to each other, and the communities became millions strong, but this is where we encounter a problem. As time passes and more people join together, old rules, far from helping, become largely inappropriate and oppressive, this can be split into 3 categories:

1) Obsolete Rules:
Rules which were made back in the times of the first gatherings, when men would regularly do battle with wild animals and each other are largely inappropriate for todays society, but have hung on so long that they are ingrained within it's core. "Men dont cry" which was originally meant to encourage men to stay strong and focused in times of danger are no longer appropriate when the most dangerous situation a man has to deal with is spilling his flat white on his crotch, in fact much of human interaction rules are now less than worthless. The idea of keeping to your group and not being overly forward with strangers helped when you HAD a tight-nit group and strangers could be there to chop your head off, but in societal groups millions strong EVERYONE becomes a stranger so not taking that first step to say hi and get along ends up isolating us and stopping us forming our little tight-nit groups, it enforces loneliness and distrust between neighbours rather than taking a chance and making friends.

Furthermore the idea of men continuing to make all the rules or the old rules men made for women way back then still being valid now when women also sit around the preverbal campfire and can speak for themselves is ridiculous.

2) Rules in the wrong communities:
Communities have gotten so big and the rules spread so far that every large group has its own version of the rules now, specialised to their people, laws and environment, but often times nowadays large sections of 1 community will end up leaving and joining another, but they will insist on taking THEIR own rules with them. This is fine in some areas and helps to bond them together into a micro community, which only helps form bonds and strengthen the community, but it also ends up being destructive in others, where the clash of their rules to their new society's rules, laws, and environment causes them to not integrate with their new community, fracturing it and causing enmity.

Furthermore many of their old rules which they hold on to will not work in the new society and they will sometimes even try to force others to adopt THEIR rules rather than adapting to their new society.

Though society's rules become part of your identity, they exist solely to help community cohesion, if they are running counter to that, THEY SHOULD BE ABANDONDED. Moving to another community and expecting everyone to follow your rules and know your language and make the same allowances they did in your old community runs counter to that new community, you are the outside, you adjust. If a large enough number of outsiders do join a community then perhaps a discussion should be held about how to adapt the rules to the new structure of the group, but this is a group discussion, not something for either side to dictate.

3) Rules which were only necessary on small scales.
Back at the campfire Frank was told it was wrong to try to sleep with other men, which was fine because no other men wanted to. But now all these years later Frank's distant relative Francis also likes being with men, but his community is so enormous that he can easily find thousands of other men who like the same thing. Their community is so huge as to allow the formation of micro-communities within itself where the rules can be different for only the members of that group, but since "men sleeping with men is wrong" has been around since the start of all communities, many people have trouble letting go, and the rules meant to help the community instead oppress a large section of it. This is not only true of homosexuality, but any group who were originally told to supress themselves but who could now form a micro-community to allow themselves to be free without hurting anyone.

On the whole the rules have been added to over and over and new rules added to counter or amend old ones but no old rules have never really been retired, and anyone who has tried to navigate the legal system or maintain software over time will agree that this type of system where you only add but never prune eventually creates a lumbering monster which is so unwieldy as to be impossible to use properly and only causes frustration or worse.

These rules we created over time govern everything from how we dress to how we talk to each other, how we act, how we think, how we value ourselves, how we work together, who we work with, who we exclude, how free we are to be who we are and how responsible we must be to others and in what ways we should take responsibility. For such a list of all encompassing rules, surely they should be beneficial to us and not end up dividing, oppressing and just generally causing harm to us right?

What society need right now is a reboot. For every community to get together and agree on 4 things:
1) Ground rules: rules which help all mankind and will bond us together, not hold us apart, basic ideas of right and wrong relevant to now.
2) Community rules: rules which help our individual communities bond together and work as a cohesive and inclusive unit.
3) Sub-community rules: rules allowing sub communities to do their own thing as long as no one gets hurt and not be judged for it.
4) A schedule to swap over to the new rules and a schedule to repeat this community reboot process again in the future.

The problem, as there always is one, is that people get SO protective of the rules they grew up with that they would rather hold onto them than figure out how to reach out to their fellow man/woman/other/pet/food source/environment/whatever else we should seriously think about our behaviour towards.

Dante · May 9, 2021

A Question
This was originally meant to be a thread for people to collaborate on ideas of people, but has turned into, more or less, my blog. The thing is, I HAD a blog once already, I stopped writing in it because I ran out of ideas I felt like expressing, but I seem to have plenty now.

The problem is that I have things on the old blog that I think will fit perfectly here, some even so good that they dont need a re-write, but I dont want to copy paste them as that would be another definite link between my real world identity and my identity here.

The obvious choice is to simply start my old blog up again and move these posts there, and simply leave a link to it for anyone who is interested, this would also allow me to refer to my thoughts on people in real life without having to worry I would lead people to my account on Suicide Forum (where I have shared WAY too many secrets) but I have found out that several people actually DO (for some reason) read this thread and going to an external link to do so may discourage them.

To anyone who DOES read this... your thoughts please?

TIWIADIFI · May 9, 2021

A voice from the back row.

I “DO (for some reason) read this thread” and here is that reason.

You are a gifted writer, and effective communicator. I enjoy the time I spend reading this thread, and I appreciate your time and effort to craft it. Your writing style is clear and fluid, thoughtful and honest, and respectful of the reader. The content of this thread, is “nutrient dense”. I find it to be good brain food. Scotch and sativa would pair well with it.

I will read your work wherever I find it.

Thank you @Dante

Dante · May 9, 2021

TIWIADIFI said:

A voice from the back row.

I “DO (for some reason) read this thread” and here is that reason.

You are a gifted writer, and effective communicator. I enjoy the time I spend reading this thread, and I appreciate your time and effort to craft it. Your writing style is clear and fluid, thoughtful and honest, and respectful of the reader. The content of this thread, is “nutrient dense”. I find it to be good brain food. Scotch and sativa would pair well with it.

I will read your work wherever I find it.

Thank you @Dante

Sorry for that, I made a decision, Im just going to keep posting here.

Dante · May 9, 2021

The Illusion of Safety.
Many years ago, I had a blog of sorts, for a few months until I got bored of it :P I have re-written a few posts from the old days for People Watching, but here is a post I feel is relevant to now and needs no rewrite:
The Illusion of Safety

Feel free to browse the Blog, but know that not all of it reflects my opinions today.

KM76710 · May 9, 2021

I do read this even though I may have nothing good to post up or offer as a reply. Very well done on the writing.

Dante · May 13, 2021

Decision Making Strategies
I know several people who suffer from a fun little condition called "analysis paralysis" (not a real medical condition) where in trying to make a decision they just endlessly analyse the situation and never make any progress towards a choice. I am one of those people, so I have spent some time thinking about decision making. There are endless studies on this topic, some saying we make decisions on core beliefs, some say its a programmed thing, some say that without emotion we can make a decision, even a purely rational one, but I have been putting off writing this because my FAVOURITE study is one I have been unable to find again, and I dont wish to be someone who invoked the "Almighty They" too much when making arguments.

My favourite study on behaviour involved having the subjects fill in questionnaires about vague preferences or ideas, and then wait for a time before returning their answer sheet and asking them to justify their decision, only the answer sheet has been altered, however, far from noticing the subjects avidly argue for the choices and preferences they DIDNT originally make. The reason this is my favourite is because it suggests most decisions are made subconsciously and we simply make up a justification afterwards, which matches my experience, most of the time, your snap judgement is the one you end up deciding on after "careful consideration".

As someone with analysis paralysis I have ended up using this to help me make decisions. I carry a coin, if I cant make a binary decision I flip the coin and allow it to choose the outcome, then upon seeing the outcome I find out if I like the outcome or am vaguely disappointed, thus telling me what I wanted all along, and if I feel nothing, I simply go with the decision of the coin.

In a non-binary decision I assign arbitrary values to everything and ask a stranger to make an arbitrary decision between those values having no idea what choices those values are assigned to thus creating a truly random result, this does get me some odd reactions, but almost never a negative one, and does give me that perfect randomised result, allowing me to find out which choice I really wanted by the emotions in the moment, I then simply pretend thats the one they chose for me, or if I felt nothing, go with their choice.

I did try to analyse my choices and make logical decisions in the past, but I find if you dont know what you WANT, you cant choose either way, you will always hesitate unless you end all your choices with possibly the most powerful single thought in human history "fuck it". Make your rational choice, say "fuck it" and just go with your decision come what may, and I find the audience participation method far more rewarding, and overall, more fun.

Dante · May 13, 2021

The Almighty They
Having grown up in a family who creatively and subtly utilise every logical fallacy necessary to win an argument, and having had a terribly poor memory myself, I have become very familiar with what I called "The Almighty They" until I found out the actual name for it: "The Appeal to Anonymous Authority Fallacy", after which I decided I liked my name better and kept using it. This appears to be people's favourite fallacy, and, I am ashamed to say, mine too, as I often rely on the Almighty They to take credit when I cant remember who actually did something I want to talk about, so I say "They did this" or "They performed a study". This Almighty They having done most of mankind's achievements seemingly single-handed, hence why I call them Almighty.

Dante · May 14, 2021

Depression Series sub 1
The Blind Observer
This is an expansion of sorts on "Visual Autofill" I wrote in March.
To recap, in Visual Autofill I talk about how you don't see the world, your brain receives information from your eyes and constructs an image of what is in front of you using that information, experience of what certain shapes tend to be, highlighting of important points and some mild guesswork. In Visual Autofill I mention how your mind can make mistakes and show you a clear image of what it THINKS is there for a second or two until it figures out its mistake and corrects, showing you something obviously different, in Blind Observer I am going to go into when it shows you nothing at all.

I mentioned before that our mind highlights important information when it presents us with an image of the world, it does this by drawing our attention to it, presenting it in greater detail, and on the flip side, it fudges the details of things it doesn't deem important, making little blind spots, this is our brain prioritising our focus and processing power, you may not immediately recognise this in yourself, but any guy who watched a gorgeous woman in a thin summer dress walk past a van will attest to the fact that he knows exactly how her hair parts, what colour it is, what her dress looked like, a decent estimation of her body underneath, her gait, the details of her face and a decent guess at her bust size, but will have no clue what was written on the side of the van in big letters right behind her, this is because the guy's mind in that moment designated the van as low priority and didnt spare it any processing power to bother presenting the words to you, ALL the processing power was on the woman.
Another good example is to think about any place you have been plenty of times and start asking yourself for inane details, like the colour and pattern of the floor, or if it is a carpet, what kind and colour, the number of plug sockets on the walls, or what shoes ANYONE you talked to this week was wearing (shoes are a common blind spot for men at least) you will soon realise how much obvious detail your mind simply isnt picking up, or rather isnt bothering to show you, because its just not necessary.

Focus is just processing power allocated to a single thing, and the above all happens because your mind is prioritising your focus to just what it thinks is important, so what happens when you reduce your focus? If you let your attention slide? Of course the detail of the world around you goes down, and your mind has to prioritise even more, large sections of your visual field will be generalised unprocessed images, meaningless to you with only the active parts in any detail, and the more that focus slips, the lower detail the world around you. As your focus bottoms out your mind struggles to process what is in your vision with the available processing power, colours fade, objects and surroundings seem to lack any significance as your mind can no longer spare the power to highlight them, any detail is lost so everything looks bland and uninteresting, and most of what your eyes pick up is simply not processed, you exist with a form of tunnel vision, only processing what is RIGHT in front of you and only in the necessary detail, and finally, as your attention wanders completely and you begin to retreat into your head or maybe daydream, even with your eyes wide open you are now blind to what is in front of you, staring forward and seeing nothing.

This ability to look without seeing is particular problem for security guards who, after staring at CCTV monitors for hours without distraction, will be about as able to see what's on the monitors as are able to make those images interesting, which is often "not at all".

Dante · May 15, 2021

Depression Series sub 2
The Distraction Engine
If I were to say a statement as unnecessarily grandiose and exaggerated as "Boredom Is Death" you would probably dismiss it as an attention grabbing phrase meant to draw you in rather than actually MEAN anything, but it isn't actually quite so meaningless.

Our minds CRAVE information, we are all incredibly curious beings, always wanting to know more, some dont seem like it all the time but that is simply because they are not curious about the same things we are. We may think they arent curious because they dont care how an engine works, or why a bird's wings lift it, or why people are the way they are, but they may still be intensely curious about what Miley Cyrus is doing with her weekend, perhaps not something WORTH being curious about, but they are none-the-less very curious. It is a constant imperative of the human condition to always want to know more about SOMETHING, even if that something is looking for an escape from your own suffering.

Our minds constantly crave information because, like everything else we do, it has a basis in survival. Finding shelter, seeking out food sources, spotting danger, planning defence, finding easy routes through tough terrain, all this relies on information gathering, in fact there isnt much about survival that doesn't rely at least in part on the absorption and processing of information, so if we were to ever stop, if our minds stopped receiving new information to process, we would probably die from something sooner or later anyway, starvation, exposure, a predator or our own stupidity, so like our hearts, which also kinda needs to keep going in order for us to live, our brains arent designed to stop, they require constant information to process or they start to fail.

I watched a TED lecture years back about the secret of happiness, in which it states the secret to being happy is to stay out of your head and stay in the moment, to truly experience your life, rather than spend too long thinking about it, and this lines up nicely with my idea here. We are happiest living in the moment because we are receiving new information, if we retreat into our own heads we stop receiving that information. Stopping and thinking is of course important and extremely useful, it allows us to consciously digest the information we are constantly taking in, but spending too long in this state will begin to starve our minds of the new information it craves, the old information, simply reprocessed over and over becomes stale and we crave something new, that new input that will put our musings in a whole new light, that new sight that we can apply what we know to to gain even further understanding, we need to see and hear and smell and taste and touch and feel and experience the world because this is the only source of new information we have save for a genuine religious experience.

This also explains in part why we love talking to other so much, beyond the basic imperative of "safety in numbers", we can see a tree and see that it is crooked and we can surmise that it was once broken and has since recovered and continued to grow, and we can even anthropomorphise that tree or assign significance to it, but when someone else sees it and tells us about "the little tree that could", about how it was probably knocked down by a drunk driver and the man who lived in the house nearby probably took pity and nursed it back to health and the tree grew back stronger than ever and is a testament to getting back up, these strange ideas from a new mind, processed using prejudices and experiences and understandings we dont have, every word out of their mouths is compacted and complex information about the world they have seen and the mind they use to understand it. Even if we have seen a thing ourselves hearing about it from others lets us see the world through a new filter, a whole new perspective, and also lets us understand the mind that processed it. People are endless banks of experience and understanding and information, so how could any mind which craves information not want to access that wealth of it?

Our minds are always in need of distraction, always craving new information, and with so many sources of it around us the world is perfectly geared to cater to this need, but if we withdraw from this world, and into our own heads, if we stay in our rooms and avoid people, we are depriving our minds from the crucial distraction it needs to keep processing, and as surely as if your heart had stopped receiving blood to pump, your mind will begin to break down.

There are documented instances of people who have undergone extended sensory deprivation and had nervous breakdowns or psychotic breaks or full visual or auditory hallucinations, nature abhors a vacuum, and our minds are no different, when allowed to get too bored our minds will break down and begin to make up new information, just for something to process, just for 1 more distraction from nothingness.

So you tell me, is the statement "Boredom Is Death" still meaningless? or does it hold just a grain of real meaning?

Dante · May 15, 2021

Depression Series sub 3
The Constant Storyteller
We like to imagine that we see the world for what it is, but the theory of "Depressive Realism" suggests the opposite, that normal people are actually deluding themselves and overly romanticizing the world around us, whereas depressed people see the truth, which, alarmingly enough, has been experimentally shown to be true, but I want to go a little further and put some meaning back into these cold hard facts for a second.

Depressed people see the world in facts, sure, but that isnt all there is to this, the more worthy question is why normal people are romanticising the world in the first place?

1) To make it friendlier.
Yes, there is a core of intentional self-delusion in normal thinking, we like the idea that our homes love us as much as we love them, we like to feel connected, and romanticising the world around us does that. We dont see just a plant in a flower pot, no, we see our little flower, the little guy we have cared for since it was a shoot, since its first leaf, we see it suffer and we want to help, we see it grow and we feel proud, and we like to think it is grateful, because why else would be put in the effort? We anthropomorphise everything because it allows even inanimate objects to keep up company, I will admit to having had some warm conversations with my car....

2) Because we crave purpose and meaning.
Yes, again we are just trying to make life easier, this time to motivate ourselves to do more, and to comfort ourselves. That trophy on the shelf isnt just a piece of plastic, no, it is a symbol of our accomplishment, and though they are mass produced and only minorly customised for us, THIS one holds within it our achievement, all our effort, and acts as a spur to further achievement. It is the physical manifestation of our pride.

That book isnt just useless information, no, it is the heart and soul of the writer pouring out to us, it is our refuge when we are beaten, our friend when we have none, our escape when we feel trapped, our inspiration when we feel weak.

That watch isnt just a way to tell the time, it is a present from your father, a sign of his love, of your connection, and a piece of his support you can carry with you always, to make you brave.

3) To understand.
Finally, a reason why our delusions are useful beyond just lying to ourselves :P - Myths, superstitions
We all want and need to understand, we NEED to know why things happen so we can predict it next time and perhaps save ourselves from some real trouble, but most of the things in the world are simply too complicated for us to properly understand, we dont know the requisite engineering to understand when our car is in need of repair, we dont know the requisite meteorology to map weather patterns, we dont know shit really, so instead we tell stories, just like with myths and superstitions, we solidify the patterns we see but cant explain into stories which we can predict, stories which warn us, protect us, inform us, even if they arent strictly speaking truth, they do allow us to see facts we otherwise wouldnt.

I know when my car is in need of repair by knowing its personality, and noticing when it's not behaving its normal self. I know when the weather is going to turn by tracking its moods, I know why the plants on my windowsill need more care than most from the story of their suffering, of how they need my care due to past neglect, and in knowing this I can better keep them alive. Our brains are far better geared towards telling stories and reading other's moods and thoughts than they are to botany or physics or engineering or any other skilled pursuit, so we convert the world into the stories and faces we can understand so we can better predict and live with it. It is an attempt to convert the world into a format we can more easily understand, not just on a small level, like with cars and plants, but on a grand scale, to tell the story of the world and to find the place of ourselves in it, to know our character in this grand story and how it fits in with all the rest, to try to glean an idea of the flow of everything, to see patterns in life, and to take advantage, to further our own narrative, to achieve, to live our lives as best we can.

Depressed people make may see the facts more clearly, but may miss the bigger picture which, however inaccurately or overly romanticised it is when seen, is visible to the Constant Storytellers among us.

Dante · May 19, 2021

Depression Series sub 4
Negativity Gate
The way I see, when a bad thing happens it is processed by your brain into 1 of 2 types of emotion, sadness or anger. Sure there are more, disgust, violation, exasperation, frustration, etc, but these are middle steps and ultimately you will end up either internalising the negativity, i.e. sadness, or externalising it, i.e. anger. I have sort of understood this for a while but it became oh so clear when working with one of our schools (I work with schools).

This school is a special behavioural needs school, the majority of the kids have some kind of horrible home life or other, neglect, violence, abandonment, and this dumps a whole lot of negativity into the kids, the interesting part is that the school in question has 2 buildings, one for the delinquents, they shout, misbehave, break things, swear more than not, just generally make life difficult for anyone around them, and the other for the self-destructives, who hurt themselves either emotionally or physically. These kids all had the same cause for their behaviour, but ended up in 2 diametrically opposed states, one turning their acquired negative energy inwards at themselves and the other outwards at the world.

Moreover, I have discovered you can hold negative energy unprocessed in a sort of holding pattern, it feels like tension, like a great knot tightening inside, until you finally release it either inwards or outwards, so when you have this negativity in you and you come to process it your mind has 2 choices and believe it or not you can control the choice, I have done it myself, choosing whether something makes me angry or sad, but the key part here is the holding pattern, the tension, this allows you a golden opportunity.

If you can hold onto the negative energy without processing it you can choose when and how to release it, however, to do that you will probably need a new trigger, but with this you can release this energy in an appropriate and healthy setting. People do this all the time, they release tension in its pure form with physically demanding activity or art, or as anger with competitive sports like boxing or squash, or just at the gym, or as sadness with a good tear jerker. These are softer more manageable version of the emotions, soft heartbreak, soft rage, healthy, under control, safe, and something you can walk away from renewed and refreshed afterwards.

The problem (that should be my catch phrase) comes when you are unable to release that built up tension, but thats for another post.

VictoriaR26 · May 19, 2021

Dante said:

Every day I find myself thinking this over and over again! I am so disgusted with society as a whole! I’m constantly disappointed and sad... I hate myself for allowing the bastards to affect me like they do... but I am so tired of being treated like shit! It is horrible feeing so ugly and inconsequential to anyone to the point where I don’t think it would matter if I dropped dead in front of someone. These arseholes around where I live would be annoyed at the inconvenience of having to step over or around a person who is so broken and hurt that all they want to do is disappear! I liked your post but it’s a lonely and hurtful position when you are the exception. Humans are mostly a horrible species 😢

Dante · May 23, 2021

Depression Series Main
Depression Mechanisms
Ok, so truth be told I have been putting off writing this one because I didnt want to get it wrong, which means it will be hard to write.

This is also a very expansive topic so will be making reference to the following previous posts in this thread, so probably best to read them first (the below are all hyperlinks):

Programming the Mind
Pain and Perception
Visual Autofill
Cumulative Erosion (Examples of cumulative erosion can be seen in the "Social Series" preceding it.)
The Merciless Gaze
The Power of Worthlessness
The Power of Purpose
The Blind Observer
The Distraction Engine
The Constant Storyteller
Negativity Gate

If you haven't figured this out so far, this post is not light reading, sorry, though I HAVE tried to cut it down as much as possible and segregate it into the above topics which, on their own, are each easier to read than if I had put it all into 1 block essay.

As a chronic overthinker, mathematician (i.e. pattern finder) and having been depressed my entire adult life until recently at which point I have got to see the change as it fades away, I have been in an ideal position to deconstruct depression, the mechanisms behind its conception, and how it plays with the mind from a psychological point of view rather than a neurological or neurochemical (which was the focus of my reading on the subject at first). I am not going to go into WHY I think all this, I am simply going to lay it out as I see it, exploring my reasoning may take too long as it took me a decade to figure this all out to the point of being able to express it in words.

I know depression is different for everyone, which is why I tried to stay away from the specific personal experience and focus on the underlying generic mechanisms, and I know I am only 1 person, but the time I have spent with other people with depression and the way that it effects them seems to correlate with the following. If this is not the case for you then ignore this post as just another hubristic attempt to define the ineffable, but if it is, then I hope it helps.

Causes
The root causes of depression lies in the neuroplasticity of the mind, as mentioned in Programming the Mind our brains are designed to pick up new skills and behaviours, strengthen and develop them, but never really to allow them to fade again, this is as true for destructive behaviours as it is for useful ones. One thing I didn't mention is that our minds will naturally follow the path of least resistance, so the most developed pathways are used automatically and using any others requires conscious choice in the short term and vigilance in the long term, so once certain destructive behaviours are the norm, they are used automatically and thus endlessly reinforced. It also means that when actions or behaviours face strong opposition, we will naturally begin to avoid them, we usually like things easy, even those who like a challenge will prefer to keep that challenge restricted to a single field or activity at a time. If we face enough pressure we will eventually withdraw from it.

As I have seen it the causes of depression can be split into 2 categories:

1) External Pressure
This is any element in your life you find simply intolerable, but are forced to tolerate regardless. This could be a huge and destructive force like someone threatening your safety, or a toxic work environment, or something small like a repeated unpleasant event which you cant escape and ends up building up in your mind, like someone who is always rude about you but who you are forced to interact with regularly and politely. It could also be money problems, or difficulty keeping up with your studies, or it could be any other external, unacceptable force you are powerless to combat and must simply tolerate.

This creates a consistent pressure with no hope of relief in sight making the world around you unpleasant to be within and interact with, so to defend yourself from it make things easier on yourself, and lessen it's impact, you withdraw from it, thus starting the spiral into depression.

2) Internal Pressure
This is when your own psychology is causing the pressure. This could be split further into 3 categories, Trauma, Conflict, and Neglect.

In the case of conflict you could have 2 disparate states such as love and fear of the same person, such as in an abusive relationship. You want to protect and nurture them, but you also want the same for yourself, but given their destructive nature, you cant do both. Every time you accept their abuse to make them happy you feel worthless and hopeless for being so complicit with your own tormentor, every time you prioritise your own safety and happiness you feel like a selfish monster for doing so at the cost of the happiness and wellbeing of the one you love, this situation could also be an external pressure, but I am focusing on the inner conflict and recriminations here (and I DO have a limited life experience to draw from so not all my examples will be perfect).

In the case of neglect, the underlying situation is very similar to conflict but you have chosen a clear priority and neglect the other. For this, perhaps this example will do: You have ASD and find the world confusing, loud, intrusive, and generally unpleasant, like nails on a chalkboard, but your upbringing has instilled within you a powerful drive to assimilate and achieve, so in order to fulfil that drive you force yourself to become outgoing and train yourself to almost enjoy the chaotic noise of the world, you even go so far as to learn to live in and deeply feel the moment, bringing the chaos into yourself, completely neglecting and conflicting with your true nature, essentially torturing a long denied core of yourself endlessly. This utter neglect of a part of yourself causes that pressure to build up within you.

Finally we have the case of Trauma, this is more straightforward and wouldn't really require explanation except that many people dont understand that trauma doesnt require 1 large event, it can simply be the effect of Cumulative Erosion where one or more repeated small events or inconveniences and the memories of all the past times end up endlessly re-enforcing until each instance is like a freight train of cumulative unpleasant experience at once. This is an external factor whilst it's happening, but just because you escaped it, doesnt mean there isnt remnant trauma within you, and THIS is an internal factor. Any trauma from past events like Cumulative Erosion, spousal abuse, loss of a loved one, personal violations or attacks, periods of impossible pressure etc, act as a splinter in your mind which the rest of your mind recoils from, every time that part of your mind is touched the rest suffers, thus causing an unacceptable internal conflict until that trauma is resolved, and as mentioned earlier, internal conflict of this degree will produce constant pressure in your mind.

When your own psychology is causing pressure, like a knot in your mind tightening endlessly or a damn whose flood gates are straining under the weight, this tends to get in the way of any real enjoyment of life, this constant pressure is a reminder that any good moment is fleeting and pain will always remain, (whether this be true or not), which is not helped by the occasional times when some minor stimulus causes the knot to slip or the damn to break and some of that pressure is released as either colossal rage or bottomless soul-eating sorrow, (See Negativity Gate) and the inevitable recriminations from yourself and your friends/co-workers at your ridiculously out-of-proportion response and seemingly unstable nature that follows just adds to the problem.

After a time like this you will stop bothering with enjoying life as it seems impossible to do anyway, and will withdraw to save energy, and avoid disappointment, thus starting the spiral into depression.

The Mechanism
As shown above, all the causes of depression as I see it produce a mounting psychological pressure which for one reason or another causes you to withdraw to protect yourself. This is actually a very good and sensible response to intolerable short-term pressures, and can soften the blow to your psyche and even help prevent or reduce trauma, but when used against a long term pressure the issue of neuroplasticity becomes apparent.

As mentioned before, any behaviour, physical, social or psychological, repeated enough, ends up re-enforcing that behaviour and eventually making it your default way of dealing with any situation, which then causes it to self-reinforce endlessly becoming ever more developed and ever harder to resists repeating that same behaviour, for positive behaviours this helps turn desired behaviours into habits, but for destructive behaviours, it forms vices, and for withdrawing from pain, it forms depression, and here is how:

1) You withdraw.
Whether voluntarily as a way to avoid discomfort and take the easier path, or involuntarily as described in Pain and Perception, you spend less time living in and experiencing the moment, and more time in your head, especially if directly confronted with an unpleasant situation. You will withdraw your focus and dull your attention. As described in The Blind Observer doing this lowers your ability to processes any sensory input and thus the detail of the memory produced and this lowers the emotional impact on you, which is why it is a defence strategy in the first place, but the more you do this, the better you get at it and the more you will automatically use it to deal with your problems, making you more and more withdrawn until you reach what I described as "your focus bottoming out". Once at this point the world you perceive actually IS greyer and duller, more empty and barren, good moments or input arent processed properly and thus dont have the same emotional impact, as you are processing and thus seeing far less of it, and upon seeing the world like this, a world which seems so wholly uninviting and dull, you feel even less desire to spend any time within in, and as seeing is believing, you count all previous memories where life seemed vibrant and full as delusions, and your current perceptions as reality, and you withdraw further.

2) The world becomes Alien.
See The Constant Storyteller. We all embellish reality in our attempts to feel connected, to understand how the world works, and to find our place in it, through narrative and ritual anthropomorphisation we not only make the most mundane parts of the world feel friendly and familiar, but also apply our skill at empathy to understand our environment, but as withdrawn as we have become, and as unpleasant as the world has become for us, we can neither understand how it works, justify seeing any of it as friendly, or wish to feel connected to it in any way, so we stop telling pleasant stories, and if anything create unpleasant ones, where the world is cruel and unkind and an enemy.

This world stripped of narrative and friendly half-delusions becomes an empty and chaotic, unsympathetic collection of meaningless and undecipherable matter and events, we fill our lives with our friendly half-delusions because reality is either too uncaring or too complex for us to understand or accept, so we simplify and assign meaning to the world around us to comfort us and keep us feeling safe. We NEED this delusion in order to function, we are too small and simple and vulnerable to be confronted with the frailty and complexity of our existence at all times, even if we are aware of it on a cognitive level we need to feel safe on an emotional one or this will eat at us and just add more psychological pressure, and make the world seem even LESS inviting, further exacerbating our need to withdraw.

3) Our minds start to break down
See The Distraction Engine. Our minds NEED input to function, they arent designed to slow down, and arent designed to cope long term without enough input to keep it occupied ceaselessly. Even the dumbest, most vapid idiots on the planet still need to read about their favourite celebs and absorb useful tips on new ways to twerk, we require new information or our minds begin to break down. Deprived enough of information our minds will begin manufacturing it, deluding itself or even hallucinating if it is bad enough (which luckily depression seldom is) but even falling short of full blown hallucinations our minds will become quite unstable, emotionally and cognitively, making it difficult to function properly. Our minds were designed to function under specific conditions, the biggest of which is a continued supply of new information to process. Deprive any mechanism of its fuel, and it will stop, and as withdrawn as the mind haa become by this point, the amount of information it is actually absorbing is a fraction of what it used to be. The mind is running on fumes, and it shows.

4) We become ineffective.
It is a sad but true fact that if you are depressed you genuinely ARE less talented and effective than you would be otherwise, and the cause is twofold.

4.1) The mind is not designed to function as withdrawn as you have become, without external input, without positive reinforcement, without distraction, and so much that we need to function, we develop neurochemical issues which causes your whole body to function improperly. The same neurochemicals used to support happiness and awareness and so forth are also used to regulate bodily functions, but as you no longer use them your brain flushes them. All your major regulatory processed for breathing, heart beat, repair, sleep, digestion, etc, all become less coordinated and thus fail to work properly, this is hardly life-threatening but causes you no end to discomfort, from aches and pains to heart palpitations to suddenly being out of breath because your body forgot to breath for a while, to upset stomachs to ruined sleep cycles to just general malaise.

4.2) See The Power of Purpose. You fail to put in as much effort as you used to into anything you do. Without your full attention, and without a meaningful REASON to push yourself, you simply dont. You tell a man to run in a big circle for no reason he will stop when he gets bored, you tell him that if he does this he will get stronger and he will stop when he gets tired, you tell him that if he does it faster than anyone else that he will be a hero, he will stop when he has WON. Without purpose and with so little focus, we will only be able to pull out a fraction of our potential even with all the effort we can still muster, and this will convince us that this new low is the limit of our potential, that we are simple lesser than our peers, that we are inferior, so why compete if we cant win? Why keep trying? And in this realisation, feeling as physically bad as we do, we withdraw further.

Continued in Part 2

Dante · May 23, 2021

Depression Series Main
Depression Mechanisms Part 2

It turns out there is a 20,000 character limit on posts...

5) We only see the bad and are blind to the good.
See Visual Autofill and Blind Observer. Our minds highlight input which it deems relevant or important by processing and displaying it in far greater detail, and when running with SO little focus it has to prioritise what it highlights to only the issues which require immediate attention, i.e. the problems. Our minds are essentially just designed to help us survive, everything, if traced back far enough, is for that purpose. When having to prioritise only the absolute BARE MINIMUM of your environment to call your attention to, your mind will invariably prioritise the negatives, the things that need to be fixed in order to ensure comfort and survival, which, at this point means that you are more or less blind to anything positive as it is not absolutely necessary for your survival and you don't have the focus to spare, and yes, when the world is THAT shitty, why spend another SECOND in it that you dont have to, so we withdraw further, into our homes and our heads.

6) We lose any sense of enjoyment from our activities.
With so little focus on anything we do, with our minds in as precarious a position as they have become, and filtering out anything good and highlighting only the bad, with our bodies aching and tired, with nothing having any meaning, and our ability to do our hobbies so reduced, is it any wonder that the things we used to enjoy hold no interest or excitement?

7) We learn despair.
See Distraction Engine and The Merciless Gaze With our access to the world around us long cut off, with our work and hobbies meaningless, and our ability to complete them so diminished, our purpose gone, the world alien and uninviting, and our bodies in pain and causing us to withdraw even further, we are left with NOTHING for our distraction engine minds to process, except itself, queue The Merciless Gaze. Our minds already so specialised in finding fault with ourselves now has nothing else to do so focuses close to 100% of its energies to tearing your existance apart piece by piece, finding every flaw and fault and magnifying it beyond all reasonable proportion. Without any external source of validation there is no balance to this and nothing to contradict it, with you proving yourself so ineffective and nothing you do having any meaning your mind has all new fuel to tear you apart with, your self-esteem and self-image worsening by the second until you see little difference between yourself and the mould you no longer have the energy or inclination to clean off of the tiles in the bathroom, with so little worth in your actions and yourself you dont look after yourself and your body aches and breaks down even more, and at some point, your general self-hated gets enough to trigger that knot of unprocessed tension and pressure within you and it opens the floodgates.

See Negativity Gate. With months or years of pressure built up and compacted and so much more pushed down on top from the growing isolation and misery of your present existence, and no access to the world at large there is nowhere for that built up pressure and negativity to go except inwards and all that pain is released as an impossible aching misery within yourself.

And with this, we have depression.

Conclusion
Depression is a domino effect of multiple ordinary processes going oh so wrong and self-reinforcing and feeding into each other in a terrible downwards spiral and all starts with 1 thing, a simple defence mechanism having to be overused enough for it to become the norm.

When we isolate ourselves, withdraw from the world, we are damning ourselves to depression and worse. We cannot simply tolerate in silence, we need to fix the problem, or at worst find a suitable outlet for all that pressure we suffer. We CANNOT suffer in silence, or in silence and suffering we will remain forever.

I tried to lay out some basic stuff for dealing with depression below based on what I have written above but I'm afraid it came out a little weak, but I would rather put what little I had that could be applied on a general stage (no specific to me) than to put nothing at all. The main purpose of this post was to try to illuminate the mechanisms behind depression (as I see them) and hopefully do 2 things: First, to show you that NONE of what depression shows you is true, that it is your mind playing tricks, that neither you or the world is anywhere near as worthless or empty as you may think, and Second to hopefully give ideas on ways to combat it, if you know how something works, you can try to interrupt it.

Palliatives:
Things that wont CURE depression, but should help whether it.

1) Exercise
Physical exercise is a good way to circumvent what depression is doing to you. One effect of depression is to drain your brain of any neurochemicals which handle reward, any feel-good neurochemicals get re-absorbed by your brain over time but your ability to produce new ones by having good emotions is quite drastically or completely reduced, however, those same feel-good neurochemicals are released as a direct result of physical exertion, especially if you set yourself a target and meet it, this is a built-in reward system for surviving a difficult situation like fighting off or successfully fleeing a threat, so strenuous exercise can be used as a substitute to fun activity or validation to take the edge off your depression.
Furthermore, physical exercise forces your mind back into the moment at least in part, which runs counter to your withdrawing into your head and helps interrupt the ever reinforcing cycle of shutting out the world for good.

2) See the facts.
If you can create an objective worth to your existence, it can act as a last life-line of self-worth to hold onto, a reason to carry on when all "meaning" is gone. My go-to has always been to try to help others. If I manage to make an objective and noticeable improvement to another's life then it stands as a proof that I am not entirely what the depression enhanced "Merciless Gaze" is telling me I am.

3) Martial your resources.
Take stock of what is still available to you, what you still value, what you still gain pleasure from, what spurs you to action, an use them like tools to keep yourself going. If need be you can even twist negatives into positives and use them to keep moving.
The height of my efforts in this field are described in the post The Power of Worthlessness.

4) Non Pressuring Support
Having a large group of understanding friends (or even a small one) can help support you in tough times, as long as they are accepting and kind, and above all DO NOT PRESSURE YOU to get better or do something you dont want to. The most they should do is be there for you, and gently encourage you to action which will benefit YOU not just something they want to do together, and this is where SF comes in I suppose, a supportive community of like-minds, there to help, to sooth, to never judge and to offer advice.

Solutions:
Things that will actively work to interrupt or counter depression.

1) Remove the source
The most effective solution is to identify and deal with the root cause, the pressure which originally drove you to withdraw, and any new pressures you developed in the meantime. Remove the reason to withdraw and you can slowly begin to dismantle the effects.

2) Relieve the pressure
Find an effective and life-affirming external outlet for that pressure. Be that counselling, or any of the ideas I described in Negativity Gate.

3) Interrupt the mechanism
Use CBT to begin redirecting your thought processes, to begin to undo the cumulative reinforcement of these destructive mental processes an

Dante · May 23, 2021

Apology
To any readers... still flabbergasted as to how I have any... I apologise for the length and hubris of the above "Depression Mechanisms" post, but I would rather spew BS into the world in the hope it may help someone than risk holding back something that could otherwise help. *dunno

Dante · May 31, 2021

Intuitive Progression
There comes a time in every man( or woman( or other))'s life when the world seems to spin away from him, where nothing makes sense anymore, and nowhere is this more true than in technology. At some point every master of industry or genius engineer will stand baffled at the device in his hand trying to figure out which icon is the telephone button and how the hell it works. This isnt because you are going senile, it is because the technology was never meant for you in the fist place.

Back in the day tech was owned by 40 somethings who had 30 somethings design the next generation of tech for 20 somethings, then those 30 somethings became the 40 something owners and the 20 somethings became the 30 something creators, and the kids become the 20 something consumers.

AT each stage tech is designed and taught to the young and innovated with the usage and mentality and common sense of the young in mind, by the time those 20 somethings become 60 somethings there have been several generations of compounded innovation which follows ever more alien forms of common sense, each shaped by the innovation of the last. These 60 somethings are still using common sense from generations ago and have no idea why you need SO MANY accounts for social media, or why it make sense that pinching your phone means zoom out, its all ideas modifying ideas modifying ideas and none of it aimed at or even considering the generations past the 40 something business managers/owners.

After a time, its not that you are out of touch, its that the industry is wilfully out of touch with you, you end up trying to think like someone 3 or 4 generations younger and understand something built to make sense primarily to those people, not you.

Sure there is the effect of decreased ability to learn new things as you get older, but its not just that, it is the habit of disregarding the older consumer as someone worth making tech understandable for, so next time you see an old granny trying to figure out what the icons on her phone mean, take pity, its not her fault, its ours, and the least we can do is be kind about it because we will all be in the same boat eventually when the tech world leaves us behind too.

Dante · Jun 1, 2021

People are Poets

I was rummaging through my files and found this written out from 2016, and it was strongly suggested that I post it on here. Its a little more florid and less matter of fact than my usual on People Watching, but it more or less fits so here it is:

I have found myself ruminating on the nature of the human experience and have come to one very simple and beautiful conclusion, that the human experience is in essence a process of art.

I came to this when I asked what the nature of the world is; the world itself is merely a mathematical equation, with an equation big enough the whole world can be written on a page; atoms, forces, chemical reactions; science and mathematics, that is all the world is when stripped of delusion and deception, so why do we see so much more? It is because of the essence of the human experience, we are poets and artists, we exist to take in the numbers that make the world and convert it into poetry, we convert mathematics into poetry and function into beauty, how else can you explain the human compulsion to have a garden, what purpose could possibly be served by having a patch of exposed dirt with plants growing out of it, to spend time to grow those plants only to then cut them back again, a garden only exists because of the poetry in us, because we see life as magical and special, because we see those flowers and imbue them with glory and purity that does not exist in the raw numbers of their atoms.

My father has a bird table in his garden, and he buys bird seed in the hopes of enticing birds to stay a moment, but why are birds so special that he would go to such trouble just to look at them, by biology they are no more special than a worm, adapted to their environment for the purpose of survival, by mathematics they are no more special than a fish, suspending themselves for the purpose of mobility, but by the poetry of our experience, they live a life we cannot, they represent freedom, we can swim in the ocean, walk on the land and even take to the skies in flying machines but we will never know the feeling of unfurling our wings on a whim and launching ourselves into the air, feeling the breeze flow through our feathers and view the world beneath us knowing that we can go anywhere, we see their frail for and perceive beauty and elegance and purity and we love them for this, for showing us a world beyond our experience, we love them for being an object of our poetry as we wish to view them so that we can adore that poetry that exists in us for them

All human experience should be for this poetry and for the love of this poetry, we should learn to see it, and share it, and nurture it for that is what it means to be alive, and perhaps, before we step cautiously into the dark oblivion of the unknown beyond this existence, we might leave something behind us to provoke that same poetry in others.

Art and poetry and music is not an act of creation, but an act of expressing the unique experience that exists in ourselves so that others can share in our experience and make it their own.

Dante · Jun 13, 2021

The Waste of Progress
It occasionally occurs to me just how much we waste the best things we have ever achieved, and then I realised that this is perhaps the keenest measure of our progress, just what we consider worth wasting.

As things progress, what was once difficult becomes easy, what was rare becomes plentiful, what was weak becomes powerful, so as it becomes so, we begin using it for lesser and lesser purposes until you get what we have today.
- Thousands of people train and get degrees and work their whole lives to design machines capable of aping thought, then tens of thousands more train to build them, whole buildings and assembly lines are built to support this, and finally a machine is created and sold which can mimic the human eye, take in light and encode this into magnetically stored information, every pixel out of millions recorded perfectly and able to be reconstructed into a single image on command.
- Further thinking machines are made, tends of thousands of times more powerful, and linked together by cables and radio transmissions all across the globe and capable of electronically transmitting information down cables on the sea bed of the Atlantic to a farm of such machines in another country to be stored there, and called up on command.
- Millions of pounds are spend to build a huge building and equipment, then hundreds of people are employed to work in it and keep it running 24/7, then thousands of such buildings are made throughout the country and these are all connected to each other and every single home in the country has power, and this is replicated in every nation, keeping these machines going
- Finally, perhaps the pinnacle of this achievement, a device which can communicate, record information, transmit it via microwaves through the air for miles without hurting the carrier, to towers dotted across the world, and can carry its own electricity with it, designed by geniuses and built by billionaires and bought for hundreds or even thousands per unit is turned on and connected to this crazy invention of power and data and communication... so I can watch 20 second video of a kitten farting on another kitten.

ALL THAT HUMAN EFFORT... and thats what we do with it. This is perhaps simultaneously the best measure of how far we have come in our achievement, that we can call such mighty achievements up for such banal things, and a mark of our problem as a species, that we would waste all that effort and work and achievement on something so pointless.

Ideas & Opinions People Watching

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