What follows is some audio I recorded today as a means of weaning off writing the daily blog.
I am also probably going to upload this as a “video” to YouTube…apparently using the new Microsoft video editing software Clipchamp–which I’m going to have a difficult time not referring to as “Clapchimp” in my mind.
I think I’m going to take a break from writing these blog posts, and I may quit doing them entirely.
They aren’t doing me any good‒they’re certainly not encouraging anyone to buy my books or to listen to my music. They also aren’t functioning successfully as any sort of therapy, which was a large part of my hope.
Of course, it’s possible that my mental health would have been even worse if I hadn’t been doing this blog, but it couldn’t have been that much worse‒almost by definition‒and maybe I would have reached a catastrophic failure at some point sooner than it’s going to happen now, and at least I wouldn’t have had to suffer through the extra time I have in this branch of reality.
And finally, not least, this blog certainly isn’t working as any kind of cry for help for me, though I’ve tried to use it that way. Perhaps there’s just too much of a “bystander effect” for this to function effectively in that mode.
I’m pretty sure these posts are not doing any good for anyone out there in the world. There are people who are entertained by them sometimes, of course, and they tell me so, and I appreciate that. But that’s not a strong enough motivation to keep going. My apologies; I do not intend to denigrate you in any way, my readers. It’s just that my strength is running out, and I feel horrible, physically and mentally.
I’ve been doing this blog at least partly as a habit, continuing the morning writing I did for years when working on my fiction. I’m not writing fiction anymore. It just feels too futile.
I don’t think my stories are bad. I think some of them are pretty darn good. But only a handful of people will ever read any of them, and though many people will say that one does art mainly for oneself‒and at some level, that is definitely true‒one also really wants to be appreciated. Likewise for music.
I mean, yes, Van Gogh painted many paintings in his lifetime, though he only sold one…but then again, he did cut off his ear and end up killing himself, too (I knew he was a genius).
Anyway, although even Stephen King writes because he must‒so he says, and I don’t doubt him‒I don’t think he would have written nearly as many books if no one were buying them. It just gets discouraging after a while.
I may do some little audio snippets here and there and share them on this blog. Sometimes those can be rewarding, and they’re usually brief, and as long as I keep the editing to a minimum, they’re not too much effort. I have a few little rants I’d like to go on sometime soon. So those will probably appear here, if I end up doing them. But otherwise, I don’t see the point in much else.
I honestly don’t want to go to work anymore. Of course, today is payroll day, so I’m going, because people would be left in the lurch if I didn’t. But it’s not rewarding, except in the obvious and banal way. I mean, there are people at the office with whom I get along, but as has been the case most of my adult life, people mainly spend time with me because I’m useful.
I am useful, in many ways. And it is nice to be useful. But it has its limits. Even at work, I try to get across to people how much distress I’m in, without being too melodramatic, but nobody seems really to take me seriously.
I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of having a dark and odd sense of humor and also having difficulty expressing one’s emotions. Even if you talk about trying to stretch the pain out of your back by using a noose‒as I did yesterday, which was a particularly painful day‒people don’t seem to realize that really, suicide seems more and more attractive all the time.
I can’t easily participate in the comments anymore on a website I’ve followed for a long time, and I don’t think the host likes me, anyway, though I admire and like him and have enjoyed following his website, and recommend it readily. To be fair, I am weird, and I am dark, and I tend to bring people down. Does the fact that I get on some people’s nerves surprise anyone?
So, yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be writing any more blog posts for a while, and I may not write any ever again. And, again, I may put audio stuff up here‒and I may turn some or all of them into “videos” as well, and put those on YouTube‒but I don’t have a planned schedule for those things right now, so we’ll have to see what happens.
Anyway, I’m feeling queasy/nauseated (and probably nauseous, but that’s for you all to judge) right now, and my train will be here soon. Try to have a good day, and a good year, and a good rest of your lives. Somebody ought to do it, and it’s not likely to be me.
It’s Tuesday, the “two day” of January of 2024 AD and the “two day” of the year. That little, rather forced play on words is about as much good as I can say about the day.
I’m at the train station, soon to be headed in to the office for the day, but I did not go in yesterday, though the office was open. If I had been feeling healthy, I suppose I might have gone in even though I resented the fact that the office was open. I’m weird that way. It’s not as though I had anything better to do with my time, had I been feeling healthy.
But, of course, I felt sick, still, albeit not nearly as bad as I did on Friday or even Saturday, or even Sunday. By that progression, you may be able to deduce that my physical health was gradually improving, and though I am not fully back to usual (let alone optimal) health, I did at least get some rest. There were quite a few annoyances related to the other people in the house, who had a huge New Year family get-together of some some kind, and were up waaaay past midnight, including some young children who were‒as sleep deprived children tend to be‒evidently quite grumpy and vociferous.
As for my mental health, well, despite my brief rest, it’s still rotten. I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to imagine that it would have improved. I got enough rest that I even had a few dreams this morning, which is unusual‒I almost never have any remembered dreams‒but they were just weird, irritating dreams involving a B-list Hollywood star about whom I know almost nothing. I have no idea how that person infiltrated my subconscious.
The holidays are over now, of course, and even though I had no cause for celebration in the first place, there is still a bit of melancholy involved in their passing. There’s nothing even nominally to celebrate for months to come, frankly, and precious little cause for major joy in the world. But of course, my main problems are internal; my hardware and software are dysfunctional.
I sometimes may give the impression that I’m some form of purely philosophical pro-mortalist or nihilist, that my sense of the pointlessness and worthlessness of my life are simply reasoned conclusions, arrived at logically, quite convincing. That probably makes some people feel that there really is no point in trying to do or say anything to change my outlook. I make impressive sounding arguments in favor of nihilism and despair and pointlessness at times. But that’s really just the left side of my brain acting as an attorney, arguing the case and providing “justifications” for the products of my dysfunctional mood and sensory and motivational systems.
It’s all sophistry. My depression‒as with any other, preexisting neurodevelopmental and possible neurohormonal issues I have‒is a disease, a malfunction; my dysthymia is in a way a real disability, at least by some definitions. These diseases are killing me, and it’s not a good death, nor even a mediocre or middling death. It’s a bad, slow, drawn-out, miserable, torturous death. Just consider the fact that I often wish I would develop cancer, because that would probably be a better way to die; certainly there would be more support and sympathy involved. And I’m a medical doctor. I’ve treated many people who have cancer, and I’ve lost loved ones to cancer; I know what it is and what it entails.
I’m trying to say that I really could use actual help. I’m not able to do self-care well at all. I’m very smart and creative and capable in some ways, but I cannot save myself nor even take very good care of myself, not with only myself as my motivation. I find the upkeep involved in having and using a bicycle daunting and awful, let alone other ordinary tasks of personal and general maintenance.
I am eroding and decaying and rotting, both metaphorically and literally, in various ways.
I do not want to feel depressed. I do not like being depressed‒that would be frankly contradictory‒and I do not like feeling horrible anxiety and hostility and confusion. I do not like not having anyone with whom to do anything. I don’t like hating my own presence and company. I would like to like myself and to like my life and to feel that I deserved something, anything, good to happen to me.
Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that one cannot simply will oneself to have a stronger will. Similarly, one cannot simply stop being depressed by choosing to be optimistic and to love oneself. One cannot simply choose to be able to integrate into the human world effortlessly and seamlessly when one simply does not feel human.
One cannot eliminate anxiety just by saying that there’s nothing to fear. And, of course, one cannot simply choose not to be in pain, if one is in pain. Nature does not select for that capability. If one could simply deactivate one’s pain and one’s fear, then one would probably do so; pain and fear are, by nature, unpleasant. But then one would not flee danger or avoid injury.
Anyway, that’s my New Year’s message about me, I guess: I’m depressed and despairing, not by choice, and I cannot simply snap out of it, nor can I save my life on my own. And I don’t know of anyone else out there who has the wherewithal to help me, so I don’t expect my life to be saved. I expect it to be lost, and soon; frankly, I expected it to be gone, already. I’m amazed and rather appalled that I’m still alive to write this. I don’t consider it an accomplishment.
Oh, yeah, by the way: Happy New Year.
Well, I’m writing a post today, again, for some unknown and unholy reason, and I’m doing it on my smartphone, because I did not bring my laptop computer back to the house with me last night. I was not up to carrying it.
I’m writing in the back of an Uber that’s bringing me to the gas station near the office, because I am feeling quite under the weather and do not want to face any train travel today. I spiked a fever overnight‒not a huge one, but my pulse really raced for a bit there (about 136 at rest). I don’t have much in the way of specific symptoms, other than a general achiness and malaise that is different from the general elevated pain I’ve been having lately. Also, I feel just a slight sense of breathlessness. It’s not literally difficulty breathing, but just a feeling as if I were exerting myself even while sitting still. My pulse ox is fine*.
You may wonder why I am going to the office at all, if I am sick, and you are not foolish to wonder this. Unfortunately, my coworker who shares some of my roles was out yesterday because his wife and baby are both sick, so I had to pick up the slack, such as it is, despite exacerbations of chronic pain and being suicidally depressed. And I don’t know if he’s going to be out again, today, but by the time I find out, it will be too late for me to get to the office on time from where I “live”.
I feel just a little bit queasy, now, also. It’s not like I’m in danger of throwing up, as far as I can tell. It’s just a bit unpleasant.
No matter what, I swear I am not going to switch and fill in tomorrow, even if my coworker cannot make it. The boss will just have to figure something out. Or he’ll have to close the office.
Sorry, I know this is all boring. I don’t know what you’re hoping for from me, but this is probably not it.
Oh, I took delivery yesterday of a four part book collection compiled from the writers of the Less Wrong website. Collectively, the set is called The Engines of Cognition, and their individual titles are:
Trust
Modularity
Incentives
Failure
In the inside front of each book, on the first page, there is a little quote from some famous thinker, such as Richard Feynman. This is particularly fun because, in the first volume, the quote is uncredited, but I knew right away Who had said it. The quote was, “If I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”
That quote is from the 11th Doctor, in series 5, episode 5, “Flesh and Stone”. I think it’s cool that the luminaries from Less Wrong chose a Doctor Who quote for the inside of this book. There’s a bit of a spoiler associated with the quote in the show, so I won’t get into it any further. Maybe some of you will eventually want to watch Doctor Who, and I wouldn’t want to mess you up with spoilers‒though that’s always a potential part of any time travel adventure, I guess.
Here’s a related thought: I don’t understand why more of the companions in Doctor Who don’t ask to learn about the science of the TARDIS and the Time Lords in general. The TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”’ thanks to “dimensional engineering” but how is that actually accomplished? How does time travel work? If the past can be rewritten, what does that say about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics? If the past can be changed and have within-universe consequences, just rewriting reality, then why (and how) are there parallel, nearly identical universes, such as the one to which Rose was sent?
I know, the writers have no idea of the answers to such questions. But why aren’t the characters curious about them?
Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’ll just close by mentioning something related to health insurance. My sister said (in a comment on Facebook instead of here‒I’m not sure why) that she would very kindly help me with filling out forms. Unfortunately, the forms aren’t my issue, really. It’s the actual starting of the process, the picking up of the phone and the calling of the insurance broker. That’s the main barrier, partly due to social anxiety‒though that feels like too mild a term‒and partly just my resistance to taking care of my health. I mean, think about it: how hard would you work to help protect the worst person you know, your least favorite person in the world?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. But I would like to remind people that I prefer it if they leave comments here rather than on Facebook or other social media. For one thing, it apparently helps boost my blog via whatever the WordPress algorithm is. And I don’t really need my personal Facebook page boosted.
I suppose it matters very little. Maybe this illness I’m fighting now will end up killing me, and everything else will be moot. 🙂
I doubt it. It just feels like an ordinary virus. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky. And, as part of that, maybe all of you who read my blog out of kindness and/or obligation, will get lucky and not have to do so anymore. It would be appropriate for it to happen on the weekend of New Year’s.
Fingers crossed!
*Of course I have my own pulse oximeter.
Hello and good morning and all the rest of that stupid bullshit.
I’m writing a blog post today—obviously—which means I’m going in to the office today, which means that, unfortunately, I am still alive. I cannot give you any good reasons for these facts. They simply are the case.
There are explanations, of course, as there are for all things, but they entail nothing more than the mindless churning of physical and, at the next level biological, and, at the next level psychological forces that happen more or less on their own. They carry a certain metaphorical inertia; to divert them requires a deliberate application of some manner of force. But since they are not literal, straightforward cases of inertia, it’s not always easy to tell just what the proper application of what “forces” should be to cause them to change their direction into one which one might prefer.
I’m at the train station now, waiting for the 2nd train of the day. I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise. It let up ever-so-slightly in the afternoon to evening, thanks to lots of Aspirin and Tylenol and Icy-Hot and all that stuff, but it still felt as though I had recently tried to do some fairly serious acrobatics without stretching and had not only failed, but had fallen hard on barely-padded ground. I still feel stiff and sore. Also, the bases of my thumbs ache severely; for that reason, among others, I’m typing this on my laptop computer rather than my cell phone.
I don’t have much else to report, and I certainly have nothing positive to relay to you. As my pain eased slightly yesterday, my mood improved slightly, but it was never very good, and it’s now nearly as low as it was yesterday morning.
I’m also a bit nauseated. That’s probably partly because of the excessive use of analgesics over the last 24 hours, even beyond my ordinary intake.
I really feel horrible, and I don’t know what to do. I feel no sense of any future other than one of stress and pain and further alienation, or alternatively, of being a burden to people I have no right to bother. I wish, I wish I had the strength of will just to stop eating and waste away until I die. That wouldn’t be so bad. After a while without food, once one gets into deep ketosis, there is little or no real pain, just lassitude. And I have lassitude anyway, so I don’t think it would be all that much worse.
But it’s very difficult just to say “no” to food when it is available; billions of years of evolution has sifted things so that not eating when food is available is quite difficult. I’m probably going to have to find some other way.
I’ve looked into things like hemlock—it seems like it might be nice and “classical” to go the way of Socrates—but although some descriptions of his death involve acceptance and serenity and the like, it seems they are highly fictionalized, which should come as no surprise. Apparently, actual death caused by hemlock poisoning is quite uncomfortable, and associated with nausea and cramping and neurological symptoms of various kinds that might lead one to seek “help”.
Likewise, unripe ackee fruit—which grows in abundance around the house in which I live—is associated with quite uncomfortable symptoms and is not even close to universally fatal. And again, the urge to try to relieve one’s symptoms might lead to one aborting the whole project.
Of course, asphyxiation via inhaling pure nitrogen or pure helium (for instance) is actually quite benign, since it is not associated with any feeling of suffocation—especially if one has a non-rebreather mask, so one does not retain carbon dioxide, which is the actual source of the feeling of not being able to breathe, and is indeed the primary driver of respiration. I have two non-rebreather masks, and tubing, and even a regulator valve, but though I ordered helium tanks, I couldn’t figure out how to hook up the party-type helium tank output valve with the tubing and respirator mask—so I let people use the helium for balloons.
Also, one really needs a decent space and privacy for something like that, and one needs to make sure one’s mask doesn’t slip as one loses consciousness. If that happens, one could live but have hypoxemic brain injury.
I’ve looked into ordering nitrogen tanks, but you can’t just get them delivered already filled; you have to go to some welding supply place or similar to get the nitrogen, and it’s hard to cart a nitrogen tank around when one does not have a vehicle. There are similar problems with liquid nitrogen. You can order a crucible (or whatever the term is) in which to carry it from Amazon (as you can the gas tanks) but to get the liquid you need to go to restaurant supply places or medical supply places or similar. And, again, it’s hard to carry such things around without a vehicle.
Of course, there’s always simple use of blades—the proverbial bare bodkin—but though I am not afraid of cutting myself, to cause life-threatening bleeding thereby is not easy, and it is also supremely messy, leaving behind a horrible spectacle for some poor slob to find. It’s likewise not entirely reliable and requires privacy. I could lay down in my shower with water running and do it, but then my “housemates” and the landlord would eventually have to deal with the situation—at the latest by the time I started smelling—and that would be inconsiderate and traumatic.
When I think of the people I’ve known in recent years who have died of overdoses of narcotics—usually heroin—I again find myself wishing I had a drug problem. But I don’t like opiates, though I was prescribed them for a few years for my chronic pain. They didn’t work as well as I would hope, and the side-effects were annoying and unpleasant. Of course, a goodly dose of an opiate plus a goodly dose of a benzodiazepine has a goodly chance of shutting down one’s respiratory drive, but as with asphyxiation above, that can sometimes just lead to brain damage.
My brain is dysfunctional enough.
A good fall from a high building (or mountain or cliff or bridge) is pretty reliable, of course, if one can muster the courage to throw oneself off. However, there aren’t very many buildings or similar near me that are aesthetically high enough, and I don’t really have access to any of them, anyway. Also, again, it leads to one making a mess for innocent passersby, and I would rather not do that.
There’s always the prospect of just swimming out into the Atlantic, which is truly close at hand, until exhaustion leads inevitably to drowning. There’s not much mess that way, and most of what there is might be cleaned up by ocean life. If I were more comfortable in the water, that might be a good option, and I still do consider it. But it requires real determination, and I am not all that strong a swimmer. I mean, I’m a good enough swimmer to swim out far enough to drown, but there’s enough stupid animal fear built into this operating system that I worry I wouldn’t be able to force my way through it.
I really don’t know what to do, or what I should do. I’m still brainstorming ideas. Meanwhile, I’ve really got loads of physical pain…but the psychological pain is worse. The former wears down and eradicates one’s resistance to the latter, and the latter makes it difficult to keep a useful attitude about the former. And I have so much trouble sleeping. I’m really very tired all the time.
TTFN
It’s early morning and I’m waiting at the train station again.
It’s also relatively cool out, and it looks like it’s going to be so for most of the rest of the week, if the forecast is correct. I should probably have walked to the train today, but even though I woke up hours ago, I just didn’t feel up to walking. Actually, I didn’t feel up to much of anything at all, and I still don’t.
I almost just stayed at the house today, even though it’s payroll day, because I didn’t want to get up and move. I’m really feeling that each and every thing I do or can do is utterly pointless, even taken from the scale of an evanescent mammalian lifetime.
Our boss apparently intends for the office to be open on New Year’s Day, but I am not going to be there. I think it’s bullshit to make people try to work after New Year’s Eve and also to expect to sell anything. In past years on those occasions when we have worked on January 1st, we barely made any business, and a good percentage of it was canceled.
I have no interest, and I have no motivation, to do anything at all, and certainly not to come in to the office on New Year’s Day. Other people had their three-day weekends last weekend, and their family holidays, and you can bet dollars to donuts that most of them will not be coming to work next Monday, anyway.
Of course, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time by staying at the house; that’s one of the reasons I’m going to the office today. I have nothing better to do.
I have nothing.
I had been looking forward to the 60th Anniversary and the Christmas Doctor Who specials, but now they are done. They were good, and I’m glad I watched them. But the regular season isn’t starting until May, apparently, and I’m sorry, I can’t wait around for that. Five months is way too long.
I am tempted not to go to the office the rest of this week, or next Monday…or ever again, really. I’m tempted not to go anywhere ever again. What’s the point? There’s nothing to which I look forward. Life is just a series of discomforts‒many of them not at all minor.
My whole body has been hurting more than usual lately, despite aspirin and Tylenol and naproxen and icy hot and a massager and ankle and knee braces. My back, especially, has felt as if the spine is becoming completely disconnected at its base and I am about to split in half. And I’m getting some new form of sacro-iliac/coccygeal inflammation/arthropathy, too, the source of which I do not know.
I wish I could go into a coma. I wish I could simply sleep. No more. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
I’m tired, and I feel horrible (and horrifying, come to think of it). I hate my life. There’s no point to it, and it gives me very little in the way of positive things. Even thinking of my kids‒the best part of my life, ever‒just makes me miss them. Since yesterday morning, I feel that I’ve just been fighting back tears most of the time. It’s pathetic and disgusting.
I really do often wish I had some kind of drug problem (other than OTC analgesics, ha ha), but even alcohol gets unpleasant really quickly. I bought a few bottles of wine for the holiday weekend and ended up pouring out as much as I drank, or more. It doesn’t even do a good job of blunting my anxiety and tension, let alone making me feel good.
I don’t really want to see 2024. I have no optimism about the year, and if anything, I feel that more and more of the little, stupid aspects of my life are falling apart all the time. I’m just a net detriment to the world‒not that it deserves anything better, but still, I don’t enjoy that fact and process, and I don’t want to keep feeling the guilt and shame of my life.
I don’t know what to do. I’m useless, even to myself. I hate this world, I hate the social and political state of things (see yesterday’s post), I hate my body for its chronic pain, and I hate myself above all else.
I think I’m pretty close to being done, here. I hope you all are having a more pleasant holiday season/experience than I am. Tomorrow is Thursday, so if I do a post, it will probably be in my old “traditional” format. If I don’t, you’ll know that I decided not to go in to work. If I don’t ever do any more posts, I guess that will become evident after a while. Though, of course, as with the halting problem in computation, you could never truly know that I was never ever going to release another blog post until you had waited until the end of time.
You could pretty sure, though‒sure enough to bet your life on, after not very long. You could even bet my life, but that’s not worth much, so it’s not much of a bet. It’s also a bit too self-referential and potentially paradoxical, given the subject matter.
Anyway, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t pleasant, and you all deserve better. But, it’s in my nature to disappoint and to bring people down, so that’s what I’m doing. Have a good day if you can, nevertheless.
It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.
I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday. I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it. It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.
I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance. I really ought to try to do it sometime this week. My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that. She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail. I should check with her.
I certainly don’t want to go through any government services. Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith. I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.
This is not a partisan position. Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features). They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation. Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.
All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive. Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.
Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you? We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.
The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”. They never have been. Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal. We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion. At best, we elect managers. These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such. When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.
It’s not really about “blame”. It’s about actually getting the job done. I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack. But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services. And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better. And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.
I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs. That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas. It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated. It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.
But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions. Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.
As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant. It does not provide any information. At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver. Reality gives no free passes.
Anyway, I don’t know how that got started. I certainly didn’t plan to write about it. But there it is. I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind. Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn. It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.
Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!
*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system. So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all. We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties). We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.
**Should that be “cortices”?
It is Saturday, the 23rd of December in 2023 (AD), and I am writing this while already at the office; I did not go back to the house last night. It occurred to me yesterday that, even if the workday were to be called off, I needed to be here, since I had several deliveries—unimaginative Christmas gifts for coworkers—arriving today. With that thought came the realization that I did not want to commute to the house and then back overnight, and that I would be just as comfortable, or nearly so, sleeping at the office. It’s not as though there was anyone waiting for me at “home”.
To be fair, I probably did not quite sleep as well as I would have at the house. Then again, sleep is a fickle friend for me at any time, in any place. And Saturdays are rather slow workdays at the best of times, so I’ll be able to meditate and/or nod off during the day as needs may have it. I really ought to do that more, anyway—meditating, I mean. I used to either meditate or self-hypnotize every day, and over quite a long stretch of time during my teenage years. I would say that I was more together and mentally stable at that time, but I cannot give all—or possibly any—of the credit for that to my introspective states. It may be enough that I was also in my hometown, and had a core group of long-term friends, and of course, I was living at home with my family.
In any case, I think it would be good for me to engage in some form of mental practice or meditation practice regularly, just to try to calm my mind a bit. I’m extremely tense very much of the time, and I think it contributes to my sleep troubles and to overeating. I rarely eat from hunger—when I’m doing something in which I’m interested, I rarely even feel hunger. Instead, I eat as a sort of self-soothing behavior, something that becomes less of a problem when I’m less depressed and unhappy. So, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty bad for quite a while.
Of course, it’s hard to avoid indulging at this time of year, since there are holiday treats and goodies everywhere. I think since around Halloween I’ve been going back and forth trying to do better with diet and exercise, with highly inconsistent results. I think that, after Monday at the latest, I should be able at least to avoid most temptations, since even at the office people won’t be bringing or receiving sweets or special foods and people won’t be talking about them as much anymore. Not that I can use such things as an excuse; the weakness is all mine, of course. But I must strive to become stronger if I can, and this will at least be somewhat easier with the holidays over.
Speaking of holidays, though, let me use this as my opportunity to wish all of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas! It’s a good holiday, a family-oriented and uplifting holiday, whether you focus on religious observation or purely secular observation, and even if you go so far as to use it as a day to celebrate the birth of Newton (whose birthday was December 25th, albeit on the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in the modern world).
As far as religious observation goes, it should be noted that—as I understand it—Christmas wasn’t even a holiday in Christendom until the late Middle Ages or some such time, when it was more or less engineered to take over from other popular solstice-related celebrations such as Yule and Saturnalia and all that stuff.
It’s fair enough that they didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus in December, because apparently most biblical scholars agree that he was born sometime in the summer (and that wasn’t in the southern hemisphere—see my post recently that discusses seasons and the solstice and such). Still, I doubt he’d be too worried about the date of the celebration of his birth being moved. After all, there’d been a hiatus of about one and a half millennia during which it wasn’t really celebrated at all, though the story—two different versions of it—is there in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke*). He was probably only too willing to take what he could get, as long as it wasn’t frankincense or myrrh.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful. When I was giving the year above, I deliberately only put in the Anno Domini contraction as a show of respect and courtesy, and I did not do so ironically. Though I don’t think Jesus was perfect as a moral teacher—C.S. Lewis himself admitted that much in an oblique way—even if you’re thoroughly areligious, there are a fair few good things in his sermons. He certainly was no advocate of war or avarice or nepotism or xenophobia, and hypocrisy really ticked him off.
He did tend to teach in parables a great deal, and he got rather exasperated when people didn’t quite get the points he was making. I don’t see how any Christian could read the gospels and then take the whole Bible as literal truth. Jesus was practically screaming in everyone’s face that a lot this was metaphor, and if you take him as an incarnation of God, then surely this can apply to the whole shebang.
Anyway, I won’t get into all that anymore for now. Belief is tricky. I’m not good at it in general—I have to check and make sure I have my keys with me about 200 times a day—and I don’t really advocate it; I prefer to be provisionally convinced by evidence and argument and to remain open to have my conclusions updated by new evidence and argument to whatever degree is appropriate. But I do believe there’s nothing wrong with wishing all of you a Very Merry Christmas (and with words borrowed from my favorite Doctor, at that).
The Happy New Year stuff will come next week.
*Am I the only one who wants to say the gospels as “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Leia”, or perhaps, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Han”, which would at least sound nearly the same? Best not to read from the book of Boba Fett, though, or so I’ve heard.
It’s Friday morning, and I did not walk to the train today. Neither did I walk back from the train yesterday evening. I didn’t really think I was going to do the “yesterday evening” thing, and I didn’t really intend to do the “this morning” thing, because I didn’t want to push it after having taken a long time off since doing any longish walking.
I don’t feel fatigued or sore or anything, but there is some chafing here and there that tends to happen when I restart walking seriously, but which I somehow forget every time until it happens again. There’s some flaw there in the code I’m running in my brain, it seems. Then again, there are many flaws in my brain code, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, so I will be writing a blog post unless they cancel the work day because no one is going to show up. As far as I know, though, I will be working, so keep a weather eye on the horizon. If the workday is canceled, then I guess the next blog post I will write will be on Tuesday morning, since I think even our office is going to be closed on Monday.
I’m writing on my laptop computer today, since I have the time before the train comes, and I’m not sweaty and there are plenty of seats. I’ve been trying to be upbeat and whimsical and so on in my recent blog posts, but I don’t think I’m going to do that today. For one thing, those posts don’t seem to garner as much attention and readership as my despondent and despairing and hateful blog posts.
I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps the things which I find interesting and entertaining and “positive” to discuss are not what most readers find engaging. If one is to base one’s assessment on the “reels” that are shown on Facebook, which I’ve been sort of auditing lately out of (rapidly dwindling) curiosity, then people’s interests are very silly and rather pathetic, though they can often be quite funny. Of course, it’s probably rather silly and very pathetic that I’m even indulging my morbid curiosity by looking at them.
I haven’t been reading any books at all for some time. Just ask Kindle; it apparently keeps track of my “streaks” and “records” and whatnot. That is ever-so-slightly disconcerting, but I know there are essentially no humans involved in keeping track of me personally—at least not with respect to my reading. It’s all mindless, algorithmic stuff, and the algorithms aren’t all that good, it seems, because Amazon is pretty bad at recommending books in which I’m interested*.
Sean Carroll and Sam Harris are much better at finding people with ideas I want to explore; a good many of the books I’ve read in recent years have been by people I’ve first encountered in one of both of their podcasts. I guess that’s not too surprising. I’m interested in their thoughts, so I’m likely to be interested in people they find interesting.
I still haven’t set up my health insurance. I have a real mental block about this, or an emotional block, or whatever. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for one thing, but the real barrier is, I think, my self-hatred. I worry that, if I get health insurance, I’m going to feel obligated in some strange way to take care of myself and try to maintain and then improve my overall health and lifespan. But that’s only going to prolong my existence, which I don’t consider a win.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I have almost a fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of inevitably terminal illness that will give me a short bit of time at least to try to connect with and say goodbye to people I love, and which will then kill me with relatively little mess. It’s the sort of thing I think many people would want at the end of their lives (though they probably would want to put it off as long as possible) if the symptoms weren’t too unpleasant and could be palliated at reasonably low cost, so one wasn’t absolutely miserable in the time approaching one’s death.
Unfortunately, we usually do not get to choose, and we often get no warnings.
Well, actually, in a sense, we all get very long-term warnings. Any sensible person is on constructive notice from an early age that someday death will come for them. I suppose most people try to avoid thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it go away.
It’s interesting occasionally to think of the various other animals in the world and wonder how many of them ever recognize, at anything other than a rudimentary, acute, fight-or-flight response level, that they are going to die. I think very few of them do. Perhaps the cetaceans do, since many of them are both very intelligent and social, and they appear to communicate to some significant degree. I’m not sure how much even the other great apes (apart from humans) actually recognize their own individual mortality. I sometimes suspect that elephants know, but I’m not sure what gives me that impression.
If there are birds that are aware of mortality, I suppose it would probably be the corvids. I guess it would be appropriate if ravens knew about death.
Huh. That may end up being the substance of my pre-holiday message, ironically enough, though there really isn’t any substance or any point to what I’ve written today. Of course, that’s probably entirely appropriate, since there is no apparent teleological substance to life itself. It just happens, and then it stops. This may be true even of the universe as a whole.
That’s okay. Something doesn’t have to have some external purpose to be worth happening. Just as one can enjoy reading a book or watching a movie or show, or listening to a song, that has no deep message or purpose or meaning other than itself, one can—potentially—enjoy a life without any meaning other than its own existence.
If only I could put that set of ideas into practice. Alas, we here return to the faulty code I’m running. If only I could update that more readily. Goodness knows I’d do something more useful than Google and Microsoft and all the others do with most of their updates. I may despise myself, but I do think comparatively highly of at least some of my capacities.
You would think that would give me at least some sense of satisfaction, but unfortunately it makes me feel worse about my character and nature. And that seeming contradiction bring me back to lamenting my buggy code, and thus I appear to be stuck in a meta-level loop, or a perhaps in an old, Basic-style “Return without Gosub” error.
Oh, well. Have a good day please, and if I don’t write anything else before then, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a Merry Christmas.
*YouTube has a better track record with video recommendations, but that’s deteriorating gradually, or I am, or both.
Hello and good morning.
I’m writing today’s blog post on my smartphone, because I walked to the train this morning. That’s not quite the non sequitur it might seem to be. Given the new train schedule, I arrived here only a few minutes before the 6:20 train is due to arrive, whereas on the old schedule, I would have just missed the 6:10 and sat down to wait for the 6:30. Of course, I could simply let the 6:20 pass and wait for the 6:50 and pull out my laptop to write my post while I wait. Perhaps, in the future, I will do that. Today, though, I don’t want to push back my departure any further.
I’m now on (actually, in) the train, and I was surprised to find my preferred, relatively isolated seat on the older style car free. Combined with the feeling of achievement from already having walked about five miles today, that’s pretty nice.
Today is the Winter Solstice, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, meaning it’s the day of longest night, if you will. Going forward, now, the nights will become shorter, though the change will be hard to notice at first, since, near their maxima and minima, the derivative of sine and cosine curves (well, any smooth curve, really) is around zero, meaning the rate of change of the function is very small. For one brief instant‒one infinitesimal moment of time‒during this 24-hour period, that rate of change will be exactly zero.
But, of course, the rate of change itself is constantly changing. This isn’t true of all functions, obviously. The rate of change in a linear function is a constant, and the rate of change of a constant is zero. That’s why it’s called a “constant”. And the rate of change of zero is still zero, no matter how many times you would like to take that derivative.
Sine waves, however, are cyclical, and their derivatives are also cyclical. The derivative (i.e., the rate of change) of a sine is a cosine…and the derivative of a cosine is a sine (inverted, I think, if memory serves, but that changes nothing fundamental). So, even the derivatives of such cyclical functions are eternally cyclical. There’s something very pleasing about that, at least to me.
Oh, by the way, it is the Summer Solstice today for those who live in the southern hemisphere. This has been a smaller number of people than live in the northern hemisphere for as long as human civilization has existed, I think, largely because there simply is more land in the northern hemisphere. Nevertheless, there are now many millions of people south of the equator, and so there are oodles of those for whom Christmas and New Year’s are summer holidays.
Summer ought to be slightly warmer for those in the southern hemisphere than for those in the north, since technically the Earth is at its closest approach to the sun in January. However, the Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular, so the difference between aphelion and perihelion is tiny, fortunately for us. Also, there is much less land in the south, and land heats up much more rapidly and noticeably than water, so that may completely swamp the effects of slightly different nearness to the sun. I’m not sure. If anyone out there has that information, please let me know.
It’s a bit interesting to think of those people who have grown up in the southern hemisphere, seeing all the movies and shows (and before that, books and legends) that associate snow and cold and the like with Christmas time and New Year’s. Of course, the reasons would not be a mystery, but it still might feel peculiar, just as it might feel rather alien for a northerner to hear of someone going to the beach to celebrate Christmas.
Instead of building a snowman, maybe such people might build a sandman. Actually, given the old horror short story about the Sandman‒not to be mistaken for Neil Gaiman’s admittedly also quite dark creation‒it might not be great to make a sandman as part of a joyous celebration.
Although, being rather dark myself, I consider the notion somewhat amusing. Maybe there could be a kids’ story called Gritty the Sandman, instead of Frosty the Snowman (Anakin Skywalker would hate that). But Gritty would be much harder to destroy than Frosty. It takes serious heat to cause sand to melt, and even then it just becomes glass. Imagine that: they try to kill Gritty with heat and fire, and he just turns into a misshapen blob of living glass, with razor sharp shards for fingers‒more deadly even than he was before!
Wait, that was supposed to be a kids’ story, wasn’t it? Sorry, I got distracted. Still it would be fun to hear a song with the lyric, “There must have been some madness in that old silk hat they found. For when they placed it on his head, he began to…”
…who knows what?
Anyway, I’ve reached the office now. My pedometer seems to have accidentally reset while I was on the train, as it’s only showing one mile of walking, which is the distance between the station and the office. That’s a bit frustrating, but I know that the distance to the station from the house is almost exactly five miles, so I’ve walked six miles so far, and I’ve now reset the little bastard, so we’ll see what I’ll do for the rest of the day. Maybe I’ll have the gumption to walk back to the house from the train in the evening. I feel okay now, from my walk, but I don’t want to overdo things and set myself back.
I’ll sign off for the moment. Have a lovely solstice if you can, be it your summer or your winter. But if you’re in the south, and you make a sandman, try not to bring it to life. Quite apart from it having the nefarious power to put you to sleep at will, remember that sand is basically just ground glass, and that can have dreadful effects on bare skin or on your mucus membranes. And you certainly don’t want it in your eyes!
I think I’m imagining a new kind of horror story here, albeit a spoofy more than spooky one. We’ll see what comes of it.
TTFN
Robert Elessar 