Hey there, everybody. I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use. Different people can have quite different priorities.
Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met. For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).
For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*. Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear. Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice. Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.
I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans. These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well. It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones: parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.
These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted. Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs. Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.
Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs. This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.
To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines. It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.
Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon. There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.
Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle. This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome. I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.
It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world. I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart. Neither is anyone else.
Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**. I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting. For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear. I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.
I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving. But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously. My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual. I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week. I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.
I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying. I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on). It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).
I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds. But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.
Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.
I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid. If anyone deserves it, you do.
*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.
**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”
