Soccer Moms

it’s all meditation now, isn’t it. from the etchings in motion on my eyelids to the scratchy thing in my chest and the waves, waves of cry that just come on sometimes, this time after an instagram story. and the wind, wind coming through my open window and the open, open door behind me – tradeoff, door open and wind flows, less privacy to emote. and door closed, private, but still with stagnancy. there’s a song snippet playing in my head, doo doo doo, do doo doo doo doo dooooooooo, dooo dooo, earlier when I listened – I think the fourth time today – I felt intense love like I haven’t felt in a while. one of those feelings that feels “complete” in its self-justification, sometimes that sort of feeling comes when I’m listening to electronic and there’s a drop that set’s up adrenaline in just the right way, and sometimes it’s poo-phoria, like fuck it’s transcendent on the way out. sort of blessed that there are states which feel complete, justified, like in the state the state deserves to exist, that’s just part of the state. states have referents to other states through memory and sometimes there are nodes who lead to themselves, and I think it’s just positive nodes, but maybe there are negative nodes that lead to themselves though not because of desirability, just because of felt inevitability. are there realms? lately all these things I write are like poetry with long sentences. pre-meditation, like pre-meditated writing, doesn’t work right now, it could work again, I have a couple ideas, like artificial intelligence and awareness – a piece about those two, and I worry if it will be “actionable”. I should just build, build, build. build and make are different. build happens when the product can do something. make happens when the product looks a certain way, has an aesthetic. is there a function or is there an aesthetic? can there be both? maybe that is where the artificial intellect and the aware intellect fornicate, function and aesthetic. i guess i care about aesthetic for awareness-having beings but this is the danger zone, it’s better not to reflect on why i care, i’ve learned, because then things dissolve and I do less and I feel less good. valence is my utility function. doo doo doooo do doo doo doooo I’m going to embed the song so you can hear it when you read this,

I think it’s beautiful, it’s on my modern rock playlist

now which is a misnomer, “indie rock” is right, but I named it modern rock because names are fuzzy sometimes in my head and I associate indie with modernity, it’s like saturated with a certain emotionality, maybe it’s kitsch – or it could be kitsch, I hope it isn’t kitsch – I don’t want to feel like it’s kitsch. this writing is a meditation, there are no other thoughts besides what’s going onto the page. and there are feelings / sensations and perhaps images, like the word “modern” sort of flashes before me and an approximated reconstruction of the cover of the playlist which I think has some green or some orange in it and probably four squares, I should know this, well no why should I know this there’s no real reason to. brains are so fuzzy, you know? some people’s are more sharp, like crisp, like not-melted chocolate peanut buttery girls scout cookies, another name which I can’t remember right now but of course I have the gestalt of it, you know I wonder— when I don’t have a name I have to activate some episodic memory/reconstruction of the experience, but when I have a name I don’t have to, it’s just the name. is there a reason? do I have attachment to the episodic manifestation as opposed to the symbolic manifestation? is it a beneficial strategy my mind learned to use for some reason? is it a thing I could trace to a gene or a complex thereof? dooo doo dooo doo dooo doo doo doo

someone I follow on instagram and sent a DM to because I love the way she use uses words (no reply but she did watch a story of mine) posted something earlier that made me sad, she basically tuned into how much sadness and chaos and fear there is in the world, which is fundamentally true and it’s indelible and it’s probably less true now than ever before but it’s still true. i go back and forth, insight, is it insightful to notice that there is all this fear etc and normally we tune it out? is it insightful, on the other hand, to realize that fear is the mind killer, emerging from the mind, auto poetic auto asphyxiation, huh. that was a nice phrase, I like that one. earlier while half-meditating on love the phrase came to mind, “my enneagram is seven in the streets, and two in the sheets” it is accurate i think both literally-ish and definitely metaphorically. recently i read a description of my enneagram results and they made me angry because they told me how I ought to be and apparently I don’t like being told how I ought to be and I projected the childhood-parental narrative onto that and had a whole long internal meditation-internal family system experience where I was crying in the kitchen and our subletter came down like four minutes after the tears had dried. I really cry a lot these days but the thing is it never feels wrong and it is rarely because I’m sad, per se, it just feels like… that which comes next, the next thing to come up, next step in the long, long process of “deep healing” as someone called it recently to me but I almost gagged because I am negatively conditioned against “phrases” or “terms” that come from “communities” or “affiliations” because somewhere in my past I began to feel like I severely rejected community and also the nihilism phase made it very very hard to handle tropes, totems, tokens, virtual signals – I don’t think any of those phrases were right, each one had a slightly different somatic manifestation, lol there is only one friend who I talk like this to, this fluid flows thing, one time I translated a text from this speak to normal english speak and she thought it was funny and i thought it was funny too and sometimes i love this speak and sometimes i hate it a lot because it feels… well some judgement aversion is activated and i feel more chaotic-neurotic than i want to, like uh oh do you see how wishy-waggly-washed the whole thing is in here? now it is not always like this and in fact it is most like this when writing – someone who i think that friend knows and who has a niche-famous substack wrote something once about writing as altered state of consciousness and that sounds about right to me, especially when this girl I sent a DM to posted a thing on her story about how she is tuned into the horror of the world and is depressed and made a comment at the end about people not replying and expressing concern then inviting her out to a drink, I almost liked the story but didn’t when I read the last line because I’m too proud for that, but it did make me sad so I went to lie down on my roommate’s bed whose bed I sleep in sometimes when she isn’t home (with her permission don’t worry) because it is so much more comfortable than mine and her room is so much bigger (which is to say there is a floor in excess of the footprint of the bed) and I just cried a bunch, really from sadness, like sadness just wanted to be expressed and I thought about loss and felt loss like I do sometimes when I wake up from naps and think about all the people I might lose, I wondered who the first of my friends to die will be, that was a hard thought. and at no point during this crying did it feel pathological, it felt like it should happen and the sadness was real and poured out and i’ve been trying to write recently, or i’ve been feeling bouts of “I should write” and then thinking that maybe my writing / desire to write right now is very egoic and that I shouldn’t do it, or that it won’t work, or that I’ll do it and it will feed the dragon or whatever. one piece of writing I “want” (whatever that means huh) to write is both functional and aesthetic. I want to take my internal family systems work, which I take detailed notes on, and turn it into semi-fiction, fictional in the sense that not everything I write will have literally been visualized in my head but not fictional in the sense that many of those things that happen in this story will really have happened in my head during my IFS process, but does that make it fiction or not? like if I write a dramatized account of something that happened in my head is it real? I think it’s real. it does not map onto matter outside of my head but it definitely maps to matter inside my head so I’ll call it real. anyways it will be aesthetic if I turn it into a story and if I just write about past IFS it will be purely aesthetic but what I think would be really cool and delightful and unique - yay unique unique for praise and self-evidencing of ego stature etc - would be if I literally did IFS as part of writing the story, now that’s hard because i think it will be hard to write anything out that isn’t just short bullets or direct articulations of interactions with parts, and a story requires much more than that, and I want the story to become more creative-imaginative-generative than my IFS processes usually are, a Dalí type thing – my insides are not so generative most of the time – and maybe the process of doing this IFS thing while I try to write in the more generative way will encourage special things for my IFS session which don’t normally happen. do you know sometimes, especially early on, when I do IFS sessions and I get to a crucial point the backs of my eyelids start to flicker black to bright light and I can sort of tell that there is some real good re-configuration of brain stuff happening. it’s been too long since I had one of those, I have been doubting the efficacy of my IFS recently and partially I am nervous because I haven’t seen that flickering in a long time. I’ve felt kinda powered up for a few days in terms of the meditative stuff, right now being no exception, nor the love from dooo doo doo nor the crying from that no-reply-DM-person’s post, and a variety of other things that come and go. i’m kind of tempted to try the IFS thing right now but I’m scared because what if it breaks my writing flow. maybe I’ll try it right now let us see what happens. are there any parts around who want to come forward? ok there is a part, it’s the part that knows certain things it doesn’t want the other parts to know because well there are two options and it won’t even tell me, either it fears the other parts knowing it because it’s bad or it fears the other parts knowing it because it’s good. uh oh i feel like it is the bad thing but maybe the part wants the other parts to think– nope, I’m doing IFS in the wrong way, which is a trap I fall into. one therapist would call it the “problem solving” or “commanding” part. the right way is to ask the part. hello part. what do you look like? I want to get a good picture of you. he is somewhere a little younger than I am right now and he’s holding a scroll, standing with weight on one leg like I do, lips are somewhat pursed and he is shaking his head and thwacking the scroll held in his right hand into his left hand. head shakes, like he is going to deliver punishment. outfit-wise, how do you want me to see you? actually forget that, how do you feel that there might be an audience here if I don’t delete this portion which I’ll be honest I might. audience, either you won’t see this or you will. I won’t tell you whether I’ve made any edits. maybe I will. I like the idea of you not knowing. mysterious! fun. anyways hello part, secret-keeper? secret-keeper I think that’s who you are. i’m sorry you should be the one to tell me this, not the other way around. what is your name? i’m not the secret-keeper. oh! who are you? I am the knowledge-keeper. the insight-keeper actually. you misunderstood my head shaking and my thwacking. you felt like it was foreboding, didn’t you? yes I did. it wasn’t that, it was like a kind smile, like you will understand one day – I can’t promise it will be today – and when you understand you will smile too. there is a fear part. hi fear part, what are you fearful of? i’m fearful that you’re changing the course of this session because you think there will be an audience, and that in reality insight-keeper really is secret-keeper and that secret is bad and that you’re lying to yourself and you’re either lying because you don’t want to know or because you don’t want to write something that is bad and maybe goes out to the public eye because you fear judgement. i do fear judgement it’s true. fear part, I hear you, do you think you can take a step back while I work with this part who calls himself insight-keeper? is that ok? yes it’s ok but I will be standing by to make sure nothing stupid happens. understood, I appreciate that. thank you for your appreciation. insight-keeper part, I ask, what is it that you feel, if anything, about this process being within the panopticon? well, follow me through this space that I will describe for you because it’s the only narratorial device that will simultaneously work and allow this session. cannot go into third party narrator to describe surroundings because it will break the flow. already part disengaging. insight-keeper back, there is another part coming up that has to do with the veracity of insight-keeper part but hey part please hang out to the side while insight-keeper part has the floor, is that alright? fine yes fine i will hang out there with fear part, dick. insight-keeper part, i’m sorry for distracting. you aren’t distracting, this is just how the process goes. i want you to follow me. we are walking now on a white floor, maybe it’s marble but maybe that’s the wrong word, again the gestalt episodic thing, fuzzy, fuzzy. it’s got florida vibes, the place where we are, in that the space is spacious and things are white and the ceiling is arched. so we’re walking through the hall now and you follow me into a study where there are a couple very comfortable eames chairs and a carpeted floor and big windows that look out over some very green tropical plants and the ocean in the background. you take the seat looking out of the ocean, I’ll sit at the desk across from you, it’s a rich brown wood whose name I also don’t know because gestalt thing fuzzy fuzzy wuzzy wuz a bear fuzzy wuzzy has no hair and onwards from that divergence, what would you like to know from me? i…. i feel scared to be in your presence, like anxious about something. but i am trying to be in [Self] which I don’t do a good job of. why don’t you do a good job of being in Self? I don’t do a good job of being in Self because I don’t feel like I have agency, whenever I think that I’m not in Self I think maybe I need another IFS therapist who can help me be in Self because I can’t do it on my own anymore at least and this is something I wonder about all the time, where there is a truth value of a belief and then a utility value of the belief. Maybe it is true that I can’t do this on my own, be in Self that is, but maybe this belief is inhibiting my ability to be in Self. I think perhaps there’s something deeper hiding me from Self. not hiding me from Self, just like making me prevent myself from being in Self, there’s a part in the way. as insight-keeper I ask you now who am I talking to? what part? I am masquerading as Self. who who are you? I get up from the chair to look into a mirror on the wall, maybe it will help me figure out who I am you know? I am performant in the bad way. I am inauthentic version of Self. you don’t need to have judgement, just listen to whatever your mind tells you. what would you fear if you were not there? ah that I would have no ego. i am a manifestation of the ego here to block the Self from emerging. it feels like I was sent though, like I am the agent of a devil creature to do his bidding. thank you for being honest. can you ask the one who summoned you if he is willing to come forward? you fucking stupid shits all of you. will you just leave all this shit alone in here. please? for fuck’s sake. yes fine I will describe myself for the benefits of this stupid audience, oh this audience is going to think this shit is fucking crazy, that you’re fucking crazy, l OOOOO l you have fun with that, so much fun. me? i’m not so much angry as I am just exceptionally grumpy. irritated. I’m irritated, that’s what I am. I’m irritated that you are trying to unearth and revise all these things because could you just leave them fucking be and not disturb me from where I am? no you’re right I suppose I’m not all that devilish, I guess I am fairly understandable, this sense of “agh god damn it” you get when you like stub a toe or when like there are no spoons left because no one else unloaded the dish washer when i didn’t unload it because I didn’t want to unload it. yes I’m irritated because I’m being inconvenienced. what way are you being inconvenienced? I am being inconvenienced in that I cannot get any god damn rest when you’re doing this thing. I sit down, I am just nestling in to chill and boom how I have to fucking get up again and relocate. and this has been going on for months and months and months do you know how annoying it is? I just want to sit on this damn couch out there in the living room and look out through the open sliding door to the beach and the water and smell the salty oceanic air and not feel god-damned irritated because lord do I feel irritated right now. i’m sorry you feel irritated, I the insight-keeper say. oh. thank you. I, the insight-keeper, would like to ask a question – whether maybe you feel like there is something under the irritation? actually, wow, such deceit! I do not think it was the insight-keeper who asked that, it was the pseudoSelf who asked that. come from a place of curiosity, right? so with curiosity I the insight-keeper just want to know more about you, irritated part. are you willing to share? thank you for asking. I… it feels nice to be asked. no one has asked me that before. uhm what’s let’s see uhm well gosh I feel sad, yeah, I feel… not needed anymore. I sense your earnest curiosity and I really appreciate it. I’ll try to keep going. take it easy, it’s ok whatever happens. thank you. I… I…. I miss something maybe? I want something? I want to be loved. I still feel your curiosity thank you. I’m being asked to do all these things and no one is showing me any appreciation for it. I don’t even know what I symbolize, getting up between different spots etc, but everyone is asking me to do things and no one is thanking me for it. I just want someone to acknowledge how much effort I’m putting in. damn it my dad called in the middle of this to ask me if he could put me in touch with someone. kind of interrupted the flow. and then I checked a work text. ok I can let it go and go back to the headspace where I was. a funny thing happened which is that the notes app was apparently slow to process so I watched like two or three sentences get typed out word by word and now I wonder if I should just display this for you in a way that just types word by word on the screen, like play sit back for you, that would be funky and maybe you won’t read it. anyways ok back to the situation at hand where this part has just opened up because he is doing so much by moving around to all these locations and feels unappreciated for it. ok i – i ok hi it’s that part, yeah gotta communicate it somehow to the audience, we’re on reality tv here or something like that and anyways I feel like maybe I can figure out what I symbolize. I think that when I get up and move around it’s really crap maybe it’s coming i’m not sure hold on. like trying to squeeze a kid out into the pool lol. that constipated life tho. thx antibiotics. you know what it is, there is loss. every time i have to move it is like i have to let something go, like i’m losing that thing, and it’s just so hard every time right like I am getting so nestled into wherever I am, like feeing whatever I’m feeling and then I have to let it go!!! I don’t want to let it go!!! god damn it! no one is thanking me for having to learn how to let all of these things go, every little moment you know. i am standing here in front of my computer with a welling feeling in my chest, waiting to see what happens next. stuff is happening inside non-verbally, i’ll pause to let it unfold. i found out what’s on the scroll. nothing. do nothing. and thank you for that. epilogue. the whole sea of parts are swaying and singing together, dooo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doooo. celebrating the passing of the doing part. 

For Introspection, Try Poetry

Here we are again, on an airplane, in a word processor. When I tune into my visual field, I'll sometimes feel like 'being there in that moment' feels just like it always has, that there's an indelible sameness between this experience right now and my walk around Lower Haight yesterday and dinner the night before when I brought this up to someone and so on.
Reading what I've written, it feels more reified than I want it to. Things feel lighter inside. Ah, a recent tendency! I use 'things' as shorthand for a more cumbersome phrase like-but 'things' also smoothes over places where I don't understand things yet about an experience.
When I notice myself using complex syntactic constructions – which, I'll say, feels kinetic like a complicated dance – and I try to simplify, I search around.
Writing introspective pieces like this feels ironic in the wrong way because the whole vibe of my internal experience is moving towards looser conceptuality, less need to form words, so much more ease.
Loose, airy, in a soft bed under a soft sheet. When I wiggle the sheet moves over me without any friction and I still feel every detail.
Writing is an expression of angst?
The drinks cart is coming in slow-motion and I've re-concluded four* times now (*estimated) that I should not drink caffeine because falling sleeping tonight without caffeine in my system will probably help me get back to eastern time more quickly.
Damn it feels better to be Avery. Even when it's painful it's better – though don't get me wrong, it can be very intense. Intense like air hockey: clocking, slapping, stinging, thrashing, gliding soft no friction.
Honest! It feels silly to write, you know? Hm not quite silly, more like – collapsing, more divergent from my 'real experience' than it used to be, and I think that's because these days my real experience has less internal dialogue and less semantic spasticity.
I'm not ready to throw in the towel and declare ineffability. Maybe my communication hasn't caught up to my phenomenology.
I'll try to point out how the previous sentence feels inauthentic to my experience.
'try to point out'
'inauthentic'... has negative connotation, in different way than I want it to have.
Transmuting writing as an account of transmutation.
I'm flying home from San Francisco and wanted to write. It's a good feeling, I've had a recent resurgence in 'will to expression', which is a phrase I made up just now to describe a subjective feeling that I semantically label with 'I want to represent internal experience' or 'I want to convey my internal experience' or 'I want to express something'. The feeling itself entails a) feeling 'in my body', and b) the physical sensation of something inside my chest 'wanting' to flow out and forward, and c) decreased conceptuality.
I started writing introspective sentences, and it was hard! Before I investigate the challenge, here are some of the sentences.

Here we are again, on an airplane, in a word processor. I told someone this week that sometimes I'll gaze out to whatever's in front of me and realize it feels just like it always has, that there's an indelible sameness between this experience right now and my walk around Lower Haight and dinner the night before and, I guess, every moment in my past.
Reading what I've written, it feels more reified than I want it to. Things feel lighter inside. Ah, a recent tendency! I use 'things' as shorthand for a more cumbersome phrase like 'a variety of internal experiences now have the subjective qualia of 'lightness', or have that 'lightness' qualia to a greater degree than in the past'. But, 'things' also smoothes over places where I don't understand things yet about myself.
When I notice myself using complex syntactic constructions – which, I'll say, feels kinetic like a complicated dance – and I try to simplify, I search around.
Introspective pieces like this feel ironic in the wrong way because the whole vibe of my internal experience is moving towards looser conceptuality, less need to form words. I think it's funny that this complaint reads heady but actually it's... the opposite, experientially speaking.
Loose, airy, in a soft bed under a soft sheet. When I wiggle the sheet moves over me without any friction and I feel details.
Writing is an expression of angst. Writing used to be an expression of angst. What is it now? Is all my expression an expression of angst? Hope not!
The drinks cart is moving towards me slowly and I've re-concluded four times now that I should not drink caffeine because sleeping tonight without caffeine in my system will probably help me get back to eastern time more quickly.
It feels better to be Avery. Even when painful emotions are there it's better – though don't get me wrong, it can be very intense. Intense like air hockey: clocking, slapping, stinging, thrashing, gliding soft without friction.
I'll be honest! It feels silly to write, you know? Hm not quite silly, more like – collapsing, more divergent from my 'real experience' than it used to be, and I think that's because these days my real experience has less internal dialogue and less semantic spasticity.
I'm not ready to throw in the towel and declare ineffability. Maybe my communication hasn't caught up to my phenomenology.
I'll try to point out how the previous sentence feels inauthentic to my experience.
Writing, right now, is oddly disorienting!
insight / hypothesis! stream sans caps except ego 'I's. when I engage in tonal commentary like 'oddly disorienting' vs. 'disorienting', I feel like I've written in the wrong tone. an example here, 'wrong tone' feels better than 'inauthentic tone', and 'feels better' feels more accurate than 'feels more authentic', and 'feels' feels better than 'is'. I'm inconclusive whether 'feels better' is better than 'feels more accurate', the former capturing subjective valence and the latter capturing a subjective sensation of alignment, i.e. it feels like two essences are 'aligned' spatially. 'spatially' feels more earnest than 'in a spatial way', more crisp-direct. what if I had italicized 'oddly'? 'this writing experience is oddly disorienting!' when I read the sentence to myself, I micro-smile when I read 'oddly', whereas I micro-frown or micro eyebrow-raise when I read 'oddly'. At first, I wrote, 'I micro-smile "around" oddly' but I have more clarity into the experience than 'around' conveys because 'around' feels pretty spatially diffuse and my experience is pretty spatially focal. 'when I read', on the other hand, at least to my own reading, says 'during the period when I'm visually and subsequently cognitively processing the word 'oddly' rather than surrounding context'. that might be closer to the mark, except that the micro-smile or micro-frown / micro-brow raise is there while reading 'disorienting' because 'oddly' modifies 'disorienting'. look, I know this can't be perfect. it sure can be better, though! meaning, some sentences will be more true-to-experience than others. please assure yourself, ('please' is tonal commentary, I'll spare you! ['I'll spare you' is tonal commentary]), this process does not unfold in realtime. in realtime, it feels authentic and true and direct, less mediated than ever before, and it feels really good! p.s. I made up the phrase 'tonal commentary' because it feels right. it means, 'commentary that imbues tone'.
What is the phenomenology of 'feeling right'?
For introspection, try writing poetry instead of essays 😊

Same Scarf on My Quarter Centennial

Pt. 1, Time During Those Years
You know, time feels different to me now.

It used to be that when I’d try to fathom some unfathomable span my chest would go tight right away. If I looked ten years back, wispy half-dreamt memories would lurch out of their burial plots dug somewhere in the timeline. Usually the bad ones, mad ones, sad ones, incompletely mourned. If I looked ten years forward, the same thing: ten years of the past would arise so I could feel what ten more years would be like. Beckoned and offended, the blessed part of me who protects from unsavory things would rage, drawing in my diaphragm nice and tight lest I know all that suffering gone by and, therefore, to come.

This doesn’t happen anymore. Around the time of my last birthday in 2021, I noticed I could perceive the entire preceding year as one piece of time-stuff, like I might normally perceive the passage of an hour. There weren’t any outside events or changes of scenery to mark time, only the life in my head, because I had been hibernating at my parents’ house in Chicago. It took a year of stasis to feel what a year of time is actually like. 
  
What is a year like? Literally the same as a minute, an hour, twenty-five years.

Pt. 2, This Year In Time

War is on my mind. A quarter century is long and short.

Will to ___.

It turns out ‘self-love’ is literal. I'd describe it like this: there are a wide variety of positive feelings I can feel toward something, such as an animal, person, trinket, memory, etc. Any of these feelings might be described as, or related to, love. Usually there’s a subtle conditionality that comes with the positive feeling: I only feel positively towards something if it deserves positive feelings. Is the dog aesthetically cute? Then I feel positively towards it. Is the person nice? Then I feel positively towards them. Self-love is when I feel one or more of these positive feelings towards myself. Furthermore those positive feelings can be unconditional, meaning that the positive feeling includes the felt-senes that nothing can make the feeling go away, or that it’s not dependent on anything – it’s just there, regardless, directed at myself. That’s unconditional self-love. It’s good.

There is a way of seeing – literally, a way of processing things in my visual field – in which everything is inherently beautiful. It's actually more than everything feeling inherently beautiful: there's also the ontological conviction that everything is inherently beautiful, which has a distinct felt-sense. It’s happened a couple dozen times maybe, and it lasts for a few minutes. Usually I cry. Often it’s triggered by indie rock.

Identifying less with my thoughts, more with my tastes.

Identifying less with the idea of identification.

Identifying less with ideas in general.

The current frontier is my self, the next frontier is everyone else. 

Human nature is a thing, in that behaviors are statistically consistent across people and time. Human nature is not a thing in that it’s actually possible to durably modify the distribution of behaviors.

I feel better when I believe phenomenology is a first-class citizen.

The feeling of confidence doesn’t have to be well-calibrated to “truth”, that’s just an assumption. Treat confidence as an unconditional feeling and confidence will treat you well in return.

It's less like a train rumbling down tracks, more like a long roll of paper gliding through a printer.

Artist?

Do I care?

My cheeks blossom dry red circles when it’s cold outside. I have a moisturizer that helps, but it smells like sunscreen. It’s turtles and tradeoffs all the way down.

Mental moves are a thing, too. I can mental move into creativity, mental move into affection, mental move into sex drive, mental move into sensory freshness, mental move into unwavering confidence, mental move into expanded sense of space, mental move into equanimity, mental move into capacity for symbolic manipulation, mental move into joy, mental move into poeticism. My success rate is low and it changes over time. The more I think about a mental move the less often it succeeds.

Sometimes my posture changes in a certain way and people look at me in public. It’s happened enough times that I’m certain I’m not imagining it. It feels good to be looked at, but I start craving it quickly.

I really miss feeling refreshed. Honestly, I'm still mourning it. 

When do people start saying “my parents’ house”?

Doctors and patients are soldiers in the great war between signal and noise. Doctors distrust signal because noise exists, and patients distrust noise because signal exists.

Call Me By Your Name is stunning. Before Sunset, Sunrise, Midnight are sublime. Should I move to Europe? 

Outside, I like it bright. Inside, I like it dim.

The Last Question.

Scared, I'm compelled to do grand things for the world. Easeful, I want to deliver beauty, seek beauty, and peacefully do nothing.

Twitter is toxic and I owe it much.

I’m so sensitive to curves, lines, edges. Explains a lot. Thanks, Mina.

The indent in the bathroom floor where shower water pools surreptitiously – It Did Not Have To Be This Way.

Ineffability happens when we experience something authentic but new.

Symbolic manipulation tires me out.

Performance, and equanimity thereof. 

Apparently, I have cold hands.

The Local-Global Idea

John Carmack recently Tweeted, “I remain easily optimistic in the face of everything happening.  Consider the most amazing person you personally know, by any quality metric you choose.  Odds are that there are literally millions of their caliber in the world, which is plenty to build a bright future.” (Double spaces sic.) Let’s be those high-caliber people: to deal with the many unfolding crises we’ve been handed, how can we have agency as local beings in a global system? 

Local-global shows up in many phenomena, such as the Us/Them distinction in social group dynamics, the topology of social networks, geopolitical hierarchies, biology, and so on.

Us/Them: “We” are local, “They” are a separate locality, and together the localities compose a whole with global properties.
Social networks: My Facebook friends are my locality, your Facebook friends are your locality. One globality on Facebook is the set of all users residing in the United States. Without doubt, there are more ways to draw both “local” and “global” boundaries.
Geopolitics: Cities are local to states, states are local to countries, and countries are local to international geopolitics. Global relations hold in reverse.
Biology: Organelles are local to cells, cells are local to organs, and organs are local to organisms. Global relations hold in reverse.
Local-global is a basic property of the systems we are made of and the systems we partake in. There is, however, a problem! Until recently in evolutionary history, we did not interact with many people other than our hunter-gatherer group, so humans evolved for local contexts. For millions of years and many iterations of evolution, this worked swimmingly (so to speak).

Internalizing local-global pays dividends specifically to that end. In this essay, I want to introduce you to the idea well enough for it to stew. First, I’ll define local and global. Then, I’ll explore how humans have evolved for the local but not the global, and finally and most extensively I’ll demonstrate the utility of local-global by analyzing two interacting local-global systems of intense relevance right now: the pandemic and social media.

The Idea
Definitions
As a flexible concept, local-global can be defined in more than one way. The definitions I’ve chosen for this discussion are a) inspired by networks/graphs, b) not formal, c) not going to cover every quirky edge case, of which there are many, and therefore d) meant to be semi-specific heuristics rather than definitive definitions, because e) a definitive definition of local-global doesn’t exist due to its flexibility. I would argue that is a strength!

Local: Regarding a network, "local" pertains to those nodes or collections of nodes which are "close" together, where we get to choose a definition of close. There are at least two kinds of closeness, connection closeness and coloring (or property) closeness. Connection closeness defines closeness in terms of connections in a network, whereas coloring (or property) closeness defines closeness in terms of nodes or collections of nodes that all satisfy some property—pictorially, all colored in some way. (I’ll use the phrase “coloring closeness” in this essay because I think the visual component helps its understandability, even though “property” is substantially more general.) Connection closeness can be defined relative to a reference node, or more nuanced techniques from graph theory can be used that define localities based on connections, but don’t output a result relative to any one node in particular; an example is a “component” in the graph theoretical sense.

In an example setup, we can look at my Facebook locality. The nodes are Facebook users, and the connection closeness is defined as “is Facebook friends with [me].” My locality, then, is the set of all people who I’m friends with on Facebook.

Here, I have two Facebook friends, and therefore the three of us combined are my locality (I’ve decided to include myself).

Importantly, we can generalize the idea of locality to apply to collections of nodes instead of individual nodes. We could talk about the locality of families who have children in 2nd grade at an elementary school (coloring closeness, via “has a 2nd grader at elementary school X”).

We could describe the locality of all employees of a company (coloring closeness, via “employed by company Y”)

Another example is the locality of all donors who donated to a given non-profit (coloring closeness, via “donates to nonprofit Z”), and so on. 

The most reduced localities are individual nodes. We can think of “generalized localities” as collections of those nodes which can themselves be thought of as localities relative to other collections—this can be done either by having connections between collections of nodes (c.f. hypergraphs), or by having properties defined on collections of nodes rather than individual nodes. Each student in elementary school A is their own locality because they are an individual node, but the group of all students is a (color-connected) locality relative to elementary schools B and C.

The “closeness” measurement in this generalized locality is “goes to school with.”

Global: There are two kinds of global phenomena, descriptive ones and causative ones. A descriptive global phenomenon is a state that occurs across many localities, and arises when many nodes could be colored the same way (i.e., share a value assigned to a property, particularly values that can and/or will change) or when many nodes colored the same way are connected together. 

A causative global phenomenon is something—anything—that causes state changes in many localities. 

“Many” in “many localities” is loosely defined, and its instantiations in specific scenarios depend on what kind of locality you’re describing, and what closeness metric you’re using. If only four humans out of 7.8B are presently experiencing a state of enlightenment (“present” pun intended)—one wouldn’t say enlightenment is a descriptive global phenomenon. However, if 690M people in the world are undernourished, that’s a distressing descriptive global phenomenon. How many people would need to be enlightened for it to be a descriptive global phenomenon? There is no single principled way to say; in that sense, globality is vague (as a term of art in philosophy).

Note that the set of localities from which we pick a subset big enough to be called “many” can be either the entire network (like all of Facebook) or a sub-network (like one Facebook group). Similarly, we can also choose to describe globality relative to fully-reduced node localities (like individual Facebook users), or generalized localities (like Facebook groups).

Making a crucial insight explicit, something that is local in one setting can be global in another. Technically, given the above definitions, the coloring that describes one set of nodes or generalized localities as a locality can similarly be used to define a descriptive global phenomenon. The easy way to think about this insight is through an example; Facebook works well. A left-leaning Facebook group has a natural locality—its members are part of the locality—but it can also itself be a local member of the set of all left-leaning Facebook groups. The set of all left-leaning Facebook groups is a descriptive global phenomenon, based on the property of being left-leaning and being on Facebook.

Evolution
It's clear that we evolved for the local and not for the global. As an insightful Aeon essay from February of this year puts it, "Global-scale interaction clashes with human biology. We evolved as members of small tribes, in hunter-gatherer societies of fewer than a thousand people. Our methods of communicating and self-organising into social groups evolved for interactions on this scale. We smile and respond to smiles, and we are experts at reading each other’s facial expressions. We follow social norms and, when others don’t follow those norms, we exert pressure on them to conform by being morally outraged at their transgressions. We are motivated to show our moral outrage because it signals our own virtue to the tribe, which raises our value in it. These mechanisms are beneficial for tribal social cohesion, and encourage cooperation in a small tribe."

Robert Sapolsky's Behave talks at length about humans’ penchant for thinking about the world in terms of “Us” and “Them.” He writes, “the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power” (p.392, Kindle edition). The “Us” refers to my locality; the “Them” is out there in the global arena.

Sapolsky provides evidence to support a basic intuition, namely that we perceive ourselves to be part of many such Us’s. “Crucially, which Us is most important to me constantly shifts—if some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn’t, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, like me, loved playing Twister as a kid” (p.405, Kindle edition). We have faculties for quickly assessing the localities to which we belong, but not for descriptive or causative global phenomena—states of large systems, and the causes that influence them.

Applying The Idea
Let’s take a look at two interacting local-global systems, the pandemic and social media.

Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon, a bona fide clusterfuck. It spread through globalized travel (the descriptive global phenomenon of having connections between many localities), and has caused chaos for economies and politics around the world (hence, a causative global phenomenon).

The basic "local" units in this context are individual people, and people are part of families and organizations; organizations operate in accordance with laws established by the government; each city operates within the context of a state, each state within the nation, each nation within the international geopolitical-economic milieu. In other words, every element of the hierarchy is local with respect to some global, and every element (except the individual, in this analysis) is global with respect to some local. All the way up and all the way down, the pandemic is local-meets-global.

To intervene with the biological disease itself we must intervene locally at the level of individual people, such as by wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, air ventilation, vaccination, participation in contact tracing, administering treatment, and generally responsible decision-making (if I had three wishes, I'd use all three on responsible decision-making...). Of course, to design, produce, and distribute vaccines, we need organizations with causative globality to coordinate with one another (organizations like pharmaceutical companies and Congress are generalized localities with causative globality over lower localities; the state of coordination between pharma, government, and all of healthcare is a descriptive globality). 

For the economy, we have causative global interventions. Take interest rates, for example: a causative global intervention is necessary because of the structure of the system—only the Federal Reserve can set interest rates. Another causative global intervention is the passing of a stimulus package by Congress (well, hypothetically). Trillions of dollars distributed into the American economy impacts many localities, and therefore it is a global causative phenomenon.

A notable difference between the disease and the economy, considered in local-global terms,  is that certain disease interventions like mask-wearing are ultimately up to the base locality, individual people, whereas economic interventions (and the state of the economy in general) are out of any individual’s control. Unfortunately, people cannot simply will money into existence; a global causative intervention is required.

All of these interventions rest on people, who as we established above, do not count global decision-making as a strength because we evolved for small groups. In a situation not unlike the Tragedy of the Commons, our local decision-making leads to local choices—”let’s have a small dinner party, we haven’t seen our friends in months”—that may be optimal for this locality in the present, but may turn out suboptimal for this and other localities in the future when one of the dinner attendees is unwittingly infectious. Compounded across a country, this promotes the descriptive global phenomena of more disease and a slower economic recovery. That so many people make local decisions like this is just a fact of our evolution: we care deeply about the people immediately around us, and less about people far away. We make decisions weighted more by present reward than future reward. We simply struggle to apprehend how small local choices unfold in complex systems with many interacting localities and globalities: a small decision to attend a dinner party might ultimately spiral into 1000s of infections and likely some deaths.

Social Media
Social media is the theatre of our times: on these platforms we watch our comedies and tragedies unfold. Structurally, social media platforms are networks ("social networks"), so they lend themselves well to local-global analysis.

In social networks, local users see information shared by other local users, either about their own lives (local updates) or about something bigger (descriptive global updates). A "global" media organization like the New York Times disseminates global information down to the local users (an act of causative globality), who then share this information to other local users. Above, we covered the nested structure of social networks; as with the pandemic, all the way up and all the way down, social media is local-meets-global.

An interesting property of systems whose nodes are cognitive—humans, non-human primates, birds, and so on—is that the nodes can directly perceive descriptive global variables of the system as expressed in a condensed way. Social media is of course one such system. For example, a descriptive globality in America right now is the presence of intense and conflicting political belief. This descriptive globality can be summarized by the title of a New York Times article, such as this one from the halcyon days of 2014. The title, “Polarization is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics,” can be displayed on a Facebook news feed. The users of Facebook, nodes of the system, see the article’s titles, and therefore receive information about a (summarized) descriptive global state of the system. In this manner, the descriptive global state becomes a causative global state and influences the system, since individual people’s behavior might change due to their ability to observe this descriptive global characteristic.

This leads to the formation of tight local-global interaction cycles in social media because most social media now aggregates global descriptions and feeds them to users. In essence, participating in social media is the process of 1) creating content that often contains your belief about a global description, 2) sharing that content with other people and thereby being a local influence on them, and 3) the lion’s share of social media interactions, looking at the content other people have created, which often captures global descriptions. Of course, this is muddied by the fact that content rarely, if ever, gives “accurate” or “good faith” summaries of descriptive global phenomena, and all sorts of cognitive biases will lead the recipient to acquire that summarized information imperfectly and mix it in with their own views, thus creating localities everywhere with distorted perceptions of the global phenomena. No wonder social media is messy. And then there was a pandemic!

Social Pandemedia
The pandemic and social media, two local-global systems, interact with one another. Social media provides the information infrastructure upon which knowledge about the pandemic is shared (knowledge about a descriptive global phenomenon like case counts, or knowledge about a local phenomenon like an individual's battle with illness). Social media is also the infrastructure for spreading beliefs and behaviors. 

Beliefs can represent local perception of a descriptive and/or causative global phenomenon, and behaviors can represent how the localities react to descriptive and/or causative global phenomena, given their beliefs. (Not to over-apply, one can certainly believe things and exercise behaviors that have nothing to do with globalities.) It’s interesting to note how large a portion of people’s beliefs and behaviors these days, as observed and enacted on social media, do pertain to the global. Though I have no evidence per se, the truism that focusing on the present leads to calm probably holds for the social media scenario as well: the more the social network’s activity pertains to local beliefs/behaviors about the global, the more tumultuous the social network activity will be.

If we regard accurate summaries of descriptive and/or causative global phenomena as (compressed) truth, then ideally truth should inform belief which in turn informs behavior. Because belief influences behavior, problems arise when truth and belief diverge. 

For a complex system to function well, its components (localities) have to be constrained to some patterns of interacting. We see it with cells: when cells become runaway proliferators because their interaction patterns are no longer constrained, a cancer forms, spreads to become a descriptive global presence, and the organism dies at the hand of the cancer’s global causation. Likewise with the complex system of civilization: when people's behaviors are no longer constrained, bad things happen. Whether by definition or by empiricism—whichever you prefer—truth (as compressed information about the environment, including global phenomena) has provided the necessary constraints to flourish, vis-à-vis determining the beliefs that constrain behavior. When truth doesn't constrain belief, belief doesn't constrain behavior. Why is this relevant to flourishing? Look at the pandemic. Flourishing means the maintenance of health and economic productivity (health is definitional flourishing, and economic productivity is a contingent fact of capitalism). The impact of the pandemic on biological health is tautological, and economic health has clearly been impacted by the pandemic as well. All of epidemiology, all of biology, all of medicine, all of economics have been developed in the pursuit of compressed truth (with major missteps and some screwy incentives, but on average tending towards truthful understandings of global phenomena and other things). Our flourishing to date is therefore the result of a pursuit of truth.

If truth, a characterization of descriptive global phenomena, is either thrown out the window or manipulated in pursuit of nefarious goals, it spells trouble. The pandemic provides examples, like mask-wearing. It’s clear for those folks focused on truth that mask-wearing is a necessary route to flourishing, i.e. widespread mask-wearing is a causative global phenomenon that will yield a desirable descriptive global phenomenon. The truth informs beliefs held by localities, which constrain behaviors of the localities—e.g., I wear a mask every time I walk out of my house. But with the pandemic, bad information (non-truths) about mask-wearing means that beliefs are being formed based on non-truths, which therefore induce local behaviors that do not produce global flourishing. 

How does this truth, belief, behavior chain happen right now? Largely on social media. Social media spreads bad information (dis-information and mis-information) about global phenomena. Because people can forward expressions of their beliefs/behaviors to so many people simultaneously either via direct messages or via posting to a feed, the "belief points" can build up rapidly within localities of people (c.f. complex contagion theory). Of course, the echo chamber phenomenon then prevents the penetration of information (truth) inwards through those walls, which leaves the within-locality super-synchronization unchecked (a widespread descriptive global phenomenon occurs without causative intervention to dissipate it). Lastly comes the addictiveness. Humans have short attention spans—especially nowadays. If we weren't hooked on social media, we would spend less time observing the information and belief/behavior expression, which would not only slow the spread of bad information-belief-behaviors, but simply put—we would care about it less. 

The Human in the Pandemedia Machine
What are the specific failure modes where motivations/incentives/cognitive architectures designed for small groups fail us when our information/beliefs/behaviors come from participation in large groups? The aforementioned Aeon piece argues that social media creates uncapped outrage expression because we don't see the pain of the accused, which would act as a dampener on our rage expression and moral signaling, and subsequently prevent runaway rage.
Beyond that, "cognitive social locality" comes into play: as per the often-cited Dunbar's number, we have bounds on the capacity to hold social graphs in memory. Speculating, I suspect this creates a new category of "just-in-time" social entities which, speaking in terms of how our brains respond, are sort of like people but don't elicit the same type of response as real bona fide people. The differences are that we don't have typical signals to assess power and trustworthiness. We can assess power and trustworthiness for local people in our local social graphs, but not people out there in the non-local other. 

I'd also wager we have weaker theory of mind for someone whose existence to us is restricted to our Twitter feed, for example. Not only do we not have information about people on social media like we would if we knew them locally (either in person or closely connected through in-person relationships with other members of an in-group), but even if we did we couldn't hold all of our 100s-1000s of social media follows in memory as true participants of our social graph—because we didn't evolve for that kind of global memory.

Because it's so easy to share information and therefore signal a belief, people do so with minimal filtering (and again, as per the above, without the inhibition coming from real human interaction)—and since people's beliefs are influenced by multiple other in-group members expressing a belief, beliefs can catch on rapidly. Other people signal thoughtlessly, and you thoughtlessly relay the signal once you see enough signals firing. Local regions ignite rapidly and eject their pillars of flame off into the non-localities without any inhibitory feedback, and all the sudden one piece of local mis- or dis-information becomes a causative global phenomenon. Because adjacent localities are closely connected through social media, it doesn't take much flame to ignite part of the adjacent localities, which are susceptible for the same reasons, and so everything continues without inhibition and with local actors participating in causative global dynamics well beyond their cognitive capacity to truly apprehend. This is the story of undamped virality.

Your Turn
It turns out that the local-global concept can yield results: in a September 3rd Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “We're reducing the risk of misinformation and harmful content going viral by limiting forwarding on Messenger. You'll still be able to share information about the election, but we'll limit the number of chats you can forward a message to at one time. We've already implemented this in WhatsApp during sensitive periods and have found it to be an effective method of preventing misinformation from spreading in many countries.” What can you do with this idea?

A Pop Star is Normal

Two hours ago, if you’d asked me to predict the subject I’d keyboard-scrawl into a Ulysses document, I literally would never have guessed it would be Taylor Swift.

I finished Miss Americana, Lana Wilson’s documentary about Taylor Swift, half an hour ago. After finishing the film, I texted a friend who told me a few days ago I should watch it, and the following thoughts spawned in the text thread, now recapitulated and slightly elaborated here:

1) I’ve never loved Taylor’s music, which is entirely okay. As an equalizing disclaimer, I write music, and I don’t love most of it either. That’s creativity for you, and the unpredictability of the audience’s response to art is precisely what makes art something distinct and of neurological consequence. (For more on that, I’d read Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight.)

2) I’m no stranger to the occasional fanboy-ish celebrity fascination, but I definitely don’t feel that way about Taylor Swift. She doesn’t grab my attention in any nonstandard way—and this I mean not as a denigration, but as a humanization. 

And yet, I enjoyed the documentary. What I appreciate about it is that I closed the Netflix tab filled with a bellyful of visceral pride, personal-level pride, real pride, at Taylor’s growth over her 15-year career. Here she is, a musician I don't listen to, in a genre I don't care for, with 127M Instagram followers as of this writing, and I’m proud of her? It’s perplexing! Her fame is blasé to me. She’s a human, who’s done things, and changed, and my brain’s treating her like any other human, and that’s why Miss Americana is pretty brilliant, I’d say. It’s a story about a person who I feel normally about, but who’s had an absolutely abnormal life.