Wild things (day 58)

"Mommy that was a sad movie".  That's what a little boy said at at the closing credits of Where The Wild Things Are.  He repeated it, looking for confirmation.  I didn't hear what his mom said but I imagine she didn't say "that's just real life, Sam".   But, just as Max realized in the movie, that's exactly what it might have been.  It wasn't sad in a tragic way, it was just sad in a regular disillusioned way.   What did surprise me is the slightly psychotic character of Carol.  He was a mixture of paranoid schizophrenic and bipolar.  The line "he doesn't mean to be that way, he's just scared" is a little too close to an excuse you give for someone's abusive behaviour.  The character of KW was good but it was never clear why she wanted out except to get away from psychotic Carol.  She was the most grounded of them all even though she had her own escapes (shooting owls out of the sky?!?).   I guess in the end I have to agree with the little boy.  The movie was sad.   It was sad because everyone was looking elsewhere for happiness.  To the king, the owls, the boat, the utopic city, the dirt clump war.  No one gets happy in the end but they are one failure closer to getting there maybe.

I never read the book.  I wasn't even aware of the book as I was growing up.  Perhaps because I grew up in Quebec?  Perhaps it wasn't translated?  I wonder how close the movie is to the book or the spirit of it anyway.  It's got me curious. 

A song for this post.

Confidently unrehearsed (day 13)

Always look on the bright side of life.  That's what they say.  Except that over-confidence will get you in the end.  Feedback is essential.  This article on Psy-Fi outlines the reasons why processes that have inherently long feedback loops are very hard to optimize and deserve a systematic approach to decision documentation and evaluation.   I love the article because it really strikes at the heart of human nature.  We are short-term beings, and for the most part cowards as well.   Most of us don't even like to hear or see ourselves on record.   There is something very frightening about seeing ourselves unrehearsed, and most of life is like that: unrehearsed and distracted.   This is why I like the premise of the article: even if it seems that emotional intuitive decisions are quicker, have the courage and take the time to analyze and document how a decision is made.  In the end, even if the decision ends up being the same, you'll have something to use as a basis for change if the decision didn't work out as expected.   The discipline and commitment that it takes to do something like that though is unusual.   The problem does not suggest its own antidote at all.

There is one thing in the article I don't quite agree with.   I don't agree that if we did see the world as the mess it truly is that we would be depressed (and make better decisions).   I think there is a nice middle ground between irrational exhuberance and irrational pessimism.  The world is a mess, absolutely.  But that's a reason to be realistic, look at the suffering directly, and try to help where possible.  Seen from that angle, exhuberance and pessimism are both forms of laziness.

The systematic way of making stock picks for effective feedback could be applied to life in general if we were clear on what we were optimizing.  With stock pics, we're optimizing a return on investment.  What about life?  I suspect there are lots of answers here.   My personal favourite is that the motivation should be related to reducing suffering and increasing joy.

Spend to live another day (day 6)

A few months ago I finished listening to the audio version of the book "The denial of death" by Ernest Becker (I don't really recommend the audiobook, it's a bit relentless. But I do recommend the documentary "Flight from Death" derived from the book). The book postulates that our refusal to look at death directly makes us blindly spend our energy to "immortality projects", thing that will transcend death or make us feel part of a greater whole that will live on. It can also increase our intolerance of those who don't support our grand project. One example is the nationalistic feeling that compels us to support the troops, or whatever else is meant to make the 'us' bigger than 'them'. If asked I bet most people would assume that if our life was longer, trending to immortality say, our fear of death would diminish. The point made in the book which has stayed with me is that accidental death would not disappear and that if the possibility of living forever existed, our preservation extinct would increase in proportion. The example they give is that it is much more tragic to die at 7 if you could live forever. This is probably why vampires are always given super healing powers with very specific ways to die. If dying was too easy, the immortality would be meaningless. If there was no way to die, the immortality would be a life sentence. The other problem with immortality (one that was beautifully illustrated in the last Godric episode of True Blood) is that laziness would be rampant. Why do today what you could do tomorrow? Death is a powerful motivator. And not just big death, all the little deaths too. We do a lot to keep things from deteriorating. It is an interesting exercise to think of what motivation might exist outside it, or in spite of it.

We want to live forever. It's true, the fear of death permeates our being and influences the amount of the risk we are willing to take. This is why most of us take fewer risks as we get older. I would even say that it's why most of us gain weight as we get older. It's a protection instinct. We think if we expend less of our life energy we'll have more later -- a savings account approach to life which turns out to have disastrous consequences. The less you move, the sicker you get. That's just the way it goes. I think it's probably best to embrace the impermanence and just spend spend spend that life energy.