No 88 Mom: "Be Nice and Trust No one"
No. 88 • 12/2/2022
Meditations on waiting
This week marks the beginning of Advent in the Christian calendar, a term which loosely translates as “arrival,” or, based on my psychology, “waiting.”
Full disclosure: I’m not the best wait-er. This is especially true when it comes to projects, text responses, dependencies on others to fulfill a task, buses, basically all the things requiring waiting. Patience, though a virtue, is not one I possess. So, rather than Advent being an exciting anticipation of the Light to Come, this liturgical season usually starts off as one long meditation on “why am I so damn impatient?”
PS: Christmas is still my favorite holiday, and I defs “anticipate” its arrival.
Mom: “Be nice and trust no one.”
The irony of building a house in the country (on a relatively secluded piece of property set back off a quiet dirt road) is that everybody on that road wants to know who you are. They also want to know:
- what you’re plans are for the property
- if you’ve heard the local gossip and who not to trust (everyone says a different person)
- if you’re aware of all the issues with the property you just bought
- if you’re ok with hunting, and if they can hunt your land
- if you’d be willing to set the driveway gate back a few feet so people can turn around
- if you’ve met Pete who is “lonely” and will definitely trespass on your property, but “is harmless”
What’s interesting to me about these, literally, day-1 interactions is the feeling of contraction I get when people I don’t know ask me about what I’m up to. I blame society.
Having lived in the city for almost twenty years, in the same apartment for fifteen, and still not knowing the names of the people who live in five out of the six units on my floor, I can easily say that this level of “interest” in what I’m up to takes some getting used to. Not to mention my mother (RIP) whose life-long mantra was “be nice and trust no one.” Let’s just say I am primed to see anyone who asks any questions whatsoever about my doings as suspect.
So, the past couple weeks have involved me trying to find balance between my cheerful, super-posi “Sure, I’ll give you a tour of what we’re building” attitude, and my other “See this sign? I have zero problem prosecuting any uninvited person who steps foot on this land” attitude. This ping-pong knee-jerkiness will be something to navigate as time goes on.
Free yaks
Upside to having a big piece of property in the country? Yak texts. From a close friend:
“Zach just told me he knows where there are 4 free yaks. You want them?”
I think it’s safe to say that I have never considered owning four yaks. And yet, here I am considering exactly that.
Blind spots along the PKM path
There are two common phenomena that occur in the personal knowledge management (PKM) / tools for thought (TFT) world, both of which are summed up in these HN comments:
“[With tools for thought, people] are not satisfying the desire to think, they are satisfying the desire to use (new) tools. Hence people keep switching and finding new and ‘better’ ‘tools for thought.’
And....
You would think that the people most popular in the ‘tools for thought’ space would be those producing the most interesting or novel…thoughts. Instead, they are people who explain how to use ‘tools for thought,’ introducing new taxonomical systems and technologies. To what end?”
The first one is, I believe, due to the emphasis PKMers place on the terms “management” and “tools.” Emphasize either and you will find yourself riding around in circles in a capitalist cul-de-sac. This came up in last week’s newsletter.
The second point speaks to a phenomenon that I totally agree with and have certainly poked fun at a few times, but today want to challenge a bit.
PKM and TFT are very interesting subjects. It’s not surprising that new converts (myself included) want to discuss them at length. Objectively, I don’t see anything wrong with that. People should feel free to roam the intellectual landscape of their minds regardless of whether it’s a cliché. That, too, is a practice.
Dreams are feelings carried along by story
My latest take on dream is this:
Dreams are feelings expressed in narratives you have little control over. Your mind pieces together a story out of bits of narrative input, creating something not unlike a crude DALL-E “painting.” Most of us marvel at the details of the narrative, when it’s the feelings we had in the dream about what took place in the narrative that would benefit from examination.
So, while it may be interesting that in your dream your mother struggled to lift up a bag of groceries which turned out to be filled with dinosaur feathers, what’s most important was the feeling you had when your mother wasn’t able to lift something so light. The feeling is the message. The story is the carrier.
Afterthought: This points to the importance of story in human development and evolution. Even at the subconscious level, when our “self” has been turned off, we still attempt to work out our experiences through story-making.
What are you tuning into?
Lately, Ran Prieur has been thinking about neurotypicality and neurodivergence in terms of “tuning”:
“Neurotypicals have perception and cognition that are highly tuned into other humans and the human-made world.
In other words, neurotypicals are tuned to what people are thinking, what their body language is communicating, what’s “typically” expected of them socially, etc. However, this, albeit important tuning, is only one among many.
“[O]utside that specialization, there are all kinds of other things you could be tuned into. This is why people tagged as autistic can be more different from each other than they are from neurotypicals.”
I’m not knowledgeable enough on the subject of neurodivergence to say much, but Prieur’s metric resonates.
Perhaps the reason I don’t identify as neurodivergent (and am not identified as such by others), despite my many quirks and eccentricities, is due to my ability to tune into and easily navigate normative social cues.
Wine is mythology enacted through the senses
Back in my wine bar days, I definitely told customers that a wine had notes of cat pee:
“(Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)
Something every single cynical take on wine tasting misses is that, when it comes to wine, it’s not about being consistent, it’s about creating an experience. There are definitely notes and finishes that can be identified pretty accurately (popcorn and acetone are easy breezy to call out). But, there’s also something to just vibing on what you’re “getting” with friends. It doesn’t have to be “true” or reproducible. Drinking wine is more mythology than fact. It’s an act that speaks more to profound truths than technical ones.
Damaged ex-social media users making a mess in the fediverse
Subcultures are built and sustained on codes of conduct. And, the fediverse, being a subculture, functions in a similar way.
“As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks. Among dominant social networks, the guiding approach to governance has been what the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls ‘scalability.’ This doesn’t just mean large scale. It means, according to Tsing, ‘the ability to expand — and expand and expand — without rethinking basic elements.’ It means exponential growth while retaining a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with problems, and it’s what venture capitalists look for in their investments.
Reading the above, I can’t help but think of how well big tech social media has trained its users to be combative, loud, obnoxious, and prone to burns. Having done so, it’s no wonder that those migrating to Mastodon bring with them some not-so-likable social traits.
Mastodon is often lauded as being a more considerate social space (see the volume of CW warnings on so many posts, due in part to “CW” being a clickable option in the posting window). It’s less a replacement for Twitter and more a network of mini-Twitters conversing with one another. In order to maintain sanity within the chaos, Mastodon challenges scalability:
Scalability explains a lot of what seems wrong with social media. Content moderation at scale needs to be semi-automated, which often means applying universal rules without context or nuance. And when abuse, harassment and misinformation drive engagement, the incentive is to address it in a way that doesn’t threaten business. Lacking local knowledge in their users’ languages and cultures, platform companies have aided political interference and even genocide. All these problems have led Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to try to outsource moderation decisions, creating independent organizations for “oversight” and “decentralization.” As Musk’s acquisition of Twitter loomed, Dorsey tweeted about the platform he co-founded: “The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.” Even he could see that the business that helped make him wealthy had taken on too much.
PS: This is one of the best pieces I have read on the fediverse, Mastodon, and how both relate to big tech-mediated models of online social interactions. Notes of scalability, user expectations when migrating from big tech social media, personal responsibility.
Intimacy requires curiosity
People endear toward me most when I ask them questions—i.e. about what they do, what they get out of what they do, and how the feel about what they do. I don’t fake it. I’m genuinely interested.
“I really like asking questions, and will often weave these questions into a conversation if appropriate. And strongly try to create an atmosphere where people are comfortable being honest and vulnerable, and where I show vulnerability in turn.”
People, when given the opportunity to speak about real stuff related to real emotions and experiences they have had, are fascinating. Scratch below the surface and you will find a world of juicy bits.
If you were to ask me about how to have more intimate experiences with people, here’s the advice I’d give:
Approach people with curiosity. Ask questions that genuinely interest you. Let people answer them. Relate your own experience to how they answer. Know when to go deep and when to step back. And, don’t go any deeper than you’re able to tread.
What do you think about when you think about moving to a new place?
I haven’t quite figured out what I want to say about this yet, but I like the idea:
“Cities and towns have souls of their own. You don’t just live in them; you live with them. If you like their company, things will align themselves to make you successful and happy. But if you don’t like the company, you will keep bumping into the wrong things.”
Rando Pone
And, that’s that! See ya next week.
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