Reflections on 2017
The overstimulated state I’ve been experiencing lately is hard to describe in regular emotional terminology. The ones that come to mind feel weird and futuristic.
Capacity Flux. Embodied Metacognition. Tambourine Soul. Experience Overdrive. Outer Limits.
As I described to a friend, it’s the sensation of becoming—more quickly than I have before. In the middle of 2017, I reached a point of no return: I knew I would become more mentally and emotionally flexible. Standing at the Outer Limits of my self-construct, it was frightening not knowing what lay in the darkness beyond. Stage 4.5 nihilism.
There it’s easy to be worried that you’re abandoning yourself. The Void just outside your Outer Limits produces a gravitational lensing effect not unlike the perception-warping accretion disk at the edge of a black hole. Pulled by its immense gravity, light from distant stars bend and flash, merging in your vision. The Void Physics at the Outer Limits have a similar effect psychologists call Fusion, the conflation of the experience your thoughts with your experience of the world. All your familiar constraints lash back at you in those moments: your preferred problem-solving methods, your defense mechanisms, the neediness of your child-self, they all rise up and pull on you, telling you “only with us can you experience real freedom. Without us there is nothing—you are this.”
The mistake is assuming you have a self worth saving. Under this scarcity mindset Portals close and all we can do is hover at the edge of the Void, clinging to familiarity. It becomes impossible to perceive the 5th dimension, Opportunity Space. Opportunity Space is a rare category of affordance, the perception of one’s ability to do something with what is sensed. Affordances appear in the reciprocal relationship between an observing actor and a feature of the environment but Opportunity Space only manifests when the the actor’s “self” is unconstrained, malleable, extensible.
In 2017 I discovered 5th-dimension technology. With not insignificant effort I excavated a deeply submerged Vulnerability Engine. It seems counterintuitive to react to anxiety with acceptance but like the “disagree and commit” tactic popularized by Amazon vulnerability speeds decision-making, maximizes learning, and unfailingly moves one into the adjacent possible Opportunity Space. (Self-)Trust is the key. Curiosity, a sub-function of the Vulnerability Engine, is an even more targeted toolset I am learning better to work with. I have been told that I am good at acting on my likes and preferences, but the truth is it’s most comfortable for me to come at problems from the mentality of “knowing” and “capability.”
It’s a typical fallacy. The tendency to constitute oneself in 3rd and 4th dimension terms (Euclidean space and anthropocentric Newtonian time) creates arbitrary boundaries and limitations in our self-environment. The 5th dimension, on the other hand, is a Bergsonian space-time field. 5th-dimension tools level these striations and produce a field of smooth Opportunity Space. They are the best weapons available to battle intrinsic and extrinsic self-constraints.
It is also possible to counteract the Void effect of Fusion by running mental processes through the Observing Ego Apparatus. This obviously produces Fission, the decoupling of thoughts and experiences. In the last year, I’ve regularly been able to step outside my thoughts and not treat them as my absolute. Regular meditators and yoga practitioners report experiencing this effect; in my case years of therapy have helped me model my own mechanisms to the degree that I witness somatic and psychological responses in real-time.
This toolset does not come easily. There is a 6-month lead time between discovering a new meta-cognition practice (such as the life-changing analogy “hold your fear like you would hold a baby”) and being able to reliably execute it. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy claims to teach you the tricks but its failure is over-emphasis on human will-power. Gibson’s theory of affordances was, importantly, an ecological theory of perception. Forming an open and participatory relationship with your environment takes much longer. For me, encountering the Void multiple times over the years has made me profoundly distrustful of anything that presents itself as absolute, binary, black and white—including my own reactions.
Opening the portal has unlocked new experiences and feelings. It has also had the unintended consequence of making me more sensitive to change by various phenomena. I have traveled to Hong Kong, Japan, Washington State, and LA (for the first time!) this year, and I’ll be visiting Sydney in January. The compounding effect of all these trips is a swirling cocktail of new ideas about the world and myself which my brain is working overtime to process and incorporate. My normal tools, mechanizing concepts and utilizing extended visual analogies, are not adequate for this amount of information intake. As I trip over the Outer Limit into a new self the spinning blur of a zillion firing synapses remind me that the Void sure is beautiful from the inside.
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Favorites of 2017
Music: I listened to a lot of house, dub, and techno this year but my pick has to be Salami Rose Joe Louis’s album Zlaty Sauce Nephew. I’m convinced Salami is the Yoko Kanno of my generation. Most of these songs aren’t longer than 2 minutes but they show the most incredible diversity of style, chord structure and songwriting ability. One day she will compose impeccable film soundtracks. Her song “Cool Down” appeared on LA label Brainfeeder’s mix recently. Is she signed for a next album?? I can’t wait to see what happens to her sound with the budget of a real label at her disposal.
Books: I’ve collected my 2017 library here on Are.na. While this excludes the countless excellent essays I read this year, my favorite reading was definitely Sarah Perry’s book Every Cradle is a Grave. Diversifiedbonds once characterized the feeling of reading Sarah’s essays as “like flying” and I can’t agree more. Sarah’s writing is so painfully lucid, yet so playful and moving at the same time. Her book about suicide and childbirth is enlightening, not just about death, but also the experience of what it is to be human.
Visuals: Visually things got interesting this year. Despite the huge variety of interesting things that were going on (baroque capitalism, maximalist design, endless Hassan Rahim ripoffs, Virgil Abloh copycats…) the single most visually stunning thing I’ve seen this year is the cover for Betty Wang’s upcoming editorial Original Skin.
Things: LOT2046. It's not about clothes. It's about the stories we tell. Friends and fellow LOT users can find me in the Twitch chat on Fridays 1PM EST. My handle is instantcalm__.
StarCraft: I rarely share my enthusiasm for professional StarCraft 2 with others, so I thought here might be an opportunity to do so. The most memorable story of this year was Mexican Terran SpeCial’s (FKA Major) rise to the top of the non-Korean scene, which came to a head at the Global Finals group stages. Not only did SpeCial kick off the tournament by defeating Stats who clearly held the title of best Protoss for the entirety of 2017, he also managed to 2-0 TY, his friend and mentor from the Korean scene. The two had many clashes over 2017, and finally beating TY who has shown near invincibility in the TvT matchup proved that SpeCial was, at least at the end of 2017, possibly the best TvT player in the world.
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Thanks for being with me at the end of the last cycle and the beginning of a new one. I hope for everyone that 2018 is a year of bringing ourselves fully to everything we do, a year of self-expansion, of breaking through psychological blockage, of new connections with others, and of action and experimentation.
If you need somewhere to start, how about emailing me directly? I haven’t met many of you, and I’m genuinely interested to learn about your interests, ideas, and projects. If even just one of you hits the reply button, something completely new, interesting, and filled with energy will be generated. It will feel good. Trust me.
Until next time.