Guilt, Depression, then Guilt

In the words of Allie Brosh

I have repeatedly discovered that it is important for me not to surpass my capacity for responsibility.  Over the years, this capacity has grown, but the results of exceeding it have not changed.

This year has been about me accepting this truth about myself as well.  My previous efforts above my capacity for responsibility have led me into the following cycle: first I would feel a little guilty about missing a day, then this guilt (perhaps coupled with other guilts) would lead to me being depressed.  At this point, I would avoid the project altogether, and this then led to me feeling really guilty, guilty to the point of self-disgust, and then I'd even become depressed about the fact I am the person who is depressed so much -- my self-talk including how because I so prone to depression I'm neither the type of person others want to be around, nor am I the type that can finish anything.  My depression depresses me and makes me feel so guilty, that there is no room to get back to the goal.

Here are three activities this has been true of in the past.

1) gardening

For spiritual reasons, I believe in a garden.  And practically, I could use some vegetables from time to time.  This has lead to repeatedly think I need a vegetable garden.   And while I can say I have always been able to get something out of every garden I have planted, in my 35th year of life, I realized a trying to garden when it is past my capacity for responsibility has been a source of the guilt-depression-guilt cycle.   It starts in the summer, as the need to water intensifies.   I will get my sleep cycle messed up, so I'll be waking up later in the day to an Oklahoma already 100 degrees and humid, so I'll feel trapped inside the house. I will miss a day of watering and weeding, then a few days.  I will watch things die.  And I will start to feel bad.

I am relieved that I have given myself permission to let go this year.  I gave my peach trees a proper pruning early in the season, and I have already foraged out some clover, chickweed, lamb's quarters dandelion, and volunteer arugula, but I have no plans to plant, and will take this year to observe, and make areas look nice.  Basically, I am looking for situations where I can bank work when I feel up to it, like pruning or moving around hard structures, but not worry about needing to do things every day.  One good thing about Oklahoma heat is that it can often make the grass go dormant some time in the summer, right around the time I have no motivation to do yard work.

2) writing

When I took my first sabbatical, two years ago, I did so thinking I was going to "be" a writer.  At the time, it was a game plan people were willing to listen to.  And, to my credit, I followed Paul Graham's proscription to "always produce."  I think the advice is sound, I just don't think I was ready to follow it properly,  because I was still in my time of grief.  It wasn't writer's block that got me, it was writer's misery, and writer's anxiety.  It was a time of great social isolation, so much so that I was happy to go back to teaching for a year.  Writing was ruined for me for a while, in really deeply ingrained ways.    And that is what I had to work against both during my last stint as a teacher, and when this second sabbatical started.  My response was to turn to other types of art, and make myself as comfortable as possible when writing.  And at some point, in fact within the last few weeks (4 months into the second sabbatical), I finally broke the curse. And here we are with blog posts again.

3) exercise

This one is all about me stopping myself because of guilt.  In my early twenties, exercise was something to do just for fun, but it didn't guide whether or not I was going to have a good day.  But some time in my late twenties, it became the case that exercise was a same-day performance enhancing drug.  I could work longer, and feel better.  Truly, I don't have time not to exercise.  So how can it be I have missed so many days over the years?  Well, in no small part it is the guilt caused by asking myself that very question.  First, guilt, then depression, and then, well you know my drill . . .  .

Setting low, even laughably low expectations has helped.  During the four months I was overcoming my aversion to writing, my quota was only 200 words a day, and now my exercise requirements are low while I try to build the habit.

Round Up #16

Research/Surfing

Great tweet-storm by someone explaining why they are leaving twitter.  Not indignation, but information hygiene.

After years of being exposed to the family in the media, I have found my favorite Romney, with all due respect to the Senator. (And, yeah, I get they are not related).

UBI and sustainability are probably totally different spheres.  Hooray for a "a more equitable arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic."

I think everyone should know about Operation Northwoods.  h/t Ran Prieur.

Someone calculating how rich Mr. Darcy would have been, as well as explaining how the financial instruments in Jane Austen's books worked.

Ian Welsh showing examples of when analog technologies were better -- and probably could be again, and then explains what digital technologies have really been about.

Hey, have you heard?  Chestnuts might save the world.

Aphorisms/Shorts

"The function of propaganda is not to tell us what to think but to sink us deeper in what we already thoughtlessly believe"  Ran Prieur from "Slow Crash"

Conjecture: with superstition marginalized, much of political discourse is socially appropriate "scary stories."

The job system -- being around people you don't like and doing things you don't like -- isn't a rite of passage; it is a rite of entrapment.

”Now that we can do anything, we must do less.” Ruben Anderson

Propogating Road Trip Utopia

Another gem from Ran Prieur.  God Bless that creative commons.  

Just for fun, here's my Road Trip Utopia:: 

It's the year 2116, and the world is finally recovering from the deep economic and infrastructure collapse of the 21st century. High tech never went away, but the old highways are weedy rubble, and nobody drives fast except on race tracks. Long-distance travel is done on trains or hybrid airships, and short distance travel is done by foot, bicycle, mule, or slow solar vehicles. All of these are used by adventurers who spend their unconditional basic income on high-grade water condensers and concentrated food, and travel the old roads through the wilderness and the ghost suburbs. They might use computer maps, but the computer never tells them which way to go, because the point is to discover it themselves.

Propagating Prieur's Basic Income Communities

Archived here.  The site is creative commons.

Ran Prieur:

I've been thinking about how we could have unconditional basic income without everyone getting bored, and I got the idea of reverse jobs: organizations that take your money and give you a life. It would be sort of like what we already do with rest homes for old people, except that people of all ages could sign over their government payout to a third party, who would give them food and shelter with some efficiency of scale, and also give them structured activities. Call them basic income communities.

The activities could be anything cheap, like meditation or gaming, or anything that brought in extra income, like woodworking or plant breeding. And because the workers are paying, the whole system would be turned on its head. What we have right now is an authoritarian labor market, where workers have to compete for scarce positions. There's no incentive for your employer to give you a good environment, because if you don't like it, other people are lined up to replace you. But if activities were competing for people to do them, environments would have to get good quickly.

I imagine that some people would stay independent, and spend their own basic income on their own particular low-budget lifes[t]yle. But eventually most people would try out different basic income communities until they found one that was a good fit. I would totally give up financial independence to live in modest and rustic housing, eat healthy cheap food, and hang out with people who play board games and improvise music all day. That's Utopia, and we're pretty close to being able to pull it off.

==

My rhetorical tweak would be to maybe call them basic income centers, because there are both retirement centers and day care centers.  What Prieur describes is really like adult day care. 

Propagating Prieur on Political Myths

From Ran Prieur:

Are political decisions more myth-based than they used to be? If so, what might be causing this dangerous trend? I can think of two stories. One is that political systems are becoming so complicated that it's both more difficult and more boring to observe political reality, so fewer people are doing it.

A scarier possibility is that we are losing the skill of reality-based thinking, because we have fewer opportunities to practice it. If you're deciding which breakfast cereal to buy, it doesn't matter if you use myth-based thinking, because nothing bad will happen either way. More and more of our decisions are like that, partly because of well-meaning regulations that protect us from bad decisions, and partly because big control systems are making more of the decisions that really matter.

===

For the first possibility, society as more complex and boring, compare with analysis of "legibility," (here is a good place to start noodling around).

For the second possibility, compare with Kurt Andersen.

So I believe both possibilities are correct.  I think they are right now highly mutually reinforcing. One question is whether they had to go together?

Gridbeam Content Relocated

[The following has been de-coupled from an older post, How to Go to Work When Collapse is Near, because it was a bit off-topic]

Another bit of home economy I am working on this year is gridbeam, which allows for completely modular, reusable construction.  I think is the perfect open source technology to spread to make scavenging and upcycling possible in the future -- and I think that scavenging and upcycling is the only way we will have a future.

Video example of a gridbeam project:




And a more impressive demonstration:



I hope of this makes for interesting and helpful reading.  Good luck in building the future.

Ran Prieur

I find it hard to believe I have never ran into the work of Ran Prieur before.  He and I have many of the same interests, outlooks, and even spiritual sentiments (insofar as he is identifies as a Taoist-Pantheist).  It's really cool because though my thoughts are on many of the same tracks of his,  he is much further down the road.  He offers so much to learn, targeted to my key interests.  I am torn between gobbling up as much as I can in a binge and, well, everything else in life.

Prieur is a doomer of sorts, though his thoughts on the matter have been developing over time.  Allowing him to explain for himself:

I used to see collapse happening for physical reasons, like resources and climate. Now I see it happening for psychological reasons, that the tasks necessary to keep the system going, are drifting too far from what anyone enjoys doing.

I used to be a doomer optimist, expecting the collapse of complex society to make a better world. Then I expected the big systems to muddle through the coming disasters and tried to figure out the details. My latest thinking is that the global economy will have a series of stairstep collapses, and nation-states are at risk, but high tech will survive and get weirder.

I used to think rural homesteading was a good idea. Then I noticed that almost everyone who tried it was unhappy and had to drive too much, and my strategy changed to getting a modest house in a city with cheap housing, with a yard for fruit trees. Now I'm improvising more than planning.

It is almost uncanny. Back to the track metaphor: each paragraph represents an important mental path I have been on, up to investing much time in research, experiments, and "bets".  And in each case, Prieur is so far ahead of where I have been stuck -- just grappling with the possibilities--  that he can sum up his ideas in elegant prose that reads like common sense.

Also, he is a master of frugality, or more accurately he used sort-term deprivation to build his nest egg, and then uses frugality to keep himself un-employable (able to not be employed).  A man really interested in workshopping the right rhetoric, he went with "dropping out" to describe what he did, though you can tell from his prefaces that he added later that he regretted that choice as well.  (My dear reader, read his essay carefully).  One of Prieur's most famous quotes on the web comes from that essay, and it deals just perfectly with the the questions of privilege that are wracking the brains of the younger millennials right now.

To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your "success" means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest.

===

Here are some of Ran's best ideas since he switched away from long-form pieces.

Basic Income Communities
On Political Myths
Road Trip Utopia

Examine Other Beauties

Early on in “Romeo and Juliet” Benvolio gives Romeo the excellent advice to “examine other beauties.”  I’m of course aware that Benvolio is talking about meeting other girls as a remedy to obsessing over one rejection.  But I also think the principle can be generalized to great effect.  Rather than getting caught up in one set-back, or worse, wallowing in whatever the culture of fear has put on the menu for you today -- seek out something beautiful from some other domain. 

It also interests me that Romeo and Juliet was written during the period that Shakespeare wrote what some call his lyrical plays, which also included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Richard II” and “Love Labour’s Lost.”

From Wikipedia:

These four plays are argued to represent a phase of Shakespeare's career when he was experimenting with rhyming iambic pentameter as an alternative form to standard blank verse; Richard II has more rhymed verse than any other history play (19.1%), Romeo and Juliet more than any other tragedy (16.6%) and Love's Labour's and Midsummer Night more than any other comedy (43.1% and 45.5% respectively).[112] All four tend to be dated to the period 1594–1595.

Having read these plays, I think Shakespeare was fascinated with how beauty could work on us, and what it’s limits were.  So I think that it’s possible, even likely that Benvolio’s advice came up because beauty was very much on Shakespeare’s mind as a philosophical concept.

So even if your mopey inner-teenager is telling you there is no way it can work, you might want to try to examine other beauties.

Un-Becoming a Non-Exerciser

If you exercise with great regularity, move along -- there is nothing to see here.

I, on the other hand, am trying to find a way for the habit to stick, and stay stuck until I am infirm, or dead.  I don't even know what number attempt this is, but I am writing this now because I think it might happen.  If I'm trying to be a positive person, I'd just say that I have not failed, I have simply gone through a bunch of ways that don't work.  Here's two ways I have failed in the past:


1) scheduling a day to lift and then giving the correct amount of ample rest (see The Four Hour Body).

Every time I did this, I would eventually stop working out, and then a cycle of guilt and depression would do the rest.   (I am coming to grips with how powerful that cycle has been in my life.  It will probably be an upcoming piece).

2) using Seinfeld's don't break the chain technique with writing as well as exercise.

One of the greatest truths about the human condition, one with the greatest impact, is Jim Rohn's simple observation

What is easy to do is also easy not to do.

And that is what makes the don't break the chain technique one of the best things I can recommend.  It takes a simple habit and gives it increasing weight as you go.  It is easy to skip a day, but I'll at least thing twice before breaking a ten day streak.

To start the year, I bought two calendars at a dollar store, and was going to use one for exercise, and one for writing, making a chain of Xs for each day I did the activity.  In practice, I was only able to follow one at a time.  In January, I did some exercise.  And in February and March I got myself to do some writing, so that now my book ("book"?) I am working on sits at 12,000 words (a dissertation, my wife says).  To do this, however, I gave up on exercising, and in turn gave up on eating well, justifying it with a bunch of pseudo-intelligent but realistically dumb-as-hell reasons.  I was left feeling bad, and knowing I could feel better.

The other possible mistake is that I had both calendars in the garage.  I had worked to make the garage a great workshop and  I thought the area where my wife's car goes in could be an exercise area when the car isn't parked.  This all made the physical calendars a case of "out of sight, out of mind." I now use my google calendar to record my chain.

The Current Protocol 

I am using the Seinfeld trick (again here) and only on exercise.  For a day to count towards my chain, I have go through first a mobility and stretching routine based on the Sunrise Salutation and some warm ups I got from qi gong.  Then I either do cardio or one kind of lift (for example push ups, or kettle bell swings, or a hammer curl).  For the cardio to really count, I am looking for progress.  The strength stuff is just make it so it is an every day habit, with no excuses, which is something it looks like I have to do.

I was at 11 straight days when I wrote the first draft.  I am at 20 days now.

Daniel Norris, Eccentric and Frugal Baseball Player

A more artistic video called Offseason.

From an ESPN.com article:

Why, with seven figures in the bank, did he take an offseason job working 40 hours a week at an outdoor outfitter in his hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee? Would it do permanent damage to his back muscles to spend his first minor league season sharing an apartment with two teammates in Florida and sleeping only in a hammock? Why had he decided to spend his first offseason vacationing not on a Caribbean cruise with teammates or partying in South Beach but instead alone in the hostels of Nicaragua, renting a motorcycle for $2 a day, hiking into the jungle, surfing among the stingrays? And was that really a picture on Twitter of the Blue Jays' best prospect, out again in the woods, shaving his tangled beard with the blade of an ax?

This is his first day of spending as a millionaire:

 On the morning in 2011 when his $2 million signing bonus finally cleared, Norris was in Florida with the rest of the Blue Jays' new signees. All of their bonuses had been deposited on the same day, and one of the players suggested they drive to a Tampa mall. They shopped for three hours, and by the time the spree finally ended they could barely fit their haul back into the car. Most players had spent $10,000 or more on laptops, jewelry and headphones. Norris returned with only a henley T-shirt from Converse, bought on sale for $14. It's been a fixture of his wardrobe ever since.

Searcher's Internet, Feeder's Internet

I think it is useful to draw a distinction between a searcher’s internet and a feeder's internet.  I thought about calling the latter a “consumer’s internet” but 1) I like it sounding close to “bottom feeder” and 2) information isn’t really “consumed” in the sense that it is used up.  Think of that lovely quote by Jefferson :

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Furthermore, if we spend our time and energy propagating ideas, we wouldn't spend as much of our money on other things.  And we would use less resources.

This is the core basis of any optimistic scenario I see for humanity -- for all the ways corruption and wealth concentration works against human welfare there seems to be another force at play, offering potentially exponential increases in our understanding, the stuff of Buckminster Fuller's dreams and pronouncements.  This force is our hope, whereas greed and habits of domination are the threats to all but the smallest sliver of elites.

When I come to the internet to answer some question of mine, making for a searcher's internet, I almost always discover interesting new things, including some of the best websites.  I also feel more alive. However, when I spend my time with the bottom feeding internet, that lovely web 2.0/anti-social media churning item after item down the anxiety-fraught zombie slot machine, I almost never open up new paths.  And I almost always feel less alive than when I started,.

There are some interesting people on, say, twitter, but either they use it one-sidedly, or they have a much stronger sense of self than I do.  But even admitting that, I can never find a way to effectively filter for quality with anti-social media.  No matter what I do, I get too much of what I don't need, including a lot of things I really don't need.

Since I started developing these thoughts and my information diet, I have become much happier with the internet and my world has become a much more interesting place.

Round-Up #15

From Research

Great article on the how Americans might start having to pay the real cost of their waste now that China has restricted importing it.

The same author, Alana Semuels, explains why only 3% of American grocery sales are online and are liable to stay that way.

I was looking for a good post-mortem on Google Glass and liked the site where I found one --it's called The Conversation, and its articles are held in creative commons. I could see this round-up becoming more and more just a digest of The Conversation.  This have I added it to my best of the free internet list.

Aphorisms/Shorts

How sad it must be to live on such a poor information diet, and with so little self control, that you think it is the job of other people to prevent you from seeing spoilers.

Netflix: because you watched a documentary based on research and facts, you'd probably love to watch ten documentaries of nothing but conspiracy theory.

Is it really that difficult to understand that a tax cut when the budget isn't balanced is simply free money for rich people?