Wellsbaum.blog

Writing takes guts

August 8th, 2022

Writing is a bitch. It takes routine, grit, and lots of induced anxiety to show up every day and put pen for paper. There’s a reason few do it: it’s depressing.

But for those who do, like runners, consistency means everything. Putting words together is like jogging the brain; working on prose keeps the artist one step away from lunacy.

Writing, as in life, is a rough draft. Remaining wide-eyed in an uncontrollable universe, we dare to make new mistakes.

The scribe is on a mission of discomfort, but the outpouring of ink is a form of therapy. Each blank piece of paper begins without a plan — well, maybe a hunch — and then, slow and steady, the words fill the page with imperfection and uncertainty. Bird by bird, the continuous present churns the valve of frustration.

Writing is an extension of breathing — an activity for sweating creativity. Surrender to it and get a share of its spoils.

No one is more insane than the person who opts for the struggle. But that’s what a true writer does. They sit in a chair and produce something from nothing, and interruptions are damned if not welcomed to break the deliberate intensity. The most challenging part of the writing process is getting started.

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open,” advises Stephen King. Writing is an invention on screen. Stare into the light long enough, and the letters jumble into pixels of starlings. Blink, and the brain momentarily goes into a fog; any words will do. Even in the poorest form, one still has something to play with.

The artists grows tired and unmotivated, of course. The dark clouds hang over the pen with the slightest silver lining. The resistance tries to pickpocket our attention by telling us we suck and that the sentences are worthless. Just buy bitcoin and work at Mcdonald’s, they said. How selfish is it to think other people care about what we have to say, anyway?

The words greet those bold enough to wrestle with them. But when one’s called to their vocation, they’re roped in — to the odd, banal, abstract, empty, and off limits. Invested is an understatement.
Memes are a hurricane of influence

August 1st, 2022

A meme is a hurricane of influence. It finds a human host, a signal booster, who spreads the meme before it takes on a life of its own.

Historically, words are the simplest of memes, necessitating a language of thought. But most memes today are visual concepts manifested in viral images shared on social media.

These images might be misunderstood — birthed from snarky Redditors before they become part of the online zeitgeist. The most transmissible, like human genes, are the ones that reproduce.

Memes, like any mimetic behavior, are less essential for thought. These contagious representations celebrate culture but bankrupt it too. Here, the adage rings true: images speak louder than words.

Reveling in the same memes standardizes how we dance, which is usually unique and personal. The psychological elements of herd mentality create a flurry of uncreative behavior.

The hive mind synchronizes with a remixed version of the internet’s infinite archives until originality loses its course. What’s viral rarely retains or sustains.

Memes offer a special kind of amassed perception, a snapshot of culture, without supplying something vital in return. We want to pursue things that are different and extend our learning. For that, we deviate toward what is radical and what is possible.
The bright rush of ideas

July 26th, 2022

Where do good ideas come from, and how do they form? They come from extensive research bolstered by the ability to connect the dots between knowledge and different experiences.

Good ideas form through time, osmosis, long walks, boredom, and the misheard; a fruitful combination of work, rest, and fearless play.

Maintaining curiosity motivates part of the unconscious; quieting the monkey mind delivers interesting ideas that err on openness and possibility. It is ignorance, like indifference, that portends a slow grind downward.

Not everyone cares about learning or showing compassion. Most people seek entertainment, amusing themselves to death. They seek minus knowledge and construct a self-narrative dependent on suppressing emotions. What they don’t know bars the synchronicities, making them “stronger.” In reality, they are less than average.

First-class minds, however, are prepared to confront their stupidity and adopt the perspectives of others so they can see the other side.

Only when people realize that there’s a solution for insouciance and stuckness — called EFFORT — is it too late. To remain active in imagination and love is to stay wide awake. People need each other because they need ideas.

We wield the baton and conduct our senses, coloring the world with our eyes. Immersion constitutes a sense of self, making all the difference in discovering the bright chunks of ideas waiting to emerge.

Awareness is a kind of anti-paralysis, liberating over-thinkers from the tyranny of thought and providing them a passport to freedom.
The invention of things

July 18th, 2022

Most creativity depends on building on top of what’s already there.

Novelty exploits and aggregates preexisting stems to manufacture new and different, which is all people pay attention to.

However, what’s new isn’t always copy-pasta, nor is it always welcome. Most inventions and reinventions are dull and undeluded, shocking just at their orientation.

No to new

Newness intercepts everyday exposure by stressing out the senses. For instance, the red stop sign is ubiquitous, obeyed, yet trite and overlooked.

Convert that sign into a magenta-based pentagon, and drivers face an awkward, uncomfortable practice. Paying attention to the road becomes a nuisance again.

We like banal conditions because they rule out the fuss. We dislike unfamiliar territory because of the time it takes to adapt. Refamiliarization triggers an accelerated grimace.

The brain, initially in denial, processes routines slowly before absorbing them. At first, we deny, and then we surrender. Just look at the prevalence of masks during Covid. Initially rejected, the spread begged the normality of N95s to enforce obedience.

Norms are the arbiters of enforcement. Rules are rules, hence the difficulty of going blind to the status quo. As authorities relax and the masks drop, bare face reigns supreme again.

We are conscious automata, often forced to revisit severe control issues that screw up our mental hardware. The least groundbreaking disruption is welcome only to test our patience and wake everyone up again.
Swallowing the elements

July 4th, 2022

Deliberately bad, mashed up, distorted like a Francis Bacon painting.

Ugly art brings the worst of our subconscious to the fore as a means of hobbling our concentration. It goads people into fully grasping how they feel, like a good old-fashioned puke, where the vocal cords saddle up and ride a ribcage as tight as body armor.

“It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done,” once said Oscar Wilde. Art offers the best revenge for both maker and consumer; both parties bring all their beliefs and biases to any situation.

The serpents continue to slither for their niche audience. After all, the frequency and provocation are what keep the momentum going. And the ideal viewer is more present and emotionally detached; curiosity is not neutral.

The interested student pays scrupulous attention to detail regardless of their mood. The scrutinizer’s eyes scan unemotionally and reward the work with a second look.

The most interesting pieces deserve the utmost attention, as each subsequent blink brings forth undiscovered light, shade, textures, and other materials. To see and “think different” help swallow the elements.

What remains unenforcible is sophistication. Appreciating context and complexity is vital — experience, education, and temperament bring to the purview everything.
Tackling the brain’s anxiety bias

June 28th, 2022

We take out the wind of anxiety by going toward the fear. The nerves left alone in anticipation, attrit our resistance with cruel swiftness.

Uncertainty pervades all those who wish to consult it and acquiesce.

The only way forward is to adopt the most extreme outcome and hyperbolize it. That’s right — export the scariest story from the human mind to inhibit its effectiveness.

Why simulate threatening stimuli? Repetition reduces the brain’s anxiety bias to what it is: ridiculousness.

Don’t fight the fear

Fight the fear, and one will lose. Never absent, we can nonetheless take all of our worries for a dance.

Age sucks up experience like vacuum cleaners until we’re not afraid. Fear, once a magnetized rod, loses its edge. Live long enough, and we all gain the magical power of perseverance.

Pushing through the CRAP (criticism, rejection, assholes, pressure) becomes an act of rebellion, a culmination of counter reflexes that help stem the doubting disease.

Feel the dread and do it anyway — the stoic, accustomed to tension, respond to the world as it is and works through it.
We are nobody’s establishment

June 20th, 2022

Good, bad, and ugly — honesty is what’s at stake. Of course, we strive for the perfect edited self. But such is a fallacy, as even influencers have adopted the strategy of no-makeup makeup.

Social media intends to captivate and drive mimetic desire. But all marketers are liars, as are the followers who buy the story. The sense of promise is a specter of underachievement. The amateur gets wrecked at nervous speed.

The truth is that some people inherit their success through luck and then repackage the rags to riches narrative. Their advice merely sounds good; all prescriptions are subjective. We never hear recommendations from those that fall down frequently and stay poor.

In reality, most people inherit the faith in discipline and engage in various activities to discover their worthy practice. Because there are no shortcuts, there are only ideas that we must exhaustively test in real life that lead us to a vocation.

Consistency is key, as the compounding magic of repetition leads to breakthrough solutions. Life’s work fuses diligence and passion. One advances with the trial and error approach of a scientist.

The shift from copying to advancing unique abilities separates individuals from the herd. Greatness builds from assertion and celebrates the differences. We are nobody’s establishment, for a good reason.
Strength through struggle

June 13th, 2022

Everything we know we learn from our handicaps. They are far better teachers than strengths. As the author Bernard Malamud quipped, “if you haven’t struggled, you haven’t yet lived.”

Mental illness, speech impediments — these brain sprains muddle thoughts and make life hard to read. But the cognitive tips and tricks we use to cope with these vulnerabilities form a chemical miracle. We’ll never be able to medicate our problems away. Managing the dialectic keeps us cognitively flexible, unlike our reassured counterparts who often shatter in hubris.

How and why God selected us to suffer — no one ever wishes an illness on another — is a mystery. Spirituality aside, the misfortune lies within our genes; personality traits get hard coded into our DNA. Experience teaches us to channel the anxiety positively rather than get swallowed by the elements.

We live inside ourselves; we know that striving to fix a handicap merely pushes us over the edge. Striving for acceptance alleviates frustration. Active hope is a survival strategy that calcifies endurance and propels effort. We age, with all the scars, into an admirable aura. We fight to win.

Dwarfed by the elements, there’s only more to gain by developing psychological instruments. How we react and manipulate the downside makes us humble and nimble creatures. Freedom from constraint is quite simply overrated. If life were so easy, we wouldn’t know how to be awake.
Passion project be damned

June 6th, 2022

The banality of doing what we’re told gets bottle-necked at the top of free will. Eventually, one balks at the factory of someone else’s to-do lists.

We do what punctures the heart. When we feel compelled to create life intentionally, the very bottom of our souls opens up.

But outsourcing the work to robots is still in the incipient stages. Most humans are the cogs buttressing somebody else’s PnL in exchange for pellets. Cash is the hard-earned trade-off for subservience. We’re just trying to get paid so we can eat!

The freedom to play is not just reserved for starving artists, though. We can earn sex and cash simultaneously; do what we like and get paid for it.

“Try not to get a job,” pleads Brian Eno. “Try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things you want to do with your time and where you take maximum advantage of wherever your possibilities are.”

Advice is always easier said than done, given its subjective context and self-reinforcing nature. It’s more challenging to identify the work we genuinely enjoy than to find a job for work’s sake. True wealth only becomes a panorama of free time after finding our true North Star.

No passion, no life project

Any struggle in which we can maintain our excitement while driving forward the human spirit regardless of mistakes or misfortune is worth chasing. When combined with grit, the quantity of hope takes on a quality of its own.

Placing creative freedom and happiness at the center of our commitment to life helps resolve personal tensions. The liveness of a passion project is just that — it can’t be forced — and provides our best chance to inject some meaningful serum into our lives.
Hope is a hedge against reality

May 23rd, 2022

We live in anticipation. The worker who looks forward to a vacation is probably far happier and more productive than one who toils away without the slightest carrot of free time dangling in their future.

Without lying to ourselves, how do we unlock the treasure of hope (of more time, more freedom, and other imagined scenarios, etc.) without fabricating it? Hope is a hedge; it sees the world for all its doom yet remains wide-eyed to know that bad times don’t last forever. The survivalist exploits hope to revenge against reality.

On the other hand, doubt is a disease that inhibits our perception of the world. It wants us to play it safe, do nothing, or persist through hell on a slow downward grind. Thankfully, the emotional muscle grows resilient to attacks of uncertainty and pessimism over the years.

Anxiety also gets pretty boring. People want to discover new things about themselves and their capabilities. So we take on new challenges and learn to be more patient.

As cliche as it sounds, hope offers something even if our eyes fail to see it. Experience teaches us that results take time and that failure is an opportunity in disguise. Every endeavor is another chance to uncover an unexpected twist.
The shared intimacy of the individual

May 16th, 2022

Behavior operates at the amygdala level. Without conscious interpretation, we either fight or run away.

Instead, what we seek is more constructive: long-term serotonin levels that strengthen emotional agility. Once we develop kinship between our senses and surroundings, we can level set and carry on when things go against us.

There will always be those resistors who share a desperate need to assert their own solipsism. It’s easy and tempting to fall for impulse and avoid cooperation in the daily saga of Prisoner’s Dilemma. But just as the clock synchronizes everyone’s day, patience, nuance, and collaboration are unifying traits with many-to-many broadcasting in play.

It may be trite to say, but it pays to be nice. While strict mandates are enough to convince people to do good — lest they go to jail — most people want to do what’s best for society. However, it is illuminating to note that the individual can still cultivate a unique identity as part of the greater collective.

Being different is applauded, as the mechanics of risk-taking and breaking things is a hallmark of innovation. One can still play by the rules in the most rebellious phase of their life. The hard part is being misunderstood for a catalog of years.

Some people prefer to go it alone, not for conceit or snobbery, but for the sake of standing for something rather than nothing. What’s good for one often benefits the whole, as the audience catches up to the characteristics of the most alive forms.
When hearts and minds realign

May 9th, 2022

We are exchanging advice, ideas, and information all the time, in effect trading minds with each other. Yet, within that knowledge transfer also oozes emotion. Stress is as contagious as a sneeze.

If a family member or we bring tension home, it spreads like a virus to everyone in the house. The obstacle becomes an instant distraction from what’s good: the experience of togetherness.

Rather than deal with problems directly, screen time becomes a short-lived panacea by alleviating discomfort. But as the results show, the candy-colored apps and variable rewards are more likely to thwart happiness.

Alone, together, relationships dwindle. And then, if left to inertia, they go off track. Instead of investing in our preferred future, we forfeit. Capitulation seems inevitable when the going gets tough.

But hope neither denies suffering nor pain. While the build back can be unsettling, facing up to the unavoidable can be consoling. Instead of waiting for the storm to pass, we err on the side of freedom and dance in the rain.

We become moored to the promise, wandering chaotically until perception realigns with an attractor. Neurons reciprocate and fire at each other in the same synchronized manner. The telepathy ensues, even if it all still feels detached. With just a little bit of mindful reawakening, we break the chain of events that beget unhappiness and play our way back into the mirror of love and trust.

Nothing changed at the end of the day but the staying power of stress, directly toxic to health, as it buffeted the seas of peace. The primary barriers were self-imposed. Intrinsically, the heart kept beating with near-perfect reliability. It just needed the beautiful struggle to wake it up again.

No to new

Don’t fight the fear

No passion, no life project