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Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

  • The invention of things

    July 18th, 2022
    The invention of things

    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
    Swallowing the elements

    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
    Tackling the brain’s anxiety bias

    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
    We are nobody’s establishment

    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
    Strength through struggle

    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
    Passion project be damned

    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
    Hope is a hedge against reality

    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
    The shared intimacy of the individual

    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
    When hearts and minds realign

    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.

  • The brilliance in absurdity

    May 2nd, 2022
    The brilliance in absurdity

    The synergy between brilliance and absurdity is one of the paradoxes of our time. One can’t be crazy without being wickedly smart. Thinking different isn’t supposed to compute.

    For the innovator, experimentation is the antidote to perfectionism. Trial and error is a mechanism for chance discovery. The right answer is a function of the mistakes.

    The great mismatch between man’s mental software and that of a machine comes down to human fallibility. The genius, trapped within their own realities, is ignorant enough to accommodate the messy unknown. It’s precisely this disconnectedness that makes their perspective wondrous and beautiful.

    The mind remains unique in knowledge accumulation despite all its neuronal connectors resembling the tangled intricacy of machines. The intuition pump that drives combinatorial creativity still does circles around artificial intelligence. Humans thwart all those chips and wires with various voltage levels of curiosity.

    Yet, the emergent output patterns are nowhere near normal for everybody. The nerds and outsiders must be motivated to deploy their weirdness by giving a shit.

  • Thinking things through

    April 25th, 2022
    Thinking things through

    What we’re thinking of right now often feels of the utmost importance.

    Negative thoughts, in particular, turn passive onlookers into nervous inward-facing participants. The face twitch, lip biting, short breaths, full-bodied elsewhereness — says it all.

    The nerves light up like a Christmas tree, flaring internally on a rollercoaster of emotions. The brain gets stuck in gear, a sprain only that a transcendent redesign can heal.

    Thankfully the world challenges our inner landscapes, knocking us in different directions, often for the better — engaging in imaginative doom-musing gets pretty dull anyway. The tension of outside interruptions helps in breaking up the rote neural circuitry.

    The mind snatches the nearest pen to think things through. The beauty arrives with the movement; a flow crystalized into an arrangement. But it’s the delicate pause, the silence between the notes, giving way to mind blurbs that might be insightful.

    Thinking is a mysterious process.

    The mind vacuums and spits out everything in abundance: anxiety, doubt, optimism, and possibilities., creating a twister of emotion. Thankfully, disfluency has elbows, becoming a welcome distraction. Trapped between provocation and constriction, we finally settle down.

    Writing recenters thought from the chaos of the monkey mind and helps us decode the insanity of reality. The extra clarity allows us to put our insides out there more aggressively. We can, on the contrary, improve the quality of life through the grittiness of diverged thought.

  • Conformity as a preventative structure

    April 18th, 2022
    Conformity as a preventative structure

    The obvious remains invisible only because we choose to turn a blind eye to any framework that doesn’t align with our interests.

    Our minds crave homogenization. Even the misfits and activists who believe in no other cause than hope share tribal urges — there’s a strong instinct to join the pack.

    The herd outwits the individual, harnessing the enthusiasm of those who “think different” to change at will to match their surroundings.

    Any form of groupthink places the pillars of arrogance on a shaky footing. The makers and resistors of history become trapped within themselves, unable to self-distance from the magnet of lies. Meanwhile, the truth offers an avenue of escape.

    “The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”
    — Hugh Macleod 🐜 https://t.co/9lo6DLKohw

    — Wells Baum (@wells_baum) April 12, 2022

    How we expose ourselves to contradiction is a hallmark of first-class minds. Genius seeks exposure to assimilation and discord, spelling trouble for those algorithms that think they know us better than ourselves.

    “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. Some can live with ambiguity and paradox.

    Human behavior is complex. A worldview rarely lasts forever. “Strong opinions, loosely held” is a mantra that protects against the bulwark of algorithms gathering manipulative predictive data fragments. The marketer knows that a good story changes people’s minds.

    The brain is a three-dimensional plastic structure that explores variable modes as it cultivates new insights. We contain multitudes, logging in new interests daily. But only by tinting the air with elasticity can we charge ahead to see beyond any rigid structure.

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