Wellsbaum.blog

Double or nothing

March 13th, 2022

The best art deserves the long look, just as the best books earn a re-read. The second our surroundings pull us out of a desultory scan and compel interpretation, we learn twice as much.

Pausing (and thinking deeply) is integral to the learning process. Disfluency extends the hesitation and augments the meaning.

We’re not all vacuum cleaners. The mind mulls over the information before chewing it up and gutting it of its value proposition. Which parts present facts, theories, pointlessness, and interest?

The student seeks links between disciplines, converting thoughts and abstractions that seem real into practicable experiments.

The educated want to dabble relentlessly in freedom of movement. Rolling wakefulness increases the desire to inspect wide-ranging interests. Curiosity is like breathing, and it unlocks all possibilities.

It pays to be both a generalist and a specialist, a fox and a hedgehog, as they complement each other. With the best intentions, we observe and make sense of all kinds of outside stimuli.
Never enough peace

March 11th, 2022

The world is a slow-methodical GIF loop that suffers from nasty jolts. The map is artifice; an illusion of safety that tempts the tyrants to remake boundaries.

We spent two years social-distancing, at home hovering under flattened time and held together by screens of electronic bondage only to get invited to the worst party in our lives: war, the maw of nature. As if we needed a further test of our aliveness.

Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

History teaches man to make new mistakes, even in the face of those horrific blunders stuck in living memory. Despite rotting like rope bridges, the past teems with patient anticipation and waits its turn to be recycled.

There’s no such thing as too much peace. Neither is there never enough action to preserve it. The hegemon(s) keeps the international order at bay. Therefore, the bully’s goal is to test his most principled opponents through scaremongering tactics designed to undermine the status quo.

The itch to spread one’s tentacles adds further piquancy when scratched.

The war of words gives shape to a doctrine of aggression while amygdalas fire on all cylinders. Unperturbed, the dog marks ground in every nook and cranny — whatever it takes to feel safe.

The imperialist demands control of the stage. Everyone else is a puppet, his own cronies — lemmings — learning to climb the ladder into dark skies. To be sure, the aggressor throws their body into participation with no fear of consequences.

War reduces people to their basest instincts; it also wipes the slate clean and restarts the most ‘august imagination.’

But attrition defeats the short-war delusion of the aggressors. Peace stands a chance, as hope grinds out murmurs of memory and perception that fend off ruin and help build more robust operating systems.
Let it roll

March 6th, 2022

We remain stuck in a rolling process, moving along despite taking on the beatings of market forces. The gyrations try to wash us out to the point we capitulate into the sea.

We only drown when we try too hard to control outcomes. Curious yet complicated, letting go of gravity and force seems the only way to stay afloat.

Never taking it easy, we proceed with the business of living, patiently waiting for time to fill in the gaps.

Life intends to be savored to the point of sensing the individual flavor notes. To develop any hardened concentration, we need to act more like the tortoise than the hare. The more opportunities we take to pause and search our minds, the better.

The stakes are far too high for a head-rush. Dopamine gets consumed and swiftly forgotten. Instead, we want to stay balanced while surfing the rolling swells of structured serotonin levels.
Creativity is for the uncertain

March 1st, 2022

Creativity is an all-in, imaginative process that prides itself on chasing the unknown. So we proceed in a random fashion, anticipating discovery through trial and error.

Most people want to repeat what they ordered in the past. And they get upset when something new disrupts their banal yet predictable everyday menu.

Certainty is too darn comfortable.

Furthermore, innovation can be frustrating, especially when what we foresee in our heads rarely comes out in the labor of our hands. But it’s that gap between what’s tangible and fantasy that compels creators to stretch their noses rather than watch from a distance.

Instinctively, we know when we’re on to something when we can identify a void in knowledge and sense patterns. Moving around in this world, climbing ladders, and reaching distant branches bring us closer to the richest fruits.

The creator is one who often experiences self-division. But what breaks us also reinforces a felt cohesiveness. Had we known where to go, we’d never stumble upon the bewildering mixtures of experiences.

The reward for all thinkers and doers is self-growth. With change being the only constant, we can only anticipate what happens next.
The role of the creator

February 22nd, 2022

Content creators are also content keepers. Like DJs, they find pleasure in curating the web for hidden gems.

The internet offers a treasure trove of interesting artifacts just waiting for perusal. So the creator notices, samples, and recasts subjects into something completely new.

Everything is a remix, built on the stems of previous forms. The end product may not be truly original, but it’s hardly theft. Previously buried in the graveyard of dead blogs, old ideas reemerge and get nurtured into clever hybrids.

Making media is the process of making sense of the profundity of content. We see patterns and connections by revisiting and jumping around in our collections. Synthesizing helps consolidate information in our consciousness and headspace.

There’s no reason to squirrel away notes and observations for our own safekeeping. We needed to know about Darwin’s finches. If the ideas never get shared, do they even exist?

The creator takes on the extreme privilege to ensure media never gets lost in the data shuffle. They tread carefully, preserving and categorizing information objects into something meaningful. The archive remains evergreen.

Creators exist to tell the short-sighted or too busy what’s what. Their job is to explore the known and strange things. Dissecting what’s overly overconsumed, overlooked, advertised, and unseen is an art that helps keep culture humming.
Divided by tribes, sprinkled into individuals

February 15th, 2022

Every mass system eventually morphs into tribes, balkanizing in the form of nation-states, denominations, political parties, and social media cliques. Those unproselytized, perhaps charged with individualism, eventually convert one way over the other.

Even crypto enthusiasts suffer from waves of hyper-transmission. With high fives and pats on the back, bitcoin maximalists scream ‘up only’ to calcify their self-selecting, self-reinforcing belief network.

Whatever harvests attention — religion, Bitcoin, our favorite sports team — shapes one’s perspective on most categories in life. Groupthink encourages every member to participate in the conversation.

Partisanship is mostly immutable. But what happens when the memory glue unsticks; the book loses its freshness, the perfume’s toxicity wears off, and the chemicals of attraction dissolve.

At some point, we have to be able to stand apart from the whole thing and develop our own thesis. Even 8-hours workdays are a myth, a product of an industrial midcycle.

The synchronization of time may be the only equalizer. For everything else, we mainly disagree. The image of collective minds and identities poses a challenge at the individual level. Different is attractive.

The purpose of ideas is to make better friends with ourselves, to carve our own little circle amid a large box of strangers.
A pace to play

February 11th, 2022

The world is covered with assholes. How do we build the confidence up to shuck them without stabbing ourselves?

At first, we take small risks. And then we let them compound into a catalog of fortified emotions. Drip by drip, the audacity of hope builds into a fortress of perspective.

Once in awe of our capabilities, our concerns feel smaller. We become less anxious and more courageous despite pending hurdles. The future is predictably unpredictable, so we chin up, chest out, and clench fists.

Once we pick a craft that frames who we are, a personality stitched together by invention and creativity, can we become artifact-collecting students instead of feeling lost by AI-powered software. Let the robots remain vocationally challenged.

Developing the pace to play, no matter how intimidating, makes possible a reason and route for being. We must remain fundamentally competitive and maintain a buffet of skills to stay upright.
The agony of choice

February 9th, 2022

People crave the ability to do things in order to get unstuck from old forms. However, the pursuit of novelty is no prerequisite for action.

Instead, it’s often the constraints that improve our creativity. Take the computer (or smartphone) for instance — it’s our one tool for listening to music, watching a movie or live sports, networking with people, reading the news, and writing or making beats.

We encounter the verbal and the visual and take the role of producer and consumer by skipping from app to app. The phone converged everything yet prolonged the agony of choice.

Hmmm pic.twitter.com/OgZwJ6VWJu
— Mira Crisp (@misscrisp) January 23, 2022

Within this instant pot of entertainment and information output comes a fusion of distraction, offering conflicting experiences and places, all of which take us away from our primary object: to do the work.

One may try to medicate their problem away with Ritalin or other substances promoting focus. Yet, it’s the process of intensive iteration of “less is more” that produces flow.

We have to build workstations and practice routines that are conducive to single-tasking. Too loose a barrier — like keeping one’s phone within reach — allows one to easily pass through to the other side, congested.

This post isn’t a recommendation to throw your phone into the ocean and buy a typewriter unmoored from wifi and a wall charger. The linearity of what constitutes a desk died in a format-shifting world. It’s about building better habits that reduce all the noise so the work can get done as efficiently as possible. Remember, artists ship.

Amid boredom and connectivity lies a flexible gate that enforces attention with intention. The internet never stops. The bicycle of the mind is always pedaling. In times of calamity and technological abundance, we recall that knowledge is a process: one that takes sitting down, setting the clock, and using just a few productive things to do our best work.

We are the tools of our tools. And we use only those that pave a road to sanity, allowing deeper thinking and ingenuity.
Despite all the rage

January 30th, 2022

Expression isn’t always vocal. It bleeds inexorably into other avenues of creativity.

Take the painter, for instance. Some prefer to let the paintbrush and canvass do all the talking. The same actionable output can be said for writers, cartoonists, coders, architects, athletes, etc.

Life often manifests itself in a piece of art. All one’s optimism and disappointment get entangled into a froth of patterns fraught with mixed or stark colors.

In times of creative paralysis, the output can be pure chaos, less dependent on preferences, and more explicitly playful. Frustration can mistakenly tiptoe into a stretch zone. One keeps going, perhaps, even more, when they feel overloaded.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.
Gustave Flaubert

The craft is part coping mechanism and part exercise machine. The process of making art shakes us out of the banality of life and ignites a wholehearted presence through a form of externalized self-talk. The trapeze performer can’t afford to be half-awake.

The work is a form of therapy that speaks for itself. Art, as expressed in many different forms, is how we reclaim our mind when spoken words won’t do.
Intent to discover

January 24th, 2022

Working out our ideas in public, whether via a speech or blog post, is an opportunity to dance with fear. The amygdala senses nothing but survival when the stakes are drawn in the continuous present.

Luckily, taking on vulnerability and accountability often leads to something of value. Starting before we’re ready begs the question: what else is possible when we put our mind to it?

When we actively perform, we have something to play with, revise, and perfect. Practice is a magical power that sharpens our discipline and improves our craft.

Of course, there are many periods of consolidation. There’s typically an apex and then a dip in form, the latter compelling us to keep learning and keep going despite inevitable gaps in knowledge. The more we know, the more we need to know. We come prepared to discover.

Making stuff means showing up and expecting to get trammeled by pernicious doubt, distractions, and feelings of inadequacy. We have to surrender to the possibility of sucking. What if the labor of love is a waste of time?

We invest in the work with the intent to discover who we are, explore possibilities, to reap the rewards of persistence. The hardest part awaits further.

As they say, the road is better than the end. They don’t tell you that enough along the way, or maybe the advice falls flat because fledglings are too perpetually restless to listen.
Nothing is mappable

January 18th, 2022

Looking back, as if all the traits were heritable and therefore traceable. But nothing is so mappable.

We contain a bundle of qualities that shift with time. As life goes on, what’s inherited yields to different flavors of personality. As Henry James put it, “Nothing is my last word on anything.”

A new challenge is always lurking, presenting another opportunity to make us feel lost. Thankfully, interior navigation knows best how to deal with the labyrinth of life.

If we refuse to adapt or become too lazy, we die. Indifference to learning kills the educated man.

“The map is not the territory,” Alfred Korzybski once remarked. The mental model is the ultimate purveyor of fiction, often confused with reality itself.

All it takes is a slight paper tear to nix the whole idea of geographic concreteness. Yet, most people remain transfixed on static, for nothing appears real until it appears on television anyway.
The debugger break method

January 14th, 2022

The work isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it just keeps coming, and it doesn’t care that our energy is as fickle as the weather. Our productivity ebbs and flows to the whims of the daily grind.

But there is one thing we can do to bring back focus: take a break, preferably an active one, even if it lasts just one minute.

A simple pause not only recharges but also stimulates our thinking. Why?

Doing something else like reading a book, doing pushups, eating an apple, going for a walk, grabbing a coffee, etc. provides just enough space to unleash our mind from the prison of chronic over-thinking.

Our dominant narrative and behavior are often on autopilot, which may be suitable for flow but bad for seeking clarity. Rest is a form of deviation, a pivot that shocks everydayness just enough before returning to baseline happiness.

“We like lists because we don’t want to die,” once wrote Umberto Eco. Whether it’s to our work and/or others, responsibility makes us feel important and keeps us alive. After all, good thoughts come from action.

But the extra awareness and restoration that comes from pause, to destress, unthink, and debug our heads, may help us see things just a little clearer.