Wellsbaum.blog

Warm among ice

January 12th, 2022

A typical day (especially the last few years) invokes more pessimism than positivity. If freedom is living without anxiety, there seems to be little hope in sight.

The vortex of bad news dwindles our daily experience into a tiny nothingness. All the while, the elements of a meaningful future disappear into the mist.

But live long enough there’s eventually an uptrend, a revolution in bullish consciousness.

The sound of serenity and joy repurchases our imaginations. After all, didn’t they say this was the roaring twenties?

“Do thou, too, remain warm among ice.”
Moby Dick

We are witnessing a change of atmosphere that is more than enough to produce good vibes. Having toiled through gradations of stuckness –quarantine is a bitch — few seem to be going into the arena anymore thinking they’ll lose.

We leaned into the darkness but now we’re not falling for it. The secret of fortune is a blast out of the past. The emancipatory power of optimism creates a haven of durability.

The other life was cold as hell.
Dancing into happy accidents

January 11th, 2022

Life involves trial and error. Effort necessitates randomness.

To generate ideas, we must try something new. Otherwise, all the ideas remain locked up in would-be artifacts.

The triumph of humankind is freedom: to create, cooperate, and act.

We can see and measure success by dancing into accidents rather than stipulating certain conditions into the design.

If at first, we act, then we deduce.

Luck happens to the amateur as a reward for having fun, perceived talent, and an appetite for grit. Ignorance and passion are easy to come by, at least initially.

It all starts with dancing with the fear, whether by accident or design. And maybe, just maybe, the beginner graduates into a well-informed and skillful pro.
The burn of discontent

January 10th, 2022

Everything starts and ends from the burn of discontent.

We all have an inkling for something, a dormant enthusiasm, waiting to erupt so we can pour our hearts into it.

But the wait is killer. Toiling in anonymity while practicing in mediocrity needs a special kind of patience.

The resistance can only win at our own capitulation. The work is all that matters.

As they say, “the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

If self-promotion along the way helps one build up the confidence to ship, by all means, do it. We must seek the respect we deserve, even as we cringe at our past selves.

We serve as both the audience and actors in the play of life, a striving artist in a sea of countless faces and avatars. Feedback is welcome, not necessary, as the challenge lies within ourselves to compose the highest quality.

No one is going to announce our emergence. All we can ask for is to be consistent with our time.

Elsewhereness is for daydreamers. Showing up saves us from giving up. The only talisman is the heart and head work.
That which tints

January 8th, 2022

We don’t want to consume things too rich — otherwise, we get fat.

Hedonism is a distraction from distraction. None of those daily binge sessions amount to anything but a temporary enjoyment, an attempt to medicate some unconscious problem away.

The same goes with eardrums; anything that sounds good gets in the way of the business of living.

Yes, straight-shooters get the emotionally augmented dopamine hit from pursuing the sweet. But there are no cheat codes to achieving long-term serotonin. Open book tests amount to nothing without knowing where to look.

We hunt not for the solutions, but the right problems to solve. And to do that, we need to establish an environment unmoored from excessive stimulation and hand-fed answers.

The trick, it seems, if we are to remain healthy and do things that matter is to find something that creates an ambiance of balance while inspiring a modicum of doubt.

So we create a neutral yet complementary and seeming invisible setting, such as the color gray laced with an ambient soundtrack in the background.

Obscurity provides luminosity. A tint keeps one locked into space and time, producing a focus that widens the thinking and expands the mind to glowing originality.

If one needs to power off to achieve alertness (re: aliveness), follow through. The pleasure of wanting the moment anticipates its existence. Maintaining a mental harmony within the shades of our surroundings is the best place to engage our internal weather.
Collecting and craft

January 4th, 2022

Friction is the great stabilizer. We need just enough technology to enable creation while constricting our attention to the gusts of other content.

The emergence of shiny new apps and devices often throws our work into disarray. Sometimes it’s the basic pen and paper (typewriter, anybody?) is all that’s required to induce focus.

The same “less is more” philosophy applies to consumption. We are more likely to be distracted when reading on the smartphone than perusing a physical book. How many Kindle books go unread due to other attention merchants (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) intercepting our thinking?

On top of this, who owns those digital books should Amazon cease to exist? We build up pixel libraries only to see our rented objects disappear into the dustbin of cloud servers.

The frustration of the digital world lies in its unfettered Balkanized packaging, where platforms may remain agnostic but resist PDF neutrality. We can’t finish nor find anything anyway because of the confused mass. The internet never ends.

Our work and collections need a type of slowed-down linear simplification. Books, music, NFTs – owned, created, rented, and consumed – move at a tremendous pace of novelty with most pieces, like our attention spans, scattered and promptly forgotten.
The creator’s secret sauce

December 31st, 2021

As creators, we strive for the highest quality of experience. We like to enter an imaginative zone and let the energy pour out when we get to work.

Some make for the audience, others craft without the intention of succeeding — complete freedom. Both parties can produce the unpredictable and still break the mold.

We are lucky to have this time to hold the tools of Gods in our hands. The computer — that bicycle of the mind — and the internet — that flattener of the world — are enablers that few could fathom.

Yet, how easy it is to become the tools of our tools.

Artificial intelligence is a potential glitch in mental software, as we destroy our natural thinking muscles for the sake of assistance and speed. A machine based on the human brain seeks only the obvious angles. It also mistakenly acts out the worst of mankind, whether through mass formation psychosis or through a deliberate trip in the wires.

The future wants to see what we can make with our little hands, from code and pixels to hardware. Patient with results, impatient with action, the field is always available to those who reason from first principles.

How to invent something new? For starters, play with what we’ve got. Resourcefulness, curiosity, pertinacity, uniqueness — these are some ingredients that may one day save the world from digital dystopia.
A simulation of self

December 28th, 2021

The neural synchronization between individuals — we can talk to each other without saying a word. The brain emits answers, and humans reap the rewards of non-confrontation. Silence is a form of communication.

What we can’t signal is the reflection of our unexamined desires. Such remain hidden in the caverns of the dormant self, the unconscious. At the heart of it all sits a person and a self-portrait they are still working on. We are the audience.

So why is self-talk so broken? If we can simulate a conversation with a stranger, we can interpret the inner-narrative, allowing the purest expression of the human self. Perhaps we are suffering from too much closeupness.

There are white fountains at the end of the mind. But only if we cease the wrestling with identity. We usually think before deciding how to react and trip over ourselves. Life, like writing, is freest at the tip of observation and flow.

The geometry of thought says that when we put our minds in the world, the environment unshackles all the hesitation and self-doubt for us. Honesty is a perfect medicine, for it has no disabling convictions but real life. It saves us from drowning in the simulation of self.
The great gambling game

December 24th, 2021

The full functionality captivates its players, keeping them coming back with the intent of trying to conquer it.

The game of life poses the most rhetorical question. And it behooves us to answer its frustrating riddle rather than be tricked into combating it.

Whether we ruminate about the past or worry about the future, it’s all-important we remain flexible in the present. Living in the now is admirable, as Joan Didion reminds us, “because every day is all there is.”

The biggest gamble is not putting what we have into good use. How well something performs is less important than just getting some enjoyment out of it before it runs stale.

Quieting the negative thought loops is already a challenge in itself. We’re better off employing doubt as to silence any regret.
The social variant

December 21st, 2021

Nothing is understood in isolation – people make ideas boom or bust. Our orientation is social in nature.

Most people dismiss new forms of thinking. They don’t want to wreck the status quo, doing everything they can to buck the fear of being uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, we’re all too connected to prevent the spread. It’s all yet another reminder of what tiny place we occupy in this universe.

At least we lucked out and inherited minds. Before brains and bonest, humans were mere pond scum. The God(s) decided to release homo sapiens from the prison of biology. Now we are contrived animals floating on the petri dish called Earth.

No wonder there’s always a spike in humility when we try to control nature. The well-greased creative force is out of our hands, no matter what idea viruses spawn to try and prove otherwise.

Instead of fighting the disease and watching it from a distance, we learn to live with it. That’s only because any antidote to the indifference to learning and science gives us superpowers.
Above the rim

December 19th, 2021

The imitative instinct drives one into a field of copycats. It doesn’t take a miracle to mimic previous forms produced by someone else.

But it does take a lot of courage to be different. If one gets lucky, magic will cluster together with the advantage of creativity, discovery, and innovation.

One is at their best when they’re most uncomfortable yet float confidently in the trek. Because the fun begins just before the feet touch terra firma.

The security of insecurity, the absence of safety, and the peril of doubt are what provide the helping hand. That’s what rolling up the sleeves and facing the world with impressive persistence is all about.

Hanging in the air is where life is most exciting. Amid the uncertainty, the trick to feeling more alive is simply feeling unresolved. It’s the herd of the content who are touched down with storytelling. They are also liars.
The free-acting individual

December 16th, 2021

Anonymity is a blessing in disguise. There’s a lot of pretense in signaling past accolades.

Success in one role inhibits the other. People like to put gems in boxes to store them away for safekeeping down the road. But identities change, and plans evolve because people are elastic.

The great mismatch is how others perceive us versus who we know we are. The individual remains the most radical space of possibility. A single direction misleads and dilutes effort.

One wants diversification to be ONE of many to avoid being crushed inside by the perils of average. Certain states of soul are inimitable from robots.

Instead, what one wants is the combined relevance gained through exploration. No one ever regretted trying, as the effort typically leads to something else. From one interesting thing to the next, if only to prevent chasing sameness down the river for gold.
The probable oddity

December 13th, 2021

Her look went beyond centuries, but so did her footwork. She demanded to stand out in a sea of sameness, to dive in a forest of waves rather than swim in the treadmill of pools.

As society hallows each of us out, we must try harder to excavate a sense of special pride. Having first raged against the machine, the striving for excellence grows harder.

One has to lead a disciplined life of creativity to give birth to insightful stars. The secret of prolific output is daily practice while keeping an increased openness to new experiences.

The probability of emerging “different” is slim. Because the tranquility that comes from being rendered a stereotype is too joyful to pass up.