Wellsbaum.blog

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.
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.