Tag: society

A catalog of emotions

October 3rd, 2022

We live with a catalog of emotions, whipsawing between highs and lows. Most of the undulation is due to poor internal weather.

We are not neutral, pushed inside and outside by competing forces. One minute we’re a lover of rule-breakers with scrupulous indifference; the next, we’re just another lemming, a sheep jumping through hoops.

We don’t aim for mediocrity. We shoot for the range of emotion — that long-term serotonin of being ourselves.

What individuates the individual is the armor of absurdity. Uniqueness treads underrated, and brilliance shines at the edges. We stand in to stand out — dialectic reflections reinforce the true self, that which is original.

Everyone’s brain comes uniquely hardwired; the difference is what one decides to shed versus the flawed attributes one decides to radically accept. Under the delusion of reprieve, those confused and jealous never get bailed out.

Divergent thinking offers a sanctuary, sheltered from the periphery’s fabricated emotions. Never take anything personally from society’s grip — the standard is injurious and little more than noise. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, albeit sticky, remain detached from the Personal Legend that makes us stretch.
Together as spiritual completeness

September 26th, 2022

It is human desire to share. It is also human desire to compete. The two — cooperation and competition — bleed into each other to test human resolve.

One excels in their particular field to consume another’s comparative advantage. As soon as those walls close down, trouble is lit. Every man for himself, absolute freedom, begets pure paralyzing chaos.

So we invent realities, make laws and pacts, and develop a socio-economic hierarchy. We drink the liquid of tacit agreement, a mere human perception.

The fear of breaking the bond threatens the tissues that hold everything together. On the whole, we prefer to bathe in a murmuration of order rather than concede to germs. What the hell is going on?

As products of our environment, we seek spiritual completeness. We need inner peace to focus on what matters to us: our families, work, hobbies, etc.

Of course, life is not linear. Relapses, and dips, are expected. Some exposure to vulnerability keeps things alive. Yet, some spend their whole lives trying to master the self, breakable at a moment’s notice.

The paradox of stress is long-term durability. Constrictions stretch our zones of comfort. Power concentrates around the individual but dedicates itself to the mirror of others.

Despite our differences and quirks, working together is a form of art.
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.
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.
Unentangled preferences

October 22nd, 2021

Unentangled from our preferences, we run free to drift back and forth between disparate thoughts. After all, that is free will, the ability to hop like frogs on lily pads between choices — even rejecting the one we want on purpose.

The predetermined life is pretty dull, as any imagined utopia where patterns materialize to exactitude.

It’s human nature to get upset and disagree with our surroundings, even ourselves. After all, differences compelled us to communicate. Man wanted to create tools and cooperate, so hands and language converted everyone into thinkers, unleashed from the prison of biology.

Humans developed minds, competence, and emotions to make sense of the plastic society. There needed to be at least some standardization.

Only after we all agreed to agree could we go on being ourselves again.
Beyond logic, beyond greed

April 21st, 2021

Beyond logic, stuck on wishful thinking, bias, and irrationality — it’s no wonder the world divides into tribes.

The internet allows us to handpick the information we want and spit it back out to like-minded folks who amplify it.

The curator — the finder and organizer of information — shares as much power as the creator or influential leader.

Still, it’s usually the few who predetermine fate for the rest of society.

But we need the non-expert, outsider, the fans to dissect what’s fundamentally sound and flawed. Does the product fit the spirit of the times or is it chasing the pennies? Greed has its limits.

Playing with feelings of passion and anger offers richer routes to the truth. The plebeians present a muscular calm to the trying circumstances of big-league shallowness.

The commoner wants everything to feel authentic because it’s all they know. They are happy with their nonupgraded experience, as it is they who also decide which pieces of work and art have lasting value.

Fail to act on knowledge, and the moment dissipates. By forging ahead, the symptoms remain under control.
Don’t adopt other people’s anxiety

January 17th, 2021

We rely on other people’s testimony. It’s no wonder, therefore, that their anxiety becomes ours. We then cognize every piece of information to fit our nervy narrative.

Worries spread like viruses. And they provoke an unwarranted shock into mass health scares, money problems, and job pressures.

Humans are a strange and contradictory animal who can barely see through the apparition of fear. The brain’s chemicals are so easily triggered and duped.

Society is just the storyteller. It’s the citizens who exacerbate panic.

To avoid falling ill to anxiety’s publicity machine, we need to convert the abstract energy of positive motivation into something with meaning. We have to put a mental finger on the synchronicities between facts and hope.

People who can stay light and grounded without falling into the trap of the mind’s filmic productions know how to separate truth from fiction.

It’s the obedient clerks that manufacture all the negativity. It’s the interested folks that refuse to buy into the algae of stress.

Keep our perspective. It’s a passport to freedom.
The script, the story

April 1st, 2020

How many of us are just acting our way through life, adapting to different settings like chameleons?

Situational elasticity lends its hand to the collaborative truth, that people inject each other with signaling serum. The slightest twang, the tinkle of dimples, the cleanest tucked-in shirt, belt, and Prada shoes – we try to demonstrate to others ‘this is who I am and this what I do.’

All life is a stage, epitomized through the internet and curated social profiles, with many people reaping the psychological benefits of expectation. We become what we collect, mirror images of our Pinterest boards.

Don’t get it twisted. We should follow the route that builds up the most confidence. We just can’t expect all these visual cues to convert to reality. By nature, we are fickle beings magnetically tugged to our natural impulsiveness.

Most people lead lives of poor self-maintenance: laziness, negativity, and force of habit. Authenticity requires self-control. The edited self is known to burn out, slip, and go off-script.

To act is life. Like a veil being lifted from our eyes, we choose to narrate beyond the avatars of attention.
Face the facts

October 6th, 2019

gif by Falcao Lucas

To weave through a world when there’s no anonymity and everything is discoverable — we are one google away from all the answers.

But it doesn’t matter how much we know. People cognize to fit what they want to believe, regardless of the facts.

We tend to throw all the information we don’t want to hear into a deep hole.

The more we deny the truth, the more it snowballs into a series of lies, rubber-stamped onto black screens of irreality. Call it the disinformation highway.

Upon further reflection, we should be forced to deal with what’s no longer pleasant: the real world.

Disagree with it. Run away from it. But live with the doubt that we could be wrong on many issues. Tribes are meant to be broken.
A mirror on information

July 25th, 2019

Journalists focus more on catastrophes than progress. They’re hard-wired to follow tragedy than highlight the good.

Bad news and sensationalism sell eyeballs.

Good news is ephemeral, quickly consumed and forgotten.

When an avalanche of information aligns with a consumption-based based society, all becomes a blur.

Knocked unconscious, we assemble identities that exceed the brain’s three pounds. We validate our preferences by referencing them back to us.

Information is an addictive substance, all too imbued with misunderstanding.

There is no breathe and stop, no detour to detox.
The bullshit detector

July 17th, 2019

You know it when you see it. Bullshit rings like a magic lantern, giving artificiality a spotlight.

More people are susceptible to believing bullshit than ever. Politics is mostly bullshit, as is mass marketing. The irrational tries to take all the mystery out of life.

When storytelling becomes manipulation, people lose their heads. Evil spreads like a fungus, as do the false narratives of a placebo.

The only way to change the reality around you is to call it for what it is: BS! Some will get it; others will need a constant reminder of their blindness.
Why people deny the facts

December 10th, 2018

Everyone gets it.

That rush of blood to the head when something or someone reconfirms your beliefs. You just knew it!

But how often is that perspective the result of wearing blinders?

The partisan brain is real and nonsense. Say and hear anything enough and of course it’ll feel true. Such mimetic behavior even dupes so-called intellectuals from grasping the reality of the facts.

The sidedness has to stop. Remixing and replaying the tribe’s view does little good to resolve the long-term problem, especially when the solution of acceptance is right under their noses.