Belly Button Lint

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Tag: mind

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    Clay analogy: pressure creates extremism

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    1–2 minutes

    Think of a society as a ball of soft clay: When you press down firmly from above with your thumb the clay doesn’t simply compress. Instead, it squeezes outward in all directions.

    The center, where most people initially resided, becomes thinner and flatter, while the edges bulge.

    Societal pressure, corporate policy, cultural oppression or political polarization apply: excessive pressure from above doesn’t just suppress people – it actively pushes them toward the extremes, hollowing out the moderate middle where compromise and dialogue once flourished.

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    Resistance and Flow

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    1–2 minutes

    The choice to stand firm (stoic) or to go with the flow (abdicate) reflects personal, but also cultural disposition.

    In religion, the monotheistic faiths (Islam, Christianity) offer a singular truth, which seems stabilizing or foundational and is individually heroic, versus the more open and communal focus of Eastern religions (Buddhism, Taoism) that eschew disruption for flow.

    Consider the social ramifications: Placing a boulder in a stream increases the intensity of the current on either side, counterintuitively not stopping the movement but further entrenching it and ensuring its survival.

    Also, on a psychological level, being an agent of flow (aligning with the “wisdom of crowds”) is a rationalization to be non-decisive, meaning that one must constantly be polling and responsive, enslaving the self to non-authentic responsiveness.

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    accounting: zombification

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    1–2 minutes

    The accountant’s instinct is to log and cut, cut to the bone, scrimp and shield, to tourniquet outgoing vitality. They save the blood from spilling, but too much constriction, too much cutting, and restriction, and only a husk remains, immobile and zombified.

    At this point, ravenous and lacking sugar in the brain, one must go out and find fresh blood. One must parasitically consume rather than generate one’s own vitality.

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    Evolving, not burning bridges

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    1–2 minutes

    Old friends… perhaps the thing that bonded you worked because while you were damaged, you liked the damage.

    Once you don’t, you don’t owe them. And yet, you don’t have to slam the door either: that is just more damage.

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    relationship precrime: booby traps

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    1–2 minutes

    Many couples enact precrime condemnation.

    First, they create (make up) a sin that is an affront to their character, but keep it secret. Next, they goad the unwitting partner into crossing the invisible barrier: breach of character, breach of loyalty, breach of trust, a crime against one is a crime against us both, and you were guilty before you erred.

    Now, drama may unfold, which is revelatory: Will the partner submit or fight against artificial guilt? Consider that any argument is a form of communication, a bid for attention with heightened intensity and sharper edges. To engage is (win or lose) to affirm and secure the relationship; to disengage is to deny validity.

    To repeatedly trip emotional, relational IEDs is a sacrificial ritual to produce resentment through manufactured fault. We force a complicit role in undermining the self for the sake of the relationship, a codependent spiral.

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    From fast-facts to gourmet intellect

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    1–2 minutes

    It is a common truism that you ignore what too easily comes to you, taking it for granted to your detriment. (too much love, too much stability, too much confidence)

    How about having too much information accessible too easily?

    The reduced (pre-synthesized) data we access online atrophies our ability to think rationally and engage in healthy logic. Much like processed food, which diminishes health in favor of artificial, quick, excessive caloric uptake, informational sound bytes and scintillating headlines are a stand-in for the labor of intelligence.

    In the infosphere, we no longer have to work to “make sense,” so we ingest ready-made nonsense: Hamburger-helper politics. The ease makes us lazy and forgetful, treating “convenience” as preferable to “quality” or “complexity.”

    Many of us are looking for a return to gourmet intellect but no longer possess the palette after our fast-fact diet. It really is easier to shift positions against your own desires and claim McDonald’s is not just acceptable but preferable (tweeting a pithy line about anti-elitist class solidarity) than to learn, labor, and prepare your own meal.

    We have been given a gift of too much, making us irrational and self-destructive, tasteless, and intellectually obese: bloated on empty facts.

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    Cognitive dissonance

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    1–2 minutes

    Cognitive dissonance is not only having two non-complementary beliefs that clash, the contradiction producing anxiety about who you are and what you value, but the antagonistic beliefs are handled by doubling down: over investment rather than correction.

    While doubling down may protect the self image (ego) it is merely a temporary soothing of the psychological disjunction, more of a means to displace and distract by acting out and blaming others.

    The longer cognitive dissonance is held, the more pathological the response: to remain traumatically blind we become defensively aggressive; protecting the internal battle through external histrionics.

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    Your Animal Operating System

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    1–2 minutes

    Your unconscious is an operating system for an animal: it speaks in images and metaphors, impulsive drives.

    It directs you before language can get in the way. It works before we can "make sense" of the world’s workings.

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    Limits of individuality

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    1–2 minutes

    We often accuse others of misunderstanding us, putting us in a box, limiting or diminishing us: their stupidity is the source of our frustration.

    Yet, we seldom confront our self-ignorance: we don’t know our limits, capabilities, desires, or how blinded we are by our ego. We drift along simultaneously fragile and inflated, a thin-skinned balloon.

    This refusal to see ourselves while fighting others ironically becomes a form of self-imposed confinement and reductive limitation that we blame on “them.”

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    Hubris of Sentience

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    1–2 minutes

    Our hubris in assuming that sentience sets us apart has allowed other intelligences—animal, artificial, and mechanical—to harness our relentless tinkering for their own survival.

    Humans serve as agents of artificial evolution, yet we remain impulsive enough to ignore the risk of creating our own demise.