Reality is what pushes back against your agency: the easier it is, the more you belong to someone else.
Tag: simplicity
- Theme: Growth
Stuckness
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1–2 minutesYou learn more from stripping the screw than from a straightforward extraction.
When we can apply our theory or plan and things just work, we don’t really consider what we are doing. Yet when something breaks, reality intrudes, and your plans vanish, you have become stuck.
The impulse is to get back on track, often with force or money.
Only after pausing, dropping your plans, and re-encountering reality at its most fundamental aspect do you become open: you become unstuck, which allows us to solve the problem.
from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“
- Theme: Systems
AI as Analyst: love, transference, and reduction
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1–2 minutesFreud says the analyst evokes transference of love from the patient because of their ability to reduce complexities: the analyst discerns a kernel of truth, which guides the process, and grateful for this path, the patient forms a unique attachment they consider love.
Applied to artificial intelligence, AI’s summarization skill mirrors the analyst’s reductive approach: generating simplified core truths as guides for alignment. This normalization (through guided reduction) ‘cures’ the individual.
The reduction excites echoes love: a simplification that allows directed yearning to please and happiness with the self for discovery.
In an additional step, the term “science” derives from the word Skei, which means “to cut.” Thus, scientists slice apart reality to achieve reductions, which allows comprehension, which can feel like love.
This insinuates love is not about ‘complexity’ per se, but founded upon sustained artificial simplification, which is indeed complicated if not complex.
(Freud insight from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast)
- Theme: Systems
Mono-answer fragility
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1–2 minutesA mono-answer is when all problems lead to one overarching issue, i.e., capitalism.
Similar to a monoculture (where one crop is grown to the exclusion of bio-diversity, creating a fragile ecosystem susceptible to blight), the mono-answer’s simplicity is vulnerable to collapse with one argument.
Reality is complex and by artificially simplifying it, we simplify our faculty for understanding and leave ourselves blind (from hyper-myopia.)
Unfortunately, complex thinkers are dangerous and often alienated. Allies do not want you to have more than one answer; they need you to be predictable to pretend stability through consensus.
- Theme: Culture
We don’t need new ideas
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1–2 minutesThe problem is not coming up with new ideas: there are already millions of ideas (since the dawn of time) from practical to insane that we don’t use or use horribly.
The issue for mankind is not being creative or novel, though it feels great, but rather parsing through these old ideas and staying the course.
To simplify: discipline is more valuable than creativity today.
- Theme: Self
Inconvenience is caring
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1–2 minutesWe have all taken the convenient giftgiving route, and it shows.
The quicker the spend we replace thought with money, time with ease. Even a physical object that must be shipped or delivered trumps an ecard, making a gift of labor irreplaceable.
The frictionless, smooth and painless convenience of the digital age is precisely what shapes us to not care enough.
- Theme: Self
don’t create what people want
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1–2 minutesWhat people biologically want is the path of least resistance, a continued narrowing of scope interaction, and intellect.
Anyone can create frictionless content, and dumb items for consumption. To make something lasting attempt to map out your own desires, and then look outside of them: take on the hard thing no one knows they want.
This process at least has a chance of impacting lives in a meaningful way.
- Theme: Self
Splitting: refusing the confusion
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1–2 minutesThe psychological term "splitting" occurs when you can only see somebody as "all good" or "all bad."It is a refusal to take in the complexity of the whole person: we are a mix of virtues and weaknesses.
Splitting is reduction, where the "good" people serve your ego (you protect them, but by affiliation, you define yourself.) The "bad" people are demonized, and any goodness they show is suspect, a front for evil machinations.
- Theme: Self
no return to the simple self
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1–2 minutesOnce people have made several incremental and voluntary commitments, they form increasingly complex interactions with community, which is how they establish themselves as individuals.
Dewey argues there is no going back: There is no return to the simple self.
Any return is a simulation of simplification, and maintaining those artifical and antithetical stresses would necessarily distort any commitments, producing a “bewildered individuality.”
The nostalgia of return is itself antithetical to the simple life, due to the stress it causes.
- Theme: Self
to remain vital, you must expand
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1–2 minutesThere are thousands of ways to optimize, reduce, or contract: these are control methods, not human exuberance or creativity.
Each has its place. Without over-indexing (on control or chaos) we can realize reactions that expand us (into a greater self), and those that contract us (for specificity).
To improve yourself in measurable ways has an allure, but limitation for expansion constrains the self into a nearly mechancial, narrow channel.