This product is habit forming

Everything we have ever experienced has happened inside our heads. Every time we "feel" something in our hands, it's really just electrical impulses being sent from our hands to our heads, and decoded there. And et cetera with many other systems in our body. But, this is a bit too clinical for the point I want to make. Consider this:

You go into a restaurant and order a burger. You probably think something like "This is disappointing. I don't like lettuce. That waitress is hot. I should have gone to..." and so on.

We take literally almost everything around us for granted, habitually. When is the last time you really looked at your own room, for instance? We always walk into our room, accept that it's our room, and go about our business. When last did you take a moment to appreciate that cleaning you did last week? Or look at how messy your desk is? Or enjoy how the walls softly reflect the light from your lamp? If you're like most people, you almost never do these things.

This is called "habituation". We get used to things, and then ignore them and carry on to other things, which we then get used to. This is an absurd and beautiful world we live in, and most people spend their time not paying attention to large parts of it.

Our brains evolved to deal very well with changes. We are creative and flexible. We observe changes, analyze them, and draw conclusions about the world. But, once we see something say, 50 times, it becomes part of the "background" of our lives. Buildings, trees, roads, billboards, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, the sky, music, many of us will disregard these things until they somehow change.

We think of everyone we pass on the way to, say, the cereal aisle, as just "extras". They are background noise, we walk past them, looking straight ahead, careful not to look them in the eye or make any gesture deemed inappropriate or offensive. Perhaps we nod our head, perfunctorily, upwards if it's someone we are comfortable with, downwards if it is someone we don't. The most loquacious of us will proffer a "Hey." or a "How's it going"?

We are, in effect, isolating ourselves from other human beings because they aren't "new" or "change-y" enough for us.

We can choose not too, though. It's a choice of paying attention to not only the "little things", but everything around us. Everything is, of course, an exaggeration, but we can drastically shift our focus. It is proposed that we can focus on 126 bits of information per second, and something like having a conversation takes about 1/3rd of these.

How much of your headspace are you wasting? How much attention are you paying to what kind of cereal you're looking for, and how much are you spending on interacting with the world, the actual world, around you? Are you really enjoying things, or are you just thinking about enjoying them?

There is this wonderful synergy that comes from being totally in sync with the world, or as I like to think of it, having your shit together. When you spend less time thinking and more time completely engrossed and enraptured in what you're doing, and the things you're seeing, and the people around you, and how absolutely beautiful Jupiter when it's right next to the moon, it is so much easier to feel the reality of things: we are all just little pieces of the world. Or, you could be daydreaming about that cute guy who sits in front of you in class, walking ahead with your head buried in Facebook, oblivious to the people and things and all of the beauty of the world around you. It seems like an easy choice to me. Perhaps not so easy to accomplish, but something to strive for.

100% Cotton

In the late 1940's, a man named Edward Bernays came to prominence in many well-to-do (read: political and business) circles in America. Mr. Bernays was the nephew of the "father" of psychology, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Now, WWII had just come to an end, and was left of Europe/America/Asia was trying to pick up the pieces and learn from the atrocities of the war.

I know this is starting to sound like a history lesson, but bear with me.

Now, Mr. Bernays, influenced by his own work as an Allied Propagandist, the horrors of the war, and the ideas of his Uncle Freud, decided that situations such as the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, were inevitable, due to the innate and unconscious desires driving the human mind...
That is, UNLESS these primal desires, such as lust, greed, and fear, along with other drives in the "Id" were kept in check. This is, of course, easy to carry out in a totalitarian government, but the downfalls of this were readily apparent in the rubble of the WWII.

The solution, then?

An admittedly elegant one.

Bernays invented "Public Relations", through which he designed and espoused new methods of advertising products. Specifically, he strove to link these products to the "unconscious urges" of the American public. This would both keep the population controlled, avoiding groupthink and the exploitation of the masses, and make a number of people, Bernays included, very very rich.
To elucidate, prior to the rise of the ideas of Mr. Bernays, nearly all advertising was carried out based on the merits of the product in question:
"This shoe is well-built, moderately cheap, and will last you for years to come!"
After Bernays, the focus shifted dramatically:
"Look at these happy and attractive people. They drive nice cars, do fun things, and have better lives than you. Look how happy they are. They also wear Levi's."
Sexual desires, desires to be happy or successful, desires to be liked, etc, these all became the main point of advertising a product.

Moving right along to point number two:

To survive and be effective, a Capitalist economy must continue to grow. The economic slump we are arguably in or not in is a result of a Recession. That is to say, the economy is still growing, it is just doing it more slowly than we'd like. The severity of our Recession (and the Great Depression) shows that if a free-market economy such as ours begins to shrink, the effects are absolutely devastating.

Do you see the conflict here yet? I'll continue.

When Mr. Bernays began to appeal to our desires in marketing, that is, desires to be young, sexy, and liked, not our desires for the product in question, he opened up Pandora's box. The deep-down and scary bits of humanity are now the focus of our consumption. We don't buy things that we want, we buy things that have been associated with things we want, like being young or sexy or rich. To keep our economy moving, then, we have to continually buy things we don't actually want. If you don't buy more and more of the things you don't actually want, the economy crashes and very bad things happen to everyone.

Things don't make us happy, really, but now that it is commonly accepted practice to market them as if they would, we must respond in turn and purchase them as if they would, to keep the economy healthy. Now, of course, we have to buy the things we don't want. How do we pay for them? We work for people we don't like. We spend 40 hours a week with people that we don't value nearly as much as our friends or family. We sacrifice meaningful human interaction for a paycheck. Shall I summarize?
The great majority of us work too hard to pay too much for things we don't actually want and that won't make us happy and, in doing so, we often are too busy to really open up to people and have meaningful and genuine interaction with them. It's no small wonder that it takes most people having a "Midlife Crisis" to realize that we are doing nothing of any value with our lives.

But here's where it gets even better:
Personally, I try to be very deliberate and limited in my consumption; I don't buy things that I don't want, nor do I buy things based on their advertisements; I don't watch TV; I enjoy buying used things when I have the opportunity to. I do all of these things because I don't want to participate in a system that I feel bullies myself and others into buying useless things.
Naturally, the word for a person such as myself is "Hipster"; I'm just "too cool" for that "mainstream" bullshit. We have bought into this system so much that we, not entirely unseriously, ridicule people who object to it. Why?

We all want to be happy.
We have been raised being completely surrounded by ads that show us that happiness is attached at the hip to products, we see happy people driving BMW's, drinking Coca-Cola, wearing Nike's, and so on and so forth.
We have been inundated with this mindset since we are children. It isn't true; but we want it to be. We get jobs and start to buy things, but we don't feel any happier, so we work harder, buy more things, and still don't feel any different. Then we see some damned dirty hipster who doesn't value the things that we do, and we get upset. Why should they be happy? I worked hard for these things, I've earned it. They haven't worked a day in their life, what gives them the right, they haven't earned their happiness!

I'm not going to pretend that I have "it all" figured out; not by a long shot. But consider this:
Most things will not make you happy. There are always exceptions, things we personally value very much, our passions, that can help us be happy. But the things that we see advertised often are not our passions. We don't want them, we just want to be happy and don't know how else to do it. Most of our generation will agree on the statement "Most things won't make you happy", but many of us are still unhappy. Because our entire lives we have seen our desires associated with products, with things to buy, we have been habitually manipulated through advertisements to the point that we are no longer entirely sure how to realize these desires through people, not products.

Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone wants genuine and meaningful human interaction. So fucking do it already. Don't make small talk while checking your facebook on your iPhone; look someone in the eye and talk about something beautiful. Don't go to the movies or the mall; go to the park with your friends. Stop wanting things and start wanting people. Sad? Don't eat a pint of ice cream or go "therapy shopping" or go onto xbox live; open up to a human being, be weak, share your vulnerability and fear, because everyone is just as vulnerable and afraid as you are, we're just forgetting how to tell each other. Turn off your television, you're not going to "miss" anything. You are a human being. You don't need iPhones or Xboxes or Tom's shoes or yoga pants or clothes; you need other human beings. Need them to be honest and imperfect and vulnerable, need them to be human, need to be human together, with them. Don't buy a new outfit, make a new friend and keep them forever.

Just, please, think about this. I'm not asking you to be Thoreau and move to the woods, only that you stop wasting so much time on objects that will never make you a happier or better person. If you have the courage to express your desires through people, to be genuine and honest and imperfect, people will value you and respect you. If you are not afraid to be weak, or be emotional, or be honest, others will stop being afraid to do the same to you. If you stop watching TV, you'll start watching people, and you may like what you see.
We all want to be happy, we just need to show each other how again.

Living Deliberately

Many people are unhappy.
Many people feel as if they are lost, or they are on autopilot, or they are merely floating through life.
Many people make decisions that they don't really care about, either way, but they make them because everyone else says that these decisions are good.
Why is this?

We live in a society that is, among other things, very good at distracting us.
We have social media, shopping malls, television, radio, and many other things that would be too tiresome to list.
These things are all great fun, which is why so many people use them.
But, on the other hand, it seems that most of us feel like we are not in control of our lives.
We feel like we are being trapped, but we aren't sure where the cage is.

The solution to this is deliberateness.
By this I mean really thinking about every choice you make, no matter how petty, and being present in its actions.
This is almost like the Buddhist idea of Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the concept of being fully present in and aware of each passing moment, and not clinging to any ideas of good or bad about it; just observing the moment and letting it pass into the next.

I said that this culture is good at distracting us, but that doesn't mean that it is possible to be not distracted and still operate within it's bounds.
Set limits for yourself, and adhere to them.
For example, don't just go to the store. Be deliberate, exercise control, go in knowing what you are going to buy, and buy only those things. Don't spend three hours wandering in the mall, store to store. You are being distracted by new clothes and advertisements into doing something you didn't actually want to do.
This is, of course, exactly what those things are meant to do; lure you into buying them, or at least consider them.

This kind of behavior transfers over into many aspects of living.
Essentially, it boils down to being passively or actively engaged with the world.
Someone who is passively engaged will look at what's before them, such as an ad, a store, a rack of clothes, a life decision, and decided on a course of action.
Someone who is actively engaged will make a decision, and then seek the means to carry it out.
For example, Passiveness would be perusing through a store, looking at a rack of clothes and, after much deliberation, buying a jacket that looks nice, while Activeness would be going to the store to buy a jacket, buying the jacket, and leaving.

This world is full of people who love to make choices for you. You will drink Coca Cola or Pepsico products, You will eat Chiquita bananas, You will drive a Ford, Toyota or Honda, You will either go to University or start a career, and so on.
Our lives are becoming more and more pre-determined.
For the most part, they follow the model of:
Be born, spend the first five years of your life in the care of parent(s), attend school, while living at home, until you are roughly 18, at this point you either a) start working or b) go to college and then start working, work until you have put in enough time or have enough money to retire, retire, enjoy a few years of leisure, then die. There are a few variations, here and there, but linear flow describes the vast majority of American people's lives.
Furthermore, our choices in entertainment are, mostly, what's on the radio or tv.
Our choices for food are, for the most part, whatever is at the supermarket or fast-food.
Our choices for clothes are, for the most part, whatever is being sold at whichever store we prefer.
It's no wonder we feel like we have no control.

Now, I'm not saying to ditch the system and go be a hermit in the woods.
Just make your own goddamn decisions.
There comes a time in everyone's life where they ask themselves
"Do I REALLY prefer Coke, or have I not given Pepsi enough of a chance?"
People fall into this rut of buying what they see on TV, and eating what they see in the store, and we are beginning to forget that we DO have a choice in this.
We, at any time, can refuse to participate in any aspect of culture, or society.
But, we first have to realize these conflicts and make a decision about them.
You have to be willing to ask yourself
"What do I want out of life? What do I want to eat or wear or watch? Where do I want to work? What is important to me?"
And so many people don't.
We get to be maybe 20 and then realize that we have no fucking clue what we want to do with our lives, because we have been told our whole lives what to wear, and where to shop, and how to think, and we never questioned it.
Don't make that mistake.

The most important step to take, at first, is being deliberate in your actions.
Don't just aimlessly surf channels, tune in to the show you want to watch, watch it, then turn off the TV.
You will find you have more time, you will be more confident and happy in your choices, and it will start to feel like you have some control over your life.
It is tough, and tedious, to ask yourself questions everyday, to be actively engaged in the world.
But being passive seems to lead to this inevitable angst, apathy, and feeling of being lost in a stormy sea.
Be active. Make decisions and be proud of them, no matter how small they are. Be willing to ask yourself how you want to live you life, and be willing to live that way.

Live deliberately, in the face of millions of people and billions of dollars that want to make your decisions for you.
For what is a human being if he is deprived of free will?

fish food

In my bedroom I keep six fish, brazenly extracted from a creek 100 miles or so away -- more guppies than fish, really -- swimming in a squalid five gallon tank, encrusted with hard-water build-up that I have neglected to clean for at least 18 months now; and there you will find my soul.

I think they may grow up to be trout, but one never knows, and I don't want to keep them because, even though I have never once cleaned the tank or similarly put any effort into fishkeeping, six full-size trout seems to be a bit too much of a hassle, but, then again, I don't want to release them into the "wild" because if they die it will have been my fault -- not to mention the possibility of ecosystem contamination. Is this what responsibility feels like?

Mind you, there used to be more --exactly how many I am unsure, at least 11 I think -- but they may have eaten each other, for fish do not presume to be polite when they are hungry.

I keep them fed though, when I'm around, look into the tank pensively from time to time -- I put in one stick and one rock from their old creek, I like to think that they like them, or at least think that they like them, but maybe they just get homesick -- one fish is bigger than all the others, but that sort of thing is a statistical certainty with a set "F" of fish where the number of fish "f" is > 1. The fish don't do much. Are they happy?

In my soul/fishtank there is a filter that is so overworked that it can't possibly be of any use anymore; it sets on all night gurgling like a very small creek running over exactly one rock and one stick that remind me of homesick; in my soul/fishtank there are a number of little swimmy bits -- a number that seems to be shrinking -- a small bit of life, raw, living with questionable comfort in a small box that never changes and has a waxing shell of hard salts and minerals deposited on the walls; they swim and sometimes get fed and sometimes eat eachother for no reason and I don't know what to do with them.

The fish follow my fingers on the other side of their glass enclosure, and will nibble at them if I press them against the water's surface.

If I let my fish go they may die and I don't think I could handle that, but I'm not sure I can handle them growing large anyway.

This, I think, is the least-interesting, most-pedestrian catch-22 that has ever arisen. My soul doesn't do much besides keeping a smattering of small vertebrates alive, but I'm attached to it with this bland sentimentality -- nostalgia for an off-white and lightly chipped dinner plate off the 4.99$ rack at Ross.

The seventh fish was found shriveled and dead, mouth agape in bug-eyed and leering surprise, on the carpet, a full 4 inches -- a heroic leap for a small fish of questionable trout-hood -- from the safety of my soul/fishtank. Did he(?) understand the consequences of his actions? Do any of us?

I, of course, picked him(?) up and performed the generations-old ritual of toilet-bowl burial. If I continue to do nothing, or rather feed them and maybe clean the tank for once in my goddamned life, will all the inhabitants of my fishtank/soul kill themselves or die of natural causes or eat eachother? Can I solve this conundrum, this question of what to do with my occupied soul of questionable trout-hood, this question of scraping off mineral deposits from the walls of my eyes to see the world clearly, this question of giving or not giving a damn again, by doing nothing?

The filter stays on all night, thoughtlessly aerating the water, quietly gurgling, but the fish remain ungrateful as always.

You are what you eat

The things that you consume become you.

Of course, this can be taken literally; All the building blocks that you built your body with came from food eaten by either you, or your mother, mixed up, digested, and stuck together again in some sort of bizarre pastiche of meat and bones we call a human being.

But, I mean to imply mainly a figurative connotation to my earlier statement.

The things you consume become you.

The music, media, people, culture, clothing, house, car, movies, television, ideas, and beliefs you surround yourself with change you and mold you to fit them.

Example: You watch Jersey Shore. You like it, and want to talk about it. You find, or make, friends who also enjoy it. You talk about Jersey Shore. One of your friends who likes Jersey Shore listens to, say, 2 Chainz. You give it a listen and enjoy it. You look for new friends, &c ad nauseum. 

This doesn't seem like a big deal, most people would call it "culture".

But, look closer. First, the decision to watch one show led to a whole slew of acquaintances. You talk with them about the things you share. You reinforce these social bonds. You talk more about these things, and then think more about these things, until it's a big part of your life.

This isn't really a bad thing; we wouldn't have a society as we know today without it, and I picked examples that seem negative.

You see, our sense of who we are, our idea of "me" or "I", is definition by negation.

That is to say, we begin where everything else stops. Be that physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever.

We see all this stuff that is "not-me", and everything that isn't filled in by that "not-me", must then be me.

We define ourselves by our surroundings.

I mean, if someone asks you "Who are you?", where do you start?

You list things around you: I am a student, a Buddhist, a poet, &c. 

These are not things that ARE me, they are just ideas, actions, and places, that I have chosen to surround myself with.

The things we consume become us, become the way we think, and speak, and feel, and interact with and about everything and everyone else in the world.

The point of this is this: Be careful that the things you consume don't consume you.

You are the aggregate of everything you do, or watch, or listen to.

Make sure those things make you the person you want to be.

Don't just do things because everyone else is, because it's bigger than that.

If you listen to music because everyone else is listening to it, or the same with movies, or television;

If you let other people decide what you do, You no longer control who you are.

You are letting other people define WHO YOU ARE.

That is, maybe, why so many people are unhappy.

Because we have grown so used to letting other people influence us so much in our consumption, in the way we feel about things, our ideas.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, perhaps, went a bit too far; we imitate things all the time.

But when you let culture, or television, or anything else decide the things you surround yourself with, you are giving up control of your very "Self" to some other person.

You are what you eat;

Have some food for thought.

I AM AN INDIVIDUAL SCREAMED THE INDIVIDUAL

To be is to be together.

To be human is to be all humans, to be humankind.

Western cultures, our societies and economies and politics, value this idea of “rugged individualism”. We value the triumph of the workingman over the elite, we value the American dream, we see the smallest unit of existence as a single person, as an individual.

I don’t think that’s true.

From the very moment of out birth we are surrounded by the language of others, the ideas of others, the notions of others, the emotions of others, the prides and prejudices of others, their hidden motivations, their deepest held beliefs, the lies they tell every day to be more likable or powerful, their philosophies and religions and gods and demons and angels;

But that is not to say that “everyone else” is not a product of everyone else’s “everyone else”, just the same as we.

When I am feeling less (or perhaps rather much more) poetic than usual, I describe this concept as a “great self-referential clusterfuck of an existence”.

Or, otherwise, I see us all as an enso. The enso is a symbol very strongly rooted in Zen Buddhism, it is a circle drawn with a single brushstroke.

Although there are numerous meanings behind this, I will focus on one.

A circle has no beginning and no end. Any two points on a circle can be connected by a single line.

This, to me, is humanity.

A person, the individual, is but a single point.

Now, you can get close to a circle with single points, but there will always be space in between. A collection of humans is not humanity; humanity is something greater than us all, something that fills in those spaces and completes the enso.

You see, the individual, the free agent (in that I mean one who is capable of exerting free will), the consumer, the worker, the cog in the clock, is nothing of any value, really.

You did not invent the language you speak, you did not invent the clothes you wear, you did not invent the god(s) you believe in and the gods you don’t believe in, you did not invent the internet, you did not invent anything, and even the people who did invent those things did so with the help of others, and the influence of many thousands others, and many ineffable environmental factors.

No one is individual; no one is unique; we are all the same ideas recycling themselves.

This universe exhibits near infinite complexity at all levels. From the quarks and bosons, to the specks of mica in a pebble, to the spots of dead grass on a lawn, to the scarred cityscapes hemorrhaging the desert, to the continents in a bounded ocean, to the stars in an endless ocean, everything is intricate and interconnected. We are one part of this complexity, but we are not the only part, nor the largest part, nor the smallest.

But the point, I think is this.

There is no way to separate someone from anyone else. Where do our thoughts begin and the thoughts that we have learned from others end?

Where do I begin and you end? We always fall into a physical answer to his question; surely I end where my body does. But let’s face it; there is no part of my body that is mine. I am made of food, most recently, and stardust, most poetically.

So, I do adore Thoreau and Emerson, but I am not a rugged individual. I am as fragile as the world I live in, which is damned fragile indeed.

It’s a very universal kind of way to think; you are as fucked up as I am; when you succeed, I succeed; we will triumph together and fail together, all at the same time. We’re all in this together, I suppose.

We humans are funny little creatures.  

We take in and process information our entire lives, by touching and tasting and feeling &c; 

We form ideas and opinions about all or nearly all of this information; 

We decided that our own ideas are trustworthy and right and well-justified;

But most of all, we don't really consider most of this, most of the time.

I digress.

Hi, this is me; I've started a blog; this is a thing now.

I'll be posting words of all sorts, throwing a dictionary at a wall and hoping to see if anything will stick. 

Thank you for reading or not reading or whatever else it is you people do.

Now, let's get down to the real deep funky festering existential questions that linger in the heartbeats of many, because those are fun.

Are human beings good or bad? 

People have been arguing about this idea for hundreds and hundreds of years; I will not presume to tell you an answer, but try thinking about this.

Everything that you have ever perceived is human-centric. This may seem obvious, but think about it. Everything you've seen, you processed it as a human, everything you've ever thought you have processed as a human, every idea, emotion, thought, epiphany, pain and pleasure is distinctly and irreversibly human. 

Because we are humans.

The idea is a simple one, sure, but let us perhaps change its direction:

We CANNOT think, feel, or otherwise perceive anything in a way that is not human.

And so, every thought, idea, feeling or emotion, every perceived morality, reality or pattern, is a direct result of our humanity. 

Now, ideas can't come from nowhere. They have to be a result of some thing we have experienced, or someone else has experienced. 

The idea of "That man is a bad man" cannot happen if we have not, over the course of our lives, seen and learned about men, and "good" and "bad" and good things and bad things and good men and bad men.

Every idea is a sort of hodgepodgery of other ideas, we define these sorts of things by slowly narrowing down how specifically we categorize them. We can have "good" without "good man" but not vice versa. 

Moving on along, though, these ideas, these abstractions we have for everything we perceive (the ideas of God, the idea of humans, the idea of sky, the idea of evil, the idea of a tree, the idea of stealing, the idea of morality &c) are directly based on our collective experiences as humans.

We cannot have an idea of something without first having knowledge of some sort about that something.

Now, words are the tools we as humans use to manipulate and convey ideas. 

We cannot very easily pass the entire sensation of "the idea of a tree" non-verbally, so we invented language.

But every word is a result of one or many ideas that existed before it, and these ideas are results of the things we see and think and touch as human beings.

So, words are, carrying this whole thing through, a direct representation of who we are; of what it means to be human.

So when we have words like "good" and "bad", we must naturally be both good and bad.

Because if we had no experience with the idea of "good" or "bad"; if there had not been some person at some point in our ancestral past who had experienced a person being bad, or a person being good, the ideas that form the foundations of the words would not exist.

We are everything we have a word for (well nearly everything. We cannot very well be Killer Whales or Gravity).

Since we have a morality, an idea of what it means to be virtuous or villainous, to be a saint or sinner, to be good or evil, we must have experienced all of these things. 

Humans are naturally good, and virtuous, and saintly, and holy, 

-but-

Humans are naturally evil, and villainous, and sinners, and unholy.

There are some things that we are not,

But we will never experience these ideas, because we are not them,

So we can never have the words to describe these ideas.

We are stuck, you see. 

We cannot define ourselves properly, because we are ourselves;

You cannot use a mirror to see itself,

You can only hold it next to another mirror, and see infinity.