Neil de Grasse Tyson and the Dangers of Philosophy

The NdGT controversy I think comes down to the question of thinking versus acting. Of determining some form of balance

Neil de Grasse Tyson recently made some comments that have been interpreted as saying 'philosophy is useless' -- as a man of want to be action, usually navel gazing, I didn't look too deeply at them, but rushed instead to form an opinion.

I did in fact read part of a transcript from the nerdist here (I think) and thought NdGT's comments were not out of line.



They come down to the existential dilemma we face every day. Acting without thinking versus thinking without acting -- and how we must each find a liveable balance between the two.

For years I made the joke about how hard it is to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning because we're all going to die.

Which is an extreme form of 'where do I turn my spade?' - which was the phrase used in some philosophy course I took. When do I stop questioning and just do something?

Where we fall on the gradient between active and introspective is likely the usual combination of genetic and cultural influences. Look at some identical twins separated at birth raised in different cultures and see how they score.

I believe NdgT's point was that you don't want to spend your entire life 'just thinking'. Or just introspecting. He seems to have been saying that scientists look at the world 'out there' and see endless questions that they may be able to find answers to.

I know that I'm prone to doing ALOT of introspection, but over the years I've had help identifying some of the times when you need to get your head out of your ass and look around. Negative introspection, when you keep telling yourself bad things about yourself. Throw up a flag, and consciously change what you're thinking/doing. Endlessly pondering a decision - at some point you have to weigh the cost of delaying a decision against the cost of making a wrong decision. And sometimes the decision is between two good things so there's little downside to EITHER! So you have to ask yourself - in these cases the SOONER I choose, the better. Procrastination - all the instances of challenges, like doing the dishes, where the amount of work won't change, but the amount of enjoyment of that work depends on when you do it. Doesn't mean you can do EVERYTHING right away, but it's a mental tool to remind yourself - hey, if I do that NOW, then I won't have to do it later.

Anyway - now I have to stop ruminating and work. But I think MAYBE NdGT's comments have been blown out of proportion, by peoples overthinking.

The chicken, the egg, and the frying pan

Enjoying pondering the unresolvables as I do, I am often faced with situations in which the path to maximizing 'the good' is impossible to know for certain.

For instance.

The big kid has a journee pedagogique which he was excited to attend as it was foam sword fighting day. "Epic" in the argot of the times. Mid week, when the day he thought they were meant to make the swords came and went with no swords being made, he began to stress that today was not in fact fight with foam swords day.

Mounting unhappiness.

Lobbying commences to not attend.

Parents, having, you know, jobs, and time spent with kids elsewhere under threat - resist. "You're going!" "I'll read books all day" "I've got to work" "Please!" "No" "I hate my life"

et french sealing cetera

He's smart and pulls out all the pro stay at home arguments - boiling down to it's just one day and why are you so mean?

But as increasingly autonomous as he's becoming, inevitably he becomes bored, needs food, love, or any number of other unreasonable things, and less work gets down.

And this is the chicken and egg and the frying pan of it all.



I want to maximize happy. If we're broke we're unhappy - if kids are over institutionalized, we're unhappy, if we're stressed because work's not getting done, we're unhappy, if we're stressed because we're feeling guilty about sending kids to what they believe is 'we're just going to fill out papers all day long' instead of 'epic foam sword fighting day' - we're unhappy.

So being self-employed and having the flexibility to manage my time means I could keep him home - but I knew it was sword day so drag him to school, foolishly engaging at increasingly high volume in debate about the degree to which my earning a living rather than keeping him home makes me evil, and we get to the door, ask the directrice of service de garde if it's sword day, it is, and all this bull hickey washes away.

Except for my need to come home and analyze it.

You need to invest time in your family - there's no substitute for time to build strong bonds. You need to invest time in your business. If you had more money, you could possibly spend more time with your kids. But if it takes all your time to grow your business to the point where you have enough money, well, the Cat's in the cradle and all that is 'Cat Stephens on some FBI watchlist now?'

So - baby steps. Experiment. Adjust. Iterate. I know to date 9 times out of 10 I've put the family before the career, but do that too long and you risk ending up resenting them. Christ, I'll be dead before they're old enough to be 'grateful'…

But, whether it's eggs or a chicken, heat up that frying pan, and dollars to donuts but that's dessert, the outcomes likely to be tasty.

Moving on up, to the good times.

Depression and anxiety - good doctor M taught me - comes from feeling a loss of control - I could feel it mounting yesterday as the wants and needs of my family were in conflict - how pleasing one, displeased at least another - how the multivariate equation was unresolvable. Pouring all my energies into finding the highest stable state, I was burning myself out.



I wanted to play with my puppet, write thinly veiled autobiography, or otherwise 'do my own thing'…playing god knows what in the play room I tried to remember the last time I'd done anything creative - I was eating myself up with guilt over a post I'd written about depression - having had 'a point' but knowing that I'd not expressed it clearly and that, in the unlikely event certain people read it, it would be misunderstood. Would do more harm than good.

And that made me really angry too - because I did have some kind of point, even if I wasn't able to express it. My point had to do with how interconnected we all are - how the mental states of each of us spill over into the mental states of those around us - and of the almost impossible to disentangle web of our psychologies - how we are constitutively predisposed to certain mental states, and yet possess some free will. How even when depressed, there are best practices - but they are practices, and require some exertion.

My friend called me on the fact that I might be projecting - that I might be more depressed myself than I was admitting, or able to recognize, and so by drawing attention to the mental health of others I was in fact really trying to wrestle with my own.

And he was right - because I have always wrestled with self doubt over whether I am exerting myself sufficiently and appropriately. I over analyze.

Last week, sitting in the dermatologist's office because I have fair skin and start to wig out at fairly regular intervals if I've not been looked over for awhile, I was anxious. And the very simple conclusion I came to is 'stop asking "why" you're feeling x y or z' - because very often it's just natural variation, and when it's not, the same best practices that help even out the highs and lows are basically all you have anyhow.

I was in a french sealing waiting room to see if I had skin cancer. I'd not eaten enough breakfast. Was I supposed to be feeling cocky and relaxed? It was a no brainer.

When I do almost anything self-directed - from publishing off the cuff blog posts, to videos of my hand puppet - I feel like I've accomplished something. It's not a job, as much as I'd like it to be, but it helps me get through the day.

I'd love to spontaneously desire to create stuff that has clear market value, but I am way too wrapped up in myself for that. To get there I suspect will require a lot more of this esoteric, weirdness - this crablike purposefully obtuse random walk. I struggle with making any effort that I am uncertain will be rewarded. So instead, I make stuff that requires little effort, and so in the short term 'costs' me less when it receives scant attention.

But the long term costs are huge.

Now I know many of us are in this exact boat, and so my current way forward is to puke stuff out. The exercise of putting these self-doubts out into the world is to let the sunshine melt their empty dharmas away. Because it's really simple bad psychology.

If you are not willing to take any risks, you will never attempt anything worthwhile. I know, and am repeating myself, that many of you over analyze as I do. And I know, as you do, that we may not all get rich blogging, or posting videos of felt puppets - but it's fun. It's fun to share, and every once in awhile to connect.

This blog was named after what I've long joked will be the title of my autobiography. And that's kind of what it is. And it's useful to me to admit some of this stuff publicly - because most of these 'issues' are so thin - so insubstantial, that the slightest exposure melts them away.

Leaving getting on with things the best and easiest way forward.
Which is way more comfy than inaction.

Friday night lite

Even the mild bourgeois tit frustrations I suffer from can fill you with a powerful thirst. Booze is such a substitute for substance, the simulation of strong emotion, a relaxant, so the stresses you've been holding tight seem to melt away and the absence of pain feels a lot like pleasure.

Don't get me wrong - I love booze. There's plenty of stress we carry in a ridiculous orgy of self-indulgence, as if our lives were really SO dramatic that we run around in a whirl of make busy make believe.
Booze is good for that. Kind of dissolves away some of the pretence. Lets us relax a little. And there's no denying the placebo element - how depending on our culture booze lets us act in different ways (citation ). Some cultures get amorous, some belligerent, stripped of culture it's not actually the booze, more how we've been trained to hold it.

So after a week of petty frustrations. A week where I had to admit to myself, time and time again, that if I wanted a better job or to be self-employed, well I'd likely have to do something about it...I did SOME things. Tried to get you all to buy a Young Poodles shirt - not for the money, see, but for the moral support - worked, parented, spent too much time on FeelBad and Twatter...and then Friday approaches and there's several live music options.

Now avoiding temptation, that's the ticket...because you can feel the almond start to glow...that part of the brain that just wants to cut the tethers and head for the sun...but there's three little kids see, and keeping a smile on Saturday morning with the steady machine gun chudder of requests is hard enough well rested and regular. And there's the lack of sufficient petty worldly accomplishments to excuse any real kind of “celebrating” ...

But it's Friday night.

You pine for the “perfect” party - the booze up that has somehow been sanctioned by all the gods. But you settle for the actual party...or you don’t. Or, like I seem to love to do - you let the empty dharma kick around until every option fills you with disgust.

Not that the options themselves are bad. Just that you're not feeling worthy of facing the consequences of any of them.

And that’s where the marble stops, for awhile - no course of action seeming impeccable. A third way, a better way, would be to do something useful...but what are the odds of that?

Writing is Thinking

If you aren't using Scrivener - and I aren't but intend to - for organizing writing and other projects you're in for a treat.

And in following Scrivener on Twitter I came across a great testimonial from a user. And the line he wrote that I took away is 'writing is thinking'

Because I've been wondering 'what the crapzaki am I posting this stuff for?'

And it became clear that most of why I write, is because I like to think, and putting things in words takes some of the pressure off trying to hold everything between your ears.

So I do it for pleasure. Or therapy. Or both.

Now writing for others is a whole different beast. Last night Bruno said "We've got to make art for arts sake" and I said "That's bullshit, I make art for attention" - even though I knew it wasn't really true.

What it made me realize is that I write because I'm constantly trying to figure things out FOR MYSELF - and that's ok. It doesn't pay the bills, but its why I do it.

Now writing for others is a beast of a different colour, and I'm recognizing now why I've never really overcome my resistance to it.

It's a bit too much of a performance - a bit too much of 'do I need people to tell me my ideas are good before I believe my ideas are good?' -- it's where people who work a job and do their art for themselves are probably much happier than guys like me who are trying to do both. Ultimately, I mainly just write for myself - and then wonder why the shit I rush to the web isn't super fascinating.

So that's Thursday. It's got me thinking a little more clearly on how my motivations are a bit muddled and how trying to reconcile Money and Art is possible, but might lead you down some dead ends and twisty roads before you get anywhere.

Which I think has left me somewhat more comfy.

How about you, loyal readers and automated web bots? Any empty dharmas that have stared you in the face until you managed to look at them differently?

French Sealing the Dog

Yesterday I felt like a can of smashed assholes. Decallage horaire, a weekend of road food, a man cold, and well, the weather was shitey.

All day I could barely work for more than a few minutes at a stretch, so busy was I pleasuring the canine.

(image credit - e-spirations which actually had some good advice right under the dog photo...)

Despair mounted.

It doesn't take much to knock the wind out of you. To feel discouraged. It can lead to a touch of negative introspection - I lack clear goals, I have no discipline, bla mega boring bla.

Now, I do lack clear goals - and this post was going to be, what the internet shills call "A call to action" for the five to six of you non bots who might be reading this. A call to ask 'What the hell in all this mess holds any interest for you?"

I start many projects but get discouraged. I have an almost physical aversion to actually being serious about my goals. The one or two grants I've applied for have been so last minute, so poorly executed it was like I was purposefully sabotaging myself.

Which I probably was.

I've constructed this narrative, which is far from original, in which I will be discovered for my own genius, without slooting myself at all (i.e without any actual real effort), and the world will rain praise and riches upon me. So I start half baked projects like The Beaver, or Self-Help for Losers, The Young Poodles Movie, etc. and while I'm proud of some of it, I get discouraged and try something new. Hey! Blogging…

It is both the rankest, freshest, and oldest bullshit in the world. The insecure creative's wish to be swept to greatness without having had to expose themselves to the world.

So here it is. Having reached my late early early forties I know my approach needs to be tweaked.

I need to set clear achievable goals, find people to help hold me accountable to them, and then execute. Because it's always so satisfying when a real world deadline looms and you go through despair, resistance, reluctant application and onto victory and euphoria. I want to tap into some of that for my own projects.

So if you've got any advice let me know.

If there's any particular direction you think I should apply myself, let me know - just don't say accountancy, cause that's what Dad said for many years and I'd always ask myself if we'd just met.

And it's probably nothing to do with man's best friend, because after yesterday, she thinks we're running off to Vegas…

Fear feeds the Man

If you can scare people you keep them stupid. If they are stupid then you can take advantage of them. Have them juggling credit cards and debt to pay their monthly bills while you skim the fat coins off the top. All 1% like.

Several times in my life I've found myself juggling multiple loans, credit cards, back taxes, etc. Paying hundreds of dollars every month in vig.

And luckily, because perhaps I'm actually underneath it all fiscally conservative, I've actually been ok. I've been able to restructure and come out ahead. Sometimes its been a very close thing - but so far so good.

The main point is perhaps that we all spook easily. We whip out the easy credit to bridge this, or emergency repair that - and we watch paralyzed as our monthly expenses creep upwards. And the more terrified we get, the less we are able to see the forest for the trees. We start carrying around truly toxic levels of stress when a good set of objective eyes can cut through all the crap and tell us: take these three easy steps and you'll reduce your expenses by 10-15%. The difference between in that nice airy atmosphere above the waves, and that much more difficult to breathe liquidy stuff beneath it.

So - Fuck the Man! Sometimes life forces you to face stark choices - but the sooner you can detach yourself from your emotions - crawl out of the panic and find at least temporarily higher ground - the sooner you'll be able to see the best choices in front of you. Hell bankruptcy sure beats suicide. You hear the stories of the suicide epidemics after the Man has basically enslaved farmers in India. Don't let Him.

And don't hesitate to ask for help. An accountant or financial planner can see things with an objectivity and experience that even the most financially savvy individual will lack at times. Hell, I've said it before - resist the urge to do your own dentistry. Get the help you need. Before it kills you.

On the fear of being pussy

There comes a time when you realize you're a pussy. That there are things you tell yourself you want but you don't take the risks to actually have them. Like stand up comedy - I'm a guy who gets some laughs at a party, but as any professional will tell you, its one thing to crack wise over wobbly pops and another to stand in front of an audience and entertain. It's a different dialogue is how HF put it - and it's an experiment that doesn't actually cost all that much - the cost, that stops me, is the work of writing some jokes and the risk of being embarrassed. As if I don't manage quite enough of that already by being a funny smart guy who doesn't risk much of anything.

Negative introspection, they say, isn't all that useful - but its a trope I've grown good at. THAT I've practiced…THAT I've written about - though having been told its unproductive I try and at least do the exercise of telling myself 'red flag' when I'm doing it and forcing myself on to something else. And so I've been here before and made deals with myself.

I've stopped worrying as much about posting shit on the internet - increasingly this navel gaving stuff because, guess what? - I'm introspective. I write this kind of stuff endlessly and exposing it to the world - or the 5 or 6 automated bots that crawl through my blog posts - is an act of self-exposure that I tell myself will thicken my skin to actually attempt 'real' writing on stuff other than the fluff in my navel.

But then I think of Woody Allen - who made a career out of his neuroses, and all the geniuses out there that tell you to write what you know. What I know is how easy it is to get wrapped up in yourself, in the endless questions, the empty dharmas that you know cognitively have no real 'answer' - there's nothing in your head that can actually simulate what will happen if you take action in the world.

Many, like 12 or more years ago, I told myself - alright, write 200 pages of stream of consciousness and then edit it. Well to avoid doing that I became a picture editor and honed my skills making sense of other people's bullshit (erm - awesome, concise, supremely beautiful material) - because a picture editor like an AD or any of the creative yet 'below the line' positions has the luxury of not really being responsible for the problem they are trying to solve. Generally a producer or a director hires an editor to either completely take on the writing and organizing of a movie (in the case of documentary) - and those are the projects I like, because I like writing and structuring and story editing, or to execute as best as possible the producer's and director's ideas. But you're doing it for a cheque, and if it's 'bad' - well, you didn't shoot it now did you? So the upside is a constructive detachment - which is why I recommend to all you producers and directors to hire an editor - objectivity AND craft is worth shelling out the candy - but the downside is lack of ownership. At the end of the day it's rare that the editor's role is ever mentioned, it's possible you don't get invited to the award shows, and with the passage of time, perhaps naturally, the final film begins to seem inevitable as if the chasm between what the producer and director dreamt and shot, and the final product never actually existed. Of course the movie needed a Lord of the Rings style opening, of course the title, tag line etc sprang fully formed onto the press materials.

So for me the 'cost' of editing is bitterness. Too pussy to really lead, I lead as much as I can in the editing, and then beat myself up that the pats on the head stop and people have moved onto other things.

Which gets me back to this mass of wallowing and self-absorption - oh wait, that's being negative - this mass of self-exploration and discovery which only slowly is seeing the light of day.

What's good about journal writing, stream of consciousness, etc, is that on any day, hopefully, you start repeating yourself - and that moment of recognition allows you a little detachment, to either look at what is bothering you in a different way, or to try and find the universal in what feels at the moment of writing, to be so deeply personal. So I know by the sheer weight of statistics that my bullshit is actually common. Not universal certainly, because we all vary along the gradients of introspective and extroverted, novelty seeking or conservative -- but sufficiently banal and common that 20% or even 2% of you know exactly what I mean. You might not express it in the same way, because, well, we're all somewhat odd ducks and I was actually dropped on my head in an age before kiddie knapsacks had five point safety harnesses.

And so that is my take away. To avoid just calling myself a pussy for not taking more chances like trying stand up, or pitching, or actually polishing anything I've written - I'm just airing my laundry on a blog. These silly questions - which amount I'm aware to long boring rationalizations for my actions or lack of actions - by exposure hopefully force me towards proactivity. I'm hoping it's a bit like AA. My name is John, and I like to gaze at my navel and then blame myself for not taking enough chances.

Self-Involvement

I'm self-involved. I've spent countless hours writing stream of consciousness prose that at its best veers towards thinly veiled autobiography and at its worst is reams of me complaining about not making more of myself and the challenges of being born smart, male, white and privileged. Oh the horror of not having had to overcome adversity! The shit stinks but it's who I am.

So I'm very interested in the scientific study of motivation.

Recently a study came out that hit the lay press that says "If you want to achieve something, keep it to yourself, because telling others about our goals actually undermines the likelihood we'll achieve them" Something along the lines of bullshitting to our friends and loved ones about our big plans gives us a neurochemical jolt of "success" so we actually don't feel as driven to do the much harder work of acting on achieving our goals. I know that feeling. I've spent countless nights drinking with my good time buddies lying to each other about the movies we're going to make, the stand up comedy we'll perform, or the transformative and incredibly redeeming new direction we're about to embark on. And some of these ideas are fairly detailed and actionable. In the hands of non-bullshit artists they could have created several fortunes by now and probably incidentally cured cancer.

A second bit of science or what passes in the lay press as science that's been making the rounds is that listening to people complain makes us stupid. Some kind of study has been done in which people's mental acuity was tested, they were then exposed to someone complaining, and when they tried the maze again they starved before finding the cheese. Holy does this mean I have to thin out my rolodex and unfriend a whack of face bookers! Or apply for special parking as I list to full dimmer.

Because, shockingly, amongst my hard drinking brilliant yet unsuccessful intimates, next to dreaming in colour is bitching, and it's a less than Amazing Race to know which we've indulged in more vigorously.

Now the silver lining of all this is forewarned is forearmed, and like with negative introspection and depression, knowing these things are bad gives us some leverage to avoid them. In my reams of self involved journal writing I've 'flagged' negativity - when I've found myself bitching in circles I'll write 'red flag' and take a moment to step back and move onto something else. I've learned also to practice gratitude - if there's one thing I've learned from the shit storm that holding a family of five together can put you through is to be grateful for what you have. Because we'll all be dead soon and whatever passes for our family life could easily blow up and find us spread to the four winds or worse. So I practice being grateful.

And as for not bullshitting about my plans and being more proactive? That one I'm not sure if I've developed actual better practices for. I put more stuff out in the world - that's progress - I've learned to accept that my process to date involves a lot of navel gazing but that if I gaze long enough I grow tired of describing lint and move onto more shaped material.

I may never be decisive and constantly in motion - but I am kind of suspicious of people like that anyway. Most decisions that are worth a good god damn should be thought about pretty thoroughly. Charging forward for the sake of moving is kind of Kardashian. There are countless examples of celebrities who's need for attention so eclipses what they actually have to offer the world that they are essentially just flinging shit on the walls and hollering for people to notice.

So perhaps I'll keep muddling. I'm english after all, apparently it's something we're known for.