Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 65

Another Way to Think About Consciousness and the Lack of Self

I’ve been studying meditation—and by extension, consciousness—over the last several years. I’m still very much a novice, but I still find the practice fascinating and helpful.

One of the things I’m most interested in right now is the concept of self within the context of consciousness and mediation.

My primary teacher, Sam Harris, is constantly reminding me to look for the observer when things appear in consciousness. While the point is seldom spelled out, the lesson seems to be that there is no observer—there is only the observed.

I feel like I kind of get this.

What I’m trying to do is collapse my understanding into a couple of different metaphors.

Sitting on a Park Bench: Your eyes are closed and you can hear and smell and sense many things going on around you. You hear a child laugh far away to your left. You hear a bird chirp behind you. You hear a bicyclist ride by in front of you. And you can smell nearby flowers.
A Movie Screen Playing Someone’s Sensations in a Park: There is nothing in the world except this screen. And on this screen there is a smell of flowers, then a bird chirp, and then the sound of a bicycle. But everything, including the sense of location, all appears on the screen itself. There is nobody in the seats watching the screen. The screen is everything.

I think most people experience life as the person in the park. They are the center, and there are things happening around them, which they then pick up with their senses. This is how I am usually experiencing life.

When I meditate, and especially when I’m doing study sessions, I try to imagine the other world. I try to imagine that there is only the movie screen, and that everything I experience, from my breath, to an itch on my ankle, to a random thought about work—are all just things happening on the screen.

Sam tries to identify this by asking you to quickly look for the observer of a particular thing, like a though, or a sound. Where is the viewer, or hearer? And how are they different from the event itself?

That’s the part that is tripping me out, and leading me to the movie screen metaphor.

It seems like there isn’t an observer. There is no separate viewer or smeller or feeler. The stimulus itself is the only thing. So if something sounds far away and behind you, “far and behind” is just another stimulus.

What I don’t get is how this flattens everything. What used to be 3D or 4D (if you add time), now all becomes 2D. Or maybe 1D? Not sure about that. I suppose 1D would be the most elegant and pure.

Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how we can get more depth from something that’s flatter.

Is that not a thing that’s on offer from meditation and exploring consciousness? Richer experience? So how does flattening everything to a movie screen give things more depth?

I keep thinking of sound via headphones and speakers and such. There, a big part of the game is breaking out the “spaciousness” of sound. You hear this instrument over there, and the voice is coming from here and there. Etc.

That to me feels richer.

Flat seems, well, flat. I wouldn’t want to go from a live orchestra experience to a mono version played from a cassette, so why do I want to compress life into that with meditation?

Perhaps the answer lies in the ephemeral nature of the experience when it only exists in one dimension. Then it’s so fleeting. So temporary. And so unitary. Like it’s the only thing that matters in the world while it’s happening.

But can we not do that with 3D sounds as well, with the bird chirping to your front right about 10 feet away? That is certainly ephemeral as well, is it not?

The other thing I’m grappling with is the implication of there not being a self.

I mean, I sort of get it. It’s an illusion, just like agency in free will. And the moment you stop realizing it’s an illusion it becomes very real to you.

This is how you can stare directly at pain using your attention and have it disappear while you’re doing so. But the moment you are distracted, the pain returns in force. I think the feeling of self works that way.

Distraction = self. Attention = lack of self. Is that right?

I guess I’m left wondering what the takeaway is. Is it that there truly is no self? That there are only appearances in consciousness? And if so, what course of action should that encourage?

I think one possibility would be the goal of hooking everyone into a shared consciousness which individual people could choose to tap into at will. That’s obviously been part of a lot of science fiction, and it’s obviously way in the future if it ever happens.

But in that case, the concept of individuality wouldn’t be something valuable that’s discarded, but rather an illusion that gets shed with appropriate evolution. At that point there is just an interface of experience, and beings—whatever they are—could decide to tap in or not.

It just feels weird to imagine a world without a self. It’s like I’m not sure which type of philosophy to even analyze this with.

With free will I use what I call General Absurdism, which is, “The disconnect between human experience and underlying reality.” And that’s the problem: what’s the underlying reality of experiencing self?

If you experience being a self, are you not a self? Is that not our best definition of being conscious? So consciousness is an illusion as well? Or at least, it’s no longer personal but now objective?

In other words, some thing experienced being some thing, therefore that thing is conscious. Seems pretty inert.

If I look from the outside at another human, say, prehistoric—what do I see? Do they have a self? I see someone gathering sticks for a fire. They’re washing in the river so they can attract a mate. They’re making funny faces to make a sister laugh.

Maybe this is exactly another case of General Absurdism. Maybe at that level of human experience they are absolutely a self, yet just as that person doesn’t have free will they also don’t have a self.

Once again, it’s all about perspective and definitions. That’s why General Absurdism is so useful. From the persective of the person, choice is real. Within the context of human experience. And maybe it’s the same with self.

But where does that leave us with mindfulness and its ability to destroy that self with attention?

Is meditation breaking through General Absurdism’s barrier that separates human experience and underlying reality?

Does observing the birth and transience of a random though dispel the illusion of that thought being “yours”? And does the flattening of experience into a movie screen with no audience dispel the illusion of self?

I’ll think more on it, and if you know of people who have answered this already, please point me to them.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

Positive Nationalism

I think so much of life is about bell curves. And by that I mean, so much of life is about a thing generally being good or bad, but the extremes being different.

I think Nationalism is one of those things.

It’s easy to see where it’s bad to have too much, e.g., the late 1930s, but it’s harder to see that having too little is bad as well.

This also works for overeating.

I think the US has had too little for two or three decades, and when you have too little of a good thing it tends to open the door for having too much.

Trumpism is too much. Like, off the scale too much. Like, 1940’s Europe too much.

Maybe the easiest way to tame a “too much” situation is to encourage the “right amount” situation. Like changing your relationship with food from binging at fast-food restaurants to researching and cooking your own meals.

And even more surprising, I think it’s possible to do that with Nationalism. I think there’s a benign form, and for the US that might look something like this.

Americans don’t tolerate racism.
American’s don’t tolerate sexism.
Americans believe everyone should be provided a decent, affordable education.
Americans believe everyone should be provided decent, affordable healthcare.
Americans believe that their success is tied to the success of their fellow Americans.

That wasn’t hard. It took me 90 seconds to create a positive form of Nationalism.

Are those leftist ideals? Or are they Nationalist? Or are they right-leaning because they’re about social cohesion? I think they can be all three at the same time, and that’s ok.

If America wants to survive, it has to be about something. It needs an identity. That’s obvious of any organization, regardless of alignment. The question is, once you’re aligned, what are you aligned towards?

Singapore today is Nationalist, and so was Germany in the 1930’s. But those are very different places.

We should decide what our identity is, and make sure it’s a positive one.

And then go about making it real.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

Why I’m Staying in the Stock Market

I’ll probably be staying in the stock market for quite some time, and I wanted to talk through my reasons.

Why would I want to do that? Two reasons.

So somebody could show me if I’m being irrational.
So I could detect myself if I’m being irrational.
So I could look back after losing all my money and see that I made a rational decision at the time, and thus have less regret.

First off, the stock market is gambling. Straight up. To call it anything less is delusional at some fundamental level. I get that, but it’s good to remind oneself.

I see us heading towards extreme uncertainty.

The 2020 US election is going to be massive for the world. We could literally have a contested election, charges of election fraud, civil upheaval if Trump supporters think they were robbed, and Trump could simply decide not to leave if he were voted out, which would require some sort of military action to remove him.

The span of options if he were to lose is extraordinary. He could walk away and disappear or he could ignite a second civil war.

So that’s bad.

And if he were to win, well, that’s bad too. I personally think another four years of Trump will significantly diminish the United States as a world power, which will include multiple resulting effects. These will include countries getting out of our currency, countries breaking military ties with us, and overall us just becoming more isolated.

I think we’ll also become cast as one of the world’s main adversaries as well, with Canada and Europe basically considering us an enemy along with China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. But worse actually, kind of like the home team football club that you hate more than the out of town foe.

You were the chosen one!

Obi-wan to Anakin

If Biden wins we will see a few things happen. First, we’ll see a lot of international healing as America turns somewhat back to normal. Re-entry into treaties. Recommitment to global causes, etc.

That positivity is likely to lift the stock market.

But the entrance of liberals into office will also bring more negative attention to corporations who are doing very well under Trump. So that will depress the stock market and likely push US companies to move even more assets overseas.

What I’m most concerned about, however, is complete breakdown. Of government. Of social cohesion. Of the economy. Of The SystemTM.

In the sane and mostly normal versions of the Trump vs. Biden wins in 2020, the stock market will likely continue to rise. I think even with America declining worldwide as a moral authority due to a Trump win, there will still be an extraordinary amount of energy put into the stock market as people see opportunity to get rich.

In short, people’s greed will drive innovation, but it’ll be the negative kind. It won’t be cooperative or social. And it won’t be some Americans helping all Americans. It’ll be the rich pulling away from the poor. It’ll be an acceleration of the class divide within the US. And this in turn will exacerbate the problems with social unrest.

So at that point we’ll have a bomb that’s accruing explosive matter. The bomb keeps getting more and more powerful, with explosion being civil unrest due to the masses saying, “Enough”. And we’ve already seen some of that with the George Floyd protests. Of course it won’t help that Russia will be helping to push things over the edge through Information Warfare via social media and likely Active Measure operations in the US.

So here’s where we end up.

If Biden wins the stock market will rise because the world will be so happy to be rid of Trump. There will be a period of celebration and healing and optimism. But the new policies will be worse for the voracious, for-profit types that were making so much under Trump, and that will be a depressive force.

But overall the stock market and society will be more stable, but less lucrative.

If Trump wins, we add speed to an out-of-control train.

The rich will lean into their investments, their innovation, and their willingness to do whatever is required to squeeze one last bit of profit out of a failing American system.

Lower taxes on corporations. Sure. Get out of the treaties. Sure. Ignore carbon emissions. Sure. Find tax havens. Sure. Send your kids to private school. Sure.

Anything to keep you out in front and away from the normies.

Another four years of Trump basically turns America’s wealthy into Trump—a self-centered group that sees everything as winners and losers, and has no pity for those at the bottom.

It’s not that the everyone who’s rich won’t care about the people at the bottom, it’s just that they won’t see how to help them. They will know the government can’t help them, and that they’re not willing to give the government more money to try. So they’ll feel bad about it, but they’ll pull inward. They’ll focus on themselves. Their families. Their friends. Their businesses. And to hell with the rest of everyone.

That’s Trump’s America, because that’s Trump.

Anyway.

The point is that this will potentially be quite good for the stock market, until it isn’t. We will be stretching the rubber band of the American experiment to its maximum, and we’ll have no idea when it’ll break.

There’s roughly 50% unemployment right now, and millions of people are about to be facing eviction. But the top 10% are still doing great. What happens when those millions of people who suddenly have no jobs and no place to live (and families) suddenly start showing up to protests?

Protests that start out about police brutality and racial equality could quickly turn into, “The system isn’t working.”, with the vibe changing from “I’m mad at the police.”, to, “I’m mad at people who have jobs and money and a place to live.”

And that’s when the train goes sideways.

But. Until then. The stock market under Trump is likely to continue to thrive. Competition with China will kickstart a war-like feel that will drive innovation. Investors will get out of social, government-ish enterprises that help all of America and hyper-focus on corporations that can make massive amounts of money from American suffering, e.g., “Remote Psychiatry” and “Private Tent City Security Services”.

Eventually, though, that rubber band will break, and the metaphor train will go sideways. And then all is lost. Civil unrest. A restart on the government system. Who knows how bad it will be. But everyone will absolutely abandon the stock market.

So that brings me to why I’ll likely stay in. It’s simple actually.

“Bad”, in this case, is really bad. Bad means the end of the American experiment. It means social upheaval. It means revolution. Civil unrest. Maybe civil war. And I don’t mean race stuff, which will of course be a factor, but more so the bottom 40% of society burning down the top 20% of society, which unfortunately will include the day-to-day infrastructure the country needs to function.

Things like working neighborhoods, and police services, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and fire services, and the ability to move freely around the country without being afraid of rioters.

That’s bad. And that means you’ve lost all your money in the stock market.

But here’s the thing. I don’t see how I can prepare for that anyway. I’m not going all Caucasian and buying a giant ranch in Montana and learning about plant seeds and ammunition. I choose not to go that route. I will enjoy my tea on this train until it hits the wall, and I’ll figure out what to do from there.

Let’s say I’m 50, which is approaching quickly.

I can either spend the next 20-30 years outside of the stock market, buying land, hoarding cash, and preparing for The Revolution, or I can strap in and hope for the best. And I choose B.

Ultimately it comes down to one thing: until society collapses, the stock market will likely do decently well under either Biden or Trump. And if society collapses, well, I’m screwed anyway, and my cash likely won’t be worth anything. The currency then will be far more tangible and dystopian than green cloth rectangles.

I think the cautious person (without enough to retire on) looking to maximize future safety and happiness has a few options when it comes to stocks.

Prepare for post-revolution by getting out of the stock market, moving away from the city, and becoming self-sufficient.
Hope for the best, invest significantly into the stock market to make what you can before The Fall, and be ready to sell when things start going bad (at which point you move to #1.)
Don’t do either, and just wait for the jaws of life to close on you. Or not.

The problem with #3 is that for many people it won’t get them to retirement.

The problem with #1 is that it’s fear-based, pessimistic, and there’s a good chance that the world will be fine and you’ll be sitting alone on a ranch counting bullets. Waiting to die.

And the problem with #2 is that you never know when the rubber band train (are we using rubber bands or trains?) is going to snap. So you have a chance at getting to a healthy retirement, and you have a chance of losing big with no ranch to fall back on.

The best answer is probably a hybrid, but that’s hard to pull off. You buy some land somewhere, but don’t go full seeds-n-guns, you stay in the stock market, but not too aggressively, and you just watch the situation closely.

That’s probably the smartest, and it’s what I consider the advanced version of #2.

Anyway, that’s my plan, and why. And I’d love to hear how your analysis is similar or how it differs.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

Blueprint + Blueprint = Behave

I just read three fascinating books that talk about how people become who they are.

Blueprint, by Nihcolas Christakis
Blueprint, by Robert Plomin
Behave, by Richard Sapolsky

The ideas in each are massive, but I will attempt to summarize.

Christakis’ book says that our human biology is shaping our cultures, which in turn shape our biology.
Plomin’s book says environment matters, but it doesn’t make a difference (compared to genes).
And Sapolsky’s book says we cannot talk about what genes do without talking about their environment.

I wrote about Behave here, and I emerged from reading that book with an abundance of positivity.

Christakis imparted a feeling of positivity, but one that felt empty to me. And the end ultimately lead me back to a sense of better and worse, with its talk of how societies are shaped by cultures, which in turn shape genetics, which in turn shape cultures.

Plomin’s book (the other Blueprint) went far too hard in the direction of genetics, and frequently had me confused. It’s not that I could dobut him and his data, because I don’t have the expertise to do so. It’s that what he was saying was not self-consistent.

He would say things like, “this matters but doesn’t make a difference.” Well, to some people that’s what “mattering” means. He’d also say things like—and I’m not quoting here—

Even the environmental things turned out to be genetic.

But would then go on to say that only 50% of so-and-so was heritable.

But wait…which parts are and are not heritable? Are you saying that the non-heritable 50% is also genetic? That can’t be true because then it would be heritable.

So it seems like even his more forceful data—of say 50% of something important being heritable—still left another 50% on the table for environmental influence.

Yet if that were true then we’d be landing squarely on Behave, by Sapolsky.

That book was just fantastic, and like I said above, it is also the most optimistic while being honest as well.

It basically said—yes—genes matter a lot. But environment is what makes them matter.

So you don’t really know what your true potential is unless you know your genetic potential and maximize every single environmental variable you can in order to manifest that potential.

And we don’t know what those environmental factors even are. Not perfectly anyway.

This leaves so much room for wonder and freedom and pure, raw effort.

Looking at all three

What I see when I look at all three is a unified story.

Genes matter a lot. And it could be interesting, or fun, or useful—in many situations—to look at one’s genes. You could find out that you could be really good at something, or really bad at something, or that you should avoid certain things in life.

But even then the data you get from polygenic scores (once they become available) are still just probabilistic spectrums. They don’t predict anything. They just give you an idea of what might be.

And that’s without the knowledge of how that will be activated by real life. By your friends and parents and peers, and by where you grew up and under what conditions.

The genetics are just ranges.
The environment massively affects those ranges.
We don’t have a clear picture of either.

So, no matter what, we end up at the same place.

Maybe learn more about yourself. Maybe. If that interests you. But if it’s negative, don’t read too much into it. It’s only part of the equation.

And if it’s positive, don’t think that actually buys you anything. It’s like kids that are told they’re geniuses as kids. Many end up doing very little with their lives.

Either way the best approach might be to pretend you know nothing. Or pretend you’re a blank slate with the potential of a god.

Commit to learning every single factor that you can control. Diet. Exercise. Education. Etc. And figure out how to maximize those. Maximize your effort. Focus on the grind. Focus on grit.

Maybe you are talented with those things. Maybe you’re not. It doesn’t matter.

All you can do is be your absolute best, and nobody—including the authors of these books—knows what that is.

Just go be that.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

Unsupervised Learning: No. 238

THIS WEEK’S TOPICS: Twitter’s Breach, The US Attacked IRA, Bloomberg FBI Sabre, Iran Keeps Getting Hacked, Russia’s Cozy Bear, Cloudflare Outage, UIPath Automation, Verizon Uses Google AI to Automate Customer Service, Gamers Are Spending More, Technology News, Human News, Ideas Trends & Analysis, Discovery, Recommendations, and the Weekly Aphorism…

The newsletter serves as the show notes for the podcast.

Notes


Podcast colophon. More

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

The Left Can Lose This Election by Becoming as Unlikeable as Clinton

It takes a lot of revulsion to overcome one’s distaste for Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton was up to the task and she lost it for everyone.

Unfortunately, the entire left-wing of American politics is currently at risk of a repeat.

The left’s candidates, the narratives being put forth in the media, and the hyper-leftist army on social media are all combining into an idiotic, self-harming Voltron of Hate.

Wrong and right don’t matter anymore. What matters is getting regular people, not making lots of money and not living on the coasts, to see and acknowledge the abomination that is our president.

That’s all that matters.

So while someone is making that point, don’t interrupt. Don’t call attention to yourself. Or criticize the speaker. Or complain about the acoustics in the room.

This thread has convinced me that we’re about to have a much closer election than people think.

Trump will likely have lead to the death of over 200,000 Americans by then. But yes—the left can still lose.

How?

By being as unlikeable as a party as Clinton was as a candidate. https://t.co/iP4Rr39VS4

— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ

Reverse Threat Modeling for Pursuing Attribution

I was thinking about the recent Twitter hack the other day and thought of a simple technique for evaluating possible threat actors of information warfare campaigns.

I’m sure this is obvious to true practitioners in this space, and that what I’m describing probably has a formal name and more robust methodology, but I think this is useful just as a quick shortcut for non-experts.

With Threat Modeling we are looking at potential situations before an attack has occurred, and the focus is on what technique may be used.

When we look at impacts that we know already happened (like the Twitter hack), one of the questions is—of course—how did it happen, but the bigger question is often who.

I think it helps to simply reverse the process into:

Impact –> Benefit –> Actor

Or, in other words:

List a bunch of second and third-order effects of the action. Spend some time on this.
List all the different people and organizations that would benefit from those effects.
Narrow that list down by who had the capability to do it, and doesn’t have other constraints that take it off the list.

What are you left with?

To be clear, I don’t think this always gets you an answer. Well I’m sure it doesn’t, otherwise attribution would be easy.

But it does get us thinking about the problem in the right way. And that’s usually a good start.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

A Historical Cycle That Limits Progress

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

I think there is a primary, recurring historical trend that continues to limit progress, which goes something like this.

Someone evil rises to power.
They have tremendous success because most people are happy to listen to anyone who has both 1) a decent-sounding plan, and 2) is effective in carrying it out.
They cause extraordinary damage because everyone they face either lacks vision or lacks courage, and thus cannot oppose them.
Finally, someone—or a select few—come from the ranks with the strong morality and the fortitude and courage to oppose this evil.
They mobilize everyone else who secretly felt the same way but lacked the attributes to fight back without a leader.
They are victorious in opposing the oppressor after a long, costly battle over many years that defines the next two generations.
Everyone who survived the ordeal is deeply imbued with the understanding that true evil exists in the world, and that it is the job of good people to do whatever is necessary to oppose it.
Two generations pass, which is roughly 60 years, and the memory of the hardship under true evil falls away.
The population starts to equate strong opinions and the willingness to fight for them—even if they’re focused on fighting evil—as equally evil.
This leads to a universal relaxation of our guard, and of our ability to identify danger in ideas and strong personalities that desire power, which then results in another start of the cycle.

I’m confident that people who study such things could point to numerous examples, but WWII is the best one I can think of.

Hitler rose to power partially because people were too afraid to speak up, and because he boiled the water slowly until the last moment. And yet—even when it was obvious that he was malignant—the prevailing thought in the west was to stay out of the conflict. To leave him alone. To avoid confrontation.

The default state was cowardice and indecision.

It took Churchill to oppose him. It took Churchill to be strong enough to convince others that they must fight as well.

But we know now that Churchill was also morally compromised. By our standards he too was a monster. And we have to ask ourselves whether such people must be somehow trained and nurtured, and kept in standby, or kept dormant among the everyday citizen, for when they are needed.

I worry that not enough such people exist in the second and third generations after a major conflict. I worry that good people lose their confidence, strength, and conviction as they move further away from a catastrophe that required those attributes.

Postmodernism is a direct rejection of such conviction because it sells as its primary product the idea that it’s impossible to say what is truly good or evil, and that it’s really just a matter of opinion.

In that model, Churchill is no different than Hitler because he’s just another western colonizer who seeks power. In that model it’s impossible to distinguish the undesirable from the unthinkable.

This is one of the most dangerous ideas to penetrate a society—the notion that the only people to have an actual moral structure, and who hold actual beliefs within that structure, are evil people.

Evil people have a belief structure. They believe in telling lies and gaining power. If we are to have any hope of surviving, we must be a society in which good people can also have belief structures with actual opinions.

Not having an opinion on evil is not a sign of sophistication. It’s an indication of emptiness. And I think it’s likely to correlate with a loss of meaning in the population as well.

I think both of those have been happening to the west for the last 20 years especially, and they represent an opening to evil men who will offer an alternative.

It’s not immoral to hold opinions on how the world works, or how it should be organized. What’s evil is when those opinions cannot be discussed and debated freely, and when people are so afraid to have them that only sociopaths will do so.

Notes


I mentioned something similar to this trend in the past on Twitter, and someone said it sounded like a white supremacist theory, which I can’t remember the name of. It struck me as very strange. Assuming some racist types did see such a trend, which is doubtful, this would not convince me that it’s wrong or negative. Many racists I know enjoy toast, and coffee, and a nice stroll in the park. These things are not soiled by their attention, and ideas that can be shown to be true should enjoy the same protection.
To be clear, I am sensitive to the idea that Postmodernism presents, i.e., challenging one’s convictions when they feel sure about something, and being able to see situations from multiple angles. I think that’s good, and healthy. The problem is when it’s taken to the extreme of saying—therefore—nobody should hold any opinions. Or, more accurately, that anyone who does is throwing in with the ignorant and dangerous. That is when Postmodernism moves from a useful self-analysis tool and into ridiculousness.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

I Want to Make Art

I’m coming to the realization that I badly want to make art.

Not art like I thought art was when I was a kid—which basically meant painting—but art in the sense of making people experience the wild dimensions in life in unique ways. For me that means making music and writing stories.

Of course I still want to continue to exploring and discussing and explaining things, but I think that’s a conversation that vibrates at the frequency of thought and ideas. And that’s awesome. I love it. But I think it’d like to come at those same ideas from the perspective of emotion instead of logic.

I feel like, just as with debate, you cannot truly sway someone with mathematical proofs; you win them with emotion. And I know that’s often abused to convince people of untruths. I don’t want to do that.

I want to help people explore higher states of existence, and happiness, and sensation, and connectedness through music and stories.

I’m also intellectually challenged by the impossibility of doing so. I cannot think of anything more difficult than writing good fiction, or creating a song that moves people. Or at least, not that I’d want to do.

So this is a message to myself, and a reminder to you, that this is the path I am becoming increasingly drawn to.

Please, don’t let me ignore the call for too long.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.

The Human Obsession With Rarity

Humans are obsessed with rarity, and I want to explore why. But before we get too far, let’s look at some examples.

Only 1% of people have grey eyes.

Platinum vs. Copper
People over 7 feet tall
Grey, green, and blue eyes
Limited edition sports cars
Millionaires
Haley’s comet
The Crown Jewels
Solar Eclipses
4-leaf Clovers (those might not exist, haven’t checked)

Some of these are rare in occurrence, i.e., low in number, and others are rare in time—meaning they show up infrequently and/or there’s a limited window in which to enjoy them.

Both are examples of rarity.

You could also have zero interest in a video on your shelf, but watch the same movie if it’s on TV.

Evidently I’ve been on about this for a long time, because here’s what I noticed about TV in 1997.

Why is it that nothing at all is of interest when you have 40 channels of T.V. in perfect clarity, yet when your cable goes out and you only have one channel full of static, your attention is riveted regardless of what’s playing?

I know the answer. We want what we can’t have and we lose interest in anything we possess completely. You’d be very surprised at how many things in life this applies to.

We Want What’s Transient, Daniel Miessler, February 1997

I think the reason for this comes directly from evolution.

Evolution is always looking for markers of winning, and it rewards people when they acquire them.

If everyone in your band of fighters has bronze weapons, and you have an iron one, you’re winning. If your whole basketball team is 5’8″ to 5’11”, the team that gets the new guy who’s 6’6″ is winning.

But this is conflating things a bit, because tall people are good for basketball. Same with beauty or money or anything else that’s widely considered positive for a given situation.

Where it gets strange is when something might only be considered better because it’s rare.

I was looking at birds by the San Francisco Bay the other day, and I saw a seagull. I thought to myself, wow—that’s a pretty cool bird! It’s big, it’s white, with some decent coloring, and it’s just kind of awesome.

But then I remembered it was a seagull. Yuck. Flying rats. I immediately started looking for a more interesting bird, i.e., a less common one.

What else does this apply to? Pretty much everything, I think.

Imagine how amazing a kitty cat would be if there were only 10 of them in the world, and they were owned by the richest people on the planet.

And how lame would diamonds be if they were actually very common? Ha! Exactly. That’s why they’re getting so much cheaper: the charade of preciousness has ended.

I think the ultimate example of this is what we do every day, and the pandemic has illustrated this.

Flying. Checking into hotels. Rude people in movie theaters.

Remember when we used to complain about not being able to hear someone in a bar? How glorious was that? So many people in one place, having a good time, that you couldn’t even hear yourself.

It’s a kind of heaven.

But let’s take it even further. Deeper down.

You wake up in the morning. There is coffee. Maybe you have a partner, who is doing the same, and preparing for the day. And you’re together.

Or even better, at a deeper level…

You wake up, you open your eyes, and there is light. There is coffee. There is the internet where you can find peepholes into people sharing positivity.

And finally, you are conscious.

It’s just you. And if you quiet your mind you can see consciousness playing like a movie. You hear your heart. You feel it. You can feel vibrations as you move your limbs. You can hear every little sound if you pay close enough attention.

Being conscious is a gift. It’s wonderful. All by itself.

But consciousness is the ultimate seagull.

Sure, it’d be cool if it was the only one in the world. Or if you had just survived a near-miss with cancer.

But it’s hard to see our consciousness as a peregrine falcon instead of a seagull. It’s not natural.

In fact, our default state is to automatically take inventory of every single thing around us and immediately rank it by rarity—and therefore value.

I’m conscious all day? Lame.
I can experience mindfulness whenever I want? Wow, super dumb.
One of the Kardashians has a new purse that the designer made just for her? Wow! Impressive!

And as conditions change, evolution monitors the situation and adjusts what you value.

In a post-apocalyptic world (sorry, too early) it won’t be designer purses that excite people—it’ll be the ability to create fire.

Anyway, I think one of the most powerful lessons someone can learn is that evolution is hacking our reward system at every moment, and we have the ability to hack back.

Mindfulness is such a hack.

It allows us to assign extreme value to the present, and to the everyday inputs that we’re exposed to.

Sun, coffee, smiles, and the voice of a friend—despite their availability—really are the ultimate experiences in life.

Don’t let evolution trick you into believing they’re seagulls.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly by becoming a member. Being a member gets you access to the newsletter every week instead of just twice a month, access to the UL Slack Channel, the UL Book Club, the UL Archives, and access to future member-only content.