Silvi Simberg's Blog, page 3

6 months in, 6 months out 2/2

Reading Time: 8 minutes

In a sense – I am just a few years old. With everyone I had enjoyed having left me – the person I had become – stopped being. Whoever I was back then, the person writing the songs and eager to get to the next rehearsal – could only exist with the people I was doing these things together with. Outside all of that – nothing else existed for me.

Those conditions for life to exist how it was – my oxygen, my earth, my north star – they vanished. I was afloat in space, not really hoping to get anywhere, not wishing it all would be as it was, not knowing it could be better or worse – I was just a thing, a state between the game and the work – of which both became more and more unbearable for me.

I wanted it all to end. And when I answered my doctor, the universe gave me a friendly poke into my ribs.

What followed was a short journey on struggling to get some help from mental health professionals. The general doc wrote a piece of paper for me and told me to go to the next building and see if I can get appointed to a psychologist there. Eventually, I did – and the girl who I went to talk with for the next six months, twice or once a week was alright – she didn’t impose any opinions on me, she didn’t make any suggestions – the only thing that did irritate me is her tendency to try to see a good reason for the boss of the company I was working at to behave in such dickish manners.

But that time, those very interactions and disagreements gave me a better experience of what the world, the people are like – we don’t see the same shit when we are looking at things. Their sense of right and wrong, how they understand things can be different to mine – and sometimes with ill intent, and sometimes innocently, so…

Of all the things I got interested in Buddhism for a while, and then somehow ended up in a forum-community for anti-natalists (their reasoning is super solid – if you don’t know any better… I am very happy to announce that I oppose anti-natalism 100% today).

So, there were a few strange phases I went through, while still working for the terrible boss, and still playing the game which was bringing me less and less enjoyment over time… I couldn’t figure out how to get started in real life – how to re-boot – how do I get to know people who are strangers? I considered going to some church – as it was the only that sort of thing I knew to exist (but I ended up not going).

The weirdest shit knocked me off that track… USA elections made such big waves that they even penetrated my pathetic bubble. Must have been that I saw somewhere on Reddit something clever said by Scott Adams, I started watching his periscopes – and that slowly replaced my interest for the gaming. He talked about persuasion and about some reading-list that he had, so I looked into that.

I started seeing leftist vitriol everywhere (even in local Buddhist church websites, all kinds of intelligentsia clubs – that I decided these will not be the places I go to – I do not want to become a part of such hateful movements…).

For some reason, I went out with a person I had known some time ago. We went to some concern, and I saw some old faces, we had short conversations, everyone of course asks if I still make music (but when I do upload something, they never listen :)).

We went around own and took photos of random shit. He talked about work and how chicks can earn even 3k euros in the developer world (but even that failed to get me deeply interested in programming for more than I already had dealt with – besides, I imagined it takes a lot more to be hired as a programmer than it really is);

So, while I was super interested in politics, the next president got elected, I was reading something about thinking fast and thinking slow, went on some dates, had a very horrible experience, and thought I might not really want to ever date again; then scrolled some 9-gag and saw some politically seductive jokes with Jordan Peterson (pointing out how hateful the leftists can get), watched some clips of his and then he said something I’d been itching to hear.

Someone had asked him what would females get from his book, and his answer was, paraphrasing, “well, what kind of a man do you want?”

I know JBP isn’t very popular in our circle, and he may as well done harm by coming around and advocating for some scientismic shit.

Maybe that’s true, but regardless of that – and maybe he didn’t come up with what he preached and simply copied sensational shit others like him had said before, or some older philosophers and smartasses have been saying all that way before him, maybe he’s just selling to the niche (hehe, get it?) – regardless of any of that – the message broke something shitty in my brain and erected something wholesome, instead of it.

This is a moment that I will remember.

And what was built back then still holds – I’m not attached to it – I’m not attached to much these days – I won’t be too proud to change my mind should something come along to explain what had happened to me – sure, I’ll change my mind.

Someone did once try to put me down, asking me, “why did you need to hear it from someone else?” Why did I need to hear it from someone else that yes, I do want to get married and I do want to get children – and I shouldn’t need to settle for anything less?

Well, life can get pretty fucked up. We hear all sorts of things. And we are very much capable of internalizing ideas that do no good for us. Coincidentally, the guy who challenged me on that seemed to be the kind of guy who likes to try on girls and never commit – the very same category of people who can make us think in that way in the firstplace. He may have disliked what Peterson was saying for other reasons.

Anyway… as soon as I had decided that yes, I do want kids, I do want to get married – my vision as if cleared up. There was no need to try to please or impress guys who are obviously just interested in the clothing booth. My whole attitude changed – I wasn’t worried about coming off as needy or naggy or annoying… For the first time, I would go out there and unapologetically be just the person that I am, I could tell how I feel about a situation, I could say I didn’t like something, I could say what I like… And for the first time – me meeting people had nothing to do with my creative pursuits.

I was using tinder to meet people, as I didn’t have any social circle around to get to places through that. And, suppose, because of JBP’s encouragement to have good relationships with your parents – I was also going over to home town to offer an olive branch to dad.

While I was over his place, I was checking on the app, someone had “superliked” me – and scrolling through a few profiles, I’d superlike him back…

A guy with heavily effect-tuned photos, staged, and selfies. A strong beard and a terrific nose.

The app would never have picked him up, as my range wasn’t set very wide – I didn’t think I’d bother meeting someone outside Tallinn. The day we did match – the day I had gone to hometown to meet my father – my now-husband had been driving out from Pärnu – so, the window for our match had actually been incredibly short, as we later mused.

Hey, I know it might as well be fooled-by-randomness – but because it ended up working out well, to me this all is magic.

As for the match, dates, and the 2 year journey leading up to our marriage (has been interesting, complicated, challenging) – I didn’t care to chat much via text, we set up a meeting, he drove over to Tallinn, we went to an Indian restaurant I had been before (with my TERA friends). I liked him, he liked me. I deleted the app, we met again, and again – and so it goes.

Just a couple of months after meeting him, I also applied for a job in a different company (whose job advertisements looked terribly corporate, but I didn’t mind, I just wanted to get out!). I got invited to interviews, I felt terribly nervous (and thought I’d defo be incompetent); they sent me a test-task – I had never ever used After-Effects before, but Silvi doesn’t care, Silvi learns quick – so, I learned the basics of AE in an hour and I made a short animated advertisement in After Effects; EZ PZ.

And I got in.

My health has been improving, I have been learning new things, I have met new people, I have met new friends. I started going to nature with these people – marshlands, seaside, forests – hikes!

I read more books, I write some music, I started writing again. I stop being that interested in politics (I found out it’s all kinda circular), I found other things referring to “Black Swan” and fail to understand what a ballet play has to do with whatever it was I was reading about…

Until I did.

Life has been very interesting. All these ups and downs are just a part of it. While I am convinced that I could never have “wisened up” to break out of my bad-job and gaming-rut – that maybe this all was necessary for me to grow up – stoop being just the music-person and have an actual human-side, too.

I believe no one can be (or maybe even should be) encouraged get out of the rut with any combination of words. The reason some of us fall into it are because we need to learn some lessons. For me it was a clean in and clean out – I had no “well-intended” people around me who were trying to take advantage of my helpless way of being, who’d, unbeknownst to their own efforts sabotage my life – like the companions of alcoholics often do.

Having to go through these kinds of harsh lessons can be a pain BECAUSE I had to go through it alone – but with a too-helpful person around it might have been impossible.

So, what makes someone stay stuck in their addictions or eventually pull the trigger – it is unclear. I’m pretty sure that most people who think they need to help someone can often cause more trouble.

Had someone forced me to change jobs halfway through my hell – had someone unfaithfully, out of pity taken me to lunch to keep me company – who knows, I might have never made it out. All that help might have had the opposite effect – it could have made it more cosy in hell.

Enablers can make your life cosy in hell! And I am thankful for the Universe for not sending any my way when I was at my weakest.

I did wonder a few days ago how come my attitude to life, the way I talk, the things I talk about or not – how nothing of what I do now was in any way a part of my life all these years ago. I didn’t exist.

And I have arrived to who I am – partly, of course thanks to the people I am surrounded by these days – but also, partly, because I went and took on some shit entirely on my own.

Should for some reason all my current ships sink as they did before – I’ll not lose my footing to that extent again. But unlike before, I feel I have connected to people now in ways that I could never do so, before – as a person, as a human, with feelings, with fun, outlooks to life – my eggs are now in many baskets, not just in the music one

The post 6 months in, 6 months out 2/2 first appeared on Silvi Simberg.

6 months in, 6 months out 1/2

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This is going to be a terribly personal crash story, maybe to provide an anecdote on how to get into and out from a “rut”. Or call it depression, the non-clinical kind. Or having no-life.

I was having the time of my life – creating music, performing some little live shows – we weren’t terribly popular, but it was a fun way to spend time, regardless. We didn’t earn any money with it, but for some reason we kept doing it, regardless.

I could say that the descent into rut, of course, takes a lot more conditions to align than what happened within the 6 months – but it is poetic to title it this way – and there is a bit of truth in there – while the 6 months mark, if I may put it this way – was the point of no return – I had been headed towards that black hole for many years – with the choices I had made and relationships I was and wasn’t in with the people around me.

I loved writing music. I felt as if that was the thing I was born for. Everything else stopped mattering when I was dealing with it. Maybe I was even a bit manic when it came to that – just too bad I wasn’t manic about making it a business. It was going so well that some of the friends I had back then, around, supported it – some even to the point of joining me on stage and writing music with me.

In the spur of that mania I even switched one long-time boyfriend for another – one that also felt more supportive about anything I was doing, and participated in my musical projects. It was awkward, but I found all the justifications for the switch, so life was a show for me, and I was the lead.

6 months after that switch I lost my day job at the CD store – but that was fine, the new boyfriend crutched me enough until I found more work and the show went on. It went on spectacularly – while I switched jobs once again – unbeknownst to me at the time into another bear trap – the music was going great, I had two bands, I did music with 7 different people, and I couldn’t imagine myself happier. I had no problems at all.

And just by the moment I felt things are about to get really good, and we had a solid repertoire, and it’s going to blow up for the good – I get the type of message, “it’s not you, it’s me” – from my wonderful co-writer and pianist – participating in both of the projects. “I feel like I’m holding back your progress.”

And it might have even been on the same day that I also got a very similar message from the drummer, saying she wants to focus on her own band.

The projects were done. Their reasoning felt like a load of bullshit, but for some reason I didn’t probe them for more honest answers. I do wonder whether I had been a dick to them, whether I was a terrible friend, was I being too tyrannical? Was, what we were doing, really bad (they were all music school people, and I wasn’t – so, they might hear things that I simply am incapable of).

I see her then doing something completely unexpected, she’d chosen to join a different project – while her choices were none of my business – it really did break my heart.

So, because the projects were cancelled, I had fuckall to do with my free time. I could have kept writing the music, but I didn’t. I downloaded TERA and started playing that. I made some “online friends” and would stay up late at night playing and chatting with them.

And then the next “it’s not you, it’s me” happens. The boyfriend, my champion – kicks me out.

Hysterical!

I was sobbing at work, saying I can’t afford to live in this town on my own with this salary, so, they gave me a raise so that I could. Barely, but could. I’ll say it was 700€, rent and all that was about half of it.

And where-ever I moved, I made sure it had stable cable internet connection so I could keep playing. And keep playing I did.

I never went out, I never reached out to anyone I had known – and that includes family members – I hadn’t been keeping in touch with them for a while even before this – as they disagreed with my life choices and I with theirs, back and forth.

So, for the next 3 years, I just worked for a horrible man (you might want to say that all business owners are heroes… But I will dispute that. And if you go all economist on me on that one, I am happy to fucking block you).

I’d come home from work, maybe not even eat – and I’d play all the hours I had for myself. And all the week-ends, too.

So, there was some semblance to life inside the game – there were social connections, guilds, activities, friendship-like-things, drama, competition, cooperation… Eventually, I even met a few people – they came over here to Estonia.

2 years in to that crap, though – I experienced a strange episode – I was all over inflamed, the doctors couldn’t explain why – so they just gave me some anti-inflammatory stuff to bring the fever down. When the general doc then interviewed me after and asked if there is something else, I said yes.

I’m thinking of suicide.

To be continued.

The post 6 months in, 6 months out 1/2 first appeared on Silvi Simberg.

Through the Lens of Risk 3/99

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Just a couple of times I have been asked – but when I have, the answer I give does not seem to be satisfactory, “risk” – is the answer, “what did you learn?” And that was the question.

It’s a question that I can’t really answer because I didn’t learn a thing or two. I didn’t learn a new concept. What I have learned has bled into many areas of my life – it is impossible to summarize it this way. But one thing I do want to summarize today – what I have learned about Risk – and just a couple of things – how viewing things through the Lens of Risk has changed how I see and handle them.

Generally speaking – Risk is a sort of a domain that works anywhere. But it’s helpful to know that risk comes in different classes. What has been repeated to vomiting this year – deaths in car accident crash is a different risk class than wars, and they both are different from pandemics. Different likelihoods, different magnitudes, and different methods of reaching those magnitudes. Car accidents do not spread virally like viruses, and neither of them comes with the possible consequences as does war (even though one could argue that in any case, the result is death – that’s not the only metric to take into consideration).

Now, more specifically speaking – a few things I have thought many times this year is about how risk relates to trust. How it relates to confidence and a need for control. For a while before getting to know the risk crowd, the philosophy and works around it and related to it, I was on my own and was exploring what the grand science of psychology has to offer. From a psychology perspective trust, confidence and control are very different from how I see them now. In psychology, phrases are used like trust-issues, low confidence, over-confidence, control-freaks… Now that I have managed to see how risk ties into all those three – these descriptors (let alone their cure) seem very “magical” (not in the positive sense).

Trust
While from psychology alone I would learn that people have “trust issues”, and from the behavioral science crowd, I keep getting directed to the ncase.me/trust/ game – thinking about it in regards to risk it cleared up a few things.
What are the things people talk about when they talk about trust? Young girls talk about trusting their secrets to their potential partners. This usually means talking about something traumatic or talking about what they hate – things that a partner that later would like to get rid of them would use to make life unbearable with them.

The most harmful form of trust would be the one where people leave responsibilities of their own up to someone else. Look, this is me and all my shards of glass – I am now handing it over to you, please don’t mishandle me. Why people might be doing this could be something very simple. Have you ever seen over-sized young seagulls squealing at their parents, chasing them, opening their mouths so the parent would feed them like they used to? It’s the same thing.

The trust game comes a little closer to the risk part – but it attempts to frame trading with other people into a system. As if trust and trade are supposed to be possible to automate somehow.

In the end what it seems to come down to – what’s the possible maximum cost/loss, and what’s the possible normal of maximum payoff. We don’t assess trading the same goods with the same money but with different people the same way – in our gut there is something based on what we feel more comfortable trading with someone and less comfortable with another.

Confidence
This is another aspect psychology only seems to complicate for all the wrong reasons. Yes, there is a strong relevance of being confident when you want to persuade (or manipulate) someone. People are more likely to follow you when you seem confident about where you are going. Especially when it is apparent that you will also pay a price if you are wrong – not someone else. But confidence is something snakes can master, too – and not because they are great at deceit and know what they are doing – but because positive feedback from their followers encourages them to repeat what they have been doing to gain all that reward…

It’s not confidence when a blind man is running towards the cliff – that’s mania.

Confidence might seem to create the illusion to the follower that their leader is confident because they know what is ahead, they know what they are doing, they know what the price is and they know what the payoff will be. That’s what the people are following (in their minds) – not a blind man running towards a cliff.

Psychology, in that regard, brings us shiny nuggets like fake-it-til-you-make it, get competent and that will also make you confident. What most people achieve doing these self-affirmations and mindlessly squeaking the running wheel to get cosmetically stronger – is manic delusions – not knowledge and knowledge-backed confidence. Knowledge-backed confidence is impossible when it comes to bigger things – even when it comes to science (hello, Popper!).

Confidence is over-rated. Everything around us is uncertain as fuck – and you becoming confident won’t change that fact. In the back of your head, you KNOW that something will fuck you up while you try to sleep because instead of clipping tails and getting insurances you have been busy trying to convince and argue what a great and competent person you are. I’m not really talking about you, I don’t even know who you are, okay?

So, the best we can get – as Mr. Risk Hedger himself says, “hedge all you tail exposures.”

To sleep well: hedge all your tail exposures. #RWRI

+ hide nothing from your enemies
+ pay all your taxes, show the IRS all your income mother of all tail risks)
+ be uncancellable
+ back up all your data
+ have some gold (and/or BTC) but not too much
… https://t.co/cS6DhS2a5M

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 20, 2020

Control

Another interesting domain that reading shit about psychology messed up for me was control. Trying to define or understand control without risk, without skin in the game – you’re just fumbling around in the dark. We want to control as much as we possibly can when our own life is on the line (or some people will worry about status or whatever other interesting fashionable things they are being competitive about). And others will “control” their situation by trying to throw other people under the bus, using them as meat-shields, manipulating and coercing others to take risks for them.

Exploring Risk
These are just a few things I have started to handle and see differently after I started seeing how risk ties into it.

For me – my real-world risk explorations have only begun – more so from real-life itself, I presume than from books and courses.

Even though RWRI was two weeks long, the scope it aims to cover is larger than that. The curriculum is longer and more thorough – and technically attainable even without getting into probability and math (which I am planning to brush up on, but we’ll see – I’m not such a great follower of plans when they are self-generated – it appears to be impossible to hold ourselves accountable alone);

In case you have nothing better to do than to read
Here are some books to start with, if you already haven’t, that teach to fumble in the dark in more observant ways!

Incerto (Fooled By Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game – Taleb) – so far I have read all those twice – and both times they expanded – reading those has been a sort of a meditation which has helped me start paying attention to things I didn’t and wouldn’t before – about risk, personality, uncertainty, experts, philosophy, health, food, relationships, my own personal callings;

Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kahneman – every time I meet someone new who is somewhat into Besci, they advise I should totally read that book. I did long before I found what Taleb wrong (and while reading TFTS – I kept thinking what does a Ballet play have to do with what the guy was talking about in the book). Today I say no one should ever read that particular book without following it up with some Gigerenzer (Gut Feelings or Risk Savvy, please).

Alchemy – Rory Sutherland – because my daytime work is related to marketing, advertising, design, branding – Alchemy was the perfect overlap of Risk, what’s interesting in Besci, and what works in Marketing.

Connected, Blueprint – Nicholas Christakis – he views society and networks through a mild lens of complexity – the studies referred to in the book are interesting, the observations made in this book, strangely enough, made me rethink much of what I write into my fiction thing – I realized what he writes in the books indeed does seem to hold true in what I observe in my personal life, too – narrowing down some “rules” around us helped me spot and eliminate some inconsistencies regarding people, communities – those kinds of things in the story.

Christopher Alexander – The Timeless Way of Building – even though it’s more like a philosophy of architecture – I’d say it’s a philosophy for building or creating anything. That possibly includes programming, design, art, stories, music… That book actually made me re-arrange my living-space in ways I wouldn’t have before

Laters o/
My learning and reading have only just begun, so that list is short. I’ve way more books to read than I have managed to read so far, and I have even more books to yet discover.

The post Through the Lens of Risk 3/99 first appeared on Silvi Simberg.