We seek patterns, make distinctions, distinguish between those people we like and others not so much, and we do it all with a rabidness that would make Mr. Hyde howl at the moon for a scotch. Because of pattern recognition we have big brains. Because of pattern recognition, we stay alive, can navigate waterways, can create narratives, have fights, talk, and do it all again, and a lot. We look out into what there is, and we lay claim to it by sorting, documenting, naming, and sharing the names we've come up with into a common system that we can all rely on. We have tremendous capacity in this sense, so it makes sense that, once a pattern has become apparent in our mind, we likewise stick to it, mostly because we believe, as has probably been evidenced, that it provides predictive capacity. In other words, that we can rely on it to guide us out of difficulty in the future. After all, we expect others to go out and do the same, strengthening our ability to rely on their actions, and making our lives more efficient. Drive on the right side of the road. Coordinate with others. Be nice.
It makes sense, then, that when we face real conflict, it is because someone else has found a pattern that they can rely on that also, simultaneously, intersects or contradicts a pattern we've found. Happens all the time.
At the same time, we want to be lazy. Our laziness makes a lot of sense. Given an appropriate amount of energy storage (food) and other basic necessities, we shouldn't go out into the world and cause unnecessary accidents, or risk them, just for the sake of it. We should have a purpose when we choose to act.
Oddly enough, though, to get really good at pattern recognition, we need to be able to practice safely, without the cold hand of death or injury or other sundry misfortune sweeping down to take us away.
So maybe there's a balance in there somewhere, I'm not sure yet. Historically, the most able pattern recognizers could then also be the laziest people, which strikes me as odd. That's probably because I think we should work for what we have, because I buy into a just world theory. I probably buy into a just world theory in turn because a norm of fairness keeps coordination between us as a group higher, increasing efficiency, so I don't like anyone that would profit at the expense of the group even though my ability to profit at the expense of the group, if I can control it, yields some incremental degree of power to me, extending my resources. It is a tricky thing that I'm going to have to think about more than I can right now.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
"Implementation Intentions"
A very basic idea, implementation intentions are the processes by which you or I will go about attaining our goal/s, or a way that we'll respond when a certain condition happens. Just spelling out your intentions helps to make them more concrete and increases ease of attainment. Instead of drinking when invited to a bar, for instance, you might make a decision to always redirect the invite to a restaurant, or some other venue where there are other options besides alcohol. This helps us to stay on track when immediately available by unhealthy options exist, like fast food as well.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Long Term Goals
Happen in the short term. That's something I wasn't ready to acknowledge, and drinking kept the edge off of the possible realization. Every day I spend thinking about an idealized goal out there that will happen, at some indeterminate place, when the timing is right, is another day spent not taking concrete steps to attain that goal, whatever it is. That said, getting what I think I want means short term discomfort. At least to some extent.
It is likewise very easy to commit to long term goals (check out the link) and to agree about values in the long term, and different when we are stressed, anxious, tired, or, generally, right now, when decisions must be made, and also, when the longing to have a drink comes out of hiding. After all, we never drink in the long term, but most of the truly bad consequences of drinking are in the long term. Stated another way, the harm of incremental steps comes to play a strong role in developing one's alcoholism, and benchmarking one's drinking against others (particularly in my social group) is likely to be based on what you or I want to be true, and not what is in fact true. And what do we want, generally: the most available short term pleasure we can easily get our hands on.
It is likewise very easy to commit to long term goals (check out the link) and to agree about values in the long term, and different when we are stressed, anxious, tired, or, generally, right now, when decisions must be made, and also, when the longing to have a drink comes out of hiding. After all, we never drink in the long term, but most of the truly bad consequences of drinking are in the long term. Stated another way, the harm of incremental steps comes to play a strong role in developing one's alcoholism, and benchmarking one's drinking against others (particularly in my social group) is likely to be based on what you or I want to be true, and not what is in fact true. And what do we want, generally: the most available short term pleasure we can easily get our hands on.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Arbitrary Coherence
We use past decisions (mostly of what we paid) to shape current ones. That is, the initial possession of a pair of Sony headphones we got as a gift may lead us to select Sony as a brand choice in the future merely because of the headphones. More here.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Status Quo Bias
When we try to stop drinking, we're doing much more than trying to abstain from a bad habit. Status quo bias refers to exactly what it sounds like, our tendency to stick to what we've got, and importantly, to value it, whatever it is, more than what we don't have, simply because we don't have that stuff. A cup costs five dollars. I buy the cup. You come around, offer me five dollars for the cup. I'm unwilling to sell it for under seven, let's say. Why? (Sans transactions costs)-- Status quo bias. Which is almost a tautology of sorts, which is likewise okay.
The take home point: we might be unwilling to trade something for something of higher value than we already have because the calculation of what we have is skewed. So, paradoxically, because we value what we have more than objectively identical stuff, we might not always trade up to better stuff because of our inherent bias.
The take home point: we might be unwilling to trade something for something of higher value than we already have because the calculation of what we have is skewed. So, paradoxically, because we value what we have more than objectively identical stuff, we might not always trade up to better stuff because of our inherent bias.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
I used to walk into a bar and I'd feel the grime crunch in under my feet like the charcoal they used to throw on sidewalks over snow when I was a kid. I could smell the cold air then, and feel the sleigh behind me rattling around. Still, no matter how dirty the floor, the stools were always the kind of clean smooth that only comes through heavy usage, place holders for our asses that they are. Sedentary patterns of flirtation mark their place, keep time with the music, the same smooth sailing of the slope in the middle of a storm, worn down enough to get up enough speed, fluffy enough to crash,--when you get a chance to let free of everything for a few seconds. All of the caution piled up and folding back on itself can go fuck off, and I'll scamper back up the hill to do it again, thank you very much.
Yep, that's where I'd go. Before I got all sober. Shit, like I'm a kid again, too. Funny, that line. How you can't repeat things, about how of course you can, about how Dylan ripped it out of an under-read Japanese author writing about a gangster.
Tell me you can't feel the cold water pipe sweat under your grip as you reach out for some structure, for a modicum of stability in a blissfully swaying bathroom. Tell me you can't see the marker scrawled there in the moderately serious tones of stoned sober patrons, having sat away long afternoons into a good case of hemorrhoids and facial hair. Tell me that you'll be able to live without the friendly embrace of that shockingly bitter IPA that makes you sit up and just beg like a damn dog. Tell me that you'll commit yourself to something a little more long term, to finding the bliss of the moment without the need for the next minute's bliss. Tell me that we'll find something out there together, one day, and that it will be perfectly selfless when we find it, being so naively self-centered, we can't find it now or we'd be spoiled forever. Tell me about late nights and early mornings breaking over shoulders cold and welcome, waves of experience, and about the discipline of waking up, turning around to face them sleep in our eyes, about knowing what you stand for without getting approval for it first, and please, just between us, it's okay, give me the courage not to complain about co-workers to other co-workers.
Yep, that's where I'd go. Before I got all sober. Shit, like I'm a kid again, too. Funny, that line. How you can't repeat things, about how of course you can, about how Dylan ripped it out of an under-read Japanese author writing about a gangster.
Tell me you can't feel the cold water pipe sweat under your grip as you reach out for some structure, for a modicum of stability in a blissfully swaying bathroom. Tell me you can't see the marker scrawled there in the moderately serious tones of stoned sober patrons, having sat away long afternoons into a good case of hemorrhoids and facial hair. Tell me that you'll be able to live without the friendly embrace of that shockingly bitter IPA that makes you sit up and just beg like a damn dog. Tell me that you'll commit yourself to something a little more long term, to finding the bliss of the moment without the need for the next minute's bliss. Tell me that we'll find something out there together, one day, and that it will be perfectly selfless when we find it, being so naively self-centered, we can't find it now or we'd be spoiled forever. Tell me about late nights and early mornings breaking over shoulders cold and welcome, waves of experience, and about the discipline of waking up, turning around to face them sleep in our eyes, about knowing what you stand for without getting approval for it first, and please, just between us, it's okay, give me the courage not to complain about co-workers to other co-workers.
Drinking and Self-Justification.
So, okay, given the problem I wrote about in my last post, we can start to see drinking (in an abusive way) in a new light: namely, that we work really hard to justify our actions and keep them in balance with our self-evaluation/self-understanding. If you feel good about yourself, you justify your actions accordingly. If you feel bad about yourself, you likewise justify your actions. Because self-justification is so deep seeded, because it is needed for survival and one of the psychological adaptations that keeps us moving quickly through a dangerous world, it is extremely difficult to push back against the immediate calculations that keep us balanced with the narratives of ourselves that we call memories. We have to break those narratives and break some modes of self-justification, to stop drinking (we being problem drinkers to some extent).
For example, you've probably all had a disagreement with someone when you show them evidence that flatly contradicts a main justification for their conclusions, right? Then what happens? Often times, they shift their concern, or conclusions, into a new sphere, and say that you haven't dealt with that new concern! And then again! And again! On a whole, confirmation bias and just world theory play a much larger role in our personal psychology than we want to admit, and here's something to reckon with as well: we are much much less important to the world than we are to ourselves, but because we need to maintain a psychological position of primary importance for survival, we have adapted it over many generations. There's that famous graduation speech by David Foster Wallace where he hits on just this fact.
Choosing not to drink for me is also a question of how to live, it is normative and prescriptive, and drinking has functioned as one way to highly inflate my (and our) already highly attuned mechanisms for self-justification in a quest for consonance. Knowing that the world isn't consonant, and doesn't have to make sense, actually frees me up to function a little bit better, because I recognize that not all events are endogenously sparked.
For example, you've probably all had a disagreement with someone when you show them evidence that flatly contradicts a main justification for their conclusions, right? Then what happens? Often times, they shift their concern, or conclusions, into a new sphere, and say that you haven't dealt with that new concern! And then again! And again! On a whole, confirmation bias and just world theory play a much larger role in our personal psychology than we want to admit, and here's something to reckon with as well: we are much much less important to the world than we are to ourselves, but because we need to maintain a psychological position of primary importance for survival, we have adapted it over many generations. There's that famous graduation speech by David Foster Wallace where he hits on just this fact.
Choosing not to drink for me is also a question of how to live, it is normative and prescriptive, and drinking has functioned as one way to highly inflate my (and our) already highly attuned mechanisms for self-justification in a quest for consonance. Knowing that the world isn't consonant, and doesn't have to make sense, actually frees me up to function a little bit better, because I recognize that not all events are endogenously sparked.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
The Problem
We have a tremendous capacity to act quickly in response to changing conditions. It literally keeps us alive. However. That ability simultaneously disallows longer term balancing/processing from taking place that might serve to re-evaluate our quick actions as qualitatively different, even when we have more information available to do so. We generally justify fast acting behavior rather than looking critically at it because we seek continuity. This justification process happens in small units, but the fundamental principle is that we avoid dissonance in thinking about our own actions, even to our own detriment, and when our world might seem a bit richer. Authors Tavris and Aronson talk about just this phenom in their book "Mistakes Were Made (But not by me)"--have a look.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Learning Something New -- like Sobriety
We adults don't like to admit we're not aware of something, or incapable of performing some task, but that doesn't mean we still can't learn how to do it. My thinking has suffered from just this kind of defect: I'm basically "who I am" already, and that is a set list of capacities that doesn't change much. I'm not trying to say that we're not more skilled or less skilled at certain things. To some extent, however, the attitude that we can't change keeps us from changing, or learning. It also keeps us from thinking that learning takes time and serious effort. If I can't "do" something right away, then I won't be able to do it, for instance. That's just not true. It may take a few years to learn a language, for instance. There's progress along the way though--and sure, I can feel bad about my language acquisition skills if I think about all of the ways I don't understand it. I can also feel good about what I've done. Seems obvious when I write it out like this that over emphasizing the good or the bad makes it less likely that I'll simply keep on trying to learn. And isn't AA all about learning to become sober? That is, the ability to keep on trying without coming to a conclusion about the result of those efforts right away? I.e. learning to live like a kid again.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Is it all going to be okay?> EDIT
See my recent post first. If the answer is truly no, then you do not have to live anymore, because you will no longer be living. The caveat is of course that the types of threats that will end your life are probably not the things that are making you anxious enough to ask the question above, though they may masquerade as such.
As much as I want to have a vision of myself as a healthy 85 year old who looks back at life with satisfaction, I know that my current levels of satisfaction 50 years prior do not manifest themselves toward the sated ended of the spectrum. If, then, I'm honest with myself, I will assert and believe that 50 years will add approximately the same proportions of happiness/other emotions as I've dealt with so far, and so shouldn't think about my long term satisfaction as a proxy for dealing with the short term reality, or, importantly, to justify previous actions and shirk responsibility--i.e. to look at my actions as they were and not as I hope them to have been. By extension, to the degree that previous actions (and reactions therefrom) helped shape current belief systems, I cannot take my beliefs about how to act/be/react as facially accurate, though I recognize that one must do so to react to quickly changing environments. My fear is that I can much more easily conjure a quickly changing environment than to ask if I've made an error or whether one belief is inaccurate.
And I'm not talking about structurally wrong, or other conceptually huge problems. I want to disabuse myself of such abstruse mindsets that seek horizon based focal points to determine what will happen/what I will seek/decide/how I will act.
As much as I want to have a vision of myself as a healthy 85 year old who looks back at life with satisfaction, I know that my current levels of satisfaction 50 years prior do not manifest themselves toward the sated ended of the spectrum. If, then, I'm honest with myself, I will assert and believe that 50 years will add approximately the same proportions of happiness/other emotions as I've dealt with so far, and so shouldn't think about my long term satisfaction as a proxy for dealing with the short term reality, or, importantly, to justify previous actions and shirk responsibility--i.e. to look at my actions as they were and not as I hope them to have been. By extension, to the degree that previous actions (and reactions therefrom) helped shape current belief systems, I cannot take my beliefs about how to act/be/react as facially accurate, though I recognize that one must do so to react to quickly changing environments. My fear is that I can much more easily conjure a quickly changing environment than to ask if I've made an error or whether one belief is inaccurate.
And I'm not talking about structurally wrong, or other conceptually huge problems. I want to disabuse myself of such abstruse mindsets that seek horizon based focal points to determine what will happen/what I will seek/decide/how I will act.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Watching other people drink.
I haven't had a drink in so long that I forgot that other people get drunk as the night progresses and even have to wonder what the fuck was going on with the outburst of closely held emotion at certain moments (always vague and agreeable though they are) conveyed to me spontaneously. The older I get the easier it is to see the world outside of my own ego. So long as there could be value added to my existence from knowing someone, it is worth it. Avoiding them because they might think that George Bush or Barack Obama was/is the best President seems pointless and highly arbitrary. I'll admit that my ego is stoked when competition for information arises, or when there's a pressing ambiguity (maybe these are one and the same), and particularly when there's an audience present. In fact, as I realized last night (we had a few people over), audience changes dynamics dramatically, and not just in a way that makes the host stay busy with dishes and food. To wit, the presence of an audience changes how two people will interact with one another. It keeps intimate conversation at bay, I think. And I mean intimate in tone, not substance. But I don't mean artifical intimate. "I'd like tea" could be said in an intimate (and friendly) tone, whereas "I totally agree with you about your stance" (whatever the stance) could be said in a way that is artificially intimate. My point is only that audience slows people up, it chokes back what could be normal discourse otherwise, and it does that over and above actual explicit disruption (though there was plenty of that too).
Having written this, it occurs to me that it might seem like the product of someone whose ego still reigns supreme, i.e. someone who is driven by visible conformity, but I'll just have to assure you it isn't true for the time being. So to be more specific I'll say that some people simply want more attention than others, and will go out and say shit louder and more forcefully to command it. And that pisses me off a little bit. There's nothing I could do about it, short of apologizing for one guest to the guest I'm trying to have a conversation with, and as I write this, I realize that I haven't been righteously pissed on if a while (it generally isn't really worth it).
And here's the lack of ego. I'm not pissed off when I recognize that someone needs to have the spotlight of an audience to feel happy. Generally I may even oblige. Instead, I know that s/he has to face harder truths than I could provide with my attendance. I'm willing to fight not when I'm pissed but when I recognize that such a person could be much happier with themselves if they could someone drop this tick. Overall, though, it isn't really my place to go around trying to make everyone I think can be happier, actually happier. I know there's a lot I don't know, and that the unknowns may weigh heavily on the observed trait and the trait's intransigence.
Look, we all have a lot of principles to stand up for and ideals to get pissed about. And we have a lot of potential to actualize and dreams to live. Life's about trade offs and possibilities, though, and hopes and dreams can, unfortunately, actually grow up to keep us closed off from one another.
Having written this, it occurs to me that it might seem like the product of someone whose ego still reigns supreme, i.e. someone who is driven by visible conformity, but I'll just have to assure you it isn't true for the time being. So to be more specific I'll say that some people simply want more attention than others, and will go out and say shit louder and more forcefully to command it. And that pisses me off a little bit. There's nothing I could do about it, short of apologizing for one guest to the guest I'm trying to have a conversation with, and as I write this, I realize that I haven't been righteously pissed on if a while (it generally isn't really worth it).
And here's the lack of ego. I'm not pissed off when I recognize that someone needs to have the spotlight of an audience to feel happy. Generally I may even oblige. Instead, I know that s/he has to face harder truths than I could provide with my attendance. I'm willing to fight not when I'm pissed but when I recognize that such a person could be much happier with themselves if they could someone drop this tick. Overall, though, it isn't really my place to go around trying to make everyone I think can be happier, actually happier. I know there's a lot I don't know, and that the unknowns may weigh heavily on the observed trait and the trait's intransigence.
Look, we all have a lot of principles to stand up for and ideals to get pissed about. And we have a lot of potential to actualize and dreams to live. Life's about trade offs and possibilities, though, and hopes and dreams can, unfortunately, actually grow up to keep us closed off from one another.
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