Lately I’ve been twittering away my blog posts and interesting finds into small snippets via text, tweetie, the web and mostly tweetdeck. The latter app is great because it allows you to easily group people you follow into various lists and see their updates at once vertically and horizontally left to right.
While tweeting isn’t as evergreen as blogging, it’s useful in having a conversation with others in semi real-time. You’re more in touch with what people are doing and thinking about moment to moment. Some say it’s not representative of reality but my assumption is time is a commodity and you’re spending a portion of it tweeting so it must have some level of importance. In the sample of people I follow, I don’t see too many updates on what they had for lunch but rather hyperlinks to articles that pique my interest.
Twitter obviously has its place in both thinking and doing time for a lot of people. Though like most social media on the internet, it connects those already connected. Those with internet access, those who have time, those who accrue marketing and financial benefits from such an app. There’s definitely a set group of people who are also more likely to think Twitter is useful. It’s not the doctors slaving away all day in the OR, not the teachers in classrooms, not the construction workers fixing our highways.
I’m not sure how, like Facebook, it plays into our overall existence, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that it exists.
Music elevates me. I’m captive to it’s essence for no reason I can ever describe. I just know I’m lost to it. I believe in truth when I listen – a musical truth that’s undeniable. I move to it so it must be real. It stirs up something that makes me desperate to understand why. But I know it doesn’t matter. It’s not in the lyrics or the harmony or the composition. It’s me. Music just lets me be that.
Understanding that people are driven by innumerable motivations can help you learn to see their actions as a product of their inner selves rather than taking their behavior personally. Not taking people’s words and actions personally frees you from the need to react to them. You no longer have to perceive any negativity on their part as ill treatment, nor do you have to see their responses to you as a reflection of whether or not you said or did something wrong. Other people’s behavior and reactions cease to be a benchmark of your worth. When you choose not to take the words and actions of others personally, you can feel positive today even when surrounded by negativity.
John Robb’s writing has been on my mind a lot lately. He’s coming at ideas wearing many hats and most of them very different from mine. Hence, the initial attraction. I keep being pinged though by his idea of a Darknet, which I imagine he will have to rebrand. It sounds too ominous and few would appreciate the irony.
My understanding of resilient, networked tribes is that it’s a representation of hyper-localism. Similar to slow food or open-source networks that band around specific themes, these tribes would come together based on mutual needs and interests. What differentiates that from a special interest group? Not much actually, but it harks back to the original idea of a special interest group, before corporate donations and government lobbying made them a little too special for the rest of the public.
I’ve seen the hyper-local idea in many places, in fiction within For Us, The Living, Childhood’s End, and Speaker for the Dead, in the real world within spas & resorts, elderly homes and foreign communities in India, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore funded by the non-resident superrich. The latter is the closest the idea comes to reality.
Robb puts it best here:
My solution is to form a tribal layer. Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet). A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of. Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence. Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…
The ancient Rome of Caesar, Crassus and Pompeius differ from modern America primarily on the education level and resources of the middle class. Power is slightly more distributed and in the event of downfall, there are more alternatives than diaspora and cross-pollination of cultures. Preservation of culture isn’t as important as preservation of information and human capital. Realizing this, people will band around similarities not on political viewpoints, but ideological ones. And what separates the ideologues of today from the Lockes, Kants, Humes and Marxists of the 19th century that spawned some of the most disturbing and historic wars of the 20th?
Technology. Specifically the communication networks developing over the internet. Transparency IS important and Robb poses a lot of questions on where to draw the line between privacy and security. While history teaches us where we went wrong, it also glaringly points out how much we thought we were right. So is the point to doubt our thinking now and stall? I don’t think so.
Evolution requires iteration and we’re simply at one point of the cycle. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for past mistakes. Just another reason to keep doing and risking, without worrying about making mistakes since they only help speed the cycle of iteration. This is what “Beta” really means. Google being the best example, of course.
What we can’t do is continue to do business as usual. It isn’t working. Next steps are tenuous and may not happen as a mass whole. Disbanding and communicating across shared networks is another version of a population coexisting. We’re experimenting with Life 2.0, or whatever version we’re in now based on historical viewpoint.
DailyOMs can be overly spiritual for some, yet they resonate a strong sense of philosophical sense that can actually be applied. The whole post is here, but it’s fun to excerpt the most provocative parts, starting with the first paragraph:
Sometimes we look at the actions of others and find it difficult to understand what motivates them. But we are all doing the best we can with the information we currently have. We have all been taught how to see the world from the examples of those around us and by our experiences. Keeping this in mind, we can accept the choices made by others while seeking ways to increase the world’s level of consciousness as a whole.
Looking back at the past, I sometimes want to reevaluate my decisions and then I realize that I was doing the best with the information I had. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have made those decisions. It eliminates regret and helps me focus more on the path that got me to those decisions so I can better understand my past mind to help my future mind think smarter. Likewise, I think of others on their own paths and don’t view them as ahead or behind but in the right place to learn what they need to. Hence,
We can share our experiences and understanding with others not from a place of condescension but of connection.
There’s no better or worse, it’s all apples and oranges of a different variety. Approaching others this way leaves little room for judgment. At the same time, we can better acknowledge current status, restrictions, behaviors and culture if we agree that we’re coming in with a personal bias. Getting rid of our idiosyncrasies to say we’re equal makes us drones. Connecting on a premise of differences makes us one. I think of looking at a cloth through a microscope and seeing all the little connected strings pattern together and when someone pulls the cloth, they flex and move but don’t break.
I love the way it ends:
Every thought we have and action we take becomes part of the collective energy of the planet…
…Remember the next time you witness an action of another that they are of the same earth as you but simply on a different conscious level at this point in their life. Find compassion, bless them, and move along your day in grace.
Sound is vibration that can be translated by the delicate structures of our inner ear, but it moves more than just those tiny receptors. It is part of the spectrum of energy vibrations that affect us on the mental, physical, and spiritual levels.
It’s unnerving how some songs connect us to the deepest parts of our being and provide solace when we need it the most. To translate that into a holistic method of healing is fantastic and easily applied on our own to bring us in and out of the mode of thinking we want to be in.
Modern existence is so complex, and much of what we long to do is left to wait by the side. We know what is important but tend to let the weight of worldly pressures lead us astray. To get back on track, however, we need only take a moment to consider where our thoughts will be as we take our last breath on this earth.
The rest of the DailyOM goes into the last moments being composed of family and loved ones and spending more time with them is what matters most. While we’re all somewhat inclined to this notion, it’s very relative, subjective to what matters most to that individual person. Bottomline, thinking this way lets you tap into that meaning for yourself and pursue it in the here and now. Better than reflecting on it as regret (a waste of time if you already do what moves you).
**A collection of inspirational DailyOM quotes can be found here.
Very. Whether it’s your desk, your desktop, your kitchen counter, your bookcase, your calendar, or whatever way you choose to organize the various idiosyncrasies of your life, it makes sense to you. You arranged it that way (or just left it there) because that’s what you like. It’s what appeals to you. It’s beautiful (to you).
People who can explain their mess to other people have an amazing ability.
If you don’t love, respect, appreciate your own mess, why will others?
Before the experiences we go through turn into memories, they become stories first. At the most basic level, we’re all storytellers. Some say it’s a lost art, but on paper that isn’t true. Look at movies, books, magazines, video games and now the unlimited amount of online content published daily. The common thread is sharing our moments with each other through a medium that helps us connect with like-minded people.
The act of telling a story though may be endangered. Growing up, I remember being captivated by storytellers at local fairs. Their presentation skills were exquisite. They knew how to hold an audience, build gut-wrenching suspense, and show you what they wanted you to see. Their medium was imagination.
Regaining this art now I believe happens through conversation. A mental shift is required first. You have to start seeing life’s events as future stories. Being stuck in a traffic jam can be annoying and worse still if you’re running out of gas. But there’s a developing story here and thinking of it this way may take the edge off and allow you to look at it as something that will soon pass.
Our frustrations with life stem not from reality but from our perspective of it. If every moment/experience/event is a story to tell later, we can converse – speak and listen – on life as it happens.
The power of words. Word choice is important. So is inflection of tone upon specific words. And most important is avoiding the distractions in speech that take away from your message, such as “um” and “uh”. Any practiced presenter will echo these observations.
Now transfer this to daily speech and think about the effect words, speech, and tone of voice can have. On your environment and the people around you. Take the word, “fear”, for example. We used to use it to communicate an emotion to another person. The emotion and the word have become so closely linked now that the word itself can produce a slight bit of that emotion. Listen carefully to the words optimistic people use and you’ll hear more positive words than negative. Their speech not only provides a circular benefit to them but also to others just by being around them more. The opposite is true for pessimistic people.
One of the easiest ways to get out of a sour mood is to start thinking about and using positive words (smiling is #1 though). Positivity is in fact contagious. Your word choice will give off a positive vibe that will be returned back to you from others. And the cycle will continue.
The first step to behavioral change is always personal experimentation.
With words like “metacognition”, “pathology”, and “matrix” diluting our daily conversation, the language we speak is becoming inflated. We sound like we know more than we do.
Language has a signalling effect. It lets the listener know what we’re all about. Whether we use complex words or the simplest form of communication, we let the other person know what we value. Bottomline, if the listener doesn’t understand you, what’s the point?
Our words combined with our tone of voice send deeper signals into the listener’s brains and understanding occurs when we create new pathways or add to current ones. Think about a concept everyone can relate to, like food, and all the internal connections you personally have associated with it. When a person talks to you about the food they like or their view on cooking at home or eating out, you view their conversation from a specific set of neural pathways built over years of experience with food. For example, when a vegetarian talks to a non-vegetarian about food, signals can get crossed. Unless…the non-vegetarian has a reason (subconscious or otherwise) to want to explore the vegetarian pathway. To agree or disagree or listen in general, we have to want to do so.
When we read papers or watch the news and hear scientific words that eventually become part of our language, we’re not explained the neural pathways that are associated with them. A pathologist views “pathology” very differently than a layman does. Our relationships to words, and language overall, comes from our personal experiences with them. It’s why we connect with people who connect with our experiences of things.
Words passed onto us through media we can’t directly connect with only dilutes – and inflates – our language. The downstream effect is a thinning of our relationships because we have less real connection to other people and their experiences. While the New York Times or Washington Post may be allowing multiple people to receive the same message and hence communicate effectively, it also makes for mixed signals because we don’t have a deeper understanding of the subject matter. There’s no foundation.
This post, for example, could only be as good as one’s understanding of it. Or looked at on a deeper level, it’s only as good as one’s connection to it through personal experience, which is more meaningful. I don’t agree fully with Ben Casnocha when he says Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit for this very reason. The purpose of communication is not necessarily to spread a message as wide as possible. It’s to connect deeply with the few who relate to that message. While Ben’s law of averages approach can certainly help this, the approach itself can take away from the connection that could be made. It’s a tough dilemma and producers (of products, blogs, ideas, etc.) fall on either spectrum. It’s hard to find the middle ground, though the Frank Herberts, Robert Heinleins and Orson Scott Cards of the world have definitely made some headway.
