One thing I've noticed as I go through this writing process on a daily basis is that my routine tends to be to open up a new blank post on blogspot, then stare at it for a few minutes while thinking about how to write about that day's topic. Already, in a week and a half I've noticed that I'm no longer intimidated by a blank page, as I was staring at it just now I thought of it more as an empty canvas than as some type of video game boss that I had to figure out how to conquer. It's interesting how writing for enjoyment rather than on assignment has so quickly changed my view on the process.
As for the day's chosen topic competitiveness, I want to start by saying that I've lived the majority of of my life under the impression that every human has a basic human instinct of competitiveness (although to some varying degree depending on the person), and that people who describe themselves as not being competitive are for whatever reason, holding back their instincts to be competitive. Now there's a few assumptions that I'm operating under so I should probably go back and define those so as to not seem like a complete ass on the internet.
First off, competitiveness is defined in my head as if you're in a situation where there is a clear winner and a clear loser, you would rather be the winner than the loser and when the outcome is decided you will be happier for having won than lost. Secondly, when I say that competitiveness is instinctual, I think of it on an almost evolutional level, where men are striving to prove themselves as more manly to attract females and potentially vis-a-versa. Lastly, this doesn't mean that in the case of victory, the winner has the right to degrade other people or make fun of the losers, and it also doesn't mean that the loser can give excuses or blame his teammates or whatever. The basic rule is, gracious in victory, gracious in defeat.
Now, maybe I'm mistaken in my assumption that everyone is competitive, I've certainly met a few people and even call a few of those people my friends that say they aren't competitive (although, in my experience, get them in the right circumstances and they are, in fact, very competitive), but I should probably leave room for them to exist in this universe.
What I really want to get at with today's writing is the question of, what causes a person to be more competitive than others? Why does society seem to frown on those who are competitive?
I've been told more than a few times that I was overly competitive, and from my viewpoint I always thought "either be in a competition and give 100% effort or don't be in it at all", now my viewpoint was and is maybe too simplistic, but is that viewpoint really too much to ask? I think I might be coming off as being whiney about this all and I'm totally okay with that, sometimes we as a society value feelings too much. Get beat by too much and your feelings might be hurt, try too hard and people label you as 'that kid' in gym class. Why do we treat getting beat as a bad thing? Shouldn't we turn that into motivation to become better? Isn't an honest realization of our shortcomings and then turning that shortcoming into a strength through hardwork and perseverance one of the greatest things a human can do?
I don't know, I'm a tryhard at heart and I always try to excel at the things I do. If there's one thing that I know about myself, it's that I sometimes lack motivation to work at things, but one thing that's motivated me as always been a competitive spirit, is that so bad?
In the words of Forrest Gump, "And that's about all I've got to say about that." It's interesting that a thing like writing that has no competitive aspect about it, I still manage a way to make it competitive. I catch myself watching my view counter to see if people are liking my writing, when the whole point of this project was to do a thing for myself not in the view of anyone else. Sometimes I love my own competitiveness and sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I do both in the same paragraph.
No big conclusions today, just some drawn out thoughts on a subject. Oh well, not every day has a conclusion.
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Cognitive Dissonance (at least I think that's the term for what I'm thinking about)
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Monday, February 23, 2015
Grappling with the Idea of Mental Health Problems
It seems like the cyclical nature of the world thrusts topics into our lives once in a while. And while we enjoy not thinking about them when they're not in the news, and we don't know what to really do about them when they are in the news, they exist the whole time even as much as the world at large would love to forget about them. This could apply to a lot of different things, but specifically I'm thinking of mental health as one of those issues. The most common way that mental health comes to the forefront of the collective American mind is when something goes terribly wrong (the kind of events that leap into my mind are mass shootings), and we tend to talk about mental health in America in terms like, "Oh, we really should do more as a country to help those with mental illnesses" or "Mental health professionals and research is so underpaid and underfunded".
Doesn't an issue this large and complex deserve a lot more than our occasional pity? Isn't it offensive that the only things that bring it into the spotlight are tragedies? Why don't we hear about the daily triumphs that mental health professionals make? Why do we only think of mental health in terms of the psychopaths that occasionally turn violent?
The last thing I want to do here is blame the media for not showing us a lot of the real issues that go on in America (although they aren't innocent in this matter), for a large part I think that the media gives Americans what we want to see and hear whether we realize we want to see and hear it or not. I think largely we like to hear news about stuff that we can't control and can't do anything about in our daily lives because we don't to feel obligated to do something, to feel empathy and to participate in the system as part of the cure for a societal ailment.
I don't know where I'm ultimately going with this thought train, and I don't have any sort of proposal to do something about it. It's just one of those things that a person points out and doesn't personally pitch in to do anything about it themselves and then points the finger at society as a whole for not doing that thing either. It's interesting how I can write these things that try to point out societal woes and ways that the world is unjust and ultimately be hypocritical myself and not do anything about the thing I'm pointing out.
One of the things I want to work on is picking a few battles/causes that I believe in and want to volunteer my time/effort/money towards. Maybe mental health can be one of them, I've always been shaken to the core by thinking about the effects of myself coming down with a sort of mental illness, recently the movie, 'Still Alice' stressed me out so much with it's depiction of early onset alzheimer's that I couldn't even bear to watch it. I get even further stressed out when I think of the possibility of a child of mine having any sort of mental handicap, not only for their quality of life, but for my quality of life as that kid's parent (how crazily selfish is that?). And while I know that just about no parent ever thinks of them as being capable of knowing how to handle that situation and the majority of them deal with that and in a lot of cases flourish with it, it still stresses me out to think of it.
So much of my life depends on the fact that I feel like a very rational, intuitive person. The idea that a person's brain could betray them, or that my own brain could betray me is one of the scariest thoughts. You wouldn't even know that anything is going wrong! That's part of the illness! I think as admittedly a very minimal first step, I want to be thankful for the rational, intuitive, fully-functioning brain I have as I still have it. Be more wary of and thoughtful towards those less fortunate than myself and perhaps keep my eyes open for an opportunity to help out (and the courage to take that opportunity).
'Til tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Competitive Nature
Doesn't an issue this large and complex deserve a lot more than our occasional pity? Isn't it offensive that the only things that bring it into the spotlight are tragedies? Why don't we hear about the daily triumphs that mental health professionals make? Why do we only think of mental health in terms of the psychopaths that occasionally turn violent?
The last thing I want to do here is blame the media for not showing us a lot of the real issues that go on in America (although they aren't innocent in this matter), for a large part I think that the media gives Americans what we want to see and hear whether we realize we want to see and hear it or not. I think largely we like to hear news about stuff that we can't control and can't do anything about in our daily lives because we don't to feel obligated to do something, to feel empathy and to participate in the system as part of the cure for a societal ailment.
I don't know where I'm ultimately going with this thought train, and I don't have any sort of proposal to do something about it. It's just one of those things that a person points out and doesn't personally pitch in to do anything about it themselves and then points the finger at society as a whole for not doing that thing either. It's interesting how I can write these things that try to point out societal woes and ways that the world is unjust and ultimately be hypocritical myself and not do anything about the thing I'm pointing out.
One of the things I want to work on is picking a few battles/causes that I believe in and want to volunteer my time/effort/money towards. Maybe mental health can be one of them, I've always been shaken to the core by thinking about the effects of myself coming down with a sort of mental illness, recently the movie, 'Still Alice' stressed me out so much with it's depiction of early onset alzheimer's that I couldn't even bear to watch it. I get even further stressed out when I think of the possibility of a child of mine having any sort of mental handicap, not only for their quality of life, but for my quality of life as that kid's parent (how crazily selfish is that?). And while I know that just about no parent ever thinks of them as being capable of knowing how to handle that situation and the majority of them deal with that and in a lot of cases flourish with it, it still stresses me out to think of it.
So much of my life depends on the fact that I feel like a very rational, intuitive person. The idea that a person's brain could betray them, or that my own brain could betray me is one of the scariest thoughts. You wouldn't even know that anything is going wrong! That's part of the illness! I think as admittedly a very minimal first step, I want to be thankful for the rational, intuitive, fully-functioning brain I have as I still have it. Be more wary of and thoughtful towards those less fortunate than myself and perhaps keep my eyes open for an opportunity to help out (and the courage to take that opportunity).
'Til tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Competitive Nature
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Movies as the Highest Form of Art?
It's time for a culturally relevant post! It's time for a post about movies! On Oscar Sunday!
There's a part of me that tends to think that a great movie can be the highest form of artistic expression that we have in the modern age. This is a bold statement (at least in my mind), so I'll take a couple minutes to try to back that up with at least some semblance of reasoning.
By definition, I think that art has to be culturally relevant, in the world we live in, if you make a great painting that is considered by critics and viewers alike to be a masterpiece but 1,000 people see it. How does that compare to a movie that is thought of as a masterpiece by critics and viewers but 50 million people see it? If the goal of art is to lift society to a place that it wouldn't have gotten on its own, a place of higher knowledge, a greater sense of self, of being in more in tune with our emotions, wouldn't a movie that does those things that reaches a wider audience mean more than a symphony? or a modern masterpiece painting?
Granted, the movies that are most likely to be considered artistic masterpieces generally aren't the same movies that are being seen by 50 million people, but I think the point remains the same even if you scale back the numbers from one thousand versus 50 million to 1 million versus 5 million.
So that's one way of reasoning my bold statement, here's another. A great movie can combine so many different artistic elements when other forms of art are limited to one element. Think about it this way, a great movie tends to have a great soundtrack or score. It has great actors, it might feature dancing or other highly choreographed routines (think fighting or other). All together there are so many elements that each seperately can be considered a form of high art, that when combined in a great manner it is much more powerful than one piece. It's like going to a museum full of art as opposed to looking at one piece in a person's private collection.
Even when you think of the all the effort that goes into making each scene visually stunning (think of the lighting, the angles, the sound and more), it just makes it so that when a movie pulls that "woah" moment off even more special. Plus, in my mind at least, the dynamic moving images of a movie usually means more and hits harder than the static image that a painting shows.
So yeah, that's my argument and I'm sticking to it, and that's coming from a self-proclaimed musician.
As for tonight's picks.... this is my picks, not who I think is going to win
Best Movie: Birdman. Just narrowly edges out Whiplash as my favorite movie this year. While Whiplash is the closest thing I've ever seen to a depiction of what it is truly like to connect with an instrument and with another person in a musical sense, Birdman has a lot more elements going on in my mind and I think Keaton and Norton kill it slightly harder than Teller and Simmons. Plus the whole movie being one continuous shot is in my mind a little more impressive than the 5 minute drum solo that Whiplash finished with.
My other favorite movies this year: Gone Girl, Nightcrawler. These 4 were in the top tier and a decent distance before you get to the Boyhood, Interstellar, Grand Budapest tier of movies.
Best Director: Linklater. Takes a lot of fine tuning for the story of the movie to outshine the gag of the way the movie was shot. I think the emotional connecting in this movie was top notch and it's not easy to do that with child actors.
Best Actor: Of the nominees: Keaton. Of all movies: Gyllenhall. Maybe I'm the only one who loved Nightcrawler so much but Gyllenhall is becoming one of my favorite actors.
Best Actress: Julianne Moore, I had to literally stop watching this movie because her portrayal of alzheimers had me so stressed out. Rosamund Pike was great in Gone Girl, but damn, I still stress out about Julianne Moore's character in that movie (which was just an okay movie overall).
Supporting Actor: JK Simmons
Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette
Whiplash and Nightcrawler for their respective writing genres.
That's it for week one of this project.
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Something to do with Mental Health (I'll try to figure out my angle later)
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Figuring Out my Cynicism towards Nature-Lovers
The Great Outdoors.
Or is it?
When I stated yesterday that today's topic was "valuing the environment", I probably should've clarified that I meant from a personal enjoyment sense, not a do we or do we not need to take care of the world around us from an ecological perspective. I think pretty clearly that the answer to that is yes and that we are so heavily dependent on the earth that we've been given that we can't afford to not take care of it and the current path of destruction we're on is not a good one. But, since that statement isn't up for debate really (at least not in my mind), I want to focus on the aesthetic beauty of the world around us and how much the average person should feel obligated to go out and enjoy all the world has to offer.
It seems like anybody who doesn't feel a sense of obligation to enjoy nature and the outdoors (not that I don't get at least some amount of enjoyment from it) gets a bit of scorn from most others and is looked down upon by the more smug members of society. I think the question I ask myself when given the opportunity is, "will I get more enjoyment from 8 hours driving to and from the adirondacks to go on a 4+ hour hike or from watching movies with friends or going to the local bar and shooting some pool." 9.8 times out of ten in my life I've gone with one of the latter options.
I think the majority of people of who feel the way I do come from vastly different circumstances which makes me feel a bit isolated. Typically, I think of city-dwellers or people who aren't in shape enough to really enjoy nature due to the physical aspects that it takes to do a lot of nature activities. Since I'm not particularly a city-dweller and I'm relatively in-shape, I wonder why I don't seem to 'get it'.
The cynical side of me wants to think that in the technology-driven, experience-sharing (via instagram and snapchat and whatever else) world that we live in, a lot of people want to go on nature adventures to do a couple things. 1) Have a shareable moment that seems 'genuine'. 2)feel like you're escaping the modern life for a day.
As for that first point, nobody want to questions anyone else's motivations for going on a nature excursion, and going on a hike and taking photos of the mountainscapes with some thoughtful quote is a surefire way to get a lot of likes and/or "oh wow, that person does cool things in their free time" thoughts from a lot of their 'friends'. The second one is more of a 'genuine' reason, but it's still caused by the same tech-driven instincts, oftentimes we feel shackled to our devices and nature is a great escape from the city sprawl. So in my cynical mind (which is like 85% of my overall mind), a lot of the reasons people my age go into nature are not purely for a love of nature but due to the addiction we have to technology.
Maybe that's just me trying to justify my own rationale, but I think there is something there. Or maybe I've just seen one too many picturesque lakeviews and mountainscapes with 100 "ooooh, thats amazing, im jealous" comments in my various social media feeds.
Side note, I kinda hate how cynical I sound of other people enjoying nature.
I dont know whether to steer this word vomit more towards myself or others, but I think one thing I'm realizing about myself is that one reason that I dont enjoy nature as much as I could is that I wrap it up and tie it together with so many other things that I can never just go out and enjoy nature in a pure unadulterated manner. I think my motivations tend to steer more towards what others think of my doing things and not purely what I think of them, which isn't the case when i do more secluded activities (like play piano.)
Maybe what I need to do to enjoy nature is to go out alone into nature with nothing but the necessary materials for the day and not tell anybody what I did. Kind of like what the idea for this blog is, do something for myself and not tell anybody I know.
Interesting conclusions, maybe once we get out of this deep freeze in upstate ny, I'll test it out. For 60-ish more days though, I'll stick with my cynical self.
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: For the Love of Movies
Or is it?
When I stated yesterday that today's topic was "valuing the environment", I probably should've clarified that I meant from a personal enjoyment sense, not a do we or do we not need to take care of the world around us from an ecological perspective. I think pretty clearly that the answer to that is yes and that we are so heavily dependent on the earth that we've been given that we can't afford to not take care of it and the current path of destruction we're on is not a good one. But, since that statement isn't up for debate really (at least not in my mind), I want to focus on the aesthetic beauty of the world around us and how much the average person should feel obligated to go out and enjoy all the world has to offer.
It seems like anybody who doesn't feel a sense of obligation to enjoy nature and the outdoors (not that I don't get at least some amount of enjoyment from it) gets a bit of scorn from most others and is looked down upon by the more smug members of society. I think the question I ask myself when given the opportunity is, "will I get more enjoyment from 8 hours driving to and from the adirondacks to go on a 4+ hour hike or from watching movies with friends or going to the local bar and shooting some pool." 9.8 times out of ten in my life I've gone with one of the latter options.
I think the majority of people of who feel the way I do come from vastly different circumstances which makes me feel a bit isolated. Typically, I think of city-dwellers or people who aren't in shape enough to really enjoy nature due to the physical aspects that it takes to do a lot of nature activities. Since I'm not particularly a city-dweller and I'm relatively in-shape, I wonder why I don't seem to 'get it'.
The cynical side of me wants to think that in the technology-driven, experience-sharing (via instagram and snapchat and whatever else) world that we live in, a lot of people want to go on nature adventures to do a couple things. 1) Have a shareable moment that seems 'genuine'. 2)feel like you're escaping the modern life for a day.
As for that first point, nobody want to questions anyone else's motivations for going on a nature excursion, and going on a hike and taking photos of the mountainscapes with some thoughtful quote is a surefire way to get a lot of likes and/or "oh wow, that person does cool things in their free time" thoughts from a lot of their 'friends'. The second one is more of a 'genuine' reason, but it's still caused by the same tech-driven instincts, oftentimes we feel shackled to our devices and nature is a great escape from the city sprawl. So in my cynical mind (which is like 85% of my overall mind), a lot of the reasons people my age go into nature are not purely for a love of nature but due to the addiction we have to technology.
Maybe that's just me trying to justify my own rationale, but I think there is something there. Or maybe I've just seen one too many picturesque lakeviews and mountainscapes with 100 "ooooh, thats amazing, im jealous" comments in my various social media feeds.
Side note, I kinda hate how cynical I sound of other people enjoying nature.
I dont know whether to steer this word vomit more towards myself or others, but I think one thing I'm realizing about myself is that one reason that I dont enjoy nature as much as I could is that I wrap it up and tie it together with so many other things that I can never just go out and enjoy nature in a pure unadulterated manner. I think my motivations tend to steer more towards what others think of my doing things and not purely what I think of them, which isn't the case when i do more secluded activities (like play piano.)
Maybe what I need to do to enjoy nature is to go out alone into nature with nothing but the necessary materials for the day and not tell anybody what I did. Kind of like what the idea for this blog is, do something for myself and not tell anybody I know.
Interesting conclusions, maybe once we get out of this deep freeze in upstate ny, I'll test it out. For 60-ish more days though, I'll stick with my cynical self.
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: For the Love of Movies
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Singularity is Near! Or How I Learned to Start Worrying, and Distrust the Data.
I gotta admit, writing a new post after finishing a work week that consists of sitting at and looking at computer screens for 90% of the time isn't particularly thrilling to me, but a commitment is a commitment for better or worse so I guess here goes nothing. Noting that though, the quality of this particular post might be a little sub-par.
One other thought before I delve into today's post, it seems that I'm really interested in how I've become who I've become. And now I'm interested to know why I'm interested in that....weird?
Anyways, Data. Data. Data. Data.
It seems that the modern world is very driven by and fascinated with the word 'data'. Or is the world fascinated by the idea of data? I know from working in a consulting firm and having the job title of 'data analyst', that a lot of people have no idea what data is all about and what it can and can't do (sometimes my bosses have this issue, that's probably why they employ people like me), but it seems that most people whether they understand data or not, they at least recognize how much data drives a lot of (or all of) the business and economic world around us and therefore hold this word/idea in a very high regard.
The advent of the internet and the interconnected world that we now live in has produced a lot of ways to measure data that we as the human race didn't previously have. And now people like me, (and people much smarter than me) are fascinated by the idea that everything that we could ever want to know is hidden in data somewhere. Which data has the answer we want is a mystery, and what question we have to ask the data to get the answer we want is also another mystery, (also sometimes even what answer we're looking for is a mystery), but there seems to be a general consensus that the answer is there, somewhere.
(I feel like this is a good time to point out that everything I'm saying is unbacked by any data whatsoever, which yes, is very ironic considering that I think of myself as a data nerd.)
What drives humanity's blind faith in data? Is that faith really blind? I sometimes think that we've created this data monster that spits out statistics based answers and trust it implicitly in a way that something we discover/create shouldn't be trusted, since humans inherently shouldn't be trusted either (or at least everything we do/say should be taken with a grain of salt.) It reminds me of that age old question which always fascinated me, "Did we discover mathematics? or did we invent it, and find that it had a lot more uses than we originally planned?"
I think that a more skeptic approach should be taken to blindly trusting data in general, but how that would play out in the modern world is up in the air (let alone the improbability of that actually happening.) A lot of people think about the upcoming singularity (the point at which the things people create are smarter than the people who create them) as a landmark event in the timeline of humanity (which it totally is). Naturally, a lot of questions abound about how this superintelligence will make choices and how those choices will affect mankind occur, along with questions about what powers we should give to this thing that is smarter than the collective intelligence of all mankind. One thing that seems to be true to me is that this superintelligence would make decisions based on data and then blindly follow them given that one action would have a higher probability of achieving a desired outcome than another.
I think that one of the best qualities about mankind is the ability to question these things that seem obvious or unstoppable and the ability to fight to achieve a goal that has infinitesimally small probabilities of ever happening (think about every inspiring movie you've ever watched). What I don't humanity to lose in this data driven age is that very human trait of distrust, and I'm worried that if we continue in our blind trust of data that we will ultimately lose this.
Just goes to show, for every data nerd out there we need an artist. And for every statistician out there, we need a person who is willing to fight the odds and exceed at all costs. I know I find myself using probabilities and expected values of outcomes to feed my decisions and I think that leads to a safe style of living and never straying far enough from the path to really enjoy some great things in life. May it never be true about humans that we all lose that key characteristic of distrust and fighting "the machine".
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Valuing the Environment
One other thought before I delve into today's post, it seems that I'm really interested in how I've become who I've become. And now I'm interested to know why I'm interested in that....weird?
Anyways, Data. Data. Data. Data.
It seems that the modern world is very driven by and fascinated with the word 'data'. Or is the world fascinated by the idea of data? I know from working in a consulting firm and having the job title of 'data analyst', that a lot of people have no idea what data is all about and what it can and can't do (sometimes my bosses have this issue, that's probably why they employ people like me), but it seems that most people whether they understand data or not, they at least recognize how much data drives a lot of (or all of) the business and economic world around us and therefore hold this word/idea in a very high regard.
The advent of the internet and the interconnected world that we now live in has produced a lot of ways to measure data that we as the human race didn't previously have. And now people like me, (and people much smarter than me) are fascinated by the idea that everything that we could ever want to know is hidden in data somewhere. Which data has the answer we want is a mystery, and what question we have to ask the data to get the answer we want is also another mystery, (also sometimes even what answer we're looking for is a mystery), but there seems to be a general consensus that the answer is there, somewhere.
(I feel like this is a good time to point out that everything I'm saying is unbacked by any data whatsoever, which yes, is very ironic considering that I think of myself as a data nerd.)
What drives humanity's blind faith in data? Is that faith really blind? I sometimes think that we've created this data monster that spits out statistics based answers and trust it implicitly in a way that something we discover/create shouldn't be trusted, since humans inherently shouldn't be trusted either (or at least everything we do/say should be taken with a grain of salt.) It reminds me of that age old question which always fascinated me, "Did we discover mathematics? or did we invent it, and find that it had a lot more uses than we originally planned?"
I think that a more skeptic approach should be taken to blindly trusting data in general, but how that would play out in the modern world is up in the air (let alone the improbability of that actually happening.) A lot of people think about the upcoming singularity (the point at which the things people create are smarter than the people who create them) as a landmark event in the timeline of humanity (which it totally is). Naturally, a lot of questions abound about how this superintelligence will make choices and how those choices will affect mankind occur, along with questions about what powers we should give to this thing that is smarter than the collective intelligence of all mankind. One thing that seems to be true to me is that this superintelligence would make decisions based on data and then blindly follow them given that one action would have a higher probability of achieving a desired outcome than another.
I think that one of the best qualities about mankind is the ability to question these things that seem obvious or unstoppable and the ability to fight to achieve a goal that has infinitesimally small probabilities of ever happening (think about every inspiring movie you've ever watched). What I don't humanity to lose in this data driven age is that very human trait of distrust, and I'm worried that if we continue in our blind trust of data that we will ultimately lose this.
Just goes to show, for every data nerd out there we need an artist. And for every statistician out there, we need a person who is willing to fight the odds and exceed at all costs. I know I find myself using probabilities and expected values of outcomes to feed my decisions and I think that leads to a safe style of living and never straying far enough from the path to really enjoy some great things in life. May it never be true about humans that we all lose that key characteristic of distrust and fighting "the machine".
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: Valuing the Environment
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Standing at The Crossroads as a Young Twenty-Something
While I don't definitely don't plan on always writing about 'heavy' topics, it seems to be where my mind is lately, so for the time being that's how it's gonna be. Also, I seem to have picked 'Stuff that's on my mind' as a topic theme, which might be normal for writer types, but not thinking of myself as a writer, I wouldn't know about what writers think of as normal, or what they usually talk about.
Anyways, one of the things that I've been thinking about and which I also find intriguing is how it seems like the landscape of my own mind has been evolving at an ever faster pace. This has come to my attention as I think about the things that I was passionate about at different points in my life. I think a lot of people are embarrassed to think about the things they cared deeply about in high school or in middle school, but to me I'm not embarrassed by that thought. I think the only thing that I would regret is how those passions played themselves out, and how I tried to relate to others my passion for things (probably very similarly to how any teenager telling their parents about post-rock music or jackson pollack paintings sounds.)
A lot of the things that fueled my passions at a younger age were heavily influenced by my older brothers (I realized this at a relatively young age too.) The reasons that I became interested in playing basketball or trying to write music or even eventually tried smoking weed was in a large part due to the fact that my brothers did those things and I not only thought of them as cool, but also wanted to emulate a lot of the things that they did. So naturally, when my brothers moved away for school or jobs or whatever, there goes a reevaluation process as to what I wanted to consider as my passion. To this day I still am pretty heavily invested in music and musical culture (although I wouldn't say I'm as passionate about finding new music as I used to be) and I still follow sports a lot (although, yet again, I don't play nearly as much basketball as I used to). But what I do think as changed as I think about those two passions of my teenage self is how I choose to invest my time in them currently as a more grown-up version of Aaron.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what determines our passions in life? when is the point that a person can make a truly independent choice about what they are passionate about? or is it always a product of your environment, the people around you and choices you make as a young person? To filter this into one question: Are the things that I, Aaron Stauter, passionate about, the product of my own personal decision or merely from the influence of the people around me?
Since I (and everyone else on earth) grew up with other people around and took cues about life from other people, it seems silly to think that any decision I could make would be purely 'my own decision'. But isn't it weird to think that your passions, the things that ultimately define who you are, are a product of other people, when you're allegedly an independent person with unique thoughts and a unique identity? I personally find that baffling and also really annoying, basically, given a different set of circumstances, I would have become an entirely different person even though I could have theoretically made all the same decisions.
Reading that back, its kind of an obvious conclusion that I'm sure millions of people have already reached, but it is also a conclusion that is vastly interesting to me as I enter a phase in life where I have the power to make a lot of choices in life that will shape the next 20-30 years of my life and how they look. I can chase new passions in life (like, why not woodworking? or skydiving? or writing?), I can dive deeper into the existing passions in my life, or change the angle of entry at which I look at my current passions. I have a lot of free time and energy and some spendable money to explore new things in life and now I have to decide how I want to do that. All of that along with the newfound realization of how much of my passions are influenced by the people around me, so do I make choices that go against the grain of the people around me? do I do something that seems completely off the map? or do I do something similar to the people around me? (not that that is inherently bad, most of those people around me are in my life for a reason, because I want them to be.)
Interesting stuff to think about for sure and I think it will be even more interesting to look back at this in a few years time to see how those ideas develop in my life. But for now, into the great expanse of life I blindly go, hoping to find some interesting things along the way....
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: How'd I become a Data Nerd?
Anyways, one of the things that I've been thinking about and which I also find intriguing is how it seems like the landscape of my own mind has been evolving at an ever faster pace. This has come to my attention as I think about the things that I was passionate about at different points in my life. I think a lot of people are embarrassed to think about the things they cared deeply about in high school or in middle school, but to me I'm not embarrassed by that thought. I think the only thing that I would regret is how those passions played themselves out, and how I tried to relate to others my passion for things (probably very similarly to how any teenager telling their parents about post-rock music or jackson pollack paintings sounds.)
A lot of the things that fueled my passions at a younger age were heavily influenced by my older brothers (I realized this at a relatively young age too.) The reasons that I became interested in playing basketball or trying to write music or even eventually tried smoking weed was in a large part due to the fact that my brothers did those things and I not only thought of them as cool, but also wanted to emulate a lot of the things that they did. So naturally, when my brothers moved away for school or jobs or whatever, there goes a reevaluation process as to what I wanted to consider as my passion. To this day I still am pretty heavily invested in music and musical culture (although I wouldn't say I'm as passionate about finding new music as I used to be) and I still follow sports a lot (although, yet again, I don't play nearly as much basketball as I used to). But what I do think as changed as I think about those two passions of my teenage self is how I choose to invest my time in them currently as a more grown-up version of Aaron.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what determines our passions in life? when is the point that a person can make a truly independent choice about what they are passionate about? or is it always a product of your environment, the people around you and choices you make as a young person? To filter this into one question: Are the things that I, Aaron Stauter, passionate about, the product of my own personal decision or merely from the influence of the people around me?
Since I (and everyone else on earth) grew up with other people around and took cues about life from other people, it seems silly to think that any decision I could make would be purely 'my own decision'. But isn't it weird to think that your passions, the things that ultimately define who you are, are a product of other people, when you're allegedly an independent person with unique thoughts and a unique identity? I personally find that baffling and also really annoying, basically, given a different set of circumstances, I would have become an entirely different person even though I could have theoretically made all the same decisions.
Reading that back, its kind of an obvious conclusion that I'm sure millions of people have already reached, but it is also a conclusion that is vastly interesting to me as I enter a phase in life where I have the power to make a lot of choices in life that will shape the next 20-30 years of my life and how they look. I can chase new passions in life (like, why not woodworking? or skydiving? or writing?), I can dive deeper into the existing passions in my life, or change the angle of entry at which I look at my current passions. I have a lot of free time and energy and some spendable money to explore new things in life and now I have to decide how I want to do that. All of that along with the newfound realization of how much of my passions are influenced by the people around me, so do I make choices that go against the grain of the people around me? do I do something that seems completely off the map? or do I do something similar to the people around me? (not that that is inherently bad, most of those people around me are in my life for a reason, because I want them to be.)
Interesting stuff to think about for sure and I think it will be even more interesting to look back at this in a few years time to see how those ideas develop in my life. But for now, into the great expanse of life I blindly go, hoping to find some interesting things along the way....
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: How'd I become a Data Nerd?
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
I Think I Might be a Backwards Racist
Hi world, it's me again.
Time to write about perhaps the most talked about topic of the last year or two. Race (and/or racism)! Yay! However, since the goal of this is to help develop my own viewpoints on theses topics, and potentially nobody is reading this then it doesn't matter that it's been talked about seemingly ad nauseum.
I've written the first sentence to this paragraph four times and then deleted it, just goes to show how hard it is to talk about race, even when you think nobody is listening...
One of the things that feeds my viewpoint on race and racism is recognizing my own circumstances. As a 22 year-old WASP-y, indie rock listening, sports following, beer drinking type, I fit snugly into a lot of the key demographics that advertisers cater towards and in a lot of ways I feel like the average American guy. Couple that with being homeschooled all my childhood and raised in a Christian environment, and I certainly have the feeling and recognition that I was shielded from a lot of race issues that can rear their heads during life. I think that the single most determining factor in my view on race to this point has been realizing how fortunate I have been to not being coupled with any certain stereotypes and unfortunately how little I know what that's like and how that manifests itself.
Personally, I'm a sucker for absorbing cultural viewpoints about race, at least I have been for the past few months (a lot of the high profile things that happened this summer forced those things into a lot of people's minds, including my own, for better or worse.) So when I see somebody post an article or make a blog post or give a tv interview that exposes how fundamentally racist America and the establishment way of thinking is, I try to take down that information to better inform my own worldview. I think that being empathetic is the key thing to trying to understand racism and relating to other races/ethnicities, because as hard as it is for me to imagine racism and what it's like given my personal circumstance, the person who endures it daily and is trying to tell me what it's like and how it manifests itself has a pretty good idea and maybe I should be listening to that person's view on the matter.
That whole last paragraph, at least to me, summarizes my viewpoint on race. I try so hard to not be racist, that in essence, a lot of what I think about is race, just so I can mentally try to not make a big deal about it when I am around other people. In other words, I try so hard not to be racist, that in a twisted way, I ultimately bring race so far forwards into my own mind, that I am racist because I see other people's race and let it affect the way I think about them in a crazy internal struggle (call it backwards racism). In fact, one of the worst things a person could say to me, in terms of hurting my feelings, is calling me a racist. How crazy is that?! Is that similar to a lot of other people in similar circumstances to me? Does it feel like walking and talking in the modern world is akin to walking in a minefield of feelings/emotions? Is it supposed to feel that way?
Obviously I've put that a little hyperbolically, but the point remains the same. Until we as humankind get to the point where we don't bring up race or ethnicity either positively or negatively, we will in someway be racist (whether its the bigotry kind or the too sensitive to it kind). And since identity, culture, art, emotions and self-expression are so intertwined with race and ethnicity (and rightfully so (not to mention how race and ethnicity should be praised and held in high esteem)) I'm not sure we'll ever remove that issue from the human landscape.
I want to make it clear, I'm not pretending like I have found the cure for racism, more than a personal realization that I don't think we'll ever get fully past it. Like how do you celebrate certain races/cultures without making other cultures feel bad in comparison? And being that I'm so blind to so many forms of racism, I'm sure this word vomit only covers ~1% of racism in todays world (casual racism is so pervasive in modern culture and I know that it affects my thinking, but I think that I haven't even caught 5% of the ways that it affects my thinking, let alone how it might affect others.)
Anyways, being white can be tough, not in the same ways it is for other races, and while it doesn't negatively affect my earnings, my ability to walk down certain streets, or how I'm perceived by people, its more a synonym for me saying being empathetic is tough because I love being selfish, but that's how life is. A lot of the 'White Legacy' (is that a term?) is the physical suffering and mental anguish that we've put anyone that doesn't look like us through, and part of what I have to fight is my own natural selfish tendencies and how that influences my view on race, and the thousands of years of White Men using their leverage against other races (without even delving into how we've used that against females). Learning to get over selfishness and being sincerely empathetic can unlock a lot of doors in life both physical and mental.
I have no idea if any of this was readable, if people reading this who are not the same skin color as me think I'm racist, or if twenty years from now I'll be running for public office and this will be used against me, but it's how I feel right now and writing it seems to be good for my soul.
'Til Tomorrow
-A
Tomorrow: The Birth and Death of Passion(s)
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