THE PALE BLUE DOT

NASA JP, http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=52392

And there goes... half a year!

Alot has happened in the mean time and kept me busy, which feebly explains the silence here. However, there is a post I have been meaning to write for quite some time now already and wanting to finally write it, was the best motivation to sit down and put fingers to keyboard once again. 

Many of you surely know the picture on the left and the accompanying prose by Carl Sagan. The tiny bright spec in the orange-ish line on the right is our Earth, photographed from 6 billion kilometers away.

I feel it is refreshing to revisit it once in a while and refocus one's perspective. And for those who don't know it, you are in for a treat.

I would suggest you follow this link to the video soundfile of Carl Sagan's narration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

I hope it remains available. If not, just search for "Carl Sagan - A Pale Blue Dot".

There is not much to add to his words. What they do is put things into perspective. They allow you to reassess what you feel may be important. 

Perspective and especially a change of perspective, as I feel Carl Sagan offers in this piece, are both incredibly important concepts and I will be dedicating several posts to them soon (I hope). 

For now, I just want to leave you with the thoughts and inspirations that this short and powerful quote creates for you.

GROW SOME (Pt. 2)

Image courtesy of Foto76/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Well, finally I have gotten round to writing the second part of this entry on GROWTH.

My apologies for being so late and taking so long. Moving and other matters ate up most of my time and the rest of it fell victim to relentless procrastination unfortunately. Self discipline is a virtue (as long as not excessive) that needs to be continuously worked on (in between breaks of course).

So back to the post. If you can't quite remember what I was getting at in Part 1, I suggest you have a quick read through that entry, as I would like to build on it.

Growth, in the broad sense, is in my opinion central to what it means to be human. We are born, learn continuously, grow physically as well as mentally and are given the gift of being able to influence the world in the same way that we influence ourselves. We can gain understanding, deepen our knowledge, perfect skills and achieve successes that in turn shape who we are and who the people around us are. It affects our direct community and society in broader context and of course it also affects our physical surroundings, the world that we live in and the many complex systems that we are part of.

Each individual and each group has huge potential for growth inwardly and outwardly.

This is precisely why I find it a shame that our thinking is often so restrictive. Our ideas and thought processes are all too often constrained into narrow channels of protecting what we have, of acquiring more of what we have, instead of growing something out of it or creating something new.

We think of growing the economic output, protecting our assets, ensuring our security and having a great career and having a family as goals. And when we have achieved these, we can finally retire and enjoy our success...But I bet you that by that time (after 50 odd years?) you will have forgotten how to really savour and properly enjoy.

And to us it may seem that we are growing as we scramble along, it may seem that we are achieving something, but in fact all of these things are only an accumulation of small goals, a ticking of boxes until we get to the bottom of the list. And when we reach the bottom of the list or even just reach half way (mid-life crisis?), we realise that these achieved goals feel quite insubstantial.

But why? This is success isn't it? Well unfortunately our thinking is infected with goals and success, from when we are kids in the school sports team up until we are gunning for that better job.

Compare it to the reading a great book. If you are primed for success, you have one goal: finish that book quickly. And then be proud of how quickly you read this book, probably faster than all of your friends.

But Why?  If the book is well written, has a good storyline and is enjoyable, why rush it? You will only end the pleasure faster and in the process miss out on being able to savour a beautifully crafted text that is supposed to evoke emotions and inspire thoughts. You rob yourself of the exploration of yourself and of new ideas. You rob yourself of real growth.

Growth is a matter of savouring, of taking pleasure in what you do and in improving personally and building slowly.

This goes back to one of the most true proverbs around (I am wording it freely here): "Not the destination is the goal, but the journey" (This supposedly dates back to Confucius, unfortunately it is not easily worded in English.)

Our societies and also the increasing speeds at which we live perpetuate the folly of focusing entirely on the end goal, when real pleasure and fulfilment come from the "doing" along the way.

My personal example of this would be shaving (as a male). The movie "Pan's Labyrinth" by Guillermo del Toro had a scene were the bad guy (as far as I remember) was shaving with a straight rasor. Beard growth is widely seen as the mark of being a man, hence shaving becomes a very symbolic act that for me implies strength and the essence of being a male. The fact is however, that electric and disposable shavers are plastic gadgets that require little skill and feature very little risk if any.

In a sense they are the perfect example of our world today: Minimising risk and saving time. By minimising risk you take away all excitement and by saving time you essentially degrade a ritual to a mere nuisance.

At the time I saw this movie, the straight rasor epitomised the ideal image of being a man for me, as it requires skill and can actually be quite dangerous if not handled properly.

Accordingly I ordered a rasor and all the necessary gear and never regretted it. Its a skill that requires you to invest time and that makes you think about what you are actually doing (unless you want to end up with nasty cuts on your face).

Not only would I consider it more fun, but it actually provides a better shave and is of course way cooler than shaving with some rubbish mass manufactured piece of plastic (A straight rasor in fact needs to be sharpened by hand every few months)

This may all tie in to the current "fad" regarding mindfulness but it is true. Approaching life in this manner is more fulfilling then simply seeing the day as a set of tasks that need to be completed.

Why don't you as an experiment pick a few activities in your life and invest your full attention and effort into them. E.g. instead of rushing the cooking and making something halfheartedly to just fulfill a need, deliberate on what you would like to eat and consciously create something that gives you and others joy instead of simply quelling the urge of hunger. Make it an art from. Of course you won't be able to do this all the time realistically but give it a go.

 Find the passion in the things you do and you will grow and improve automatically.

Now finally as a disclaimer, I am not saying "don't be ambitious, don't have goals and don't strive for success". Life has many facets and we have increasingly let healthy competition and drive for success swamp everything else. Take a step back and stop rushing to the end. Otherwise you will be dead before you know it.

INTRO TO GROWTH (Pt. 1)

Image courtesy of Foto76/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Before I continue my rant on society's paranoia and the excesses that are leading us towards collapse...I have the need to write something that feels more substantial and more personal. It is a matter that regularly resurfaces for me and that indirectly is espoused in many arguments for slowing down and refusing to chase the holy grail of economics: growth.

Firstly let me point something out about the society we live in. Growth is all to often cut down to only one possible meaning...That of growth in numbers/figures. GDP or Revenue or Profit or any other kind of value that really just means a number in a certain currency. But like any model, this one dimensional model of our world can only offer a weak understanding of the complexities of real life and the world. It can help us understand parts of society, the economy and the functioning of companies and organisations for instance, but as a model it can only ever be a weak simplification of a very complex universe.

Unfortunately this model and simplified view of things seems to dominate everything. In order to make sense of things in society today, they must be valued and then grown. If there is no growth in financial value there seems to be little point. This worldview has been so effective and successful that we try to convert natural goods like water and the air (CO2) into financial value and thereby understand it and manage it better. The only problem is that financial value can never encompass the real world value of any good and financial growth can only ever reflect a fraction of the mutliple meanings of possible growth. So let us disregard the financial aspect of life for a while.

Growth can come in many forms, personal growth for example, learning to interact with other people in a more effective and supportive manner that will help others to grow in turn. Growth in ability in various activities. Growth in understanding of humans, emotional states or even the interplay in complex systems. Sure, all of these can probably be turned into a financial value and then commoditised, as our economy today always aims to do, but the financial value, a one dimensional value, can never encompass all the complex effects that happiness of a single person would have on its surroundings.

The effect that happiness would have on the behaviour of that person alone could never be measured absolutely. The person would have more enthusiasm in what they do, their creativity would be enhanced, their efficiency probably and therefore the end result. The skill of the person would improve faster and all of this would have an immeasurable amount of knock-on effects. Just as you would imagine it to be in a system with almost endless variables. No model could ever encompass all of this.

So in the following post and many others more most likely, I would like to ignore the concept of financial value and growth and concentrate more on personal growth, and of improvement in intangible values of happiness and wellbeing and the experience of being alive in general. After all, we don't live in a simplified model in a computer (at least I hope not) so let's stop acting as if we do.

TO PROTECT OUR HOMELAND

George Orwell

Given the current scandal surrounding the PRISM programme by the American government, it is quite fitting that I decided to read Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World" a few weeks ago.

His own introduction, written many years later, is fascinating and very much on point with how society seems to have further developed over the last 50 years. And he makes a good point of assuming that the real world will probably resemble more a mix of the dystopia from "1984" and his own earlier vision of the future.

So, what kind of society do we have now?

The internet has developed from a medium allowing the anonymous expression of people's true beliefs to nothing but a technologically capable mirror of human society. The revelations about the American spy programme have confirmed a development that has been evident for a while now.

Especially the growth of internet conglomerates, becoming behemoths that control large swaths of the net has made it easier to track us users and their behaviour (I am certain this page is getting caught up in some kind of net, even if no human actually reads it on the other side). The People still reject official online identities which would tie their doings on the net to their real name, but in reality all this information is already laid bare for those with the capabilities to access it.

So, increasingly we must adjust our online face just as we adjust our face in public or in professional life. The freedom the internet offered in its early years, the wild net, seems to be coming to an end. It is bound, tied down and broken up by commercial interests.

This brings us back to which dystopia we are heading for. It seems like it will be a strange mix of both "1984" and "A Brave New World".

Huxley was right in that consumption must go on and on, grow and grow, to keep the wheels of a stable society turning. The public is numbed and anaesthetised, drawn into a maelstrom of easy delights and empty thrills to keep it from seeing the puppeteers behind the bright flashing lights.

And from Orwell comes the PR and propaganda that washes away any questioning thoughts or any potential to find an escape for your mind (and possibly body, as in the case of Assange and now Snowden)

And finally...if you do find a way out or try to make one, the wrath of the corporate state comes bearing down upon you and in all likelihood will crush you into oblivion. The fanfares and carnival music will then ensure that any remains you leave behind are washed away and covered up so that you don't ruin the public's chance to have a spectacularly monotonously fun time. Business as usual, as the media either ignore the important story or quickly move on  to more "exciting" news.

And the internet plays a major role in all of this.

The questions that should be asked is: Is there anybody who is somewhat in control of this all, who has managed to evade being enveloped by the propaganda and infected by the life of the consumer? Somebody who is in charge of the old power structures that are trying to grab hold of the net and the power it radiates.

I don't believe so...

As Huxley and Orwell prove, society has been developing in this direction for a long time and anybody born into it and conditioned by it would have an extremely hard time to evade its clutches. Would there realistically be a "World Controller" as in a "Brave New World" that has the intellectual capacity and one must also say, strength of character, to stand untouched above all this turmoil?

It is unlikely.

So how can we, as eternal members of global society, stop this cycle or make it change course at least?

Our world won't keep revolving in this way. It simply cannot do it indefinitely. One of its cogs will have to break. The environment is already disintegrating dangerously rapidly as it cannot sustain the ever spreading pillage. The system itself is showing structural cracks already, exponential growth with limited resources is simply impossible. Human efficiency can only be improved so far.

Pressure is growing on all fronts on each human; environmental, psychological, in terms of physical wellbeing, people just won't be able to cope anymore.

We are potentially headed for a sudden break, a ruder awakening than the "financial crisis" in 2008 and the still reverberating aftermath. 

Or...

... hopefully the slow progress and relentless chipping away of innumerable initiatives can bring meaningful change. The change at the small, individual level has been preached for a long time. With more people leading the way with interesting projects hope grows. One just has to look at the slew of TED videos to see many things to be hopeful about.

Overall, one thing must happen however. Those countries with supposed democracies must defend themselves against the consolidation of power of today's "leaders". The struggle for "freedom" has been tremendous over many generations. We seem to be all to willing to just give away these freedoms that many people struggle and died for.

We aren't too far off living in the worlds of Orwell and Huxley. It seems we need a new writer to compose a dystopia (or utopia depending on your point of view) of 2063...

Or if there is anything out there already I would be delighted if you let me know.

SYSTEMS

Human society (as opposed to all the other societies out there...) keeps evolving and increasingly amalgamating with the technology it has spawned.

The Internet is still in its infancy and in all likelihood will  keep changing and evolving at the same amazing pace we have witnessed so far (unless corporations will succeed in cripling it). In some instances life will become easier, in others it will become a lot more complex.

Our ever increasing technical capabilities will combine in a myriad creative ways to spawn new methods and processes. Humanity's control over the world will increase and yet simultaneously things will become unbelievably complicated to the point where we, as individuals, can only hope to control a small fraction of the possibilities on offer. Us humans will increasingly have to  face our physical and mental limits (unless we expand these as well).

Already we find ourselves linked to society and the economy in tremendously complex ways. Our connections keep multiplying and all need to be maintained and fed with information. I need to access important current news, information from my personal networks, emails, all my bank accounts and social  media online:  facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin and all the others that will arise and are developing already.

Economic and technological advancement arguably came about to make work and life easier and to increase efficiencies/effectiveness. There was the (possibly utopian) hope that people would not have to work any longer, that we could have machines shoulder the hard labour while giving us humans more time to enjoy life and shirk the toil. 

Since the industrial revolution we have been freed from hard manual labour in many cases and to a certain extent menial process driven thinking as well. But instead of being freed to live life more fully, we have developed new ways to toil away (during work hours and after) in order pack ever more sensual experiences in to the few free minutes we have each day.

So here we find ourselves. Our personal lives and experiences are being commoditised and broken down into little bits of information that can be sold and traded and used to lure us into spending all our disposable income or more. If it is not already the case for many people, we will in the foreseeable future have to spend all of our waking time (and maybe our sleep?) on maintaining our communication channels. 

The physical value producing economy will increasingly have to be left to automated processes and robots.

Evidence of this can be found in automatically operated trains and other systems such as automated trading algorithms on the stock exchange.

The human will become the master at the top of the pyramid of systems and will increasingly become further removed from the basic operations and functions of society and the economy until...

Where will this end? Will we end up like the fat and imbecile humans in Andrew Stanton's comic but disturbing dystopian future in the movie Wall-e?

To be fair many parts of the world are still centuries away from any such vision but one can observe the beginnings in highly "developed" nations and societies where humans are only a controlling cog in a system of systems where the sole role is to exist/consume and keep the system running.

Will we in the end have one large system, for example the internet, that runs and regulates everything independently and only requires us to be alive and enjoy its benefits (there will of course be little choice to live a different life)?

Imagine the internet as the cyber equivalent of the physical world, where life and lifelike processes have evolved, keeping an automatic balance, like nature and the circle of life. Imagine this in the internet with apps and intelligences spawned to control and evolve the net and its system. Imagine as humans caught in between the two or living in two worlds at once.

Or will they eventually merge?

OUR TIME

The Beat...One...Two...Three...Four...Five...Six...Seven...

It keeps beating. Pulsating ....Eight....Nine....Regularly

With every moment it interrupts....Ten.....Eleven.....Twelve.....A noisy silence

A second beat emerges, a third and a fourth, in between the first, and it further breaks down to a fifth, sixth...and ever smaller beats......

Until we reach Now.......

Music is a reflection of the beats of life, the heart, the months, the seasons and the years.

With every new technological development, human society and time, our time, is further broken down into smaller and smaller fragments. And each fragment and fraction is allocated to its rightful role, sequestered into the correct order of things, an order to improve effeciency, an order to be followed.

As humans, I think we are close to reaching our limit. A limit in terms of our natural capability to cope with the fracturing of our time landscsape. Our timescape.

Where will we be when our surroundings in spacetime are broken down to their smallest useful units, when each unit is identical to the next and all that disctinguishes beats from one another is the overarching structure that they are put together in.

10 minutes powernap vs. 10 seconds of mindfulness: They are both made from the same beats

And  when the broken down beats and tiny tic tocs of each person have been worn down to the smallest possible unit, do your beats and mine become interchangeable and the same? 

Will these beats of humanity and the beats of life be reconstructed and architected into a perfect and whole symphony of efficiency and effectiveness? Will incredible complexities in this architecture's grandeur and minute simplicities at its smallest leave no room for the free spirit in between the beats?

Where are we heading with our efficiency?

P.S.: There is a fantastic movie called timescapes available on DVD. I have not been able to watch it yet/purchase it, but you can view trailers here if your computer is powerful enough for the high resolution: http://timescapes.org/

PRACTICE

Please bear with me as I get back into the hang of things. Writing is like any other activity or sport. After a long break it takes a bit of practice to get the flow back.

Hopefully it won't take me another 6 months to write something again.

GO WEST!

Well! What a surprise! 

After a tad more than half a year I have overcome my procrastinating tendencies and have finally plonked myself down to scripe (scribbling typing) a little passage. A full time job and many other things going on at the same time unfortunately don't leave alot of time... Or in fact they monopolise energy and creativity that should be avvailable let your thoughts run free. Well, before I ramble off into the distance I will return to what I in fact actually wanted to write about:

"the WEST vs the EAST" or "the WEST vs the rest"

It is quite common and has been presumably always been to group certain countries, certain people, certain systems and certains ways of thinking into a casserole called the WEST. We have Western ideology, Western democracy, Western lifestyles and so on ad infinitum (I haven't used latin in a long time!).

But what does this mean?!

Having grown up mainly in Europe this question never really posed itself for me. 

When Europeans, North Americans or Australians speak of the West it is often in order to distinguish "us" from "them" whether "them" be Asia, China, Japan, Africa or even South America.

In the past this may generally have been a not entirely unwaranted sense of superiority but as with any symbol it didn't just stand for the good sides and the progress but also of course for the many negative things that the American and European cultures claim for themselves. 

Already in this context it is evident that the term "The West" does not distinguish between key differences of  say England and Germany for instance.

My main contention is however, that for a number of years now this term has increasingly taken on the connotation of putting Europe and North America (and Australia) almost exclusively in a bad light.

A talk I recently watched on TED by Martin Jacques on the rise of China was quite revealing in many aspects. One point that Jacques made resonated strongly with me. On average, he said, Asians will know more about European countries than Europeans do about Asia... 

I do not necessarily agree with this statement and will come to this in a moment, however this statement highlights an automatic way of thinking in us, that tends to group vast regions together including people and their cultures with incredibly diversity. 

Europe is often perceived as the continent and not as its individual countries and very divergent cultures. Just compare Turkey and Norway.

On a similar level in Asia, Thailand and Laos, two neighbouring countries with largely shared ethnicities and languages are socially significantly different  because of their very different histories. In this light, grouping people together by regions makes little sense. And identifying oneself with this socalled West makes no sense.

This leads me to my actual gripe with the term and its connotations. All too often the West and anybody living west of eastern Europe is automatically compounded into western lifestyle and all the negative aspects of it. A common theme is to decry western consumerism and the economic system as the bane of human future on this planet. The East in turn (also an unfair generalisation) is lauded for its wisdom and more wholesome and holistic thinking.

Without a doubt, there are some seeds of truth in these generalisations but it seems to me that many of the people extoling these themes either have not witnessed many Asian societies first hand or choose to ignore the evidence of what is really happening.

My personal experience of many parts of Asia has been of far stronger consumerism than in many European or American countries. I have seen rampant marketing fads, complete disregard of creative or intellectual value, societies devoid of grassroots activities or any culture apart from financial success and commerce. 

Of course there are a great many things to learn from many eastern cultures but at the current rate of development, consumerism should be coined in an eastern context.

There is no space for simplistic generalisations dividing the world into exploited East and rapacious West. What we have is a global economic and social problem with a myriad of different facets and angles and accordingly many ways of finding solutions. It will take effort from each part of the globe and its intricate network to solve the problems that the world faces. 

As an example, read through the history articles on Wikipedia about hundreds of empires led by untold numbers of emperors conquering huge swaths of land and subjucating endless millions of people in all 4 corners of the world. 

Despite the huge importance these men and their agglomorations of power  held for their regions at the time and despite their probable beliefs that they ruled almost the entire Earth, their individual influence on the current world will have been negligible in the grand scheme of things. But put together all of these stories and they form the intricate pattern of human history. A decently educated person would most likely not even know half the empires and emperors that existed over the course of history.

Thus simplistic generalisations help little. Right now we are supposedly witnessing the rise of Asia and the fall of Europe. And yet Japan continues to struggle economicaly and socially, while Germany's economy long predicted to die a miserable death by Britain and the US, rampages on.

The world is interconnected by many intricate puzzle pieces. We will not be able to change whole regions and billions of people at a time, so if we want change, small scale is the way forward, as is increasingly becoming evident. It is easy to let our thinking be overrun with grand themes/terms that encompass hundreds of different ideals when its the small scale successes and little decisions that add up to make a big impact.

So, please refrain from using terms such as West and East that hold such clear connotations. Language is important. Dont throw out the baby with the bath water. Not all is bad in European and North American countries and not all is good in Asian societies. Cherish the good that you have and strive to incorporate the good you see elsewhere, whether its around the corner or far away.

DELIBERATION

One of the many lessons I learned during my education and one that has likely endured the longest, is the lesson to avoid using “I”. At the beginning of a sentence, a letter or a paragraph or also in any essay it is simply bad form. And despite my agreeing with this guideline generally I am breaking free of it now, deliberately.

I have mulled through ideas about this blog, this project or series of essays, whatever you may want to call it, for quite a while now. My previous attempts to express some thoughts clearly and in a somewhat structured manner have never been quite as encompassing as I had hoped for. I have made several  energetic but seemingly short lived attempts at objectively written blogs and other sorts of media. However, in hindsight I feel that they were all lacking the vigour and passion of life as we live it.

So my deliberation turned in circles with me trotting along thinking of the best framework to bring thoughts together with, ever circling around and trying to home in on the “objective” viewpoint.

That deliberation finally ended as I set finger to keypad and broke with the learned behaviour of never using “I”.

I hereby also hope to break with my string of poor attempts at producing enticing reading for others, as well as and especially enticing writing for myself.

So what is this blog about?

This blog will be about it all. Life. The only piece of art there is. A human life in all its facets. The human perspective from all its angles and maybe a bit more.

For those of you who never leave your own skin or preordained trajectory, prepare to travel way off course. For those of you who are already keen practitioners of being alive, I hope you find pleasant reflections of your own silly ideas or even a few moments of inspiration.

I for myself set out to hit the nail on the head while missing completely.

FANTASTIC TEST POST

This is an amazing test post testing the characteristics of this Blog. Yeah. There you go. Its amazing stuff that is being recorded here in this form of information storage. Very strange indeed if you think about it.