So... I'm home.
I'm very tired from all of today's worrying and running about, for multiple purposes. Still recoiling from the last few days, too. Thinking, figuring out. Several people have been very insightful into what I'm experiencing and what helpful with letting me figure out what am I to do now, and I'm grateful to every single one of you. I've learned a lot in these few days... I guess more's still to come.
But I'm still to tell you what's so special about being home.
I've managed to finish my summer exams session with an almost perfect score: only one exam out of four has the equivalent of a B. The process of preparation for the exam for one to take its toll, because for the first time in years, I caught a cold. Weak, it was, but it got me out of comission for a few days and made my last PhysEd run - 2.6 km or ~1.6 miles - a bit more challenging. Still, teachers noticed that I know my stuff and didn't interrogate me like they did some of the worse students.
The last few days I've been slowly preparing for the departure from Tomsk, the city where I was studying, to Kemerovo, where my family lives. Finally, the day came.
And... it felt odd. A mix of things. I was excited about coming home. I don't particularly like the place, but I was awaiting the departure eagerly. I forgot how truly bickerful my parents are and how terrified my mother is of the world (leading her to mildly distrust everything and everyone) - and both of these take a toll on me. The circumstances of my life have certainly changed for the next two and a bit months, but I can't peg it either extreme with certainty. Overall, however... I guess I'm glad, though I can't point out the reason yet.
I have so many things on my mind right now. A lot has happened to me today, and I can hardly begin to describe even one of the things.
My mother came into my Tomsk apartment with her typical passive-conflictive critique of things she doesn't find appealing in my life. I did not miss that, tell you this much. Still, in a year... I think I grew out of taking it to heart, especially since I learned about what makes a narcissist what they are (google that on your own, but I'll give you a hint: Psychology Today was of great assistance) and grew a spine enough to have some foundation of self-respect. I can take that for a couple of months if it gets me another ten of living on my own.
The landlady of the apartment I used to rent - a sixty-something woman - still believes it to be fine to treat me like a child. Sure, I'm thrice younger than her, and sure, I was a cause of a trouble for her (I inadvertantly flooded the apartment below because of a leak I didn't know about), but for an adult that I am, that's not good enough. Not particularly nurturing. But I'm not to complain: I know I can do better at being and showing myself to be a responsible person; I just need some time.
After the car was packed - and boy, have we packed it till it was full - we visited a sacred spring an hour away from home. I'm not a religious person, but I enjoyed it from a personal perspective: it was clean water - both visually and taste-wise - pouring from underneath the earth. It had a separate well where one can take a dip - it's supposed to cleanse you of your sins as well as your diseases because it was very cold. Something clicked in me after my father took a dip - not for religious reasons, either - and I decided "You know what? I'm gonna do it". So I did. Felt truly like cleansing: any sleepiness or boredom I might have had was gone, and I was feeling way stronger and more elated. I wonder if I can replicate that in any way. Cold showers in the morning don't give near such an effect, as good as they are.
Also, we don't often look at the clouds, do we? They can be just magnificent.
Gonna stop there because I'm getting too tired to produce meaningful commentary. Shit's tough, but it gets better as I work on it. Special shout-out to kleinbl00, whose commentary on having to work harder makes me do just that, empowering as it is. Fuck you, dude. Keep dishing out the good stuff.
When I lived in Budapest, my friends and I would meet at a Turkish bath house every Saturday morning, and soak in the mineral waters. We would chat quietly in the ancient rooms (built in the 1500's), enjoy the varying waters from 16-42 C, and then go have lunch together. I know that feeling of plunging into the cold pool. Drawing your head under water, and all of your skin lighting up like electricity. And the feeling of elation after you get out. It is invigorating and life-affirming. The mineral waters are also supposed to make you healthier. I don't know if they do that or not, but I sure felt good! I also found that it was important to close out my work week with some sort of ritual. Going to the baths was a physical cleansing, yes, but it was also a mental cleansing. A clearing of the head of the stresses of the week, and an opening of the heart and mind towards the weekend. Humans are animals with some built in programming that we need to respect. Humans seek rituals. And modern life has little respect for these rituals. Maybe some of what you experienced in the water was that human/animal connection to some form of ritual. Affixing a physical manifestation to the ritual - going to the bath house on Saturday, or running 5k, or yoga, or making your morning tea in a specific way - might help you find that inner calm you are seeking. When we are involved in these rituals, our muscles remember what to do, and do it automatically eventually. That frees our mind to wander and explore and think about things that we may not think about otherwise. This is another important result from observing some sort of ritual. Congratulations on your exams, and finding peace with letting your mother be herself (and not making her narcissism about you). Have a lovely summer away from school! Something clicked in me after my father took a dip - not for religious reasons, either - and I decided "You know what? I'm gonna do it". So I did. Felt truly like cleansing...
The cheap and easy answer is "media". Media's entire job is to distract you from being happy and self-sufficient. The vast majority of the human population that has ever lived, has done so with very few concerns outside of the daily search for food, somewhere to sleep, and somewhere to shit. Since every human sense and our key brain functions are finely tuned to seek out patterns, we attribute agency and motive to randomness constantly. For much of history that has manifested in people thinking gods or spirits of some form or another were responsible for things happening. The sun rising... flowers blooming... your sister breaking her leg. To make the good things happen again (sun rising, flowers blooming), and to fend off the bad things (broken legs), we looked for patterns in our behavior that would explain why a thing did, or did not, happen. And you now have a ritual. A pattern to live by that - you believe - will bring you good fortune. For most of human existence we have sought out these patterns, and our brains are hard-wired to give us little endorphin boots of feel-good-juice whenever these patterns are replicated. For the last 50-100 years, humans have developed a deficiency-model of need. This is entirely built around the advertising industry, and the advertising delivery mechanisms of the print and on-screen media. They operate on a distraction-based model that jerks your brain away from the patterns it knows and seeks, and instead short-circuits that wiring with instantly delivered triggers that produce similar endorphin rushes. Colors. Lights. Confirmation that you made the right decision. Giving you perceived power over situations in which you feel powerless. (Chewing gum in a meeting is not going to make your boss see the wisdom of your plan. No matter what Dentyne wants you to believe.) So, feeding those base human needs for rituals taps into an inner feeling of calm. Your deep, animal brain, is satisfied when you sit around a bonfire and quietly chat with your friends. This is something your ancestors have been doing for tens of thousands of years. Watching Baywatch isn't. So it doesn't cue the same parts of the brain that have that need for the Old Rituals, or whatever you want to call them. That's why people get pushed away from the old rituals: Distraction. Saturation. A lack of space, physically and mentally. At least, those are my beliefs.
It's an interesting theory. You're an older fellow than myself, so you must have more experience with it. Has it always been the case with the media? I remember reading about the man who made advertising the vicious way it is today, which was in the 30s. Nephew of Sigmund Freud, the man was. Before him, ads were actually trying to show the product to be good compared to others. Ads being only one point of the media, obviously. Is it the model in which your insecurities are pushed to make you purchase stuff? Could you give examples to either of those components of the modern media? I can't seem to be able to make some up myself. So, basically, rituals make for comfort because they make us feel good about maintaining the "good behavior"? That's something I never thought of. Rituals are the circus bonus - the good circle, as opposed to the bad circle of the vicious cycle - that support themselves solely through being good enough to be repeated. How do you think the modern gigantic population density (compared to even a hundred years ago) affects us? Also, how and why are the Old Rituals better than the constant feeding of pleasure? I can see a few points on my own but would like to hear your full opinion on that.Media's entire job is to distract you from being happy and self-sufficient.
For the last 50-100 years, humans have developed a deficiency-model of need.
Confirmation that you made the right decision. Giving you perceived power over situations in which you feel powerless.
So, feeding those base human needs for rituals taps into an inner feeling of calm.
A lack of space, physically and mentally.
You're an older fellow than myself, so you must have more experience with it. Has it always been the case with the media? Honestly, it hasn't always been that way. There used to be shows - 60 Minutes, various evening news programs, Nova, most things on PBS, etc - that existed for "the public good." They were the equivalent of eating your vegetables at dinner: they were the real nutrients in the meal, but generally weren't your favorite part. Sometimes they were amazingly delicious. (Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate, etc.) But those shows are all gone now. The print media held the banner for a while, but once the Internet really got going, they had to give up and go for the advertising dollars as well. Of course, there are still a few media outlets that go for substance over style - The Economist, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, to name a few - but if you peel back the veneer on every other media outlet in the world, you will find an advertising content delivery network. Not a news organization. Even Omidyar tried to throw money at the problem, and build a true news organization. It flourished briefly, and then got caught in the undertow and fell apart. Glenn Greenwald was the iconic "catch" for the Omidyar group, but I think that lasted about 3 months before falling apart. Look up "Confirmation Bias." This is the basis of all media today... get you to buy something, and then feed the confirmation bias. This podcast does a really good job of exposing how we self-sabotage, and think we are smarter and more un-biased than we are. I think it is a red herring. All we know is our own experiences and lifetime, and the immediate population of our building or town does not grow enough for us to actually notice it, regardless of what we think we know. There are no more boom towns that go from 1200 people to 40,000 people in a month, any more. The gold rush era is over. So population density is, from the level of our personal cognitive abilities, stagnant. KNOWING the population is growing is an intellectual fact. EXPERIENCING population growth is not something that most people can experience on a human-perceptible timeframe. So how does it affect us, vs 100 years ago? The short answer is, "it doesn't, because we weren't alive 100 years ago to know experience the significant change over that timeframe". Two things: One is how our brains are hard-wired. We evolved over eons to thrive in a social and physical environment that doesn't exist anymore. Our brain wiring is old, and the environments we live in are new. Recognizing that, and letting your brain work the way it was designed to work, can calm it down by letting it fall into the patterns and functions that it was designed for. Two, constantly feeding pleasure is identical to drug addiction. You keep pushing the button, getting the rush, push the button, get the rush, etc. But over time, the rush is deadened, and you need more of the stimulation to feel the same rush. (We all know the cycle of addiction.) So in the end, you are left with memories of brief moments of happiness, that got briefer and less happy over time. Now you are looking for a new jag, a new high, to replace the old one. (Ever wonder why AA meetings have so many smokers and so many binge coffee drinkers?) A momentary endorphin rush cannot replace deep inner calm. You can distract yourself with moments of shiny and happy, but you will come down from those, and be "down" again. But when you feed the brain's deep inner need for ritual, you tap into a base animal need - something in your basal ganglia - that creates an upwelling of good feeling from the base of your brain, rather than just slathering shiny paint on the outside. There's probably some science that addresses this in a more science-y way, but - in layman's terms - activating different parts of your brain produces different results. Ritual gets down deep in the old animal brain, while flashy shiny pictures and fast-moving objects trigger momentary endorphin rushes that quickly fade. Media's entire job is to distract you from being happy and self-sufficient.
Could you give examples to either of those components of the modern media?
How do you think the modern gigantic population density (compared to even a hundred years ago) affects us?
Also, how and why are the Old Rituals better than the constant feeding of pleasure?