Ran Prieur

December 13.

2023-12-13T13:50:14Z

December 13. Matt comments on boredom:

Your post made me think about how actors deal with the boredom of doing the same show dozens or hundreds of times. One, we start playing games. There's Pass the Quarter, where you have to find a way of giving a quarter to another actor, and the quarter is never supposed to leave the stage. Then there's the less rule-bound game of trying to crack other people up. In comedies, there's the game of trying to get laughs on lines that don't usually get laughs, trying to push a scene into maximum funniness.

The other main way of dealing with boredom is being present and paying such close attention to what the other actors are doing that you're not anticipating and therefore become willing to follow the scene into different nuances of emotion. And if your scene partner is going through the motions, then that itself can become fodder for the scene.

For me, there's no other way to get through a long run than to make the performance a meditation.

December 11.

2023-12-11T23:30:35Z

December 11. Today, practical psychology. I've written before that the word "boredom" points to two things: the pain of having nothing to do, and the pain of having to pay attention to something uninteresting. I noticed this distinction because I'm good at entertaining myself inside my head, so I like having nothing to do. But that makes it even worse when I have to listen to a boring speech or watch a boring movie. And now I have a better definition to explain why.

Boredom is hedonic blowback from entertainment. The longer you are entertained, the more pain you feel in its absence. Modern people are haunted by boredom. We are so loaded with entertainment that we live in fear of the emptiness when it stops.

It's often said that cannabis "makes you ok with being bored." What it really does is turn your own perspective into a beacon of interesting, so that whatever you focus on, you're entertained. That's not being ok with being bored, it's being immune to it.

The cure for boredom, of course, is embracing it. A few years ago, I was watching a spare and slow-paced movie called Shell (2012). I could tell it was good, but the lack of explosions or conventional plot gave me an increasingly desperate urge to switch it off. Having already experimented with completely feeling anxiety, I decided to completely feel boredom, and to watch it all the way through. I felt like the kid in Dune who has to hold his hand in a box of fire -- a scene brilliantly parodied by Elmo.

Anyway, in hindsight, that was a key moment in my mental health. Since then I have not felt that intensity of boredom, and now I'm using it as a meditation instruction, to seek, and expand into, the pain of non-entertainment.

December 7.

2023-12-07T19:50:15Z

December 7. Stray links, starting with a new issue of The Whippet, with a discussion of "aha moments". Studies show that the experience of suddenly understanding something, makes you more likely to believe that thing is true. This leads to a strategy where, if someone wants you to believe something, they give you hints instead of telling you straight out.

Lots of cool stuff in this r/Psychonaut thread, Weird events take place when you are tripping, right? There's a big sub-thread about electronics malfunctioning, and I've read elsewhere that people who have had near-death experiences, often have continuing problems with electronics. My crazy theory is that modern technology is not just miraculous, but literally miraculous, and a different mental state can break the spell.

From r/AskOldPeople, a thread about the world getting better, What generational trauma have you ended?

More getting better, Results are in from one of the world's biggest experiments in fighting poverty. A charity gave different versions of an unconditional income to villagers in Kenya, and results suggest that universal works better than non-universal, unconditional works better than conditional, and a lump sum works better than a gradual payment.

The UBI is often misunderstood as a way for everyone to do nothing all day. But most people love being busy, and a UBI would allow more people to be busy on their own terms. Related, from r/AskReddit, People who wouldn't quit their job even if you won the lottery, what's your job?

December 4.

2023-12-04T16:20:18Z

December 4. Continuing on authenticity, Imre comments:

I feel like I need to grab this word in the context where I mostly hear it being used nowadays - authentic experience. And in this sense, the mere fact that such a construct came into being and is widely used, it speaks of the extreme deficiency of the real that people are suffering.

I was overlooking the problem of authentic experience, because I have a weird practice that most people don't have: aggressive appreciation of nature. This is something I learned to do on psychedelics, and now I do it all the time. Just walking around the city, whenever my eyes aren't needed to navigate, they're in the trees. Even watching TV, my gaze will wander from boring human scenes to landscapes in the background.

And it occurs to me, this is a learned skill. Telling an authenticity-hungry person to look at trees is like telling a depressed person to cheer up. It's not something you can just do without building a foundation of knowing how to do it. Before something can be experienced as authentic, it must first be experienced as not alien.

Another place to find authenticity is by feeling your own body from the inside -- but again, you have to learn how to do it, and it's harder than looking at nature, because your body gives you pain.

On a different tangent, I was trying to think of an example of a website with low bullshit and high misinformation -- one where people present themselves without a lot of filtering, and where there's a lack of verifiable facts. And I've actually been hanging out on such a site recently: the Spirituality subreddit.

A week ago there was a thread with some great answers to the question, What Is Your Purpose In Life?

And from another thread, an exceptional comment, Effects of sex work on the spiritual body. A key paragraph:

When I was actively doing sex work, it has given me psychosomatic illnesses like you cannot even imagine. Some days I couldn't get out of bed because my body wouldn't move at all even though I felt completely healthy in my mind. I had close to 4 months of severe labyrinthitis after a traumatic experience. I learned to dissociate with my body and I would black out in the middle of a sentence sometimes and come right back to fight or flight mode once awake. Sex work gave me ptsd and anxiety that I still am trying to heal to this day.

December 1.

2023-12-01T13:50:43Z

December 1. Merriam-Webster's 2023 word of the year is authentic, and at the top of that article is who else, Taylor Swift, the world's most authenticity-deprived person. I'm sure, if you really know her, she's as authentic as anyone -- because authenticity is everywhere. The problem is not source but distribution.

Or, authenticity is not a thing but a relationship, in which both parties have to do work: the perceived must let go of what other people expect, and the perceiver must integrate the unexpected. The perceived lets down a filter and the perceiver adjusts one. This is hard, and the bigger the crowd, the harder it is -- especially if professional media get involved, because they profit by making the content more easily digestible. At the highest level of fame, the only way to pass the filter is to be completely unsurprising, or to do something wrong.

The opposite of authenticity is bullshit, a.k.a. propaganda. Not only is this different from misinformation, they're sort of opposites. Any source with a tight filter against weirdness, is also likely to have a tight filter against factual incorrectness. So CNN is high in bullshit and low in misinformation, while some websites are low in bullshit and high in misinformation. Misinformation spoofs authenticity, merely by being different than the information provided by propaganda. When people are so hungry for authenticity that they embrace misinformation, I wonder if they're looking at screens too much, and they need to go outside and look at trees.

By the way, the kind of bullshit I notice most is in emotional reactions, and you can see this both on the news and in fiction. In the very first episode of Succession, when the kids all think their mean billionaire father is about to die, they don't shed a tear but get straight to scheming. In season four, when he finally dies, their reactions are Hollywood boilerplate. On IMDB, it's the highest rated episode.

Also by the way, I've tried to listen to Taylor Swift, and I find her music impressively uninteresting. I've heard that when Jimi Hendrix was living in London, he would go see bands every night, and he could learn something from the worst band in the world. What I haven't heard, but I'm sure it's true, is that you can learn more from an amateur band, than a polished successful band. Human perception contains two opposite motives, one for surprise, and one for recognition, and Taylor Swift has taken recognition to a new level of purity.