Buster McLeod

the allure of being unhealthy

Ideas are like magnets, or planets, pulling you towards them. They have a special force about them that hypnotizes us into thinking that everything is black and white, that lines are neatly drawn between healthy and unhealthy, good for you and bad for you, happy and depressed and sad and content, etc. My last year of lifestyle experimentation has resulted in my questioning how health and happiness are related, how being smart and being happy are related, how knowing what is right for you and happiness are related. It's crucially important to understand how things are related to happiness because it is this crazy thing that you cannot get directly and yet it is the gold of this world. Complete this sentence for me:

The first step to becoming happy is...

It can be the first step of a thousand or a million or even infinite things, but where do you start? Without being able to start, there is (ready for this shocker?) no way to start! Have you started yet or what?

Here's my first step... to watch yourself. A lot of times when I look at myself I see ideas. I am a person that likes to go 80s dancing. I am a person that likes to have time to myself. I am a person that has to enjoy what he does at work. When you look at yourself and you see an idea, you're not really seeing yourself. You're seeing a magnet, or a planet, that has pulled you towards it. Put on your anti-gravitation suit and try again. Watch yourself... what do you actually spend your time doing during the day? What do you actually think about? When are you happy and when are you sad?

Okay, stop watching yourself. That really doesn't help either. It helps make you a bit obsessive compulsive, though. Which I really enjoy by the way. In fact, I'm taking it to the next level soon. While recording my morale for the last year, I think I've learned that the 1-10 system has its flaws. For example, some people think 5 is average, others think 7 is average. But nobody thinks 6 is average. I'm going to change my scale to a -10-10 system soon. 0 is therefore more obviously average. Also, it's going to work better with my morale-feedback scoring system which will work with my happiness game. It's all a bit crazy if you're wondering. But just as people can use bio-feedback to learn how to regulate their own heart rates and stress levels, I think I'll be able to learn how to regulate my own happiness with this morale-feedback system... it's basically going to track my morale along with an evolving point system of my daily activities and I will strive to make the point system become in sync with the morale trends... ultimately getting more points when the point system chart mirrors the morale-o-meter chart.

On the allure of being unhealthy and unhappy. It makes me easier to relate to. Anyone can relate to a fuck-up. In the meantime, I'm really curious about the real boundaries of the body. How much do I have to drink before I REALLY AM an alcoholic? How much do I need to smoke before I ACTUALLY WANT a cigarette? How little sleep can I get before I can no longer function? The ideas of alcoholism, smoking, and general health are some of the most gravitational of our society. Surely they're already punching their ways out of your heads as you read this. It's like the first time I got drunk or high... I had no idea for the range involved and ended up way overshooting the mark each time. But now I know what the range is... and that's something that some people may not know. It's important to know where real thresholds lay, and not to rely on the idea of thresholds. It's part of not learning from experience (in this case, second hand experience). And what if I did become an alcoholic, would that really change things that much (again, resist the punching of the ideas in your head... have you been an alcoholic? Do you know that it's ALWAYS bad or have you just been trained to think that? Is there anything that we think that we haven't been trained to think though? Nothing is always one way. There's only one difference between geniuses and crazy people--both of them will do the same stupid thing over and over and over and over again against all reason and better judgement--but geniuses eventually prove themselves and crazy people don't.

I've been identifying myself with unhealthy activities for almost a year now... I now see what it's like... and also see that it does have its advantages and disadvantages. In the name of not giving into gravity, I am seriously considering flopping back to healthiness (especially as my bronchitis kicks in and I don't want to have another 3 months of hacking and coughing). Does this mean I am going to go on the wagon (or off the wagon... I forget which)? No, but I won't make a point of my wagon-orientation as often as I do... it'll be another uninteresting neither here nor there fact about me. And I am thinking of dusting off my running shoes too, and getting a few other parts of my life in order. Why not? See, I don't want to give up one idea for another... I'd rather live in the empty space between ideas where things float and bounce off one another willy nilly and no line can be drawn between here and there and that other place. I'll check back in a bit later.

Nuts

I feel like I'm making progress on some tough nuts to crack, after having nothing to say in the sense of progress for a while. In fact, I almost thought about giving up drinking for fear that it was making me dumb... well we'll still see about that this has got to be a phase but I just don't know when it will end.

The biggest lesson I've learned lately is to not learn from experience. Learning is for suckers. Learning from experience is (more often than not) like being a pigeon and learning that spinning in circles will help make the pellets come from the dispenser. Our brains are hard-wired to tie effects to causes (not the other way around) but this only works as a brute force survival method. Other parts of our brains, I think, are much better at judging each individual thing individually, and deciding with a less crude system what to do. This involves some learning from experience, but it's never of the "I learned to never" or "I learned to always" variety that usually tries to take over our personalities. I think part of the way that I came to learn this was due to my many years at Amazon testing small changes on the website in parallel to see which small change was superior... and slowly coming to the realization that small changes, though they can have big impacts, don't matter. When you take in incremental benefit, and then weigh in the lack of certainty that your tools naturally emit, and then weigh in lack of certainty in your own plan, and your own goal, and your own happiness, well, everything comes out flat. And yet, the black and white nature of "winning a test" or "losing a test" is addictive, and you can't help but base future decisions off of past colors, and who knows where you end up. The system is so alluring and aesthetically pleasing that it makes me doubt myself but damn it it's just precision at the cost of accuracy times a thousand. By that I mean that you gain certainty and measurable results at the cost of losing sight of what really matters. Can you tell me what really matters to a business? Or to a person? A business, like a city, is just made up of people, and people have to be happy. And that is way too difficult to measure by making a small change to something and seeing how revenue changes... or whatever equivalent have you.

Next, we should not talk about punishment and reward anymore. Why feel guilty for jaywalking, or not returning a library book, or even worse crimes to society and ourselves? Accidentally jaywalking in front of a cop today and I found that I actually wanted to pay a ticket because I felt like I've jaywalked enough (and taken enough small risks to myself and the public) that I should pay a ticket. By paying a ticket, I earn my right to jaywalk some more. I'm willing to pay for the right to jaywalk when it makes sense, in other words. And by not turning in the library book on time, I'm merely going to pay the cost of renting the book a bit longer and inconveniencing the next person in the book line. Why call it a fine, and not simply a price? I don't know if this makes any sense, but for some reason there is a lot of guilt built into the world that could simply be turned into costs. Like the cost of buying a banana... it should be the same as stealing a banana and then paying the fine when (occassionally) you get "caught" or asked to pay the stealing price. It's simply an alternate method of payment for the banana and both should be socially acceptable. Don't you think?

Lately I've been feeling like life has been a bit too easy. I need bigger challenges. Ones that don't succeed at first try. Part of the problem is that I know that success doesn't matter. My goal in life is to be passionate about the things I'm doing, and happy with the environment that I live in, but not to necessarily succeed at them and have everything exactly the way I think it should be (because I'm often wrong). Succeeding is sometimes good when it enables you to do another thing that you're passionate about... but often times it locks you into something that you're not passionate about anymore, when it would be better simply to continue to doing what you want, and changing when you wanted. It's not easy and takes practice, so I think until I really get the hang of it it would be better to trade a bit of success for a bit of flexibility and experimentation. Of course, that's also a potential trap... you should never get in the habit of storing up possibilities without cashing them in occasionally. You may end up with a million dollars in the bank that you never used, and what good is that?