Category: Journal

💡 self-actualization 💡

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Like any feedback-addicted millennial* I love online personality quizzes etc. Here’s one that claims to be less bullshit:

Now Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Barnard College, Columbia University, believes it is time to revive the concept [of self-actualization], and link it with contemporary psychological theory. … To this end, he’s used modern statistical methods to create a test of self-actualisation or, more specifically, of the 10 characteristics exhibited by self-actualised people, and it was recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

Christian Jarrett, Aeon

You can take the test here. Here are the traits that they measure for (maybe take a look at these after taking the test):

My strengths were Efficient perception of reality, Authenticity, and Purpose, and lowest scores on Peak experience, Continued freshness of appreciation, and Good moral intuition, which tracks very closely to my self-perception. My only quibble with the grading is that I don’t think that having a fast/quick moral sense is the same thing as having a good moral sense. I’d rather come to the right answer than the fast answer.

*My pet theory about this is that it comes from a marriage of the eternal human desire to fit in and not stick out in the herd with the brand-new dogma that data driven insights are more true than our own lived insights.

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

It’s important to me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go.

Jenny Odell How to Do Nothing

Welcome!

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I still believe in the internet.

You power the internet. Your preferences, fed back to you in the form of ads, fund the internet. Your attention and your anger give it political power. Your experiences and preferences and interactions shape design on the internet and in the built world. Someone is always trying to take your personality and behaviors and monetize them for themselves.

This is my own little digital homestead. I like using all the feed based apps as much as anybody else, but to have a little archive of my own is important to me too. Please enjoy, and if you want to follow me elsewhere, please do!

big canvases

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

the new Star Wars trailer dropped today

The Last Jedi was a really beautiful and important movie to me, and there are others who have written longer and better than I can about why (most especially Film Crit Hulk, both about the movie and the reactionary culture clash that followed).

While the Star Wars movies were certainly a part of my childhood* but they never captured my imagination to the extent that other media would, like Harry Potter or Dune. Maybe to some, that would be enough to discount my opinion. But I did like them, and I’m grateful that I was able to be exposed to the original trilogy in the quiet years before the prequels were released, when the culture at large was not interested in them beyond extended universe books and video games.

*In fact, the copy of Star Wars that we had in the house was a single extremely long playing VHS with all three movies taped from a TV broadcast. Honestly, I think this is very legit, fandom wise.

There’s a funny paradox at the heart of the mega-franchise dominated culture we live in now: the health of franchises is determined by the attention they attract, which determines which get sequels. At the same time, the more attention a franchise has, the more any given movie in it is required to include characters and events to support the infrastructure of the universe, which leads to the movies becoming thematically incoherent, long and boring (see: every Marvel movie with a colon in its title).

The wild thing about The Last Jedi, the thing that makes it such an outlier, is that it managed to have artistic depth in a form and a creative structure that are difficult to work within. It did three very difficult things: it worked as a movie (it was fun to watch, the story made sense, there were good jokes), it had a thematic gestalt, and—the most difficult part—the thematic ideas of the movie complicate and enrich our understanding of the stories we have bonded with.

Put another way, it’s hard to make one of these movies that say anything, and it’s even harder to make one of these movies say something that makes sense, and it’s even harder to make one of these movies say something that both makes sense and is meaningful.

There are a whole host of good but flawed movies in which a clear director’s sensibility shines through: Sam Rami’s Spider-Man, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, as well as Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and James Mangold’s Logan. And there’s also many other movies that are workmanlike but are so much fun that we don’t care that they don’t say anything: James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Jon Favreau and Shane Black’s Iron Man. And then there are a whole bunch of hacks, turning out movies that are fun enough and are forgotten the second you walk out of the theater.

The most depressing part of the followup to The Last Jedi is that J.J. Abrams is the king of the hacks. And so this movie is going to end how all of his movies end, with slowly moving shots of characters we don’t quite understand experiencing what seem like profound emotions that aren’t quite proportional to the events that just happened, all set to shimmering strings in Michael Giacchino’s score. And none of it will have meant anything, and we’ll walk out of the theater and it will be like none of it ever happened.

doing nothing

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Today was a good day, and one of the good things in it is that I came across this wonderful piece of writing called How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. It’s a Medium post based on a speech she gave that she has expanded out into a book, which I immediately put a library hold on. It weaves together so many of the things I’ve been thinking about this year: how do we decide what is worth paying attention to, why do we all feel unbalanced by the internet and what has changed, how to communicate through the internet without being on the internet. The single, electrifying thought that Odell expands upon is this:

The function of nothing here, of saying nothing, is that it’s a precursor to something, to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb

Oh, I am so resistant to this idea.

There are some plants that only start to continue growing when old, dead matter is cut away. I am in a growth phase right now, and for every new idea tried, for every moment of understanding, there is also deep regret and loss for old ideas that I was just wrong about. One identity that I’m trying to let go of is as an “information junkie,” this persona who is curious and creative and constantly hungry for new information and stimulus. As a kid, I was always bored. I felt cut off from the information and cultural pathways that other people had access to because it was pre-broadband (if you were born after Google, pre-internet) and our household didn’t have a television set. Not even for VHS tapes. I went away to school in 9th grade, and one of the most precious freedoms I gained was internet access, and nothing was ever the same again, really. Since then, as each social network has been founded and attention has been fragmented and collated and monetized and optimized, there has only ever been the direction of more and more stimulation, more and more information. And over time, I think it’s drowned out my own thoughts.

Here’s the part that hurts, and here’s where the regret comes in: I thought that my ability to process and assimilate information was a rare gift. I thought that my peers who didn’t have the patience or stamina to sit down and power through a book, or the adults who didn’t seem to be in touch with news of the world or politics, or busy adults who didn’t have much time to read—all of these people deserved compassion, but they did not have the gift I had. In humble honesty, I thought that this made me better than other people. What I have to confront now is that other people may have just chosen to strike a different balance between what they give attention to in the wider world/culture, and what they give attention to in their own life.

This may seem like a small things, but there are implications that I’m very sensitive to. One is: if this is simply a different balance point struck, how satisfied am I with mine? Right now I am very unhappy with that balance—the stimulus I get from the internet and social media is addicting but makes me feel bad. Another is: if I have staked my identity on being a big brain, and the internet is a construct where the mind has complete dominance over body, what does it mean about me that I am washing out of being Extremely Online? Was I an animal the whole time, did I have bodily needs that a brain in a jar doesn’t have. Of course I was. A bleaker question: what did I miss out on while I was ignoring those needs?

Jenny Odell speaks to this, too:

What is missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality is any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual groundedness, in the ground.

[…]

 This is real. The living, breathing bodies in this room are real. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force. I’m lumpy, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, I see, and I smell things that hear, see, and smell me. And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are.

We have powerful forces that keep us from attending to the “soft animal of our body”: social platforms that don’t exist in real space and need our constant engagement with them to operate; our primate brain’s fear that if we don’t keep posting and ❤️ing, the troop will move on without us; and even our survival instinct:

In a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.

This is the biggest fear that I’m working through right now, as I’m changing my habits to incorporate more silence, more time for synthesis rather than stimulus. There’s an image I return to over and over again: the wonderful shapes in smoke after you blow out a candle. Move or talk too much, or if the room is too busy or drafty, and the smoke will just be blown around. But in stillness, in silence, the smoke makes wonderful patterns as it follows minute eddies of air. When I choose silence on a walk over browsing twitter as I walk, or listening to a podcast or music, I fear that I will become bored and it will have been a “waste of time.” An even deeper fear is that I will end up tuning into my own thoughts, and there will be nothing there.

But, of course, there always is something to be found there, if we’re brave enough to be patient. I hope. And if that turns out not to be the case, then I will set this idea down and try the next thing, which is all we ever can do anyway.

drawing of a candle with smoke