#27.6.2020

Date: 27 June 2020

Duration: 47 minutes at 11:59 pm

Depth: Here is the note that was written soon after the session-

June 27, 2020 - Day 8

Go through Rules/Management WG meeting and record co-ordination overrhaul ideas to bring to Thanos.

SOPHIE - Immaterial

As a complete 180º from Faceshopping, Immaterial is an uplifting, joyous, hyper-active, blender of shine and gloss. Still with SOPHIE's unconventional sonic processing and vocal style, but through pushing her distinctive style into a conventional format she continues to push the boundaries of pop, club, and electronic music.

As i-D magazine puts it: it's "pop culture experienced through underground sounds". This excites me to no end as both a creative and a member of that very same culture. I feel a real affinity toward how SOPHIE accomplishes this through her music with her off-the-wall sounds and lyrical references to both sexuality and identity.

Totally unafraid to push boundaries both within music and identity, SOPHIE for all intents and purposes reminds me of a 'new generation' David Bowie, inspiring me for all the same reasons. As someone who has grown up queer, surrounded by friends from such an extaordinarily wide array of backgrounds all co-existing in colourful contemporaneousness, as well as choosing to reside in a city as diversive and outgoing as Brighton, SOPHIE's ethos toward community building and the creative process speaks deeply to me. As she says further on in her interview with i-D magazine: "I’ve always dreamt of creating some sort of community atmosphere, which is queer, fluid, diverse, genderless, dynamic… I guess I felt like a lot of the culture around club nights in London was very macho when I started doing music. I did want to bring something different, to try and open up a different space for people.”

Question: what is my biggest obstacle to what I consider to be success? Answer: depressive feelings and mental unwellness. Question: what causes mental unwellness in me? Answer: when the stress of my environment outweighs my innate resources to get my needs met. Question: where do those innate resources go? Answer: obfuscation. They become hidden behind how much bigger the stress of my environment seems. Question: so what alleviates these depressive feelings? Answer: spotlighting. Re-identifying my innate resources and bringing them back into the fore through personal exploration and self-discovery. One final question: what do I consider my version of success to be? Sure. Answer: Ikagai. My raisson d’etre. Doing all this, ‘gestures wildly around me’. As long as I am doing this I am already successful.

Some more pondering: Is there a correlation between journaling and success? If there is for me, I believe that it operates by re-identifying my innate resources, as said above, via the process of reflective practice that I discussed in my last entry (1). The deparment of psychology at the University of Michigan ran a study on forty participants, who had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, in order to test the efficacy of everyday journaling as a treatment for depression. The test opened with a set of questionnaires and cognitive tasks before half of the participants were then assigned to write about an emotional event for twenty minutes over the next three days. The second group were assigned to a control, wherein they wrote about the simple events of each day dispassionately. The test then closed with a second questionairre, followed up by a third four weeks later. Those in the expressive writing condition showed a marked improvement to mental wellbeing. These effects persisted even up until the third review. (2)

Whilst they do not delve into how the mechanics of such an improvement might work in this paper, I believe that by re-identifying my innate resources for handling stress via the reflective practice of journaling, it allows me to not exactly ‘rebuild my strength’, but instead redirect the strengths I already have - those innate resources - back toward handling the stresses of my environment. An alternative way of saying it is that - borrowing from Maslow’s more ‘expanded’ hierarchy of needs - I have a distinctly separate set of innate resources bestowed upon me to deal with each facet of human wellbeing: physiology, security, belonging, self-esteem, expanded knowledge & understanding, the need for aesthetics, the need for self-actualisation, and the need for transcendence. It is fair to say that through life’s knocks we each have those different innate resources damaged in some way depending upon what we, as individuals, experience. I likely have different resources that need repairing than, say, someone who has experienced the trauma of war. To give a little background I have just come out of the other side of a major mental health crisis. I have, however, come out very much changed. Certain things I once thought of myself as being good at now very much elude me, such as an increased and paralytic ‘social anxiety’ that I now experience preventing me from often talking to my closest of friends or even spending time with my own family. I have also had my resources around self-expression, focus, and direction damaged too, attributes that would likely come under self-esteem if viewed via Maslow’s needs. I will likely be discussing Maslow quite a lot through this journal as I view him not just as one of the most valuable psychologists, the field to which he is most attributed, but also as an absolutely visionary philosopher. He is one of those few I consider to truly hold most of the answers for living a good life (living a good life being my predominant interest in philosophy, as opposed to sciences, economics, or politics). However a quick background for those who are not familiar, as he goes rather a lot further beyond just cognitive psychology and the traditional, stripped-back hierarchy of needs people typically display in their offices beneath low-quality laminate. Whilst Maslow is considered to have pioneered the field of Humanistic Psychology - a psychology centered around self-actualisation and the acknowledgement of spiritual aspiration as an integral part of the psyche (3) as opposed to psychoanalysis or behaviorism - his theory is heavily rooted in the philosophies of humanism, a “rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters” and existentialism, a “philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will”. Those resources that allow me to meet the need of expressing myself, focusing, and directing my life have already begun to be improved via this reflective practice that I am doing. My need for belonging likely needs more time.

Next-steps: My aim for today is:

To go through the meeting for the Two Piers Management/Rules working group and pick out key ideas to bring to the Co-ordination management group in order to hopefully contribute to the co-operatives attempts to overhaul their data centralisation and communications systems.

Continue along my Unreal Engine learning path once that is done.

Other things:

I would like to start finding one song or artwork from each artist who inspires me and gather these pieces into a collection so that when I am done with my chosen Unreal Engine learning paths I can move on to doing response pieces in order to further refine my practice.

I have created a new Spotify board for this purpose, as well as a new technicalities board for the ‘atmospherics’ of a song and a ‘songs to analyze’ board for songs I may wish to study on here.

In addition to everything else that I’ve been doing on here, I would also like to start throwing some exercises that I’ve found when reading another blog into the mix. These exercises are: utilising gratitude prompts throughout my day, as well as any other types of prompts or self-questions that I can think of, phrasing any problems or obstacles I may have to the tasks in a day as questions to solve, for example “how can I buy this?”; and concretely ending each day with a day’s review: what was successful, what was not, etc.

Regarding the gratitude prompts, I am considering using the app ‘Grateful’ by Treebetty LLC, as it provides utterly randomised, thought-provoking prompts each day that really vary things up.

Finally, I have begun to read ‘Dawn of the New Everything’ by Jaron Lanier as a fascinating exposé on the virtual reality industry by somebody who helped to pioneer the technology back in the 80′s. I have decided to begin taking notes on each book ready for whichever Brain Drain coincides with their completion, as well as having put together an official Amazon ‘reading list’ now that I have my Kindle which is predominantly composed of literature I stumble across when researching and writing these. So far the books I’m curious about are: