#munchuscript

It’s that time of year again, waves of resolutions are washing across my timeline and a sense of self-improvement is in the air. If you think for a second I’m going to miss out on an opportunity for easy compliments and encouragement, you clearly don’t know me that well. But, I’m not a huge fan of New Year’s resolutions. Creating pass/fail goals over long stretches of time that necessitate radical changes to your lifestyle without accompanying radical changes to your lifestyle never seem to work out. I am a huge fan of yearly themes, however. In fact, I had one for 2019.

Last year was the Year of More. I knew that once I started college I wouldn’t have nearly as much temporal freedom as I once had to waste away and accomplish nothing of value, and so I resolved to branch out and expand my both literal and figurative palate as much as possible before school started. It’s hard to state exactly how successful the year was without concrete data, but I was able to accomplish a few of my goals. I picked up new skills that I use still routinely, I massively expanded my pool of artistic inspiration and intellectual stimuli, I tried a bunch of weird/scary foods, traveled to far off places without my mommy, and moved to a new city across the country. All of these are great victories, but the actual moment to moment of the year was pretty much how the moment to moment of my life had been before it. One of the main goals of the Year of the More was to finish creative projects I had always wanted to but never found the time or place for. That, obviously, didn’t pan out. As it turns out, you can’t do more things just by saying you’ll do more things. Productivity doesn’t really work like that.

Your brain loves crossing out items in a to-do list. There’s no greater feeling in the world than accomplishing your goals and seeing men cower at the sight. But, doing things is hard. It requires time and effort, both of which are limited resources. Not to mention, while your brain loves a completed project, it hates actually performing the actions necessary to complete them. If it’s a matter of life or death, your brain can compel you to do almost anything, but it will continuously try to weasel out of every other scenario until it reaches that point. Besides, your deadline isn’t that urgent. Maybe it won’t be a big deal if you don’t get started right away. You’ve been so good lately too, you deserve a break. You can always get it done tomorrow. It’s here, when your brain is confronted with ambiguity of necessity and genuinely plausible excuses, that it becomes all too easy to become distracted and procrastinate. The problem is multiplied when you have multiple projects you want to work on, because even the act of deciding what project to work on can trigger you to hesitate and become distracted. When you’re distracted, you’re not doing work and you aren’t really having fun either. It’s hard to not feel guilty booting up that video game when you know you should be working, but it’s equally as hard to pry yourself away from it once you start playing. You’re stuck in the middle, all because there was no clear decision to be made. In your hesitation, your brain defaulted to the path of least resistance and you’re paying for it. This sort of thing would happen to me nearly every day of my life. And it wasn’t just my laziness, there’s something else at play here too.

Across the nation, our best and brightest are being round up and employed at a handful of mega-corporations with a singular purpose: to find cool, new ways to sell things to you. This is not a conspiracy, this is not science fiction, this was cutting edge ten years ago and now it’s just taken for granted by everyone who thinks about it for more than a second. Your favorite social media is not a neutral platform that you come to socialize and consume content on. It is a business, and as a business it has the sole purpose of making money, and the way these business makes money is by selling ad space and by selling your data to advertisers. The longer you look and the more you refresh, the more advertisements you’ll see and the more data you’ll leave behind. All the while, that social media platform is making money. Many people I know, perhaps even you reading this sentence right now, get the vast majority of their social interaction and consume the vast majority of their media through these systems which have been designed with the sole purpose of maximizing the amount of time spent looking at advertisements. To accomplish this, social media platforms (and by extension the promoted user generated content on said platforms) intentionally make their websites as addicting as possible. They develop algorithms to show you the posts that will keep you the most engaged, for better or for worse, because they need to keep your attention for as long as possible. It doesn’t matter if you have AdBlock and aren’t literally seeing advertisements, the systems these websites are built on still affect you and are still extremely dangerous. We have become addicted to refreshing the page in the hopes that we will get to see and consume more and more content like pigs at a trough, all for the benefit of the pasty nerds and rich people. Just to be clear, I’m not above this. You aren’t stupid for closing that tab just to reopen it moments later. Like I said, our best and brightest are intentionally designing these systems for their job. They are preying on the mind’s easily exploitable ability to become distracted and using it for possibly the most evil goal fucking imaginable. Facebook broke your brain to spam you with pop-up ads.

And so, as a result of being a scatterbrained creative with too much time on my hands and a stable internet connection, I have the worst of both worlds. I’m pushed by my lack of severe lack of self-discipline and easily distractible set of hobbies, and pulled by algorithms designed by a team of the nation’s top scientists to be as addicting and time-consuming as possible, into becoming a strange being consisting only of wasted time and untapped potential.

But no more, I say. It’s time I take matters into my own hands. These distractions are like the brambles of a jungle-- chaotic and ever-growing. I must cleave through them with my machete and create the sort of life I want to live in. It’ll be a life without distractions, without addictions. It’ll be a life of intentionality, of clarity. I will conquer this jungle.

2020 is the Year of Conquest. I’m taking back my life and making sure I live as intentional of a life as I possibly can. What’s so painful about distractions is how they can eat away an afternoon or an entire day you promised yourself you would spend working. I’m not going to never play a video game ever again, quite the opposite. I’m simply going to clearly define times where I will work and times I will play, there can’t be anymore ambiguity. When I’m working, I’m working. When I’m playing, I’m playing. And, of course, I will try as hard as I can to wrestle with my addiction to social media. I’m not leaving the internet, obviously. I will still use social media but, again, in an intentional manner. I will not allow my tools to seduce me. My phone does not get to beckon me to it with notifications and interrupt my work. I will use it when and only when I choose to.

All this might sound a bit vague, but that’s how themes work best. The Year of Conquest is simply the prompt, the starting point for a whole roster of specific resolutions. I fully intend to get more specific and walkthrough my actual plans/goals for the year, but if I just start listing them all right now then I’ll get a dopamine rush that’ll satiate my self-improvement appetite and I’ll end up not actually doing them. In general though, I’m going to use a combination of incentivizes, disincentivizes, and structural lifestyle changes to try and lead a more intentional life. These carrots, sticks, and tracks definitely can and will be explained in a future post but again that’s a story for another time. Probably tomorrow, it’s my bedtime.

You’ve probably noticed a change in me over the past year or two. I know I’ve noticed a change in myself. It's a difficult change to articulate, since it’s the result of so many different factors, all with varying origins and impacts. Simply put, despite holding the title, I haven’t been a rowdy fucker for a long time now. I’ve gone from screaming edgy jokes and racial slurs to carefully rehearsing thoughtfully worded speeches to awkwardly spit out in the middle of podcasts. Now, I’m less of a wannabe performance artist and more of an armchair pseudo-intellectual. I’ve mellowed out, in other words. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. I know a lot of you actually prefer me when I’m not screaming nigger, and I’m not really here to nostalgically reflect on some halcyon days that never really existed. I’m not here to renounce the results of mellowing out, I’m here to try and explain how it happened in the first place.

I have been an intellectual hikikomori. Since my popularity ascendancy after Radcon 2 and plunge into being a full-time professional amateur demagogue, I have cognitively circled the drain. I have let my mind deteriorate and my interests stagnate. To make great artwork, or even just to be really fucking funny, you have to be constantly seeking out new perspective to depict and/or parody. When you create something, you draw upon previously in-taken inspiration from things you’ve seen or shows you’ve watched. This is a resource that can dry up, and you have to constantly be filling it back up with new ideas or else you’ll quickly run out of original inspiration to draw upon and turn into a washed-up hack. When you’re young, definitionally you accrue more new experiences faster. As I grew up, I kept taking from my well of knowledge far more than I was returning back into it, and soon enough I was turning into a washed-up hack.

For the better part of two years, I talked to a revolving handful of the same fifty people and discussed an even sparser variety of topics. Since I went to online school, I had all of my most precious, formative years to waste on the modern internet, with all of it’s manipulative trappings. Every day, I would make the same rounds through the same four or five Discord servers, and then peer through Twitter, my only window into the outside social world. If that last part didn’t give you a carcinogenic lump on your testicles the size of a soccer ball then consult your doctor, you’re probably already dead. I would never leave my house, besides the occasional expeditions to fast food joints. I wasn’t even doing nothing right; I wasn’t consuming art, just mindless content on Youtube from the same thirty or so channels. Every new channel I would subscribe to would just offer a slightly different variation on the content from another channel I was already subscribed to. I wasn’t even really talking or playing video games with friends, I thought that was a waste of time I could be “working”. By working, I mean opening up Google Docs or Photoshop or Pycharm and throwing myself at creative projects, getting distracted every five minutes and switching back and forth between my work and previously detailed distractions. I didn’t work smart and I didn’t work hard, but I also didn’t totally relax or build my social life. Everyday was spent in a nervous state, the in-between of war and peace, work and play. All the while drifting off into the twilight realm of my own secret thoughts and occasionally gasping for air in insular sycophantic communities and drowning my sorrows by watching shitty vlogs.

That is, until a few months ago.

I started college in September, and it’s been pretty rude awakening, if nothing else. All of these previously articulated thoughts had been fading in and out of focus in my brain for the better part of two years now, but it was only now that I was able to actually gauge the effect it’s had on me. At this point, there’s a thousand different directions I could diverge into. What has it been like adjusting to a completely different lifestyle? How has my first semester of normal school in six years been? Was Digibro right about everything? The answers to all of these deserve their own points, and they shall receive them in due course. I want to close off this post by partially answering the first of them as it relates to what I was just talking about.

Back in the ‘70s, a bunch of scientists who are probably on the flight logs conducted an experiment with moral allegories so blatantly obvious they don’t even need to be explained and yet here we are. They locked a bunch of kids into a room and gave them this ultimatum: “Eat a marshmallow now or eat two marshmallows in fifteen minutes after I get back from a smoke.” A lot of the devilishly-hedonistic five year olds gobbled up the first option like pigs at the trough, but the pious few who didn’t felt the sweet caress of justice during follow-up studies in what is clearly only a logical result in a universe with intelligent design. As it turns out, if you had stuck out the wait for two marshmallows, you were statistically likely to be a better person (exact quote, trust me). The kids that did this grew up more responsible, more accomplished, and even fucking healthier. This is a great study because it blew out a chunk of the research budget delivering us the hard data to reaffirm an obviously true concept that literally anyone of the fucking street could have just told you were obviously true, you fucking idiot. All good things come to those who wait, patience is a virtue, yada yada yada, the sky is blue, this is all pretty much just common sense.

Like I discussed last time, your brain loves crossing out items on a to-do list but hates putting in the effort to actually do them, even if putting in the effort ultimately causes less suffering than the satisfaction of completion. Your brain will take the path of least resistance, which nine times out of then manifests itself as instant gratification. Working on that project you’ve told yourself you’re going to get around to finishing one of these days for the past three years is way less attractive to your brain than just jacking off. With more time and effort comes more potential suffering. You know putting in work will be hard, but often times you don’t know exactly how hard it will be and if it will be worth it in the end. When you’re still in the early stages that project you should be working on, when the path ahead of you is unclear, then that ambiguity of investment and outcome is a real turn off for your brain. Compare this with masturbating, an extremely easy and predictable activity that you know returns a profit after satisfaction minus suffering. Your brain will always want to masturbate instead of working on that satisfying but difficult and/or ambiguous project. This is also why projects tend to get easier the more you work on them and habits become easier to maintain once they become routine. Being predictable is almost the same thing as being easy to your brain when calculating decisions like this. Yes, sticking out the fifteen minute wait for that extra marshmallow makes more sense to us fully rational stoic philosopher god-kings, but those kids weighed up their options just like us all and concluded that the investment of time, potential ambiguity of outcome, and a dozen other potential factors meant that just going for the surefire instant gratification and eating the first marshmallow were worth it. Worth it to their dumb kid brains, at least. But we’ve all got dumb brains, at the end of the day. We all know that acting responsibly, waiting patiently, and putting in hard work will reward us far more in the long run than doing something for instant gratification, but to our brains the risk just isn’t worth it for the same reasons that the kids ate the first marshmallow. Your brain will always tell you to jack off.

The way to put in the hard work to finish that long overdue project is to train your brain to make better decisions. Discipline is a muscle that you can strengthen just like any other, and if you can train yourself to ignore your brains bitching and moaning then you’ll be golden. But, that’s easier said than done, and no matter how disciplined you are you can’t force your brain to want to do things it doesn’t want to do. You’ll always be working against your brain than working with it. Even if you’re master of your domain, your brain’s default will be taking the path of least resistance and jacking off. No one wants to waste their time and put off their passion projects, it just works out that way because of the flawed risk/reward calculations of the brain. So, instead of trying  to pretend this bias doesn’t exist or trying fruitless to change your brain, let’s beat it at its own game. We can tip the scales of those risk/reward calculations, we can make the path of least resistance to lead to favored outcome. Your brain will always take that path, but we can change the destination. If we can dangle enough carrots in front of the favored outcome and block the unfavored outcome behind the promise of sticks, we can more or less leave our brains to make the right decision. Here are some examples.

If you wait for the second marshmallow, then you can treat yourself to a serving of extra marshmallows after you’re thrown out of the research lab. This is a carrot. It’s meant to sweeten the deal, which it does literally in this instance. For this example, I chose to have the reward be just more of the favored result for simplicity’s sake, but this won’t always work for non-marshmallow related endeavors. After all, treating yourself to working on another project after you complete your current one isn’t exactly a motivating reward. Instead, you can use whatever indulgences you fancy as carrots, only the basic idea of having rewards for making good decisions matters. Whatever will work best for you, man.

If you eat the first marshmallow prematurely, you can’t eat any more sweets for the next week. This is a stick. These should have a little bit more structure to them. Obviously, sticks are meant to be a disincentive from choosing an unfavorable outcome. But, it shouldn’t be overly punishing or difficult to perform. In the example, notice how the punishment is limiting something pleasurable in your life rather than introducing something unpleasurable into it. It isn’t the end of the world to not eat sweets for a week, it’s mildly annoying at most. This means that when you do inevitably do eat a marshmallow prematurely, you’ll be more likely to actually stick to your stick and carry out the punishment. If it were too harsh, for instance if it were for a significantly longer period of time or if you were cutting out a significantly more important part of your life then you would be tempted to not carry through with the punishment.

Make sure that both your carrots and sticks are clearly defined, easy to preform, and most of all limited to the important problems in your life. Having a meticulously crafted web of interlocking and difficult to explain systems of carrots and sticks for everyday decisions is a great way to waste your time and get little out of the system. You’re supposed to making decisions easier to make, after all.

Now, all that is fine and all and I use carrots and sticks myself for everything from waking up in the morning to journaling at night. But, there’s another way we can influence our decision making that’s even easier and far more effective than carrots and sticks. We can remove our brain from the decision making process all together. After all, if those researchers really didn’t want those kids to eat that first marshmallow, then they wouldn’t have given it to them in the first place.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Tracks and Societies.

Sometimes, your brain just doesn’t cut it. There will always be circumstances under which it will abandon you in your time of need. There are some addictions too great for even the most disciplined, seasoned veteran of No Nut November. Sticks can only take you so far, too. As long as temptations are present, eventually you will give in and take the undesired path of least resistance. As long as a mistake is possible to be made, it eventually will be. So, how do we make a mistake impossible to make? We need to remove our brains from the decision making process, and to do that we need to eliminate the decision making process altogether. You can’t be tempted to eat the first marshmallow if you weren’t given it in the first place. By removing the possibility of making the unfavorable decision, your brain has quite possibly the easiest decision imaginable. Your favored outcome is the only option, so you’ll be forced into it whether you want to or not. Analogies to the Marshmallow Experiment break down right about here, so in other words: If you want to masturbate but you have mutilated your genitals beyond the point of recognition or functionality, then the decision not to has already been made for you. Instead of trusting your brain and relying on discipline, both of which can fail you, you can just bust your dick and shoot your cock off to make masturbating impossible before you even get horny. You have removed the possibility to make bad decisions along with your penis.

Now, cutting off your penis to avoid jacking off is total overkill in most scenarios. But, there are scenarios where removing factors to incentivize certain types of behavior isn’t just useful, it’s a prerequisite to making good decisions at all.

Humans are a result of their surroundings, and nothing more. From the moment we are born, we are influenced by the people and the systems in place around us. Where someone grows up will completely define their personality, and even after we’ve grown we are still susceptible to the influence of the people we hang out around. If your friends and family do something, chances are you will too eventually. This is just how society works, and isn’t really a bad thing inherently. But, you can be influenced by those around you negatively, obviously. If you grow up in an abusive household, any number of developmental problems can arise based upon your specific situation. If you are beaten, you could be normalized to violence and beat your children. This same idea can go for ideas. You can be infected with bad ideas by your friends if your friends are crappy-ass friends. I’m not talking about political ideology, I’m talking about everything. If you spend your time in an environment with veggies who just slack off and loaf around, then you might lose that fire yourself and slip into inaction. If you spend your time in an environment with assholes who only see the negative side of things and are quick to anger, then you might start feeling irritable and depressed more often than you used to. And, if you spend your time in an environment with people who are overweight, you might care less about what you eat and never work out. This isn’t magic, it’s common sense. Not only will you adapt to resemble the other people in your environment for social reasons, but people are the way they are because of the environmental structures in their lives that incentives that behavior in the first place. Thus if you are also in that environmental structure, you will also feel the weight of its manipulation. Society will manipulate you into its patterns through a mixture of a thousand different factors. There is a social factor, but there’s also cultural factors, economic factors, and even geographical factors. People are overweight for a reason. Your economic background could affect the kind of food you can afford, your geographical location could make exercising difficult, and your culture could affect how important health is to you, all coalescing into you being overweight, which in turn makes you a social factor that further manipulates those around you to be overweight too. All of these factors are what constitute your society, your environment, and it’s this society we’re going to have to change if we want to stop jacking off.

Tracks are the secret third prong that I alluded to at the end of my last post. Together with carrots and sticks, tracks can keep you making the right decisions far, far more consistently by removing unfavorable outcomes from your environment. Most of your worst habits aren’t the result of your lack of moral character, they’re a result of the environment you’re in. By changing your environment, you can make making good decisions easy by making bad decisions impossible. Carrots and sticks are for you, tracks are for your environment. If there are structural issues in your life manipulating you into unfavorable outcomes, trying to fight against your brain and the society at the same time just isn’t going to work out. You need to craft your environment to the point where it can foster your favored outcomes, or at the very least doesn’t foster your unfavored outcomes. While it’s impossible to choose your environments, if you make a concerted effort you can affect individual factors of them. If you’ve got crappy-ass friends who don’t want to get action or who routinely anger or upset you, dump ‘em. They’re a negative factor in your environment. Don’t let marshmallows that you know you’ll prematurely eat into your life, they aren’t worth it. Tracks are this action, removing the negative factors in your environment to make way for carrots and sticks.

Now, you can erect tracks throughout your life, but I have used them to fantastic results on the computer especially. After all, you will have to exercise some discipline to not buy more marshmallows when you are craving them. But, the computer is an unfeeling machine. If you tell it to do something, it will do it, no matter what. Your computer has no emotions with which to sway it’s decision making processes. It is a perfectly mold-able environment for you to shape into whatever type of space you want to. It has thousands upon thousands of theoretical track configurations and is the perfect playground to test out your carrots and sticks. And, perhaps in the modern world it is the most relevant place in your life to do so.

This is a blog. I’m going to use it to write blog posts. Think of this as a solo podcast, but you have to use your eyes to read it. Posts here will be somewhat personal, though mostly they’ll be write-ups on subjects or themes that’ve been rattling around in my head for a while. 

My main/art blog is here. There, I will post my art and make an occasional text post to let you know what’s going on with me as it pertains to my art. Maybe I’ll let you know about events going on in ENDLESS WAR or about upcoming projects. Stuff that, if you’re interested in my art, you will also be interested in.

This blog is for long-winded diatribes and the occasional hot take (please, end my fucking life), so if you don’t want any part in that then you can mosey on over to the main blog.