#reconcepting

I don’t know anything about jojoba oil, but beeswax is made by bees!  Thousands of tiny workers, devoting hours to this task, making honey and wax according to their ancient genetic recipes.  We, with all of our science, don’t know how to make these substances.  But by the miracle of evolution, the bees do.  It is one of the wonders of the natural world.

And essential oils... these are the distilled essences of plants, concentrated into a purified form.  They’ve been used for millennia for magickal and ritual purposes.  If plants contain a spirit, if interacting with the plant matter is like interacting with that spirit, then it’s easy to imagine that that spirit remains in the essential oil.  And when you use the oil, you are not just “adding an ingredient” or “using a tool”, you are interacting with a spirit and a lifeform.

I think I grew up with the idea that work is “a job” -- something you do for someone else, that pays you money.  It probably takes place in an office, and it’s probably not something you would do voluntarily, if no one was paying you.  (I mean, even if you work as a programmer, and you program as a hobby, you wouldn’t necessarily work on [boring application that you code at work] in your spare time.)

And I realized, after spending time at the Bushcraft School, and getting a sense of what it’s like to live off the land, that this notion of work was very specific to our culture.  I mean, if you’re a hunter, a forager, or a subsistence farmer, you’re not doing anything for pay.  You’re just collecting, hunting, and growing food for yourself (and your family) to eat.  The notion of “a job” does not apply.  Pre-industrial people (or whatever the appropriate category is) never did “work” in the sense that I just described.

But clearly they worked very hard, growing and hunting and foraging food.  And so I was thinking about alternative definitions of “work” that could replace the one I was using.  (I was also just considering throwing out the concept of “work” altogether.)

Anyway, here’s a couple of other definitions I considered.

(1) “Work is anything you don’t want to do.”  This is definitely a sense in which people use the word, for instance “If you find a job you like, then you’ll never work a day in your life.”  If something “feels like work”, it feels laborious and unpleasant.

(2) “Work is anything that takes effort.”  No matter how much one enjoys chopping firewood, it could still be thought of as “work” because of the energy required.  It’s “work” because it leaves you exhausted when you’re finished with it.

(3) “Work is anything that needs to be done.”  A lot of things take effort, but don’t count as work, because they don’t really need to get done.  Painting a picture takes effort, but if you’re just doing it for sheer enjoyment (and not because, say, the king has commissioned this painting for his royal lavatory or something), then it can’t really be thought of as “work”.  Hobbies, while effort-requiring, definitely fall under the category of “leisure”.

Anyway, we probably use all of these senses (and likely many more) when deciding if something is “work”; the more senses apply, the more prototypical the thing will be.

But reasoning through this helps me understand why I had so much trouble figuring out what I needed to do for grad school.  I was getting paid, and I had a job, but I was never quite sure what I was supposed to do for it.  So I looked to the other three definitions.  Well, nothing really *needed* to get done (I guess our funding sources were counting on me to do research, but it didn’t really feel like a *need* the way washing the dishes or tending a cash register would, and even if I did *need* to do research, which research was necessary and which research was leisure?), so I figured it must be the other two definitions.  Work was anything I didn’t want to do, which took effort.  And in order to be a good grad student, I had to do 40 hours of that every week.  Which is undoubtedly why I would wake up in the morning with a heavy heart at the prospect of working.  Because either I’d spend 8 hours doing something effortful and unpleasant, or I’d spend the entire day feeling guilty for being a slacker.

I’ve never really been interested in grad school, and I think that going to grad school was a mistake, and I’ve always figured that this was a failing on my part, that I was a failure.  Like, this was my dream in undergrad -- I wanted to go to grad school in NLP or computational cog sci, and I wanted to publish a bunch of papers and become a professor and spend my life in academia.  And then... at the end of undergrad I burnt out, and then I spent two months traveling, and... when I got back, I just didn’t want to go to grad school.

And despite immense depression and repeated attempts to drop out, I’ve stuck around, largely because I felt like I “should” be interested in grad school, and that my lack of interest was a fall from a better state, and that maybe I could “recover” and learn to love grad school again someday.

But this weekend, somebody made a comment that was like, “after you’ve traveled and seen more of the world, the things that once seemed important to you often stop seeming so important”.  And... something about that comment made me realize that my lack of interest in grad school was not necessarily a fall or a failure; it could be a change or a growth.  A natural part of a reasonable life-narrative.

And I’ve already been pretty ok for a while with the fact that I might get fired at the end of the semester.  Thanks to @somedaysiamspike, I know I have a job lined up in that event, and a cheap room to rent, and that takes an enormous weight off my mind.  But the comment I heard this weekend made me feel even more ok with potentially dropping out of grad school.

(I’d actually prefer to stay in grad school, for at least one more semester, since there’s a class on algorithmic game theory that I’d really like to take.  But if I get kicked out, then things are going to be ok.  And maybe I’ll drop out on purpose sometime later.)

I’m more and more ok with just exploring, with not having a life narrative or keeping my eyes fixed on any specific goals.  I’m not trying to do anything important; I’m not trying to save the world; I’m not trying to get married and have kids by this-and-this age.  I’m just trying to enjoy my life and get by.  Would working in a grocery store help me along a career path?  Would it earn me a lot of money?  No, but I would enjoy it, and that’s what matters to me right now.

You can tell me I’m giving up on my traditionalist values.  You can tell me I’m giving up on the things that are important to me.  You can tell me I’m succumbing to the same liberal “enjoy my life” nonsense that is (supposedly) going to be the death of our society.  But here’s the thing -- I am not going to get a husband or kids by worrying a lot about how I don’t have those things.  That’s the paradox of lust for results: it’s only when you stop seeking that you’re able to find.  And I’m not going to get anywhere by sticking to a highly demanding career that I don’t like, one that requires an immense amount of emotional investment to succeed in.  But I have enough skills to support myself, and I will get by floating from job to job for a while.

That said, the sense of responsibility I described in my last post does carry through to my plans for my future.  Right now, I’m currently weighed down by debt, and that affects my life significantly.  It’s why I haven’t dropped out of grad school so far (since at least that’s a reliable salary), and it prevents me from doing things like hiking the Appalachian trail or doing the wwoof thing for a while.  (I know, I know, look at me whining that I have bills to pay, and so I need to *have a job* rather than spend my whole live going on adventures and vacations.)

But anyway, I could pay back all my debt, and save up a bunch more money, if I just worked as a software engineer for 2 or 3 years.  I’m sure I could get the job -- I’m an algorithms badass -- but up until now, I hadn’t really considered it as an option, because the prospect just seemed really daunting and unpleasant.  I know I could wake up every morning and go to work in Joseph’s organic grocery store and be really happy about it.  But when imagining a software engineering job, always I worried that I would have trouble dragging myself out of bed.

Here is at least two lasting powers of psychedelic and mystical experiences: they reveal unconscious assumptions in our understanding of the world, and they facilitate the emotional resignification of facts about the world.

1. Unconscious assumptions: let’s take being at one with the universe. Is it true that a guy on mushrooms *is* the universe? No. But it’s not false either. The boundaries of the self are arbitrarily drawn. Usually, we think of the body as the self. But sometimes, we see the self as our executive capacity (“ego”, if you prefer), in opposition to other mental phenomena like feelings and impulses. In certain mystical practices, we dissolve our identification with the ego and identify only with consciousness itself. In the other direction, when we drive, we think of the car as an extension of ourselves. We identify with our accomplishments, with our family or friends, with our community. If you are a patriot, an offense to your country feels like a personal offense to you.

Edit to connect explicitly to the main point: the unconscious assumption that your self is definitely only one thing is not true and leads to suffering.

“Being at one with the universe” means nothing more than the feeling of extending that boundary of the self to encompass everything. Is it wrong? No, because it’s not exactly a proposition. It can’t pay rent in experience anticipation. But feels right, and it can make you feel a lot better about things that make people miserable like death and impotence and feeling small. This brings us to

2. Resignification. Let’s run through an example. You’re going to die someday. Chances are, you think of death as something frightening, associated with frightening feelings or impressions like darkness, isolation and helplessness, and this may cause you a lot of grief and anxiety.

Mystical experiences allow you to resignify death – to change your emotional relationship to it. Instead of associating it with darkness and horrible things, you can think of death as “an old friend”, like the third Peverell brother. *Is* death an old friend? No. But neither is it darkness, isolation and helplessness. This understanding is no more accurate than the old-friend understanding, and the old-friend understanding causes a lot less heartache.

Creative nonfiction is what that is called

However, there do seem to be real clusters in thingspace, real contrasts between my worldview and a lot of other people’s.  For instance, I think I can say, fairly definitively, that I’m not progressive.  I don’t think the world is getting steadily better; I don’t think technology is necessarily an improvement; I don’t think society is becoming more moral; etc.

So maybe the following distinction carves reality at the joints a little bit better than liberal vs. conservative does (at least as pertains to my worldview): forward-looking vs. backward-looking.

Forward-looking people:

are excited by new technologies

think the world is getting better and will keep improving as time goes on

think that society is becoming more moral

embrace or are excited by transhumanism

prefer science and rationality over tradition

etc.

Backward-looking people:

revere mythology, tradition, and other sources of knowledge from long ago

think that the world is getting worse, and long for an idyllic past

tend to be suspicious of new technologies

etc.

This isn’t a strict dichotomy, of course, and someone can obviously like mythology and tradition while also being excited by new technology.

(I noticed this distinction the other day, by the way, when I saw a phrase along the lines of “an idea that all forward-thinking people can agree with”.  And I noticed that “forward-thinking” had no positive connotations in my mind; it wasn’t something I wanted to be.  So I was thinking about the metaphor FORWARD IS GOOD in the George Lakoff sense.)