Thinky Thursday: My Ethed Up Work Ethic/Mind Slightly Ajar

My Ethed Up Work Ethic
It was one year and two days ago today that I posted this little 'Sunday Supdate' (a tradition sadly dying out), which outlined my Summer failures of motivation and writing (and also doubled as a love letter to Felicia Day, looking back at it). So of course, Summer comes round again and obviously I'm not going to let this happen again. No sir-ee; I am going to sit my butt down, write at least 25 posts, develop some creative ideas, write a play, a short film, a few songs... And I can do it all because of all that wonderful spare time, tralalala.

12 weeks later (extended Summer, just makes it worse): Here I am , sitting my butt down, writing at least 1 post, mulling over undeveloped ideas, kicking myself for not trying harder on writing, composing, filming -- hell, I didn't even read as many books as I'd planned. And I can do it all because of all that wonderfully depressing hindsight. Trala-freaking-lala.

Two years in a row. It's time to work this thing out.

"Learn from your mistakes", the oldest saying in some sort of book, but you don't mess with the classics. So Introspection, Reflection and Self-Awareness have lead me to a conclusion; I SUCK at working when I don't have to. Consider this now, because I know plenty other people have the same issues, that when no pressure or expectation is applied, nothing gets done. It's simple to the point of being stupid. But when one hundred and eleven things are going on that I'm supposed to be doing, I manage to do another one hundred and eleven on top of it. Sense makey?

As people, we naturally thrive for things to do. Whether the gain be short term or long term, for better or worse. So we do. We do much. The thing is, it's through all the doing that you gain 'extra dos': caught up in a sweep of progress usually brings out more progress. There's no room for pushing back or doing later, because later might be a ton more stuff to do. I need a drive to keep driving, otherwise I'm just lolling about in a limbo of "plenty of time", "couldn't hurt to do that later" and my personal favourite, "*looks at blank page* Blurgh. *closes blank page*". Now whether this theory remains true will be seen next week when I start sixth-form college, which means a large work increase, so potentially a large drive increase. Or a big time decrease... So check back to measure the success/redundancy this post has come then.

But enough about me, let's talk about the upside of my Summer. The part two of the inaugural Thinky Thursday:

Mind Slightly Ajar
That's it, I'm done with secondary school. As of June 2012, my studies were complete and I received some fairly decent grades, especially in the things I'm excited to take forward to the next level. But what I left behind on those exam papers of subjects that weren't of that much interest to me were perhaps more impactful than I give credit for. Maths and Science, specifically; things that I didn't particularly love (hated in some cases) but on the whole I was quite good at. However, I'm never going to do them again -- leaving all that information in a static state in my brain (if not deteriating out of boringness). Sure they've given me a good grounding in their ways, which on the most part I understood and will continue to, but it's not what I've learned in them that I'm getting at, it's what's happened since I've stopped learning them...

It is believed that the way the human brain works is like in this image:

Now I for one hate it when people define you as one or the other in terms of which side you'd use. I've always seen myself as a middle ground mixer of the two hemispheres, and still am. I've got varying extents from each side, as I'm sure you wouldn't argue, but look at that Science and Math sitting humbly on the left side. What if we were to reduce the portion of thinking belonging to that? Say, if I were to stop actively learning them and not have to again...

Enter "The Free Brain Space".

(Please remember that what I am saying here is in noway proven, only what I'm currently perceiving)

So I've now got room for other areas of thought to grow out into, expanding at greater rates to compensate. Thought in particular is where this is headed. No, I didn't read all the books I had hoped to over the break, but there was one in particular that I most certainly did: Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, an apparent seminal work of philosophical fiction that gives a frank and realised examination of the power of existing. Existentialism.

It's a deep book.

The thought of existing and how physically frightening that actually is (he words it a lot better...) gave me a clarity of persona, so to pretentiously speak. I honestly believe that this book will be one of the most important I'll read in my life and that I read it first at just the right time for it to have the powerful effect that it's had. Why? Because my thought process was ready for it; with all that worked out and calculated straight thinking of maths and science reduced, it left the mind slightly ajar for Nausea's dizzying concepts to speak to me. Thus reaching the free-thinking, perceptive anti logic part so it made some god-damn sense (also, very much the "Pompous Windbag-iness" part).

Hey, it's called Thinky Thursday for a reason.

ATR
Follow Me: @The_DudeMeister

Note: Not all Thinky Thursday's are going to be as self-involved as this narcissistic piece of nonsense, just a one off to get things started. You can always count on self-deprecating though!

Philosophical Phinking: The Truth of Truths

Recently, I've been considering a lot for stuff about my views of the world. Stuff like: why/how do we exist? Is there a god? How do we know that science is true? Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. And so on, and so forth until my brain hurts. But it's weird, thinking stuff like this. It fills you up with this strange sensation of nausea and excitement; the wonder at whether what you're pondering is either fascinatingly genius, or dangerously psychotic. In the end, it leaves you with both a worrying paranoia about the "point" of it all, and a satisfying shot of intelligence. The problem comes with distinguishing one from the other, much like the ol' "red wire or blue wire" debate in that arduous task of defusing a bomb (I'm sure you've all been there).

   What I'm struggling with though, is trying to define what exactly it is I think. But then it is hard to pin down the exact thoughts I have. I don't reject God, yet I don't accept him. Surely that makes me Agnostic, right? But then I think of how I'm mostly on the side of rejection than faith, and how it's not God per se, but maybe just some "Higher Being(s)". However, upon deeper thought, I don't think we'll ever know what makes the pure idea of living, as humans, which points toward something called Absurdism: to believe that it is humanly impossible for us to ever understand the meaning of life, as such. Perhaps life is humans, is what my mind now leans to, promoting a Humanist philosophy within me. Are we responsible for giving our own lives meaning? Because that question leads down a very long, very confusing road known as Existentialism.

 And from there, well then anything is possible, as long as you give it the thought. I could be the only real person, with everyone else just created to service the path I've been given within this sole, central universe. We could all be figments of each other's imaginations, we could all be living inside a tiny hologram of the universe, we could all be dead, passing onto the next stage. One radical idea a friend suggested to me, was that we are all one person, who - despite the billions of paradoxes it would create - is just going back in time after each life to live within another person, with no memory of the life before. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, completely insane, and utterly bat-crap crazy, I understand that. But how do you know? Surely everything we currently believe is just based on a single idea, no matter how ludicrous, and has slowly expanded over time to the point of almost pure international truth.

    Take our current views on chemistry and physics. We're not certain of these, they aren't the absolute truth of why the universe is like that. They are, instead, just the human truth of it, until something else comes along to change that. Take religion, any kind you like. Now think about 1000 years ago, where literally everyone believed in a deity of some kind, and imagine trying to explain science. You'd be laughed at, for sure. And in 1000 years from now, when science has advanced or something entirely new has come along, they may laugh at every single fact we think we have procured today. What I'm saying is that, despite whatever, there is no truth: everything is just Human understanding and the evolution of that.

  Numbers are another great example. The way people believe that the 21/12/12 will be the end of the world, just because the Mayans wrote it down. But the Universe does not submit to numbers, because ultimately that's all they are. But it is not the opposite either, because it is only Humans that numbers submit to; no more, no less. There could be alien races that have entirely different number systems, countless variations of counting, infinite possibilities of infinity. The world still works and moves forward (as we currently believe), no matter if we have clocks or not.

The exit is to your mind...

       In the end, you just need to ask yourself what your truth is, what you want to keep as personal truth, just so we don't all kill ourselves from curiosity and the prospect that death equals answers. It's confusing and vast and mad and, often, too much, but the real truth is your own, regardless. After all, belief is just what we give as an answer to life, to tide us over for our time in this universe. It keeps us sane, it keeps us right and above all it keeps us Human. No one can take away truth, meaning or reality from anyone else, because it is true to them, so what's the point wasting life away attempting to disprove something that's only created to get through life. Everything is true, nothing can totally, honestly, really be disproved, as long as it lives inside someone's belief.

So, technically, my Philosophy is what I want. I don't need to put a label on it like it's some kind of cheesy, High School drama. Facebook may ask for just one "Philosophy or Belief" on my profile, but I know there is  so much more to that. So I guess, when the Sun finally sets on our short times upon this world, we will go out with the truth that is our own personalised truth. Be it what it is, at least it was your Human truth.

And that my friends, is my Philosophy.

ATR