Status and Competitions

When I was a kid, there was a gradual transition in the organized activities kids participated in from "free form games" to structured competitions. I didn't really "get it" for a long time, that is, I was sort of stuck in the free form game mode when classmates were shifting into competition mode. I remember, for example, being kind of traumatized by the coaches and kids being "serious" about baseball when I was still in "game" mode when I was maybe 8 or 9.

At some point, even the tone of school changed similarly. In elementary school there weren't really grades. I think we got check marks or something like that, then in 6th grade/middle school there were "grades" and maybe even rankings of students. There were also myriad competitions in almost every activity, like in band there were rankings of players "1st chair", and so on, plus spelling bees, competitions in presentations, etc... Of course there were organized sports as well, so kids began training to be on the football team or whatever.

All the organized judging and rule based games are supposed to be training for "the real world", which is theoretically a bunch of similar competitions. I heard warnings from adults maybe 1,000 times that I'd be a loser if I didn't work hard, or that if I didn't buckle down and study I'd be a bum. As I noted in the previous post, "the loser" character is really the invisible fence of the boomer world, or the corporate/consumer society.

I guess the purpose, or maybe just a side effect of all the competitions in school is students internalize a phony model of reality, that is, there is a merit based hierarchy all throughout life that's determined by work and talent and judging. Maybe you suck at sports, but you can win the spelling bee, or maybe go to the chemistry olympics, or vice versa, you suck at chemistry class, but are a starter on the football team and so on. That is, there's always some "fair", real competition you can participate in.

One fairly useful observation is that almost every game is arbitrary and even the competitions are fraudulent or severely distorted in the sense that the rankings are really meaningless. For example, in high school football in the US, there are divisions of schools because some high schools only have 150 students and others have 3,000 so a kid who might be the quarterback on a Division IV football team might not even get on the varsity Division I football team. That's true in almost every type of organized sporting event I ever participated in as an adult. The competition is divvied up so people are participating against "peers" rather than the whole population of athletes, like in running races there are age groups, or in cycling races there are skill categories.

In professional sports, which is ostensibly the closest thing to the "real world" form of competition, that is an unlimited contest which reveals who is really the best, there are myriad arbitrary rules. In fact, in many pro sports the rules accumulate endlessly. In pro cycling, for example, there are all kinds of rules about how much your bicycle can weigh, what the geometry is, the position you can ride in, and on and on. Most pro or olympic level sports have all sorts of rules about the substances an athlete can take to eliminate the use of 'roids and HGH and such.

Another aspect of this competition internalization is people seek counterfeit representations of merit via "status" symbols like expensive cars and houses or sporting goods. In almost every case, a person gets their "status" object like a house with a giant pile of debt. Then they retain their status symbol by avoiding loser status, usually by grinding away at a shitty corporate job for their whole life. 

Anyway, quite ironically, it turns out that the elementary school view of games versus the high school competitions forever corresponds to the "real world". That is, there's no gamified reality except the shared hallucination of the general public who's been trained to participate in it.

"The Loser" is "The Wind Beneath My Wings"

I lived in two fairly distinct "worlds" through my life. I was born and raised and trained to live in the "boomer world", or corporate/consumer society, but I liked to be in "the woods". I think it's a really common story, especially when you add in all the other "worlds" people inhabit. For some people it's beach world, others it's boat world, or mountain world. That is, we'd all rather be in that other world than living the boomer world anxiety grind.

When I was in my 20s, I went on a vacation with my girlfriend at the time to the Allegheny National Forest. Her family had what they called a "camp" there. It was a small plot of land her father owned, which I think he inherited from his father, which had a trailer parked there. It was kind of a time capsule, because it was stocked with vintage stuff, like the prior generation of a radio, or a coffee maker, or whatever. It was all very basic, and it was obviously "fine" in fact it was a good place to live. Visiting that place demonstrated that the cost of living could be super low, and that life was very pleasant. I remember asking her why people like us would go "on vacation" away from the boomer world, but then repeatedly return to the boomer world. Neither of us had an answer. In fact, we both slowly transformed from granola/flannel/nature people to just another pair of yuppies. She went full yuppie and I was pretty reluctant and confused about that and really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time.

When I was growing up my family went on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks a few times. The overall feel of the place was similar to "the camp". The cabin was setup in "lodge" style with pine furniture and similarly dated decor, probably from the early 1960s. (We were there in the 80s.) It was all pretty nice and relaxing. Inevitably we'd return to the boomer world, school, and my parents would go back to "the grind" and my sisters and I went to "kid grind" in school.

What actually keeps people in the boomer world instead of just slipping away to their version of the woods? I've been mulling this question over lately. One potential answer came to me via a very crude girl in a Midwest Safety Video. At some point in the video she (a drunk) becomes incredulous she's being arrested for DUI and she hilariously shrieks to her mom on the phone, "I'm not a nigger!" That video is a hall of famer bodycam edit.

That dumb moment shows one of the ways "it works". She doesn't mean "I'm not black", she really means "I'm not a low status person". People stay at the grind from "status anxiety".

There's a sort of generalized anxiety about maintaining status, meaning a social position, which is for the most part completely imaginary. I've been "out of work" a couple of times in my life. The first time I was laid off during the dot com implosion. I remember feeling sort of hollow and like a pretender once I wasn't working. I think that anxiety was due to my bad finances at the time. I needed to get a job to pay bills and keep my house and the like. I felt like a pretender because my boomer life really was a costume I was renting, including my house. If I were too long out of work, I'd end up homeless trash, that is, I'd lose my social status and fall out of what's essentially a club and it's not a very exclusive club.

Many retards who can barely do anything have fancy high paying jobs. When I was in college, I busted my ass in physics classes and was up late many nights a week studying and doing homework for several years. At the same time, shitloads of people in my school were just partying or taking dumb fuck business classes or whatever and as far as I know, none of those people ended up homeless.

When people have anxiety about losing health care coverage which is tied to their job, they really worry about bouncing down the status ladder into the poverty life because "the loser" is really the driving force in their existence, ironically.

Conversely when they have a job, the same people don't worry about their horrible diet, lack of exercise, totally sedentary life, etc... In fact, many people are sort of kept alive in spite of that unhealthy lifestyle by the medical system which gives them a pill for their ailments.

Anyway, ironically it's a sort of mythic "loser" which terrorizes the eternal boomer and keeps this shit show going. The "loser" is basically like an invisible fence for all the people who briefly escape on vacation.

Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).

A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".

 

Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels