Entanglement

“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived.” - Erwin Schrödinger

Taking a chance is often an intimidating task.  All possible outcomes race through your mind.  Each play out simultaneously, indefinite until measured.  It’s easy to leave it to theory, to chalk it up to superposition and move on with your life.  Giving something that matters a definitive state can be a scary thing.  But they say the only things you live to regret are the risks you didn’t take.

Over the past few years I’ve learned betting on myself pays off more often than it doesn’t.  As success bred confidence I found it easier and easier to take a chance on myself.  And my life is so much better for it.  But this lesson was learned so late!  I can't help but reflect on all the chances I never took.  My life is filled with regret.  So many parallel lives playing out simultaneously in my mind, lives that could have been, should have been.

So many chances to shine were spent hiding in the dark.  So many ambitions silenced under my own guard.  Too many dreams of my youth never made their way to my waking life.  I've loved, but never took the chance they might love me back. Most of them never even knew.  I imagine a life where I told every girl, took every chance, and risked for every reward.  A world where every possibility was sparked into existence through my observation.  I’d have gained more than I lost.  I’d have taken 2 steps forward for every step back.  I’d ride the wave of probability.  Who knows how far I’d be if I hadn’t waited so long to open the box.

I’m still young, despite being the oldest I’ve ever been.  I can go forward with this knowledge, and try not to repeat the mistakes that haunt me still.  But they will haunt me forever.  I may never forgive myself.  Regret is the most diabolical of mechanisms.

Growing up, it seems, is the collapse of possibility into the reality.  Better late than never.  If we don’t take risks, life ends up being nothing more than a thought experiment.  So many dualities denied any kind of fate, left for eternity in limbo.  Parallel lives, both living and dead.  And neither.

Six Feet Under

I started watching my way through Six Feet Under again.  For those who don’t know, it was an HBO series that ran for 5 years, and is one of the highest rated, most critically acclaimed shows of all time.  And well deserved.  I just watched the series finale tonight.

I first watched Six Feet Under 5-6 years ago.  Some friends and I got into it and watched it religiously on DVD together.  I remember us watching through season 3 in one night.  When the series finally ended after its 5th season, it blew us away. 

Re-watching it now, with more life experience, was just as great, and my opinion on the show has only gone up.  It’s a character drama that follows a family who run, and live in, a funeral home.  The entire series is a spiritual, philosophical and often frank look at death, a subject our society largely shies away from. 

In fact, when you watch it you really start to realize how absurd it is that we almost universally ignore the one certainty about life, that it ends.  Death is perhaps the most personal thing we’ll ever face, and we will ALL face it in time.  During the Making-Of I watched afterwards, there is a statistic that the average person sees over a hundred thousand simulated deaths by the time they’re 21, but are not prepared for the reality of it at all when it happens in real life.  I think this show is one of the very few things in media today to convey the realities of death and grieving.

It’s not all doom and gloom though.  In fact it’s one of the most life-affirming pieces of fiction I’ve ever experienced.  And it’s filled with clever dark humor.  The ending is, suitably, one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, to any form of story-telling.

It frustrates me how many people haven’t watched this show.  They may be offset by the sometimes pretentious nature of the show, or perhaps the subject matter is too hard to handle for some.  But it’s one of the few shows that surpass entertainment to become true art.  Something that is not consumed and forgotten, but stays with the viewer, inspiring them. 

Anyone reading this, I implore you to watch this show.  Like any good character drama, it takes a few episodes to really get into it, because you have to get to know the characters.  But once you do, I guarantee you’ll feel like you’ve known them your whole lives.  And it will remind you that life passes by in an instant, so make the most of it!

Favorite show of all time.

In Production

Layers melt away until all I can see are the patterns. The mechanisms in my life are hard at work. As the equations work themselves down to their simplest expressions, I see it all play out. And it all seems so familiar. The faces behind the masks, the meanings behind the words. All those I've always known but never met.

I glide between the orbits, never making contact. Pieces come together, pieces fall apart. I see lone elements on vagrant paths to nowhere, I see overwhelming plans coming to fruition.

It's all so beautiful in its function. It's the art of living. Paint stroke decisions, melodic mistakes, the grammar of emotions.

I wonder the landscape of my past, strolling through the painful times and taking a moment to rest in the pleasant ones. I watch the machine operate as a whole. It doesn't make a sound, flawlessly creating a product never meant to be completed.

Things start to lose their perfection, variables are added to the equations. An uncertain future fractures the landscape. The masks slip back on, the layers are laid down once again. I begin to lose sight of the orbits. As the over-saturated colors of subjectivity begin to fade in from the monochromatic perfection I'd witnessed, I find myself back in the abstract.

I step into the future and let the mechanisms get back to work, and I make some new paint strokes. The melody goes on.

Tomorrow Never Comes

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.  ~William James

For as long as I can remember my friends have told me I should eat healthier, maybe workout.  Over the last few years, this last one especially, I’ve watched the pounds add up, and continually told myself I’d start working out soon, later, tomorrow.  It’s been this way with many of my goals in life.  They were abstract, not something I felt I could actually reach out and grasp, but a light at the end of the eternal tunnel.

I’ve been having a bit of a paradigm shift lately.  I’ve been making the most of my 3 months off.  I wake up early, work out first thing in the morning, shower, have a healthy lunch, do Unreal training, etc.  My days have been extremely productive.  At first this schedule was really hard to maintain.  Waking up early did not come naturally to me, I was incredibly out of shape so working out gave me a headache and made me feel like crap, and I’d spent years making a habit of procrastination.  Breaking these routines and excuses was tough.  But I forced myself.

As I caught up on everything I’d let slide, all the things I swore I’d do someday, I began to feel elated…  Moment to moment life felt so much better knowing there wasn’t a dozen tasks hanging over my head.  When I have a free moment, it truly feels free.  NOTHING is nagging at me, and instead of guilt for not doing what I know I should be, I feel pride in the reward of a truly free moment.

It’s like I’ve been in debt for most of my life.  And I don’t mean financially.  I owed this many tasks, to that many causes.  But I wasn’t budgeting, and in reality I was falling further behind from my goals, not catching up.

I’m finally catching up, finally making tangible progress.  And the light at the end of the tunnel is getting bigger as I get closer.  There will always be another goal after, but for the first time I’m actually making constant progress towards real goals, and every day offers their own rewards on the way.

I’ve learned procrastination is the enemy of happiness.  All the things you put off, you put in between yourself and your goals, your happiness.  You are opting for more obstacles, just to maintain your inertia.  And those obstacles pile up until they obstruct the light from reaching you.  It’s time to clear the tracks, full steam ahead.  The light at the end of the tunnel is not abstract, it’s there and can be reached.

Fear Of Science Will Kill Us

This video is a must watch.  I’ve often found myself alone on the pro side when it comes to scientific progress.  Genetically modified food, new vaccines, medicine over holistic, etc.  I loved this video.

Designing Dystopia

The preceding video is a speech given at the DICE 2010 design conference.  It is a talk about game design, social interaction, psychology and advertising.  It shows the far-reach design can have in society.  And as I watched it, to be honest, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a good thing…  I love game design, and design in general.  Photography, video editing, level editing, web design, etc…  All forms of design I’ve had fun with.  Design is the very career I pursue.  That being said, after watching the video above, this is an email on the subject which I sent to my cousin, the one who showed it to me.

Dale Furutani - February 26 at 12:34am

I watched that speech on Kotaku. It touched on a few things I've actually debated with Reid before. I told him about how Achievements were such a success because they turned your gaming as a whole into an augmented reality. Your gaming life was one giant MMO and playing GAME X was just a specific quest. It taps into the same things.

That being said, that speech REALLY depressed me. I hope it never gets to that point. He starts off by talking about how we're getting more and more disconnected from reality, and that hopefully we can eventually use technology to reach back to it. But then he talks about a global points system and technology that monitors our every move. The future he described terrifies and disgusts me. It's the point when we as a species become consumers.

The conclusion of his speech offset me the most though. He says with a record of everything we do, with our grandchildren able to see every book we read, and where we spent our days, we'll be motivated to be better people. How is that any different than saying the government has placed cameras in every house and the only people who have anything to worry about are the ones breaking the law?

The future he described was the furthest thing from authenticity I can imagine. I do like the concept of games breaking through to reality. I like comparing my scores to my real friends and I'm clearly an achievement whore. But I also recognize that as a bit of a psychological flaw on my part, and I recognize it's being exploited. Kinda like the way a WoW player may tell you he loves it, even though he's pale, malnourished and has no real friends.

The very definition of an illusion is to distort your senses into thinking something unreal is reality. I really hope that future never comes, but designers and advertisers everywhere are getting wise to the back-doors to our brains that leave us completely vulnerable to such exploitation.

I don't want to see our society become a culture of OCD, counting every brush of our teeth, every gallon of gas saved, every Dr. Pepper drank and every advertisement read. The idea, to me, is the complete opposite of authenticity, and reflects the dark side of design.

My cousin replied in agreement.  His response makes me want to elaborate a bit further.  I suppose the future is coming one way or another, and as someone who hopes to get into the design field I guess I better get used to the idea of exploiting the psychology of our current society with the drip-feed, carrot on a stick approach.

I still can’t help but feel a sense of sadness.  The psychological markers left within us from our times surviving in nature now have us comfortably consuming our shrink-wrapped unreality.

I suppose I can only hope for, and maybe help design the backswing of the pendulum, to return to something more authentic.  Humanity tends to work that way, find something new, and love it until we hate it.  I must assume someday the consumer will get tired of having their OCD appeased and long for something more lasting than the next drip.

Either way, this trend in design and advertising is something to watch and be aware of.

Divide By Zero

Forgive me this long rant about myself, but I’m sure you’ve come to expect it.

I’ve always been a passionate person, for better or worse.  At work several people have made jokes that I’m a natural salesman because when I like something, I get so passionate about it I try to convince everyone around me of it, even if it’s something as mundane as, oh I don’t know, electronic cigarettes…

I’ve also always been a bit on the intellectual side.  While others may want to spend their nights having drinks and getting wild, or playing sports and being active, I always found a good debate to be my pass-time of choice.

And there was always much to debate.  Whatever beliefs I hold, I hold them strongly.  This has always been the case, and has gotten me into trouble more than once.  But this passionate advocacy of whatever side of the debate I was on has taken its toll over the years.

When you’re so behind something that you’ll go out of your way to debate it with anyone willing to not punch you in the face, you eventually hear many good arguments against it.  And as someone who respects truth more than any one opinion, I’d always do my best to overcome my personal bias towards my held belief and reconsider both options every time I received new information on the subject.

Eventually I couldn’t help but realize some of my beliefs were wrong.  Not wanting to be a stubborn ass, well no more than I’d already been, I suitably changed my beliefs accordingly.

But it doesn’t end.  Eventually I’d become passionate about this new belief, and get into as many debates as I could on the matter.  I’d debate against many points I myself used to hold.  Until eventually someone would make a good point that disproved the new belief I now held…

I’ve been a pacifist and a pragmatic.  I’ve been a socialist and a capitalist.  I’ve believed in free market, regulated market and all the shades in between.  I’ve believed in freedom over safety, and vice versa.  I’ve done almost all the things I once swore I’d never do, and taken back things I swore were intrinsically true.

Over time I was left feeling pretty disenfranchised.  I’d been so sure, so many times.  And being proven wrong was humbling.  But naturally I had to take humility to it’s extremity.  And now I’m passionately passionless.  I raise the white flag with pride.

The stance I now stand behind is a transparent one.  Nothing is intrinsically true.  Truth is a relative term.  While it may be the case that some combination of matter is accurate, we will never know it, not really.  We will perceive it, and file it away in the context of who we are, and where we were in our lives at the time of perception.  Some day it will need to be re-evaluated and filed accordingly by who we’ve become and how our perceptions have changed as a result of holding them.  Even if one of those times we get it right, we won’t even be able to tell it from all the mistakes we’ve made, and eventually we will inevitably re-evaluate and file it back into fallacy.  The truth will have no recognizable quality by virtue of itself, it will look and feel just like all the illusions.

Some people choose this moment to find faith.  I suppose once I see the inadequacy of intellect to find any lasting truth I can understand the inclination to faith.  But if you’re reading this, you know me, and you know the summary of this article is not going to be faith.  Nietzsche once defined Nihilism “as a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value and how the world appears to operate.”  Basically, when we realize what we want to be true isn’t, or at the very least, can’t be known for sure, we want to continue operating as if it were.

I will not make the argument that a life of faith is easier.  I’ve known enough people of faith to know their lives are just as difficult as anyone else’s.  But I will say that a life of purpose has direction.  So while it may not make the load easier to bear, it does give one a reason to bear it.  And so we’re down to the catch-phrase of nihilism.

“What’s the point?”

I’ve been at this crossroads for several years now.  It’s difficult to lead a life of value when you see how subjective value is.  How do you lead a just life if justice is just a word?  How can you do the right thing when righteousness is really just justification?  I don’t want to devolve into some animal, only in it for myself, fulfilling my base needs.  This, despite the fact that if you ask me what I believe we are, I’d answer “just animals, in it for ourselves, fulfilling our base needs.”

I have always considered myself a moral person.  I try to do the right thing.  But when morality is just a social construct, why do the right thing when no one’s looking? 

It’s that tension.  I believe in nothing, but to continue I have to believe in something.  It’s oft been said a true nihilist offs himself right there, the living are just posers.  Of course this is generally mumbled by emo teens wearing too much eye-liner, but they do point out a logical flaw of nihilism.  If there’s no point…  What’s the point?

And eventually you get tired of studying both sides to every coin.  The whole process starts to make you sick.  You search and study, but for what?  Everything is negated by something.  The easy thing to do would be just forget it and occupy myself with hedonistic pleasures, like tv, sex, drugs, alcohol, adrenaline, whatever.  And sometimes I fall victim to such distractions.

But at the end of the day, I’m still a passionate person.  And I’m still a bit on the intellectual side.  So time and time again I find myself back at the blackboard, hoping I’ve figured out the equation.  I try again and again to rid myself of that tension, to find a way to navigate that disproportion between what I want to value and how the world appears to operate.  Despite it all, I still want my life to have some sort of meaning.  I want there to be a right and wrong.

So for now, I’ll have to take that as truth.  I can’t say what is true about the world, but I can at least say what is true about me.  I don’t know anything for certain, and while sometimes that can be overwhelming, more often it’s just really exciting.