There and Back Again – A Hobbits Tale by Jordan

What does going there and coming back mean?

I have a friend who when we see each other for a prolonged period of time we always return to the same conversation. Namely that of travelling. Whilst we both agree that travelling is very beneficial to your personal development, and it is of course a great way of exposing yourself to new things, ideas, loves and languages. We usually end at the point that it comes at a cost. Now, I would encourage anyone to go away, live abroad, submerge yourself in someone else’s culture, but as I’ve gotten older I have realised that for me at least, there was a cost involved in doing that. I believe that it is important to be aware of all the outcomes when you make a decision, and I understand that what I am putting forward is controversial, or at least not the mainstream opinion, and perhaps to an extend, what I am going to say is personal at least to me and the people I know, who while not openly agreeing with me, I feel that could relate. I recently wrote an answer on Quora – an incredible web page if you haven’t heard of it, but the question was “Why should I bother to learn another language?”. I read through the answers and they mostly annoyed me. They were of the ilk “to be less close minded”, “to see the world differently”, “to be less Anglo-centric” which while true, I feel is quite a snobbish way of trying to encourage someone to do something. If you begin an incitement with negatives, outlining all the reasons why someone is insufficient, how can you inspire change? I went on to write that I felt it was (and this may sound very nerd-like) an entertaining thing to do. Difficult at first, but then inherently more and more rewarding, more and more exciting as you get the hang of it – fun even. I love the way I sound when I speak it, I love the way my brain moves when I write it and I love the way it feels when I understand something I found hard.

I started to learn Spanish just before I moved to Barcelona back in 2012. A friend and I used to have private lessons in her flat with a lady called Jemma (oh the hours of laughs calling her Hemma, with an over pronounced H). I had never attempted to learn it before, and I knew plenty of people around me that didn’t want to learn it. I ended up in a relationship for about 18 months with a Catalan guy, and I guess it was there that I really picked it up. You know those first few weeks where you text for hours on end, Google Translate was a frequent flyer. I am a firm believer that the best way to learn a language is to get really loved up or pissed off with someone, and that passion will inspire you to learn. While I moved to Spain in 2013, that wasn’t my first foray into going abroad. I went travelling after school, and again a little bit after university. I guess I was probably a little snobbish about why I travelled. It seemed to me that it was something to be snobbish about, that the more countries you ticked off a list, the happier you would be. I suppose that stopped a little in Spain because I managed to justify it along the lines of “well yes, I’m not travelling now, but I am really living a different culture, not just flying in, getting drunk and taking the obligatory photos and then moving on.” I was getting to know “the real Spain ” and how many people could say that? (well, lots apparently.)  Having been back in the UK for a few years I have changed my relationship with this too, and started to think about what I lost and gained in the meantime.

Everybody knows J. R. R. Tolkien’s story of The Hobbit. I recently picked it up again in Spanish and I got to tell you El Hobbit is actually quite difficult to read. I bring up this book because I feel it can show us something about the nature of a There and Back Again. I guess I see the similarities quite strongly given that when I moved back to the UK I went to the rolling hills of North Devon and in a lot of ways I imagine that this is where Tolkien’s idea of the Shire came from. It truly is as beautiful as all that, rolling forests, perhaps with more cliffs than Hobbiton, but stunning nonetheless. Perhaps it is because I have been away and returned that I can easily morph the residents here into hobbits, in as much as the majority seem to like it (plus lots of hairy feet). I think there is a scene in the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring where Samwise is talking to someone, and the hobbit responds along the line of “well, Bilbo is weird, because he went away”. Now that mentality I can understand. People either think that going abroad is some huge achievement, that only a select few are capable of, or as I found out when I arrived back to the UK and published a post on my Facebook page asking for a Spanish language exchange and was told “Fuck off back to Spain”, that it is something so unusual. I remember very vividly feeling this comment was justification for my resentment. I felt like everyone was an idiot and I had the answers. I think back on that now and realise how naive I was.

In The Hobbit Bilbo gets roped into an adventure by the wandering wizard, Gandalf. He finds himself in the company of some dwarves on a quest to defeat a dragon and re-establish an old kingdom. That is quite a feat. I sometimes struggle to get out of bed in the mornings. He has many adventures along the way of course, and does eventually return. On its own, the Hobbit is a story with a happy ending. It follows Joseph Campbell’s journey of the hero nicely. Bilbo beats his own dragon, as well as playing his part in the demise of Smaug the terrible. He sets out at the beginning, the call to adventure being the chance encounter with Gandalf on his doorstep. He then follows this wizard, until the wizard disappears and now with no wise old man to follow, Bilbo begins to find his own way. (The similarity with A New Hope from the Star Wars franchise is quite stunning really. Swap Luke for Bilbo, Gandalf for Obi-Wan, Darth Vader for the Dragon, the Death Star for Erebor, literally endless comparisons). By the time he returns, Bilbo is not longer the same person any more. At the start of The Hobbit and our introduction to Bilbo, he lived his life in a quiet, repetitive fashion, calm, tranquil in the Shire at the top of of hill (so analogous to my our childhood- I distinctly remember having a pipe when I was younger too – for show obviously, apparently I thought it was cool). When we meet Bilbo again in The Fellowship of the Ring he is organising his 111th birthday. In all the pomp and fanfare, I think it is often missed that Bilbo’s life since the Hobbit, has been a little sad to an extent. He had no friends in the Shire (except for when his cousins grew up), never found love, and adopted an orphan (which really was an amazing thing to do). I guess his relationship with Frodo is beautiful, but even still, his life became reliving the memories of his adventure in his youth. I would even go as far as to say that Bilbo was so changed by his adventure that he never really went back, he went back physically but not emotionally. The place to which he returned no longer existed, and within this is the element of loss. There was no place for him back in the Shire, he ceased to belong, because he had changed. I guess the climax of his story was that ultimately he went to the undying lands to be healed, so I suppose he did find a place that wanted him in the Middle Earth equivalent of heaven, but by then he was an old man looking back on his life, lost in a myriad of memories. One of his last lines in the Return of the King is to talk about the ring, and granted it had mystical powers etc, but I wonder if on my deathbed I will be talking about “This one time… in Spain ” in true Band Camp style. Now think about travelling as a youth, while fun and glorious and exciting, it is important to remember that the back again of the adventure was difficult. There is not always a space for you in your Shire, and perhaps even if you are welcomed home by all you know and love, and are able to settle into jobs and live fulfilling lives, there will always be a part of you who like Bilbo longed to do it again, or came back, but was never fully back. Me and my friend who have this conversation usually end up deciding that it is better to have experienced what we both have in different ways. That while the cost of that can be measured in terms of “contentedness” it is worth the pain. Like Shakespeare said in his Hamlet or whatever “It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all” exchange love for travel and there you go. Almost through the words of the bard himself.

Oliver Burkenhem discusses trying to tick things off a bucket list, particularly travelling, as a result of the rise of secularism. He calls it the Bottomless Bucket list. There is an inexhaustible amount of things that we could be doing. You only need to scroll through instagram to see what we are missing out on. Inevitably, there is frustration, a conflict between what you want to do and what you are capable of doing. When people begin to move away from thinking that there is an afterlife – it all comes down to what we do in this life. There is an anxiety generated from knowing how short life is, from FOMO. So therefore we go out of our way to fill this life with experiences. The world has an infinite amount of possibilities and you will only ever scratch the surface of them. He says “The more wonderful experiences you have had, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have or ought to have, on top of those you have already had”. Perhaps this is why when Bilbo returned to the Shire he found it a different place to what it had been. He has seen and experienced other worlds, tasted other foods and found those pesky outsiders, which the others disregarded so shamelessly in the Fellowship of the Ring, and found them to be equally valid ways of living. He loses his reputation but has zero regrets about it, proving a fictional hobbit is probably more mentally stable than I am. Not that I have any regrets about leaving the idyllic county of Devon, but I sometimes regret that I couldn’t make it work going back. I had a hunger that I could not satisfy, a hunger I sometimes get even living in Bristol. There’s a scene in the Fellowship of the Ring movie where Bilbo says to Gandalf “I want to see mountains, Gandalf. Mountains!” and I feel that. That urge to escape the mundane and for some reason, as a late teen I equated that with, like Bilbo, travel. However, at least for Bilbo, he managed to square that circle – much better than his nephew Frodo did after his adventure.

Plato, the seed from which all philosophy in the western canon spawns, created the allegory of the cave. It tells the story in the republic of a man imprisoned in an underground cave since birth. He is trapped down there with two others and they experience their whole lives in this way. They see shapes on the wall, shadows of light cast in from outside and create explanations for this phenomena. One day, he manages to escape from this detention and sees for the first time in his life the outside world. He finds that the world is much bigger, more beautiful and infinitesimally more complicated than any in the cave could understand. Upon returning to the cave to explain what he had seen he finds he is an outcast. He is rejected by his peers and thought of as crazy. Does he regret it though? Evidently, no. Plato makes the case that realising this, seeing outside your box, being adventurous and admitting your limits allows you to grow, perhaps against the vine, and discover your potential. It’s so interesting to find that allegory play out in the first and last chapter of The Hobbit. The idea of deception is prevalent in this allegory. Those in the prison were deceived into thinking their own reality was more real than the external one. I wonder if this could be said of people who don’t travel or leave home but actually, looking back on my experience as a young closeted gay man, crippled with shame and anxiety (although still a good laugh) whether perhaps leaving was the deception. I always thought that going travelling, heading off to uni would fix me in some way, repair the damage I did to myself mentally during my teenage years and allow me to grow, just like Bilbo (figuratively, obviously). However, looking back, the not fitting in when I returned wasn’t to do with the place, it was more to do with me, because in fairness, I didn’t fit in before.

Bilbo sets out in search of gold, he is designated a burglar despite having zero skills for the role (we all applied for those kinds of jobs, have we not?). The dwarves he travels with, particularly Thorin Oakenshield, are craving the gold at the end of the trail, carefully guarded by a terrifying dragon. His desire is the gold, it’s something, some kind of material good and in the end, it turns him a little crazy. I wonder if the same could be said for my desire when I was younger to tick off places I have visited. The Hobbit is at first glance, an adventure tale – a there and back again story but it also depicts personal growth. The growth of a normal character. I guess one thing that Bilbo nailed, at least a lot quicker and better than I did, was acceptance. The constant references to his adventures shows that Bilbo takes into account the past, he even writes about it (perhaps I should pen a memoir?). In Plato’s allegory of the cave, he suggests that it is returning, which is the most important part. Returning allows you to assimilate the two worlds, the two differing realities. When I came back from Spain, did I do this? To a large extent no, I was resentful in a way we don’t see Bilbo being, in a way I don’t see lots of people coming back from their adventures being. I came back from living one life, and that life was now over. In a way, I suppose unlike Bilbo, I wasn’t happy I had had the adventure, but more grieving the fact it was over. I constantly compared the two, thinking about what I would be doing if I could just go back. I made plans to move to other countries, like Italy and Costa Rica, both places I would love to visit, but I see now that I didn’t do the work to merge these two worlds together. Have I managed to do so now? I hope so. I often get pangs of boredom, although that doesn’t quite cut it, it’s more an existential knife that points out the monotony of everything. This usually rocks up on my commute to work. What is interesting though is I know that feeling, and I can distinctly remember having that feeling even when I was abroad. Monotony is everywhere for the majority of people, a few may get to slip through that net to some extent but they are the lucky ones (or perhaps, when they return, the unlucky ones). It has taken a long time, a lot of self reflection, a lot of consideration and probing my own feelings (using a particularly helpful technique I developed with inspiration from The Lego Movie) but I do feel now I have scratched that itch. Would I do it again? Most definitely. Would I come back feeling more smug, more above my peers? I would hope not. Those feelings are resigned to my past, and I wonder if it is a perk of getting older that I am feeling happier for other people, or the fact that I have slain my own mental Smaugs that my return journey is a lot more settled. Quite obviously, Bilbo did it better than me, and I wonder if we look at Gollum, who too an extent represents holding on to the past, craving for it, longing for it, not coming to terms with the experiences of the two realities, we can see what, at least mentally, awaits us. I was fixated on my precious and like Bilbo, I had to let it go and I think, or at least hope I did. I had my there and back again. Yes, I am not in North Devon and while I love to visit it, I couldn’t make it work but that is more because I learnt more about myself on that journey than I could have done at home. Some people manage to do this episode of self discovery where they grew up and in this I failed. However, I will pepper that with the admission that it was only coming back and living my life in a new normality that I realised how to appreciate my experience, to learn from them and to merge those realities together. If you imagine me as Bilbo in that very opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring (or I guess in the first hobbit movie) penning my memoirs of those events I am equally as happy as Bilbo. I am now proud to admit that I am smashing

this back again part of my Hobbits tale.

Books, games and evil genies

How can indulging in the escapist bosom of an excessive amount of fantasy series nonsense help us to overcome regrets?

Over the last three years I completely changed my life and during a pandemic, that was tough. To say it has been easy would be a complete lie, in fact, given the lockdown, I am specifically happy that I didn’t quit the journey to become a primary school teacher. I’ve struggled with the workload, my own mental resistance and feeling like a fraud. The amount of work and effort I have dedicated into this course and career forced me to take a step back from what was a great comfort to me and my mental health, essentially this blog, self help and philosophy. Instead I’ve spent my free time with Dean (I believe I once referred to him as a Luna hunk, lol.) exercising and indulging in some well deserved food, perhaps a little too much of the latter resulting in a 10kg weight loss regime before I graced the beaches of Bali – thus saving myself from being doused with water on the shores by members of save the whales.

In true escapist fashion, during the training, I opted to embark on a fantasy saga inspired by one of my favourite video games of all time, The Witcher 3. I understand the games is based on the characters of the story, but I came at the books from the game. Perhaps my obsession with stoicism led me to seek out a fictional equivalent of Epictetus himself only minus sermons in the Stoa in favour of killing monster for money. What I particularly enjoy about the fantasy genre in general is the scope it can offer philosophical discussion and posing thought experiments about life. I thoroughly, and perhaps somewhat shamelessly, dedicate this sentence to encouraging you to invest in this dark and twisted child of Lord of the Rings. While at times complicated, it is not a saga that will disappoint. I recommend you start with Blood of Elves, the first in the series, then read the short stories after, even if that is not sequentially correct, I think you appreciate it more that way as you are more attached to the characters.

One particular short story in the series is called The Last Wish. If you are not inclined to literature you can check out episode 5 of season one of Netflix’s adaptation (warning, the series deviates from the novels and not in a “the books are so much better” way but in a general – it doesn’t make too much sense way). After reading this my mind jumped into Lewis Carrol’s rabbit hole as I began to explore my thoughts about the potential it could offer to examine my own life. The premise of the story is, very simply, as follows. Geralt, our stoic mutated monster hunter, is on a fishing trip with his musically talented twink best friend, Dandelion. They come across a bottle which contains a djinn. A djinn is a supernatural entity from pre-Islamic Arabia. The anglicised name for djinn is genie, think Disney’s Aladdin, but with one crucial difference, a djinn is inherently mischievous. The djinn in this story hits Dandelion right where it hurts, in the musical testicles (his throat) robbing him of his voice and Geralt has to take him to a sorceress for help. This sorceress wants to use this djinn for her own needs, but plot twist, the djinn is granting Geralt’s wishes without him being aware of it. Short story, well, short, the djinn grants the last wish and goes away.

Now, my thoughts after this story led me to return to an old day dream of mine, nominally, what I would do with three wishes. Younger me would always just wish for one wish, which was to be a variant of redesigning my life, starting again some how. In a way, similar to the Simms character creation. I would be taller, have more hair, be in better shape, and amazing author, brilliant at singing, just all round, amazing person. It’s odd because I would just exaggerarte many aspects of my personality and become more. More confident, funny and good humoured and attractive. I wasn’t greedy, I wasn’t asking for loads of money, or lots of wishes, just this one, as if only needing one wish would make it more plausible. I could stretch to two wishes, and opt for some kind of time travel option, but only ever Terminator style, and not Back to the Future style, there is a big difference. I have discussed ideas of time travel and what it is suggesting about your subconscious world here. Despite being a minor aspect of the series this short story, it helped me to finally exorcise this day dream and see it in a new important way, especially when I add the analogy of the Witcher 3 video game to my life. How will I do this I hear you think silently to the computer screen? Read on dear reader, read on.

Knowing that a djinn is inherently mischievous and will twist any wish to something that you wish you hadn’t wished for (I wonder how that would work, for my third wish, I wish none of this had ever happened?) imagine this scenario. Here I am discovering that a djinn who has ultimate cosmic power (iddy-biddy-living-space) and who has just agreed to grant me three wishes. I excitedly demand of the djinn “For my first wish, I wish to start my life all over again!”. My wish is granted, I return to the day I was born again, ready to correct all the mistakes and bad decisions I have made in the past and become a better, more informed version of myself. Focus and exaggerate those parts of my personality I wish I had perfected earlier. Perfect wish, right?

This is where the video game comes in. I spent a lot of time during the period of my life I like to call BD1 (Break Down 1, the one is always in anticipation of the second you see), playing this computer game. What is great about this game is the plethora of choice you can make, and these choices have an impact on the world in the game. I diligently researched what decisions to make to try and ensure I lived the best moral life in game. Morality is something I have discussed before. I recently began to replay this game again, for a second time, and what is interesting to note is that I have made mostly the same decisions for a second time. I just cant bring myself to conclude the game in a morally ambiguous way which I suppose is reassuring as it is demonstrative of how want to live my life. There were a few occasions were I was unhappy with a choice so I would head to a previous save and reload sometimes losing hours of gameplay – but as I said – that was breakdown 1 – I had time to spare. Back to me reliving my life and starting over. Now imagine at some unknown point in the future I do find a Djinn, I get ready to make this perfect wish. I release the demon wish granter from its captivity and in a clear, proud voice recount my perfect wish. “Oh great and powerful Djinn” (the creature is pretty powerful in the pantheon of The Witcher universe – so it’s worth while to kiss some magical ass) “I have only one wish – and if you ask me, it is pretty perfect – I wish to start all over again so I don’t make the same mistakes as before.” Instead of seeing the Djinn rub his hands, or better yet roll up his selves a la the Genie from Aladdin, I hear its deep grumble. “I am afraid all your wishes have been granted – you have no more wishes.” I’m not one to argue, but I would ask what my previous wishes were and be horrified to hear that I had already wished the same wish three times before.

It seems I was no specific enough – in any of my play throughs and the Djinn is, after all, a mischievous wish granter. I suppose I ought to have worked in some kind of clause that allowed me some kind of consciousness about these choices, about the direction I want to take so I would have needed to be very specific, perhaps even requesting a lawyer to look over the Terms and Conditions. Without a priori knowledge of how this life panned out – I wouldn’t be able to make any different decisions or precognition over the errors nor how to avoid them. Just like in my game – the characters have no awareness of the course of action I took before reloading a previous safe point, even if it resulted in their deaths, I had no awareness of my restart. In a similar vein, this second play through – I am making the same decisions (more or less) that I did the first time I played it. I live my life in the exact same way as before, met the Djinn again who grants me the same wish. Live through that life, meet the Djinn and get sent back to the start and then live through this life only now I have lost my wishes. Was the whole exercise futile? Or would the knowledge that the mer fact of reliving my life wouldn’t result in any drastic changes be beneficial?

It may be that the life I am living now is my first attempt. It could be my second or even my third. Perhaps there is an immeasurable amount of times we can play through this Game of Life. This thought experiment, the inclusion of the Djinn can offer great insight into the philosophical concept of free will. This is something that philosophers, religious thinkers, scientists and more recently neuroscientists have poured over for centuries. Free will is the concept that we are free to determine our decisions. That we all have choices.The belief that during my second play through of my life I would have the power to make decisions – whether they be the same or different – that I have the ability to determine my own course of action. The opposite of free will is determinism. That even if we had the power to relive our lives there would be no alternative route. The first time I live my life, right up until I meet the Djinn the first time – I had freewill. I made my own choices based on what little resources I had available to me – but the second and third time – my life is already predetermined that is to say – that I would not have the chance to make any different choice, The idea that every single choice I have made in my life is the result of of an unbroken chain of events – and this bit always blows my mind – stretching back all the way to the start of time itself. Noah Yuvel Hari in his book Homo Sapiens points out that all of our ancestors, even down to the singled cell organisms during the life on earths infancy, were fit and healthy enough to procreate. When at school we look at subjects like “what were the causes of World War 2?”, it is feasible that we can track that journey back all the way to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon nearly 2000 years before. At its core, determinism is the idea that everything is already chosen, all of your decisions have been made and you are just living through them. As a result, everything is predictable to some extent because it has already been chosen. This might seem far flung, but we live our lives with this in mind. We know that a child’s education can often determine their futures, that some quirk of genetic make up can determine our personalities or medical conditions in the future and that engaging in unhealthy habits can determine a possible outcome from that. Under these conditions then, no matter what you do, what choice you make (or struggle to make if you are as indecisive as me) the situation was always going to end up the way that it did. If the world consists of mostly cause and effect, then the dawn of time, the big bang, is the cause of everything and everything is playing out exactly as it should – regardless of your decisions within it. Although we are unable to predict the future with any certainty, the future is there, waiting to happen. I am always going to meet that mischievous Djinn irregardless of how I live my life. If I go back in my game to an earlier save – could I predict the future of the characters I encounter – yes – because I have the knowledge of that future, of how cause and effect has played out. Without that knowledge I am essentially an NPC (Non Playable Character for all those none gaming people out there) and even with my wishes I am powerless to change it.

Now to muddy the waters even further, would it be predetermined that I chose that wish in the first place? I did (or would) chose that wish, thus exercising some type of free will in my decision – at least the first time. In fact, making decisions is a universal experience. We all know what it is like to ponder, consider and boil things down to a list of pros and cons. Likewise, we all know what it is to make a decision impulsively, without much thought or consideration. Take a moment to think of an occasion in which you have made a decision in those two ways, however big or small. The first, while seemingly more considered because you thought about it, is the same as the latter because no matter how much you consider something you decisions are, at least at a biological level, impulsive. At some point in your long deliberations you make a decision. You may believe that you have had the opportunity to choose the other option even though you discarded it but if you, like in my example with the Djinn, were to live your life again you would make the exact same decision. If you were given the chance to change any decisions you have ever made, with the exact same knowledge under the exact same conditions you would make the same decision again because essentially – it is the only decision you could make. Whether it is a good or a bad decision is a different matter and one that I certainly dwell on, particularly when I am feeling in one of my darker places. There are critics of this concept and of course, it doesn’t really match up too well with societal ideas of responsibility and self choice. The amount of variables in our life, in our world, make it impossible to determined the future before it has happened.

I see myself as a good person. As I stated earlier, during my second play-through of The Witcher 3 I have stayed consistent to making the morally right choices consistently. I like to think this is how I live my life and to anyone that knows me, or if anyone was to watch hours of my interactions with others, they would assume that I handle all situations in my social interactions with kindness, particularly in public. Who then could have predicted the following situation, which in hindsight even surprised me. There I was in Lidl collecting a few bits after a particularly testing day. I had a handful of things, no more than four items, I looked at the checkout situation and on one queue there was one person and another there was a few. I went to the one with one person, because I’m not one to enjoy wasting time in what you would assume is an efficient shop, which actually rather isn’t when it comes to length of time queueing. I put my things on the conveyer belt and noticed a full basket on the floor. I ignored it – happily listening to STEPS greatest hits or something equally as disappointing. The belt juttered forward and just as I was about to get served a lady came back. She said I had pushed in and she was in front of me. You might predict, based on my aversion to conflict and the many similar situations, that I would politely apologise and move my things back. I didn’t. I said she wasn’t in the queue and turned around. She tapped me on the shoulder and said something, and I’ll be honest dear reader. I rolled my eyes and turned around. After all, it still grates me that I had four things and she had a whole basket, and hadn’t even unloaded her basket yet, and it was a Lidl basket – those things are deep. It was only when the people on the checkout opposite and the Lidl staff themselves began to complain about my actions that I felt obliged to move my things from the front, not further back, that was already full, but into my hands. Livid I was. That is not how the queuing system works. Yet, this behaviour, which I have never exhibited before, would have been hard to predict. Just for clarity sake, I did then profusely apologise, trying to offer how bad my day was but the damage was done. Alas, that I fear now I have ruined any chances of ever striking up a friendship with that stranger in Lidl. How determined was this situation? Was I always going to react that way? Was I just having a bad day? Am I terrible person? How much did I exercise free will in the situation, defying all odds at predictability and how much was that small exchange determined to happen. You can see how much it affected me by the sheer fact that this happened months ago and yet, I still hold it in my thoughts, an example of what David Sedaris in his book Calypso would call “the lowest type of me”.

It is interesting that human behaviour exists outside of predictability, however there are scientists who would suggest that everything is predictable if we could take into account every single variable. Granted, the life of one human being is full to the brim of small interactions and exchanges that will influence an out come, but say for example, a computer system was designed with enough capacity to take all of these variables into account, or some fantastical element, say perhaps a djinn, was able to factor or this in. It could be feasible that the computer could predict even the smallest of outcomes, or the djinn could save time granting wishes because it may have seen the process and therefore said it was my last wish, even on my first wish, having seen how it would all play out, in the same way that the Witcher 3 allowed me to go back to a previous save and play the game through in the same way. Imagine The last instalment in the Twilight saga, an amazing, all out word – death, twists and turns, turns out it’s only a prediction.  In Matt Haig’s book The Midnight Library he writes this exact scenario. A woman, on the cusp of death arrives at a mysterious type of purgatory which allows her to experience the many thousands of lives she could have had, had she made different decisions. Ultimately, and here be spoilers, she ends up choosing the life she was living and why? Perhaps because it felt right. I was having a conversation in the summer with a friend of mine, where we were discussing regrets and choices we wished we had made (for any school aged readers, a lot of them stemmed around not trying hard enough at school). It was in this conversation (he is also a gamer) that this idea came to me. That no matter what regrets you have, you made the best decision you could have at the time – based on all the minutia of experiences and knowledge that you had available to you. I covered something similar in my analysis of an episode of Red Dwarf called Better Than Life (which you can peruse here) and concluded that even if you could correct those regrets there would be other regrets to fill those gaps, other factors or external events. The very nature of regret is universal – but how much you feed into those feelings is a decision. You can chose to indulge them, wish to start over, to go back to an earlier save, but in many ways life would pan out in similar way. Fawning over winning the lottery or imagining better paths, and ultimately a happier you, is to some extent futile, because this life and how we have lived it has been our choice, and it is created out of the only choices we could have made at the time. To quote a wise old grey, then white, sage Gandlaf himself when discussing events and not wanting a particular course of action to pan out “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”.

The Hero of Interrupted Routine

What can mythology teach us about tough times?

What does an average day look like for you? You wake up roughly the same time, you do the same activities to schedule appropriately, and you can know whether you will be free next Wednesday for lunch. Obviously everybody has a different normality, a different routine. Perhaps it is something to do with our ancestry, an evolutionary craving for regularity, or maybe it is a cultural disposition. Either way, the creation of your normality is one worth considering. Probing your normality can lead to questions such as, “am I bored?” (Click here to read what I do when I’m bored and alone), “is there something more than this provincial life?”, do I like my job / house / partner?” And the ultimate stickler – “am I happy?”.

These questions are often the prerequisite for a midlife crisis (although, my experience tells me that people have various, leading to the neologism – quarter life crisis). The heart of these questions is your relationship with primordial forces. It would be easy, now I have mentioned this, to write this off as esoteric nonsense, but bear with me as I navigate a psychotherapy and mythological smoothie to delve deeper into this idea. In Peter O’Connel’s book he follows in Sigmund Freud’s footsteps to label these forces Eros and Thanatos. Eros, traditionally the god of love, is the manifestation of order. There is a love to this order, and a safety (think caring parents as the implement their benevolent regime over their children). The opposite of this is Thanatos, the god of Non-existence, the ultimate manifesto on of chaos.

One of the contradictions between these two entities is that chaos is more difficult to define than order. We all experience order on a daily basis. Your routines, the underlying rules of your job, social and cultural conventions, I probably use variants of the word order as a teacher at least once an hour. Chaos, is something we experience, hopefully less often, but you know it when you are there. Jordan B Peterson points out in his lectures on personality, that time is also a place as well as it’s physical counter part. He gives the example imagine you are sitting at home, living your normality, then you are given some bad news. Really bad. You are not in the same ‘place’ as you were before, even if you haven’t even lifted a finger. Where are you then? What has changed? This is the introduction of Thanatos. You are, for all intents and purposes, in hell. That seems drastic if you take a religious perspective as ‘hell’ as a burning underworld reserved solely for all the ruffians, but let’s take a step back here.

Almost all pantheons of mythology have a concept of hell, a dark place – pain, suffering, but it isn’t only an awful place awaiting after death. It is a place that can be visited, and in most cases, must be visited. The adventures to the underworld, to rescue, find, destroy things are repeated cross-culture. A useful analogy would be Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – hero descends into dark dungeon to defeat reptilian monster and save virgin girl – oh wait, that could also be George and the Dragon. The repetition of these stories are not because the ideas are stale and constantly reinvented, but because they are so powerful, so as Carl Jung would say, archetypal that they transcend time and speak to all of us. Peter O’Connell describes mythology as for the soul, with logic, he claims, for the brain. He discusses the idea that in our modern time we have undervalued the importance of nurturing the subjective element of our lives, the traditional domain of mythology. A consequence of this is expressed in the modern epidemic of anxiety and depression, and generations of people with no ‘goal’, drifters. Sure there might be immediate goals, ones that even stretch to the year ahead (“go on holiday”, “buy a car”, “have a huge wedding”) but there is something fleeting about these goals. The falability of these kind of goals is that they are attainable. Slavoj Zizek says that happiness occurs when people are working towards goals, not when they are realised. He argues that the worse thing you can do to someone is to give them what they want, as to rob them from their goal is to separate them from intrinsic meaning (sorry SMART goals supporters). In his book 10 Types of Human, Dexter Dias uses a study to demonstrate a very interesting point to this effect. The study was completed over a period of time and asked two groups of people to rate how happy they were. The first group were people who had recently won the lottery; the other group people who had suffered life changing injuries for one reason or another. As you might expect the lottery winners rated themselves as incredibly happy, while the injured people very unhappy. As the study progressed the gaps began to narrow, until there was no difference between the two groups. This is an important thing to consider – the lottery winners were no happier than the people who had life changing injures. After a period of adjustment, both groups were in pretty much the same place they were before – normality.

You made my heart break and that made me who I am
Here’s to my ex, hey, look at me now
Well, I, I’m all the way up

Powerful words, Little Mix. It is true to an extent that getting dumped or something like that rips you away from your normality, and sends you into such a down that you feel lost. An important distinction I think to call out here is that when we try to describe this feeling one of the many adjectives we use is ‘numb’ a nothingness or an inability to feel, but it’s not that really – it’s pain. To be numb you would need to feel nothing at all, not even sadness which is something we are unable to do, but our bodies are just as tricky to read and express as Eros and Thanatos. Happiness, love, joy are easier to express, pain and suffering are not. When you are in these places you are experiencing the mythological hell, or rather mythology has been used to express these feelings in a way that is so powerful that they have existed, in some cases, for thousands of years. As our Little Mix quote shows, a descent into despair is hopefully followed by a return in which you, the real life protagonist returns, but changed in some way. The importance of Thanatos here is to facilitate that change. Too much order results in sterility, healthy doses of chaos keep everything moving.

In mythology, the hero follows this pattern. Joseph Campbell defines it as the Hero’s Journey. The hero is living a normal life, then receives a ‘call to adventure’. They can deny this call, and continue to live the life they had before, or they can act upon it. Think about your own life, have opportunities presented themselves to you? When have you responded to this call, and when have you rejected it? A nice thing to keep in mind is that unlike in movies, there isn’t just one opportunity in your life, but many, some of them are very small but grow exponentially. You haven’t missed your opportunity. The hero leaves the domain of the ‘known’ their community, their home. In the Lord of the Rings, the hobbits leave the shire; in Harry Potter he leaves Private Drive, in Star Wars Luke leaves Tatooine, in Game of Thrones the children leave Winterfell. In the legend of King Arthur, he was just living his life, then bang – drew the sword from the stone and became King. Odysseus is summoned away from his home on Ithaca to participate in the battle of Troy, thus begins his Odyssey. This story repeats itself over and over again in our culture, in our books, in our movies and then once you notice it, in our lives. The hero enters into the unknown, and while there; makes a sacrifice, loses something, finds something, saves someone or something, battles some external threat and overcomes an internal one. Perhaps an incredibly unbelievable one, but powerful none the less. We enjoy watching these things, reading and telling these story’s, because we see ourselves in them. We do the same thing in our own lives. We face monsters, internal demons, and we change, we grow, we develop. The idea of the ‘rebirth’ is crucial to story’s like this. Although in the myths and the movies the characters may die and resurrect, that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant to you experience. Our lovely Little Mix shows, there is a symbolic death, perhaps the part of you that was naively in love needs to change, and where there is death, symbolic or real, there is pain, and mourning. The end of a relationship, your time at a school, university, holiday, employment, ends with the collapse of your routine, and that death is experience. When Frodo returns to the Shire, he has changed and cannot continue to live life in that way. When you reach adolescents, you have changed and cannot live the life you did before. The Shire (your childhood, for example) is closed to you, like Frodo upon his return. You have changed, your childhood has symbolically died, and our teenage years are spent mourning this (and masturbating, I suppose). This pattern repeats itself in your normality.

Over the new year, I looked back at my “things to remember” I wrote last year to see how much I have developed and grown. What is very interesting is that I know I have. I can see the physical differences, and also teaching – I know I have learnt new things, but I don’t feel changed. I feel the same this obviously led me to revisit a favourite thought experiment of mine Theseus’ boat. Some of that change has been caused by pain, some of it by purposely entering into the unknown, in my case represented by new situations, new jobs, new environments, new people, new experiences. These are all part of your Hero’s journey. An important take away from this is the idea that humans can create a normality out of anything. Our example with the lottery winners and the injured people show that even the most drastic of circumstances at either end of the spectrum will stabilise. Nothing is unmanageable. Jordan B Peterson stresses the importance of facing the inevitable voluntarily, and as polemic thinker he is, I agree. I hear echoes of stoicism in this idea, and even though this is sometimes the hardest thing to do, it is the only thing to do.

Recently, I had some world shattering news, the kind that Baz Luhrman describes in his song Everybody’s Free “The kind that blindsides you at 4am some idle Tuesday.” If you are anything like me this is enough to shatter reality. Questions of mortality, meaning and futility circle your mind. The unfairness of it, the cruelty, the empathy, the unforgotten emotional weight you carry physically from that point on. I’m not rescuing any virgins, or finding any treasures or defeating any monsters, but I am in the unknown. I am trying to navigate difficult waters, and the key word there is try. The Hero’s path is never easy, and there are times of fatalism, questions of meaning and the futility of it all, but ultimately, we know from mythology that is normal, that’s expected, that’s part of the journey. Earlier I discuss the transience of goals, but here is one I feel is less futile or detrimental, and something I think even Slavoj Zizek would approve of. My goal is to face this journey into the unknown as best I can, I won’t deny it, or ignore it, but face it with what tools I have. By creating a new normality out of challenging times, I am reestablishing order, reasserting Eros in the face of the unknown.

References.

Joseph Campbell – The Hero’s Journey

Slavoj Zizek Podcast

Jordan B Peterson – “personality and it’s transformation” lectures on YouTube.

Peter O’Connell – Beyond the Mist – What Irish Mythology Can Teach Us About Ourselves

Good cop, bad cop.

What role can asking questions play in overcoming feelings of depression and anxiety?

In the opening episode of HBO’s Westworld we see Delores becoming corrupted by something her father says to her. She then passes on this information to the other lady with the line ‘these violent delights have violent ends’. I’m not too sure what the purpose of those scenes ended up being because it seemed that the dissent was already programmed in them a priori. That inclusion in the series is either a depressing oversight, an attempt at complication, or subtle genius – much like this blog post.

This analogy is something I was thinking about on the bus the other morning. Cold, Monday, feeling overwhelmed and dreading the day before me. I was having what I refer to as my weekly existential crisis. Mentally, I have developed a lot of strategies, techniques for coping when my brain decides to stall. They mostly revolve around exercise and reading, but even with these in place I still suffer lapses into darker times. Like a passing storm, suddenly a sunny day becomes dramatically overcast. I think J K Rowling said it best when she likened the dementors from Harry Potter to her struggles with depression. The questions that circulate my head, like vultures over carrion, probe my very existence. All semblance of meaning is questioned, my abilities, my worth, my sanity, all on a short, teary, bus journey. I some times see myself as if I was a character in a movie, looking out of a steamed bus window, tears on my cheeks, thinking “oh yes, there is a compelling final scene.” It could also be the opening. Either way, pretty pathetic. Knowing this makes it worse.

The question “what’s wrong?” is thrown my way. In true middle aged closed individual style, I reply “nothing”, obviously. I sometimes struggle to find the words to describe this flirtation with nihilism. I could answer the truth. I’m feeling a little down because I am questioning everything, nothing seems to have any inherent value, I doubt my own self worth and struggle to accept anything that may be said to counter these fleeting moments of crippling low self esteem. It’s almost like a perversion of Socratic questioning, the new rules are that all of the answers have to be negative. I think it’s important to point out here that it’s not negativity seeping out of me, its that there is no positivity, it’s lost. If you told me I had won the lottery when I have these moments, I wouldn’t be any more able to snap out of it, that news would be put into the ‘crap factory’ and manipulated into bad news. As depressing as that sounds, it isn’t at all that bad to experience. In someways I find it quite hopeful because as the day goes on I begin to see how wrong I was, it’s almost like I slowly claw back meaning (between sobs). Experiencing this helps me to maintain my perspective, and to some extent allows me to view my life in what Socrates would describe as an ‘examined life’. Nothing gives you more perspective than acknowledging how pathetic you can sometimes be.

I know the commonly accepted solution to these crisis’ is to talk about it. Sometimes that is exactly what you need, a problem shared is half solved, two minds are greater than one, etc. If you can make me laugh in a way that isn’t a twisted black snarl, I’m slightly on my way back out again. However, for all as helpful as talking can be I do see one minor flaw with this, and like my Westworld analogy that is how contagious these thoughts are. If I do express these thoughts am I not just spreading dangerous ideas? Aside from the temptation to suck in positivity and then spew it out neglected and broken, I can fully appreciate how difficult it is to hear. I hear it in my head, every. Monday. Morning. What use is it to air these feelings and cement them in reality? There is nothing worse than opening yourself up and hearing the words ‘cheer up’. Yes, thanks, I’ll do that now. I hadn’t thought about that. What a truly insightful piece of advice to someone who is questioning the very absurdity of the fact we can both make noises and communicate with them.

In my course at university I am studying a lot of educational theory. It is interesting how often ideas about how people learn can be converted into self help. I know from CBT that depression and anxiety can be manifestations of learnt behaviour, thought patterns that have been developed to help you suddenly become distorted and are no longer functional. The importance of this is the fact that they are learnt, and how we learn is something discussed about at length in theories of education. Ollerenshaw & Ritchie talk about how sometimes we are not always aware of what we are thinking. Socrates said he was the smartest man in all of Greece because he knew there was a lot he didn’t know. The ideas of Ollerenshaw and Ritchie would suggest that he didn’t even know what he thought he know. Insert mind blown emoji.

There are things that we think we know, and they may be stored in you brain somewhere, but you are not always consciously aware that you knew them. Thoughts are filed away in an analogous locker, I imagine it to be a bit like the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, just stored in a box waiting to be recalled. Consider this exercise.

1. What is the capital of Greece?

2. Who is the current president of Greece?

Now unless you are Greek, or take an interest in Greek current affairs, one of those questions will be much easier than the other. Before I asked them though, did you consciously know that you knew them? Did you know that you didn’t know the answer to the second question? I had to ask the question before you knew whether you knew them. Can this be extrapolated to everything we think we know? The idea that we can only be aware of what we know in reaction to stimulus sounds very complicated and existential, but bear with my while I connect it to the beginning.

On those mornings where nothing makes sense, or has value, I don’t really know what I am thinking or feeling. So obviously, I say I’m fine, because what else can be said. In moments like this where you debate whether anything you say or do has meaning, even opening my mouth is a calculated course of action. Apparently I ‘go into myself’ lost in a subjective rabbit hole, and I must tell you ’twas brillig and the slithy tomes’ in there. Is there anyway out? Back to good old Socrates. The only other skill I have learnt that can help is a good old fashion probing, and unfortunately not the type I like as a gay man. Instead it is literally asking yourself questions and seeing which one makes you feel more upset. A process of training you metacognition to change the way it thinks to transfer from those negative mental attacks to brutal questioning. If it is a good cop bad cop sitcom playing out in you mental narrative, all the better (extra points if it is like the character from the Lego movie) If you can change the phrase “you’re rubbish at everything you do” to “are you worried that you’re rubbish at everything you do?” Then testing your emotional response you can start to understand how you are feeling.

In exactly the same way that I didn’t know that I didn’t know who the president of Greece is until I asked myself, it sometimes seems that you don’t know how you are feeling until you ask. Mental statements like Dolores’ “these violent delights have violent ends” reinforce the struggle. When we make statements we learn at a young age that they tend to be true, or if we think of a BuzzFeed quiz, something we agree or disagree with (sometimes strongly!), but when we ask questions we are opening a dialogue. That internal dialogue needs to be establish before talking to someone else will help, at least for me, in what appears to be an endless repeat of weirdness manifesting itself in a bald man.

I have obviously framed this in respect to a melt down I experienced Monday morning on the bus, overwhelmed and worried as I was, but I can see the utility in using this technique for every emotion. I challenge you to give it a go. Do you always know why you are angry (although that can sometimes be useful)? Do you know exactly why you are sad? Do you know why you are jealous? Can it work for laughter? I know answering questions with more questions is to be discouraged and is mildly annoying, but unfortunately not everything can be reduced to simplicity. That is the distinction between Dolores and the other AI in Westworld, she questioned her reality (despite telling Bernard that she didn’t). Although it could be argued that her life was better when she wasn’t questioning her existence, it made everything a lot more interesting when she did.

References

Westworld series 1

The Jabberwock – Lewis Carroll.

Science, Elicitation, Making it work- Ollerenshaw & Ritchie

Solitary Misbehaviour.

Do you behave differently when you are by yourself?

Have you ever thought about the things that you do alone, but wouldn’t do in the company of someone else? The list could be extensive; all the things you sniff, scratch, rub, pick, tug, taste, eat and I guess even think about; you would be mortified if people knew. Sometimes we get caught out – “Did you just pick your nose?” “No, I was scratching it!” – other times, it can feel like the perfect crime (like farting in a nightclub.) What about the innocent ones, the behaviours that you indulge in when you are alone, but it doesn’t even cross your mind to do when another human is present (hell, sometimes I feel uncomfortable in front of cats – they have such judgemental glares). If you were ever caught doing it, whatever it is, even by a complete stranger, you’d feel like the ground will open up and drag you down to a subterranean layer of humiliation and shame.

In my first ever blog post I talked about Instagram asking questions about my behaviour on that platform, and whether I could consider it to be an authentic display of my personality. I think I concluded that there was an element of duplicity, that what I was presenting was not, in fact, me, not true to who I really am. I have however, changed this view, and believe that far from being undesirable, our predisposition to have many personalities reflects more accurately how complicated we are as human beings. To reduce something as complex as who I am, who we are, to the idea that we have a binary option of being authentic or being inauthentic in relation to ourselves is too simplistic. Perhaps it is something left over from our evolutionary development, a mechanism that allows us, not just to survive, but also to thrive, a psychological phenomenon, matching that of a chameleon, changing ourselves to match the environment, it would, after all, be absurd to accuse a reptile of being disingenuous on the grounds that it can blend in effectively to the background.

However, this being said, something happened the other day that made me question, not the adaptability of my personality but the strength of it. It could have happened to anyone, and I am sure that this is by no means unique to me. I was cycling home from work, riding a School’s Out For Summer feeling (thanks Daphnie & Celest) the high that we all have after finishing work for the day. I had my headphones on and I momentarily forgot that I was riding along a public footpath on a sunny Saturday afternoon, performing some terribly awful song. I am not a good singer, and even the slightest bit of exercise turns me into a sweaty and red faced individual. There I was live at Wembley in front of thousands, but really on a bicycle in leggings swelling up like something out of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. As I came around a corner, probably changing tones more often than I was changing gears, I came across someone walking the other way. I was probably going to fast, matching my pace to that of the song, so I had to slow right down. That reaction to my speed was easy to work out, but what of the singing?

Within a few moments, somewhere in my consciousness I went through the following binary debate, before I even had a chance to really acknowledge it. My options were; firstly, carry on singing, keep belting out whatever song it was, and consider the other person lucky to have entered into this live performance for free, and maybe even thank him for coming ( “You’ve been great!” ). Option two, stop singing instantly, the gig has been cancelled, a statement on social media will apologise and advise people that tickets are not refundable. What I actually opted for was a fudge. I laughed and then apologised to the poor dog walker. He made a comment about me being chirpy, and I advised him I was yet to be signed up to any particular label, but obviously it is only a matter of time (I’ll add that onto my list of what to do if I won the lottery – I assume auto-tune can repair my putrid singing abilities). Obviously the exchange left me very embarrassed, it is probably a good thing that I look like a larger Elmo who has been submerged in his own bodily fluids when I exercise, because I imagine I would have swelled up with embarrassment if I hadn’t already reached Verruca Salt post the blueberry pie stage of the bubblegum. Such an insignificant and everyday thing (for me, at least), but I spent the rest of the cycle home thinking on this awkward encounter. Why was I so embarrassed? That kind of behaviour is who I am when I am alone and in high spirits.

Here was something I felt completely comfortable doing alone, singing, but was hit in the face with wet fish style shame. Why is it then when I am alone, I will sing; dance, pose, do voices (Mrs Doubtfire – “great impression of a hot-dog” style) talk to myself and generally just be an idiot, but as soon as there is an audience, as soon as the presence of someone else is felt, I am threatened by a wave of self-conscious, enough to stop what I am doing. This I think is where my ideas of authenticity should be being explored. In this discrepancy between who I am alone, and who I am in company.

I’ve been known, as an adult, to put a scarf around my head and move around in the shadows as a ninja. I’ve put on the Best of Bond playlist and crept around corners, pistol of fingers poised and ready to fire. I’ve tried to lose the car driving behind me during a commute. I’ve walked around on tiptoes, dancing to some album by a drag artist from the RuPaul drag show, just to see if I could do it. I’ve substituted broomsticks for guitars, microphones, swords and longbows (or staffs – “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” style.) I’ve put bits of cardboard I have found lying around onto various parts of my body then moved around imaging my new life as a cyborg. I’ve squatted over mirrors to see what it looked like; I’ve practised the latest dance rage The Floss in the shower in front of the mirror. I’ve made excessively bubbly baths only to put the bubbles onto my head like a judges wig then sentence myself in the mirror to the penal colonies. I’ve picked scabs and then put them straight in my mouth, not to eat, I’m not a beast, just to chew slightly. I’ve taken pleasure in particularly rotten farts. I’ve gotten out of the sea in a true Cast Away style, clawing at the sand as I pull my shipwrecked body to the shore.  I’ve later returned to the same beach and left Daniel Craig in Casino Royale style. I’ve worn underwear and a tie at home by myself for my own personal, professional pleasure (not that kind of pleasure, literally the why the fuck not kind of pleasure). I’ve wished on stars for absurd things, stared at my own eyes in the mirror for ages to try and time travel or have an out of body experience. I’ve bought crystals and convinced myself that they work. I’ve made myself laugh at the most absurd things, practised new laughs, made noises, repeated the same word over and over again until you’re not sure if it means anything, or if it is just a bestial grunt. Sometimes, I even give my self semi counselling, asking myself questions, and then responding to myself in Spanish. I’ve shouted, growled, practised accents, and performed scenes from movies. All alone, for my own amusement, by myself. The sad thing is I could literally go on with this list all day.

Are these traits, this strange ritual of behaviour, these twisted (and might I add, distinctly unattractive) quirks more indicative of who I am? Is this person who I am alone, really me? It is interesting though because I can’t help but think that I am probably at my most creative when I am doing those things. I do come up with ideas, or become possessed with such inspiration in a way that I can understand the ancient Greek understanding of the muses, that it literally happens to you, externally almost. To me it makes complete sense that this how most people come up with new ideas. I imagine that J. K. Rowling first came up with the word “muggle” whilst wandering around in her underwear surrounded by various empty party sized packets of cheap Wotsits making noises like “MMMMUuuuuage” until she struck, with that awful orange dust on her fingers (that Wotsits try and pass off as cheese) on her eureka moment. I know it sounds absurd but if there is anything we have learnt from 20 years of the internet it is that the answer to the question “Does anyone else ever…?” is pretty much always a resounding and often comical yes.

Now I love a good analogy, and there are plenty to chose from in this scenario, but one that I really resonate with is the 1994 cult classic The Mask. Starring Jim Carrey, this film worked in such an odd way. There is something about this movie that has stood the test of time, ageing in a way that not all comedies do, and if anything hit on some themes that have only really become relevant to me as I have gotten older. When I was younger I loved Jim Carrey movies, then when I got a bit older and got into my significantly pretentious/alternative phase, anything mainstream, was so, well, mainstream, and that was a bad thing apparently, so Jim’s movies were put on a pile of cute but common. Now however, having relaxed my pretentiousness somewhat (a call centre will do that to you) I have come to see these kind of movies for what they are, nothing short of genially constructed examples of personality disorders and extremities. Apparently, the original idea for The Mask was a lot darker, in a way I imagine that Deadpool went on to become. The Mask was intended to be an antihero, disfigured almost like a green Freddie Kruger. I suppose the success of Ace Ventura sent it on its family friendly path with added comedy, making the main character, practically a living cartoon. Even though the Mask grants super powers, it isn’t your average superhero movie. Arguably, the Mask isn’t giving Stanley Ipkiss super strength, invulnerability, the power to fly, the main power is confidence. I did read somewhere that the whole movie The Mask can be read as an analogy for alcoholism, and I certainly get this. I know from my own experiences with alcohol that it does almost exaggerate your personality, stretches it. In the same way that the Mask does in the movie, I guess Stanley always had the power to do all of this, but he needed something, to give him the confidence. Watch that movie again and then think about how you behave when you are under the influence. Even if you aren’t robbing banks and  doing the other things that happen in the movie, I bet you are dancing like an idiot (and hopefully to Hey Pachuco! just like in the movie.)

I’ve talked before about the ideas of Carl Jung, focusing on all the elements of your personality that are hidden from yourself and bundled up into the shadow. I discussed that in this post, but arguably the analogy of the mask fits. When Stanley wears it, he becomes a lot of everything that isn’t necessarily his real self. Carl Jung developed an idea called the Persona. He took the name for this idea from ancient Greek theatre meaning the literal word for ‘mask’. The persona is how we behave in different situations, how we compromise between our innate psychological being and the society we are acting within. It was Shakespeare who famously said “Life is a stage” and I guess, for Jung, this rang true. The idea that how we behave in any given situation is a reaction, a psychological reasoning and response to the environment. The idea of the persona relies heavily upon the nature of humans to adapt to their environment, and adaption is something humans do incredibly well. In his book, The Paradox of Choice Barry Schwartz points out that we humans are able to adapt to literally anything, we can create normality in a relatively short amount of time. That thing that you are pinning after, that you really want, that you feel as if once you purchase it your new life can begin, well, Schwartz believes that this is a fallacy, and that before long you will have adapted to it. Dexter Dias gives the example of a longitudinal study of people who win the lottery and people who are involved in life changing accidents. You would expect that the former are much happier than the latter, and for a brief period of time, this is the case, but after the initial high (or low) wanes, their levels of happiness returns to an equilibrium. This is human adaptability in action.

Do you ever heed the advice of “just be yourself” or “be true to who you really are”? Doesn’t it just do your head in? If you are anything like me that advice will leave you spiralling into an existential abyss – if I don’t know my true self, how can I be sure of anything? Maybe I am just an NPC in someone else’s world and action! Queue crippling anxiety, thanks for the advice. Granted though that if we take Jung’s mask analogy to explain our psychology, then ultimately someone has to be wearing the mask? Some one has to be acting the role, in a way that an actor on stage can become someone else then return to themselves after the show? Think of it like this, in The Mask, Stanley ultimately has power of whether to wear the mask but what if the real crime of the movie, the real problem was the mask he wore when he wasn’t the mask. The boring bank worker, timid and nervous in true nice guys finish last style. He needed to go outside of his comfort zone, to don a different mask to really thrive, to be able to become more confident and well rounded. Perhaps the mask that we all wear “figuratively speaking” are not for hiding ourselves, but for negotiating the worlds we inhabit. Alfred Adler talked of all problems in our lives being one that revolve around interpersonal relationships. It is a big step to accepting this position, that actually the roots of all your problems are how you react to the people in your world. After a while this seems to be more obvious your relationship with your boss, your partner your family, the person in Starbucks who gets your name wrong, the faceless driver going too slow in the car in front of you, all these people and more are the source of all of your problems. We saw Stanley Ipkiss try and over come his maladaptive relationship with himself, by forging a new way of being, by overcoming his own shortcomings in how he dealt with the world around himself. The simple answer to this question of whether I am more myself when I am alone is that I can never really be alone, psychologically. The things I do by myself are perhaps an extension of who I won’t be when I am with others, but not any more myself. The filters that I bring down are not more authentic to myself, but parts of the masks that I cannot wear in other scenarios. The difference isn’t about who I am, but how I behave, and I behave slightly differently when I feel I am alone, in a way that I would behave differently if I was having dinner with a grandparent, my partner, my friends, my boss or a stranger.

Je t’adore, Je t’window. I don’t care!! 

 

References

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-we-different-when-we-are-alone-and-when-we-have-people-around-us

http://www.selfawareness.org.uk/news/understanding-the-johari-window-model

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-mask/32994/looking-back-at-the-mask

https://www.britannica.com/art/mask-face-covering/The-wearing-of-masks

The Mask 1994

Carl Jung, The Complete Reader – Joseph Campbell

Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz

 

You Clueless, Fraudsters!

Survival of the Group and Impostors.

Cast your mind back to the first time you watched the 1995 classic Clueless. If you haven’t seen it, well you have just outed yourself as a virgin, who can’t drive. We will wait for you to watch this staple of popular culture and re-join us once you can make at least two comical references to it. At the end of the film (no spoiler alert here, it was 24 years ago, that’s practically historical fact) Cher realises that she is in love with Phoebe’s boyfriend / Ant Man. I always thought this scene was a bit strange; the idea that Cher didn’t know how strongly she felt about someone, that she could be so Clueless – Ah! Makes sense now. How did it take her that long to realise what a hunk he was? Then I kind of realised that this state of clueless (ness?) is something that I experience a lot more than I ever really acknowledge. I have emotions, or feelings literally all the time, but I am not exactly an expert and explaining what they are. Am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I annoyed? Am I lonely? Am I horny? It’s strange that I can ask these questions of the same symptoms, and still not really diagnose what I am feeling correctly.

 

My most recent intellectual crush has seen me gushing over the works of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. There is just something about the way he talks; annoying as it is, his wit and his intellect, it makes me envious that I don’t have a shred of his insight or capacity. I have to be content with orbiting his ideas and understanding them as best I can, like the scene in the Life of Brian where the lady mishears Jesus in the audience “Blessed all the Greek!”. Anyway, he said “We feel free because we lack the language to express our unfreedom”. Perhaps then I just don’t have the capacity to explain my emotions effectively to myself. Know thyself the inscription at Delphi reminds us; To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom, Socrates said; Alan Watts suggests that the reason you don’t know what you want is because you don’t know yourself! Trouble is, it is quite hard to do. I did however, stumble upon a slither of an insight into my own mental life the other day, a small idea, that as soon as I had read it, I ran with completely and identified almost every aspect of my core with it. I had found the language to express my unfreedom. I know this was something I would do ever since I first asked Jeeves if I was gay circa 1998, his reply was an overwhelming yes – I guess I couldn’t even fool a late 90s algorithm – that I would continuously google things with which I could identify. I don’t suppose it is that bad, like more awareness is a good thing, right? To me at least, it is easier to relate to someone who has diabetes, if you spent a week convinced that you had it too, based on facts from Web Doctor and a hyper vigilance of your urinating patterns. Fine, it’s not the same thing as actually having it, but you’ve done your research and isn’t that the corner stone of empathy? It’s like that scene in Wayne’s World, only made more vibrant by the dawn of the internet, when Wayne says “I once thought I have ME for an entire year. Turns out, I was just really bored.” Anyway, let’s get this back on track, the word that I recently found I could identify with, in true Spiderman Venom style was;

Impostor Syndrome, impostorism, fraud syndrome or impostor experience, literally anyone of these phrases will do. It is the name given to a psychological phenomenon which apparently affects up to 70% of the population at some point in their life time. It is important to point out that impostorism is a phenomenological occurrence and not something that you can catch or develop like other mental health problems. I guess it stands to reason that people who suffer from mental health issues may experience this more intensely than others because the emotions attached to this syndrome are similar to those of anxiety, depression low self esteem and so on. Initially, it was thought to be confined to women in the work place who had achieved a measure of success within their employment. The term was first coined 1978 in a publication titled The Imposter in High Achieving Women; Dynamics & Therapeutic Interventionwritten by Dr Pauline R Clance & Dr Suzanne A Imes. They point out that this reactionary phenomenon that manifests itself in an individual, that even though external evidence exists to the contrary suggesting success is tied to competence and not deceit, it is hard to accept this as reality. The study sparked a plethora of interest into the idea, and it has been explored countless times since then. The belief that it was something limited to women and minorities, specifically not straight white men, has been contested lately, especially when the latter mentioned are asked anonymously. It would seem that straight white men experience these feelings but struggle to talk about them, and even though I am only two of those three things, I struggle to talk about it too.

This is why it is beneficially to come across these ideas, to help you articulate what you feel, to express and deal with emotions differently. While we can never see the world through the eyes of someone else, through the lens of any perspective that is not our own, we can come close to it through discussing and listening to different accounts of experience. Henry David Thoreau said “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eye for an instant?” and until such time that technology allows us to perform some kind of psychological Kafkaesque metamorphosis, a subjective Face Off (Nicolas Cage & John Travolta style), the best we can do is communicate our experience and listen to others yarns. There is something very powerful in the idea of orientating yourself through the paradigm of conversation, something I am only recently discovering. I suppose much of my life was a competition with changing challengers, shifting rules, fluid and unattainable finish lines, and distorted measures of success. Slavoj Zizek uses the analogy of a Slovenian farmer who is visited by some kind of god or genie, who says he can great him any wish on the proviso that it is granted twofold to the farmer’s neighbour. What would you wish for here, bearing in mind that it will happen to your neighbour twofold? The farmer decides to wish to lose an eye, fully aware that his neighbour will lose both. Obviously, any thought experiment with genies and gods will be extreme, but I wonder how much of our lives are taken up with thoughts like this. The futility of wishing ourselves into worse situations knowing that it will hurt someone else. The idea that life is a game, a competition, that in order for you to win, someone else must lose. I think this came up in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, that in our system the rich want more, even if that means that others have less, that to be is to have, and if you don’t have, then you aren’t. In global political economy theory, there is a concept called the Zero-Sum Model. It is bases international interaction as a chess game of geopolitical importance, setting the nations of the world against each other as they compete for resources and wealth. Given that resources are finite, for one to win, another must lose. The idea that life is a game and that we must win, that anyone can win, if only you are cutthroat and cunning, display traits that if life was a Christmas pantomime; you would be booed when you entered the stage. This idea is so embedded within us, the idea of survival of the fittest, the individualistic drive to have more, a Victorian mentality of exploitation and extraction, that it is barely disputed any more. However, just for the sake of the tangent, let’s try.

 

The idea of survival of the fittest relies upon the presupposition that particular traits will develop and allow for individuals to take advantage of them, surviving against the odds of their competitors, with resources limited, any biological edge you have to make it easier to survive, in turn will lead to procreation with your choice of mate, and the passing on of this amazing genetic mutation to your offspring and so on ad infinitum. All very well and good, however, with this model of human evolution how do we account for altruism? Some humans inhibited remarkable traits that would appear counter intuitive to survival of the fittest. How can e explain away people who make decisions to lose their lives to protect others? The thousands and thousands of childless men who have marched off to war over the centuries, potentially making the ultimate sacrifice, a decision that can not be attributed to genes. Are we not social beings? Doesn’t our survival depend directly upon the survival of the group? Isn’t the harshest punishment our penal system offers solitary confinement? We need the group, and wee need it to be healthy and thriving. There is a scene in The Grinch where he is coming around to the fact that his heart has grown three sizes. “Oh no!” he says “The presents, they’ll be destroyed… and I care!”. The fact that he cares is so universal, we all care about others in some way. We are all moved by stories, or movies, or the plight of friends. We care about people who are so disconnected from us. In terms of evolutionary biology, the survival of the fittest, how can we account for Kim Kardashian? If we were all so individualistic and out for ourselves, how does her popularity hold? If there was a zombie apocalypse, I am not sure what Kim’s chances would be. I am not postulating that I would last to the cure was found, or at least to set up a very unique utopia where all men must wear incredibly short shorts and preside over it for the greater good, but I am assuming I would last a little longer than an international celebrity who has a big retinue of people, and thus more exposure to the virus. I mean, how fast can she run? Does she have any survival skills? Obviously it would depend greatly on the type of zombies, The Walking Deadones, there might be hope for my homoerotic utopia, 28 Days Later zombies, well I don’t expect to make it very far. Yet, end of the world aside, we do care about Kim for some reason. We have elevated her in our cultural importance, because she must mean something, she must say something to or about the group that she represents. She holds a place in our group identity, an identity that fundamentally transcends our own. This idea is very contested amongst evolutionary biologists, but to me at least it seems common sense and hopeful that life is not a vicious Monopoly game, that what is of benefit to the group is of benefit to us all. I appreciate that this sails very closely to utilitarianism which I would be keen to avoid, but the sentiment is there. Accepting our role on this earth, fleeting as it is, as a part of a team, a group, allows for so much more diversity and compassion than a (queue the Abba music) Winner Takes It All mentality.

James O’Keefe did an amazing TedTalk on the role his gay son played in the family. Obviously this is something very dear to my heart, and so I usually relish these kind of talks, and I can honestly say as a gay man, I had never seen the interpretation he offers up as a means of explaining homosexuality from an evolutionary stand point. Using ants and a hive mentality, which I am sure under scrutiny wouldn’t hold up, he explains that mother nature has plans to make everything turn for us. I have showed this to other gay men before and some of them found it offensive but to me it was so hopeful, and normal that it really spoke to me. The example can be extended beyond James O’Keefe and his gay son, and into the roles people traditionally defined as Introverts & Extroverts can play in a society. In the nature article, they offered a brilliant analogy of these two types of people being the brains and the muscle almost, the idea of a group of people sitting around the fire, the introverts more observant hear and animal approaching, and tell the extroverts who go and kill it, bring it back for the introverts to cook up. Whilst the sexist undertones could be exemplified here, I do think that its is kind of true, think about a friendship group you have, what roles do you all play? I normally take up the role of either the loud extrovert or the sad crying one, especially after a beer, but I suppose that position in the group needs to be filled, right?

 

So, tangent complete, back to Impostor Syndrome. It is very common and I am pretty certain that everyone has felt it at some point or another. It’s that feeling of being in a situation but knowing that you ought not be there. You’ve lied, or cheated, deceived your way to this position. There has been a misunderstanding, you will be apprehended at any moment, you fraud. It is literally a matter of time until you are discovered, you fiend. You didn’t work hard enough to be here, look at all the people around you, they are talented, capable and confident, not to mention beautiful. You don’t belong here, your accomplishments are all luck and circumstance. All your achievements can be explained away; after all they don’t really mean anything at all.

That is imposture syndrome, and I accepted that may have been what Johan Hari refers to as Pain Porn, a phrase I love (it’s not like S&M but the idea that when talking about anxiety and depression people will go into great deal describing the sensations that we all already know. The gratuitous presentation of suffering Hari refers to as Pain Porn) but at least you have an insight to what the it means, even if you only feel a fraction of those examples. There is the possibility that it is not as common as I think (or hope) and I did find it quite difficult to find an example of this in a movie or a book, but struggled. The only example I could come up with was Harry Potter, the cultural go too for much of my psychological maladies (What Would Harry Potter Do? – A question I often ask myself in the face of Horcruxes and social anxiety.)

 

In the first Harry Potter book (and film, don’t worry film only people, there will be no discriminating about whatever floats your boat to Hogwarts) one of his first interactions with the wizarding world was exactly the emotions I have described above, the denial of himself and his abilities. “I… can’t be a… wizard. I mean, I’m… just… Harry. Just Harry.” Already he is deceiving himself into thinking that there has been a misunderstanding. Sorry Hagrid, you have been misinformed, no wizards here. (Just another side track, I was more than ready at 11 to accept that I am a wizard. I am still waiting for this reality to come to fruition) He slowly begins to accept his new reality, his new story of who he is, but then spends the train journey worrying that he will make a fool out of himself, that he will be the worst (witch… lol!) wizard that ever existed. Much of the first book (and movie) is peppered with this stuff, it even runs throughout the whole series. We as the reader are thinking, Harry, calm the fuck down, you’re amazing (for a drama queen). There is one more specific example I wanted to explore, and that is the sorting. Obviously, only a true muggle could forget “Not Slytherin…eh? Very well, better be GRYFFINDOR!”, but in the second book (and movie, don’t worry) this seed of doubt has fully germinated in Harry’s personality.  He should have been in Slytherin, he can talk to snakes for crying out loud, all the signs are there, he is a fraud. The fact that he managed to save the philosophers stone from he-who-must-not-be-named less than a year before the events of Chamber of Secrets, those events mean nothing to Harry now as they don’t fit the story of his impostorism. All the achievements of the first year slowly disapparate. We as the readers know that he is a true Gryffindor, but that is the crucible of Impostor Syndrome, it is very hard to accepted external evidence that indicates otherwise, even if someone you know, trust and love offers it up, you end up feeling guilty for deceiving them into believing your lies too.

I know that unlike Harry, we can’t all have our feelings of being an impostor eliminated by pulling out a sign of our rightful place in Gryffindor from an old hat, thus confirming our identities and abilities. So without such sorely needed symbolic gestures, what can we do to tackle it in our lives, and even in the lives of those we care about? Although I have to admit I do experience these feelings, they are usually limited to certain situations, so being mindful of what circumstances led to impostorism can help us identify when it is an appropriate response. I feel it most strongly, in new situations, when I receive praise, sometimes in response to criticism, sometimes in relationships if I begin to doubt my own worth, or when I am nervous or apprehensive about a particular event on the horizon.  Sometimes I can feel the complete opposite, entrenched in a sense of pride, an oblivious entitlement and a feeling of invincibility. While certainly a better sensation to feel, I often wonder whether along with feelings of imposture syndrome comes a desire to work harder. For example, when you start a new job, and you are feeling a bit like a fraud, so you work that little bit harder versus when you have worked there for a while; your coffee breaks take up most of your day; you’ve mastered the ability to be as unproductively productive as possible and end most conversations about your behaviour with “What are you going to do, fire me?” Perhaps, then, a little bit of impostorism is a good thing. Like with Harry, his performance wasn’t necessarily inhibited but his psychological experience was impaired, subjectively he suffered more than he needed too. For me, I know that when I am plagued with feelings of being a fraud I am less, well, me. More worried, more cautious, more reserved and more self-critical, I develop a hyper-vigliance over everything I saw and do which makes it very difficult to be in the moment. I asked the wonderful Dean, an Adlerian by nature, even if he doesn’t agree, if he had ever experienced this sensation and he said while he knew what I meant, he refuses to let it happen (Adlerian, right?). He just asserts the inverse of the feeling, fake it until you make it I suppose. I wonder how effective that mentality is, the mantra of I am a strong independent woman man in as a garlic garland to ward off the vampiresque feelings of impostorism. I guess it would be the equivalent of bumping into someone at a party who is wearing the same T-Shirt as you, to save yourself the feelings of being uncomfortable, the only way to deal with it is to go on over, say something along the lines of “double-trouble” and then go on to introduce yourself as the British contingent, Parent Trap style – “We are more than sisters, we are like twins!”

Amy Cuddy, a psychologist from Harvard university, suggests that the best way to deal with these feelings is to be more aware and communicative about them. It is only in realising that others probably feel the same or have felt the same in the past or at some point in the future, that you can almost exorcise that demon, spinning head and vomiting. Cuddy points out that the delusion that if you just achieve the next hurdle these feelings will leave you has been proven false over and over again. She interviewed Nail Gaiman, the author who wrote American Gods, Stardust and Good Omens with Terry Pratchett, who admitted that even though he was successful he put most of that down to success and worried that when he published the next book, the gig would be up. Emma Watson who Played Hermione Granger in Harry Potter said she has felt the same in the past, undeserving of the attention and praise. In recognising the feelings of impostorism, we have been given the vocabulary to be able to articulate change, awareness is the first step to change. Cuddy suggests that by framing our internal experience within the context of the environment we should be able to change thoughts from “I don’t deserve this” to “This is a new environment or experience that is making me feel like I don’t deserve this” ergo, it is the environment you find yourself in and not your capacity that is leading to these feelings. The realisation that your feelings and reality are not always N*Sync (Bye Bye Bye) but can be doubted or distorted in true AliceThrough the Looking Glass style. One of the rules in Jordan B Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is treat yourself like someone you want to help and I think when dealing with emotions such as these that is an important one to remember. What would you say to yourself if you were a friend asking you fro advice? You would say, just the same as what we said to Harry above – calm the fuck down, you’re amazing (for a drama queen)!

If this is the first time you have heard of impostor syndrome then I am both sorry and happy that I have introduced you to another thing we can all say we got, in a kind Pokémon card collection – “gotta catch them all!” style. I suppose the take away message is that it should help to know that these feelings you experience are not unique to you, even though it may feel like that. You at least share them in common with me and while I would hesitantly add myself to a spectrum which includes normality, I don’t think I’m too far away from at least the standard deviation. If you are a dab hand at impostorism, how do you deal with it? If you have never experienced it, you probably should have by now….

References.

Henry David Thoreau – Walden

Slavoj Zizek – In Defence of Lost Causes

James O’Keefe – Homosexuality; It’s about survival not sex – YouTube

Nature.com – Survival of the Fittest Group – https://www.nature.com/articules/nature13755

FS Blog – Survival of the Fittest; Group Vs Individuals https://fs.blog/2017/02.survival-of-the-fittests/

Dr Pauline R. Clance & Dr Suzanne A. Imes – The Impostor Syndrome in High Achieving Women. Dynamics & Therapeutic Intervention – http://mpowir.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Download-IP-in-High-Achieving-Women.pdf

Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressd

J. K . Rowling – Harry Potter Series

Johan Hari – Lost Connections

Jordan B Peterson – 12 Rules for Life

Amy Cuddy – https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/28/amy-cuddy-presence/

 

 

 

 

 

 

What if? Abstract Words, Dangerous Mindset.

But, If I won the lottery, then everything would be better, right?

I won’t even care about the catastrophic injuries about doing this. I could afford it.

On Friday morning last week, for the first time in a long time I purchased a lottery ticket. Drawn in by the advert for triple mega super once in a lifetime, awe dropping amounts etc rollover, for some reason I supposed that my chances of winning may improve fractionally if I actually exchanged some hard earned pounds for a ticket. The maths is interesting – a quick google search reveals that I had roughly a one in 14 million chance of winning if I bought the ticket, as opposed to zero if I didn’t. With these odds, it’s not surprising that I didn’t win, but that didn’t stop me from imagining what it would be like when I won and specifically how much better everything would be. Thus began a weekend of fantasy, how brilliant I was going to look diving into my money pit, Scrooge McDuck style.

When I lazily checked my ticket the following Monday, with the hope that my indifference would lead to some divine intervention from the universe to reward my forgetfulness and feigned lack of greed, I saw that, perhaps inevitably, I hadn’t won the lottery. “Oh well, next time!” I concluded. In a good show of sportsman ship, having been cheated from the big win I felt I deserved, I angrily tore my now worthless ticket up (and placed it in the recycling bin – come on, I’m not a complete monster!) and continued with my day as an (self-proclaimed) international pottery expert. Emotionally though, I began a subconscious journey of returning all of the items I had bought in my imagination. I had to mentally cancel my trip to Costa Rica where I planned to help turtles; advise the yacht builders that this was not the summer I would be learning to sail in my bespoke crafted boat; let the architect know that my modest sized mansion by the sea would not begin construction this year, and accept that my role as the Count of Monte Cristo, dishing out divine gifts in my role of providence to my loved ones would have to be pulled back in scale drastically. On the whole, I felt pretty shit.

Now, I appreciate that you may be reading this and thinking “alright you diva, calm down” and I accept that perhaps I may be a tiny bit more dramatic than Adrian Mole, but I was experiencing a feeling that I was finding hard, with only language to help me, to express. Was it, maybe, disappointment? I think not, after all I didn’t expect to actually win, and what is disappointment if not the division between expectations and reality? I had hoped I would win but I never expected to, otherwise I would have bought the boat I had mentally designed.

It was the “Oh well, next time” that helped me to explain to myself the sensation I was feeling. I had accepted I hadn’t won – hence the “oh well” – but acceptance is a neutral term and I was closer to disappointment / outright outrage! The word I think I was looking for was resigned and conceivably this hits the mark a little more accurately, but the question remains, what was I resigning myself too. I continued on in my role as (self-proclaimed) international pottery extraordinaire, but it suddenly dawned on me in a fashion that caused me to blurt out in an (luckily) empty room “Oh, Jordan!” in a tone you would adopt when you try to console a crying child, with sympathy. I was feeling resigned to this life,  my life, the one I am living now.

I think it is important to point out here that actually, on the whole, I consider myself to be in a very good place and tentatively would attach the word happy to my life. The last few years, although peppered with happiness, have been full of a self-competition, a desire to escape and to mash together parts of what I thought would make me happy into what can only be described as a faux pas to match that of the botched fresco restoration – Ecco Homme. At this moment in time, I have an outlook on life, which matches Dobby the house elf, a blind positivity despite his returning to a similar role to that of his previous enslavement. I have dedicated time to reading and really challenged myself with the choices I have been opting for. I have embarked on a journey to get into the best shape I have ever been in physically, focusing more on habits than results, but with the latter showing (when I tense) none the less. I have an amazing and inspired man orbiting my world, a Luna hunk, and an appreciation for my loved ones that I never felt so severely. I’ve got some plans and goals, which I am excited about the path I will under take and not just the potential rewards at the end goal. I fully accept that there are areas that I am not happy with, but I can see with a clarity that they need work, and how I can resolve that. I don’t feel paralysed by indifference, or plagued by uncertainty, bogged down in a haze of loneliness and disillusionment. All that being said, I still felt, at the loss of my big win on the lottery, that I was resigned to this life, a life, that to be fair, is full of love; potential, and meaning. How confusing, then, to feel this, if to all intents and purposes – I am content.

To explain this then, I thought about how I had responded to the obvious news that I hadn’t won the lottery. Immediately after the “oh well”, perhaps with the same disappointed breath, I uttered “next time!”, and on reflecting on this I had found my answer. The gamblers trap, the illusive mating call of inverted anticipation. It could be misconstrued as hope, a positive emotion, but Hic Autem Dracones. What I was saying by “next time” was more or less a new ‘What if?’ one that mirrored the initial one that inspired the absurd notion that for some reason my chances of winning this time where more hopeful, after all someone’s got to win. Next time I will be that one in (roughly) 14 million, who goes on to travel to Costa Rica where I will  help turtles; I will contact the yacht builders and advise them that this is the summer I would be learning to sail in my bespoke crafted boat; I will let the architect know that my modest sized mansion by the sea would begin construction this year, and accept that my role as the Count of Monte Cristo, dishing out divine gifts in my role of providence to my loved ones would, if anything, have to be expanded to include harsh but just vengeance to those who wronged me.

What are these What if’s trying to tell me. Perhaps that I have an overactive imagination? Or that how I am viewing happiness is fundamentally flawed in some way. If I can attach solutions to pretty much all of my problems and concerns on the mathematical probability of being one in 14 million twice a week, then maths really does make the universe turn, or perhaps I need to consider what it is that my mind is doing here. Ken Robinson in his book Finding Your Element spends a chapter discussing happiness and the idea that you can count this ethereal condition like you can count cold hard cash (I assume £1 equals one happiness. The more you have the more you have. (I imagine that’s why some people get plastic surgery to make it look like they are always smiling – money = smiles, lots of money, lots of smiling)). He suggests that this idea is based on a false polarisation, that if you have zero money, of course you are going to struggle and be relatively unhappy because your basic needs aren’t being met. If we take Abraham Maslow’s Hiearchy of Needs as the base here, then food; shelter, water, air, sex (LOL!! – no wonder I was so miserable!)  and sleep are things that Maslow would suggest you couldn’t be happy without. Robinson, however, stresses the point that the opposite isn’t necessarily true. That while no money will make you unhappy, more money, potentially, won’t make you happier. If we look at the position of the world’s largest economy (excluding the European Union because that is a group of countries, and I have to respect that fact that I am, at least, mostly British and would hate to deter any Brexitiers from reading what I have to say) then the USA is the wealthiest, and not by a small amount. According to statisticstimes.com the outlook for the USA in the coming years, based on IMF predictions is that it will hold 24.4% of all GDP, worldwide by 2022. Such an incredible amount of money and if we stick to our idea that 1£ (although lets convert to dollars, because why the hell not? Reminds me of Ducktales for some reason) our idea that $1 = one happiness, then the USA should in theory have 24.4% of all the worlds happiness. Yet, according to the World Happiness Report, publish in 2018 (something I have referred to before as a more effective way of measuring success between countries you can read that here) the USA is only the 18th happiest in the world. A stunning 13% of Americans take anti-depressants on a daily basis, I accept that some of that $1 = 1 happiness might not be being spread out to that 13% of the population, but even still, the idea does come under some stress. Finland, has the highest levels of happiness, and yet has the 45th largest economy in the world, followed by Norway (38th largest) and Denmark (36th). For my British friends the UK is the 19th happiest, yet the 7th largest.

To me it seems somewhat counterproductive, for me to mourn the loss of the lottery I never won, not to mention the waste of precious mental energy and time (if time = money, then I not only wasted the £2 for the ticket but also the cost in time spent researching best time to visit Costa Rica for optimal turtle helping!) I had some time off over the winter months, and I have to admit, while I had more time to dedicate to other enjoyable things, hobbies and exercise, reading and writing, I found myself more frustrated than anything else. When I reflected on this I kind of realised that most of the people I know who are retired share that frustration. I think about my granddad complaining that there is nothing good on television, and obviously directed him to Emmerdale, but to my astonishment, he was not interested. It seemed strange that actually, a lot of people I know plan for the retirement, and yet the ones who are already retired would trade it all for a younger body and even some of the most numbing jobs out there (Shout out to all the veterans of Pall Europe out there, it’s a scar we share!) I guess what it boils down to is a confusion between pleasure and happiness. That one automatically results in the other, and while that may be the case it is not sustainable.

The reason why it is not sustainable is because of an idea called The Hedonic Treadmill and although this sounds like a move I would attempt to do (and obviously fail, perhaps comically so) at the gym, it is related more to a staple fact of adaption of the human species. Human beings have an amazing ability to adapt to our environments and situations. You may think that this is a positive, and to a large extent, it has been in our evolution, but it is also a restriction, especially when you consider happiness. To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to explain with the epic tale of how I went online and bought a new laptop. I sent that one back because I didn’t feel I deserved it the first time around, but a few weeks later, I bought it again, perhaps even the same one I returned, but none the less it came. Oh, the possibilities I attached mentally to this shiny new laptop, I could write more on it, edit photos more, generally organise my life more effectively. The laptop arrived and for a few glorious days, I considered myself to be a beacon of how laptops should be used; it went everywhere with me and I did all those things I wanted to do. Then the glory days came to an end, the imperial dominion of this laptop waned and it went on to become like any other thing I have been excited about in my life, and stopped offering the possibilities it had once offered. The laptop hadn’t changed at all really, perhaps a little bogged down with disappointing pornography, but still the same, it was me who changed. I had got used to the laptop and the novelty no longer rewarded me the way it did. Like the pornography. I have a similar story about a rabbit (obviously, relating to the laptop and not the porn) but it had a sadder ending – it died, the laptop, much more positive and relate-able. I adapted to the presence of the laptop (rabbit, pornography – whatever you prefer, insert here) and it no longer became the thing that bought me happiness. This is the hedonic treadmill.

In my desire to win the lottery (and all the things I’d do with the winnings – expect obviously the turtles, that is true altruism) I was embarking on an exercise in imagination. Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness discusses the various states of our minds when thinking about the past, present and the future (I have written about the past before focusing, melancholically, on regrets, you can wade through that here).

“To see is to experience the world as it is. To remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine – ah, to imagine is to see the world as it has never been, nor never will be.”

“Nor never will be.” Wow! Danny boi! You’ve hit the nail on the head here. Even if my numbers had come up on that uneventful, but in in this thought experiment, very eventful Monday morning, I could not see clearly how that future would unfold. Daniel Gilbert talks about our inability to foresee an accurate prediction of the future as normally it is so much more positive than what it would be like (or negative if you are depressed and cannot see the positivity, either way, it’s not going to be as much of either.) I have no idea of the details my lottery win will involve, only the positive aspects, and none of the potential pitfalls (but honestly Mr Gilbert, what could possibly be bad about turtles in Costa Rica?). So obviously I will be disappointed when what I would have liked to have happened – a perfect future, with lots of money, no stress, a yacht, turtles, divine justice and a mansion by the sea, doesn’t come to fruition this time, because really there was no thought put into anything negative. What if I get seasick? What if the moderate mansion is on a flood plain? What if I am allergic to surprisingly sinister turtles?

Now take away my absurd and perhaps slightly exaggerated none winning of the lottery and attach this mind-set to anything in your life that you are striving for. Now as I have mentioned somewhere in this repetitive button bashing session, the dawn of some goals in my life, attainable and exciting has really fostered in me a Star Wars Episode IV – A New Hope. So I am not detracting from the idea that goals are impulsive and pointless, because unlike the rest of the Star Wars series, what followed that instalment was two great movies. Goals lead to great things, but enter into them with realistic expectations. Pinning your hopes on the formula When I get/earn/meet/see/experience/taste/achieve X, I will arrive at happiness and my optimal state of being, because like a rainbow with the promise of gold, the treasure is illusion (and physically an impossibility I suppose, the gold, I am probably short enough to be genetically of leprechaun ilk.)

Alain de Botton, in his Consolations of Philosophy delves into the works of a Greek philosopher Epicurus and presents his work in a way that can ring true to modern readers. Epicurus was by no means adverse to the finer things in life, Alain de Botton even quotes him

“Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may be able to indulge myself whenever I wish.”

What a rock star and a man after my own brie stained heart! He believed that money, power and fundamentally stuff were falsely perceived the means of happiness. Epicurus believed that the real source, the spring and sustainable origin of happiness was in fact Friendship, Freedom, and Reflection (and obviously, I suppose, cheese). I guess this is weird that when planning my big win, I selfishly didn’t think about the freedom it would give me, who I would share it with, or how much self-reflection I would be doing when helping turtles, but I suppose at least that not winning has given me the chance to do the latter of Epicurus’ list of Eudaimonia.

I would love to write more, but I need to get off and grab a ticket before the shop closes. Despite all I have said, I really feel like tonight is my night… for the turtles, of course. I leave you now with a poem I found online called ‘What if?’ by someone called Shruthiyspencil. Link in the references.

 

What if?

What If
The most scariest word in our vocabulary
Signifying endless possibilities of existence,
Making you live in your scariest dreams and
Haunting your mind with terrifying thoughts.
What if life was never born?
What if there was no sunshine?
What if the world suddenly disappears one day?
With these feelings swirling around
Our life’s greatest puzzle “What if?”
Has remained unsolved for eons.
With probabilities and possibilities attaining infinity,
Many such questions remain unanswered for eternity.
What if I could never pen these words?
Just, What if?

 

References:

Finding Your Element – Ken Robinson

The Consolations of Philosophy – Alain de Botton

The Hierarchy of Needs – Abraham Maslow

Stumbling On Happiness – Daniel Gilbert

What if? – Shruthiyspencil. https://allpoetry.com/poem/13388798-What-if–by-Shruthiyspencil

GDP projections – http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php

World Happiness Index  – https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2018/WHR_web.pdf

Depression in the USA – http://time.com/4900248/antidepressants-depression-more-common/

 

 

 

‘Everything is Awesome’ – The Lego Movie Review

Part 1. The Movie.

Recently I’ve been on a bit of a movie binge, catching up with some of the latest (and older) blockbusters I missed over the past few years. My last post on laughter got me all inspired to watch something funny so I finally got round to watching the 2014 Lego Movie. I had put off watching this movie as in the past I had been less than impressed with movies based on toys. The Transformers series (apart from Shia Labeouf – phoarw!), the terrible Battleships, and I even seem to remember a Cluedo movie, all were ultimately a little disappointing. I was worried that the Lego Movie would be a 2 hour advert, and to an extent it was, I did fish out some of my old Lego sets (what can I say, mentally I am prepubescent) but there was a layer to the film that got my little thinker whirring in philosophical contemplation. Who would have thought that what is essentially a children’s movie could ask such deep questions that left me a little stunned at its ambition. Obviously – spoilers.

 

Sure you could watch the movie without seeing any of these things, and enjoy it for what it is, an action packed story of a reluctant hero as he embarks on an adventure to save the world; but there are multiple layers to this story that only developed as the film progressed. Perhaps it is because I have spent the best part of the last year reading philosophy, or watching hours of YouTube videos of philosophers and their big ideas, that I was so taken aback by this movie because I actually saw so many links between things I have learnt over the last year and themes explored in this film. The amount of puns in this film really is what makes it so enjoyable. I don’t think most of these puns could really work in any other film, from one of lines that subvert our expectations and make them applicable to the Lego world (“Rest in pieces”) to the teenage anxiety of Batman (“This is a song I wrote for Wildstyle. It’s about how I’m an orphan”.)

 

 

The film opens with a fight scene between two characters. We can assume that the one dressed in black and red is the antagonist, and this suspicion is soon confirmed by his actions. We are introduced to an old man, judging by his beard and his staff, we can assume that this character will be fitting the role of the “wise mage” an archetype that Joseph Campbell insists is integral to any hero’s journey. This character who is revealed as a Masterbuilder, claims that he can see all, moments before he is, rather comically, struck blind. He then goes on to make a prophecy, that one day good will triumph over evil. This idea of prophecy is something that came up repeatedly when I was reading a book about Irish Myths & Fairy tales.Most prophecies seem to operate like our idea of a contract but this one was very clearly stating the idea that evil will triumph for a period, but the dominion of the aforementioned is deterministic, there is an end in sight. There will be some kind of loophole, some kind of way out of the problem, a slight of hand in the interpretation, and it usually when a hero rises to challenge that the spell can be broken, or the evil defeated. This idea of prophecy is something that repeats itself again and again in popular culture; Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Game of Thrones even to an extent Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code and the Bible. Obviously the way that Lego present this prophecy is in a way that is so jovial and light hearted that it would be easy to over look this. By giving us this at the very beginning of the film, we already know on some level that we are going to witness some kind of happy ending, that evil will be defeated, and the prophecy fulfilled. There would be no need to add the prophecy if it was never meant to be filled (Something I wish I had known whilst I was eagerly awaiting the Harry Potter books to be released.) We know this about prophecy as a reflection of the film theory of Chekov’s gun; the idea that if there is a gun in the first act of the film, even just hanging on the wall in the background, it better be used in the third act. The same idea runs true for the prophecy, it must be fulfilled by the end of the film (or long series). How accurately it is executed remains to be seen.

After the initial opening sequence, which I must admit I was not too impressed by, we are introduced to a labourer called Emmett (my mind went instantly to my fan boy obsession with Back to the Future – where the crazy scientist is also called Emmett. I know from my obsessive theorising about this movie that Emmett means truth in Hebrew). We see him waking up, way too jolly for me to be able to relate too, and instantly turn to his guide book of instructions as to how to live his life. I think the manual was called “How to fit in and have everybody like you and always be happy.” This made me laugh, because I am pretty sure, that I have read many self help books; websites, blog posts, YouTube videos even inspiring memes, all hawking the same thing. That’s our goal isn’t it really. Those three points pretty much sum up most of our struggles, perhaps add an additional line about making lots of money, and you have summed up society and the million pound self-help industry.

 

We are then introduced to the antagonist again. He is presented to us in a TV commercial and introduced as President Business of the Octan organisation and the world.Seeing that his position in a company comes before his position of a state shows us that the beautifully named Brickville is a society based upon the political idea of cooperate capitalism. This is the idea of a society, that instead of being run in a democratic way; a communist way, or monarchical, is managed instead through cooperate bureaucracy. The advert sees the President carry on talking about what makes a good citizen and then he lets slip in perhaps the most passive aggressive Freudian slip “don’t forget to obey the rules, or you will be put to sleep, and on Tuesday FREE TACOS” Emmett recognises this slip and is at first a little shocked, but brushes this comment off, evidently distracted by the prospect of free Mexican food. It is interesting to see that his character is so intent on fitting in, that he will literally chose to ignore what he can not cope dealing with. Later in the movie Emmett comments on how the Octan Corporation own everything (“including polling booths…oh!”)

 

This dystopia reminded me of the Sunni chapters in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, one of my all time favourite reads. The premise, briefly is that capitalist society has progressed beyond the point production through manual labour. Advances in Artificial Intelligence has result in a new working class being made of synthetics(basically robots). It is these beings that become conscious, who are subjected to the tyranny of cooperate capitalism. There is a large movement, as seen at any G8 meeting of disgruntled citizens who now view the world as predominantly dominated by the powerful lobbying groups that represent interests of particular companies, threatening to withdraw operation from these countries, or invest in them, as a bargaining chip for favourable trade deals. I always think a good example of these interests is when they build new supermarkets or shopping centres. No matter how much the locals may protest, it goes ahead anyway, and those concerns by the citizens are silenced after construction has been completed. In Cloud Atlas it is revealed that capitalism ceased to provide jobs for the traditional proletariat in favour of A.I., where as in the Lego Movie, we soon discover the motives of President Business being a drive to maintain rigid order.

 

I did think that the irony of Lego here was quite impressive as they are arguably one of the largest & most renown toy companies in the world. By insinuating that big cooperation is a bad thing, they run the risk of undermining their own legitimacy. I think that the obvious dig at big cooperation, softens the blow of this movie being seen as an advert, because after all they appear to be critical of it. As Emmett moves around his city, we can see more clues that indicate how severe the dystopia is, with some posters reminiscent of George Orwell’s’ book 1984 reminding people that the president is watching. We see CCTV cameras dotted around, and a perfectly functioning road system, everything seems so perfect. This movie really has all the trade marks of dystopian societies; torture, re-education centres, mass genocide, exile for rule breakers, reduced agency and superficial happiness with the status quo. One of the rules states you must drink over priced coffee (“That’s 37$ please.”… “Awesome”). This idea, that citizens must obey the state line, regardless of the expense to themselves, places the collective good above the individual one. This made me think of the Ministry of Magic under Pius Thicknesse, the puppet ruler for Lord Volde- sorry, he who must not be named. The statues inside the ministry were chance with soviet style statues and depictions like “for the greater good”. Another rule that should be followed is the idea that you must like popular music, and a song starts on the radio called “everything is awesome”. To be fair, the song is ridiculously catchy, but it is an excellent example of the world they live in. Not to question the status-quo. Not to be individual, but to sacrifice your individuality to the group identity. After a day in the construction yard Emmett hears a noise, and goes to explore. He sees someone doing something, and instantly refers to the instruction manual for what to do. When he sees that the person he should report is a beautiful woman, he instantly stops what he is doing, literally frozen in place.  He tries to take a step forward and slips down a seemingly endless and gravity defying hole. This tumble reminded me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and represents a falling away his normal life and into a new realm. It is an idea repeated in Dante’s Inferno as he descends into hell, with appropriate colour scheme when he finally lands. He comes across something called “The resistance” and is very much tempted to touch this mysterious object, but upon placing his Lego hooked hand on there he loses consciousness. When he comes too he is being interrogated by a police officer. Here we see that Emmett’s idea of following the rules is dashed when we see that all the people he makes an effort with have little to no regard for him.

 

When the beautiful women, who is named Wildstyle, realises that Emmett is not special, that he has none of the expected abilities the prophecy spoke of she is annoyed at him. Emmett asks her for some backstory and in a clever way it is delivered “Blah Blah Blah, back story, I’m angry at you for some reason.” I loved this scene because it really plays fun at the standard addition of exposure in movies. The introduction of Good-Cop, Bad-Cop, an agent of President Business, struggling with a personality disorder. It is around this time that the movie gets interesting as we start to see clues that this film is taking place within our world somehow. We see nail polish remover being used on Good-Cop, thus removing that part of his personality. We see his parents glued into position with superglue and learn of President Business’ plan to glue all the inhabitants of the world into a fixed position. There is even a few references made to “the man upstairs” in a way that introduces an element of religion into this society, showing a belief in a higher power. There comes a point in the movie were Emmett makes the ultimate sacrifice to safe the world and here the film really climaxes into the most philosophical part of the movie. He falls through a vortex and lands, on the floor in a basement, in our world. He is picked up by a child but he is still conscious. He is aware in true Toy Story style, that he is a toy, as he looks on a young boy play. The Will Farrell rocks up, the human personification of President Business and we learn that the conflict in the story, President Business’ love for order and the determination to fix everyone in place, is reflected in the father figure in the real world. He wants to glue all the pieces down and enjoy Lego as a model. He picks up various things the boy has made, and is horrified at the lack of organisation, not noticing the imagination the boy has invested into it. Seeing this pan out could explain the movie in a “oh, it’s all in the boys imagination way” but then we see Emmett move in our world, thus blurring the line between reality and fiction. If it is all in the boys mind, then how come Emmett still had the agency to affect the real world. It is while Emmett is in the real world that he becomes aware of the limitations of free will. He is not in control of his own life, expect for when he has transcended the child’s game and acts intentionally. He rebels existentially to exert his own agency and changes the course of the game thus reconciling father and son.

 

Ultimately the movie touches on themes of happiness, and finding meaning something which I have talked about before in previous posts which is why I think it speaks to me so strongly. If you imagine your life to be that of a citizen of Brickville in the opening of the movie, it can be quite painful to realise, that actually, we do all get caught up doing what are essentially pointless activities, with no real justification for their inherent value. The fact that it is a kids movie always leaves a bittersweet taste in your mouth, because on the one hand you can yearn for that which has been lost to you, think Lara Silver tongue in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials but also enjoy it with the wisdom that age grants you. I thoroughly recommend this film to everyone, and have been doing so on a regular basis. In fact, my opinions of this film run far deeper as I explore some of the philosophical, metaphysical and pop culture references it alludes too in my next post.

 

References

The Lego Movie (2014).

George Orwell – 1984

Irish Myths & Fairy tales

Lewis Carole – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Dante – Inferno

Emotional Wrecks – Get Giggly!

What’s so medicinal about laughter?

Have you ever thought about how absurd sneezing is? You feel that unique sensation in your nose and then the momentary hesitation, the am I / aren’t I moment. Then, if this time you go through with it (there is after all an undeniable disappointment on a sneeze that got away) you have a fleeting moment of satisfaction. Have you ever noticed how similar laughter is to sneezing? A quick trawl of google yielded me plenty of results about laughter but it seems that while there is a lot of literature discussing it, there is very little consensus on why we do it. Have you ever been in a situation where you find yourself laughing with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you? Somehow, the fact that you are laughing manages to transcend your languages because it is a universally understood lingo. Laughter, like sneezing, is something that happens to us, we can’t really decide when to do it. Obviously, we can pretend to laugh, but subjectively, it is not the same experience, we don’t feel the same compared to when we actually laugh. You can’t experience real laughter on demand, and like sneezing, we always feel a little better after we do it.

Think about the last time you laughed (and I mean the really guttural kind where it hurts) where do you laugh? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Your face changes, your body shakes, we move our heads; arms, legs, our breathing changes and sometimes we can quite literally roll about laughing. It is interesting to think that at some point in the evolution of our species that someone (or something – after all animals can laugh too) laughed for the first time. Did you ever actually learn to laugh? I know from spending an incredibly amount of time with my little nephew as he has grown from a baby to a toddler over the last year, that laughter is something that comes so naturally to him. Then there is that weird age, normally in your teenage years where you try out new laughs – what was all that about? 

I remember once at university, me and some of my friends sat around in a circle, probably playing drinking games, and someone suggested we all fake laughed at the same time. Those fake laughs turned pretty quickly into real laughs. What is it about the sound of laughter that makes you laugh? Think back to something really funny that happened, and sometimes it is enough to make you laugh anew all over again. I have already laughed numerous times, just writing about it. Apparently, although not uncommon, you are less likely to laugh by yourself a proposition that has been proven with experiments involving laughing gas (one science experiment I am devastated to have not been a part of). So the next time you watch a comedy or some stand up, know that if you are watching it alone, you are less likely to enjoy it (if we set our enjoyment as laughter) than if you were watching it with someone else, who is also laughing. Some theories of laughter (what a funny job – “Oh, I research laughter” but apparently, such a thing exists) suggest that the purpose of laughter, if we look at it in times of evolutionary biology is perhaps as a bonding mechanism. Most of your friends are likely to have shared some funny experiences with you, and that in turn endears them more to you. I was once at a really awful job interview in Barcelona. There was about fifty people sat in a high rise building all wearing suits for some poorly described sales job. Everyone was sat nervously when the door burst open, and this hobbit in a suit came strutting in. He went on to show us a PowerPoint of ex-employees and how successful they were after moving on from that company. When the slideshow ended he asked us a simply question; 

“Hands up if you’re here for a job?”

Obviously, I nervously raised my hand along with everyone else in the room. He surveyed the hands and nodded to himself, then with a deviant little smirk he said;

“Good, good. Now, hands up if you are here for a career?” 

Some people made affirmative noises, some were even a little aghast at the wit this man oozed. I was less than impressed because the whole situation was so absurd and the guy was so excessively serious, about what was ultimately, a cold call sales centre. I caught the eye of this other young guy in his suit, and we both smirked. I had never met this guy before, but we couldn’t actually look at each other again without laughing. Truthfully, I felt so much affinity to that stranger and we were drawn to each other for the next stage of the interview (which strangely enough involved us going into a separate room to shout at the hobbit “SHOW ME THE MONEY” – to see if we had what it took to succeed. (Un) Fortunately – on that occasion, I did not.) 

John Morreall, an American philosopher and founder of the International Society for Humour Studies, is a very entertaining speaker on YouTube and suggests that humour is a powerful force, perhaps more so than we ever give it credit for. He puts forward the idea that someone who has the ability to control the laughter of a group can perhaps yield a greater force than if they emitted fear. He said that this is because people are not only more likely to do things for them, but would do it with a smile on their faces, otherwise willingly. Being able to orchestrate the humour of a group, is thus a powerful position to hold. He also suggests that another reason we laugh is to limit the threat of a situation. Imagine you fall over, and you really embarrass yourself, if you laugh, you reduce the tension of the situation because if you don’t and other people do, you feel awful and potentially so do they because you didn’t. If you can all laugh then there is no need for feelings to be hurt. Morreall also points out that laughter is also a natural way of reducing stress too. I talked before in my post The Happiness Question about how I am prone to tears quite easily, but Morreall points out that some people who nervous laugh, or break out into fits of uncontrollable giggling do so because of a subconscious attempt to reduce stress (If you ask someone who has the giggles “Why are you laughing?” more often than not they will say “I don’t know” – they are stressed.)

Now for some classes examples of scenes from movies where the characters laughter demonstrates exactly what I have just said. In the 2004 film Ocean’s 12 there is a scene where Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon are having drinks with Robbie Coltrane. They are trying to win the latter’s affection and laugh at all of his jokes, regardless of how unfunny they are. What follows is a very funny scene in which all the actors are pretending to fake laugh. We have all been in a situation like this, but the fact that they drag it out for so long is what makes it amusing. If you think about it too much the scene gets even more confusing because essentially, we are watching three men, pretend to pretend to laugh and for some reason it makes us laugh. In the 1986 movie The Money Pit just after the bath falls through the floor of Tom Hanks’ dream house come nightmare cesspit, he lets out the most hysterical laugh. One of the best Tom Hanks scenes in my opinion, the laughter is so manic, bordering crazy, but sometimes even when everything is going incredibly wrong, all you can do is laugh even if it is slightly insane. In the classic Mary Poppins, when she and the children along with Bert, pop round to see Uncle Albert, they all get caught up in his humour and end up floating, perhaps symbolic of the euphoric power of laughter, not to mention its contagious nature. The song I Love to Laugh is such a light hearted one, that it is hard to not listen to it, and smile as you remember those moments in your life when you howled and felt as high as Uncle Albert. Finally, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 live action blended with animation we see the weasels at the end literally laugh themselves to death. Now while the idea of laughing yourself to death seems a little excessive there could perhaps be some truth in the idea that laughter is a transcending experience. 

Milton Bearle says of laughter that it is a “…vacation, that we go away when we laugh and then come back again feeling better” He then refines the idea of going away to suggest that we don’t leave where we are, but rather our consciousness suddenly losses its connection with time. “In no time at all, we are in no time at all” he says, suggesting that when you are caught up in those brief moments of sheer laughter, that you are not really there. You are living your life; problems, cares and worries, minor stresses all a burden on your busy mental life: then suddenly you aren’t thinking about any of this. You aren’t really thinking about anything, or you can’t really explain what you are thinking about. He suggests that this kind of laughter is like a mental time out for you mind, a time where you exists purely as consciousness, previous thoughts just disappear momentarily. If you identify with your thoughts, who are you when you are laughing? If you ever watch any video interviews with the Dalai Lama, you will see that he is always on the cusp of laughter, perhaps this is a form of transcendence. Now if this idea of time seems unusual to you in relation to laughter, then just take a moment to think about the nature of jokes. A key element of what makes an effective joke is the element of timing, delivering that perfect punchline at exactly the right moment. Have you ever told the same joke on two different occasions, the first time was a hit, and the second time maybe not so much. Perhaps it was a proverbial “tough crowd, tough crowd” (If your saw the reference to the Grinch there, then perhaps you would be interested in my post regarding his personality here) or perhaps it was an element of time (and I guess without getting to metaphysical, space). A good joke could also be about the stars and planets aligning for it to be received well at that particular time. Our own sense of time is something that separates us from other animals, after all, we are the only creatures that we know of that have the ability to be aware of our own “selves” over time, a continuity of who we are. We have a clear sense of our past, our presents, potential futures, and yet when we laugh we suddenly loose this. Schopenhauer said that this was fundamentally a good thing, to be relieved of the shackles the burden of being self aware lays upon us. We are human for all that means, but when we laugh and loose ourselves in that, we perhaps are something else. Either less human, or potentially more so. Schopenhauer says that there is enormous freedom to be found in those moments that we are not attached to ourselves in this way. Being human means we are always, on some level, aware of our own mortality, and our existential problem of knowing that one day we will die. He suggests that laughter is a means of avoiding that inevitability, if only for brief moments. I guess there is a reason why in some films people laugh right before they die. Laughter, instead of causing death like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, may turn out to be our best defence against it. 

I generally laugh quite a lot, and although sometimes it comes across as inappropriate. I try to see the funny side in situations. In an article for The New Philosopher Oliver Burkeman suggests that in our current society, people who laugh more are seen as less serious than those who are not. The article focused on the importance of play in our lives, and talks about the idea that our sense of fulfilment is tied up with achieving our goals. The idea that everything in our lives must have a purpose, must have some kind of meaning is all well and good until we stumble upon the topic of laughter. Having fun, and laughing does not really have any measurable end goal except the fact that it acts as “an antidote to drudgery of accomplishment”. He quotes Kieran Setiya’s  idea that we tend to view fulfilment as something that can be achieved in the future or was achieved in the past, but never in the present. Any sense of fulfilment from these successes are fleeting. This idea of success (and failure) being relatively short term came up in The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. He explains that people who win the lottery soon return to the same levels of happiness as pre-winning, and likewise people who become disabled return to pre-accident levels of happiness within a certain amount of time, thus proving that time is a healer, of bother negative and perhaps counter intuitively positive things. No amount of success can make you feel as attached to the moment as a good session of hard laughing can. 

How then to take this knowledge forward? After all knowing that we enjoy laughing is no surprise, there is that old proverb “laughter is the best medicine”. In his book The Rules of Life Richard Templar states as his 30th rule (rather low down in my opinion, but hey, I’m no published author) “Have a sense of humour”. He suggests that the best way to keep ourselves on track, to stay connected and grounded is through laughter, at ourselves and our situation. That even in the utmost moments of despair, a sure solution can be found through fleeting moments of humour. When I read this it reminded me of Albert Camus’ idea of the absurdity of life. What I read when I went through this rule is the realisation that the only way you can deal with life effectively is to acknowledge it as absurd and laugh about it. Make time for laughter in your life. Controversially I am a strong believer in the idea of making yourself laugh, after all there is nobody in the world who will ever understand your sense of humour as well as you do.

References:

The New Philosopher Magazine – Issue 20 July 2018

The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz 

The Rules of Life – Richard Templar 

How stuff works – Why we laugh

Philosophy Now – Laughter is a Time Machine

Who Framed Roger Rabbit 1988 

Mary Poppins

The Money Pit 1986 

Ocean’s 12 2004

How to Overcome Indecision.

Can re-framing decisions empower you?

The most annoying thing about the new year is all the promises and resolutions people make to themselves (or more annoyingly – loudly to other people) about how this year they are going to enact a series of changes, give up vices and exaggerate virtuous behaviour. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for self improvement and self awareness, but I feel that goals should be kept personal, because at the end of the day (or year) your goals should be for yourself. Having said that, I am going to share with you something which I am trying to ascribe to in 2019. I have made a few promises about things I want to improve personally, and after reading various self help books in the forms of rules, I presented these ideas to myself in the only way a nerd such as myself would do – as a contract or citizens agreement with myself. I won’t go into these ideas but needless to say they are hanging up in my room in a place I will have to see everyday. I like the ideas of rules, although I framed mine as reminders because, what can I say, if I set myself some rules perhaps I would probably annoy myself to into rebelling. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life – an Antidote for Chaos and Richard Templar’s Rules for Living were very inspiring to me in developing these ideas this way. I know from my experience with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that we all of us live by certain rules, whether consciously or not, and sometimes those rules are maladaptive. I believe that by aspiring to adhere to new rules, more productive ones, you can make a change.

What I wanted to explore in this post was a particular area of my life where I genuinely struggle and after talking to a few people about it, I get the feeling that it is something people share. That area is indecision & uncertainty. The sensation we all get that we are making the wrong decision in the face of all the possible outcomes we can imagine. I talked a little bit about knowing you will regret a choice in the future in my post Regrets, Choices & Time Travel Reading that blog post now, I can really feel the melancholy place I was in when I wrote it. It was a particularly dark period of my life that I feel is well and truly in the past, and while scarred, I have learnt so much from it. None the less my relationship with uncertainty remains similar and as time goes by, I feel it creeping into many different areas of my life. I understand that there is a relationship between anxiety and being indecisive and this has manifested itself to me personally in many different ways. Take a moment and consider the last time you were confronted with a decision that you were certainly unsure of how to act; How did you feel in the run up to the decision? How did you feel after you had committed to a course of action? How do you feel about the decision now?

If you are anything like me, you are still troubled by that decision, all the alternatives still play on your mind. I discussed where I thought may dependency on indecision comes from in my post Of Ships & Shadows. In Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice he calls people like me maximizers, and suggests that there is a link between this mentality and lower levels of happiness and satisfaction with life. Throughout his book he is critical of the abundance of choice we enjoy in our society and suggests that it inevitably leads to dissatisfaction knowing that there was, potentially, a better option available. A maximizer,he says, is someone who will investigate all the possible outcomes of a decision and then strive to make the best one. The distinction between the best and a good one is very important. If you are not a maximize you are a satisfier. The latter will make a decision based on their own criteria, and will more often than not be happy with the outcome, even if a better option was available. The former will be sad to know if what they committed too was not the best option. Imagine you go out for dinner; you stare at the menu struggling to decide what you would like to eat. A satisfier will think along these lines: “I want something with cheese, something hot, and maybe some serving of potato, preferably chipped, but I’ll accept roasted”. They will come across a portion of cheesy chips and be happy with that choice. A maximizer will think more along these lines “OK, what is the best deal here? What is the cheapest but most filling option? Should we even stay in this restaurant? I heard next door do two for one, and the portions look bigger. OK maybe I will opt for the lasagne because it looks reasonable.” Then when the lasagne arrives, they wish they had also bought cheesy chips, regardless of the thought process that goes into the decision.

Now that example, while peculiar, can seep over into other areas of your life. Schwartz basic point is that while in some circumstances the maximizer will inevitably end up with a better deal, the subjective experience of looking for that deal, and stressing about what decision to make, is more intense, draining and costly on an emotional level. The satisfier however, will be more content and happy with their decision. It is clear that Schwartz is an advocate for always trying to aim for the middle option. This seems counter intuitive in our society where we are always told to aim high, expect the best, but in reality, or rather in my experience of reality, this is often the path to unhappiness. That is not to say that you can’t aim high, but that this must always be tempered with an element of realism. How likely is it that you will end up with that dream job that you cannot even articulate yet? Not very. How likely is it that if you make the good middling decisions you may end up with a job that you don’t mind that allows you to life the live you want to lead, with potential at your fingertips. Much more likely.

 

As Voltaire said “The best is the enemy of the good”.

 

So if we accept that we all need to try and aim towards becoming satisfiers in order to live a more fruitful and happier life; we ultimately end up tackling the question of indecision. By accepting that the decisions you made were the best decision that you could make at that particular moment in time should then start to diminish those feelings you may harbour that another option was better. But what of uncertainty in general? What do you do when you have no idea what to do for the best? What do you do when you feel completely paralysed by choice or lack of it?  Brian Schmitt did an excellent TedTalk on certainty which really spoke to me. He points out that uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it is at the very core of the entire universe. Even within your own life, there may be events that appear as random, but ultimately, if you have faith, they are leading you somewhere. Where that is cannot always be seen at this moment. There is an account on YouTube called Like Stories of Old an incredibly beautiful and creative perspective on what films are saying to us, the morals they have and the society it reflects. They did a kind of analysis of the 2002 film Signs with Mel Gibson which really spoke to me. Although the film is about an alien invasion, there is also a narrative of the main character’s loss of faith in God. Spoiler alert, it works out in the end, but the way it does is interesting. A series of seemingly random events crescendo into meaning that have an ultimate purpose. I’m not particularly into religious interpretations, which I guess in my life is why I wouldn’t find any, but I do believe in an element of fate. If we accept that your life is a story that you are tell yourself, a narrative you create with the content you have lived, then there is no reason why seemingly random events couldn’t be connected to see some higher purpose.

Joseph Campbell, an American comparative mythologist calls this path the Hero’s Journey and stresses that it is filled with uncertainty. First the hero, which is you in your own life, receives the call to adventure, the summons to leave what you know and venture out into the realm of the unknown; in mythology sometimes represented as the safety of the castle. We see this all the time in Disney movies; Rapunzel in her tower in Tangled, the elephant graveyard in the Lion King or even Andy’s house in Toy Story.The idea that you must leave the realm of the known, the safety of what you are used to in order to become the hero. This idea of a journey in which the hero must face monsters, challenges and even their own limitations, is so embedded within us, almost a biological format we are attuned to follow through what Carl Jung called the collective unconsciousness.This is the idea that we all share a structure in our unconscious mind that is populated by instincts and archetypes., and that there are patterns we must follow in order to become who we really are.

Once you read Joseph Campbell, who incidentally has the most beautiful writing style – pages and pages of creative and insightful prose, you begin to see the pattern he outlines repeated in so many areas of life. Books; film, TV shows, games, interviews and even conversations you have with loved ones. I unashamedly listen to Russell Brands Podcast Under the Skin and almost every guest is asked “Why are you doing what you are doing?” and they will all answer with a story of seemingly random events that led to this moment. How does all this relate to my goal of striving to deal with the role of indecision in life different this year? I guess by accepting that any decision I make is in reality a random event that in the future could potentially be one of meaning. I mean in the sense that if you imagine all your decisions as purchases, by accepting them from a position of future opportunity, instead of future regret I can free myself of the shackles of indecision. By remembering that decisions I make however small or large, may potentially be a metaphorical Ariadne’s thread for how you view your life – how you construct the narrative you live by. Robert Frost’s beautiful poem The Road Not Taken opens with the weight of deciding which path to take, a paralysis of indecision, and discusses the decision making process. The poem ends with the line “And that has made all the difference”. Make your decisions to the best of your knowledge and have faith that they will lead somewhere.

I heard a Chinese parable the other day that I though was beautiful that I will relate to you now to end this ramble. It is on the long side, but I feel it sums up what I am trying to say. That we have the gift of hindsight, but the power of foresight is denied to us, it is only ever an educated guess. Don’t feel guilty over limited knowledge, and accept that paths in the past are now closed to you.

There was once a farmer who owned a horse. One day the horse bolted and all the villagers came to see the farmer and said “What bad luck, your horse has bolted!” The farmer stoically replied “Maybe, we will see.” The next week the horse returned with two other mares. The villagers returned to the farmer and said “What great luck!” Once again the farmer replied “Maybe we will see.” A few weeks later the farmer’s son fell over and broke his leg. The villagers returned to lament the farmers bad luck. “Your poor boy! What bad luck!” The farmer replied slowly “Maybe, we will see” The following week some officials came round to gather all the able bodied young men to fight in a war off on some distant shore. The villagers said in grief after having lost their boys to the military “Your boy wasn’t taken, what incredibly luck.” The farmer once again replied “Maybe, we will see”.

 

References;

Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice

Carl Jung – The Portable Jung – edited by Joseph Campbell

The Hero’s Journey – Joseph Campbell.  

YouTube – Like Stories of Old

Under the Skin Podcast – Russell Brand

Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken