aspire-to-the-light

[aspire-to-the-light]

I think it’s really interesting how a lot of things that talk about taking a break from your phone or not being so reliant on your phone don’t talk about replacing the function of phones. Like for example, I recently got a basic wrist watch that was easy to tell the time on for me. When I got that and started wearing it every day, I instantly found it a lot easier to not be on my phone as much. I had gotten used to needing to check my phone to see the time, which often led to me getting distracted on my phone as well.

I’ve also been able to start using my phone less when I started carrying around a small notebook and pen. I like being able to quickly write down my ideas and thoughts, and I used to just pull out my phone and write it in my notes app or text it to someone, but when a pen and paper is just as convenient, I didn’t feel the need to always have my phone on hand in case I wanted to write something down.

I still use my phone more than I would like to, but I want to get a way to listen to music without needing to open my phone, maybe a cassette player or something like that. I found out how to use the Libby app through my library to get a bunch of ebooks to read on my kindle, instead of trying to entertain myself with reading posts or things on my phone.

And it’s just made me think about people who can’t seem to get away from their phones, or young kids having phones. There are certain functions that most people need in order to be functional. People need to be able to check the time, people need to be able to write things down, people like listening to music or podcasts, and communicating with people when they need it. Most people nowadays fill all of those functions with one tool- a phone- but a phone isn’t the only thing that does those things. I really wonder if a lot of phone-reliance could be alleviated by just being aware of what we use our phones for. If you use your phone to listen to music or read things, there are other ways to fulfill that same need. If you use your phone to check the time or write down important info, there are other ways to do that. But if you try to cold Turkey cut yourself off from your phone, even for short amounts of time, without finding alternatives to the tools your phone contains, you’re gonna have a really rough time.

[aspire-to-the-light]

Honestly, probably the best social tip I could ever give you guys is literally just ask. Need to make a doctor's appointment but don't know how? Call the doctor's office and ask. Don't know the meaning of what someone said? Ask them. Don't understand the instructions you were given? Ask them to repeat or clarify. This has literally never failed me, no one's gotten angry, no one's refused to answer.

Even in situations where you think it might not work, I once accidentally missed a deadline to accept a job offer, so I called and asked if they could reset it and they did. Just today I called a doctor and asked how to schedule an appointment, the lady told me how, and then I did it. Didn't know if someone was being sarcastic or not, so I asked and they told me. Just ask.

[aspire-to-the-light]

one of the most amazing things that has been said to me in therapy is that self esteem doesn’t exist.

and that floored people and the psych went onto say that what she meant was that self esteem is a concept that actually includes a vast array of things and labelling them all as one thing is really limiting and prevents actual improvement

you could have real strong pride in the things you create and hate your body

you could hate your creations but also want to share them with people

you could not hate yourself at all but not take care of yourself, engage in reckless self endangerment

thats all bundled under ‘self esteem’ but saying ‘i need better self esteem’ doesn’t mean anything

whereas if you say ‘i need to work on ways to keeping myself safe, refusing to act on destructive urges’ or ‘i want to be in a place where i believe compliments trusted people give me’

thats concrete, thats a goal.

having it said in therapy helped a lot of people in my group stop saying ‘i have low self esteem’ and start specifying about the actual issue they have

[aspire-to-the-light]

“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.”

— Julien Smith, The Flinch (via wnq-anonymous)

[aspire-to-the-light]

One of the most important things you can do is learning how to improve. How to be a beginner at something and get better; how to make mistakes and learn from them. It could be a language, an instrument, a skill - anything. As children, we are praised for learning something, even if we make a lot of mistakes while doing it. This kind of compassion stops for adults; and most importantly, we stop having this compassion for ourselves.

A lot of us are focused on results, not on the process itself. School and university put a lot of emphasis on how good you are at something within a certain timeframe - not how you get there. This causes us to think of ourselves as naturally good at some things, but not at others. The truth is that we all got there by practice, not by nature.

We are afraid of making mistakes - even though they are perfectly natural. We feel embarassed when we learn new information - and we feel a strange sense of pride when we know something that others don't.

So here's to trying and failing - and eventually: improving.

[aspire-to-the-light]

https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1529402899016699906?t=lOqdzspgrZrvtYQwNqYiqw&s=19

Good twitter thread, talks about the same things as my Executive Momentum posts.

[aspire-to-the-light]

Now I understand why people make algorithms that automatically reject your CV if you don't use the right keywords. I've been awake until 6am checking references and my brain consists entirely of pea soup now. I've set my damn alarm so I can get up and look at work samples....

[aspire-to-the-light]

there was a guy in my drama school who was a former Olympic gymnast and he was insanely ripped and could do shit like backflip and the splits no problem, and one day he was walking around on his hands and i was like, “damn i wish i could do that!” and he said,

“No you don’t. Not really. You don’t wish that you had done all the shit I had done to be able to do this. You’d like to be able to do it without the practice.” Anyway he explained how he had done gymnastics even from when he was a tiny kid; always missing out on stuff and doing it after school; being away all the time, being a bit of an outcast; been injured several times; won a few competitions but also had many crushing losses - and just generally all the things he had to do before he could do that. And it made me a lot happier about where I chose to put my time, and I appreciated more the things I could do that he wished he could. And whenever I see someone and I’m like, “FUCK I wish I could sing like her, or look like that, or have those talents!” I remember my buff gay gymnastics Gandalf

[aspire-to-the-light]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[aspire-to-the-light]

Indulgence over rest

You can reward yourself for working by taking breaks. “I just need to do 45 minutes of studying, and then I’ll give myself a 15 minute break!”

You can also reward yourself for working by giving yourself nice things. “I’ll take my textbook out to the park and study there, and I’ll buy myself an ice cream on the way home.”

Personally, I find that option 1 is absolutely terrible for my brain and option 2 is far better. YMMV!

The issue with option 1 is that I’m framing it as though work is a chore. And sure, sometimes work is a chore; I hate doing laundry and I hate emails. But I love learning, and cooking, and writing! When I constantly tell myself “you just have to write one page and then you can stop” or “just cook for thirty minutes and then you can lie down”, I constantly reinforce to myself the idea that writing is painful and not-writing is better. By ‘rewarding’ myself for productive tasks by getting to not-do-tasks, I end up feeling like any and all productive tasks are horrible things to be endured.... and any and all unproductive tasks are ‘breaks’, rewards, preferable ways to spend time.

I actually enjoy lots of productive tasks! And there’s lots of unproductive activities that I don’t enjoy, but I can get trapped in doing easily (like mindlessly scrolling on my phone). So I shouldn’t be reinforcing to myself that productive tasks are painful, and unproductive activities are the reward for doing productive tasks.

Indulgences do the opposite. When I tell myself that I’m going to make a nice cup of tea and eat delicious biscuits while I’m writing the essay, I’m trying to make the experience of writing the essay into something I have positive associations with. I want to go to the park and sit under a beautiful old cedar tree and read my fascinating textbook.

For me, it’s a more positive state of mind; rather than thinking about how to force myself through unpleasant work activities with the promise of rest afterwards, I’m trying to think about how to be really nice to myself. Like hell yeah, I’m gonna buy myself my favourite cookies and then I’m gonna play myself inspiring music while I write my emails. I love cookies. Bring it.

[aspire-to-the-light]

How to know when "take a break" isn't working for your brain

If your dash looks anything like mine, Tumblr is quite fond of telling you to take a break. It says things like "your body needs to rest, it's not shameful" and "don't feel bad about getting nothing done during the pandemic, it's a very stressful time" and "capitalism tries to stop us taking breaks but actually breaks are vital". Unfortunately, it took me a long time to realise that most advice in this vein is absolutely horrible for my brain and it is very damaging for me to be constantly hearing those messages. Here are some signs that you might be a person like me, who needs to either block those posts or mentally reverse the advice.

You do want to do something. Check in with your feelings. If you want to do a million different things but can't decide on one, the solution is to roll a dice. Taking a break and doing none of them will probably just make you sad.

You have been lying in bed for 12 hours. "Take a break, rest is important, don't be ashamed" urges your Tumblr. You have been lying in bed for 24 hours. You need to eat something and don't want to get up and make it. Thinking about getting up and making food is very stressful, so you decide to take another break. You have been lying in bed for 48 hours.

You feel just as tired after lying down as you felt before you lay down, but you feel energised and renewed after achieving something - even something small.

When you are "taking a break", you actually feel compelled or obligated to finish the things that your brain has labelled as "break actions" - eg. you take a break by playing a game of solitaire, and don't feel like you can end your break until after you've beaten the solitaire (even if you kind of actually want to get back to work).

Worse, maybe your break actions feel more urgent and compelling than your work - like if you know that your homework is more important than scrolling Twitter, but emotionally you feel like it is absolutely vital to be up-to-date on all the latest world tragedies via Twitter and have all the correct takes, so when you take a break and scroll Twitter you actually get more stressed out.

You find it very easy and enjoyable to finish a task that you've started, but incredibly daunting to start a new task or to restart a task that you took a break from.

You are trying to "take a break" from basic self-care actions like feeding yourself and using the bathroom. Those actions are actually obligatory and you do not get to take breaks from them, sorry.

You feel afraid of introspecting about your goals, because if you worked hard on the things you're passionate about and really enjoy, then you might have to admit to yourself that it's time to stop doing the daily quests in the phone app you don't even like. You don't want to admit that to yourself. You take a break from thinking about it, and go do your daily quests in the phone app you don't even like.

You are afraid of coming back from breaks because you drag them out so long, you're scared of replying to people's emails and messages - you find yourself constantly writing "sorry it took so long to reply", then taking another break because that was stressful

Taking a break becomes your only mechanism for coping when work becomes stressful. Don't know how to start a task? Take a break! Anxious about getting something perfect? Take a break! Made a mistake and upset about it? Take a break instead of fixing it! Burying all your woes in Solitaire is not a healthy kind of "taking breaks" - it is just encountering a problem and responding by giving up.

You find that your breaks inevitably get longer, and harder to come back from, every time you take one

You find yourself nodding along to a "rest is vital and breaks are important!" post and decide that you're taking a break, despite the fact that you have done zero work in a week and aren't taking a break from anything at this point

You are using "I just need a short break" as an excuse to avoid pressure whenever anyone asks about your work, because you are ashamed and uncomfortable

You find that your idea of what is normal is very malleable; it used to be easy to work 12-hour days when you considered it normal and expected and just did it... but now you expect to need a break after 30 minutes of work, suddenly your brain demands one

It feels like you're giving ammunition to the excuse-monster inside your head, who says things like "just five more minutes" and "but breaks are really important" and "can't we just finish this one video" when you're trying to persuade yourself to get back to work - and feeding the monster doesn't feel good

Rest does not make you feel good

Movement makes you feel good

Interacting with people makes you feel recharged and/or inspired

You are diagnosing yourself with burnout when you haven't worked in a long time and no amount of rest seems to be making the "burnout" better

Diagnosing yourself with burnout doesn't feel like relief, or like an explanation of what's being going on, or like finally having a label for something you couldn't speak of - it just feels like feeding the excuse monster, it feels scary

You find it much easier to do work and feel energised when you get out of the bed or room where you've been stagnating, but taking breaks and resting always seems to involve staying put

The unease in your soul is really with yourself, not with the pressure of the outside world

Doing nothing and resting makes you feel very anxious, and you take a break to recover from the anxiety, which feeds a vicious cycle

Think carefully about whether this is you. Many people find that the Tumblr-advice, on resting more and feeling less guilt about taking breaks, is useful and important to them. This post is not aimed at you if you are one of those people. You are not bad for taking breaks. This is purely aimed at the people who are "resting" in ways that actually don't make them happy or rested.

If you think you are one of these people, here are some alternative things to try:

Have tasks that feel productive and exciting, but are very easy to get started on - eg. opening up a Duolingo app and starting a lesson

Try to have lots of things around that make it low-cost to start different activities - for example, roommates who will drag you into the kitchen and ask to cook together, lots of accessible screens (phones and tablets and PCs) with your work in Google docs, and an easily accessible todo list

Instead of finishing a task and then taking a break, leave the very last line of your essay unfinished and then take a break. It's much easier and less daunting to come back and write the final sentence of your essay and then start on the next task, rather than having to come back from a break and immediately figure out a new task. The final line of your essay becomes like an easy starter task that you know exactly how to do, to tempt you back from your break.

Instead of doing 'rest' activities, rotate tasks - eg. alternate working on your website's code and working on your artwork so that you get a 'break' from each type of task while remaining in a flow/work state

Surround yourself with people who treat it as extremely normal to work all day and cook yourself a meal; they should be sympathetic if you express that you're struggling but they should not regard it as the default/normal state of affairs. It is not something your excuse-monster gets to demand. Your excuse-monster is the unreasonable one here, you know it, and you want other people to back you up when you're arguing against it.

Recategorise what your brain thinks of as "rest"; when people tell you to take a break, they are not telling you to lie in bed and play solitaire, they are telling you to work on your novel. Lying in bed and playing solitaire is not rest. It is just not an action that people like us should do.

Internalise that you do not want to lie down and watch TV if it makes you feel bad, and that means you shouldn't do it, no matter how many people tell you that rest is important. You should only do things that make you feel good.

Make a list of things that make you feel good - not the things that are 'supposed' to be restful but things that actually make you feel energised and revived. For me this list includes martial arts and writing poetry and does not include naps or TV.

Do not negotiate with the excuse-monster. IFS does not work on the excuse-monster. The only way to get rid of the excuse-monster is to do the incredibly hard work of actually making yourself feel accomplished enough that the excuse-monster isn't panickedly clinging to its Cookie Clicker high score. The only way out is through.

Instead of resting, indulge. No, I will not lay in bed for another five hours. I will make myself an extra special dessert and a cup of nice tea. It will be nice. It will be worth getting out of bed for. I will treat myself by drinking the tea while I work on my novel (or learn Spanish or write my essay or whatever other task makes me feel good). It is important that the reward for being productive is "I get to eat these delicious biscuits while I work on my essay" or "I get to enjoy this beautiful view at the park while I read my textbook" and not "I did tasks for a bit so now I get to stop doing tasks". Not-doing-tasks is not inherently a reward and mentally categorising it that way will fuck you up.

If you notice a bad routine forming, like scrolling Tumblr for two hours on your phone in bed every day after waking up, do anything to break it before it becomes habit. Uninstall the app. Sleep on the couch. Invite a friend over for an 8am run together. Do not let it become normal, because once it's normal you'll feel like you're being put-upon if you decide to do something good instead, and that's when the monster thrives.

Again, these are ideas for if the standard advice does not work for you. I am not trying to imply that everyone is lazily making excuses to get out of work. I am saying that I have an excuse-monster and these are things I do to try and keep it managed.

I will add more if I think of more later. I mostly just wrote this off the cuff while waiting for my tea to boil. I'm going to get a nice cup of tea to help me through handling my emails!

[aspire-to-the-light]

One view of the internet that I find important is that it’s an amoral ecosystem of ideas, many of which are poisonous to you and can have effects ranging from ‘making you waste your day angry at someone’ to ‘causing you join to a cultish crusade for or against some political ideology that renders you incompatible with large swathes of mainstream society’. If you are a very online person, you cannot just take content as you go, otherwise the hungriest and most efficient predators will snap you up and consume huge amounts of your mental resources. If you are Very Online, the internet will radicalize you by default.

The fact of radicalization is neutral. Certainly there’s nothing guaranteed to be good about the things you already believe and the ways you act; there are extreme-relative-to-society viewpoints and movements floating around that will, in my view, make you a better person. But the majority will not, just because there are more bad things than good things, more incorrect things than correct ones. There’s nothing that says morally righteous movements (or the ones that will make you more thoughtful and happy) are more memetically powerful and good at capturing the imagination and belief system than the immoral.

If you read an unusual claim online, there are two equally important questions to ask about it – the first, of course, is “is this correct?”, and the second is “if I take this seriously, and become the kind of person who believes it, how will it change my life? Do I accept that?”

[aspire-to-the-light]

Arguing about politics online is just about the worst thing I can do to my brain. It makes me into a person I don't like, and also none of my friends like.

For now I have a rule about online discussions: topics are only okay if I can POKE THEM WITH A STICK.

What is the best method for fixing a broken shelf? This is an acceptable topic to discuss online. I can poke my shelves with a stick. If I am uncertain who is correct and who is wrong, I can just try both methods for fixing my shelf and report back on how stable my furniture is afterwards. The discussion is likely to be practical and useful for something that is relevant to my life (ie fixing my broken shelving units) and this means that I will practice good habits of thinking and debate - things like "checking what the right answer is in reality", "making my models detailed and concrete enough that I could actually use them to achieve something", "collaborating with my debate partner on finding truth rather than trying to win by forcing them to adopt my view" and "grounding my thoughts in evidence that I understand thoroughly rather than just citing the paper that supports my viewpoint".

For instance, if I make the mistake of angrily citing a source I don't really understand just because it seems to support my viewpoint, I will rapidly discover my mistake when I attempt to fix my shelf using that method and I put all the screws in backwards because I didn't really get the details.

What is the best tactic for winning at chess? This is also an acceptable topic for debate, because it is okay if the stick is metaphorical. I can play an online game of chess and test out the ideas we are discussing. I can relate the ideas directly to the actions and experiences of moving my pieces on a chessboard. If someone is bullshitting me, I can see for myself that they're bullshitting when they repeatedly lose games. The stick is my mouse and I can poke the little squares on chess-dot-com and see what happens.

How should we fix misogyny/homophobia/police/immigration/corruption/whatever? No. Stop. This is not a sane topic to discuss on social media. There is literally no reason for me to post my opinion on this on Twitter. I am not even an American and yet I find myself having strong opinions on US gun control. Step back and wonder why it has become so normal for everyone to angrily discuss their opinions on these topics online, despite the fact that doing so will make some of us literally go insane.

There is no possible way for me to poke this with a metaphorical stick and see what happens; I am not in a position to publish a policy recommendation and see what happens, or vote for a different law and see what happens, or establish a new policy in my home/school/community and see what happens. If I end up in that position and I need to know about these things, I will learn from trusted sources like academics and journalists and books. If a marginalised person wants to tell me about a bad experience they have had with these things, I will listen respectfully. What is the point of having a take? The government and culture are not going to change because I made enough angry tweets saying that they should.

Being unable to poke it with a stick is the thing that makes you go insane. You can't go out and run some experiments and figure out who's right, so you just yell at each other into infinity. You don't have to actually execute the strategy you propose, so it doesn't matter if you don't fully understand all the details in your plan. You might not even notice that you don't understand! There's no motive to be right, only to look good and be popular. There's no improvement, no feedback loop that makes you more competent at getting-things-right as you try and fail different things over time. It never feels good because you will never debate yourself into a situation where you have successfully figured out the best way to fix your country. You can successfully debate until you figure out the best way to fix your shelves.

So that's my strategy. I don't divide topics into "political" and "not political". You can talk about 'political' subjects: "how do I best make my transgender friend feel welcomed, safe and included?" is a valid question to debate online. I can poke my trans friend with a stick and ask them whether that made them feel welcomed or not. "How do I stay safe at a protest?" is a valid question although people will probably recommend that you don't poke the police with a stick. But "does affirmative action make racism better or worse?" is a topic I am literally not qualified to have an opinion on. I can't poke that with a stick. Absolutely nothing I can tweet will change anything about affirmative action policies worldwide. I don't know the answer. If I wish to know then I shall read a book and look at data, not arrange a shouting match with an angry Conservative wearing an anime girl's face in 240 character increments and expect this to somehow enlighten me or do anything other than make me insane. And if I wish to change public policy on this issue, I will donate to researchers and campaigners, because I am aware that Tweeting about it will not fix the problem. And anyone who says I need to Tweet about it to "be informed" or to "be a good activist" has been infected by the insanity, and I should try to do something kind and helpful for them like invite them on a trip to the Botanic Gardens and read poetry to them about real and tangible things like raindrops and dogs and soup.

This is the tactic I have arrived at by repeatedly poking my brain with the metaphorical stick of interacting-with-social-media and seeing what happens. Try it with your own brain. You will know if it works for you when you see actual real changes in your actual real life.

Losing friends to twitter brain?

I’ve noticed a weird pattern. In the last months a couple of people that I know in real life became increasingly unpleasant on social media. Every single post sounded like it was directed at racists/terfs/antivaxers etc even though they had zero followers like that. Every interaction no matter how carefully worded, resulted in getting shouted at as if you were part of their big ‘the enemy’ group. (I think I’m going to call this specific kind of hypervigilant constant hostility ‘twitter brain’, though I’ve seen it everywhere).

Since I wanted to maintain a real life connection to these people, I tried explaining to them why this was so unpleasant and why I wanted to unfollow them on social media for now. Most seemed surprisingly understanding of that, but for some reason they all said something along the lines of “it’s so sad that social media drives people apart like this”. And when I tried to explain to them that social media may have created this dynamic but it was still their behavior as shaped by social media that was driving me away, I just hit a wall. They were aware of the evils of social media, but they were completely incapable of seeing their own behavior as a product of that.

So now I’m thinking about how to get beyond this. It’s clear that the last two years have been incredibly stressful for everyone and that most people have been on social media way more than is good for them, and as a result they have increasingly conceptualizing the world as consisting entirely of ‘people who 100% agree with me’ and ‘racist antivax terfs’. Social media will do that to you if you let it.

And that good-evil binary, with a clear and militant-feeling answer on how to fight it (just be really angry at the evil people all the time) provides comfort, it provides validation, it provides an answer to how to act in a frightening world. And anything that challenges that also challenges your self esteem, challenges your knowledge that you are one of the good guys, challenges the idea that you can tell safe from unsafe, makes the ground under your feet feel unsteady again. It’s no surprise that people lash out.

But honestly, losing people to twitter-brain looks a lot like losing people to the far-right. The constant anger, the strict good-evil binary, the self-isolation by pushing away of friends with slightly different perspectives, the idea that only lashing out is the appropriately militant response to evil… that’s very familiar. The final outcome is probably significantly less harmful, at worst some will be recruited into the kind of call-out culture that mobs and harasses people over tiny mistakes, but none of them are going to end up planning a mass shooting. Most don’t even seem to graduate to that level of internet villain at all and just gradually damage their mental health and social life. 

Still, this shit is concerning. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get people out of there are so far my main answer has been ‘don’t engage online, only talk to people offline’. For a lot of people like this their hypervigilant hostility switches on the moment they get on social media and switches off or is in sleeper mode when they’re not. It’s been surprisingly possible to maintain friendships with most of these people after unfollowing them on social media and gentle, slow, real life conversations have been by most effective tool so far in talking to people about what I was seeing happening to them. But I’m not sure if that’s effective enough, ‘cause I can talk to them offline for an hour but the rest of the week they’ll be online again for hours per night getting pulled back into this stuff, and the stress and unsafety that motivates this behavior is still there. So.. yeah.. no clear answers on this one yet. 

[aspire-to-the-light]

Arguing about politics online is just about the worst thing I can do to my brain. It makes me into a person I don't like, and also none of my friends like.

For now I have a rule about online discussions: topics are only okay if I can POKE THEM WITH A STICK.

What is the best method for fixing a broken shelf? This is an acceptable topic to discuss online. I can poke my shelves with a stick. If I am uncertain who is correct and who is wrong, I can just try both methods for fixing my shelf and report back on how stable my furniture is afterwards. The discussion is likely to be practical and useful for something that is relevant to my life (ie fixing my broken shelving units) and this means that I will practice good habits of thinking and debate - things like "checking what the right answer is in reality", "making my models detailed and concrete enough that I could actually use them to achieve something", "collaborating with my debate partner on finding truth rather than trying to win by forcing them to adopt my view" and "grounding my thoughts in evidence that I understand thoroughly rather than just citing the paper that supports my viewpoint".

For instance, if I make the mistake of angrily citing a source I don't really understand just because it seems to support my viewpoint, I will rapidly discover my mistake when I attempt to fix my shelf using that method and I put all the screws in backwards because I didn't really get the details.

What is the best tactic for winning at chess? This is also an acceptable topic for debate, because it is okay if the stick is metaphorical. I can play an online game of chess and test out the ideas we are discussing. I can relate the ideas directly to the actions and experiences of moving my pieces on a chessboard. If someone is bullshitting me, I can see for myself that they're bullshitting when they repeatedly lose games. The stick is my mouse and I can poke the little squares on chess-dot-com and see what happens.

How should we fix misogyny/homophobia/police/immigration/corruption/whatever? No. Stop. This is not a sane topic to discuss on social media. There is literally no reason for me to post my opinion on this on Twitter. I am not even an American and yet I find myself having strong opinions on US gun control. Step back and wonder why it has become so normal for everyone to angrily discuss their opinions on these topics online, despite the fact that doing so will make some of us literally go insane.

There is no possible way for me to poke this with a metaphorical stick and see what happens; I am not in a position to publish a policy recommendation and see what happens, or vote for a different law and see what happens, or establish a new policy in my home/school/community and see what happens. If I end up in that position and I need to know about these things, I will learn from trusted sources like academics and journalists and books. If a marginalised person wants to tell me about a bad experience they have had with these things, I will listen respectfully. What is the point of having a take? The government and culture are not going to change because I made enough angry tweets saying that they should.

Being unable to poke it with a stick is the thing that makes you go insane. You can't go out and run some experiments and figure out who's right, so you just yell at each other into infinity. You don't have to actually execute the strategy you propose, so it doesn't matter if you don't fully understand all the details in your plan. You might not even notice that you don't understand! There's no motive to be right, only to look good and be popular. There's no improvement, no feedback loop that makes you more competent at getting-things-right as you try and fail different things over time. It never feels good because you will never debate yourself into a situation where you have successfully figured out the best way to fix your country. You can successfully debate until you figure out the best way to fix your shelves.

So that's my strategy. I don't divide topics into "political" and "not political". You can talk about 'political' subjects: "how do I best make my transgender friend feel welcomed, safe and included?" is a valid question to debate online. I can poke my trans friend with a stick and ask them whether that made them feel welcomed or not. "How do I stay safe at a protest?" is a valid question although people will probably recommend that you don't poke the police with a stick. But "does affirmative action make racism better or worse?" is a topic I am literally not qualified to have an opinion on. I can't poke that with a stick. Absolutely nothing I can tweet will change anything about affirmative action policies worldwide. I don't know the answer. If I wish to know then I shall read a book and look at data, not arrange a shouting match with an angry Conservative wearing an anime girl's face in 240 character increments and expect this to somehow enlighten me or do anything other than make me insane. And if I wish to change public policy on this issue, I will donate to researchers and campaigners, because I am aware that Tweeting about it will not fix the problem. And anyone who says I need to Tweet about it to "be informed" or to "be a good activist" has been infected by the insanity, and I should try to do something kind and helpful for them like invite them on a trip to the Botanic Gardens and read poetry to them about real and tangible things like raindrops and dogs and soup.

This is the tactic I have arrived at by repeatedly poking my brain with the metaphorical stick of interacting-with-social-media and seeing what happens. Try it with your own brain. You will know if it works for you when you see actual real changes in your actual real life.

Losing friends to twitter brain?

I’ve noticed a weird pattern. In the last months a couple of people that I know in real life became increasingly unpleasant on social media. Every single post sounded like it was directed at racists/terfs/antivaxers etc even though they had zero followers like that. Every interaction no matter how carefully worded, resulted in getting shouted at as if you were part of their big ‘the enemy’ group. (I think I’m going to call this specific kind of hypervigilant constant hostility ‘twitter brain’, though I’ve seen it everywhere).

Since I wanted to maintain a real life connection to these people, I tried explaining to them why this was so unpleasant and why I wanted to unfollow them on social media for now. Most seemed surprisingly understanding of that, but for some reason they all said something along the lines of “it’s so sad that social media drives people apart like this”. And when I tried to explain to them that social media may have created this dynamic but it was still their behavior as shaped by social media that was driving me away, I just hit a wall. They were aware of the evils of social media, but they were completely incapable of seeing their own behavior as a product of that.

So now I’m thinking about how to get beyond this. It’s clear that the last two years have been incredibly stressful for everyone and that most people have been on social media way more than is good for them, and as a result they have increasingly conceptualizing the world as consisting entirely of ‘people who 100% agree with me’ and ‘racist antivax terfs’. Social media will do that to you if you let it.

And that good-evil binary, with a clear and militant-feeling answer on how to fight it (just be really angry at the evil people all the time) provides comfort, it provides validation, it provides an answer to how to act in a frightening world. And anything that challenges that also challenges your self esteem, challenges your knowledge that you are one of the good guys, challenges the idea that you can tell safe from unsafe, makes the ground under your feet feel unsteady again. It’s no surprise that people lash out.

But honestly, losing people to twitter-brain looks a lot like losing people to the far-right. The constant anger, the strict good-evil binary, the self-isolation by pushing away of friends with slightly different perspectives, the idea that only lashing out is the appropriately militant response to evil… that’s very familiar. The final outcome is probably significantly less harmful, at worst some will be recruited into the kind of call-out culture that mobs and harasses people over tiny mistakes, but none of them are going to end up planning a mass shooting. Most don’t even seem to graduate to that level of internet villain at all and just gradually damage their mental health and social life. 

Still, this shit is concerning. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get people out of there are so far my main answer has been ‘don’t engage online, only talk to people offline’. For a lot of people like this their hypervigilant hostility switches on the moment they get on social media and switches off or is in sleeper mode when they’re not. It’s been surprisingly possible to maintain friendships with most of these people after unfollowing them on social media and gentle, slow, real life conversations have been by most effective tool so far in talking to people about what I was seeing happening to them. But I’m not sure if that’s effective enough, ‘cause I can talk to them offline for an hour but the rest of the week they’ll be online again for hours per night getting pulled back into this stuff, and the stress and unsafety that motivates this behavior is still there. So.. yeah.. no clear answers on this one yet. 

[aspire-to-the-light]

A quick life update:

So I'm a super-early-stage startup founder now or something, I guess.

I'm regularly working until 6am, I'm throwing my life savings at a huge career risk, I have no safety net if I fail, and there's a very solid chance my startup won't make it because statistically most don't. Yet somehow none of that matters.

These past few weeks have been the most relaxed, confident and fulfilled I've ever felt, ever. Somehow this is the best my mental health has been in years - by a mile. I feel confident in saying I've beaten depression and I don't think it will come back.

I don't struggle with anxiety anymore because there's no point in feeling anxious; rather than wallowing around being anxious I should just fix the problem that's causing me anxiety. Of course, it's easy to say that, but in the past I've never been able to just do it. I think the difference is that I feel totally in control of my outcomes now. I'll get anxious about writing a report for a boss because it doesn't matter how objectively good or correct the report is - I have to figure out how to please my boss' subjective standards, and I can never really 100% know how to do that. Running a startup? I just have to be correct. I just have to win. I don't have to please any boss. So I don't really sit around being anxious or miserable any more - I just figure out what winning would look like, because I get to define that now, and then I figure out how to win, and then I go try my best to do that. I know it's irrational to have a feeling of absolute control over the outcome, when startups involve a huge amount of luck - but I just feel like I'm in control. So it isn't scary, really, no matter how risky it is.

I'm not really struggling with executive function, either, because I understand exactly how all my tasks need to be executed. There's never that feeling of knowing that I need to write my English essay, but not really knowing how to get started or what the first steps should be. I defined every task on my todo list. I know what the steps are, because the steps are whatever I say they are. I don't always get everything done, because I'm juggling a huge amount and I'm still pretty disorganised, but that ADHD paralysed feeling of just wanting to sit there and scroll social media and not start any tasks - that feeling is gone. Working until 6am doesn't feel painful or difficult. It feels satisfyingly exhausting, like the endorphin high after a good exercise session.

I keep encountering things that feel like they might be really difficult, but then I get this immensely comforting sense of... the best way I can describe it is that scene in Moana where all her ancestors are right behind her. Like recently I had to make a very big scary decision, and I wanted to find an adult and ask for advice and then I realised (in a big holy shit moment) that I knew absolutely nobody qualified to tell me the answer. I am the adult now. Everyone else who works on this project needed me to tell them what to do. And that was almost terrifying... and then I realised I've read about this exact feeling. I've read people describe that feeling in books, at TED talks, on twitter - that "holy shit I am the adult" feeling is probably a universal startup founder feeling. Thinking about it now, I just get this sense that I'm walking down a road I know from stories, that others have walked before me, that I am incredibly lucky to have a roadmap to.

There are so many new challenges and they're exciting. I've never really interviewed people for roles before. I interviewed candidates for 6 different roles for most of last week. In the back of the mind I've been running this constant self-evaluation process trying to figure out what the key skills are for interviewing, how I should get better at it, where I could look for resources... And that's a good feeling, too. I feel like I'm learning. I feel so excited to get better at this. I am privileged to be able to choose people to surround myself with who will give me clear, valuable feedback so I can actually get stronger. I feel ready to tackle whatever new skill I need to learn next week.

I am only a few weeks or months in, depending on how you define it, but I already know I will not regret this. Even if I burn out my entire runway and get nowhere and achieve nothing with this startup, this will have been the best thing I've ever done for myself. This enables me to be my best self. This feels so much like my best self that I take joy and pride in almost everything I'm doing, even the mistakes I'm making because I absolutely treasure how much I'm actually learning from every mistake. I never learned this much in years in school.

I don't think this would have been possible without me getting care. I'm disabled and sometimes I struggle with feeding myself. I used to go entire days just lying in bed feeling too weak and hungry to even make myself a meal. I have a carer currently, who comes round for an hour or so in the mornings to make sure I eat breakfast. It turns out that was all I needed all along - I can make myself all the other meals so long as I've got that energy from consistently eating at least one meal. And that revolutionised everything about my life and I've gone from being unable to hold down a job at all, realistically unable work more than a couple hours in the day if I was lucky, to.... this. I don't know how much is the startup vs how much is the care, really, but I reckon that's worth sharing in case it helps break the stereotypes of disabled people who need care. I'm disabled, I need care, and I'm also founding a startup and working sixteen hour days. I could not work these hours on anything else. My last job was an incredibly good job by the standards of working-for-a-boss jobs, but I can't work a 9-5. I have a sleep disorder. I can work a noon-6am and I'm doing it and I am the happiest I have ever been.

I did not think it was possible for an obligate extravert to be this happy and fulfilled in the midst of a pandemic that prevents me seeing anyone for months. Mental health is a weird thing, I guess. What I thought I needed - parties, hugs, money, security - turned out not to be as important. I need breakfast and I need to be in charge of my own destiny. And it turns out that if I have those things, I have the capacity to be incredibly happy. Not that I'm just sitting around feeling wirehead joy all the time, but more like - I feel excited, fulfilled, engaged, fascinated, motivated, confident, decisive, inspired. I might not feel good all the time but I never feel hopeless, helpless, angsty, directionless or meaningless. I'm never bored. I feel bad things sometimes but I don't get into spirals or traps where I just sit around wallowing in the bad things, because I feel empowered to act.

I keep talking to people who think I'm decades older than I am. Apparently I sound it. I feel like I've aged a decade in a year.

The best part is the certainty. It feels like I was meant to do this. It feels like all the foundations I've been laying for years and years are paying off. It feels like I always sort of knew I had to do this.

I'm not sure why I'm writing all this out, except to say something like - I don't think everyone should follow their dreams because I really don't think everyone would experience things this way, but if you're anything like me (and I don't know how to define "like me" yet but people have been telling me that I was meant to found a startup since I was a little kid), you should consider quitting your job (no matter how good and secure a job it is) and trying to take over the world.

I have found so much joy.

So yeah, that's my life update.

[aspire-to-the-light]

I really do not normally like this blog, but this post is a solid:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/

And what I'd add to it is that often, as an autistic person, if I'm trying to understand you it will sound like I'm arguing with you. It will sound like I'm picking a fight with you, and I'm not.

A silly, toy example in which we are building a blanket fort:

A: "We should tip the sofa over on its edge here, and put this chair over here."

B: "Surely we should put this chair here, closer to the sofa? Otherwise the blanket isn't big enough to stretch between them, so we won't have a ceiling."

A: "Oh, we have a much bigger blanket."

B: "We do?"

A: "Yeah, it's in the cupboard under the stairs if you want to go grab it. It might actually be great to bring it over so we can check it all fits!"

The thing that's happening here is that B didn't know what question to ask to make the world make sense, so they had to explain what their understanding of the world was so that A could point out where theirs differed.

We're often told not to argue back, that it's rude, that asking questions is more polite. But B couldn't have asked a question when they didn't know what information they were missing. All B knew was that A seemed to think this was a good plan, and that didn't match with their understanding of the resources available. Only after A mentioned the existence of the bigger blanket could B have hit on the right question to ask: "Oh, are we planning on using the bigger blanket for this? Where's that stored, again?"

And this happens all the time when people are trying to explain neurotypical minds to me. I often end up explaining how my own mind works, hoping they can pinpoint where theirs is different, but it's interpreted as a challenge.

You might tell me I need to change something about how I behave or talk, and I'm often happy to do it, but without a good model of neurotypical minds I'm left thinking, "huh, I'm being told to be more concise, but I don't like it when others are concise; I often feel like they're leaving out information, explaining things insufficiently or using a text size that is too damn small. This doesn't make sense, so others' minds must be different to mine in some relevant way, but how? Do they have better eyes to read smaller fonts, are they more comfortable with missing out on information, or perhaps they prefer looking up their own explanations? Without understanding that, I can't tell how to execute on this being-more-concise thing - whether I should use more jargon and do less explaining, or make my margins thinner."

So what I say is something like, "So here's why I don't like reading concise text..." and it sounds like I'm arguing why I shouldn't become more concise after all. I'm not (always). I'm laying my cards on the table: here's my understanding of how brains work, based on my own brain, and I'd like you to tell me exactly where your understanding differs from mine. Then I can make my mental model better.

This seems like a distinctly autistic thing that lots of us do, and I've never heard an allistic person express struggling with it in these terms. So here's my cards on the table, I guess: what's up with that? How do allistics manage to extract information, when stating your own opinion could be taken as arguing, but you don't know what question to ask until you know which bit of the world you're confused about? Which bit of my model of this problem is an issue you find you can get around?

[aspire-to-the-light]

I just want to say really quickly: this last bit isn't true. For most people reading this, you probably can get your clothes tailored.

Now, some people are buying clothes exclusively at charity stores and Primark, and paying £3-5 per shirt. If that's what you have to do to afford clothes, then yeah, you genuinely can't afford to get your clothes tailored. This is more for people who have something vaguely approximating a salary you can live on.

I'm a trans guy, and I'm short and stockily built; wide hips, broad shoulders, thighs like a cyclist. It is nearly impossible for me to find clothes that fit me, especially trousers. Anything wide enough to fit round my hips is usually 30 centimetres too long. Anything short enough for my legs, I usually can't get my damn ankles out the end of the leg. In my hunt for trousers that fit me I have bought £15 H&M clothes, I have bought £30 department store clothes, I have even spent unspeakable amounts in John Lewis when I was in a rush before an interview.

I got a whole bunch of my trousers tailored - waists taken in, hems shortened, extra fabric taken out of the back, etc - and if I remember correctly it cost me £7-12 per garment.

That is, if I'd just bought the damn charity shop trousers which were far too long for me (but fit perfectly around my hips).... then gotten them shortened at the tailor... it would've worked out to £3-5 + £7-12 = £10-17, which is cheaper than buying new £20 trousers at a department store.

Now, you definitely have to find the right place. If you go to one of those professional shirt places that sells shirts that are £50 off the rack or £200 to have made specially for you, then yeah, you need some money and most people can't afford that.

I went to a tiny place in a lower-income bit of London which advertised itself as a dry cleaner, with "alterations" added to the sign out front. The walls were covered in bagged-up wedding dresses. There was no changing room, so I hid in the back room while I put my other trousers on. It was dusty. The shop's owner spoke just enough English to communicate, hummed along to a crackly radio in Arabic and tutted at me. He used pins to mark his place and did not write my measurements down. His stitching was neater than most machines', basically invisible in most places, and everything fit perfectly. This was not a place celebrities go, he asked for a very fair price and his work was beautiful.

Tailoring is something I recommend to anyone who finds themselves shopping in more expensive clothing shops because they're hunting for something that fits. You can go back to your favourite cheap shops, buy things you like, then pay a tailor to alter your existing clothes. It's also a way to be more sustainable (keep altering and repairing your old clothes rather than buying new), support small local businesses that are often run by immigrants, and feel more confident in your clothes. I'm a big fan!

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.