Today, I yakked about sleep.
As patient readers know, sleep is a sore subject with me. Not only is my sleep apnea completely untreated and presumably slowly killing me every time I take a nap, but my sleep is also disturbed by my depression and by my hyperactive mind.
In fact, shortly after recording the vid, I made a connection that seems obvious in retrospect (as they often do) but which I nevertheless think might be quite fruitful, at least in terms of insight.
And who knows, it might even turn out to be useful.
I have known for a long time that one of the fundamental aspects of my mind is its ability to consign thinking tasks to the background of the mind and continue to process things via my powerful subconscious mind, only coming back into my conscious mind when it outputs the result.
This is the engine which produces my substantial gift for insight.
And it operates so well (?) that I honestly have no idea how many processes are running in the background of my mind right now, or what they are.
Or how much of my mental resources they take up. I get the feeling it’s a lot.
And it makes me wish I had Task Manager for my brain so I could go through the process list and shut down the ones I don’t care about any more, and free up priceless mental bandwidth that way.
It does help when I have to wait for something, though, because I have a solid twenty minutes of backlog to clear up at any given time and I don’t get bored till it’s done.
Then it’s like I wake up and suddenly realize I’m super bored now.
I can only provide my own mental stimulation for so long.
Anyhow, the insight in question was to ask what all this mentation does to my sleep.
I mean, it can’t be good for it. No wonder I have felt like the inside of my skull was a very noisy place for so long. It’s like a very busy open office in there, full of the desks of people all working on different tasks like my mind is the city desk at a major newspaper.
This just in : mental overload impacts sleep. Duh. More news to follow.
The question then becomes what the heck can I do about this issue. Task Manager dreams aside, there are no obvious ways to convince your mind to cancel all its subconscious programs so it can truly shut down and not just go into the ironically named “sleep mode” when what you need is a cold reboot.
Eastern meditation practices spring to mind. I’ve thought for a long time that this is what meditation really does for a person. It allows them to synchronize their scattered modern minds and shut down all those extraneous processes and get back those mental resources so they can be used for important things like mood stabilization.
There are no practical reasons why I couldn’t start meditating. There’s a million apps out there to help with it. I could put one on my phone and use it every day.
Yeah right. That’s not gonna happen. I’d install it, play around with it, maybe do the meditation a couple of times, then lose interest when the thing stopped being a novel toy and started feeling like, ya know, work.
I have a truly tragic lack of self-discipline and I know how I am about these things. If I am to get the fuck over myself and get to have an actual life, I am going to have to remember that once that initial burst of enthusiasm fades, I will lose all interest in whatever it is I “should” be doing and want to move on to the next thing.
There has to be a way around that problem.
Maybe I just need to find the right thing for me. Something I find sufficiently rewarding.
And that is preferably not a video game.
More after the break.
Money is power
Money is power. And power corrupts. Ergo money corrupts.
And while there is no such thing as absolute money in the mathematical sense, on a spiritual level it is, indeed, possible to have so much of it that it corrupts you absolutely.
Right now, the world is at the mercy of something like a thousand utterly degenerate billionaires so hollowed out by wealth and privilege and greed that they can’t stop themselves from accumulating more and more and more and doing whatever it takes, no matter how short-sighted and despicable, to keep mindlessly acquiring.
I’d love to ask these people to name something they wouldn’t do even if it made them richer. I bet they’d have to think pretty hard to come up with an answer.
Along the way, there have been many failures on the part of those who are supposed to keep these monsters in check. They have managed to bribe, swindle, compromise, and otherwise neutralize all forms of accountability and restraint and they did it precisely because they cannot control their rapacious avarice and so their world has the deadly simplicity of all addicts and hoarders.
All that matters is more. More is good. Less is bad. That is the sum total of their ethic. They have clearly demonstrated that they would set the world on fire to make a buck.
In fact, they’re doing it right now.
And we’re all paying the price. The world is on fire. It gets worse every year. And yet the odds are in our favour by 8 million to 1.
Billions of us. Hundreds of them. If we rise there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop us. We can flex out true power, take the handgun away from the toddler, and set the world back on the right track and it doesn’t even have to be particularly violent.
Look at the millions showing up at marches already. They show the power of the people because nobody did a damn thing to try to stop them.
Even the fascists knew better.
Power corrupts. But we the people are the real power.
It’s time we woke up and embraced it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.