First off, here’s today’s vid.

I had another idea and even recorded video chatting about it, but the video turned out to be badly out of sync, and then the webcam mysteriously stopped working, and so that idea died.

But that is OK. A full reboot of my computer fixed the glitches, and I think today’s little talk turned out better than the first one would have anyhow.

You will notice there are a lot more little jump cuts in this latest vlog. That is not just because I am doing what other vloggers do and putting little cuts in to make a talking head it more visually interesting.

No, that was just a happy little bonus. Mainly, it’s because I edited out more little imperfections like overlong pauses and stammers and whatnot this time.

The process is a tad crude as of now, but it will improve over time.

I also want to start writing some sort of outline beforehand, just to make sure I cover all the points that I want to cover. I don’t want to write it out like a speech. That would rob it of spontaneity, not to mention creating the logistical problem of reading off the screen and looking at the camera at the same time. I certainly don’t want to be one of those noob YouTubers who can’t stop looking at themselves on their computer screen and hence never looks straight at the camera.

That is terrible amateurish and very off-putting. Just imagine what it would be like to actually have a real life conversation with someone who never looked you in the eye!

So I won’t be writing a full script for the episodes any time soon. As things progress, I might develop the basic techniques to the point where I feel I can take the kind of time it would take to write a script, memorize and deliver it a sentence or two at a time, then stitch the whole thing back together.

But for now, I am going to keep using the “babble at the camera then edit it into coherence” method.

All will come about in the fullness of time. That is something I need to learn. Depression destroyed my faith in the future for many years, making it nearly impossible to believe in delayed gratification and hence making it very hard to have faith that things will progress nicely on their own if you just set them on the right path and get out of the way

It all comes back to building up your faith in the universe to the point where you trust it enough to stop trying to control everything, and worse, rejecting all things you cannot control enough.

That is the sort of thing that leads to isolation, and that only furthers the depression. The depressed person retreats into an environment where they can control the level of stimulation and where nothing spontaneous or unexpected can happen.

That succeeds in throttling down the stimulation level to a tolerable (very low and highly selective) point, but it kind of precludes the sort of connections to others that might well help.

After all, other human beings are inherently unpredictable, uncontrollable, and might even hurt you. They are certainly a very powerful form of stimulation no matter what.

So clearly, if the extreme low stimulation regime is to be maintained, people have to go.

Turns out, you need some damned stimulation in order to remain sane. You especially need connection with others. Study after study shows that the greatest predictor of happiness is the quality of your connections to others. Connecting to others is more important than job, income, social status, beauty, and all the other things we foolishly pursue, thinking they will bring us happiness.

And any of those things might help… for a while. Certainly they all can provide the sort of pleasurable distractions that the decadent often confuse with happiness.

But that sort of happiness is fleeting, and sooner or later you are left alone with yourself and that is when you find out just how lonely and detached you are.

Long-term happiness, the science says, comes from making solid connections with people with whom you share a deep appreciation and respect with one another. One can call it a peer group, but that does not convey the necessary richness and supportiveness of the connections.

Of course, the most natural source of those connections is one’s family, either biological or artificial. But there is something about modern society, a massive and pervasive centripetal force that pulls us apart from one another.

Maybe that is just what happens when you cut so many of the ties that bind and define us. The extended family is gone, the church is largely gone, faith in institutions is gone. We sought freedom to define ourselves and ended up with perpetual self-doubt as the booby prize.

I would have liked to at least had the option to believe in things. I look at more authoritarian cultures and I admire their sense of order. It seems, from the outside, that they work a lot harder to find a place for everyone. Nobody is simply left out of society because they couldn’t take the rat race.

Remember, even if you win the rat race… you’re still a rat.

But that doesn’t necessarily require an authoritarian society like China. It simply requires a society that does not treat people as if they were disposable. One that realizes that it is in society’s best interest to find a place for everybody where they can be productive.

But oh no, that would be the dreaded Nanny State!

Sounds better to me than what we have now, the Neglectful Parent State.

My parents gave me so much freedom. And freedom is lovely, right? More freedom is always good.

From an early age, I could stay up as long as I wanted, go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, and my parents would not object.

They wouldn’t even notice.

It’s a wonder I didn’t act out more, honestly.