Week of thoughts..

Okay, so @pechichemena has put forth the idea of a week of thoughts... Okay, so here we go.

I find myself always with so many projects and ideas and unfortunately I'm quite terrible at following through on any of them. I'm sure most folks can relate, as life is just so frenetic nowadays. And the thing I've learned, as part of the Abraxas Initiative, is that the velocity of life is only as frenetic as you let it be. But unfortunately...

THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO SLOW DOWN.

Much of the torment that people feel in today's world is engineered. I touched on this a few weeks ago I think, in my post about Supporting your local Scene. But something that I have learned, through great trial and tribulation, is that American society is fully and completely engineered to inflict distress on it's citizens, and then keep that distress at fever-pitch, because distressed animals will seek any comfort they can get.

And ofcourse, there is good old Convenience Culture to deliver comfort on a silver platter, for just the price of your life. Consider how virtually every sort of product, whether it be an object or drug or especially, a food; is designed around the idea of planned obsolescence, or more fundamentally, to exploit The Law of Diminishing Returns, as a means of behavioural modification.

In economics, diminishing returns is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant. The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant ("ceteris paribus"), will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns.[1]
The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common.
A common example is adding more people to a job, such as the assembly of a car on a factory floor. At some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other's way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more due to inputs being used less effectively.[2] Another well-studied example is throwing more headcount at software development, yielding Brooks's law.
Wikipedia - Law of Diminishing Returns

I have a couple of metaphors that I'm going to throw at you, because it's easier that way.

Imagine that your attention was an expendable resource (hint hint, It totally is) because you can only -do- what you are paying attention to. Now imagine that you are a tractor., and you have a field to plow. Your attention is the fuel for this tractor. When you pour attention into a goal, your tractor moves forward toward that goal... Easy-peasy, right?

Photo by Christophe Laurenceau on Unsplash

Except... now imagine that everyone around you was judging your tractors worth not by how fast or far it went, but how much attention you poured into it's appearance. People all over the place are shining their tractors and painting them and while they are doing that... their tractor hasn't moved

ONE SINGLE CENTIMETER.

But hold on... there are some other folks out there who say that appearances don't matter (good for them, right?) What -really- matters is how LOUD your tractor is... (oh, okay...) So these people aren't shining a thing.. they are installing the loudest exhaust pipes they can find, and some super-inventive guy builds a trumpet into his, so now it's not just LOUD, it can play music... And everyone is blown away.. and follows suit.. And now it's so damn loud that the people shining their tractors can't ignore it, and some of them are putting attention into changing their tractors now, because clearly, it's the VOLUME that matters.

And they have not progressed

ONE SINGLE CENTIMETER.

But the shiners have a secret weapon.. Strobe lights! So now they are building massive flashing lights on their tractors, so bright they can't be ignored.

And then the heretics.. the foul bastards who go both Bright and Loud... screw those guys, they're total poseurs... Sheesh, how do they think they'll ever get -anywhere- doing tha... Oh god what's that SMELL!!?!?!?!

Yep, somebody just loaded sulfur into his exhaust pipe. Gods the stench!! But wait.. man he's getting an awful lot of -other peoples- attention now.

Wait guys.. I have an idea.. We only have so much attention for our tractors.. But what if we spare some time and build one big huge amazeballs tractor! And it can represent all of us!!

NOT ONE SINGLE CENTIMETER.

And there you are, on your little tractor, surrounded by a cacophony of visual, auditory and olfactory sensation, and all the different Sense-cults are judging you by their standards, and trying to get you to join them in building their super-tractors, and all you know is that you gotta do SOMETHING!
Enough of the metaphor building.. I'm sure you get the point. The thing is, that this is -exactly- how Consumer Culture functions. Substitute money [a way to buy the products of someone else's attention (labour)] or any other expendable resource, and it works the same.

But in this case, I'm speaking of your attention specifically... because this is the entire purpose of mass-media... Ratings, a metric by which attention is quantified. The problem being, that putting all your attention into making your tractor (Life) shiny or loud or stinky does nothing to move you towards your goals. As a matter of fact, it is downright counterproductive.

And so, rather than focusing on going forward, you end up trying to find some kind of Finish-line after which your tractor will be good enough and then you can start plowing your field.

Ofcourse you know where this is going.. Your tractor will never be good enough. You'll never be ready to start plowing, because all the Sense-cults want something different, and you aren't exactly given a manual on effective plowing. In fact, you've been very purposefull mislead your entire life as to what matters when it comes to a tractor. It's plowing the field that matters, everyone knows that... but then every single one of them judges you on all these other things too, and pretty soon you just aren't going anywhere. You don't even know where to start.

But maybe the one thing you haven't noticed.. is that other people, who never plow a goddamned thing, are making shit tons of money by keeping you distracted. By making damned sure that your field never gets plowed, and telling you that not having a plowed field makes you a bad person, and that if you'll just buy this special paint or muffler or sulfur, THEN you can start plowing for real.

And so this is the purpose of much of Convenience Culture, and the Outrage Culture in particular: Keep you dazzled, engaged, WOKE and utterly ineffective.

And it works.. It works on so many levels, so many permutations, that it's near impossible to just even put your tractor in drive. Almost completely futile, it seems. Why bother trying to plow when all people really care about is how well you satisfy their Sense-cult.

Let's nevermind the people they hired to dump rocks in your field and break your plow. ;-)

... and that's enough for now. I will continue tomorrow. Or as it has been so eloquently put:

STAY TUNED...