Scale in perspective

A friend showed me a picture of the radius which radio waves have traveled to outside of earth in the past 70 years or so. It's a tiny dot in comparison to the size of the galaxy we live in, which the picture is of. He says that all our troubles, etc., are in that dot, and that we therefore don't matter. Drew sees his sphere of influence as tiny in the grand scheme of things, and he despairs.

This is the same despair created when we care too much about politics. We are too small to do anything big. Look at the greatest rulers in the past - all their accomplishments. This handful of world leaders and conquerors, all they've done, is hardly remembered or relevant. Genghis Khan may be the ancestor of millions of living people today, but he's still dead, and hardly any of his descendants know or care about their lineage. 

Our sphere of influence is as big as we are, and only extends further so much as we can influence others. Unless we get something out of the extension of our influence, there's no reason to try. What could I want that I could get through influencing others? A family, a salary, friends, etc. What could I want from a galaxy? 

Musings on "The Black Swan"

Black Swan

an event which 

(1) is a surprise, 

(2) has a major effect, and 

(3) is rationalized by hindsight. 

There's a book. 

 Applying this type of thinking to my life is difficult for me, but I have a few ideas. 

There are good black swans and bad ones. 

A good one could be outrageous success as an entrepreneur. If I start a business, I could make it big. Considering the industry I'm in, however, this is unlikely. Horticulture has too low an entrance barrier; anyone can compete. However, is there an area in horticulture which has the possibility of being a good black swan? In plant breeding there's the possibility of finding a novel, patent-able, and profitable trait to sell. In every other horticultural pursuit it seems that results aren't scalable. Even if I land an exquisitely high-paying job, I still have to work for it. There's no black swan lottery winning in horticulture. 

However, there are smaller surprising, majorly effective, rationalized events. There's the opportunity I had last year when a senior manager resigned and gave me his position on a silver platter. 

A bad one would be a major injury. This would surprise me, have major effect on myself and my career, and I'd probably think it was bound to happen. This almost happened to me this spring, when a coworker dropped a limb on my head and gave me a light concussion. It could have been much worse, a negative black swan which would have destroyed me. 

I need to seek good black swans, situations in which big gains are possible and not much damage can come from failure.
I need to avoid bad black swans, situations in which only a small or mediocre gain is possible, but a large loss is possible. 

I need to invest 80-85% in stable, risk free investments and 15-20% in investments with good black swan possibilities. I need to not go for mediocrity, but for surety of return and possibility of great results. 

What else does this strategy apply to? Spouses? Careers? Cars? Exercise? Diet? 

There's so much to re-think. 

Permaculture as a philosophical problem

Permaculture has a philosophical problem. If a permanent, easy lifestyle could be attained, would it be a happy one? Do we need the rat race to be happy? Has competition been bred into us?
Evolutionary psychology may have something to do with it. Why be happy with what you have? Isn't the notion that you're content an indicator that you could have more?
Think of Amish and Mennonite people. They live with less, and have an acceptable quality of life/level of happiness, all while away from the rat race. But, they live in a closed community, they don't see what they don't have, and they disdain what they don't have as immoral for them.
What about stable native cultures, like of Papua New Guinea? In "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, they're seen as happy and curious. Is this how a stable humanity would be? How can we be stable with so many different people, so many other sides of the fence where grass is greener? A large part of happiness might be the lack of envy found in the ignorance of a better life.
What does the average person do, anyway? They find stable employment they can do and stick with it. It's boring, yet a living. For most it's not even much of a living, just enough to keep them needing to come back for more.
Maybe I'm not cut out for chilling out. Maybe I see the other side of the fence too much. Maybe I need to cultivate the idea that my life is as good as it can be.
My coworker was telling me about his bug-out bag, his plan to buy a four-wheeler just for emergencies. Perhaps his desire for a meta-apocalyptic situation, like a zombie epidemic or gang war, is fantasized about because he wants the change in environment that it would bring. I've known many people like this. The change would rip them away from the stable employment they've been at these years, forcing them to change, to have adventures. None of us want the difficulties of violence and disruption, but we all want the adventure, the upheaval of our lives. Our lives aren't as interesting as those of the characters in zombie movies. They don't have the same carnality or lack of responsibility. This modern life is devoid of the carnal, everything is so clean and polite. It is non-dynamic, a-manual. We want the adventure, the movement, the killing of zombies who were our annoying suburbanite neighbors minutes before. My coworker's preparation of a "bugout" bag, his fantasizing of escape, is perhaps the result of this unconscious desire to radically change his life. To get rid of "the others"; those that enforce the molds we're in, to be free of the rat race created by other's competition, and to escape from the docile passivity of our lives.
But in my reality, in my yearning for adventure and escape, what can I do? Really, can one escape from general humanity, let alone their own? "If you can't beat them, join them" becomes confusing if "them" is "me". "If I can't beat me, I'll join me". Perhaps the answer is appreciation of human nature, of appreciating it in myself. To be, that is the answer; to be the organism and be happy about it. I don't need a cabin of solitude or a bug-out bag, I just need to do as humans do. Perhaps this is the new permaculture: to to die of natural causes after a happy, humanly satisfying life. No need for zombies. I just need to figure out what it is that "humans do".

Musings on "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying"

Upon reading Joe Martino's article "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying", I've had the following thoughts.

The most common regret was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me". I have to ask myself - what do I want? What is "true" to me? And what exactly do others expect?
I want some bit of adventure. Maybe this is just me being young and male; it seems stereotypical of my demographic. But I dream of road trips, sailing ships, and broadening my horizons. I want to enjoy an ease of living, too; to spend my time doing things for myself rather than an employer or other. I want to have a garden and live on a sailboat. I want to have a pretty and happy wife and to have kids.
Others expect me to provide for them, particularly the wife and children. Still others expect me to do well professionally, like my parents. Still others, as a recent meeting with a group of old friends proved, expect me to have a career in public garden curation. I want all of these things to various degrees, but each people group has a unique goal for me to work toward.

Second most common, and coming entirely from men (however that statistic worked, I don't know, but I suspect the sample examined was predominantly male), was "I wish I hadn't worked so hard".
How can I avoid this? Do what comes naturally, I suppose. But really, how can I work so that I don't miss out on family life? My assumption is that I will need to work, and though I've questioned that assumption thoroughly, it seems to hold true. I could work from home, bring my children to work, work 40 hours or less, or work hard to retire or semi-retire early.
Working from home would be great, but what work can be done from home? Anything I'm interested in? I could be an estate gardener, or an employee of a business which had on-grounds housing. It would seem that the ideal would be to work at Longwood Gardens, live on property, and homeschool children. In this way, I'd constantly be around my family, my children would have the run of the place(hopefully they'd like plants), and life would be neatly organized around work and family.
Bringing children to work is an idea; I could be an entrepreneur and bring my children to jobsites. They'd be with me all day, learn from my work how to work, and enjoy the community around them. They'd learn social and job skills, though they wouldn't be around children their age much at all. This is important, I think, and deserves more research.
I could work part time, but this would limit my options to highly-paid positions and/or extreme frugality. I'm on board for both, so no problem there.
I could, lastly, work and save to travel frugally with family, driving around and/or sailing around, racking up a lifetime of family experiences I wouldn't, hopefully, regret. There's risk to this, and little stability, but what adventure! What worldly children, too! It'd be a great way for children to learn.

The third most common regret was not expressing personal feelings. I'm usually good about this, it's just that I don't have too many cares currently, and therefore don't feel strongly about many things. Giving a damn is hard when you care so little about so little, but it's a great stress-reliever. I used to read the newspaper, follow politics, and attempt to be a good christian republican. Now that that awful pox of a phase is over, I can rest without fear or hate. Choosing to be a teapot agnostic with my head in the sand was the best investment I've ever made in my happiness.

Fourth most common was the regret of losing touch with friends. This is a fault of mine. I don't invest too much in friendships nor do I create too many. I don't usually run in circles of people with common values, and I derive "no satisfaction from shallow encounters based on values that are not my own". To be honest, I don't enjoy most people's company because I judge their passions and pursuits to be worthless. Take, for instance, an acquaintance of mine who was/is into reality shows. I've never had a conversation with her which did not revolve around celebrity gossip or television shows, and I've also never enjoyed a conversation with her enough to want to see her again. This is really back to question one, living a life true to myself - I can't spend my life in boredom.

The fifth most common regret was "I wish that I had let myself be happier". I've consiously worked towards this for years, using mainly the method of faulty memory. I can't remember things I don't focus on, and I try to focus on things I like. Therefore, it takes a current event and a friend's reminder of past injuries to jog my memory of a person's past wrongs. This rarely makes me a happy person; rather it makes me an angry person. A grudge is too stressful to be worth anything, I need to think positively and enjoy being stress-free. I need to forget more in life than to remember, and to plan more happiness than avoidance of unhappiness. I'm ok with being happily amnesic, but I'd rather major on the "happy" and minor on the "amnesic".

There you have it, hundreds of words which shall remain in the closet of internet obscurity. I aim to gain all the advantages of being a Niemann; from nothing and into it. However, if this closet prose has filled your time, please let me know; it's nice to know somebody's out there. Oh - and "Hi" Scott! I hope your intestines are feeling better!

A Passing Glimpse

By Robert Frost

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

Obstacle 1: Happiness Negation

Centuries-old cultural conditioning has given us a nasty neurosis: the belief that happiness must be "earned". It can be "earned" only by enduring unpleasantness (eg work, pain, misery). But how do you know if you've endured enough unpleasantness to deserve happiness? Another unspoken game rule: "responsible adults" can never endure enough unpleasantness to truly deserve happiness.

Laid on top of the first neurosis is the idea that spending money will make you happy. This is toffee coating on a bad puritan apple. If you spend enough money to give you the (advertised) conditions for happiness, the neurosis emerges in the form of apparently random worries, guilt, "feeling shitty", etc. Worrying is the easiest and most popular way to negate happiness. (See sidebar interlude).

So: we never stop working, we never stop spending money, we're never really happy – ideal conditions, coincidentally, for a certain type of slave economy.

from http://www.anxietyculture.com/worry.htm

Will Hates

Posted recently, rebutted tonight, courtesy Scott Willis, my brother. Had to share. 

Joshua Willis

Hmm... The older generation speaking down to the younger generation, for a litany of more popular than real faults. Surely this has never happened before.

Scott Willis 

‎1 Why shouldn't life be fair? Currently it is not, but should we accept that and admit defeat? 2 Self esteem is the only thing that will protect your mental stability. 3 I made that at 19, why shouldn't others go for it? 4 I hardly ever see my boss, Tough? No. 5 Flipping burgers earns you what opportunity exactly? 6 Yeah sure, an individual act is not the fault of the parents on a legal basis, but our parents are a major factor in who we become. There is a certain type of liability in that. 7 People don't become boring because of bills, but because of lost vision and drive, a surrender to failure if you will. 8 Real life? Grades? When have the two been correlated? And what school is this? can I attend? I know of no such institution post-preschool. 9 Depends on what career you choose. Also, a sense of self and purpose is never to be underestimated, whether in a work setting, or outside it. 10 Sure, but I go to a coffee shop on my days off, so do the people on TV, but for them it also happens to be their job. Who really thinks this anyway? How many teenagers do you know think that they will not have to work?

Putting down people when they are at their most vulnerable, and least capable of defending themselves (ie: children/teenagers) is not helpful. Did it help you? I want to see an end to the whining about the oncoming generation. It is a recurrent theme that has had what effect exactly? Yeah, your generation is definitely more original than the one that came before... Whining never changed anything, or hasn't life taught you that yet? Life teaches difficult lessons by experience, not asinine lists. If young people have an idea of the way the world should be, they will make it so, or not. The problem is that to those kids for whom this input would actually be helpful, it is useless. For those who it would help, they already know. The scorn of our forebears when made a generality is destructive and unappreciated, it accomplishes what exactly?

Putting Bill Gates in the pic tells us that we can achieve a higher level of success than is realistic, while telling us on the chalkboard that we suck. Is that really a fair comparison? The reality is that it takes all kinds to make the world go round. Scorn, no matter who it is aimed at, is not a helpful attitude. Derision is merely one group of people belittling another. Are you really one of those? I refuse to be.

My generation outnumbers yours 2-1. What do you think we will tell YOU when you're old and expect us to pay for your medical care and social security if what you give us now is negativity? I'm pretty sure we'll be sympathetic... Trust us... After all, for the majority of Americans from your generation, there is no other choice. You're not good financial planners as a whole.