For some time, I've noticed an odd trigger of nihilistic thoughts: running out of something. Often toilet paper or toothpaste, sometimes peanut butter. It seems to produce "oh my fucking god how many times am I going to have to buy more of this!" 😳🙄😑☠️
Running out of toilet paper, fear of boredom, and everyday meaning
16 tweets · December 2019 · 44 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
I think the particular flavor of this nihilism comes from a fear of boredom. Not boredom itself, but fear *of* boredom.
Makes sense that it's fear-of, not boredom itself. 😨 Actual boredom isn't so bad. Maybe isn't even real! 🤯 On lots of levels I've recently been busting through this:
And yet... these nihilistic thoughts are fascinating because despite my life being incredibly richly meaningful, they still feel tempting! This highlights how easy it is to lose touch with what you ordinarily know, when you're in a fear state. Thread 👇
Today I got to the end of the row of melatonin pills I keep along top of my corkboard for easy access from my desk, and had to put more out from the container in my closet. Dunno if it was the fact that I hadn't fully run out or what, but I had a non-nihilistic experience today!
I poured out a handful, and as I placed each one up there, I felt connected with my future selves who would take one off each day. This represents 2½ weeks of my life! What'll happen in that time? There's meaning in all of that. It's less poetic, but same goes for toilet paper.
One anchor that has helped me in the past when this nihilistic feeling comes up is humming the hook from Setting Up the Pins by @grovesroad, pointing at the beauty of the inevitability of having to take care of stuff again & again. Beautiful music video: youtube.com/watch?v=I1MQaH…
"Sing for the beauty that's to be found setting up the pins for knocking them down." Everyday life itself as infinite game. Creating the conditions for playing the game as part of the game itself, not as somehow separate. Intertwingulating work & play.
My attention much more naturally orients towards exalting the beauty of abstraction—in the computer science sense—the beauty of not *having* to concern oneself with the details of the pin setup. But obsession with *that* beauty is part of the fear-of-boredom nihilism.
Iain McGilchrist wrote an essay/ebook called The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, which explores this question: > How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it?
(I'm about to mention brain hemispheres, so if you haven't already read McGilchrist or my tweets about it, I will probably need to clarify at this point that this is a new model, not Gazzaniga's model that's considered debunked even by Gazzaniga.)
So the left-hemisphere tends to be "not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens." It "sees truth as internal coherence of the system" then hustles to twitter.com/djmicrobeads/s…
Such a coherent model is awesome, but dangerous unless you can reconcile that model with actual reality. This requires the same perceptual shift involved in seeing the beauty in settings up the pins, even—and especially—if you *also* have a PinSetterBot™
This perceptual shift is table stakes for grokking complexity, which is critical for taking on global problems without making yet-worse problems.
How to learn this? I'm working full-time on scaling answers to that question. I wish with all my heart I could tell you in a tweet or two. But it'd be a totally different world if I could, so 🤷♀️
I could try to give pointers at where to start, but of course you have to start where you are, & that's different for everyone. Here's a link to a recent blog post, which works with a lot of similar themes and has links to relevant works by me & others. malcolmocean.com/2019/10/the-ch…