Today, I’m initiating my writing with only a vague sense of a subject in mind, because there’s a lot on my mind. I suppose that is the subject.
I’ve never been good at keeping various trains of thought separated from each other for long, so I feel the need to list them now lest they float away and become inaccessible (if I went looking for one, I’m sure I could find an ADHD diagnosis; but one thing at a time, right?).
As it stands, my various ideas take a very short time to turn into mixed-color Play-Doh: there’s an awesome rainbow for a while, but eventually, the colors all turn a purplish-grey much soon than you’d expect. And once a few housekeeping REM cycles have had a go at them, well, that’s pretty much the end.
So, here are the colors before they’re totally mixed and become something new and possibly less exciting:
EMDR was the witchy shit at the psycho-traumatologist’s office. So far, inconclusive, but I’ll admit that it certainly got me thinking, and I haven’t been sleeping as fitfully since. Basically, you listen to sounds and follow a light movement that stops periodically for you to say what thoughts have come to mind related to some trauma or other. The lights and sounds and whatnot are supposed to perform some mysterious neurological maneuver in the brain by getting those feelings unstuck from a place so that they can’t bother you anymore, neutralizing the pain as a starting point for what currently ails you.
I hope it works, and I’m worried it won’t. You’re supposed to really feel the trauma (or an example of part of the trauma, I guess, if it’s generalized) — to really get into that space emotionally — but I feel like I don’t have much direct access to it, having successfully…numbed? Dissociated? Whatever the pop-psych lingo of the day is. It’s hard for me to express what I’m feeling, not because I don’t want to, but because I often have no clue what that is. I often sit speechless, feeling like a blank page when my therapist asks me how I’m feeling right then, panicking to come up with something that sounds human. “Where do you feel it in your body” is even worse. “Nowhere? I think things in my head?”
Given this difficulty, I find it ironic that words are my main medium career-wise. But they’re written, not spoken; as a kid, I spoke so little that teachers would call my parents to ask what was wrong with me. I speak quite a lot now, but spontaneous, on-the-spot speech when it Really Matters continues to elude me, and not being able to say what you need to say when you need to say it has consequences.
I feel like I was born without a throat chakra.
Which leads me to my too-frequent eye-rolling. As an adult, I’ve been both skeptical and derisive of these kinds of things that seem to be magical (though I later learned that EMDR is approved by the WHO, which makes me feel better; as far as I know, it has little to say about chakras). I’m just too cool for school, y’all, but I secretly kind of do believe despite myself, and want for it all to be true.
This leads to things like feeling embarrassed about and scoffing at the white people saluting the four elements/cardinal directions before leading a sweat lodge or something, but then really, really enjoying the experience of being in there (one of my favorite original jokes: “It’s so hot right now, it feels like a spiritual experience!”).
I read my horoscope when no one’s looking and own not one, but two tarot decks. It’s hard being a sociologist that recognizes the specific ways in which so many people are stuck in ways that are beyond their control and also a human naturally inclined to magical thinking. How can we humans be simultaneously so smart, and also so prone to hallucination?
I’m rewatching Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I wanted to watch TV or a movie the other night, and it came up as a suggestion. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen it, and I have a horrible memory, even when it comes to things I did last week. But one of the few benefits of a bad memory is that you can enjoy great art again as if it were the first time (“There’s nothing like a first kiss,” says Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates). Plus, I knew my partner would like it.
I have a deep appreciation for absurd but ultimately idealistic media (think Everything Everywhere All at Once and Maniac). It’s also nice to imagine that what we suspect to be true (that “everything is connected”) is actually true, though the grouchy realist in me scoffs at the idea. These types of stories serve as an infusion of optimism in uncertain times that seem to rise to this crazy moment in history on the precipe of some Very Big Changes.
I’m still thinking about and wringing my hands over Artificial Intelligence, which in my opinion should instead be called Collective Intelligence, since it’s information created by all of us, and without our permission, I might add. My fantasy is that all the money generated by CI would be scooped up and distributed to everyone as Universal Basic Income. I mean, isn’t making it so none of us have to work anymore the goal? The more likely scenario as I see it (and I hope I’m wrong) is that it will indeed take over most of our current jobs, but that we will still be required to work in order to live.
Below my fear on this subject is anger about living in this “move fast and break things” era of technological “revolution” that none of us gave permission to happen, and likely few of us would have had we been given the choice; we’re all just chumps along for the ride.
Break your own fucking things, my dudes (you’ll notice, they don’t…at least not without ensuring a proper safety net for themselves first). I mean, really. How self-important do you have to be to think that you are literally the man-gods in charge of moving humanity forward? If it were really “all of humanity” experimenting and ultimately standing to benefit, as Hamilton Nolan recently wrote, then it’s time to admit that their own jobs (those of executives) are actually the most easily automated. AI CEOs with clearly set parameters for ensuring fairness among all stakeholders, including workers? Why, what a novel idea! As Nolan points out, getting rid of those workers — the most expensive workers! — would certainly save the companies a ton of money.
Finally, looping back around to tie AI to our natural tendency for magical thinking (I salute those who have stuck around this long…I always end up writing more than I intend to): doesn’t it feel like whatever AI creates must mean something, even when we know it doesn’t?
I mean, it’s so hard to believe that if I tell Midjourney or something to draw me a picture of “perfection” or some other concept, that what it turns back would truly be meaningless. We know it’s meaningless, but the part of us that sees faces in the textured wall in front of the toilet doesn’t quite believe it, not really. Forget AI hallucinations. Our own hallucinations are the ones we need to worry about.
It strikes me that AI is the perfect metaphor (that is, if an unromantic “there-is-nothing-but-this” stance on reality is to be assumed) for our actual knowledge of how things really are and our tendency to believe that there’s so much more, as the likes of Dirk Gently and Evelyn Wang insist.
The past few nights as I’ve been falling asleep, worried about everything but giving up on them enough to let myself slip into unconsciousness for a bit, a voice has come to me saying, “have faith,” together with some light filling an oddly-shaped leaky container (fabulous description, right?). The possibility that the voice is my own is strong. But it sure does help me sleep.