On relationships, objects and accessories

Life is, from one perspective, a process of collection. Everything that you learn and experience adds to your perpetually changing mind state; it all changes you as a person. In essence, any single moment that you encounter will play a part in your future mindset by altering your present mindset, much like a step in the Markov chain that is your thought process. Considering this, it is very important to habitualize yourself to accepting information and experiencing events that won’t have too much of a negative consequence on your future self.

Even if you believe that you can handle resisting profoundly stupid ideas, cognitive strain and the insidious nature of ideas will inevitably filter down into an outcome that alters your future behaviour if only ever so slightly. This is also true of the attachments that you make to other people, other things, and any augmentations that become part of your life. You might disagree with me at this stage, possibly thinking that the more you experience, the bigger your library of experiences and learned lessons is, which means that you’ll be ready to go ahead and not make the same mistake again. Sadly, your memory will fail you in that regard, possibly repeatedly, and you’ll only be increasing the probability of this behaviour by strengthening the pathways between the synapses of your fallible human brain.

To use an example to bring this vague wording to light, think back to something that you’ve associated with a previously good experience. The reason for this association is that it was concomitant with something that you’ve already found pleasurable. Perhaps you were impartial to the associative object or experience prior to the association, or you were positively disposed to it – either way – but at some stage you had a falling out with a person linked to the association, or anything that subsequently made the original good experience an appurtenance to the overriding memory. Now both have been deemed negative merely due to the fact that they both remind you of the most recent memory of either thing – a negative memory. You’ve allowed association to ruin a perfectly good thing by accepting additional inventory into your life.

The idea that I’m trying to get across is that life might have a diminishing point of returns for additions and by allowing new things into your life, you not only don’t augment your being with them but you actually guarantee a diminution of one or more things from any addition subsequent to the first one (assuming any loose relationship between the two). If I haven’t lost you completely by now, you’d might have realised that I’d like to reintroduce the Stoic lifestyle mentally, and a minimalist lifestyle physically. What fortune has not given you, she cannot take away.

Bono comes to SA

Bono once said that every time someone snaps their fingers, a child in Africa dies. A stand-up comedian, I’m pretty sure it was Jimmy Carr, came back with the remark that maybe Bono should stop snapping his fucking fingers. I actually wish that I could meet Bono just to tell him that in case he hasn’t heard it before. Lucky for me, U2 will soon be on our Shores and me writing this blog post could win me a double ticket to go see them, at which point I’ll plan out my Bono speech in all of the military precision that my SpecOps mentor taught me.

So before the Irish midget arrives, U2 will have a mobile stage that will move across different places around the country – you can track and follow the stage by following Highveld on Twitter or Facebook. The stage actually looks awesome as can be seen on their YouTube channel. Why the hell would you want to follow a stage? Fuck knows, actually I lie, there’ll be other freak fans following this thing, mostly hot chicks (or guys if you’re into that sort of thing), and you can absolutely get some action by jumping on the stage and pretending to be Bono. You’ll have to chop off your legs below your knees to imitate his height, and have some bail money ready because you’ll almost definitely be arrested. But we’ve all done crazy things for ass, haven’t we?

I probably shouldn’t be telling this to anyone because you bastards will end up diluting my chances of winning tickets by writing your own (less interesting, awesome) blog posts and blasting out your own tweets to the world. But fuck it, I’m a nice guy, and I know that if you do win, you’ll hook me up with one of your winning tickets because I’ll rock the party, so tweet away (by tagging @947Highveld and #U2Highveld). I’ve got special secret Google Analytics that shows me who you are. YOU, the person reading this blog post, so I’ll know if you win and don’t hand me over your other ticket.

Here’s the stage you can visit. If you’ve got the memory of a goldfish, the links above will help you keep track of where it is.

Why Twitter is good for friendships

What keeps good friends together? Aristotle suggested that there are three foundations that friendships can be built upon. These foundations are virtue and goodness, pleasure, and usefulness. If you consider the first foundation in the context of modern relationships, then it can be translated to mean the sharing of values.

These values can be religious, political, or any commonality that overlaps both friends. The value that is particularly prominent is that of shared topical interests (sports, work, passions etc.) and many conversations between friends are usually based on these. These conversations include observations, analyses and introduction of new aspects to these interests to the other parties.

Twitter serves as an augmentation channel in that it allows for information exchange between friends. Studies have shown that strong tie connections aren’t very economical in terms of new information exchange because you will usually know many of the things that your strong peers know (because you share many of the same nodes in your network). Twitter alleviates this if you and your friends each follow different accounts that preclude homophily.

Thus any new information that is gained by either party can easily be disseminated among friends that share the same interest and strengthen that connection (using that shared value as a pipe) in the process. Additionally, because this type of behaviour and sharing is useful to both parties, under Aristotle’s theory, it satisfies two of the three conditions for friendship relationship building.

A word on love

The thoughts below are all pseudo-science and just my views on the subject:

Under Greek philosophy, love is categorized into several types such as affectionate, intimate, selfless love and the love for the supernatural (Deities). Bearing in mind that people experience these emotions, we can safely assume that they culminate from various hormonal mixtures. Generally these types of love provide people with feelings of well to do or comfort, for instance in loving a brother or god respectively. Because these consequential feelings are felt within the person experiencing them, we can also safely ascribe them to the hormonal alterations that occurred from experiencing love.

So basically love makes people happy thanks to the rewarding properties of dopamine and what have you. Unfortunately the intimate type needs some kind of reciprocity – I’ve never met a person that felt limerence for another while being acquiescent with the fact that the other person is completely apathetic about the situation. I’d go so far as to say that people don’t really seek love but seek reciprocity instead and just want to see their own desires mirrored from another person. It would explain why people impartial to emotion don’t seek love – because they themselves are impartial, don’t desire to have love beset upon them.

If this were true, why people feel a love for the deities is well beyond me. But perhaps the delusion that their feelings are being appreciated by a super-being is enough for their brains to reward them anyway. This sort of turns everyone into a drug addict – everybody is out to find the next rush, all good intention is just a ruse to get the kick of dopamine that will be excreted for behaving in an apt manner. All the stoics would then be considered as having underdeveloped hypothalamus parts in their brains.

Comic 13 – The problem with social networks

Comic 12 – mass behaviour

Comic 11 – Deja Vu of the mind

Some might argue that this is a symptom of minor temporal lobe epilepsy. Perhaps it might be, but either way the sense of déjà pensé combined with the feeling of Presque Vu can be quite irritating as it gives the thinker a false sense of access to greater knowledge. At the very least, it gives the thinker a [most likely] false sense of what it feels like to know that there is that access to complete knowledge.

So happy I could die

I was thinking about this over the course of the last few days, and all of my thoughts about the topic have seemed to gather around close enough to express my opinion on the matter. The matter in question is the phrase ‘So happy I could die’. Unfortunately a quick Google search returns a list of Lady Gaga results, and a negative phrase search doesn’t help in getting a good reference to the phrase’s meaning, so I’ll just give my own. The common vernacular usage of the phrase refers to an emotion similar to a euphoria or ecstasy wherein a person is so overcome with joy that they are inspired to take on any possible action that is layed out in front of them.

An example would be somebody claiming to be ‘so happy that they could die’ followed by a subsequent impetus to use that happiness-driven motive to conquer the proverbial mountain, or even lounge around and relish in the general vibe of happiness that they claim to be basking in. However, from an etymological perspective on the phrase as a whole, there is a major flaw in the relationship between the claim and the effects it has on the person. The fault, I believe, lies undoubtedly in the general understanding of the phrase.

What then does it really mean to be ‘so happy that one could die’? Quite simply, it means exactly what it stands to mean. When a person is so happy that they could die right then and there (Which, truthfully, cannot be that often without a hidden psychological disorder or chemical imbalance), it means that a person has reached a stage of transience where they could literally die at that very moment without any remorse of death.

What it means is that the situation they’re in has instilled an acquiescence or serenity that is so deeply embedded, or so deeply affecting of the will, that they accept that state of happiness as an archetype, and feel no need to ever top it. The person in question, together with the satisfaction of his current state, has no further need to carry on attempting to attain a better disposition and concedes that if he had to be removed from existence that very moment, that it would be alright, because their current state of happiness sufficiently reaches a level for them to feel as such.

Having said that, I don’t think that there is a ‘level’ that everyone can reach to attain this feeling, as it is most likely completely subjective to a person, and even to a state of mind. It is most likely an ephemeral emotion that could even be seen as a symptom of clinical depression (ironically), but nevertheless, I think that at certain stages, most people can reach this state of mind.