Elsewhere

This culture confuses excitement and fulfillment. Fulfillment can’t be mass produced and sold in 30 second increments. It’s not quantifiable. Excitement is much easier to package and monetize, and because it’s not fulfilling, getting a little just makes us want more. We are bombarded by it and our appetite can never be sated and the means become the ends and we end up spending all our time, money, and energy chasing the next high, the next new thing. We’re a nation of addicts. Viva la capitalism.

Part of conscious capitalism is vigilant defense of your mindshare. Just cuz they’re sellin’ don’t mean you have to buy, or even pay attention. Your time, and especially your attention, are the most precious things you own, and the 21st century has made our culture the battlefield to harvest those things from you as much as possible.

The first step is awareness.

listening to music will not fulfill you
watching tv will not fulfill you
watching movies will not fulfill you
playing games will not fulfill you
eating food will not fulfill you
empty sex will not fulfill you
sleeping all day will not fulfill you
buying stuff will not fulfill you

creating will fulfill you
sharing yourself with others will fulfill you
travelling and learning about people will fulfill you
developing trust and nurturing intimacy will fulfill you
making things better, in some small way, wherever you go
will fulfill you

it starts with yourself
but it doesn’t end there
there is always more to do, more to learn, more to give
life is growth and change
things will settle down when you die
until then
seek fulfillment in life
when you are fulfilled, excitement is just a novelty, not a need

it can be harder to rest easy
than to stay on the edge of your seat
as I grow older I find that I favor
the savory over the sweet

Q: Why is it that whenever you’re looking for something, it’s always in the last place that you look?
A: Because once you find it, you stop looking.

The same is true of all perception. Once your expectation has been met, you accept it as truth. Consider, though, what you might have found had you expected–and looked for–something else.

Quantum physics: all possibilities exist simultaneously–until observed.

“Reality” is more malleable than we might think. It is nothing but our perception of the world. The universe is recreated inside the head of every single person, as an abstract model of synaptic patterns filtered through their experience. It’s why a virtual world can be just as emotionally tangible as the real world, if one believes in it. And it’s why one’s attitude can significantly shape one’s experience in life.

Like attracts like. What are you attracting to your life?

* It’s not about software, it’s about communities.
* We’re heading towards relationship-based computing instead of document-based computing.
* The cognitive dissonance between online and offline identities is dissipating.
* The distinction between different media types is blurring as they converge.
* We can–and should–harness the unique engagement experience of games to help us learn more about the world and our place in it to foster better long-term thinking and behavior. [Will Wright]

Registration at South By Southwest Interactive 2007: $300
New friends and hope for humanity: priceless

Got a Mac with an iTunes library full of unprotected AAC files, and want to play them through your networked TiVo DVR using the TiVo Desktop software?

You can’t. TiVo only plays MP3’s. Unless…

You install the LAME MP3 encoder command-line executable. Then, TiVo Desktop will automatically convert your unprotected AAC files to MP3’s on-the-fly. It works. I just did it

1) Download the Mac OS X installer binaries for LAME from Mac Update.

2) Install it (just keep clicking, it’s all automatic)

3) Open System Preferences, open TiVo Desktop, click to Stop the server, click again to Start it.

Voila. Your TiVo now plays your unprotected AAC files (note, it still won’t play your DRM-protected iTunes Music Store downloads).

Don’t thank me. Thank the folks in the TiVo community forums.

Numbers are used as justification when there is no personal relationship.

Think about that for a moment.

If I trust that you’re going to give me correct change, I don’t even count it when you give it to me. Why bother? I trust you. And I trust you because I know you–we have a relationship. I trust that, even if you miscounted and I find out later, you would quickly correct the mistake, with little harm done.

When some stranger gives me change, I count it. We have no relationship; both his competency and his ethics are suspect. Guilty until proven innocent, you might say, but really, most of us have been burned enough times to accept this reality of everyday life. There’s a fine line between openness and naivete.

This concept scales indefinitely. We monitor the finances of corporations because we don’t trust them. We quantify our achievements so that we can prove to some stranger in the human resources department why we deserve a raise. We don’t need to prove that to our boss; she already knows us. But she needs to prove it to them.

With each degree of separation, trust drops dramatically. I trust you, and I might trust your friend, but I might double check them anyway; and their friend, I wouldn’t trust much more than a complete stranger.

Think about how much time and energy is spent on numbers–justifying, proving, defending to people we don’t know. Entire industries, professions, and disciplines within professions are dedicated to it. How much efficiency could be gained if there was a trusted personal relationship instead?

I don’t have any answers or moral message here. I know that life usually gets more complicated than that. Just something to think about.

Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I first remember learning this insightful, elegant prayer at a young age from a wooden inscription hung above the door of a neighbor’s kitchen. It’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Something quite interesting and significant about the second of the prayer’s three parts is the implication that we should change things when we can.

It makes me think of some of my new friends in Austin, including Steve Harper, Asha, and MagnumVox–a self-described “change agent.” That’s a good term. We should all consider whether or not we are acting as change agents, both personally and professionally. (OMG, sorry, but perfect moment to plug Steve’s The Ripple Effect again.)

When I was a boy scout, whenever we’d go camping in the wilderness, our motto was, “Leave it better than you found it.” Pack out any trash you find (even if it’s not your own), don’t trample or otherwise vandalize the area.

Once, in my early teens, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. My response was something like, “I hope I never grow up. I hope I never stop growing.”

***

Growth and change are an integral part of life. Life is growth. Without growth, and change, we’d still be a bunch of random chemicals floating around on a primordial planet.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that there is some end-state, some point in time at which everything levels off and they can just comfortably cruise through the rest of life.

Any such security is an illusion, and temporary at best. Just ask anybody who’s lived through the uncertainties and surprises of the past century. The only constant is change.

Would you prefer to be reactive or proactive in dealing with the inevitable changes of life? Which one do you think might bring you more success and happiness?

If you choose to be proactive, you are choosing the path of creativity, in which you attempt to anticipate external changes and also create the changes that you want to see. But in order to create, you must have a vision of what you want, and your vision will be informed by your desires, which are dictated by your values.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, if you want to do more than just survive–if you want to prosper–you must first get down to basics and really figure out what you are about.

Without moral traction, you’re just spinning your wheels. The scenery might even change, but when the screen falls away, you’ll realize you never actually moved.

**

Humanity is a continuum. We inherited this reality from the generation that came before us, and they from the generation before that. Our children will inherit the sum of what we inherited plus the changes we make to it. To proactively manage that change so we can leave a positive legacy, we should:

1) Accept and engage the reality that we have inherited (serenity)
2) Use our vision and creativity to “leave it better than we found it” (courage)
3) Continually grow and refine our awareness to find the best balance between the two (wisdom)

***

As a mental “cheat sheet”, just remember: VISION, ACTION, and FAITH are the fundamental pillars of successfully creative behavior. This is my own personal paradigm which I’ve developed within the last year or so. I’ve been wanting to blog about it for a long time. Consider this a teaser. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be next week, but… sometime soon. I’m a little busy with the ACTION part of it at the moment.

Oh what a lovely summer. New releases from three of my most favorite electronica artists.

BT is releasing a new album at the end of August entitled This Binary Universe. His MySpace page and blog have a teaser video and hint at some details: a musical and spiritual epic masterpiece accompanied by abstract artistic visuals of some sort. You can pre-order it on Amazon and supposedly also on iTunes, although I don’t see it listed there yet. Some people don’t care for BT because he’s straying too far beyond straight dance music, but that’s why I like him.

Hybrid’s new album, I Choose Noise, will be released in early September (info also culled from their MySpace page). You can download a free track from the new LP off of their website. Like much of their previous work, it is sweepingly cinematic and orchestral; good, but it didn’t blow me away. I expect some new tricks from artists of this caliber — then again, anything of similar quality to the seminal Morning Sci-Fi would be just fine.

The Crystal Method have released a new 45-minute mix; that’s the good news. The bad news is that it was developed exclusively for Nike to promote their new Nike+ iPod shoes, and it can only be obtained via iTunes as a single monolithic track (for ten bucks!). Although TCM is promoting it as their latest release, some of the reviews complain of recycled material, so I ain’t buyin’ it (literally or figuratively). Maybe next year? Until then, the London soundtrack will tide me over.

I’m also hoping that Tiesto releases a new artist album sometime to follow up his much-beloved (by me) Just Be. But for now he seems content to keep releasing DJ sets ala his In Search of Sunrise series. I like DJ mixes, but I don’t buy them; I prefer the creative and thematic qualities of artist albums (although Sasha’s Involver album interestingly blurs the line). A good DJ does not a good artist make, contrary to what some DJ’s might mistakenly think of themselves. (Apparently BT agrees with me on this one.)

Here I use the term technology in a very broad sense to mean any skill, technique, or body of knowledge which is intellectual rather than instinctual and improves human productivity; for example, language, religion, and agriculture were some of the earliest technologies; internal combustion engines, democracy, computers, psychology, and quantum physics are some more recent examples.

The promise of technology is to give us the tools we need to transcend mere physical survival so we can focus our time and energies on higher purposes (which are, as of yet, undisclosed to us, except in subjective beliefs).

We are in a race against time, however, to improve and refine our technologies to the point where they are indefinitely sustainable. The resource consumption and infrastructure necessary to support our current technologies cannot be sustained — and we are already feeling the negative consequences in very tangible ways (hurricanes, heat waves, etc.).

But this is not to say we should abandon technology; in fact, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We’re simply wired for it. We passed the point of no return when we developed opposable thumbs. The trick is to advance to the point of sustainability before we burn ourselves up.

What should we be working on to reach true sustainability? Art, spirituality, politics, science, culture? All of the above, of course, because they are all technologies with complex interactions.

Personally, I’ve got a special preference for information systems and digital media because I think it’s the most unique tech of our time with the highest return on investment as it accelerates improvement in all other technologies simultaneously. I also have a penchant for spirituality and personal growth technologies that allow individuals to maximize their positive contributions to the world.

“Life in the so-called space age“, the semi-ironic sub-title of this blog (and lifted from a rather good and underrated album by God Lives Underwater, who apparently lifted the phrase from the booklet of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration — fun trivia!), reflects this theme of a technology-centric life, working to get us a little closer to technology’s ultimate promise — while trying not to kill ourselves in the process.

I heard someone mention it on TV the other day — “Youth is the engine of the world.” Apparently this phrase can be credited to Matisyahu, though I haven’t heard his music yet. (Just added it to the list of things to check out, though.)

The truth of the phrase has stuck in my head. Teenage angst is not just a hormonal thing, it’s also the result of innocent idealism crashing into the vagaries of the real world. It’s the purest reflection of the values we teach children conflicting with the values we are actually living, before “maturity”, with its practical goals and responsibilities, catches up to them. It’s vitally important to pay attention to teenage culture as it’s often a truer commentary on the state of our society than anything else. (Marilyn Manson understood this too well.)