tijaco

could I have chosen three more varied topics?

On my walks today, there were many different thoughts that came across my mind. I am going to discuss each of them quickly.

First is based on the neglect of the aged care sector, and ultimately the elderly themselves. Our response to this COVID-19 pandemic has been nothing short of extraordinary. As a society, we have cooperated extremely well to attempt to mitigate the spread of this virus. For the most part, we were not doing it for ourselves. Instead, we were doing it for the elderly. We have stopped our entire economy because of a virus which might wipe out up to 20% of the elderly. This is completely necessary, and I am not criticising it at all. But it is curious that we are willing to bring our entire economy to a halt for COVID-19, while at the same time neglecting those people that we are supposedly doing it for. In terms of community cooperation, why has there been no movement towards fixing the aged care sector such that the aged aren’t tortured in these facilities? There’s a strong argument that it is causing far more suffering to far more of the aged than COVID-19 ever could have. Looking into the goings on of the aged care sector has to be one of the most confronting things I have ever researched, and I just wish it was treated with the same urgency than a virus.

Next, I had a thought relating to the book I am reading at the moment called ‘Why Him? Why Her’ by Helen Fisher. It is a relationship psychology book in which she categorises people in two four separate categories based on the dominance of the neurochemicals dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen. She labels these personalities as explorers, builders, directors and negotiators respectively. She then surmises that explorers are best matched with other explorers, builders with other builders and directors with negotiators. But upon reflection, I thought about how this was a kind of oedipal process in that my reading of this book will make me search for people who are negotiators (I am predominately a director). It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy once you have the knowledge. This doesn’t denigrate the research that Fisher has done – the point is to be able to predict these things without the subjects previously having the knowledge. But it does speak to the power of belief. And this connects to countless self-help concepts which are based on the same concept – that you can almost always believe something into being. For example, if I believe that I will be a famed writer by the age of 25, I far more likely to take actions that propel me to fulfil that prophecy.

The final thought that I will discuss here is one about psychedelics. I attempted to explain my experience to a friend the other day, and my efforts proved mostly futile. Today, I found a far better way to conceptualise it. It’s similar to the analogy of skiing down ski slopes with a new coat of powder, but it seems to be more than that. The way I conceptualise it now is to think about how the brain likes to take shortcuts for efficiency. For example, you don’t really think about how you tie your shoes anymore. Each morning, you just do it and it is automatic. This is the same with taking a walk in a very familiar neighbourhood. You don’t notice things because you have seen them before. Even in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, there are things that you won’t notice because your brain has noted them as irrelevant. Things like the reflection of a tree in the window of a house. The way that the sun hits the side of a building. The colour of a pink fence and how it matches the wall of a building three houses down the road. These are things that the brain has taken shortcuts around and as such you don’t notice them in your everyday life. But taking psychedelics seems to, as if given a fresh coat of powder on the slopes, allow you to notice them again. But it is not as if you are seeing the world for the first time, because your memory isn’t affected in any way. Instead, there is just some shortcuts that no longer get taken, which allows you to notice seemingly irrelevant things that you wouldn’t have noticed before. Whether or not it is a valuable thing is whatever you make of it. But it doesn’t seem to go away. It’s been weeks since my experience, and just today I started experiencing this renewed sense of awareness of things I wouldn’t otherwise notice. I don’t experience it every day, but it is enough to notice.

Anyway, those were my three main thoughts today. I also was trying to wrap my head around the situation in Xinjiang, but I am sure I’ll write on that soon.