my (first) deathnote (deathnote 2)

sidenote: this post and the next one or two i write (i think) are both going to be about death. 

i’m fairly obsessed with the american anti-obsession with death. the lengths american society goes to to avoid thinking about, dealing with, seeing in real ways, and coping with the fact that we’re all going to die one day are amazing. i think a large portion of the issues american society faces flow from this aversion. i could go on and on about this, but that’s not the point.

the point today is to start dealing with it myself. and i’ll start with my own death (because i almost always think the place to start in in oneself). i think this may become an annual tradition. who knows. here goes:

it’s nearing the end of 2016 and i’m thinking about my death.

my first thought: i am resigned to the reality that one way or another, the oppressive systems we live in will probably kill me. if it’s not a bullet or other direct assault from a human it may be the climate and resulting catastrophe or it may be cancer from the toxic environments/lifestyles we’ve created for ourselves.

so be it.

or maybe I’ll die of old age and my body ceasing to function in a way that keeps my soul in it. that’s fine, too. it feels less likely, but hey, nothing’s impossible. and maybe i’ll look back at this when i’m 90 and think “what a ridiculous thing i wrote.”

either way, this note about my death is actually about how i want to live (knowing that i will die):

• i hope that some people i crossed paths with know what it feels like to be loved because of me
  
• i hope that people and the world are better because of my life, relationships, and work
  
• i would love to be a part of ending hunger worldwide
• i hope to be part of bringing about new ways of living that help people live lives more aligned with their true selves, people arond them, and the planet
• if there’s an afterlife, i hope that the things i did while alive land me on the side of it where there’s contentment

whether i die later today, tomorrow, or in some years, i hope i’m able to genuinely live every day like it’s my last and also like i’ll live till i’m old.

ps - also, i didn’t commit suicide. if shit gets crazy, don’t let anyone tell you i killed myself. i will never kill myself. if you hear it on tape, i was tortured. i promise. i have already died once and that experience taught me that life is much too precious to willingly end.

resources

• death, redesigned
  
• the backlash to death, redesigned
• america: a nation founded on genocide and trauma that is afraid to acknowledge death and grief
  
• 
  

writing: 18:36
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 9:11

the distance between what we learn in school and what we do on the job is SO far that it’s laughable (and other jabs at the academy)

welcome to today’s rant about the brokenness of our education system. this is an ongoing rant, if you haven’t been reading along. #sorrynotsorry.

some jumbled thoughts:

• a few weekends ago i had a conversation with two friends (let’s call them a & m). we were all lamenting the distance between what we learned in school and what we found we needed to know on the job. a was saying how the most useful things to her work was finance. m was saying that there was almost no relationship between what she learned in school and what she did right out of college (because it takes a while to get to a point in your career where you’re doing what you learn in school and lots of people don’t ever even get to that point because they choose to practice different types of law).
  
  now, on the one hand, i do believe that it’s really important to have time to step outside of the flow of practical learning. creating mental space to explore the history, ideas, and theories in a field of interest is important.
  
  that said, it just feels way to fucking expensive and time-consuming for what it is currently. people are putting themselves in debt to not learn skills they’re going to need on the job. is that not ludicrous? seems like there’s a strong connection here to what i wrote about the other in seneca’s letter 48: isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short?
  
  
• for a while i’ve been noticing the tension in phd students between teaching and doing their research. this carries on to professors (because they’re trained in the process of earning their phds). this tension in the leaders of academia is the exact problem manifested. professors are valued by on their research publications and even though they’re given teaching responsibilities, those come secondary. engaging with the present world and putting energy towards making it better (in this case to further student learning) is said to be a requirement, but in actuality, there are no/weak systems for professors them accountable to this “requirement.”
  
  
• i’ve had a few conversations about this, but the most recent one was with a friend (let’s call her n) about funding in academia. the older we get, the more we’re both seeing into the structures that make academia possible: fucking giant government grants. for many academic institutions, when you win a grant from the government, the institution charges a massive overhead (tax) on the grant. this overhead funds all the people who work at institution, sometimes including the person who won the grant.
  
  now, on one hand, i do believe it is actually important for the government to fundamentally support education. if tax dollars can go anywhere freely, it should be education.
  
  but on the other hand, it totally seems like the people doing the educating should be getting way more of the money. from where i stand, this whole thing looks increasingly like a scheme to funnel job support money back and forth for the certain classes of people (government officials and university staff/faculty). and why is it that we can fund academia so well when literally everyone there knows how little direct good it does for the world, but we can’t see to figure out how to fund public schools? why can we afford to fund the schools that a fraction of the population goes to but we can’t fund the ones that everyone goes to? you can probably guess my answer…

hmph.

ps - in hindsight, i have no idea why i bulleted these. i hate bullets that are sentences. T_T

writing: 21:21
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“you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad...”

there is a recurring theme in seneca’s writing that i am coming to appreciate a lot. in letter LV (55), he puts it like this:

“the place one’s in doesn’t make for peace of mind, it’s the spirit that makes things agreeable”

below, i’ve typed up seneca’s thoughts on the same topic but in a much more thought out way. they’re excerpts from letter CIV (104) and the argumentative arc seems perfect.

i can think of at least five people in my life who i think are suffering from lack of this knowledge. while i do believe a certain physical place can allow one to do things they couldn’t do before, most of the issues people have in places are internal. a move for a particular industry or type of culture that is strong in one place makes sense. but many relocations aren’t made with such strong determinants in mind.

since finishing graduate school, i’ve seen a number of people leave town, seeking happiness and fulfillment in their new home. turns out, a majority (but not all) of them land their new town and have the exact same struggles. seneca is on to something when he said “It’s medicine, not a particular part of the world, that a person needs if he’s ill.”

excerpts in an argumentative arc about why travel doesn’t solve people’s problems from letter CIV (and here’s letter CIV in full):

“… the man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing. the story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’… If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person…

…What good has travel itself been able to do anyone?… It has never acted as a check on pleasure or a restraint influence on desires; it has never controlled the temper of an angry man or quelled the reckless impulses of a  lover; never has it rid the personality of a fault… All it has ever done is distract us for a little while, through the novelty of our surroundings, like children fascinated by something they haven’t come across before. The instability, moreover, of a mind which is seriously unwell, is aggravated by it, the motion itself increasing the fitfulness and restlessness. This explains why people, after setting out for a place with the greatest of enthusiasm, are often more enthusiastic about getting away from it; like migrant birds they fly on, away even quicker than they came…

… But travel won’t make a better or saner man of yourself. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have merged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered…

… So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting…It’s medicine, not a particular part of the world, that a person needs if he’s ill.”

writing: 8:41
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 5:58

isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time's so desperately short?

more stoic philosophy:

“…isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!” - Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter XLVIII

i think this idea is universally true and has always been. in fact, i can actually imagine that it’s part of what certain people at certain points in history “get ahead.” maybe it has to do with being an early adopter, maybe not. but i can imagine a trend among people who have a knack for identifying what is folly to learn based on their current context and avoiding those things.

this is showing up for me in two contexts. the first is preparing to live life in a trump presidency. the second is watching education systems fail all over the place.

on the trump point, i’m finding myself drawn to different things than before. i’m thinking more about what skills and knowledge do i want to have to best serve my community (myself included) in a fascist america. this has shifted my reading list and also where i think i should be spending my time.

on the education systems side, i’ve talked about this several times before, but it really comes down to google and cell phones. it’s crazy to me that school systems are still “teaching” people, young and old, with a deficit model. we have a lot of human knowledge available at our fingertips, but we’re still transferring knowledge in industrial ways. the model of school has just got to evolve to take that into account. the goal of education (to prepare future generations for participation in the world) can still be the same, but the tactics and methods need to evolve. it is folly to not do so and i’d argue that we’re actually wasting resources while also diminishing the ability of future generations to participate well in the world we’re living in (which is, itself, changing constantly).

ps - the edition i’ve been linking to isn’t the edition i’ve been reading. the one i’m ready has language that makes much more sense to me, but isn’t online. the translation differences seem minor but they have a marked difference on meaning. sucks.

writing: 12:54
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one of the people i respect the most about the internet is going dark as soon as possible

one of the people i have the most respect for in the tech world (let’s call her alex) is planning on going dark as soon as possible. this terrifies me.

alex has watched the internet evolve pretty much from day one and she has gone from staunch advocate for it to wanting as little to do with is as soon as is feasible. this is difficult because she works as a technology head at her day job, but as soon as she can retire, she said she’s going off the grid.

her reasons are pretty solid:

1. nothing is neutral.
2. with the amount of data that private corporations now have on individuals, it’s almost trivial for someone to hack a system and learn everything about who you are.
3. america’s response to the snowden situation is insane. at a national scale, we publicly saw that the government is regularly committing unconstitutional acts… and almost nothing has changed. the snooping that the government does has basically been socially greenlighted (under president obama, this seemed like not a big deal… under president trump, this is fucking terrifying).
4. google, a private company, is constantly and continuously collecting data on us in order to garner massive profits and sell our information to marketers and advertisers. people talk about the fear of artificial intelligence like it’s going to appear in a humanoid form (a la ex machina). if google knows basically everything about you (they have almost all of your emails even if you don’t use gmail yourself and many of your documents), targets you with ads, and then is able to learn whether or not you respond to those ads to do the targeting better, google itself is a learning machine that sooner or later will be ai (or something).

yikes.

scary resources:

• ACLU Says the Feds Have Asked Apple and Google to Unlock Devices Many Times
  
  
• Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
  
  relevant line: “While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords. Google doesn’t first obtain permission from students or their parents and since some schools require students to use Chromebooks, many parents are unable to prevent Google’s data collection.”
  
  
• Not OK, Google: Chromium voice extension pulled after spying concerns

writing: 15:03
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