Why do we make choices?
I liked her but was too shy to say so.
Shy? Why?
I thought it was my childhood. Being the softer brother more interested in peering at pond water under a microscope than picking up a guitar or a football.
Shy is partly built on fear, increasingly on what you become good at, and what you do predicts what you will do in the future, forming memories of what you get used to. You became more used to a behavioural shyness.
So I enjoyed being isolated, and became fascinated in everything I could see, or how I could amplify my senses with lenses, with a tape recorder or simply by thinking about it. The mind is the most fascinating tool if you can stop it repeating itself endlessly.
Meditation is a process to stop your mind serving up images and memories without a reason. A song that repeated in your mind or the cutting criticism from your friend, that moment you discovered your attraction became automatically repeated over and over, firing the dopamine due to something only your mind is aware of, but her attraction was uneven with yours, you could expect a sense of loss and continuous repeats of memories you no longer enjoy. Eventually they run out of steam. We recover from trauma and become emotionally stronger.
We are all plugged in our survival reactions (pleasure, pain) to random individualised stimulus. We are in “The Matrix”, the “simulation” – a sort of unreality that is more real to us individually than our shared reality of struggle. For example, with a close person you trust. To get trust you have to have hundreds of days of constant experience and it builds slowly. This is part of what we are.
Or in the modern social media context our shared experience is both artificial (AI “friends”) and casually triggered into instant disassociation. We used to call that a “breakup”. Now it is an “unfollow” or if we feel really bad, a “block”.
We used to break up by saying “I never want to see you again!”. But if you do happen to go to the same shop ten years later, you may want to briefly “catch up” (but, without being caught).
Now, it is a silent dismissal. One we can get over simply by not being aware. We juggle many memories and repainting our perception of NOW.
Forgetting someone who has only stimulated our visual cortex (e.g. Instagram, etc.), or more in a typed chat session (e.g. X.com, Facebook, etc.) or so much more if we have two way communication with a microphone and headphones (e.g. Youtube, etc.) – each stimulated one, two or three senses form progressively deeper memories.
Reality plays on far more perceptions, they form more than memories, they become part of your dreamscape. Your way of understanding the world is building memories that can last far longer. Real life is far more difficult, rewarding and hard to forget.
Social media can form diluted memories which have less affect. We have a tendency to continue to do what we did as kids.
The iPad is the default mode for young children.
It guarantees the continuous reduction in procreation that is affecting most of humanity. It will die out over three generations.
It bodes well for evolution of physical communities who will have more children.