Trying out Tumblr
Simplicity is good. Let’s see.
my friday night
If you happen to be at a loose end tomorrow, and you find yourself in Calgary, Alberta, come along to the Loose Moose theatre where I will be doing a show along with a bunch of other improvisers from around the world.
In the likelihood that those circumstances don’t hold for you, just wish me luck. I’ll be coming back from Canada well fed, well worked over and well ready to chew down buildings and spit out wildernesses.
With too much to tell, nothing gets told, so just a reminder of my movements: you can catch me in Edinburgh for our show at the festival 16-27th August – it’s at the Voodoo Lounge at 8pm and free. I’ll be back in London in September.
I’ll give an update about work soon, not now. This is time for the playground.
Back to your unscheduled program
– breaking news –
I committed a cardinal sin of blogging. I promised a series of posts on a technical subject before locking down what I was going to say. I decided to do some extra research before pressing ahead, and it was clear that the world of reward systems has gathered more nuance since I wrote grants on it 5 years ago… hence one vast block on me blogging. Bad idea. So we’ll return to this someday, but for now, render it inert ground. There’s much more, more immediate to tell!
Placeholder…
Dublin, still, as I write this. The city is cold, but the ache has ebbed from my face and feet. The thrum of sunshine has abdicated to the pretender of sound, from the road below and the aircon unit perpetually clearing its throat.
Putting yourself back into play I
I am writing in a hotel in Dublin. From time to time my eyes crease to the strum of sunlight, eking through the cloud-smeared sky. Below, the river teams with ripples, making their way east. Tomorrow, I travel to Belfast but today I am just here, in Dublin.
Being abroad shields me from daily obligations, and hands me a day to actually get something done. We know where those days normally go.
If you are like me, you are a sucker for procrastination. Items on your ‘nice to do’ list languish on the page as you spend your time on news websites, emailing or watching funny videos. When you send the keyboard skimming away in disgust you feel little satisfaction for these activities. You probably didn’t even actively enjoy them while you were experiencing them: you were skirting around BBC News looking for that one good article – just one more, then out – that proves quite elusive.
The maddening thing is, the much delayed activity (say, writing a blog post) would be providing a real pay-off at the end of the day. Moment by moment, it’s typically pleasurable in its own right. When you really hit your stride, doing something you aimed to do, the feeling is hard to beat.
So
We aim to do what
will be pleasant to do
and satisfying to finish
but end up doing what
leaves us unsatisfied
and we little enjoy
‘My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe?’ St Paul’s letter to the Romans
Like St Paul, you may too wonder: why? I’ll put forward an answer – or at least, a gesture towards understanding this. It’s dopamine.
The dopaminergic system is a key reward circuit within our brain. It encourages orientation towards features of the environment by the mechanism of wanting: you aren’t forced to eat food, you want to eat food. So you eat food.
Recent theories argue that dopamine doesn’t give you all the goods. To understand this, know that there are a few things tied up in the notion of neurological reward. Pleasure, or liking something, may not be driven purely by dopamine, but rather by range of reward transmitters: opioids and cannabinoids for certain kinds of consumption, oxytocin for interactive pleasures such as social or physical contact.
The thing that dopamine is damn good at is anticipatory desire: that ‘I have to have it’ feeling. The dopaminergic system is very sensitive to a few things: novelty, uncertainty, and salience, for example.
As Tom has pointed out, many systems out there give us exactly this in spades – and his points about emails hold true of all sorts of facets of the web, checking your texts, updates in the football scores etc.
It’s also clear that these events aren’t massively satisfying: how can they compete with the feelings we get from bodily feedback, opioidal consumption, social synergies or cognitive accomplishment? It’s basically just staring at colours on a screen.
A neurochemical explanation thus goes as follows: there are many competing events in our environment that are pinging our dopaminergic system, tempting us with anticipatory desire but leaving us in the gutter without a satisfying pleasure payout. Hence, we are still hungry for our pay-off, and suckered in again and again by the carrots that the dopamine-friendly stimuli are dangling.
But, hang on. Isn’t there more to it than that? Sure. Lest we threaten to fall into an absurdly reductionist view of the issue, I’m going to take a step back and talk about happiness, and some ways in which society may have interfered with its ready flow. We’ll get into that in the next post.
2010: Happy Metanoia
Metanoia, changing your mind, going beyond your own perceived limitations. A word classically associated with repentance, and in the 20th C with psychic healing. Also, I just discovered, a rhetorical device: to retract a statement and express it in a different, better way. Metanoia is my hope, my wish for 2010.
Firstly, in order that our innumerable institutions shift course just slightly – a patchwork response to the perils of this decade – we will need to get better at expressing ourselves, and articulating what we believe may lie ahead. This is a duty, pure and simple, and will come in different guises; for myself, I know that I need to be ever more vocal about the state of play, more honest and challenging of false hopes, without falling into judgement or pessimism.
Secondly and more importantly is what follows, those manifold changes. I wish for myself the strength to do more of what is needed and less of what isn’t, and I wish the same to all of you. I’ll be documenting here what I do, which might be valuable to some of you, and hope this can be a space for you to spark ideas and spur me forward.
Third, and tied into all of this, is the absolute requirement to get our internal houses in order – otherwise we’re just going to chase our tails and replace one house of cards with another (albeit with nicer varnishing). I’ve believed this for a long time, never better articulated than through the practise of Soma and neatly summarised by E. F. Schumacher: “Only a perfectly clean instrument can obtain a perfectly clean picture.” I’m hoping to travel a spell further down that road, by a variety of means, and raise a glass to you if you would do the same, whether it be through application of therapy, religion, conscious breaking of habits and reformation of thought, or a series of good long chats with those that you love. Truly, it’s all good, and the year will be better for more of it.
Oh! The best description of metanoia I’ve found is the simplest, and the best descriptor of what I’m wishing: A turning around. Happy New Year.
One Big Conversation: Rage Against The Machine Christmas Number One
Rage Against The Machine have claimed the UK Christmas chart number one thanks to a grass roots campaign highlighting disenchantment with how much music is promoted and marketed. This is water cooler stuff, at work, at home, on the bus, it’s something to share and chuckle about.
So. It prompts a question.
When was the last time our flavour of the week was a group of revolutionary, pro-Zapatista, pro-Black Panther, pro-Shining Path, bank-hating rockers, who have been shut down, forcibly removed, and arrested for taking action through music and more direct means?
A while, no?
So. This is our Christmas gift for a shitty year.
This is the opener for a dozen heated conversations to open up some minds.
I’m choosing to get excited about this, and invite you all to get excited along with me. If you’re in for the ride. Wrest the world back onto the right orbit, through individual talk, thought and action. Not as easy as downloading a song, but a hell of a lot more satisfying.
The focus is on the song, so what about the song?
No need to get complicated: Killing in the Name is about bucking control systems, pure and simple. It focuses on institutional racism in security agencies, but this isn’t where it’s at for me. What feels timely is the failure of a meaningful accord at Copenhagen, and the gathering voices for direct action that have followed in its wake. Action against corporations or the state and for the people and our futures. If you think these ideas fall outside the mainstream, think again.
If this makes you want to do something – and it should! – one place you could start is
http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/
What else? A lot else. I’ll pick just one thing out that inspires me, beyond which I recommend you check out wikipedia or the band site and see what stimulates you. Be incredible, organic and grassroots.
So.
Food security
RATM members supported South Central Farm in LA. People worked as a community to grow their own food, enhancing local economies and making themselves more resilient and self sufficient. They were eventually forced out by a businessman with a claim: now, it’s to be a car park.
In a future where energy will be costlier and industrial outputs must be downscaled, this is exactly backwards. Experts agree.
They haven’t lost the fight, having sourced land to continue production.
http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/
But no question, it is a fight: the powers that be are still after their car parks. We need to change that. And no doubt, this is a problem for us too. And we need to be even more inventive with how to DIY, as 70 hectares of land comes even less easy on this small island.
Here in South London, this is where I would look for more info and things to do
More broadly, loads of good stuff is going on here:
http://www.transitiontowns.org/
Remember, groove-rocking chart toppers care about community vegetable plots, so why the hell can’t you?
According to the band, anger is a gift. It’s true. And so is this, right here, a gift that was never meant to have grander consequences than denting the ego of a man with a mansion.
Talk, furiously talk this week. Reflect the next. Come January, act. Let’s do this.
Unfurl the flag
Hi all, back after hiatus.
Legacy blog (currently overrun by spam, but no bother!) is at http://farmerversusfox.blogspot.com/
Birthday update
Resurrected for a day!
Nice.
Um, birthday plans are looking ropey, due to the weather. The contingency plan is the following:
1. Arrive at my place from 12.30 onwards. Still bring picnicky stuff, we will do an indoor picnic and other fun stuff.
2. At some point, we may then stretch our legs out to a nearby pub, probably The White Horse on Brixton Hill around the corner.
I will confirm on-blog and on Facebook later today….