Epitome of New Orleans

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New Orleans Reaction to Election

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Thoughts on the iPad

Now there is the iPad. I just realized, in the next ten years, I'm going to look at the size of the computers we have now in the same way that I look at the size of cell phones in the early 2000's. It will be gradual, and then, shocking. Kind of like getting fat. Or getting old. I guess they are the same phenomenon, really, the process of things around you changing faster than you are. It's the key to staying young: never getting stuck, keep up with the pace of the world. But the desire for youth is pulled by the desire to do something, to become someone. That seems to be the pressure these days, to make a decision, settle, dig in my heels and become something. Sometimes, I worry that if you spend too long choosing, you'll never become anything. That there will be a point when it will be too late.

The idea that I will run out of time doesn't bother me too much, because I know I'm very young. But even at my young age, things like the iPad, or I Love The 00's, or the fact that 1997 was 13 years ago, begin to awaken this fear. This is because I do believe there comes a time when you have spent so long not deciding what you are, you become someone that couldn't decide, and that's a static person as well, a commitment in itself. I'm realizing that sometimes when you make commitments, be they degrees, relationships, locations, you can still sustain flexibility and contribute to your growth. That even when you gain definitions you still have room for new contours. Personal growth is a way to maintain youth, because the feelings it gives you are identical to the way everyone feels as a child: That sense that the world was constantly filled with delights and surprises, or, in other words, the feeling that you could become someone new. But is not always fertilized by a constant wandering. Instead, one grows both by accepting commitments and living up to definitions and keeping an eye for continued positive change.

Narcissism Does Not Mean Self-Love

There have been some recent studies on narcissism that a Scott Barry Kaufman outlines nicely in this post, and a blog on psychology today writes a 'field guide' to narcissism.

The dictionary definition of narcissism is: inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. I think this definition is a confusion, and too often people confuse Narcissism with Self-Love. Kaufman summarizes the behaviors of a narcissist as follows: "Leadership/Authority, Self-Absorption/Self Admiration , Superiority/Arrogance, and Exploitativeness/Entitlement."

What's striking about these features is how under the right circumstances they could be positive traits, i.e., having good leadership skills, self-esteem, self-confidence and the ability to seek help from others. But these are not exactly the opposite of the behaviors above. The opposite would be Passivity/Lack of Control, Self-Hatred, Inferiority/Insecurity, Self-Pity. So what is the 'core' emotion that these two sides rest on?

I think the answer is self-love. These are questions I think about a lot, because it is something I really struggle with. Often, I want to be proud of something that I have done, but I have a voice in my head that says if I start feeling proud I will become a narcissist. Since I won't allow myself to feel proud or good about who I am, I start hating myself. After a while I realized this kind of thinking had kept me from caring about others, in the same way those with the classic narcissism described above are kept from caring about others. Because of this, I've come to view narcissism and self-hatred as two sides of the same spectrum, and both emotions that lead to similar negative external behaviors.

I think self-love is the healthy feeling that resides in the middle of those two negative poles. The desire for self-love can be answered by one rejecting oneself and classifying oneself as unlovable, or this desire can be fulfilled by deciding that one is worthy of love by external standards(whatever deemed important by the individual: beauty, intelligence, success, partners with status). The first leads to self-hatred and second leads to narcissism. It is a confusion of the term narcissism and self-love to say that narcissistic people love themselves, because I don't think that they do in an honest way. I think to do this, you have to both fully realize the enormity of your flaws and find a way to love yourself for them without trying to will them away by living up to external standards.

I can't honestly say that I have successfully found a way to love myself in the ideal way I describe. But I think I have gotten a little closer by telling myself to "cut yourself a break, everyone has flaws but you are still lovable". I find this ironic because it is also the advice I would give to narcissists, although perhaps as "cut yourself a break, everyone has flaws but you are still lovable."

Links of the Week

Here's a weekly round up...Anya Kamenetz's new book is coming out in April! Here's a preview of the cover....And for some preview of the content, check out this brain picking's post...New York Times is manning up and gonna charge for content: my guess is, it's gonna work out fine...Ken Wilber gives a really interesting talk about integrated art, I loved it!...On LessWrong, a brave soul admits to being a theist, rationality ensues, pretty interesting...Chaos on the quantum level is explored...the fashion industry demonstrates once again how deeply fucked up they are...Really pissed about the supreme court decision? Do something bout it!...Could someone PLEASE tell me why 100,000 people watch these people EVERY SINGLE DAY? They're so boring, it's kind of mindblowing...and perhaps most importantly: GEAUX SAINTS!

Louis Kahn: Visionary

I recently watched this documentary about the life of Louis Kahn, filmed by one of his children, Nathaniel. At Yale, I was in the midst of some of Kahn's most beautiful buildings, and had a friend at Exeter who showed me his library when I was a freshman.

Louis Kahn had three families, one child in each one. So one wife, and two mistresses. When his two mistresses got pregnant, he did very little to support them. In the movie, both women state that this surprised them, that they expected Mr. Kahn to do something, like leave his wife or acknowledge his children once they got pregnant. But he didn't. And yet, on the flim, both women appear to still be in love with Mr. Kahn, and harbor little if any bitterness towards him. His first mistress, Anne Tyng, actually says she believes all of Kahn's children and loves are part of a large family.

Throughout the film, almost everyone that Nathaniel interviews tells him what a spiritual and visionary man Louis Kahn was. It's times like these that I wish it was traditional to speak only honestly of the dead, but it's repeated so many times it seems it must be true. The most heart wrenching moment comes in the end, when Nathaniel visits the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, and is told, in so many words, that his father brought democracy to Bangladesh.

On paper, Kahn's personal life seems like a despicable sham. Neither of the women he had affairs with ever remarried, and they both live alone. And yet on screen, they at least appear content. They seem to love him and be satisfied with the relationship they had with him. I certainly believe that social standards for what an individual should do in the archetypal relationships: mother, father, wife, husband, child, are extremely confining and inadequate to describe the full range of love relationships that are possible between human beings. The standards don't allow for the infinite possibilities of connection in human interaction. Perhaps Louis Kahn, and other visionaries who led seemingly horrendous personal lives were just living their personal lives with the way the lived their working life: bravely and boldly bucking societal pressures and to fully live in their idealized world.

I'm not saying that everything Louis Kahn did in his personal life was greatness. Rather, I'm suggesting that it's easy to immediately discount the relationships visionaries engaged in as incongruous with their output as creators, when really it could be our own social standards that limit our understanding of his relationships. What if societal conventions about love relationships were loosened and relaxed, and love was defined not by sexual commitment but by deep and honest connection over intellectual and spiritual interest? What would we think about Louis Kahn's life then?

The Internet is Creating a Collective Brain

This should maybe be filed in the 'duh' category, but it never ceases to amaze me how internet is quite literally constructing a communal brain. Just by logging on, you tap into a constantly regenerating conglomeration of thought that is, at every turn, urging you to type your thought in. Blogs, facebooks, twitters, myspaces, away messages on gchat...all tools you can use to put your thought into the huge thought space that is the internet. Before I log in, I'm thinking about one thing, by the time I get off, the thoughts of maybe one hundred others have flown in and out of my head.

This brain is becoming increasingly immediate, as per Google's latest: Real Time Search (go adam!>). Now when you google something, you can see what people are saying about that thing at that very moment--including individual twitters! And let's not forget about Google Wave, which will even further facilitate this collective nature of internet. But there are tons of other examples, The Hype Machine for music, Wikipedia of course for information, huge filter blogs like Huffington Post and Real Clear Politics for news.

I'm pretty certain it's going to be a while before we really get a handle on what all of this means for people's individual brains, and I think I'm gonna try to keep an eye on this idea to see what other stuff pops up about it (privacy, pervasiveness, uniformity all come to mind). But to start, one thing I think is interesting is that the center of this brain is a search engine. That the start of every journey onto our collective brain begins with the question, what are you looking for? Or, to put it another way, what do you want to experience?

Is that how you start your morning, in your individual brain? By asking, out of the millions of things that I could possibly experience today, which do I want to, what am I looking for? For me, the answer is no, but I wonder why. If you can buy into this internet-as-brain metaphor, why don't individual brain experiences start the same way?