Kyle's Files: Reality?, ADHD Advice, Bob Dylan on Everything
("The path to the nest of spiders"Gianni De Conno, via @marysia_cc)
I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.
Ben Franklin wrote that in 1750 about a letter about what he was learning about electricity. (Apparently this is a common problem.) We're down to 3,500 words from 4,500 last week. Another couple of weeks at this and maybe I'll remember how to get these things to a reasonable length. Still, it's great to hear from quite a few of you that the letters have been useful.
This week we're talking about reality and advice for ADHD.
1. Tweets'n'Things™
For the last decade the web has served up bite-sized information like cheap fast food. But the new web just might give us that nutritious gourmet meal we’ve been waiting for. And why not? For my part, I find the whole notion rather appetizing. Ted Gioia, Has The Internet Reached Peak Clickability?
A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents. Stephen King as Mr. Bowditch in Fairy Tale
To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value— the occasional side and wrong roads, the delays, "modesties," seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
i genuinely think hating digital ads is a midwit trap designed by some coalition of tim apple and legacy media operatives to destroy some of the best websites on the internet tszzl, Twitter
No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung, The Essential Jung
A new wave of wildly ignorant marketers, proud of their lack of marketing training, have appeared, and are intent on reshaping marketing to their own myopic ends. For the past decade, ill-informed, untrained marketing gurus have been declaring various concepts they do not fully understand to be dead. William Snijders, Eat Your Greens
The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures
If you persist in throttling your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms. You will be able to say with perfect sincerity: "I don't know what I want in life." Henry Miller, Sexus
Pliny the Elder said Fortune Favors the Brave when deciding to take his fleet and investigate the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Pliny the Elder ultimately died during the expedition. Alex Tabarrok, Twitter
One of the most disorienting things in the world is that the labor theory of value is false. Highly competent people can work really hard on something difficult…that’s totally worthless. Sarah Constantin, Twitter
In summary:
(1) Family time is limited—cherish it.
(2) Friend time is limited—prioritize real ones.
(3) Partner time is significant—never settle.
(4) Children time is precious—be present.
(5) Coworker time is significant—find energy.
(6) Alone time is highest—love yourself.
Sahil Bloom, Twitter (based on a fascinating Our World in Data post)
2. Reality Is Just A Game Now
Jon Askanos at The New Atlantis published an entertaining, insightful series of three essays on the loss of our shared reality. The middle one, Reality is Just a Game Now, explores how gamification has turned various activities that used to be rightfully boring into alternate reality games (ARG), which they describe as:
a story that you play along with in the real world. It’s like an elaborate scavenger hunt, on the Internet and in real life, with millions of other people all over the world playing along too
One direct way to see this is how we use our bios:
We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields. A Tinder profile that reads “White nonbinary (they/her) polyamorous thirtysomething dog mom. Web-developer, cross-fit maniac, love Game of Thrones” sounds more like the description of a role-playing character than how anyone would actually describe herself in real life.
Role-playing games combined character-building, world-building, game masters telling stories, creating puzzles, and rules for scoring points and making decisions — all for having fun with friends in an imagined world for a little while. Could we have imported online all of these tools for building alternate realities without getting sucked into the game?
The gamification of and universal participation in worldview shaping online means that market forces and tribal rules come before facts (the facts that stay facts when a group decides they aren’t facts):
ARGs are not about establishing the facts within consensus reality. They are about finding the most compelling model of reality for a given group. If your ads, social media feeds, Amazon search results, and Netflix recommendations are targeted to you, on the basis of how you fit within a social group exhibiting similar preferences, why not your model of reality?
Perhaps this helps to explain why fact-checking seems so pitiably unequal to our moment.
Even undeniable debunking fails in the face of faith in and identifying with some narrative:
Debunking only ever eliminates one small set of narratives, while keeping the master narrative, or the idea of it, intact.
This is the moment of the conversation with a flat-earth-style conspiracy theorist when, after one nutty thing is disproved, they jump to something completely disconnected, like alien lizard royalty, and scream that IT’S ALL CONNECTED (after which they look at you, exasperated by the thought of getting a sheeple like you up to speed).
When writing for niche audiences, more status accrues to sharing narrative-enhancing facts and interpretations than to sharing what most of us can agree is reality. Those who quixotically hold on to the TV-era norms of balance and fact-checking won’t find themselves attacked so much as bypassed. By a process of natural selection, attention and influence increasingly go to those who learn to “speed-run through the language game,” to borrow from Adam Elkus, laying out juicy narratives according to the incentives of the media ecosystem without consideration of real-world veracity.
When dealing with an audience who doesn’t want to be disappointed or scared by the truth, attention accrues to those creating alternate realities, and:
In an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.
(One of my more optimistic recent beliefs is that this age of alternate realities has peaked.)
3. Advice For ADHD People (And Others)
Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder by Gabor Maté was the book that made me believe my ADHD diagnosis. My goal here is to include all his major advice for adults with ADHD without turning this into another 4,500 word monster (it's a 3,500 word monster), so we’ll keep to brief descriptions of the “what” and “why” of ADHD. The “what”:
The hallmark of ADD is an automatic, unwilled "tuning-out", a frustrating non-presence of mind. A person suddenly finds that he has heard nothing of what he has been listening to, saw nothing of what he was looking at, remembers nothing of what he was trying to concentrate on. He misses information and directions, misplaces things and struggles to stay abreast of conversations. Tuning out creates practical hardships, and it also interferes with the enjoyment of life.
Maté believes that the only genetic part ADHD is our general level of sensitivity:
Environment does not cause ADD any more than genes cause ADD. What happens is that if certain genetic material meets a certain environment, ADD may result.
This leads him to consider it an impairment, like “a visual impairment in the absence of any disease.” It also means that early chapters are dedicated to describing the types of childhood environments that could lead to ADHD in kids with the right genetic makeup.
In line with this early-life origin story, Maté frames his advice as self-parenting duties. These are broken into some that are more physical and some that are more psychological, we’ll start with the physical:
1. The physical space
Although many ADD adults assert that they function well in the midst of the physical chaos around them, the fact is that they are too sensitive not to be affected by it. Neglecting to honor their physical environment is to neglect themselves.
Because “the ADD brain is overwhelmed by a multipartite task” and defaults to an “all-or-nothing mind-set,” he suggests to:
…not insist that any one task be finished but to impose a strict time limit in which to work.
Maté says that the ADHD adult will fail for usually a long period in keeping physical spaces organized, and that a clean space isn’t the only upside:
The effort itself, in the long term, has an organizing effect on the mind.
2. Sleep hygiene
Poor sleep undermines what is already vulnerable in someone with ADHD: “his emotional state, his alertness and his capacity for attention.”
3. Nutrition
The child or adult with ADD is exquisitely sensitive not just to the external environment but also to the internal one. If we are concerned about the brain's biochemistry, so we ought to be concerned about the biochemistry of the body: to the health of both, proper nutrition is indispensable. The ADD child completely falls apart when his blood sugar is too low, becomes hyper when it is too high, showing how directly nutritional states affect the brain.
4. Physical exercise
Exercise releases substances in the brain that are necessary for mood stability, motivation and attention and, in the long term, makes the chemical apparatus that manufactures these substances more efficient. I recommend that people set a goal of vigorous exercise every day.
He also recommends stretching, in part because:
People with ADD, habituated lifelong to self-generated tension, tend to have tight muscles and stiff joints and ligaments.
5. Nature
Maté suggests that nature has a “powerfully harmonizing influence on the mind." He includes this quote from Marcel Proust:
"Nature, by virtue of all the feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less it bore their imprint, the more room it offered for the expansion of my heart.”
6. (Less) extracurricular duties
The ADD adult’s workaholism and dread of the word “no” leads her to overextend herself. A large proportion of the ADD clients I have seen are juggling too many projects, commitments that leave them with nary a moment to finish a thought. We engulf ourselves in hubbub, chase our minds in ten directions at once and then wonder why we cannot stand still long enough to notice anything. This "symptom" of ADD, too, is self-perpetuating. It creates itself. If a mind in a different relationship to itself is a goal, we need to clear some ground for its development. We may need to let some activities go.
7. Recreation
Recreation needs activities that nourish the mind or liberate the body. What these may be will vary from person to person, but universally ADD adults deny themselves regularly scheduled times for mental and physical regeneration.
8. Creative expression
The self-parenting part of healing ADD must, I am convinced, involve paying attention to one’s need to create.
...
It is unusual for me to meet an ADD adult who does not have some secret longing for artistic expression, and almost as unusual to find one actively doing something about it. Essential to finding meaning and purpose in life is the liberation of one's creative instincts.
9. Meditation and mindfulness
Spiritual work is the cultivation of a mindful solitude.
Maté believes that:
Enormously beneficial to everyone, spiritual work is essential in the self-treatment of ADD.
Meditation is the method I have chosen for myself. The ADD mind is most uncomfortable with meditation, is intensely bored with it. It's all the more amazing to me that recently I have actually come to enjoy and look forward to it. It becomes fun, after a while, to watch the fretful and anxious mind do its backwards flips, somersaults, and disappearing tricks to observe it all, and work at not being identified with it, not mistaking it for me.
And now we move into the psychological advice:
1. Compassionate curiosity in the search for self-insight
This boils down to (1) watch yourself and (2) be a good friend to yourself. But details are helpful here:
Needed are both a desire to accept the self and the courage to look honestly. Beyond that, the ADD adult also has to acquire the skills of self-understanding, the first of which is the capacity to notice each time she makes a critical, judgmental comment against herself, to notice whenever she is seized by anxiety, to notice when her behavior does not jibe with her long-term goal.
Maté goes on:
She notices, and asks … what the meanings are, what is being acted out, what messages the Morse code of her behavior is trying to convey. One notices, and gradually learns not to judge the behavior but to accept the feelings that drive it.
He suggests we behave more as someone conducting an “insight-oriented interview” rather than an “inquisition.” The reason for this process is:
We can let go of what we understand; we cling most ferocious to aspects of ourselves that remain hidden to us and whose power we do not comprehend.
2. Self-acceptance: tolerating guilt and anxiety
A lot of Maté’s ideas about ADHD turn on childhood development. In this case, he believe that some children use guilt as a mechanism to help them suppress their own preferences in favor of the adults around them in order to avoid the anxiety of separation. And so:
Guilt is a prime example of an emotion ADD adults would crawl through jungles to escape. It is sometimes difficult for people to understand that their psychological safety does not lie in avoiding the feeling of guilt at all costs but in learning to live with it. "I'm a people pleaser" is the routine self-description of ADD adults. "I'm always so conscious of what the other person might need from me. I feel guilty if I disappoint someone. I can never say no."
In these cases, the feeling of guilt can act as potential a sign of growth. Maté suggests relating to our guilt in a different way, providing a template for engaging with many challenging parts of ourselves:
If we saw in guilt the well-meaning friend it was—doggedly faithful, to a fault—we would make room for it. We would listen to its one-note song of warning, don't be selfish, but decide for ourselves consciously whether we need to dance to its tune. Yes, thank you, I see what you mean. By all means stick around if you wish, but I will let my adult brain circuits judge whether I am really hurting someone else or merely serving my legitimate needs.
He continues:
At least in the beginning of growth, if she does not feel guilt, she is probably ignoring her truest self.
3. You don't punish yourself for where you find yourself
If you want to go further in the direction of healing, you do not chastise yourself for wherever you happen to be along the road. You don’t berate yourself for not having got there faster.
4. Choosing a guide: psychotherapy and counseling
Adults who hope their ADD-related problems can be addressed without psychological work under the guidance of a professional are, in most cases, setting themselves up for failure.
Maté specifically suggests working with a family therapist (even solo):
The skilled family therapist is not fixated on people's dysfunctions and their difficult feelings. She helps clients acknowledge painful emotions but also helps them to see their problems in the context of the multigenerational family system that they are part of. She encourages people to take responsibility for their own feelings rather than imagining that these feelings arise from the failures or ill will of their partners, friends, or co-workers-a liberating perspective that allows a client to shed the garb of victimhood.
Family therapy also helps individuals to see the invisible wires that connect their emotional experiences to those of the significant others with whom their lives are intertwined.
4. Miscellany
Twitter thread on the present moment: Every meditation teacher talks about the present moment as a special important thing but rightfully people often don’t get why it matters. Or what it means. Even my depressive thoughts about the past or anxious ruminations of the future are in the present moment
Kumar Patel doesn't mind that they couldn't make Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle today. (TikTok, 36sec)
Twitter thread from guy who wrote Peak Performance: "Here are 10 insights I've learned over the last 5 years coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes." Everyone wants to be SUCCESSFUL. But few people take the time and energy to define the success they want. As a result, they spend most, if not all, of their lives chasing what society superimposes on them as success. Define your values. Craft a life around them. THAT is success.
Francis Fukuyama with More Proof That This Really Is the End of History: No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.
This paragraph from the Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan's new book covers a ton of ground: Sometimes he ditches the music connections entirely. Sonny Burgess’ rare, unreleased slice of jump swing and rockabilly, “Feels So Good,” results in his state-of-America rumination about the days “before America was drugged into a barely functioning torpor … If you’re wondering how a nation will fall, look to the drug dealers.” An equal-opportunity provocateur, he employs Pete Seeger’s Vietnam-war protest song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” to grumble about the tribalism of modern media, slamming both “left-wing whining” and “right-wing badgering.” To Dylan, outlets that stick with rigid political or cultural opinions are “the equivalent of letting an eight-year-old pick their own diet,” and that kid will “end up undernourished with rotted teeth and weighing 500 pounds.” Give the man a podcast, fast.
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Thank you for reading, it's an honor to be in your inbox. If there's an idea in here you liked, maybe forward this to someone who might appreciate it.
<3 Kyle
