tweetstorms on nihilism & hunger

Snickers has a pretty big & long-running ad campaign called "You're not you when you're hungry" and the examples are playful but the underlying point is deep and unsettling.

I think that this is actually a great example of something "everyone knows and nobody talks about because it would lead to general chaos."

Simply: If I don't eat, I die. If you don't eat, you die.

twitter.com/mykola/status/1198719315589160960

Somebody said those sentences recently & I was like DUDE YOU DON'T SAY THAT.

I didn't actually blurt it out but it was fascinating to recognize the part of me that was just like "you can't just talk about people dying" even as simultaneously he was stating an obvious basic fact.

Snickers makes their campaign about people getting angry, grumpy, or confused when hungry, but (for obvious reasons) they don't talk about how the anger is often a cover for fear.

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1120903424256675840

Going up a level of abstraction from hunger→fear→"you're not you", there's a more general general thing where *any* kind of scarcity (perceived, not actual) dramatically

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1158541455281000448

For some time, I've noticed an odd trigger of nihilistic thoughts: running out of something. Often toilet paper or toothpaste, sometimes peanut butter.

It seems to produce "oh my fucking god how many times am I going to have to buy more of this!"
twitter.com/visakanv/status/1108796358519984128

I think the particular flavor of this nihilism comes from a fear of boredom. Not boredom itself, but fear *of* boredom.

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1120903424256675840

Makes sense that it's fear-of, not boredom itself. 😨

Actual boredom isn't so bad. Maybe isn't even real! 🤯

On lots of levels I've recently been busting through this:

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1171096267642015744

And yet... these nihilistic thoughts are fascinating because despite my life being incredibly richly meaningful, they still feel tempting!

This highlights how easy it is to lose touch with what you ordinarily know, when you're in a fear state.

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twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1201390364558594051

Today I got to the end of the row of melatonin pills I keep along top of my corkboard for easy access from my desk, and had to put more out from the container in my closet.

Dunno if it was the fact that I hadn't fully run out or what, but I had a non-nihilistic experience today!

I poured out a handful, and as I placed each one up there, I felt connected with my future selves who would take one off each day. This was a representation of 2.5 weeks of my life! What would happen in that time?

The words in the previous tweet, of course, utterly fail to render my qualia in that moment. It doesn't help that I ended up taking a 8h break in the middle of writing this tweetstorm. Such is life.

One anchor that has helped me in the past when this nihilistic feeling comes up is humming the hook from Setting Up the Pins by @grovesroad, pointing at the beauty of the inevitability of having to take care of shit again and again.

Beautiful music video:
youtube.com/watch?v=I1MQaHQgqrY

"Sing for the beauty that's to be found
setting up the pins for knocking them down."

Everyday life itself as infinite game.

Creating the conditions for playing the game as part of the game itself, not as somehow separate.

Queering work & play.

twitter.com/callumflack/status/1200801403683262465

My attention more naturally orients towards exalting the beauty of abstraction—in the computer science sense—the beauty of not *having* to concern oneself with the details of the pin setup.

But obsession with *that* beauty is part of the fear-of-boredom nihilism.

Iain McGilchrist wrote an essay/ebook called The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, which explores this question:
> How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it?

amzn.to/33Edard

(I'm about to mention brain hemispheres, so if you haven't already read McGilchrist or my tweets about it, I will probably need to clarify at this point that this is a new model, not Gazzaniga's model that's considered debunked even by Gazzaniga.)

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1187752418353860608

So the left-hemisphere tends to be "not in touch with reality but with its representation of reality, which turns out to be a remarkably self-enclosed, self-referring system of tokens." It "sees truth as internal coherence of the system" then hustles to

twitter.com/djmicrobeads/status/1192947862604263432

Such a coherent model is awesome, but dangerous unless you can reconcile that model with actual reality. This requires the same perceptual shift involved in seeing the beauty in settings up the pins, even—and especially—if you *also* have a PinSetterBot™

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1148003045424414720

This perceptual shift is table stakes for grokking complexity, which is critical for taking on global problems without making yet-worse problems.

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1201411445751197697

How to learn this? Fuck, I wish with all my heart I could tell you in a tweet or two. But it'd be a totally different world if I could, so 🤷‍♀️

twitter.com/NoraBateson/status/1106099786791485440

I could try to give pointers at where to start, but of course you have to start where you are, & that's different for everyone.

Here's a link to a recent blog post, which works with a lot of similar themes and has links to relevant works by me & others.

malcolmocean.com/2019/10/the-challenge-of-partial-control/

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