Excuse me, fellow driver, I’ve got five terabytes of space in my car; makes it hard for me to fit through. Can I just squeeze by and turn right? Thank you for not making that easier at all.
What’s that guys name? Not Zipf. The other guy, the opposite direction. I always thought he was full of it. What’s his name? Doesn’t matter. And it has slowed down hasn’t it? He was full of it. Storage capacity no longer doubles. Maybe we were behind and now we’re ahead. That’s a sentence worth enjoying several times.
Ties together, somehow, choices and storage. We have our choices to make and we have storage. We’re getting —don’t we? Well, mistakes are great. You learn from them. But there’s only so much life to go around. Have to let other people learn from your mistakes if you actually want things to be better.
Mmm, doubling. Doubling. Doubling, doubling. Pleasant word, pleasant idea to think. Sounds like bubbling. Just kind of rolls.
Choose your enemies wisely. Best advice I can give. Don’t like to give advice, but if someone said, Hey give some advice! I’d say choose your enemies wisely. Don’t put anything in your ear that you can’t fit in your elbow. Same idea really.
Get it?
Doubling, doubling doubling, and doubling. View the universe a certain way, and every decision you make creates two possible worlds. Doubling the size of the universe as it were. One wonders if the universe has enough storage for all the junk that you do.
Oh, it sounds like I’m in a bad mood. Isn’t that interesting. Here I am with five beautiful pristine terabytes of storage and it sounds like I’m in a bad mood, when of course I’m not at all. How very interesting. Why should that be? Is Someone somewhere cranky?
Think someone may have edited the words uptown funk out of last my video. Right at minute seven. Funny how often censors mishear people. It’s like, what is your job?
Good to make good decisions. There’re a lot of decisions made, make us think, probably, well– we watch people make decisions and think wow, God is going to hand that person their own behind. Which is a neat image. Really makes you think. Don’t want my behind handed to me. Don’t want that to be possible.
Wondering if the universe is operating as efficiently as it should be. Seems like no. Time to make fewer choices, maybe. Free up some swap space. Overall, I mean over-over-all*, things aren’t functioning that well anymore. System’s overloaded with a bunch of junk. Do we really need your ability to choose one of 27 different snack items? No. One snack item ought to be enough for you. Just take that snack item and go.
Everything grinding along slowly. Just isn’t as much progress as you think there’d be. Space-time busy processing all of those choices we weighed about things we didn’t need to make choices about in the first place, what kind of satt-nav you got in your car. Who cares. Get lost.
I’m surprised myself. Didn’t expect this result. Progress being slower because we’re all busy making choices about things that we don’t need to make choices about. I go to the dentist and she says, What color toothbrush do you want? and I say, Give me the toothbrush that I get. And, Well, that I can do, she says. Because I don’t want to waste one bit.
Yeah, your brain uses as much energy as the light bulb in your refrigerator. You knew that, right? That’s what you have. That’s what you have at any given time to do anything, at any given time, with your mind. And you’re going to waste some portion of that wattage when deciding what color toothbrush you want? I’m not.
If you’re waiting for me to say thank you very much, to whomever you are who made my life so desperate that I manage to realize this, I’m not saying that. Let’s stick to the point here. You have x number of years times one lightbulb. That’s all you get. That’s the capacity of your mind, all you’re ever going to think. And sure it’s amazing what we can get done, sure it’s a pretty efficient machine, the mind, but finite is finite. All you’re ever going to think. And I just made you think about that last sentence twice.
I wouldn’t waste it. Wouldn’t waste it hating people, wouldn’t waste it jerking around at other peoples’ expense, don’t have time for that that—
Hold on, I swear someone is cranky somewhere and I swear it’s not me. Cheer up, whoever you are. Cheer up. At least you have a lightbulb.
Don’t know. I’ll probably just find some person and annoy the heck out of him. I’ll just annoy the heck out of this guy over here. What else is he going to do with his life? I don’t care. He’s not going to do it now anyway. He’ll be too busy being annoyed by me.
I wonder if I can figure out a way to make money off of that. I’ll just make a lot of money, and then when I’m old, I’ll eat my money. And my children can also be nasty jerks, and what money I can’t fit my stomach they can eat before they die. Now I’m relieved. Have all that worked out.
—
You know, I think it’s from the coffee that I’m sounding cranky. Caffeine’s a very delicate thing. You know there’s a red wine drunk, a beer drunk, an apple juice drunk** etc. etc. Because the chemicals in red wine are different from the chemicals in beer, they both contain things other than alcohol, can you imagine? that affect your mood in a distinct reproducible way. So there’s a reason why we like which we like. The same way with there’s a reason why we like the coffee that we like: because we’re completely addicted to it.
Whatever, brands of coffee correspond to different moods, is what I’m saying. Think that’s what I’m jiving on right now. Just drank about 12 ounces of some coffee I’m unfamiliar with; I think it was loosely based on Dippin’ Donuts. Just a little too sharp, a little too edgy for me. Starbucks, that’s a bad high. You just grind on yourself all day. That feeling of perpetually fleeing an assailant. Yecch. This one has a little bit of weird acid at the back of it, and I think maybe a little of that Dippin’ Donuts self-loathing. You know the self-loathing I mean. That coffee is fun at first, it’s like, Hey! Sugars and light! but about halfway down that little bit of self-loathing kicks in, and it’s like, hey, this isn’t fun anymore.
It’s difficult to drive, isn’t it? For you, I mean. Basing this on the fact that you can’t seem to do it well.
It’s to make you buy a second donut. You knew that, right?
Hey, if you have one of those little family stickers on the back your car, where you have your creatures, you have your husband and they’re all stick figures, hanging out the back your car— make sure as soon as that thing starts to peel a little bit that you get out there and peel it all off, because it’s really sad to see the disintegrating family on the back of your car. It’s not good.
I don’t know why you had to put it back there in the first place. Showing me you are proud of something, I can’t quite figure out what that person is proud of, but they want me to see it. In addition to this SUV, we also have a cat and sometimes wear flip-flops. Hey, I’m glad you told me. Going to run straight somewhere with this information and do something with it. No idea what. I’ll just grab the next person who’ll listen. Hey, see that guy? He sometimes wears flip-flops, him and his wife, and it really made me think, you know? That maybe I don’t wear flip flops enough?
There’s something to this choices thing. Might even be a blog in it.
If every choice we make multiplies the size of the universe, we might want to be a little bit more careful about what we care about. Quite possible that the universe has its size limits, or at least functions better with more excess space. I imagine the great black vacuums between the planets, filled things like whether I want the curtains in maroon or periwinkle. Give me some curtains, I’ll hang them up. Can you go and entire day without making any decisions? That was a question. Can you think about having 20 decisions per day as your quota? So was that. What would you do with them? Good things, right? Yeah, good things!
We all have a lot to do any given day. Especially when we’re not watching television.
So, finite life span, overloaded, overclocked universe, God’s some kind of hacker, I imagine He’s already taken steps to try to make things run better. Clean this up, clean that out, not saving any of that, all that comes in that way goes straight to the trash. Still it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere. You can see Him, kindof scratching his neckbeard, Man! Doesn’t seem like except for one every thousand years we make any kind of progress. Meanwhile, all these background processes churning: Cure for cancer, estimated time remaining ………..555 more years.
Give the universe some space. Relax. Give up. Don’t care. Whatever. You’re finite, universe is too, at least locally. Locally everything’s finite. Be efficient in your thinking. That’s what religion’s for, at least one thing it’s for. What books are for. What families are for. What school is for. Teach you things so that you don’t have to figure them out on your own. Go ahead and take that to the next level, as an adult. Not forced to sit at a desk, or in a pew, under the thumb of your parents, set up your own system that will make the majority of the decisions that make up the rest of your life. Here, look:
1. By default, do nothing except drink juice.
2. When someone asks you to do something, do it right away until it is finished.
Even a system as simple as that can handle 100% of the decisions you make daily, in advance. Yeah, you’ll have to work out what to do if you’re asked to do something while you’re still doing something you were asked to do. That’s doable. But you won’t be flailing around making every decision on its own. All made for you, by you,*** in advance.
Or try this: be on the lookout for people that are better than you, and then follow them around. They eat breakfast, you eat breakfast. Simple. Saves on the lightbulb. They go to Providence, RI, you go to Providence, RI. Simple. Saves on the lightbulb. Wait— maybe follow them around is the wrong choice of words. I meant to say learn from them. Learn from them, learn from them. DON’T follow them around. Ok? Don’t. Say hi and things; don’t be creepy.
But still, even just as a thought experiment, you can decide to be the same as someone and be conscious about it. When he eats breakfast, I eat breakfast, etc. Try that part.
*aka exalted
**I’m very sensitive, chemically.
***FYBY
(If more of us would think about the same thing at once, that would be more efficient. Everyone’s got to do the same things, but one at a time only. Make our plans, different from other’s plans. I know I do this, but not to be special, just because I don’t want to be where you are. When I go on vacation, want to go where you’re not going, because I don’t want to see you. Not so I can come back and say that I went somewhere where noone else went. If we wouldn’t have to be together, I’d be fine all going to the same place.
It’s expensive. Cognitively expensive. Save your lightbulb, group up. Don’t make decisions, just do everything someone else does. Who cares about you? Don’t even think about it. Problem is that’s so efficient that it feeds on itself. More people decide not to decide, more compelling it is for people who haven’t even decided to join in. Without even wondering why. I don’t know. This is what I do. Why not? Everyone else’s doing it. Brain takes these efficiencies. Without checking with you first.)
Also, just a note:
I don’t think you have anything I haven’t seen, unless you’re going to make it up today. Even then I’m probably still not going to be too surprised, because I know how your mind works, inside and out. Thanks for sharing all these years.