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Friend, close friend, relative, parent, child, self. Do we reserve increasing level of seriousness for all of them? I think by definition "serious mode" is binary. It's full throttle consciousness. The maximum we can produce.

It's sad that these moments are so rare and mostly sad. They can change our lives.

What if we chased these serious moments. It would help to know that there are non-sad serious moments.

What if we eventually got so good at making serious moments that our whole life was one serious moment. Taking yourself seriously takes is on a whole new level.

You'll complain about the specific color of blue for your computer. But maybe the same energy that goes into taking such a minute detail so seriously is part and parcel of the mechanism that released so much energy.

Sometimes it feels weird to choose. How 'serious' to take things. Seriousness is associated with a lot of "bad" things for me. War is serious, death is serious, suicide is serious. Isn't it better to make things less serious?

E.g. this avatar is a talking cat. yet it's non-seriousness feel necessary to slide in some serious stuff.

"Death is becoming one with the universe again" when taken seriously means that you're not longer bothered by any sort of death. Usually people say this in an agnostic sarcastic sense. "Maybe, but maybe not, I dunno. Interesting idea though."

So there's a limit to how seriously we can take certain ideas based on our faith requirements. 90% chance child will die. Full Serious Mode. 50%. On. 20% On. 1% On 0.0000001% "Well, they're just flying to see grandma."

Having an above average tendency to believe that rare events will happen exposes you to them because it adjust how seriously you take certain event. You read small signals as "signs" when otherwise it would be random noise.

When seriousness is tempered by knowledge, some cool stuff happens. The hobo reading the stars to fill out a lottery ticket is in many ways the same as the professor unlocking a mystery in dream but the professor's is far more likely to have a real-world interesting effect.

I've a feeling that the more things in life you take seriously, the more interesting your life is. The internet has made it so that we have a lot of skills and knowledge, so for most young people nowadays the bottleneck is responsibility.

Another issue is that there is too much peace. That is, the skills of war aren't useful in peace. The only things we take seriously at a social level are war vs beautiful or useful communities.

This means that culturally we aren't taking the right things seriously. E.g. for the U.S. this means things like mental illness, fragmenting communities, meaningful lives, etc... Only 'war' stuff (which includes 'economic') stuff is taken seriously.

So all these artists and creators knowing 100x more stuff than their parents aren't taken seriously by the "country" (and its systems) because it only takes war seriously. s they're war mongers!!"

"but I don't want to take war seriously." "but see China! see how they're making all the iphones. it means they're planning on world domination!!" "but this app takes 4 clicks, if I make it 2, i'll have achieved a 50% reduction in ..."

Every argument is basically "you're not taking the right things seriously!!!!" Which means that every argument has an Adult and a Child. When 2 Adults see the other as an Adult, no argument is possible.

Arguments can be solved by taking nothing seriously and taking everything seriously. In theory, these 2 pure states are equivalent. Enlightened monk takes 100% of life seriously but also is a jokester/trickster.

In practice few can wield these infinite states and arguments are resolved by creating large but bounded fields of seriousness and non-seriousness. E.g. "Play Hard Time" and "Work Hard Time"

There's a flawed sort of anarchism that believes that destroying all structure and hierarchies of value will make it so that the non-seriousness field can become infinite. It's sorta right. The field of non-seriousness always sees itself bounded by the serious.

The problem is that what it will do instead is create a huge field a seriousness when at every moment you have to worry about dying or getting your next meal. This is actually just Regular Nature. It's actually idyllic.

Animals, because they are in the infinite states of taking 100% of their life seriously, actually end up taking 100% of their life unseriously. They are cute, happy, sad, tragic, heroic, etc... they are the full drama of life.

Without achieving the 100% state, a 99% states of seriousness is actually a terrible state to be in if that 1% of non-seriousness is your "home". You'll feel surrounded by intense darkness and danger all the time because you can't inhabit serious space.

No one can actually live in serious space as a home. It's possible in a limited capacity for young adults but they eventually can't keep up with the new young blood.

(side thought: ageism isn't seen as a problem in tech b/c the current crop of programmers is too shortsighted to see how they themselves are headed towards this meat grinder. they don't think about the future much.)

Not taking yourself seriously is a quick and dirty defense mechanism. "Haha you got me I was joking/I wasn't trying" If used too much, it disconnects you from seriousness. seriousness becomes like the feeling of jumping into a cold pool but x1000.

Vs if you swim everyday eventually you reach a state where going serious just isn't a big deal. They have the energy to lead heroic lives.

Seriousness always has good intent. Two serious people reading bad intent and arguing is always due to bad communication. They aren't "seeing" each other properly.

Example. Racism is serious. They are always born of real life experience creating real scars. (Seriousness NEED scars). E.g. there are many people who are scared of black people b/c of actual life experiences.

Their children don't have that experience. While the parent is just trying to be helpful. "Stay away from black neighborhoods." it's interpreted as a kind of non-serious "I'm just being a jerk." If you don't have the scar, you can't feel the "realness" of the seriousness.