every disease of intellectualism is reducible to unwillingness to live in real time
most often people want to live slower than real time and that's like 17 diseases, but some want to live faster, and that's like 3-4 more
Some version of this is the DSM for temporality diseases
Frodo: “I wish it need not have happened in my time”
Gandalf: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I suspect my entire career is overcompensation for felt reluctance to live in real time (in my case Slow Disease #7)
-- studied control theory (aka "real time" engineering)
-- wrote one book on time, writing another
-- gravitate to more real-time media (blogs, twitter)
-- consulting practice built around time-centric management ideas (TTM-minimization, OODA loops etc)
... train of thought sparked by my saying "I'm solving for TTM, not quality, quality can be fixed in post..."
Half the shit I say to clients is about forcing time-awareness
I also like to get to the airport early and have never missed a flight in my life (not counting connections)
I think people who argue that never missing a flight is suboptimal are wrong (or don't have phones or don't like airports) but it IS a strong symptom of slow-time disease
It is still a disease when compensation/coping leads to high-value skills. For eg, the intellectual disease called "strategic thinking," where it works, buys you so much time, you can stay in slow time and don't have to indulge in melee frenzies at all
"feeling rushed" is partly about being less in control than you like, but partly also just disliking the actual pace of reality... 99.9999999% of the cosmos is a very, very slow place, but the parts we live in kinda move along at a brisk pace
wanting to live faster than real time leads to seeking out of intense, fast-paced experiential environments (aka gonzo-ing, "I feel a need for speed"ism) and can lead to patterns of high-value artistic work, but is still a cope... you fall into depression if forced to slow down
A basic but easily forgotten boundary condition of life is that it’s finite. If you live slowly, you’ll live less, but make more sense of it. If you live fast, you’ll live more, but make less sense of it. It’s not even obscure woo. A literal race between I/O bitrates and compute
Your temporal archetype is given by the formula
A= ∫(closed-loop I/O bitrate)/(flops) where the integral is taken over [0, Lifespan]
Important to only integrate closed-loop bitrate where you’re interacting with environment. Pass-through (spectator/consumer life) is ignored
The philosophically most elevating thing about programming (and the reason I’m bad at it) is that it’s the closest in-their-head types will ever get to “melee living”
Life at the heart of a software project is the closest thing to “human real-time” I’ve ever experienced.
New post on Expanding Awareness: to rush is to try to compress time
"Rushing creates a generalised tension in our bodies. There's a strong need for the rushed experience to be completed, a kind of embodied 'come on already, come on, come on' "
https://expandingawareness.org/blog/to-rush-is-to-try-to-compress-time/…
Wish someone had warned me of this before I tried to “slow down” last year
I’m leaning towards idea people sort of have a set tempo, embracing it is healthier than fighting it
Mostly though