Tag Archives: metaphor

Masks and heights

I shared this metaphor with families before the March break started:

 —

I knew at some point this would happen. At some point the covid guidelines would include optional masks. I also know that this will be something that some people look forward to, while others will be concerned.

When I think about life beyond wearing masks in a pandemic, I think a good analogy is people’s comfort level with heights. I don’t have a fear of heights, but heights still scare me. What does that mean? Well, I’m the guy who stands on the edge of a massive drop-off at the end of a hike to a high lookout point, and I want to lean over to see more. That said, I’m not stupid and know this can be dangerous, so I’m scared that I’ll be too comfortable with leaning over and might be careless. Not afraid of heights, but afraid of doing something reckless. Other people fear heights. Still others lack the little fear I have, and they partake in dangerous activities with respect to heights, like free climbing without any ropes. 

Just like people have different levels of comfort with heights, many people will have different level of concerns around wearing or not wearing masks. Some will not wear a mask again, some will wear them only in crowded places, some will wear them almost all the time in public settings for quite a while now. Our job is to make sure we are following all other safety precautions and to respect others’ decisions around what they want to do. Going back to the heights metaphor, we don’t need to push people closer to the edge of the lookout, nor do we need to comment on others being more willing to get close to the edge… as long as they aren’t doing anything dangerous… and that’s the tricky part. Someone fearful of heights might think even standing one foot away from the edge is too dangerous! 

What has made BC more successful than most jurisdictions around the world, keeping schools open all year and still keeping cases lower or comparable to other jurisdictions that have had far more restrictions, has been that we have followed the guidance given. We have one of thehighest vaccine rates in Canada, and the world. And from what I’ve seen (despite the news highlighting a very vocal minority), we’ve had incredibly respectful compliance from fellow Canadians. It’s time for us to move towards normalcy again. That doesn’t mean we suddenly go cliff jumping, but it does mean that we have to be prepared to live in a world where we respect each others comfort levels with mask wearing, just as we would respect other people’s comfort level with heights… let’s allow everyone to determine their own comfort levels, and let’s be respectful to people who don’t share the same comfort levels as us. 

Wishing you all a safe, healthy, and happy March Break,
Dave 

Put another log on

I could sit and watch a fire all day. It’s mesmerizing and hypnotizing. I wonder if the appeal is somehow ingrained in our DNA from caveman times, in the same way that animals know things, like turtles hatching and heading straight for the ocean.

Fire is warmth. Fire is safety. Fire makes food. Fire is life.

For thousands of years fire was also community. It represented an opportunity to share stories, to connect with family, friends, and neighbours. We don’t gather around fires anymore. People share stories in different, digital ways.

Thanks for sitting around this digital fire with me. I’m honoured that you choose to join me. The visits are short, but I’m here every day, I’ll keep the flame going between your visits.

The view from the summit

One of my favourite sayings, that I learned from a former Hare Krishna devotee is, “There are many paths to the top of a mountain, but the view from the summit is the same.” I was at a professional development session about restorative practices last week and I shared this quote in a circle.

This little saying reminds me of three things. First, good people are good people. If they are on a good and kind path, it doesn’t matter what their faith, background, or ideology is. If they are on a path to being the best they can be, if they are doing their part to make this a better world for themselves, their friends, and their community, well then they are on a good path. It doesn’t have to be the same path as me.

The second interpretation of this quote is that sometimes it’s good to take the 2,000 foot view of things, to not get lost on your own path, and not see that others’ paths are going in the same direction. A good example of this is when dealing with upset parents. It’s easy to get lost in the issues, but if you pause and look at the issue from above, suddenly you can see clearly… you both have the best interest of their child in mind… you both want the same thing. With this perspective, it’s easier to see the forest through the trees. It’s easier to not focus on your own path, but a mutual path. The view from the summit is not hindered by the path.

When it comes to faith and religion, I think of this quote as meaning there are many ways to seek God, or to be spiritual. The biggest issue I have with religions is their fervour that there is only one path to God. That seems ridiculous to me for 2 reasons. First, how many 2,000+ year old religions are now dead? How many people lived before modern faiths even existed? Surely God cared about some of those people that lived before the ‘one true religion’ even existed. Surely He/She cares for people today who are good and righteous, but have never been exposed to that one religion. And secondly, if a benevolent God were truly that concerned about a specific unyielding faith, then He/She would have given us scriptures that were more universally interpreted and less framed in the era and geography they came from. Just think about the animals mentioned in religious texts, and whether they should be eaten, not eaten, or sacrificed… these animals had relevance not to a wise God, but to the people at the time that these people wrote the scriptures. No scripture is written well enough to be the words of God, they are all so obviously written by people.

“There are many paths to the top of a mountain, but the view from the summit is the same.”

A Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Mormon, a Jew, an Atheist… each one of these can be good people on a path to a kinder world, and each one of these can be selfish jerks that are of a belief that somehow their faith or ideology makes them righteous and heaven bound or makes them better than others. What if they just saw each other on the same mountain, and all heading to the same summit?

I like the view from the top of that summit!

Out of sync

I wrote a post recently about my routine being disrupted, and a good friend read it then texted me saying, “Hey, be gentle with yourself around the whole routine thing. We’ve been thrown a huge curveball right now and it’s impacting everybody“.

I replied that I’m motivated by making my goals public, and I did indeed improve on my routine. However, my response neglected to really listen to the point he was making. In previous posts I’ve written about the fact that I tend to consistently wake up before my alarm. Last night I was in bed earlier than usual, and while I looked at the click far more often than I usually do, I needed to hear my alarm to wake up for the 4th day in a row. I find this frustrating because I wake up before my wife, and she is a light sleeper, so I know my alarm disturbs her sleep quite a bit.

But as I started to beat myself up about the fact that I can’t seem to do something that I’ve previously found easy to do, I thought of my buddy’s message. Nothing is normal these days. Everywhere I look, things are either disrupted due to Omicron, or someone I know, and/or their family members are dealing with Omicron. Schedules at work have changed, students are all in rows facing the front of the class, and people’s plans and lives are being disrupted.

Extending my buddy’s metaphor, we haven’t just been thrown a curve ball, we have been thrown a curve ball with a wiffle ball. 🤪

Yeah, I’m out of sync, the whole damn world is out of sync! And maybe I have to wake up in the morning with an alarm, like most people do anyway. And maybe my healthy living routine will get disrupted again. And maybe (likely) Omicron visits our immediate family. And maybe I be gentle with myself when I swing and miss the curve balls headed my way.

If you are living a life where things feel somewhat normal, you deserve a trophy. And if you aren’t feeling like things are normal right now, be kind to yourself and know that it’s perfectly ok to be feeling the way you do. Give yourself a break… you deserve it! (And so do I.)

Fast and slow

We are having a renovation done and it’s about to move a lot faster. When electrical and plumbing are happening, the changes are incrementally slow, but this week they will start the drywall, and then things will start to move really quickly, adding walls, cabinets, and flooring. Soon we won’t remember what things look like now.

Kids are the same. Day to day you don’t notice them growing up, then suddenly they are adults. Day to day they are just your kids, but blink and suddenly they are their own people, with their own relationships, and work. The transition was slow, but looking back it seems so fast.

When you are building a home, things move both fast and slow.

Where are my keys?

My wife and I are constantly asking questions like this since we started our main floor renovation. We usually have our spots for things as we enter the door and those spots have been replaced by plywood and empty rooms. This morning it was, “Where’s my wallet?”

But as I internally asked myself that question, I wondered whose voice do I here and who am I asking? Do I really need to verbalize that question to myself? Yes, I do. But why?

Our minds are fascinating. And they don’t come with a user guide. One important thing that I’ve learned about it though is that minds are powerful answering machines. My mind may not know where my keys or my wallet are, but it immediately starts to think of a possible answer when I ask.

So are we asking the right questions? I’m not sure we are most of the time?

Why do I always lose my keys?

Why do these things always happen to me?

What’s wrong with me?

Why me?

Ask and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find.

Ask the wrong questions, and your amazing brain will do its job and find you an answer.

So, are you asking your brain empowering questions, or are you asking it questions that undermine you, and give you reason to believe you deserve less, are worthless, (worth less)?

What did I do with my keys after I came through the front door?

What will make this situation better?

What can I ask myself, so that my brain gives me a worthy and self-enriching answer?

It’s time to find the key.

—

Downward Spiral into the mud

My grandfather had a saying, and I’ve shared it often, “Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty but the pig likes it.”

The pig has some success no matter what. This is something that I think is playing out with anti-vax and conspiracy arguments… they have some success every time we argue. The reason for this success is that they are operating from a fixed mindset, their minds are made up… but they are often arguing with people who have a growth mindset and are open to some level of persuasion. It’s a guaranteed downward spiral, with some of their fixed and misguided ideas seeping into the consciousness of people who try to factor all things in to their understanding.

An example of this is when the twin towers fell in New York. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories that started with the premise that ‘steel towers can’t crumble like that just because a plane crashed into them’. Spoiler alert, they can. But at the time we had no examples to go by, no science to support the possibility, and so just raising this concern could put doubt into a reasonable person’s mind. Then came the videos. Google something like “twin tower conspiracy video” and you’ll see what I mean. These videos are well crafted and convincing.

If you are someone prone to the idea that there is some cabal that has a master plan to rule the world, the fall of the twin towers easily fits that narrative. However, if you are someone who looks at evidence and makes sound decisions based on the information you have, too much of this convincing misdirection and misinformation could influence your thinking. In other words the spread of well constructed fake news has influence on all parties… meanwhile simple logic and boring facts only work on those with growth mindsets willing to do the research work.

The pig wins the moment you engage you in the fight. They get you dirty. Here is a study done at MIT, ‘Does correcting online falsehoods make matters worse?‘, which looks at how pointing out mistakes doesn’t help the argument:

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

And the article goes on to say,

“We might have expected that being corrected would shift one’s attention to accuracy. But instead, it seems that getting publicly corrected by another user shifted people’s attention away from accuracy — perhaps to other social factors such as embarrassment.” The effects were slightly larger when people were being corrected by an account identified with the same political party as them, suggesting that the negative response was not driven by partisan animosity.

Now in this case the ‘evidence’ will often degrade, and so it may not be too convincing, but research like this suggests that the conspiracy or fake news spreader is very unlikely to change their minds given sound evidence against their ideas… but when their false ideas are well crafted and instil doubt, the same can’t be said for thoughtful people who aren’t fixed in their opinions.

Social media engagement is more likely to influence people towards believing aspects of fake news that to promote facts and sound evidence. It’s a downward spiral, and it’s getting us all a little dirty.

A metaphor for meta

By now most people have heard about Facebook’s plan to open up The Metaverse to everyone: a virtual environment where we interact and engage in a digital world.

Back at the start of September I wrote Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor, and shared how wearable technology will enhance us. In it I said, “The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision.”

Essentially, if you aren’t augmenting your sight with added (meta) data from the world, normal vision would be like you are walking around with bad vision, missing out on what everyone else can see. The Metaverse is a bit different. It isn’t augmentation of reality, it is an alternate reality, albeit a virtual one. It is a world unto itself, with locations to visit and items to consume and purchase.

There are a lot of movies about people being trapped in a virtual world or a video game, this is a space people choose to go to. It has all the trappings of the present world, but without the crowds, pollution, and effort to commute to different places. But while I haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that first coined the Metaverse, from what I understand it’s quite dystopian, with capitalism reigning supreme and the rich controlling the virtual world. Sure, it will produce some new winners, the early adopters who understand how to build and capitalize in this new frontier. However, the rich will also do very well, and be the early buyers who build the infrastructure for profit. Facebook will profit the most, with a younger generation that was a demographic that they were losing.

It’s going to happen. It’s going to be a space everyone finds value visiting. From moviegoers, sitting in a virtual theatre with the biggest screen they’ve ever seen right ‘in front of’ their eyes. To birthday parties of friends in other parts of the world. To business meetings. To music concerts and live performances. To actual video games where you spend both time and money living in an alternate reality.

Except it won’t just be a vacation land and escape. It will be a temporary happy pill for some, and a permanent place of work for others. It will not bring happiness for most, it will only extend the rat race of the physical world into a virtual world.


if this feels like a dystopian outlook, it’s not because of the inability for this new Metaverse to be a great place, but rather because those who build it and first explore it won’t be there to make it an ideal place to enjoy, they will be there to make it a market to gain profit and power.

Welcome to the virtual rat race.

Living in a dream

One of my favourite responses when someone asks me how I’m doing is “Living the dream!”

Yesterday I wrote about how there seems to be many people who think they ‘took the red pill‘ – revealing an unpleasant truth, but they have actually taken the blue pill – remaining in blissful ignorance.

Then this morning I was listening to a podcast and musician Baba Brinkman was quoted as saying, “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”

This made me realize how much reality right now (for many if not all of us) is literally like being in a dream. Let me explain… In a dream, when something doesn’t fit with reality, it doesn’t always trigger a response.

Examples:

  • You are in a dream talking to someone and turn away, you turn back and now it’s a different person, but having the same conversation.
  • You are in a dream and in it you are in your own house, you change rooms and now you are in a room you’ve never seen before, or even outside.
  • You are in a dream and cars can fly, or you can fly.

In each of these cases, had it been reality, the experience would be jarring, but in a dream it just makes sense.

Well in today’s reality, I think many people are living in a dream. So, you give an anti-vaxer, or a flat earther some profound point that undermines their belief, and what happens? Nothing. It doesn’t interrupt the dream. It isn’t jarring, it doesn’t ‘wake them up’. Their reality includes points and counterpoints that do not trigger a wakeful response. So, the dream can keep going… uninterrupted.

“What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”

The problem today is that too many people are agreeing on hallucinations that just don’t fit our reality; hallucinations that undermine our future reality… and I’m not sure how we can wake them up?

Revisiting

I wrote this here on Daily-Ink a year ago:

— — —

“We are living in a red pill/blue pill moment, except people are colour blind and everyone thinks they are taking the red pill.”

— — —

The Terms Red Pill and Blue Pill refer to a choice between revealing an unpleasant truth, represented by the red pill, or to remain in blissful ignorance, represented by the blue pill. These terms are in reference to the 1999 film The Matrix. ~ Wikipedia

The insightful thing about this is that there are a lot of people who are (unknowingly) choosing the blue pill. This can be summarized by 2 TikToks I’ve seen recently:

1. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZM8DgTr6X/

2. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZM8DpNoJP/

While these are American references, (welcome to using social media in Canada, that’s what you get), there are many conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers all over the world that think they’ve somehow taken the red pill, but are colourblind and have ignorantly taken the blue pill.

This is so much more dangerous that people who just choose the blue pill because that’s what they wanted. This is about people steadfastly believing that they have seen behind the (metaphorical) curtain. They “know” the unpleasant ‘Truth’.

Ignorance may be bliss but intentionally seeking out ignorance and claiming it is fact is outright dangerous.

Dangerous. Not mistaken, not misguided, not just ignorant. Dangerous.

Social media has amplified this danger. When Facebook posts with misinformation get shared 5 times as fast and as much as the information debunking the information; When QAnon can constantly change their stance(s) and people still believe, despite how wrong this ‘inside information’ has been; When crackpots that claim to be experts get more views than researchers who actually share the data… this is dangerous.

It’s one thing to choose the blue pill, it’s a whole other kind of scary thing when the blue pill is ignorantly chosen while the taker believes they are taking the red pill.