Culture

Watch this video. Then read this post.

(EDIT: and this one too!!)

Self-expression

If there is a French fibre within you, here’s the video which inspired me to write this post:

Recently, I haven’t been posting as much. There are a number of reasons as to why.

First off, I’ve been busy with work and the holidays. I’ve been trying to relax, take a break from technology and I didn’t want to over-stress too much by trying to write on my blog as much as possible.

But I think that embodies part of the problem. The blog for me has become a bit of a chore rather than a hobby I look forward to going back to. But more on that later.

The second reason why I haven’t been posting as much is the paralysis of perfection. I feel that, in order to produce good quality content, I need to take my time over the posts I do. I need to do a lot of research and thinking about the topic I want to talk about; I need to plan in detail what I’m going to talk about; I need to analyse the structure of my post to make sure it flows smoothly.

(For more on the relationship between quantity vs. quality, see this video.)

But that effort that goes into every post has meant that, to my mind, I’ve been overthinking about each article I write. And that’s why it’s become a chore for me.

So there’s gonna be a brand new philosophy for the next few days, weeks, and maybe even months.

I’m going to be producing more content. I’m going to be writing more. And I realise that not everything is going to be 100% perfect, or that perhaps if I took an extra ten minutes on each post I do they would improve, but I need to get something onto the page.

You see, self-expression is (I think) one of the best ways of dealing with a mental health issue. I’ve only just begun to realise how many ideas (no matter how wacky, crazy, stupid, daft or downright dangerous they may be) I’ve got inside of my head, and if they remain inside of my skull and I don’t externalise them somehow, then those ideas are going to get stale.

Not only that, but it means then when those ideas turn bad (I hate myself, no-one likes me, what’s the point) they linger inside of your mind and just progressively deteriorate, becoming worse and worse. Externalisation of one’s thoughts is a brilliant way to calm down when you’re feeling emotional. Often when we are emotional, we know we feel upset or angry or annoyed, but we don’t know exactly why we do. This is why writing something down or talking to someone can help so much.

And so yes, this blog is meant to hopefully help people in need of help, but it’s also for me as well. It’s my way of self-expression, sharing myself and my thoughts to the world, and it helps me so much in ways I had almost forgotten. I believe my recent dip in general mood has been as a result of not posting as regularly as I used to.

So that’s gonna change.

I understand that, sometimes, thinking through things carefully before you put pen to paper can increase the quality of the end project significantly. But that’s where the video I posted up top comes in: if you’re not able to understand French, the main moral of the story was that this YouTuber (Olivier Roland) is in the process of posting one video a day for a whole year. His friends and colleagues think this is mad, he must be so stressed trying to gather all the content for each video every single day – but he feels liberated. He feels relaxed. Happy.

He’s not constrained to follow a rigid pattern of a post on this topic of Tuesday and a post on this topic of Friday – he can just say whatever he’s thinking, he can let out whatever is in his mind on that day to the camera and share it.

There’s another French YouTuber who spends ages compiling images and research and graphical effects and so on, so that a 5 minute video takes him a good couple of days or longer to prepare. But for Olivier, a 5 minute video takes about 10 minutes to make, edit and distribute. No wacky fancy equipment, no brainy gimmicks, just him, talking to a camera, genuinely.

That’s where I want to move this blog onto for the near future. Me, sharing my thoughts, to the world, genuinely.

Let’s see how this works.

Till next time 🙂

Thinking

I think we undervalue the importance of thinking in today’s society.

Perhaps this quotation from Simon Blackburn’s Think demonstrates what I’m getting at:

The word “philosophy” carries unfortunate connotations.

I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering. For just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involves seeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes were made. This is what we aim at when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

Especially at my age, people get obsessed with memorising mark schemes and stuffing their heads full of as much information as possible. But that is a bit like stuffing one’s head full of bricks from every corner of the globe with no sense of direction, purpose or structure.

You end up with a huge disorganised pile of bricks.

Thinking is picking up each brick one by one and assembling them into a structure in your mind – your structure, full of your worries, concerns, memories, emotions, knowledge and beliefs.

In many ways, reading a book is a shortcut for thinking: instead of having to think about how to join a chemistry brick and a biology brick, read a biochemistry book and we’re already there.

Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that – we have many chemistry bricks and many biology bricks in our brain, where each brick is like a titbit of information we have acquired over the years.

But whilst reading a book and listening to a talk is where the acquisition of bricks happens, without organisation, the huge pile of data can get overwhelming.

Pure thinking is often what is needed to sort out the mess in your mind. Maybe a bit of speaking and writing will help too.

If you don’t sort it out, that mess in your mind could trigger some crises later on in life…

I highly recommend reading this fantastic article on the avalanche of information in today’s world and watching the video below – I really like how Chris Anderson visualises an “idea” and depicts how it is transmitted almost telepathically from person to person.

Till next time 🙂