Like almost everyone else, I make New Year’s resolutions.
Like almost everyone else, I break them.
Not this year.
When I came to China the first time, back in 2006, I became obsessed with human potential. Not the woo-woo stuff about telepathy and astral projections, but something more like the Mentats or the Bene Gesserit of my beloved Dune, a kind of ultimate flowering of human powers. I explored strange alleys of the internet and obscure sects of Chinese religion and practice, made a couple of hacking attempts at practicing what I’d found. I learned names like Kahne, and Weed, and Lorayne and LeShan, names you’ll soon be familiar with.
This year, I put it into practice.
I’ve collected all my old notes, and sorted them out. Of the wishful fantasy of becoming a Bene Gesserit, I’ve harrowed four abilities that I believe are skills, and which, like any skill, can be learned by dint of practice. These four I call simulflow, mnemonics, meditation, and petit perception.
Simulflow is similar to, but distinct from, multitasking. Multitasking involves giving partial (mental) attention to many things at once. Simulflow is the art of giving your full (mental) attention to several things at once.
Mnemonics is the ars memorativa, the Art of Memory. It involves training oneself in a few brain hacks or mental cheats to assist natural memory in normal tasks, like remembering where you set your glasses.
Meditation, as I’m doing it, is mindfulness meditation, paying attention to one thing at a time. This is harder than it sounds.
Petit perception is clocking the details. You would be amazed at the things you miss. Try closing your eyes and naming the objects on your desk. Then open your eyes and see how much you missed.
I’ve put together a plan that lasts twelve weeks, or three months. I call it Roscoe Learns to Think, and I’m starting on January 1st. By April 1st, I will have concluded this experiment, one way or the other. Either I’ll have finished, and accomplished what I set out to do, or I’ll have finished, and fallen short, or I’ll have given up. Only the latter is failure, as far as I’m concerned.
But this is only partly about me. Mostly, this is about you.
I’m including all this detail as an invitation. You can come along, if you like, and take part in the experiment, see if this stuff really works. If it does, you’ll be able to remember everything at a glance, and rattle it off casually a week later while you’re composing an email and reading one of my stories. And you’ll know where your keys are. If it doesn’t work, and this is the awesome bit, you’ll still be ahead of where you are now.
It’s gonna be tough going. We’re going to need practice, and discipline, and mastery(1) to get to April. I’m going to note my progress, and add snarky commentary, and put up suggestions for application (I’m pretty sure “How to have better sex by sitting around and doing nothing” is going to be fairly popular), and I suggest you do, too. Join me, and we’re in for the long haul. But we’re gonna Learn to Think.
Sound good?
Sign up here in the comments, and I’ll put your name up to the right. Yeah, right there at the top. A long list of men and women, willing to work for their bread and pay their dues, and willing to participate in a grand experiment, to find out what a human mind can do.
This year, I’m going to the stars. I’m going to Learn to Think.
Who’s with me?
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1 – George Leonard’s Mastery is going to come up a lot, and it’s a great book anyway. You should read it.
It’s hard to talk about dreams, especially cherished ones. As the Shins taught us, “caring is creepy,” and as Obama (supposedly) demonstrates, idealism is for kids and the deluded. Everything is going wrong, and it’s much easier to bitch, whine, and moan. Besides, telling people your hopes and dreams means they can attack them.
Let me tell you my dream.
Carl Sagan described a glorious dawn, a galaxyrise of four hundred billion suns. I see the glorious dawn, where every sun is different, strange, and new. Every star has heard the word, that the Eagle has landed. Around each sun are humans, in groups, in families, alone, speaking a babel of tongues. From one end of the galaxy to the other, you can find a sky full of ideologies, values, customs, histories, practices. Zensunni philosophers rub shoulders with Weighty Friends and Orthodox rabbis. It is a galaxy full of mystics, of people who have felt a strange and inexplicable connection to the sublime and indescribable.
And not just people. Too many futures are sterile, by choice or by accident. Asimov nailed the first with Trantor of Foundation, an entire world occupied only by “man, his pests, and his pets.” I see, instead, a flourishing and blossoming of Earth life and that of other worlds (if any). Humanity “and friends,” if you will. Where humans land, they bring Earth (or Mars) grasses, trees, yeasts, yogurts, whole ecosystems, which then change and adapt (as humans do, as ecosystems do, as life does) to their new worlds. We seek out new life, but not alone, we start new civilizations, but within a living world.
It is a living, thriving, meditating future. It may, in places, have war (but I hope not), and oppression (but I hope not), and horror (but I hope not). It’s a future to fuel an anthropologist’s wildest dreams, a sky full of lost tribes and strange subcultures. You could go into the field and never come back for centuries. And among the scattered stars are my children, laughing, fighting, weeping, sleeping, and exploring. And yours, too.
C’mon, eighties kids, you know this one: snakes, temples, death-traps, idols, desert chases, melting Nazis, human hearts, a map with a red line on it.
Lucas’ marketing men did their homework: “If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.”
My boy, Henry
But the eighties were a long time ago, and the thirties that Indy lived in never existed. You had to grow up, go to school, get a proper degree (not something useless like English, or history, or archaeology), rack up student debt, find your first real job, and, generally, keep up with the Joneses. It’s the right way to do things, and it might be a little harder now, but I’m sure you’ll get through it.
Let’s look at the numbers. I’m not studying social sciences for nothing. The economic unemployment rate is based on the labor market, which is the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years or older (1). That is, everyone over 16 who’s not in the military, in prison, or in a home. The jobless rate for Americans between 16-24 is a whopping 16.4%, damn near double the national average at 8.6% (2). Oddly enough, college kids in that cohort also have 8.6% joblessness, again double the unemployment rate of their elders.
Or, to put it another way: Look at your freshman English class. If it was anything like mine, there were forty people there, some of you standing in the hall. By the time you graduate, four of you will be unable to find a job. If you can only spot three people who will never work, guess what.
And you can back this one up with anecdotal evidence. All of you know someone who sent out a few hundred resumes, collected a few dozen rejections, and have moved back in with their parents “temporarily” to save money. They’re sending out a few hundred more. It’s been six months, or twelve months, or two years, and their grace period for their school loans ran out a long time ago.
What’s worse, they’re telling us that we’ll be feeling it in forty years. According to Business Week, those of us with the temerity to graduate into a bad job market (England in the early 1980s, Japan in the 1990s, America in the late 2000s) will be making 93% of what we could have if only they’d been born about five years earlier (3). This will stick with us, in the form of reduced pay over a lifetime, chronic holes in our resumes, and increased rates of depression and mental illness. Income in the form of purchasing power has been dropping steadily since we were born, since the first Indiana Jones film came out.
Still, there’s nothing you can do. If you want to live a comfortable lifestyle, you’re going to have to move out, get straight to work, and pay off your debt. Except, you can’t find work, you can’t afford it, and, well, frankly, that makes you a bad person. A failure. And it’s because you spend too much time online, and you have the attention span of a goldfish, and you have no idea how the real world works.
I’d like everyone under thirty to join in here: Fuck that!
This is a wonderful time to do something insane and awesome, because you have nothing to lose. No, really. If you could spend the next year living in your parents’ basement, collecting rejections, or teaching English in the heart of Asia, making ramen money and getting life (and work!) experience, which one would you choose? Willingly?
This is the kind of time, and the kind of place, where the insane becomes practical, and the accepted becomes insane. Expecting to find any kind of work after graduation is pretty much batshit insane by now, given that you’re competing against Baby Boomers with forty years of experience, sullen Gen-Xers trying to make mortgage payments, teenagers, and that one guy in your year who was class president, captain of the swim club, valedictorian and held down three jobs while working his five internships.
Since that’s looking more insane, the previously insane options look pretty tame by comparison.
Besides, starting on “the old straight track” keeps you on the old straight track. You know, the one where you listen when your friends explain why it’s a good idea to flip the “starter castle” you bought after working a few years out of college? Where your neighbors snicker when you show up in your old reliable beater? The one where you start seriously paying attention to those “debt consolidator” commercials on the big-screen TV you bought with a credit card?
That’s life keeping up with the Joneses. Fuck that.
If you want to try again when the American job market doesn’t suck as badly, you’ll have something worth talking about on that resume. You may even have acquired valuable skills, like these transferable skills, or learning to speak Chinese (or Spanish). If, as Colleen Kinder points out in her book Delaying the Real World, people who start out adventurous stay that way, I’ll see you on the road and buy you a drink. And if it doesn’t work out, at least it beats mailing resumes every goddamn day.
How are you going to raise money for it all, you ask? Well, a lot of these ideas pay money. Almost none of them pay great money, but teaching English in Korea or Russia should make enough to keep your student loan payments going. I couldn’t have spent a year over here in China if I was paying for it out of pocket. Starting your own business, according to Scott Gerber, may be the sanest option of all (4). A lot of them defer those payments, like KNOM or the Peace Corps. The price tag on most of these is $5000 or below, total. That’s cheaper than one semester of college. A lot of them are just the price of a plane ticket. If you’ve got a car, sell it. Sell your old crap on eBay. Work a McJob if you can find one, and apply for a few-hundred-dollar loan at the Bank of Mom and Dad (5). McJobs become a lot more bearable when you’re saving up for something and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Live your crazy. Live the life of adventure. Nobody died regretting the summer they spent in Paris or that time they taught skiing in Aspen. And, frankly, it’s not nearly as crazy, by comparison, as expecting to find a job with a medical plan or that your 401k will be worth shit in forty years. Your 401k will be raided, but they can’t raid your experience, your skillset, your friendships, or your memories.
Would you rather keep up with the Joneses? Or would you rather become Indiana Jones?
Once, in 1955 San Francisco… the west coast weirdos and the east coast beat-down desolation angels met together in the six gallery to listen to a new poetry. it is a poetry of genitals and poverty and tatters, a jazz poetry, eastern mysticism and american hustling. the crowd was electric, shouting and stomping, the compression of elements like atoms smashed together forming a new write, a new literature, a new and self-aware rebellion against the old and established ways, the grey and consumptive of doing things. it would go by many names and many faces, and come by many more.
In 2010 in China… an American made his own rebellion against all that was grey and consumptive. he wants to channel the lightning and charge people to see the show. fusing elements in the reactor of his mind, blowing up the petty things, sparking off a chain reaction of questions. the experiment spans the big bang to stray thoughts, a science fiction of outer space and
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