Ummagumma

I started my slow aging practice in the 1990s.  I did not call it a practice or really even think of it that way. The whole idea of cultivating your life by combining “practices” just wasn’t there holistically. Back then there was this rather nebulous idea that something called “ the Singularity” might happen about 4 decades in the future. 2032 was the year, supposedly . This Singularity was going to arises as a combination of different technologies and disciplines co-mingled into something larger. A kind of utopia was predicted by certain fringe scientists. Biotechnology and nanotechnology were converging into something that looked, from a distance, like it might rewrite what a human body could be. I had no evidence this would happen on any particular timeline, or at all. I was already in decent physical and mental shape in my mid-30’s. So the assumption was straightforward. Fine tune. Perpetuate. Back then there was a large school of thought that free radicals were the main cul...

Since I watched videos pertaining to my recent post , there has been sooooo much Göbekli Tepe clickbait in my YouTube feed lately. "The world's oldest temple." "The mysterious sanctuary that rewrites human history." Then a thumbnail appears showing some ancient limestone pillar next to an ominous-looking guy pointing at it like he just found proof that the Neolithic had Wi-Fi. It is mostly bullshit. Maybe Göbekli Tepe was a temple site. No one knows. That is the first thing to say. There is no surviving text. No named god. No prayer. No priestly rulebook. No account of what people thought they were doing there. No carved little sign saying, "Welcome to the Temple of the Great Fox. Please leave your offering at the front desk." There are, however, enormous limestone pillars. There are animals everywhere. There are lots of animal bones. There are some human remains, though the site does not appear to be a cemetery or a place where people we...

In my books , I highlight research that indicates play is good for neuroplasticity. Your brain changes through use. Play is one of the more enjoyable ways to keep that change alive. No grim self-improvement face required. Play is strange because it looks like nothing serious is happening. Kids run around making up rules no adult can understand. Someone tells a joke. A family enjoys group games after dinner. People sit around a table playing cards, laughing, arguing over the rules, and pretending the stakes matter more than they do. Alex Hutchinson, writing in Big Think , discusses recent work in a piece called " Why Play Brings Us Pleasure ." The basic idea is simple enough and yet surprisingly deep. In the article's own phrasing, play lets us "create the uncertainty that we can then resolve." We invent a game, accept its restrictions, enter its little world of rules, and suddenly the outcome is unknown. That uncertainty is the point. Play is chosen uncertai...

When you combine practices — when you actually connect the things you do, the skills you've built, the interests you've cultivated — something additional appears. Not just the sum. Something beyond the sum. That's not a story you tell about your life. That's something happening in your life. I call it harmonious generation. Harmogenics for short. The word is new. The phenomenon is not. In fact, it is everywhere . It shows up in physics, in biology, in neuroscience, in psychology, in ecology, in aging research, in philosophy, in religion, in craft, in athletics, in ordinary kitchens and ordinary lives. It has been running in the background of human experience for as long as there have been humans combining practices. And nobody has named it as a single thing. Everybody keeps finding pieces of it and filing those pieces under different headings. Hydrogen is a flammable gas. Oxygen is a flammable gas. Combine them and you get something that puts out fires. Wetness belongs...

My YouTube feed sent me another goodie recently.  The title was something about animal warfare and it opened with that Fallout  quote — "War, war never changes" — before pivoting to the paper just published in Science  about a chimpanzee civil war in Uganda. It was a reasonably good summary and I watched the whole thing. What it mostly did was make me want to write this post, which I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now since the study broke. Because this is not new territory for me. I have been looking into this particular mirror since long before I started this blog. Chimpanzee culture and behavior have always caught my eye for some reason. A natural curiosity. Jane Goodall’s first book gripped me in my college years. In 2009 I wrote about a BBC Planet Earth segment narrated by David Attenborough — extraordinary HD footage of 150 male chimpanzees in Uganda organizing themselves into a raiding party and attacking a neighboring group's territory. Several wer...

A small part of  Göbekli Tepe with the viewing platform at its edge. There's a place in southern Turkey, on a limestone ridge, that shatters entire worldviews. This is undeniably something we can put our hands on. Human beings made this place circa 11,000 years ago. Other than late-paleo cave paintings, this is the oldest human stuff we can physically touch. Göbekli Tepe . The name means "potbelly hill." The site predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years. The Great Pyramid of Giza by 7,000. Everything scientists “understood” about the origins of organized human society — the clean progression from agriculture to settlement to religion to monuments — this place inverts it. First came the gathering. Then came everything else. That's unsettling in a specific way. The old story was comforting. It told us civilization was a logical climb. First you feed yourself reliably, then you can afford to think bigger. The monument comes last, as a kind of reward for having organized your...

Something happened to you already. Before you noticed. Before anyone else noticed. Sovereignty — the old idea of a bounded, private self directing its own life from the inside out — is gone. Not eroding. Not under threat. Gone. It was gradually converted, during your lifetime while you were busy enjoying the convenience of buying what you want when you want it. Nobody directed this. There was no master plan. The Complex — the vast interlocking system of easy consumption and entertainment — doesn't have intentions any more than an asteroid does. It just does what it does. And what it does, systematically and without malice, is make you legible. Observable. Modelable. A pattern of behavior that can be targeted and predicted and nudged and engaged. It’s a world of Likes. Like. Like. Like. The history of lost privacy is the history of lost sovereignty. Not because privacy and sovereignty are the same thing — personal sovereignty was always larger than that — but because privacy was...

It was about this time last year I started writing what I thought would be one book entitled Harmogenics . That turned into three books with the last, Raucous Reckonings , completed in October. I was late in the “final” revision of the text when I came across Albert Camus and his remarkable affinity with what I have in mind by "cosmic indifference." Short version: don’t slit your wrists. I have known of Albert Camus's philosophy as long as I have known Jean-Paul Sartre. Decades. But while I read and studied Sartre at different times of my life, I never studied or read Camus. I just knew he originated, more or less, contemporary philosophy of the "absurd." Camus gets designated an "existentialist," which annoyed him while he was alive, and then reduced to a single slogan about Absurdity. That reduction misses the point in a very human way. Camus wasn't trying to depress anyone. He was trying to keep people honest without lying to themselves for c...