How to Tell a Good Dream

I ran into that old familiar complaint again yesterday, the claim that no one is interested in hearing about your dreams. As a writer who works frequently with dreams, naturally I find this idea to be dismissive and obnoxious. But in a way, I do understand where they’re coming from. We’ve all been there. Someone tells you about a dream they had where the dog had their grandmother’s face and they were pulling carrots out of the ground in the back yard but they turned out to be giant AA batteries. Our eyes beginning to glaze over. Our attention wanders. There’s no point of entry for us. We weren’t there. We weren’t mystified by the oddness of the experience. We have nothing to gain or learn. To the dreamer it’s a baffling enigma, invested with all sorts of peculiar emotions. But to us, it’s just random nonsense, noise.

Some people pin our disinterest in other people’s dreams on the fact that they didn’t actually happen. I doubt that’s the case. The truthfulness of a story has very little to do with how interesting we find it. Granted, if a story ends with “…and that’s how I found this huge sack of money that I’m going to split with you”, then we’d be plenty interested in how true it is. However, I believe our interest in a story qua story bears little regard for the facts. No, I think the problem here is primarily in the telling. We aren’t interested in the dream that we’re being told because the person telling us isn’t involving us, drawing us in with the evocative details of the experience. They aren’t finding common ground where the dream becomes relatable. It’s just their dream, and they aren’t giving us more than just a report of the bare oddities of it.

Consider, for instance, if a passing acquaintance told you that their mother had died. You would express whatever sympathy was necessary for the sake of politeness. You might even feel whatever token sympathy you would for any human being in that situation. But if they told you nothing more than the basic fact of their mother dying, then it’s unlikely that any deep emotions would be evoked by the news. However, if the person sat with you over coffee, went through the details of the experience, those last fleeting expressions, if they drew you into the room, if they expressed what their mother meant to them personally, the things that she had said, the things she had done for them, made her become real to you as a person, then you might beginning to feel something about this woman’s death.
 
This is what any good story-telling is about, and it’s no different with dreams. It’s true that dreams don’t always seem to have that necessary through-line that connects it with common experience, but you have to find it in the details, bring it to light, cultivate it into something, tweak a detail here and there. Let’s say, for instance, that instead of the dog having the grandmother’s face, let’s say that it simply reminded you of your grandmother in some uncanny way. There was a turn of the head, a look in the eyes. There was a sense that her spirit was somehow inhabiting the dog, and it reminded you of that time when she scolded you as a child for stealing something from the cupboard, and you were afraid. And now you’re feeling this same fear of the dog. It wants something from you. You shut it up in the room, but you can hear it in there, growling, scratching at the door.

Now you begin to peek your listener’s interest. The idea of a hostile dog inhabited by someone’s dead grandmother is plenty odd enough, but yet it taps something visceral, something common. We can understand how unsettling the experience would be. Given enough detail, we begin to see this room, the dust hanging in the light, the metal frame of the twin bed. We hear the dog’s sharp nails on the thin wooden door. We see the dreamer in the dark hallway, out of the light, listening, on edge, trying to figure out how to satisfy this dog.

So you connect the carrots with the dog, so that the dream begins to take an almost narrative shape. Now you’re digging up the carrots to feed the dog, but when you go to pull them out of the ground, you find a never ending network of electrical cables buried under the soil. You can almost smell the loose dirt as you try to pull them up, but there’s just more and more cable, stretching out in all directions, as though they went on forever, circling the Earth, as though you had found the nexus of all the power lines on the planet. You pull and pull, but you know it’s futile. You’ll never get it all up. You’ll never satisfy the dog. It’s all connected. You’ll never get a piece of it free. You tug and you tug, and then you hear it behind you. A calm comes over you. A breeze comes through out over the garden and the morning sun. You drop the cables, loosen your shoulders, and you turn to face the menacing dog, ready for it to lunge at you. But the dog just cocks its head in that friendly way, and you know it’s going to be alright. The dog comes to nuzzle against you, and you wake up in a flood of tears and relief.

Now, that’s how you tell a dream.  Of course, you don't even have to necessarily change and embellish the details in this manner.  Nine times out of ten everything you need will be right there in the dream itself.  You just have to bring it to life.  But when you get right down to it dreams are really just a bunch of lies to begin with - wonderful enchanting lies, but lies all the same - and if you're going to lie, lie big, lie your ass off.   

No Martians in the New Total Recall

A few months ago they came out with a remake of the 80's action movie Total Recall.  The special effects and the cinematography were, of course, light years beyond the original, but the story...well, it kind of sucked.  The main problem was that they took Mars completely out of the story, and they didn't really bother to find anything else to fill the gaping hole left in the plot.  Below is a list of reasons why this is such a problem.  It would probably help immensely in your quest to understand this post if you've seen the remake ...or the original ...of if you just get out and see a movie once in a while.  What's wrong with you?  (Anyway, yeah, spoilers and all that.)    

1. In the original, Quaid has an inexplicable fascination with Mars.  He dreams of it.  He doesn't know why.  He wants to go there, but he's pinned down in a job and a marriage.  Meanwhile, Rekall is presented as a kind of virtual travel agency.  It makes perfect sense that he would go there.  In the new movie, Quaid feels that he was "doing something important" in his dreams.  So why would he go to Rekall for this?  And exactly what is Rekall in this new movie?  Even though there is ubiquitous advertising on both sides of the world, it's presented as a little, seedy, clandestine, back alley kind of place which seems to offer a service more akin to the "playback" in Strange Days than the concept in the original.  Remind me again why someone would go to a place like this when they had a yearning to do something important with their life.

2. The possibility that Quaid could just be a normal guy dreaming of an exciting adventure on Mars who pays Rekall to simulate that adventure, OR a secret resistance fighter all along, is the essential ambiguity that's supposed to be at the core of this story.  Now, it's possible that someone could just be a normal guy dreaming of "doing something important", but it doesn't really play out as well in the details.  An average Joe having exotic dreams of Mars - even if they are nightmares - has a simplicity that we can easily appreciate.  Being chased by faceless robots down generic sci-fi corridors?  Ummm, not so much.  In the new movie, there's never really a possibility that Quaid is just a normal guy with an exotic fantasy that he lives out in a virtual simulation through Rekall.  From the first scene, he's the cliched "man with a secret destiny haunting his dreams that he must uncover."  Not a whole lot of ambiguity there.

3. The original movie uses the travel agency idea to have the man from Rekall lay out a kind of itinerary for Quaid's trip, an itinerary which uncannily matches the subsequent events of the story, further developing the ambiguity.  By the time Quaid is facing a recording of himself telling him "Get your ass to Mars", we're either thinking, "Hey, just like the package he ordered from Rekall!  Hmmmm...", or, "Ohhh, so that's why he's been dreaming about Mars!  He'll find his answers there."  And the story can be taken both ways.  Then another man from Rekall visits his room on Mars and lays out a new itinerary.  This time not for the package he ordered, but for how the ensuing "schizoid embolism" will manifest itself inside his delusions.  And, of course, everything happens just as he says, carrying the ambiguity all the way to the end of the film.

What do we get in the new movie?  Quaid just tells the guy at Rekall that he wants to be a "secret agent" before the guy considerately allows himself to be murdered.  Then his friend shows up and basically just goes, "Hey, we're really at Rekall!  Trippy, huh?"  Yup, way to develop that ambiguity and expand on the movie's interesting premise.  Oh, and then he shoots the friend because...ummm...the girl was crying?  I guess?  And that proved it was all real, how? I think it was at this point that I realize that this movie made about as much sense as one of my shits.  It was like some simpleton was in charge of making this movie and they said, "Well, there was moisture running down someone's face in the original scene.  We need moisture running down someone's face in this scene."  Of course that's all the movie is really: appropriated pieces lifted completely out of context and "clever" reversals on details from the original.  It may be the first remake ever that's completely incomprehensible outside of it being a remake.

4. In the original, the radiation on Mars has created mutants, some of whom are psychic.  This establishes the need for Hauser and Cohagen's plan, which is the cornerstone of the entire plot.  Hauser has his own memory erased so the he can become the perfect mole, his true identity and loyalties a secret even from himself and thus hidden from the psychics.  He leads them straight to Kuato without even knowing it.  The new movie has...gas masks?  A techno beat?  The step-father from Shaun of the Dead?  I got nothing.

5. The original ends with Quaid CREATING A BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERE ON FUCKING MARS.  The new movie ends with Quaid destroying a glorified subway car.

I rest my case.

The Bank Door

Today's post from Strangers Call Me Sunny is kind of hybrid of the posts I do there, as well as the kind of stuff I used to post over here.  So I figured that I would post this on both blogs, and use this as an opportunity to plug the other blog and try to bring some of you stragglers back into the fold.

Over the years, I've heard about plenty of psychological experiments which demonstrate our human tendency to conform to a group, as well as many of our other unflattering propensities.  There was one experiment I learned about in school where they put a subject in a room with two other people that were secretly working with the psychologists who were conducting the test.  The three of them were ostensibly left alone to fill out some paperwork, but the experiment was purposely set up so that at one point someone would call out for help from somewhere down the hall.  The two plants would just ignore it and go on filling out their paperwork like they didn't hear anything.  The test was to see what the subject would do.  More often than not, they would look up at the other two, see that they were doing nothing, and they would ignore it too and go back to filling out their paperwork.  Meanwhile, the subjects in the control group were left in the room by themselves and they almost always got up and went to respond to the call for help.

People get an odd kick out of sharing these kinds of things - myself included.  I freely admit it.  There's a mischievous satisfaction in deflating people's pretensions about themselves, in telling someone something like, "They did an experiment where 80% of the subjects drowned in their Alphabet Soup after all the letters except for the Q's had been removed.", and watching the ground give way beneath them.  In this particular case, we'd all like to believe that we'd respond to a call for help.  We'd all like to think that we always act on our own judgment without being so easily swayed by a group dynamic.  But the above experiment suggests that a good many of us are wrong.  That's a sobering thought.  We all like to think of ourselves as the hero.  No one wants sheepish conformity on their resume'.

Ah, but there's where the plot thickens!  Because you have to wonder: Why is that?  Doesn't that indicate another, mitigating, tendency, one where we all like to think of ourselves as trail-blazing rebels, where deep down we tend to believe that only fools trust in other people's judgment?  Isn't there some test for that?  Well, as it turns out, I have seen such a tendency in action.  I may not have the funds or the inclination to conduct my own experiments, but sometimes, if you keep your eyes peeled, the world can serve as your laboratory, and life itself can set things up perfectly.

Before my bank changed their hours, I used to show up early and I'd often find myself standing around with a group of people, waiting for the bank to open.  As I stood there, I would watch whenever someone new walked up.  Almost every time, they would stride right past everyone like they weren't there, and they'd go right up to the door and give it a nice hard jiggle to see if it was locked.  And it was like, what were they thinking?  Did they just assume that the rest of us were idiots and none of us had hit upon the brilliant idea of checking to see whether the door was still locked?  You begin to see how this scenario mirrors the experiment above.  In the first case, the subject was intimidated by the thought that everyone else knew something they didn't.  Here the subject boldly charges forward under the assumption that they know something everyone else doesn't.  They're special.  They have important business to conduct inside the bank, while the rest of us bumpkins are apparently just standing around waiting for the Salvation Army to come along and pass out free cheese.

It's not so easy, after all, is it?  It's not just a simple matter of charging to the rescue when you hear someone crying out down the hall.  There are conflicting forces at play.  It's a double edged sword.  We ignore the calls for help because no one wants to be like the asshole that jiggles the door handle.  On the other hand, we jiggle the door handle because no one wants to be like the chump that sits there while someone's calling for help.  Ain't that a bitch?  And the sad thing is that we ended up fucking it up on both counts.  I guess if there's one consistent message in this, it's that people are a lot bolder when it comes to their money then they are when it comes to helping people.

So hopefully you'll remember this the next time you encounter a crowd standing around waiting for the doors to open.  Hopefully you'll realize that jiggling that door handle is a big "Fuck you!" to everyone there.  Or maybe, just maybe, it's one of those experiments you always hear about.  They get 15 people to stand around, and they wait to see if anyone tries the door.  You don't want to end up as some statistical footnote to the embarrassing traits of the human species, right?  You don't want to be the perennial punchline passed down through the ages, the loser who stood there with a group of people around an unlocked door.  You never know.  You better give it a little jiggle just to be on the safe side.  There, don't you feel better now?

The Death Bed

Consider the following scenarios.

1.) A man is on his deathbed.  He is a wealthy man; a man with the means to hire the best minds on the planet to come up with some way of prolonging his life.  One day his most trusted adviser comes to him bearing good news.  He tells him that they have found a way to clone him (as a young man of course), and more than that, they found a way to imprint the clone with the man's thoughts and memories.  Ah, but the adviser has made a crucial misstep.  A clone has already been made, imprinted with the man's memories as fresh as the past 24 hours.  The adviser makes the fatal blunder of bringing the clone to the man's bedside to introduce him.  The man beholds the clone in horror.  He sees in it, not a continuation of himself, but rather a replacement.  He knows that the clone is not really him, because although it possesses the imprint of his thoughts and memories, he can not see out through the eyes of the clone.  It's mind is closed to him.  It is something other...different.  It is every bit as much a stranger to him as anyone else in the room, or even the world.  He orders the clone destroyed and lapses into deeper despair.

2.) Okay, now this scenario is the same as the first, the same man, the same cloning technology, ect.  but without the adviser making the fatal blunder.  In this case the adviser simply comes to the man and tells him that they have found a way to transfer his mind into a clone as soon as he dies.  "Transfer his mind", those are the words that the adviser uses, but he really knows nothing more about these metaphysical mysteries than anyone else does.  He only knows that the man's thoughts and memories will be imprinted on the new clone.  He just says, "transfer your mind" to the man to reassure him.  And it does reassure the man...for a while.  But at night, when he's left alone with nothing but the beeping and pinging of his medical equipment, he begins to have doubts.  He ponders his own essence.  Will this clone really be him?  Will he really be there, or will he be gone, leaving someone else to live his life with his memories?  This "not being there" tortures him more than the thought of death itself.  He stares up into the dark.

3.) Okay, let's leave the dying man aside for a moment to consider a hypothetical proposition.  Suppose that our consciousness isn't the continuum that we think it is, connected from birth until death.  Maybe every time we drift off to sleep or fall unconscious our consciousness dies.  Maybe it disintegrates when it's not actively sustained.  Then when we wake up, it is with an entirely NEW consciousness which has simply inherited all the memories of the old consciousness.  In other words, every time we wake up it's as an entirely new person who just thinks they're the person who went to sleep simply because we remember being that person.  This is an unfalsifiable theory...or at least apparently so as this point.  Still, it's not completely far fetched.  What reason do we really have to think that our consciousness maintains a continuity with our identity?  Perhaps consciousness is just an abstract commodity, accessed when needed.  When you turn your computer on, you find the same stuff in memory, the trusty icons arranged the same way on the desktop, but yet you wouldn't think that this was being powered by the identical electrons in the electrical current, right?  What if the vital spark operates in a similar fashion?  The dream may even be a kind of booting up process, a side effect of the new consciousness accessing the memory.  This would kind of explain why we can never remember our prior waking lives during the dream.

This is, of course, highly speculative.  But you notice that it bears a similarity to scenario 2.  We've only removed the concept of the clone from the equation.  Just like the man on his deathbed, we face the possibilty of "not being there" when we wake up, but somehow it isn't really troubling at all, is it?  Why exactly would that be?

4.) Consider an even wilder hypothesis.  Suppose that a few years back you sat at the bedside of a dying friend.  We'll call him Freddy.  You were with him at the very end.  Now what if, at the moment of death, the essence of Freddy's consciousness leapt from him and into you, due to your close proximity.  This consciousness either supplanted your own or blended with it.  But it was only his consciousness, none of his memories.  Once he was in your brain, he only had access to your memories.  So in effect, from that day forward you weren't "you" anymore, you're now Freddy, but you only remember being "you", and you talk act just like "you", and so you never noticed that anything was different.  Again, we're in highly unfalsifiable territory, but yet the idea isn't all that disturbing, is it?  Whether your "you" or Freddy or the King of Siam, you're still HERE, still able to breathe the air, and feel the sun on your face, and be thankful for it.

5.) Okay, final scenario.  Let's return to our dying man.  The adviser comes to see him and tells him that he has found a mystic who claims that he can transfer the man's consciousness into someone else's body, but only his consciousness, none of his memories.  The adviser brings a bright-eyed young man to meet the man on his deathbed.  He tells him that when he dies he will leap into this young man's mind, seeing through his eyes, but only ever remembering being the young man.  The adviser, naturally, doesn't know whether this mystic is a fraud or a fool or the genuine thing, but he senses that it doesn't matter.  If the procedure is a success, no one will ever really know for sure.  The man on his death bed senses this as well, and he drifts off, his mind finally at ease.

Thoughts?

State of the Blog 2011

First of all, Happy New Year from everyone here at the nuclearheadache staff.  Of course, that staff is mostly just me.  So, I guess that means Happy New Year from me.

There are some benefits to running a one man operation.  I can make my own hours, set my own terms, and come and go as I please.  So, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that it's time for another break here.  I'm not sure how long.  It could be a month, or maybe more.  At the very least, I'll probably start posting on the Night Owl blog in the early spring.  The change in the weather always seems to put me in a sentimental mood.

In the meantime, I'm trying to work on some ideas for a Kindle series, something fictional, something serialized.  I'm open to suggestions.  Also, I'm sure I'll be kicking some nonsense up onto the FARNC from time to time.  And although I've neglected my Encyclopedia of Sheep for the past few months, I always hope to have some dreams to report over there.

So you won't be rid of me completely.  I'll still be around, reading everybody's blogs.  I just need to kick back for a while, go into a low power mode, amass my ideas and get my ducks in row.  Maybe I'll work on my metaphors a little.  I'd be a little more specific about time tables and such, but that's the point, I need to be a little unspecific for a while.  I need to relax.  Anyway, rest assured, one way or the other, in one capacity or another, I'll keep blogging and writing.  I can promise you that.

And finally, this blog topped 30,000 pageviews this morning!  Thank you slender man, wherever you are!   

Out Here Among the Stars

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently learned that Carl Sagan's Cosmos series is available through Netflix's streaming video service.  I don't know if it's a new addition to the service, but it is a welcome one.  I've seen most of the series' short thirteen episode run here and there in various different ways over the years, but this gives me the opportunity to watch it all in order and at my own leisure, which, naturally, is the nice thing about the Netflix service.  I find that, like all works that resonate deeply with me, I return to it time and again with a different perspective that reflects my own progress as a person.  It becomes like a touchstone or a familiar place; it remains constant and serves as something to mark your own change and growth by.

For instance, watching it now, I keep thinking about recent conversations with my friend Vincent, who has a somewhat passing, almost mild, antagonism towards science, depending on what kind of mood you catch him in.  Vincent isn't alone, of course, and there are plenty of other people with similar feelings.  Yet, I can't help but wonder if their problem isn't as much with science - as a collection of data and a discipline of factual inquiry - as much as it is with the attitudes and mind-sets of certain scientists who rub them the wrong way.  One might be tempted to cynically conclude that they just resent more sober minds raining on their fairy tales, and that they lash back with any means at their disposal.  But I'd like to think there's a little more to it than that.  I suspect that when Vincent thinks of science, he tends to think of Richard Dawkins or someone similarly disposed.  

Yet, the problem with Dawkins isn't necessarily that he's a scientist or even that he's an atheist.  Rather, the problem is the implicit insistence on an almost militantly prosaic viewpoint whereby he arrives at his conclusions.  He comes off as the sort of smug jackass who subjects a religion to ruthlessly "logical" interrogations, not as a way of trying to learn more about it and gain insight into its tenets, but as a way of holding it up to mockery as an irrational farce.  It's the sort of game a person is up to when they ask how Noah fit all the animals on the Ark or how reincarnation accounts for population growth.  These aren't necessarily invalid points, but the people raising them usually aren't looking to know; they're looking to deflate.  Consequently, some people come to feel like they are under fire from science and reason.  The irony is that the prejudice and dismissive close-mindedness that underpins such smug games goes against the very spirit of science and reason.

Most likely, Sagan would have agreed with Dawkins on nearly all matters of scientific fact, but it's the man himself that makes all the difference in the world.  His Cosmos series was billed as "A Personal Voyage", and it takes a moment's pause to appreciate the significance of this.  Clearly he wasn't talking about "personal" in the sense of "biographical", and there's little about the man himself throughout the series.  What is personal is Sagan's passion and wonder for his subject matter, his sense of amazement when he tells us that we are all "made of star stuff", his hopefulness of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, his benevolent optimism towards the human race, and his urgent concern about the possibility that we might destroy ourselves which he mentions again and again as a warning and a leitmotif through the series.  Sagan sees poetry where Dawkins insists on prose.  They may draw many of the same conclusions and believe much of the same things, but for entirely different reasons.

Throughout the Cosmos series, Sagan displays a boundless enthusiasm that fits him well in his role as a teacher.  He constantly puts things in a perspective that's deliberately designed to evoke awe and curiosity.  I particularly liked the calender model he uses to try to bring the fourteen billion year existence of the universe down to a manageable scale that the mind can grasp.  He stands on a stage with a giant illustrated calender laid out on the floor.  The calender year represents the entire life-span of the universe, and down in the right hand corner is a tiny little spot, the last few seconds of December 31st, which represent all of recorded human history.  "Everyone we've ever known, every story ever told, happened right here.", he tells us, and suddenly the majesty of the universe, and our fragile place in it, is as clear and touching as it has ever been.  This is the amazing achievement of Cosmos.  "What we do at the beginning of the next cosmic year is up to us.", he continues, touching again on the themes of optimism and concern.

So, I come away from all this wondering if there isn't another dimension to how we draw the lines between us.  We get hung up on the differences between our beliefs and ideologies that we tend to lose sight of the fact that it's the people behind those differences that really matter.  Whatever side of whichever line someone falls on, it's the spirit of the person, the humanity, the compassion, that bright eyed warmth that really matters.  A heart in the right place is worth far more than the details of any particular dogma, as far as I'm concerned.  We focus on the difference between things like science and religion, and we forget about the difference between people like Dawkins and Sagan.  We're all on the same journey, turning and revolving out here among the stars.  Sometimes it's how we feel about that journey that makes all the difference.

Sartre's Anguish

I remember the first time someone told me what would happen if you were outside on a cold winter day and you stuck your tongue to a metal post; how you were likely to find yourself securely fixed until the paramedics arrived.  This idea held a grip on my imagination for days, weeks, even months after that.  I was afraid that I would find myself in a situation where I would just go ahead and...stick my tongue to a metal post.  It wasn't that I wanted to do it.  I wasn't particularly curious about what would happen, and I had little cause to doubt what I'd been told.  And I could hardly imagine a situation where I would need to stick my tongue to a metal post.  In fact, I really had no conceivable reason what-so-ever for sticking my tongue to a post, but despite all that, I was still afraid that somehow I was just going to go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that many of you at one time or another have had a similar experience.  Sartre calls this feeling "anguish."

Anguish, as Sartre uses the term, is a special breed of fear: fear before one's self.  A soldier going off to war may understandably be afraid of the enemy, of battle, of leaving home, and many other things, but there's another sense in which he may fear the potential of his own actions.  He may be afraid that he won't measure up in his duties as a soldier.  He may fear that he'll run when he should have taken cover, or that he'll take cover when he should have ran.  He may spend long, sleepless, hours possessed by the thought of inexplicably sticking his head up out of a hole at the wrong moment to see what's going on and catching enemy sniper fire right between the eyes.  More even than the fear of being killed, it's the fear of doing something stupid and getting himself killed that seizes the soldier's heart with such a powerful rush of anguish that it takes his breath away.  So he tries to be a soldier, as a thing in a uniform equipped with a weapon, a machine designed exclusively for war.  If he must die, he wants to die as a soldier, not through his failure to fulfill the responsibility of that role.

Of course, we don't need to invoke the special circumstances of war to find anguish.  There is, perhaps, no more common or appropriate illustration of our experience of anguish, than our morbid fascination with suicide.  I'm sure that most of us probably have no pressing wish to kill ourselves or serious plans of doing so, but yet the thought does flutter in now and then, doesn't it?  We think of the opportunities that might present themselves, the rigged noose and the chair, the gun laid in our lap.  We sense all too well that we are capable of pushing through all those layers of resistance, all those reasons not to do it, and with a quick flip of the foot or twitch of the finger we could end our lives....Snap! Just like that.  It's enough to turn your blood cold.  It's the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing that you could just say the hell with it and hurl yourself over the edge and nothing would stop you.

It's not a all a question of mortality.  It crops up in a number of little ways.  I remember a while back when I debating some of the finer points of free will and determinism with Mr. John Myste, I used the example of how I had to continually force myself to get up for work night after night, how I had to perpetually sustain my role as a responsible family man.  I told him that I could throw it all away at a moment's notice.  I could just get in my car and drive off into the dark, never to be seen from again.  Even writing those words gave me a flash of anguish, a dizzy spin of vertigo from the cliff's edge.  It's not even that it's a particularly terrible prospect.  It's just that facing the fact that you could change your life so radically at the snap of your fingers is exhilarating and yet horrifying at the same time.

Naturally, a determinist would insist that these are baseless fears, a odd glitch in our psychological programming.  They would say that this agonizing over suicide, for instance, is a pointless waste of time.  They would say that no one has ever been seized by such a reckless impulse of self-destruction; no one has ever pulled a trigger because they were overcome by their own willpower.  But yet, people do kill themselves, do they not?  Who's to say that all of those people had better reasons for doing it than you or I do?  Where do you draw the line?  Where does the determinist stand over the body lying on the floor with the smoking gun and say, "causality led to this"?  I submit that not only would I disagree that no one has ever pulled the trigger out of sheer willpower, I'll go as far as to say that it always goes down just the way we fear.  It's rarely a clear cut case of a person just wanting to kill themselves.  There's struggle, conflict.  There's nearly always some reasons to live.  But the person pushes past all that, says the hell with it, and does it anyway.

This all makes anguish sound like a negative thing, but it's actually a necessary part of our existence.  It serves much the same purpose psychologically, that physical pain serves biologically.  It is the constant pin prick, keeping us on our toes, reminding us of our responsibility for our actions.  It drives the soldier to train, to learn, to sustain his role as a soldier.  The sobering awareness that he is not merely a soldier, as a thing, that he has within him the capacity to fail to live up to the demands of being a soldier, prods him and drives him on.  To try to defuse that feeling, as determinism does, is dangerous and deadly.  A soldier without anguish, a soldier who has fallen into bad faith, has sealed his fate.

And suppose I'm wrong, and Sartre's wrong, and free will is all just a big delusion.  Well, then what difference does it make?  Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and I have no more control over the fact that I believe in free will than I do over my own eye color.  Ironically, there's always, behind a determinist's argument, an implicit subtext that they came by their position by choice.  They keep telling you why they're a determinist and why you should be a determinist, even though from their position "why" shouldn't matter a bit.  They are a determinist as the western wind blows and nothing more.  So, if I'm wrong, it makes no difference, and I can't even help being wrong anyway.  But if I'm right, and we really are free, then believing in free will makes all the difference in the world.  It means that you assume ownership of this life, and all the possibilities open to it.

For now, we end our adventures in Sartre's theory of free will out along its most paradoxical outskirts: will beyond reason, choice beyond control.  We face the disconnection between the person we dream ourselves to be and the consciousness which is free and unbound by the limitations of that dream.  We face anguish with that nauseating drop in the pit of our stomach as well fall into nothingness, free almost even from ourselves, overwhelmed by that freedom.  Sartre said that we are doomed to be free.  Well, so be it.  Let's make the most of it.             

Get Your Slender Man Buttons, Coffee Mugs, and T-Shirts

A recent check of my stats for this blog shows that I've gone well over four thousand pageviews for this month, and I'm well on my way to topping five thousand by the end of the month, possibly even topping 30,000 total pageviews by the end of the year.  This has easily been the most successful month so far here at nuclearheadache...at least traffic-wise.  Unfortunately, I find this achievement to be somewhat hollow, and I don't get much satisfaction or sense of accomplishment out of it.  It seems that I owe all the credit to that Stretch Armstrong of child abductors known to his friends and family as...The Slender Man.

Pictured: NOT Slender Man.

Yes, there appears to be quite a Slender Man following out there, a thriving sub-culture much larger than I would have ever guessed.  They want to know his hopes, his dreams, his passions, his obsessions.  They want to know where he buys his suits and how he knots his ties.  Some are looking for pictures of "real Slender Man sightings", while the more skeptical are looking for reassuring confirmation of a "Slender Man hoax."  And apparently this ravenous wave of curiosity is washing up on my nuclear doorstep.  In a little over a month since it was posted "Ballad of a Slender Man" is far and away the most searched and viewed post on this site.....Or at least the pictures are.

That isn't him either.

So let me set the record straight here, folks.  This is not a special Slender Man blog, providing one stop shopping for all your Slender Man needs.  I'm afraid I don't have exclusive, never before seen, video footage of Slender Man.  In fact, I have the same incredibly realistic photos of Slender Man that everyone else has.  I do not, NOT, possess the secret, shocking, truth behind the Slender Man legend.  I'm not giving away free Slender Man pizza coupons, or offering amazing bargains on Slender Man ink cartridges or pre-paid Slender Man cell phones...just in case anyone was wondering.  And...I can't be adamant enough about this...I most certainly do not provide Japanese, crossover, Slender Man, tentacle, fan-fic, anime, fetish porn.  Nope.

Ehhh...Close Enough.

There.  That should clear things up ;D       

The Invention of Smiling

Yesterday my wife asked me a question that I had been wondering about myself for quite some time: Why didn't people smile in old pictures?  Since I've never liked to be stumped by one of my wife's random questions, I took a stab at pronouncing the word "daguerreotype" and speculated that the long exposure times that were originally involved in taking a photograph necessitated keeping your face still and relatively expressionless.  I further speculated that this tradition probably persisted for a long time after taking a photograph became a much quicker affair.  A quick Google search of the matter shows that I've scored a direct hit with this answer.  Either that, or someone else came up with the same dumb idea that I did.  Nevertheless, the real question now becomes: When was the trend reversed?  When did people start smiling in old photographs?

Well, my exhaustive and notoriously thorough research led me to a man by the name of Dr. Karl Bruegger.  Dr. Bruegger was a Bavarian dentist who had immigrated to America and set up a private dental practice in the late 19th century.  One day an eager young photographer was admiring the photographs which lined the walls of Dr. Bruegger's office, portraits of the dentist's patients proudly displaying their healthy white teeth.  What struck the young photographer, however, was not the quality of the dental work, but rather the blissful expression that the teeth-baring pose lent to the subject's faces.

When the photographer asked about the oddly charming expression in the portraits, Dr. Bruegger was obligingly eager to explain his technique for obtaining the unique pose.  He began by drilling a small but precise hole in the subject's skull.  Then he would proceed to poke around in the hole with some of his surgical instruments, removing a few excess cubic inches of brain tissue.  The subject would then lapse into a state of stupefaction.  Their mouths would hang loose, showing their teeth, and the blissful expression that the photographer had observed in the photographs would settle over their faces.  It was a quite simple procedure, as the dentist kindly demonstrated for the photographer on the next patient that arrived that afternoon.

It became known as the Bruegger Technique, and it soon became popular in photo studios through-out the world.  World leaders, famous celebrities, and rich debutantes all lined up to have their "Bruegger Holes" drilled.  After undergoing the procedure, one high society lady was quoted as saying, "uhhhh..."  The procedure was a rousing success, but it seems that the word "smile" did not appear until 1914 in a book by Samuel Westabahn called Plasticity and the Human Form.  Westabahn proposed an alternative method to the Bruegger Technique, which had been showing a distinct loss of effectiveness over time.  Drilling new Bruegger holes wasn't helping.  One man had had sixteen such holes drilled and his face hung slack and loose and he was quite unresponsive.  The "Westabahn Method" dispensed with the barbaric drilling of holes in the subject's skulls.  Instead, Westabahn administered a heavy dose of arsenic to his subjects.  After a fairly uncooperative struggle, the subject's heart and breathing would eventually stop and they would settle into a state which Westabahn called "the period of plasticity."  At the this point, the features could be manipulated into the proper expression which would finally solidify once rigor mortis set in.  A special liquid solution dropped in each eye would given them the proper sparkle and the whole procedure would "achieve the desired pose known as the 'smile.'"  However, it's not clear where Westabahn first heard this term.

Eventually, sometime during the 1920's, photographers learned that the same expression could be prompted simply by asking their subjects to say "cheese" before take the photo, and the rest is history...more or less.            

Reflections on the Meaning of Christmas

When I was a kid, there was a rather strange couple that taught a few of the Sunday school classes at the church that I went to.  Their family adhered to a very strict orthodoxy, which included a few extra and unusual stipulations that they had thrown in themselves for good measure.  For one thing, they didn't believe in owning a TV, as they considered the idiot box to be inherently sinful regardless of what channel it was tuned to.  Furthermore, they didn't really celebrate Christmas.  I mean, being Christians, they naturally believed and observed Christmas, but they didn't celebrate it in the traditional manner.  In other words, they didn't give gifts.

I can still recall that woman's syrupy, pious voice, and all the countless times she explained it to us.  "Christmas is Jesus' birthday.", she told us.  "How would you like it if everyone else except you was getting presents on your birthday?"  Seriously.  She said that.  I can almost imagine a certain sanctimonious wink accompanying this pronouncement.  They thought they were awfully clever.  They were going to celebrate Christmas the right way.  They didn't buy each other gifts.  They didn't buy gifts for their kids.  No fruit basket for the neighbors.  No token of appreciation for the mailman; not even a card.  They didn't even buy a special treat for the dog, but then again, I don't think they had a dog.  They probably considered having pets to be some form of pagan animal worship.  They could probably show you the chapter and verse to back it up too.

But hold up a minute.  Let's think about this.  It's not like you could ever get Jesus a tangible, physical gift.  What are you going to do?  Buy him a pair of socks?  Get him a sweater that says "World's Greatest Savior", or a coffee mug that says "#1 Begotten Son"?  I mean, what exactly do you get the omnipotent Lord of time and space that literally has everything?  Well, what if people presented a gift that could only be offered through their own free will?  Something like, say....oh...I don't know, maybe peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.  Yeah, that has a nice little ring to it.  Oh, and hey!  Maybe they could demonstrate this gesture of peace and goodwill by giving each other gifts and generally trying to be decent human beings to each other.  Crazy idea.  I know.

Of course, when I was a kid I was just appalled at what this woman was suggesting and the whole notion of not getting toys on Christmas.  I was horrified when my mother even seemed to give it a few seconds of serious thought.  But now that I'm older I see that the matter goes beyond Christmas.  These people were an extreme case, but I grew up around quite a number of these "Super Christians" who never missed a church service, prayed before every meal, made sure that the boys' hair wasn't too long and the girls' dresses weren't too short, who could quote you an endless stream of Bible verses for any occasion, and yet they didn't have the slightest clue what their own religion was all about.

Christianity isn't about not owning a TV, or trying to turn your life into an ascetic monument to your own self-righteousness.  Christianity is about accepting that you're never going to be able to mold yourself into this perfect person "worthy of God's love", and yet realizing that God, in His grace, loves you anyway.  It's about opening your heart to that love, and showing that love in return to your fellow human beings.  It sounds like a trite notion, older than the dirt itself, and it's certainly been devalued over the ages by people paying lip service to the words without really embracing the spirit.  It's definitely a case of easier said than done.

Take the present example, this family that I've been talking about.  Part of me clearly harbors a certain anger towards them.  I'm annoyed by their smug "holiness" in the service of such misguided ignorance.  I'm angry that their kids never got to enjoy a proper Christmas, and I'm angry that for a split-second they almost ruined my own Christmas.  And yet, there's another part of me, like a quiet calm whisper out beyond all that, a part of me that realizes that these people were just trying to do what they thought was right.  Christianity is about embracing that feeling, and letting everything else go, the anger and the hostility, because it doesn't do me or them any good.  But it isn't easy.  And this isn't even a difficult case!  There are definitely things that are much harder to forgive.  But beyond all the noise and anger that quiet whisper is always out there, reminding me that we are all lost and confused children in this world, trying to get by the best we can. 

Jesus brought an idea to the world, so enchantingly simple and yet so difficult to practice.  He told people that the vicious cycle of vengeance and retribution could end with them.  They just had to lay down their arms, turn the other cheek, let go of their suspicions and their resentments, sincerely open their hearts, and have faith that their friends and enemies alike would do the same.  It's a risky proposition and few people have been fool enough to commit to it fully, but the stakes are plain to see.  Peace on Earth is at our fingertips, anytime we want it, and whenever we're ready for it.  It's completely up to us.  It's up to us as the whole human race, and it's up to each of us individually.  That's where it has to start.

I may be fuzzy on the details; I may have my own spiritual and metaphysical doubts from time to time, but I believe in the idea.  And the idea here goes beyond a matter of religion, beyond the question of whether there's a bearded man in the sky or whether there's a cloud and a harp with your name on it somewhere.  It's about what we make of life here on Earth.  Jesus has had two thousand and eleven birthdays, and we've had two thousand and eleven chances to get it right, and we keep handing in the same badly wrapped gift with most of the pieces missing and all scuffed up here and there with our wars and the pain we constantly cause each other.  Hopefully one of these days we'll get it right.

(Note: This post is an entry is yet another one of Rachel Hoyt's Sociology Studies.  I could have mentioned that at the top, but I didn't want to break my rhetorical momentum ;D )      

How to Disarm a Nuclear Book

When it comes to dark dystopian visions of the future, George Orwell's 1984 is the standard-bearer, the prototype.  It's not a subtle work, by any means, but it is an extremely powerful one.  It's a dire warning about totalitarian government, an indictment of censorship, a defense of the nuances of language, and a text book on brainwashing, all rolled into one.  It relentlessly follows the logic of its premise to its most extreme conclusion.  It makes no compromises; it takes no prisoners.  It drives its point home like a railroad spike through the skull, and it achieves a sort of strange ruthless beauty as a result.  When I first read the book nearly twenty years ago, if someone would have asked me if there was one thing in this world where people could not possibly miss the point, I would have said, 1984.

But alas!  Time and experience have shown me otherwise.  I've seen quite a number of misinterpretations, misapprehensions, and misapplications of the book and it's ideas over the years.  Some read the book as a political novel, specifically a roman a clef' of Soviet Russia.  This is a strictly journalistic reading, as if the book were simply a magnification of newspaper headlines and historical events.  Although the story operates in a political milieu and the landscape has a certain Soviet touch to it, there are much more universal themes at work.  It's about the group mentality, mass hysteria, blind devotion, obedience driven by fear, the corruption of absolute power, the boot stomping on the human face forever.  It's about the individual vs. the state, reality vs. consensus, freedom vs. control.

To look at Big Brother and see only Stalin is to miss the forest for the sake of one mustachioed tree.  Big Brother is the archetypical figurehead.  In the story he serves at a galvanizing point of focus.  He consolidates the power of the party in a single individual, serving as an object of unquestioning loyalty for the people and a point of reference for the agendas of the party as a whole.  It's a mistake to look for any one person in Big Brother.  Even in the book itself, it's not entirely clear if Big Brother is a real person, and it's strongly hinted that he isn't.  It's the principle at work that matters, the people's response to Big Brother.  In fact, you could even go through and replace every instance of the name "Big Brother" with the word "God", and I think you'd be quite surprised and more than a little disturbed at the result.  In the end, Big Brother isn't nearly as important as the atrocities committed in his name.

On the other hand, the term "Big Brother" has recently developed into a sort of short-hand for surveillance of any kind.  While I can certainly appreciate the term becoming a sort of watchword reminding people of their right to privacy, such a reading of the term is a gross over-simplification.  As a result, some people fail to see the difference between the U.S. Patriot Act and a store's closed-circuit security camera.  They focus so much on the surveillance, that they forget that the issue is really about rights.  Big Brother isn't about cameras, it's about the attitude behind the cameras that says, "If they've got nothing to hide, then they shouldn't mind if we have a look."  It's about inferring suspicion, making crimes out of thoughts, and building prosecution out of pure speculation about your intentions.

And then, as with any work which has become such an iconic part of the culture, you have people who come out of the woodwork to apply their own pet theories to it.  Robert Pirsig, in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which deserves some consideration of it's own one of these days), applies a particularly misguided interpretation.  In addition to his heap of other missteps in his quest for "Quality" with a capital Q, he declares that 1984 represents a rationally efficient society.  Well, I don't know what book he was reading, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly rational about Oceanic society, and as for efficiency...well, as Goldstein himself says in "The Book", "Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police."  But I suppose if you imagine a world like 1984 when you think of reason, then you're going to see a reasonable world when you look at 1984.

But it wasn't supposed to end up like this.  "1984" wasn't supposed to become a pointless buzzword of paranoia that people stopped taking seriously a long-time ago, something indiscriminately applied to anyone's vague dis-satisfaction with their government, another bogeyman, another internet Hitler.  "Big Brother" wasn't supposed to be become a casual joke and the title of a reality TV show.  1984 was supposed to be the guardian, the antidote against the very world that it was warning us about.  Don't let them disarm the book.  Don't let them relieve the guard from his post.  1984 is just the sort of thing we need to keep 1984 from happening.

                   

The Philosophy Tree

When we think of philosophy, we tend to think of an esoteric subject far removed from the actual practice of living.  We think of the obscure terminology, the perpetually ponderous "isms" and the various schools of thought which bear their names.  We tend to think of the great names of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and so on, those giants of wisdom who's names we invoke in intellectual arguments as though they were the patron saints of their own peculiar ideas.  If we're in a particularly imaginative or hypnagogic state, we may even picture philosophy as the domain of the wise hermit living on the mountain top who pilgrims have to brave treacherous paths and passes to reach in order to hear his sage advice.

In short, we tend to focus on the vast body of work done on the subject of philosophy, accumulated in books and texts, rather than on the object of study itself.  While the stars serve to remind us what the astronomer is looking at, and the flowers are there to remind us what the botanist is up to, philosophy studies something that isn't quite so easily brought to mind.  It seems like something more intangible and remote.  So it's easy to fall into the misconception that philosophers are off hunting ghosts in another dimension with no relevance to the real world.  "That's all well and good.", we say, "But we've got work to do and bills to pay.", and we move on with our lives.  This is a dreadful mistake.  Philosophy isn't hard to fathom because it's so remote from our lives.  Quite the contrary.  We have a hard time seeing it because it looms so large in our lives, because it is so fundamental and all encompassing.  Philosophy is nothing less than the study of existence itself.  Deeper still, it's the study of our understanding of existence and our place in that existence, and our understanding of ourselves.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Imagine that you and I and everyone else has a tree growing somewhere deep in the core of our minds.  As trees tend to do, this tree branches out from a central trunk, and those branches branch out into more branches and those into even smaller branches, and so on.  This tree and these branches form a kind of network which connects all the ideas and opinions and beliefs that you have about everything, from the seemingly inconsequential things like the etiquette for parallel parking out along one of the small twigs, to more meatier issues like where you stand on the death penalty on one of the sturdier limbs.  Your position on fundamental matters along the main branches are going to affect all the smaller branches that lead off from it.  It's all connected.  The tree as a whole represents our concept of the world and our attitude and approach to life.

Philosophy is the study of that tree.  More than that, it's a way of caring and tending, trimming and maintaining that tree.  Many people don't bother.  They let the tree grow wild, the gnarled branches twisting haphazardly around each other at random, choking the life out of some branches and leaving others neglected in the shadows unexposed to the nourishment of the sun.  They suffer the consequences of this in their actions, their choices, and in their very feelings towards life itself.  There are others who do tend to the tree, but some of them end up doing even worse damage because they don't know what they're doing, because they're not careful, and because they don't take the task seriously to begin with.  They cut into some vital organ and leave the tree half-barren, lifeless, and rotted from the inside.

If I say that I am a philosopher, I don't mean that as a matter of vocation or title.  I am a philosopher in the sense that I am an eater, a dreamer, a bather, and a sleeper.  I am a philosopher because I tend to my tree.  I've devoted a large part of my life to tending to my tree.  I've nursed it to health through the long, grey winters; I've cultivated its blossoms in the spring.  I've tried more than one ill-advised method and risked permanent damage, but hopefully I've learned something from my mistakes.  It's nearly a full-time job, taking on the task myself.  It takes time and thought and study and research.  But so far I've resisted the temptation to farm the job out to any religious group or political affiliation.  I have consulted a few experts on occasion, though.  I let Nietzsche have a go at it one summer.  The tree grew tall and strong, and even a little terrifying to behold.  Kant proposed putting a box of mirrors around the tree, blocking out the sunlight completely.  I sent him packing.  And of course Sartre still drops by now and then in the evenings.  He smiles and nods and reminds me that the tree is mine to make what I will of it; the choices and the possibilities are up to me.

And it's up to you as well.  You can tend your own tree, or you can ignore it altogether, or you can hire someone else to do it and find all of your ideas in their debt.  But make no mistake about it.  You have that tree too.  We all have that tree.  Philosophy studies something which is relevant to all our lives.  We all have some way of looking at the world.  The question is: Are you going to let that view fall into place by a random accident of jumbled ideas, or are you going to cultivate that view deliberately and help it to grow into something wonderful?  The choice is yours.                    

Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.