This resonated with me somewhat. I think what he describes is my default inclination... I focus very closely, struggle to multitask, etc. Classic ADHD symptoms, though I cope because a) I think my symptoms are relatively mild (though noticeable). I think I could get a diagnosis if I wanted one, but could also probably avoid one if I wanted to. And b) I have the great luck that I can simply "weaponize" my hyperfocus to get work done. I know that in general people can't pick what they hyperfocus on, but I will suggest I don't pick... it's just that I always hyperfocus on coding and coding is my day job. So, quite serendipitous. Thank you Alan Turing, I would be homeless and alone without your inventions.
But uh - back to the topic at hand - I also try hard to spend at least some time just being open and perceiving. Looking around for no purpose but to absorb and observe what is there to be absorbed and observed. I think sometimes I take it too far - missing my turn because I was examining the construction off the highway too closely, wondering what that construction worker holding the sign was thinking of to have that curious expression on his face - but I think it's better to overcorrect a little than to not try.
FWIW -- You're not wrong that you could probably get a diagnosis if you wanted to, but everything you describe about your experience is relatable to almost everyone. That's exactly how farm workers spend 8 hours picking strawberries, how carpenters spend 8 hours hammering joists, and what everybody is doing when they miss that turn.
In a lot of mental health diagnoses, its the persistent inability to "cope" that warrants treatment rather than the little laundry list of symptoms (which are often very common and relatable). Lots of people don't learn that and needlessly feel alien or pathological when actually experiencing a very everyday and relatable sort of life.
Ah just to be clear, I don't think I really detailed any of the things I experience that make me suspect I have ADHD. I do struggle a lot sometimes. For instance: The kids need socks so we can leave. I go upstairs. Hmm I want to check how that download is going that definitely doesn't matter at all right now. I check it anyway. Maybe click around a bit. Now I need to pee. What was I up here for? Go downstairs. Wife (rightfully) asks me where tf I've been and why don't I have socks. Etc.
Another example: hyperfocusing on something (again, usually programming-related... thinking about a project). Need to do a simple task. Autopilot doing a different task because I'm too busy stuck in my head thinking about the thing.
It pays off during interviews, oddly enough - the anxiety and novelty have me super sharp. Same thing during incident response when things are broken.
It's the classic executive dysfunction and novelty-seeking stuff. I don't have the hyperactivity symptoms though.
I'm not that you have ADHD if you are primarily in your zone.
For me ADHD means being physical twitchy and constantly thinking about everything.
The zone is the opposite but I never heard someone constantly being in the zone. It's a lot of procrastinating and then hyperfocusing 6h before the deadline
In the context of this metaphor, I would describe ADHD as the inability to get into the zone despite desperately wanting to, and the inability to get out of the zone despite desperately trying to.
Lots of zone time, very little aimed at the targets you'd prefer.
The problems for me really began when I was no longer able to get in to any zone -- part of this came with a shift in to more managerial roles and constantly having to split my attention between multiple people and projects.
The diagnosis has at a minimum put a lot of context on to large parts of my life and the medication leaves me with some energy left over at the end of the day instead of collapsing like a zombie into the sofa. Still a work in progress.
One time, at a family gathering, I asked where a relative named Cindy was. The entire room got silent and stared at me. I found out later she'd been dead for a few years and I somehow had not noticed or had forgotten.
I stopped asking people about family or work unless I already know the answer. I have terrible luck and always end up asking people who just went through tragedy.
Just living in a big city for a long time can do this to you. After a while you just learn to tune most stuff out and engage "autopilot", for a lack of a better word.
Zero situational awareness. Completely unaware of the disgust being felt by his date seeing a person defecate. Completely unaware a plant has been in the room for two years. The feeling to post this on the internet with a “lessons learned” theme is kind of naively comical.
You mean you think he shouldn't have? I think it's a great post. It describes a noteworthy phenomenon and doesn't much editorialize. The mere fact that some people have verbal internal dialogs and others don't went extremely viral. People care about cognitive differences, and many of the differences we're surrounded by are not obvious.
That said, the commenter who describes not remembering that his relative Cindy had died has a pithier story.
"situational awareness" walking around places like skid row or the tenderloin is exactly not paying attention to the normal (for the area) things going on that aren't a threat, like a guy pooping on the sidewalk
For what it's worth, this sounds like the opposite of autism to me.
People with autism generally have less of a filter for familiar or ignorable stimuli. Where neurotypical people are generally able to tune out things they know or decide to not be relevant, people with autism have less ability to do that, and doing it is more draining for them.
If anything, it sounds more like ADHD to me. But armchair diagnosis is always fraught with peril, and the couple of dozen labels in the DSM-V are nowhere near enough to describe the millions of ways that brains can be different.
"The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning."
I've felt the beam widen a few times on long runs: I'm seeing while not looking at anything, hearing it all while listening to none of it. It's really quite nice
Not necessarily. One of the Jhanas (states of mind attainable through meditation) is "Neither perception nor non-perception". This can be described as not being aware, but it's complicated.
Like Christianity, I think there are a lot of important ideas in Ayurvedic wisdom, but I'm not convinced everything they have a word for exists. Enlightenment is another one.
Ah yes a casual date thru the tenderloin. These are the types of individuals with no situational awareness that end up getting hurt and wonder why. The world will kill you if you let it.
On the contrary, even areas of the city considered "dangerous" are mostly not. The media likes to make these places sound like war zones because that sells.
I haven't been there recently so maybe it has gotten more obviously bad, but pre covid at least there were some bars in the tenderloin that were easy to end up walking to without realizing which part of town you are entering.
The tenderloin is really not that dangerous if you don't bother the drug dealers, don't antagonise the crazies, and keep an eye out around you. I lived there for a bit over a year.
It's a miserable place for a date and everywhere smells like piss, but two uninvolved walkers are unlikely to be killed in the middle of the street.
I think we all have different radars - and also what we perceive consciously and unconsciously differs.
For example, my wife has a much keener recognition for something that's messy - a full sink or a shirt laying on the floor of my office will "scream" at her louder that it does at me. Although, I suspect the mess still "affects" me - eg I might be less focused/happy in the messy environment despite not thinking about it consciously.
Something completely wild is what my 3 year old sees. A few days ago I was stopped at a red light and he said "daddy, what are all these arrows?" My first response was "what arrows?" Then I saw the arrows on a sign that explained the intersection. Then I saw the arrows on the overhead exit sign. Then I saw the ones drawn on the lanes itself to show which ones can turn and which ones go straight. Then I saw the one-way street sign. Then I saw the red arrow on the traffic light. And probably a bunch more other stuff, including my blinker signal. So at the instant he asked me about arrows, I was consciously aware of 0 arrows, while in reality there were like 12 in our field of view. Now obviously this is because I've been driving for a long time and I don't need to be consciously aware of the arrows to process their information. But it also tells you how much we might omit / filter out because our minds don't think it's worth surfacing to conscious attention.
Rather apropos, you explained precisely something I felt when I read your OP's comment (but, humorously, did not consciously notice). I loved it, but couldn't articulate why.
It hit too close to home.
I pictured driving down the road through town, the "turn only" lane indicators painted on the asphalt, the wash of signage, lights, traffic cones—the background noise of our civilization that provides passive information we've grown so familiar with it fades out of our vision.
Just want to say - this comment means a lot. I thought the experience with my kid and the arrows was really poignant for me and I am glad I could get it across.
I once went on a flight in a glider. I fly RC planes, so I know how to fly (in theory), but I wasn't able to fly the glider well. The pilot, on the other hand, obviously flew with no problem.
I noticed that this wasn't because I didn't know what to pay attention to, but I didn't know what to ignore. I knew very well that I needed to pay attention to my speed, attitude, etc, but there was so much sensory overload that I didn't know what to process and what to just ignore.
Sure, knowing what to notice is good, but knowing what you can safely ignore so you can free up bandwidth for processing the useful information is critical.
This is why "hours" are so important for pilots, but not just pilots. "Hours" for pilots is just a way of saying experience, but cooler. Every aspect of life has different ways of letting others know your experience in something. Ranks in the military, Senior/Junior dev titles, intern, apprentice, black belt. Some are just more mundane, and also get ignored!
This really rings true to my early experiences with driving. As a novice, every moment driving was a sensory overload. Check the rearview mirror! Am I going at the right speed? Is anyone overtaking me? Am I staying centered in the lane? How long has that light been green? Plus all the little mechanics of actually operating a motor vehicle, actually moving your hands and feet the right amounts.
Now, a lot of getting better at driving was just building up muscle memory and good habits, yes, but I think a lot of it was really improving my selective perception and being able to quickly filter out the irrelevant to focus on exactly what was needed to drive safely and effectively.
I also play a lot of fighting games in my spare time, like Guilty Gear, and I feel this there as well. Pick up a new fighting game - especially if it's your first one - and quickly get overwhelmed by all of the things happening on the screen and all of the precise button presses you're expected to make. But then over time, you filter out all the noise and just track the minimum information - the positions of characters, the strategies, the higher-level gestalts at play - and end up spending much less cognitive effort for more effect.
I don't think it's that people don't notice or see, it's that the recognition is mostly subconcious.
I was once driving on a 3 lane highway with a semi going slowly in the middle lane. I was in the left lane and passed him but needed the right lane for an upcoming exit. I pass the semi, slide into the middle lane and then wait. I realized I was waiting on a small blue car that, sure enough, popped out of the right lane going faster than either one of us.
And I realized I had processed that a small blue car was also passing the semi going faster than either the semi or myself and that I needed to wait for them before completing my move into the far right lane.
I think often times things get processed at a subconcious level and I imagine that's what was happening with the anecdote about arrows.
>I noticed that this wasn't because I didn't know what to pay attention to, but I didn't know what to ignore. I knew very well that I needed to pay attention to my speed, attitude, etc, but there was so much sensory overload that I didn't know what to process and what to just ignore.
Getting overloaded is common in stressful situations in aviation where it's often called getting behind the airplane. It's the reason we're taught to aviate, then navigate, and then communicate. It's a graceful degradation where by purposefully ignoring what's not currently most important you can focus on what's most important rather than failing at everything. For me flying gliders, the most stressful situations I've been in are winch launch rope breaks with questionable land ahead possibilities. In those cases I've never made a call that I'm entering a modified circuit. Despite a decent amount of experience, I'm just too busy.
Relatedly, gliders are really good at flying themselves. I heard a story about an aerotow where due to a miscommunication the instructor and student thought each other were on the controls. They only discovered this once the instructor praised the student for their best take-off yet. Similarly, learning to land feels like it's about doing the minimum possible. Keep the nose up and just wait. So not only are good pilots paying less attention to distracting inputs, they're also spending less effort controlling the glider on the output side.
I don't know how passenger gliders are designed, but if they're anything like well-designed RC planes, they'll stall by dropping the nose, cruise with a slight up pitch, and have a tendency to right the wings.
That does make a craft very stable in flight, to the point where some RC craft I've used land themselves (albeit a bit hard) when they lose power.
Pretty much yes. Trim to your desired speed in level flight and you can go hands free. Large fins mean strong yaw stability, long wings mean strong roll damping, dihedral on those long wings is relatively large as well so you're stable in level flight. Nearly all gliders are very well behaved in stall and mush forwards without being likely to drop a wing.
As far as pitch, elevators tend to be close to neutral or produce negative lift. There's generally not a noticeable pitch on the aircraft simply because you want the fuselage as closely aligned to the airflow as possible to reduce drag.
> For example, my wife has a much keener recognition for something that's messy - a full sink or a shirt laying on the floor of my office will "scream" at her louder that it does at me.
This may be because she's trained more that there are negative consequences for her, or that she's responsible for that stuff. I don't really pay attention to tickets I'm not assigned, for example, unless they're on stuff that I'd be the go-to-guy for if anything broke. I figure stuff like that works the same way: at least when I was growing up it was ok for me to be a bit lackadaisical with my living quarters whereas my sister was considered filthy for leaving a makeup brush unwashed too long.
You'd probably get in trouble too if they found your makeup brush :) But on a serious note, I think the difference in attitude between me and my wife is deeper.
She puts a higher premium on solving problems right now and doesn't mind solving the same problem multiple times, whereas I am more interested in solve-it-once-and-for-all type situations, and please less emphasis on something being fixed right now vs a bit later.
Not surprisingly, her personality is a perfect match for emergency medicine while mine for engineering and product management.
Really good example. I try to do this regularly around me. Take stock of the small things. It's almost meditative, although not quite. More just a intentional consciousness of and concentration on the world around me.
There's a strange song I heard that talks about noticing things like that and just considering them. It's called My Dog's Eyes by Zammuto. There's a line towards the end that says, "These were children who hadn't yet lost their sense of wonder.", and to me, that beautifully encapsulates what I want to do: Maintain that child-like sense of wonder for everything in the world for as long as I can!
Keith Johnstone's book Impro recommends an exercise involving looking around and naming everything you see out loud, but deliberately giving the wrong name in every case. Look at a chair, say "banana!", stuff like that. Can be done with a partner or a group, too. A few minutes of that is supposed to have a perspective-shifting effect—making things feel off such that you notice more details—lasting hours or days.
I tried it once, just for just a few seconds, and it did seem to have an effect. Need to try really doing the exercise one of these days.
Once a friend in grad school made fun of some todo note I had written down, announcing, "Note to self: Love parents." I don't remember what the note was. I do remember laughing. Later I decided she had a point. Not that I didn't love my parents, but that if I spent more time reflecting on my history and particularly my interpersonal relationships, behaviors that came with difficulty would come more naturally.
But then did it? Or did the lack of reminders just make you revert to the original problem of needing reminders of things you'd otherwise simply never think of anymore?
I didn't respond to her advice by stopping the reminders. Indeed I didn't respond to her advice at all. But a few years later I developed a writing* habit. The deliberate practice of reviewing my experiences seemed to reduce my need for external reminders. (Causality is hard to prove, but they were contemporaneous, and theory suggests they would be related.)
* I'm saying writing, not journaling, because I wasn't always writing about my own experience. Even when I wasn't, though, the impulse for the writing probably usually came from those experiences.
Concentrating your attention (we here are all quite familiar with it) has a flipside. A vast blindness.
Because the degree to which you concentrate upon a thing (ex : a puzzle, thoughts about a puzzle, thoughts in general... to name some common ones) is the degree to which you ignore everything else.
And this state can be habitual.
Which is why brilliant, creative, industrious types are... well, you are familiar with the stereotype.
That stereotype applies widely but is not universal. Richard Feynman, for instance, was a good example of a well-adjusted, happy, aware-of-lots-of-stuff hyperfocused creative genius. There are many others. On the order of half of the economics professors I know (at least fifty) seem to me similarly well adjusted, despite all being quite focused.
This is mainly a question of attention directed inwards vs outwards. From a biological perspective, situational awareness is what has allowed our species to survive, there's evolutionary pressure. That this behaviour is so prevalent now, given the comments, suggests that our environments have become too safe and human beings are losing this awareness. It also suggests a high degree of narcissism, where my own thoughts are more important than what's happening around me.
For the purposes of natural selection, everything that's happened since the Pyramids (and probably several hundred thousand years prior to that) is effectively instantaneous and natural selection/evolution has had no time to "react".
If anything, the narrative should be that clearly being inattentive in safe scenarios isn't selected against and thus can't be that detrimental to reproducing successfully.
That is certainly very recent, although I agree with your core point, that we are but an instant on an evolutionary timeline. Life has normally been much more dangerous than the past 70 years. We don't know how long it will last either.
Some people in this thread have mentioned ADHD, but the latter half of the article could be explained by Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM), which is somewhat correlated with ADHD.
> Last year I was on a date, and, [...] I had not seen this.
And some people who are closer to "hyperobservant" in many contexts might've also missed that sight -- because they were in a social context, and focused almost entirely on the conversation with the other person.
The City And The City (China Mieville). Two nations, occupying the same physical area, and occupants of either nation have been trained/socialized since birth not to see or interact with the other nation. If they do accidentally, for example with car accident that breaches the psychosocial barrier between them, they must 'unsee' it lest they risk an illegal breach themselves.
Sounds like the OP was in the United States of Silicon whereas pooping man was in the Democratic Republic of the Tenderloin. His g/f breached instead of unseeing it like any natural citizen of the US would have done.
Now if only Breach would actually whisk away any Tenderloin citizens who threatened or harassed Siliconians…
Great book, one of my favorites. Really draws attention to the absurdity of borders and legal status. (I’m not saying we should do away with borders. Just that they carry some weird weird consequences.)
I'd say, whether this is a good or bad thing, will, as always, depend on the environment and what it demands from you. So, in a Darwinian way, the fit(ness) of those two.
If this secures your income and your environment is able to fill in for the more attentive parts, you're well set.
There are enough possible settings and helpful augmentations in our current society to survive and prosper with any kind of focus/attention distribution. Given they are applied to a somehow matching problem/problem space, this makes up much of this society's success.
So the most positive, and therfor naturally sympathetic, aspect of the post might be the happy acceptance of one's own configuration without the need dismiss that of others. While there has always been a tendency of generalist dismissing specialists and vice versa, the insight that we only (or at least much better) progress with the right combination should not be forgotten, even if we feel unsecure or a bit greedy
or envious when the opposite talent of ours was a much better fit for a certain situation, or position, again, and got all the praise this time. (Everything else will make you look Dunning-Kruger anyway.)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadBut uh - back to the topic at hand - I also try hard to spend at least some time just being open and perceiving. Looking around for no purpose but to absorb and observe what is there to be absorbed and observed. I think sometimes I take it too far - missing my turn because I was examining the construction off the highway too closely, wondering what that construction worker holding the sign was thinking of to have that curious expression on his face - but I think it's better to overcorrect a little than to not try.
In a lot of mental health diagnoses, its the persistent inability to "cope" that warrants treatment rather than the little laundry list of symptoms (which are often very common and relatable). Lots of people don't learn that and needlessly feel alien or pathological when actually experiencing a very everyday and relatable sort of life.
Another example: hyperfocusing on something (again, usually programming-related... thinking about a project). Need to do a simple task. Autopilot doing a different task because I'm too busy stuck in my head thinking about the thing.
It pays off during interviews, oddly enough - the anxiety and novelty have me super sharp. Same thing during incident response when things are broken.
It's the classic executive dysfunction and novelty-seeking stuff. I don't have the hyperactivity symptoms though.
For me ADHD means being physical twitchy and constantly thinking about everything.
The zone is the opposite but I never heard someone constantly being in the zone. It's a lot of procrastinating and then hyperfocusing 6h before the deadline
Lots of zone time, very little aimed at the targets you'd prefer.
The diagnosis has at a minimum put a lot of context on to large parts of my life and the medication leaves me with some energy left over at the end of the day instead of collapsing like a zombie into the sofa. Still a work in progress.
That said, the commenter who describes not remembering that his relative Cindy had died has a pithier story.
People with autism generally have less of a filter for familiar or ignorable stimuli. Where neurotypical people are generally able to tune out things they know or decide to not be relevant, people with autism have less ability to do that, and doing it is more draining for them.
If anything, it sounds more like ADHD to me. But armchair diagnosis is always fraught with peril, and the couple of dozen labels in the DSM-V are nowhere near enough to describe the millions of ways that brains can be different.
- The Wisdom of Life, Arther Shopenhauer.
To enjoy life you have to pay attention to it.
Not to nitpick but that ain't necessarily so.
In meditation we study attention and do neat tricks with it.
One trick is a refinement of plain old concentration.
The other trick is breaking the habit of always paying attention to something.
That second one is especially neat.
I use the terms (awareness , attention) synonymously.
To put it another way.
It's like a flashlight. I shine the beam upon a river of experience-stuff (sights, sounds, thoughts...)
When I pay attention to a thing, I direct the beam at that thing.
When I concentrate, the beam narrows.
When I refrain from all directing and concentrating, the beam widens.
I agree that broadening the beam is, among other benefits, enjoyable.
It's a miserable place for a date and everywhere smells like piss, but two uninvolved walkers are unlikely to be killed in the middle of the street.
For example, my wife has a much keener recognition for something that's messy - a full sink or a shirt laying on the floor of my office will "scream" at her louder that it does at me. Although, I suspect the mess still "affects" me - eg I might be less focused/happy in the messy environment despite not thinking about it consciously.
Something completely wild is what my 3 year old sees. A few days ago I was stopped at a red light and he said "daddy, what are all these arrows?" My first response was "what arrows?" Then I saw the arrows on a sign that explained the intersection. Then I saw the arrows on the overhead exit sign. Then I saw the ones drawn on the lanes itself to show which ones can turn and which ones go straight. Then I saw the one-way street sign. Then I saw the red arrow on the traffic light. And probably a bunch more other stuff, including my blinker signal. So at the instant he asked me about arrows, I was consciously aware of 0 arrows, while in reality there were like 12 in our field of view. Now obviously this is because I've been driving for a long time and I don't need to be consciously aware of the arrows to process their information. But it also tells you how much we might omit / filter out because our minds don't think it's worth surfacing to conscious attention.
I would argue, even better said than the blog post.
It hit too close to home.
I pictured driving down the road through town, the "turn only" lane indicators painted on the asphalt, the wash of signage, lights, traffic cones—the background noise of our civilization that provides passive information we've grown so familiar with it fades out of our vision.
Thank you both for this! Love it!
I noticed that this wasn't because I didn't know what to pay attention to, but I didn't know what to ignore. I knew very well that I needed to pay attention to my speed, attitude, etc, but there was so much sensory overload that I didn't know what to process and what to just ignore.
Sure, knowing what to notice is good, but knowing what you can safely ignore so you can free up bandwidth for processing the useful information is critical.
The NOVA episode 'Human Brain: Perception Deception' really shows well how much we don't see
https://youtu.be/HU6LfXNeQM4?si=KiQHNLNziNU6TA4a&t=535
Yep! This is key to a lot of things.
We build up tacit knowledge which influences this ignorability in multiple facets of our lives.
Now, a lot of getting better at driving was just building up muscle memory and good habits, yes, but I think a lot of it was really improving my selective perception and being able to quickly filter out the irrelevant to focus on exactly what was needed to drive safely and effectively.
I also play a lot of fighting games in my spare time, like Guilty Gear, and I feel this there as well. Pick up a new fighting game - especially if it's your first one - and quickly get overwhelmed by all of the things happening on the screen and all of the precise button presses you're expected to make. But then over time, you filter out all the noise and just track the minimum information - the positions of characters, the strategies, the higher-level gestalts at play - and end up spending much less cognitive effort for more effect.
I was once driving on a 3 lane highway with a semi going slowly in the middle lane. I was in the left lane and passed him but needed the right lane for an upcoming exit. I pass the semi, slide into the middle lane and then wait. I realized I was waiting on a small blue car that, sure enough, popped out of the right lane going faster than either one of us.
And I realized I had processed that a small blue car was also passing the semi going faster than either the semi or myself and that I needed to wait for them before completing my move into the far right lane.
I think often times things get processed at a subconcious level and I imagine that's what was happening with the anecdote about arrows.
A fixed-wing pilot may have an easier time transitioning to the V-22 Osprey because he doesn't have the helicopter pilot's training/habit of constantly fiddling with the controls. <http://web.archive.org/web/20120914073208/defense.aol.com/20...>
Relatedly, gliders are really good at flying themselves. I heard a story about an aerotow where due to a miscommunication the instructor and student thought each other were on the controls. They only discovered this once the instructor praised the student for their best take-off yet. Similarly, learning to land feels like it's about doing the minimum possible. Keep the nose up and just wait. So not only are good pilots paying less attention to distracting inputs, they're also spending less effort controlling the glider on the output side.
That does make a craft very stable in flight, to the point where some RC craft I've used land themselves (albeit a bit hard) when they lose power.
As far as pitch, elevators tend to be close to neutral or produce negative lift. There's generally not a noticeable pitch on the aircraft simply because you want the fuselage as closely aligned to the airflow as possible to reduce drag.
This may be because she's trained more that there are negative consequences for her, or that she's responsible for that stuff. I don't really pay attention to tickets I'm not assigned, for example, unless they're on stuff that I'd be the go-to-guy for if anything broke. I figure stuff like that works the same way: at least when I was growing up it was ok for me to be a bit lackadaisical with my living quarters whereas my sister was considered filthy for leaving a makeup brush unwashed too long.
She puts a higher premium on solving problems right now and doesn't mind solving the same problem multiple times, whereas I am more interested in solve-it-once-and-for-all type situations, and please less emphasis on something being fixed right now vs a bit later.
Not surprisingly, her personality is a perfect match for emergency medicine while mine for engineering and product management.
I look back at pictures from before cars with envy, they're so clutter free in comparison
From the times I’ve walked there in nice summer weather, it’s utopia.
(1) https://www.thestar.com/life/want-to-rent-on-toronto-islands...
There's a strange song I heard that talks about noticing things like that and just considering them. It's called My Dog's Eyes by Zammuto. There's a line towards the end that says, "These were children who hadn't yet lost their sense of wonder.", and to me, that beautifully encapsulates what I want to do: Maintain that child-like sense of wonder for everything in the world for as long as I can!
I tried it once, just for just a few seconds, and it did seem to have an effect. Need to try really doing the exercise one of these days.
<https://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/file-deleted>
* I'm saying writing, not journaling, because I wasn't always writing about my own experience. Even when I wasn't, though, the impulse for the writing probably usually came from those experiences.
Because the degree to which you concentrate upon a thing (ex : a puzzle, thoughts about a puzzle, thoughts in general... to name some common ones) is the degree to which you ignore everything else.
And this state can be habitual.
Which is why brilliant, creative, industrious types are... well, you are familiar with the stereotype.
If anything, the narrative should be that clearly being inattentive in safe scenarios isn't selected against and thus can't be that detrimental to reproducing successfully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Memory...
And some people who are closer to "hyperobservant" in many contexts might've also missed that sight -- because they were in a social context, and focused almost entirely on the conversation with the other person.
Sounds like the OP was in the United States of Silicon whereas pooping man was in the Democratic Republic of the Tenderloin. His g/f breached instead of unseeing it like any natural citizen of the US would have done.
Great book, one of my favorites. Really draws attention to the absurdity of borders and legal status. (I’m not saying we should do away with borders. Just that they carry some weird weird consequences.)
If this secures your income and your environment is able to fill in for the more attentive parts, you're well set.
There are enough possible settings and helpful augmentations in our current society to survive and prosper with any kind of focus/attention distribution. Given they are applied to a somehow matching problem/problem space, this makes up much of this society's success.
So the most positive, and therfor naturally sympathetic, aspect of the post might be the happy acceptance of one's own configuration without the need dismiss that of others. While there has always been a tendency of generalist dismissing specialists and vice versa, the insight that we only (or at least much better) progress with the right combination should not be forgotten, even if we feel unsecure or a bit greedy or envious when the opposite talent of ours was a much better fit for a certain situation, or position, again, and got all the praise this time. (Everything else will make you look Dunning-Kruger anyway.)