Thesis: on Friendship

Awake, early, 6am-ish. But probably also sleeping too much, because I tire myself with too many distractions. A friend asks me if something is bothering me, and so I think about it, and become more awake (for better or for worse). Perhaps, just the usual tirade from my various sources, reading this and that, and considering the economics of pleasure, companionship, conversation, and sex.

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Where B = casual sex:

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I think, I demand a certain degree of intellectual agility from my closest companions, and no one should demand less. I think it's important for [friends to be able to discuss the costs and benefits of casual sex]:1, without [having to depend on sexual activity to make their friendship viable]:2. Too often, I suspect that I lose friends because they are incapable of dissociating point 1, from point 2.

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Probably, there are too many people in the world who depend on point 2, and that is why many other people are suspicious of point 1, as a strategy to flag abusers of point 2. Meanwhile, there are many practitioners of point 2, who are completely incapable of point 1. Of course, it is also important to note that you can algebraically replace the word 'sex' in points 1, and 2, with any other genre of behaviour, B, and this entire discussion on points 1, and 2, will still hold.

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For all possible values of B, in general:

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Here's an anticipated criticism of my thesis. The activity of point 1, may be defined to be a subset of the activities of point 2. For now, deeper discussion of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

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In general, I hope to meet many more friends who are capable of point 1 without point 2. And, I hope that in general, people who practice point 2 will learn to lose that dependence, until they have performed a thoroughly audited valuation that [whatever their friendships depend on] are priced efficiently.

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Many are likely to argue that some Bs are central to their preferred definition of friendship. As this once again depends on definitions, the construction of specific arguments about any ordered pair (B, friendship_definition), is also left as an exercise for the reader...

Christmas Presence

Today I met an old friend. More accurately, I was summoned, as is our custom. Once in 52 months is a little overwhelming, I must admit. But I do not think we were too fazed.

We spoke about how we met, and what each of our challenges are in the present, where those might come from, and where they might go. We visited places which were once familiar.

My friend appears to be in good health, on a long break between large projects. I am right in the middle of a long project, myself, taking a breather from what fazedness is inherent in the nature of long projects.

News? Only new events, based on familiar patterns we had discussed before. Each of us seeks different things from our respective companions, each of us values set periods of solitary activity, and each of us is currently committed to specific directions with their own opportunity costs. We each have different beliefs about what our time is worth, and we discuss what we have (and have not) obtained from our respective engagements over the recent years past. Each of our bodies fails differently. Each of our minds fails likewise.

Since today's meeting, I have formed a few questions for our next meeting, so I shall write them down.

• How is your health?
• Did you ever give me something, which I did not ask for?
• If you did, which of the commonly discussed reasons did you have, for doing it?
• Did you believe I wanted it?
• Did you not have capability at the time, to tell me it may have been intended for someone else?
• Were you afraid that I would be less useful as a companion, if I did not receive it?
• How are your friendships?
• Have your newest friends served you well?
• What is the market price for friendship these days - what are the acceptable barters, to you, and how do your counterparties react to these terms?
• Costs: Did you form any unexpected perceptions after any transaction?
• Clearly, the demand for my time is low, which is unsurprising. Of the commonly discussed reasons, why is this the case?
• Am I tiresome to read? (From most people I should ask, the answer is probably 'yes'.)
• Do I fail to communicate sufficient appreciation for your time?
• Do we simply meet too infrequently (in general, for logistical reasons), for these conversations to be sufficiently useful?
• How can I improve the quality of service which I deliver in this friendship? (Cursory, but perhaps necessary to eke out an explicit expression.)
• [Insert other hypotheses, and elucidations variously.]

The end, for now.

Update: we had a short exchange on the last day of the year. It feels indeed like another long silence is upon me. It is very familiar, an anxiety that is brought about by the fear of loss, and I often seek to make it constructive by building things - I suppose the built things are distractions, though they have their own merit. A five-year-old business, for example. Within minutes I reflect further and find that the anxiety disappears if I think only of what it means to love, without expectation of reciprocity. Then, a functional peace falls upon me. I wonder what the next five years will bring in various domains of life. As always, I wonder if there will be another conversation.

More questions:

• What is my role in our intermittent conversations?
• I believe the need for that role arises under specific conditions, which we have discussed.
• If that is the case, are there no other roles for me to play, at other times? (Typically in all my social relationships, I focus on the determining the ways in which I am useful - that is enough for me, in general.)
• Is there a pattern to our distance? ~976 days, ~500 days, ~121 days...

Season's Greetings

Christmas is always a good time to talk about values. My wish this year is the same. I hope that civilisation progresses, regardless of the cost to individual people. I hope that brutish characteristics, such as the elevation of empathy, the glorification of sentimental relationships, and the enfeeblement of law, shall gradually be stripped away from our world - these very definitions of evil surround us. And I hope that meanwhile our daily work against a world of moral absolutists shall be minimally troublesome. Merry Christmas everyone. May we receive as good as we can manage, and if we can't manage I hope we soon expire. That is the greatest good.

Reflection: Mapping Neurotransmitter Effects to a Model of Phenomenology

Prior to my current job, which I now serve in my fifth year, I never really had an opportunity to challenge myself on the micro-management of excitation and anxiety*. The reason is, most of my multi-year projects since the 1990s have been carried out in a mode where I recognise an opportunity for personal profit in the world, and then I work against parameters of resistance largely defined by those around me. It's usually been a unilateral assault.
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Whereas on the current project I am largely in control of which parameters of resistance my teams do and do not work against on a monthly, daily, and minutely basis. So about half my time is spent reminding myself [not to be more than 55% sure about any target on any timeframe (Rule 1)], and the other half of my time is spent being as productive as I can without compromising Rule 1.
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In my fourth year of working in this role, after several campaigns which set me to all kinds of work with various c*unterparties over that period, I found myself quite disturbed. I think the development of symptoms of borderline personality disorder (perhaps more accurately framed as a general cognitive decoherence) should be expected, given that I work to actively discourage myself of surety about anything whatsoever.
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I think it's a good time now to spend a few days improving my recognition of excitation versus anxiety on a minutely basis, based on the firm definitions below. Then, once a useful dichotomy has been retrained into my intuition, I should then more closely study the dynamics of that system based on the model below.
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* For the purpose of this post, I'll use the rough model that excitation can be quantified as rates of change in memory buffers for conscious sensation, recognised from the peripheral nervous system, or from imaginative generation (including memory); and anxiety can be quantified as frequency of pausing during any cognitive task - perhaps mappable to dopamine and serotonin respectively.

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Update, 2019-12-24:
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Time to integrate this a little bit with some of my earlier models. Let's look again at the working definition of the dichotomy of states in memory buffers, 'static data' versus 'changing data'. In the mid-2000s, I used to monitor my conscious buffers, and look for those patterns originating from my sensory nervous signals, and I used to try and map them to whatever my motor nervous signals were doing at the time. If efferent/centrifugal/motor signals are not changing, then afferent/centripetal/sensed signals tend to be less dynamic also (tentatively, I associated that with my understanding of what Chinese traditional kinesthesiology might refer to as 'yang' mode); and the converse is true (tentatively, I had previously built a model associating that with the terminology of 'yin' mode).
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(Note that efferent signals can be sent to the virtual space of the imagination instead of the motor system - but that's a separate pathway for discussion.)
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So let's attempt integration of the two working languages/models.
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Category A:
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• 'excitation',
• 'changes are happening in conscious memory buffers',
• 'dynamic data in field',
• 'high degree of information transfer in the pathway: CNS -> efferent -> afferent -> CNS',
• 'some kinesthesiology traditions may refer to this as "yin" activity'

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Category B:
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• 'anxiety',
• 'conscious memory buffers are not changing',
• 'static data in field',
• 'low degree of information transfer in the pathway: CNS -> efferent -> afferent -> CNS',
• 'some kinesthesiology traditions may refer to this as "yang" activity'

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I've not checked this model of integration for coherence, so it'll serve simply as a back of napkin scribble, for now.