deliveroo etc

IdleRich said:

I don't think that we can choose what we crave though can we? I suppose that a person may think "I would like to be a person who craves high culture and renaissance art, but in fact, what I really desire the whole time, what fills my mind from when I rise to when I go to bed is in fact a disappointingly mundane desire to get my hands on a great big pair of knockers" and then they can recognise this unfortunate shortcoming and they can choose to pretend they crave the former and they can live their life as a person who does and so on.... but the underlying craving itself can not be changed can it? I'm not saying cravings are fixed, but more that they are not controllable as we might wish.

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One mechanism for gauging psychic hygiene that I have found useful, if even slippery, is to ask yourself "what do I want?" and "what to I want to want?" and then to try to reconcile those two, assuming you detect a difference.

luka said:

why would anyone care about success? who's marking you?

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I mean more in terms of self image, feeling insecure because you don't think you stack up well enough alongside your peers, and that such measurements, if we can even call them that, aren;t made according to some explicit and tangible metric, but rather a more dynamic and amorphous circumstantial framework that differs across generations, cultures, etc.

version said:

It's one of the major uses of technology. You look at a lot of the stuff we invent and it's designed to save time, make things easier etc etc.

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That's why there is something particularly funny about when it does the total opposite. Like Denis and his "smart lights" basically coming and off at the wrong time and him being unable to override it. Also, there are certain things that you can't cram any more convenience into, i don't really know (or care) what a smart corkscrew does, but I am pretty certain it is totally unnecessary.
My dad used to be a real "early adopter" type cos he worked in technology and he liked to get all these gadgets. But the problem with getting the first of everything is that the first one is normally shit, the problems have not been identified and so on. So he was the first person I knew with a beeper and then a mobile phone and so on and they were usually greatly flawed. In the 90s or something he had a mobile phone stuck on the dashboard of his car and it was, in theory at least, voice activated, but the recognition thing was really bad and so it never did the right thing,
Dad would pick me up from somewhere and it would always lead to a conversation between the phone and dad which would go something like

Dad: Hi Rich, how are you?
Phone: Voice activated, awaiting command
Dad: No... Off!
Phone: Contacts selected, say a Contact name to make call
Dad: No, don't call anyone, turn off. OFF!
Phone: Phoning Gwyneth
Dad: No... no!

Clinamenic said:

I tend to think desire is mutable, which I think we would agree one, but I would even go as far as to say it can be willfully mutated, which is where we may differ.

It's been a central facet of this whole project, "steering" oneself by shifting the direction of one's fulfillment pursuit. Tough to impact these primordial drives with sheer logic, but logic can have an impact and if that impact is made in certain ways, it seems to make a critical difference here.

For me it involves exercising the basic ability of sensing the potential for fulfillment in many, if not all things. That, if approached from a certain angle, fulfillment may be had in otherwise unexpected ways.

For me its more of a sublime science than a precise one, but yes my experience indicates that desire even desire qua cravings ca be willfully mutated, if even not in the heat of the moment, but rather an overarching effort that covers some series of moments.

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I do think in fact that there may be some sort of potential for pushing changes of desire in the, er, desired direction. I think what you're getting at is a kind of "fake it till you make it" thing where by acting in a certain way as if a certain position obtains you can cause it to do so... but I wouldn't want to bet on my succeeding in that, perhaps though (in fact almost certainly) you have stronger will power than me.
Then again, suppose you do crave x and you want to crave y and so you train yourself to do so.... but why do you crave the craving of Y, can one change that meta-craving?

luka said:

also they live in share houses with people they fear & loathe and avoid communal areas like the kitchen like the plague

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A common phenomenon I think and one that has not been sufficiently.... I dunno, noted, investigated perhaps. I think there are lots of people who completely hate their flatmates and thus are mundanely in this situation, but also there are a quite a few who simply don't click with one of their flatmates and then they sort of avoid them a bit and then somehow it builds up into this irrational fear of seeing them and yeah, they hide from the communal areas. I have seen this so often. A kind of loathing but with nothing behind it... if they did accidentally bump into each other it would probably be fine.

luka said:

why would anyone care about success? who's marking you?

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As mentioned earlier, when I was growing in the sticks I had two cousins who lived in the absolute centre of London, the coolest city in the world (later I discovered that Watford wasn't quite as central as I had thought) but every time we would meet at family gatherings and whatnot, the boy one who was cooler than me cos he was a year older and cos he lived in London would introduce us to all the new words, I believe that the first time I heard anyone say cool or skill or man or safe were all from him. I think I also mentioned how when I had a new shirt that I thought was really good and we met up with them and he said "Nice shirt man, I used to have one like that. Before my dad got a job" crushing me utterly.
Anyway, the point is, he made a computer game called Be Cool and you had like a coolness rating and you had to chat up girls and stuff and... answer to your question, I guess he was the guy who was marking me.

a good reason for getting food delivered, in my experience over the last few months - i think you can get deliveries from lots of sit down places that didnt deliver previously, is getting fancy london food while avoiding bourgeois foodie wankers

people get deliveries so they can have time to spend in the gym or ride their peloton or do some other tightly scheduled tech enabled activity in their busy 21st C lives isnt it
that's how i imagine it would be based on adverts and lifestyle propaganda anyway

IdleRich said:

I do think in fact that there may be some sort of potential for pushing changes of desire in the, er, desired direction. I think what you're getting at is a kind of "fake it till you make it" thing where by acting in a certain way as if a certain position obtains you can cause it to do so... but I wouldn't want to bet on my succeeding in that, perhaps though (in fact almost certainly) you have stronger will power than me.
Then again, suppose you do crave x and you want to crave y and so you train yourself to do so.... but why do you crave the craving of Y, can one change that meta-craving?

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Critically right about "fake it til you make it" but my caveat is that its a sort of balancing of what feels like pursuing natural desires and pursuing artificial ones, which may only be artificial until you discover what is actually fulfilling about it, at which point it may feel more natural and you may find yourself starting to automatically pursue it rather than manually pursuing, that is faking it somewhat.

The best I can do re meta-cravings is to ground them in a logic of pragmatism, which is what I was getting at with "second-order pragmatism" - how do you decide the basis for your decisions? How do you choose what you want to want?

I just use pragmatism, in as flexible a manner as I can. Its like constantly breaking out of and redefining your ideology, but with an emphasis on desire and the power desire has on predetermining your decisions.

IdleRich said:

I do think in fact that there may be some sort of potential for pushing changes of desire in the, er, desired direction. I think what you're getting at is a kind of "fake it till you make it" thing where by acting in a certain way as if a certain position obtains you can cause it to do so... but I wouldn't want to bet on my succeeding in that, perhaps though (in fact almost certainly) you have stronger will power than me.
Then again, suppose you do crave x and you want to crave y and so you train yourself to do so.... but why do you crave the craving of Y, can one change that meta-craving?

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And the cultivation of willpower, for me, involves similar methods of forcing certain behaviors that you believe will sediment naturally, and excavating sedimented behaviors that aren't as well suited, pragmatically speaking, to your given ends.

Once a rhythm is gotten, it may become more apparent just how plastic we are. Thats what is happening with me, anyway.

Once further progress is made, in terms of understanding and developing these methods, perhaps it will be possible to define certain psychic modules, or psycho-behavioral algorithms for other humans to adopt.

I sweated over a hot stove in tarmac melting temperatures and had zero thanks

so it goes

never used Deliverfuckinoo, never will

Clinamenic said:

Critically right about "fake it til you make it" but my caveat is that its a sort of balancing of what feels like pursuing natural desires and pursuing artificial ones, which may only be artificial until you discover what is actually fulfilling about it, at which point it may feel more natural and you may find yourself starting to automatically pursue it rather than manually pursuing, that is faking it somewhat.

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It's an ugly phrase but I didn't mean it in a pejorative sense here.

Clinamenic said:

The best I can do re meta-cravings is to ground them in a logic of pragmatism, which is what I was getting at with "second-order pragmatism" - how do you decide the basis for your decisions? How do you choose what you want to want?

I just use pragmatism, in as flexible a manner as I can. Its like constantly breaking out of and redefining your ideology, but with an emphasis on desire and the power desire has on predetermining your decisions.

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I just think that there is a potential infinite regress type trap thing here isn't there?
The formulation is that you one is free to act on one's desires but one can't choose what those desires are. But as you point out one may in fact be able to influence those desires if one wants them to be different.... but where does the "wanting" at that level come from, and are we able to influence that? If we are there must be a further level behind that and so on.
And it kinda feels as though, each time we discover a new level which might be able to influence how we want what we want to want etc we discover a level behind that controlling that. Each type we escape we find a new prison but with each new prison we discover a new escape. The pairs keep coming but the question of whether we ultimately choose or not depends on the final level.....

IdleRich said:

It's an ugly phrase but I didn't mean it in a pejorative sense here.



I just think that there is a potential infinite regress type trap thing here isn't there?
The formulation is that you one is free to act on one's desires but one can't choose what those desires are. But as you point out one may in fact be able to influence those desires if one wants them to be different.... but where does the "wanting" at that level come from, and are we able to influence that? If we are there must be a further level behind that and so on.
And it kinda feels as though, each time we discover a new level which might be able to influence how we want what we want to want etc we discover a level behind that controlling that. Each type we escape we find a new prison but with each new prison we discover a new escape. The pairs keep coming but the question of whether we ultimately choose or not depends on the final level.....

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As you demonstrate, a treacherous logicspace.

I tend to view it as a feedback loop that my will has but a partial degree of control over, but a degree that can make a difference, in terms of aligning values and desires, or overcoming unsustainable desires.

I think that one has to believe in that partial degree of control as the alternative is too depressing to contemplate... not a very honest way to argue but sometimes you have to tell yourself the occasional little white lie.

I can't believe no one has posted my famous Pro deliveroo comic which you can cut out and fix into a deliveroo style box.


Originally in the "drawings"

'Post drawings you have done' thread

My original notes did actually touch on some of what people have already said, food as an inconvenience to some people