Anyway, today’s topic is a new thought process for me, trust. It’s an interesting concept, relying on someone else to do what’s in your best interests either because the action would directly benefit them or because the intangible reward outweighs what they would give up by doing the act. For instance, someone does you a favor because they hope to gain a future favor from you, they want to increase their social standing with you to increase the chances of future favors from you, or they want to do something nice or charitable (and FUCK, pandora, why do you have to play something so ear piercing after something so low key?) which translates to them gaining a greater feeling of being charitable (I’ll go into that in a second). Basically people are nothing more than difference engines that act based on value of result vs value of action.

Charity is funny, even if it’s true charity (the kind where nobody but you knows you’re being charitable), there is a reason you’re doing it. Let’s take the example of money because it’s easiest to look at, someone who donates money at church for example: I guess this is a bad example, social pressures and the guy with the basket guilt people into giving money. So let’s say you anonymously donated money to a charity.. In this example, nobody will ever find out it was you, not your accountant, not your wife, nobody. Look at your motivations, at this point it’s all about self, does the charity go toward cancer research? Do you have a family history of cancer? Maybe you just like the feeling of being charitable, nothing wrong with that, random acts of kindness tends to flood your brain with endorphins, I like holding doors and picking up things for the elderly for this reason. So this rush you get outweighs the amount of value you donated (value isn’t just a currency amount, though currency amounts can be translated into value based on an individual factors like income and expenses). Let’s say you don’t do it for the charity fix your brain experiences, maybe you like to feel self righteous or you are religious and believe that God will know. In either case, the value you gave away is less important to you than your self righteous feeling or God’s approval.

I’m told (and wikipedia confirms) that this type of rant is very similar to the views of Ayn Rand and her writings. I guess it’s not a very novel topic in that case, but it’s new to me. I never read her works personally, but I got the cliffnotes from my own life and musings.

Anyway, the whole point of this thing at the time of writing is that you can’t rely consistently on anyone else to do what’s in your best interests, the moment that the cost (value whether it’s a monetary, time, effort, or just mental cost) increases past their benefit threshold, they will not continue aiding you. Even once a person has agreed to help another, they will weigh the costs based on their  own subjective view and just add the social obligation termination value to the benefit to them: in other words, the awkwardness or lowering of favor from the recipient’s view when the offerer declines the favor will be added to the benefit total as a negative value. Once the cost to you outweighs the benefits and the potential loss of face (or whatever your cost in backing out) the person will still pull out of the favor. Some people are self righteous or view themselves as reliable or honorable, and that increases their cost upon pulling out, but they still have the threshold.

This is all very boring suddenly, maybe I’ll think about it later, but my difference engine requires that I do something else right now.

That’s not what I logged on to write about today though. I drank a bit more than I usually do last night and was paying for it this morning, but the physical consequences didn’t have anything on the state of mental derangement that I found myself in just a couple hours into my hangover period. I don’t know what triggers it, but every 2-7 months I tend to undergo a complete psychological breakdown and have to soothe my consciousness into cooperating again. It’s usually a rough period mentally, though there seems to be no reason for it. I suppose I could pay a shrink to analyze my thoughts and prescribe me interesting chemicals, but I don’t have the trust or patience for that. Everything I do or say is a carefully calculated step toward the betterment of my life in some way; without getting too Ayn Randish I just feel like there is no way I could trust another person enough to open my thought process to them (even if they were being paid for their services).

So my mental breakdown commences and I have to start reasoning with myself about how there is no reason for it: life is much better than it could be so this bit of tumultuous thought battling is basically nothing more than whining by my subconscious (the whole process seems similar to a prepubescent child complaining that they have to take out the trash when the parents don’t have any chores). My brain decided to not listen to that logic, instead it kicked and screamed even worse, so I went for a drive. I enjoy driving, despite the fact that there are terrible drivers and people who decide that something else is more deserving of their attention than controlling a hunk of metal many times their weight and speed (like texting). Driving is a very calming thing to my psyche, I especially enjoy cruising around by myself wailing along to whatever song is on the radio. I ended up making it to Montauk after a couple of hours of driving and went to the beach; I kicked off my sandals and just dozed on the shore of the Atlantic for a bit while my body worked frantically to detoxify my blood stream. This worked remarkably well to calm my nerves and lull my brain into a sense of peaceful indifference. I don’t know what it is about Montauk, but I’ve had some kind of bond with the place since childhood and every time I go there it seems to rub the happiness into me. I drove into town and instantly smelled the ocean, felt the wind whipping down main street, and my entire existence was calmed. There is no way to explain the feeling with my limited vocabulary, it was some kind of soul tranquilizer that nullified every negative feeling that my entire existence was experiencing at the time.

I don’t know what my point for this entry was, but one thing that I will take away from it is that ocean air is an excellent mental breakdown cure.

Most of these are bullshit, I hate going without sleep.

I love coffee. More than any other drink I’ve ever had (yes, even beer), it’s just so damn delicious. The wonder of it is that you can drink it black if there is any quality in it, or add flavoring if it’s crap. The sideaffects aren’t too shabby either: it’s basically a legal amphetamine. That being said, I propose a opening up a new front in the war on drugs. The Colombian coffee lords have had it too good for too long. It’s time for the world’s moral police to drop this charade and take a Stand.

It is said that just prior to signing the Cuban embargo, JFK had an aide go and get him 1200 cigars. When this coffee ban goes into effect look for me, I’ll be the one with the underground bunker filled to the brim with Starbucks.

Anticlimactic? Probably.

That’s exactly my point: everyone who uses the internet has the ability to create content. I am putting myself at risk of sounding old here, but these days there are all kinds of ways to tweet, poke, and list until your shift is over and you can do it from home. If you are very good and very lucky you may catch the attention of the masses, for 12 seconds until a lolcat distracts them. Like the NFL but without the payoff. I pray that I never become the recipient of such attention, I am considering not even linking to this and filling these spaces with therapeutic ravings anonymously.

And yet, all of the content on here is not enough.

The internet needs more white noise. I don’t believe I just wrote that but it’s true. The vast majority of content is hosted by only a few sites. I would guess that fewer than 100 web sites are responsible for 95% of the noise. Even I am not helping by using WordPress as my ranting medium, but the simple fact of the matter is that the internet is consolidating, even as its userbase expands. People are just letting the natural order happen as it would in the wild, or in an unregulated market. I’m on the fence with this idea; on the one hand we are getting great value for web product, but the downside is that we are sacrificing anonymity. Google and Facebook are one well worded court order from becoming big brotheresque tools of the people that conspiracy theorists have nightmares about.

But enough ranting about digital addictions, I think someone just tagged me in a porn video…