The importance of sense making

“He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.” - Josef Pieper, Catholic philosopher.

As Eric Pilon-Bignell pointed out to me in our recent Being Human conversation, we are experiencing as much change in ten years as previous generations might have experienced in one hundred.

If this is The Age of Complexity, it is also The Age of Sense Making. 

The time paradox

I’ve started reading ‘The End of Certainty’ by Ilya Prigogine.

In his introduction he points out that 

“.. the basic laws of physics, from classical Newtonian dynamics to relativity and quantum physics, does not include any distinction between past and future.. there is no arrow of time.

Yet, everywhere - in chemistry, geology, cosmology, biology, and the human sciences - past and future play different roles. How can the arrow of time emerge from what physics describes as a time-symmetrical world? This is the time paradox, one of the central concerns of this book.”

I’m looking forward to getting into this. This question of whether time is real has been coming to the fore for me recently. When I submit to being present, I experience that there only is this moment, that time is an illusion. Yet, it seems to be also true that my past repeats itself over and over.

I hope to report further on what more Prigogine has to say about this. 

 

Commitment bias

I was sharing with a colleague today the issue I’m having with a client who is refusing to consider some evidence that may call into question the entire premise of a piece of work they’re leading.

My colleague reminded me the concept of commitment bias sometimes called the sunk-cost bias, or the sunk-cost fallacy. Perhaps we simple call it pride. 

In any case, in this situation with my client, we have a classic example. There are just too many stakeholders ‘bought in’, too many public pronouncements made, to consider that they might be on the wrong track. 

I wonder how many billions, indeed trillions of dollars, this quirk of human nature must cost us as a society. 

Working my balls off

 

As I shared in a recent podcast recording - out soon with Sonya Blignaut - I'm currently working on a testosterone issue.

I discovered through a test I took a few months back that I have the testosterone of an 80-90 year-old man. In pursuit of improving my testosterone for a host of reasons, but mainly energy levels, I came across the work of Paul Chek.

As far as I'm aware, Paul is in his fifties, he's ripped, he's happy, healthy and has a thriving business. What's fascinating about his message, and something he repeats in his videos, is not to work too hard. "Less is more" is his common refrain.

This has been something of a revelation. I've always had a belief of 'hard work makes a man', and yet here is this archetype of vibrant masculinity in Paul telling me to slow down if I want to increase my testosterone levels.

Then I thought of our common phrase 'working your balls off'. I'm left with the question, over the 20-odd years of my working life, have I literally been working my balls off? 

Perhaps it's time to learn how to work whilst keeping my balls on.

In pursuit of quantum strawberries

I recently came across the company 90.10 via the YouTube channel Alfa Vedic. 

90.10 claim to have a “quantum” technology that enables them to charge objects to hold different frequencies using a magnetic array. The idea is that these frequencies promote healthy expression in whatever they come into contact. Be that humans or, say, strawberries. 

I have to say that (a) I don’t understand this technology; and (b) they don’t release the details of their core ‘encoding’ product, so even if I did understand it, I wouldn’t be able to asses it. However, because the concept of emotional resonance has played such an important part of my healing process, I’m intrigued by anyone playing with this idea of resonance.

All that said, I’ve created an entirely unscientific experiment with two strawberries - see picture. One is in contact with the charged 90.10 balls. One is not. I’ll leave them for 1/2 hour, remove the balls and see if my partner Kate notices the difference between the two. 

Let’s see!

UPDATE 2/5/21:

Kate actually picked the strawberry that had not been charged with the quantum balls.

Quantum fail. 

UPDATE #2:

I’ve also been using 90.10 ‘quantum charged’ water bottle. Again, it could be entirely autosuggestion, but the water from this bottle seems to have a richer, somehow creamier, taste than water that has not been stored in the bottle. I’ll perhaps do some blind tests with the water and see if I can taste a different under blind conditions. 

The Great Reset

According to Wikipedia: 

The Great Reset is a proposal by the World Economic Forum to rebuild the economy sustainably following the COVID-19 pandemic. It was unveiled in May 2020 by the United Kingdom's Prince Charles and WEF director Klaus Schwab.

I'm all for sustainable development, but just the term tells us a lot about those involved in this initiative. We 'reset' machines, not cultures. Immediately, I'm sceptical. If society is a machine that can be reset, how do the authors of this plan view the human beings who make up the world they're addressing?

Are we computers, robots, who need to be reprogrammed? We must be careful when choosing our metaphors. Metaphors build narratives. It is narratives that control us humans more than anything else. We're meaning-making machines fuelled by stories.

I for one don't want any part of a narrative that assumes that I'm part of a machine that needs resetting.

What's new pussycat?

 

I'm back b*tches!

This is a restart of a blog I started six years' ago. A lot of therapy, a lot of healing, a lot of growth since then. 

I've been feeling the need to get my writing game on of late. It's the start of a new year, so let's goooo.

I've given myself a challenge of not censoring my style on this re-launched blog. This is going to be authentically me. Raw Richard Atherton. Richard Atherton: a middle class kid who grew up going to working class schools and was mates with kids from working class families.

I'm educated and fairly well read, but my part of my soul still wants to piss off the teachers and stick it to The Man.

This will be personal and professional musings straight from the gut.

Onwards.