VidCon Cancelled, Making the Best, Internal Voice

by Mike Levin

Monday, August 23, 2021

VidCon in October is cancelled. Boo! But for the safety of their audience I guess it’s the right thing. Gonna keep the trip to Disneyland and Anaheim anyway. It’s time Adi saw the Pacific Ocean, and maybe we’ll visit my old friend Marc Rifkin. I think he’s near that part of California.

Hmm, okay what next here? I love that jumping around in THIS journal doesn’t risk any proprietary information leak. THAT is one of the valid reasons for not using one-and-only-one place for important things. You always know where to look when you do, which is the benefit. But if you’re there in a different context, like publishing publicly, then it’s a liability.

And so… next? I’ll keep this short because I have a lot of work to do this week, and doing these “At Eleven” broadcasts is a lot like lunch break. It stimulates the mind… always writing, it’s the process of narrating your own life. The old example I’d use is The Wonder Years or Scrubs, but people of this generation wouldn’t get it so I have to find the pop culture equivalent now. Adi talked with Nat and me about that yesterday, your inner voice, where it comes from, whether you can turn it on and off and control it, and its function. As a compulsive journaler and advocate of the observation game, my heart sung for joy that they initiated that topic. It’s the early stages of super-smartness.

The “upper brain” (prefrontal neo cortex and all that) processes information differently than the rest of your lower or more base animal brain. Forcing your thoughts through it, and therefore the voice centers (BTW, drawing does a similar thing) forces you to actually… uh… shall we say database index your experiences. It’s not that the experience was actually different, but it WAS different for you once you journal it or vocally or visually describe it, because you more greatly recreated the experience in your head than other people who were near you (or whatever).

This database processing makes you “smarter”. Again, it’s hard to really call it smart. It’s just that you have greater capability and resources in making use of that experience. For example, learning from it to make better decisions later in life because you can look back at it better. It’s like reading a book and learning from it, except that the book is your own life.

THAT is the observation game. I’ve been talking to Adi about it since they was old enough to distinguish words. I read the Walrus and The Carpenter to her even prenatal. This is deep in my psyche. There are so many things you can learn about life and so many ways to improve the way you live your own life (by your own standards, by the way) if only you stop and analyze through your own brain what you just saw.

Who was the Walrus
Who was the Carpenter
What were they up to and why?
What is the relationship between the two?
Who is better off and which would you rather be?
Who are the Oysters?
Why are the Oysters in that situation and should you feel sorry for them?

The list goes on and obviously part of the observation game is internally asking questions about what you saw.

And THOSE QUESTIONS are sort of part of your master-list for life. Even though I’m in THIS MikeAtEleven “journal”, I’ll show you how important that is to me based on how I start my personal private everyday journal over in:

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And there you have it. It would be way too long of an AtEleven entry to delve into WHY those are my 3 questions, but in a nutshell:

What’s Most Broken is a weakest link in the chain analysis
Where’s the Biggest Bang for the Buck is an 80/20-rule & Rabbit Hole analysis.
What Plates Need to be Spun is a… well, to answer one metaphor with another, a “don’t drop the ball” analysis.

So much of life is just maintenance and paranoid pedantic checking that nothing is going wrong. We live life on the razor’s edge, and that razor is always vibrating. So the less love-worthy parts of life is tending to that fact. That’s why it’s 3rd (lest love-worthy) but why it’s one of the big 3.

Anyhoo, that’s enough for today. Thanks for joining me. Don’t forget to subscribe. And if you’re reading this when I’m dead, Adi, I’m never really dead so long as the memory of me is alive inside of you. I’m a little virtual simulation running in your prefrontal cortex, actually in either case.

It IS the simulation of course, because simulation is just a label for something running on a processing… uh… substrate? Whiter it’s reality or a simulation is just a matter of label choice.

Love ya lots and lots!

#VidConUS 2021 cancelled

End