Love, admiration and illusions

I was reading this article on why marriages which last, do. They made an interesting claim, that marriages which go the distance rely on illusions. The people who stay married tend to do so by creating an illusion which lets them overlook their partner's faults. It was an interesting conclusion coming close on the heels of how distraction helps your will power(see previous post). It reinforced a view I've held for a long time, that your mind works by simplifying your surroundings. Your mind is very practical, but your concious cannot possibly take care of all the parameters involved in everything. Your subconcious tends to do some, lets say background work, to help you cope. Maybe these distractions and illusions are examples of our subconcious at work, it's way of telling us that the positives outweight the costs.

Which brings us to love. Interesting thing, most stated cheezy opinions about it tend to say that it makes us do somewhat unfathomable things, things no sane person would do. Applying the aforementioned conclusions, it would seem that love makes us work the same illusions that married people supposed have, illusions to distract us from all that might be negative. That is, obviously discounting the massive chemical and biological things that might underly all this. It seems to be fair to question the logic a mind would have for this. A mind is fairly practical, everyone weighs the pros and cons of everything before deciding, so there's no reason to believe our minds wouldn't either. So, under it all, to love someone, we would have to see some extreme positives to help us develop a justification for masking all the bad things. And this justification, heightened by hormones, would still have to be fairly superlative. But if you look at love in general, not just puppy love, I mean people you like and love for a long time, like family, you'll notice you can see these justifications quite simply. You'll see that one or more thing that make you admire the people you love. Even the people you're friends with, you'll find qualities in them that you admire, qualities you wish you had. And so it doesn't seem too forgone a conclusion that admiration is a cause and justification, if not the cause. Which would explain much of a leader's charm, admiration, it seems, can lead pretty easily to love, or maybe lust too. And it would also explain the reason why people break up. The admiration which lead them to love in the first place, is gone, or probably was not as superlative to begin with, but simply heightened by, well lets call it chemistry.

I like to believe that behind every face, there is this cold practicality, dealing in reasons we may not be aware of. Like when you meet people the first time, you make up your mind pretty quickly whether you're going to like that person or not, first impressions. It seems plausible, and this research suggests, that we look for clues to whether this person has something that would be useful to us, something that we like, and then we create conditions for that logic to prosper, which would make these people amenable to us, and us amenable to them.

Of Goals & fantasy worlds

We all love fantasy, at least to a certain extent. Movies, books, music, all are a certain way to escape the dreariness that engulfs our life sometimes. They're great stress busters too. I recently read about a study of will power, on kids who were left in a room with no supervision with cookies, and told they'd get 2 if they waited till the supervisor came back. Interestingly, the ones that held out, distracted themselves, or simply kept reminding themselves of what all wrong could happen if they gave in.

Children are good subjects, as they're not muddled by accessory concerns that tend to clog the adult mind. The best part about the study, I found, was the power of distraction. Distraction isn't always a bad thing, even studies of children with attention deficit disorder have revealed that the constant fidgeting actually helps the children concentrate, even though it may not seem that way to you. I, myself, have never studied without a distraction like TV or music since the past so many years. So what does this have to do with the title, you may ask. Well, we all love our fantasy worlds. Everyone has one, also known as their "happy place", and by numerous other synonyms. Fantasy worlds are our way of escape, simply moving into another dimension where you aren't worried about anything, nothing can happen to you, and you can passively enjoy the interesting twists of another's life. We need that quite simply like children need it to avoid cookies. Except, we're not trying to distract ourselves from anything good, well, mostly not, but something bad. If you've seen Coupling, you probably know about the examples of something good too. Everyone in life has certain goals, expressed in a multitude of ways, be it wanting to be an astronaut or a doctor as a kid, your wonderful "where do you see yourself in 5 years" type crappy questions, or simply a desire to achieve something. Life has a way of kicking you in all the wrong places, atleast sometimes. You have your good moments, you have your bad ones. The thing is, all these tend to remain with you, and your wonderous brain keeps dishing them out to you when you least expect. Fantasy worlds let us escape that. In this world, you can be the lord and master, people at your beck and call, where you are adored and fawned over etc. etc. To some, this escape is through books, to some like me, through movies, to others, through other forms of art. What I like about movies is the means to experience something you would probably never experience in your own life, in a way that's safe and side-effect free (see my previous post). You get transported into worlds beyond imagination, or atleast beyond anything we'll see. That is one of the big reasons I like graphics, because it gives you the power to bring things and worlds to life, that are otherwise lost, or were never there to begin with.

For all it's wonders, fantasies are simply like any other addiction. Like booze, cigarettes and the like, they offer an easy quickfix, and consistent usage eventually tends to start affecting your life. You are but one person, and can only live fully in one world. You can extend bits of yourself into other worlds, but the demands of each can make you withdraw from some to cut your losses. That's one of the reasons I don't like games like The Sims, or Second Life. The first life you have, and the people in it have the biggest priority from you, in my opinion. The draw of these other worlds is nice, to escape everything. To some it may seem like the only option, or maybe the better option. I myself am the social hara-kiri expert :) . Movies are my guilty measure, I have probably watched more movies than the average person, even crap most people would kill themselves halfway through. And I somehow never get bored. Ever since I watched a Hindi movie called "Junoon"(A werewolf or rather were-tiger movie), at the tender age of 4, which scared me shitless, I've been able to watch any movie with aplomb and ease. I have mine, and others have theirs. I guess the key to it all is moderation, till I become that guy who does everything sitting on a couch, I'm ok. As they say, even a little bit of poison is good for you.

Perfection, stupid actions and time machines

I agree, at first glance, those 3 terms seem like they have very little to do with each other, or a lot. I was wondering the other day about all the stupid and not-so-stupid things I've done in my life, and I wasn't quite able to finish the list, there're that many. I guess everyone's done their share of stupid things, I believe I've done atleast about 2 person's worth, maybe everyone does. My problem is that with every stupid action, I tend to start off a string of corrective measures, and I can't rest until all is fixed. My stupid actions don't usually involve bodily harm, apart from a rare few, but their ramifications usually are on a pretty nice scale. I always wonder whether the corrective actions cause more damage than the initial actions themselves. One thing I'm sure of, this is one post that'll probably make sense to me, no matter what the post date is, past, present or future.

So lets get to perfection, everyone's seen the seemingly perfect people. Who are on top of everything, do everything right, and all the right things happen to them. And these people seem to exist out of fiction as well. I guess someone in another position would consider me as one of these descended-from-heaven sorts, at least for a moment. The simple fact is perfect people are god-awefully boring, there's nothing so interesting about them, you get used to them doing their tasks with immaculate precision and efficiency, in so much that you get used to it. Roger Federer in his now interrupted reign as world no. 1 is probably a good example of this. The media loves these perfect people, at least until they can find a bit of dirt on them, or they stop being perfect. Science is the pursuit of perfection, and they do pretty well. But one of my professors once remarked about the cyclical nature of research, atleast in computer hardware, and it's probably true in a sense. The essential nature of all new things we do can be classified in terms of something old, that's our nature. But all these new things begin as an aberration, almost as a stupid action. Copernicus wasn't considered as smart when he said the earth wasn't the center of the universe, Van Gogh wasn't considered a great artist during his lifetime. It seems all new things derive from the certain level of unhappiness with the status quo of perfection. Henry Ford attributed most new inventions to a lazy man looking for an easier way to do something.

Coming to time machines, I always feel the ardent desire to have a time machines to fix all the stupid things I've done till now, after I've done something stupid. It only lasts for a while, after which slowly, it either dulls out, or becomes funny in some stupid way. It's always interesting to ponder about questions that have no answer, because if you are able to go back and change things, logic should dictate that you as you know yourself should cease to exist. Because, quite simply, you are one path through a decision tree, if one decision changes, you changed a branch, and thus you will end up on some other path. As much as I might hate the stupid things I've done, I like myself, and am rather risk averse, so that time machine scenario seems less appealing after calming down. If all this seems a little weird to you, this is either the first time you've read my blog, or never really got any of the previous posts :P . Philosophy in all its beauty, is simply the thought and pursuit of the unanswerable questions, which seem pointless to most. Coming back to stupid things and perfection, maybe to attain perfection, we must do stupid things. Else if it was a scientific path, someone would have done it already, and given a proof to fit. Maybe that's the reason artificial intelligence isn't yet able to match human "intelligence", because what may seem stupid to us may actually be perfect. Because maybe we're inherently flawed, and maybe perfection isn't the absence of flaws, or rather understanding them. In so doing, I don't quite regret the stupid things I've done, only their ramifications.

In case any of you were wondering at the beginning that they've made more stupid mistakes than me, I rest my case. Anyone who can think up such reasoning must've thought about it more than anyone else :) .