The "LOL" Coach on Resilience

"We are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma." Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness. 

The loss of a loved one in our life is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. While most bereaved people are sad for a period of time, very few become chronically depressed. 

Psychologists state that more than half of the people in the United States will experience a trauma during their lifetime (physical assault, natural disaster), but only a small fraction will develop any post-traumatic pathology or require professional assistance. In fact, resilience is usually the most observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event. Like the Kool Aid Juice Man, it would appear that we, too, can put those defensive resiliency walls right back up.

Resilience is all around us. So, why do so many people believe it is not within their grasp? Often times, we tell ourselves how things are going to turn out before we've ever lifted a finger, dooming ourselves to live up to whatever low expectation we placed ahead of ourselves.

Take the classic, "I just know I'm going to get sick after this." 

Yep, you probably will. In case you're not following cutting edge scientific reports on neurology and quantum theory, "thoughts are physical" - so be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes. This also applies to thoughts. Be mindful of what you think. If you're thinking "this isn't going to work out" or "that isn't going to work out" or "this or that is going to happen, for this reason or that reason," before you've done anything to circumvent the event, "you're right!"

Assuming you continue along that life trajectory, that would be the most likely outcome. But I'd like to think we can change that with an easy fix. 

Do not ask other people to define your life for you. If you're not the central character or protagonist in your life, rewrite your script. Start by asking yourself, "Who do I want to be?" This is not the time to hold back by fear and self-doubt. Be bold! Like they say, shoot for the stars and if you land on the moon, you're still doing alright. Even if you fall short of your life's dream, at least you emotionally enjoyed the thought, emotionally enjoyed working toward the goal, and emotionally enjoyed the milestones along the way. The reality is, we do get further faster if we write down our dreams and script out all the scenes that would have to take place to lead to that climax. 

If your life really sucks, then you've probably got some work to do and should consult an expert. An expert can be anyone whose life is working, from your neighbor next door to your friend on Facebook. How do these people do it? Ask them. People love giving out advice. In fact, this is usually where the majority of altruistic intentions materialize. Good advice for a friend when you're not emotionally involved means that you can see probable outcomes easier without complex emotional wiring getting in the way (fear, anxiety, anger, guilt). In this respect, advice from a friend will probably prove quite helpful. 

While you don't have to do everything they say, unless you want to live as their exact clone, take to heart any tips they give that you feel might warrant revisiting in your life. 

Sometimes just the reminder of something we already know but for some reason quit employing. Of course, they may suggest something totally off-the-cuff that you've never thought of or considered. In this case, write down the suggestion and make a mind map of what outcomes could arise. If there are more possible ones than negative ones, it might be worth the effort, odd as the suggestion may sound. If you can't figure out what might happen, ask your friend to help you brainstorm some outcomes. After all, they should be able to back up any advice with tangible activities and outcomes - assuming that is that they're speaking from experience. 

Forget liposuction, herbal supplements, and power food for a moment. Forget vitamins and protein shakes, and 2-hour gym workouts. Take some time each day to just CHILL OUT. Even if you have made a total debauchery of your life, actually, even more so if you have made a debauchery of your life, you're in serious need of "me" time. 

Take 30 minutes a day to do something totally enjoyable, whatever that may be (nothing that involves pleasure at the expense of another). If you don't have 30 minutes, take a quick 5 minute pick-me-up "Think Break" and allow your mind to enjoy a comic, a funny joke, a YouTube video featuring 1980s commercials. The "cheesiness" of those videos are bound to make just about anybody laugh. Or do like I do and imagine your favorite Warner Bros character, in my case Wile E. Coyote, throwing away all those ACME kits, taking some cold hard cash, giving it to Sonic the Hedgehog, and finally catching that darn Roadrunner. Instant gratification in a simple thought experiment. Gotta love it! 

That's about it from the "LOL" Coach today. Honestly, I'm a bit tired from all this writing. So, quite frankly, I'm going to follow my own advice, set my phone alarm for 20 minutes, and go take a little nap. 

Vita Alto's Political Survival Advice for Mitt Romney

Politics can be a bit... unpredictable, contradictory, and downright conspiratorial. Despite your motives going in, Chairman Mao's land of the "war without bloodshed" is nothing like the Call of Duty or Halo Reach. In this world, you only get one life, and what's more, nothing can prepare you for how "real" this SIMS game is going to feel. 

Vita Alto is a Sim (The Sims 3) in Sunset Valley. As a local representative in the political career track, she starts out with 5 charisma skill points and 2 writing skill points. Beware, her evilness shows. This lady lives the high life and knows well the Game of Thorns to successfully navigate the virtual political scene.

How does Vita do it? What can she teach Mitt Romney? 

"First things first," says Vita, "you have to get yourself elected, then deal with the media, then deal with the scandals, then open your offshore bank account," which she recommends doing prior to embarking on any political career track, "then you have to learn to how to change your identity, add additional skill points, and then return to the political landscape like a ghost, only this time, you're the long lost twin brother that was lost at sea, the one that the writers added back into to the script after an actor's contract negation resulted in a renewal for another season." 

Vita's political survival advice for Romney also includes such activities as: "Join the most popular political fraternity, hatch a plan to take over the White House, dig up embarrassing information to intimidate rival politicians, transform your family's vices into positive campaign issues while highlighting your relationships with acceptable family members, pretend that you think consumers deserve protection from predatory lenders, tell everyone that America's greatest days are ahead of them (this instills voter confidence), use words like "squeaker" to show your humility for support at the Iowa caucus - identify with others." 

"Identifying with others," says Vita, means determining what's "hot" and what's "not". So, therefore, "use popular symbolism," and don't forget to employ visual aids, like "a flag," things that easily symbolize traditional values." 

"With respect to crowd management, praise the crowd for forming. Tie their formation to their shared desire to defend a traditional value still shared by most people. Place your most exuberant supporters in the front and front middle rows of your televised audience. Enthusiasm is contagious. Once you get the voters thinking as one, they will act as one, and vote for you come election time." 

"Do not allow someone else to hijack your media event." 

Last but not least, Vita says, use "The British House of Common's sword line approach to raising campaign funds."  

In the Middle ages, boundaries were established by stitching red lines into the carpet to separate members of opposing parties to keep rival members from slashing one another during heated debates. Separated by two rapier lengths, plus one foot, the "sword line approach to political campaign funding means more money when you need it, protected by a generous amount of red tape to protect you until long after you've already been elected into office." 

How To Find Your Way Without A Compass

Sitting along the edge of the lake last evening, I wondered how someone would find their way out of the forest without a compass. 

During the day: 

If you have an analog watch, you're in good shape. Just place a small stick vertically in the ground so that it casts a shadow. Then, place your watch on the ground so that the hour hand is parallel to the shadow. In the Southern Hemisphere, put it at 12:00. Now, find the point on the watch midway between the hour hand and 12:00. This imaginary line is a north-south line. The sun will be located toward the south. 

Since we're already looking up, we can always consult the clouds. What direction are they moving? Generally, weather moves west to east. While this theory can be a little funky depending on which side of the mountain you're lost, as a rule of thumb, it's pretty good. Voila! Instant compass. 

In 3rd grade physical science class and then again at 6th grade science camp, they taught us that mosses grow in places with lots of shade and water, in areas that are cool and moist. On tree trunks, the north side is usually more shady and moist than the south sides, therefore, moss usually grows on the north side of trees. If you're in the Mayan jungle and apply this rule, you might as well take a seat on the side of the river and wait for another civilization to be built around you. Basically, it could take awhile to get out of there. Hopefully, you have a well-thought out pack with emergency gear in the event of such an experience. 

During the night: 

Use your iPhone to locate the North Star. Depending on the app, you can type in the word Polaris - that's it. If your iPhone is discharged for any reason, just look for the Big Dipper and you'll find the North Star. The North Star is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper. Walk toward that star, that's north. 

During metaphorical moments: 

Metaphorically speaking, if you have lost your way and are in need of a directional device, do not stop and ask for directions. In this case, self-analyzation may feel like a step backwards, when in reality, it is akin to having a line-jumper pass at Disneyland. Write down on paper all the actions of your day as you do them, then after 30 days (any amount of self-reflection will yield insight into whether or not your behavior is in alignment with your goals), categorize the actions (cooking, sleeping, eating, working, dressing, specific projects, activities, etc.). 

Now, calculate the data and build a simple pie chart. Color each section if you like. Having a big picture, non partial view of your location works much like a compass. Depending upon the direction you wish to travel, you can get there by treating each pie slice like a direction on the compass. If reaching your next destination is taking longer than you planned, you can speed it up by spending less or more time performing a specific activity. This is how you superimpose the imaginary lines of a compass onto your life to find your way. 

Self-analysis charts often times lead to metaphysical thoughts. While consciousness is undoubtedly a theoretical conundrum, you can use Penrose's theorem to garner support in the most dense regions of the mind's synaptic forest. 

According to Penrose, consciousness is not an independent cause which triggers quantum collapses. It is simply the way in which such quantum collapses manifest themselves in our minds. 

What does that have to do with finding your way through our subjective life experiences?

If this guy's right about Godel being right, that no axiom system is powerful enough to generate all the truths of arithmetic, then according to Pendose, the human mind must somehow have non-algorithmic powers that go beyond axioms and rules. 

Essentially, we're talking quantum mechanics here and that is a subject upon which I have but limited understanding. I guess you could say it's like piling one mystery upon another. When in reality, there's no obvious reason to suppose that consciousness has the same source, multiple energies could be flowing through our atoms which are held together by some sort of cosmic bonded agreement. 

Coming full circle here, if you're really feeling lost in life and fearful that there could be a cliff with a waterfall with your name on it right around the corner, the fact that nobody else really knows what's going on here remains. So, I'm going to just chill. 

I'm not the only one playing roulette with me life based off of my subjective experiences. In this case, I intend to have fun with it. Make that silly chart I described above because it's not only cool to create visual displays of information, but it's really helpful if you just want to play with your life. Tweek it in certain areas just to see what happens. Put some basic theories to the test. 

Unless you think that some other person who is equally choosing based off of their subjective experience knows what's best for you, then by all means, do what they (your boss, your kids'  school administrators, the doctor you assessed your entire being in 6 minutes flat prior to moving onto the next patient) tell you to do and blame them if it doesn't work out. Heck, blame yourself. Those two activities keep people quite busy in life. So busy that people buy all sorts of things to help them find their way, all sorts of things except a little compass. In fact, few people these days own analog watches. Why bother? They're single-function devices. I don't even know how many things my phone does in comparison. 

I have had a lot of people tell me who I was and where I was headed, actually, thinking back, since childhood. It seems to me that we spend the rest of our lives here testing someone else's hypotheses. While nurturing and guidance are essential for our species' survival, there does come a point when in society we can choose to revise our present systems to allow for more creativity and free thinking - the earlier the better. 

Free thinking doesn't lead to chaos. No quantum or economic system will collapse in the process. While we might miss a day or two or three of work-related activities, the company won't fall apart tomorrow, the agency won't close its doors.  If your kid is in a 6th grade American social studies course, they don't need to know the names of the rivers of Northern China by heart. Unless, that is, you're going fishing in the north of China and you're teaching your child the names of the rivers in that immediate region so that if they were to ever wander off without a compass, they could find their way back to you by following a specific river to a pre-defined location. 

Other than that, who cares. I surely don't and I don't need to pretend that I do. A few years ago I walked away from a life course that I used every tool available to me to build. I still have people anxiously awaiting my input in that world. The only instructions I left when I walked way was: "Figure it out and try not to lose the company in the process." 

I'm going back to work next week, which means they didn't lose the company. Hooray!  After a 4-year international journey of cultural enhancement and all that that implies, and a 9-month exploration of Ludwig Wittgenstein's statement that "a serious and good philosophical work could be written that could consist entirely of jokes." 

This statement tortured me since the moment I came across it. Initially, I wanted to dismiss it as trivial and less deserving of scholarly examination for it fell within the realm of aesthetics, whereas my immense ego-maniacal favorite is logic. I could write the definitive graphic guide to logic and make it a whole lot more funny now! 

This challenge simply hasn't yet been met. Just when I thought I had thought all that could be thunk without going into the deep recesses of the small, precise, trivial details of some random theory of thought, the idea of writing a philosophical joke book took hold of me and the delightful satisfaction I derive by merely questioning whether I could be the one to write it has ticked me pink ever since. 

My exploration into humor arose in large part due to the promise I made myself after our voyages came to an end, namely, to follow my heart after exploring it with a few charts of my own (including biofeedback data), but the impetus for the promise that resulted in my taking on the role of the philosophical humorist was simply to answer this call. In this respect, humor studies is rather egolishious - logical surrealism at its finest. 

Saul Steinberg observed, "Trying to define humor is one of the definitions of humor." 

I think he's got a point. 

Of course, my logic could be a bit foggy.