Observe Don't Absorb Quotes

They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.

I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes then translates that into character and story. You don’t have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well–and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.

In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter. Yet we also recognize that the experiencing self should not be ignored. The peak and the ending are not the only things that count. In favoring the moment of intense joy over steady happiness, the remembering self is hardly always wise. “An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds,” Kahneman observes. “We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory … has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.” When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

They don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation. The sad truth about divorce is that it’s hard to teach your kids about life unless you are living life with them: eating together, doing homework, watching Little League, driving them around endlessly, being bored with nothing to do, letting them listen while you do business, while you negotiate love and the frustrations and complications and rewards of living day in and out with your wife. Through this, they see how adults handle responsibility, honesty, commitment, jealousy, anger, professional pressures, and social interactions. Kids learn from whoever is around them the most.

Our hurts and wounds can make our self-centeredness even more intractable. When you point out selfish behavior to a wounded person, he or she will say, “Well, maybe so, but you don’t understand what it is like.” The wounds justify the behavior. There are two ways to diagnose and treat this condition. In our culture, there is still a widespread assumption of basic human goodness. If people are self-absorbed and messed up, it is argued, it is only because they lack healthy self-esteem. So what we should do is tell them to be good to themselves, to live for themselves, not for others. In this view of things, we give wounded people almost nothing but support, encouraging them to stop letting others run their lives, urging them to find out what their dreams are and take steps to fulfill them. That, we think, is the way to healing. But this approach assumes that self-centeredness isn’t natural, that it is only the product of some kind of mistreatment. That is a very popular understanding of human nature, but it is worth observing that it is an article of faith—a religious belief, as it were. No major religion in the world actually teaches that, yet this is the popular view of many people in the West.

Coverts do have a grandiose sense of self, are preoccupied with fantasies of power, require excessive admiration, but they hide these attributes so people will like and trust them. They know if they are obvious about their self-absorbed traits, people won’t like them. They believe they are “special” and entitled, but they know it would turn people off to let that be known. They know they must appear humble to be liked and revered. They know how to play people, how to charm them. They are master manipulators. They don’t have empathy but have learned how to act empathetically. They will look you in the eyes, making you feel special and heard, make sounds and give looks that tell you they care, but they really don’t. They mirror your emotions, so it seems like they have empathy. They have observed and learned how to appear to care. They thrive upon the attention of others. People who think or act as if they are amazing are their energy supply. They have people around them who adore them, respect them, revere them, see them as special and almost perfect, and in some cases seem to worship them.

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever--you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus.

Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way. The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, "This is our man." "What the devil do you do in that galley there?" said Monsieur Defarge to himself; "I don't know you." But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter. "How goes it, Jacques?" said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. "Is all the spilt wine swallowed?" "Every drop, Jacques," answered Monsieur Defarge. When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge, picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line. "It is not often," said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, "that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?" "It is so, Jacques," Monsieur Defarge returned. At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line. The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinking vessel and smacked his lips. "Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?" "You are right, Jacques," was the response of Monsieur Defarge. This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and slightly rustled in her seat. "Hold then! True!" muttered her husband. "Gentlemen--my wife!" The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became absorbed in it. "Gentlemen," said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly upon her, "good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor- fashion, that you wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard close to the left here," pointing with his hand, "near to the window of my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!" They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word. "Willingly, sir," said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to the door. Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

Life is a constant battle of fighting your own fears and not absorbing others. Don’t fill the empty spaces of your heart with the fears of others in your life. It is the highly anxious person that will tell you that certain people and experiences need to be labeled and kept either close or at a distance. They go to great lengths to categorize things, in order to feel balance in their life because they are out of balance. Life to them is about control and making you believe that their perfect world is normal when there is nothing normal about it. Highly anxious people live through manipulating their world into what is easy and palatable to them and they can easily pull you into an unrealistic view of the world around them. You constantly have to reassess what is reasonable and what is over exaggerated because fear drives their every action.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It open you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don't know what's under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child - why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns that patters of living. Ever second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand. But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can't know a smell until I've smelled it. I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it. I can't feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can't smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb

In this exercise we try to untangle the knot of pain and/or anger created by conflict. Even if the relationship is not one you want to salvage or have the option of rebuilding, this exercise will help you let go of anger and find peace. Before you start, visualize yourself in the other person’s shoes. Acknowledge their pain and understand that it is why they are causing you pain. Then, write a letter of forgiveness. List all the ways you think the other person did you wrong. Forgiving another person honestly and specifically goes a long way toward healing the relationship. Start each item with “I forgive you for…” Keep going until you get everything out. We’re not sending this letter, so you can repeat yourself if the same thing keeps coming to mind. Write everything you wanted to say but never had a chance. You don’t have to feel forgiveness. Yet. When you write it down, what you’re doing is beginning to understand the pain more specifically so that you can slowly let it go. Acknowledge your own shortcomings. What was your role, if any, in the situation or conflict? List the ways you feel you did wrong, starting each with the phrase “Please forgive me for…” Remember you can’t undo the past, but taking responsibility for your role will help you understand and let go of your anger toward yourself and the other person. When you are done with this letter, record yourself reading it. (Most phones can do this.) Play it back, putting yourself in the position of the objective observer. Remember that the pain inflicted on you isn’t yours. It’s the other person’s pain. As Wayne Dyer once wrote, when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. When you squeeze someone full of pain, pain comes out. Instead of absorbing it or giving it back, if you forgive, you help diffuse the pain.

With the importance of resetting the entropy each time a steam engine goes through a cycle, you might wonder what would happen if the entropy reset were to fail. That’s tantamount to the steam engine not expelling adequate waste heat, and so with each cycle the engine would get hotter until it would overheat and break down. If a steam engine were to suffer such a fate it might prove inconvenient but, assuming there were no injuries, would likely not drive anyone into an existential crisis. Yet the very same physics is central to whether life and mind can persist indefinitely far into the future. The reason is that what holds for the steam engine holds for you. It is likely that you don’t consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself. But think about it: your life involves processes no less cyclical than those of the steam engine. Day after day, your body burns the food you eat and the air you breathe to provide energy for your internal workings and your external activities. Even the very act of thinking—molecular motion taking place in your brain—is powered by these energy-conversion processes. And so, much like the steam engine, you could not survive without resetting your entropy by purging excess waste heat to the environment. Indeed, that’s what you do. That’s what we all do. All the time. It’s why, for example, the military’s infrared goggles designed to “see” the heat we all continually expel do a good job of helping soldiers spot enemy combatants at night. We can now appreciate more fully Russell’s mind-set when imagining the far future. We are all waging a relentless battle to resist the persistent accumulation of waste, the unstoppable rise of entropy. For us to survive, the environment must absorb and carry away all the waste, all the entropy, we generate. Which raises the question, Does the environment—by which we now mean the observable universe—provide a bottomless pit for absorbing such waste? Can life dance the entropic two-step indefinitely? Or might there come a time when the universe is, in effect, stuffed and so is unable to absorb the waste heat generated by the very activities that define us, bringing an end to life and mind? In the lachrymose phrasing of Russell, is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?

This life I have made is too small. It doesn't allow enough in: enough ideas, enough beliefs, enough encounters with the exuberant magic of existence. I have been so keen to deny it, to veer deliberately towards the rational, to cling solely to the experiences that are directly observable by others. Only now, when everything is taken away, can I see what a folly this is. I don't want that life anymore. I want what Julian Jaynes's ancients had: to be able to talk to god. Not in a personal sense, to a distant figure who is unfathomably wise, but to have a direct encounter with the flow of things, a communication without words. I want to let something break in me, some dam that has been shoring up this shaefully atavistic sense of the magic behind all things, the tingle of intelligence that was always waiting for me when I came to tap in. I want to feel that raw, elemental awe that my ancestors felt, rather than my tame, explained modern version. I want to prise open the confines of my skull and let in a flood of light and air and mystery. I want this time of change to change me. I want to absorb its might, its giant waves travelling around the planet. I want to retain what the quiet reveals, the small voices whose whispers can be heard only when everything falls silent.

Just as photons are scattered off the charged particle-antiparticle pairs fluctuating in the vacuum, electrical charges will interact with the virtual photons of zero-point radiation. Again, the resistance the physical vacuum might be opposing in this way to the propagation of the electron cannot be measured by comparison with any resistance an emptier space might offer; the charge emits, then absorbs a photon in the emptiest imaginable space. This is what makes vacuum effects observable im the first place-elementary particles don't just interact with each other. Their accompanying clouds scatter off the particles and off one another.

Some people put years into their heroic accomplishments; assassins do not. While stalking Richard Nixon, Bremer wrote, “I’m as important as the start of WWI. I just need the little opening, and a second of time.” Such narcissism is a central feature of every assassin, and like many of their characteristics, it is in us all to some degree. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Denial of Death, Ernest Becker observes that narcissism is universal. Becker says every child’s “whole organism shouts the claim of his natural narcissism. It is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation.” Becker says we all look for heroics in our lives, adding that in some people “it is a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.” But the howls for glory of assassins had been unanswered in their mundane pre-attack lives. The assassin might be weird or unusual, but we cannot say we don’t understand his motives, his goal. He wants what Americans want: recognition, and he wants what all people want: significance. People who don’t get that feeling in childhood seek ways to get it in adulthood. It is as if they have been malnourished for a lifetime and seek to fix it with one huge meal. The same search for significance is part of the motivation for the young gang member who kills, because violence is the fastest way to get identity. Murderer Jack Henry Abbott describes the “involuntary pride and exhilaration all convicts feel when they are chained up hand and foot like dangerous animals. The world has focused on us for a moment. We are somebody capable of threatening the world.

Some people put years into their heroic accomplishments; assassins do not. While stalking Richard Nixon, Bremer wrote, “I’m as important as the start of WWI. I just need the little opening, and a second of time.” Such narcissism is a central feature of every assassin, and like many of their characteristics, it is in us all to some degree. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Denial of Death, Ernest Becker observes that narcissism is universal. Becker says every child’s “whole organism shouts the claim of his natural narcissism. It is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation.” Becker says we all look for heroics in our lives, adding that in some people “it is a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.” But the howls for glory of assassins had been unanswered in their mundane pre-attack lives. The assassin might be weird or unusual, but we cannot say we don’t understand his motives, his goal. He wants what Americans want: recognition, and he wants what all people want: significance. People who don’t get that feeling in childhood seek ways to get it in adulthood. It is as if they have been malnourished for a lifetime and seek to fix it with one huge meal. The same search for significance is part of the motivation for the young gang member who kills, because violence is the fastest way to get identity. Murderer Jack Henry Abbott describes the “involuntary pride and exhilaration all convicts feel when they are chained up hand and foot like dangerous animals. The world has focused on us for a moment. We are somebody capable of threatening the world.” Ernest Becker writes, “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society.

Observe, don't absorb.

Small data is big data in disguise. The reason we can often make good predictions from a small number of observations—or just a single one—is that our priors are so rich. Whether we know it or not, we appear to carry around in our heads surprisingly accurate priors about movie grosses and running times, poem lengths, and political terms of office, not to mention human life spans. We don’t need to gather them explicitly; we absorb them from the world.

How do we get indoctrinated with the Laziness Lie? For the most part, parents don’t sit their kids down and feed them these principles. Instead, people absorb them through years of observation and pattern recognition.