Category: Outside the Box

Confession: I’m a dork. A nerd. A geek. A bona-fide weirdo.

I’m also past 50. The last five decades have been quite the journey for me. I watched the digital age come and go. It’s rise to, and fall from, prominence.

“But the digital age isn’t dead!” you decry, nostrils flaring in contempt. “You’re even posting this on a digital platform!”

I’m not talking about the mere existence of digital media. As you can see, it’s still here.

No- I’m talking about the waning dominance of digital media as a place of wonder and growth. You know what Instagram reels catch people’s attention the most? The ones that show someone making something- some kind of physical art. The digital media itself is just a communication tool showing the actual, physical art. There’s no wonder in the digital aspect of it at all.

Once upon a time, I would play with computers (like the Commodore 64, or the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo 2) and teach myself to program sprites in BASIC because, well, just because I could. The technology was new, and you didn’t really know what it could and couldn’t do. It was exploring an unexplored space. But today, all of that wonder is gone. Everywhere you look, there are unending expanses of procedurally generated landscapes, where everything is just a little bit different, but nothing is really new.

Fortunately, the human mind isn’t bound by digital limitations. When you are a true creative, the means of producing ideas will not be limited by the equipment you use.

You can write a novel on a typewriter or on a computer (or a physical word processor) and the novel will be either good or bad. You can record a song on a computer or a tape 4-track, and the song will still either be catchy or it won’t. You can paint a picture with an ipad or paint and canvas, and it will be interesting or it won’t.

But there’s no value in “digital” as anything but a tool now. There’s no fascination in it by itself. Computers are unable to produce ideas on their own, despite what the AI investors want you to believe.

My commission to you, from one human being to another, is to regularly come up with ideas and try to bring them to fruition. As an additional challence, I want you to do it without computers, just to prove to yourself that it’s not the computer that comes up with ideas. It’s *you.*

I’m not talking about finished products- I’m talking about ideas. A sketchpad, a notebook, a pocket minicassette recorder- something to just get the ideas down. You can always go back and finish them later.

If you practice doing this, you will find that your creativity will likely increase because your brain is no longer trapped inside a digital prison.

Learn to break free of the mental limitations you put on yourself, and the machines that represent those limitations.

Move past the Digital Age, and embrace the creativity of raw, analog humanity.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m tired of being mentally stimulated all the time. Seriously- I’m getting sick of it.

The problem I have is that, as a geek, I’m constantly interested in and drawn to the internet and social media. Technology in general fascinates me, but not in the way you might think.

My brain is what modern psychologists call “ADHD.” You can name it whatever you want, but in the end, it just means that it’s extremely difficult for me to focus on things that are important if they don’t provide dopamine or stimulation.

And so far, the best thing I’ve found to deal with it is- get this- being bored.

I hate being bored. When I was a kid, I would throw temper tantrums about being bored. I didn’t want to play the same game again. I didn’t want to go to the same classes every day. I didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t impulsive or adventurous.

Fast-forward: I’m now 50. My life has become one boring activity after another, over and over and over, until I die. Continue reading “Slowing Down: The Ruthless Elimination Of Hurry”

With the outing of Google’s latest AI fiasco, people are finally starting to realize what I’ve been saying for years:

Big Data is not your friend.

In fact, 99% of tech companies are not your friend.

Let me explain why. Continue reading “The Fall Of The Ivory Tower”

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
– Dylan Thomas

You may have heard of the words “redpilled” or “bluepilled,” references from the 1999 film The Matrix. The two different pills represented Truth and Ignorance, respectively.

The whole idea of “-pilled” became a thing, and we saw the emergence of words like “blackpilled” and “doompilled” which represent Nihilism and fatalism. They embody the ideas that “nothing we do matters, because the world’s outcome has already been determined.” This itself stems from the idea of Determinism- that everything that happens has already been predetermined.

Does anything really matter?

Does it really matter if we try to fix anything? Does it even matter that we exist at all?

Of course it matters, because we’re not just sentient blobs of dust shambling around on a rock. We are God’s creation, even with all our flaws and imperfections imposed on us by the Dark World. At our core, the very fact that we are sentient is amazing. And to know that we were created this way by an unseen, omnipotent God makes it even more incredible.

And to think that the incredible omnipotent God cares about us, and wants to know us is simply unbelievable.

But it’s 100% true.

 

You may remember the piece I wrote a while back about ADHD and Faith. Or maybe the one about Spirituality and Mental Disorders.

Have you ever wanted to be able to do something, but weren’t able to mentally do it? Have you ever wondered “If ADHD, or depression is a mental disorder, how does that affect my ability to ‘take every thought captive to be obedient in Christ’?”

How can I “take every thought captive” when my frontal cortex is dysfunctional? Some people will ask “Do you believe God wants you to be focused?” Well, I would hope so… but I also believe God doesn’t want people to die from cancer. And yet it still happens.

“People don’t choose to get sick!” you might say, and you’re right. But I didn’t choose to have ADHD either. I mean, it’s all I’ve ever known, but at no point did anyone ask me if that’s what I wanted.

Furthermore, what I believe about God’s character doesn’t seem to affect my ADHD in any way, as far as I know.  But does my mental “disability” affect my spiritual walk? And if so, how can I know? How can I tell if I’m just spiritually apathetic, or if it’s just my brain refusing to work the way I want it to?

Is there any hope for Christians with ADHD? Continue reading “ADHD and Spirituality, Part 3”

Over the last three years, I’ve come to realize that we’re not in control of much of anything.

“I’m in control of my own destiny!” you exclaim defiantly. “I only do what I want to do!”

But that’s only partially true. One could argue that nobody can force you to do anything, but that’s not true either. They can make your life miserable to the point where you’ll do anything to make it stop. (Side note: this is called torture.)

I’m not talking about Free Will or The Matrix- I’m talking about autonomy.

How much of what we do is “allowed” and how much of it is “free?” If you’re in control of your own actions, but have to change or limit what you do under threat of force, are you really free? Continue reading “Who’s In Control?”

I recently read through the book “Pagan Christianity?” and was struck by how much of what we call “modern church” is actually borrowed from ancient non-church traditions, including sermons, clergy, and (you guessed it) modern worship music.

“Does that mean we shouldn’t sing worship songs?” No, that’s not what it means.

What it illustrates is the fact that we are so removed from our traditions, we don’t even question why we (the church) do what we do. Pragmatism abounds, and popularity seems to be the dominant requirement for whether or not a church does something.

Jesus wasn’t popular. Continue reading “What Is Church?”