Why Constraint Is Good

The amount of information available to us on the Internet is limitless,but how often do we actually take a look at a totally random site? When do we ever go on a trawl through hundreds of disparate pages, unless it’s for the purposes of research? On the other hand, sites like StumbleUpon and Digg are hugely popular, and becoming moreso.

Why are these filtration sites so popular? Don’t they somehow fly in the face of the random beauty of the Internet? Well, maybe from a technological perspective. But true chaos is not generally desirable to the human experience. We enjoy being held back, and it works in our favour.

Illustrations are readily evident in the creative arts. For example, the first Matrix film was a hugely ambitious project that drew in discrete elements of Manga, existentialist philosophy, martial arts, technology etc. It should have been a total mess. It wasn’t. The second and third Matrix films, however, used the exact same elements – and were total messes ( Come on, what the hell what going on in the third one?). The difference? Personally, I think it may have been the lack of constraints on the directors (the Wachowski brothers) after the monumental success of the first film. With their debut, they were taking a huge gamble and absolutely had to at least make it a little audience-friendly to guarantee box office returns. After that, Warner Bros said, “Hey guys, do whatever you want.” And the Wachowskis indulged, throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the sequels. Filmmaking with no restraints resulted in films that made no sense.

“Donnie Darko” is one of the most beautiful, rich films I’ve seen. The director, Richard Kelly was given a much bigger canvas and budget to make his second film, based on Donnie’s success. The result was “Southland Tales“, a free-jazz-on-film film that makes very little sense and, to my mind at least, is intensely boring.

Indeed, constraint is a wonderful thing when applied properly. It gives you something to prove, something to rail against.

Every self-help book worth its salt tells the reader that they absolutely must set out their goals. This may be via a process of writing them down, of intensive visualization, of telling your friends and family of your deadlines so that you will adhere to them. The common element with every goal that is set is that is immediately enforces a set of constraints. It focuses the mind like a laser, pushing out other, irrelevant thoughts. If you have one thing to do, and one thing only, the chances are that you will do it.

Constraint often equates with brevity, which can be a wonderful tool for effectively conveying information. Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code“, which was an international publishing phenomenon, was notable for its concise chapters. Readers loved that; it made for a fast-paced read, which, though it heavy with religious and historical symbolism, was sectioned into easily-digested portions. One of my favourite books, The Lucifer Principle, does the same with an elaborate theory on the relationship between science and religion.

I think that’s why someone like Kurt Cobain or Bob Dylan will always be more appealing to the masses than guitar virtuosos like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. Cobain and Dylan were and are much more restrained in terms of their musical ability, and that can be a good thing. There’s a scene in the Nirvana film “Live, Tonight, Sold Out!” where a music journalist described Nirvana’s music as being like nursery rhymes that you can’t get out of your head. I always thought that was very insightful; for example, “Come As You Are” is based on a slow riff that consists of 5 notes. Vai or Satriani, on the other hand, could easily play 10 notes per second on one of their tracks. Which is a fantastic ability, but complexity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. And it’s those nursery-rhyme, 5-note melodies that invariably seep into public consciousness and convey their message most effectively. I guess that’s why it’s ‘popular’ music.

I suppose the ideal is to have all of these creative tools at one’s disposal, but to still be able to maintain that popular sensibility when you want to use it. A great example of one such musician is Jeff Buckley; his technical abilities were second to none, but he was consistently able to distill them down to something subtle, refined and accessible.

And that’s a difficult thing to do, because having too many options can be crippling. It goes against the classical idea that more choice equates to more freedom, which equates to more happiness – but there it is. In his book “The Paradox Of Choice“, author Barry Schwartz argues ‘why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable’. He says that it actually creates a state of paralysis; that having too many things to choose from makes it very difficult to actually make a choice. Not only that, but even if you do make a choice, and a good one at that, but the idea that you could have made a better decision in the first place can make you regretful.

f

Here is Schwartz’ short lecture from the famous TedTalks series:

f

Schwartz makes the example of clothing; when he was younger, buying a pair of jeans was simple. You went into the store and you bought the one type of jeans that was on the rack. And you were happy with them, because there was no other choice to make. Today, you go to buy a pair of jeans and are confronted with hundreds of varieties; faded, stone-washed, designer, boot cut, torn, brand-label etc etc. So while you may find a pair that fits and looks pretty good, the unrealised potentiality of choice still hangs over you. And if you do happen to find something – anything – wrong with those jeans, it can only be your fault. Why? Because the choice was all yours.

This may seem trivial, but if you expand that phenomenon across millions of different products, combined with the incessant psychic pummeling of advertising (which tells us explicitly that we will be unhappy if we make the wrong choice), we can imagine the rate of misery generated growing exponentially. We are told that we need the products to be content; then the range of choice makes contentment, even with the product, impossible anyway.

Henry Ford said about his cars, “You can have it in any colour, as long as it’s black”. And that was coming from one of the most successful industrialists of the twentieth century. That’s not to say that “the good old days” of one choice only were perfect. But having one choice certainly makes things a lot simpler, and seems to promote contentment. Even if that one choice is far from ideal, it still gives the chooser something to complain about and fight against; a goal of sorts. But limitless choice means that the burden of responsibility is totally on the shoulders of the chooser. There is no constraint, the individual becomes a veritable island of personal responsibility – and that can lead to a great deal of misery.

How To Slow Down Time And Live Longer

In his article in New Dawn magazine, Steve Taylor outlines the human experience of how, bizarrely, time seems to pass more quickly as you get older.

We all know the anecdotal evidence; As we age, the birthdays come around faster every year, Christmas seems to blindside us altogether. But there is much more to verify this as a concrete phenomenon. For example, scientists have long been aware of the psychological effect known as ‘forward telescoping’, or “our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have.”

This occurs with alarming consistency; when questioned on the chronological proximity of a memorable event, say,the death of a public figure or a major international incident, people generally tend to consistently underestimate the length of time involved. Not only that, but the greater the age of the individual, the greater that underestimation tends to be. Put simply, the older you are, the more likely you are to think that events distant in the past have happened more recently.

The opposite seems to be true of children and younger people in general. The example Taylor uses is that of a restless child stuck in a car on a long journey – the trip will seem to them like a massive, neverending expedition. The space between each “Are we there yet?”, while mere minutes to the parents, seem like wide temporal gaps to the youngsters, who judge it as a perfectly reasonable interim after which to pose the question yet again.

There are multiple theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first involves the human metabolism: A child’s body operates at a much faster rate than an adult’s in terms of blood flow, heart rate, expansion etc. The theory asserts that this directly affects the child’s perception of the world; the child’s metabolism is moving like a cheetah, and the mind is analogous. So if what happens around the kid is anything less than whizz-bang, then boredom sets in and time seems to move more slowly than usual.

The second theory appears more feasible to me at least, and yet not incompatible with the first. This one focuses purely on the psyche and says that how the perceive the passage of time is directly related to how much information we are experiencing at any given time. As Taylor says, “The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes.” He refers to an experiment in which students were played two pieces of music; one, a sparse Brian Eno composition, the other a frenetic Rachmaninov arrangement. Asked to guess the running times, the students overestimated the length of both – the Eno by 32 seconds, the Rach by over a minute.

The conclusion would seem to be that when we take in more information, time slows down. Our cognitive processes seem to pull back and allow the data to wash over them, absorbing it. And yet, the neurons are firing like crazy, generating new associations, assimilating the new information. It seems as if this joyous participation with the universe, this tiny step closer to oneness, can slow down time itself.

You might say, “Ok, but that’s not really altering time, is it? Folks around you aren’t going to start walking in slow motion or running at 10x normal speed.” But think about it for a second. How is it that we experience time? We, as humans, only ever experience the here and now. Ideas of the “past” and the “future” are nothing more than constructs and exist nowhere outside of mental abstractions. Much of the science of Buddhism is based around ridding oneself of those tangential thoughts and simply living in the moment (but, of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds).

So if we think of “time” as nothing more than a way to describe our moment-to-moment existence, then what have we? Well, if we can alter the feeling of how much time has passed between one glance at your watch and the next (the connection to the construct), then, we have altered our moment-to-moment existence, right? And, by that rationale, we have altered time. You don’t need to get into wild notions of Matrix motions; you have the full ability to slow down time, in a perfectly literal sense.

As already mentioned, this should ideally be done by the absorption of information. That sounds awfully dry; what I mean is the act of throwing yourself into the world around you; literature, media, politics, film, psychology, sex, music, society, everything. Sometimes, you get bit by the creative bug and become a filter for this information, pulling data out, connecting it, making fun new things just like you did with Lego and Plah-Doh when you were a kid (Keep the Play-Doh of the sex, though. Just a suggestion.). If we can fill our little worlds up with these things, then time slows down. Life becomes a matter of urgency; there is no time to waste when there’s so much going on, and it’s essential to squeeze the juice out of every last minute.

The effect can also be pharmacologically induced. For example, the psychedelic experience (LSD, Mushrooms) has often been compared to feeling the wonderment of infancy again. One tripper states, “My trip on mushrooms is simply indescribable. The only way I can relate it to people who haven’t done it is that I felt like a child again. Everything was new, beautiful and had some deep and significant meaning.” Indeed, the psychedelic experience seems to be an intense compression of experience; diving through vast volumes of information, whether good or bad. It opens up the creative pathways of the mind, blows out the accumulated cobwebs of cynicism and allows one to interact as excitedly with the world as one did before the jaded mores of state education took root. The only problem is that, if you don’t feel comfortable with this experiential compression, it can quickly become terrifying beyond reason. Suddenly, the information makes no sense, the thoughts become pure staccato, and the feeling of connectedness is reversed to a feeling of utter isolation – a bad trip.

(Just as a side note, I recently watched the original version of The Hitcher, a superb 1986 thriller about a killer, played by Rutger Hauer, chasing a young man, C. Thomas Howell, across the highways of Arizona. In the director’s commentary, Robert Harmon says that what Hauer is doing is educating the protagonist; in that in this single 48-hour stretch of total horror, he is putting the kid through more than most people will even experience in their lives. And he will be wiser and more learned for it. In a sense, Hauer is doing this naive kid a favour by putting him through this nightmare…)

Because oddly, time can seem to slow down to a crawl at the other end of the spectrum too – when the mind and/or body is in pain. Einstein said “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” (Another example: People with depressive illnesses are often prescribed SSRI medication, which require a three month minimum before the patient can say objectively whether they are feeling better. To most people 90 days would fly by. But for the depressive, on a medication they are not sure will even work, this can seem like an eternity.) Most forms of torture, and particularly solitary confinement, are based on generating this effect. For all the modern Abu Ghraib innovations in the art of torture, the simple act of throwing someone into a pitch-black room for days, weeks, month, years on end is an incredibly potent way to inflict psychic torment on another human being.

Deprived of any external input, the brain perceives time as passing at in interminably slow rate. Though in one sense experientially similar, it is the fundamental opposite to the states of child-like fascination described at the beginning of this article. The brain does in the absence of information what the stomach does in the absence of food; it begins to consume itself. It invents all sorts of wild reveries to stave off the nothingness; nature abhors a vacuum and the mind will do anything to avoid that state.

In an excellent, harrowing BBC Horizon documentary called Total Isolation, we watched the effect of 48 hours of this type of isolation on six volunteers. In just this relatively short space of time, people panicked, paced their rooms endlessly like caged animals, sensed a “presence” in their rooms, and even had full-on hallucinations. Most importantly, however, they all lost their sense of time, and after a short while seemed to have no idea as to how much time had passed in the experiment. This made the experience all the more frightening; since they truly had no idea as to when they would get out. How long had passed? Twenty-four hours? Twelve hours? Six? Three? That total loss of connection with even the passage of time must be a truly horrendous thing to endure.

Going back to the Steve Taylor article, it seems that in the middle of these two extremes of childlike wonder and brutal despair, lies a middle road in which time runs at breakneck speed for the individual. That middle road is routine. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it also speeds things up considerably. For the person who gets up and repeats one day after the next with the same informational patterns, day-in and day-out, time is jet-propelled. And since most people’s lives are based on the 9-5, live-for-the-wage-packet patterns of modern office existence, then we can understand why the great majority of us are frustrated about our lives “flying past us”.

The thing is, routine seems so much easier than the constant investigation, thought and movement that is required for one to experience life in its “slow/fascinated” form. But of course, that’s not true at all. Each is nothing more than a habit, an association with pleasure formed in the neural patterns of the brain. The routine habit is perpetuated around us by a society that constantly pushes the idea of swift gratification – and the fact that public schooling tends to kill off one’s youthful love of learning. We associate learning with “work”, in the same vein as that office job we yearn to leave. But learning isn’t work. In fact, as Robert Anton Wilson once wrote, when done properly, it should feel like play.

If we can make that the habit, then we can become as children once again. We can get up in the mornings and look at the world anew, wide-eyed. We can feel endless fascination with the workings of every facet of the universe, just as we did when we were kids. We can take back the love of learning of which schooling and advertising has robbed us, bombard our senses daily with the joy of new experiences and connections – and by doing so, live longer, more fulfilled lives – regardless of how long we live.