Read on for fascinating meditations, such as:
- The Merdenomicon: COVID’s epistemic anxiety and finding answers through ‘manifesting;’
- On Journaling as Developing Critical Thinking: Or, “Why you should record your thoughts in a blog;”
- Reveries of Grilling Time: The time I spent playing Smash during COVID.
The Merdenomicon
People in my life often ask me, “How do you remember all these things?” Answer: I don’t, I really don’t. That’s why I’ve taken journalling as a prosthesis seriously:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/26/my-spines-as-stiff-as-a-prosthetic-leg
Technically, the beginning of lockdown was when I started, but I got tips from ol’ Some Guy On YouTube, who made it out like the only telos of journalling worth pursuing is manifesting success. He may or may not have been wafting bullshit from The Secret under my nose (or, as I might start calling it, the Merdenomicon). As Christy Harrison points out in The Wellness Trap, Google saw an increase in the search term ‘manifesting’ during the first lockdown, correlating with trends on TikTok at the time:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/10/that-old-back-catalogue-part-ii-anti-diet-and-the-wellness-trap
In August 2020, the Merdenomicon also manifested 15 minutes of fame when it reached #12 in Amazon’s Most Sold list (in the UK):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/charts/2020-08-16/mostsold/nonfiction?ref=chrt_bk_nav_fwd
Mass epistemic anxiety is the perfect culture for a book like this to grow in. COVID uprooted everything we personally thought we knew about how the world worked. When we find ourselves suddenly planted in precarity, as with the people around us, we become more selective when filtering information. The cost of believing in something wrong feels more severe:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03788-7#auth-Lilith-Newton-Aff1
If anxiety is an emotional response to a perceived threat, and your epistemology is “how you know what you know,” then epistemic anxiety is an emotional response to a perceived threat to how you know what you know. In a word: “What if everything I knew about human labour was untrue? Wait, it is? Shit. Now what?” You don’t know what’s true or false anymore.
If you were in work when COVID hit, I imagine some of you (quite rightly) asked: “How can I work from home? Am I going to live paycheck to paycheck? Will I need to burn into my savings to make ends meet? Will my career ever go forwards again?” Epistemic anxiety has the answer to all of these – it stonewalls you. You’ve got all these questions, but you don’t know when or if you’ll ever get your answers.
But anything the Merdenomicon has to offer harmonises with cult leaders, conspiracy theorists, and con-artists. They all leverage and exploit epistemic anxiety in very similar ways. To paraphrase social psychologist Karen Douglas, they offer explanations to the ultimate causes of national and global events well beyond our purview:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12568
It filled a need for understanding and security at a time where those needs were at an all-time-high in demand. But, to quote Granny Weatherwax on the difference between a fake crown and the real thing:
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.” Well-known fact:
https://wiki.lspace.org/Well-Known_Facts
If it looks plausible, reads plausible, sounds plausible – like the Law of Attraction – it does not necessarily follow that it’s true.
Sometimes, however, there is real conspiracy: Darrell Huff, author of “HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS” colluded with the tobacco industry to downplay the health effects of smoking (his followup, “HOW TO LIE WITH CANCER STATISTICS” was never published):
https://timharford.com/2022/01/how-to-truth-with-statistics
Google worsened its own search engine to keep users searching for longer, so it could deliver more ads:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google
Boeing does, in fact, attack or hire its regulators, investigate their own cut corners and conclude that everything is fine, actually…
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/boeing-737-max-passenger-boycott/index.html
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing
…EVERYONE dies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Accidents_and_incidents
Now, I can’t claim in any way to be an expert in psychology, but I do think there’s such a thing as second-order epistemic anxiety – sometimes (and I really must stress this, SOMETIMES) conspiracy theories have a point:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point
What can we say to agree with those points, and not go so far as to imply we believe in the whole theory? When we don’t know, that’s second-order epistemic anxiety.
Take, for instance, a previous Brologue on productivity. Having goals is good. Being deliberate about what you do helps you reach those goals:
https://brologue.net/2024/02/28/my-god-pure-productivity
All fine so far. But how to make these points to an LoA truther without also implying I accept everything else? I’ve no problem with looking on the bright side when coping with stress. But if I want to write a bestseller, believing I’ve already written it makes zero material difference. Nor would I, at any point, manifest it from the Universe’s 48KHz frequency.
No matter how you look at it, “Your thoughts alter the Universe through vibrational frequencies” is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. The Merdenomicon has none – but it sure spends a lot of time blaming the victim when they think bad thoughts, or when their manifesting doesn’t work:
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4096
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/secrets-and-lies
If I want books on magical thinking, I’ll read Discworld – where if enough people believe a sixty-foot dragon will tear through the streets, it will. That’s satire for you.
This is supposed to be an empowering book. It’s anything but. “Wanted it bad enough and didn’t get it? That’s your own damn fault.” “How did billionaires get rich and stay rich? Simple: they manifest wealth by thinking about it.” All the homeless people you see on the street got there because they clearly didn’t think about wealth hard enough. It’s definitely not because someone up the chain of power thinks the bread-burner’s right to property trumps their human rights to food and shelter.
The book opens with a promise that the ‘secret’ is available for anyone and everyone who wants to learn it, yet it quickly becomes apparent that, while anyone can change the Universe with their thoughts, not everyone can. It contradicts itself at every turn – it only works when a surplus of people are suffering, and individuals think only of their own wants and leave everyone else to it. That’s not liberty – that’s cruelty.
On Journaling as Developing Critical Thinking
Look, critical thinking’s not like breathing. You have to do it deliberately, and, clue’s in the name, you have to think a lot. My biggest epistemic anxiety right now is, “how do I know I’m doing enough of it? Am I thinking critically, or engaging in denialism?”
https://mastodon.green/@HelgavanLeur/112528892080360628
In each post, I can only say so much. I know there’re things I’m not seeing, or writing, and I’m aware my arguments could be much stronger if I walked through opposing views. The best coping mechanism I have is to keep journaling, keep this blog running, and ask as many critical questions as I can – this is a public ledger of what I think, and I can expand upon it whenever I find something new to add, or clarify.
My methodology has three rough levels: the journals where I sketch ideas; the Zettel, where I might take some of those ideas, do a little research, and bring in more sources1; and the blog, where I turn those notes into posts and hear them echo off the walls. Writing for an audience – real or imagined – both keeps me in check and serves as a lesser-known memory hack.
While exploring where we got these ideas about “equality” from (17th-century debates between Amerindian intellectuals and French colonisers), David Graeber and David Wengrow remark that neuroscience underexpresses one key fact – human thought is, at all times, dialogic:
Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot… What [they] almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end…
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, pg. 94
So, there you have it, two reasons why you should journal, or blog, or both:
1) An argument is easier to remember if we turn it into a story.
2) When we walk through our argument with someone else, real2 or imagined, we can think on it for longer, and there’s a better chance it’ll go into long-term memory.
Coders know this as ‘rubber duck’ debugging; writers through the ages have consulted myriad imaginary muses to squeeze ideas out of their heads like an orange juicer: tarot cards, dice, commonplace books, and yes, ChatGPT, just to name a few. Another I’ve come across recently is Oblique Strategies:
You’re worried about an audience? Wondering who asked and who’s going to care? I’ve got news for you: before platforms promised to find our audience for us, the early web never so much as promised nor entitled us to an audience – only a place for us to put our work that will stick around long enough for at least one person to find:
https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful
Go wild. And don’t just go wild on X, either – go the POSSE route and syndicate your work to as many platforms as you want:
Reveries of Grilling Time
If I’d figured out my journalling system earlier, I’d be able to tell so, so many more stories about Grilling Time. It wasn’t just pre-journal, mind you – it was pre-ADHD BM, too. Long story short: during lockdown, a group of Smash Ultimate players in the UK (and later, across Europe) banded together and, over the second half of 2020, shot up the SCS’s ranks to become its strongest crew:
https://www.ssbwiki.com/Team:Smash_Crew_Server
If memory serves, it originally started from a small group of Scottish players called Square Go (I joined a little while after it expanded to become Grilling Time). We were all in the same boat with COVID, and you’ve only so much patience for dinner breaks and delay-based netcode in Wi-Fi brackets, so crew battles were a happy medium:
https://www.ssbwiki.com/Crew_battle
Like any team sport, if you’re taking it seriously, there’s a lot of reconnaissance that goes into picking the right players to target the other crew’s blindspots. I remember laying out plans to write scripts to scrape player data, and do some rudimentary statistics, but it never came to pass. If it did, then if an upcoming CB had a lot of players with a DK issue, our leader could know this in advance, and send our DK in to go apeshit.
As a custom, most crews give their MVP a special role in their Discord server. Ours was Prime Cut. Maybe some people went for Prime Cut because they were on that lockdown #GRINDSET, but I’m pretty sure most of us turned it into a meme for no other reason than it was funny. People’d go out in public, see ‘PRIME CUT,’ send it in chat, and the next thing you saw, after blinking, was shitposting kicked into ludicrous speed.
I was never anywhere near Grilling Time’s strongest player – I peaked at taking 15 stocks off a crew with an Olimar skill issue (including their own Olimar!). After I left the following May to pursue my Uni studies4, Smash Ultimate just wasn’t the same. I floundered in my third year of Uni, fumbled the bag in my penultimate term, dropped the Piklag video and The Art of Olimar’s Down Air, and in January 2022, I was pretty much done with the game:
Years later, I’m still uploading videos about Olimar. I promised Olimar players 10TT, and as long as I have the capacity to edit videos when I’m not working, it’s going to be finished. But I’ve probably said it a hundred times already that I haven’t had a stake in Ultimate for years. Leaving the community silently wasn’t the right thing to do, but since I didn’t really get to know a lot of people, I can’t deny it was easy.
When your only connection to people is through Ultimate, and that connection isn’t particularly strong, network effects are weak, and thus, the cost of switching games – or quitting entirely – is low:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/24/nick-brawl-2-the
https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back
Discord servers don’t get indexed by search engines, besides which, I think the servers where Grilling Time saw its glory days have long since rotted. And this is another reason why I write – someone has to keep track of these memories:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/01/f-is-for-friends-who-do-stuff-together/#u-is-for-u-n-me
Storage devices can hold these memories (if you’re lucky) for decades, but they’re only as consistent as the mind that decides what they should store. I’ve got only got the odd fragments here and there. Everything else, to me at least, is effectively lost history. So it goes:
Thanks folks. I’m glad you were there. You made lockdown bearable.
- Adjacent to this level might be the part of my Zettel repo where my literature notes go. To be honest, I’m terrible at writing lit. notes. I try to follow Bob Doto’s example these days – as I understand him, a build-your-own index of things you found interesting, but no more complex than a cursory description:
https://writing.bobdoto.computer/what-is-a-literature-note/
Sometimes when I put a book down, I don’t want to immediately start writing. I want to work through the ideas the author’s given me in my head. I should capture my thoughts in my journal or Zettel right away, but I don’t. And if it gets captured in the journal with intent to add it to the Zettel later, sometimes I forget that, too. I only make it harder for myself! ↩︎ - Bo hangs on every word I say, but he’s a tough cat to persuade. ↩︎
- This is what we in the trade call ‘inside jokes,’ and they’re funny as shit. ↩︎
- I did come back for a while, but I don’t remember doing any more CBs. ↩︎
The Merdenomicon | Reveries of Grilling Time is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.