This one’s a little softer because it was not a time of night when a kind neighbor sings loudly. They are all the same songs that I usually play. I haven’t had a lot of time to learn new ones, but I hope to soon.

My experience with music has been so strange. A part of me just needs to sing, even if I can’t always sing in tune. I have a list I maintain called Creatures that Sing. Humans are songful creatures, among many others. I believe that our culture is tuned to encourage the songfulness of just a handful of people, and I wish it weren’t so. We tend to experience another person’s song as a sort of performance that we might judge as good or bad, but we don’t have to. That way of thinking carries some baggage. For one, the prospect of sharing our songfulness becomes complicated if we don’t think it will be experienced as good.

That’s the biggest thing I miss about church. For many people, there is just a single person in their lives that encourages their songfulness, and that is the worship leader. They are true saints. The wind in their sails is the idea that God loves our song, not as a showcase of talent but as an expression that carries meaning and emotion. If we listen to each other sing the way God might be listening, the way a worship leader listens, the way a bird listens to another bird, I believe we will experience music on a very different level, and on a level that welcomes everyone.

I’m working on an app called Streetlight with the idea of calling to the songfulness in all of us. In this way, I wish to be like a worship leader. But it doesn’t take an app. I think the reason why birds are always singing is because all the other birds are always singing. This might sound simple enough to be silly, and Rustbeard tells me it is not strictly true in a zoological sense1, but there’s an important social algorithm here worth considering. The song from another has a potential to resonate in us, and there is a natural impulse to respond with a song of your own. It’s why we can’t help but sing along sometimes. This is wiring we share with the birds, gratefully so.

Songs carry so much. Birdsong carries bird stories and humansong carries human stories. They are a way of processing our emotions and our lives. The human experience can be strange and wonderful and difficult and not always easy to understand, but in lieu of understanding it, we can always just sing about it, and that might be just as good. It reflects another kind of understanding, not the kind that is sure to bring answers, but maybe it brings a reminder that we are not alone, that we really do fit into this grand experience of humanity.

We usually use the word song to refer to a particular composition of melody and lyrics, and I’m using it differently here when I talk about my song. These words and melodies were all created by other people. Even if I could write my own songs, I would still sing these too, with a deep appreciation for where they came. They all resonate with something in my life, they hold for me a particular beauty that is deeply personal. So when I say my song, it is that resonance of which I speak, which I hope can be heard by others. The word just fits better within my thoughts than my singing and my text editor keeps telling me songfulness is not a word and it seems like it is starting to get upset2. We all have a song in us that we can share if we wish, like our understanding of birdsong.

So this is the song in me, just as it is. It is the bird in me on a branch doing bird things, and it makes me happy. If these ideas or my song speak to a song in you, happier so.

In the last post, I mentioned my favorite chapter of my favorite book. The name of the chapter is How to Wonder like Socrates. I very nearly plagiarized the name of the chapter until I had the insight of putting part of it in the subtitle, problem solved.

What does it mean to wonder? I still don't own a dictionary, but I'm guessing it says something like "to ask questions." People write a lot of glowing things about curiosity, and yet it is never overstated. Many creatures have a curious spirit. Its danger to cats is legendary. Dogs can be very curious about what you are eating. I’ll leave it as an exercise to you, dear reader, to think of another example. I’ve left the comments open on this one so that you may share.

In this chapter, Eric Weiner explores the concept of experiencing questions. He relates a conversation with another philosopher, Jacob Needleman, that introduced the idea to him.

"Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions."

As a programmer, I can tell you where my mind went— hacks and quick fixes. Fix the exception or just catch it and output to the log. Use a library, even if you think your own solution would be a better fit and not too difficult to write. Of course, that is how projects get finished. So they tell me. If I ever finish a project, I will let you know.1

I've learned that life is sublime when we take our time on the question part. We can enjoy the state of not knowing. Let everyone around you know that you do not, in fact, know. They may sigh, as I often experience. Or if they are a certain kind of soul, they may wish to shake your hand. 🤝 It's enough, for now, this is the way.

In therapy, it might be a little different. Many therapies these days are what they call solutions focused and designed to wrap up in just a handful of sessions. You don’t always have to understand how you got somewhere to understand where you need to go. This is generally good, therapy is not an infinite resource, and if something is troubling you right now then finding a solution sooner rather than later is just compassionate. Sometimes a mindhack is exactly what you need. All that being said, when personal insights can be uncovered in therapy, it can be life changing.

It is interesting that Weiner calls Socrates the original therapist. You know when I said that therapy is a limited resource? I was lying. Friends create the perfect space to experience these questions— longtime friends and the kind you just met at the bar or cafe or bowling alley. Maybe the bar in the bowling alley.

Why do we rush to solutions? For one thing, knowing the right answer at the right time is sexy and cool. But let’s look deeper. Humans have a highly evolved discomfort avoidance system— the envy of our part of the galaxy, so I’ve heard— and to have a question without an answer can indeed be uncomfortable. Maybe we would like to rule out one possible answer that keeps us up at night. So we avoid that feeling as much as possible by finding the answer as quickly as possible.

And here is a weird bug in our source code: avoiding something or rushing away from something, even something small, tends to make it bigger in our minds compared to when we turn around and face it. As we dodge and run, it just gets bigger and bigger, like a video game boss with sneaky mechanics. It becomes habit forming, and the relief we find through avoidance becomes greater and greater, until you can't even imagine yourself doing the thing.

Living with uncertainty can be like that, start out mildly uncomfortable and then grow after we always avoid it. If we finally let ourselves be in the same space as uncertainty without trying to escape, we tend to find it less scary than we imagined. We might even feel silly about all the effort to get away.

To be fair, sometimes uncertainty is legitimately scary. But I think we treat it that way far more often then we need to. The fear of experiencing death, for example. They sometimes say, "life is fragile." In some sense, that's not really true, life can be remarkably robust. I've learned that the hard way. I’m going to take a wild guess, the average years to expiration for someone reading this post? Fourty. In any case, plenty of time to rewatch Star Trek: TNG.

But it will happen, and then what happens? I've always thought of it like turning out the lights and I immediately fall asleep. Maybe I don’t dream. Maybe I have one last dream that only lasts a moment. Maybe it seems to last forever. It is the Occam's razor version of the afterlife.

Of course, there are other explanations that involve very beautiful places or very hot places. Or some kind of transformation. These are all fascinating to think about, and perhaps that is how you might experience the question yourself. I just think, whatever we believe, it shouldn't make us more afraid than Occam would have it.

Questions are a great alternative to opinions and fill the same void. A favorite part of the chapter:

“A philosopher says to his opinions, ‘You are my opinions. How did you get in here? You didn’t ask me. I didn’t examine you. Yet I believe you. You’re taking over my life.’ ”

I think of my opinions and how they colonize my mind. Like all wily colonizers, they trick me into believing I invited them. Did I? Or did they show up unannounced, these ideas of others, and dress themselves in my clothing?

Asking questions. Socrates was the king of it— to the degree that they named a whole method of dialog after him which is basically just asking questions. So let's ask questions. Not just ask, 🤙 experience. 👈️

Weiner introduces a new kind of greeting: "Take your time." If that's where the Socrates Express takes us, I’m on board.

This seems like late in the post to talk about the other meaning of wonder— to hold awe. It's how we respond to something wonderful. But really we were talking about that the whole time.

Here is what I try to remember each day: Start at the beginning. Find comfort with uncertainty. Enjoy your stroll toward truth,2 hope that you do not arrive too soon. Arrive, when you must, at answers of the heart.

It was important for me to write that post defending the fool within us, because I'll be channeling it now.

I took only a single philosophy course at school, and instead of talking about philosophy, my professor used most of the lecture to tell us about a woman that died about a hundred years ago, someone that came out to Colorado during the pioneer days. I believe he was involved with her archaeological find. He read all her letters. When he wasn't talking about this woman, he was talking about his divorce or flirting with the students in the front row. I actually came to learn about philosophy, so.

So there wasn't much philosophy in my one course on philosophy.

I'm not well read in philosophy, but the last philosophy book I read might be my favorite book of all time, The Socrates Express by travel writer and philosopher Eric Weiner. The book has a beautiful chapter about the philosopher of its title. Socrates understood that the path of a philosopher will sometimes appear foolish, sometimes genuinely so. It is not a role that lends itself to dignity as much as you might hope.

Here, let's let ChatGPT explain it:

What I believe I can add to the discussion is the perspective of an outsider. I didn't get much philosophy at school but I got a lot of psychology, and that is philosophy adjacent. I also grew up in a very strange world, sometimes it was as if I were on another planet. Many psychology students acknowledge their choice of major has at least something to do with making sense of their own mental health experience.

I have always been interested in people and difficult questions. It is a path that started at church, when I was a young person. It took me through a bachelors and then several years as a research assistant and then 4/5 of a doctorate. Then it took a very strange turn into software and game design. So, all my life, I've been working on a model of the human experience, from the perspective of religion, psychology, therapy, and game design.

Game design? It is not widely recognized as a branch of philosophy, but it should be. The joy we find in games comes from learning how to play. The joy in life comes from the same place. The spirit of curiosity and play is strong within us, when we make room for it. Games offer a rich and engaging surface area to explore the human experience.

Sometimes I will offend people. Socrates offended people, and it led him down a path that ended with a cup of hemlock tea. People felt threatened when they believe he was attacking their gods. People might feel that way sometimes about me too. I don’t usually contradict religious gods. But I might contradict our actual gods. What do we truly worship, in America? What do we believe in so strongly that we get angry or just dismiss anyone who says otherwise?

Socrates could be a bit of a troll, but I resist the temptation whenever possible. I put a lot of thought into my words, not because I don’t like hemlock tea, but because I want to be a good ambassador for the slice of truth I’ve seen. We are experiencing turbulence, as a society. We can never hope to completely avoid turbulence but how it is experienced depends on how it is understood.

It is a perspective that I think people will find very hopeful. It is a kindness, to offer calm to a troubled heart, one that I wish to give and receive whenever possible.

I am a strange kind of hermit, the kind that actually likes people. So why am I a hermit? When I spend a lot of time around other people, my world begins to slide into incoherence. I learned all my social skills in a strange way. The first part of my life, my social interactions were entirely with family and church and neighborhood kids. I had no teachers, outside of family and church. That environment was not always healthy or safe.

Then, in my freshmen year, I went to high school. It was like stepping onto another planet and I felt like I had to catch up in a lot of ways, academically and socially, and very quickly. As if overnight, I found a way of fitting in that was always a little clumsy and yet I could talk to anyone. But I also struggled with the image I had of myself as reflected back from other people.

I remember at a young age, watching a video with some other kids, and someone remarked that I looked like this one kid in the video. I was shocked, and when I looked in the mirror, I could see it too. It was as if I didn't recognize my own face very well until that moment. I found it deeply disorienting. This might sound silly, but it was a vivid experience for me.

Do you know someone who says they never forget a face? Think of me as the opposite. It is not so much that I forget faces, I seem to recognize people who I haven’t met. One time, I thought I recognized my girlfriend at an Avalanche game so I sat down next to her, expecting to surprise her. It wasn’t really her, and that was a little awkward. I have a lot of little stories like that. The problem is that I have too many false positives, and so sometimes I doubt the true positives. When I get tired, faces start to appear strange, as if they do not fit together very well. If my brain were software I'd be looking for bugs in the facial recognition module.

Most people find me friendly, and I can connect easily. What they might not know is that it is partly out of necessity, I’m sometimes uncertain if I know someone until we start talking, and I pay close attention to whether they recognize me. I hate the idea of accidentally passing a friend like I do not know them, so I offer a little bit of familiarity to almost every interaction. You'd think that might get strange but no one has ever complained, much more often I end up with a new acquaintance.

However, there are still times that I struggle socially where other people seem to have no problem. I can be so insecure at all the wrong times. Sometimes I feel like a man child. Sometimes I become self absorbed to the point where it drains all the color from life.

Thankfully, it seems to wear itself out, and people can be very understanding. They hardly even noticed, so they say.

That’s a long way of saying I’m an odd duck, but then again, not so much. Whenever I speak with friends or family about challenges, the most common response is relating on a level that surprises us both. It almost seems like the typical story arc of the human experience is about growing enough to see outside of oneself and to recognize a little clearer the human spirit in the people around us and see something familiar.

To help me navigate life, I've developed a few little tricks, most related to some aspect of reality testing. When I've shared them, they seem to help others just as much. They come from my experience as a researcher and a therapist, but other places too, like games. If there are any lessons to be learned, that is what I hope to explore in this section— game mechanics of life.

Alas, Dear Sapien, we are but fools. This is an inescapable fact of our species. Nature has blessed us with an awareness of right and wrong that is most clear after we are the second one. It's no reason to be ashamed, it is life that makes fools out of us. To be fair, sometimes we cooperate.

There's good news, being a fool is not as bad as you've heard. Heck, sometimes we even get close to recognizing its value. Mark Twain is among the greatest Americans to ever live, and he also made terrible business decisions, squandered whole fortunes, and frequently embarrassed his family with his antics. His wife, who loved him dearly, would sometimes throw up her hands and exclaim, "Oh youth!"

Mark Twain was ahead of his time in so many ways. He was a pioneer in recognizing the dignity and humanity and value of all Americans. He is thought to be the first American mega-celebrity. He was a fashion genius, thanks to him we have white suits.

There is also the idea of the holy fool. My favorite brother Karamazov was Alyosha, but I suppose everyone loves Alyosha. In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell explores the concept of the holy fool applied to modern times. He believes they are like courageous outsiders, mistaken as naive because they speak the unconventional truth. He believes Nate Silver is something like a holy fool, and he even means it as a compliment.

Lest I sound cynical, it is important to recognize that we are much more than fools. The foolish part of us is only a part of us. We also have a dignified part that sometimes outshines the rest.

Part of the problem is that people think of foolishness and ridiculousness as the same thing. They are not. I don't have a dictionary but I'd guess that the definition of ridiculous is something like "deserving of ridicule" and fool is something like "lacking good judgment." Do you see the difference? This seems to me like an eye of the beholder problem.

I don't think anyone deserves ridicule. That might sound radical, but let's think about it. First, let them that have never lacked good judgment cast the first stone. Second, how does it help? Please contact me and tell me the true story where ridicule and mockery solved the problem without nurturing a much bigger problem down the road. Even if there was a possible scenario, that is not where our true power resides. It is much more likely that we only bring ourselves low.

Mr. T taught us to pity the fool. Exactly which kind of fool should we pity?

There is the serious fool. I'm thinking Alex Jones. He is not tethered to dignity in any shape or form, but he uses this power for bad things. He is equally untethered to reality. He always steers the story to a dark place. I am watching The Truth vs Alex Jones and it is difficult.

The annoying thing about having principles is that they are hardest to apply when they are most needed. Let us test our stand against ridicule, for if anyone deserves ridicule, it is the Alex Joneses of the world. Do you still feel like it? I honestly do not. He certainly deserves consequences. Hopefully not the kind that take away his humanity and dignity but rather give him an opportunity to find it again. Rather than offering ridicule, I would much rather understand what is driving the behavior. If there was ever an opportunity where I could offer him compassion, I would try it in a heartbeat. I've seen it do miracles.

If there was an alignment chart of fools, the opposite of Alex Jones would be Robin Williams— also not tethered to dignity. But rather than take the story to a dark place, he took it somewhere funny or beautiful or true. A lovely man, the best of us.

There is also the bitter fool. Life sometimes gives us a lot of reasons to be bitter. Perhaps we see no reason to have dignity when nobody treats us with dignity. We act the fool as a bizarre punishment. We become like The Joker.

At last, there is the fool who refuses to see it. This is the most common of the varieties of fool we should not follow. It is a path that leads only to arrogance and even bigger mistakes to never acknowledge. More and more, it feels like a prison. Thankfully, it is easy to jailbreak.

Why do we tether ourselves to dignity? An effective fool notices that people put on that leash to hide. An effective fool sees all the ways that people try to seem sophisticated and dignified and then makes a very wise decision: don't. It comes as a huge relief. For one thing, it takes a lot of effort and focus to maintain the charade. We could focus on something that matters more. And more importantly, it has a way of draining the fun out of life.

If we could ever truly tether ourselves to dignity, it might be worthwhile. The problem is, whenever we aim to do so, we tether ourselves to something else.

Occasionally we might find ourselves near dignity anyway, almost by accident. We find ourselves there when we trust the good impulses, the ones that tell us to help a stranger if we can and appreciate the beauty around us. The spirit of dignity within us leads us there, it turns out we didn't need the tether. These moments are beautiful.

An effective fool has a deeper connection to humanity.

This morning, I was walking to a bus stop on Colfax & Sable and I walked by a man I had never seen before. He was bent over, looking for a cigarette butt that someone gave up on too soon. His hair and his clothes were matted and unwashed. I was listening to my headphones and he said something as I passed.

"What was that?" I asked, taking off one ear.

“Do you have a dollar?” he asked, standing up and walking along beside me.

“I don’t, I’m sorry.” I said, slowing my pace.

"How is Gary doing?"

"I don't think I know a Gary."

"I thought your brother was Gary." He seemed genuinely surprised.

"My brother is John."1

"Oh, you mean Big John?" he said, and put his arms out to illustrate someone with a large, muscular frame.

"Yes, he is big!" I said, and we both laughed and held our arms out like muscle men as we walked down the sidewalk.

As we began to walk in different directions he looked over at me and smiled. "That's what I love about you," he said, mysteriously, as we waved goodbye.

I don't hear that very often. It made me feel great and I held on to the spirit while I danced, waiting for the bus.