Unsolved Problems

Some of the most popular search terms, on my blog, are about how to do something that nobody has ever done before.  One way to begin that task is to choose a problem that hasn’t yet been solved.  If you snoop around and read a bit, there is any number of unsolved problems.  Here are some that come to my mind:

• Writing bug free software
• Getting your car repaired before it actually breaks down
• Extracting radiant energy from the Cosmos (Tesla style)
• Finding a way to communicate great ideas in the face of propaganda against them
• Finding a way to ask important, unanswered scientific questions that scientists don’t want you to ask, without facing ridicule or worse
• Living in peace with all
• Opening those indestructible plastic blister packs that are meant to prevent theft of the contents
• Learning a language without spending forever on doing so and retaining what you learn
• A national and global economic system that isn’t mired in debt
• A way to teach people not to gain pleasure from seeing other people unhappy
• Guitar strings that don’t rust, yet sound bright, seemingly forever
• Reusable packaging that doesn’t end up in landfill
• A faster way to read and comprehend books
• A way for everybody to see the 99 million more colours that some rare people can see
• Houses purpose-designed for space, light, peace, quiet, energy efficiency and creativity
• A very low cost, yet effective soundproof booth
• Pharmaceutical drugs that actually cure you, instead of treating you indefinitely
• An Internet where you own and control access to your personal data
• Food that is designed for taste, optimum health and nourishment, instead of extended shelf life and profit maximisation
• Truth in media, as opposed to propaganda, slant, naked bias and advertising
• A way to sell your music online, without so many people stealing it for free
• A way to survive and live without having to sell anything at all, if you want
• Finding a way to teach people to be vocal and passionate about things that materially and spiritually matter to them and to others
• A way for most people to work where they are, instead of having to commute
• A method of dismantling the permanent military-industrial complex for good
• Toasters that can be repaired, if they break down (same for most appliances, actually)
• A computer that lasts longer than three years without having to be replaced
• Contemporary furniture that will still function in three hundred years from now (like antiques do)
• A less energy, labour and water intensive way of washing clothes and dishes
• A way to put all the empty buildings to good use, instead of leaving them empty
• A faster way of learning to use all the nuanced, rarely used, but useful features of software packages you use
• Hover boards (I was promised hover boards, dammit!)
• Removal of environmental, endocrine-disrupting and epigenetic toxins from the soil, air, water and products
• Looking for impairment, not just outright death, when describing the toxicity of materials
• Access to well equipped workshops / studios / ateliers for all who want them
• A way to do research and development that isn’t perverted by the need to find funding or tenure
• Low energy, high luminance lamps that don’t burn out so fast and require tossing away
• Reusable, hygienic ways of bring food home for consumption, from where you buy it
• Food distribution systems that do not leave food in the channel so long, that its nutritional value is depleted
• Subsidised fruit and vegetables, instead of grains, sugar and corn
• A cure for cancer that doesn’t involve burning, cutting, poisoning or damaging the body
• A way to prevent and/or reverse dementia in old age
• A computer that doesn’t freeze up or steal the focus, when you are in the middle of doing something
• Software that works in the background properly, instead of making you, the user, wait
• Software installation that doesn’t force or require a reboot
• Personal computers designed for inherent resilience, high availability, redundant storage, disaster recovery and drive replacement, without software reinstallation from scratch
• Vehicles that don’t pollute or despoil then environment, when at end of life
• Vehicles that run so cleanly, there is no significant emissions of anything harmful
• Delicious, nutritious food that can be grown reliably, without pesticides and fertilizers
• A monetary system that doesn’t inevitably end in runaway debt and extreme wealth concentration
• Data centres that we, the people, own.  Networks that we, the people, own.
• A way of influencing important decisions without resort to elected representatives that are prone to corruption to raise campaign funds
• An end to poverty, because it’s a man made phenomena that we bizarrely and unjustly choose to perpetuate
• Reversal of hair loss, sight degradation or hearing loss, by non invasive, safe means
• A way to correct anti-social behaviour that doesn’t involve violence, cruelty or vengeance
• A means of raising the profile and desirability of kindness, as a life goal, over monetary wealth or “success”

If you really start thinking about it, the list is endless.  If you are able to make even a small contribution to any of the great unsolved problems, you are bound to be doing something that nobody has ever done before.

What’s on your list?

Surviving or Thriving?

Surviving is all well and good, if the only other option available to you is perishing.  Survival is the least that you want to achieve.  But it is absolutely the least.  Do you think we were put here to merely scrape by, for our whole lives?  Everywhere else in nature, things are busy thriving.  Why not us?

The annoying thing about survival is that it takes up all your time and energy, leaving precious little left to devote to attempting to thrive.  In fact, in the event that you break the chains that bind you to mere survival, in an attempt to thrive, you can find that, ironically, it can threaten your very survival.  While you attempt to grow and prosper, you can find your savings and resources steadily depleting.  It’s difficult to make the leap from surviving to thriving.  But how is it possible to go from a big chance to finally thrive, back to barely scratching out a living and struggling to survive?  How can that be how it pans out, even some of the time, let alone most of the time?  Something is wrong with that.  Something is wrong with us.

Who wants to scrape by from month to month, watching their meagre, dwindling finances like a hawk?  Who, on the other hand, wants to be in a dead end job, working hard for people who don’t care about you, just to make ends meet?  What kind of existence is it, if you run a business, to become completely exhausted serving just one customer, so that you dread the second, or have nothing left in the tank to even attempt to give them good service and value for money?

Thriving is our natural state.  It’s what we desire to do.  It frustrates us when, to survive, we must forsake the opportunity to thrive.  Not enough time.  Not enough money.  Not enough room.  They all throw you straight back into the brutal survival battle.  Yet, if you could find a way to break free and survive for long enough, until your true passions and skills began to be recognised, you would be sure to thrive.  How could you not?  Doing what you love most, what you do best and which lights the fire of your passion seems like a breeze, compared to the slog of incessantly turning up and grinding through day after day in an occupation that affords you the ability to barely get by and just break even.  Hunkering down in an effort to try to just survive can begin to be a threat to your very survival.

If you set your sights on merely surviving, that seems to be all you ever manage to accomplish.  Thriving takes something broader, by way of vision.  It takes courage.  It feels risky.  It is risky.  You never know how your brilliance and awesomeness will be received and whether or not it will actually lead to your thriving and prospering.  That has nothing to do with how capable and hard working you are and everything to do with how insulated and isolated we have become from each other.  Shouldn’t we be helping each other to thrive, at every opportunity, instead of keeping our heads down, pre-occupied with only just surviving?  How on earth did we organise human affairs in such a faulty way?

The thing about thriving is that my thriving doesn’t need to be at the expense of somebody else.  Nobody else need be forced into survival mode for me to flourish and prosper.  We can all thrive.  The more we all do, the more we all do, in fact.

It seems odd that so many people, in the world, seem to see others finding their own ways of thriving as some kind of threat to their own ability to thrive.  It doesn’t work that way.  There is no need to prevent another from thriving, so that you might.  Yet, that seems to be the basis of competition and the underpinnings of our economy.  We start from the premise that to win, others must lose.  There is no model in which, I do well, flourishing in what I do, and so do you and, logically, so does everybody else.  It’s not part of our intellectual axioms, is it?  We just don’t imagine that it’s possible.  It’s not only possible, it’s probable, but we all have to commit to thriving, in the first instance.  While somebody, somewhere, thinks like a predator, the whole thing is at risk, plunging us all into a visceral fight to the death, for survival, without hope of growth.  Doesn’t make sense, does it?

So what will you choose?  Will you be content with survival, or is there more than that possible?  Wouldn’t it be far better, happier, healthier and beneficial, not to mention a general improvement to mankind as a whole, if you were to thrive?  So what will you do about that?

I hope you find a way to do much more than merely surviving and that you discover a way to thrive.  I hope we all do.

Enthusiasm Deficit Disorder

Straw poll research that I conducted scientifically in the coffee room reveals that few of us are strangers to Enthusiasm Deficit Disorder (EDD).  Don’t panic.  There is a cure.  You can trust me.  I’m a doctor (no I’m not!)

The root cause of EDD is that you are tired.  The cure is to rest.  Then do something fun.  Your enthusiasm will return.

It always does.

Call the Art Squad

What do you do, if somebody hurts you in the street?  What if they assault you, or mug you and take all your money, leaving you bruised and battered?  What if they break into your house, ransack it and escape with your valuables?  How about when somebody vandalises your car, or causes your car to become damaged in a collision, due entirely to their negligence, carelessness or recklessness?  Who do you call?  If you’re like most people, you call the Police, without thinking about it.  They’re the obvious people to turn to.  Everybody does.  You want them to find the perpetrator and punish them, depriving them of their liberty, if necessary and using whatever violence and force they need to use, in order to apprehend the criminal.  We want our property back.  We want revenge.  We want the wrong-doer to be punished, so that they don’t do it again.  We think this works.  We think it makes society safer and better.  It’s an unquestioned article of collective faith.

Do we ever think through what could have brought another human being to the point of committing such harm against other human beings?  Do you think they were born that way, or did they become that way, through violence and extreme deprivation visited upon their own lives, unjustly and unfairly?  In which case, does the application of more deprivation, force, punishment and violence serve to correct them, or does it just reinforce the callousness they have already built up against the rights and feelings of their victims?

If you look at the evidence dispassionately, calling the Police isn’t working.  The rates of recidivism are at an all time high.  The more harshness and punishment we apply, the worse it gets.  We’re dealing with a population of humans so damaged and unloved that they have lost the capacity to feel any remorse or guilt for dishing the same out to other people, even strangers.  In fact, it’s probably easier for them to hurt a stranger, so in what sense does isolating them further from humanity cause them to develop more empathy with people they’ve never met?  It doesn’t.  The more you harm these perpetrators, the more they perpetrate.  It’s a downward spiral and correctional facilities are not helping.  They’re worsening the situation.  They amplify the disenfranchisement and remove any last vestiges of hope.

Here’s a thought.  Imagine that, at a very early stage, before serious crimes are committed, the criminal-to-be is given another sort of treatment, for their misdemeanours.  There are always early indications of children that will grow into off-the-rails adults.  The injustice hurting their souls is already palpable.  You can tell that they already feel unloved, isolated, frustrated, impotent, trapped, hurt and wronged, even when they’re small.  You can see the resentment building against every person that compounds their life’s unhappiness.  Imagine that instead of giving them punishment, detentions, isolation, admonishments, judgements, banishments, further deprivations, violence, pain, force, harsh treatment, cutting words and less love and acceptance, we instead gave them art.

What would happen if you put a guitar, a pair of drum sticks or paint brush into the hands of a young person that needed to express their rage and let it out?  Would their impotent powerlessness be directed toward theft, vandalism, violent crimes, damage to property and dishonesty, or would they put all that emotion into their art?  What if our first response to petty crime was to embrace them, listen to them, understand them, offer them some support and sympathy and provide them with the tools and techniques to speak their pain, their sense of deprivation, their sense of loss and their sense of injustice being visited upon them?  What if we kept that up, with each lapse into anti-social behaviour?  Would we manage to turn around even a few lives?  I think we’d achieve a lot more.

A child, taught to create, learns that he is not powerless or disenfranchised.  He learns that he can shape the world to be a place in which he can thrive.  It provides an outlet for the anger and frustration, for the violence that builds up, for the hatred and contempt.  It lets them dissipate their negative views of people and turn, instead, to imagination, creation, innovation, inspiration and achievement.

But we call the Police instead.  We tell the head teacher, who often calls the Police for us.  We default to a regime of correction that bypasses creativity entirely.  We eschew anything which might permit them to express their rage and frustration in a dissipative, positive manner.  Instead, we insist they contain it and bottle it up inside.  It’s inconvenient for us to deal with.  We opt for beating them into submission, metaphorically (and often literally!), when that might be what’s at the very root of their anti-social behaviour in the first place.

What if we called the Art Squad as first responders, instead of the Police, especially for minor crimes?  The Art Squad would arrive on the scene, armed with creativity coaching knowledge, art materials, encouragement, respect and love and embrace the little criminals, helping them see that the world can be a much more beautiful place, of their own making and that they don’t have to suffer their fates in silence.  What if we showed them, through the Art Squad, how to turn their own lives around through making changes that matter, speaking their truths and showing the world at large that it ought to care more about people unfairly foist into their particular situations?  It would be worth a try, wouldn’t it?

But there is no Art Squad.  There is no three digit phone number to summon the creative resources of society, at short notice, to help misbehaving youngsters recreate their own worlds for the better.  There are no painters, poets or musicians on standby, waiting to intervene.  No, instead we make it worse, until they, the minor criminals, rot and decay into hardened criminals, capable of doing the worst kinds of damage in society.  And when they have, we throw them into a concrete garbage can and leave them there, forever.  And we, as a society, feel better for having restored law and order.  We feel righteous for using State violence to make these human beings live even nastier, more deprived and hopeless lives.  Then we have the gall to talk about “rehabilitation”.

We haven’t the collective imagination to envisage and call into being a more positive response to anti-social behaviour than the violent, para-militaristic, top down, unfeeling, uncaring, uncompassionate, harsh, forceful answers we serve up, time and again, even though it’s blatantly obvious that this answer hasn’t worked, doesn’t work, never will work and can never be made to work, through the application of more of the same.  We don’t have the insight and courage to try building the Art Squad.  And so we perpetuate a horrible cycle of violence, waste and destruction of lives.  We suffer, as a society, because we can’t even question or inquire into alternatives to traditional policing.

So next time somebody wrongs you, “who you gonna call?”

How to Do the Thankless

You might have taken up art to make a difference.  You might have loved the idea of entertaining and delighting people.  Perhaps you wanted to help people, through your art or give them a new perspective, to see things a different way.  Maybe all you wanted to do was to make the place more beautiful, or at least pleasant to be in.  There might have been a goal of quietly earning a living, doing little harm, during your time on earth.  You might have expected at least a tiny bit of gratitude for your labours.  Most of the time, if you’re like most artists, you don’t get any appreciation.  Your task is thankless.

You may even be attacked and vilified for trying to do some good.  People may hate your choice of colours, or how you dare.  They might not want to be helped, comfortable as they are in their own personal cocoons of complacency.  They might resent being shown some obvious truth in such stark clarity that they had assiduously avoided facing, or even acknowledging.  Your ideas may disquiet and disturb them.  Your art, therefore, becomes an affront – a constant prod to their intellectual and psychological inertia.  They might fear your answers, for not understanding the implications.  Your art might become the conscience they never had.  Whatever you’re doing, nobody is going to thank you for doing it, at least not initially.

As an artist, how do you carry on with the struggle?  How do you keep showing up for your art and expressing it, putting it out there, to cause a perpetual thankless response?  What motivates you to become disliked, despised, belittled, isolated and shunned, by the simple act of creating the things you create?  Would you ever be able to choose a colour that makes everybody happy?  Of course not!  Could there ever be an idea, expressed through your art, which caused nobody any friction?  I don’t think so.  Such ideas would be so anodyne, banal, commonplace and ennui-inducing, that they barely qualify as new ideas at all.  In fact, they would be mere reinforcements of the terrible status quo that most artists fight, their whole lives.  Who wants to shore up a set of circumstances that holds so many people back from achieving their full potential?  Why would you work hard at it?

My art, at times, has been my ability to create software systems, or at least to motivate people to bring them into being and make them good.  How do you think it feels to know that all the hard work, sacrifice and personal integrity you attempted to apply to the task was in the service of tax avoiders and evaders – people who do this on a massive, unprecedented scale, short changing every one of us?  That’s the ultimate in working hard to do something with your art that keeps the world entirely the same as it was (i.e. unsatisfactory) and maybe a little worse.  Even if thanks were forthcoming (and they weren’t), it would feel like a hollow, pyrrhic sort of praise.  It would be thanks not worth having.

When discussing this with my wife, the conclusion we reached was that you do the thankless for only one reason.  You do it because you must.  There is a cosmic obligation upon you to say your piece, show others what you see and do what you know.  Your truths need to be recorded, for posterity, in case they ever guide even one person into a significantly better place.  If you happen to influence that one person that turns out to change everything for the better, it was worth the trouble.  You do the thankless, because there is no choice.  You are compelled to do so, as an artist.  The alternative is to not do art or to do art with a veneer of protective fakery, hiding what you really feel and think, masking your authenticity.  The alternative consigns you to perpetually sitting in front of your screen, impotently shouting, “Bastards!!”, as the world carries on a course you don’t want it to follow.  No, you do the thankless because we humans are programmed to dare greatly.

So next time you feel the despair of being alone in what you think or see, or think that your tribe is far away, nowhere near you and perhaps never will be, or conclude that nobody wants to know what you intuitively sense, don’t succumb to the loneliness and isolation.  It can be a frightening and barren place, I know, but you can survive there.  You have your art.  Don’t feel so in the minority that you must be wrong.  Yes, you might be, but if your intuition is strong and your research, learning, experience and reading leads you to think the ideas you think, it’s equally possible that you’re thinking and doing something that nobody has ever done before.  You might be the very first to travel this intellectual path.  You, alone, might have found the way.  You might be a pioneer.  Your artistic ideas could be original.  Imagine that.  Original.

You might be one of those artists that, in generations and centuries to come, people look upon as the first of a movement, the turning point in history and somebody with such audacious, daring, bold and courageous artistic statements to make, that they admire your tenacity in having done so, against a tide of vehement, violent disagreement.  Did anyone thank you, during your lifetime?  Probably not.

Of course, none of that can happen if you back away from your truths and fail to put them out there, seeking a quiet, conflict-free life.  You must create what you create, the only way you can, and screw the consequences.  You must do the thankless because you have no choice.  Otherwise, you’re not really an artist and your art isn’t really worth a damn.  Harsh, but true.  It’s not easy doing the thankless, but you have to do it anyway.

Humanity requires your truths.

If I Had My Life to Live Over

You sometimes hear people say “if I had my life to live over” I’d do this project or that thing differently.  It’s an expression of regret and also of an unwillingness to take immediate, drastic action.  It is another way of accepting your lot, the way it is.

Depending on your beliefs and convictions, it might be the case that you will never have your life to live over.  This could be it.  This could be the only one you’ve got.  If true, would you really be so complacent about continuing to do whatever it is you are doing, when you know full well that if you had your life to live over, you’d do something different?

Some people say “if I had my life to live over” as a way of saying they think it’s too late to change.  Why?  When is too late?  What age or date on the calendar?  Isn’t the real truth that you believe that it’s too late, or too difficult or that you aren’t going to be able to manage the change and transition?  Why should any of that be true today, whereas if you had made the change ten, twenty or thirty years (or weeks or days or minutes) ago, the path you should have taken would have been one you were capable of taking at the time?  What could possibly have changed for the worse, in all that time that now makes you incapable of switching tracks?  I would argue that today, you know more than you ever knew before.

Perhaps they mean they have become so hopelessly committed and entangled, that to do the other thing they wish they had done would require too many ties and relationships to change.  What are you?  Some kind of martyr, willing to lay your own life down selflessly to avoid everybody else you know having to come to a different accommodation with you?  Do you really think those that love you would abandon you because you suddenly went back and learned to programme, instead of remaining a book-keeper that spends all day in Excel?  Maybe you lack the confidence in yourself to try.  Do you think those that love you lack confidence in you?  If they do, do they really love you, or do they love that you are in a convenient situation for them, from their point of view?

The only life you have to live might be the remaining years you still have in front of you.  Why would you keep doing what you know you wouldn’t do, if you could have started on a different path earlier?  Isn’t every day that you spend on that unsatisfactory path just another day wasted?

Live your life as if there was no possibility of having it again, to live over.  You probably only have one life.

The Infinite Dance with Humanity

We all think about our art in different ways.  Those brought up to believe unquestioningly in market economies and in a culture of the self look at their art in what might be entirely the wrong way.  In this world view, you produce art and it is sold, like making something in a craft workshop.  End of story.  There is nothing else.  It’s a transaction.  Finite.  Closed.  A singular point in time.

To make it possible, it is believed, you have to muster all of your creative energy, even if that means neglecting to care and share with others, so that somebody can take your work, for money and go away and appreciate it quietly, somewhere else.  If you’re a performer, you might imagine that people come to see you, because you are wonderful and special, then you deliver your performance and that’s the end of it.  We all part and go our separate ways.

It probably isn’t really like that.

We are all, whether you acknowledge it or not, connected.  We share a culture, a zeitgeist and an environment.  We are one species, on one planet.  So far, we know of no other.  How we create our art (or anything else, for that matter, including things made in craft workshops or production assembly lines) and how it is perceived, appreciated, consumed, loved and what meaning it carries all ripple forward in time.  For a very long time.

Consider a painter.  The painting you make is actually due to the fact that somebody loved and nurtured you into life, taught you to appreciate your talents and nature’s beauty.  Somebody else may have showed you techniques and how to make your own aesthetic choices and made the opportunity for you to stand in front of an easel and paint.  You didn’t get there on your own.  You’re there as a proxy for everybody else that willed you to paint.  Even your materials came from somewhere else, where somebody took the time and trouble to make them for you to use.  If they cared about their manufacture, you can be assured that the paint is good, it will adhere for a long time, the colours won’t degrade, the pigment is consistently mixed with the medium and the paint is of a high quality.  The same applies to your canvas.  Your first brushstroke has already involved the love, support, integrity and care of a vast number of people, some of whom you will never meet.

What you paint, if it reaches an audience at all, continues to profoundly affect strangers for years.  Think of all those Monets and Van Goghs.  Those paintings are still hanging in galleries, astounding, inspiring, delighting and moving the emotions of people that weren’t even born when these painters died.  Their consequential impact goes on, long after their own demise.  Paintings by even the most obscure and unknown artists have this effect.  People see them, long after they were made and cannot help but feel something of the struggle that was involved in their making.  The beauty is evident for as long as the painting remains intact.  That can be a period of time of hundreds of years.

Think of dear Freddie Mercury.  Do you remember those concerts where he encouraged the audience to sing alternate lines of songs he had written?  Where had the song come from?  Was it from his imagination alone, or from his time?  What did that audience interplay mean?  Was that the spectacle of a person delivering a message in a one way traffic style, or was he playing with the audience, responding to them, interacting and enjoying a game that all were playing together, co-operatively?  Was the audience responding because they were ordered to, or were they returning the love to him, in gratitude for his music?  Did the music mean something to them because of how clever it was and how well crafted, or is it more likely that the song meant something, personally, to each member of that audience?  How many significant life moments were marked and associated with “Love of My Life”?  You see, while the song was made with a certain intention, it takes on its own life and meaning, when released to the public.  It becomes a shared, collective memory – a part of the culture, because of its personal, intimate associations that individuals make between the song and moments of importance to their own lives.

I’ve heard it said that you should drop contact with negative (meaning unhappy or sad) people, rather than have your creative energy drained by these so-called “misery vampires”.  They say you need to cut yourself off, as an island, so that you, alone, can continue to produce art.  Well, if we all do that, who heals humanity?  Who is left to comfort us, when terrible things happen to us?  When one of us is crying, all of humanity is in pain.  Surely for art to have any value at all, in the long run, it must be in the service of making humanity feel better, agitating to create a world in which terrible things happening to people is the exception, not a commonplace.  You can’t lock yourself away in your studio, make something to earn a few bucks and treat your audience as mere consumers, too stupid to create their own art, utterly dependent on your brilliance to provide any.  It isn’t like that at all.

You’re creating art because humanity provided you with that special privilege.  What humanity wants back is something and somebody that cares about them.  It has to be something that enlivens them, ignites, inspires, unites and connects them.  They want to be comforted in their sorrows.  They want a refuge in beauty, where there is ugliness.  They want calm, when they are distressed.  They want memorable milestones that they can attach their happiness and wonderment to, so that replaying the art brings those happy places and moments back to mind, vividly.  They want clarity and answers, when there is confusion.  They want to see a different way forward, when all avenues of enquiry and questioning have been stifled.  They want freedom, when there is constraint.  They want hope, when there is despair.  They want to return the love, when they feel the love.  They want to belong, when they have been alienated.  They want to feel powerful, through your art, when they are feeling powerless.  That’s the job of the artist.  And it never ends.  Your art, if it is made with integrity, has lasting value in this purpose.

So don’t be quick to see yourself as separate from humanity.  You aren’t.  You’re an intimate part of humanity and you are here to heal it, using the gifts and talents you have and were given, which can have such profound emotional impact.  Your art can start revolutions.  Your creative, positive energies are not yours alone, they are supplied and made possible by your community.  You do not have the right to treat others with disdain, judgement, cruelty, harshness, coldness or unfeeling callousness.  You already owe them better than that.  You’re here to give back through all that you have been given, through your art.

Love humanity as much as it is capable of loving you.  And that’s infinite, by the way.