Category Archives: lifestyle

After the golden age

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Collect the small moments that make you smile, that make you feel warm inside, that make you think “I am glad I did that”. They may not show up in your budget or even in your obituary; but when you go to die, they will make a world of difference.

I realized this spring:  I have pretty much stopped warning people about the economy, as I routinely did before. It is too late for that.  Instead, I will concentrate on the gospel of finding happiness in small things. Because small things is all most of you will be able to afford in the coming age.

The age of growth is over in the USA and its closest allies.  But there are still those who just dig in and hope for the golden age to return. It won’t.

“Our golden age has ended; so say our analysts.” A familiar phrase for those who played the strategy game Civilization. Based on thousands of years of history, the second version of the game incorporated the idea of “golden ages” for each civilization. There certainly seems to be something to it. In any case, the US and its best friends had a glorious one, better than any time in known history. So let us not be bitter. All things that have form come to an end; strive diligently!

***

Riches come and go; customs and fashions change; the values of one generation differ from the next; even languages drift over time. But there are many joys that have existed since the dawn of history. Already Aristotle wrote glowingly about the greatness of friendship. It is just as great today, and for the time being at least, we have a rare ability to make friends all over the world. This is amazing. But to be able to visit a friend or invite a friend or a few, to listen to them talking and see their smiles (and occasionally frowns), is just as great as it was more than 2000 years ago.

The beauty of nature is still available to most, thought it is not right outside the door for all. But even a park can be a place of beauty, yes, even a backyard. Flowers grow even indoors, and the clouds in the sky are still free.

Do you remember when you were a kid and enjoyed a blank piece of paper and some crayons? (Well, unless you grew up in the age of computers, I guess.) Crayons are still affordable for pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world, long may it last! You may even be able to get your hands on some good watercolor sets. I can’t count how many hours I spent drawing and painting when I was a kid, although I have less than no talent for it; in fact, I may literally be brain-damaged in that regard. I still enjoyed it, and if I could, so can you.

For those who enjoy listening to music, the golden age has definitely not ended. There may not be much good music created lately, but the music from the past is still around, reaching centuries back for those so inclined, although some prefer to stop in the 80es or 60es. Your taste may vary, but there sure is a lot of music in this world! And should you want to make your own, there are various instruments that don’t require a huge expense, at least not until you reach the level where you want to perform in public. And if it is the day before payday, hopefully you still have your singing voice!

If you have read this far, you are definitely good at reading, so you may want to borrow a book at the library or from a friend. Be a friend and lend someone a book, if they are not known for vandalizing them at least. And there are books you may want to buy, when you can afford them, because they are worth reading not just twice, but many times throughout your life and in generations to come as well.

I will not go on and on, but if you don’t hate people, there is no reason to live and die unhappy. This world is a good place and every day the sun rises again, even the days when you can’t see it. Be calm, be friendly, forgive mistakes as you also make mistakes, create something, give a gift or a word of appreciation, and live with light in your heart. It is cheap and your happiness will last for this life and, I believe, into the next.

 

Climate change of mind

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Now that I have your attention – it HAS got a little bit warmer, hasn’t it? Just not in the USA, according to a recent study.

Today I read an article in The Economist, about some scientists who had calculated that food prices were currently around 5% higher than they would have been without the global warming of the latest two decades.

This is a difficult thing to calculate, of course, and was probably wrong. There is a lot of marginal land that becomes worth farming if food prices stay high for a while, whereas if prices remain low, land may be laid fallow more easily. If prices should continue to rise, it may become economically viable to use new forms of agriculture, such as vertical farming. The world could easily feed 20 billion people if these were people who produced valuable goods and services, so that anyone would be bothered to grow the food to sell them. Facing a beggar bowl however does not motivate farmers to invest.

In fact, there is not a lack of food on Earth even today. There is a lack of money to buy food among some people, but less so than ten years ago, not to mention twenty or fifty. Today, obesity is a health risk to more humans than is starvation.

What we most need then, is not to reverse the physical climate change. I would not mind if we did something about that too, but it is not the most urgent. Rather, we should do something about the cultural climate. The climate of the mind, for each of us and for society as a whole.

For instance, we know that producing meat is in most cases far less efficient than growing plants. There are in fact some areas which are best used for pastures, but a large number of the meat animals in the world eat grain, soy and other food that is edible for humans.  While strict vegetarianism does pose some health challenges, most Americans and Europeans could halve their meat intake and halve it again without experiencing any discomfort. In fact, they would probably feel more energetic and enjoy better health and a longer life. And it would lower the food prices in the world, faster than reversing climate change would.

To permanently end starvation, however, there needs to be a culture change in the countries where starvation is widespread. There has to be an end to war and oppression in these places, so people again dare work without fear that their work will be stolen or destroyed by enemies. This is the fundamental requirement. There are various things that can be done after that, but this is what must be done first. You cannot grow food on a battlefield.

When I say that these countries need to change, you may hear it as “blame the victim”.  It is certainly true that the rich world could have dealt better with other parts in the past, and should do so in the future. But there will be no food to the starving by paying reparations to a dictator or by fanning the flames of war. There is only so much outsiders can do until the people themselves can agree on a philosophy of live and let live, at the very least. This is the task of religion, philosophy and art, to teach humans to live in this world without losing control of their own aggression. You cannot simply substitute money for any or all of these factors. There needs to be a widespread change of mind.

***

As you can see, I do not wish to teach something that is entirely remote and out of our hands. There are things that people in poor nations have to do for themselves, and there are things we can do as a society, but there are also things we can do as individuals, even at our dinner table. These things are not different and separate. Whether it is in Norway or the USA or Congo, we all have to cultivate a mind that accepts other people as real and precious.

I think I mentioned when it happened, a few years ago. As I prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and came to the point “give us today our daily bread”, the Lord reminded me that I was not praying “give ME today MY daily bread”. This is the kind of awareness we need to have at the dinner table. What we choose to eat or not eat has effects on us, our families, our society, and the entire world.

Likewise when we come home from work and decide whether to sit down in front of the flat-screen or do some exercise, these decisions made by each of us has a profound effect on the national health care expense.

And of course, our energy use and transportation has some effect on the atmosphere. (Although not necessarily the way you think! For instance, if you are a meat-eater, biking actually causes more greenhouse gas emission than driving a small car, because of the large amount of greenhouse gas that goes into your food. Or to take another example, transport by ship and rail gives off very little CO2 compared to the mass and distance of transportation, so that buying something from halfway around the globe could cause less emissions than something made locally, if it was made more efficiently in the other place.)

There are a lot of things to learn, and there will be disagreement about details. This cannot be avoided. But we need a climate change of the heart, with much more warmth than before. Then we will surely find a way forward for everyone, starting at home and spreading around the world.

After “peak everything”

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There will probably be trains for a long, long time. And there will always be light from above, all the more beautiful through the clouds.

It could have been a coincidence that the next two entries after “Peak everything” were a collection of pretty (?) nature pictures and an entry about religious studies. But actually I wanted to come back to this topic again, and I want to point out how these two are continuations of what I ended that entry with: There are many sources of happiness that don’t depend on having lots of oil and copper.

Of course, most people today depend on such limited resources directly or indirectly to do their job, and earn money to pay their bills, buy food and have a place to live. So to varying degree, even the simple pleasures depend on a civilization that is based on excessive consumption. However, this lifestyle is not set in stone. We can adapt sooner and be seen as weirdos, or we can adapt later and with considerable pain.

If your job depends on driving a lot, you may be in trouble. No matter how intensely you wish for cheap gas, it won’t happen, or at least not without some global disaster that makes the recent debt crisis seem like a walk in the park. On the other hand, electric cars are already available, and hybrid cars, and even gas-powered cars that use much less fuel than average.  So it is not obvious that you will have to change your job. However, you will probably have less money left by payday no matter what. And if you plan to change your job or plan to move, travel cost should definitely be on your mind. There is no reason to react with stunned surprise when the gas price doubles again, which you will definitely experience unless you die an untimely death.

Again, it is not like you wake up one day to a post-apocalyptic dystopia from a horror movie. It is a gradual change, where you have to pinch more pennies than last month, where you have to consider things you did not consider before. At some point you may want to make drastic lifestyle changes. Or you may wait for the government to fix it all for you so everything goes back to “normal”, in which case I hope your sanity gets better soon. But by and large, the end of the golden age is like the end of a spring day here in Norway and the onset of night: So slow and gradual that you can never quite say when the day ends and the night begins, but it still comes eventually.

There are those who say you should grow your own food, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is feasible. It is probably good for you and the planet both. There are those who say you should look for a way to work from home, and that is certainly a good idea if your education and skills allow it. But that won’t be possible for all people, certainly not right away. It will gain wider acceptance over time, no doubt, but if you’re a nurse you can’t work over the Internet any time soon.

What is important at this time is to gain a broad insight in the nature and scale of the changes we face. To not blindly believe that the future will be like the past, only more so. That has never been the case, but it will be even less true now.

Barring some global disaster, electricity will still be widely available at an affordable price. Perhaps not as cheap as today, and perhaps the prices will fluctuate very rapidly, with the price twice as high at some times of the day, but overall it should be widely available. So there should be no reason to prepare for a life without electricity.  Silicon is also one of the most common elements on the planet, so it seems likely that computers and similar electronics will be widely available. They may get slightly less efficient as certain rare metals become scarce, but there may also be new inventions that offset this and then some.

Transportation by car and plane are among the things that are going to be worst hit, as peak oil is already a fact and will only get worse over time. Bulk transport by ship and train however are quite efficient in terms of energy use, so don’t expect China to stop shipping stuff across the Pacific. In fact, even if oil disappeared completely, it would still be good business to ship stuff by steamship or even sail rather than make everything locally. Railroads are also highly efficient, and largely use electricity already. Globalization is not going to fall victim to this scarcity, although I suppose it could fall victim to something else, like an actual war.

Electric cars may replace gas and diesel cars at an extra cost that most people can live with. But electric planes are highly unlikely. If you are young, I would not recommend choosing a career closely associated with flight.

By and large, however, what we can expect is a gradual decline in material wealth. Expenses will increase, income stagnate. All people who depend on sales, directly or indirectly, will be affected when people have less money to spend on what they want. Since resources are more expensive, factories and farms will also give less profit. So everywhere there will be stagnation and a gentle slide toward poverty. Unemployment is likely to remain high, and even increase for a while. New jobs will be different from the old and mostly pay less.

In this situation, it is good to keep in mind that we can live happily without being rich. It is a long way from today’s first world standards down to abject poverty, and there is no reason why we should ever hit the bottom if we as a society live with even a little wisdom. If I am alive ten years from now, it is not certain that I can afford to live alone in a house in the countryside anymore. But I can still find sources of happiness, Light willing. Whether it is potted plants, drawing with crayons or reading again books that deserve a second or twentieth reading, it does not require a lot of money to enjoy oneself. Think back to when you were a child, how little it took to bring you joy!  If anything, you should be better at it now, after decades of living and learning. Start thinking this way before need forces you. That way your happiness will be without interruption.

More fun with surveys

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“You have to sit in a block of steel which moves at an unbelievable speed.” -This is actually pretty much how I feel about cars. You can probably not even imagine how I feel about TV.  Let us say that references to the Apocalypse come unbidden to my mind…

Synovate, my provider of Norwegian surveys, sent me another one. This time I may win an iPad! Somehow I don’t think that will happen. Actually I suspect all of my surveys are quietly filtered out at the very beginning of the processing. There is probably some algorithm that scans the results and rejects those that are obviously not made by a human. And that’s where I think mine go.

This time it was TV. I managed to answer the two first questions, which were about names of cable TV providers, of which I knew 3. It went downhill from there.
Do you have…
O – Digital TV
O – Analog TV
O – Don’t know
I don’t even have a TV, and I know that quite well! Still, my best hope for the iPad was to pick the least misleading. So from there on and out the survey it was “Don’t know”.

It is not the first time.
What brand of car does your household have? “I don’t know” (don’t have a car).
What part of the world did you go on vacation last year? “I don’t know” (don’t go on vacations).
Which radio programs do you listen to? “I don’t know” (don’t listen to radio).
Which newspapers do you subscribe to? “I don’t know” (none).
Which of the following movie ads have you seen? “I don’t know” (don’t go to the movies).
What do you think of the following soap operas (or something like that)? “I don’t know” (still don’t have a TV).
Which readymade dinner do prefer? “I don’t know” (don’t buy readymade dinner).
Which air plane company did you last use and why? “I don’t know” (it’s been 25 years after all).
And so on and so forth.

It isn’t exactly that I am dead to the world. If they asked me what mobile phones I used, I could answer them. They did in fact once ask me about web services, and I did answer. (But I did not win anything…) I could probably still say something about computers, unless they included the “last 12 months” as they sometimes do. I also once recognized some snacks! Admittedly most of them were familiar names from before the fat intolerance, but I still occasionally buy some small snack.  And I have pretty strong opinions on soda (Pepsi Raw / Natural is The Best!).

So I don’t subsist entirely on water, spiritual books and City of Heroes. But evidently I am still far from normal. I am not sure that is a bad thing, though.

Mind to mind

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Are you a bioluminiscent girl in real life too?

G.K. Chesterton writes (“In Defense of Ugly Things”): “There are some people who state that the external, sex or physique, of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people will not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.”

I suspect this was spot on, throughout the thousands of years before the Internet. Now, however, I have numerous buddies (I can’t really call them close friends, but more so than my neighbors and almost all of my coworkers) who I have never seen even in a picture. These are people I have met on blogs, forums, mailing lists, USENET groups, or in online games. In some cases I don’t know the gender; in some cases I think I know it, but I may be wrong. In most cases I don’t know the color of their skin, the color of their hair, whether they are thin or fat, sometimes even not whether or not they are in a wheelchair.

Let me be honest. If I had actually met them in the flesh, it would almost certainly have colored my impression of what they said afterwards. I’m not really happy about this, but I am still that much human. I might be able to correct my mind to compensate for my prejudices, but probably not exactly. And of course even now I may have some idea about how they look, at least in some cases, on a subconscious level. But by and large, it is indeed a communication of mind with mind.

We live in an age of wonders. Many things that seemed not even miraculous but flat out impossible in the 1930es are now taken for granted. And the Internet is one of them. Actually, the Internet is many of them, and perhaps will be many more in the years that still remain for our civilization.

Food consciousness

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Having a spare stomach for cake, dessert etc is actually quite common. How does this work?

What I reveal today is a truth that can change lives and even make life much longer and more enjoyable for many. Even if you don’t need it, bookmark this or save it, print it, and share it with a friend. Or better yet, understand it so deeply that you can tell them in your own words. But if not, printing is OK. In fact, I explicitly allow you to copy this to your own website.

Science tells us that only about 5% of those who lose weight through diets, actually keep the weight off. I hope these numbers are adjusted for those who in the meantime have taken up smoking, or got some chronic illness to their digestion, or changed to a physically demanding job. Because if not, the number would be around 0%.

Another scientific fact is as least as puzzling: Different diets give roughly the same results, even opposite diets. So if you pick a high-fat, low-carbs diet and your identical twin picks a low-fat high-carbs diet, you are likely to lose weight at around the same rate.

It gets better. One of the most effective “diets” has actually nothing to do with what you eat. Eating in front of a mirror is one of the surest ways to return to a healthy weight for those who are prone to overeating. A more time consuming but less insane looking alternative is a food diary, as detailed as possible, including all meals and all snacks. There is no need to restrain yourself, just make sure to never eat anything without writing it down.

A final piece of this puzzle: Studies show that people who eat in front of the computer or the TV (if it is on) eat about twice as much as if eating in the kitchen or dining room.

I actually had the privilege of seeing this in action when visiting a highly intelligent friend once. He devoured a bag of chips on front of the TV, and later that night accused his daughter of having taken it. Needless to say, this man lived a constant “battle of the bulge” over his belt.

But I have seen a much worse case. I worked for over a year at an institution for alcoholics. One of the patients had for some reason drunk methanol instead of ethanol some years earlier, and blown his long-term memory. He could hold a reasonably sane conversation, as he could remember the last minute or so. But what happened and hour ago was left to his imagination. This included any meals he had eaten and not just recently finished. So he would eat them again. Any attempts to convince him otherwise were ignored.

We imagine that the feeling of being fed comes from the physical pressure or weight of the food in our stomach, but this is only for the first minutes after a large meal. Pretty soon the contentment actually comes from the brain. The level of blood sugar does signal a recent meal, but that does not last long, and may soon turn worse than nothing. At that point, your subconscious uses your memory to determine how fed you are. This fact completes the puzzle. The picture is now clear.

The higher your “food consciousness”, the more precise your appetite.

In the past, food was a scarce resource. Eating was not something you did to while away the time, or because you had your hands free. Filling your stomach was an occasion of joy, and surrounded by ritual. Thanks were given to the spirits, all of the family was together (and in earlier times often the whole clan or village in case of a large feast). Everyone knew that eating your fill was not a basic human condition like breathing. It was something worthy of notice.

The human operation system still works the same way as in that not so distant past. But these days, food is often beneath notice. It is eaten alone while we read through the latest report from management. And so, like in the unfortunate alcoholic I mentioned, the meal never quite enters long-term memory.

When you start a new diet, you pay a lot of attention to your eating. By chance, you somewhat duplicate the conditions of the past, and your body and mind become aligned. But after a while the awareness fades, and your brain goes “What food? I don’t remember any food” and so you eat again.

Yes, there are certain illnesses that severely warp the metabolism and make a person prone to obesity (or the opposite). But they do not count in the tens of millions in one country alone! These things are more like people being born with fur or an unusual number of fingers. Diets are unlikely to have much influence in such a case, I fear. But for the normal human, raising food consciousness to its natural level is definitely worth a try.  Especially when the alternative so often is to live hungry or die early.

As a final note, I feel obliged to mention that the body is in any case a temporary dwelling, and we would be well advised to raise other forms of consciousness to a higher level than that of our food. But those who want to hear that can hear about it another day, or somewhere else. Take this for today.

Carbohydrate gluttony

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So good! Eating is a primal pleasure, and these days, when it is no longer regulated by religion, it is still held in check by social taboos and personal complexes.  But not for everyone, I guess…

A few hundred years ago, in the Middle Ages, gluttony was considered one of seven Deadly Sins: A transgression against God and natural order, so heinous that the sinner would go straight to Hell. Those who kept doing such things were thrown out of the church and shunned by good people.  I guess it is kind of like racism today. It is something you just don’t do if you care at all about your soul, or your reputation, or common decency.

Today, people rarely even say grace as they sit down with a double whopper cheese with fries. As in so many ways, objective measures have replaced the commandments of Heaven. Now, the commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Be Fat!”  In the modern mind, it is the life of the body rather than the soul that is in danger, but you still face the threat of excommunication – not from the Church, but from your circle of friends, or at least polite society. (Your friends will generally forgive you if you grow fat at roughly the same rate as they do.)

Now for the “carbohydrate” part. Regular readers may remember that humans really suck at making fat from carbohydrates (or “carbs” as they are known these days – sugars and starches). The only notable exception is fructose (as in “corn sugar”), which can be transformed into fat in the liver. This is a slow process though, and in practice the difference between the carbs rarely matters. Normally we all eat a mixture of carbs, fats and proteins.  In this situation, the body has the foresight to burn most carbs, which are hard to store in the body.  (It can be stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen, but only enough for about a day’s use. Fat, in contrast, can be stored for years.)

Basically, the more you shift the balance of your diet toward carbs, the more your body burns carbs and stores fat.  If you go the other way, eating almost only fat, the body can use fat as a substitute for sugar too. Even the brain can run on fat in a pinch, although it usually uses only sugar.  But during normal life, we burn carbs quickly and fat slowly.

Of course, not all of us are normal. I, for instance, fall ill if I eat more than tiny amounts of fat. But I can eat lots and lots of carbs with no ill effects, or at least none that I can discern. And I don’t become fat. If I eat more sugar than I need, I just burn it off harmlessly, at least as long as it is “real” sugar and not fructose. So unless you actually watch me work my way through the cola, candy and sweet desserts, there is nothing to betray my gluttony.

Today my conscience is pretty good, though. According to my pulse watch, I burned some 1060 calories (kcal in Europe) on shoveling snow and walking to the grocer’s.  That will take its SWEET time gaining back – carbs have only half as much energy as fat, and 1000 calories is quite noticeable: That’s half as much as an average woman burns in a whole day (24 hours). Imagine eating 12 hours’ worth of food extra, and having to avoid anything fatty. No cakes, nothing with cream, no sauces, only tiny specks of chocolate. Do you think you could do it?

Diversity of ignorance

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It may not have turned out the way I planned when I was 12, but at least I got this part right!

Once again, Bjørn Stærk has an astounding little entry in his blog. When thinking of this man, to my mind comes the expression from the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 11: “…illumination, insight and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods were found in him.” (In all fairness, the wisdom of the gods at that time was perhaps less impressive than we might wish for in a god today.) There is, to once again reference the book of Daniel, “a high spirit in him”. This is even though he is not religious in the traditional sense. I am not sure if I have any part in that lack of religion: We have had communication since many years ago, and he may be one of those who picked up my habit of meditation, which is more transformative than I knew at that time.

Be that as it may, you should make a habit of keeping track of this man. Even when I am gone, he is likely to continue to illuminate the world, for he is many years my junior, and yet in some ways ahead of me.

Trying to be ignorant about different things than everyone else is a short and concise argument for diversity of knowledge. He does not belabor the point that we today have an astounding diversity of knowledge in our work, and that a shared knowledge base in our free time may help retain social cohesion. I largely agree with him: There is if anything less diversity in the freetime of the non-knowledge workers, so it seems to me.

I remember when I was about 12 years old, I decided to learn unusual things, so that my future wife and I together would cover a large spectrum of knowledge. I don’t think this decision has contributed much to me still being single nearly 40 years later — there are too many other reasons for that — but it may have contributed to my happiness. Some familiarity with mainstream knowledge is bound to seep in even from basic socialization, so even alone I have some of that spread of insight that I aimed for. And I love it.

But go read at Bearstrong.net, there is indeed light and insight like the wisdom of small gods. Although he has diversified out of writing only that, it is still a good place to graze.

tl;dr

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Pick one or another! People only read blogs that cater to their particular narrow interest, so should I stop writing about a thousand different things?

The dreaded acronym tl;dr means “too long; didn’t read”. I hope the use of an acronym was originally ironic: If not, it shows the sad state of impatience that is widespread in the world.  As I mentioned last time, this is not entirely due to the Internet: The TV remote and the crazy jumpy nature of TV programming has prepared us for the world of soundbites.

But this time is not about how we got here. This time is about what I should do about it.

I have written literally thousands of journal entries. By coincidence, or inspiration, or copying Debra, I have included a picture at the start of my entries from the very beginning. This was smarter than I knew, because I know today that people turn and run at the sight of a huge screen of text. A pretty or funny picture puts them in the mood to stay long enough to overcome the backspace reflex, and possibly read some of the text.

That said, even I reached the tl;dr point of my own journal after about ten years.  That’s why I went on hiatus, and that’s why I eventually shifted my journal to WordPress.  The old HTML setup was great, arguably better in some ways.  But the link to the years-ago entries (1 year ago, 2 years ago, …, 9 years ago…) caused me to go back and read those.  And when I had done that, the day was pretty much gone. I did not have time to write a new entry too. So I stopped.

If even I cannot read this mountain of text I have produced, who else will?

One problem is that the quality varies randomly.  Not just the content, but the quality.  The content is one thing, you cannot expect someone who came for the Sims to stay and read about spiritual practices.  (Although the Sims do yoga and meditation…) But even when writing on the same topic, sometimes I write better than other times.

And of course I change over time, and facts change over time. So I may contradict myself, when I don’t repeat myself.

Perhaps I should just keep adding seemingly random stuff at this end of the journal, and leave to historians of the future to try to organize it. I mean, who else would, when even I myself can’t imagine going through it all?

Or perhaps I should split off different categories into different blogs. Actually I already have that.  I have a pretty much purely spiritual blog in English, a personal and a political / philosophical blog in Norwegian (that I rarely write in), I have my Sims blog on LiveJournal, I have Twitter and FaceBook. But I could go further.

I have considered  making a more systematic overview of my philosophy of the mind. A kind of one-man Wiki perhaps, with links between the different parts that relate to each other.  Or perhaps something more similar to a book, which imposes a kind of narrative and presents my thoughts in order.

Then again, should I really do that for the couple readers who don’t come just for the pictures?  If it is that important, historians of the future will do it.  If it is too long, people won’t read it anyway, right?

tl;dr: I don’t know how much work I should put into writing for a generation that does not read.

From Jennicam to Happy Science

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“You never thought angels wore business suits,” says Edison in the anime “The Laws of Eternity”. Well, I am starting to see lots of angels around, even if some of them may be angels only for me.

Stephen Jay Gould is famous for his claim that if we could rewind evolution and run it again, we would end up with a completely different biosphere, and certainly not with anything resembling humans. I have to admit that my life looks a lot like that too. But strangely, both evolution and I somehow moved in the right direction, as if subtly influenced by some Great Attractor far beyond our sight. Today I will regale you with the tale of how I ended up with half a bookshelf full of Ryuho Okawa’s books. It is almost as unlikely as life itself!

I know exactly where my reality branched off from what should normally have happened. It was the day I bought, on a whim, an issue of the Norwegian magazine Komputer. It was a magazine for owners of home computers, and this was back when the World Wide Web was fairly new here in Norway. One of the fascinating sights on this new medium was Jennicam. Jenni was a young American woman – a student back when she started this – who lived her life on webcam. She had cameras in both the living room and the bedroom, taking one picture a minute throughout the day and night. People watched her spend her days in front of the computer, and nights sleeping.

I was one of the curious people who checked out her web site after reading about it in Komputer. Naturally I would be curious about what women actually do, strange and unfamiliar beings that they are. Unlike some of her viewers for sure, my curiosity was not primarily sexual, although I did collect a few nice, small (by today’s standard) pictures of her butt, usually in jeans. Pretty tame, I guess. My “buttpic of the month” was a homage to her for getting me started down the path to my own journal.

It was another girl of the same sort, Debra of Soyaratcam (New Zealand) who actually showed me how to do it. She was also living a pretty tame life on the web in the same style, but then her software broke down. For many days, she could not show the automatic pictures of her life. So she wrote a few lines and had a typical picture from the day on top. I pretty much adopted her format, down to the size of the picture, in my original JPG diary. (I think I even took that phrase from her. I searched the Web but found no one else who had it, so for months I thought I was the only one in the world after she went back to her webcam and eventually disappeared.)

After some months, I happened upon another like me. I found that they did not call their diaries diary but “journal”. Searching on this revealed a small community of several hundred people. This was before the age of the blog, so that was pretty much the world population of online diaries at the time. We were pioneers. But more pioneer than I was Al Schroeder, author of the journal Nova Notes. You will find numerous references to this in my early archives. We were strikingly similar in temperament and outlook, despite living on different continent, and despite him being married to a fellow geek and having three sons, two of which were autists. OK, that may be a similarity rather than a difference: It seems now that autism, or at least the main form of it, comes from geeks having children with each others. The same genes that make people smart and able to concentrate, in double dose causes them to become hypersensitive and apt to disappear into their own world.

I counted Schroeder as a friend for several years, and I guess I still do, but he eventually stopped writing his journal to concentrate on his online comics. Before he got that far, however, he had already established contact with other web comic artists, and started to review some of them. One of the first was Sinfest, which despite its name is not about a lot of sin but a kind of philosophical comic with stereotypical people and frequent appearances by God, angels and the Devil. There is a surprising dignity to it, for a humorous comic. I never saw any malice in it, even as it relentlessly revealed human folly in its many forms. If it had not been that good, Schroeder would not have recommended it, and neither would I have continued looking at other online comics.

But I did. I started reading lots of them for a while. Over time, it became common to have forums where readers could write about their impressions, and this often turned into general discussions about life, the universe and everything. Many of the comic creators were college students, and so were many of their readers. Intelligent, curious and often lonely, they were interesting people to get to know. I made many of my online friends this way. And especially from the Acid Reflux forum. Despite its name, it was not about the illness (which I also have to some degree) but a comic that seemed to attract particularly interesting readers. It also saw two of those readers marry each other, and then two more. But unfortunately the writer and the artists did not. So it came to an end, but not before putting me on the next path.

One of my friends there was very enthusiastic about something called “anime”. It turned out to be Japanese cartoon movies. Both these and comic books are even more popular in Japan than here, perhaps because their books are written in an extremely hard to read script, with a mix of sound signs and concept signs. In any case, this girl was in love with these cartoons. She also fell in love with one of the guys on the forum – not me, luckily for them both – and they are still married. But I had found a new interest. While I read very few online comics anymore (mostly those by Al Schroeder, actually), I watch anime fairly regularly.

Japanese culture certainly is fascinating. It is different but still kind of understandable. It is also very varied. Here in Scandinavia at least, Japanese manga (comics) and anime (cartoon movies) are mostly famous for sexually explicit content. The line between pornography and art goes quite a bit further to the sexy side in Japan, it seems. It is perfectly normal for non-religious anime to have random sightings of girls’ panties, for instance. In all fairness, Japanese school uniform skirts really are that short, so in school buildings with stairs it may well happen much the same way in real life. I am not sure why they do this. Then again, it is a foreign country.

I don’t watch anime for that purpose. (That would be crossing the river for water, seeing how I live in Scandinavia, but I also try to live with some degree of self-control when it comes to such things, despite being single.) My favorite are humorous slice of life movies. Luckily there are many of those too.

I was expecting something like that when a fellow anime fan shared a copy of the anime The Laws of Eternity last year. It seemed to be an interesting adventure by a bunch of friends who more or less by accident end up in the spirit world. Well, it is that, but mainly it is a way to visualize the teachings of the religious organization Happy Science (Kofuku no Kagaku, literally “Science of Happiness”). This particular movie was about the spirit world, which can be seen as both the afterlife and our state of mind while we are alive. The attitudes of the various heavens or hells are actually found in people alive in this world, and I could recognize them easily.

This was how I bumped into Happy Science, and I was surprised by the effect of the movie. I watched it repeatedly, sometimes twice in the same day, something I almost never do. I felt that watching it made it easier to live the way I wanted to in my daily life. I have tried to buy this and other movies from the organization, but this seems to be hard to do for an individual. They probably have their reasons for that, though I don’t know what.

Google Books lets you read a few scattered pages of a book online if the publisher allows this. That is the case with the English translations of the Happy Science books. By reading those few pages, I realized that these books were even more inspiring than the movie. They were more practical and down to earth, an everyday wisdom that added to the understanding I had gained through my own Christianity. Seeing the same things from a different perspective gave me a sense of depth that I had lacked before, or at least had less of.

I am still not sure what to say about this, or what will happen with my life from here on out. But this came into my life just when I was finally ready to understand it. If not for idly buying that magazine that day, it is quite unlikely that I would have bumped into them in my lifetime.

There are many such “coincidences” in my life. But then again there are many such coincidences in the world. Suspiciously many, don’t you think?