It’s the New Year! 2012! Time to go out and buy a new Mayan calendar!
(Actually one has until December until the end of the current B’ak’tun, it seems. I wonder how Mayan Calendar vendors remember to stock up before the rush every 394 years or whatever it is.)
This year we made a mere 159 New Year dumplings (餃子, WordPress permitting), which is about the same number as in 2005, considerably more than in 2007, but significantly less than in recent years. We had somewhat more meat than dough (the kids are speaking of dumpling-meat patties), which traditionally means we will have enough food but not enough clothes in 2012, which is better than the main alternative.
Search o’ the Day: arrow in the meme. (You’re welcome!)
So I asked on “Facebook”: “How do you decide what to want?”.
Didn’t get much in the way of (substantive) answers (although I admit it’s fun that the two answers I did get were from a co-worker and a childhood friend who live on like different continents). It seems like a very important question. As questions go.
On some piece of paper somewhere, maybe not in digital form anywhere, I wrote something about some part of Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” I think it was, about how soldiers returning from war could find the ordinary world meaningless or arbitrary; I think I wrote that this is likely because they had been in a context where they had to spend alot of time just thinking about survival, and when that need then went away they were left with only less compelling reasons for action.
So (I’m writing very stream-of-consciousness here) we can think about ascending ol’ Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where it’s more or less obvious what to do when we’re down at the Physiological level (find air, find food), and for that matter the Safety level (get further from the tigers, put up walls), and as we get higher up it becomes sort of less obvious, more arbitrary, less compelling. And if we make the mistake of thinking about what to want, rather than just wanting what’s expected, we may find nothing to speak of under our feet.
How do you decide what to want? Your ancestors all wanted to have children who would in turn have children, or at least they all did that, or they wouldn’t be your ancestors. The intellectual ancestors of your beliefs and attitudes all wanted to pass their beliefs and attitudes down to later generations, or at least they all did that, or they wouldn’t be the intellectual ancestors of your beliefs and attitudes.
So there’s a strong (what?) evolutionary tendency to want to have and raise children, and/or to pass one’s beliefs and attitudes down to later generations. But we don’t necessarily want to follow that evolutionary tendency. Or, we don’t have to want to follow that tendency; it’s not mandatory or required, it’s merely easy and obvious. (Easy and obvious to make that choice, that is; the actual doing of it may be hard and subtle.)
Somewhere when I was even younger :) I wrote down “the is-ought connection is choice”. And I think that’s true; choice, or the lack of choice, the slipping into the default choice. But how do you choose? How do I choose? How, especially, if one of the things that we’re choosing is the deepest basis for our own choice-making?
It seems like the choice must either be arbitrary, or (which may be the same thing) must be based on things that are so fundamental that we don’t get to choose about them however hard we might try (ingrained preferences that we can’t get beyond, or can’t want to get beyond, intrinsic tendencies that are too deep down even to represent as preferences).
So, hm. Am I an Existentialist now? :)
I think I have probably written all of this down before, and it’s not clear what there is to say about it next, or what to do beyond writing it down and mentally putting it in your pocket, for the next time it comes up. So now I’ve done that again.
Tamara de Lempicka. Just sayin’.
ceoln 