Chronicle of black_son_of_gray's failures

[7Wannabe5]

I suppose ERE itself is an example: the incorrect perception being "money == quality of life" and the missing third element being "skills"?

Or maybe "love."

[mountainFrugal]

@mountainFrugal - "participating as a citizen on a search" How did you hear about that? By that I mean, if I could just get on a listserv...

I would try contacting the local branch of whatever SAR group and see if they allow it. Living in a rural area and knowing the land from spending a lot of time in the backcountry was how I got involved. It was a friend of a friend that went missing after a mountain bike ride. There was a formal search and our small crew of "citizens/locals" just self organized and tracked our GPS tracks for where we had searched. We sent the files to the sheriff who had them updated on the large search perimeter map. We did 4 full days of search and on the last day were "assigned" an area that was under-searched, but the missing person had spent time there in the last year. We did not find him or a corpse, but the trained SAR team found his bike and some gear as part of the grid search. There is a larger speculative narrative there, but it was turned over to the Sheriff's department after the search was called off.

[black_son_of_gray]

So my partner has been researching into the qualifications/training required for search and rescue dogs, with the thought that she might want to raise and train a puppy for that eventual purpose. (This is a very big commitment of time/effort.)

An update: my partner was able to pick the brain of someone locally who does dog search and rescue. California has just under 40 million people and (if I'm remembering correctly) something like 140 trained dog/handler pairs.

The training is super time and resource intensive, and the handler my partner spoke to said she has to drive over 100 miles several times a weeks for special training. You might be thinking, who can afford to do all this work (the search and rescue teams are not compensated)? The woman (in her 50s) said she was fortunate enough to have retired early .

As far as dogs that are suitable, the answer is: very, very few. If you want to do this, it is highly encouraged to work with a breeder who specializes in these types of dogs. What you will almost certainly end up with is: 1) A 40-80lb dog, 2) of a certain narrow range of 'working' breed that naturally has a high 'work drive', and 3) a dog among (2) that is bred to be particularly high in 'work drive'. Basically, you want a large, powerful, smart, agile dog that just won't give up on the task before it. You will note that these properties do not generally make for great house pets.

Speaking of which, if you are looking for a pet dog that is a good fit with your home environment/lifestyle, might I suggest fostering a few from your local shelter before adopting? We have been doing this for about half a year now, and we both have come to the conclusion that it's a very good idea:

1) It helps out the shelter.
2) It helps out the dog. Which is to say, your house and the attention provided is probably much better than a kennel. Also, most of the dogs we've fostered have particular reasons for a better/calmer environment: recovering from surgery, or puppies too young to adopt out, etc.
3) It gives you exposure to care-taking needs of different ages. E.g. People think they want young puppies. Puppies are insane.
4) It gives you a chance to actually see the dog's temperament/personality. This usually starts to come out after a week or two in a new home. That gentle sweetheart at the kennel might just be a shell-shocked, high-energy maniac once they come out of it.
5) At least with our shelter, they supply all the vet care, food, toys, pee pads, etc. that you might need during the duration.

In conclusion, it is very unlikely that we will be raising/training a search and rescue dog in the near future.

[jacob]

Basically, you want a large, powerful, smart, agile dog that just won't give up on the task before it. You will note that these properties do not generally make for great house pets.

On the other hand, a small, weak, silly, and clumsy dog makes for a great house pet and can also be used as an armrest.

[ffj]

Having been on a fair number of searches that included dogs, I have no doubt that the dog can smell just about anything. The problem arises when the handler interprets what the dog is saying. To say that the whole field is an imperfect science is being generous. I love dogs and am amazed at their capability but I couldn't help but notice that the dog teams didn't produce the results we wanted. It's been a few years and in fairness they were always volunteer dog handlers so maybe my slice of reality was skewed. I'm a little salty about it because every time the dog "hit" on something then that created a lot of work for us with no results most times. Reviewing the after action report with what the team handlers told us and what actually proved to be true once we found our subject was many times contradictory.

Once upon a time I romanticized being part of a search party but what you'll find is that 99% of them are nuisance calls. Kid gets into fight with parent, runs off, divorced parents don't communicate about where the kid is, call the fire dept., parents over-reacting when all along the kid is playing video games with his next-door neighbor friend, etc. The suicidal people are the most aggravating, the attention seekers I must clarify, because they will tell their family members or friends that they are going to shoot themselves or hang themselves somewhere and we have to go find them. We used to have one girl that would do this every few months or so and we would have to search the woods in the middle of the night while she hid from us. It's aggravating as shit because someone has to make the decision to call off the search and what if you make the wrong call? Not everybody is bluffing. I still remember her name because it was so unique and it lended to the theory that people morph and are influenced by their parent's name choices.

A great book for reality based searches and results is this one if anybody is interested:

https://nasar.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?id=21972477

Very good book

[chenda]

On the other hand, a small, weak, silly, and clumsy dog makes for a great house pet and can also be used as an armrest.

And a warm pillow.

[OutOfTheBlue]

What about dogs for blind people?

[7Wannabe5]

On the other hand, a small, weak, silly, and clumsy dog makes for a great house pet and can also be used as an armrest.

Also true if you sub "lentil baby" for "dog" and "mate" for "pet" and "head" for "arm." And, by definition, a lentil baby is less expensive to keep than the median U.S. dog.

[theanimal]

Once upon a time I romanticized being part of a search party but what you'll find is that 99% of them are nuisance calls.

This is probably more dependent on location. I think in big, rural landscapes of the west and north, there are a lot more "wilderness" scenarios involving lost hikers, boaters, skiers, travelers and so on. Maybe it parallels popuation density. the higher the density, the more nuisance calls.

[black_son_of_gray]

@jacob Indeed, both of us didn't think very highly of chihuahuas or chihuahua mixes...until they fell asleep in our laps. I totally see the appeal of the tiny, ridiculous dog now (although my fear of accidentally maiming them with an ill-placed footstep has not gone away). From what I can piece together, the Bay Area shelters seem to get lots of shipments of chihuahuas from the Central Valley.

@ffj I appreciate you sharing your experience with search and rescue. The woman that my partner talked to was a little diplomatic in how she chose to phrase it, but she definitely did bring up the fact that many of the people needing rescue/finding aren't exactly characters in a Hallmark movie who got caught in inclement weather while on a hike. Lots of people in mental crisis, maybe drugs are involved, "problematic" individuals. I think "romanticized" was a good word to use. The S&R woman framed it as something like, "It's not my job to judge the people I'm out there looking for, it's just to find them." That's something I really need to think about because I'm unsure how much that kind of experience might wear down my enthusiasm. Perhaps a great deal. (And thanks for the link!)

@OutOfTheBlue I asked my partner about that...I think she might look into that as well. Might be a better fit for sure.

[ffj]

@theanimal

For sure. I just wanted to lend a bit of realism to the subject. I hope I don't come across as a troll. There are lots of really cool aspects to SAR such as land navigation, man tracking, rope work and the like and dog teams for that matter. But even the wilderness calls are mainly due to drug or alcohol abuse or suicide.

Now the assist runs are more in line with helping someone such as a hiker that has hurt themselves or fallen. Or a medical emergency. There isn't much of a search because they want to be found and when you get to them it's just grunt work after the medical care. People are heavy.

@bsog

Sort of in response to animal, if you are on a dedicated SAR team then more than likely they will only call you out for serious runs. That will help tremendously with motivation but your run volume may be lower than you like, which ironically also affects motivation. I was on the fire dept in a larger city for my state but I also volunteered on my days off for other departments. You may work for a national park that has a million visitors per year. It's all situational and random. But the skills you will learn are good to know regardless.

The book is excellent. It is data compiled from real searches and their conclusions. And there are real patterns to human behavior based on their age and mental acuity. One of the biggest mistakes you'll see in organized searches is overlooking the obvious and not revisiting what a person would logically do based on their age and acuity. A person suffering dementia when obstructed by a fence will stop or follow the fence rather than climb it for example. So your hasty search should be inside a fenced area. And double-checked. My team and I once found a 92 year old lady walking 2 miles from her assisted living compound she escaped from, just as lovely as she could be. She had found a road and followed it. She wasn't flailing around in the brush as that isn't what most dementia patients behavior exhibits. I asked her if we could give her a ride in our big red truck back to her home and she had no idea where it was located or even called. There are no absolutes of course but the book gives you some strong and consistent guidelines on where to start.

[black_son_of_gray]

I'd like to thank once again those who posted album recommendations a while back. I have been consistently listening to a random selection...

Speaking of which, I have a few dangling thoughts to share.

First, I have been doing most of my album listening using Hoopla on my phone*. I tote my phone around on my belt in a holster I DIYed with the sewing machine while I do chores . I don't know whether to praise Hoopla or to disparage YouTube (I guess I'll do both), but Hoopla is so much better of an experience. Principally because there are no advertisements, but also because I can repeat/shuffle/stream/download etc. much easier. Of course, these are only basic features, so I'm not sure how much credit Hoopla should be given. It's a competent app, but nothing particularly special? (Or is that the bar now?) Rather, I think it points to how far YouTube (as in, the company) has debased itself. More and more, I'm finding it borderline unwatchable and usually a mildly unpleasant experience overall. I just can't and won't deal with the level of intrusive advertising. In particular, trying to listen to an album is infuriating. <- Now, the knee-jerk Internet comment to the previous statement is, invariably, "why don't you just install [insert browser extension]?" And the simple answer is: I just don't want to. I'd rather just avoid the unpleasantness altogether. There are plenty of other interesting things in life. It's actually useful to have the annoyance remain because it pushes me to seek out and explore those other interesting things. Sometimes it is easy to think that you are doing yourself a favor, when what you are really doing is enabling yourself (in an addictive sense).

*Also, over the last few months, I've started just turning my phone off for long blocks of time and overnight. It's a small little thing to do, but it's been kinda nice. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you kept it on all the time in the first place... Like, do I really think that someone might need to call me at any given time of the day? To quote Gary Gulman: "To me, the phone is just a seldom-used app on my phone." In the last five years, the number of unplanned instances when someone needed to contact me has been, if I'm remembering correctly, zero times. Again, the small annoyance that I have created by turning the device off means that I have disincentivized looking up things I don't actually need to know, or wasting little bits of time here and there (rather than doing something else).

Back to music, I have been listening to whole albums as an activity for pretty much my entire life. Partly, that is because I grew up listening to cassettes, and partly because I just like longer, thematic music. But recently, I started thinking that listening to whole albums straight through also might help to strengthen a kind of endurance...kind of like the musical equivalent of reading long-form material rather than 'headline and skim', or writing a long essay, post, or story rather than 'firing out a text/tweet'. Why wouldn't music (or any art form**, really) be any different? There is a so-called 'second screen phenomenon' whereby e.g. movies and tv shows are being written/produced differently now because they know that the audience will only be partially paying attention to the story as they simultaneously scroll on phones. What can I say? I rather like having/using/developing a long attention span or testing my "endurance of focus". It just feels right to do so, like I'm moving in the right direction.

**In my personal study of art over the last few years (trying to provide myself the education on the topic I never received in school), I have inadvertently stumbled across one particularly transformative lesson: to 1) take my time and 2) really think through what is going on in my head when I look at a piece of art. Like wine-tasting, art-viewing has a lot of assumed pretension, but I'll do my best to explain... It feels like having a conversation with myself, wherein I learn about my own tastes and how certain feelings are expressed and evoked in a piece. So, for the last half-dozen or so trips to the art museum, I've parked myself in front of each piece and looked at it for usually 30 seconds to a few minutes, asking myself questions, then answering them, then asking more. "Meh, it's just a desert landscape." "Why 'meh', though? What does that even mean? Be more specific" "It's just so empty, you know? And the colors are muted and washed out." "Is it really empty?" "Well, yeah, mostly. The only thing that really pops is the sun up in the left corner." "Ok, so sun in left corner. What makes it pop? Is it the color? (Is the artist playing with complements? Is that because they want me to notice it?) Is it that it sits alone in the sky (and therefore its the only thing in the top half of the painting?) How is that balanced by the rest of the painting?" "Yeah, the color of the sun really stands out, so that little circle seems to dominate the painting in a way (and yet, the overall composition does feel 'balanced' in some way...interesting...)...kind of funny to think how that might parallel actually being in the desert...how the sun when it is way up high and alone in the sky kind of dominates all the landscape..." And so on, and so on... It's kind of like, in Daniel Kahneman terms, letting System 1 do its thing, then interrogating it with System 2, then let system 1 riff again, and back to System 2. It helps you articulate what specifically you like, don't like, what kind of observations you make (or which emotions tend to show up). It's very exploratory and personal, and if you can actually find someone to accompany you--an interesting way to learn about someone else. I like to do this little exercise before reading whatever information is available about the piece. Sometimes the artist explains their intention or inspiration in a little blurb, and I'm often surprised that my own reaction, that I explored with my little inner dialogue, is pretty close! Sometimes I'm way off, but when I read and then look again, it kind of 'clicks' into place. Anyway, my point is...this takes a lot of time and effort--if you ever try this, you'll immediately notice how quickly everyone else in the museum flits from one piece to the next--but I have to say, it's way more interesting and enjoyable. To me at least. I honestly have a hard time understanding why most people take the time (and money) to go to a museum, and then not really look at what is in front of them.

[Western Red Cedar]

Back to music, I have been listening to whole albums as an activity for pretty much my entire life. Partly, that is because I grew up listening to cassettes, and partly because I just like longer, thematic music. But recently, I started thinking that listening to whole albums straight through also might help to strengthen a kind of endurance...kind of like the musical equivalent of reading long-form material rather than 'headline and skim', or writing a long essay, post, or story rather than 'firing out a text/tweet'. Why wouldn't music (or any art form**, really) be any different? There is a so-called 'second screen phenomenon' whereby e.g. movies and tv shows are being written/produced differently now because they know that the audience will only be partially paying attention to the story as they simultaneously scroll on phones. What can I say? I rather like having/using/developing a long attention span or testing my "endurance of focus". It just feels right to do so, like I'm moving in the right direction.

I just watched the documentary Vinyl Nation last week. It would probably be of interest based on what you are exploring in terms of the depth of art and music, and the mediums we use to listen. Here is the trailer (ironically via YouTube ):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UagWhoBms80

I don't use YouTube for albums, but there are some channels such as NPR Tiny Desk Concerts or KEXP that offer some great live performances and expose me to new musicians (and IIRC they don't include ad breaks as they are public radio).

[7Wannabe5]

In the last five years, the number of unplanned instances when someone needed to contact me has been, if I'm remembering correctly, zero times.

Due to the particular form of ADD under which I labor, I owned a digital assistant device (which my kids referred to as my "pink brain") many years before smart phones became common. So, I sometimes consider just keeping my smart phone and doing away with my phone service, BUT I can't, because my answer to your question above after reviewing my log would be "Depending upon how strictly you qualify "need", at least 15X on low end approximately 150X on high end." For example, in the past month, one person contacted me before they called 911 while experiencing major panic attack, another human contacted me because feeling very lonely, Meals on Wheels called me when my mother didn't come to the door, one person contacted me 8X for sex, one person contacted me twice for cooking advice in the moment, and multiple people who want me to do some kind of work for them contacted me. So, kind of like adjunct brain and electronic womb/breasts with multiple dangling umbilical cords. Life as a middle-aged woman these days (sigh.)

I have been listening to whole albums as an activity for pretty much my entire life. Partly, that is because I grew up listening to cassettes

It's interesting how the form of technology can influence listening style. For example, the first music I purchased for myself was 45s, because I had a portable player and my babysitting earnings could better afford singles than albums. When I was gifted with a better stereo, I started purchasing albums, but the fact that my stereo could readily handle 3 albums at a time nudged me towards considering albums to have A and B sides like singles, and it seems likely that producers of this technological era would have also had the reality that albums were preferentially stacked to be played in mind. I am rather inhibited in offering album recommendations, because too close association with many talented musicians has informed me that my taste in music might be towards the basic. One of my classic favorites which is quite themed and hasn't yet been listed would be Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville." Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" is a classic 70s stoner album; it's intro was used in "The Exorcist." A few random others would be "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" Joni Mitchell, "Dead As Dreams" by Weakling, "The Detroit Oratorio" by Destroy All Monsters, "Jazz" by Queen (only themed in part) "Kick Out The Jams" by MC5 (more iconic than themed), "Armed Forces" by Elvis Costello, "Horndog Fest" by the Dirtbombs, "Street Sermons" by Morray, and my new favorites project (not quite album) "Alligator Bites Never Heal" by Doechii and "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" by Chappell Roan.

[black_son_of_gray]

@WRC Thanks for the recommendation! I agree, there are a few outlets on YouTube that don't have tons of ad breaks that are actually wonderful channels...those are pretty much the islands I stick to when I use it.

For the record, I could live with e.g. a short ad at the beginning of a video (ahem, more or less how it used to be), but what really gets me raw is that the current situation for most videos feels intentionally punitive. An ad interrupting the video (usually at an inopportune time, e.g. mid-sentence) at every 2-3 minutes is quite disruptive to the quality of the experience. I suspect that YouTube wants to push its premium subscriptions and therefore degrades the non-subscription option beyond what is necessary to cover their costs. It's not that you get 'perks' for being a member--you get 'relief' from something they themselves inflicted. This is one of my main gripes with Amazon as well. They push Prime membership in a way that feels punitive to a non-Prime member. I notice when I order with the free, non-Prime shipping that, more often than not, their logistics still operates in Prime, 2-day-shipping mode...they just wait around a few days after I place the order before actually executing it. So they still actually provide the 2-day shipping, just with the additional punishment of delay. Now, I almost never actually need the product in 2 days, so I'm not really affected...but I dislike that kind of orientation to customers, so I buy from elsewhere whenever practical.

@7Wannabe5 Well, damn! Just reading that stressed me out. Out of curiosity, I scanned through the log of incoming/outgoing calls on my phone for the last several months. Outside of a handful of calls per month from/to 1) my partner, and 2) my parents...there is no call history. Pretty much every one of those calls was what one might call a courtesy call -- just a social check in or a "I'm on my way, be there in X minutes" kind of thing. Perhaps I am a massive outlier here. Perhaps this is revealing of my social circle these days...I am clearly not a hub around which anything is organized.

I'm definitely going to give Tubular Bells a listen...thanks for the recs!

[7Wannabe5]

Don't stress. It's not really a measure of overall social functioning. More a measure of how Mumsy you are perceived to be by others. Nobody ever contacts me to have beers or play sports.

[jacob]

**In my personal study of art over the last few years (trying to provide myself the education on the topic I never received in school), I have inadvertently stumbled across one particularly transformative lesson: to 1) take my time and 2) really think through what is going on in my head when I look at a piece of art. Like wine-tasting, art-viewing has a lot of assumed pretension, but I'll do my best to explain... It feels like having a conversation with myself, wherein I learn about my own tastes and how certain feelings are expressed and evoked in a piece. So, for the last half-dozen or so trips to the art museum, I've parked myself in front of each piece and looked at it for usually 30 seconds to a few minutes, asking myself questions, then answering them, then asking more. "Meh, it's just a desert landscape." "Why 'meh', though? What does that even mean? Be more specific" "It's just so empty, you know? And the colors are muted and washed out." "Is it really empty?" "Well, yeah, mostly. The only thing that really pops is the sun up in the left corner." "Ok, so sun in left corner. What makes it pop? Is it the color? (Is the artist playing with complements? Is that because they want me to notice it?) Is it that it sits alone in the sky (and therefore its the only thing in the top half of the painting?) How is that balanced by the rest of the painting?" "Yeah, the color of the sun really stands out, so that little circle seems to dominate the painting in a way (and yet, the overall composition does feel 'balanced' in some way...interesting...)...kind of funny to think how that might parallel actually being in the desert...how the sun when it is way up high and alone in the sky kind of dominates all the landscape..." And so on, and so on... It's kind of like, in Daniel Kahneman terms, letting System 1 do its thing, then interrogating it with System 2, then let system 1 riff again, and back to System 2. It helps you articulate what specifically you like, don't like, what kind of observations you make (or which emotions tend to show up). It's very exploratory and personal, and if you can actually find someone to accompany you--an interesting way to learn about someone else. I like to do this little exercise before reading whatever information is available about the piece. Sometimes the artist explains their intention or inspiration in a little blurb, and I'm often surprised that my own reaction, that I explored with my little inner dialogue, is pretty close! Sometimes I'm way off, but when I read and then look again, it kind of 'clicks' into place. Anyway, my point is...this takes a lot of time and effort--if you ever try this, you'll immediately notice how quickly everyone else in the museum flits from one piece to the next--but I have to say, it's way more interesting and enjoyable. To me at least. I honestly have a hard time understanding why most people take the time (and money) to go to a museum, and then not really look at what is in front of them.

This perspective is rather very interesting to me!

I also think that the school failed in educating me on this topic to a degree where I still feel a bit bitter about wasting 10 years of my young life when it came to mandatory classes in art and literature. To this day I still tune out any poetry in the same way that most people tune out equations when they encounter them. Ditto artwork.

It was only much later I learned about the philosophical framework of the mid 20th century that guided my humanities teachers although I'm almost certain they themselves were blind to it as in unable to put it in perspective.

Looking back at the notes of my 8-18yo self and being a modernist by temperament at the time, I yearned for a way to figure out the "correct answer" to questions about literature and art. My take at the time was that other students and the teachers were just bullshitting their way through the questions; that the goal was to figure out what the teacher or everybody else wanted to hear and just say that. This was the only way to figure out the response-function in terms of grades. Whoever seemed more engaged got the higher grades. Dignity be damned. For me, reading the prose of borderline insane authors didn't seem worth my while. When asked "how this poem made you feel", I was always stuck between "truly meh!" and the proscribed assignment to write 800 words. A rock and a hard place. This resulted in me handing in a bunch of BS aligned with what I thought the teacher wanted to hear. What a nightmare in miseducation that was ...

It was actually only recently that my reignited interest in philosophy made me realize that the point of philosophy is not to "find the truth as a goal" (like in science) but to "discover the truth for ourselves as a process #overandover#. The same process-orientation very likely holds with art and literature. It took me almost 50 years to figure this out. Perhaps it was always so obvious to the teachers that they didn't bother pointing out the distinction. However, I remember no such time when that was actually pointed out, so I think not. Most humans are blind to their paradigm.

Your framing of this in system1/system2 terms is useful to me because it's a framework/method I can actually work with. I suspect I'm unlike the normal student in that I'm 90%+ system 2 rather than 90%+ system 1 to the point where "no, I don't connect with whatever emotion that the artist or advertiser is trying to trigger here". As such, demanding an 800 word w/o a method for generating it is like asking a people to do algebra w/o explaining arithmetic. However, the system1/2 approach provides for a Hegelian dialectic. With that in the toolbox, I might give art et al another chance. I thank you.

[black_son_of_gray]

Your framing of this in system1/system2 terms is useful to me because it's a framework/method I can actually work with. I suspect I'm unlike the normal student in that I'm 90%+ system 2 rather than 90%+ system 1 to the point where "no, I don't connect with whatever emotion that the artist or advertiser is trying to trigger here". As such, demanding an 800 word w/o a method for generating it is like asking a people to do algebra w/o explaining arithmetic. However, the system1/2 approach provides for a Hegelian dialectic. With that in the toolbox, I might give art et al another chance. I thank you.

I appreciate the feedback - sometimes I write these little bits of posts and I question whether it's something people want to read or if I'm just rambling. It's nice to hear that there is a kernel of wheat in the chaff every once in a while!

I suppose other ways I might describe the process (other than using terms System 1 and System 2) might be something like "intuitive" vs. "analytical" or "reactionary" vs. "deliberative" or maybe even "iterative introspection".* In either case, I feel like what the process is ultimately generating, as you mentioned, is not so much an answer, but a more specific, more articulate description of my preferences/"taste"/inner state. Part of the reason that I am super excited to have become aware of all this in the last few years (also, many decades later than I would have preferred...) is because it is so damn useful in honing in on: priorities, what activities/content/genres/foods/(etc.) really tend to 'click' with me and why, what my 'north stars' are in life, and so on. Basically, I think it is useful for ERE.

Regarding giving art another chance, I'd be really interested in hearing about your experiences! My (unsolicited and probably obvious) advice might be put in more effort initially in areas that 1) you already have some reason to think would be more appealing to you, and 2) that are already popularly beloved/critically acclaimed. For me, that looks like "relatively contemporary exhibits at a reasonably well respected museum". I.e. Renaissance portraits do nothing for me. After praising art several times in various posts, I must admit that an awful lot of it doesn't really appeal to me. (That's me being diplomatic. If I'm being judgy, I'd say most art is not very good.) Nothing wrong with having a very selective filter. In a way, finding out what you absolutely, positively don't like is progress.

*Because it occupies a lot of my thoughts these days...there is an interesting parallel here with a certain framing of "writer's block" which is that writers have to alternate between a 1) creative, free-flowing, generative state; and 2) a rational, analytical, 'editor' state. When a writer gets stuck in (1) they produce mountains of writing that is ultimately garbage, and when stuck in (2) they cannot produce any writing at all, because each fragment that pops up in the head is immediately considered inadequate/'not good enough'. As they say, "writing is revision", and good writing is the product of swinging back and forth between (1) and (2) many times. To that end, the act of writing is a great way to practice this process.

"no, I don't connect with whatever emotion that the artist or advertiser is trying to trigger here"

Yeah, often the same here. Maybe it's less a System 1 issue but that you are just bored by it? A lot of that (for me) has to do with finding the 'big, primary emotions' (like happy! sad! angry!) to be low-hanging fruit and cliche. They are depicted so frequently and stereotypically that they just don't have any real meaning any more. Particularly advertising, which is usually hell-bent on being generically sentimental in some way that I find utterly distasteful. Sometimes there are hidden layers, though. I'm reminded of the poem The Road Not Taken by Frost which most people seem to take (or were told?) as being inspirational in some way. Apparently Frost wrote the poem as a kind of joke directed toward an indecisive friend. Whether that is true or not...reading the poem with a sarcastic tone really changes the vibe. Some might find that icky, some might find that hilarious. I rather like the sarcasm myself.

[frugaldoc]

In medical school we had an elective called "Art Rounds". We met for six evenings over the course of two months at the local art museum. Several curators and art historians led us through the examination of 3 pieces each night. Before we arrived they had taped over any identifying information on the piece: no artist name, description, etc. It could be sculpture or painting. We were given ten minutes to look at it. We were encouraged to look up close, from afar, and at different heights and angles. It was a much more active form of art appreciation than I was used to. And then we talked about what we thought of the piece. It completely changed the way I experience art. Now, when I go to a museum I try to concentrate on a few pieces and not read anything about them until after I have spent a few minutes forming my own opinion about what I am seeing. It sounds very similar to what you are doing.

[ertyu]

sometimes I write these little bits of posts and I question whether it's something people want to read

I'm into anything that deepens self-knowledge and insight, I read them and find them interesting