Archive for September 10th, 2017
One second every day?
There are so many tiny, beautiful, funny, tragic moments in your life — how are you going to remember them all? Director Cesar Kuriyama shoots one second of video every day as part of an ongoing project to collect all the special bits of his life.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
So, I’m an artist. I live in New York, and I’ve been working in advertising for — ever since I left school, about seven, eight years now, and it was draining. I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own.
And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called “The power of time off,” and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, “I have to do that. I have to take a year off. I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas.”
The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I’ve done in the past.
There’s all these things that I’ve done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, “Oh yeah, that’s something that I did.”
And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn’t doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video. So the day — the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it’s something that I really wanted to —
from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again.
Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory.
this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I’ve done. Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day. It’s difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second. On a good day, I’ll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I’ll just have to narrow it down to one,but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway. (Not sure this statement stand up to time in memory)
It’s also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they’re disturbing you.
They’re not even enjoying the show. They’re watching the concert through their cell phone. I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit, back in the day, and I’ve decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person, is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, “Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert.” And it just takes a quick, quick second.
I was on a three-month road trip this summer.
It was something that I’ve been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding. I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project.
One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape. We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day.
It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. It’s not — we tend to take our cameras out when we’re doing awesome things. Or we’re, “Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture.”
But we rarely do that when we’re having a bad day, and something horrible is happening. And I found that it’s actually been very, very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment. It really helps you appreciate the good times.
It’s not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it’s important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days.
one of the things that I do is I don’t use any filters, I don’t use anything to I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes.
I started a rule of first person perspective. Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn’t the way to go. The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it.
a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn’t it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this?
I turned 31 last week, which is there. I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this. I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it. I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day.
Personally, I’m tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do. I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now — most people in this room, I bet — and it’s something that’s — I never want to forget another day that I’ve ever lived, and this is my way of doing that, and it’d be really interesting also to see, if you could just type in on a website, “June 18, 2018,” and you would just see a stream of people’s lives on that particular day from all over the world.
Can our biggest decisions never be rational? Like how big a change?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 10, 2017
A philosopher who studies life changes says our biggest decisions can never be rational
At some point, everyone reaches a crossroads in life: Do you decide to take that job and move to a new country, or stay put? Should you become a parent, or continue your life unencumbered by the needs of children?
Instinctively, we try to make these decisions by projecting ourselves into the future, trying to imagine which choice will make us happier.
Perhaps we seek counsel or weigh up evidence. We might write out a pro/con list. What we are doing, ultimately, is trying to figure out whether or not we will be better off working for a new boss and living in Morocco, say, or raising three beautiful children.
This is fundamentally impossible, though, says philosopher L.A. Paul at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a pioneer in the philosophical study of transformative experiences.
Certain life choices are so significant that they change who we are. Before undertaking those choices, we are unable to evaluate them from the perspective and values of our future, changed selves. In other words, your present self cannot know whether your future self will enjoy being a parent or not.
“You’re supposed to know these special things about yourself—like if you’re a smart, thoughtful person, and you reflect carefully, you can know. I think it’s not a failure if you don’t know,” she says. “We can be alien to our own selves at different times.”
Paul began considering the lack of a rational decision-making framework for transformative experiences after having her own children.
She found, as most parents do, that her core preferences changed; she was now willing to sacrifice herself for this other being, her child. Hearing about this instinct beforehand simply didn’t provide the same knowledge as experiencing it.
“One of the deepest and most important features of being a parent was epistemically inaccessible to me,” she says. “There’s a way in which I am a different person. I’m metaphysically the same person but I’m a different self.”
To count as a transformative experience, something must be both epistemically and personally transformative. Examples include taking certain drugs, going to the moon, going to war, killing someone, being spiritually reborn, or suffering a major physical accident. (Not all of these examples are choices, of course, but they are certainly transformative.)
When faced with a potentially transformative choice, Paul explains the problem at hand:
“It’s going to change who you are, it’s not clear that there’s a straightforward question about which life is better. In each life, you’ll develop values about that way of living. You can’t make this decision by projecting yourself into your future self by knowing what it’s going to be like and deciding if that’s the way you want to be. It’s just not rational.”
Paul is an analytic, rather than continental, philosopher—an important distinction in the field. Continental philosophy encompasses 2,000 years of thought from some of the most well-known philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Analytic philosophy began in the early 20th century, with a focus on logic and language.
It doesn’t attempt to address questions deemed unanswerable (such as whether there’s a god), and it has a tendency to get obscure, fast (unpacking the nature of the word “and,” for example, is a pretty hot topic).
Analytic philosophy is the dominant school in both the US and the UK, which has likely contributed to philosophy fading from the public sphere over the past century. Paul’s work has been so groundbreaking in part because it combines the rigor of analytic philosophy with the significance of truly profound topics.
“Big questions often get soft and squishy very quickly and I find that unproductive,” she says.
In her telling of the problem of transformative experiences, there’s a factor that cannot be represented in the decision-making model. “It’s unknown, like the unknown unknown you see in economics,” she says.
Philosophers were not so accepting of Paul’s work when she first started considering transformative experiences. The subject was a “huge career risk,” she says, and plenty of people told her to abandon the topic.
“Talking about it was just not something serious philosophers do. ‘We don’t talk about babies,’” she says. “But I was a philosophically trained adult who went through that experience and I knew that it had a certain structure that needed to be explored.”
Having established the epistemological significance of transformative life choices, there still remains the question of how, exactly, we should make such decisions.
Paul is still figuring this out. So far, her best proposal is that, while you can’t know which choice you’ll prefer, you can at least decide whether you want to experience a transformation.
