{"id":3272,"date":"2018-01-12T03:40:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T09:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicreborn.com\/?p=3272"},"modified":"2018-01-11T22:41:12","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T04:41:12","slug":"do-you-think-your-wu-tang-sword-can-defeat-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/2018\/01\/12\/do-you-think-your-wu-tang-sword-can-defeat-me\/","title":{"rendered":"“Do you think your Wu Tang sword can defeat me?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so begins the greatest album to rip a concrete bowl on 100 degree summer days.\u00a0 There’s something about early 90’s hip hop and late-90’s skateboarding that combines to create something sublime.\u00a0 Playing this album on repeat on an absurdly primitive mp3 player, and I could skate ten hours straight\u00a0 ..\u00a0 I reached a zone in those days, very close to what Dierdre McCloskey meant by “flow”:<\/p>\n

“In fact, the \u201cpositive psychology movement\u201d created in the \u201990s by Mih\u00e1ly Cs\u00edkszentmih\u00e1lyi (I will just call him \u201cMike\u201d) and Martin E.P. Seligman and now hundreds of other psychologists do useful research on the good life with full attention to what we know. It is \u201cpositive,\u201d concerned with psychological strengths, as against the steadily growing number of alleged weaknesses (once homosexuality, now still gender crossing) proposed in successive editions of the\u00a0Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Mike, for example, discovered around 1974 that good lives involve what he calls \u201cflow,\u201d the absorption in a task just within our competence: \u201cin the zone,\u201d as we say, or indeed \u201cfeeling flow,\u201d which is how he came up with the word. I remember him in the early \u201970s explaining to me his technique for spotting it, by having people carry pagers, a recent invention, which Mike would randomly activate and have the subject write down in a notebook what she was doing and thinking right at that moment. Brilliant. The idea of flow has been fruitful as science, and it deeply acknowledges the humanities, too. The researchers have mercifully never attempted in a Benthamite manner to compare the amounts of flow achieved by Roger Federer at break point with the flow achieved by Miles Davis on\u00a0Kind of Blue.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s worth reading her entire essay, “Happyism<\/a>“, because it captures the state of mind that emerges from those difficult-yet-doable tasks where true happiness emerges.<\/p>\n

My point, I think, is that “flow” in an unknown concept today, in this age of digital instant gratification and the social validation feedback loop that’s been hijacked by Big Tech, as Sean Parker presciently, and ominously, observed.\u00a0 Our tech has become a crutch we can turn to when things become too boring, or too hard.\u00a0 We prefer to avoid pain when possible, and tech, social media, and the internet has become the perfect outlet to avoid that previously inescapable boredom, which is actually a crucial experience for the development of our psyches.<\/p>\n

Strapping on the headphones as I lower to the ground a miracle of engineering; the 7.5″, double kick tail with Destructos, Bones Reds, four black Pigs, and Black Magic grip (has there been any man made creation that becomes so much an extension of our physical selves?).\u00a0 The back truck locks over the lip of a concrete bowl, 110 degrees.\u00a0 I start the music, lean in, become vertical, and weightless, and in that very instant I believe I descended into the Self, and the universe blinked out of existence.\u00a0 It was only me, my board, and Flow, an endless ballet in an endless concrete inferno.\u00a0 Who experiences that today?<\/p>\n

The point of this post, if there is one, is that true happiness lies in Flow.\u00a0 Or at least that ‘Flow’ is essential to living a fulfilling life. And the bigger point I’m apparently trying to make is that opportunities to experiencing Flow are diminishing, due directly to the galloping advance of instant technological gratification.\u00a0 Yet I don’t want to do away with the internet, or gadgets, or anything else.\u00a0 It’s a tool for some, but a vice for most.\u00a0 Or a drug.<\/p>\n

Who feels as Ishmael did? The real Ishmael, not the long-winded commie ape who bought into the population-bomb propaganda that an alarmingly large number of people regard as “deep”.\u00a0 That monkey could never have spoken as his namesake, who said, “As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.\u00a0 I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”<\/p>\n

We should lose the ape and return to Ishmael the sailor, the one who embarked on a voyage with a madman, not the one content to sit in a cage.<\/p>\n

And this is what happens when I attempt to write at 3am, to the sound of my quasi-silent guardian, a snoring pit bull, who for some reason has one ear always cocked, and probably one eye always open. I shall leave it as is.<\/p>\n

Rantings and ravings can be sent to digitalsunset86@gmail.com.\u00a0 I have a feeling I’ll never get to working out the comments section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And so begins the greatest album to rip a concrete bowl on 100 degree summer days.\u00a0 There’s something about early 90’s hip hop and late-90’s skateboarding that combines to create something sublime.\u00a0 Playing this album on repeat on an absurdly primitive mp3 player, and I…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… “Do you think your Wu Tang sword can defeat me?”<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3272"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3274,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272\/revisions\/3274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicreborn.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}