Jacob Martinez

Question

Suppose we perfect interstellar travel and find no inhabited planets in our neck of the woods but plenty of planets which could some day support life. Do you think that it would be right, or indeed, our responsibility to “seed” these planets with genetic material that may someday be the groundwork for their entire existence?

Netflix’n The Night Away

• Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior isn’t good. It was barely even trying to be good.
• And they use the words “ingress” and “egress” way too often. The only person that’s ever said that in any other show was Lt. Cmdr. Data in TNG.

How To Be Not-Sad. A Few Simple But Not Necessarily Easy Steps For People Who Want A Little More Contentment.

Step Zero: Identify and pinpoint what maladaptive* thoughts and feelings are and where they originate.

•  This is an absolutely essential step for any kind of therapy but can often be difficult for people who have never really thought about these kinds of things.
• You want to be able to identify how you feel and what you’re thinking at any given point in time.
• Also, be able to identify what sequence of events led you to your current state (thoughts or feelings) and what thoughts, feelings, and behavior follow your current state.
• Sometimes a daily diary or journal is good for keeping track of thoughts and feelings. In the beginning it may even be helpful to keep hourly entries in a journal EXAMPLE:

• 1:00pm: I currently feel ANGRY. This is due to BOSS YELLING AT ME. 
• 2:00pm: My body is TENSE I have a HEADACHE. I am experiencing IRRITABILITY.

• Heavily detailed journals like the example above are a good start. Eventually the need to record entries will diminish and you’ll be able to identify the cause and effect relationship of thoughts and feelings automatically.

Step One: Put distance between yourself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings.

•  Here we want to figuratively take a step back from our maladaptive thoughts/feelings in order to examine them.
• After we’ve identified our maladaptive thoughts/feelings and their point of origin, we can use this information to create space. Notice how in the following examples the space between yourself and a thought/feeling is increasingly expanded:

• “I am feeling ANGRY.” “I am thinking that I WILL FAIL.”
• “I notice that I am feeling ANGRY.” “I notice that I am having the thought that I WILL FAIL.”
• “I notice that I am feeling ANGRY and that my anger is located in my TENSE BODY/HEADACHE.” “I notice that I am having the thought that I WILL FAIL and that is manifesting itself in THE PIT OF MY STOMACH.”

• Via this technique you can put as much distance between yourself and your maladaptive thought/feeling as you want. The goal here is to be able to zoom in and out on your current and past emotional states at will and to examine them for what they are instead of getting bogged down or wallowing in them.
• Verbally expanding the distance between yourself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings isn’t the only way you can create space. In the past I have visually created space between myself and maladaptive thoughts/feelings by creating an image of the maladaptive feeling.

• In this case, during a bout with depression I turned the feelings involved with being depressed into the image of Haunter the Pokemon.
• Now instead of having these feelings emanating from within my body they were separate from my body, constantly hovering over my head, following me wherever I went, and when things got really bad clawing at my body.
• That sounds kind of bad but for me it helped a lot. No longer did it feel like I was drowning in a sea that bubbled up from inside myself.

• After creating space between yourself and your maladaptive thoughts/feelings you start to get a little bit of control over how you’re feeling and how your feelings are affecting you, and that brings us to our next step.

Step Two: Now that you’ve got some breathing room, take a breather.

• Now is the time to take comfort in the fact that your thoughts and feelings (most of the time) don’t just spring up out of nowhere, and even if they do you can create space between yourself and them.
• Eventually you’ll learn to see certain patterns between events and their effect on your thoughts/feelings, and the patterns between your thoughts/feelings and their effect on your subsequent behavior. Learning these patterns will be beneficial so you can see things coming ahead of time.

• “Uh-oh! I just made a mistake on this project. And now here come the thoughts about being a failure and never succeeding in life. LOL! Good one brain ;) , that’s just what I need right now. So why don’t I skip the feeling bad for myself part and jump ahead to fixing this mistake I just made and going about with my business.”

Step Three: Keep at it!

•  If we can identify our own maladaptive thoughts/feelings, and if we can determine the sequence of events that follow and precede them, then maybe (just maybe) we can learn to see them coming and step aside when they do. Avoiding maladaptive thoughts/feelings is impossible, but at the very least we want to be able to allow them to come and go without doing too much damage.
• Try to use these techniques every day even if it’s only once a day. It’ll be hard at first but the longer you do it, the more natural and automatic it will become.

Super Secret Step Four: Use these techniques on your happiness too.

• Don’t just identify your maladaptive feelings, identify and pinpoint the way it feels when you’re happy, the way it feels when you’re ecstatic, the way it feels when you think it’s time to get out of bed but you realize that you’ve got a whole hour left.
• Create space for your good feelings and thoughts. Give them room to operate. Visualize them if you feel like it.
• Eventually you’ll see how easy it is to create a kind of synthetic happiness which is awesome, trust me.

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*Maladaptive - To make it easier to think about you can substitute the words “Bad” or “Undesirable” here, although the word maladaptive is actually the most descriptive. These are thoughts and feelings that aren’t going to get you where you want to go in life (“No time for tears, wasted water’s all that is, and it don’t make no flowers grow.” - Bill Withers).

• The man asked me what kind of sauce I wanted with my chicken nuggets and I froze up and said barbecue when really I should have said ranch. I really wanted ranch.

• Saffron is actually the most expensive thing on earth.

• Stellar.io is not going to go anywhere. You guys can trust me on this one.

• The entire concept of shaving is so weird to me. I scrape a sharpened piece of steel across my skin to remove hair. That’s such a human thing to do.