Pepe
Andrew and Rhiannon’s cat. We miss her a lot.
Andrew and Rhiannon’s cat. We miss her a lot.
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I actually don’t have an opinion about this. Enjoy 
From David Seah: Better Living Through New Media
Posted April 23, 2007 at 0306 EDT
“I was feeling very positive on Friday; Never before has my path seemed so clear, with so many things within my grasp. It was thus with great confidence I predicted a landmark productive weekend. The power I felt on Friday, however, began to resemble more a rolling blackout by Saturday, followed by grid failure as I slipped into total couch potato mode. What happened?” [more…]
I’ve been reading your blog for some time now; I think with what you wrote about tonight, David, you’re on to something that has the potential to change your life much more profoundly than you may realize at this time.
I used to me a lot more solitary myself, and have therefore developed skills that I now implicitly use to make money and survive. Even though I’m really excited about what I do, after a while it loses the novelty factor and I decided to explore different things, such as forming closer relationships with other people, both romantic and platonic.
This proved to me much more difficult than I had initially assessed, since I found myself to be innately familiar with technology and interactions with computers or other inanimate devices. But humans, not so much.
I came to this realization again last weekend when I realized that if really put my mind to it, I can be much better at human-human interaction. I can apply some of the same principles I apply with computers: when I sit down at a computer I have this immediate sense of emporement, I feel that I’m in control and that I can do whatever I want without fear of being stopped and without the fear of failing. When it comes to computers, I simply don’t fail.
It’s strange, however, because when I sit down in front of a person and start a conversation, my feelings and attitudes are very different. I feel that the outcome of my interaction is strongly influenced by the other person, which is an element I have absolutely no control over. So I find myself in a situation where I have to submit myself to someone else’s (to me) arbitrary whim, which immediately makes me very uncomfortable. I can’t always use familiar logic to determine what I should do or say to achieve the desired response, since the response will vary from person to person and from situation to situation, even given the exact same input.
This is the primary challenge I face with other people. Over the last few years, I have made it a point to go out of my way to interact with other people, so I force myself out of my comfort zone, otherwise I really would be lonely all the time. This has worked well. Now that I have acquired more advanced skills in interacting with other people (although this still doesn’t feel ‘native’ to me), I often find myself in situations that are completely unforseen. I’m still not used to dealing with the ‘human’ element, which introduces a degree of entropy into the flow of events.
Going back to my first point, I think it is this entropy that may lead you down a path that could change your life in a much more profound way than you may want or predict at this time. When you form closer relationships with other people, you not only make yourself vulnerable to them, you also give up a certain degree of control of your life. Sometimes a great degree, depending on the type of relationship. This, especially with romantic relationships, I have found to be more of a problem for me than making myself vulnerable. Most people aren’t out to specifically wrong you, but most people are out to do what is best for them, and that may not always be what is best for you.
To sum it up, humans are extremely complex. Personally, I recognize that I am well-trained to deal with computers and I do well in situation that are logical and structured in a predictable manner. Often having a close relationship falls outside of the scope of what I’m trained to do and this has often lead to very unforseen, sometimes detrimental, but often exhilarting experiences.
Just my $0.02 
