For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
Programming fast.
When I program for my personal projects it takes hours to get very little done.
hmm, I have the same thing. But I do test a LOT and make backups on backups, tbh. Most of my time probably goes into that.
Dancing. And even something like swaying or tapping one’s foot to a beat is hard for me unless the song makes it super obvious. Most people seem to just intuitively get all of this. Plus I don’t have good coordination or spatial awareness, where I still routinely run into doorways in my home and such. And then add social anxiety on top of all that. A nightclub might as well be a torture chamber.
I’m gonna go meta on this one:
I don’t understand how some people just know that they can do things from the get-go. Like from their early teens on.
It took me until age 50 to understand who is holding me back: me.
There’s very little I don’t think I can grasp now. Anything another human can do, so can I. I could have been a doctor or a musician or a chemical engineer or Michelin starred chef if had believed in myself like other people do.
How??? Why did they know they could do these things???
I had this realization when I decided to rebuild the carburetor on my old mustang. After taking it apart I was absolutely paralyzed by then realized that some schmuck designed it, so surely I could just put it back together
Time signatures fuck with my head too. I’m not a pianist, but I decided to try and learn Gabriel Faure’s Clair de Lune, which has always been one of my favorite pieces. My whole life I’ve heard it in my head as 4/4 , but to my surprise it’s in 3/4 and the left hand are actually 16th notes with the first one missing in each beat.
Socialization.
Autism?
Taking up the theme of not answering your question, Broken Social Scene - Shoreline was my first taste of a really cool nonstandard signature. ✌️
5/8, 5 beats per measure, eighth note gets the beat.
Anything that requires moderate hand-to-eye coordination.
So I was always the worst amongst my buddies at sports, which I hadn’t associated with my deficiency yet… then, when I joined the army and realized that, besides running (and swimming, because I lived in front of a pool for most of my childhood), anything that required technique and skill was gonna take me 5x the time to learn compared to my comrades (rope climbing even at my strongest and slimmest, rifle assembly and disassembly, for example) and even then I was just barely passing. Then I tried getting a driver’s license whilst still in the army, which was basically a gift in all but name, and damn did I suck at driving. I still do, just less so. 🤣
Thankfully I married a somewhat handy woman. 🤷♂️
I’m the same way! I don’t know about you, but when I was an adult, I learned about dyspraxia (a pretty common coordination/balance/motor disorder - used to be called ‘clumsy child syndrome’ lol) and having poor proprioception (which is the sense of being able to automatically know and tell where exactly your body parts are in relation to eachother and to other things, where this thing is in relation to that other thing, etc. without really having to think about it) and reading and learning about those helped explain a LOT for me.
I just thought I’d mention it in case it helps you! It really helped me feel less broken and helped me understand myself better, and how to work with it instead of trying to force myself to be ‘normal,’ when it’s not a matter of ‘not trying hard enough’ like so many people told me it was as a youngin’, etc. Anywho, you are soo not alone! :)
Oh zip, thanks for the extended explanation and encouraging words. I always just saw it as the result of my lack of focus and hyperactivity but maybe it’s something else, just by itself… I guess I’ll have to get checked 🙃. And indeed we are not alone!
division. i can do basic fractions but anything more complicated feels completely unintuitive.
Huh. It sounds as if maybe you missed a basic building block as a child.
Once you’re missing a foundational concept, everything after that is difficult. It’s sadly not uncommon - maybe you were ill that week, or you had a teacher that couldn’t explain in a way that worked for you, etc.
My work is in maths and stats, my husband is a lawyer, so when he did an introductory finance course a few years ago, I tried to help him understand some formulas that involved percentages. It was an unmitigated disaster. So I called my mom (a retired math teacher) and she started by drawing a circle and saying this is a pie, we cut it into slices, etc. like you would for a young child. At first I was horrified, but she kept building on it, checking he understood at each point, until they reached a point where he wasn’t going, “yes, yes, OK”. She explained that piece to him and something clicked. Problem solved.
Anyway, that was a long anecdote to tell you, you probably just need to find a good maths teacher who is willing to spend a couple of hours with you building up, until you find that gap. I could ask my mom if you like? She’s genuinely a really good teacher.
Edit to add: Alternatively, go through the Khan Institute lessons. Skim them until he starts doing something that isn’t obvious. Then go back and watch the previous lesson.
i’m a senior computer engineer currently specialising in signal processing algorithms on constrained systems 🙃 so i have really tried getting that intuition to stick, including the khan stuff, for years, but no. i have to double-check everything i write out because i can’t visualise it as soon as there’s division involved, unless it involves powers of two.
it genuinely is as you said, it feels like i was ill for a week in middle school and suddenly i didn’t understand anything. and now i don’t have the energy to do studying on my off hours. thanks for the offer though, that’s very sweet.
Hmm. I know the point of this thread wasn’t supposed to be a bunch of strangers info-dumping your weaknesses at you, but I’d like to take a crack at this one 😉
Problem one may just be that you overestimate how much the rest of us “intuit” or “visualize” division. It may just be that the rest of us use the tool for its outcomes rather than because it feels right, as opposed to visualizing it. Maybe it’s just the language you chose to use, and it doesn’t imply what I said, but it does make me very curious how you visualize addition and subtraction 😛
Okay, that aside, division is the opposite of multiplication, that’s the thing it does, but it’s also how we reconstruct its algorithm. Pies and their slices are fine for fractions, but here we’re talking about division. So instead I’m going to start with dealing cards. Each card will be a ©, and we’ll start with 15 of them, and we have 4 players.
©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©Okay, first round, we deal out the first 4, one to each player
© © © © ©©©©©©©©©©©We have 11 remaining. Next round:
© © © © © © © © ©©©©©©©2 to each player so far, 7 remain. Round 3!
© © © © © © © © © © © © ©©©3 to each player in 3 rounds, and we can’t do another round because we have fewer than 4 remaining. Specifically 3. So we could now answer that 15 divided by 4 is “3 remainder 3”, because that’s how many we get per player when there are 4 players, and then there’s 3 left over.
The reason I’ve constructed it this way is because we’ve reconstructed the primitive square intuition of multiplication, but from the other direction! I think we can see how 4×3 makes 12, and then also how we did the dividing by re-distributing the first 12 cards of our 15 into 4 columns to work out how many rows our square would have needed to be to get us to 12. We knew we were interested in 4 columns, that’s our problem setup, but we didn’t know how many rows that meant, so we divided them literally amongst the columns until we ran out. Then we looked at the square we’d built and said “aha, I guess it was 3 rows!”
To put it in algebra format and play around a little:
15 = 12 + 3 15 = 3×4 + 3 15 - 3 = 3×4 12 = 3×4 12 ÷ 4 = 3Just playing with division being the opposite of multiplication. Maybe that didn’t help, in which case ignore it and go back to the cards thing! 😅
Okay, so that’s algorithm number 1, and it works every time. With integers… So what the heck is long division?
Well basically it’s a heuristic algorithm on top of this attempt to make squares out of numbers, where we want to use our intuition about multiplication, because it’s easier, in order to do division. And basically the only reason to do that is because dividing each number by getting a set of counting stones in that quantity and divvying out a square is time consuming and we’re busy people.
So we’re doing 15÷4. We bascially guess how many rows we think this will have, by our intuition about the 4s times-table. We go "okay, maybe 2? 4×2=8, 15-8=7, that’s bigger than 4, so I underestimated, but not by much. So I try 3, and that gets us our 4×3+3 from before. If we’d started with a guess of 4, we’d have got 16 and known it was too high and come down to 3. It’s about guessing how many rows our square would have if we divvyed things out like before, but hopefully without having to actually do that work. And we check that guess by calculating the remainder and making sure it’s smaller than the number of columns in our square, because if it wasn’t then we could go another row.
Okay, now what about long long division. Like 1573÷48?
Just like with long multiplication, we want to leverage our intuition about smaller numbers to break down bigger ones. So we’re going to break down 1578 into 157×10+3. Then we divide 157 by 48. I don’t know about you, but I’m not great at my 48 times tables, but 48 is near 50 and 157 is near 150, so I’m going to guess 3. 48×3 is 144, 157-144 is 13, so we did good. 157÷48=3R3, or 157=48×3+3. That’s great! But it wasn’t the problem we were ultimately trying to solve. 😛 So we need to put back what we took off before, meaning our running answer so far isn’t 3, it’s 30. And our remainer isn’t 13, it’s 133, because we broke 1578=157×10+3 before, so 13×10+3 is 133.
So now we have a smaller new problem! 133÷48. Again, I’m going to go on my “about 50” intuition from before and say 2. 2×48=96, 133-96=37. So far so good! So now we add our 2 to our answer of 30 so far and get 32, and our remainder is 37. And, in this case, we’re done! So 1573÷48=32R37.
An interesting property of this process, is to check our work, you can long-multiply 48×32 and you’ll notice some old friends. You’ll do 2×48 and get 96, you’ll do 3×48 and get 144 which due to position is actually 1440, and you’ll add those together to get 1536. Then you can add 37 to that to get 1573!
And one last step here. By generalizing our division algorithm to be based on multiplication and subtraction, we can extend this process to non-integer numbers in a way that’s difficult with our “card dividing” method. We can multiply and subtract non-integer numbers already, after all. And even more than that, if we want to get rid of our tidy remainders and replace them with dirty dirty decimal places, we can continue to extend this process infinitely! Instead of stopping at remainder 37 we can extend our question to 1573.0, convert our remainder to 370, and then ask how many times 48 goes into that, get 7R34, but remember it’s not actually 7, it’s 0.7, so our total so far is 32.7 and our remainder is not 34 but 3.4, and if we check we can see that 48×32.7+3.4 is in fact 1573.0!
And if we want to eliminate that remainder altogether we can just keep adding new zero deicmal places to the right, and keep working our remainder smaller and smaller until it’s either perfectly zero, or we decide it’s small enough that we’re going to round it to zero from here. Or maybe we get repeating digits, which is a story for another time! 😉
So, I don’t know if any of that helped at all! But I enjoyed typing it, so thanks for reading! Also, my “long division” section was done conversationally rather than in the typical “frame” that long division goes in. That’s because I was explaining my thought process, but the frame is doing the same thing, it’s basically just there to help you keep track of where you’re at in the problem, which deicmal place everything is aligned to, etc. But it’s not essential to the process! There’s no magic, besides algebra I guess 😛
holy shit, now that’s a post. very well written, easy to follow. nice.
unfortunately, what you’ve described is basically what i’ve been doing, which is way more steps than i tend to need with the others. i don’t know if it exists in other places but we had an entire module in middle school on “överslagsräkning”, which basically translate to “rough calculations”. it was about using iterative methods like this to land at a plausible solution to a problem.
unfortunately, i mostly need actual solutions. as an example i’ll tell you what i did today.
today, i tried to refine an algorithm that, given a set of points (represented by a c array) and a “fractional index” (a positive non-integer value) can give result for a number between two defined points. i had previously done this through simple linear interpolation, but since we sample data from actual physical objects the points tend to represent a curve, and the common way to solve that is with a lagrange polynomial. so, i found an algorithm that, given a set of n + 1 points, evaluates the unique lagrangian of at most degree n that intersects all the points at the given index. i split the terms out to an
(a + b) / cform and then i realised that i have no fucking idea what i’m doing.like yes, i can run the algorithm to see if the numbers line up, but i could never actually do the math. i’m not talking about the algebra part, i’m talking about the arithmetic. if i plug some numbers in and do the parts i can do, i end up with something like
0.23 / -7and i don’t even know where to start. i have no idea where that would even land. so, while i can verify that my test data works, i have no way to quickly extrapolate numbers. which in turn means i can’t come up with plausible input. i’m back to using a calculator for that, which is so damn annoying.Ah! I think I see what you mean. Well, I night. You mean you don’t have a rough sense of what to expect of your answer without just computing it? I’m not 100% sure I do either 😛
But there’s some things we can maybe do. The easiest one, in this case, is that we can temporarily play with orders of magnitude and put on a factor of 100 to get 23/7 = ~3 which means when we take that 100 back off your answer is going to be roughly -0.03. And again, that answer comes from leveraging multiplication insights, to aid division. 23 looks like 21, and I know 21 is a multiple of 7.
Any magnitude we add to our numerator is countered by any magnitude we add to our denominator. So if we had 0.23/73, we could multiply by 100 again to get 23/73, and then multiply by 10 again to get 230/73, but we can also equivalently reduce the denominator by a factor of 10, giving us 23/7 ish. We’ve actually moved by 3 orders of magnitude to get there, so our new “gut” answer is -0.003 ish.
That’s my first guess of what you meant. But you did say you needed “actual” solutions. So maybe you didn’t mean you wanted an intuition about approximations, and you actually wanted to do the long division?
Just in case, I’ll do another worked example of what you might do on paper if you didn’t want to use a calculator.
0.23÷7. 7 goes into 0 zero times, easy, that’s our ones place solved. 7 goes into 02 zero times as well, so our answer so far is 0.0 and we’re moving on to hundredths. 023 is larger than 7, and as before it is recognizably near to 21, a multiple of 7. 7×3 is 21, so our answer so far is 0.03, and our remainder is 23-21=2 (which is actually 0.02, but we keep multiplying things by 10 during the algorithm so we don’t have to worry about that). Okay, we move another order of magnitude down and have 20÷7, which again looks a lot like 21, but smaller so we know it’s 2. 0.032 and a remainder of 20-14=6. 60÷7 is 8, so 0.0328 and 60-56=4. 40÷7 is 5, 0.03285 with remainder 40-35=5. 50÷7 is 7, so 0.032857 and remainder 50-49=1. 10÷7 is 1, 0.0328571, with 10-7=3. 30÷7 is 4, 0.03285714, remainder 30-28=2. And now we’re in trouble. Because we’ve already seen 2. 20÷7 is 2, remainder 6 again. So it just loops now!
-0.032857142857142857142…
And that’s less of a division problem and more of a problem with decimal numbers rather than fractions. It’s simply a limitation of the way we write things. So there isn’t an exact numerical answer for this particular division, you just have to decide where is enough decimal places for your application.
I don’t know if any of that helped at all… but it’s an attempt!
it’s a good attempt too, because i had completely forgot how to do that (mostly because we were taught something called the “chair method” for long division which tends to take up entire pages) and it reminded me of another thing: times tables.
whet i was in school, we got these arithmetic worksheets with times tables on them once a week, (one meek it was 4×n, then 5, then 6…) and we were supposed to do them while being timed. iirc we had five minutes at the start of maths. i don’t think i have to tell you how stressful that is with no intuition as well as fine motor issues. anyway, point being, i don’t remember ever doing one for division. we went from pieces of pies, to the chair method, to short division problems. now, i’ve since learned that apparently the worksheet method isn’t a good pedagogical tool, but it still feels like we skipped a step.
For sure, yeah. I think that honestly division just isn’t as intuitive, for people. It’s weird. But you’re right, maybe none of it is as intuitive as it feels and it was just the school hammering things in 😛
Like, a classic example, it feels intuitive that 1/3 + 2/6 = 3/9. I know those are fractions and not division, but I think it goes together. And it makes sense why it doesn’t work that way if you really dig into it, in this particular example all three of those fractions are actually ⅓, so it’s a+a=a, which is only true for a=0. You can draw pictures of pies and stuff, but I do agree it doesn’t feel quite as “natural” as addition or multiplication. There is also a giant hole in it with division by zero, which isn’t the only time the math runs into and edge, but it is the first one people encounter…
Well, it’s been fun chatting about math with you anyway!
i’m a senior computer engineer currently specialising in signal processing algorithms on constrained systems
Ah. Hmmm. I mean, division is just multiplication turned on its head, so maybe it would help to start with how you visualise multiplication, and see whether you can extend that to work for division too? 🤷♀️
If it makes you feel any better, my arithmetic is horrendous. I understand complex mathematical concepts easily, but don’t ask me to add 2 big numbers. It’s ridiculous 😂
you know cuisenaire rods? those counting stick things. i think in those. that means addition makes a line, multiplication makes a plane, exponentiation makes a cube. higher exponents make cubes of cubes.
division doesn’t really fit in that visual because it’s a quantised system. fractional multiplication fails for the same reason.
Division is taking a plane and breaking it into equal lines. I assume when you multiply you are already giving that plane bounds because anything else wouldn’t give you a result. It takes a few passes to go the other way, but your facility with powers of two can help you narrow it down quickly enough. You’re just trying to find out how long the box of a certain width has to be to fit a given number of blocks.
Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. It’s surprising how many ways people have found to achieve the same goal.
yeah i understand the principle, but the issue is i have to “go through the motions” every time. i can’t do a quick ballpark for division in the same way as for other arithmetics so i can’t self-correct.
I’m not sure if that’s a familiarity issue or an intuitiveness issue. I’d say I’m very good at math, but I’m also weakest at division mentally. I think part of it is we come across the other operations more frequently in life and our brains are more tuned for them, whether that be nature or nurture. I think the only way to change that is practice.
Thats where patterns repeat. It’s just for convenience, an 8th note is an 8th note no matter the signature but its how you count the beats. If a piece is in 3/4 the phrases will feel different from 4/4. So, if youre sight reading, it makes it easier to predict when phrases begin and end, when to come in off rests, etc.
I hope that helps somehow lol.
Also helpful to know where it’s appropriate to take a breath on a wind instrument if it’s not marked.
To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics.
That could be part of the problem: time signatures aren’t a property of the notes, they’re a property of the song. The time signature is the rhythm and flow of the music. If you try to do a waltz in 4/4, it’s probably not going to sound like a waltz unless you do some really screwy things.
Plus, knowing the time signature helps you figure out why that guy is waving his stick like that while you’re playing.
Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is a walz and you can’t convince me otherwise.
I’m pretty sure it is in 6/8.
You could write in triplets in 4/4.
Anything can be in 4/4 if you count hard enough.
That really bothered me at first! Kept thinking ‘why ever have a different time sig? No need for 13/8 (or whatever) when you can just sprinkle in double dotted 16th notes tied to 8th note (or whatever).’
Over time I slowly realized that it’s not about technically being able to write it, but rather describing what usually happens. (Tho I still don’t really understand, intuit, or hear any of it well.)
I give you those “screwy things”. Somebody stripped the fifth beats from Brubeck’s magnum opus, and made the most waltz sounding 4 I’ve ever heard.
Comment so I can find this later
It’s funny how stripping out the fourth beat just sounds like a band who doesn’t quite know how Take 5 goes and they’re just winging it: https://youtu.be/t3u8GwMlJaw
Wow, this sounded amazing!
This. I’m not a musician but have learned many types of dance and the time signature is key for dancing. Maybe it would help OP to do a beginner dance class, to learn time signature in a different context.
So, the original Mission Impossible theme tune is in 5/4. When U2 re-did it for the 1996 Tom Cruise film, the beginning is in 5/4, and then they transition to a slower 4/4. For most of the “Dee da duuuuuuuuuuuh” sections, as far as I can tell it’s just a beat shorter, but the tempo is lower, when they do reprise the Dun! Dun! Da Da! section they use two measures, 8 beats, making it dun dun dun dun da da.
Fun fact: The original dun dun da da was supposed to be “MI” in morse code. --… dash dash dot dot, with a dash being a beat and a half, a dot being one beat, five beats total. U2 turned it into MMI. ----…
How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I’m going wrong, I don’t reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say “find your tribe” like, I might be the last of my kind.
I basically don’t have any friends of my own anymore. The ones from high school I was never really close enough with to hang out outside school. We were just too different. Almost a decade and a half later and we see each other maybe once a year and don’t talk outside of that.
College was supposed to be a place to meet new people, and I did meet a few, one of which is my current partner. But that also didn’t last past college years, really.
I’m now in a different country, don’t really speak the language well enough and don’t really have energy or time to find new people. Plus, my introversion, social anxiety and health are only making it harder. My partner occasionally comments on me having no friends of my own, but then I look at his friend circle and want to roll my eyes. Most of his friends are from high school years, and he sees them maybe once or twice a year. There are a few he met through work, but it’s easier for him because the field we work in is male-dominated. So for him it’s okay, for me it sucks to be the only woman. But he doesn’t hang out with any of these people on regular basis. Realistically, most people he knows are acquaintances.
I think about this whole situation frequently and it makes me depressed and bitter. I feel like even if I find new friends, I’ll never be the friend, you know? They’ll always have other people they’ve been friends with for longer and I will be either not as important or discarded later. It’s been this way my whole life. Always easily forgotten and replaced.
I’ll never be the friend, you know?
this hits a little too close to home
You aren’t doing anything wrong.
That’s just how life is. Practically nobody makes friends as adults due to the structure of adult life.
As children you have tons of free time and no hangups or social status to maintain. As an adult you have zero free time, lots of hangups, and most adults are obsessed with social status.
Real friends are the ones that stick with you when shit hits the fan. When you’re an adult and you meet new people, you usually want to show yourself from your best side and for everything to go well. She we were kids, shit hitting the fan was somebody kicking a ball into a neighbors window or falling of a bike, minor things as an adult, but as kids that built character. The stakes are so much higher as an adult when things go wrong, so generally you avoid it even though this means that most of your relationships are superficial.
I’m not saying that something horrible must happen in order to get friends as an adult. But sometimes it’s better to simply work against the odds together to form a deeper connection.
that’s true. the stakes are higher and you have way more to lose from a bad friendship.
people forget that there are lots of folks who are happy to exploit, use, and betray you. and when you are a kid that might mean they steal your $20 toy, but as an adult it can be a lot more costly. like your friend can come over, slip your stairs, and they can sue you for damages and take your entire life away. and where i live it’s fairly common for people to threaten lawsuits over the stupidest shit.
I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.
I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.
Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.
It’s normal. Hardly anyone makes friends after college or early 20s.
And folks that do, it’s mostly through their children. Because they become friends with the parents of their kid’s friends… because it’s convenient.
It might be normal but it shouldn’t be normalized.
Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅
For me it is drawing. I think it is because I don’t really picture things. My mind is full of descriptions mostly, not visualization, but I don’t know.
I’ve put a ton of time over the years into trying to cultivate the skill, but 3 dimensions complete escapes me. I cannot picture a 3d object, then draw it. I can get away with some geometries with vanishing line references, but that’s it.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t think being able to visualize helps as much as it would seem. Drawing is just hard. I say this as someone who has a very active mental imager and has been drawing (poorly) my whole life. The technical aspects of drawing/painting etc., is really just about understanding the theory, application, and practice.
Does it help? Sure, a little but nothing I’ve ever drawn has come out looking like the mental picture with any satisfaction and I could probably do just as well with a verbal or written description to go off of. And references, of course. Several famous modern artists have aphantasia.
As the saying goes, “Draw with your eyes, not your brain.” Drawing is just a loop of asking yourself whether it looks right or not. Nobody is timing you, if you have to check a reference a million times to draw a single line and then erase it angway then so be it, because the next line will maybe only take half as much, and then half of that…
Theres this wrongfull elitism that an artist has to be able to draw perfectly from memory. They don’t. Fuck it. Print out an image and trace it, that practices line commitment, line width control and scale. Then you can use the traced image to practice shading and coloring. You don’t put a kid on a bicycle without training wheels first, why would you do the same thing as an artist?Same. Aphantasia here and I can’t draw anything for shit. Well, unless we include things like flow charts.
I’m on the extreme end of hyperphantasia and I can’t draw for shit either. I know it is in there somewhere; I project shape, colors and objects into my vision but drawing it is beyond me.
I also have concept/shape, emotion/color, emotion/shape, vision/texture-tactile (/mirror touch) and various other forms of synesthesia. I have a lot of visual “noise” that affects my perception and perspective. It is hard to focus on making drawings that are understandable and relatable for others. When I do draw it is usually complex geometric patterns and colors associated with the “thing” I am trying to draw instead of the “thing” itself. It is hard to describe but I can construct the “thing” and clearly visualize it but when I go to draw it my hand fixates on recreating the shapes and colors of my synesthesia experience of that “thing”.
As a matter of curiosity, you don’t also have aural (auditory tactile) synesthesia do you? That would be wild.
Nope. I didn’t know that was a thing. I do get frission response to certain music, but ASMR is generally just annoying/grating to me.
I do get almost physical sensations when reading code, which is kinda wild.
I don’t mean to drag this on, but interestingly I dislike the asmr craze. But I do get overwhelming frisson and often very teary eyes with even no upset at certain song segments, especially live organ pieces.
same.
but ASMR is generally just annoying/grating to me
It’s so rare to find other people like this! ASMR sound effects make me viscerally uncomfortable, and I especially get creeped out by the whispering voices as if they were right next to your ear 😰
I’ve seen the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory being recommended to those who have a hard time learning to draw. The commenter also provided examples of their own drawings before and after, and it was night and day.
However, I looked through the examples a bit, and am wary of reading the books myself, because the drawings there are very representative, while I’m aiming for a more wacky style. It could also be that the books are mainly about drawing from references, not sure yet.
I’m not sure if this answers the question but I feel like the older I get the more I see through “the game of life” and once that illusion gets shattered it’s impossible to unsee. Much of the status seeking, tribal behaviour becomes nearly impossible to partake in once you start seeing what it’s all for.
Go ask a person why their Instagram is filled to the brim with pictures of their face, for example, and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic. Try doing that while being fully conscious about the true motivations behind it. You can’t - something has to give.
However, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Sure you can pat yourself on the back for being above it all but it makes it really difficult for anyone to try and integrate in normal everyday social situations when all of it just feels like a performance.
There is a difference between being narcissistic and craving validation. It’s completely normal to want validation, feel needed, wanted and appreciated.
It’s very sad that every human need has been turned into a subscription based service.
the problem is people twist themselves into knots to get it these days, and it makes the mentally unwell.
And they hate people who don’t ‘go along’ with the ‘game’ they play.
Narcissism is just pathological validation craving. They’re on the same spectrum. However, I’m not one to judge someone for just posting on instagram.
Narcissists don’t crave validation. They don’t think they even need it, because they already feel so self-assured.
You’re confusing narcissism with insecurity, which is practically the opposite of narcissism.
A narcissist doesn’t think they need your approval, and isn’t going to beg for it. They’ll just explode the moment you express disapproval or disagreement, because that clashes with their worldview and self-image, and that’s something they can’t tolerate.
Add in a psychedelic experience or two, and it becomes impossible not to recognize how ridiculous it all is.
Can be done without them, of course, but psychedelics can blast you right to that position, for better or worse.
I’ve taken the slow route and have been doing mindfulness meditation for a decade which probably plays a role in all this.
I’m at the point where I don’t even try to integrate any more. The only time I leave my flat is against my will because I have to go to work to be able to afford to live.
Take it as a call to develop deep, authentic relationships with those people who are willing to let their guard down with you.
those people don’t exist in many people’s lives.
and even if they do, it’s typically only temporary. people who get these lifelong deep authentic friendships… are pretty rare and lucky to have the circumstances in life that allowed for that.
like, a lot of people don’t have those kinds of relationships and never seek them either, the concept just doesn’t exist for them and they live their entire lives on a very surface level understanding of the world.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t understand how I can develop a deep authentic relationship with people who obsessed with shallow things like their social status and how expensive their car is compared to other people’s cars… and that’s what dominates the culture in my city. Or who fly into a long winded speech about their anxiety and despair over the fact they only make 350K last year or their stock portfolio only returned 5.5% instead of the 7% their account manager promised them…
With who?
start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic
Humans are narcissistic and selfish because over the millenia the ones that were selfish outcompeted the ones that weren’t. It’s totally natural to be selfish. Some are just better at hiding it than others.
However there is also a simple social aspect to including yourself in photos. It’s a clear visceral way to say “I was here”. A photo without your face does not have capture the “you” part of that statement. Social interaction is not just an exchanging of ideas, it’s also about building relationships, and for that to happen, the “you” part of the equation is vital.
To be fair I rarely include myself in photos, but for the same reason I am also less integrated into my social circles.
If narcissism is so adaptive towards survival, why don’t you put a couple dozen narcissists together on a deserted island see how well they’re doing after a week.
Yeah I also have autism
autism has nothing to do with this.
Sure, sure
Oh, it does
It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.
In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.
But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.
A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.
I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.
and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic.
I encounter this when chatting with a family member and she mentions that she “loves animals” and who “couldn’t hurt a fly” while also being an omnivore. She feels sorry for the animals when she thinks of industrial farming, but does her best to never think about it. When this topic comes up, I don’t say anything (we’ve been through the topic in the past), but she sees the impatience with her bullshit on my face, and gets flustered by the fact that someone doesn’t consider this cognitive dissonance normal.
I can somewhat relate with that. Eating meat is one of the few behaviours that I still do despite being unable to morally defend it. It’s not even that I’m trying not to think about it or have to somehow deceive myself believing that it’s good. I know exactly what I’m doing. The convenience of it simply outweighs the moral guilt.
What I think would possibly make me feel different about it is someone handing me a gun and telling me to shoot a cow. If it turns out that I can’t do it, then that really puts into question the outsourcing of the messy part of it in the first place.
Cool. I love animals and I eat meat and I love it.
I see nothing wrong with it. Death is part of life.
Do you ever ask yourself why it is that you need other people to believe and practice what you believe? And do you find when other peole impose their beliefs on you find it offputting and upsetting?
Maybe Bootsy Collins can help explain 4/4 https://youtu.be/IHE6hZU72A4 When he plays “on the one” thats 1 of 4, the first beat of the bar. A repeated grouping of 4 beats.
