The Friday Roundup -- 4/19/2024 FREE Edition

State of the Substack & Works in Progress; How to Appreciate What You Have; Why Time Goes By Faster As We Age; The Art of Growing Older; Netflix Accused of Using AI Photos in Documentary & More!

Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our paid subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.

Today, I’m offering a free preview of what paid subscribers get every Friday.

If you’d like full access to the The Friday Roundup and all paid subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $5/month or $50 per year, right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that here:

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Happy Friday everyone!

I’m going to do things a little bit differently with this edition. Break things out a bit more cleanly under some section headings, and offer slightly shorter summaries for easier reading.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Housekeeping

The Skojec File:

I won’t include this section in every Friday Roundup going forward, but it’s the place for announcements and other administrative items.

First, this publication is holding steady at about 2000 free and 160 paid subscriptions.

I’m at a very real crossroads where after 10 years of working for myself doing the thing I love most — writing — I may have to go back and get a regular old job (or start selling my organs). And because of the kinds of jobs available where I live (mostly service industry) and how long I’ve been out of the workforce, that will likely mean doing something menial that will eat up most of my writing time, which could kill off The Skojec File, at least for a while.

I’m working on multiple projects that will hopefully create several revenue streams, but as with everything online, it takes time to build the audience, develop the products to sell to them, and move the numbers until they get to where you need them to be.

So here’s the ask: if you enjoy this publication and can subscribe for just $5/month, it would be a huge help. If every free subscriber were a paid subscriber, I could actually make this my day job. I have more content ideas than time to implement, but I have to prioritize paying work. All I ask is that you consider this: is the enjoyment you get from reading The Skojec File worth $5 a month to you? At this point in time, that doesn’t even buy you a hot cup of coffee most places, and the work I put in here takes quite a bit more time than foaming up a latte for you — although, I do make a mean latte.

It’s a no-obligation, no-contract subscription. You can cancel at any time. If you’re ready to support the ‘stack, you can subscribe right here:

ALSO: Perhaps we’re not ready to bring back patrons of the arts en masse, but if you’re interested in being a patron of my work beyond the nominal subscription fee, that would be very helpful. You can always buy me a coffee or make a donation via My Paypal. (I’m open to considering other methods if there’s anything you all prefer.) The button below will also take you to my Paypal page.

(Also: all the links to things on Amazon in this post are affiliate links, so anything you buy through those links helps me out as well with a small commission.)

I’m working on some ideas about how to better segment out the regular, non-roundup content here into clearer interest categories. My thanks to those of you who took the survey a couple months back for helping me to understand what you’re looking for. You made clear which topics were of greatest interest to you, so I intend to keep those areas as the primary focus here, but I do want venues for writing about other things, so I’ll either break this down into what Substack calls “sections” — divisions within a single publication that can be opted into or out of by subscribers so they only get updates on the topics they like — or I will break it into multiple publications that have different focuses altogether. I’m still noodling out the specifics.

TL;DR: I will be writing about religion/religious deconstruction, personal development, cultural issues, personal wellness, (and the interplay between all of these) here on the main publication, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon. There’s just so much to talk about, so I hope you’ll sign up! Here’s that button again in case you haven’t pulled the trigger yet!

Projects:

Another way you can support my work is by buying my books and other items.

I’m about a third of the way through a manuscript draft of a book to help beginners get going with writing online (and writing better in general) that will probably end up being released before the novel is finished (it always ends up getting put lowest on the priority scale because it has the longest track to ROI of anything else I’m working on, and bill collectors aren’t patient.)

As I’ve mentioned, I also recently created a children’s book of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, that began as something I could read to Eli, my almost 3-year-old son. But there was no reason to just keep it to myself. If you’ve got little ones or grandkids, this is a very visual book that you may enjoy.

I am happy to report that Eli loves it!

I never thought the first books I’d publish would be children’s books, but I have lots of children, and they tend to inspire me, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Here’s a handful of pages from the book, so you can see what you’d be getting if you decide to grab one:

If you’re interested in buying a copy, the book comes in two flavors:

You can get the cheaper, ebook version (which looks great on iPad) right here.

You can get the slightly more expensive, physical version right here.

Both are under $10, so I think it’s a pretty good deal.

Of course the Atomic Robot Coloring book is still available as well. If you missed that one when it came out last year, here’s a preview:

We’ve sold 86 copies since I released it, and it’s getting rave reviews:

If you’re interested, you can grab that one right here.

Now, onto the meat and potatoes of the Roundup:

Articles

In case you missed it, my column this week was about dealing with anger, with a special emphasis on male anger and the importance of figuring out how to manage it well when you have a family.

Full disclosure: I’m a student, not a master. I published this on Monday, and went on to have a terrible day on Tuesday where I followed none of my own advice and was an ass all day.

It’s almost like the Universe is reminding me not to get cocky.

That said, I’ve learned a lot from living with a lifetime of difficult-to-manage anger, and I share some of my findings for those of you struggling with the same. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on this piece, so I hope it resonates with you:

How to appreciate what you have — Avram Alpert/Aeon

I have slightly mixed feelings about this piece. It’s written from a perspective that comes off as a bit of an idealist’s whinge; the sort of “egalitarian” ideology that laments the existence of wealth disparity and climate change in a way that makes you roll your eyes.

But in a way, that makes the focus in the piece on doing the work to be appreciative more impressive.

From the article:

[A]ppreciation means not just being grateful for what you have or what you’ve been given, because gratitude does not necessarily imply an attitude of care and consideration. Appreciation, as I use it here, may begin with thankfulness for what you have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.

It is not easy to engage in this kind of appreciation, and not only because it asks us to think in these multiple registers. Even when things are going well, you might not feel that you appreciate it all as much as you could or should. Alternatively, maybe you’re not sure that you have anything genuinely worth appreciating. There are many general reasons why appreciation can be challenging, and they stretch across psychology, culture, economics and politics.

I found this bit particularly interesting:

Humans are incredibly complex creatures with competing instincts. We have neurons telling us to get what’s ours and to achieve social status, while simultaneously leading us to underestimate our gains. One explanation for this is that we evolved to go through a boom-and-bust pleasure loop. Humans don’t just have to eat or procreate once, in order to pass on their genes; we have to do it continually. So we are led to desire something, get it, and then not be satisfied by it. The famous image for this in modern psychology is the hedonic treadmill: we’re always running toward what we think will make us happier, and always ending up back where we started. [emphasis added]

Alpert breaks down the steps to developing the appreciation muscle as follows:

1. Appreciation can be useful in an imperfect world. We can recognise the value of what we currently have without giving up on changing our lives and the world. In fact, appreciation can help give us the energy and mindset to make transformations.

2. Begin where you are. Recognise that there will always be some degree of difficulty in life. If you don’t appreciate what you have now, you might never appreciate what you have.

3. Identify what you have. Begin by acknowledging what you don’t have in this world. Let it all out. Once that’s done, list all the things you do have – personally, culturally, worldly, cosmically. Let it all in.

4. Reflect on what you have. Write about or speak with someone about one or more of the things on your list, exploring why you appreciate it.

5. Keep the deeper meaning of appreciation in sight. It’s one thing to have a good life and to notice how good it is. A deeper form of appreciation happens when you appreciate what’s going well in spite of what is not.

6. Allow yourself to appreciate imperfection. The inherent imperfection of life can force you to recognise what you value. And it can help you to see that none of us are without flaws, and all of us deserve appreciation.

As someone who went from broke to successful back to broke again, who is starting over in his career at an age where retirement should be coming into view in not too long, who is tired of struggling with mental and physical health, the relationship-damaging aspects of childhood trauma, and the stress of trying to figure out how to give a large family what they need while still fumbling to figure my own stuff out, I often have a hard time practicing gratitude. This is where being neurotic is a real disadvantage — it makes you insanely good at seeing the cloud in every silver lining.

But it’s also what makes gratitude super important.

Recognizing that even though everything feels bad sometimes, it doesn’t mean everything is bad can be a critical life skill for going through hard times. Forcing yourself to accept reality instead of the narrative you tell yourself so you can wallow in your own misery? That’s a good thing.

As Alpert says:

Many people today rightfully feel angry about the world. This anger can have a positive effect when it motivates us to try to improve conditions. But, of course, it can also be very dangerous. Energy from anger is often like that from a fossil fuel: it is cheap and easy to use, but it is ultimately destructive, and eventually it runs out.

When people think of appreciating what they have, they might imagine simple self-help clichés that appeal to those who think only about themselves and what they possess. But, as I’ve tried to argue, appreciation is in fact much more than this. And we can use it to replace anger as a source of motivation. Because appreciation is more like geothermal energy: once you tap into it, it is an endless resource, and it can provide clean energy with minimal side-effects.

This other kind of energy can have profound psychological benefits. On an individual level, it can reduce some of the stress and difficulty of constantly grasping and wanting. It can increase your sense of contentment and meaning by helping you focus on what gives you these things. And it can help you learn to care for yourself and what matters to you.

Read the rest right here.

Why Time Goes By Faster As We Age — Clifford Lazarus/Psychology Today

When I was a kid, time seemed to stretch on forever. The five hour car trip from northern Connecticut where I lived to my grandparents’ house in Binghamton, New York, may as well have taken five days.

Summer vacations seemed like they stretched on endlessly, and every moment was precious.

Birthdays and Christmases never came quickly enough, and were always gone too soon.

Over the years, I noticed something odd, though: the older I got, the faster time seemed to go.

It didn’t take me long to develop a hypothesis: every year that passes adds a year to the pile of your experience. When you’re five, a year is 20% of the life you’ve experienced. When you’re 20, a year is just 5% of your life.

So, as you accumulate years, each individual year feels smaller because each becomes an increasingly smaller percentage of your total conscious time.

According to Dr. Lazarus in this piece at PT, that’s part of it. But there’s more to it than that:

Another intriguing hypothesis stems from the fact that young children have faster heart rates and faster breathing rates than adults. It is likely, therefore, that their brains’ electrophysical undulations and rhythms occur faster as well. Just like the heart’s pacemaker slows the heart’s rhythm as children age, it is possible the brain has a pacemaker as well that slows as people age, and this “neural metronome” provides an internal sense of the passage of time.

Indeed, if you ask a young child to sit quietly, close their eyes, and state when a minute has passed, most children will report a minute has elapsed in 40 seconds or less. Run the same experiment with adults and seniors, and they will likely report a minute has passed in 60 to 70 seconds. Hence, children's brains "beat" faster than adult brains, thus allowing them to have more conscious experiences in a given unit of objective time. This, in turn, leads to the subjective passage of time moving more slowly for children than it does for adults.

A fascinating explanation that extends this neural pacemaker theory has recently been posited by Professor Adrian Bejan. He presents an argument based on the physics of neural signal processing (Bejan, 2019). Bejan hypothesizes that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, and this is what makes time “speed up” as we grow older.

This is because objectively measurable “clock time” and purely subjective “mind time” are not the same. Unlike the number of a cesium atom’s vibrations (the current agreed-upon definition of one second), mental time—memory—is never veridical and universally agreed on. It is a reconstructive process that involves a great deal of mental imagery (i.e., A. A. Lazarus, 1978). Bejan believes time as we experience it represents perceived changes in visual stimuli. We know something happened because we see change. And things always change in one direction; from cause to effect. We will never see a broken glass reassemble itself and jump onto a table from which it fell.

It gets even more interesting:

Like frames in a movie, the more frames one sees in a second the slower the image appears to pass. The fewer frames one sees per second the faster the image seems to move. In other words, slow motion reveals many more frames-per-second than normal motion or fast motion. Bejan asserts that as we age our brain’s neurovisual memory formation equipment slows and lays down fewer “frames-per-second.” That is, more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. Children perceive and lay down more memory frames or mental images per unit of time than adults, so when they remember events—that is, the passage of time—they recall more visual data.

This is what causes the perception of time passing more rapidly as we age. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images relative to our older selves. Like a slow-motion camera that captures many more frames per second than a regular speed one, and time appears to pass more slowly when the film is played.

Read the rest here.

Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older — Maria Popova/The Marginalian

This one feels intimately connected to the last piece. Maria Popova is a master at providing thought provoking topics and unique pattern recognition:

“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” But who is the person staring back at us from the mirror as the decades roll by? The mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of changes is, after all, one of the most interesting questions of philosophy. Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.

The piece is really about Paley’s reflections, which are beautiful and unique, but I was struck by that paragraph, which had nothing to do with Paley’s thoughts on aging.

For her takes, go read the rest.

Netflix Accused of Using AI Photos in True Crime Documentary — Matt Grocoot/PetaPixel

The title of this one is self-explanatory, but here’s the gist: in a documentary about Jennifer Pan, a young woman who was convicted for hiring a contract killer to murder her parents, who had a history of controlling every aspect of her life.

Her mother died in the attack, but her father survived his wounds.

The filmmakers showed still images of Pan being “bubbly, happy, confident, and very genuine” before her turn to violence against her parents.

The problem is, the images are almost certainly AI-generated and not real. Telltale distortions in the image point to them being faked.

These are the kinds of unethical distortions the ubiquity of generative AI will bring to photographic and video evidence, and as the generators get better, the artifacts will become increasingly difficult to detect.

Read the rest here.

Books I’m Reading:

The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin

I’ve mentioned this several times and will probably continue to do so. It’s a rich book that feels more like a meditation than a text. I’m savoring it slowly, only taking it in in pieces when I feel like I’m most capable of absorbing the wisdom it has to offer.

If you’re a creative person — and really, I think everyone is on some level — I highly recommend it.

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The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

Done in the style of a Socratic dialogue between a young man seeking answers and a wise old philosopher in his town, this introduction to Adlerian psychology is providing a counterpoint to all the trauma work I’m doing to uncover the origin of certain behaviors I want to change that seem to be on automatic.

Not that I want to undermine the efforts to make those changes, but Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, had a very different take on the narratives around childhood experiences and trauma and the way they affect us than were prevalent in the work of Freud and Jung and remain typical to this day.

Understanding that different take gives me a different angle of attack on my problems and helps me to see the weaknesses that might exist in common approaches.

The old philosopher, channeling Alder, tells the young man that he doesn’t believe “trauma” as it is commonly understood exists. Referencing a friend the young man brings up who is an agoraphobic shut-in, the philosopher says:

PHILOSOPHER: So if the here and now of everyone in the world is due to their past incidents, according to you, wouldn’t things turn out very strangely? Don’t you see? Everyone who has grown up abused by his or her parents would have to suffer the same effects as your friend and become a recluse, or the whole idea just doesn’t hold water. That is, if the past actually determines the present, and the causes control the effects.

YOUTH: What, exactly, are you getting at?

PHILOSOPHER: If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable. Am I wrong?

YOUTH: So you’re saying that the past doesn’t matter?

PHILOSOPHER: Yes, that is the standpoint of Adlerian psychology.

I don’t buy the argument yet, but I find it fascinating. In one sense, Adler is clearly correct: there’s nothing deterministic about the way we respond to trauma, or everyone subjected to the same traumas would react the same way.

If the outcome is not determined, and the results are only a function of the way we process a negative experience, then we are empowered to change the results of what would otherwise be seen as a traumatic experience.

That said, I think that even the trauma model makes space for this. We learn what our traumas are and how they have affected our behavior so that we can begin to heal and change the reactions.

I’m only 15% of the way into the book, so I’m very curious to see where this is all going.

Music I’m Listening To:

I’m not, generally speaking, a big music guy. I have an enormous song catalog in my head, and can sing along with most of the stuff that comes on the radio, but I’m not, for whatever reason, someone who busts out my favorite albums to listen to when I’m just chilling at home.

But I do listen to music while I’m working. Preferably soft, ambient music with no lyrics. I’ve been on a kick lately with this album from Justice Der, which is just incredibly chill and easy to listen to while writing. In fact, I’ve been listening to it the whole time I’ve been writing this issue of the roundup:

I just discovered a British singer called Raye, and she reminds me of the first time I discovered Amy Winehouse. Incredible vocal talent, soulful, and unique. I’ll be checking out more of her music when I have the chance. Some of her stuff seems to be a fusion of hip hop and the old school, old-soul standards. Here she is doing Nina Simone’s Feeling Good:

My favorite version of Feeling Good is still the one done by Michael Bublé, but Raye’s is a close second.

If you’ve not heard Noah Kahan’s (pronounced “Khan”) Stick Season you’ve probably been living in a bunker, but it’s a great song with an addictive chorus:

What I didn’t expect was this really solid cover of the song from Olivia Rodriguo:

That’s it for this week’s edition. I’ll see you next week!