I spent most of last night scouring the internet and reading… The same guy who blogged about his successful transition into uberman is also behind a massively successful self-help website, www.stevepavlina.com. He has some really wise things to say… and some really quirky new-agey things too. The article 10 Tips for College Students has some really juicy ideas. It led me to a great site that teaches you tricks to improve your memory. Very very cool stuff. I have a terrible memory, but after only the first 15 minutes I was able to memorize an ordered list of 10 random nouns after only looking at it for 1 minute.
My reasons for trying uberman were curiosity and the desire to increase my overall awesomeness. I never quite registered the acceleration at which I can continue increasing overall awesomeness when I have 6 extra hours each day to devote to it. In face of the ever-present itch of curiosity, I’ve been armed with a huge freakin backscratcher. Imagine how vastly my understanding of the world would grow if I devoted 4 hours every day for a year to exploring wikipedia or raiding the school library.
As Geoff put it, “You’ve gone MAD WITH POWER!”
During the day I feel pretty good, but this last night was pretty rough. I was feeling fantastic up until 5:30. But I woke up from my nap feeling so crappy I wanted to go right back to sleep. I threw in an extra nap at 7:30 and the same thing happened. I’ve finally just now started feeling lucid again as the sun-light filled my room.
And now it’s time for my 9:30 nap….
Update: (after nap)
I feel spectacular again. 100% or more. I was having a dream when the alarm went off. I think it’s much less painful to interrupt sleep in the middle of REM than during other deeper phases (turns out REM isn’t a very deep form of sleep, just the most immediately necessary.) This time it took me significantly longer to fall asleep — maybe 10 minutes. I wonder if the other two naps left me feeling crappy because I overslept into the after-REM phase… I think I’ll start cutting down my allotted nap time from 25 minutes to 22.
5 Comments
You know, I’ve read a couple articles about how the new media forms, and particularly the internet, have changed the way we think and function: instead of being able to concentrate on one thing for long stretches of time, we’re adapting so that we absorb lots of different, largely unrelated information in tiny quanta. This sounds obvious, but the implications may be more extreme than you’d expect, especially in terms of in-depth reading and writing (I also wonder how it affects us when we listen to, perform, and write music). Here’s the latest article I read: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Anyway, I was wondering whether this new micro-evolution (I know, I know, that’s not technically what it is…yet) is affecting your efforts to adapt to the Uberman schedule. Superficially, I would suspect that it would be much easier for our generation to adapt, since the Uberman breaks the day down into individual fragments much like the internet breaks social and other information down into things like tweets and blog posts, and TV breaks things into 5-minute segments with commercial breaks. On the other hand, it’s much harder to become immersed in the type of long-term project requiring intense dedication that they say is so helpful for adjusting to Uberman (not to mention the fact that Uberman itself is obviously quite a project). Bucky Fuller died in ’83 (thanks Wikipedia!), well before the dawn of the popularized internet (but well into the age of television), so his success (along with his statement about napping as soon as he felt his concentration slip) would probably indicate that the “old” way of thinking is better for Uberman.
Also, I tend to think that awesomeness is more akin to velocity than to position, so I think what you’re really talking about is the “acceleration with which [you] can increase [your] overall awesomeness.” Just a thought.
Not that your overall awesomeness needs a heck of a lot of acceleration–I’m pretty sure that in most people’s minds, you’re already fairly close to the awesome-equivalent of c. Which, I suppose, could be a dangerous place to be.
But of course, the truly awesome enjoy life most at the edge.
The heck is the awesome-equivalent of C? Like, C the language or C the grade? …C the vitamin? Vitamin C is pretty awesome.
On a more serious note, that’s a really interesting Idea. It’s definitely easier to stay distracted in our world than it has in the past, and multitasking is becoming more of a necessity. I’ll be sure to read the article after my nap, but I have to admit, the title makes me roll my eyes. I believe that the internet is reawakening us to learn, explore, and act at unprecedented level, kind of the opposite of what TV did… but I guess flash games are just as bad.
Yes, I agree awesomeness should be a velocity. I’ll update the post… right after this nap :)
I read the article. It’s good.
A lot of people expect that humans will “evolve” into cold rational beings but I don’t think so at all. I think we’ll certainly evolve, perhaps become part machine, or whatever, but emotion is such an integral part of what we are that I don’t think it’s likely to just go away. I’m thinking that we’ll have art-forms hundreds of years from now that will probably be more beautiful than anything we’ve ever seen.
As for the decrease in attention-span, I highly welcome the laconic brevity of modern prose over the rambling, unfocused, and pointlessly complicated writing of our earlier authors. Though I’m sure we have lower attention spans now, I think that’s because most things we do shouldn’t be holding our attention for more than 5 minutes. There are more important things to be doing with our time. I say we get bored reading books, _because they’re boring!_ according to our new standards anyway. I’m still able to have 4-hour philosophical conversations with friends, or dedicate myself to a single project for days on end when I find that particular thing interesting. I think boredom and low attention-spans come out of a natural desire to want to get to the point of the information presented us.
Now obviously that effects our response to something like classical music, and probably not for the better. It takes considerable time and energy before you can really “see the point” of music and we are now less likely to take that time.
My main point is that all this technology is not a zombification of our ability to focus or feel. In many ways it enhances it.
I actually meant c, the velocity constant (as in the speed of light).
Yeah, the article title was pretty stupid, but then the actual article had basically nothing to do with that, so it was okay.
I agree that a lot of the time old authors would just ramble on and on about nothing (for instance, I’m reading some tracts by Martin Luther right now, and he has some interesting things to say–but then he says them over and over and over again in different ways), but a lot of the time I think that the most powerful ideas and art forms can only maintain their full power when they include a lot of “boring” stuff, because that boring stuff eventually becomes important, or because it contributes in unexpected ways to the rest of the work. Take the movie Citizen Kane, for instance–it’s unrelentingly dark, and by the end of the first half or so, you really don’t know where it’s going, or why. But the rest of the movie pulls everything together. This technique really wouldn’t work in most modern films, which won’t allow for that sort of slow build-up (The Godfather comes close to that sort of thing, actually, but even that was decades ago). I guess this is sort of the same thing as what you’re saying about classical music.