chaz720.net - journal

October 15, 2001

There you were freaking out, Trying to get your head around the fact that me and you and love is dead. See how I'm trippin out, 'cos you can't decide what you really want from me. Why does it have to be like this? I can never tell. You make me love you, love you baby, With a little L. There you were shouting out. Cranking up your altercations, getting upset in your desperation. Screaming and hollering, How could this love become so paper thin? You're playing so hard to get. You're making me sweat just to hold your attention. I can't give you nothing more, If you ain't givin' nothing to me. you make me love you, love you baby, with a little L. why does it have to be like this? I can never tell. Seems like you're stepping on the pieces of my broken shell. 'cos you make me love you, love you with a little L you know that's the way you make me love you yeah.

After reading Joel's entry about apathy being a highly enlightened state, I felt compelled to respond. And in talking briefly with him I think I have a way to proove numerically that I have found the one true way to live... or something like that, ahem cough.

So I came up with the idea that everyone has to have in their mind some idea of scope in which they exist. This meaning, when they think of the word "everything" a certain collection of stuff kinda lights up in their head. And this scope is inversely related to how much importance they place on any given thing in that collection. To see this illustrated I'll use the extremes. Someone whose scope is miniscule, represented by those who are manic/depressive, sees the world as containing very little besides what is happening right now, and thus they will tend to react very rashly to many things that happen. Because if that is all the world is, it must be very important. Whereas someone whose scope is infinate, that is when they say "everything" they mean everything, will be completely apathetic. Because over the course of all of time nothing really holds any signifigance. Now it's time to bust out those numbers I was promising...

Let's say there are a finite number of events that are going to occur involving your existance. To involve you means you know about it, you've done it, or someone knows you've done it. So included in your existance is, everything you know about the past, everything you will do while alive, and the knowledge of everything you have done by those people in the future. This is sometimes called your sphere of influence. And, as I said, it is going to contain some finite number of events. Now lets assume that things that happen can be given a particualr value of importance, and we will add all these values up, to come up with a "total quantity of your importance". This being, essentially, a value placed on your sphere of influence. And assuming we hold some belief in fate, let's say this number is pretty much set for every person. We'll use this number in a minute

First let's look back at our percieved scope I was talking about, and give that a number. This is fairly easy. I'll say a person with an infinate scope will have a value of infinity, and a manic/depressive person has a scope value of near zero. And most people have a scope value somewhere in between. Now let's say that the amount of concern that someone will place on an event, is equal to the value of importance of that event, devided by their scope value. Let's see some examples. We'll arbitrarily say a car accident is 100 points, and stubbing your toe is 1 point.

To the person with infinate scope we have 100/infinity compared to 1/infinity both of which are zero. Meaning this person doesn't really care how many accidents he gets in or home many times he stubs his toe, it's all the same in that nothing is really important.
Next of which, we have the manic/depressive person. they are comapring 100/almost zero and 1/almost zero. these are both simply very large numbers, and the person will react very much the same to both of them.
finally we have the person who is somewhere between. They will get two reaction types that have a fair amount of distance between them, reacting more to the car accident than the stubbed toe.

So we can see that the first two people may not be the best way to respond to things. As the infinite in scope will end up being a rather shallow person who takes everything at face value believing nothing has any importance at all. And the manic depressive will live their life on a rollercoaster. But where in the middle like the third person makes the most sense to be? Well, I say it makes the most sense to live by a scope that places the sum of all your reactions close to 1. That is the same thing as saying, live with a scope value equal to that number we found a minute ago, the "total quantity of your importance".

So in other words you can react to things that you know about the past, behave in a particular mannor while alive, and you can change the way you act based on the knowledge that people will remember you. But I don't think it is very appropriate to base the way you live your life on something that lies outside your sphere of influence. Of course, that's just me and my infalible calculations talking so take it for what it's worth.

P.S. the event value of having read this entry was somewhere between stubbing your toe and drinking a cup of coffee.

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