Phil - The Suburban Layman

Creator of the Vitality Buffs Channel, Vitality Buffs Substack, Art of Intrigue Channel, and Next Revolution in Science Channel.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

My interview with Iain McGilchrist - the most important philosopher of our time

Iain McGilchrist Interview: We Discuss Scientific Models, T. Gondii, Art... https://t.co/Mmul4bFMKL via @YouTube

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

@AncestralHealtz @XM1186 Why didn't Tasmanian Aboriginals develop lighter skin? They were the blackest of all Aboriginals. And were apparently down there for 45,000 years. Compared to Europeans apparently 30,000 years out of Africa. That's if the mainstream story is true.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

@AncestralHealtz @WholePersonDiet I prefer very white skin on a woman

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

@WWelander @SolBrah I remember seeing some literature research about people poisoning the wells at that time. Probably wasn't even an infectious disease.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Something that is being missed perhaps though is a point that Richard Dawkins made in the Blind Watchmaker. It was something like, a female lyre bird may prefer a male with an even bigger tail than what is found in nature but the one's that commonly exist are simply a trade off between the female's sexual preference and survival capacity. In other words, although that is functionally peak physique, it may still be so that a lot of females dream of a jacked Thor like physique. Hence the interest that men have in obtaining it.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

@JMGreerWriter With which specific people in charge? Asians?

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

“To me, ultimately martial art means honestly expressing yourself. It is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flattered with a cocky feeling […] Or I can make all kinds of phony things — you know what I mean — and blind you by it. Or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly — not lying to oneself — to express myself honestly, my friend, is very hard to do. And you have to train. you have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it, it’s there.”
—Bruce Lee

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Eric Clapton on the Flow State:

“I can’t really explain what it’s like except in a physical sense. It’s a massive rush of adrenaline, which comes at a certain point. Usually it’s a sharing experience; it’s not something I could experience on my own […] It’s not even just the musicians: it’s everyone that’s involved in the whole experience. Everyone in that place seems to unify at one point. It’s when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They’re all transported toward the same place […] You could call it unity, which is a very spiritual word for me. Everyone is one at that point, at that specific point in time, not for very long. Of course, the minute you become aware of that it’s gone.”
—Eric Clapton

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Aversion to Solitude

A person who strongly dislikes being alone will have difficulty in developing one of the most important character attributes of an innovator — the potential to employ initiative. The pursuit of mastery will inevitably involve periods spent in solitude while thinking, reading, and practicing, as skills and understanding are developed and deepened. Fear of solitude is one of the strongest fears across all people, though it does not affect everyone. And for most people, it can be quickly reduced through a better understanding of the nature of loneliness.

Loneliness seems like a simple matter on the surface. The assumption is that if a person is not paired up, or if they have few friends around to keep them company, then they must be lonely. But when loneliness is looked at more closely it isn’t as straightforward as that.

Many people who are married with children are still very lonely, while on the other hand, there are many people who live in solitude and are not lonely.

Romance doesn’t always cure loneliness; it can often exacerbate it (suddenly the person feels insecure when their partner is gone for just a day). And most people tend to feel much lonelier when they are in the wrong company than when they are alone in their own company.

Stranger still, if solitude is chosen intentionally, it doesn’t carry any sensation of loneliness with it.

So, what is loneliness then, if it’s not always cured by close relationships?

For sure, it’s understandable that people hold this fear. But in many people, it’s a little over-the-top. As far as the pursuit of mastery is concerned, usually a person would only need to be able to relax in their own company for a matter of hours without freaking out. It’s surprising how rare that ability is, considering that nobody who cares about you now is going to forget about you any time soon. But fortunately, the ability to relax in solitude is one that can be developed through intentional exposure.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
—Blaise Pascal

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Submission to social authority doesn’t just hinder innovation; it also stands in the way of enjoyment.

The flow state is a rare occurrence for people who believe they need social authority to instruct their every move.

Some people only seem to appreciate sights and experiences that are accepted as being valid and glamorous, like seeing the Eiffel Tower, for example.

But these experiences are not necessarily any better than the happenings that we are fortunate enough to witness on an ordinary day.

Many things can be seen as being more miraculous and entertaining than famous monuments and landmarks if we take off the distorting lens of social authority.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Don't Be Led Astray By Social Proofing

In the pursuit of mastery, we can be led astray by the distortion of our perceptions that social authority creates.

There is a common strategy in marketing called social proofing. Social proofing occurs when the display of attitudes of higher- or equal-status group members influence an individual’s perception.

Social proofing can be induced intentionally, for example when a commercial shows attractive people enjoying and worshipping the product being sold. But it can also happen indirectly. An example of this is when a person hears a song on the radio — if they don’t know anything about the song they might think it’s nothing special. But then they hear that same song in a movie and in a shopping center and at a party, and they hear it was ranked highly on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Songs of All Time list. The more they encounter the song in this way, the more social proofing they are receiving regarding the song, and so its prestige is building. After hearing the song in this variety of contexts, the song may begin to appear to be ingenious.

For an artist who wants to create work of genuine value, it can be a disaster to fall for social proofing like this. Searching for the qualities in the song that led to its great success might only lead the artist astray because it wasn’t necessarily the artwork itself that made the song popular. The song may have risen to that level of popularity by means of social proofing. By worshipping and replicating what is really just a social fad, the artist will waste time creating work that has no value in tomorrow’s culture.

Excessive submission to social authority is one of the biggest killers of innovation. Things that carry social authority can only ever be things that already exist as being popular and accepted.

A good way to side-step the hypnotic cage that social authority traps us in is to explore areas that are not considered to be prestigious or valid. The most innovative of the popular musicians are always influenced partly by music genres that are unpopular. By finding the best aspects of those less popular genres and bringing them into play with the qualities of a more popular style of music, they are able to create a fresh sound that a mainstream audience is ready for.

Even in sports, bowing to social authority can stunt performance. The American high jumper Dick Fosbury was laughed at when he began jumping over the bar in such an awkward way. Nowadays, the “Fosbury flop” is the standard method in high jump.

The key to avoiding the rut of submission to social authority is to bring the focus back to creating true value. Rather than trying to be something, why not aim to do something. If you’re making music, your aim is most likely to communicate something to the listener. If you’re playing tennis, you want to win beautifully. If you’re designing a house, your aim might be to design a house that creates a good vibe. By focusing on the task at hand without needing to impress or to blindly fit in, the constraints of social authority are lifted and innovation is made possible.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

A similar situation to the one described above is what I like to call “the vintage effect”. That is, the tendency for older works to be valued more highly than recent works.

It is often said that music was better in the past than it is today. But those statements are neglecting the vintage effect.

When an artwork has aged, it has built up in it a lot of history, social authority and nostalgia. It has stood the test of time, and to some extent, that is impressive in itself. But the idea that older music was better is an illusion, created mostly in this way. (

As a side note: the perception that old music was better also comes partly because “old music” encompasses the best songs out of half a century of music while “new music” usually only refers to the past five years at most).

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Instruction in Coaching and Performance

Playing video games can be a surprisingly effective learning experience. When you play a video game with enough skill and focus at some point you may lose yourself in flow. At that moment, you are not thinking in terms of instruction. You are just doing what you are doing. You forget that you are there in front of a screen.

But most of the time when we're going about activities we don't act in this way. We distrust our abilities. We assume that even the simplest tasks require a monotonous level of control.

Giving ourselves instructions as if we have split ourselves in two. As if we were there with the game controller, as one self, directing the lesser self.

Ultimately, the movement becomes one action as a whole, with no separation between the conscious mind and the instinct. They are dance partners, moreso than instructor and student.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

Accessing the Flow State -- Don't Try to Repeat the Past

In an artist’s lifetime, there are times when he feels he has hit that sweet spot we call being in the zone.

It is different to simply going through the motions of playing the song. When the song is played at its full depth, when the musician is the song, the performance is experienced with a quality to it, a realness, that is sensed by the performer as well as by the audience.

Once an artist has felt such an experience there is a tendency to want to repeat it.

The musician may think to himself, “I wish I could play it again like I played that day." But, as many artists report, the attempt to repeat the experience as it was, always fails.

It fails because the want to repeat the experience is not the same as beingthe experience.

Or in other words, the memory of the experience is not the actual experience.

The thought of the thing is not the actual thing.

The state he was in at that moment when he hit the sweet spot was not a state of wanting to repeat something of the past. He just did it. He was the song.

Songs say something. He was saying something. That was his approach at the time.

Being it. Saying it. Playing it. Enjoying it. Dancing it through.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

The highest art can seem childish -- Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

Sophistication in Artistry

It is said of olives that they are an acquired taste. You won’t find many children who love eating olives. They much prefer something sweet. Like grapes. And it’s just as well, because olives are bitter and a bitter taste potentially signifies poison in the natural world. For this reason, we are instinctively suspicious of bitter foods when we first encounter them, but with long term exposure to them we can sometimes become unusually partial to them. Even addicted to them.

Wine is an example of a bitter food that takes time to develop a taste for. Hence its association with sophistication. When you want to be in a different class to the unsophisticated people—namely, children—it helps to demonstrate that you have a taste for something that no unsophisticated person (child) would take interest in. Hence the practice of wine and cocktail drinking at the high end of town (especially when served with olives).

But sophistication is not only relevant at the high end of town. The other end of town has its own brand of sophistication. Customary displays of sophistication observed at cocktails parties are forms of OVERT prestige while its counterparts observed in dirty pubs are forms of COVERT prestige. Rum is, to the man at the pub, what wine is to the man at the cocktail party.

In the world of music, sophistication works in much the same way. It is those forms of music that have an acquired taste, such as acid jazz, that we consider to be “sophisticated”. It may be no coincidence that its name, acid jazz, gives away hints of resemblance to bitterness.

Sophistication is not a full bunk-worthy concept however. There are genuine advantages to sophistication. Many art-forms that are considered to be sophisticated are genuinely valuable. After all, there is a quality to acid jazz that other forms of music can’t offer and I’m sure its enthusiasts can verify the value in its qualities and in the culture surrounding it.

But sophistication on its own does not necessarily signify better art.

The question really comes back to what is being communicated.

For example, if you want to communicate something universal about human relationships to the masses, then a popular style of singer-songwriting may be the best art form. But if you want to experience a more subtle and unusual feeling, maybe more advanced technical skills and a sophisticated art form like jazz is more fitting.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

In artistry, it can be very limiting and ineffective to bow to the categories that have been set in place through evolving traditions.

When the artist places himself in a pigeon-hole, that comes with both advantages and disadvantages.

For example, an aspiring songwriter might stick to the category of country music. This makes the whole pursuit of musicianship so much easier to navigate than it would be without a clear genre to conform to as he knows exactly what skills he needs to learn and how and where to get them. He will also know where to market himself and who to network with, and will practically have a template for the whole pursuit. But fitting into a category like this comes with its drawbacks too. In some respect, that country songwriter’s creativity will be limited by the constraints of what can be thought of as country music.

An alternative approach is to loosen up the category and open up to influence from other genres. By detaching from the label of “country musician”, his creative options are freed up. He can then choose the boundaries of his artistry consciously and add elements of other genres as they inspire him.

So, to categorize oneself — which is often an unconscious action — is potentially very limiting. Maybe we do need to think and move within categories at times in order to ease progress, but it’s important to be aware of this tendency to categorize and to question whether it really is for the best or whether the categories just appear to be convenient on the surface.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

“I do not believe in styles anymore. […] When you have no style, you say, ok here I am as a human being, now how can I express myself totally and completely? That way you will create a style [your own] as a process of continuing growth.”
—Bruce Lee

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

The Insight Phase of the Creative Process

When the insight finally comes, there remain two pitfalls to be aware of.

The first is that it may actually be wrong. Faraday, Huxley, Darwin, Plank, Einstein and Poincare have all said that flashes of intuitive insight can sometimes be incorrect. Einstein himself claimed he lost two years of hard work to a false inspiration. Even if the unconscious intelligence is unfathomably deep, it’s important to remember that we are interpreting its expressions or signals with the very limited conscious mind as a receiver.

The second pitfall is to believe that the insight is wrong, or that it is invalid or too controversial to be accepted. In many situations, an innovation will appear to be so absurd that it will be disregarded by the innovator’s peers or even by the innovator himself.

An excellent example of this is the famous story of when, in 1846, the Hungarian Doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, first discovered that deaths due to puerperal fever could be dramatically reduced if the hospital staff washed their hands before delivering babies — he was ridiculed by his peers. Fortunately, those thinkers both went ahead with the research despite that they would be seen as being crazy.

Most serious inventions began as toys or games.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

The Incubation Phase of the Creative Process

Self-doubt is an important and inevitable part of the creative process. In the incubation phase the innovator is coming to terms with the blow to his ego, which he has just endured.

He wonders about the worthiness of his work. He is likely questioning whether it was even a worthwhile task to pursue to begin with.

Having been defeated by the task, the innovator will often take up something new or go on a holiday to ease the stress of having failed at something so core to his identity. Unbeknown to the innovator, however, the creative process is still continuing. His holiday is a part of the process itself.

It’s often said in creative fields,

“If you want to solve a problem, get it away from your heart.”

Since desire leads to distortion of perception, the innovator becomes like the monkey holding the banana (mentioned in an earlier post). He clings so tightly to the aim that he cannot see the situation clearly. It’s like looking at something with your eyes too close to it. Vision is obscured and the matter is not seen for what it is. From a further distance, however, the situation may be easier to navigate.

And so, the intuitive leap may come when he least expects it, after he thought the task had been left to defeat.

[Phil - The Suburban Layman @MenSP_Channel]

The Apprenticeship Phase

During the apprenticeship phase, the mind is primed for future innovation through the learning of skills and by developing a depth of understanding that allows the apprentice to navigate his field.

He learns what has worked and what has not worked in that field. He learns which areas within that narrow field need solutions and thus finds areas within it to focus his energy on.

By developing a unique range of skills, the apprentice is much more likely to produce unique solutions in his attempts to tackle problems.

Typically, in both science and art, innovations have been created through influence from other fields and, usually by mistake, through play.

For example, Velcro was invented by George de Mestral, when he found he was getting burdock seeds (cobbler’s pegs) stuck to his clothes while hiking.

And in music, most fresh sounds are made by combining an unusual array of influences from different genres. The music of Mozart — who was actually a highly skilled billiard player — had been influenced partly by the click of billiard balls as they bounced around the table.

It should be added also, that unique situations and unique relationships between people are important factors that often lead to innovation by providing unusual input and thus leading to unique ideas.

What is also important during the apprenticeship phase is that the aspiring innovator does not label himself prematurely, as that would stunt creativity by preventing the apprentice from ever applying his knowledge to other fields where it would provide fresh input.

The apprenticeship phase is about learning skills through intensive immersion within a field. That expertise is then complemented by input from other learning, which usually occurs during leisure time.

The apprenticeship phase forms the foundation for a productive tinkering phase.