Pictures on the Wall Reconsidered

When decorating a home, it is customary to put things on the walls. Large expanses of bare wall are unusual. Visitors will note the blank space as a peculiarity.

For the past year and a half I have lived in an apartment with a rather eccentric and demanding landlord, who asserts that any screw holes or nail holes must be patched up perfectly to avoid a charge against the security deposit. My solution has been to just leave the walls bare. For the five years before that, I lived in a converted attic with slanting walls which do not allow putting up pictures in the usual manner. I elected to leave the very few suitable vertical wall spaces bare as well. Although external factors led me to this situation, I find I like this arrangement.

I am of the opinion that thoughts should be guided from within. We should choose what to think about. Of course this is usually originates with our senses. Whether we use old-style books or magazines, or look at screens, we usually start with words and images to guide our thoughts. (The battle over advertising's imperative to impose their own agenda on our minds is the topic for a different day.) In the internet era it is more and more possible to actively choose. A TV channel was much more passive. The only options were to look for a new channel or turn it off. Even there, the TV screen was constantly changing, showing us new things. Today, clicking different places on a screen in sequence can lead to a stunning variety of different destinations.

Pictures on the wall never change. When we look at them they interrupt anything else we were thinking about and our perceptions of them take a place in our minds. Is there really anything that we want to endow with that power? Is even a picture of a beloved deceased parent really helpful? Perhaps you do want to remember them, but do you want your memories to be guided by looking at that particular patch of wall at that particular time? Most pictures do not tie us to something of such powerful emotional significance. Why should we think about that particular thing (yet once more) when we were in the midst of a train of thought we recently chose to start in on? The mind wanders plenty as it is, but do we really want to give another nudge to the wandering? We may feel we get so used to what's on the wall that we don't really register it any more. But more of our thoughts are governed by automatic processing than we are aware of. And if we really don't see it, there's surely no strong reason for it to be there.

Then there are visitors. What a first-time visitor sees when looking at our walls gives them an impression of us. But does a series of pictures, however carefully chosen, really convey what we want to convey? If we follow the standard rule that walls should be covered with things, then they can judge us compared to the other things we might have chosen to cover our walls with. But perhaps we would do better to escape that paradigm entirely, and with mind uninterrupted by anything on the walls, hope they listen more carefully to what we say, or think more carefully about what they say to us. If we want them to concentrate on a particular set of images, we can show them a photo album in some format or other (phone, tablet, paper book).

I recently saw at someone's home a sort of intermediate arrangement, which is presumably quite common. A large-screen TV had a looping slide show of pictures from a recent vacation. Presumably they enjoyed being reminded of that vacation. But they quite likely replaced it with a different set of pictures after the next vacation, or perhaps simply shut it off and had a blank large-screen TV on that section of wall.

Compare this to places outside your home. If you have your own office, the same considerations would apply, if to a lesser extent. If you go into a restaurant, the décor has likely been chosen to help set a particular mood, and quite possibly you chose the restaurant in part because of the "ambiance" for that particular block of time while you're eating. If you go into something like a Target or Walmart, you have put yourself in the world of retail commerce and probably aren't upset to be inundated with advertising -- some of it might actually be useful! If you go into the sanctuary of my Unitarian-Universalist church, you are typically wanting to nudge your thoughts in the direction of the profound or spiritual. Stained glass windows are in line with what you want to be thinking about.

In your own home, whatever is on your walls is bound to be relevant to a much smaller fraction of the things you want to be thinking about at any given time. Likely so small that they hinder rather than help you in your life goals. Maybe bare walls would serve you better.

It's not the money, it's the eternal emails

I am a fan of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot" https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot, especially the series on airline crashes or near-crashes. I'm not sure why, but I like them. The Swedish owner "Petter" has a variety of sponsors. One sounds kind of appealing to me, "Curiosity Stream", which would offer a wide variety of documentaries. What amuses me is how he emphasizes how it's only $20 a year, and you can get $5 off if they use his code, and to top it all off there's a money-back guarantee (I'm making up the specifics, but you get the idea). Presumably others with sponsors make the same sort of pitch.

But the price has nothing to do with why I won't subscribe. I'd happily pay twice that much. I won't subscribe because once I did, and my information got into their database, my expectation is that I would never, ever be able to free myself of the various promotions and "junk email" arising from that purchase. Possibly if you look carefully there's a way to opt out of them selling your information to others, but it wouldn't stop they themselves from sending me promotional email forever. Or they would change their terms of service, or Curiosity Stream would be bought by a bigger organization who would inherit the access to your information, and send you promotions for far more products. Basically, my perception is that one way or the other they've got you. Perhaps writing a blog post with "Curiosity Stream" in it will bring me to their attention and get me on their lists.

You could create an identity with links to entities you're not sure you want to hear from forever and then shed it every so often, like Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose shed his antlers. Perhaps some service could help you with this. But perhaps the marketers have a clever way of rediscovering people if the new identity subscribes to some of the same things as the old one.

If there was a service that guaranteed they would use your identity for the sole purpose of the subscription you make, and never ever send you another email or share your information, on pain of criminal penalties vigorously enforced, I think they might have a market -- if we could ever really trust them.

I'll also share one way I stayed naive until just a few years ago. When you belong to something like the ACLU, they send messages like, "your membership is about to expire!" and "last chance!" and I somehow got the idea that if I didn't respond then I'd lose my chance to be a member and they'd take me off their mailing list. Ha! Of course they won't ever take me off because they'll always be hoping I'd come back and give them more money. (The ACLU has lost its way -- they have become "woke" at the expense of protecting civil liberties.)

Subscriptions and "Ghosting"

I recently emailed an old work colleague to reminisce about that old job, and he replied telling me he was not on speaking terms with me because of a blog post I had made a year and a half before. He had disliked it, but decided that we were so far apart there was no point discussing it, so he just unsubscribed from my blog. This overall situation has disturbed me quite a bit.

I think in modern terminology what he did is called "ghosting" -- someone just disappears without a trace, and you aren't informed of it.

I don't know how many people read my blog. When I looked using the simple tools at hand, I found one person subscribed by the simple method, but I know from email replies that there are at least 4 other people who have read my blog within the past year. At least two of them get my blog posts by email, one of them (maybe more) from Google FeedBurner. I have generally been fine with that situation. I figured only a handful of people read the blog, and I was writing for those few. I started this blog in 2007, which is forever ago in internet time, and I am very poor at figuring out how these shifting program configurations connect things together. There was some hint that FeedBurner was itself an obsolete technology. If anyone knows how to figure out who is actually reading my blog, I'd love to know. Then I'll at least have a method to figure out if someone "ghosts" me.

The readers I have heard from emphasize that they don't always agree with everything I say (possible translation: think lots of it is really crazy), but find it interesting. A blog author would ideally get comments from readers and there would be occasional discussions back and forth. I've accepted that my blog isn't that kind of place -- which is probably more the rule than the exception for blogs with few subscribers. Sometimes I toss out ideas that I am not at all sure of, and a few words might lead me to look at it again and happily say (perhaps even with relief) that I take it back.

The post my former colleague reacted to so strongly was one where I said people were eager to make sure Derek Chauvin paid for what he did without knowing the full evidence, and I gave some reasons why maybe he wasn't really guilty of murder. Simply being alerted that "Someone really hated this post" led me to look at it again and see that it was terrible. I hadn't looked at even the basics of evidence on the other side, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was appropriately convicted. The whole post also had an emotional tone to it, where feelings were trumping careful thought. I first quickly posted a reply saying that this was a bad post and I didn't believe it, and then within a couple days decided it was such a bad post I would just delete the whole thing (I do have a saved copy in case anyone really, really wants to see it).

My former colleague was an "inconsistent ghoster", where my recent email brought the whole issue to his attention again, but I can hardly blame him for that. It just happened to bring to light a situation that otherwise would have just lain hidden.

Overall I think what's disturbing is this idea that people who sign up for the blog might have extremely strong negative reactions -- and I'll never have a clue. Of course maybe many or most of my readers are prepared to have very strong negative reactions but just let them go by and wait for the next interesting idea. Perhaps they would think that only if I was actively a purveyor of evil would they be moved to reply or unsubscribe -- but I would never know about the latter course either. If anyone wants to comment to me privately, my email is bart.wright@comcast.net.

In one post from a while back (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html), my reasoning led me to the astonishing conclusion that racism shouldn't be in the top tier of problems we should be working on. I also said I definitely believed it was a serious injustice -- not trying to say there was no racism or white people have it just as bad or anything of that kind. I'm not sure I had ever heard anyone with that combination of views. Could some reader with a few words point me to some article that would explain why my thinking on the subject was wrong? Or maybe they all agreed, or they just let it go -- reading a blog doesn't commit anyone to provide feedback, ever. I guess I'll never know.