Personal: Dual Mode Nerd

Dear Blog,

Each of us has multiple modes we operate in, and most have to do with the type of concentration we're using, which in turn, is a time sclicing problem as we use our meager intellectual abilities to do one or more things of differing complexity.

I have a friend mode, a teacher mode, a professor mode, a philosopher mode, an economist mode, and like most people, a lay-on-the-couch-watching-bad-sci-fi mode, which means "doing nothing". But aside from the last one, each of these modes increases my reasoning ability, but at the same time, increases the nerd factor, by selectively eliminating layers of interpersonal consideration in favor of objective truth. This is a hard skill to develop, but the ability to switch it on and off is better than simply being an anti-social nerd all the time.

This morning I was writing about debt, the economy, and politics. A subject which requires me to vacilalte between modes as I write, often making my writing difficult to understand. I am not one of those amazing people who can do multiple things at once, and writing in one voice while thinking in another is something that is beyond me. I seem to be able to do it while speaking, since the person I'm talking to is a tether to reality that I can grasp now and then during the conversation.

Anyway, Allora asked me a question and I did not toggle out of economist mode and into friend mode, and when I do this, it means that I am very intense, and intolerant. I know that changing is beyond me because this mode switching in the first place requires herculean effort on my part, and changing topics under consideration amplifies the problem geometically. I have struggled with this all my life and have developed a dozen tools to help, but the underlying context myopia is something that I cannot seem to alter, and in this later stage of my life, I find that it is the source of my skills, and therefore something I do not really desire to lose, and instead, would prefer to amplify.

So, this makes me a bit of a jerk to be married to, unless there are a dozen people around in a social environment, I tend to be thinking about something fairly complicated at any given point in time, so the chances that any random question is going to drag me out of one context into another is highly likely. For years my dear wife had tolerance for this fact, but for a variety of justifiable reasons, largely to do with having a child, a home, and a job to keep running, mean she is time sliced as well, and has her own context problems.

So my response to her question about what time it was, when, she could have been referring to any of three time zones, was less charitable then it should have been. How does this relate? Well, it relates to travel since travel makes people spend more time together. It relates because one of the reasons to travel is to be closer together. It relates because in economic terms, the reason we need an economy is that we're all time slicing in a division of labor, and because we need to develop tools to handle that division of labor.

The trick is, that the tool needed in this case, which is to be able, not to specialize, but to generalize across more topics than any of us can physically accomplish, may be something that can only be solved by doing less of them. And all that that entails for interpersonal relationships. That is, unless we choose to do without, or choose to live on less affection, which is the compensation we give each other in exchange for mind share.

Everything is economically based.

Curt