The Kazoo, and Vulnerability

Kazoos rule.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the kazoo is a musical instrument that muffles the tone of your voice via basically wax paper, creating a wacky, buzzing sound as you sing or hum through it.

There are a couple of interesting things happening here, with the kazoo. First and foremost, it has a fun name.

Secondly, the kazoo essentially acts as a filtering system for your voice. Let’s compare this with another popular voice-filtering system - auto-tune. Auto-tone is a win-win for both the performer and the audience. While the performer gets a wall of protection from needing any sort of skill or vulnerability, the audience gets neat, robot-y sounds. The kazoo provides none of these things. To play, it requires an about-as-expected amount of skill, and a surprising amount of vulnerability. One might argue that the kazoo requires even more vulnerability than if you were to just sing with your own voice #nofilter, because of how annoying it sounds to the audience (the kazoo, that is).

If this is starting to sound like one of those kazoo diss blogs, rest assured that it’s not. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is about the kazoo’s surprising, hidden potential to teach vulnerability. Not following? Here’s a challenge for you - complete the following three steps in order:

1. Play a song on the kazoo by yourself

2. Play a song on the kazoo to a friend

3. Play a song on the kazoo at a party

You probably won’t complete this challenge; it is kind of silly. But that's the point. Because if you did, you will have conquered vulnerability, and you will have helped make kazoos as cool as they deserve to be. Kazoos rule.

The Moment or the Memory?

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” ― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

What's more significant: the moment itself, or the memory you have of it?

Nobel Prize winner and psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who has been widely recognized for his work in developing Prospect theory, presents an interesting perspective on the relationship between the experiencing self and the remembering self. As you can probably deduce, the experiencing self describes the version of you who is present during life's moments as they happen, while the remembering self is the version of you who reflects upon these moments, which would then exist as memories.

Consider Daniel Kahneman's example of a one-week vacation vs. a two-week vacation. To the experiencing self, assuming that the second week was just as good as the first, a two-week vacation would seem to be twice as good as a one-week vacation, right?

However, when asking the remembering self to compare these two scenarios and determine which is better, the factor of "time spent" seems to play much less of a role. According to Daniel Kahneman, the factors that are actually in play here, as with any memory, are the changes, the significant events and the ending. These are the elements that make up our memories, and determine how we feel when we reflect upon them. So in this sense, in terms of its contribution to overall happiness, the one-week vacation suddenly seems just as good as the two-week vacation, and perhaps more practical.

"Inspired by true events" is a preface you'll often see at the beginning of a movie or book. But this preface is just as appropriate for each and every memory we've stored. When we recall one of these memories, we are not reliving the experience as it happened, but rather assessing the critical moments within the experience, and building a compelling story around the overall sentiment that these moments produced. The remembering self is the storyteller, while the experiencing self is just one of the characters within the story.

So, what's more significant: the moment itself, or the memory you have of it?

"Look Again at That Dot."

Earth from Saturn, as captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in April of 2017

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Take a moment to observe one of the many now-famous images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, in which Earth was wondrously captured as the only source of light between the acting frame of Saturn's rings.

While this image may prompt thoughts of our sheer insignificance in the grand scheme of things, challenge yourself to examine this photograph from a different angle.

Consider just some of the many, many factors needed to sustain life on a planet, amidst the desolate and violent conditions of space: being the right distance from the sun to allow for water to melt, being in the “habitable zone” of the galaxy to avoid deadly radiation, having a near-perfect circular orbit to maintain consistent warmth and light, having a moon that creates tides, and so on. And, by the way, it doesn’t hurt to have “gas giant” neighbors, like Saturn, to attract asteroids and comets, often preventing them from reaching us.

As it seems, we just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Whether by luck, by fate, or perhaps by something we do not yet understand, behold life.

From the first microorganisms to the ~8 million species that now reside here, life on Earth has evolved over the years. Us humans, the luckiest of the bunch, have even grown to possess a heightened state of consciousness, for better or worse. That is to say we have the ability to do extraordinary things like imagine, perceive, and love.

Let this image of Earth pose a thought, not on insignificance, but on what can become of being in the right place at the right time. Whether by luck, by fate, or perhaps by something we do not yet understand, behold.

Two Things...

"Don't be an asshole, and there's more than just yourself." - Shane

This isn't a blog post. That's literally it.

Follow Shane's advice, and you should be fine.