Spoiler: There Is No Solla Sollew. The Solutions Are Within You
Learn to think dynamically and find the solutions to your problems within yourself. Discover the power of journaling and observation to help you identify and address your internal issues that you are projecting onto others. Don't forget the wisdom of Dr. Seuss and the Solla Sollew, even though Dr. Seuss was a cheater himself.
Discover How to Find Solutions to Your Problems Within Yourself
By Michael Levin
Monday, May 15, 2023
There are those in life who have dynamic personalities, there are those in life who have static personalities, and there are those in life who would have you believe in false dichotomies. It’s never black and white people. The solutions to problems that aren’t about pride and fear are shades of grey. Better still, since our shades of grey metaphor has been ruined, there’s a rainbow of solutions in in there! What, we can’t use rainbows generically either? Sheesh! What’s that? My favorite Rabbit Hole metaphor is tarnished now too Paramount+? And we can’t put a question mark after these stupid streaming names without it looking stupid? Be dynamic, Mike. Be dynamic!
Okay, I lean static. I like my tools not changing for decades on end, even in the field of technology, and yes that is realistic because vim & emacs. End of story. Anyone promoting VSCode over them, talk to me in another fifty years and we’ll see where the Web UI is. The command-line interface will still be here. It’s what our robot overlords will use to boot themselves with. Yet, even this static-advantage muscle memory stuff I love is to fade into the background so that you can use all that excess capacity of your neo-cortex to do the real dynamic work. When things change, you need to pay extra attention with you higher order mind. The part that thinks therefore it is.
Yes, it’s higher order, folks. Animals have a different kind of intelligence but it didn’t let them build the Internet and reach out to you with this article. Human intelligence did. It’s different, and it’s higher order. It’s not better and maybe that’s a language problem. But you see the problem with shades of grey, rainbows? Same thing. If you’ve determined that you will misinterpret, then you will misinterpret, but you know you’re doing it, so that makes it transparently disingenuous.
Bad guys aren’t really bad. Their mommies and daddies, who themselves probably weren’t equipped or ready to be parents themselves, made them that way. It’s often through a series of classic mistakes:
- Over-sheltering them from learning things for themselves (fear)
Is there a second one? I don’t know in this age of pandemic quarantines. Everyone’s a shut-in, so it’s okay to be a shut-in yourself and raise your children as shut-in’s, rotting their brains with the social media and not setting good examples by reading in front of them?
If you try to instill discipline by taking their phones away, lock your own damn phones in a safe. Lead by example, people. Read in front of them. Better still, write in front of them. Let them see you flipping open that laptop and actualizing your thoughts onto “paper”. Let them see you switch from one computer to the next doing exactly the same thing, getting the point across that matter doesn’t matter. It’s the information primarily inside your own head that matters, and after that, the information that flows from machine to machine. It’s very spiritual and quite the cure for doomscrolling.
If you’ve been ruined by your folks, may I humbly suggest you watch someone thinking out loud in vim. It doesn’t matter if it’s me or someone else. It doesn’t matter the subject-matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s just free-flowing associative brainstorming or if it’s a structured tutorial.
It doesn’t matter if it’s poetry or prose… it doesn’t matter if it’s poetry or prose… it doesn’t matter if it’s poetry or prose… fugue state coming on… poetry must escape…
Whiplash Got You Down?
When Cheaters Cheat
They Bring up Cheaters
I’m Not One to Cheer ‘Em.
Call Them Out
They’re Sure to Shout
And Piss and Scream and Sneer-um.
Snidely’s Snide
And … uh…
Me: Who is Snidely Whiplash and Who is that Other Guy Dasterdly?
Bing: Snidely Whiplash is a fictional character who originally appeared as the main antagonist in the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties segments of the animated television series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He is the archenemy of Dudley Do-Right⁴.
Dick Dastardly is a fictional character and villain who appeared in various animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. He is partly based on Snidely Whiplash, a villain who appears in the Dudley Do-Right segments of the television series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show¹.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 5/15/2023
(1) Snidely Whiplash - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snidely_Whiplash.
(2) Dastardly Whiplash - TV Tropes. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DastardlyWhiplash.
(3) Snidely Whiplash | Rocky and Bullwinkle Wiki | Fandom. https://rockyandbullwinkle.fandom.com/wiki/Snidely_Whiplash.
(4) Snidely Whiplash | Villains Wiki | Fandom. https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Snidely_Whiplash.
Thank you, Bing! You are a true treasure-trove of wealth. I wonder if Google will ever catch up, because you know I got on their Google Labs waiting list for that thingie they announced last Wednesday at the Google I/O which seems to be some sort of way of getting alternative revenue sources from the tanking of AdWords clicks they’re going to experience… Paid Inclusion 2.0. But I digress… where was I? Oh yeah, in the flow… in the zone…
Snidely’s Snide
And Dick’s a Not Nice Guy
But Their Method Never Fails
They’ll Do You Wrong While You Do Right And Tie You to The Rails.
So, Do What’s Right
And Don’t Despair
And If They Make You Fear,
Continue Care
For Their Welfare;
Stay Sharp and Very Near.
Ugh! That is just generic poetry, people. Find your help from inside first, through writing and journaling. Survey the landscape. Dredge your subconscious. As the astronomers used to say, you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. Play the observation game. Recognize attempts to recast reality as something different. There is no Solla Sollew. Solutions to your troubles? They’re all within you.
But those solutions will not surface if you’ve committed yourself to your old static ways. If you’re not actively doing something to better yourself, you’re not working on solutions to “external” problems. There is no way I can express in this book the power of that story, suffice to say that when you find yourself projecting your own internal problems onto others, especially those who can’t defend themselves, take up lessons from Solla Sollew and inhibit yourself. I call it the Solla Sollew Uptake Inhibitor technique. It’s much more natural than the alternatives and won’t interfere with the development of your own self-regulation mechanisms at a critical time in your life.
You know, sometimes you are denied the chance to be involved in important life decisions as expressly laid out, and you have to take matters into your own hands. It’s always best to explore options that are not as dramatic as what you are capable of, given the situation and evidence. If someone evades the issue every time it’s brought up, make it an issue they can’t evade. Some things are important enough.
And even though Dr. Seuss cheated on his wife exposing his moral character human weakness, and also even though such infidelity and betrayal is so highly advertised and in your face these days given the state of our culture, making it very hard to forgive him, let’s try to cut Dr. Seuss a break. I think you mike like to be cut the same slack if you were in his position.
The fact that Dr. Seuss drove his sick wife Hellen Palmer to suicide, just reinforces the importance of doing the right thing when innocent bystanders are at risk from your behavior.
Keep an open mind and open up I Had Trouble in getting to Solla Sollew and give it a read. Who knows, you might even find yourself reading it to your kids.