Are you soaking?

The human experience through absorption.

Heads up: If you’re reading this and Mormon, I hate to disappoint but this post might not be about what you think it’s going to be about.

So I want to talk about the art of soaking it in. But I thought leaving “it in” out of the title would make this seem a little more erotic and worth clicking. But now that I have tricked you into reading this far, please give me your trust again and believe me when I say the rest of this is worth reading.

The idea came to me at a wedding, specifically a rehearsal dinner, I attended over the weekend. Two guys in their late 60s, best friends since med school, gave maybe the funniest wedding speech I have ever heard. I won’t try and describe it, because wedding speeches generally fall into the “you had to be there” category of entertainment. But it was a style of comedy you don’t really see anymore. A refreshing relic. Not hitting the usual beats you would expect in a “funny wedding speech.” You’re just going to have to use your imagination, because I won’t describe it in any more detail than that. But as I watched it I couldn’t help but think, this joke style is now a part of me. I am going to be doing my own version of this for the rest of my life. It’s brilliant. I am not going to go around doing their speech about the bride’s late father, obviously, but their style of joke which you almost never hear these days I couldn’t help but absorb.

It got me thinking about the importance of absorption. How we are just a compilation of the things you absorb from the world. You could say its the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate, but when does that nurture end? It doesn’t really. We are constantly soaking ourselves in things and absorbing them and shaping ourselves whether intentionally or not. Your “self” that is from nature is very small. You are like a sponge where 1% of your weight is what you entered this world with and the other 99% is what you took in through osmosis. I’m rambling a bit, but let me give a few examples of the importance of soaking (lol) in life.

In learning

When we think about absorbing like a sponge, the first thing that comes to mind is learning. Children are better at learning languages because their mind is so much like a sponge. As we get older we can still absorb thing but instead of a sponge we become more like wood. Slightly less porous, a bit less flexible but still extremely absorbent if we spend enough time in the water. We will still get waterlogged. While we all know this, we still sometimes get fooled into thinking there is a shortcut. Maybe if we are really clever we wont need to spend the time to absorb. We can just memorize the information or download it. We can ask AI for the overview and grasp it and move on. This will not work though. The process of absorption requires spending time with the material. For learning a language you have to be around people speaking that language and the same goes for anything else you want to learn. You have to soak in it in order to soak it in.

Ezra Klein spoke on this recently and went a bit viral. Talking about how the human mind was not designed to “download” knowledge like characters in The Matrix.

It’s the process of living with information and wrestling with it that allows it to permeate our membrane and become a part of us. Because after all that is what learning is. Taking something that is not a part of us and making it a part of us. That can’t really be done via summaries and skims. **horny Italian guy voice** 🤌 you musta make a love to your desired knowledge.

In finding yourself

There is this idea that “finding yourself” is a solo process. You go up to the top of a mountain and meditate, you go into the jungle and take ayahuasca, you go into a hut in the desert and sweat or… well you know the tropes. But it doesn’t work. Because yourself isn’t inside you. It sounds counterintuitive but yourself is in everyone else. You don’t find yourself, you build yourself. The most self-assured, complex, and interesting people are those who have experiences. Interactions with others are what fill the holes in you (lol), not time in solitude. Because you are built up of all the things you like out in the world. You absorb these things. You make them part of you. Soaking in the human experience and creating a human.

You also absorb the things you don’t like. When you meet people and think “I never want to be like that guy.” Thats also a form of absorption. A way of “finding” yourself through the sea of human behavior choosing what you soak in and what you don’t. So the answer you are looking for may not be a “retreat” into solitude but rather a charge forward into it all. Filling yourself up until you feel more whole.

In judging the impact of things

Sometimes in politics people talk about being “on the right side of history.’ The implication being that its hard for everyone to tell whats right and wrong right now but in time, when everything is absorbed, it will be obvious. Now I don’t know about all that, considering history and right and wrong are not objective things, but I do see this on a smaller scale in my life. When I see a movie or read a book, my initial reaction is largely irrelevant. Sometimes I will love a book and won’t even recall anything about it a few weeks later. And other times I will hate a book and then it will stick with me and I will think about it all the time and reference it and I will realize it is now a part of my personality. My point is that our consumption is just the starting point of our absorption. Ice cream doesn’t make you fat when you take a bite of it and your bicep won’t get bigger when you pick up the weight (well, you get a little bit of a pump, but you know what I mean). It takes awhile. You consume it and then you digest it and then you absorb parts of it and other parts you leave behind. It will be awhile until you know its impact. The absorption is a slow process.

A personal example of this is that “Are we human or are we dancer?” song by The Killers. When they were at their peak and coming out with hits, we all made fun of this song. It seemed so dumb. What does that even mean? But now 15 odd years down the line it really is a slow burn. Might be one of my favorite songs of the era because of it’s hard to parse, abstract lyrics. Took awhile though. Where as the Richard Linkleter movie “Boyhood” seemed like it was going to be a keystone film in my psyche when it came out. I remember watching it in awe of what was created. Feels like a piece of trivia now that it even exists. I rarely ever think about it.

For a more global example. If you were to tell someone in October 2001 that 9/11 would have a decades long impact on culture, politics, and the world order, they would likely believe you. They might even say “yeah duh, that doesn’t convince me you’re a time traveler at all.” However, if you were to tell someone in 2009 that Facebook adding the like button would completely transform culture and the human psyche, people would look at you like a nut. But 15 years later it seems to be true. It could be argued it had a larger impact, anthropologically than 9/11 even.

You have to soak in things for awhile for their true impact to come out.

In love

Sometimes my friends will go on a date and be like “yeah she’s really cool but she’s not the one.” But like thats not how it works? Dating is the process of going on multiple dates with someone and acclimating and adjusting and absorbing each other slowly. Two different chemicals blending until they hopefully create a compound. It makes sense that many things look like oil and water until you stir them a bit and give them some time to mix. You may not have a ton in common but you introduce them to things you like and they do the same to you and eventually you have things you like together and you become blended and are each others people. Dating and falling in love is a process of absorption. You are a log dropped into their pond and they are a log dropped into yours. When those logs get soaked with each others being you will still be separate but you will have much of them in you and you in them and you will be in love. So keep that in mind when dating I guess.

In shopping

Okay for something a little lighter, I think of absorption a lot when shopping. There is lots of pressure (I don’t know where its coming from) to buy things quickly. You see something, you try it on, it fits, you still aren’t sure if you want to buy it because you have only known this thing existed for 5 minutes, but the clerk had to go in back to find your size so you feel like you owe them something, so you buy it. Its all very rushed. You are acquiring a new possession though. Thats a big deal. I try to never buy anything the day I meet it. If I like it, I have to make sure I wasn’t just in a shoppy mood. So I wait a week after trying it on. If I can’t stop thinking about it all week and regret not buying it when I met it then I will go back for it.

On the other hand, as is often the case, I go on fine without it and forget all about the sweater I tried on a week ago and never go back. Give yourself time to absorb. Time to soak (feel like I have to keep tying back to this semi-vulgur newsletter title). Let your body and mind have time to accept or reject the item into your life. This is an example I guess where absorption comes before consumption.

Be a super soaker.

So if you take anything away from this post its that were made up of our surroundings. In fact, that is the most human thing about AI. The fact that it just kind of read the whole internet and is a sort of digital being made up of what it consumed. Its not so dissimilar to how we operate in that sense. Except for the fact that we also have our own unique experiences and feelings and taste that shape how we absorb the internet and the world around us. Us and the LLMs are both like sponges that sucks it all in and squeeze it back out to others at the appropriate times. I know thats an oversimplification of how LLMs and humans work, please dont “well actually…” me. But we, unlike the LLM did have a little more something there before we began absorbing. We also have an internal monologue. Im not sure, but I don’t think AI ever just sits and thinks to itself without being prompted.

So go have experiences (AI cant do this), let them sit, spend a long time with things, nothing will happen quickly but it will happen. The time will pass regardless and if you don’t spend it soaking in something you will calcify and have a harder time absorbing in the future.

Be deliberate in where you soak, because those puddles will become a part of you. This is important. You can’t spend years with people or in some place and not be shaped by it. So be aware of what surroundings you are immersed in because that is what you are becoming.

And lastly…

Soak on dis ✌️💦!