Awareness is Fun
But this post is deadly serious
There are many ways to increase and sustain awareness. Some have appeared in this publication already: how to pay more detailed attention to your body, how to meditate on routine tasks, and even how to use our expectation of death as a tool. Now it’s time for some unusual tricks.
Arbitrary day-long rules
Although I haven’t been a frequent D&D player (which probably requires fixing), I’ve been keeping this die since I turned 17.
When I bought it, I did it for a wildly different purpose. First, I composed a list of 20 rules that restricted my behavior in one way or another. Some examples:
Don’t consent to do anything.
Agree to whatever you are asked to do.
Give a tooth stick to every person you interact with.
Whatever happens, stay silent.
Don’t touch inanimate objects with your right hand.
The next thing, naturally, was to throw the dice right after waking up, every day for something like a month. The number that I got would decide what kind of “behavior augmentation” I should be wielding. Basically, it was like a mantic device in reverse.
You’ve got to try that. It may sound trite and useless but it’s like a serendipity engine, invoking unexpected situations here and there. Free high-variance training data. And it’s also not as simple as it may look at the first glance.
Russian smileys
Since the majority of you are non-Russian, I need to provide a brief introduction. In a quirky chain of events, when the world was adopting smiling punctuation, Russians decided to be lazy and only used parentheses, without any symbol for eyes.
Now you may try to use those instead of normal human smileys for some time. (And for Russians that would be the opposite.) It’s not that easy! When I was adopting my punctuation to writing in English, forcing my hands not to type “)))” automatically at the end of the sentence was quite a chore! :)
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