Josh Allred's Blog

The only time I have lived without tap is when I would go backpacking. Which isn’t much to go off here.

If you always lived with tap water, however, you will begin to take it for granted that when you turn on the faucet, clean water comes out.

And the same if you live in a house or have money or live in an area with a good school system—if you’ve always had it, you won’t appreciate it as much as someone never did.

And that changes our mindset. For worse, I’m afraid. Because we forget not everyone has what you have. We just like to talk about what we don’t.

By getting rid of say your temper, we are also at the same time acknowledging that there is a part of ourselves we don’t like. A part you are not at peace with your self.

The illusion is perfection—when learning to live with our faults we can’t be peace with our faults. If we’re not at peace with our faults, how will they ever get better?

Quite the paradox.

It’s one thing to be locked into a cage.

It’s a whole other pain not knowing when it is you’ll get out of it.

The waiting can be the hardest part.

You can spend all the time in the world learning how to play a song on the guitar. With enough practice you can get really good at playing that song.

But it doesn’t mean you learn how to read music or play the instrument itself.

We can be sitting on a beach watching a gorgeous sunset and then feel the need to check our phones. That is when we are not settled or happy in present. Part of it is our mind wanders. We can do this when eating a nice meal or during sex. It doesn’t really matter.

It takes mindfulness to stay in the moment, to sit in the situation we are in instead of looking for a way out or on to the next thing.

If we are only at peace in bliss moments, we are only allowing one piece of us to live.

Instead of becoming masters of the self by overcoming our hate, tempers, anger, resentment, depression, anxiety, or any other neurosis for that matter, why don’t we instead become masters of joy, peace, and clarity?

We can be off balance when intensely focused on overcoming deficiencies instead of raising the ceiling.

There are more aspects to life other than the parts we struggle with. The squeaky wheel doesn’t need all your attention—it’s just loud.

In 20 minutes, you’ll feel different from now.

And in 48 hours, you will have cooled down.

A week, it will begin to soften.

And in a month, you won’t remember it.

The point is time lets cooler heads prevail. The amygdala is a good high jacker of reason.

The thing that worries people the most about AI is the speed at which it can replicate work that took hours, months, and even years.

If I wanted to write a book, I could have it done in minutes. Doesn’t mean it’ll be a good book. Doesn’t mean it will be well researched but I will have a book.

To limit the amount of books made by AI Amazon decided to limit “authors” how many they could submit. The answer? Three per day.

So the problem is not the amount of content that is out there because most of it is junk. The problem is that we have so much junk to sorry through to get to the good stuff.

Art, I believe, is anything that we do where one human connects with another. That definition is about to be stretched. Because what is art in the age of artificial intelligence?

Is it art when somebody puts into the computer to make an AI painting? Is it art when we replicate the great works of the past only to tweak it just a little bit? Is it art as long as it transfers emotion? These are all difficult questions. But it isn’t the first time we have faced these difficult definitions. In fact, when Marcel Duchamp submitted R. Mutt (a toilet) in an art show people freaked out. And now we have AI on the scene, now what?

We get to decide what art is and what it is not. And we also get to decide what we value. If it’s made from a human or a machine, it matters. Because of the story we get to tell.

All things come to an end. When they do we can have a hard time letting go. The person who we say we used to be is done. For better or worse. And we take the lessons, the experiences with us to start the next journey.

The end of the road, is the beginning of a new. When one door closes now new doors are there to open and see what happens next.