On perceived scarcity, intertia, and relational thought; a collection of mini-posts

[Originally posted @thesunrising on September 14, 2007]

I’ve been wanting to write full posts for each of the items below for weeks but haven’t. I just realized that is because I have no idea what I’m talking about. Accordingly, I’m publishing them as half-baked, random rants; enjoy : )

Perceived scarcity creates perceived demand, and thus, perceived value
I wonder, how much of value is perceived versus real? Diamonds. Home prices. “Premium” items. Dating. Heck, even in interactions with friends, I sometimes feel like the less available I am (to a point), the more demand there is for my time (or, at least, the higher the perceived value for my time). On a daily basis, I find that many things have mostly implied value, not real value. This is reinforced by something else I often find: demand creates demand. I often (unfortunately) forget how much the concepts of supply and demand factor into many aspects of my daily life — and how much they are shaped by perception.

Inertia is the strongest force in my universe (yes I know it’s not technically a force)It’s crazy how if I don’t work out for a day, the next day I find an excuse, and the day after that, until it’s been weeks since I’ve hit the gym. On the flip side, if (huge if) I can break that cycle, it becomes progressively so much easier to hit the gym. Same thing with my eating habits (I already had the cookie, may as well eat the ice cream) and my drinking habits (although, I do blame some of you for being that “net external force” that throws me off there). Though in public I might mock folks who have personal coaches, privately I’m quite jealous; if I had someone whose job it was to make sure that I stayed on track — that inertia worked for me, not against me — I wonder where’d I be?

Everything is relational (right?)
A web search on the term “relational thought” brings up links to esoteric papers and some very random sites/blogs. This is curious to me…why isn’t this studied more? Doesn’t our mind operate relationally? In my life, anyways, it’s “this note reminds me of this song”, or “this perfume reminds me of”…eh, you know what I mean. A couple of years ago I found this cool site that gave you book/music/movie recos based upon an input favorite in a relational way (check it out here); I swore I was looking at the future. Soon thereafter a buddy of mine started drawing mind maps of his thoughts, a way to format output similar to the relational way in which we think; I think he got smarter over the course of just a few weeks (I’m not kidding). I’ve been sitting here waiting for the “relational revolution”, but instead, I feel we’re conforming to the way (current) computers force us to interface with them, which is very “singular input, singular output”. Okay, now I officially don’t what I’m saying so I’m going to stop.

[I had one comment from Kareem: "dude, all great insights. esp. the relational thought one… i had the same reaction re: liveplasma."]