Lifeform Details

About Me

Picture of Eric Normand

My name is Eric Normand. This is my blog. I write about what I find interesting.

I am interested in human development. The developed world has solved so many problems of survival. Face it: if you’re reading this, you’re probably not going to starve to death.

So, with those things solved, what comes next? That struggle has been the main thing motivating people since the dawn of man. What do we do with our wealth?

That’s the question I’m going to explore here, on this blog. I talk about yoga, meditation, tai chi, and other exercises as I explore what makes life worth living.

Brief bio

I’m from New Orleans, Louisiana. I went to a French Immersion school, and was taught all of my subjects in French in elementary school. I started university a year early, because I was tired of high school. I spent my last year of college in Paris, France.

I came back to New Orleans and went back to school. I studied Kung Fu and got my black belt. Then I left for the Peace Corps.

I served as a Math teacher in Guinea, West Africa. I came back in 2007 and earned my Master’s in Computer Science. Now I’m planning on traveling the world. Crazy.

About the blog

Central thesis

The developed world has so much bounty that we are bored. We consume too much. We distract ourselves with TV and internet. But something more is possible. We can use the wealth that we have, that we are so lucky to have, to do something more creative and constructive than loafing around, drinking Coke, and watching the next episode of Lost.

Life in the developed world is boring. I lived in West Africa for almost two years, in a village, and life was interesting. Was your bush taxi going to break down on the side of the road? Was a significant death in the community going to close down school? Would I get to the market before they ran out of meat?

All of these were significant events that occurred frequently during my stay. And when they occurred, I had to solve the problem. Always interesting. Now, I am not saying we need to have more problems. What I am saying is that we have solved such a significant portion of the problems of survival that we don’t know what to do.

Humans evolved big brains to deal with all of the problems that came up during the course of a day. And all of the problems felt significant. They were in tune with the biology of the individual. Hunger, jealousy, fear. All of our emotions were signals to guide us through life.

Now, we don’t have the same problems. The problems of modern society are not aligned with our emotions. If they were, you would have an emotion when it is time to go to the grocery store. And you wouldn’t get stressed when you’re stuck in traffic.

And we’ve got these big brains that really don’t get used very much. We’re bored. We’ve got education. We have the world’s information at our fingertips. We’re well (read: over) fed. We have air-conditioning. What the fuck are we supposed to do now?

Background

The purpose of the blog is to document my explorations in self-transformation. I’ve been on this path for a while, but I’ve never really written things down. However, I don’t want to turn into one of those personal development blogs. I really don’t. And I hope it doesn’t look like one. There are several principles that I am going to attempt to adhere to.

I suppose that my first act of honesty is to say that I will probably fail many times to adhere to all of these. I am still learning. You may find many posts on this blog that violate these principles. Please forgive them. Many posts were written before these principles were developed. I am open to criticism. But no insulting. That’s not nice nor is it productive.

I want to document my various attempts to adapt to the universe. The essence of spirituality, as I see it, lies in one’s relationship to everything else. One could therefore say that this is a spiritual blog.

I am documenting my experiments in the hopes that the blog will help myself and others. It will help me to analyze and organize my experiments. And it will help others, I hope, to know of my results. There is one other purpose, and that is to find like-minded people. This blog will serve as a digital projection of myself. It will, by necessity, be two-dimensional. I hope that kindred spirits will relate to the blog and that we can know each other. In other words, I am looking for friends.

I haven’t made any friends online. I have been online for 15 years. I have mostly read what others have posted. Many of the people were already dead. The web was my library. I had very little patience with chatrooms or forums. So I didn’t meet very many people.

But I want that to change. I want to meet people online, to have discussions, to meet people with similar interests as myself. So, if you like what you see here, leave a comment or contact me. We could even meet up offline. In meatspace. I would like that.