Defining good

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I was thinking more about that last article, especially the photography part because it’s easier to explain. My best photos are rarely taken with my best equipment. They were taken with what I had with me when the stars aligned.

These three were taken with an iPhone, because that’s the camera I always have with me when I’m not actually going out to take pictures and a picture shows up in front of me. Then at one point I realised that I don’t actually want all my photos to be taken with a phone, and started to take the proper camera out with me when I’m out for a walk. Of course, the camera has only one lens on it and that lens happens to be the one that takes the pictures, so the determining factor tends to be not which lens is the sharpest, but which one tends to be chosen for walks, because it’s either light, or practical, or I just like having it on the camera.

Sure, there’s one way of making sure that all your pictures are taken with your best equipment, and that is to have only the best equipment; no inferior lenses, no inferior but practical cameras; however, that’s not as simple as it sounds. “Best” is not a single-dimension metric. Recently I carried two lenses up the local hill in sunset; one was the new 14mm f/1.8 ultrawide, which is one of my optically best lenses, perfect for all intents and purposes. Sharpness edge to edge wide open with resolution that probably outresolves the 61MP sensor, no flare directly into the sun, no contrast loss, no geometric distortions, nothing; just perfection. I also took the 24-105mm f/4 zoom as a backup. Well, as it turned out, almost all the pictures that showed up were ideal for the 24-105mm zoom and the 14mm went into the bag and returned only in the end, in the blue hour, for that one picture.

Sony A7RV, FE 24-105mm f/4 G OSS

The pictures I made with the 24-105mm had some flare on them when I shot into the sun, the sun stars weren’t as crisp, the parts in focus weren’t as sharp as they would have been had I used some of the optical monsters I left at home, but guess what – I got several pictures that are my all-time favourites, that are sharp and contrasty enough to be printed meter wide, because the lens was versatile enough to allow me to get those shots, and it was also optically good enough to make the pictures look great. In the end, yeah, it wasn’t as sharp as a GM prime would have been, but a GM prime wasn’t there and the versatile zoom was, so tough shit. If I only had my optically best lenses, I wouldn’t have taken those shots. That’s the reason why “versatile while still good enough” is sometimes preferable to “exceptional but limiting”. When the pictures in front of me demand 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 105mm, and I have to carry the optics for an hour of brisk uphill walk, I’m just not carrying four primes of half a kilo each. Also, when the ideal light is changing quickly, I’m just not going to waste it changing lenses. I’m going to look for motives and use what I already have on the camera. Apparently, trying to aim for perfection can be a good way of getting nothing.

So, an obvious question presents itself: if I can take those pictures with an iPhone, and if I can take pictures that good with standard zooms, why do I have those expensive super-lenses? Because image quality at magnification is a thing, and I like looking at what happens when I actually get to have one of those optics on the camera when a picture turns up. The iPhone pictures break under magnification on a big display or on a big print. You actually need a certain level of quality to pull certain things off, but you also need to be reasonable and have all kinds of tools in your toolbox, because as I said, “good” is not a single-dimensional metric.

This goes way beyond photography. For instance, cars exist in all kinds of shapes, form a fast convertible to a large SUV, and what looks sexy in a showroom isn’t necessarily what’s practical and useful. A home that’s on a respectable location will elevate your perceived status, but if you don’t have anywhere to park your car and there’s something noisy in the neighbourhood, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. A wife that’s super beautiful but cold, calculating and disloyal is a nightmare.

When you’re looking for someone who is a candidate for yogic practice, you don’t look for the person who’s smartest, best looking, least emotionally damaged. You are looking for someone who has the best reaction to transcendence, who flares up with desire at the presence of God, but you still want them to be smart enough, to have a good heart, and to be willing to break, to give up the known and the safe. You avoid the crazy, the cruel, the selfish, the stupid and the self-absorbed. However, the metric of “smart” doesn’t have to mean a university professor, or the most intelligent person in the world. It just means someone who has a good head on their shoulders – smart enough to get things quickly, not necessarily smart because they maintain Linux kernel or teach university level mathematics. If someone is really stupid, no amount of good heart or desire for God will help, because stupid gets deluded quickly because they can’t discriminate between pleasant and useful, for instance, or detect that someone is really harmful because they are trying to be nice to everyone. If someone is really smart but nasty, their poor character will be a bigger liability than their intelligence is an asset. You really need a mixture of qualities, and some things are immediate red flags, while some things don’t really matter because everybody starts fucked up in some way; that’s why yoga is a process, and process means you get better with practice. Eventually you get to be holy, pure, smart, powerful and beautiful, but that’s not how you start. What matters is that you’re not someone who will immediately give up at the first sign of trouble or difficulty, someone who will keep doing something like an idiot despite warnings, or someone who will be easily deluded and perverted by all kinds of evils you are bound to encounter along the way. You can think of it as a selection of good company for God. Who would God want to train to be worthy of His company? First of all, someone who really strongly wants Him and wants to be with Him. Other characteristics need to be just good enough to avoid failure along the way, because you actually get to develop everything you’re missing in the start, but if something is really fucked up, you’re not going anywhere. It’s like the lenses – if things are good enough, you can make your best picture with it, but if something is really bad, it’s going to ruin things and make the end result useless. So, multi-dimensional vector representation of good. That alone is an example why you need to have enough brain to attain success in spirituality; because if you lack it, you won’t be able to understand explanations such as this one.

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.

Holy trinity

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I keep hearing “photographers” talking about “holy trinity” of lenses – 16-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm zooms at f/2.8 aperture, as if they are something every “real photographer” needs to have in order to be recognised by his “peers”, as, apparently, having more money than brains. Honestly, people are such fucking sheep it makes me sick, and it seems that having money provides absolutely no immunity, considering how I heard the same “holy trinity” phase on watch forums, where Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Ademars Piguet differentiated between “those in the know”, and the unwashed plebs. In fact, since those things tend to create their own reality, people who want to be seen as “insiders” and “having knowledge and taste” all seem to be buying the same five watches and the same three lenses, thinking they’ll be recognised and approved of by others in some kind of a ritual asshole sniffing process.

I am pretty sure there’s an equivalent thing in everything, from handbags and shoes for women to cars and suits for men, musical instruments, HiFi sets, and so on. Everybody wants to “win” by picking the right side, right equipment, right ideology, in order to avoid being mocked, ridiculed, scoffed at and marginalised by people they don’t give two shits about. It’s incredibly stupid, not to mention wasteful.

So, let me address the photographic aspect of this nonsense.

Yes, the “holy trinity” of lenses is basically what wedding photographers and photojournalists should have in order to cover the requirements of their work without having to change lenses too often. Also, since those lenses are “bread and butter” equipment for lots of professional photographers, the camera brands try to do them really well, because that might be the difference between people deciding to go with your brand, or not. Since marginally informed amateurs try to “be professionals”, they parrot the equipment choices of professionals, and that’s how this stupid nonsense starts.

I’m calling it stupid nonsense because there’s no such thing as a “holy trinity of lenses”. There’s no formula for being a “professional”, or being competent at photography. If anything, as photographers mature in their skills, as they find their niche and particular style, their equipment choices will widely diverge. Sure, some will opt for the f/2.8 zooms. However, others will go for the f/4 zooms because they want to go light and save money, but they will get fast primes for portraiture or other specific needs. Some will get very specialised macro equipment. Some will have only a very long telephoto. Some will get only a 50mm f/1.4 lens and use only that for all of their work. Some will shoot with a view camera with digital back and super fancy lighting equipment. Retired Americans with more money than brains will go online to find a formula for looking competent, and they will find the “holy trinity” nonsense to parrot.

What I’m saying is, stop trying to “win” by looking up the best equipment to have if you’re a “pro”. Nobody gives a fuck. You’re just going to waste money buying stuff that tries to be universal, so that you don’t have to change lenses, at the cost of constantly having the heaviest possible option on your camera. God, the entire thing is so stupid I feel like screaming at my laptop in frustration. Nine times out of ten, when I see someone carrying one of those things around, they are some idiot tourist who has no idea what he’s doing, but he’s always doing it with an attitude of “he he, look at what I have, you all want to be me, I know”.

And then there’s that other kind of annoying, the hipster who thinks he’s being unique, individual and creative by having weird equipment choices – toy cameras, weird film stuff, outdated digital stuff “because old CCD sensors have better colours”, and so on. No, you’re not being unique, creative or individual with that stuff, you’re just another brand of insecure and probably incompetent. You know how I can tell whether someone is a good photographer? I look at their pictures. They don’t have to hide behind “sharpness”, or “resolution”, or intentional lo-fi look of shitty equipment. They will have enough technical knowledge to get what they want, and they will use the equipment that’s good for what they want to do. Also, when you try to talk to them about “holy trinity”, they probably won’t know what the hell you’re talking about, because it’s a made up thing from some forums for retired yuppies. Or they will think you’re talking about M6, 50mm f/2 Summicron and Tri-X. Or about 35mm, 50mm and 85mm at f/1.4. Or about camera, lens and tripod. Or about Leica, Zeiss and Schneider. If you try to explain the concept of striving to have a trio of f/2.8 zooms covering “the entire range” because that will make you a pro, to an actual photographer, they’ll look at you and think you’re an idiot, because that’s what people inventing such concepts are. Insecure idiots looking for both safety of groupthink and admiration for having money, at the same time. And, since nobody really gives a shit, they keep running around trying to find something that will get them respect and admiration, something other than themselves.

What I’m saying is, learn skill and theory, learn how to technically do photography, and then use that and whatever equipment suits your needs to take the kind of pictures you want to take. The actual “holy trinity” of photography are the idea, the technical means and the end result. I just made this up, but it’s still less stupid than those f/2.8 zooms.