Emerging needs (5)… Late life stage(s); whole of life patterns
Torrey Orton
May 24, 2013

For a while I’ve been distracted more than normal for me, which is quite a lot. I know as a result of recent brain inspections that my distractibility is not precursory to dementias. More expressive of persistent characteriological and endemic congenital inclinations. And the distraction has been accompanied by more feelings of impending personal doom than usual, too.

 There’s not much reason for doom premonitions. I’m doing quite well at the big four on my must-do-to-be list: (1) understanding the world, (2) helping therapy patients live better, (3) enacting my hopeless vision of impeding the harassing effects of HoGPIs on Fertility Control Clinic patients and (4) writing about the first three. But I am having doom premonitions… fuelled by an underlying sense that I’m not really being effective in addressing the way the world seems to me - roughly, falling apart …

 This has been going on for about 6 months now. My blog production dropped off; irritability rose, along with hours of low grade distress avoidance activity…reading the latest news in five papers on three continents; watching mindless tube reruns; struggling to get in sufficient stick work to feel tuned up for mountains next month, and for everyday activity now….and I found myself over the last few months sighing, sometimes, repeatedly with a biggish intake of breath as if I were holding my breath doing whatever I was doing…a good precursor to a possibly shape shifting new departure perhaps.

…I first remember this happening in Paris in 1973 around my 30^th birthday – an occasion marked by my first writing efforts and a sharp realisation that whatever I was supposed (according to my class and education) to have achieved by then I was achieving something else (which didn’t become clear for another 10 years or so). I had one of my first touches of depression in my second year of undergraduate life a decade earlier. All have carried the basic elements of depression – hopelessness, helplessness and overall torpor with a scattering of self-destructive inclinations and emotional fragility surfacing in irritability with little blockages (e.g. a difficult instruction sheet for a home climate monitoring system), ruminant angers at worldly injustices,  plus imagined withdrawal from many of the things I most cared about, though never actually doing so….

This pattern of depression around the turning point of some personal / career trajectory has history. I almost did not finish my undergraduate psych course 25 years ago because I couldn’t be bothered writing the last couple of papers…they dragged on me...there was no question of capability…more one of significance, mattering…they didn’t and the process was for the four years of night school somewhat beneath me???

I’ve been coming up to my 70^th for 18 months as my appreciation of my declining statistical life potential increased. It was the half-way point between 60 and 70 that yielded this blog and a first time commitment to intensive work as a therapist, and then three years later the start of Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic. Both were outcomes of a five year search for the next big work things in my life as my China consulting period came towards a close (too much flying, etc.) in the mid noughties.

 What I have to face up to now is writing seriously, aiming at a larger audience about fewer things. This has been coming for 18 months. I knew at the turn of last year (Jan. 2012) that I should ramp up my writing effort, having established that I can produce weekly for three years in this blog on a scale appropriate to weekly commentary production and often enough in a style generally accessible, maybe.

 One of the topics is neuroscience and well-being mediated by therapy. I’ve had 8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance (Rob’t Scaer, 2012; Norton) sitting on my reading table for 6 weeks and approached it a number of times in the way I approach what I imagine may be a disconcertingly high potential reading: apprehensively, tentatively and sporadically. The latter usually means reading a bit of the introduction, then poking through the chapters, preceded by a scan of the table of contents, checking out the index for a few key conceptual indicators (power, conflict) and starting with the last chapter. So I did here. It took five weeks to decide that I really was going to read it. My process has been sporadic, though with an ‘I hope this one’s different’ focus driving each encounter.

 I’m now thinking this means starting a new blog, or similar, which would be aimed at larger audiences and retain www.diarybyamadman for continuing forays in its existing topics and readers – therapy, acting right, appreciations, rectifications and such. I know this will require a focus and discipline well beyond what I’ve managed in my life to this point, signalled as they say by doubts about both my competence and will to do it - the normal process recurring in the story above. Finding the right basis for choosing focal points will be the principle challenge. The choices have to all be self-sustaining, as the neuroscience and psych one feels to be. That is, what I need to write about I have to be sure is my need, and if I can make it the world’s as well that will be good, even in any small part. A couple of other candidate focal points are in view but still not enough for a mention or an election.

 I’ll let you know how it works out…by hook or by…One early warning sign is that I’ve cleaned up my desk, mostly, for the first time in five years. This includes actual throwing out of two reams of printouts and dud post-its and clippings from imagined subjects of interest, and relabelling of a couple of collection boxes. Also, I departed about 20kgs of redundant IT wires and instruments like long superseded backup drives - remember Iomega?? – to the local recycling station on a loose Sunday morning. There were three lifeless laptops in the collection, too – another memory lane: Twinhead?? Doing this confronts me with the next stage: retained clippings, etc. which I believe by retaining are worthy of development. So….

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?
Torrey Orton
March 17, 2010


I went looking for something the other day and found it, though I didn't know what I was looking for. I set off with a need in mind – to find a birthday present for Jane. It was already late, so some effective action was required. My plan was to look around town between one meeting and another. Not much of a plan in project management or business plan terms. However, it worked within 5 minutes of actually formally (in my mind) starting to look. The cue was a sign on a door next to the first meeting place.


It said "spiral " or something similar in a slightly attention grabbing script - more so because it was not visually garrulous and effusive. I remembered having seen it a dozen plus times and wondered what it was, while having an underlying impression it was a cover for a newsagency. You know… one of those multipurpose ones which thinks it's a gift shop and office supplies centre, with tool shop and copyfast production airs.


Having a couple of minutes before the schedule meeting, I ambled over to a window for a quick squiz, and immediately was blocked from an interior scan by a couple of women wrapping parcels in snappy paper – gift shop type! One beckoned and I shuffled away in my usual don't notice me noticing you way. As a result another window in a door shuffled into a view so the squiz was on again. More evidence of gift shopness and nil of news agent with allied services.


Enough evidence to hazard a look in the displays. So I shuffled in the door and in two more minutes what I was looking for materialised at my eye level. The beckoner of a minute earlier materialised herself with a well-timed "Can I help you?" I pointed at the beckoning prospective gift which I was fast reconstituting as an earring box. She noted she'd bought one for her husband's cufflinks before I got my thoughts out and she reached with a key to unlock the case. The rest is visual marketing history. She opened the box; it had four equal sized velvet sections in it; I said yes; she asked 'wrapped"? I yessed that, too and carded up for the final steps in the sales minuet.


Only left to finish the search: the recognition of the found thing as the gift it is intended to be in the eyes of the gifted one. And as it was so recognised, fulfilling for her a need she did not know she had exactly until the container for it was seen. She noted that she was always misplacing earrings, usually one of them, but had not formulated the fact of misplacing them into a need for a solution. The unwrapping disclosed more than it contained.


Jane reminded me that Asian sages have long known something like this, which left me both uplifted and downtrodden at once. Up for being in grand company and down for knowing that I would never belong to that company, neither of which is my fault; just my fate.

Emerging needs…and wants.

Emerging needs…and wants.
Torrey Orton – July 27, 2009


I’m partial to the view that life is for fulfilling human needs, if we know what they are. Ah, if we know! We know that they change over time, that some are not available to direct inspection, that they emerge often under a veil or obscured in the stream of other needs which dominate daily life… we know, thus, that we cannot know them until we have them at a certain level of intensity, salience, etc. And we are expected, and expect, to pursue our needs politely, temperately, considerately, as well as focussedly, commitedley, all to pass through flowingly...to happinesses again.

We are in a world of intemperate processes and outrageous wants, often disconnected from substantive needs, whose momentum generates unnecessary activity that reinforces itself. Talk about moral degeneration…For in this world our needs are distorted, reconfigured, powered and bustled by waves of energy we often cannot even feel until their infectious power grips us. We discover needs by the emergence of new behaviours…sometimes discussed as trends or megatrends, the fashionable material of second rate sociology sustaining consumption-driven marketing to create new ‘needs’ like this:


Commercial self-indoctrination?

Rashid’s commercial self-indoctrination story – told to me one day at lunch.

He and Safiya went to the optometrist’s to get her new eye test done. After she went through, the staffer asked R. if he wanted to have an eye test, too.

He said no, no problems reading or anything else, thanks.

She said it’s free on Medicare, just have a try…maybe…

OK, he said, and so he did have them tried. There was a slight shortfall in tasks like reading.

So, R. accepted that he needed glasses. Why? Because the test said so, though he did not feel any need of them until he heard the test results. If the test said so, there must be something. He found it a day or two later (before getting his first glasses) when noticing that some things seemed a little blurred while reading…Voila, commercial self-indoctrination.

A few days later he added by email, speaking of the above rendition of our chat:

“It’s nice and accurate T. However; after wearing my new glasses few days now, I do feel that I really needed them!! Power of commercial self-indoctrination getting stronger by the day :)”

I love vindication. However, R replied to my reply to the above:

“Somehow I don’t want you to post the story, and when I inquire into the nature of my resistance I hear two things. One seems to do with resisting public self-disclosure on the net and leaving digital crumbs and the other is to do with knowing now that actually the glasses are medically useful to me. While I could read even relatively small prints but wearing glasses now I notice that I was subjecting my eyes to quite a bit of stress! It also has an undercurrent of denying that “commercial self-indoctrination” could happen to me. “

So, it’s a very delicate business, this emerging needs / wants one. Now I understand what a marketing friend has often tried to get me to see – what a serious business it is, too, fooling as it does with the boundaries between acknowledged needs with hairextension-like retro-fitting of them to the latest thing, fashion, trend, innovation – all the materials of consumptionous wellbeing.


Expressive need

Here’s a quite other kind of need – an emerging need for ‘negative’ self-expression which I wrote in a post entitled Popular anger denied makes way for populists a few months ago.

A small example of displaced anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few questions as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).

This need is for expression of experience. People need to do this. Just when and how much is a personal and social question. Unvented anger is an internal stressor; lots of little ones may make a big explosion – a rage. We all know that withheld anger or irritation builds, often to be inappropriately expressed on the wrong person(s) (often at greater distance and of less power than ourselves); or, expressed to the appropriate person(s) but well over the top of the immediate cue that sets it off. Inappropriate after all. This comes from the arena of perceived injustice or unfairness, a capacity which it seems all humans have (for personal detection of injustice, that is). Accessing emerging perceptions of injustice is a core skill for a competent person and a competent social system. Prevention of inappropriate blow-ups is one reason for getting better at it. Another is to rectify emerging injustices.

Getting a grip on emergences, separating the real from the false, the liberating from the enslaving, is one of the major challenges of our turbulent times where standards and process of all kinds are up for grabs. The challenge is personal, familial, social, political…multilevel, multi-sectoral…all happening at once.

A sense of need, but what need?

A third potential example of the emerging, and a difficult one to even present, is this: I have a sense that there is a new level of intellectual / spiritual activity, a kind of desperate expressiveness coming from every type of existing socio-political paradigm across all domains of human activity (all those which are disordered, distressed, displaced by turbulence) as if they are gearing up for a fight and want to get on the field of influence or battle early. Perhaps it is just a flowering of new expression liberated by the turbulence – change is good for innovation, encourages it, demands it. My sense is that we are entering a new phase of activity.

So, join me in discovering and disclosing emergences of all kinds…we certainly can’t tell now which ones matter for the future. Refining our detection capabilities will count for the future, since some of the emerging needs / wants will be thematic in the future.