MONSTERS OF THE MIND

February 14th, 2020

In biology, and in simplistic terms, an allergy is when a perfectly innocuous compound triggers an alarm reaction in the body’s immune system.  Our natural defense system mistakenly decides that this innocuous compound, like a peanut or maybe some pineapple is foreign and dangerous and things get cranked up into a hair trigger gear.

It’s fascinating that this biological mistake also occurs in a mental way, and especially in the modern world.  We are filled with worries and fears and anxieties that perhaps don’t actually warrant such strong emotional responses. 

With an allergy, the body is reacting as though a peanut can kill you, and the reaction can be so strong that the body actually makes it happen.  

The same is eerily similar on a mental level.  We can be rendered paralyzed with incomprehensible levels of panic over an issue that, in reality, doesn’t actually pose us any real harm.

Indeed, we seem to have a capacity to have allergies of the mind.

The much tossed around subject of ‘victim mentality’ is perhaps a good example to trap between glass frames and examine with some specificity.

Regardless of whether someone has actually experienced trauma, there’s two somewhat polar responses that seem to dominate.  Either a person is crippled by the experience and fully inhabit this victim mentality, whether it’s ‘justified’ or not…

or, the individual finds the idea of being viewed as a victim, or feeling like a victim as offensive, even repulsive, and this mentality is characterized the a somewhat phoenix-esque underdog.  There’s  total refusal to let the victim mentality take hold, because the person does not want to be defined by the trauma (real or imagined) or defined by the identity of victimhood.  This is often marked by a total reclamation of one’s life, and weirdly enough, the experience can indeed empower people in a way that wasn’t present before.

Interestingly enough, a recent antidote for biological allergies that is being used to reported success is repeated and increasing exposure to the allergic compounds, and starting with very small quantities.  A person’s system seems to gain a sort of familiarity with the substance and seems to learn or figure out that the substance isn’t actually harmful.

Might the same be true for our mental allergies?  Can some form of exposure therapy, regarding the monster in the mind actually be good for us?

Is it possible that our exuberant resistance to a feeling or a thought is triggering an entire host of other feelings and thoughts that are largely unnecessary, and this, all due to the fact that we aren’t willing to calmly and peacefully simply be with that first thought or emotion?

An experience with meditation seems to indicate that the answer is yes.  Mindfulness in particular is marked by the simple process of looking a stimulus, or a feeling or a thought square on, and simply being fully aware of it.  This might sound strange, and perhaps even scary, but it functions like the terrified but brave child who finally throws open the dark closet doors and shines a flashlight into the darkness to find that there wasn’t really ever anything there.

Our greatest fears, our most terrifying monsters, are almost always a creation of the imagination.

IMISM'S SWORD

February 13th, 2020

Are you a pessimist or an optimist?

Despite people’s likelihood to answer this binary question, it’s a ridiculous and potentially damaging question for the very reason that it is binary.

Can we not be somewhat optimistic and pessimistic?

Is it possible to be a pessimistic optimist?

Or an optimistic pessimist?

These might sound like an attempt to combine words in superficially pedantic ways, but the intention is a bit more genuine.

For one, there’s that old adage:

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Does that not sound somewhat like an optimistic pessimist?

In the realm of business, startups and well, generally trying anything, being an optimist is touted as the superior perspective in this binary, and for one core reason:

The optimist is more likely to try something, and keep trying when things don’t work out. 

In this case, even if the optimist never actually learns, they can still succeed by sheer luck of just trying random things.

In comparison, the pessimist is less likely to take action because the pessimist does not believe that action will accomplish what it aims do to.  Pessimists might disagree with this by claiming that the action they do take is with the belief that it will result in the desired effect.  But an optimist might say the same thing.  But given the two perspectives, the optimist is far more likely to add the caveat that something unexpectedly good might also happen, and therefore make it worth doing.  The truly diehard optimist will claim that every action, no matter how ill-formed the result has some sort of silver lining.  And as impractical as this might be when it results in recklessness, it’s certainly a better mentality from a subjective point because the optimist –if true to their belief- can’t really get beat down in the way a pessimist believes by implication of their lack of action.

But, we can combine these two perspectives.

An optimist can strive to accomplish some good achievement, but also maintain a pessimism about the effectiveness of the plans that have been laid out to get there.  It might seem more even-keeled to balance optimism with skepticism that one’s plans will work, but examine the difference in the result when a plan actually does work.

The skeptical optimist is going to be pleasantly surprised,

whereas the pessimistic optimist who takes the action anyway, will prove themselves wrong when the action succeeds.

Now which is a more useful experience from an emotional point of view that seeks to move forward?

Being pleasantly surprised?

Or being proven wrong?

In the short term, being pleasantly surprised sounds like a better deal, for the superficial reason that it sounds like a nice experience, but that’s not the question.  Which experience is actually more useful?

Proving one’s self wrong is undoubtedly more useful because it allows a person to become more comfortable with being wrong.  This is important because all of our inability stems from flaws in our assumptions and our perspective of the world.  It’s only by rooting out those flaws and correcting them that we gain a clearer understanding of the reality that we’re dealing with and thereby gain greater agency.

While the skeptical optimist might passively assume their thinking is wrong in some ways, the pessimistic optimist knows their thinking is wrong in some ways and actively seeks them out as opposed to waiting for the pleasant surprise of something going the way we want.

The pessimistic optimist holds an idea in their mind and then tries to prove themselves that it’s not possible by taking all potential action that might make it happen.  This method is far more robust than the wishy-washy hope of the skeptical optimist.

Our outlook is a double-edged sword, and the pessimistic optimist remembers to use both sides.

1. An optimistic pessimist is impossible. You simply… can’t really Hope for the worst and expect the Best. That’s simply a contradiction, because if you are hoping for anything, then that’s going to be some sort of ideal, which would also be the best.

HEART OF LUXURY

February 12th, 2020

For all it’s conspicuousness, it’s gaudy signaling, the core of luxury - the real reason why any given person should be driven to chase it - is invisible.

The word Luxury has bit of a bumpy history, but if you go back far enough, it originates from Latin, and refers simply to excess.  This excess has a negative association and that negative association only grew through the centuries until it morphed into the current usage which appears to be more in line with the original Latin root – still somewhat negative despite the fact that everyone is gunning for it.  Those who can afford luxuries do so with an excess of money.  And often, the obvious luxuries are conspicuous displays of this excess:  unnecessarily expensive cars that do nothing more than get a person from point A to point B in much the same way a dirt cheap car does, expensive clothes that cover and warm the body little better than what the salvation army has on offer, food delicately prepared that offers nutrition little better than what someone can prepare on their own for far less.  All of these forms of luxury are merely a way of signaling to others the excesses that an individual can command.

These conspicuous symbols of luxury are superficial.  The signaling nature of luxury, and particularly its advertising often drives people to undermine their own wealth just to be able to display a wealth that they no longer have because of their drive to upstage or equal the visible value of someone else.

All of this misses the point of luxury, and the unique opportunity it can afford.

The core function of luxury is actually convenience.  Top brands are often obsessed with figuring out ways to save their top spenders a little time.

Instead of “that’ll be $782.” it’s “I’ll just put that on your account.”

Every transaction that occurs in the market is a function of convenience.  For example, it would be inconvenient to an insurmountable degree to build your own laptop from scratch.  Luckily there are many thousands of groups of people that have been conveniently organized in a way to accomplish this work, and we pay for that convenience.  There is little difference between the laptop and a cup of coffee that a barista prepares for you.  Even if you are at home and that barista is you, chances are high that someone else is largely responsible for how those beans came to be in your possession, and you paid for the convenience of finding them a couple blocks away at the grocery store.

Think for a moment about the amount of time you would need to construct a laptop from scratch.  Not just buying the components and putting them together, but mining the materials and developing the processes to form them into the right shape, and discovering or developing the laws of computation and how exactly you accomplish this with your mined and shaped materials.  How long would you need to accomplish this as a single individual?

A thousand years?

Ten thousand years?

The cup of coffee is similar.  If you were totally without coffee, how long would it take you to make a cup of coffee happen if you were alone on the planet?  Depending on where you are located, you might have to travel and very long way in order to find a coffee plantation or a naturally occurring plant that yields our beloved black bean. 

How long would you need?  A few days?  A few weeks or months?

It would certainly take you far less time than constructing a computer from scratch, but then again, a cup of coffee is far cheaper than a laptop. 

Framing it this way, it seems like a miracle that powerful laptops are as affordable as they are.  Making a few hundred or even a thousand cups of coffee from scratch to equal the cost of a laptop would take an amount of time that does not even begin to register on the time scale of creating a laptop from scratch.  Either our coffee is far overpriced, or the relatively low price of a laptop is nothing short of a genuine miracle.

The excess that exists at the heart of luxury is time, hence it’s connection to convenience.

The adage Time is Money, also comes to mind to cinch the laces of this connection a little tighter.

An excess of money ultimately affords us free time, which can be spent in the productive pursuit of curiosity, but the benefit of this is counter-intuitive, and many would rather spend this extra money, not on free time, but on symbols to broadcast to others.  And yet, our greatest achievements as a species often come from the mind unencumbered by nothing other than coming up with a way to creatively fill free time. 

Two wildly different examples help illustrate this.  The popular writer Neil Gaiman has often said that the way he comes up with stories is to simply make himself very bored.  At a certain point, his mind starts to build it’s own entertainment and he starts writing it down.  Another immensely powerful example that elicits this point about free time is Newton.  It was during his isolation created by the Plague that he developed Calculus.

When sloth and idleness were deemed vices, it was a time of far less knowledge and information.  But in the modern world, with so much information dammed up at the thresholds of our senses, the vices invert:

The most valuable way to spent time, is to allocate it as free time.

BRANCHES & NETS

February 11th, 2020

There’s no consensus on what consciousness is, nor how to define it.  The only irrefutable and accurate thing we seem to be able to say is that:

something is going on.

If creatures or things other than humans are conscious, then it’s certainly possible to say that there is a range of results when it comes to diversity of action.

Whales dive, eat, mate, and repeat.  But they also sing songs of apparent complexity and variety.

Bees pollinate flowers, build hives, and produce offspring and honey.  But they’re clearly capable of navigating a large, complicated, and varied environment in many different ways as a team.

Leaving the entire morass of discussion revolving around intelligence aside,

We can identify limits of consciousness.  For example, we have no reason to believe that whales contemplate the rotation of black holes.  Nor do we have any reason to believe that bees might be capable of studying giant squid.

Humans, on the other hand can do all of these things, and much much more.  Our consciousness seems equipped with a certain plasticity that has little equal in the rest of the animal world.

For other species, it seems as though knowledge, know how, and diversity of capability grows like a tree.  Through evolution each generation of a species contributes to the shape of the next generation, adding and probably forgetting ways of doing things.

But the knowledge and know-how of humans seems to operate with a different framework.  What we pass on is not necessarily cumulative, and not bound to vertical movement.  For example, few people know how to hunt and gather like our ancestors before the rise of civilization.  None of this is shared vertically or rather hardcoded into who we are, but despite this, any individual has the ability to learn through our network or knowledge.  We seem to have taken the tree of knowledge and ability upon which all other animals seem to operate, and gone lateral.  We replaced the tree with a net.  One that is functionally impossible for one human to hold all at once, but a net nonetheless which we can travel across.  A musician can drop his instrument and start learning how to woodwork, or dance, or code tomorrow.  A singing whale on the other hand seems bound quite strictly by what it’s parents were capable of.  Edge cases in animals seem to be just that: edge cases.  Whereas with humans, all of us are edge cases.

Our abilities and knowledge are no doubt a result of memes, our ability to create them, and spread them.  Individual words are perhaps the most enduring examples.  They are constantly used, shuffled, shifting and on the whole as a system or language, they are fairly resilient through time. 

Our variety of consciousness, unlike the majority of animals seems capable of hosting this vast network of memetic knowledge.

Narrowing in on this difference, we might define our consciousness as marked by an ability to draw new connections and associations between parts of greater and greater disparity. 

We seem to have the ability to take two things that appear to have no relevance to one another and let them mingle in the fictional space of our mind in ways that often reveals surprising and potentially hidden connections.

We do this both as a group and we do it on an individual level. 

Each individual net of knowledge and know how adds to the groups net.

The question boils down to:

How big is your net?

THE CONVERGENCE OF THOUGHT & EMOTION

February 10th, 2020

Hard truths are difficult because our emotions are not aligned with what we know.

We experience this strange internal resistance: we know what the better food option is.  We know we shouldn’t text that toxic person.  We know we should buckle down and get to work on that important project.

But when push comes to shove, there’s a snap decision moment when we our thoughts and emotions on the subject sail past one another like ships in the night and we say screw it!

Derek Sivers put it quite well once when he said that “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

He makes an excellent point with humor.  We have more information at our finger tips than ever before.  The methods for how to accomplish many extraordinary things has been teased apart and detailed ad nauseum for those willing to look for it.  We know what works, whether that be to gain wealth, or to have a healthy, fit body.

We can go so far as to say that we know how to be happy.  Even the knowledge and the techniques for that are ancient, and yet so few systematically go after these goals..

The question is why?  Why would someone not strive to make their life better, especially when such great heights are clearly achievable?

Even if these methods are obvious in terms of information, this rarely means that the same things are obvious from an emotional standpoint.

If something is ‘logically obvious’ but radically different from our previous behavior then emotions are almost certainly not going to be aligned with what is logically obvious here.

Emotion is the basis for our action, not logic, and certainly not information.

For the most part, modern culture, especially in the west is a mess when it comes to any kind of alignment or regulation of emotions.  It’s starting to creep in for the individual level, as with the resurgence of interest in the stoics and meditation, but still for many, these options are not obvious.

More importantly though, is: what exactly is emotion?  And why is it so different from thoughts which is the realm of all the good ideas that might change our life for the better?

In short: emotion is what moves us.

Think for a moment about attention and distraction.  Think about the instances when you have a hard time focusing.  Why?

So many things are fighting for your attention.  In this sense, there are many emotions occurring.  Each distracting is eliciting an emotion and pushing you in a certain direction. 

Many large emotions are conglomerates of many aspects of one’s state.  Think of how someone can become irritable because of an uncomfortable plane seat.  The reason is physical but manifests in this somewhat unrelated behavior of being grumpy.

Emotional regulation is a lot like sifting and listening: you sift out the unnecessary emotions that aren’t of any immediate help or use.  Sure one can be generally depressed about one’s station in life, which can be a very useful signal, but it almost never guides one well in the moment.

Noting that emotion – which drives a person to do dumb things in the short term but as a useful long term signal – and then sifting it out, allows a person to listen to what else is going on in consciousness.

Get good enough at quickly sifting and listening and we begin to start finding gold, regarding smaller, quieter emotions that give a person a tiny push to do something useful in the moment.  These are often totally crowded out.

Sift, note, and listen long enough, practice deeply enough, and we begin to realize that everything is an emotional composite.  Individual words may even be said to be emotional in that they move our mind to a certain object of imagination.  And in that vein, even what is logically obvious but initially counter intuitive begins to resolve as a subtle and unexpected combination and path of emotion where our mind is taken on an unexpected journey of attention.

What is ‘obvious’ to most people are the big loud, dumb emotions that aren’t useful in the short term if we act on them, and which will have negative consequences in the long term. 

Good ideas are not that obvious, somewhat by default.  They are quieter, and their emotional power is of a subtler degree.  One that we have to train in order to be properly moved by.