OBSESSIVE IMPULSE

January 25th, 2020

We all have an impulse to obsess.  While the word has a fairly negative connotation, it’s appropriately descriptive, but we only use the word obsessive when it’s being leveraged on something that may not be very good for us.

Examine a synonym of obsessive for a moment.  The word fanatic.

This generally implies a person who is obsessed about something that we deem negative.  But cut off the last four letters and you get the word fan.

The two are related in the obvious way.

A fan is a fanatic, but one which is generally harmless or positive.  These two words are Rivalnyms, and hilariously so considering they are in fact pretty much the same word.  Perhaps, none of the words so far examined by Tinkered Thinking exemplifies the underlying nature of rivalnyms more than this pair.

The fan/fanatic dichotomy begins to illustrate how our impulse to obsess can be either good or bad.

When we fall in love, and the intensity is mutual and generally leading to good places, we might identify that as a positive instance of obsessiveness.  Though the mere use of the word makes one squint and wonder if something unhealthy is going on.

When we become addicted to something, that’s certainly an obsession and the word feels entirely appropriate.

When we lose ourselves in our work with great productive results, that might be a kind of obsession.  When we love a company so much we are willing to clean toilets for a few years in order to get a shot at the more exciting roles.  That might be a positive form of obsession.

When we start to learn something and we manage to get past that barrier to entry – that period of slow difficult learning at the beginning when nothing seems to work – and then beyond that when our abilities compound in faster, more agile ways, it’s easy to get obsessed because the feedback is so quick and the sense of agency is so high.

It can be extremely powerful to become mindful of this impulse in one’s self.  People often indulge in obsessions for years and years without realizing how much harm it’s doing.  Akin to an abusive relationship, the full realization doesn’t come until after when a new perspective on the past behavior unfolds.

But knowing we have this obsessive impulse can also be used for good.  Say you want to learn something.  Because of the barriers of entry for most skills, that obsessive impulse isn’t going to kick in for a while.  But this fact can be used as intellectual leverage to keep going in order to stay motivated.

All of this might sound a bit lofty or abstract, but fortunately we have something that pours rocket fuel into this impulse and makes it’s prevalence all the more evident on a smaller time scale.

The internet.

This issue with it is simple.

We are all looking for something to obsess about.

The internet makes this a blessing and a curse depending on how quickly you decide on what to focus on.

Did you know that a whopping 40% of youtube use is for learning?  That’s an astonishing use of the internet to leverage learning.

There are infinite productive rabbit holes of learning that are afforded by the internet.

Then there is also

rage,

and empty pleasure.

Best not to be so quick when you decide to interact.  Reserve that impulse and take in more.

STROLLING THROUGH INFINITY

January 24th, 2020

Think of what it’ll be like when you go to bed tonight.  It’ll most likely be dark, and quiet.  Now here’s the question.  If you drifted off to sleep, and slept for exactly 24 hours and woke up in the exact same conditions, that is, it’s dark in just the same way and it seems to be just about the same time, would you know that a day had passed?

Other than the fact that you might feel incredibly refreshed and energized, the answer is no.  Unless you look at your phone for the date, or corroborate the missing time with other details, say the fact that you missed work, there’s simply no way to tell that time has past.  Even if you’d had a slew of intense dreams, we’re all familiar with the experience of hitting the snooze button and having what seems like hours worth of dreaming in just a couple minutes. 

This begins to unpack an unappreciated conundrum regarding time and our experience of it.

From a subjective point of view, time is not uniform.  It ebbs and flows, it stops and then stitches itself together with huge gaps missing. 

We’re all familiar with the experience of time seeming to crawl while we endure some less than ideal circumstance, like a boring day at work or school.  Minutes seem to have complete painstaking lives of their own. 

But when we have fun, time seems to fall away like cash on a spending spree.

However, regardless of how it slows down or speeds up, or stitches itself together across deleted portions, for us, our experience of time is endless.

But we die, you might say.

True, there’s a lot of evidence that points out the probable fact that we will all die.  However, there lies a subtle unseen aspect of this experience.

The end of one’s time with death seems like an endpoint because everyone else who continues to live can mark that end point in a larger context.

This is an important point.  The only reason there is an ‘end’ to anything is because people from other perspectives can place the duration of something, or in this case someone’s life in a larger piece of time.  But for the person who has passed away, the experience of this expanded time quite literally doesn’t exist.  The only way to be truly aware of the end of your life would be to experience the world after you cease to exist, which is of course a contradiction of terms.

The point of this exercise is to highlight something about our subjective experience of time.  That is, since it’s dependent on our waking conscious existence, then our subjective experience of time and our life is that it never ends, our life is subjectively infinite.  The moment we pass away, our life stops in time from the point of view of others, but from our own point of view, time ceases to exist.  There is no future second, minute or hour during which we can look back and say that was my life and it ended right there.  This inability to be aware of this end means that from our subjective point of view, it quite literally has no end.  The awkward alternative is to say that our experience of time is infinite.  This sounds ridiculous only because we quickly imagine that other people and the world will continue to persist beyond our life, but this is an imagined fiction.   We have no way of accessing and experiencing those potential facts.  We arrive at this imagined fiction inductively from the fact that other people have died, but this always fails to take into account what the subjective experience of time would be.

Another way to think about it is to go backwards: can you remember the moment you were born?  No, or course not.  We can all recall a few early memories, but it’s more accurate to say that our experience of time doesn’t really have a beginning.  There is, however a point when we start remembering things in ways that we can recall, but this is no different than waking up in the morning.  Your memory comes back on line.  Perhaps you remember a few dreams, but you can’t remember every little toss and turn in the same way you can remember where you went at the end of the day.

While our conception of time and history allows us to place ourselves in a larger context, our own experience is one of a continually expanding, non stop ride.

We are in some sense strolling through infinity.

Albeit our own personal infinity.

QUESTING STATEMENTS

January 23rd, 2020

At the heart of a question is a push to go discover something.  It’s even in the word.  Lop off the last three letters of the word question and what do you get?  A quest. 

It’s no accident.

What exactly is at the end of that quest we are pushed on to go discover?

The answer, ironically, isn’t really an answer.

What we hunt for at the behest of a good question is a new perspective, one that reveals the world in a different way, in the context of the original question now well explored.

For a moment, think of it like a movie you are about to see that you’ve heard excellent things about. 

What’s it about?

You’re in for a treat. I don’t want to tell you any more, just watch it.

There’s a kind of joyful buzz in the imagination in those moments before we actually begin to watch.  And then when the film is over, our question: what’s it about?  . . . has certainly been answered, but it’s more than an answer at that point.  It’s an experience that has unfolded in a continual change of perspective. 

Good questions aren’t meant to simply ponder, they push us into a dialogue of building with reality, rearranging parts of reality so that it shows us a new perspective.

Another way to think about this is to realize that questions in this manner can also be rephrased as statements.

Take this question for example:  Is there a better way to word this?

versus..

I know there is a better way to word this.

Both the question and the statement are indicating something about the future where some imagined version of reality may or may not exist.  However, the statement carries a bit more psychological horsepower than the tentative sounding question, which might defeatedly be answered with a no.

We might look at our project and ask:  can I make this work?

The question holds almost as much impending failure as the limp statement I’ll try.

But rephrase the question as I know I can make this work.  And suddenly there’s a bit more motivation to go on the journey to actually find out.

While this connection between questions and this particular variety of statements might seem to undermine their respective definitions a little, we have to step back and take in a larger context regarding language, namely, what’s the point if not to use it to better effect?  Language is, after all, a tool, and regardless of how it’s seems to have been built and how it seems it should be used, the more important consideration is what can we actually do with it?

TIME WELL SPENT

January 22nd, 2020

We’re always afraid to lose tangible things.  The money in the safe, a sentimental trinket, our phone.  But these things pale in comparison to the value of time.

Time is potentially infinitely more valuable than anything we might own.  And yet we are ironically quick to let it slip by.  Or sell it to the owner of the company we work for.

It’s perhaps a little quaint, not to mention ironic, that we are so careless with the one thing that is most valuable in life.

Luxury, when we commonly think of it, calls to mind images of private jets, glasses of cold champagne, nice watches, and effortless destinations.  But this is not the true definition of what luxury means to those who can “afford” it.

The most luxurious gift you can give someone is to grant them more time – to somehow save them time that they’d otherwise have to spend on something extraneous.  The top tier of luxury has more to do with convenience than it has to do with fancy things to own.

This pairs the ultra wealthy with an unlikely subset of society: the homeless.  Though, it goes without saying that the life of almost all homeless is an extremely tough one, and the time they do have on their hands is most likely not enjoyable.  The likeness to the ultra wealthy is more akin with those who have willingly separated themselves from possession and the usual obligations of society.  A figure like the Buddha comes to mind. 

Both the ultra wealthy and the ascetic have this one central issue with time in common; both are going to extremes in order to hang on to as much time as possible.

This begs the question:  what is time well spent?

This may in fact be the most important, and of course, the most difficult question that we can  confront ourselves with.

Is time well spent if you are using it to maximize future time?

Or it time better spent without bothering with such things and simply investigating how to simply be present inside the enigmatic moment?

There’s something paradoxically inscrutable about this question.  It’s almost as infuriating as what’s the meaning of life?

But fortunately it can prove to be more useful.  And we can achieve this by changing the context.  By zooming in.  Instead of asking how ALL time can be well spent, which is a bit of a non sequitur since we cannot spend all time in one single way, we can ask: 

How would today be well spent?

or

How would the next hour be well spent?

How would the next five minutes be well spent?

All of these questions invariably have different answers because they are addressing different levels of context, and each question increases in specificity because the resolution of time is higher.  These questions, though share something crucial in common.  They all require a thoughtful pause.

One thing we can be fairly sure about when it comes to this question of time well spent is that time spent contemplating the value of our moments alive is never wasted.  This small action, this event, this question that we are always free to pose ourselves, is at core, an act of gratitude.

No matter how difficult life is, even the worst of our lot is lucky to glimpse this strange universe.  To wonder how to spend our time during this glimpse is to honor it.

METATTENTION

January 21st, 2020

One aspect of mindfulness meditation, or Vipassanā, as it’s referred to in the original Pali, is developing the ability to notice what your attention is focused on and realize when this focus changes.

This might at first sound a little odd.  Doesn’t this require two sources of attention?  First there’s the attention that’s focused on say, our breathing, but does it not require another perspective to notice when that focus has wandered off to thoughts about lunch?

Or are we simply ricocheting very quickly between breath, lunch and the realization that thoughts of lunch interrupted focus on the breath . . .

. . . which was in turn interrupted by the realization that thoughts of lunch were interrupted by the realization that a switch had taken place.

It’s bizarrely recursive, just to try and describe it. 

But two examples come to mind in order to dig into this conundrum.  First there’s watching a movie.  Often times we can get so engrossed in the movie that we totally forget where are, and we can even forget the fact that we’re watching a movie.  And yet, with other movies, perhaps less compelling movies, we can pay attention to what’s going on in the story while still being very aware of what’s going on around us.  Perhaps this is a single attention bouncing between the movie and the larger situation quickly enough so that both threads of attention appear seamless.

Another example involves young kids, or even animals.  As we watch them, perhaps to make sure they don’t hurt themselves, we have the ability to realize what the child or the animal is focusing on. Perhaps a toy a few feet away that the child is crawling towards.  It’s this ability to imagine the child’s source of attention that allows us to look ahead, see that a potentially hazardous paperclip is near the toy and that we should remove it.  We might call this awareness of the situation.  Again, perhaps it’s a single attention of ours that has the ability to quickly bounce between different things, zooming the context in and out, but it can happen so quickly that it’s easy to suspect or wonder if there’s not two cameras of attention keeping an eye on things, like two eyes that can look in different directions. 

With the practice of mindfulness, our seemingly second attention, our meta-attention, can begin to take on the role of a movie goer.  After enough time it’s as though our better self is always present, and most of the time, this better, more thoughtful self, just watches the movie of our life as it happens. 

But unlike the movie goer who is bound to the whims and turns of a predetermined script up on the silver screen, this metattention that we develop in mindfulness creates the constant opportunity for our better self to step in and change our default behavior. 

For example, those who have anger problems can seem practically drunk on the emotion.  Some people even experience memory problems regarding their spells of anger.  With enough practice of meditation, a metattention of the situation allows for a more thoughtful version of this angry person to eventually have the ability to step in and decide that the default actions that are usually taken in anger, won’t be this time.

This is one of the true benefits of meditation.  So many of us are simply on autopilot, doing the same thing day in and day out, unable to break the pattern, even if we want to, because the moments when we truly and thoughtfully pause are few and far between.  Meditation not only gives a person the ability to see themselves more clearly, but eventually it provides the avenue to step in and make changes in the moments when it is most needed.