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.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DRIFTWOOD & TALLOW

February 9th, 2020

When Lucilius was young he took work aboard a ship.  It was a grunt position, being the ships’ boy, and being the youngest he was tasked with every manner of tedium and grime, leaving him little chance to learn the true ways of the ship, gazing up every day at the taut sails, seeing the men haul their lines and mend their ways.

One evening, exhausted, he sat with the cook in the galley, his only kind shipmate at the time, and watched the cook go about his business of food.  The ship had already had it’s fill and most were grogged down for the night, and Lucilius, eating last, savored the food only by being too tired to rush it into his ravenous body.

The cook removed the lid from a pot and with a ladle, skimmed off some tallow.  The cook blew on it and tasted it, smiling and then extended the spoon to Lucilius who sipped off the rest.  The hot fat was delicious to the two.

“Good stuff,” the cook grumbled through his crooked smile.  And then, “Well,” he said, looking at the boy Lucilius, feeling the nudge for a lick of conversation.

“When ya gonna be more than just boy?”

Lucilius looked at the ancient man.  He shrugged his shoulders.  “I just do what they tell me,” he said.

The old cook gave him a dissatisfied look.  He turned back to his pot and skimmed off a little more tallow, lifting it and then poured it back in slowly.

“Know why tallow floats to the top?”

The boy Lucilius shook his head. 

“Cause it’s so good. Yeh, ye need water like what’s b’low, but a man’ll go far longer on tallow then’e will on just water.”

The old cook looked seriously at Lucilius.  “I seen it ma’self.  Man’ll just shrivel up.  Don’ matter how much water he got.  But tallow does far more for ya.  S’why it rises for us.”

The boy Lucilius struggled, listening to the old cook, trying to understand what he was saying about the hot fat.

“Be like tallow boy, an y’ll rise.”

For the next week, Lucilius pondered the cook’s words as he went about his work, and one evening after stand-down, Lucilius was tasked by the bo’sun to recoil lines along the rails.  He was left alone as the crew went about their frivolity down below.  He’d yet to deal with lines and no one had taken the time to show him, nor had he paid much attention when the older sailors had been at the work.

He unhitched the coil and let it fall to the deck, and then he began to unhitch the line from it’s cleat, unaware of how much weight it was holding.  He came to the last turn and the line began to pull, and it sucked Lucilius straight into the rail, pinning him as he winced in pain at a trapped hand, keeping the line from feeding more, but totally unable to move.  He gasped heavily for breath, looking skyward, trying to figure what heavy piece in the rigging might fall because of him.

Then with a quickness that Lucilius could not fathom, a strong hand threaded round and clapped hold of the loose line behind his hand, and another holding high above teased the angle, till Lucilius’ hand was free.  He fell back to the deck gasping.  

The captain stood tall above him, and with dizzying speed, the man had the line held fast again.  Then he turned to Lucilius with a flat smile.  He grabbed Lucilius’ pained hand and examined it.  Then looked Lucilius in the eyes.

“Let me show you.”  And with that the captain lead him through the maneuvers of the line held fast, explaining how and why it was cleated.  What is was connected to, and then he coiled the tailing line, perfectly, and hitched it, then stayed with Lucilius as he went through the same maneuvers, and made him do it over and over until the boy Lucilius had it right.

“Good,” the captain said, and then he turned to leave.

“Thank you Captain.” Lucilius was barely able to say.

The captain stopped, turned and looked at him.  The captain motioned with a gesture to the whole ship.

“All this,” he said, shaking his head,  “without us, it’s just fancy driftwood.”

The next morning Lucilius arose before all others who were not on watch and he went to the galley to prep the cook’s work.  Then he went to the forepeak, and helped organize the bo’sun’s keep, and he started on the crew’s chores early, polishing the ships metals before getting to his own work, and he kept at the extra work, day after day, rising early and turning in late.

SUPER SOAKER

February 8th, 2020

The speed of progress while working on a project is surprisingly and perhaps even depressingly variable.  Hours can dawdle by with a mere pittance of work done, but see the clock, realize there’s only twenty minutes left and suddenly things get kicked into a gear nearing warp speed.

The day or two before a vacation are always incredibly productive compared to any old normal Thursday or Friday on the calendar.

There seems to be a sort of pressure that we can apply to our ability to get work done.  As time falls away and looming obligations suddenly stand poised to topple upon our present moment, we hustle.  But when time is but a rolling grassland of open opportunity, we dilly dally.

Walking away from a particularly hectic and productive bout of work, it’s frustrating to wonder why that kind of productivity can’t always be called up.

Perhaps it can?  But how?

How do we build some sort of time pressure for our work?  We try to covet those large swathes of time in order to really go deep on the project, but it backfires as we relax in stead of settling in.

Is it possible to chunk that large swath of time in order to apply pressure in small sprints?  Like pumping a super soaker, creating a pressure to move forward?

It certainly is.

When Tinkered Thinking started there was a twenty minute allowance of time for each episode.  This was simply to ensure that something would get on the page, but more than that it also ensured that something somewhat cohesive was left on the page when finished.

Repeating a timer of 20 or 30 minutes can be surprisingly effective.  The alarm goes off and we realize we’ve gone down a rabbit hole with little promise of accomplishing anything.  Instead of spending an hour or two down such a path, the alarm jolts us from the reverie of exploration.  We can pivot far more easily and charge the pressure again, and with a different target, fire.

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: INFLUENTIAL MANIPULATION

February 7th, 2020

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Rivalnym, it is something developed by Tinkered Thinking to address a certain class of words and concepts that fall in a strange place between Synonyms and Antonyms.  A rivalnym is a word, or rather, a pair of words that are somewhat synonymous in literal meaning, but opposite in terms of the emotional valence we ascribe to the thing being described.

A pair of words that makes a good example is Nervous and Excited

One is generally positive, that is, excited, and nervous is generally more negatively valence, and yet, what registers our excitement?  Our nerves.  And when we are nervous, is it not because our nerves are in an excited state?

Another pair of words that form an exceptional Rivalnym pair are: Influence and Manipulation.

Both words can be defined as an instance of having an impact on the way another person thinks, feels and behaves.

Influence is generally regarded as positive or neutral, as in that friend is a good influence or a bad influence.

But the word manipulative is wholly negative.  The idea of positive manipulation simply doesn’t spin well in the mind of the English speaker.

And yet it describes much the same thing as influence.  To manipulate someone is to have an impact on that person in a specific and targeted way.  The difference is that such manipulation is taken up for selfish gain on the part of the manipulator, whereas someone looking to have an influence is more likely to be doing this for altruistic aims.  Or rather, the manipulator is playing a zero-sum game where they win, and the influencer is looking to play a non-zero-sum game where everyone wins simply by playing.

It’s of further fascination that the word influence has given rise to the somewhat new word influencer, as in someone with a lot of pull, usually through social media platforms. 

The territory with influencer gets sticky, because it becomes harder to figure out what sort of game these people are playing.  Is it just a means to gain?  Or is there a form of the non-zero-sum game that can be played?

The answer to this question has perhaps yet to be realized, but there are certainly those out in the social spheres that would be more aptly labeled as manipulators as opposed to the more magnanimously sounding influencers.

But time will tell.

MEASURING QUESTIONS

February 6th, 2020

We are taught to think that all questions are good, but questions are never equally effective.

We’re told there are no bad questions.  This fosters the curious spirit by encouraging the inquisitive mind.

And this is a strategy that is great for children and beginners.  We all respond well to encouragement.  But after beginning, there comes a point when improvement depends on a critical analysis of our own performance.  This is almost banal in most areas.  Athletes track metrics of performance in order to see where things can improve by also figuring out where things aren’t going well.

The business world is replete with this kind of talk about optimization and efficiency.

But the most basic, core task in order to carry out these kinds of processes towards improvement has been left undisturbed and unimproved in it’s beginner’s state.  That task is the Art of Questions.

We can still maintain that no question is a bad question while making progress with this subtle art.

A question’s first and most important metric is easy to measure, and it’s best evoked by another question.  One that sharpens our view of the first.

Does our question inspire the action to explore?

If our question merely keeps us ‘deep in thought’, then the answer is ‘no’.  And this is an important sign that it’s time to explore better questions.

If a question doesn’t propel you into the role of an explorer, either in the form of a researcher or someone who experiments with reality in order to get an answer from the source, then the question either fails on an emotional level or a practical one.

There might be enough emotion evoked by the question to keep our mind’s spinning for days and weeks, but this implies that it’s not practical enough because it’s somehow too vague which leaves us without a legitimate path in reality to explore a potential answer.

In the case of a question that is too large, it can benefit from chunking.  Meaning, ask another question that addresses a small aspect of the first in a way that can actually be answered, and by this process slowly build an answer. 

Otherwise, we can always begin again and ask an entirely new question.