WASTING TIME

December 4th, 2019

There are two ways to waste time.

The first is the obvious way.  Completely passive, with a belly full of food, another beer now cracked and a TV show or a movie coming into focus.  Or with the phone whipped out, a thumb flicking away furious minutes.

We suspiciously refer to this activity as ‘relaxing’.  And we’re told it’s a good idea because as it’s said all around, you gotta take it easy.

The second way to waste time is to try and create something.  To work.  At first glance work doesn’t sound like a waste of time, but if we are working on a project that makes no money, then perhaps some might call it a waste of time.

Isaac Newton for example wasted quite a bit of time tinkering around with Alchemy and theology.  Luckily he wasted time in a third way that seems to have proven some benefit.

Some people don’t fit into cubicles.  In fact, as a side note it’s fairly astonishing that so many people do fit into them, for years.  And given the fact that many of them might not even really be doing anything.  This is all the more surprising – perhaps even disturbing- when we compare it to a basic description of prison.

People who have genuine trouble with this kind of set up often have notions compelling them to seek other situations where those ideas might find a fertile patch of reality.

These people are often wasting time in a productive way.  Of course, these people have little to no visibility until that thing they wasted so much time on suddenly turns out to be not so much of a waste.  The curiosity and work pays off, and then others give it barely a second of thought as they wonder how they did it.

Must have just been lucky.

Luck certainly plays a role that is hard to pin down.  But luck is more willing to play in certain environments with certain people rather than others.  Luck certainly might frequent the cubical environment in some form, but it’ll be far more rare to bestow the same kind of opportunity it does for the inveterate tinkerer who toils away in obscurity with their latest idea.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION PART II - THE TEST

December 3rd, 2019

[This episode extends from Episode 591, Emotional Regulation Part I.  This will be a casual, ongoing series with an experimental attempt to group some of the themes that appear on Tinkered Thinking regularly.]

This, ‘Part II’ is dedicated to Saher Cherif who you can connect with on Twitter @Saher_Cherif

Every action is predicated - in fact - dictated by an emotion.  Just like a good question which can generate the emotion to draw us into a quest to find an answer, even the smallest action, like grabbing one more potato chip has at its root, in emotion.

Success, or even just progress, in any area is determined by the kinds of actions that we take.   This process of action selection and execution gets a lot of the fanfare in the noisy world of productivity hacks.  But if we agree for a moment that all action is derivative of an emotion, then why is this emotional component not part of our focus?

Tinkered Thinking has previously spent some time exploring the symmetrical nature of both vicious and virtuous cycles.  The vorticular structure of these cycles, like a whirlpool,  seems to be everywhere, from the shape of galaxies, to the rotation of a hurricane – even to the way it feels when things are falling apart in life.  Think of the wording we use around this instance.  “I’m in a downward spiral”.  Terrible emotional experiences like depression and anxiety seem to have a self-reinforcing nature.  It’s as though they are primed by default to get stronger for as long as they exist.  All of us, aside from perhaps the psychopathically happy, have experienced this sense of being drawn down into a funk.  To put it lightly.

We might even wonder if there is a neurological pattern or structure upon which this whirlpool process is hosted, and if the Default Mode Network plays a crucial role in the particular polarity such cycles propagate, whether they be geared toward happy and productive or depressed and passive.  Of course, this is mere speculation and is far beyond the scope of Tinkered Thinking’s aim here.

The underlying point is that our brain propagates this process, no matter what we shove into the machinery. 

Think of it like any other piece of machinery.  It’s built to do a certain function, and when that machine is turned on, it’s going to try and do that function, no matter what you put into it.  Let’s take something basic as an example:

Say a garburator, which is used to tear up food scraps so they will wash down the drain.  It’s built for food scraps, but it’s not build well enough to know if someone drops a fork down the drain.  Either way, it’s going to try and process  whatever is thrown into it.

The brain is much the same way.  Give it an emotion, any emotion, and it’ll run with it, make it grow. 

Thinking about yourself, and your brain upon which some sense of self operates on top of, as a slippery slope casts everything else in a new light.

For example, just think about how we are all so reactive.  How we turn on the news and purposely expose ourselves to negatively framed information.  And then that material gets fed into a brain which seems designed to amplify things emotionally.

With each and every waking moment, we are presented with a test.  That test can be phrased as a simple question:  which emotions are you willingly going to entertain? 

When something goes wrong and there’s the opportunity to get angry or defeated over it… will you let those emotions define the moment, and potentially inform how you move into the next moment and onward into the future?  That’s the test.

If instead you can regulate these emotions to the point of redirecting helpful emotions and misdirecting useless emotions, then progress will naturally arise.  The test is simply how we choose to feed our internal emotional environment. 

There’s that old parable about the two wolves that live inside of everyone.  The good one and the bad one, and they are constantly battling one another for dominance.  The question arises: which one will win?  The answer of course, is the one you choose to feed.

The entry fee to progress is this emotional test.  After that, success is a function of time, consistent effort, and attention.

How we actually pass this test effectively, and consistently is the real trick.

The tool that has the most ROI here is a dedicated meditation practice centered on concepts of mindfulness.  How it works, is meditation gives you a pause button.  It’s during this pause that you can make a conscious choice about which emotion you’re going to feed to the meat grinder.

ON YOUR MARK

December 2nd, 2019

Just before you start something, anything, especially something creative, there is a moment when the human spirit seems to come up to the edge of an insidious chiasm.  At first it’s just a quick skip to bridge the gap, and then as we hesitate and lollygag, the chiasm grows wider and deeper.  Procrastination becomes it’s own whirlpool, it’s own vicious cycle.

Before we know it, we’re medicating our own psychology with distraction.  Checking a social media app, scrolling through reddit, or going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of needless research.  Anything to keep from facing the growing barrier between ourselves and the thing we should be doing.  The thing we wish we were doing. 

The answer here is to simply start as fast as possible and let the structure of the process arise on it’s own.  There are tricks to this, like setting a 5 minute timer and hitting the keys before or on the timer, or like a trick used by insomniacs:  don’t lie awake in bed because then the mind becomes accustomed to being awake in bed and fails to associate the environment with sleep, thereby becoming a vicious cycle.  So if you can’t sleep, don’t stay in the bed, or so goes the current thinking on this niche of behavior.

We also have this surreal ability to visualize things on top of the world that we see.  Whether you are reading these words or listening to them while doing something else, for those blessed with visual faculties, it’s strangely possible to suddenly see the green apple floating in space right in front of you.  It just pops up there because I mentioned it.  Of course it’ll fade away as quickly as we forget about it but this ability to superimpose another reality on top of the one we see is a strange tool that is perhaps not used to any remarkably good effect. 

Certainly athletes and performers of a similar nature use visualization techniques akin to this superimposition, and this visualization apparently aides their performance greatly.

But what about for the non-athlete.  How can this visual canvas be used?

Well, to return to that interminable growing canyon of procrastination, one way to use this superimposition is to see – as quickly as possible – the best version of yourself acting as you’d expect that person to.  Leaning into the work before you even feel ready for it.  Imagine that version of you, feeling like they’d left you in the dust, experiencing the exhilaration of leading the pack in a race. 

We are all capable of imagining better versions of ourselves, and certainly many if not all of us sense that this person actually exists in some way, if cooped up by strange constraints, whether that be situational or psychological.  Regardless, there’s a sense that this person could one day finally stretch their legs and take reality for a ride.

Is it possible to visualize this person, and superimpose their actions upon our waking life, and then try to race that person?

Maybe,

But first we have to imagine the mark of that person clearly,

Get set to try and outdo that person,

and then go.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: AS ABOVE SO BELOW

December 1st, 2019

Lucilius was beginning to find his work tedious.  Each day loads of different poisons were carted into the lab and he was part of a massive team that was tasked with figuring out how to process the poisons, finding what potential fuel was available and discarding the rest.  The work had always been interesting, like a puzzle, but now after many years the puzzle was beginning to feel solved.  There were certain elements they just couldn’t do anything with, and some so hazardous that workers in the lab sometimes became casualties to the toxins.  And the ones they could process always abided by the same tools they had.  Lucilius was as good as the rest, but it was now as though there was nowhere to grow.

He began to think outside of the confines of the lab, now more like a factory of labs, he realized.  He was curious about where these poisons came from, why they came to this factory of labs, and at the heart of his curiosity was a question:  could the system be changed?  He knew the labs would be able to become far more efficient if the amount of poison they had to process could be less.

He realized that no one knew who decided what came into the lab.  So he decided to find out.  He headed out and found a strange world.  There seemed to be all sorts of different factories, each with its own workers, each factory specializing in a different material that had to be processed.  He discovered an elaborate transport system that connected them all, and through that system he toured his world, meeting workers of all types.  They were of all shapes and sizes, but all so much like him and his coworkers.  All trained – designed nearly – to tackle their specific job. 

Lucilius stayed with some transport workers who seemed to carry different compounds to all sorts of different places.  He stayed on these rounds for a while, exploring the huge network, until he came to a delivery site where he wasn’t permitted to enter.  There was a barrier that he had no idea how to get through.  So he clung to the area and began to watch, seeing what sort of workers could get in and what sort of compounds they delivered.  It took some time, but Lucilius eventually learned the trick that would allow him through, reinventing himself. 

Beyond that secret barrier, Lucilius found a place that was unlike any he had ever seen.  Instead of workers processing compounds, this place was filled with a chattering network.  As far as Lucilius could explore, the workers here were passing messages.  While he didn’t completely understand, and no one seemed to be able to explain the big picture of what was going on, he suspected that this network somehow had an impact on the work that all the factories were tasked with, and after watching the process for some time, he grabbed a message that someone was stuck with and handed it to someone else who quickly and mindlessly took it and off it went into the system.  Soon enough, someone handed Lucilius another message, and then another and then another, but he couldn’t tell what they meant or what he was supposed to do with them so he simply passed them along.  Soon he had many workers handing him all sorts of messages, but he’d grown suspicious of the work and began experimenting.  He tossed some messages to see if there was any difference.  Then he cycled through the workers he handed messages to, giving some none, and giving others far more than usual.  It took years, by moving around to different spots, he began to see patterns.  Most workers simply passed along their messages.  But some seemed greedy to receive them faster.  Some messages were clearly about what was going on in the factories, and others directed those factories.  But there was an even more subtle layer of messages that had to do with something that seemed completely alien.  As though there were patterns that had nothing to do with the factories but also dictated what happened to them.  It seemed as though there were portals to another world where information came from, information in the form of patterned messages, and those patterns seemed to dictate a lot of what was going on.  Lucilius eventually met similar workers who had similar theories, and painstakingly they roamed the network of workers to try and understand what was going on.  But it became ever clearly as they studied that the only way to understand was to change what was going on and see what happened.  So they coordinated their efforts and began to slowly apply pressure on one set of workers they had grown suspicious of.  A group that always seemed very eager to work.  The group agreed with Lucilius’ idea that it might be interesting to see what happened if those workers simply took a break. 

In another world of sorts, a different sort of Lucilius was sitting at a bar, looking at the drink that had just been placed in front of him.  He’d been thinking about the whole world and how so many of the people in it were confined, constricted by systems that lacked the malleability to let their creativity and potential thrive.  The screen above the backbar flipped to a news station and the latest atrocity was being reported with unsteady footage.  It all seemed a sad mess, and certainly there was reason to drink.  A slight smile came to him as he remembered the beverage in front of him.  He gingerly grasped the glass and brought it closer to him.  But as he was about to lift it for a sip, he felt strangely different.  His habit of drinking had been on his mind lately.  And something new was there – a feeling that bothered him.  The lure of blurry relief pulled on him.  Then he let go of the glass, fished out some cash from a pocket, tossed it on the bar and walked out.

WANDERING LIGHTNING ROD

November 30th, 2019

Can you plan discovery?

Can you plan when you’ll have your next great idea?

Perhaps discovery can be anticipated, but planning when a great idea is going to show up?  That’s likely a fantasy.

But despite how difficult it is, we can create conditions where it’s more likely we’ll be struck by a good idea.

We need to create the right conditions for lightening to strike, and lightening rods don’t work very well in basement offices.

We are not unlike lightening rods in this respect.  In order for ideas and giant pulses of electricity to strike, there are a couple non-negotiable ingredients:

We need space.  The right sort of space.

Somewhere to wander, which is easy enough to do.. for a person the range of subjects and topics that are available for your average human are so abundant that a few lifetimes would be fairly easy to fill.

The problem is the other variable.  We can’t wander if we don’t have the time.  And while this is widely acknowledged as the most important resource we have, few actually take the long hard look at their life to maximize this resource. 

Many would rather wile away 8 hours a day 5 times a week and feel reasonably safe about shelter, finances and social connection than perhaps take a big fat red marker to this equation.

As is commonly reported and apparently never taken to heart: no one regrets not working more when they find themselves on a deathbed.

but of course this prescription is phrased in a negative, and without some sort of substitute, the mind is quite poor at filling in the punch line.  We can only imagine the thing being discussed which is of course work.  It’s akin to being asked not to think of a pink elephant.  What do you think of? 

So no wonder people don’t delve into the implications of our tired, dusty aphorisms. 

What’s the opposite of work?  One might think rest and relaxation, so perhaps the question doesn’t correlate with our perspective of the subject.

Perhaps the better rewording of the question is:  what’s the opposite of busywork?

Certainly most people who have contemplated the precious fleeting nature of life will shutter at the idea of wasting it with mere busywork.

The opposite of busywork might be to wander.

We seemed to intuit the value of this also.  Travel is the the ultimate activity in today’s day and age.  But we cram wild, highly scheduled trips into tiny one and two week stints and completely miss the gist of what it means to wander.

We gain return to that important variable: time.

If time is so important, than we need to examine how we are wasting it, and we must look hard at what comforts and pleasures we must be willing to sacrifice in order to have more of this one precious gift.