THE LAST DOMINO

September 30th, 2019

This episode is an extension of Episode 496, entitled Organized Systems which addressed the issue of Tinkered Thinking releasing episodes late.  The premise of the episode is that every recurrent problem requires a system that solves it automatically.  For most people, this is going to take the shape of a habit. 

James Clear and Charles Duhigg have written extensively about the creation and use of habits and one of the largest take-aways from such research and work is that the first month is the hardest, but it gets easier as the run streak of repeated behavior passes certain thresholds.  3 days, 5 days, 7, 21 and 30 days seem to be the most notable.  That first month is the hardest.

So Tinkered Thinking set out to commit to a month of on time posting and today marks thirty days in a row.  There were one or two days that were a couple hours behind the designated time due to unforeseen recording issues, but not one day went by without a post.

James Clear in particular outlines a good system for how to make this first month happen, and much of it was simplified for this Tinkered Thinking experiment.  Two things in particular were of great benefit.  Each time a ‘habit threshold’ was passed, some sort of pre-planned reward was at hand, and small daily pleasures were withheld until the daily work was finished. 

A set time every day for this work would be ideal, but do to the nature of other primary projects, this doesn’t get to happen everyday.

It is remarkable to look back over the first month while building any habit.  Things do get easier, and by the time the end rolls around, it feels nearly inevitable.  Like the falling of the last domino.  The work isn’t so hard to do, because so much work has already been done. 

After just one short month, there’s already momentum.

Do we stop here, and simply expect it to continue? or is there some way we can Level-up and further entrench the progress?

Staying on time is one thing, but what about staying ahead?

Perhaps this will be the next iteration of the habit to install, but for now, there are rewards to be enjoyed…

This episode references Episode 496: Organized Systems, and Episode 42: Level-Up

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE MATRYOSHKA DOLL OF MODERNITY

September 29th, 2019

The bus jolted forward and quickly stopped at a red light, making Lucilius waver from side to side in his seat.  Lucilius was living in a well-to-do city, getting on with the days, enjoying what moments he could and even learning how to enjoy the time in-between.  It was a beautiful, clear day and the bus was crowded.  Lucilius was trying to soak it in and see if he could make a mundane moment memorable by simply focusing his attention.  It was at that point a loud, wet snort and followed by a hacking cough drew his attention. 

Someone in a far less fortunate situation had gotten on the bus and most of the people around Lucilius were staring at the person.  Snot ran down over their lips, soaking into whiskers and bloodshot eyes shifted around at the ground.  Lucilius noticed someone holding a sleeve to their nose and then Lucilius could smell the weeks without bathing.

The bus jolted to a stop and the doors opened.  A couple with huge backpacks and loud accents tramped aboard and stood in the only space available, not noticing the unfortunate person who was still the focus of most people on the bus. 

The two were happily barking about their plans for the day, recounting the mundane adventure they’d just finished with all the enthusiasm that comes with the frame of travelling, when another loud wet snort rattled the hunched and stinking person near them.

The couple stopped talking, and the woman turned to look at the homeless person hitching a ride on the bus.  Her upper lip curled, much like many others on the bus, and she turned back to her partner.  And without discretion nor shame she said simply:

“disgusting…”

Everyone on the bus could hear it.  Lucilius looked back at the homeless man and wondered about the assessment, thinking about the times during his life when he’d been homeless.  But a whisper interrupted his remembrance.  Sitting next to Lucilius, one friend whispered –almost inaudibly to another:

“figures an Australian would say that…”

Lucilius sighed, taking in the whole situation, and thought about how much sense it made that someone in this well-to-do city would say that about an Australian.

And then,

Lucilius burst out laughing.

THE REASON BEHIND A LIE

September 28th, 2019

Ever argue with yourself?

Sure.  We all do it.

Ever try to convince yourself something?

Sure.  Pretty much the same thing.

But.  Wait a minute.  What exactly does that mean?  Why would we ever be resistant to something we want to do? 

Surely there is the obvious case of something being socially unacceptable, like when someone cuts you off while you’re late to work and you suddenly wish you could prop up a grenade launcher on your shoulder, shove it out the window and send that senseless bonehead to hell.

We resist such impulses because the consequences are much worse than just dealing with it without doing anything.

(As an aside: it’s amazing how much easier life gets if a person can become genuinely comfortable with doing nothing as a response to life’s meaningless aggravations.)

But there remain other, more subtle circumstances when the consequences are not nearly so extreme nor so obvious. 

We might think of a relatively harmless example, like eating a bit too much.  Everyone who can, has done it, and most do it very often.  The consequences of getting just a tiny bit fatter or unhealthy are imperceptible.  And without such a clear signal it’s easy to just shrug off any little annoying thought about health.

Drink is another example.  When does it go from just having a few, to a few too many?

The difference is subtle, easy to miss and impossible to actually calculate.  Individual tolerance can certainly be calculated but, it’s also a moving target, and bad habits can form even within some sort of institutionally defined ‘limit’, like the limit defined in law for drinking and driving.

Whether it be eating, or drinking, or any other choice of drug, poison or pleasure, anything that lights up the Substantia Nigra in the brain to a greater degree than usual is going to start creating a slippery slope.

This slippery slope becomes a vicious cycle, because every instance of a behavior lays the foundation for the next time that behavior occurs.  And if that behavior lights up the pleasure response in our brain, the brain’s sensitivity to the experience re-regulates in order to create a desire for a greater dose and greater frequency.

Ok, that’s the grossly over-simplified neuroscience of it.

But more importantly is: what does it feel like?

Ever hear someone say that sounds reasonable…

Or ever hear yourself say it?

Doesn’t matter what it’s in response to.  The question is: what ‘reason’ is behind the sense that it’s reasonable.

Fact is: it’s not a reason at all.  At least not in the rational, logical sense.

The reason is a feeling. 

That sounds reasonable, is exactly the same as that sounds good.

We experience ‘good’ more as a pleasant sensation more than anything else.  We do not use logic to deduce some sort of best option with all possible consequences and externalities appropriately balanced.  We rely on an old system of heuristics that isn’t well calibrated for the modern world.  It tells us to eat to much, to be lazy, to drink, and when we get a touch of substances that are ultimately very bad for our health, we indulge a little more.

Why?  Because they feel good in the moment.

This feeling of ‘good’ becomes the underlying reason that gives birth to all sorts of other ridiculous reasons that form an emotional narrative about how we want to do something.  When habits get bad enough to effect our lives in meaningful ways, the maintenance of that emotional narrative often begins to require lying.

The thing is, the lie makes sense to the liar in the context of wanting or feeling a need to do something that the lie is covering for.

Such a lie, is of course first and foremost a self-deception.  But it doesn’t feel that way because it’s in the name of something that feels good.

Another way to think about it is with a story like Romeo and Juliet.  They’ve each got the hots for each other, but they know their families wouldn’t be happy with it.  That asymmetry is at the heart of all the conflict and tragedy for Romeo and Juliet. 

We can replace the the object of desire in a story like Romeo and Juliet with something else and see a similar result.  When we desire to do something that isn’t in our best interest as per our relationships, family, long-term well-being, we are dealing with the same sort of asymmetry.

That feeling of pleasure overwhelms us in the short term and it gives rise to a phenomenon more eloquently stated by Benjamin Franklin:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

And this is at the heart of lying.

The reason for lying is that something feels good, and that prospect of feeling good is closer in time than the negative consequences that might follow. 

We are poor long-term thinkers, unless we’ve been lucky enough to develop a strong executive cortex that has strong over-riding connections to these other emotional centers of our brain.

But this shouldn’t be too surprising. 

We’re actually just animals.  And there aren’t any animals who engage in dynamic long term planning.  Everything in the animal kingdom that might look like long-term planning is actually rote instinct.  The alternative to long-term planning is this simpler function of just trying to get what’s good in the moment.

A grotesque historical example comes to mind.  Before the United States had been fully explored by European descendants, and when the buffalo still roamed free by the millions, the Lewis and Clarke expedition witnessed a great example of this short-term penchant in the animal kingdom.  As so happened, they came across a river that was flowing with dead bison.  Some strange and unknown incident had occurred upstream that killed all these buffalo, and when the expedition came across them, they also discovered wolves that had so completely gorged themselves on the buffalo buffet that they could not even stand.  It’s reported that members of the expedition could walk right up to the wolves and kill them without the wolves being able to defend themselves in any way.

It’s a great example of short term thinking: gorging yourself to such a degree that you become instantly helpless to an enemy you could easily outrun, if not just bite.

It’s fascinating to realize that no animal creates 5 and 10 year plans.  They just do what feels right in the moment.  And sometimes that looks like long term planning.  Like when the temperature goes cold, it suddenly feels right to a bird to take flight and head south.  The bird doesn’t decide ahead of time in the same way we decide which seaside village in the Cinque Terra we are going to vacation at next summer.

Most people, most of the time, are still driven by this short-term animal thinking.  We order a donut instead of a salad, because it feels right because we know it’ll feel better.  Be damned tomorrow, next week and five years from now.

It’s when this dumb autopilot comes into contact with a behavior or substance that will at some point down the slippery slope put us into conflict with our relationships that the lying arises.

The lie is a short term resolution to an unsolvable problem:  The lie maintains the status of the relationship that our behavior is in conflict with.

It’s a situation of wanting to eat your cake and have it too.  We don’t want to give up the behavior and we don’t want to give up the relationship.  The lie seems to solve it.

But in the long run, lies rot relationships at their core, and any semblance of things still looking normal is as superficial as it’s surface appearance. 

It’s either one or the other, or both with a lot of pain.  And what is the point of a relationship if it’s just a constant source of pain?

Hard to say, and of course relationships of all types can become a bit of a drug like anything else and cause problems in other relationships.

At the end of the day, life is utterly polluted with pleasurable experiences that can become bad habits that can then escalate to toxic behaviors and on and on.

What’s important to take away from that process is that it feels reasonable at each step, no matter how bad that step might seem to someone else.  The difference is that someone else hasn’t taken all those baby steps down to that point.  Without that subtle emotional slide, it looks like a huge obvious mistake to the outside observer.

The principle extends universally beyond any discussion of lies and toxic habits:

At every moment, the decision that each and every person is making seems reasonable to that person, simply because it feels right.

This is unavoidable, but we do have the ability to hijack it for good.  By thinking deeply and thoroughly, we can imagine a new course of action that makes sense from a logical standpoint and hitch a good feeling to it, usually by way of pride or better yet, curiosity.

It’s perhaps fitting to note that the etymology of curiosity comes from late Latin and derives from something akin to ‘care’, as in something you might care about.

And what does it feel like to care about something?

Generally, it’s a good feeling. 

MEDITATIVE

September 27th, 2019

The word ‘meditative’ does not refer to the practice of meditation. 

In today’s parlance, it means merely ‘relaxing’.  And for those who don’t meditate, this might seem confusing or nonsensical: Isn’t meditation relaxing?

Many will often say things like ‘making collages is my meditation’ or ‘going for a run is my meditation’.  Sure, these mindless activities might feel relaxing but it totally misses the point.

Let’s say we’ve got two people: Julia and Alanna and only Alanna knows how to ride a bike.  Julia hears Alanna talking about the benefits of riding a bike, and Julia pipes up and says, ‘oh, well I go swimming, that’s how I ride a bike.”

Clearly, Julia doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about.  Swimming doesn’t have anything to do with riding a bike.  Sure, both activities might be enjoyable, and they might have similar health benefits and both require the body. But, swimming is not riding a bike, swimming doesn’t give you the faintest clue how to ride a bike, and swimming definitely doesn’t give you any sense of what it’s like to actually ride a bike.

This is precisely the error that people make when they claim some relaxing activity to be their form of meditation.  If there is one thing that meditation has in common with things like swimming, running or riding a bike, it’s that there’s a meaningful and unavoidable barrier to entry.

We are not born knowing how to swim, or how to run, or how to ride a bike.  Everyone who can do these things spent some time, usually in youth figuring out how to do these things, and we simply don’t remember the huge amount of effort it took to learn how to stand, then walk, then run, then swim or all those times we fell on the bike before we finally got it.

Here’s a question for people who think they are meditating while doing some other relaxing activity like filling in a coloring book.

If you think meditation is simply relaxing, then why don’t you do it?

It’s for the same reason that most people don’t wake up during a day off and sit down to figure out how to write python code with no prior knowledge.  It’s hard.  And it’s hard because there’s a learning curve, and it takes a little while to get your bearings and figure things out.

But unlike coding or swimming, riding a bike, or coloring in a coloring book, there’s something about meditation that elevates it to an entirely alien category of activity.

Meditation isn’t simply an experience that a person takes part in for 10 or 20 minutes a day, it’s an activity that changes all experiences.

An easy way to think about this is to imagine a kid who was born with blurry vision.  This kid is experiencing the exact same world that everyone else is, but the moment a discerning adult puts a pair of glasses on the kid, that kid’s experience of everything is now radically different.  Everything is brought into sharp focus.  It’s still the same world, the same set of experiences, but all of them are different now, better.

It’d be a bit silly, simple and inaccurate to say that meditation provides a pair of reading glasses for the mind, but the analogy with regards to changing experience is accurate.  Meditation, after some months, or years changes a person’s experience of everything, even the experience of what it’s like to have a thought.

RESULTS PART II: A GAME OF TENNIS

September 26th, 2019

For Part I check out Episode 528.

The word Result comes from classical Latin, meaning ‘to spring forward, or rebound”

This etymology can provide some help for thinking about plans and results in a healthier way.

If anything, when it comes to plans and results, our goal is for our plans to increasingly produce the results that we would like to emerge.

As explored in Part I, it’s better to move through this iterative process without disappointment, frustration and all the bullshit that surrounds failure.  It’s better because it’s more efficient: we lose less time.

Even if a plan completely fails to produce the desired effect, we have still learned something.  We’ve learned what doesn’t work.  This might seem like a limp victory because it’s easy to imagine that a nearly infinite variety of plans would also fail.  This is merely hyperbolic, because fact is, no one is going to be stupid enough to try all of the obvious variations that clearly aim in ineffective directions. 

They say a miss is as good as missing by a mile, but this is terrible logic, and simply not true.  If you miss by just a few millimeters, well then that’s definitely not a mile.  It’s a few millimeters, and if the preceding shot was a few centimeters, well then it’s a sign of progress that’s heading in a good direction.

We can induce some flexibility into our thinking about results by examining tennis.

We fire a shot over the net with the hope that it’ll thwart our opponent and gain us a point.  But our opponent fires a shot back.  Our shot essentially rebounds from our opponent and it springs forward towards us.  This evokes the etymology of Result.

We volley back and forth and with each return, or rebound from our opponent, we learn about them.  Oh, she’s slow to get to the right side of the court.  Oh, she’s most comfortable trying to score on the left side.  Oh wait, that was a trick because she just went hard for the right side.  Interesting. 

Each time we fire a shot over the net, it’s like a little hypothesis about what might work.  If the ball is returned, then we have a little more information about what works and what doesn’t.

A game like tennis in this case is quite helpful for contracting our plans to much smaller iterations.  The goal of the game is to win, but that can’t be achieved with one static plan.  It quite literally changes on the fly and we try a new plan that instantaneously manifests with each returned shot.  Each result or rebound updates our strategy and then our strategy spits out a new plan and we take another shot. 

This is more like how we should approach plans in the rest of our life.  Short-term plans and long-term goals.  We carry out plans to see what will work, and the shorter they are, the quicker we get feedback, and the more plans we can make and carry out.  By this method our strategy for achieving long term goals slowly updates.

We are essentially always playing tennis with reality.  We try something, and reality shoots back a result.

The more results we can invoke by taking action on more and more plans, the quicker we learn just what is going on with reality, and by this way, we increase our agency because we have a better idea of what actually works.