SECOND WISE, YEAR FOOLISH

June 22nd, 2019

We’ve all heard the phrase Penny wise, pound Foolish.  We make a decision regarding a small sum of money that is wise, while wasting large sums…  Perhaps we can think of someone who spends time cutting out coupons but then squanders hundreds of dollars while at the bar with friends.

There’s an even more important distinction to be made here, and it’s often one missed in the pursuit of aims.

That distinction is time.  We can flip the actions of this wise fool on it’s head and ask: what’s a better use of time?  Sitting around cutting coupons, or spending time with friends?  Perhaps the monetary cost seems justified in this frame, or perhaps not.

Money aside, we can investigate this use of time with even more scrutiny.

How exactly are we spending our seconds and our years?

Are they passing us by unnoticed?  Or are we wasting years waiting for the occasional second when it feels like the movements of life take our breath away?

So many sleep walk through time bouncing from one distraction to the next, waiting for some monotony to end, chasing some pleasure, and all of this might seem justified for the rare second when life feels alive, but all the time between these few and far between moments add up to the majority of our lives. 

We waste years for seconds when we think things are finally good.

This is inevitably a waste of years, and subsequently a waste of most seconds that make up such years.

When it comes to our most valuable resource.  Our non-renewable time, how we spend it is our greatest and most important decision in any given moment.

We do ourselves the greatest service by seeking to be a master of how to spend a single second.

If in any given moment, no matter the circumstance, we can call upon a full and mindful presence of our attention, then fewer seconds and fewer years will be lost.

So many of us are waiting for something amazing to grab our full attention.

We need only learn how to give our full attention in order to experience how amazing any given moment can be.

THE PROS & CONS OF PROS & CONS

June 21st, 2019

How to decide?

One thing we’re apt to do is create a list of pros and cons for any given decision. 

But how exactly does this work? 

We do not ascribe some kind of weight or numerical metric to each thing that we write in the pro and con columns in order to arrive at some kind of mathematically satisfying result.  In fact, sometimes the list works out lopsided but we end up making the counter-intuitive decision against what our list seems to indicate is the better choice.

And yet such an exercise often allows our decision to come about with more confidence.

The exercise rarely functions to evince what the actual better decision might be, but it merely works as a labelling exercise.

Each factor that we might write down in the pro and con columns has associated with it an emotion that is pushing us for or against some decision.  The sum of these emotions creates a vague mess of feelings that is confusing and unclear to navigate.

The exercise of a pro and con list merely gives all of these small intricate emotions appropriate labels.

This is often referred to as affect labelling.

To be clear, affect labelling doesn’t invoke some sort of clarity about what is actually a better decision.  It merely helps to resolve any troubling emotions by giving them attention.

Emotions and even thoughts that seem to plague us in repeated and often annoying ways can be dispelled simply be recognizing them consciously. 

We can think of a child tapping our arm to get our attention while we concentrate on some task.  Eventually we have a moment to give the child attention and it turns out the kid doesn’t really have anything to say.  They just wanted attention. 

Many of our thoughts and emotions operate with much the same mechanics, and many have commented that the practice of meditation is, in the beginning, just the process of giving each and every thought and emotion the attention it’s been waiting for.  We can imagine a long line of these thoughts and emotions, all just waiting to be noticed, and once noticed, they vanish.

Many of us walk around, hounded by these neglected thoughts and emotions.  Constantly distracted from the present moment without ever dealing with the distraction properly.

It’s only when we come to some pivotal decision that our un-meditated mind gathers enough focus to put pen to paper and write a list of pros and cons.

In some sense, this pro & con exercise is a small instance and aspect of what meditation is for people who practice on a daily basis, and the equanimity that one can enjoy after creating a thorough pro and con list can be a tiny glimpse into what’s it’s like to have a mind well oiled by the benefits of daily, long-term meditation. 

This is perhaps the greatest advantage of making a list of pros and cons.

on the other hand,

the disadvantage of a pros and cons list is that it probably doesn’t help us make a wiser decision: most likely, it just makes us feel more at peace with whatever decision we make, however unwise our decision may be.

DON'T MOVE ON

June 20th, 2019

When bad things happen in life, the perennial advice is: move on.

Life goes on, and so must we. 

Or so goes the common belief on such situations.

However, learning, is all about reflection.  Particularly when it comes to mistakes and misfortunes.  ‘Learning’ in this sense is in direct opposition to the common sense prescription to move on.

If anything, learning is all about knowing how to pause and dwell on the recent past in a productive manner.  The word ‘dwell’ often has a very negative connotation in this sense.  To dwell on the past is often referred to as a bad thing, like driving while staring exclusively in the rear-view mirror.

But to charge forward into the future without reflection is equally unwise.

To reflect on the past, particularly when someone has past, is to honor it, to learn from it, and to change the future in accordance to the magnitude of things past.

When someone we care about is gone, it’s a mistake to simply move on. 

And to merely dwell on the loss is equally unwise.

What we can do is to keep such people close in our minds. 

With each relation that we create, whether acquaintance, or long-time friend, we all create a sort of mental model of that person.  In our own mind we create a sort of working copy of how that other person reacts to the world. 

Such a model is bound to be incomplete and inevitably wildly inaccurate, but not so inaccurate that we cannot gain some sort of lasting benefit from the people who have graced our lives.

We can always ask: what would they have done in this situation.

We’re likely to surprise ourselves when an answer comes to mind that never would have occurred had we tried to navigate a problem with just our own opinion in mind.

To simply ‘move on’ is terrible advice.

We must move with the experiences of our friends and family, whether gone by distance or by some irrevocable circumstance of life.  We can carry these people, and their wisdom with us, and no matter how tightly clamped the past may be, we can continually grow from the wisdom of those who have honored us with their presence.

This episode references Episode 32: Rear-View

TASK EN PLACE

June 19th, 2019

In a kitchen, especially a successful restaurant kitchen, there is great emphasis placed on mise en place.  This is French for ‘everything in it’s place’.

The logic behind this kind of practice is obvious.  If you know where something is, then when it comes time to use it, there’s no time wasted trying to find it.  In a place like a kitchen, or a workshop of some kind, this can become so beneficial that it allows for a seamless workflow to emerge that is otherwise impossible.  When we are undistracted by disrupting and wandering tracks of thought like ‘where the hell is the spatula that I need,” our thinking is free to play around with novel and creative ideas that arise while more mundane tasks are efficiently executed through muscle memory.

The philosophy inherent in this kind of organization can be applied to things other than just tools that are arranged within arms reach.

Take for example anything on the perennial or hypothetical to-do list that is causing stress: something that we’ve been slacking on, or putting off just because it comes with a sense of dread.

All of us are subject to this odd form of self-torture and we are all aware of how much better we’d feel if we just get it over and done with.

But, perhaps one neglected aspect of this whole process is what might have happened in the absence of all that perseverating stress we experienced while procrastinating.  Our thoughts were consumed with the dread, the difficulty, the feelings of unwilling and unwanting.  What might have we thought about if there’d been no annoying task to dread and procrastinate on? 

The annoying task that we put off is like a lost spatula for the chef.  What creative idea might have arisen but never had the chance because the chef was busy looking for the lost spatula?

This brings us to a deeper reason why a to-do list, however simple, offers potential benefits that far outstrip the naivety of such simplicity.  The to-do list certainly helps us get things done, but more importantly, it frees up time and attention and emotions for more interesting work that is easily hampered .

Imagine for example someone who is sitting at a computer trying to write the next chapter of their novel, but can’t seem to concentrate because they are worried about their credit card statement.  We all waste innumerable valuable minutes everyday with this sort of inefficient division of attention.

We can wonder: if the writer took a few minutes to simply pay off what was possible in that moment, how much more free would the writer be to concentrate on the more gratifying task of working on their novel?

This isn’t so much having a to-do list, but more about an organization of that to-do list.

Where the chef as mise en place, we can think of task en place.

Is our to-do list in a thoughtful order?

If we leave all of the least desirable tasks till the very end, not only are they more likely to spill over into the next day when we fail to get them done, but anything we might try to do in the mean time is tainted with the dark cloud of such a future task hanging over us.

This episode references Episode 375: Two-Do

FIRST PRINCIPLES - PART II: LANGUAGE

June 18th, 2019

Be sure to check out Part I of First Principles

Language is a tool with many edges, all of them growing dull or sharp, sticky or slick.  It shifts, drifts, morphs and bloats against our will and often fails to change as we might hope and wish.  S.I. Hayakawa went so far as to say that no word ever means the same thing, ever.  And he meant this with regards to every single use of a given word.

This is simultaneously mind-boggling in that it doesn’t make sense but also brilliant because it invokes the inherent uniqueness of every perspective at every given instance.  When two people are looking at the same tree and they both point at the tree and indicate it by saying out loud the word “tree!”, they are not necessarily using the word in the exact same way.  Each person is seeing a slightly different tree because they are viewing the tree from slightly different angles.  Though our circumspection of such a situation is fast to gloss over this detail and garner what productiveness we can extract from the idea that these two people are talking about the same tree, it’s impossible to deny that each person is actually seeing something different.

This infinite malleability of language is both the key to it’s massive utility which has enabled us to build societies, and this malleability is also the core of danger that the use of language presents on a near constant basis.

When words begin to mean other things, it sends ripples of disruption that resonate throughout all levels of our human system.  A substantial rift in the meaning of a word can quite literally put a rift in our system.  This is most easily seen with words that have less concrete definitions.  The number 5 as a word and a concept luckily has very little tendency to mean 8 or 72 or ‘unicorn’.  Whereas the words ‘democrat’ and ‘republican’ refer to such a hazy  and complex set of meanings that it’s unsurprising and quite funny that the parties represented by such words have swapped labels over the years.  We can humorously wonder why exactly this has happened and if it has something to do with a greater similarity than we might first believe, but humorous wonderment aside, if we were to suddenly swap the concept of the number 5 with the number 8, all sorts of systems that rely on the order and quantity that each number represents would break, and financial systems, transportation systems, healthcare systems would all incur catastrophic problems.

In this respect, words and the concepts they represent exist on a kind of spectrum of specificity.  The number and word ‘five’ is far more specific in it’s meaning than the word ‘republican’.

Part I of this topic ended with the question: What does first principles thinking mean when we think about language?

It’s certainly understandable for thinking on this point to lead towards the world of numbers.  Mathematics presents a series of cognitive models that is often extremely useful for dividing the world down into it’s base parts.

But.  Another way to rephrase the question about first principles and language is to take any given message and ask: what is this message actually communicating? With all the emotional, verbal and linguistic fat distilled, what is the core of the message? In essence we must constantly have one particular question form a filter for everything that we hear and read when it comes to words.  That question is:

What does this word really mean?

In a time when we are so eager to speed read and engulf whole sentences as though they were mere words and gloss over things as we skim in order to ‘get to the point’ as fast as possible, we perhaps miss all the individual points that make up language.

For example:

How many people have really reflected on what the word fear means? 

Have you?

And yet this word, and the emotions associated with it often dominate our actions or lack of action in very negative ways.  Is the word fear some sort of fundamental unit of meaning that cannot be further divided?  Or can it be further extrapolated?  And if so, can that be useful?

Episode 63 of Tinkered Thinking quickly unpacks the etymology of the word fear and unearths a deeper meaning that can paradoxically give a person more courage.  This is a strange discovery.  Just as it’s a strange discovery that a silver ring costing $100 could indicate that an artisan is operating at wage of 3.5 Million dollars an hour.

While we cannot stop the flow and expansion of language and it’s individual words, we can prevent ourselves from any risk of being swept away by any dangerous currents. 

It’s only by mindfully investigating the core meanings of words that people are using and noting any new difference that has arisen that we can then intelligently react.

We can think of the meaning of a word like the direction of the wind.  While sailing, if our sails are well trimmed, our boat is in balance with the wind in a way that propels us forward towards our destination.  But the winds never stay constant.  They shift, coming across our sails at different angles.  If we fail to understand the shift that has occurred, then we cannot re-trim our sails in a way that enables us to keep going in the direction we wish.  Even worse, our sails begin to luff, and with enough breeze they will rip and tear, rendering our boat totally incapable of getting anywhere.

Applying a kind of First Principles approach to language is not like having a perfect dictionary definition on hand for every word, but it is truly a practice – one that requires an acute awareness of current changes and their relation to what things used to mean.  Whether a word has remained stable in it’s meaning or not, the core root that we are after in any moment is:

what does this word mean in this instance?

If we can mindfully understand any difference that has arisen in a word’s meaning, we do not lose the previous meaning:

We add in the same way today adds to the history books. 

Often, when we see a shift in a word, we can understand the intentions of a person using such a word on a much deeper level.

The most famous recent example is captured by the phrase: alternative facts.

An understanding of the word fact makes it clear that the person who first used the phrase alternative fact, not only wanted to portray something that is not true, but that such a person also knew that it wasn’t true.

Any fact about a situation is unique.  We can have alternative perspectives on a situation, in the same way that two people looking at a tree have two different angles on the tree and so it therefore looks a little different to each person.  But, the tree is a fact about the situation that arises from the virtuous difference of perspectives that can be further verified by more perspectives.

When someone purposely mixes the meaning of a word like fact with a word like perspective, it’s either a sign of lazy understanding, and perhaps stupidity, or it’s a willful attempt to lead someone to a dangerous and flawed understanding of reality.  It’s the non-numerical equivalent of removing the number 5 from society with the aim of breaking a whole slew of systems that rely on the concept of 5.

Like a surfer who never surfs the same wave twice but somehow learns how to surf waves that are always novel, we must constantly expect that the words upon which we build our understanding are bound to shift.  And with those shifts, the way we communicate and understand things must also shift in accordance to deeper axioms in the same way gravity is a steady constant for the surfer.

The way we phrase and word these deeper axioms is bound to shift, and it’s a particularly insidious danger when someone appropriates the current language of such axioms for other means.  This is bound to happen, and it’s only with a calm and equanimous state of mind that we can be free of any emotional overwhelm that such words might cloud our judgment with and therefore sweep us away as a word changes meaning.  It’s that very emotional resonance that such an insidious actor is counting on in order for their strategy.  While we are distracted by our own emotion, such an actor can maneuver in practical ways that are ultimately counter to the words used.  Without recognizing the insidious shift in the meaning of the words used we are like a surfer who tries to surf a new wave as though it were exactly like the old wave: 

We are bound to fall.

Thinking about first principles and language is to investigate the irreducible core of what is being communicated.

In that respect, it’s

best to pay attention to what’s being said.

This episode references Episode 422: Bloat & Bust, Episode 425: Virtuous Difference, Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear, and of course Episode 428: First Principles – Part I: Ab Initio

This episode was also heavily influenced by both S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, and George Orwell’s 1984, both of which you can find links to purchase on the Recommended Reading list and below.