FRUSTRATION FOCUS

March 14th, 2019

Exposure tends to breed tolerance.  The more consistently a person lifts weights, the more weight that person can handle.  The more consistently a person drinks alcohol, the more they seem to be able to drink.  The fifth time trying to make it through a fast is much easier than the first. 

Frustration on the other hand, or rather, the objects that inspire such a response do not necessarily seem to fall within this paradigm.  If this were the case, we’d all be able to maintain the placid composure of an enlightened bodhisattva during times of stress and confusion.

Instead, it seems, our mind might be haphazardly gearing itself for another kind of tolerance, indeed, the exact opposite of what we want.  Many people may in fact be priming themselves to exercise a response of frustration.  Many of us can probably call to mind a person in our life that is so easily riled up by even the smallest things.  A meaningless detail of the day doesn’t unfold according to some plan and the whole day is lost because of it. 

A first thought about such subjects might find it puzzling that an adult, after years of living and dealing with the innumerable aggravations both large and small that befall us on a daily basis would train a person to be completely unsurprised and unconcerned by such trifles.  The opposite seems to be the case.

One idea that may answer why, revolves around the simple reason that we as people merely want to feel  something while we live.   For many people life falls -unfortunately- into long spells of monotony and boredom.  Most bullshit jobs do not really require any growth or present much challenge with regards to what a person is really capable of.  We attempt to placate this dearth of utilized potential by bombarding ourselves with T.V. shows, medications, and vacations.  As though these “reprieves” are functioning in the same way recovery time after a work out is healthy.  We should ask the harder question: are these healthy reprieves?  Or are they masking a deeper problem?

These modern tropes are trying to accomplish two emotional functions simultaneously:  we are trying escape our usual feelings of eroding monotony and we are trying to replace them with something a bit more spicy and exciting, whether this be the gore-porn of Game of Thrones or the hot sun and jostling waves of a far away beach.  Regardless, we are simply trying to feel something more intense than – the usual.

Frustration and it’s tendency to rile a person at an accelerating rate over the years may fit into this paradigm of simply wanting to feel something of substance and gravity.  Of course any frustrated person will deny wanting to react in such ways, but this tension, this feeling of being trapped within a tense circumstance is part of the drama that helps one escape from the mundane facts of normal life.

We can think of sensationalist news and tabloids that function within society by broadcasting ridiculous and often negative stories.  The clue about why these function is in the subject title: sensationalist.  They hit the senses, creating a sensation that we feel, and just as all publicity is good publicity, we are geared to want to feel something, the larger the feeling the better – it doesn’t really seem to matter if that feeling is good or bad, though it’s clear, one is easier to find fodder for, and negative feelings are about as difficult to raise to a pitch as a weed left un-pulled. 

Unfortunately this seems to be a bug that was once a useful feature.  Back when survival was a fairly constant daily concern, being primed to recognize the (negative) threat in one’s own environment was very very useful.  Indeed, evolution weeded out those who did not have this as a hardcoded program.  But now, a donut offers far more danger to our health than some lurking predator, and this tendency to notice and focus on the negative finds itself in an environment where it has outlived its usefulness and now does us a great disservice.  For how many is this tendency perpetually pulling us away from the present and the possibility of simply enjoying a moment breathing and being alive?

We can take a moment right now.  Just a quick second, to think about how nice it actually is to be alive.  Things could be far far worse, and yet here we are, after all that had to come before us to make it so that we would exist and experience this moment. 

What luck.

Our relationship to frustration progresses in the exact opposite direction of this ability to be present.  Like the movies, the medications and the vacations, we always need more in order to out-do the last experience we had.  The movies are flashier, gorier and more action-packed.  The medication dosage ratchets higher, and the vacation has to have a new destination – preferably somewhere better than last time.

Frustration – for many people – follows the same trend.  But instead of getting frustrated with bigger and more important topics, our reaction magnifies any chance it gets, which means that the ingredients required to provoke our frustration become more granular, until it takes almost nothing at all to spark a fire in our mind.

The only real solution is developing an ability to Pause – to foster a habit and a practice of mindfulness – which is really just an ability to step back within our own mind and notice what is happening on an emotional and intellectual level.   This slowly, but surely turns the trend in the opposite direction.  It turns a vicious cycle into a virtuous one, until we can stomach that old quote from Churchill without feeling a sense of embarrassment.  As he once said:

A man is about as big as the things that make him upset.

This episode references Episode 23: Pause.

POWER & ENTITLEMENT

March 13th, 2019

The words ‘power’ and ‘entitlement’ have entered into a strange dance that is undoing each as useful concepts that we can use in order to think and communicate effectively.

Often the connotation of a word bloats and metastasizes in directions of meaning that can eventually be totally at odds with their actual definition, and sometimes, this connotative expansion then takes over the actual definition.

An easy example is the pair of words: Awful & Awesome.  They both grew from the root word of ‘awe’, but they polarized around the phenomenon of feeling a sense of awe.  The word awful went down the negative route and the word awesome went down the positive route.

The words Power and Entitlement are not as closely paired but their usage in relation to one another is causing some unhealthy growth in meaning.  This is occurring by an increasing expansion into an abstract arena and a dearth of tying concrete realities to these words.

We can investigate this quite literally with an initial question of what exactly is power?

Machiavelli might have a treatise on the subject, but the scientific lens of physics provides a far more useful and clean answer:

Power = Work / Time.

Power is quite literally how much work gets done as a result of one’s hopes dreams and wishes during a given interval of time.  If a person has a lot of money then tasks can be outsourced and since it’s fair to say that a lot of work is being accomplished in relatively little time with that wealthy individual’s thoughts, hopes and dreams as a blueprint, such a person can be literally described as powerful.  It doesn’t matter if the outsourced task is the transport of champagne from a bottle behind a bar down a walkway to the beach where someone has paid for the service, of if rockets are being built in accordance to that beach goer’s design and direction. 

This fungible nature of money enables this phenomenon of outsourcing and ultimately stands in for trust when it comes to cooperation with strangers.  If, however we ask a good friend for some help and then offer money in exchange for that help, we risk offending the trust that has been built through the growth of such friendship.  Indeed, it can even imply a lack of trust, whereas the limits of time, circumstance and memory force us to interact with strangers all the time to get things both large and small done.  Given these constraints, the development of organic trust has no viable environment and so money stands in as the mechanism that enables strangers to cooperate.  Huge numbers of people can be brought together through the direction of this money resource, and as the old maxim follows: there is power in numbers, there is quite literally power in money because money can bring together people and have them each work in a coordinated way towards some unified cooperative end.

We need only look at the similarity between words like corporation and cooperative to see how this one-way street is looked at in two different ways.

The uncomfortable truth that people do not like to look square in the face is that power enables entitlement.  If you can muster the resources to make some unit of work happen, then such an accomplished item forms the substance of such entitlement.  In today’s cultural parlance, it’s not hard to imagine such a statement landing with a great deal of discomfort.  But, we need only get even more literal with our words to see how they interact through reality.  Example:

The heavyweight champion of the world cannot hold that title unless it’s been earned, and such a title is earned quite literally through a physical expression of power generated by muscles and directed in accordance to the goals of the mind in question.  Some pipsqueak standing on a street corner claiming to be entitled to the title of heavy weight champion is ignored for laughably obvious reasons. 

And yet when entitlement is claimed in other, less physically obvious domains, the squawking claims often land with some strange force of legitimacy.  The parallel juxtaposition calls into question this legitimacy and frames it almost as a kind of lunacy.  This is intended to be uncomfortable.  People who claim entitlement without the power to generate the work required to claim such entitlement are quite literally suffering from a conceptual disconnect.  This disconnect is the word entitlement itself which has broken loose from it’s anchor in day-to-day reality and has drifted off into a land that is more and more simply imagined.  The discomfort of this conceptual disconnect serves an important and often misused purpose in the minds of those who feel such discomfort.

Such people often feel powerless but entitled.  This is akin to someone who thinks they can do a physical feat that they have not trained for.  Attempting such is only going to cause physical pain and possibly damage.  In less physical domains, it causes emotional pain. 

A person who feels such emotional pain and discomfort might simply default in frustration to a conclusion that things just aren’t fair.    But this is swinging the pendulum in the absolute opposite direction.  Claiming things aren’t fair is a complete slap in the face to the tiny amount of power any one person has independent of wealth and other people.  The conclusion things aren’t fair is actually a different subject revolving around justice and fairness.  Such a diversion is counter-productively leapfrogging a person’s actual real power, however small, and ignoring any potential use it may be applied to for benefit. 

The conclusion ‘things aren’t fair’ turns a person with a tiny amount of power into a totally helpless person. 

It’s best to ignore questions of fairness altogether.  Such discussion is not helpful to the individual looking to change themselves and their life.  Such questions of Justice and Fairness are better left to governing bodies, and if a person is not willing to dive into that swimming pool, then such concepts are more likely to paralyze a person’s mentality rather than enable it for beneficial use.

It’s best to examine and concentrate on the very real power any given individual actually has.  Short of being totally disabled, catatonic, and requiring complete care from other human beings, there is always something we can do.  For example, a person who has been able to read this far into the article and has been able to follow along both conceptually and emotionally must be fit with an intellect and a command of language that has some degree of power.  A power that could be leveraged into more power if such a resource is applied, properly.

We can easily call to mind the somewhat malicious relationship between the rich and the poor.  The rich stereotypically think the poor are lazy and the poor stereotypically think the rich are thieves.  Meanwhile the rich feel that their entitlement, and power is well earned and the poor feel powerless yet entitled. This is an age-old story, one that is in dire need of fresh air and sunlight to kill off all the mold it’s fostered.

As briefly explored above, money is a conceptual mechanism that enables cooperation.  This age-old story of friction between rich and poor is in many ways a hint at inefficiencies in the way money moves and pools, and this could be labelled quite simply as a mass failure of cooperation.  What other label than ‘failure of cooperation’ could be more appropriate when a country’s currency becomes worthless and society starts to dissolve into less desirable forms?  Regardless of how economists and politicians might spin this rotten top, at it’s most basic form, something about the way people cooperate in order to live together has given out in a disastrous way.

People who feel powerless but can understand such concepts here presented might need to confront the power inherent in such intellectual prowess.  As opposed to belittling the use of such conceptual power by merely complaining or squawking about unfairness, both of which degrade the cooperation that we so desperately need, perhaps such conceptual, linguistic and intellectual power could be put to better use in order to find a way to open up a productive dialogue between different pools of cooperation. Indeed what exactly is venture capital if not a risk on the part of powerful people to cooperate with people who have good ideas but lack the financial power to implement such ideas on their own?  Relative to the venture capitalists who dole out the money, the startup founder is essentially the poor person with the good idea.

We can thread an arrow through this entire line of axes and imagine a relatively unentitled person with minimal power leveraging their small voice of intellectual power to generously and emotionally convince some powerful and entitled executive to see the future in a different way, and thereby initiate actions that change bad courses of action into more virtuous ones.  Oil executives come to mind.

We can even see such a process occurring in ourselves on some level.  When we grab for a chocolate donut and hear that tiny powerless voice in our head tell us that it’s not good for our health and that we shouldn’t eat it. 

Just as the poor unrealistically view the rich as thieves who only got their wealth through tricks and hacks of the system, we might imagine a similar circumstance where a person yields wields power through intellectual, linguistic and interpersonal channels.  Rasputin comes to mind as someone who was poor in the sense of money, but leveraged his tiny amount of intellectual power on a person-to-person basis in order to gain access to much larger swathes of power.  Another example that comes to mind is Jeff Bezos’ recent splash across the news regarding a certain woman who by all reports seems to have Rasputinesque abilities with regards to persuasion.

Directing powerful and entitled people via emotionally persuasive discourse can be seen through two different polar lens, depending on our stance on the issues at hand. It can either be seen as manipulation that borders on gaslighting, or it can have the positive bent that so often evokes religious tones, as when someone finally ‘sees the light’.

Indeed, aren’t we constantly wishing for that tiny underdog voice in our own head urging us to be healthier to win the battle?  Wouldn’t it be nice if that tiny voice advocating health suddenly developed the silver tongue of some linguistic seductress whose bidding we cannot stop doing?  How healthy and effective would we grow with such a benevolent demon residing in our mind?

This discussion of power seeks to draw a connection between two levels:  the first is the work we do in interpersonal relationships to build organic trust, and the second is how those connections can be leveraged to create larger forms of power that no longer require –indeed cannot handle interpersonal relationships- and function solely through the mechanism of money.  We can think of a company that is started with a few trusted people and eventually grows into a large cooperation where the mechanism of money bears more of the burden of ensuring that someone can be trusted.  These highlights of the word power are not terribly difficult to grasp, but they are important to reference in order to see how the word ‘entitlement’ has mutated in a way that is self-defeating for the individual and even iatrogenic.

 The word ‘entitlement’ is in dire need of deflating back down into proportion with the power that is mustered behind such entitlement.    This is not to say that people who seem unrealistically entitled should bite their tongue and mosey along.  It’s to urge such people to recognize one’s real and actual power and recalibrate a sense of entitlement to reflect that power.  Not only would this alleviate huge amounts of emotional pain, but it makes a person more effective.  In simple terms it’s the same as saying: let’s work with what we’ve got, because currently we don’t have anything else to work with.

Using the power any given individual has to accomplish some feasible task entitles a person to the fruits of that accomplishment, and much of the discussion using the word ‘entitlement’ robs people of this kind of efficaciousness.  Such small abilities to do work – if thoughtfully and cleverly directed – can be used to leverage such power into greater power, as is so often seen with those who manage to bootstrap a successful business, or even author a successful book.  Regardless of other hacked and deceitful ways to gain power and influence, all roots of power ramify in reverse back to one central fact that is important for the person who feels powerless to realize:

Real power is not in money or the cooperation one can muster from strangers through money.

Real power is inevitably reduced to how a single person can effectively direct their own mind.

The episode references Episode 293: Rivalnym, Episode 311: Fake Fortune, and Episode 325: Failures of Cooperation

PRESSURE PLAY

March 12th, 2019

One of the best things to do to make sure something gets done is to set a deadline.  This is hailed as one of the cornerstones, if not the keystone to productivity.  But deadlines cannot and should not be applied to everything we hope to do and get done.  Indeed the useful stress of an impending deadline can be totally destructive to our efforts.

Deadlines can often have that counter effect where we find our self engaging in totally unrelated activities that we rationalize are more pressing because for whatever reason we do not want to do what we know we should be doing.

We might for a humorous moment imagine opening up our computer, clicking on our browser icon and suddenly a message pops up saying “I don’t feel like opening up that app for you right now.”

And yet this is exactly what we do quite often.  Procrastination we might ponder could have two roles:  It may delay action on something so that we actually get it done in the quickest way possible, since work often expands to fill the time allotted for it.  Or it could be evidence that the task is not worth doing.  But both of these undermine a certain aspect of long-term goals that require long-term effort.  If something requires practice on a daily basis, like say, meditation, then procrastination with starting or procrastination to continue immediately starts to undermine the point of the practice.  It’s consistency that is important in such a case.

On the other hand, what of the opposite of this stress caused by deadlines?  What about play?

Play is a seriously underrated and underutilized practice in adult life.  It’s children that play, not adults.  And yet, who learns more efficiently?  But it’s because their minds are young of course – this flexibility and plasticity is what enables them to learn more efficiently.  There is some truth to this sentiment, but it also functions as an excuse to explore no further. 

In the world of productivity, much is written about the flow state.  This is where work is getting done and we are making progress in a seemingly unhindered way.  Distractions do not distract us.  Time seems to fly by.  The work seems to unfold naturally as opposed to being forced into existence, and it’s –dare we say- fun.  We might wonder if play is a kind of catalyst for a flow state.  If there’s a lot you need to learn, best to find the easiest switch to flip in order to turn on that flow state.

But play goes far beyond this mere oiling of our regular work.  Play is an exploratory tool that uncovers new things which prior to such discovery we could not set a deadline on using. 

At base, play is a guilt-free, deadline-free exploration of new aspects of reality where we can discover new patterns which we might be able to manipulate.  These patterns might be the studs on different lego blocks, or it might be query statements for a database language.  This latter example hints at one of the problems we have with the concept of play:  we incorrectly assume play is for meaningless amusement.  But play is not watching a dull sitcom, play is active, exploratory.  With a fuel tank charged with curiosity, play seeks in a nearly destructive manner, taking things apart to see how they work.  This is literally pattern finding.  How something works is really a pattern that we can imagine repeating as something is functioning again.

While play and curiosity deserve far more in depth explorations, the main point here is to highlight their open-ended nature in contrary juxtaposition to the trope of setting deadlines in order to be productive. 

While the business world is marked by this obsession with deadlines, progress ascends when both the pressure of deadlines and the freedom of play are balanced with one another.  The novel patterns discovered through play can then be reimagined in helpful new forms and the work required to manipulate this pieces can than be put into the pressurized environment of the deadline.  This switch from one to the other can become an incredibly powerful recipe for moving forward in an unknown space. 

For example, we might just play with a few colors of paint.  After some time we discover all the other basic colors we can create by applying different mixtures.  Once this is discovered, then we might set a goal of creating a painting with this new understanding.

School seeks to give us these basic parts while stripping the experience of the sense of discovery.  Something handed to you is not discovered.  We might reimagine school as an environment we enter that is primed for students to discover the precepts by simply interacting with that environment – by playing.

Like so many lost gifts of childhood, it can become a superpower in the adult world.

The next time you find yourself stuck, whether on a project, or in life, don’t stress and pressure yourself to work harder.  It might be best to let all that go for a little while, and just play.

TOOTHBRUSH

March 11th, 2019

So often we are simply scared to start.  Self-conscious about one’s ability to write, or dance in public, or whatever it be.  The best antidote is to take heed in the fact that doing it everyday will make this dissolve.  One must simply start and focus more on consistency of effort rather than result and have faith in the idea that results will improve.

A good example of this is brushing teeth.  This habit becomes so engrained that we hardly even think about it.  And beyond that, it seems to happen on it’s own as though it’s automatic and hardcoded into the way we operate.  Surely some people aren’t doing it appropriately or optimally.  Surely some people are brushing too hard, or not brushing long enough, but are these people particularly hung up on the short comings of such a simple ability?  Most likely: absolutely not.

Many impressive abilities fall into the same kind of framework.  Someone who sketches every day for years and years isn’t terribly surprised by their ability at any point in time because their familiarity with their own skill is so pervasive through time.

As is often said: anything worth doing isn’t easy.  But often what this means is figuring out how to make one’s self apply some effort consistently over a long time.  If we are thoughtful in such efforts and don’t simply repeat our effort as we do with brushing teeth, then that concentrated effort compounds.  Small realizations gained through experimenting connect and tie to other realizations to further breed new insight. 

This is the power of thought.  We might take a moment to reflection just how powerful this phenomenon is.  Almost all people, especially those who are listening to this or reading it cannot look around themselves and see something that is not resulting from compounding thoughts of many people over many years.  Just think for a moment about every single little ‘ah ha!’ moment that was required for a smart phone to come into existence.  Such an invention requires so many other supporting inventions, that such ‘ah ha!’ moments extend far into the past.

We can apply this compounding interest of realization to our own life.  This is how we learned to speak as an infant and how to walk.    It’s worthwhile to note that we don’t go to school to learn how to walk or speak.  We figure out these immensely complex tasks on our own, by trying to take part in these activities every day, over and over.

This is the key to many goals we’d like to accomplish.  Steady effort everyday.

One of the greatest attributes of this repetitive effort is that all the self-conscious hang-ups that exists before we even start, slowly but steadily evaporate, until it ceases to exist and we simply do.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: UNUSED LUGGAGE

March 10th, 2019

The dance instructor turned to face the mirror and said “Ok now, everyone, if I can do it, you can do it: follow me!” and began to move through the sequence as everyone else in the room followed along.  Some faltered, but Lucilius did not notice them as he paid close attention to the teacher, moving as well as he could in sync with the movements he saw.

When the class was over, he walked out side into the dreary rain.  The sky was grey and nearing dark.  The wet street bouncing up warped light from the neon signs that lit the drag.  Lucilius turned and walked down the sidewalk, passing storefronts and bars.  A sign stood outside on bar that had chalk scribbled writing.  It said “Heaven is here!” with an arrow pointing into the bar.  Lucilius stopped and looked in.  Music was pumping and the faces of people laughing and smiling filled the joint.  Lucilius smiled weakly and moved on.  He stopped at an intersection and waited for the lights to turn.  Across the street a ragged bearded man stood with a blank expression holding up a cardboard sign that said “Follow Only Him” and below it “John 14:6”

The light seemed to be stuck so Lucilius decided to duck into another bar on the corner for a quick drink.  He ordered brandy and bitters and stood at the bar, thinking back to the dance class, trying to go over the moves in his head.

“You gotta stop being so nervous” Lucilius over heard one guy say to another.  “You gotta be just like me, honestly, forget about you, and maybe just try pretend to be me for a little while.  I mean even if you are nervous.  Hell, we’re all nervous, but I don’t show it cause it’s gonna freak a girl out, make her uncomfortable.  You gotta look confident, you know? Like how you can scare off a bear if you yell at it, but you still wanna be so cool and calm you could walk up to a deer and pet it without scaring if off.”

Lucilius looked at the two young men.  The talker was smiling as he spoke while the other tried to nod encouragingly in response.

“Honestly, you just gotta try, and as you do it, you’ll get the hang of it, and before you know it, you’ll be just like me.  Here, follow me.”

The one followed the other as the leader walked over to a pool table and started chatting with the two girls playing.  Within a few minutes all four of them were playing a game and the girls were laughing.

Lucilius finished his brandy and walked back out into the rain.  The cross walk was lit and the ragged man was still there holding his sign.  He did not look at Lucilius as he passed.

Lucilius ran to catch his buss and as he boarded and paid, the bus driver was pointing at a map and talking to a passenger.

“You’ll have to get off and wait for the next one.  See that green line that cuts through downtown?  You have to follow that all the way to the end. Ok?”

The passenger thanked the driver and got off.  The doors closed and soon enough the bus rumbled on into the night.

When Lucilius got home he put down his bag and flopped down on his bed.  He looked at the biographies on his nightstand, all half read and waiting for more attention.  He clicked on the T.V. and flipped to a movie channel.

“You were looking for a way to change your life.  You could not do this on your own.  All the ways you wish you could be? That’s me…..sometimes you’re still you.  Other times you imagine you’re watching me.  Little by little, you’re just letting yourself become—”  

Lucilius clicked to another channel and found a nature documentary about Tigers.  A raspy British voice narrated about the youngest cat in the litter.  “Soon, she will have to follow in the footsteps of her mother and break off from the family and go on her own way.”

Lucilius clicked off the T.V. and simply laid in bed, staring at the ceiling.  He thought about how the ceiling was just an expanse of light that was hitting his eyes.  How the light was creating tiny reactions in the cells of his retina.  He wondered, was the ceiling really up there, or was it just something occurring in his eye.  He thought about how he could be dreaming, which would mean that none of it was happening with his eye, how it was just all somewhere in the back of his brain, pinging around, mish mashing memories.

He closed his eyes and breathed slowly.  Thoughts bubbled up, but as each did he noticed it, let it do it’s thing and watched it fade.  He felt his chest rise as he breathed in again slowly.  He noticed his attention slowly shift to another thought and he entertained it.

The thought was about happiness and what it was.  Some particular frenzy of neural activity, he figured.  A memory flooded into his consciousness and he smiled at the time.  However it fires up, it’s some sort of structure in this brain that’s thinking this thought.  He refocused on his breathing and felt the air fill his lungs.  I guess that means I carry around that neural structure all the time, he thought.  It has to be the case, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to feel it.  He decided to think about a few things in life that he was grateful for and a smile appeared on his face again.  He wondered if he was consciously poking that neural structure that might involve itself in happiness.  He felt his body exhale and felt himself further relax. 

Then he opened his eyes and rolled over to grab a pencil and a notebook from the nightstand.  He turned to a blank page and wrote:

Happiness is always with you.