DAYDREAMING ABOUT THE PRESENT

March 9th, 2019

It’s unclear what exactly has given us our imaginative abilities, but what is clear is how ruthlessly such abilities dominate our experience.  Often our mental space is inundated with dreams about the future, or nostalgia for the past.  Each tendency has at its core some feeling that we felt or hope to feel again.  We morn the passing of such circumstances that gave us this sense of feeling and we hamster-wheel our way towards future circumstances that we think will bring about this wonderful feeling again.

We can all picture someone sitting on a beach with a wonderful body, in the lap of luxury with a brow furrowed as they angrily tap away at a phone.  Perhaps we have even been fortunate enough to have this unfortunate experience of being miserable while engrossed in a lovely circumstance.

Certainly no one would disagree that this disconnect is rampant in our experience of life.  And yet the follow-up question that should naturally arise from such an observation rarely intercedes on the way we operate in any meaningful or long-lasting way:

Is it not our perspective in the given moment that defines the moment more than the circumstances in which we find ourselves?

Certainly this must be the case.  And yet, do we spend as much time and as many resources developing our perspective as we do on destination vacations?

One of these options certainly sounds way easier.  Pick a place. Spend the money.  Done.

Develop a perspective?  This is far less concrete and certainly not something that is easily or smoothly purchased if such a thing can be purchased at all.  This begins to sound like real work and what could be more antithetical to a destination vacation?  The point is to not work.

The funny allusion here is that something that doesn’t work: is broken, which begs the same question about our perspective.  Do we have broken perspectives?

If our perspective seems hellbent on paying attention to anything other than the present moment, perhaps it is broken.  Such a wayward focus certainly doesn’t help with execution, learning, or the subject at hand: enjoying life as it happens.

The problem here becomes even more twisted if we recognize that the future and the past don’t actually exist.  We cannot go retrieve them in the same way that other existing things can be experienced.  Our experience of the past is really an imperfect memory.  What actually exists is some combination and path of neuronal fire.  The future is exactly the same thing: some novel and changing combination of neuronal fire.  The past only really existed as the present moment, and if the future happens, it will only be experienced as the present moment.  Both the past and the future are really just different ways of thinking about the present.  We are indeed daydreaming about the present moment when we are wrapped up in thoughts about the past or the future, all the while missing the actual present moment.

Of course there is benefit to conceptualizing the future and reflecting on the past: doing so has helped us create the modern world.  But spending too much time exercising this conceptual ability robs us of another ability:  to invoke a sense of calm and equanimity and simply enjoy the present moment, no matter what the circumstance.

Chances are the saving fund for the next vacation should be put aside and the time should be used for a different kind of work, one that begins to answer the question: how do I develop my perspective and my attention so that I can enjoy the gift of being alive in the present moment.

Indeed, the present is the only gift we can really enjoy.

Best to stop daydreaming about it, and figure out how to relax and

let it happen.

ENDURE INURE LIFE

March 8th, 2019

The word inure often has an attributed meaning of jaded and blasé due to being accustomed.  But the word merely means accustomed, or to be in practice and of use.  While not necessarily related in etymology, we can hear the relation of the word inure to other words like durable and and endure.  There is something going on in these related concepts that speaks of a constant practice, one that is often mistaken for a cold and ineffective state.

this is the criticism that has often been levelled at the Stoics, and unfairly so.  Stoicism often evokes the image of a stony and cold man who either has no feelings or snuffs them out with no breathing room.  Nothing about this image sounds healthy, and if anything, any common person or armchair psychologist is going to guess that such a person is a seething pressure cooker just ready to pop.  This is close only insofar as a bullet comes close to it’s target, but misses, and then proceeds to hit something very very far away.

As is often said: a miss is as good as a mile.  Or rather a slight miss is just as meaningful as missing by a huge margin.

Much of stoicism is about exposing one’s self to difficult thoughts, feelings and situations so that over time, such disagreeable items have less effect on one’s being.  Notice the subtle difference of purpose here.  Often people concentrate on their problems in totally counter-productive ways, allowing such problems to chronically stress out their minds and bodies.  The stoic is doing much the same for the exact opposite purpose.

A practical example helps illuminate this:

Someone may eat every chance they get because they are afraid of a time when they might have nothing to eat.

The stoic would simply fast for some period of time in order to have the emotional and physical experience that enables, indeed, entitles such a person to meet that worry square in the face and say “see, we’ll be just fine if we don’t have food, now shut up and leave me alone with your petty and negative fantasies about the future.”

Here the stoic has endured hunger in order to inure one’s self to the experience.  The practice has been put into use and the experience of such creates a cascade of new emotional understanding and a change about what no food actually means.

We can apply this kind of endure to inure practice in many aspects of life.  Whether that be a slight shift to nutrition: picking the healthier option gets far less painful and difficult the more often it is put in practice.

or if we go to the most viscerally unpleasant things, like pain:  lifting weights is painful, in the sense that if someone woke up feeling the sensations that are felt while squatting their own body weight, they’d most likely call an ambulance.  But given enough time engaging and dancing with such pain, it’s sensation decreases, and it can even turn into a kind of pleasure.

This begs a strange question of attention in general.  It seems to be misleading.  In one situation we can focus our attention on the sensations of the body and feel a lot of pain, but if we subjugate our body regularly to such exercises, the focus of our attention garners a much different sensation.

Perhaps the most important arena that this capacity can be applied to is frustration.  Perhaps we are trying to learn something, or deal with an aggravating person.  The frustration that arises in such situations either adds to our overall frustration and brings us closer to the brink of exploding, or with a different perspective, it becomes an instance to exercise our ability to accept and relax.  We can practice this so that we are accustomed with frustration and instead of having losing focus on what we actually need to do, we can smoothly forge ahead.

When it comes to learning something new, this acceptance and accustomed ability to handle frustration can be a superpower that enables one to learn much faster and more efficiently than others.

We can even zoom out to a much grander perspective and wonder if those who are truly at peace with their movement through life, those who seem calm and have achieved a real equanimity: perhaps they are properly inured of life, in the most positive way possible, meaning, none of the meaningless negativity affects them any longer.

How lovely does that sound?

OBVIOUS NOVELTY

March 7th, 2019

Retrospect is 20/20, as they say.  Things always seem obvious after the fact.  For example when a friend comes over and casually suggests a solution to a problem we are banging are head on.  Perhaps we’ve been toiling for hours trying to get some gadget to work and a fresh pair of eyes alleviates and leapfrogs all our effort to a simple solution.  Of course it seems obvious after we’ve been shown.   Like the answer to a riddle.

Obvious comes from the latin ‘ob viam’, meaning ‘in the way’.

We might invert the use of the word obvious back to this original meaning and use it as a way to find problems to work on.  We are, all of us, beset constantly all day by annoying problems that are waiting to be solved.  From simple problems like a taking out the trash to find an over flowing dumpster, to the largest that beset our species, like climate change.  All of these problems provide ample field for novelty.  A field where riddles can be fitted with solutions.

Such obvious problems often get sifted into one of two categories: either they are too big for one person to take on, or they are so small that they are trivial and somehow uninteresting.  As Benjamin Franklin once said “so convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”  Or in this case, not do.

Whether a problem is interesting enough or not, or whether it is obvious, or if the solution is obvious – all of these are simply perspectives.  Mental configurations that handle and turn over some object of our consciousness.  Holding a problem a certain way in our minds, it can be boring, or simply annoying.  Holding it another way and suddenly the solution seems obvious.  None of these perspectives have anything to do with changes in the real world or changes in the problem.  These perspectives occur solely due to changes within ourselves.

We might wonder the next time we hear ourselves say I don’t feel like it, if perhaps we can think about things a bit differently and in so doing invoke a completely different feeling that suddenly impels us to get to work on the problem at hand.

A lack of motivation about any given thing is really the absence of a better question that we have not yet asked ourselves.

Suddenly we ourselves can be the most obvious problem standing in the way of progress.  Often the solution is to simply get started, and then progress seems to guide itself. 

The solution of just getting started suddenly seems as obvious in retrospect as the problem of not knowing how to start seemed like the big problem in the way of progress in the first place.  

It’s somewhat encouraging to think of the experience of a solution arising with a new perspective and  applying it to the future and wondering just how many novel solutions are staring us in the face right now, just waiting to be seen.

This episode references Episode 234: Chipping the Composite, Episode 323: Control.

FAILURES OF COOPERATION

March 6th, 2019

How many movies and real human dramas have this statement as their core conflict: give me my money.  A funny response - indeed, one likely to provoke anger might be: if it was your money, wouldn’t you have it?

The snap counter-argument here is to substitute money for an actual thing, like say, a guitar, and then it sounds like theft: give me my guitar implies that an actual thing was taken, but this analogical substitution is problematic because money is fungible and a guitar is not.  Which leads to the deeper question of: what exactly is money?

How can a one-hundred dollar bill be worth more than the paper it’s printed on?  We can’t really say that a guitar is worth more than the physical guitar that it actually is?  This illuminates the problematic part of our substitution.

The one exception here is if a person has actually taken physical money from another person and it was against their will at all points in time, like someone grabbing a purse and running with it.  At no point in time did the person with the purse willingly agree to the exchange.

The phrase give me my money - strangely enough - is most often used in other situations, when money was willingly transferred from one person to another and then due to a sour turnout of events, the giving party wants to somehow rewind the whole interaction and level the score, so to speak.

But the initial willingness to hand over money provides our hint to help peer into one of the core meanings within the concept of money.  At first there was a willingness to cooperate, the situation changes and the willingness to cooperate vanishes.  Give me my money is really expressing a regret about willing to cooperate.

Episode 311 of Tinkered Thinking entitled Fake Fortune delves more fully into this idea of cooperation being a core part of money.

Anger, if anything, is one way we emotionally react when we realize that our idea of the world and how it works has been incorrect.  Others might be more prone to be sad as opposed to angry, but the situational mechanism is the same.

We can compare two situations in order to see just how much the notion of cooperation is at the core of these things.

We have Amy and Bob in a romantic relationship and when Bob finds out that Amy has been pursuing a relationship with someone else, Bob gets sad and potentially angry because at base Bob has evidence that shows the world does not work how he thought it did.  Anger and Sadness are indications that our mental models have been flawed.

Or

We have Amy who starts a bakery with Julia, but then several months into the operation Julia runs off with a bunch of Amy’s money which was supposed to be spent on new equipment to help expand the capabilities of the bakery.  Amy gets sad and probably angry and yells into her phone at Julia “give me my money!”

Both of these stories are about cooperation falling apart.  But only in the second one do we have the illusion of a mathematical value that we can ascribe to the cooperation.

Though Bob probably contributed to the romantic relationship in a financial way, an angry response of give me my money is not as fitting as it is with Julia and the bakery.  If we were to try and come up with an equivalent statement, Bob might yell give me back my wasted time and effort!  But this is of course a silly thing to demand. 

What is most important about these situations is how our own perspective entraps us.

Being in a position where we say ‘give me my money’ is a terrible one to be in.  It’s a position that feels entitled but is simultaneously powerless, which is a subtle contradiction and therefore gives rise to pain.  Recognizing the powerless part can help disable the unhelpful sense of entitlement.  We can illuminate this contradiction more easily with a physical example.

Someone who feels entitled to bench press 300lbs cannot do so unless they can actually generate the physical power to get under a 300lb bar and push it up.  Someone who feels entitled to do so but does not actually have the strength to do so is literally going to hurt themselves due to this mistake.

In the examples of cooperation falling apart, this mistake leads instead to an emotional pain, especially when money is involved.  It’s perfectly fair and just to say that Julia does actually owe Amy money because it was not used in the intended way, but this statement does not actually change Amy’s situation unless some higher force can rectify the situation.

What is more helpful for Amy is to realize that she took a chance, she took a risk and decided to cooperate with another person in the hopes that it would generate a result that enriched both of them more than they could do separately.  But as with any chance or risk, we have to keep in mind that we cannot predict the future, and some cooperative situations fall apart due to no obvious or intended fault of the parties involved.

Emotional restitution resides solely in creating a new mental model of the world that takes into account these uncertainties.

And this new mental model, which takes into account people’s very limited ability to predict the future, even their future selves, may help enable us to forgive in a way that helps put to rest our failures of cooperation.

It is perhaps fitting that the word ‘forgive’, arises from an etymology that means to completely give or to give away.

This episode references Episode 311: Fake Fortune

NUDGE

March 5th, 2019

Culturally and psychologically, we operate with an illusion of self-control.  It’s not entirely an illusion but the word or phrase self-control carries none of the nuance and gradation required to be a useful or realistic concept.  We do talk about this gradation from time to time when we observe that someone has a lot of self-control or that we wish we ourselves could muster more self-control.  This is a somewhat healthier use of the concept but it does not fully address what is occurring without total self-control.  We are constantly negotiating our affect on reality as a tug of war between what self-control we can muster and all the other forces that take the wheel in the relative absence of our own personal control.

The majority of these forces are counter to our conscious wishes and in many cases seem to be undoing the actions we undertake when we are exhibiting agency with self-control.  The simplest example of this is mindlessly eating some dessert knowing that we will go to the gym in the morning.  Many people poorly rationalize that one cancels out the other, but regardless of equivalence, these behaviors are ultimately in opposition of one another. One is solely undertaken for immediate short-term pleasure and the other is often undertaken with a vision of the future that for many is only a sort of fantasy.  Even though it is possible, few people achieve full transformations, and it’s for a simple reason:

We cannot access a visceral emotional experience of the what this transformation will be like

Whereas

The emotional and pleasurable experience of short term decisions are accessed as soon as they’re undertaken.

The first requires a heavy consistent conceptual understanding of possibilities.  One must constantly remind one’s self of the goal which feels unrealistic – for the plain and obvious reason that there’ never been a real experience of such a state.  Essentially it requires a kind of faith in a process that we do not yet feel will work.  Whereas most of our detrimental acts require the absence of this kind of thinking.  Basic urges take over and form a kind of autopilot for self-destruction.

These polar states can feel as extreme as some epic battle between good and evil, where victory can only be achieved with some massive and unrealistic mental effort of total domination over our less beneficial selves.

This, however, is not necessarily the truth:  we can slowly nudge our way to victory.  In fact this is the only way that we can make substantial long-term changes.  We cannot wake up the next morning with a total different program of behavior.  But we can slowly form and nurture habits that will put us on a new autopilot aimed at a better life. 

That consistent mental effort is still needed, at least in the beginning while a habit is forming, but once the brain has reorganized its own physical structures to reflect this habit, the new behavior begins to gain it’s own momentum, carrying us along with less and less mindful effort in order for such a thing to be carried out. 

Meditation is a good example:  Aside from any potentially positive reaction to merely sitting in a quiet calm place for a few minutes due to its novelty, the first handful of sessions has a negligible effect on who we are, how we feel and how we operate.  Brain scans show that it takes at least three to four months before changes in brain structure occur due to the practice.  This is a somewhat steep entry fee.  We must put in a lot of time with little to show for our efforts.  This is in accord with our idiotic cultural definition of insanity: doing something over and over and expecting a different result.  But this is exactly what happens given behaviors that are geared towards long-term benefit:  For quite a while it seems like nothing is happening, but eventually, such new habitual behavior begins to yield results. In such cases doing the same thing over and over does produce a different result.

Physical exercise and nutrition is an easier and more visible example.  We do not wake up on day 2 of our new efforts with a new body and mind.  We have to nurture a kind of fantasy about a possible future and keep toiling away in the faith that such a fantasy will eventually materialize.

Such faithful efforts are better viewed as gently nudging our personalities and bodies in new directions. 

We generally expect drastic changes to have drastic results, but when a drastic day of novel exercise and healthy eating does not produce a corresponding drastic result, it’s easy to lose faith.

But if we think of nudging our selves towards a new life with consistent little nudges of new behavior, consistency is the most important part of this recipe.

Just as water can slowly shape and sculpt stone, we too can move the monoliths or our more stubborn selves by nudging it in new directions.

This episode references Episode 323: Control and Episode 78: Infernal Parking Meter