A LUCILIUS PARABLE: WISDOM OF THE MASSES

February 10th, 2019

There came a time when Lucilius in a rare bout of introspection decided that he was too ostentatious and needed to make some changes. 

He quit all of his projects, handing them over to business partners and people of capability, and then gave all his wealth to charity.  Afterwards he applied for ten credit cards and received them all.  Then he maxed out every credit card buying food and clothing, warm accommodations and even educational programs for homeless people whom he interviewed in order to get a better idea of how such funds might be allocated.

When Lucilius had dug a financial hole about as deep as he could manage, he got a job cleaning at a movie theatre. 

Despite his reluctance with promotion, the continual exit of his superiors created a vacuum that he was forced into by people who were even higher on the hierarchy. 

The job was vapid and boring.  It took Lucilius years to notice how this aspect of the job was changing his mentality.  The stress of debt combined with an absolute scarcity of time to do anything about it  compounded to create a particularly toxic cocktail of brain chemistry.  In later years Lucilius would reflect on this nearly invisible phenomenon and marvel at the symmetry between a mindset of poverty and one of success.  They were the same shape, just pointed in different directions.  But at the time Lucilius was neurologically incapable of such a realization, nor any realization about how to effectively get out of it. 

As chance would have it, meditation as a practice was coming into vogue and it seemed to be broadcast everywhere, from magazine covers to the chatter of people in lines at the movie theatre. 

Having almost no money to do anything exciting, Lucilius decided to give the cheap activity a try.  For several years he bounced between different traditions and techniques.  This slowly sharpened his focus and when he was several months into an exploration of a basic mindfulness approach, something seemed to change in Lucilius’ brain and mind.  He started to interact with his own emotions differently, almost as though he were holding them like a curious child.  As though freed from some kind of bondage, his mind began to explore creative ideas almost spontaneously.

Each day at his job he started to tinker with the idea of the whole boxed situation being a kind of videogame, each day with a fresh input of people.

Lucilius was smiling at this idea of the video game one day while he was arranging the belt stanchions that are used to line people in order before a movie when an idea struck him.

He looked around at the wide space and chuckled.  There was a huge blockbuster that was coming out in a couple days and Lucilius knew what he had to do.

After work he went out and bought a remote camera, and the next day he had this camera attached to the ceiling right in the middle of the largest part of the movie theatre complex.  The camera was facing straight down at the floor, giving a bird’s eye view of the whole room.

On the day of the blockbuster’s release, Lucilius got to work extra early and took every last stanchion out of storage.  Then he got to work:

He spent the entire day building a maze with the stanchions, ensuring that many of the internal branches were winding and lead to dead ends.  He created only one entrance and one exit and roughly calculated that the size of the maze far exceeded what was needed for the number of people who were coming.

And just before the doors of the movie theatre opened, he turned on the camera and hit record.

People began filtering in and those with reserved tickets began making their way into the maze of stanchions.  The first couple found themselves confused at a turn, then looking around, they saw how much of an ordered mess they were in.  The couple laughed and had fun with it.

And then more people with reserved tickets began filtering in and the maze began to fill up.

Several days later, Lucilius created a Youtube channel, activated ads on his channel and then posted the video.

The footage went viral.  The money generated from ad clicks allowed Lucilius to pay off all of his credit card debt, and with the extra he had left over, he bought some time off in order to explore a new creative endeavor. 

NON-ZERO DEED

February 9th, 2019

Every word we utter and even every word we think is part of a story we are not only telling ourselves, but a story we are continually bringing to life.

As the old logic follows: thoughts give rise to words, and words give rise to actions.

Or deeds.

The optimist feels the implicit value of performing a good deed, while the pessimist will refrain, guarded by the reasoning that no good deed goes unpunished.  Like many quaint quotes, this sentence seems like a tidy package, one that we readily feel has ample evidence in experience, and if we do not come armed with a curious question to delve further into this thought, we risk it becoming a mantra. A repeating thought that will begin to shape our actions or lack of actions. 

Seth Godin has asked whether or not we should say ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ to an AI like Siri or Alexa.  He extrapolates on the point about our thoughts and words being an auto-narrative that reinforces who we are.  Saying ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ to a arguably inanimate object is a good idea because it reinforces an idea of who we think we are and who we would like to be.  Marie Kondo might fit in nicely here as the cultural force urging all of us to thank inanimate objects before tossing them out in order to tidy our living spaces.  Indeed we might even see a lovely empathy embedded deep within ourselves when it comes to our reluctance to part with some useless scrap of paper of item gifted long ago.  Seth Godin’s question turns this potential passive empathy into an active choice.  Saying thank you at any reasonable opportunity helps shape our being into one that has more gratitude.

This is somewhat like how the heart functions.  The heart’s main function is to provide fresh blood to the whole body by powering the entire circulatory system.  But this main function is not it’s first function.  The first thing the heart accomplishes with every single pump is to nourish itself with fresh blood.  Only by doing so can it be properly equipped to carry out it’s main function.  Here we have a perfect, systematic solution to The Selfish Paradox. (Discussed in Episode 28).  We can map Seth Godin’s question onto this allegorical image of the heart that shows itself some love before tending to the rest of the body.

When we say thank you, that good deed is first a good deed unto ourselves.  It reinforces the likelihood that we will say ‘please’ or ‘thankyou’ again.  The humility and gratitude generated by such actions are not without their self-serving benefits.  It’s a well-studied correlation that practicing gratitude increases our sense of well-being and happiness in life.  Humility, it might be argued may be instrumental in enabling our minds to have an increased flexibility and agility to pivot in order to persevere, but that is a topic to be more fully explored later.

What is left to explore about our deeds is their further ramifications beyond their immediate effect upon our own selves.  How we understand these ramifications coats much of how we approach life.

We can easily hear the pessimist seeing the economy as a kind of winner-take-all zero-sum game.  It’s a eat or get eaten kind of world and it’s best to keep out of the way because sticking one’s neck out only turns you into a target.

On the other hand, the optimist, who feels the implicit value of good deeds, might find the concept of a non-zero-sum game very attractive. A non-zero-sum game is essentially and simply a game where both players benefit.  One of Tinkered Thinking’s Lucilius Parables, Episode 161 explores this concept in the form of a story for those who want to explore this concept in a form that’s perhaps more pleasant to digest.

Presented with these two frameworks, we might ask: is the heart an optimist or a pessimist?  This might seem like a silly question, but there does seem to be an answer in the design of our vital organ.  The heart certainly isn’t without some selfishness, it tends to itself first, but the majority of it’s effort and ultimately it’s main function is to give to the rest of the body.  In this framework, the heart is playing a non-zero-sum game.  Another way of phrasing this is by saying: there’s an organ inside all of us that is working constantly, day in night in order to give us the opportunity to do… absolutely anything. 

This relatively simple concept extends to much larger entities.  For example Elon Musk has stated repeatedly that the whole point of Tesla is to speed up the advance of sustainable transport.  This is the main function of the company.  But just like the heart which has a main function of powering the body and an initial function of feeding itself.  Tesla’s first function is to make enough money to keep the whole enterprise going.

We might be able to see all businesses fitting into this simple framework.  The first function is just to stay alive and keep running, but the main function is a larger, loftier and long term goal: to provide some service or product. 

Perhaps it should be no surprise that successful business creators are generally labelled as optimists.

On a long enough timeline we might see that both perspectives pay in their own currency.  It’s important to try and imagine this on a large timeline because of two factors:  One is simply the limits of our own perspective.  We just don’t get to see every little effect each of our actions has.  The other is randomness.  We might think of reality as being filled with a good deal of noise, and if we take some of this noise as a signal without deeply investigating it’s nature, then we can easily mislead ourselves.  Chance can pile up a few failures and when this is combined with our blindness to any potential good our efforts have actually had, it starts to smell like a ripe recipe for pessimism. 

It’s in these difficult times when nothing seems to be working that any person must remember the bootstrapping value of the optimist.  In the same way that saying ‘thankyou’ to an inanimate object shapes us for the future, merely invoking any kind of optimism has the potential to reformat our thinking, by feeding our perspective.  What this boils down to in a literal and practical sense is quaintly framed by another maxim:

Where the pessimist sees and obstacle, the optimist sees an opportunity.

But the optimist can take a step beyond this framework that the pessimist cannot.  The optimist does not need to come across some object to interpret as obstacle or opportunity or even go looking for opportunity.  The optimist can generate opportunity from seemingly nothing, by tinkering with the situation they find themselves in and creating something of value.

This episode references Episode 28: The Selfish Paradox, Episode 72: Persevere Vs. Pivot, Episode 93: The Generator, and Episode 161: A Lucilius Parable: Infinite Game

THE OBVIOUS CHOICE

February 8th, 2019

The word obvious is defined as ‘easily perceived or understood; clear, self-evident, or apparent’

This is obvious to anyone familiar with the word.

What is more interesting are the implications of the etymology.  From the late 16^th century in the sense ‘frequently encountered,’ from the Latin phrase ‘ob viam’ meaning ‘in the way’.

We might spend a moment thinking of things that are frequently encountered.  But this category requires some tempering, due to the fact that our attention does not gravitate equally to all things. For example our attention is more efficient at detecting negative emotions or threats than it is with things that have positive association.  In this sense, ‘what is frequently encountered‘ is already skewed.  The way this might play out in the ‘real’ world is that when we scroll through some sort of social media feed, we are more likely to pick up on negative stories simply because our attention is more efficient at picking these out.  This creates a problem for our understanding of reality.  Negative items that we come across are automatically encountered more frequently, not because they actually are more frequent, but simply because our efficiency with detecting them makes it seem like they are more frequent.

Another example of this discussion of obvious as a function of what is frequently encountered is digital advertising.  Because of the addictive nature of screen technology, it provides an attention portal through which to bombard someone’s consciousness with ads for a particular product or service.  How many times do we see an ad before clicking on it?  If encountered enough times, the probability of clicking on that ad goes up and up.

Any person or company that can out-spend the competition on the battle front of digital advertising will win, simply because their product becomes –literally- the more obvious choice because it’s simply the most frequently encountered choice. 

It’s important to note the insidious connotation this phrase has.  The Obvious Choice, is not necessarily the best choice, though this is exactly what the phrase means in our current cultural parlance.  It goes to figure that if the obvious choice were always the best choice or the right choice, we would all be living much better lives.  Life is made of choices and making better choices leads to a better life.  Unfortunately, making the obvious choice clearly does not lead to a better life.  But this counter-intuitive approach to the concept is, appropriately enough, not too obvious. 

This is why the meme “common sense is not so common” evokes the ironic response of common agreement and general head-nodding from everyone.  The first conclusion one might draw from this rather humorous phenomenon is that some people who agree with this sentiment don’t know what they’re talking about -  in fact any agreement with such a sentiment carries this conclusion that some large set of other people are foolish to think as they do.  A conclusion that is perhaps more nuanced might examine the fact that no two people can possibly occupy the same perspective, and therefore the understanding that each person carries around is quite valid based on the totality of their experience, circumstance and atomic makeup.  The counter-intuitive extension of this second conclusion is that a healthy engagement with other people requires thinking more about the systems that exist between and around people instead of the perspective they may be attempting to assault us with. 

This is NOT the obvious choice when it comes to common conversation.  Today’s conversation is characterized more by an identification of what is wrong with other people or their views instead of an exploration of what might be contributing to the generation of such views.  Our idea of common sense is often likewise invoked by the seemingly dumb actions and decisions on the part of others. We witness some strange behavior and think or exclaim “don’t they have any common sense?”. 

Wisdom is perhaps appropriately and ironically defined as being able to simply follow one’s own advice.  Unfortunately, when it comes to our behaviors that we’d like to change, the wise choice is not the obvious choice, for the simple fact that we have not frequently encountered that version of ourselves that makes the better choice.  And here in lies the rub: to make that difficult and wiser choice enough times so that our new behavior begins to inhabit the category of ‘frequently encountered’.  Once we’ve sat and meditated enough days in a row, or gone to the gym enough days in a row, or reached for the healthier food options enough days in a row, these options start to become: the obvious choice.

This episode references Episode 163: What the Fool Believes.

GET THIS AWAY

February 7th, 2019

We’ve all had the experience of suddenly realizing that we’ve been mindlessly snacking on something for a few minutes, taking one last potato chip or pistachio or M&M and pushing the rest away, saying “get this away from me.”

It’s almost as though there are two animals at work in this instance.  The one that only sees food and understands it only as something to consume, and the more mindful executive animal that thinks along the lines of “I remember what happens when I eat too much of this and it’s not good.  I don’t want to end up back there.”

The solution is an alteration of the environment.  Pushing a carton of Oreo’s out of reach is  essentially a resource allocation.  Making it less readily available to ourselves, and often trying to make it more available to someone else who will exhaust the trap and eat the rest of the Oreo’s and therefore eliminate the nagging temptation to just dive in more.

The Oreos exist in the first place for the exact same reason.  Tens of thousands of years ago there were no Oreo’s or M&Ms or Potato Chips.  But if you’d been able to somehow snack from a secret source of such pseudo-foods, it would have been a benefit.  Such tempting foods are very energy dense and therefore less time would need to be spent finding that energy elsewhere, leaving more time to do other things such as invent culture.  We kept tinkering with the way that we process different parts of our environment until we were able to unleash a chemical synthetic jui jitsu move on raw ingredients and create all sorts of super-charged high-fructose corn syrup foods tasting like all manner and variety of things.

Tens of Thousands of years ago, the concept of being obese would have seemed like a kind of fantastical heaven, and yet since we’ve figured out how to make this a reality, it’s only lead to a hellish kind of health crisis in the eyes and experience of many.  Many diets try to mimic and kind of return to a system of food that is more akin to the biological adaptations of our body, whether this be paleo or keto or any nuance, variety and variation between the different systems gurus have devised, many of these dial down to a careful curation of ‘get this away from me’, and leaving only the essential, healthier option available.

We might wonder how such a strategy might extend beyond food.  The word ‘diet’ has shifted to mean something more transient, something that only lasts for a week or a month.  When in fact diet is simply everything you intake over the course of time.  Diet may change but when someone talks about a specific diet, they are really talking about a particular curation of their diet.  We might even broaden the term diet beyond food and think about our information diet, or our diet of human interaction, our entertainment diet, even perhaps a social media diet.  All of these in some way or another are things that we intake and have an effect on us.

A particularly toxic relationship might be akin in some stretched way to a habit of eating ice cream every single day.  Social Media is an example all too ripe for this kind of addictive and unbeneficial behavior.  And when it comes to good information, like reading a business book, we might perhaps be inclined to describe ourselves as nutrient poor.  Perhaps time would be better spent reading such a book instead of briefly checking how many ‘likes’ a post has and then scrolling for endless minutes, consuming nothing of value except the wasted time.

We might be more likely to think ‘get this away from me’ when we realize just how insidious and unhelpful a particular social media avenue is in our life.  There’s actually a fairly interesting and somewhat effective app for this process.  It’s called “Space” and what it does is mask any of your social media apps with a proxy that when clicked routes you to a screen that instructs you to breathe deeply a couple of times before actually opening the target social media app.  In an oversimplified way, these deep breathes help weaken the addictive neural pathways that make opening a social media app a compulsion that our thumbs dance into just as effortlessly and fluidly as when we find our hand feeding our face with some kind of nearby junk food.

It might not be too much of a stretch to say that success and fulfillment boil down to a careful curation of our environment.  What we allow ourselves to see, hear and eat, and what conditions we construct in order to make the situation most conducive to productivity on tasks that lead to the accomplishment of our goals.  This extends to a curation of our relationships and the time we spend with people or even simply the space we have available.  How many projects have benefited wildly from merely having a room where only that project exits?  Where everything else is essentially locked out of consciousness by the walls and door.

Our entire constructed environment of buildings with walls and entrances, with times when locked are all a curation of our environment.  Perhaps our phones could even benefit from a ‘closed for business’ concept when the device is simply off. 

Clearly we are very far from having all of this curation optimized as we squabble over untested details and blindly steer by emotional dictates as opposed to a studied analysis of the larger picture.  In the meantime we need to somewhat rebel against the baser automatic instincts built into our brains and do our best to curate our own experience.  In a world of increasing abundance, this will often take the form of get this away from me!

NATURE IS UNNATURAL

February 6th, 2019

Natural is one of the most ambiguous words we have and because of this infinitely hazy property, it is used in all sorts of circumstances when our phrasing could be much more accurate, precise and helpful to those who are willing to listen.

We might for example hear someone say that it is not natural for so much plastic to be in the oceans and by extension in the seafood that we eat.

While such a sentiment has good intentions, it does not use language accurately.  Natural is defined as anything that exists or is caused by Nature.

Another way to phrase this is to say anything possible within the laws of physics is natural. 

Such a definition puts a different spin on the idea of plastic in oceans being unnatural.  It’s physically possible, so does this not mean it’s natural?

Many would say no, but due to a poor understanding of the words being used.  A better word would perhaps be ‘good’.  Plastic in the oceans might be a natural occurrence but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

A counter-argument might be that something is unnatural because it’s caused by humans.  And yet humans evolved due to the same mechanisms that created sea life and even dictate the movement and existence of oceans.   Surely humans are a product of nature and by extension anything that humans do is a natural phenomenon, making plastic in oceans.. natural.

What is really in conflict here is imagined concepts.  Nature and Natural exist more as idyllic concepts of perfection and harmony in our mind more than they exist as well defined words.  When our actions or any occurrence is in conflict with those idyllic concepts we label them as unnatural.

But there is an important caveat here.  Nature has given rise to humans and subsequently to language and conceptual thought.  We can further extrapolate on this and draw the conclusion that Nature created the concept of unnatural.  Nature also created through us this idyllic concept of nature which it clearly does not keep in accord with.  Nature not only created the contradiction, it created the concept and opportunity of being down right wrong.

Nature, if anything seems to be a restless push to rampantly experiment with what is possible within the laws of physics.

The structure of this process, whether we call it evolution, or identify it within other domains or processes will be explored much further in the first Tinkered Thinking miniseries.  Stay tuned and in the mean time, remember that everything is natural, it’s the context we need to be careful about, and most often this means paying close attention to the words we use and what they actually mean.  Otherwise we might paint ourselves into a corner without realizing it claiming things like: Nature is Unnatural.