SETTLING

January 28th, 2019

The question: “are you settling” has an appropriately negative connotation.  We might be asked this when one of life’s quandaries has somewhat tentatively been decided upon.  Even the one who has made the decision is likely to ask this question of themselves.

What lies within this question is a worry that we are slowing down in some fundamental way.  That our decision is somehow a setback and that a different decision could somehow move us forward in a way that is in accord with some higher imagined value.

To settle is inevitably to settle for less than you should.  Otherwise, such phrasing is not used.  It’s often been observed that if you have to ask if you’re settling, then you are.

But no matter how obediently we fulfill the root of the word settle, which derives from the simple act of taking a seat, we are still being pushed through time inexorably.  While we can take a moment to pause our thoughts and take inventory of what is going on, we cannot in fact pause time.  There is no settling and it’s for this reason we like to remind one another how life can pass us by. 

One of the current concepts in wellness, productivity and fulfillment is the ‘optimal challenge’.  We as humans seem to atrophy in all sorts of ways if we are not challenged, either physically or mentally, and both through some kind of learning or problem solving.

Within the worry about settling is the question of whether or not we are being optimally challenged.  Superficially we ascribe some kind of value judgment to the question, as in: are you settling for less than you’re worth?  This is an underdeveloped corner of language because value is highly correlated with some kind of quantifiable metric, like money.  It’s not only taboo to value someone in accordance to such a metric, it’s unwise for the very reason that a quantifiable metric is not a process and has no inherent potential.  A quantity is not a dynamic entity, it is –at the moment it is measured- a static, settled fact.  The very act of attributing a value to something is a form of settling.  The image of two people bargaining or haggling over a price might arise as two people who are trying to settle on a common agreed price.  While this act might be useful in the markets, simply for the reason that if we could never settle on a price for even a small amount of time, nothing would ever change hands, it does not make sense to do it with people, nor ourselves.  Even the value of a given product changes and goes up and down over time.  A human being represents a far more dynamic process.  But as we are all familiar with, we can experience the eerie spectrum of feeling like we are moving forward in life, or being stagnant, or even spiraling some kind of drain.  Moving forward might be described as achieving things, or navigating obstacles with an efficient variety of strategies, and being stagnant on the other hand might be described as settling, which is closer to spiraling that drain which is a whole different story.

One fickle benefit that seems to arise from language is our ability to compartmentalize different parts of our life.  This is perhaps unavoidable since language itself is simply a vast network of categorizes.  Our tendency to shy away from uncertainty makes the borders between these categories look opaque, when really they all exist on a spectrum of semi-permeable membranes. It’s unfortunate that such a fact doesn’t seem to affect our behavior in a meaningful way.  Or rather, it’s unfortunate that we can compartmentalize things in our life, but the drift that occurs with words does not seem to replicate in our modes of thinking.  We often fail to open the flood gates between those compartmentalized parts of our life and mix things up.  This is another form of categorical mistake, and it’s brought up here because we can so easily find that fulfilling optimal challenge in one area of our life, say at work, but then find ourselves ‘settling’ in perhaps our personal life where no optimal challenges arise.

Optimal is key here.  If we face a challenge that is too big, one we don’t know how to deconstruct, one that is simply overwhelming, then we risk falling victim to a kind of learned helplessness.  And if the challenge is too small, then the challenge is rote, and we become bored and perhaps even insulted because we feel our capacities are far greater than what such a bullshit job requires.  Gauging this optimal aspect of the challenges we choose requires a fair degree of mindfulness.  The overwhelming feelings of an overwhelming problem can create a kind of emotional feedback loop which prevents an undertaking of new challenges that we actually do have the capacity to meet with success.  Such a vicious cycle can make an individual far more likely to settle.  But as with time, we are never actually settling.  We have simply agreed to move in a new direction.  And the direction from optimal challenge to settling is a track that eventually leads to spiraling a drain.  Whether that be a lay off from an unchallenging job after decades of work, or a divorce, the seeds of such outcomes often lie in our disposition at the beginning.  While we cannot see, nor predict the future, we can safeguard against many unwholesome outcomes by mindfully seeking a sense of challenge and difficulty to ensure that we are in fact never settling, but always moving forward and growing.

This episode references Episode 139: Regretting Categorical Mistakes  

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: KEY OF COURAGE

January 27th, 2019

During a childhood summer, the father of Lucilius took the boy down the rocky headland to the water where a wooden dock rose and slowly fell with the tide.  The clear and healthy water gave view to the colors of the bottom, laid with thick bunches of mussels and the bright purples and orange of starfish.  Lucilius’ father sat to read while his son swam about in the warm water.

As the sun grew high in the sky, Lucilius grew more curious about the colorful bottom.  Crouching at the edge of the dock he studied a purple starfish that seemed not to move at all.  Lucilius’ father noticed and prompted.

“Why don’t you dive down and bring it up.”

Lucilius looked quickly at his father.  “No,” he said.

“Why not?  They don’t bite.”

Lucilius looked back down at the creature and fear grew throughout him.  The boy wanted to dive down.  He was curious, but something seemed strange and terrifying.

“Go ahead,” his father prompted once more.

And the more his father prompted him, the more Lucilius grew frightened.  His father tried to reason with the boy about how harmless the creature was, but to no avail.  And soon they had to give up on the whole idea, but Lucilius kept crouched at the edge of the dock staring down at the bright creature.

It was then another boy and a young girl came down to the dock to enjoy the warm water and sun.  The two swam about in the water and then as Lucilius had, took a notice to all the creatures on the bottom.  They were on the other side of the dock and the girl pointed.

“Look how bright that one is!” 

Lucilius looked back at the purple starfish he’d been watching and then called to them.  “Check this one out.”

The boy and the girl both came over and looked, and indeed, Lucilius had already found the biggest starfish around the dock.

“Wow,” the little girl said, “ I wonder what it feels like.”

The other boy remarked.  “We should go get it.”

And before the boy could act on his own words Lucilius dove into the water and swam down to the bottom.  He took the huge starfish by a leg and gently lifted it from the bottom, swam back and hoisted it up on the dock.

“Wow,” the little girl exclaimed.  Lucilius smiled, wiping the water from his eyes, and it was then his father began to laugh.

ILLUSIVE VISION

January 26th, 2019

This episode was inspired by an exchange with @mudandfire1.  Follow them on Twitter.

An illusive vision might be more succinctly stated as a plain old illusion.   But the word ‘illusion’ is not something we legitimately ascribe to our own perceptions.  Illusions are things that other people suffer from and misguided understandings that we are selves used to operate with but do no longer.

Much of our thinking and perception during any given moment is laced with a steadfast drip of self-assuring validity.  Our thoughts and perceptions might be thought of as a tightly collaged set of categories that arise from certain givens or axioms. A plain example would be that when we stand up and walk around we do so with the underlying given regarding gravity and the fact that it will be present.  Whereas when we walk down the steps into a pool our actions are predicated on the axiom that gravity will lessen in it’s apparent effect and we will begin to float.

These axioms about the physical world are non-negotiable, but we also operate with many superficial axioms.  The largest set of examples for this are words.  We can hear, see, read and think the word ‘chair’ and have an instant reliable understanding of what is being communicated.  But there is no underlying non-negotiable axiom that links the word ‘chair’ as a sound we make or a graphical representation of letters to the actual thing that we can sit on.  It’s an arbitrary link that is useful because so many other people operate with the same axiomatic association.

Notice the important difference between the case with gravity and the case with the chair.  Gravity is non-negotiable when it comes to the raw movements of our bodies.  Whereas the concept of a ‘chair’ has many many names in many different languages, whereas we cannot choose a different kind of gravity, nor can we ignore it or be ignorant of it in the way that we can be ignorant of word in a different language that has no translation in our own.

This infinite flexibility of language is at the core of it’s utility but this attribute is double-edged.  Because language can spin off so far from the hard axioms of physical reality, we have the ability to create an endless variety and gradient of mental illusions.

One rather negative manifestation of this is referred to in psychology as ‘rumination’.   The word derives from the action of a cow chewing, or ruminating.  For us, rumination is when we mull over something over and over in our minds in a sort of rut.  Such a state is a hallmark of depression and often perpetuates inaction.  When we are caught in such a state we are existing at the whim of a whirlwind of nearly pure conception.  Like being lost in a trance or staring at an optical illusion, we figuratively and perhaps quite literally lose sight of the world.  This is perhaps the most relatable form of illusive vision:  we believe we are thinking productively about the matters and circumstances of our life, manipulating a model of our life in an imaginary space in order to figure out some best course of action, to form some plan.  The imagined world we are trying to manipulate in our mind though, is a very simplified version of the real one.  It lacks a gargantuan amount of data.  This is why action is so much more effective than thinking.  Action yields missing data, and if our action is well designed it can extract the exact sort of missing data needed to help illuminate our next step.

This is where the word vision comes in as such a healthy counter point to illusion.  We might wonder about the difference between ‘having a vision for the future’ and ‘operating with an illusion.’  A vision for the future implicitly communicates that it does not yet exist.  The vision could very well be an illusion if it does not prove to be physically possible.  It’s perhaps a random piece of chance that the word vision as a noun is also the same word for our ability to see.  Our vision as a faculty is the channel through which we literally see a way forward.  Having a vision for the future is an abstraction from the literal case.  The concept of visibility determines whether we are chasing a practical vision for the future or whether we are chasing an illusion.  If for example we find ourselves in a space that is pitch black and has no light, we do not stay still and try to imagine what the space looks like; we start to catalyze other means for seeing.  We carefully reach out and move our feet forward slowly in order to register any possible obstacles.  As we slowly explore our immediate space, our visibility increases even if we cannot actually see anything.

Having good vision on a wide spectrum of living simply means having a realistic and accurate understanding of the way reality functions.  In order to achieve this we need to constantly update our understanding by interacting with it.

We need good vision in order to have a vision for the future.  And having a realistic vision for the future is what we should all strive for.

A poor understanding of reality, on the other hand, makes us more prone to chasing an illusion instead.

This episode references Episode 125: Rut, Episode 285: Plan on no Plans, and Episode 201: Visibility.

PLAN ON NO PLANS

January 25th, 2019

Someone recently remarked: “The more often I have plans, the more I realize they don’t work out.”

There is a lot of wisdom in this observation.

At first glance there emerges the simple realization that flexible plans that can adapt as circumstances develop is perhaps indicative of a better strategy.  We might be able to pivot with more agility if our plans are of a shorter concrete nature.  Or rather, our very next action should be as straightforward and definite as possible, but beyond that, our plans should immediately get hazy and more conceptual so that we can integrate whatever feedback that next step yields.  If our plans are too definite too far into the future than we are more likely to ignore feedback from our next step if it is not in accord with those long term designs.  This is how an axiomatic error compounds into a circumstance we have many phrases for: ‘a wake up call’, ‘a slap in the face’, ‘when the bottom falls out’.

We are prescribed by productivity gurus to have definite goals.  This is perhaps poor phrasing because it can easily be misconstrued into ‘have definite plans,’ which is a very laborious process for failure.

What the productivity guru is trying to say is something along the lines of “when you think about going on vacation, make sure you pick a destination!” 

The travel vacation is ironically a very ripe analogy for goal-oriented productivity.  For one simple reason:  what’s the worst part of the travel vacation?  The actual travelling.  Lost bags, delayed flights, cancelled flights, broken down trains, flat tires.  We attempt to plan the travel portion of our vacation like a computer program, where each leg of the journey trips the activation of the next leg of the journey.  We do this so that we can fit the actual travelling part of the trip into a window of time that’s as small as possible in order to maximize the amount of time we spend at the actual destination.  This makes sense in theory, but a walk through the airport any day of the year will evince how often this breaks down in practice.  It’s rare to ask how someone’s vacation went and get the report that the actual travelling part of it was incredibly smooth.

Now compare that somewhat masochistic situation with the opportunity to have open-ended plans?  How often to open-ended plans not work out?  It’s somewhat fundamentally impossible for an open-ended plan to not work out due to the very nature that it’s open-ended.   With such framing, any delay turns into an opportunity to enjoy the current location.  Even an airport can be a wonderful location if we bring along audiobooks or remember we have several dozen hours of podcasts we’d like to investigate, or some writing we could do, or even just sitting and meditating, even if it’s for the first time.  Anyone who has the ability to read or listen to this has the ability to google an introduction to mindfulness and begin developing a new skill.

If we compare both frames of mind, which one is more likely to think themselves…lucky?  Certainly someone who views their life as a series of failed plans is not going to think of themselves as lucky.  But someone who gives up this fear-driven dependence on plans is far more likely to see opportunity in any given circumstance.  Imagine that for a moment.  What if every situation in life suddenly seemed to come ripe with opportunity.  How lucky would you feel?  And yet does it not seem like this is possible if we reinterpret the way that the concept of ‘plans’ effects our life?

While the word ‘plan’ derives from the Proto-Indo-European root pele- meaning to ‘to spread, flat’, which is eventually evocative of the image of spreading a paper drawing or diagram flat in order to see it clearly, it’s worthy to note that it did come through the French language via the word ‘plant’, as in to plant something in the flat ground.

We might ask, do the roots of a plant follow a plan?  Or do they follow an open-ended strategy that changes depending on the soil and circumstance?

Perhaps we would do better to feel our way forward like a plant and plan on no plans.

This episode references Episode 243: Roots, Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot and Episode 278: Axiomatic Mistake.

STICKY FINGERS

January 24th, 2019

It’s possible to shove all sorts of food onto a fork, but for the most part, it’s a single-serving bite-sizing tool.  You take a single bite of this, a single bite of that.  Maybe some sauce comes along for the ride.  But for the most part, it’s a one-at-a-time endeavor.

Now picture a toddler trying to eat a bowl of spaghetti.  It’s just a mess, and a fork is something that’s more useful as an object launched across the room rather than as something to manipulate food.

Even in these contrasted methods of eating, we have a subtle nod to ways of thinking and operating that either limit or liberate.

There’s the old idiom used to describe a person of many interests, someone described as “having a finger in every pie.”

Imagine this literally for a moment.  Ten fingers, ten different pies.  Ten different flavors. 

Compare it to a single fork. 

Even in this seemingly banal image, we have a ripe metaphor for optionality.  Our idiomatic description of fingers in pies hints at some kind of awareness of this on the part of our culture.

That career oriented individual who inhabits single positions one after another, switching either through promotion or company change is strangely evocative of eating a meal with a fork.  One bite after another.  Single bites of flavor, one following the other.

We might now switch to the individual who spends an hour or two every night after work developing a little side hustle.

Often this arises from a convergence of an interesting hobby and a concurrent exposure to lightweight business models.  In the age of the internet, it’s become exceedingly easy to set up a business with minimal start up expenses.

Such a side-hustling individual might be said to have a taste of two pies.

The funny difference between creative pursuits and a career job is that we have no idea where a creative pursuit might go, whereas a career job seems more predictable and stable, it has an absolute upper limit that cannot be breached in the way that an independently owned creative pursuit can.  Our fear-based instant reaction to such a point would most certainly go along the lines of “ya but there’s no guarantee that a creative pursuit will yield anything.. it could just fall flat.” 

This is actually false.  Even if such efforts don’t yield anything that is observably meaningful, like cash in the bank, the experience of putting one’s self through such motions is perhaps more valuable because of how such an experience effects the psychology of the individual who makes the attempt.  Companies send their people off on development retreats, which is perhaps funny if we compare a week of conventional hotel living and conferences, or something edgy and outdoor with the experience of living lean and working hard on something totally new.

There’s also the fact that anyone can get fired from any career job at pretty much any time.  This quaint little fact is something that we like to conveniently ignore.  But if we backtrack through the reasoning here, the initial ‘ya but there’s no guarantee’ statement starts to look quite nonsensical. 

Investigating why there’s a tendency to proffer such poor logic will quickly unearth a flimsy emotional reason.  We’re scared of uncertainty and venturing into that unknown arena.  It’s as simple as that: a little fear.

If this fear can be fully processed, by either diving into it like a messy toddler or by dissecting it through seemingly rational means, bite by bite, then we come to a counter-intuitive conclusion:

It’s best to throw away the fork and get a finger in as many different pies as we can reasonably keep track of.

Even the great Isaac Newton had no idea if his development of calculus would be more valuable than his efforts regarding alchemy and theology, but he was curious enough to have a finger in all three pies.  Imagine if he had solely focused on alchemy?  He would have gone down unremembered in history as just another crack-pot who thought he could turn lead into gold if he just kept tinkering with it.  Instead he also spent some time tinkering with numbers and gave birth to one of the greatest tools of humanity.

At the very least, having a few fingers in a few different pies can give you a better context regarding  your opinion about your main meal.  One taste of a better pie and who knows what curiosity and creativity it might spark in you.

Life is a buffet of opportunity.  Best to throw away the fork and taste as much as you can.