A LUCILIUS PARABLE: INFINITE GAME

September 23rd, 2018

Lucilius walks into the hospital and finds on the map the appropriate wing. He takes the elevator and walks the busy corridors and finally finds the room where a good friend is bed ridden from sickness.

Lucilius approaches his friend, bends over and kisses his friend on the forehead. Eyes gently open and the widest of smiles greets Lucilius.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t comment on the situation, the setting, the ailments of his friend, just lifts a boxed game he’d been carrying.

“Brought a game. Let’s play.”

The groaning motor of the bed spins into action and Lucilius’ friend is slowly hoisted to a sitting position while Lucilius unfolds the board and places the glass beads in their respective places.

His friend, having never played, listens as Lucilius explains the simple rules.

They play a couple rounds until Lucilius’ friend has fully grasped the game. They set up another board and begin.

Lucilius looks to the clock in the room, thinking about the appointment of another loved one. He wonders how things went. Wonders when he might hear, and Lucilius’ friend watches him note the time.

After a few more moves, Lucilius notices his friend make a curious decision. He did not make the most advantageous move.   Nor was it a terrible move.

Lucilius thinks it’s a fluke, until he notices his friend make a similar move. It’s easier for Lucilius to win with these sorts of moves and he wonders if he’s explained the game thoroughly enough, but curiosity keeps him quiet and he continues to play. He watches his friend undermine his own chances at victory again and again, making good moves only when Lucilius starts to inch towards victory.

Then Lucilius understands. His friend makes a few bad rolls losing the well balanced advantage he had with Lucilius, so Lucilius undermines his own advantage.

They both play like this for some time, neither gaining on the other, each keeping a vigilant balance against the other with no focus on winning, but only to play, and to continue playing.

Lucilius works into a sort of meditative state with the game play, rolling and moving glass beads, keeping the board balanced, the movement never ending, until Lucilius hears a sniffle.

He looks up and there are tears in his friend’s eyes.

“What’s up?” Lucilus asks.

His friend nods towards the clock. “It’s ok if you have to go. You don’t have to stay.”

Lucilius smiles. “Can’t leave in the middle of a game.”

“But neither of us are trying to win.”

Lucilius picks up the dice once more. “I know,” he says. He rolls them again, looks at his friend.

“it’s kind of nice, isn’t it?”

CROOKED CROSSHAIRS

September 22nd, 2018

It’s one thing to go about achieving your goal in the wrong way.  It’s quite another problem to have the wrong goal and not even know it.

Imagine having the wrong goal and going about achieving it in the wrong way.  Now we’re really screwed.  It’d be like using a hammer on a screw and expecting the piece of wood to become cleanly cut in half.

Using such literal visual images makes it sound ridiculous and silly, but when we extrapolate the analogy up the ladder of abstraction so that it fits with our all-too-human endeavors and mis-endeavors, we do not react with the same amusement, though that would be the best response.  The sunk-cost fallacy is one psychological phenomenon that keeps our crosshairs trained on some outcome even when we realize that our crosshairs might be crooked.  We would be best to laugh it off and head in a new and better direction, but instead we think “But I’ve come so far!”  So we keep banging away at the screw with our hammer.

Identifying the correct problems to tackle is perhaps the most important skill to acquire in order to live a good and productive life.

Obsessing over sales and cutting coupons when there’s half a million in the bank and limited free time might not be the best use of time.  It might be a vestige of earlier times when spending some free time cutting coupons and hunting for sales was actually a useful and helpful endeavor.

For this reason we need to constantly Zoom-out and take a look at the big picture to ensure that we are wandering in productive areas.

When it comes to the crosshairs on our zoom, we might realize that even if they are a little crooked, zooming out makes this misalignment less of a problem.  Crooked crosshairs becomes more and more of a problem the more we zoom-in.  We must adjust these crosshairs at every level of zoom to ensure that when we are most zoomed-in, when we are most concentrated on the nitty-gritty aspects of a project with a focus so narrow we might as well have horse-blinders on, we can be confident that we are focused on the right thing.

One way to help align these crosshairs is to zoom out to the big picture of one’s life and ask, does this seem like a useful direction in a productive area, and then zoom in and ask the question again, and then repeat this process until we are at a single task. 

This is part of the reason why we must keep our zoom well-oiled, because we might find that we have zoomed in and found the answer to the question is ‘no’.  At that point we need to zoom back out and look around to see what other options curiosity has waiting for us to pursue.  We test each by zooming into them, investigating them, interacting with them and then asking if they are useful while keeping in mind what we know about the big picture. 

If our crosshairs are misaligned from the start, all of our questions may be misdirected, and we may be misidentifying the problem as though we mistake a nail for a screw or vice-versa.

We should always be on the look-out for such a possibility, and when we sense and suspect that such might be the case, its best to zoom-out again, take stock of where we are and start the process over again.

This episode references Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom, Episode 133: The Right Track, and Episode 159: Hammer and Screw

HAMMER AND SCREW

September 21st, 2018

We have all witnessed an argument that we felt was going in a ridiculous or unproductive direction.  Perhaps we were compelled to take part, and try to right the course of both straying minds.  We have all found ourselves in such arguments, holding our ground on points that – in the long run – don’t really matter.

Somehow, when the resistance of an enemy is at the forefront, the energy and determination (or stubbornness, depending on how you’d like to look at it) comes so easily, whereas that same tenacious drive seems impossible to call to our aid when we are alone and contemplating some project we’d like to start.

But if we were able to switch the activities and the drive we have in each and compare the outcomes, how would we feel?  If we were able to walk away from the meaningless argument, or simply not engage at all in the first place, chances are we’d feel better about that behavior in retrospect than we do becoming a fool by arguing with a fool.  So too with the other situation.  How would we feel in retrospect if we were able to manifest a strong stubborn drive to ‘get our way’ regarding a personal project.  Chances are good that the project would be completed and we would have a sense of accomplishment lingering around, not to mention any additional benefits the finished project produces.

For whatever reason, we are more likely to argue with the fool and squander our time.  We use the wrong tool for the wrong situation.

We pick up the hammer to use with a screw, and then wonder why the nail doesn’t work when we apply a screwdriver.

Each behavior that we witness ourselves perform is driven by some kind of emotion.  In the examples above, we might say that the wrong emotion is popping up at the wrong time and driving the wrong kind of behavior.

Just as with tools like hammers and screwdrivers where it is necessary to learn how each works and for what situation, so to with our emotions.  We must learn which ones are best for which situations.  But unlike tools that might be arranged in an orderly fashion in a workshop for anyone to easily see, pick up and use, our emotions are not so quaintly organized.

Our emotional tools might be arranged more like a toy box, or a hastily packed box.  It probably requires some work to find which tool we need because, like the procrastination-plagued person squandering their time, we don’t know where that tenacious feeling that arises as stubbornness in the face of an enemy actually lies within ourselves.

Notice how in this analogy of a toy box, or hastily packed box, we might eventually find the tool we are looking for by rummaging around for it, but even then, it does not achieve an organization of all our tools.    This is akin to the late night manic cleaning spree we might go on after finally being fed up enough with the clutter of our living space.  After everything is put right we might feel finally accomplished.  But then the mess starts to creep back to life and increases until the situation reaches the necessary pitch to go rummaging through that tool kit again because we are unpracticed with calling up the emotion to deal with such situations before such situations arise.

By honing our only real tool – our ability to form a better question that we may pose to ourselves, we can slowly organize that tool box.

While sitting down at a bar, we may ask: “is this going to be the best use of my time right now?”  The answer may be ‘yes’ if we’ve brought a book and just need a little rest and relaxation from some other deep concentration, or if we are meeting much-missed friends.

Or if someone says something particularly aggravating that we feel the need to argue with, we can ask “Is this the best use of my time?”  Probably not.  To engage is to misidentify the problem.  To see a situation as an important problem that we need to solve, when it is anything but. 

The easiest rule-of-thumb in these cases is to ask “is this easier?  Am I engaging in the easier thing?  What would be harder right now, in the short term, but more gratifying in the long-term?” 

The results of almost all of our behaviors fits into this little paradigm, and we can use it to help organize our emotional toolkit. 

It can boil down to an even simpler question: “is this useful?”

We might ask the same exact question of the hammer and the screw?  Is the combination useful?  No, not at all.

And neither is a screwdriver plied to a nail.

This episode references Episode 3: Determined vs. Stubborn, and Episode 30: The Only Tool

SHARPENING THE SENTINEL

September 20th, 2018

In the past, it was quite difficult to get to know someone.  It took a lot more time and was generally a person-to-person interaction that is at the heart of much of what we like to do as a species.

Today, however, there are new entities that can get to know parts of us much much faster, by tracking what we click, what we buy, what we listen to, what we read and what we watch.

It’s commonly said these days that the real currency is attention and companies like facebook and Netflix and Amazon are vying for larger and larger pie slices of our attention.  To do so, they have built algorithms that track our interests, locate similar things and plop them right in front of us in order to keep us glued to a screen.  The human mind is being hacked faster and more efficiently than ever before.  So fast in fact that individuals cease to know themselves as well as the platforms that engage them.  This is a scary and nervous fact.

The antidote is not another app.

One antidote is simply to get to know ourselves and our own mind better.  This is impossible to do while watching the next hit show or scrolling through a news feed that provokes outrage.

Here is an exercise worth trying:  Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and try to notice the inhalation and exhalation of the next ten breaths.  If you have time now, try it. . .

Unless this sort of concentration has been developed, chances are the count was lost and some other idea, fantasy, worry or ill-remembered thing popped up into consciousness.  Most of the time, our minds are chaotic clouds of half-fired activity.

It’s this out-of-control quality that allows sticky mediums like the Instagram feed or reddit to consume huge portions of our attention without our conscious awareness.

But a practice of mindfulness meditation.  Even 10 small minutes a day gradually has a tremendous impact on the mind’s ability to cut through the noise and decide if something is worth the attention, and if not, to switch towards something more worthy of our invaluable time.

Think of a chef who sharpens her favorite knife on a stone.  Does she casually whip the fine blade across the stone willy-nilly while looking somewhere else and recounting some inane story?  No.  Her concentration is tight and she takes her time slowly moving the blade across the stone, mindful of the angle, the speed and the track across the stone.  Then she flips the blade and with equal attention and determination, plies the blade to the stone.  She takes her time to ensure that the blade is sharp and even, because she knows that the blade’s performance later will be equal to her efforts while sharpening. And if she does the work well enough, then the knife will be more accurately attuned to her will, when she wants something chopped or sliced, the knife will split where desired.

So is the case with meditation and the mind.  Each inhalation is like moving that knife across the stone, and each exhalation is moving the flipped knife back across the stone.  Just as the chef spends time before the real work sharpening her knife, we too can take time each morning to sharpen our mind to ensure that we are less distracted, more focused and more on point with our goals and desires. 

This kind of training and sharpening creates a kind of sentinel in the brain.  When a facebook notification pops up and we feel that tiny spike of wanting that usually propels us down an unproductive rabbit hole, that sharpened sentinel that we’ve honed through our practice can help us notice our own actions, cut through the noise and make the better decision.

The digital platforms that analyze our preferences and tailor suggestions for us are only going to get better, faster.  As they develop, it’ll become easier and easier for our human minds to be ‘hacked’ so that our attention will be constantly directed. 

This rapidly growing process poses some very troubling realities when it comes to the notion of ‘freedom’ and before that weed chokes the light out of our decision-making abilities, we would be best served to start sharpening our mental ax and developing a mindful vigilance so that we know when to use it.

CONQUER OR CONCUR?

September 19th, 2018

What’s easier: to pull a trigger?  Or to evoke your own viewpoint in the mind of an enemy?

This may be the most important and fundamental example of refusing the easy, short-term solution, in favor of something much more difficult, but supremely better in the long term.

To clarify, we do not necessarily need a deadly weapon to pull the trigger – though that is the most extreme and most poignant act on the spectrum.  When we resort to insult and defamation as a response, we are still pulling a trigger in some sense.  Pulling whatever trigger is simply an attempt to end or damage the interaction as fast as possible.  Flying insults might result in a screaming match, but the goal of such a screaming match is quick and total domination.  The goal is that it will happen much quicker than an attempt to bring an enemy closer by understanding them, getting to know them, and ultimately evoking our own perspective and viewpoint in their mind.

There is also a subtle risk inherent in the attempt to bring our enemies closer with the aim of creating an amicable relationship.  We risk giving up our own perspective and viewpoint in favor of a better one that might be at the core of our enemy’s M.O.  This feels counter-intuitive because we are all blessed with the unfortunate certain conviction that we are correct in our current viewpoint.  But when we engage with an enemy, either with generosity or force, this is what we are asking of our enemy.  We are asking that enemy to abandon their own viewpoint and perspective in favor of our own, often when the enemy is also blessed with the symmetrical conviction that they are correct.

This so often fails because we make this request – often forcefully – at a distance and without the mutually vulnerable possibility that we ourselves may have to relinquish our cherished viewpoint in favor of a better one.

Getting closer to an enemy with the aim of transforming that enemy into a friend does not involve drawing them in.  It requires a simultaneous drawing in of that enemy and approaching that enemy on our part.   This approach on our part is necessary because we must learn how the enemy thinks, what experiences the enemy has had and what emotions are currently guiding that enemy.  All of these intimate components of our enemy’s psychology comprise tools that we use, colors that we can paint with.  We must look at the ideas and emotions of our enemy as raw materials from which we can construct a working model of our own perspective.

This is at the heart of the Socratic method.  Socrates would elicit his own perspective from his companion in dialogue by asking questions which would lead the mind of his companion on a series of mental quests ultimately leading to a place where that companion could view the point Socrates was trying to make, and in doing so, Socrates recreated his own viewpoint in the mind of his companion.

Notice the language we use when it comes to our mental constructions of situations: we say perspective or viewpoint.  Both words make more literal sense in the physical world, where we can walk around and stand at different points to obtain different views or perspectives.

So often we merely wait for our turn to speak, and when our turn arrives, we graffiti the opportunity with a description of our opinion or viewpoint.  Doing so almost always fails to bring the person we speak with to a point where they see such viewpoint. 

It is akin to standing before the Grand Canyon and asking someone over the telephone “Isn’t it amazing?”.  If they don’t have an idea of where we are, imagine the confusion, and the downright inability to answer the question.  We could describe what we see, and this would maybe elicit something in their mind.  We could send a picture, which might work even better because that person then gets to have their own experience, not solely based off our own.  Or best yet, we could buy that person a plane ticket and fly them to the very spot where we stand so they can have the exact same viewpoint and perspective that we do. 

It’s important to note that in this example, the person had to go on a quest to get to the Grand Canyon where we are standing in order to have the exact same viewpoint and perspective that we do. 

The Grand Canyon is a literal physical example, that we can analogize back into a figurative example.

If we want to evoke our viewpoint in the mind of an companion in dialogue – even someone we might consider an enemy, we must take their mind on a figurative quest. 

Our enemy’s own imagination is our greatest tool for persuasion.

But in order to use that imagination as a tool, we must get close to that person, we must get to know them.  We must have a working understanding of their emotions and their past experiences.  In doing so we are acquainting ourselves with the color pallet of their imagination.  And once we have become sufficiently acquainted with that pallet, we can start to paint a representation of our own idea in their mind. 

Knowing the same language is not good enough. 

The reason for this is that words in isolation between people do not mean nearly as much as what the same word means in the context of one individual’s life.  An easy example of this is how some people hate some words, often choice profanity, while other people may not mind such words at all, or better still, other people might adore such words.  This simple example shows how the same exact language, the same exact word does not mean the same thing to different people.  Because of this difference, we must investigate and explore our companion or enemy’s mind so that we can use these nuances.

By acquainting ourselves with the history and emotional make-up of a person, we gain an understanding of the flavor to which their understanding of language is attuned.

Notice the risk in doing so.  In order to get to know someone so well, we may discover reactions in our own self that we did not expect.  Compassion might pop up when we hear of a particularly grueling and brutal experience that our enemy was subjected to by the whims of fate.  We may grow feelings of disgust for the parties our enemy feels are guilty of such brutal experiences.  We may find ourselves questioning our own alliances to such parties because of this conflict of emotions.  Here in lies the terrifying but necessary risk required to get close enough to our enemy to unlock that enemy, using their own experience to paint within them a picture of our own view point.  To take the core of their experience by the hand and lead it on a figurative quest to a place we have in our own mind, where they can see our point.

If we merely graffiti the dialogue space with a description of our point of view, we effectively build a wall.  The question is not a building tool, but a kind of scalpel.  One that allows us to dive into our enemy, to understand them beyond the blanket walls of opinion that are erected in most conversations.

The Question is the Trojan horse of conversation.  But instead of sacking Troy as Odysseus and his compatriots did, we can build a new tower in the center of our enemy’s city - in the center of our enemy’s mind.  One from which our enemy can finally see our own point of view.

This episode references Episode 30: The Only Tool, Episode 89: A Lucilius Parable, Whims of Fate, Episode 128: Question.