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.  

BEYOND VICTORY

September 18th, 2018

The cultural image of Darwinian struggle might be summed up as two animals battling it out for life and death.  Naturally this betrays a lot of the nuance in his Origin of Species, and yet, this simple contest is an unfortunate benchmark of our society: for some reason, we crave the winner and the downfall of the loser.  Whether it be MMA fighting or the Olympics, War, or even a simple bet between friends, much of our thinking rides on this structure of victory.

If man were a more purely solitary species, like say a leopard, or a white shark, this would make more sense.  Most interactions of such species are an effort for victory in order to eat and nourish their bodies.

But man is first and foremost a cooperative species.  Our infatuation with being solitary opponents is clearly subordinate to this desire as evidenced by our sprawling, innovative, planet-encompassing culture and society.  By default, none of what we have accomplished can be built in isolation.

Dolphins and Orcas live in pods, wolves and some dogs hunt in packs, ants build elaborate structures to house their family, but we as humans take cooperation to a whole new level.  One never glimpsed before in the history of the planet.  Our drive to cooperate is so much at the forefront of our efforts that we even try to cooperate with a large number of other species, whether this be a depressed whale jumping in a pool or a dog running through wreckage looking for survivors.  But our cooperation with each other is tantamount.

Nearly every building, every manmade object we can see, the phone we read or listen to this on, the desktop computer, the books on our selves, the food we have in our fridge, even the language we use to understand this sentence was the harvest of vast amounts of cooperation and creativity between people.

In the light of this megalithic cooperation we’ve achieved, our near obsession with victory seems a bit out of place.  Surely competition has been a huge driving force for much of the success that society has achieved, but on such a small level, as say, a conversation, it seems counter to our deepest wishes to be so hell-bent on victory.

A simple argument is the most puzzling example, and we see it all the time and everywhere.  Whether it be a presidential debate, or a quarrel between lovers in the next grocery isle, we are depressingly quick to set up a rickety power dynamic scaffolding to see who gets to be king of the hill.  Perhaps we do this because a room full of leaders is no team at all, but this stark view of individuals does us a disservice once again.  A room full of true leaders would be an agile group, full of individuals who are capable of taking the lead when they can, or who can become a different, important aspect of cooperation.    Think of someone driving a car who turns to the passenger and says “Take the wheel for a second.”  The passenger jumps into the leading roll for a moment.  There is no bickering, no crushed pride, nor a desire to prove who is better because the aim of both people is clear:  to get farther down the road safely.

And yet in arguments of all sorts, we are quick to forget our common human goals in favor of the current pedantic flavor of this or that viewpoint, which may or may not be verifiable in a scientific way.

We would do well to ask: What is beyond victory in this argument?

Are we best served to dig a deeper trench for our threatened view point?  Or can we look at our ‘opponent’ as a kind of gold mine.  But one that has not been excavated.  One that requires some good questions and hard patience to find the goods.

The word conversation, from converse, simply means to ‘live among, and be familiar with’.

How are we working towards the point of conversation if we are hell bent on winning an argument?

It’s long been said that we should keep our friends close and our enemies closer.

A first glance at this adage makes one’s eyes grow thin with cynicism and we see humanity as a deceptive species, and because of this we need to watch out backs.  Keeping enemies close seems like an easier way to keep tabs on their movements and therefore increase our chances of thwarting their aims if we see their crosshairs nearing ourselves.

There is, however, another way to interpret this saying.

Perhaps it is asking us to become closer with our enemies, not so we can keep tight tabs on their movements, but so that we can actually get to know them better.  To converse with our enemies so that, in due course, they cease to be enemies.  Perhaps the saying is telling us that we have enemies because we have not gone through the difficult process of getting to know our enemy. 

The word ‘enemy’ comes from the Latin meaning literally ‘not friend’.

Perhaps the saying is indicating that some one is ‘not a friend’ because we have not brought them close enough to ourselves.

We’ve perhaps taken the word in a new and unwholesome direction.  According to the Latin, it’s more accurate to define enemy as a stranger.  Someone who we simply do not know, and such a definition makes this second reading of the old saying a bit more fitting.

We must ask, what if we did away with the current concept of enemy?  Even just as a thought exercise.  How would we reimagine our interaction with such people that are strangers, or not friends?

Perhaps we can redefine enemy as ‘not yet a friend’.

We need not even go this far as to try and convert enemies into friends.  We can look much closer to home.  To the arguments we have.  We can thoughtfully pause and ask ourselves: “what’s the point of this relationship and this interaction, at their core?”  Am I honoring it with my words and actions?  If not, how would we better honor the spirit of cooperation?

So that we can get a little farther down the road, safely…

This episode references Episode 23: Pause.  If you’d like to fully explore the reference, please check out that episode next.

ESTEEM

September 17th, 2018

In the late 60’s and 70’s some studies hailed a correlation between high self-esteem and a successful life.  The resulting thinking from this followed as such:  if we generate high self-esteem in kids, then they will be more successful.  And thus was born the precarious and doomed self-esteem movement where everyone is special.  The results of this experiment surely fall very short of the expectations incased in the good intentions that wrought such fanfare.

The whole debacle could have been avoided and redirected towards a more productive message if only the actual words comprising the idea had been more closely examined.

Mainly in this case, the word ‘esteem’ is problematic.

In the cultural milieu, the term self-esteem has a meaning akin to confidence.  The connotation evokes some sort of magical positive attitude that is somehow expected to manifest all the necessary thinking and skills to achieve things without any disruption in that positive attitude.  Unfortunately, such a connotative definition betrays the real definition of both confidence and esteem.

Just as Confidence 2.0 is something that we must systematically build, esteem is something that applies to the exact same situation, albeit viewing that situation from a different perspective. 

Esteem derives from the Latin meaning ‘to estimate’.

How much different would the self-esteem movement have been if it was titled the ‘Self-Estimation Movement’?

If we are asked to estimate our own worth of character and individual, would we focus so much on how we generally feel on a moment to moment basis, or would we look at other evidence?  How we act and what we do is a far more meaningful metric for getting a sense of what kind of value we offer other people.

The self-esteem movement was the equivalent of asking kids to estimate themselves when they had done little to nothing in life. 

Perhaps those studies have it backwards.   The conclusion was that self-esteem produces a successful life.  Perhaps the more accurate conclusion would have been: A successful life produces a person with high-self esteem.  And this makes more sense with regards to the actual meanings of the words.  A person who has been successful in life (regardless of how they define it) is going to estimate themselves to be of higher value than a person who does not think they have been successful. 

Phrased in such a spelled-out-way makes it seem blatantly obvious.  But to do so elicits just how misguided our thinking and actions can become when we tack on a meaning to a word that doesn’t fit so well with our aims and goals.  Moving the meaning of the phrase ‘self-esteem’ closer to something like positive mental attitude, instead of something that would come after the experience of accomplishment and overcoming obstacles is like trying to get a chicken without the whole process of INCUBATING an egg.  Or like having the cart before the horse.

We gain more self-esteem when we are forced to make a larger estimate of ourselves based on the behavior, the acts, and the accomplishments that we have worked hard to make happen.

Self-esteem is not free.  But this is what the self-esteem movement attempted to do.  It was an experiment lacking thoughtfulness that asked the question: if we just hand out fake self-esteem for free, maybe it will trick kids into becoming the sort of people who become successful.

This begins to sound like: fake it till you make it.  But in the case of the self-esteem movement, the kids were not being told about the faking part.  The important difference is that someone who if faking it till they make it knows they are faking it.  Whereas kids influenced by the self-esteem movement risk being confused and even betrayed by the identity given to them when things don’t work out the way they want.

When it comes to self-esteem, we want to make estimates that are as close to accurate as possible.  Like a carpenter or painter making a cost estimate for a given project.  If the estimate is wildly off from the final cost, word will spread about their lack of accuracy and they will find less and less work.

As with self-esteem, we would do ourselves much good to be honest in our estimates.  Doing so provides valuable information and a clue about how to level ourselves up, so that the next estimate we make is much bigger, and such is the way that we

increase our self-esteem.

This episode references Episode 38: Confidence 2.0, Episode 129: Positive Mental Attitude is just First Gear, Episode 5: Incubation, and Episode 42: Level-Up.

PROGRESS OR PERFECTION?

September 16th, 2018

Perfection, as a modern concept is an asymptotic illusion.  Something that cannot be achieved, and yet something we spend an inordinate amount of time fussing about.  The obscene amount of time spent retaking selfies comes to mind as a particularly superficial attempt to achieve this illusion.

But the word perfect, if we look at it from an etymological and historical standpoint, simply means ‘completed’.

Alas, the word has mutated far beyond ‘completed’ into some kind of idealized and unattainable state.

It’s this imagined ideal that hinders many people.  So much so that many potentially great projects do not even begin to see the light of day.

Perhaps part of this reason is that we occasionally come across products of culture that we admire so much that we regard them as perfect, or at least so far away from what we imagine our own abilities can achieve that such a thing might as well be in the realm of perfection.  In all of these cases, we do not even get the montage of progress that lead to such a final result.  We only see what the creators wanted us to see.  We would do well to remember that even if we were privy to some kind of summary montage of progress, the montage is still false.  Only by going on a similar journey of progress and development can we get the most comprehensive and intimate view of all the imperfect efforts that were required to achieve the end product.

Progress merely means to move forward, deriving literally from, ‘to walk forward’.

If we wish to accomplish or complete anything, we would be much better served to concentrate all of our mental efforts on this second concept.  The idea of progress, or merely generating forward motion, or rather any motion at all.  Some progress may reveal that we are actually moving in the wrong direction, and even that revelation is far more productive than doing nothing at all because an mental obsession with perfection has our mind stuck in a RUT of circular thinking.

The first few efforts with regards to any project often shows just how out of touch our minds are with the reality of any given project.  Details we worried about can turn out to be nothing at all, while obstacles never imagined pop up and surprise us.

Any project, is a projection of our own mind upon reality.  To project something means to throw something forward.  The word means something very similar to progress, and this would do us well to remember.

We cast efforts upon reality and see how they land.  We tailor our next effort based on the impact our previous effort had, and when we have done this enough times so that reality has changed enough so as to look like what we initially imagined, then we might say that our work is completed.  Technically we could say that the result is perfect, merely because we succeeded in completing our efforts.  Of course almost no one would label a finished project as perfect, but it might do us some psychological good to haul the word back to its roots and do away with the modern idealized concept it now inhabits.

This new incarnation of the word perfect could very well be a categorical mistake.  One that has hindered untold numbers of people who have had an inkling of an idea that was never acted upon for fear of falling short of the ideal.

We must examine our own relationship to the word and pull out the screwdrivers and wrenches if necessary.  Perhaps even a sledgehammer.  It begs the question:

Can we have an unhealthy relationship to a word? 

If there’s any chance the answer is yes, then we might be best served to try and change that relationship. 

We may want to find some way to haul the word perfect a little closer to the word ‘completed’ in our mind.  Or we may want to forget about perfection all together.

Any attempt to subvert the concept of perfection will probably lead to some progress.

Progress that might even spread to all sorts of areas of our lives.

This episode references Episode 125: Rut, Episode 139: Regretting Categorical Mistakes, Episode 21: The Montage is False, and Episode 8: Tiny Steps and Leaps