EVOLUTION OF CONCLUSION

February 26th, 2022

Is it good to judge an evolving thing? Say for instance, a child, who is learning the ways of the world. Would it be good to lay some sort of conclusive judgement on this kid after they, say… whack their brother in the face for no reason whatsoever? Of course not. Only the most short sighted and callous adult would write the child off as violent. We intuitively understand that children will learn and improve.

What’s a bit odd is that people continue to change throughout adulthood, but we ignore this fact. Or, at the least, we don’t give it the same sort of importance that we do when we think of children. It’s true that people, in general seem to be less capable of change as time goes on, but no one really wakes up the same exact person they were on the previous day. We all change a little, even if it’s imperceptible. 

Other things that rapidly evolve seem to get the adult-treatment. Most novel forms of technology for example, are tried and regarded as either good or bad, which is again quite odd since innovation can change a piece of technology and improve it. The most basic form of this today is simply the software update. Incredibly, updates are supposed to improve things but a lot of people dread updates because things change and suddenly the tried and true way of using a piece of software seems no longer available. 

The idea that things keep static is a convenient falsehood. Cognitively it’s far less taxing to assume the world and the people in it aren’t as dynamic and changing as they actually are. Such dynamism is also out of sync with the static nature of words and the labels we create with them and slap on to different things: that person is a psycho, this app sucks. Well did you see the new update? Did you know that person was grieving and had almost no sleep during the last few days? Our labels for the world have to be constantly updated when new information arises, but this requires the actual information, which might not be available, and it requires a willingness and a desire to make the mental update. Neither of which always happen.

Perhaps religions have a concept of a ‘final judgement’ because it’s simply impossible to make a conclusive judgement while things are still in progress. Nuance is hard to catch on the fly while it changes, and the mind constantly yearns for a definitive last word. But the truth is it’s all just laziness. People dread the update of their own mind the same way they dread the new phone update. It’s pure laziness, because all these changes, all these updates, all the effort required to incorporate new information? It’ll lead to a better world, and a better experience - that is, if we’re willing to make the effort.

OUR MODERN REACH

February 24th, 2022

It’s a default feature of human attention to focus on the current negative aspect of reality. Given a picture of 99 smilie faces with one frown face, we will pick out that frown face far faster than if it has been 99 frown faces and one smilie. We are hardwired to be wary, and that it. Our wariness does not discriminate other than hovering up the negative to be dwelled upon. Our wariness takes no heed of the place of such negative material in a larger context. There simply is no larger context when attention is brought to bear on the negative.

This does not, and should not delegitimatize anything negative that actually is going on. But there is a useful hierarchy of questions to be asked, in order to refocus attention in the most useful way. Given some negative thing, the first question that should arise, is: do I have any direct influence on this issue or situation? 

If the answer is ‘no’, then this is the quick exit from concern. It’s not to imply that we don’t care about the issue, but if agency is limited to a scope that does not include the topic, then any more energy spent fretting over the issue is unnecessary anxiety. Mental health is a virtuous combination of agency and concern. If these two domains don’t have substantial overlap than the human mind is rendered incapacitated, paralyzed, and depressed. Our concern must be primarily on things that we have some degree of influence over.

Notice how the “News” delivers to one aspect of human nature, but not the other. The News feeds into our default tendency to root out and focus on the negative. But it does so by drawing from sources that are far beyond our scope of influence. It’s one thing for the president of a country to watch the news. It’s quite another for an average citizen to watch the same news. One person might be able to have influence, the other - not so much.

But. Perhaps in the age of social media this isn’t exactly the case any more. Do ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ and comments on a subject have some sort of effect?

Well, maybe. This vast majority of such social-media empowered influence is irrelevant. Most of what happens online actually leads to nothing. But, that being said, it’s still the place where a completely disparate group of people unbound by nationality, location or law can bind together with a cohesive opinion - and given enough people, that opinion can go viral. 

In rare circumstances, our sphere of influence extends beyond our personal agency. In normal circumstances, that’s a contradiction, but the internet provides counter-caveats to the usual song-and-dance of human interaction.

From a personal perspective, the isolationist policy of ignoring 99% of what is going on in the world is a useful and wise one, allowing for precious attention to be allocated to better regions of influence. But - while rare - the new tools of the last couple decades do offer interesting opportunities to reach out into the world. . .

SALARIED INCENTIVE

February 23rd, 2022

For all our gripe and balk when it comes to money, the concept of fungible value is still too conceptual, and in most cases, we just don’t get it. This likely seems absurd: money? We don’t get it? Are you kidding? Money makes the world go round. Sure it does - well sort of. Money as an incentive unto itself is highly conceptual and is always at least once removed in abstraction from a true incentive. Money in of itself is not the incentive, it is merely an avenue for other incentives which are not as difficult to fathom.

For most people money is a kind of ethereal chore. We are constantly taking out this garbage without taking the time to understand what’s behind the opal plastic of the bag we carry. Whatever it is, it’s somehow correlated to virtually every other part of life. 

Frugality and even greed affect money in inside-out ways. It’s by failing to interact with money we have that we end up saving it. In all other instances with money, we deplete it as a means to the ends of a different incentive. Such as an incentive to feel more relaxed: pay for a massage or a pedicure. And incentive to feel healthier: buy supplements or a fancy wearable for tracking sleep. An incentive to be perceived as wealthy? Buy an expensive car.

Money presents this counter-intuitive backfire if we try to apply the concept of an inceptive directly to money itself. The incentive is rarely if ever for the actual money, but for the things that are accessible through the conduit of a certain amount of money. Even the person who diligently and wisely saves and successfully invests does so with the imagined outcome that some day such money will come in very handy for other things. 

Upton Sinclair once said: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

This quote seems to give a lot of weight to the value of money, and this very sentence should give reason to pause because it sounds a bit funny. A lot of weight to the value of money? A little redundant, no? A salary in this case, and in most cases is a bundled set of other incentives that generally represent a person’s real life: paying for a place to live, the food they eat, the toys their kids play with, the clothes they wear. The incentive to have and provide all of these things runs very deep - and they existed long before we even invented money.

But we can have incentives that aren’t related to money. Nationalism, for instance, requires no money, but the ethereal social grist that makes up the fabric of socialism drives untold masses of people to engage in often extreme behavior - war.  This might seem correlated to money in that its conceptual, ethereal - more in the realm of thought than it has to do with the hard tacks of physical reality. But there’s an important difference.

Money has no identity. This is essential for its fungible quality to remain in tact. All incentive on the other hand entails a strong component of identity. Salary becomes a conduit and an avenue by which to express and maintain a certain identity - at least for components of that identity that require money. But the incentive structure of a person isn’t limited to what people can buy, thankfully, but also, the strange relationship that exists between incentives and money also means that by default we’re all quite untalented when it comes to building wealth.

NEVER TRUST THE WORDS

February 22nd, 2022

Never trust the words someone says. This isn’t to say that trusting someone is a bad idea - but to point out the disconnect between what they mean and what they say. We feel this on a personal level all the time. We have a sense, a notion, a ‘thought’, a feeling, and we endeavor to convey it, but upon hearing the sentences we utter we grit teeth thinking how far from the mark we hit.

So why don’t we apply this internal lesson to all that we hear from others. Why isn’t the built-in assumption that what we hear from others is at best just a hazy approximation of what they are trying to convey. But think about this a little more in depth: what exactly is attempting to come across with the sentences and paragraphs of others? Within each of us there is a unique internal environment that fluxes with misremembered pasts, edited constantly by evolving concepts - all of it tweaked by the color of emotion that is flooding the body and mind. 

We have far too much faith in the meaning of words. Even though, even with this topic there is so much shift and drift. Truth used to mean something objective, something immutable that we all collaborated to try and approximate. Now the word truth just means ‘strong opinion’, because the word ‘opinion’ lacked the intestinal fortitude of a word as magnificent as “Truth”. So it was co-opted. The medium through which we try to convey our messy shifting internal landscape is itself a messy shifting landscape.

The whole endeavor of communication can easily seem hopeless. Better to just keep your mouth shut. And quite honestly, in almost all situations, this is the wiser if not simply easier course of action. But to withdraw completely is a sin unforgivable. Paired with a judicious choice of when and where to inject one’s own faulty speech is the necessary issue of how to listen. Never trust the words, they are but a fuzzy approximation of what someone wishes to say. You have to venture beyond their words, taking the context they create with sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph and extrapolate an entire model of who this person is, where they have come from and what exactly it might be to be that person, right now, in that situation we witness them in. It’s apparently wise to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but can you become a mental model of your friend or your enemy? If you can model the mind of an enemy perfectly then you can predict their next move. And if you can model the mind of a friend, then you can love that individual with a greater sense of compassion than most ever dream of. But with either the adversarial or the friendly, the medium of expression has to be taken with a flexible margin of error, one that can stretch to the shape of an accruing model of the person. A colloquial way of phrasing this is to take a person with a grain of salt. To allow for wiggle-room, to allow for the verbal and behavioral foibles of a person to live comfortably within the concept of who they might be.

Never trust the words, not because their intent is to lie, but because the words themselves will always - to some extent - fail the intentions of the one who speaks, just as your words will always fail you to some palpable degree.

ENJOY THE WAIT

February 21st, 2022

Red lights and check-out lines. Waiting rooms and response times. For whatever cursed reason, the default response to forced waiting is frustration, annoyance - even anger. And almost no reflection is devoted to this extremely common part of life. People in their last decades can get just as pissed off at an unwanted wait as a toddler who can’t get their food fast enough.

If we could only see these parts of a person’s life, the only conclusion to be drawn would be that such a person simply can’t wait for life to be over.

And yet life is short. An old man once said to me: when you are young, time is like the distance between telephone poles, but when you get to be my age, it starts looking like a picket fence.

It’s an equally strange phenomenon that time seems to speed up as more of it passes us by, and yet despite all this, a slow check-out line can bring absolute ruin to a person’s mood and mind.

Is it possible to find red lights meditative? Can a waiting room be anything like sitting at the beach? Can a checkout line be an opportunity to realize anew just how improbable our entire existence is?

Certainly. These are all advertisements for a meditation practice - something which comes online in all of these scenarios - at least for the well practiced individual.

Many of the arguments for starting a meditation practice are touted as altruistic: it makes you a better person, less of an asshole to friends and family. Do them a favor. But a well honed meditation practice does first and foremost improve the quality of life for the meditator. 

Simply imagine if all of the frustrating pockets of time in life that normally inspire a low-grade rage could all be replaced with that overwhelming feeling of relaxation and pleasure that comes after a much needed sigh and a breath of fresh air?  This is an upgrade that money simply can’t buy, and which at the end of life is simply priceless when looking back.

It’s strange that in a culture that goads us to use time wisely, that we are so prone to use it so poorly when a pocket of it presents itself. Even if it means “using” that time in the simplest way possible: life grows shorts as the seconds tick by; best to enjoy the wait.