A LUCILIUS PARABLE: END OF A CHAPTER

April 25th, 2021

Lucilius let himself into his apartment, lifted his work bag and placed it on the kitchen island.  The place was quiet and he was tired after a long day.  His work was going well but it had grown exhausted with it.  

He pulled open a fridge door and looked with lacklustre let-down at the collection of condiments, and the snacked left-overs from a few days ago.  He hadn’t been to the grocery store, and he was too tired to go now.  

He ordered more delivery and poured himself a glass of wine and sat quietly while he waited.  He wondered quietly, sensing some lack, some discrepancy that seemed unacknowledged in him.  But as always his thoughts drifted back to his work, as though through a kind of default and habit.  Already he was thinking about what tomorrow would bring, the issues to address and possible solutions that might speed the whole process up.  

The buzzer broke his tired work reverie.  He put down the glass and went to the door.  Dinner too, was quiet, barely enjoyed for thoughts about his work, but he didn’t notice, unaware of how bent his mind had become on the subject.

After packing up the left overs Lucilius followed his well worn, daily path, as though he were running on a track, from the bathroom to bed.  And there he picked up his journal.  He’d kept it for many years, and the volumes were lined up on his bookshelf.  He picked up his pen and flipped through the thick book with a casual thought that he’d very soon be on the next one.  He bought them in bulk a few years ago and numbered them for the future.  As the pages thipped and cascaded from his thumb to rest open, they ran out.  The book was full, and Lucilius turned the last page to find a note scrawled there, one he had written years ago and had completely forgotten about.

It read: Dear Lucilius, no matter the composition of your life right now, pick up only what you need, and leave.  No questions, no plans, just do it.  I promise to you that I will do this.

Lucilius read it several times, blinking and without thinking.  He looked off, trying to remember writing the note.  It was in his hand but he couldn’t for the life of him remember.  He read it a few more times, and slowly a smile began to lift his face.

He threw the covers back and got up.  He opened the closet and pulled out an old hiking backpack and started packing.

LIFE'S GEARS

April 24th, 2021

It feels far more satisfying to knock off a whole bunch of things from the to-do list than just one.  It’s similar to the difference between reading a bunch of short chapters versus one long chapter.  Though the same amount of time may have passed, one instance is more varied in composition and because of this it feels longer, as opposed to doing one thing all day.  Though doing one repetitive thing might drag in the moment, at the end of the day there’s often an eerie wonder about where it all went.

These points about a single day extrapolate to weeks, months, year, and a whole lifetime.  Doing the same thing for a decade makes it feel as though the decade flashed by when it finally is over.  Switch jobs a dozen times, take on different projects, and then it’s as though that decade was packed.  And there’s probably a fairly straight forward explanation for the different experiences of time.

Doing the same thing repeatedly requires less and less mental effort as we get used to the process.  In essence, we don’t have to pay attention to things that are automatic, which is what happens with anything done repeatedly for enough time.  Imagine that, just not paying attention to life as it’s passing you by because you’re so used to what’s going on, and what will happen tomorrow that you don’t really even have to pay attention to it.

The new, the different, the thing we have to figure out, learn and don’t at first understand - these require attention without choice.  Learning something new is one the easiest way to get a visceral sense of the moment, though it’s often not a pleasant one because the default state of learning is confusion - if you aren’t confused and understand it, then you’ve already learned it. Learning on some degree has to happen when we switch things up and work on something new.  Of course this functions on a spectrum.  The more radically different the new work, the more of a dog-ear that will mark in the pages of your life, and in some sense, dog-earring one’s life is the point here because it’ll ensure that life feels full when it’s finally coming to a close.

Perhaps this explains why time feels so long as a child, and seems to speed up as we get older.  As children everything is new.  There’s so much to learn, figure out and explore that a single day can feel like a book of a thousand chapters, and then as we get older the variety of experience radically decreases with jobs that go on repeatedly in much the same way for years and decades with almost no real change.

A fulfilling life is all about switching gears, marking time out episodes in an adventure.  Notice how little repetition exists in all the adventure stories of our heroes.  An adventure story never stays in one gear for the whole time, it’s constantly switching and mixing up. The good news is that as the age of human mechanized labor gets replaced by robots, this will unpleasantly force people into a position that requires being able to switch gears fluidly and more often.  While it sounds less stable, it’s more agile, which is more able in the long run, and more importantly, more memorable.

PERMISSION TO LIVE

April 23rd, 2021

You have a ticket to ride by default.  And yet many go about life as though they are waiting for permission to get aboard life and take it for a spin.  This is likely, at least in part, caused by a modern industrial education system where children are berated with a condition where only one course of action gets the good grade.  And then when school is over, the rules change: suddenly success is not a rigid set of directions, it becomes a creativity exercise with an infinite set of possibilities.  It requires a whole new way of thinking.

Kids are remarkable in this respect.  Kids don’t have to goad themselves to play, they don’t need to plan it, they don’t worry, they just do, and most importantly, they don’t feel like they need permission. This freedom is lost along the way for so many, and those who do manage to harness the creative potential of life as an adult are either people who managed to hold on to the child they once were, or it’s rediscovered.  Unfortunately, both are rare since most go about their days in much the same way as yesterday, coming up with ideas for what could be, what might be possible, but staying in a perpetual state of stalemate, waiting always for permission that no one has the power to give.

So much modern anxiety is wrapped up in saying or doing the wrong thing, perpetually, obsessively thinking about those embarrassing moments in the past, the ones that no one else remembers.  They amount as most to a genuine mistake, and this is exactly what school trains us to judge our worth by.  Our grades are determined by how many mistakes have been made, and so to it seems is the mental health of many people.  Could just be coincidence, but the stark difference between this state of affairs and how we approach the same issues as children makes for a palpable argument that there’s more than just correlation at work here.

The grudging realist might try to think there way out of this trap by accepting that mistakes will happen, but it’s more than this, mistakes are actually very important and it’s good that they happen.  The process functions best when the whole of it is embraced.  A permission to live is really a person, and even an enthusiasm to dive into a pool of action with the confident expectation that it won’t all go well.

The perfect grade is an ideal that only a few can really achieve, and yet, despite it’s lack of relevance to the way life works after school we’re all goaded to strive for that ideal, often painfully, like a Sisyphus who can never rest, always chasing the asymptote of an ideal.  On some level we all know this is bullshit, otherwise everyone would be a better student and there would be some serious skin in the game that activates the sort of primal motivation that makes failure a non-option.  Instead we are worn down into a mediocre and tremulous sense of doing anything.

The secret is realizing that the only person to give you permission to live is the one waiting to hear it.

STATE CHANGE FEAR

April 22nd, 2021

Any radical departure from habitual living is bound to provoke a little fear.  When that fear, or the experience of it is seen as positive, we call it excitement, and when negative, it’s nervous, stressed or worried.  Our emotional valence isn’t actually as important as is the fact that anticipation of something different simply creates a rise in emotional intensity.

We have to wonder, is it the new circumstance that generates this blend of excitement and anxiety, or is there some mechanism in our minds that is trying to ensure that we stay right where we are, doing the same thing day in and day out?  In neuroscience, this mechanism might be called the ‘Default Mode Network’ which is a spread of about 12 brain regions that, among many other things, keep the hamster wheel of the mind spinning just like it did yesterday.    The unnerving anticipation of the future may be a kind of survival cry related to this network, While of course this is just conjecture, why wouldn’t a state of mind fear ‘death’ in the same way all living things do.  Is a state of mind not a living thing?  In some sense, we get to experience a kind of reincarnation while living, all we have to do is change our circumstance.  We experience the anxiety of death in miniature, and when the mind resettles as it reacts anew to a new situation, we become someone slightly different, and in this sense, our body hosts this little reincarnation of the mind.  The description isn’t really meant to be taken literally, but only to prime the discussion for what we might be able to learn from the way people die, and how that can effect everyday life.  We can, for instance compare the bitter and scared person who clings to life with the person who has accepted what will happen and approaches it with curiosity.  The two perspectives don’t just apply to death, they form a fairly accurate depiction of the two main ways that people approach or resist new experiences.

The point is: how much worse is a newly imposed circumstance that is less than ideal if we resist and begrudge it the whole way?  As opposed to simply accepting it and moving forward.  Which disposition arms us with a better ability to try and improve things?

It even goes the other way: is the vacation better or worse with the days, weeks and months spent eagerly anticipating it before hand?  Or is the time less likely to live up to our amped up expectations because of all this jazzed up anticipation?

A BLEND OF OPTIMISM & PESSIMISM

April 21st, 2021

A healthy perspective is one composed of both optimism and pessimism.  But this is putting it crudely.  Each word carries too much of an emotional connotation about someone’s disposition toward life.  It’s often stated that pessimists are more in touch with reality, and yet, it’s the optimists that actually get new things done.  One would imagine that the pessimist, with their superior model of reality would be more adept at making the possible real, but clearly this isn’t the case, and this is at the core of the problem with these two words being too laden with emotional resonance.  Imagine for a moment what it means to be an optimist or a pessimist without the emotional valence that’s associated with it, what would this look like?

Another way to look at these perspectives is to think about worst case scenarios and best case scenarios.  The optimist aims for the second one, the best case scenario, and of course risks great disappointment when it doesn’t happen.  Although, appropriately enough, a true optimist isn’t likely to be all that fazed by such set backs, which is at the core of optimism’s utility.  The pessimist, on the other hand looks for the worst case scenario, and this is tremendously useful, because if the worst case scenario can be accurately modelled, then measures can be taken to ensure that it doesn’t happen.  A combination of these two specific features is the sweet spot to develop: imagining, understanding and protecting against the worst case scenario in order to free up opportunity to safely aim for the stars.

The problem with the emotional association with the words ‘pessimism’ and ‘optimism’ is that in order to combine the best features of both perspectives, one has to let go of any emotional intensity.  Only from a relatively neutral emotional standpoint can a person see both the worst case scenario and a much better potential future.  Emotional intensity on either side of this dichotomy blinds us from the benefits of the other.  It’s not so much how we look at the world, but how we feel while we’re looking.  Emotion infuses and tints all aspects of reality, making even the most beautiful sunny day repugnant to the person unwilling to enjoy it, or the a dreary and wet camping trip a small slice of heaven to the person who is looking for details in experience to enjoy.  While one of these is certainly far more preferable for normal, everyday living, both become a hinder when we try to assess something new about the future, and what we might be able to do with it.  The key is to keep a foot firmly planted on the ground of reality while stepping up into the unknown, imagining a step that we might be able to build.