THE ANTI-ROUTINE

January 16th, 2021

The end of an unproductive day can drag right past a decent bedtime for no obvious nor good reason.  The rebellious mind keeps scrolling or whiling away time with more unproductive pomp.  We add to a bad day by indulging in the opportunity to make it worse, and inevitably tomorrow is already at a deficient with a poor foundation of sleep.

Most of us have been there.  It’s too late to actually start anything of substance.  The day is already a throw-away.  So why can it be so difficult to actually throw the day away and get on with sleep and welcome the fresh slate of tomorrow?

An unproductive day is an insult to personal agency.  It’s an affront to our ability to seize control of our life and make something of it.  More than anything, it’s evidence that we don’t have control.  And it’s this helpless and even desperate feeling that we rebel against by trying to stretch the day out longer.  With so little will power, the power to further ruin the day becomes the only way we can express our sense of agency.  When we’d be better served to just call it a day and try and forget it and move on, we finally persevere, but only to our detriment.  This is a sort of anti-routine, and the procrastination it represents only fortifies how powerful a routine can be.

Pushing through the routine of work, even when it yields nothing but frustration, new problems and further blocks to imagined progress, we can, at the end of the day still rest with the notion that we gave it a shot.  Beyond this, there’s the realization that all those new problems, frustrations and blocks would have still been waiting there tomorrow if they hadn’t been discovered today.  The flimsy logic of procrastination indulges in the idea that something might be better handled at a later time when conditions are better.  Not only is this circular logic by way of being a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it creates a fantasy of progress, making it out to be smoother and easier than it actually will be, if only we just time it right and have all the predatory details in order.  Fact is, unfortunately, the problems of progress only get kicked down the road of finite time, leaving less of it available to use in order to solve those problems.

Procrastination, inaction, or progress and action - both sides of this divide snowball.  They gain momentum through the day, and by the end of it, one barrels onward, cutting into sleep to ruin tomorrow, while the other enables it’s own end with a decisive call to actually end the day.  Routine perpetuates further routine, whereas the missed opportunity to use that routine  breeds a rebellion to keep that routine at bay even longer.

UNSOLVED WEAR

January 15th, 2021

It can be exciting to take those first few swings at a problem, full of hope that an answer might be near by, and if only delivered, rearranged, clicked into place, the problem evaporates and instantaneously we live in a better universe.  Of course, not all solutions yield to those first few attempts, and some may elude us for quite some time - time that grows disheartening as we struggle to endure.

It’s as though there is a timer, like a time bomb on our ability to persevere.  Slowly we lose steam about our prospects and our optimism that we might bring about that marginally better universe.  As we search for a solution, more problems seem to pop up, and it becomes necessary to solve totally unexpected problems just to further the course toward a solution that might not even work out.  Like a prospector digging holes here and there hoping to hit gold, or a kind searching for a playmate talented in the ways of hide and seek, our psychology can be quick to let the most useful of emotions deflate, giving room and rise to those that are ultimately, self defeating.

We wear ourselves down with the experience of not knowing.  The solution, wherever it may be has no feeling nor any real connection to us, especially our subjective experience of the hunt.  Like the set of keys we’ve searched the house twice over for, it just sits there, waiting with infinite patience.  And that’s the difference, problems are infinitely patient, but we are not.  Many of the most wonderful solutions that have aided humanity came about after a very long time and after a great number of people took swipes at the issue with hope of finding a solution.

The good news is that problems, well solved, only need to be solved once, and those solutions, once found, can be forever uncovered.  This is also the process of learning, which is primarily an experience of confusion and frustration.  Our ability to understand is a function of our strategy surrounding confusion.  If our strategy enables us to enjoy confusion, then we call that experience curiosity.  But in many cases the frustration wears down the mind and the heart, until, we give up.  The solution to this problem of endurance and wear is to merely become aware of it.  Once the pattern is laid bare, it’s far easier to just keep pushing toward the goal.  As with anything it takes practice, but with a few difficult grinds to prove the solution, we can being to turn a curious eye to the issue and wonder how long the unknown will manage to elude our effort.

FALLING BEHIND

January 14th, 2021

Having a daily practice that compounds output is an experience replete with lessons to learn.  It’s often how books are written, how bodies are sculpted and how mastery is formed.  None of these things can be done any a single heroic effort. ( Granted, perhaps a book can be written in all one go, but this is exceptionally rare - so rare in fact, that it’s negligible. Most books take a tremendous amount of time consistently spread out in smaller units.)

The tremendous result that can occur from a compounding daily practice often feels quite disconnected from the actual activity.  Writing a fat book doesn’t seem like it would feel like a 40 minute session of writing, but that’s exactly what it is when repeated enough times.

One insidious lesson to learn from the daily practice is encapsulated in the stress of falling behind.  Tinkered Thinking is behind - quite behind on writing and posting.  Now regardless of the cause, be it a worthy one like a high velocity project dropping out of the sky, or simply laziness (in the case of Tinkered Thinking it’s luckily the former) the mounting anxiety of a good practice falling behind is something to be thankful for.  In some sense it’s a horror of something good slipping away.  And the more it’s allowed to slip away, the more it seems like it’ll require that mythical and impossible heroic feat of catching up all in one swoop.  

For small things, like a blog and a podcast that’s not out of the range of possibility.  The technical record for Tinkered Thinking in terms of number of episodes produced in a single day is somewhere around ten (in harried anticipation of a planned vacation), but that sort of record is not one worth trying to break.  It defeats the virtue of a daily practice to catch up or get ahead.  The point is to live one great day, everyday and the daily practice is what contributes to that day being great.  Otherwise we are talking about unsatisfactory obligation.

We cannot catch up on days lost to a lack of being seized.  Though we can catch up on the quota of a daily practice, the time and those days are forever lost.  Falling behind isn’t really something that can actually be caught up - it’s not falling behind at all, it’s missing out entirely.  Facing that bitter pill can help ensure that when tomorrow comes, it doesn’t just slide by.

DIGITAL CARTOGRAPHY

January 13th, 2021

We are spatial animals, not encyclopedic.  It’s no surprise that physical health - specifically, how we move or don’t move our body has a tremendous impact on brain health, and these effects only become more and more exaggerated in later years.  The brain is not an island, as much as it can sometimes feel like that: a cage for the mind, strangely separated from the outside world.  We remember the dance but fail to recall the instructions.  We know where that lovely hole-in-the-wall is but the address escapes us.  We operate through narratives of space and its geography.

Oddly, and probably sadly, the internet has no geography, at least not in the sense that it can be visualized and navigated.  This is despite the language we use around the internet:

Where do I go to see that?

How do I navigate this site?

On an actual website, the problem is concrete, and therefore less of a problem.  Webpages have actual geography because they exist as shapes on a screen.  The literal analogy to geography is all the more appropriate when the occasional problem of redesign is encountered.  Few things are more obnoxious than looking for a button that is no longer where we remember it to be.  Just imagine trying to commute to work via a different route everyday.  In fact, that scenario doesn’t even encapsulate the problem very well because the point of departure and the destination are still in the same absolute relative position.  More appropriate would be: imagine commuting to a different place every day… without directions.  

This is why changing an icon or an app or webpage layout can be so infuriating for people who visit regularly.  There’s another vestige of our geographical minds: we do not see websites, we visit them.  But answer this question:  Where is Reddit in relation to Wikipedia?

This is an impossible question to answer.  Describing the spatial relationship between two words in a dictionary is easier despite the oddity of the task.  There is no way to see the internet as a whole as it relates to itself, the way we can overlook a city from the top of a tall building.  The internet is encyclopedic, but it’s an encyclopedia that has no definite order.  It appears only in the order that we stumble through it.

There is one area of life that has a similar geography or non-geography that is identical to the internet, and that is the mind itself.

Thoughts have no order or spatial relation to one another.  One thought might remind us of another related thought, but this isn’t an explicit spatial relation.  It’s the equivalent of a hyperlink on a webpage.  The two are associated but the association is dimensionless.  

If time is taken to watch the manner of thought closely, the experience of moving from one thought to the next isn’t like moving at all, it’s straight up teleportation.  Even the Television has more spatial structure than the internet.  Everything exists on a channel and those channels have a numerical order.  But the internet is a sea with no bottom and no surface.  We can easily forget that a website exists just as we can fail to remember that great idea we had while waking up but which now escapes the conscious gaze.

Imagine, however, if every time you visited Twitter you had to pass by a meditation app in order to get there, because it was just on the way.  (This might sound like an advertisement, but advertisements are far more fickle and prickly.  If there’s any mental equivalent of advertising, it’s probably that negative self talk, or that evil demon trying to lure you back into bad behavior.). The closest thing we have to this is the placement of apps on a phone.  Notice how we rarely forget where  on the phone a particular app is, but we can forget about a favourite blog that was never bookmarked.  One exists in space, the other only exists in time, and time has a geography more akin to thought than the linear order we try to associate with it.  As much as things may proceed one after another, we don’t remember them that way.  The past is mostly relegated to the same soup as most thought.

The irony of digital geography is that all of this stuff does actually exist within a complicated set of relationships that even do exist spatially, in the physical world, but these microscopic configurations are meaningless to us, meaningful only to the innards of a computer.

As the power of hardware increases and areas like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality become more of a…. reality, It’s worthy if not just merely fun to imagine the entire digital world spatialized.  What if Twitter were suddenly a landscape of hills and mountains, each representing it’s own niche as with Money Twitter or VC Twitter or Tesla Twitter.  Those with the most followers in each of these niches have clambered their way past others by communal merit to top so they can be seen and heard by all who gravitate to that highpoint.  

Scrolling then is a bit like a high-speed flyby through the valleys and canyons created by these voiced peaks.

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that it’s so easy to get lost in these digital realms.  Like an IKEA which has specifically designed their store to be a maze that requires seeing everything in order to escape, the digital world is a place with no landmarks, and no exit signs.

Putting down the phone or getting off the computer is a bit like trying to wake up from a dream on command. It’s a skill more than it is a reliable set of directions, and perhaps this is because - like a dream - there is no definitive and reliable spatial geography.  The “way out” entails a wholly different reality.  It’s not just teleporting, it’s more akin to sobering up at will or remembering that good idea that escapes the mind.

In the absence of landmarks and exits, the experience of the digital world highlights more than anything, the importance of attentional navigation.  Like a compass that orients itself based on something that exists on a far larger magnitude than trees, rocks and other landmarks, our attention can be trained to orient in relation to itself, examining it’s own direction and content and placing on offer the chance to choose, something different.

GEARS OF INCENTIVE

January 12th, 2021

Large projects can slow and stall.  The enormity of the task paired with the agonizingly distant incentive of life where the project has been realized can make the going slow, and slower.  The marathon can turn into a race that seems to take longer and longer as each step gets shorter and takes more time.

Just as it’s wise to work up to large projects by chunking the necessary learning with smaller more bite-sized projects, it can be just as useful and invigorating to pause that huge project in order to sprint on something smaller and easier.

A drastic switch of gears can be a reminder that those smaller ones for accelerating still exist.  This applies on multiple levels.  An hour and a half of focused work often gets far more done than a full day of distracted swings at the goal.  

Even evolution works in a similar way.  We tend to think of evolution as this gradual process that occurs over the course of tens of thousands of years, but in fact the evolution of organism occurs in fits and spurts, with long periods of stagnant morphology.  Usually it’s a sudden change in the environment that necessitates this jump in evolution.  Suddenly the temperature rises, or falls, and most of the population dies off, unable to cope with the new situation.  But a few outliers who have just the right cocktail of genes and mutations survive and eventually thrive, giving rise to a new direction in the species.

Self-motivation boils down to a curation of incentivizing emotions.  But it can be incredibly difficult to constantly bombard that internal mental environment in ways that charge anew those always deflating feelings of determination and ambition.  But just as with the organism evolving in response to situation, we can consciously place ourselves in a new situation to stimulate an evolution in the emotions that incentivize and motivate us.  Whether this be as simple as taking on a short but high-intensity project, or even just going for an hard workout, there are many ways to engineer the conditions for the mind that we need in order to move forward.  What’s important to realize is that the mind isn’t always capable of engineering it’s own conditions alone, but it is always possible to figure out ways to provoke the environment in ways that poke back.