REDUCING DEPENDENCIES

December 1st, 2020

Freedom has many meanings.  For some it’s a freedom from some kind of constraint or pressure.  For others it’s a freedom to do something - kind of agency.  The two often go hand-in-hand.  One constraint often limits an ability.  Those with fewer constraints or dependencies often have the freedom to do more.  But what exactly is a dependency?

There is the literal use, as in, a dependent, like a child or a sick loved one who needs to be cared for.  Such adventures in love and compassion take time, energy and money.  If the child grows up or the ill loved one recovers, these dependents graduate to being otherwise.  But what about permanent dependencies, like oxygen.  It’s certainly non-negotiable whether someone can be dependent on oxygen or not.  We need that little molecule to help burn our own energy in order to do anything.  Oxygen is a basic input, and needing it isn’t so much a dependency as it is a necessity - perhaps a worthy distinction to lay out.  

Sleep is another dependency, though many people try to function as though negotiation on this one has hours and hours of wiggle room.

Strangely, a necessity like sleep often gets short-changed for other dependencies that are not necessities.  A penchant to scroll social media, for example.  This can easily become a dependency and it’s a well-entrenched one for many people.  It apparently degrades sleep quality, if only by being a reason to stay up a little later when the brain could be getting a few more minutes (or hours) in repair mode.  The juxtaposition is apt to suss out an important distinction:  many dependencies feel like necessities, and our behaviour honors the feeling, not the fact.  This is precisely how priorities get out of whack and incentives drive us to self-destructive places.  

The difference is a hard one to parse.  For example, much if not most of the food eaten is unnecessary, but it certainly feels necessary when the hunger hormone Ghrelin is running high and suddenly we hear ourselves say the words “I’m starving!”   Granted, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that quite literally no person in the modern world who says these words is actually starving.  Even someone who is relatively lean can go quite a long time without food before it actually becomes a problem.  But of course, it never feels like this.

The task of reducing unnecessary dependencies is counter-intuitive and it requires an intellectual faith in the facts of the situation.  In order to pull of this trick, it’s a matter of confronting the feelings of the situation, and regulating them.  For the unmindful person, this is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.  And the rampant infection of so many unnecessary dependencies should go to show just how few people have the mindful capacity to observe, parse, and regulate their emotions on such simple subjects like the kind and quantity of food, sleep, and technological engagement.  This lack of mindfulness is made even more distinct by the fact that most people know these simple facts about getting more sleep, eating a better selection of food, and cutting down on the zombie-scrolling.  We may have the capacity for rationality, but our behavior is often anything but.  Our behavior is tipifyied mostly by a reaction to the moment and the current stimuli and state of the body.  Any quick reaction simply doesn’t have the time for rationality.  There’s simply no time to actively think about whether it’s a good idea to pick up that phone and check social media when there’s a microsecond of distraction from the current task.  It just happens because that’s how we feel.  The rational decision to do otherwise quite literally requires a few more seconds than we are in the habit of giving such reactions.  The difference might seem trivial but it’s essential: it requires a couple of seconds to engage that dialogue with one’s self and ask: do I really want to do that right now?

LIMBIC FRICTION

November 30th, 2020

Lack of motivation, procrastination and general laziness is a kind of friction.  Appropriate considering the root of the word motivation is the same as motion, and friction is what hinders movement.  Buried within the divide between the cortex and the limbic system is a border similar to that which exists between objects that slide, or don’t slide.  This border is where we experience that obnoxious disconnect between all the grand plans we gleefully think about and the actual drive to get up and go do those things, it’s called Limbic Friction - or at least, this is how Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has termed it.

The interesting thing about friction in the real world is that the more that friction is engaged over time, the less that friction becomes.  Of course, this doesn’t hold for everything, but we do see it a lot.  Stone steps wear smooth after enough treading feet.  An old piece of clothing becomes soft from use.  River stones grow smooth and round.

The same phenomenon occurs psychologically.  The more we push against that limbic friction - that resistance to do things, the less friction we experience later.  For example, doing something difficult in the morning, like taking an ice cold shower actually makes it easier to do other things later in the day.  We tend to think of it differently - that we only have so much energy and we’re best to expend it on the right things, but it’s the opposite with limbic friction.  The more we push ourselves to do - especially the difficult things, the easier everything else becomes.  In essence, we can make that transitional phase between inactivity and actually getting something done smoother by exercising that transition, and similar to weight training - the harder the better.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ONE STEP AT A TIME

November 29th, 2020

A little girl watched in a trance, lulled by the rhythm and click of Lucilius’s chisel and hammer.  Slowly stone crumbled away from the chisel’s edge as it bumped along, pulling a new surface, new planes to catch the light for new form.  Lucilius was roughing out a bust on commission in his work yard, and the little girl had halted her meander to watch.  

She slowly entered his work yard and took steps nearer to get a better look.

“How do you know when to stop?”

His working reverie broken, Lucilius noticed the little girl for the first time.

“That’s a good question,” Lucilius admitted, looking back at his sculpture, a bit surprised he’d never heard the matter phrased so clearly.  “It certainly is a bit of an art to figure out when you’ve arrived when you’re headed for a place no one has ever been.”

The little girl took a few steps closer to look at an eye in the sculpture that was far closer to completion than the rest.  It looked as though there were someone buried in the stone, peering out.  She held the gaze of the statue - an unwinnable contest that she quickly abandoned to look at Lucilius again.  

“So how do you know?”

Lucilius took a deep breath, wiping his forehead with a forearm.

“Well, the farther I go, the less progress I make.  In fact, the farther I go, the less progress is possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the beginning,” Lucilius said, switching out his chisel for a larger one and raising it to a rough part of the stone, “I take off big chunks.”  

He swung the hammer and chipped off a hunk that fell heavy to the ground. 

“But as I get closer to where I think the surface might be, I have to go slower, and take off less.  But also, the further I go the better idea I have of where I’m going,”  he paused.  “Here, let’s have you try it.”

He handed the chisel and hammer to the girl and they were far too heavy.  Lucilius wrapped his hands over hers and lifted them to the stone and gently tapped them to chip the stone.  The girl was  mesmerized  by the work. 

When they finished the girl shook her hands, trying to shake out the little pain from the reverberating metal.

“So you don’t know when to stop?”

“I know when I get there.  I just don’t know ahead of time.”

The girl looked a little confused.  Lucilius smiled and stared off into the bright sky a moment before he hunkered down to talk to the girl at her own level. 

“It’s a bit like life.  You don’t know where you’re going in life do you?” 

The girl shook her head.

“But you’ll know where you are when you get there, right?”

A smile slowly grew on the girl’s face.

“Maybe,” she said.

Lucilius smiled back.  “Life is a bit like carving stone.  You get a better sense of where you’re going as you go."

ADAPTIVE BOREDOM

November 28th, 2020

Few people who haven’t trained for it can stand, let alone enjoy a few quiet minutes alone.  Particularly if it’s unknown how long the quiet and the loneliness will last.  The phone gets pulled out instead, the podcast gets turned on, the feeds are scrolled, email, texts - we now carry the ultimate cornucopia of stimulation with us wherever we go.  One would think that we’ve finally conquered boredom, that it has been forever banished to the annals of the past.  But this is certainly far from the truth.

Boredom has a strange and unappreciated utility.  To sit down and ply one’s own mind with single focus upon a task is, somewhat boring before that subtle moment arrives when a sense of flow overwhelms the consciousness.  The weird juxtaposition begs to wonder: what exactly is boredom?

Being in a flow state isn’t just productive, it’s fun.  It can be incredibly rewarding, so why is it that we’re not always on the look out to try and dive into a spell of it?  How is that work can be boring - even work that we generally claim to like, and yet something can flip and suddenly the subjective experience becomes quite the opposite?  This is perhaps a question that’s impossible to answer with what we currently know, but our penchant for distraction has some likely evolutionary roots.

If an animal is single-mindedly focused on a task with no tendency or ability to be distracted from that task, then it becomes very very easy for a predator to sneak up on that animal and get an easy lunch.  It’s likely that all such animals actually did become lunch, and those who were a little bit easier to distract noticed that predator in time to get away with their life, even if their task was left unfinished.  Our penchant for distraction, whether it’s aided by the vibrant juvenile colors of a superphone or if it’s just our own internal pressure to switch tasks, the tendency might have some deep roots in survival.

The Darwinian world of natural selection doesn’t really optimize for the deeply contemplative creature, but civilization rewards for it, and it's only had cultural pressures to select for it.  Those pressures are tepid compared to the brutalist culling of natural selection.  It’s a wonder that we have the capacity at all to sit and work with single-minded focus of flow for hours and hours, blocking out all sorts of things, things that could potentially be dangers.  If anything it’s likely that attention is operating on a few stratified levels that can maintain no crossover.  Typing away in a café, it’s not difficult to get into a flow state, but if a car accident happens outside or if someone starts screaming at the barista, everyone is going to notice, flow state or not.

Attention might be thought of as a sort of pie that always has at least a couple slices.  One of those slices was cut permanently, long ago, and is always scanning for danger.   Our ability to pay attention after that is likely determined by how many of the remaining slices we can herd together onto the same topic. 

Now if those remaining slices of attention have absolutely no capacity to endure boredom, how likely is it that someone can get into a flow state?  Certainly such an individual has the capacity to be transfixed and hypnotized in order to avoid boredom, and if anything, a capacity to endure boredom determines the barrier to entry for deep focus.  The transfixion of scrolling a feed on a phone is due to a pleasure adaptation.  We get all these tiny dopamine hits as we search and discover for the new.  But hedonic adaptation occurs.  The dopamine response lessens, so we need more.  And more.  And soon enough, our incessant need for pleasure renders a person completely incapable of enduring boredom.  The phrasing here is hyperbolic, surely, but not entirely.  

Difficult work, especially learning or solving a hard problem is the exact opposite of the stream of dopamine hits that populate most of our phone usage.  Difficult work isn’t just boring, it can be painful - at least at the start when the experience is likely accompanied with confusion and frustration.  

But that adaptive change works both ways.  Just as pleasure calls for more pleasure as it’s intensity dulls, so too is our capacity for boredom adaptive: the more boredom that is endured, willingly and with effort, the easier it becomes to handle that boredom.  Eventually an individual can thrive in it by meeting that barrier to entry for deep work more often, and breaking through quicker in order to make the time count.

HIDDEN PRACTICE

November 27th, 2020

It’s just like riding a bicycle, but why?  Some things certainly aren’t like riding a bicycle. Don’t solve a calculus problem for a decade and it’s not going to be suddenly obvious when one finally comes along (if it ever does). Most of the time, such experiences are more about a process of solution.  It’s not just how did I do this back then? It’s how did I figure this out back then?  Strangely, the process of discovery often provides a better way to wedge into the issue, perhaps because it’s a story and it simply has more potential points of memory when compared to the final conclusion.  Remember one aspect of learning the skill and adjacent realizations are close on both sides of the timeline, and then it becomes like knocking down old sticky dominos until we’ve got it figured out again.  But what about that bicycle?  Why does that stick with us?

There’s an eerie similarity between the phenomenon of beginner’s luck and the ability to get on a bicycle after years of no riding and pedal away without an issue.  If we don’t practice, how do we maintain the ability?  As with everything that involves the brain and our abilities, you either use it, or lose it.

The trick is that we are always practicing the key skill for riding a bike, but that practice is hidden.  Every day that we get up and walk or run or climb or jump or simply move the body successfully through space, we are exercising the  Vestibular system.  This is an ingenious little piece of the inner ear that looks like three rings glued together at the same point, but all turned at (roughly) right angles to one another.  Altogether they form a trimensional organ that registers movement and acceleration in the three spacial dimensions.  This is exactly what you need to stay balanced on a moving bike, and luckily, it’s getting it’s practice and exercise while doing anything else that requires balance.  

Beginner’s luck, or what we might think of as innate talent probably functions on a similar trick a lot of the time.  It should be little surprise when someone who is really good at water skiing finally tries the same on snow only to discovery they have a knack for it.  In other situations the connections might be more subtle.  Someone who spent a childhood playing chess might be able to do acrostics puzzles very quickly, Someone who spent a childhood playing with legos might have no problem fixing your espresso machine.  The pairs might not be explicitly connected but success in both relies on subtler skills, ones that we might not even have names for, or ones that are generalized that we don’t immediately think of as requisite skills, like dexterity or spatial rotation.

In essence we have trained our whole life to become exactly the person we find ourselves to be today.  It goes to wonder, will your training today contribute to a gift of ability for the person you’ll become tomorrow?