NEW NORMALS

December 2nd, 2020

For someone who has never gotten a good night of sleep, who is chronically sleep deprived, the experience of a completely well reseted body and mind is not even a fantasy, it’s not even imaginable.  What’s even more frightening about these sorts of issues is how quickly and completely we can become immersed in new normals.

When a subpar situation persists for long enough, we adapt, often accept and so subpar normalizes into par.  A key aspect of this is forgetting just how it felt when things were different - or being completely obvious to just how much better things could feel with an improved situation.  Our ability to adapt comes with this unfortunate second edge that cuts back in all sorts of counter-productive ways.  It’s imaginable that if people could have a visceral sense of just how much better life could be, behaviors across the board would shift to bring about those better lives.  But instead, we adjust, without even meaning to.

In such instances, a good imagination coupled with a concept of dissatisfaction can be a powerful combination.  Much of the time dissatisfaction is concept and an experience to be eschewed, but a sense of dissatisfaction can be a powerful fuel for progress and improvement.  A good imagination helps an invented sense of dissatisfaction because it can help create a faith that a better life actually can exist.  

A subtle distinction worthy of parsing within this frame is the difference between self and situation.  Many if not most are all too quick to blame themselves for their situation.  And while this may be valid in a straightforward way, the connection is often strong enough to paralyze any effort to change.  A helpful trick to help loosen this knot lies in the ability to accept one’s self but not one’s situation.  Our situation is not completely a result of our own actions.  There are other influences, a degree of randomness that must be admitted.  But no matter what sort of situation we might wake up to find ourselves in, even it feels like it is a self-inflicted creation, our departure from acceptance becomes a dual rebellion: one that strives to change that situation and one that refuses to see the situation as the final stamp of judgement on our character and our abilities.

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.