ON RAMP

September 4th, 2020

We wait in rapt and growing anticipation for months, even years for the movie, the book, the epic vacation.  There’s an aspect of human psychology, clearly rooted in dopamine and the substantia nigra that infuses waiting with a wanting that is often more intense than what comes when the long wait is over.

The intensity of this experience is something we can all relate to.  But is it something we can also appropriate for other means?  Can we get this excited about work?  For the vast majority of people the answer is a disgusted and emphatic NO! This inability to get excited about work probably says far more about the nature of our work and our incongruity with such work than it is an absolute answer.  

What if our life was filled with work we love and enjoy?  What if life was a string of projects we chose and designed ourself?  Could we then plan, and anticipate the work as we do a book or movie or a vacation?

The luckiest of us seems to have figured out a sweet hack of life where work isn’t so much work as it is an extension of our personal agency in a curious way.  The concept of personal agency here is key.  People who feel like they don’t have any personal agency while work - meaning they are told exactly how to do their job - they are micro managed, and they have no freedom to develop their own methods - these people are the least happy of all.

Juxtapose this with the counter-extreme: the artist, whose entire job is quite literally dealing with the freedom they’ve afforded themselves.  I the absence of a boss, an artist has to dictate and schedule their own work, which can be quite difficult - but when such work is at the discretion of one’s own curiosity, the structure and course seems to materialize on it’s own without planners and productivity hacks.  

Non-existent but imagined projects begin to balloon with gleeful anticipation like the new book that so many anticipate, or the sequel movie that people just can’t wait for.   This is a pleasure that so many people -unfortunately- do not get to experience.

We get the curiosity beaten out of us with industrialized education and then  we become weighed down with responsibility, and the time for exploration is squeezed down to nothing.  And then often for so many people, the on ramp they look forward to is wrapped up in an ideal of retirement- one that is hard to fulfill for lack of practice.

ANTIHABIT

September 3rd, 2020

There’s good habits, bad habits and then there are anti-habits.  Bad habits are easy to develop.  They are seductive and generally pleasurable in some sort of way that is easy and desirable to repeat tomorrow… like buy another bottle of wine, or a six-pack of beer.  Good habits are usually the exact opposite in terms of ease of development.  That first month usually requires a substantial dedication and discipline to get that new behaviour through the hoops of 3 and 5 and 7 consecutive days in a row.

The antihabit describes a combination of both.  It’s the seductive ease of the bad habit and the unravelling of the good habit rolled into one.

Let’s say you have a solid meditation practice of a couple years.  It feels as though there is a substantial momentum and inertia that will carry you forever into the future.

The antihabit starts slow, but easy.  It’s when you have that stray day that is characterized by an unusual schedule, and it slips by without meditating.  The next morning perhaps there’s the realization - whoops, that didn’t happen yesterday!  That’s a key moment to make sure that one day missed doesn’t grow into two, because two slides into three missed days far easier. 

This is the development of the antihabit, which is the unravelling of the good habits we have.  Just as habits have thresholds of development - generally attributed to 3 days, 5 days, 7 days, 21 days, and so on and so forth, the unravelling of a good habit seems to accord to the same stretches of time.  Miss three days and the likelihood you miss 5 is substantially greater.  Miss 5 days in a row and it becomes far more certain that 7 days will pass without the good habit happening.

Antihabits are bad habits taking root in the guise of the ghost of a dying good habit.

Being mindful of their pernicious development is perhaps more important than stopping other bad habits or starting even more good habits. Preventing the antihabit is a defence of all that we’ve worked for up until this point.

FALSE GLOW

September 2nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Barbra who has been kindly beta testing "Brutal Honesty" mode in a new App from Tinkered Thinking and found herself face to face with a very interesting question.  You can connect with her on twitter with the handle @_brbaramrtns.

Despite our modern obsession with happiness, we understand it quite poorly.  And beyond this, our discourse surrounding happiness is terribly unorganized, vague and shifting. This is a bit odd considering western culture’s obsession with categorization and taxonomy.  English in particular has a gargantuan vocabulary.  English is quite a bit larger than most other languages you can name because English has cannibalized those languages and cannibalized even itself in a growing mission to fulfill that biblical profession of pointing at things and having a name ready for it.  Despite this sprawling and voracious effort on the part of english, when we each point at happiness and say the word, we don’t all seem to be on the same page.

Some people think happiness is about peak experiences - that is when joy and pleasure seem to get together in the core of our experience and get busy.  It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that living with an experience of a perpetual peak experience isn’t just impossible but it would be paradoxically awful.  First off, everyone would probably think there was something terribly wrong with you.  Aside from this, it’s difficult to imagine anyone getting anything done if they were constantly in a state of peak pleasure and joy.

Well of course you can’t be deliriously happy all the time, that’s ridiculous!  So what do most people mean when they speak of happiness? Could the very concept of happiness be doing us some harm?  Imagine for a moment if the concept of happiness just didn’t exist.  By talking about happiness it’s easy to come to the conclusion that perhaps you’re missing out on something.  Everyone seems to be talking about something that you don’t seem to be experiencing.  Perhaps the follow up question that we forget to ask is:  What if no one is actually experiencing this happiness thing in the way it seems everyone is describing it?

Humans certainly aren’t strangers to the idea of pontificating about experiences, realities and laws that actually don’t exist.  There are a few other words that fall into this devious category: hope, and passion, to name just two.  All of these words form an imaginary inner sanctum of experience, which functions primarily to alienate us from ourselves.  The human imagination has vast powers and with these sorts of words, the power of the imagination is turned against the individual who imagines.  If you imagine a perfect ideal, than real life is always going to be a bit of a disappointment because that object of the imagination sets up an expectation that never materializes.

We constantly jump to grasp the peak experience only to grasp at something that isn’t there and leave ourselves to fall lower than we were before.  The subtle lesson of a mindfulness practice, or stoicism or even potentially a steady creative practice is that everything is actually quite nice as it is.  It’s these hazy concepts that we use to inadvertently gaslight ourselves, and by doing so we miss out on how lovely the simplicity of any given moment is. No matter where you are, whether it be waiting for hours in line at the bank, or slogging it through a day at work, it is possible to take a conscious breath and look around with gratitude and amazement at the fact that you are alive.  This is possible even when burdened with terrible sadness and even pain.  But it is a bit of a skill, and the development of this skill requires a bit of skepticism for some of the concepts we already operate on.  It requires questions that feel odd in the mind and on the tips of our lips:

What if hope is a damaging concept?  

What if happiness is a mirage that makes us miserable?

What if they are best regarded as NULL concepts?

What if the present moment is actually quite lovely and...

What if it’s the mind that bars our ability to see it?

Our sense of experience is overwhelmingly dictated by our ability to make sense of it.  We have to ask: what exactly is the software we have running that is allowing us to make sense of it in the way we do?  What if there’s some insidious code running, camouflaged as our favourite feature?  Should it be any surprise that buried within the box of Pandora with all the other ills of the world that were unleashed when opened was hope? 

If happiness is something that can be achieved for moments longer than peak experiences, then it most likely begins to look, sound and feel a lot like another concept:

peace.

Do we achieve peace by adding more things?  Or do we all have a subtle intuition grown from our total immersion in consumerist culture that adding one more thing probably isn’t going to make us happy.  But what if we do the opposite?

What if peace is a subtractive process?

CROSSROADS

September 1st, 2020

Though our lives are changing with each passing moment, there are times when it feels like this flow of time hits a fork replete with detours, side quests and adventures of all new kinds.  We all seem to have a built in mechanism of boredom that blossoms a couple years into any new project, job or relationship. The association with boredom is generally negative, and that antsy desire to jettison one’s self from a certain course of life can easily be seen as a weakness as though we lack the strength to persist and endure.  While the potential roots of such persnickety cultural views are beyond the scope of this topic, it’s certainly fair to say that everything has a place and time, and when such crossroads occur in life it’s fascinating to reflect on the utility of boredom.

We may in fact have this function built in as a feature to help stir up life into a more interesting forms.  

What’s perhaps strange is that we can often take so long to actually get bored enough to actually pull the plug, firebomb life and jettison our consciousness into a new and fascinating direction.

We seem to sense crossroads only when they are super obvious.  When a project is done, when a lover gets a new job or needs to move, when a promotion doesn’t happen.  We wait for an obvious set of signs that feel like a stop sign in the middle of nowhere, the blinking red light warning us of continuing, the empty stretch of road to the left and to the right, each with their own new horizon.  

This is an illusion of the metaphor though.  A moment of reflection dissolves the very road itself, revealing that there is in fact no set path that we’ve been following, but only an imagined one.  The fork in the road exists at all times, in all places of our life.  To torture the metaphor with the heat of a little more accuracy would place life directly in the intersection with an infinite variety of choices and paths swivelling before us in a kaleidoscope of perpetual possibility.  

It’s a trick of the mind that keeps us on the straight and narrow of this profession, that living situation, that relationship, that hobby, activity and way of thinking.  And as useful and practical as this trick of the mind can be, for it really does enable us to make progress with a dedicated and disciplined consistent effort, so many people lose out on a universe of opportunity hidden just outside the purview of our thinking.

Life does not need kid gloves.  Life is a sculpture of infinite shapes that can and sometimes should be molded with a reckless and rough abandon.  

The small iteration - that carefully planned step is touted as a kind of ultimate tool in modern times, but it can pale in comparison to the fearless leap of faith, founded in your ability to land on your feet, or if need be, build the rocket ship as you fall.  Let that last little step, that small iteration be the final glance at the ground rushing up to destroy you, as you press the ignition button.

PATTERNED RANDOMNESS

August 31st, 2020

A pattern can only be recognized if it has repeatable and reproducible parts.  The main magic of a song is the fact that it’s so repetitive.  Not just the beat is occurring at regular intervals, but whole melodic patterns are repeated: hence the ‘chorus’ of a song.  It’s no surprise that the chorus of a song is generally the most pleasing and liked part.  Interestingly, the more repetition we have, the less information is actually present.  Think about a song which is simply the chorus played four times.  If the same song were to be rewritten to only have the chorus played twice with two unique verses, does it become more interesting?  More pleasurable?  

Hard to say for sure, but it’s certainly fair to say that the version with two unique verses conveys more than the version with just a chorus repeated over and over.

The way we garner meaning and make sense of the world has to do with this strange tension between randomness and repetition.  We are pattern recognition machines.  Perhaps more so than any other creature that has ever existed.  We aren’t just Pavlovian in our ability to sense a pattern, we are driven, curious detectives when it comes to the matter.  But of course, too much pattern and suddenly we can begin to lose interest.  The same exact groundhog day occurring over and over with no variance is bound to drive anyone mad.  It’s the variance we inject into the regular and the routine that isn’t just interesting, it stresses patterns into new, more complex shapes.  

In an abstract way, this is a description of learning.  Our brains are highly repetitive machines.  Neurons all fire based on input of other neurons.  From a bird’s eye view, this is simply a vast game of telephone with neurons talking to one another.  Of course there is the varied input we get from the senses to stir up these firing patterns, and of course we might wonder about whether or not the brain can actually generate its own randomness, but more interesting is to think about the experience of learning.  

Learning is a conscious and willful disruption of previous ways of thinking.  We quite literally have to rip apart our repetitive thinking and reorganize it into a new pattern that is consistent with the subject we are trying to understand.  We continue this somewhat painful reorganization until we hit upon a pattern that is in accord with the subject.  

This subtle tension between pattern and randomness is what drives us.  We experience it as the tension between the boredom of repetition and the pain of confusion.  We don’t enjoy either and often settle for one in order to avoid the other.  But of course, diving head first into the experience of confusion is the only thing that is going to really alleviate boredom.  Neither are ideal, but the combination of both keeps us moving forward.