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Exercise as exercise
July 14, 2024 @ 2:41pm – Pioneer Park, San Francisco He felt athletic, he felt strong. In the gym, he could squat 400 pounds for multiple repetitions, he said, and he could bench-press close to the same amount. Plus, he loved how he looked.
People move their bodies for a number of reasons.
Losing weight, of course. But also to look good and feel strong. Reduce the risk of diseases. Stress relief. Mood enhancement. Cognitive function. Community. Improved sleep.
The list goes on, and is well backed by science.
I’ve used exercise for lots of things. Escape, staving off boredom and loneliness, procrastination. Helping me to both think and think less. It’s endlessly useful.
The benefits of exercise also provide motivation for us. We desire that feeling of extra muscle, of hitting an impressive PR or how we look in the mirror. And that helps us to be self-disciplined and go out there and do the thing. When we have a very clear goal and we are seeing progress towards it, it’s easier to control old habits and inhibit ‘bad behaviour’.
Movement itself is obviously important. Not only does it remind us that we have a body but it keeps it functioning properly. If you don’t move it, you lose it.
But does exercise need to do everything?
Does it have to be our pharmacy? Our primary care doctor? Our social group? A platform for social media and/or fame? Are we burdening it with too many jobs?
We like to turn things into tools. Eating becomes a tool. Sleeping becomes a tool. Don’t make exercise a tool.
Let a run be a run. Let a deadlift be a deadlift.
Let exercise be exercise.
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Painting into corners
August 2, 2024 @ 12:54pm – Hawthorn, Australia The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
Three great lies that nearly all of us tell ourselves: I’m a good driver; I have a good sense of humor; I’m a good judge of character.
Gordon Livingston
I’m certain about lots of things.
The movement of the sun.
Water freezing at 0 degrees.
The hardness of a brick.
When I drop a tennis ball, it falls out of my hand.
Every
time.
Stable.
Certain.
Lots of things are very stable and certain.I’ve never seen a germ but I have little doubt that they exist.
Same goes with ancient cities, black holes and the damage we are doing to the earth with pollution.
I don’t know these are true in the same way as direct experience.
But I don’t spend any energy in doubting them.
There are books.
Test results.
Consensus.
We are certain about these things, for good reason.Germans have a word for a different kind of knowing – “Kennen“
This is a knowledge different than remembering names of cities or birds.
I know that noise at a certain level becomes uncomfortable.
I know what it feels like to drink a lot of alcohol.
I know what a dream feels like.
I’ve been there. I’ve done that.
But usually, subjective stuff is slippery.
There’s more uncertainty than how light refracts through water.
Whether or not my job is ‘right for me’.
If I should ask her out on another date.
If I should buy this cereal or that.
Or like, what is anger?
What is love?
I’m less certain about those things.Certainty about uncertain things is very common.
Religious people are certain that some people are going to hell.
War mongers are certain they are saving their country.
Vegetarians are convinced eating meat is wrong.
Many people are convinced they have bad judgement.
Or that they are better than average drivers.
Or that they can’t speak in public.
Or that they are not good enough.
Dangerously, we tend to mix up these certainties with our sense of self.
We hear a voice that says you can’t do that.
You don’t belong here.
They don’t like you.
You’re required to do this, in this certain way.
You deserve it.
I have to.
I’ve got to.
I can’t. It’s impossible for me to do that.
And we usually listen, without thinking twice.But when examined closely, these certainties are not very clever.
Simple.
Shabby.
Black and white.
They might point to reality, or some facts, but they aren’t true.
Like google maps.
The roads are all the same colour.
The buildings don’t look like buildings, they are simple squares and rectangles.
There’s missing details.We get blinded by certainty.
We can’t see straight.
We’ve already decided, so we stop thinking.
We stop learning.
We have less options.
We lose flexibility.
We lose choice.
Because no matter how accurate our map is, it’s still just a map.By all means, keep your certainties.
They’ve built up over a long period of time.
They’ve served you.
Maybe they have been passed down from your parents, and their parents and so on.
They give your life structure.
But examine them.
Maybe not the maths, engineering and medicine.
But the certainties about you.
Open up.
Think of a stream.
Place a rock in the stream.
See how the water can barely flow around it.
Now, remove the rock.
See how the water flows faster.
It doesn’t really matter if the rock is there or not. But the water can’t flow well if it’s there. Can it?
The same goes with how certain we get about ourselves.
It’s really got nothing to do with who you are.
It’s just more practical to be open minded.
Certainty limits.
Open-mindedness allows.
If you are convinced you are wrong, you are.
If you are convinced you are right, good, bad.
If you are convinced you can’t do it. Or shouldn’t do it.
It’s very hard to do something different.
When we are certain, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.That’s why we keep doing the same things.
Over and over.
Making the same mistakes.
Even if we try something new.
The old way comes back.
Because we haven’t changed our minds. -
For the love of money
July 12, 2024 @ 1:22pm – The Mission, San Francisco Don’t let, don’t let, don’t let money fool you
The O’Jays
I’ve always liked saving money.
I receive money, and whether it’s two or two thousand dollars, I move it off to one side, and don’t touch it. End of story.
A small pile of gold two dollar coins on my dressing table.
A check from my grandpa that I deposit as soon as I can.
Pocket money. My sister and I both had piggy banks. Hers was never more than a quarter full. Mine was heavy and barely touched. Hers a rowdy bar. Mine a rarely visited temple.It physically hurt to lose money.
Of course, it’s pretty rare to actually ‘lose’ money.
But I worried about spending too much of it. I felt like if I didn’t pay attention at the supermarket, I’d buy the ‘expensive’ version of something and the next minute I’d be broke.
My friends couldn’t wait for their paycheck to drop into their account. They’d refresh the page, waiting for it to appear.
I never even liked looking at my bank account. I’d wince if the figures looked ‘low’. When I started a new job, I’d wait for several paychecks before I took a glance, and even then it felt like it would all easily be gone soon.
In my 20’s, I started making American money.
The best kind of money, right?
I learned a little more about saving.
Investing.
Retirement accounts.
Mutual funds.
Compound interest, the eighth wonder of the world,
I read books by people who were really good about talking about saving money, like Ramit Sethi and Dave Ramsey. That mustache guy.
Stories of people scrimping and saving and buying a house, or retiring early. These stories were mythical to me.
The crowning achievement of my life was a three month emergency fund. But why stop there?
It was no longer about an emergency.
I saved money because it felt good, not because it was smart.
It might look like discipline, but it’s really not.
It’s not wisdom either.
It felt good.
Of course, I’d never admit that to myself.
There’s always a good, sensible reason to save.
A house. My future. The bad economy. A rainy day.
It felt good to ‘stay in’. It felt good to say no. To throw away stuff I didn’t use. It felt good, just like it felt sickening to blow hundreds of dollars on booze.I’m not even interested in money.
The money in my account was like a strange, mystic totem, a rock sculpture in a forest. Purely symbolic.
I read financial advice not to learn, but for reassurance and validation.
I didn’t get happiness from finding ways to get more money. No matter how much or little I earn, payday doesn’t thrill me more than any other day.
I’m not the kind of person to find ways to lower my tax.
Or even cut my utility bills.
And those are great ways to save more money.
Go figure.
I have a friend who is more of a ‘maximiser’.
She’s always looking for ways to get more out of money.
She has a ton of deductions on her tax return.
She studies the tax code so she can part with less of her pay.
She loves sales, deals.
She’s doing something funny with her house. Something about investment property.
I’m more simple.
I see money, I save it.One day, my addiction to saving went away.
I think it was when I bought my apartment.
When I was looking for a place to buy I noticed I cared less about the price.
I just wanted a nice place to live.
And when I finally pulled the trigger, all those acorns I had been squirreling away were gone.
Of course, they weren’t really gone, they had just shape shifted. But I wasn’t even thinking about return on investment.
I just wanted my own place.
In that moment, money had turned from something sacred to something ordinary.
Some small print on a contract.
Most my battles in life feel like they are internal. Perspecties, attitudes, emotions, memories, dreams.
But this was external. I had to move some coins from one place to another.
Am I a spender now?
Just because I no longer see myself as a ‘saver’, doesn’t mean I’m a ‘spender’.
There’s more than two ways to be with money.
But I no longer feel really good about saving money.
I have to admit, I miss that feeling.
I no longer wince at spending ‘too much’ on a sandwich at the airport.
I don’t miss that.
I don’t think it’s ‘good’ to save money, just like it’s not ‘bad’ to spend it.
I invite you to use your money appropriately
It’s not appropriate to worry about $5 difference in your energy bill.
It’s not appropriate to buy a new smart phone every year.
If you are thirsty, buy water, don’t buy a dual-fuel outdoor pizza oven.
What matters is the compulsion.
There’s making money and then there’s “I have got to make money“. There’s saving money and then there’s “I have got to save money.”
See the difference? -
Street furniture
July 14, 2024 @ 10:12am – San Francisco, CA Leisure is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.
Joseph Pieper
It’s Saturday morning. It’s 11 degrees celsius (51F), but the concrete grey sky and whipping winds make it feel close to zero. A few stragglers walk past me, scuffing their heels as if to say ‘isn’t this a nasty morning?’
I would tend to agree. I’ve just picked up my coffee and I’m about to turn down my street to walk home. I’m standing on a street corner, bracing against the wind and I glance up across the road.
It’s something I’ve never done, and will never be able to do again. To stare at this old boot repair stop. This bridge over train tracks. These shrubs. Holding this coffee. Right at this moment. And it’s not easy.
Because this particular intersection, it’s so banal to me it’s almost hard to do.
Because there’s nothing interesting there.
I’m both familiar with it, and tired of it at the same time. First impressions stick. I saw these shops, this bit of road, this dirty sidewalk once, and I knew it wasn’t worth my attention.
And so it was.
It made me think. If I have make up my mind so quickly about this place, I likely do the same for everything else I register with my eyeballs.
Try it out. Look at something you perceive to be ‘nice’. A bright red apple is pretty universally liked. Maybe you notice some thoughts naturally come to mind. Nice, little, yum, crunchy. These are basic value judgements. It’s a little word cluster. Morphed together it forms a sort of ‘vibe’ of that thing you’re looking at.
Two people look at a church. One word cluster ‘god, epic, holy, sacred, safe’, the other ‘junk, old, history, old people, boring’. Two word clusters. Two different churches are seen.
Conversely, a row of trash cans on the street: Dirty, plastic, gross, smell, ugly.
And that’s what they look like. Don’t they? At least that’s how they look to me.
Back to that street corner. Conscious of my little value descriptions, ‘concrete, grey, ugly, empty, sparse, boring’, I push myself to continue looking and let the value judgements drift off into the distance. Not much changes. But every cell in my body wants to move on, to ignore what I’m seeing. I’ve seen it so many times before. Another word drifts in: ‘waste of time’. But my eyes are content to move around and they rest on a little green electrical box. It’s an interesting colour and shape. And nearby, a similarly green shrub, about a foot high. More shrubs. A glimpse of a pastel coloured mural behind a car. The dull shine of a wet rubber.
It’s all there. There’s probably a lot more there too.
We need the ability to critically assess the world around us. In many ways, we are critical assessment machines. Instead of a body with eyes, we are eyes with a ton of CPU and some moving apparatus attached.
But when we allow our minds to run wild with fearful stories, harsh judgements and defensive attitudes, we start to lose touch with reality.
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Seinfeld the Stoic
At first glance, Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t look or act like a Stoic. His stand-up routine is emotive and stacked with complaints, his car collection1 is in triple figures and his net worth is over a billion dollars2. Isn’t Stoicism about sleeping on the ground and walking around in rags?
But if we compare Jerry with Marcus Aurelius, the most famous stoic and the ideas from Meditations, the results might surprise you. Here’s five things a comedian and an emperor have in common.
Jerry Seinfeld & Marcus Aurelius don’t really care about money
“I like money, but it’s never been about the money.” – Jerry Seinfeld
The Stoics famously did not value external, material stuff. Like Buddhists, they believed attachments to job titles, bank statements and big houses tended to make one unhappy in the long run. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t be rich. When we look at the two men who best exemplified Stoic philosophy, one was a Roman Emperor (Marcus) and the other was a slave (Epictetus). A philosophy doesn’t care about where you currently sit in the social hierarchy. And stoicism simply cares about doing a good job. If you’re a slave, be a good slave. If you’re the king, be a good king. We could even argue that it was more difficult for Marcus to be a stoic considering all the temptations and power that was at his disposal.
Jerry Seinfeld and Marcus Aurelius are cool with death
I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead.. – Jerry Seinfeld
In an interview with Barri Weiss, Jerry is asked about his age. Rather than looking wistfully back on his life, or positively toward the future, he gives an unusual answer. “I’m almost 70, I’m dead. I could die and it’s fine.”3 And why should he worry? Marcus had the German hordes at the border, but if they were to win, he had no reason to feel bad about it. He did all he could do. If Jerry was to die tomorrow, he would leave his family behind but he won’t feel guilty: “I did great by my kids. I was a good dad. They feel loved. So… we’re cool.”4
Jerry Seinfeld and Marcus Aurelius are lone wolves
There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. – Marcus Aurelius
No one was meant to read Meditations. Marcus wrote it to himself, and in many ways he had no one to write to, because he had no equals. And who is really equal to Jerry? All Marcus wants to do is to live a good, philosophical life, but he needs to lead an empire. There’s an endless queue of ‘meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous’5 people knocking on his door asking him for stuff. And all Jerry wants to do is to craft jokes which he likens to calligraphy or doing lego6. He agrees that being a comedian (especially the richest and most famous comedian) is a ‘lone wolf racket’ and that he’s ‘only really comfortable with another standup comedian, or alone.’
Jerry Seinfeld and Marcus Aurelius are not your friend
There’s no one opinion that has any value. – Jerry Seinfeld.
Many people admire the Stoics. They look up to them and wish to be like them. They own heavily underlined copies of Meditations on their bookshelves. But what would Marcus Aurelius really think of you? Michael Sugrue, a former Princeton professor, doesn’t think you’d like the answer. “You wouldn’t want to work for this guy… He’s never going to be satisfied. And if he is.. he’s never going to give you applause. He’s going to say, you’re doing what you ought to do. You’re living like a philosophical man, which is reward in itself. You’re virtuous, what do you want from me? Back to work.”7 Tough stuff. Jerry also doesn’t really care what you think of him. “If you’re built right as a standup comic, you don’t give a flying fuck whatever thinks of (you)…I’m doing this job, I’m getting the money and I’m getting the hell out of here.”8 If you don’t like the joke, he’s not surprised. “Why would I think that I’m going to make something everyone will like?” What’s unnerving about these attitudes is that even though they sound a bit unpleasant, it’s hard to find ‘the slightest taint of hypocrisy.’9
Jerry Seinfeld and Marcus Aurelius know you better than you know yourself
Meditations is a ‘dreadful, powerful, caustic analysis of (Marcus) and others.’ 10When you read it, you’re shot in the face with a barrage of truth bullets. How can you argue with a line like “human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.”?11 Isn’t it the same feeling when you hear a good joke? A good comedian will make you laugh, but is also able to “see through the surface of life itself.”12 A stand-up set and a chapter of Meditations are like acid that bubbles and boils through all cliches, habits, beliefs and language. Jerry continues, “if you could hear some of the conversations that comedians have you would feel like you took the most cleansing rain shower of your life… it is so peeled away of the surfaces and the gauzy phony planes of existence that most people deal with.” 13
We’re quick to judge what a stoic should look like. Ryan Holiday has certainly popularized a certain brand of discipline and hyper productivity. But strong philosophic ideas, Stoic or otherwise, stand outside our beliefs and preferences. And we can thank comedians and stoics alike for seeing us for what we really are and giving us the gift of perspective, neatly packaged in wise epitaphs and one liners.
- Inside Jerry Seinfeld’s car collection ↩︎
- ‘Get Out!’: Jerry Seinfeld Is a Billionaire ↩︎
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Rules of Comedy—and Life ↩︎
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Rules of Comedy—and Life ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002. ↩︎
- The Scholar of Comedy (New Yorker) ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: The Stoic Ideal ↩︎
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Rules of Comedy—and Life ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: The Stoic Ideal ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: The Stoic Ideal ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002. ↩︎
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Rules of Comedy—and Life ↩︎
- Jerry Seinfeld on the Rules of Comedy—and Life ↩︎
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May 2024
© Hergé / Tintinimaginatio – 2024 Bristling
After an early morning swim, I rode home and noticed everyone looking spritely, fresh, showered, well-heeled. Or still exercising, walking, strolling, hustling. Bustling and bristling. Melbourne achieves this energy in certain parts of town, at certain times. It’s the same vibration of opening up a shop, rushing to an important appointment, but all the time. On every scale. In a waiting room, at a hot dog stand at a baseball game. Some cities are always like this. New York for example.
As a human being, you have a frequency/vibration. When you are in the place that your frequency/vibration matches the frequency/vibration of the place, you feel comfortable. – Jerry Seinfeld
What does $19 dollars actually get you?
A hot coffee, a place to sit, strangers to look at or to meet, a surface to write on, warmth, cover from the elements for a few hours, 500 calories or so.
Quotes
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. – Jorge Luis Borges
Trust in Allah. Tie up your camel. – Islamic proverb
Existence rests in the fleeting present; it is thus always in motion, resembling “a man running down a mountain who would fall over if he tried to stop and can stay on his feet only by running on… Thus existence is typified by unrest.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
How slipt? What deeds? What duty left undone? – Pythagorus
The whole function of the imagination is to draw up the material from the unconscious, clothe it in images, and transmit it to the conscious mind. – Robert Johnson
Writing
The Talking Cure – Hey! Put down your notepad when I’m talking to you!
Drowning – A review of Manodrome
Honor the Elephant – A review of Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow
The Trolley – A few thoughts on the body we are stuck with
Music
Don’t Stop The Dance – Bryan Ferry
Music and Lights – Imagination
Voyage to Atlantis – The Isley Brothers
Blues at Sunrise – Albert King
Albums
Lambs in the field
We are like lambs in the field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who choose out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have in store for us—sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason. – Schopenhauer
We can admit there will be stuff in the future that we didn’t see coming. What then do we do about that? Forecasting seems to help. If we can forecast then we can potentially avoid some of it (cancel the flight), minimize it (eat something before that meeting), protect yourself (take out insurance), accept it (this is unavoidable) or find meaning in it.
Dreams sometimes indicate upcoming events as we start to mentally prepare for them. We could even think of a dream like a psychological weather forecast: Tomorrow will be partly cloudy. Light winds. High of 19 degrees. Prominent feelings of resentment, judgment, desire and fatigue.
A message from Shakespeare
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Home crowd hostility
An American Beats an Italian In Rome – Seb Korda feeds of the hostile home crowd
Fresh flowers
If we pay attention, our environment teaches us a lot.
For example, I go into a grocery store to buy some flowers. But as soon as I walk in, I’m a bit overwhelmed. Which flowers do I buy? Automatically I start peering very closely to all the varieties and try to think of the ‘best’ one to get. But I can’t make up my mind.
Instead of continuing to slog, I slow down and take a few steps back.
I see some things.
I see that fresh flowers are getting laid out. Someone grabs some while chatting on the phone and says “roses and tulip”. She’s combining flowers. I hear someone else says “get them wrapped”. I see that you can get flowers wrapped for free and they look much nicer.
There’s lots of great information all sitting there. The decision in many ways makes itself.
How to create more time
If you wake up at 5am instead of 7.30am, one would gain about 57 days or nearly 2 months extra per year. If you usually wake up at the luxurious time of 9am, you would gain an additional 7 days per month.
Every thing you need to do in a day, might be able to be combined with another thing you need to do. Don’t go to the grocery store twice.
Is your physical body just like pretty colors on a page?
Donald Hoffman argues that reality is more like a 3D desktop designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adapted behavior. Space is the desktop, physical objects are the icons on that desktop. – Do we see reality as it is? – Donald Hoffman
Intellect vs intuition
I can’t think of my bike shed code. I have my phone in hand, where the code is stored in my password manager. But before I check, I let my fingers type in the code without thinking. It feels wrong. I see my fingers type random numbers. Click. Unlocked.
I think our unconscious is quite happy to receive and carry out an order, as long as the conscious doesn’t interfere. For example, I want to fold my hand towel such that the tag is hidden. My intellect wants to figure this out procedurally and say “well if we flip it this way, then this should appear here”. But instead, give yourself the task and let your ‘hands’ figure out the rest.
I wrote more about intuition and the unconscious here.
Fear reduces your options
Only at 3-5, 0-15, do I start to serve with less fear, and worrying less about how ‘good’ it is.
Playing tennis with no fear pulls attention out of your head and soaks it into the other side of the court. Suddenly, I can see where that nasty cross court is coming from. There’s suddenly space to anticipate rather than react.
To riff on Viktor Frankl, I’d say that fear constricts the space between stimulus and response.
A dog with a friendly attitude can make a handful of people in a park very happy in the space of 5 minutes.
Two different ways to look at nature
In Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog and his subject Timothy Treadwell look at nature through very different eyes. They are making up stories about something neutral that is impossible to judge. Timothy sees a dead bumble bee (which was actually sleeping) as “beautiful, sad, tragic”. His heart can’t help but break. Herzog on the other hand, is left cold and haunted by the same environment. “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy.”
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The trolley
“Tintin et les Bigotudos” – Studios Hergé collection If you are alive, you have a trolley.
You didn’t make the trolley. You received it on loan and will eventually return it to the store once you’ve used it all you can.
From the outside, the trolley looks simple. It has a material surface, wheels and a place to put things.
The trolley is strong and flexible.
It is made of natural material, and has a clever, efficient design. No trolley is the same.
The trolley is helpful for tasks and getting around. It can do many different jobs. And without one, you wouldn’t get much done.
Wherever you are, there is the trolley.
A trolley requires some raw materials to make enough energy to operate properly. The trolley wears down faster if it’s moving all the time.
The trolley is strong, but still breaks sometimes. Since the trolley is always being used, it’s natural for little bits to break off and change shape over time.
Some trolleys are smaller or more prone to breaking down. Some have been treated carelessly and roughly. Some trolleys are carrying a lot of weight and cannot move easily.
Interestingly, many people don’t accept their trolley. They are dissatisfied and unhappy with it. Other people take their trolley very personally. Many trolleys are repainted, renovated and refurbished.
A trolley can be changed so much that it is hard to recognize, but a trolley can never be swapped completely for a new one. Some people return their trolley early and say ‘take it back, I don’t want it anymore.’ Others ask philosophical questions. ‘Why this trolley? What’s the point of it?’
The trolley can’t answer these questions. It can only be a trolley. The point of the trolley to be used well as a trolley.
Whatever state your trolley is in, we should treat it respectfully, like a knife you’ve borrowed from your Grandfather.
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Subliminal
© Hergé / Tintinimaginatio – 2024 There is only one other acceptable theory of how to hit a golf ball. Grip it and rip it. – Tin Cup (1996)
“Over the years, I’ve sort of learned to follow my nose on these hunches that I have, and usually something turns up pretty interesting.” – Hit Man (2024)
For most of human history, we have collectively understood the world without the help of machine learning, excel spreadsheets or even written words. Instead, we’ve made do with all things inexact: stories, myths, dreams, poetry, dance, drama and a deep connection with nature. These tools have helped us to make sense and meaning out of the mysterious. And they’ve done so by respecting all of ourselves we are unaware of – our unconscious.
These days, we think differently. We’re avatars on a digital social graph, sharing every thought to thousands. We hardly spend time outside. We don’t move our bodies much. We use tv instead of our imagination. We talk to computers with code. Thinking logically, analytically and systematically is highly valued. It’s all about precision baby.
Biologically, most of that type of thought is ruled by the left hemisphere. That’s where detail, order, power, control, rationality, planning, math & logic live. It’s the bread and butter of western civilization. It’s also the kind of thought we experience much of the day, when we zoom in, plan for our holidays, tick off to-do lists and tally up our budgets.
So where does that leave our intuition, imagination and other largely unconscious processes?
In Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow doesn’t exactly have a point of view on that question, instead reviewing the latest and greatest science of the ‘new unconscious’, and all the cognitive biases that have become mainstream knowledge since it was published in 2012. These quirks show us that we are not as clever as we thought. And there’s consequences. Faulty memory sends innocent people to be jailed. Social and racial biases cause unqualified men to be hired or women to perform worse on a test. A light touch on the arm or the word ‘because’ is all it takes for us to say yes. Pick up artists rejoice, growth marketers profit.
Time and time again, reactions and decisions that are self-reported as good or accurate, are neither. An image used to describe this lack of conscious control is a monkey riding an elephant. The monkey thinks he’s in charge, but in truth the elephant pretty much goes where he wants. We conclude that we need to clean up our biases and get better at statistics if we’re going to keep our job or ever find our soulmate.
In terms of ‘correctness’, humans do seem to be hopelessly inaccurate and likely to misjudge reality. Hell, by looking at the eye, we know that we only have detailed vision in about two degrees of visual angle (that’s a thumb width at arm’s length). Ambiguity is everywhere and when it’s computed by our brains it invariably ‘opens the door to stereotyping, to misjudging people we don’t know very well. It also opens the door to misjudging ourselves.’
But what if we are looking at the elephant the wrong way? Rather than big and out of control, maybe it’s actually wise. Iain McGilchrist points out that intuitive thought is something unappreciated, undeveloped and deserves more of our brain power.
A lot of people have come away with the idea that intuition would be very bad thing to be guided by at any stage to any degree.
You can set up these artificial situations in which we seem to be getting things wrong by following our intuition… that’s often because 99% of the time we followed this intuition it would intelligently and quickly take us to the right solution.
Intuition, in certain cases, and certainly most experiments, can look like a contradiction, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useless. Like Nassim Taleb says, “If a cognitive ‘bias’ is helpful, it is not a bias.” Rather than clean it up, or push it further back into the dark, we should seek to understand and involve it. Why?
- It’s need balancing. In high school we learn more about language, math and science than art or poetry. There’s no reason why our intuition couldn’t be as robust as our intellects.
- It’s all one system. Your unconsciousness isn’t in some deep water tank separate from your conscious mind. There is no monkey or elephant. Even the left and right hemisphere are part of one body. Any problem solved uses things we are aware of and in control of, and some things that are not.
- Most things are done better unconsciously. The better a fighter pilot or saxophonist gets, they ‘think’ less and less. In fact, many things get worse if we try and do them consciously. Csikszentmihalyi shows us in Flow that everything from gardening to choir singing benefits from intuition.
- It needs attention. Next time you feel overwhelmed with counter-productive or harshly judgmental thinking – try speaking to yourself. Say something like “I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts anymore, thanks.” Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a left brain stroke and basically lived in her unconscious for a few months likes to add “a kinesthetic component to my message like waggling my pointed finger in the air, or standing firm with my hands on my hips. A scolding mother is more effective when she says what she means with passion and communicates her message multidimensionally.”
Also posted on Substack
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The talking cure
June 9, 2023 @ 3:31pm – Ubud, Bali Some kinds of therapy seem to suggest that the way to get better is to inspect yourself a great deal. Now there are moments that you certainly need to come to a realization of what it is you’re like and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, of course. But it’s often better that you should lose yourself in something.
Iain McGilchrist
It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow)
These days I feel like I’m drowning in data. Messages, emails, videos, articles, documents, spreadsheets, lists, tasks, tickets. Packets and packets of data that are all screaming for attention and consumption.
There’s work data pointed at me, there’s personal data and there’s a constant leak of environmental data too, overheard conversations, dog barks and billboard advertisements.
It’s no surprise then, that I tend to bias toward capturing and making sense of the world with words – data out of data. Apple notes tells me I log about 5 notes per day. Thoughts, things to remember, insights, random facts. Same goes with reminders. Less verbose, but still a sort of documentation or type of information processing.
There’s value in this type of practice. With knowledge work, ideas and projects often succeed on the strength of their documentation. One pagers, narratively-structured memos, wikis, JIRA initiatives. Over time these habits of extracting and boiling information can become addictive. We get tunnel vision, lost in a vortex of productivity that forms when we are constantly writing, logging and summarizing.
But the main danger is that we actually communicate less effectively. We miss the bigger picture.
Take therapy for example. Therapy as we know it today has been around about 140 years. Freud believed that there was a ‘talking cure’, that by talking about thoughts and feelings would give you insight into unconscious material and find relief from psychological distress. So therapy is a sort of conversation, a special type of communication between patient and therapist with the goal of shedding some light on previously unknown parts of your psyche.
The talking cure cures. I would walk out of a session with more clarity and more comfortable space around problems that previously felt claustrophobic. I’d excitedly write down what we talked about, eager to apply it. But over time, I found the more I tried to capture what was getting talked about, the less I got out of it. Like a raccoon washing cotton candy, the insights and lessons I had just experienced seemed to melt away into nothing. Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson says he hates when people to notes in their analytical hour:
“They’re trying to instantly to catch something in canned tomato juice form that they can take home and drink later, and it doesn’t work. Any teacher worthy of this name is frequently wanting to yell at someone – for god’s sake forget about the notes and remember the level of consciousness you have at this moment.”
You can’t blame us for wanting to capture canned tomato juice. We have a bad habit of seeking the summary and skipping the thing itself.
- When we are reading or listening or learning about the context of a problem, we quickly start thinking about solutions. Stop. Wallow in the problem. Feel around in it blindly. Instead of rushing off to brainstorm anemic solutions, we should be storing up and absorbing more problems than we think we can handle. The solution will be better.
- We all know the difference between a good and a bad conversation. Author and Psychologist James Hillman describes some things that can interfere: “just talking out loud about what we feel. Complaints. Opinions. Information doesn’t work–Simply reporting what’s new, where you’ve been, what you’ve heard. Lullabies don’t help either-singing charming little stories to prevent anything from entering the heart or mind. And boosterism isn’t conversation either-broadcasting, self advertising what we are doing, have done, going to do. You can’t converse with a sales pitch or positive preaching.” 1So, just like therapy, a personal conversation flows better when and stop trying to capture and control the moment.
- Watching or listening to someone or something passively. Assuming you have the attention skills to concentrate and remain undistracted for 30 minutes, we rarely absorb most of what is being said. If it’s an important announcement at work, although we frown our faces so we look very serious and concentrated, and even write down some notes, we are not really listening. Maybe we are thinking very hard about a smart sounding question we can ask at the end, or wondering what this film or book is ‘really trying to say’. When we do such things, we have stopped engaging with the prime material.
Whether you are listening or conversing with an analyst, a friend or the CEO of a billion dollar company, drop the notes. By not taking notes, you couldn’t possibly be taking it more seriously.
Also published on Substack
- Hillman, J., & Ventura, M.. (1993). We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (p. 99). HarperCollins. ↩︎
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Drowning
February 17, 2022 at 9:49am – West Village, New York Manodrome (2023) – Two stars.
In Manodrome, Jesse Eisenberg plays Ralph, a down and out loser who succumbs eventually to his rage, alienation and overall brokenness.
The story begins with one of his Uber passengers, calling him a creep and running away from him. She was breastfeeding her child, which he is caught looking at. He is alone, looking out at the world, unable to access love, feeling, life or anything else remotely nutritious. He is a baby himself, bulked up in the gym, but barely communicative, perpetually curling up, like a standing fetal position.
We don’t hear his thoughts, but we can assume there’s some thin trail of commentary there. All we can see is where his eyes furtively glance to, or away from. Gym rats tease him ‘still looking. still hungry.’ We see very little emotion or feeling echoing back from what the world throws at him. He’s trying to stay positive. He wants people to show a ‘little respect’. Everything he says, feels and does is undercooked, until it’s not.
His heavily pregnant partner asks him basic questions like, where did you go, how will I get home tonight. Simple questions, but there doesn’t seem to be a simple answer available to Ralph. Maybe these questions do not register. Is he focused on something else, that we can’t see? Is his soul responding to her, but it’s buried so deep in mud we can’t hear it? His compass, or any method for orienteering through the world is not completely gone, but seems to be constantly broken, or worse, hallucinatory.
Trash in, trash out. Pumping iron, for many people seems to provide a boundary, a weak fence-line between him and the abyss. He can reliably go there, and at least things don’t seem to get worse. Push on the bar, it goes the right way. When he pushes on anything else, things go wrong.
This lack of balance or inability to rest in a middle ground is exasperated by his run-in with Dad Dan’s (Adrien Brody) crew of lost boys. They shake him up, beg him to voice his concerns, to scream, to reverb, to bounce back. He is given some explanations for why he is the way he is, and offered a potential path out of hell.
Like a lot of similar stories, he starts to take on more agency. To step out of his rut, he stops listening to himself, or others. He follows a basic motto. Is he transforming? He has been treading water, almost drowning, does he now have one hand on a rope, or is he starting to swim even deeper? Is beating up a stranger heroic or cowardly? Up or down? The answer, which is unanimously ‘down’, makes this film un-interesting. There is no tension or complexity or questions we need to ask ourselves. He’s a rock dropping out of the window that doesn’t know it’s been thrown. It’s almost always a tragedy when someone deeply believes they are right.
Instead of a hero’s journey, where there is often a ‘fake it till you make it’ stage while the universe (or Yoda) nods and urges you forward, Ralph actualizes in the wrong direction. He’s getting more confused. He’s painting with broader strokes. He’s an out of tune radio, but now the volume is cranked. He’s churning out spreadsheets but the source data is wrong. His misery is externalized, with predictable results. Sex, screaming, shooting. More people are now sucked into his suffering.
In one of the final scenes, Ralph is on the run from the law and has broken into a restaurant pantry. A worker catches him feasting on bread like a feral dog. The man looks at him with a sort unconditional acceptance, a stark contrast to every other person who usually responds to him out of fear, habit, manipulation or transactionally. Stunned momentarily, more out of confusion than clarity, Ralph puts the gun to his head. It clicks. It’s the punchline of a long, cosmic joke. Someone, somewhere is laughing.
The stranger takes him home and tells him a story. When he was little, he fell overboard into freezing water. He’s drowning, and thinks he will die. He takes one last breath, but can see his dad swimming to save him. In one moment he understood death, life and love, certainly. Three things Ralph doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know. Ralph is still drowning. Ralph blinks, and then curls back into a fetal ball, falling into deep unconscious – as we see the flashing lights of the police streaming toward the building.
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