Fluid attention, somatic intuition, rule by dancing and rootless world
I would describe a lot of environments around us as being frictionless, because of how easy it is to change between tasks in a digital setting. This is great to keep in mind if you reduce friction towards things you want, such as to make it easier to get started on meaningful work, but not so much when it is for stuff that has been designed to keep you stuck there, such as social media feeds. Being able to switch between any video or article instantly isn't necessarily a good thing because it can promote a type of zombie-watching, where you aren't present but keep watching. In such a state, you don't retain anything, but you keep "wanting" more.
Having an environment with useful friction creates boundaries in space, which create boundaries in your attention. This allows you to allocate time to work, and other time to rest, without being stuck in this awkward middle ground limbo where you aren't doing anything particularly useful for your life, but also aren't resting or enjoying yourself. Zombie-watching isn't enjoyment, it is quite the opposite in fact: it is apathy.
I'm writing this because I think it is useful to deliberately add back boundaries and friction in your work environment. You might want to straight up remove your access to internet, such that you can focus your attention on the task at hand, without any opportunity to distract yourself, which would break your flow and any possible enjoyment from being productive. Another option would be for instance to install a browser plugin, such as Leechblock, which can add a delay to certain webpages, or simply block them during a certain period of time.
Those changes might seem needlessly contrived, because after all, shouldn't you be able to stay focused and avoid distractions? But the thing is that it is much easier to change your environment than to change your habits and your ability to pay attention. And they also allow work to be more enjoyable, because they allow you to get in a sort of flow state for a defined period of time, and then out of it when you're done with your task. Boundaries are useful because we need a diversity of experiences, including meaningful and useful work, but these healthy tasks are often more uncomfortable than zombie-watching, which can honestly ruin your life if you keep it unchecked.
Something I've been playing more and more with lately is the ability to loosen your attention, such that it doesn't get stuck on unpleasant sensations, or avoiding things I feel like I should be doing, or my current job which I totally despise, or scenarios that the mind gets stuck in—such as the effects of societal decline within my lifespan. 1
All of those things exist and it would be a terrible idea to deny them, but at the same time, they do not account for the totality of my experience, and moreover, focusing on them rarely improves anything in my life. Having a job you hate is one thing, but ruminating over and over again about how much you hate it doesn't move you in any way whatsoever towards a better life, it's just an indulgence in negative emotions.
As such I find there are two general directions worth moving with regards to those negative emotions: 1) allowing them to come up without filtering or suppressing them, and perhaps even leaning into them even more and 2) allowing your attention to gently rest on more pleasant things, which isn't the same thing as trying to forcefully delude yourself into feeling better.
By default I think most of us hover in the limbo between the two, similar to how hovering between work and genuine rest is the default, because the two responses require a fluidity in attention that isn't really promoted in our society, which benefits from people being mechanical, i.e. unconscious, as much as possible.
The first response is very useful because it actually takes a fair amount of conscious time, not just time, to process that something is going on. That's probably why people in abusive relationships take so long to even realize what's going on, and to a much lesser degree, it's probably why when it's really cold outside, people feel the need to say to themselves that "it's so cold oh my god how can it be so cold". I am not sure I have even accepted that so much of my time is being funneled into something I simply do not care about, and how much I hate this. As such, I'm very much struggling with getting a healthy sense of motivation in my own life.
The value of the second response is straightforward, because there are many things that are not improved by merely focusing on what sucks. Moreover, it is good to remind ourselves that it is basically impossible to be in a situation where absolutely everything is unpleasant: even when the body is tense, there are still parts that are totally relaxed, such as the ear lobes for instance. Or, even when several things suck in your day, there is still the next day, and chances are that some things are still at the very least okay in the current one.
It is worth noting how our mood can very easily swing based on a series of only three to four unpleasant events in a row, which we could handle individually, and would have been fine if they were spread over a longer period of time. Having the bus be late and a disagreement with a coworker and the food be awful and a technical issue on the computer and a quick unpleasant comment by the boss, are all rather small inconveniences individually , but if left unchecked, we can feel that the day is rotten just from the accumulation of those small things. The mind tends to get stuck on a sort of availability of evidence: if a lot of recent events, even if rather trivial, add up to the story "this day sucks", then it will keep finding more and more, and believing its own story more and more.
As such, learning to move out of those sticky stories strikes me as a rather crucial move of attention, one that is actually pretty easy and pleasant to do, but one that requires the ability to slow down in daily life, which allows us to not react to everything like a machine, but instead live with more intention.
Easier said than done of course, but very worthwhile.
A good heuristic in life, when in doubt of what's important, is to do the stuff that gives you energy, makes you feel more alive.
Examples:
Of course as any advice or heuristic in life, it has its limits.
For one, some people might genuinely feel energized from hurting other people, or the sense of feeling superior to others. Even in those cases, it might be worth examining the underlying dynamic behind the energy, as it is rarely a specific activity that we find energizing, but more like the interaction between 1) what it provides 2) what you're good at 3) what you care about.
For instance, I used to be very energized by video games, because they game me a) a sense of freedom that school didn't b) a sense of agency through getting better something, which again school didn't c) some form of connection with other people, with online games. Those things stopped being true over time, and as a result, I now feel like video games are a drag more than anything, and look for activities that hit the same core needs without the rather addictive nature of games.
Another limit of “do what energizes you” is that a lot of people who desperately need rest will interpret this as encouraging even more activity. I have found that closing my eyes and doing nothing—not even meditation per se, which to me involves some type of focus—is one of the most energizing things in my day, far better than taking a nap for instance.
Energy is tricky because in other circumstances, what you need is not static rest, but a specific type of action to address an emotional knot, 2 which is a problem that needs to be released by untying an underlying problem. For instance, being tired by your inability to progress on a project you really want to complete.
But I think broadly speaking, what I observe around me are people who need way more conscious rest, and it is also worth noting that even the problems that require some type of action, such as emotional knots, are greatly helped by having a consistent amount of do-nothing time each day, to reflect on what you need the most, and to not waste you energy in hundreds of different directions.
I remember being at one of my Nephew's house, going to the bathroom, and in the staircases I could faintly hear a woman say, over and over "Oh my God, oh my God". Seems like the kids these days are very keen on religion, that's good to hear. Didn't want to disturb him for obvious reasons, because it was clearly a sacred time for him.
Ever noticed how long people take to order something at a restaurant, but on the other hand can very quickly settle on purchasing a house or a car, or getting into college for Americans? Those purchases are so big that they essentially dictate your financial situation for decades just by themselves. And yet, people treat them so casually, what is going on?
The fact that they are so big might be the precise reason why people treat them so casually. The term "hyperobject" refers to situations or events which are far too big, in time, space and complexity, for simple worldviews and models based on local reality to be accurate. That loose definition might be somewhat inaccurate to its original usage, but for me the key aspect relevant here is that hyperobjects are outside the sphere of embodied reality, which is to say, what we can feel with our guts, and instead have to use our mind to make sense of.
As sad as it is to say, most people do not know how to think, which isn't surprising because the institutions within society do not benefit at all from people who genuinely think as individuals, since obedience and specialized competence are far more important there. As a result, most people's capacity to make sense of hyperobjects, such as global existential problems, misaligned incentive structures and the deep self-deception of the ego and the systems it builds, is basically non-existent.
I wouldn't lump big purchases, such as a house or a car or a degree, under the term "hyperobject", though they are definitely big enough for the somatic intuition we use to make most decisions to be gone. For instance, tell someone that their house purchase of $250.000 now went up to $260.000 and they won't really bat an eye. But the difference is still $10.000, which matters a great deal no matter the proportional increase it corresponds to, because it corresponds to the same amount of time spent working at the end of the day. To further emphasize the absurdity of that decision-making, the people who do not bat an eye at the $10.000 increase would likely spend many hours over the course of a year just to save a few hundred dollars in total over small things here and there.
To give other examples, notice how we can have a good mental image of how long a soccer field is, because human beings frequently run along it, but then try to imagine how long a 5km or a 10km road is, and see how your ability to imagine it in its entirety is pretty much gone. You might know that the 10km road is twice as long as the 5km one, but can you even feel any of them, the same way you can feel the length of the soccer field?
When our somatic intuition is gone, we need to turn to our mind to compute a result, as opposed to being able to feel roughly what it is. Can you guess, at a glance, how many years of work you need to acquire $250.000? How about actually computing that answer? Were your two answers close to one another? Probably not, right? And even if you were able to guess roughly how many years you need to work to acquire the $250.000, are you able to feel how long those years are, the same way you can feel how long a minute is? Put in that context, the additional $10.000 can be a very significant amount of time, especially if you don't like your job, like most people do.
Unsurprisingly, our society benefits a lot from the loss of the somatic intuition. The more disembodied purchases are—for instance, using a debit or credit card as opposed to using cash which would have to physically leave your wallet—the more people tend to spend. The solution as always consists in slowing the fuck down, especially for big purchases. Your money is ultimately your time, which is your life, and financial wisdom is realizing that being good at the big purchases is so much more valuable than focusing on how to save pennies on the small ones.
I do think we live in a collapsing society, but we still live very, very well right now. Simply having a place to sleep in, running water, convenient access to food and a fridge gives you incredibly privileged material conditions compared to the vast majority of human history. Remove yourself from the toxic mindset of modernity, its emotional deadened state, its obsession with acquisition and status, and you can live like a king for very little, thereby benefiting from the material wealth while minimizing the spiritual atrophy.
Moreover, what better times to practice virtue than our current ones? Since when is life supposed to be easy? It seems to me that many people make themselves miserable because they constantly expect life to be easy and thus constantly fight reality when it isn’t the case.
I am not saying we live in wonderful times, but then again, what is the supposed golden age of humanity? Darren Allen makes a good point about primitive life 3, but even he would agree that we cannot simply go back to the woods in our current situation, though we can still learn a lot from primal folk on how to live in a way that is aligned with human beings, as opposed to the unnatural technological system that we must live by. Society will do its own thing, better to focus on what you can meaningfully influence and care about.
(Footnote for title) 4. Perhaps you've reached the point of no return with regards to politics? You don't believe in any global solution that people propose, you feel like the current systems are stuck in structural attractors that make them unable to ever address their own problems, you sense that the number of people who have what it takes to create meaningful changes are too rare and unheard in the current age of noise, and so in short, you're very pessimistic about the landscape of collective organization.
In the light of this sentiment, I propose the following: if we can't make governments do useful things, how about we fully admit that they're useless and turn them into some type of entertainment contest? Replace governments, mandates, debates and all of those officials circuses with an actual dance show. People dance to garner the most approval from their followers, which also puts them more in the spotlight and more likely to be featured in the news, and then those people "in power" do ... nothing.
The fact that they do nothing whatsoever is actually a massive improvement when you think about it, because doing nothing is still better than making a system worse through regulations that merely react to the current problem, thereby creating new ones. 5 Dancing means that the spectacle of politics is now admitted in plain light, and that we get to see top quality entertainment from rigid, middle-class and middle-aged people trying to move their body around.
And who knows, maybe a few good dancers might rise from the lot and inspire people to revive this declining art? Maybe the Western world would become more embodied and alive as societal decline progresses and starts becoming apparent even to the average person? Who knows. Of course such a thing could never happen, societies are not just rigid in their structures, but also in the people they create. But one can still dream and laugh.
Two words I am completely against are "we" and "should", which come up quite often in discourse about what can be done about the current societal problems.
So what should "we" "do"? Nothing. Large collectives don't do anything, they merely react. They do the thing that is easiest for them to maintain their survival in the short term within the ambient collective environment, such as companies maximizing for profits, or activists shaming people to join their cause, or academia using dogma to establish its legitimacy, etc. Those collectives do not make conscious decisions because there is no center that is conscious. Individuals on the other hand, and very small groups too, can act from a conscious 'I'. But it does not come from a place of should, it comes from an understanding—not merely intellectual but also embodied—of the current situation. When you catch yourself talking too much, you simply stop, no need to "should" or make plans. 6
For some reason, throughout the office I work in, they have put screens which display a selection of artworks. I mention this because this is probably the only highlight of my day when I am in there. Everything there is so sterile that to actually look at something beautiful does make me feel better about my day in this dreadful place. And the selection is actually enjoyable too! I guess even the most spiritually dead places still have their glimmer of light.
A lot of stuff on the internet is just an appeal to the novelty-craving ego. It is rather obvious with pornography, but what is more subtle is for instance the novelty porn of many "educational" channels, which blast you with cool facts after cool facts, but which never amount to anything: no deep understanding of any principles and how it relates to other aspects of life, no introspecting on what matters, just quips and bits about discrete, isolated aspects of reality.
The systems around us optimize for ease, such as the ease of watching, the ease of playing, the ease of understanding, etc. But ease is very different from what is wholesome, which is apparent with food, though we don't seem to translate that lesson well with information and activity. The stuff you need to hear is not the same as that which you want to hear.
This is also why I am rather skeptical when people say that video games are a form of art, because video games are pretty much always geared towards some type of ease, if not straight up addictiveness. It is not always the case, but the fact that video games respond to a user makes this dynamic far too tempting, especially because video games cost so much to make. We wouldn't call a book or painting that panders to the reader or viewer a masterpiece—though this doesn't mean that deliberate obscurantism is art either—because there is something much more fundamental, and unselfish, that art wishes to get at: beauty, freedom, love, death, truth, and the vividness of life, just to list the most common ones. Pandering means pandering to the ego, whereas art is about pointing to something outside the shell of that ego. 7
(or for some of these points, your classroom)
In my office there is a space where there used to be a coffee machine—which they removed in order to put one in an open space, I guess to discourage people from just staying there too long—but is still in use in order to have a water machine, a sink, and some posters. One day, I get there and see someone standing perfectly still, straight back and all that, staring at a wall. The whole vibe was incredibly off, it gave me the impression of an NPC which wasn't assigned any task to do, and was just standing still in an idle animation. Turns out he was reading some poster on the wall, but my god it looked weird.
It’s also incredibly weird how compulsively people check their phone—I no longer have a smartphone and so for me there is nothing to really check there. It really feels like a default NPC idle animation at this point.
Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself — as though that were so necessary — that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.
As every year goes by and my dread of coerced work increases, it seems to me increasingly true that Man has an element of Chaos that can never be subsumed under any plan, no matter how reasonable it may be. Have you ever had a curious thing you observed in your life, and then proceeded to search up if anyone had something to say about this, and then found it that it got subsumed into an idea, or a framework, things which can be manipulated by the mind and sort of ... kill the joy of discovery? When aspects of life become classified, they kind of become dull, squashed into something that "we" "know" and no longer need to inspect.
It seems to me that this instinct is a rather crucial part of the rebellion against order, the sense that Reality with an upper case 'R' is simply too big, mysterious, wild and vivid to be captured by the neat categories and structures of the mind, which are then instantiated into the pseudo-reality of society.
Perhaps that is why there are so many people who supposedly have an "attention deficit disorder", because there is a deep part of them that simply refuses to pay attention to a dull lesson in a dead classroom, and that deep down they know that life and learning are way more exciting than this, way more adventurous and embodied. As such, when people are coerced by someone else but don't have the means to outwardly rebel—say no, change things or leave—they can still decide to not pay attention, and to not care, by for instance procrastinating or doing the bare minimum at a job.
We could label this response as the flight response in the 4F's model of trauma, and the other major one in my own life has been the freeze response: a tiredness that "coincidentally" occurs every time you have to do something you really do not want. 8
And perhaps that flight response is also why some people would rather believe in their own reality, through conspiracy theories and fantasizing, than accepting the dull, "known" reality provided by our society, because the sense that there must be more to life is simply too strong to ignore, even if it can easily be misguided as in the case of conspiracy theories. In general, rebellion is rarely something that "makes sense" in the modern world, because reason, rationality and going with the flow of society are the precise things which are being rebelled against.
I call the hard problem of insanity the following question: Am I insane, or is everyone else around me insane?
Note that both and neither can be true. But whatever is the case, how would you know? Through yourself, who could be insane? Or through the people around you, who could also be insane (individually and collectively)? Or something else than those two options, but in that case, what?
If I had to teach my younger self how to think, I think I would only focus on asking the same two questions over and over. They are very simple one-word questions, but they are immensely powerful at providing clarity. They are:
"Why" is about seeing the bigger picture, the context behind the current situation, and what is important. "Really" is about being more precise, as well as making sure you're not bullshitting yourself, by examining what you just said.
Here's one example, which will become repetitive but I hope the point will be conveyed. Let's say I feel like I need to go to the gym but don't want to. Alternatively, substitute "going to the gym" with anything you are forcing yourself to do, I just want to pick a concrete example here.
I could go on and on with this example, but you get the idea. The idea behind the two questions is to be curious about the problem, and let go of judgement as much as possible. Judgement is really the enemy of introspection. When you interact with thoughts like "I'm screwed up" or "No one likes me", it's basically guaranteed that you'll stop thinking clearly about your problem, because you're now stuck in a place of pain.
It is worth acknowledging that pain, because my god the world we live in can be cruel at times, for instance judging even very young children for not conforming to imposed standards, which are often completely arbitrary like in school, and then shaming them until they comply. There is real pain in how we get taught to relate to ourselves, and I do not wish to ignore that. On the other hand, that pain response rarely provides anything of value. I have never seen someone solve anything by flagellating themselves. And it is not fun to be around people who treat themselves that way either.
So perhaps an adjacent skill to asking good questions is the ability to see the disruptors of asking good questions, where being stuck in that pain mode is one example. Another example of a class of disruptors are the structures of power that surround us. A child in school cannot genuinely critique the school they're in, because the institution holds so much more power than the individual, especially a child. As such, they could never genuinely ask why it is that we have to go to school, because they'll be forced to go there anyway. And yet another example of a class of disruptors is the flow of distractions: entertainment, addictions, outrage, gossiping, sensationalism, blame, etc.
In the end, I would say that asking good questions is far more fundamental than having answers when it comes to being truly intelligent. You are always ignorant in some way, and how you navigate that ignorance is far more telling than all the answers you have accumulated. This is especially true when the source of most of the "answers" surrounding us is the technological system and the institutions that descend from it, because they all have their agendas. As Thomas Pynchon said:
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
In many ways, the second is far more disruptive than the first one, though in practice people only find the second one after the first. Just think about how subversive being in touch with the vividness of life is. What can a society which primarily uses coercion and incentives to get people to work for it give to someone who, for instance, is at peace while simply being in nature? I cannot think of anything personally. Wealth? Status? Easy pleasure? Those things are only worth something within the game that society tries to make everyone play. This connection to life itself short-circuits the entire reward structure of society, and thus creates individuals who are not easily manipulable, hence they're dangerous.
Also, the first realization should not be confused with cynicism, which is when an individual can see through the veil of deception of our society, but becomes miserable because it is the only thing they focus on. Much of the internet is about "blackpilling" people about society, how bad it really is, but in doing so, they do not create free and authentic individuals, but instead people who are stuck in an identity built around misery and thinking of themselves as more intelligent than others—the stereotypical "smart people are less happy because they see that it's all meaningless" type of deal.
This form of passive cynicism is actually very useful for society, because it doesn't provide anything to build towards that is outside the usual obey-consume-sleep routines of the modern world. As such, they are very likely to numb themselves with the very things that they would point out as cope: internet, video games, porn, drugs, alcohol, navel-gazing, etc, without really doing anything about their life.
I wouldn't say that the modern world has a culture, which I would loosely define as an ambient social environment which helps inform our relationships with one another and our broader context, such as nature and other such embodied realities. In other words, a culture is something like the collective equivalent of the human body.
Instead what we have is a hyper-fragmented schizoid self-referential network of coping mechanisms. The coping mechanism part is rather apparent with digital entertainment, but social media also largely serves as cope for people who do not have any agency in their life, by giving them the illusion of doing something useful by debating with other people. To be more explicit about the other terms:
We can sense that what we have is not a culture because everything feels so rootless, so disconnected from other things. Your workplace is like a tunnel for your time, energy and attention, which you enter and exit every day, and which has very little connection with other aspects of your life. All the other main aspects of modern life are similar, which leads the private world to become increasingly desertified: health, friends, family, enjoyment and rest become neglected because they are separate from the productive aspects of the modern world. As such, genuinely healthy people, i.e. not just in their body but also in their emotions, mind, relationships and we could even say their soul, are incredibly rare. Health cannot be uncoupled from your environment, and the ones we have in the modern world are simply not geared for the wellbeing of individuals.
The point of all this is that I think the vast majority of people (everyone?) ultimately craves for roots, for meaningful and lasting connection, not the hyper-virtual, disconnected and disembodied world that is increasingly becoming our reality. And as pessimistic as it may sound, those roots don't grow over night, they take time and cannot be forced. The idea of "organic" might apply to human collectives even more so than food, and this is one of the major reasons why I do not believe in the staying power of the modern world. Alienation, meaninglessness, disembodiment and loneliness are simply not sustainable, no matter how many layers of technology and systems you add on top.
How is your posture? Up to your liking?
Not just your physical posture, but also your field of attention. Is it wide and open, or did it narrow down to whatever you’re reading or staring at?
There is a massive difference between an emotion, and the idea of that same emotion. The problem is that people who are bad with emotions are also bad at perceiving the distinction between the two. This is incredibly clear with fear, as a lot of emotions can be entirely downstream of fear, such as:
I would say there are several reasons why the fear hides itself behind other emotions. The first one is that basically no one wants to admit that they're afraid. Admitting that you cannot talk to girls, don't know how to draw or dance, are addicted to porn and video games, do not trust your partner, are very emotionally brittle or that you are always restless, those can all be very embarrassing, but still, people sometimes confess about those things. On the other hand, admitting that any of those things is downstream of fear: the fear of rejection, the fear of other people's opinions, or even the fear of living, feeling and having free time, those are far more confronting. People would rather be losers, incompetent, selfish or even insane, than be cowards, because it feels so personal. At least when you're incompetent or selfish or a loser, you could argue that certain things are out of your control, and that you were dealt a bad hand. But when you're afraid of taking action? There's a visceral sense that you are weak.
The second, more existential reason is that the fear has a sort of intelligence, that can slip underneath the conscious layer of the mind. Ego is constantly looking for danger, and thus constantly afraid, because it knows ultimately that it is built on a shaky foundation. Not just the fact that it will die, which is of course true and something that very few people actually acknowledge in their guts (not just their mind) but the existential fear of the ego is broader than that. It is firstly afraid of any deep change: challenging work, taking risks at another path in life, breaking out of old habits, removing unhealthy relationships from your life, etc. But it is also deeply afraid of any deep examination, because it is pretty damn selfish. Acquiring things—which includes knowledge, when used as an armor to feel superior to others for instance—controlling people and events, only paying attention to others when it benefits you, etc. 9
We could summarize as such: ego is a fragile shell, but one that has a sort of intelligence—your intelligence in fact—that allows it to maintain itself in a more active manner. Ultimately that shell will die out, and it is also intelligent enough to know that, but will never look at that truth, and many other small truths, dead in the face. This is why egoic people distract themselves all the fucking time. Distraction is a fantastic mechanism for the ego because it feels like it is doing something useful, when for instance talking about politics, getting better at a video game, building an intellectual armor out of meaningless facts, etc. But ultimately that distraction is born out of fear, which is why people are never fully at peace when they engage in modern entertainment. Deep down, they know they are bullshitting themselves, and running away from something important.
More examples of emotional confusions
§1. Love being confused for: 1) neediness 2) fantasizing about someone 3) desiring to possess 4) fawning over
All of those things are forms of self-obsession masquerading as love. As such, the kind of "relationship" that emerges involves two self-obsessed people being angry that they do not get what they want, and two people who do not actually pay attention to the other. Dating is particularly obvious in that regard, when for instance a man thinks to himself: "Oh my god, I'm so afraid about what will she think of me!", and becomes obsessed with impressing the woman in front of him, instead of first seeing if they're worth impressing in the first place.
Because Love is the most unselfish thing you could embody, and because our world is built on selfishness, it shouldn't be too surprising that the typical views on love in media are completely distorted.
§2. Some other great examples from the Apocalypedia entry 'dissimulation':
Some words sound like what they mean:
More examples can be found on this stack exchange post and on Wikipedia, though as I mentioned in another entry here, it sort of killed the magic of discovery when I saw people trying to systematize it.
Discernment is so crucial in life because things are never explicit. This includes the value of discernment itself. For instance:
§1. If you're being abused, or taken advantage of, you wouldn't know immediately without prior experience, and of course never from the abuser themselves, because abusive power will never label itself as such. This is why childhood is so formative, since it completely dictates what you consider to be normal, acceptable, etc. And this is why having other points of view through traveling, meeting genuinely different people, running small experiments, is so valuable.
§2. The same thing applies to our current society, and the so-called normal, and it has been so successful at covering the globe and infiltrating minds that few people actually see what is fundamentally wrong with it. They might see important but isolated aspects of it, like environmental destruction, warfare, the unsustainable consumer culture, the soulless and deeply booooring "work" that people are forced into, etc. But to see the system itself as problematic, is quite rare because it has become so good at removing everything outside itself, or making those things appear non-existent, outdated, dumb, etc.
§3. Things only change if you decide to change, if you decide that you've had enough. Often life comes knocking at your door, telling you that you need to change. But even then, change only happens if you decide to pay attention to those knocks. Denial can be extended until death, unless you've got enough discernment to pay attention to problems before they grow too big, and enough care to move towards a better place.
§4. The worst mistakes in Life are done with utmost confidence. Because if someone isn't too confident in something, then they start considering possible problems, alternatives, and their own expectations and assumptions, which might be able to mitigate the worst scenarios or lead in simply not doing the thing. As a result, discernment is the acknowledgement that being confident in something is actually not a good indicator of how well it will succeed. Marriages and businesses are great examples of that, because no one marries a person they expect to divorce, and no one opens a business they expect to fail, yet the failure rates of both of those are pretty high.
How do you develop discernment though? As with the most important things in life, it is not straightforward. Life experience, pain, and learning from that pain—especially unrealistic expectations—seem to be the most reliable though. You can try to read so that you may learn from other people's pain, which is a big value of biographies and non-fiction I guess, but even then that can only go so far. There are many things that can only be truly learned from experience, in my opinion.
Some higher up (manager of my manager) mentions visiting some part of the U.S. where Native Americans still lived—I think near the Death Valley. Not in their usual wild environments of course, hence why people like her could meet them. She mentioned how she found it shocking how sad the Natives looked, and she didn't seem to understand why.
I guess it is not too surprising that upper-middle class people within our glorious "civilized" world do not understand why others find it so soulless, but it is despairing that those people hold so much power. I have often found that by far the hardest thing within the modern world isn't the actual set of tasks and problems that it requires from you, but instead the sheer difficulty of caring enough to get it done, when your entire body couldn't care less and wants to go out and be free.
Our society is not inclusive, it is a cultural blender. The differences that matter, such as in thinking, living together, embodying, relating to the world, are totally erased, and only trivial differences are allowed to exist. In reality, society is "inclusive" by utterly homogenizing any real difference between people, and when that doesn't work, coerce them to work for it.
For instance, has the world steered towards feminine values, such as kindness, embodiment, playful humor, 10 amongst many others, with the rise of "feminism"? No, instead women are encouraged to work in soul-crushing and body-numbing office jobs. Companies still ruthlessly optimize for profits. Warfare is still the norm in the modern world. People are still dissociated and numb, if not more. Institutions are still as rigid and disembodied from material reality. But because the number of people working in men-dominated field goes up, then clearly the world is getting better right?
Let's ignore that women might have perfectly valid reasons for not wanting to get into those men-dominated fields, such as the alienating experience of sheer disembodiment required to work 8,9 or 10 hours a day where your attention is completely sucked in by the monitor you're looking at and the problem you're thinking about. Or the complete lack of any meaningful personal connection, at the expense of increasing the profits of a few already rich people.
Instead, let's have women be shaped by the molds of the modern world, and celebrate as that dehumanizing process becomes more and more complete. This is progress, this is good, as we're led to believe. And so every significant difference is treated this way, as a bug that needs to be corrected and homogenized into the non-human mode of "living" within the technological system.
This is especially apparent with children before and after school, 11 who have their spontaneous, carefree and energetic approach to life squashed into institutionalized passivity, fear of authority and an obsession with getting the "right answer", i.e. the one that agrees with the system or its institutions.
The surface might change, such as having more minorities and female protagonists in movies, or more restaurants of diverse cuisine, 12 the statistics tell us we are more and more "inclusive" in more and more jobs, but no real difference is made. The system keeps marching on, and people lose their ability to discern between the surface propaganda and the underlying essence—or rather non-essence—which in fact hasn't changed at all: coercion and disembodiment.
We are allowed to be different in ways that are totally harmless to our system, but anything that could allow people to truly live as they want, i.e. freely from the system, has to be erased, in order for the system to stay powerful.
The above discussion highlights the difference between actual inclusiveness—allowing people who think, feel and live differently from the system to exist and thrive—and nominal inclusiveness, such as the tokens of equality of modernity.
In general, the nominal trap is about conflating between different things because they hold a similar name. For instance:
I love you
I feel alive
She said yes
Life is great
No work tomorrow
I am ill
Death is near
We broke up
I hate life
Civilization is falling
1 By saying that the mind imagines those scenarios, I am not implying that they aren’t true at all. What I am saying is that the mind has a way of monopolizing your attention, such that you forget everything else, such as: 1) paying attention to your body (see also somatic hazards) 2) focusing on what you can do 3) paying attention to what is good in your life.
2 Visakanv's term, see for instance this tweet.
3 See “Anarchy at the end of times” here
4 From Moliere:
> All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
5 "Prayer is powerful precisely because it does nothing", from Luke Smith's critique of "reason". One of the myths of our society is that reacting to problems is always better than doing nothing. This is one of those myths that can only be invalidated by the test of time, because everything in the media will reinforce this idea because we get "good" results by hiding away all the problems that build up.
6 Great analogy pointed out by Darren Allen. Another relevant essay here.
7 I really like Darren Allen's essay on "Video games are not an artform", link here, where he gives a good pointer of art—not a definition, because of its ineffable nature.
8 By the way, you can assign each of the 4F's response to one of the 4 elements: Flight = Air, freeze = earth, fight = fire and fawn = water. My life has been dominated by flight and freeze mostly, though in some situations also fawning, but very rarely fighting, probably because the institutions that surround us hold so much power compared to a child. But if you ever catch yourself chronically tired, consider that perhaps you are being coerced—or coercing yourself!—into doing things you don’t really want.
9 See also You are a Bastard, by once again, Darren Allen.
10 It is often said that women have no humor whatsoever, but this is a big mistake in squashing humor into the deeply alien activity of stand-up comedy. In my experience, women are usually funnier on a day-to-day basis—they simply don't take everything as seriously as guys usually do—but this doesn't translate well into stand-up, which is an incredibly artificial environment when it comes to human interaction.
11 Not that adults should emulate them completely, but that we have much to learn in how children see and live, and that I think a lot of people can relate with this sense that something very important has been lost from their childhood.
12 Even then, it is worth tracking how the globalization of many cuisines utterly destroys what made them good in the first place, hence why "cultural blender".
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2024-07-22