Passages from Ran Prieur and Darren Allen
Because I've already written quite a lot for this month, I'm simply going to dump a few entries I've written down while going through Ran Prieur's archive entries, which you can find here, as well as a few entries and quotes from the "Apocalypedia" by Darren Allen. (Link to the book here)
As always, here isn't any real coherence in what I'm picking, it's simply that I was going through some of their stuff because I've been finding myself so utterly bored while at work. The number I will be referencing under each quote is the number of the entry in the archives, so for instance the link above to Ran Prieur’s stuff points to 91.
I've been critical of normal "meditation", in which you sit still, focus on your breath, and attempt to empty your mind of thoughts. If I spend half an hour playing piano, not only do I have a good time, but I make clear progress in whatever little thing I'm working on. Not so with meditation, a tedious chore with no obvious benefit. But I've come to appreciate a subtle benefit, which is that I become nicer at correcting myself.
As a beginner, you're not going to go three seconds with a blank mind, before you slip back into thinking again. Maybe it takes another three seconds to notice and try again. Do the math: that's ten times a minute, or 300 times in half an hour, that you're correcting yourself. It's impossible to get mad at yourself that much. Inevitably, you're going to learn to re-center yourself without making such a fuss. And this is going to rub off on all kinds of other things, not only mistakes you make, but annoying things the world does, like pop-up windows and traffic lights.
From Ran Prieur’s 086.
This is very much my experience with meditation, except I never had this expectation to have a clear mind. I'm not sure why actually, but I just figured that simply being in silence was much better than whatever I was doing on the computer. But the practice of refocusing without making a fuss about it is very valuable in my experience. It helps you develop something that is infinitely more valuable than sitting in peace on a cushion, which is the patience to navigate the chaos of life.
There will always be things that don't go according to your plans, and that's just life. Honestly, in many ways that's probably a good thing, because plans have a way of becoming very tedious very quickly. But real peace comes from the ability to deal with any situation, not from the desperate hope that nothing problematic will occur. So letting go of the resistance is very valuable in my experience, because you can refocus without adding extra tension.
These were students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard. Their reward was—surprise!—more frogs. So they ate those frogs too. And now they're staring down a whole lifetime of frog-eating and starting to feel like maybe something, somewhere has gone wrong.
From this Substack essay called "Why are you eating so many frogs" referenced on Ran Prieur’s 082.
The whole thing about coercion feels pretty difficult to navigate to me. On a basic sense it isn’t, because it is evidently clear what energizes me and what doesn't, which I find to be a better indicator than some idea of what your mind believes that you enjoy. But on a practical sense, the world we live in is unlikely to provide stuff that you enjoy, and while it won't forbid you from doing it—unless you're into illegal things obviously—it also won't reward you for it.
So you're either left compromising by working a job that pays the bills but which you probably don't care so much, or you try to turn your interests into something that pays, which can become problematic too because of the tendency to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make that happen, and because it might feel like something you have to eventually force yourself to stay consistent at.
I don't know, I definitely haven't figured this out in my life, but one thing for sure, I don't want to keep eating frogs right now, I'm kind of sick of that. It helped me to get through university, but now I realize that it isn't sustainable at all long term. It's just not enjoyable.
Twitter has a way of taking people who start out as distinct individuals and converging them into the same personality... The example I use is Trump, Kanye and Elon. Ten years ago they had distinct personalities. But they've converged to have a remarkable similarity of personality, and I think that's the personality you get if you spend too much time on Twitter.
From Ran Prieur’s 085.
That's a great observation, but I wonder why that is the case? The thing about Twitter is that it is a bubble, which can actually be a great thing if you surround yourself with people that embody values you resonate with. Most people however seem to get stuck in the 2 main attractors of social media: 1) chasing followers and likes and 2) the performative game of hating things or people just for the sake of hating, or because that also gets you likes, more so than being honest and constructive.
But it doesn't have to be that way. So coming back to the original question, why do big accounts seem to converge towards being the same type of person?
The first thing I'd say is that the big accounts are not representative of most people, for the obvious fact that they're big. Their interaction with Twitter is pretty much a single player game, because there is no way you have time to interact with anyone else in a meaningful way, and if you do it's someone you know, and so you might as well do it in private messages at this point. This means that we shouldn't only look at the biggest accounts to determine the effects of social media, because not everyone is interested in the quest for big numbers. Maybe the vast majority of people are swayed by that, and thus it is worth taking into account, but it is also worth holding the fact that you can literally decide to use the internet in a different way from most people, and surround yourself with better influences.
The dynamic of having social media devolve into a single player game means that it is essentially an echo chamber of their own thoughts, except that it has to fit within a narrow window of what is okay to share about at the risk of receiving massive backlash. This isn't necessarily about the political Overton window, though of course that is very real, but then again Trump and Kanye West are already known for being controversial, so it can't only be that. 1 It also has to do with for instance sharing things the lowest common denominator would like, such as funny remarks instead of insightful thoughts, or commenting about the thing everyone else talks about. In essence, you either talk about utterly inconsequential things, or you oversimplify everything to be understood by the average Joe and get liked by your in-group.
This means that the constraint of not being cancelled is one thing, but on the other side there is also the entire game of maximizing the amount of likes. I don't know to what extent those people consciously or unconsciously, play that game, but you can imagine that it reinforces a certain dynamic. For instance: people recognize you for saying certain things, which is inevitably an incredibly reductive version of who you are because everything is filtered through a 280 character tweet, and then you start to be known for certain bits. The type of tweets that match that bit get liked far more than the other ones, such that there is an audience capture that leads people who optimize for likes to become bits themselves. Repeating the same gimmicks over and over, because they're trapped in a prison of what is recognizable, which is literally Flanderization but for social media. The essence of that dynamic being that subtlety fades over time once you start optimizing for popularity, because the mass collective's sense of discernment is essentially non existent. 2
So perhaps that is the key reason why mass media is so problematic: because the large scale collectives that surround us are totally unconscious, and increasingly so. An individual can make conscious decisions, and direct their attention, and learn from their past, but the largest, and thus most powerful ones aren't able to do so. So what gets spread around is just the type of stuff that people are bad at not sharing, not the stuff they actually want to share. People talk about Will Smith slapping that other guy because they don't really know how to not do that, they don't slow down enough to think about what actually matters in life. It might be a sad situation, but ultimately I don't have control over social media, only about my attention and how I use it. And I don't care about that type of clown show.
I think the reason things keep getting more complex, is the same reason that Elvis and Michael Jackson died. Both of them had a personal doctor, with only one patient, and each doctor got bored doing nothing, and had to justify his existence by doing a lot of unnecessary and ultimately harmful stuff. That's what engineers (and managers and executives) of tech companies are doing. If they don't make upgrades, they feel useless, and I guess it's really hard to upgrade something without making it bigger or more complicated.
From Ran Prieur’s 075.
I think this is an important point I never thought about, as to why people contribute to the modern world. There is a type of person that simply doesn't know what else to do with their time, because they're paid to do certain things so they might as well make something that works well, expand, etc.
I don't think it is the main reason however, because there is also a major component of constraint, often times not explicitly but rather through removing the other options. You work within the modern world because there isn't any other real way you know of to make money, and then you're told that being an engineer pays well, so you go down that path, etc.
But to come back on the original point, it is pretty embarrassing to admit the extent to which I don't know how to handle extra free time. I guess you could say that it's the addiction of novelty and doing things, which is to say, the momentum of the mind which keeps spinning in circles and which overtakes your attention.
So in an important but also pretty hilarious way, a major skill to practice seems to be the ability of being fine with doing nothing. 3 Enough is enough, and often you just make things worse and worse by adding extra complexity. As Montaigne says:
There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.
Contrast that with the Windows updates which don't add anything meaningful and simply bloat out the operating system, making computers slower over time by virtue of running slower software. This is definitely the default trend of computer-related technology, so it is difficult for me to assess how malicious Windows is with their updates. I think overall there is a push for profits meaning it is somewhat intentional, 4 but at the same time I can't help but feel sorry for those who actually want to produce lean and simpler software but are stuck working within incredibly bureaucratic environments.
My point is, technological complexity tends to create tasks that no one feels like doing, and the people who get excited about tech are insulated from those tasks. This goes back to the subject of elite overproduction. Too many people see themselves as the designers and beneficiaries of amazing new technologies, and not enough people are willing to do the increasingly fiddly grunt work.
From Ran Prieur’s 074.
This is an incredibly key point that techno-optimists consistently ignore. They believe that social problems are simply another type of technical problems that they can solve by applying the same mindset they use in engineering, as if there was such a thing as a social architect, but it simply isn't the case. If no one believes in your vision, if no one wants to do the grunt work necessary to make it come into reality, then it simply won't happen.
In a sense the entire project of civilization is about getting people to work for its growth without their full consent. Either through overt physical coercion, or through removing options, or through brainwashing, or many other techniques. But this can only work for so long.
I think Ran Prieur is very correct when he points out that motivation is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental component of societal collapse. As he mentions above the paragraph I just quoted:
I continue to think that motivation is the number one factor in collapse. A society collapses when not enough people feel like doing the stuff that holds it together, and too many people feel like doing stuff that breaks it down.
I'd say that we can sense the motivational collapse coming in many areas:
Related to the term 'elite overproduction' that Ran Prieur mentions, Joseph Schumpeter had this idea of the intellectual class, which would constitute one of the major factors of the demise of capitalism. This fall would be the result of the considerable successes of capitalism, because that system would create so much wealth that a significant portion of the population would have enough free time to educate itself and others about the problems of our world, not just the local ones but also across the globe and throughout time for instance. On top of that, the lack of fulfilling work, or simply work because of technological shifts, will compound with the intellectual class into a climate of critique about our society, protests and dissatisfaction, which will eventually undermine our system.
While my explanation of Schumpeter's idea of the intellectual class might be somewhat inaccurate or overly simplistic, I think the broad trend of our system undermining itself through its intellectuals comes across to me as very accurate. Everyone wants to be the smart guy in the room, especially if they can attack the system that way, but ultimately very few people have what it takes to create any meaningful change.
Also more gems from the same paragraph:
Low tech doesn't magically create utopia. But look at it from another angle. Your task is to design a society where nobody is ever forced to do anything. Are you going to go high tech, or low tech? There have been societies where nobody is ever forced to do anything, and all of them so far have been technologically simple.
For growing food, the most motivationally robust system is a semi-wild food forest, full of perennials, self-seeding annuals, and wild game, all powered by a fusion plant called the sun. There's a lot of room for highly motivated people to make this system work better, but there's also a lot of room for idleness.From Ran Prieur’s 074.
"Motivationally robust" is an incredibly thought provoking idea. The thing about efficiency is that it is incredibly misleading because it only focuses on one isolated aspect at a time. If you look at people's individual lives today, their personal time is spent in incredibly inefficient ways because all of our main needs are scattered in different activities and containers. You go to one place to exercise, because your job doesn't involve any physical activity, and on top of that it requires significant commuting. Then you spend additional time to socialize, because exercising or working or commuting don't provide for that need, and so on.
So while individual machines are getting more efficient, it is incredibly unclear whether human life as whole is. I would say no, see more from me in a small piece about 'Belonging you don't have to earn', but in isolated aspects it can be. But one thing that is very clear to me, it isn't motivationally sustainable, there is simply too much coercion required to make systems and institutions function.
Technology saves time and labor with total indifference to whether we enjoy spending time doing certain things. It assumes that we never do—that sitting and doing nothing while machines do the thing, is always preferable to doing the thing ourselves. Taken to its logical extreme, the message is that nonexistence is preferable to existence. A milder conclusion would be that everything useful should be done by technology. No wonder we increasingly feel that life is meaningless.
From Ran Prieur’s 058.
It's quite shocking how many worldviews, when taken to their extreme, actually lead to the conclusion that nonexistence is preferable to existence. If for instance eliminating suffering is the only thing that matters, then honest to God, why is ending all life on Earth not a good idea? 5 The truth is that life cannot be squashed into a suffering versus not suffering spectrum, because there are significantly more types of experiences in life than that.
There is curiosity, friendship, peace, joy, overcoming, sharing, mystery, love, learning and laughter, amongst many many other experiences. Those are valuable for their own sake, but because the drive of technology is geared towards continual improvement, 6 they aren't as valued as the "productive" activities of the system, putting “productive” in quotation marks because of the previous discussion on how misleading the concept of efficiency is.
Or to come back to the original point, the dichotomy between work and not work strikes me as a rather modern confusion. Most activities can be very pleasant if they involve other people you enjoy being with, and if you have the freedom to go at your own pace and do things your own way. So I personally have never been interested in removing work from my life, and instead pursue work that has impact on the things I care about and which I can do with enough freedom for it to be enjoyable.
The problem is that because work within the system is completely coercive and utterly devoid of any meaning of real impact, people confuse that type of work with the totality of work, thereby leading to online movements like the subreddit Anti-work. It should really be anti-bullshit-work or pro-communal-work, because work itself isn't the problem.
In Harry Potter, people can fly through the air and shoot bolts of energy, but it's all part of an unshaken third person perspective—strange physics in a spotlessly objective metaphysics. In The Magicians, magic does the work of physics, like bending light. In His Dark Materials, there are different realities, but the doorways are clean portals, out there in the world.
In real magic, it's the mind that's bent, and the doorways between worlds are in our perspectives. Two people side by side can be in different worlds and not know it. Battles between worlds are not gunmen coming through portals, but people getting each other to look differently.
From Ran Prieur’s 068.
I don't have much to say about real magic because I can't say I ever felt like my mind has been bent—though it's certainly been broadened quite a lot—but the observation that most magic in storytelling is essentially just another of technology is very astute. Unsurprisingly, living in the technological system your entire life makes you see reality through a technological lens, which means that even enchanted worldviews get seen through that lens: controlling the external world without paying attention to subtle phenomenons like how you perceive reality.
People often say that technology is neutral—something which I completely disagree with 7—and that it is only a matter of how it is used, but then spend no time whatsoever thinking about how to actually become better users. You can add however much technology you want to solve older problems, but that too will reintroduce new, completely unforeseen problems that people can only be worse at dealing with, if they haven't consciously learned to use them better.
For instance, there is such a thing as being a poor reader of a book—which for the vast majority of human history is actually an incredible piece of technology, especially when you have an entire culture that teaches and uses reading—but this is nothing compared to being a poor user of social media, who spreads bullshit ideas, is engaged in narrative warfare and is constantly scrolling their feed like a zombie.
But the problems I see with inner change, compared to external control, are that
As a result, coercion strikes me as a significantly easier way to create coordination at a scale, because of the short term incentive of power. But it only works in the short term, because the long term effects of coercion is of course rebellion, or a motivational collapse, or debasing the environment upon which we depend, etc. In other words, societal decline.
There's a video, I don't have a link, but it mentioned a two year old who developed full-blown autism. So they took him to a treatment center, which put him in a very low stimulation environment, and the therapist gradually built up his ability to deal with more stimulation. By age 8, he was neurotypical.
From Ran Prieur’s 067.
I don't really get involved in the discussions surrounding autism, but adjacent to it is a label I use and which I find very important, which is the term sensitive as described by Dr. Gabor Matte, on this podcast for instance, though he also wrote several books on the subject.
Sensitivity simply means that you pick up more things, often far more, than average people do from their environment. For some people that means tunneling on details, one of the stereotypical traits ascribed to autistic people, but on a broader level, you are also much better at picking up energy from the people around you. If people are mad, you really feel that, and so you're likely to try to do things to appease them, even if you aren’t the problem. If they are sad, you also feel that deeply and that can easily swing your mood.
But the list of consequences of being sensitive is very long, so here are some noteworthy observations:
So the bottom line for me is that if you're someone who identifies as being sensitive, you might benefit from slowly building your capacity to feel more and more. It is incredibly likely that you've built ways to cope with the intensity of the world, such as scrolling, watching the same stuff over and over because it's predictable, or staying in bed because it's safe, because your life just feels so overwhelming.
As an example of what you could do, you could start with spending some time each day without any digital media, and allow your attention to rest in your gaze and in your body. Really pay attention to what you're looking at. Realize that your visual field is much wider than how you naturally tend to look, and allow it to expand. Spend more time than you usually would on what you're looking, and really pay attention without rushing to something else. This takes time so be patient.
With your body, start noticing parts of it, slowly but surely. The feet are the best place to start, because they are the literal and metaphorical ground of our being, so standing up and really allowing yourself to feel your feet can stabilize your internal world. You then might want to move your attention to places of your body that typically hold a lot of tension. For me it is and has always been the belly, so find ways to slowly dissolve the tension, by feeling it, breathing into it and allowing your entire body to relax. For others it might be their shoulders, their jaw—which can cause tinnitus by the way—their eyebrows, their lower back.
That is just a starting place, so feel free to experiment with the rest. The key of the practice is learning to move through life consciously, and noticing where your energy and attention go.
When a situation feels too overwhelming, what often happens is that you'll go back to an old strategy to deal with it: video games, social media, loud music, thinking or worrying, porn, etc. I'd say that some addictions are much better than others, so I wouldn't feel too bad about swapping one for another. Progress is still progress.
But what you want is to become better at dealing with the overwhelm, as well as reducing it in the first place. Spend less time on things that cause you to be tense in your body, or on activities that simply provide too much stimulation. That's a general plan for stabilizing your inner experience and living from a more conscious place.
In 2008, a guy tried to make a toaster from scratch, including smelting metal from ore. It turned out to be much easier to make a toaster out of parts of broken toasters.
From Ran Prieur’s 079.
It is interesting to think about the type of technology that will still be possible in a post-collapse world. Of course the major problem is that so many of our devices are utterly useless without a source of power, which can be provided by a generator, but the latter also requires fuel which by then would have become scarcer and scarcer as societal declines ensues. 8
In his novel Star's Reach, John Michael Greer explores the idea of a world set four centuries after ours, based around groups of people salvaging old pieces of technology in order to mine their metal or extract specific parts. I haven't read it, but I think that type of vision is very interesting because it informs a type of skill set which can become incredibly useful even in our times: repairing and tinkering with simpler technology.
I don't know enough to know what kind of technology is worthwhile to salvage and cobble back together, but it is intriguing to think about.
When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules. But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren't getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
From a comment on Hacker news, referenced in Ran Prieur’s 058.
This was very much my experience in school. I didn't have good relationships with the supervisors in my school, even though I had good grades and didn't do anything to really get in trouble. But I don't know, they just didn't like me, which is fair because their job doesn’t consist in liking me in the first place. On the other hand, other more troublesome kids were closer to the supervisors, and I guess they had to in order to survive in the school environment.
It's one of those games where you can see what it is all about, but the whole dynamic is so disgusting in the first place that you can't be bothered to do what is required to “win”.
The particular strategy above is a form of fawning, which might be one of the most widespread social strategies from what I can tell. In other contexts, it's called ass-kissing, people pleasing, bending backwards, or as I like to call it, making daddy/mommy happy. School isn't about learning, it's about making daddy/mommy happy. Work isn't about productivity, it's about making daddy/mommy (the manager, the boss) happy. On and on.
That's one way to play the social game. The downside is that you can't honestly look at yourself in the mirror afterwards and have self-respect, so there's that. As Louis Rossmann often says, Do what is easy to live with, not what's easy. It's easy in the moment to contort yourself into the highest-probability Authority-pleasing shape 9 but it's not easy to live with.
From playing piano, I've identified five different possible sources for what your fingers are doing on the keys.
1. If you're reading music, your eyes are telling your fingers what to do.
2. If you're improvising, your ears are doing it.
3. If you're playing exercises, it's your brain.
4. If you're playing a song from memory, it's also your brain, but a different function, plus some muscle memory
5. And the fifth one, after years of playing, I only noticed this week. Your fingers can direct themselves, based on what feels good for your fingers, with total indifference to the notes.
From Ran Prieur’s 089.
As someone who draws frequently, I've been thinking about the equivalents for visual art. I've definitely noticed a stark difference in my ability to draw from a reference, versus simply drawing without. 10 Here is what I see:
Anxiety and depression are disorders of attention.
From Ran Prieur’s 066.
I completely agree with this point. I find the term “mental health” incredibly misleading, because the difference between a healthy use of the mind and an unhealthy one really has to do with attention. Moreover, I wouldn't say that anxiety and depression only have to do with your mind, they are also consequences of being utterly disconnected from your own body, and having little agency in your own life, so overall I like the summary provided by the quote, though obviously you cannot capture the entire situation with a short sentence.
I am not sure how I generally deal with them actually. I can list some of the shifts for me but it's difficult to say if it was because of those that my internal state improved, or because of something else entirely. But anyway:
§1. Establishing a continual connection with my body made a massive difference, because often I would engage in behavior because of sensations in my body, like being tired, hungry, or stressed out, but I didn't do the direct thing that would address it. Now if I'm tired I close my eyes and do nothing, 11 if I'm hungry I eat, and if I'm stressed out I do jumping jacks, shake out my body and slow down my breathing. The way I like to remain embodied is to pay attention to my feet once in a while, because they really are the ground of your being, literally and metaphorically
§2. Being better at doing the things I want to do also helps a lot. If you start out the day with a small win, then the rest of the day feels better, whether or not you keep working on stuff. And the main way I've become better at doing things is honestly to let go of the expectations I had regarding them. Writing down words and making some improvements if I don't like some sentences, putting down lines without allowing myself to erase, and seeing where that takes me, etc. It doesn't make sense to optimize a routine if you don't even have a routine in the first place. If you're in that situation, focusing on quantity over quality is genuinely helpful, so you can build a momentum in your activities.
§3. Not taking things so personally. This extends the previous point about doing things as well. If you don't feel like spending time on your projects, then that is worth listening to. It doesn't mean you are lazy, but instead there is simply a desire to try out something else, or maybe there is something about your environment that makes it unenjoyable to get things done: distractions, too much friction before you can get started, not satisfying enough, etc. And then in daily life, not taking what people say so personally. Most people have their own problems, so what they say or do says more about that than anything specific about you.
§4. Surrounding yourself with better influences. Changing yourself is difficult, but changing your environment is far more tangible and you keep reaping the benefits without having to do much extra work. Many people complain that social media swallows all their time, but few actually do something about it. What is it about social media that keeps you there, and can you shift to something more wholesome? Why doesn't your feed feel inspiring, instead of it being demoralizing? Can you make it easier to naturally reach out for things that are healthier for you, and harder to do the things you eventually regret? The book Atomic Habits is worth mentioning in this regard, it's very straight to the point about how to shift your environment.
§5. Allowing play and silliness. It is far more efficient to rest and play because you end up doing things for so much longer than without them. The usual outlook on productivity doesn't take into account your morale with regards to your project, and that is honestly a major oversight. The difference between my worst mood and by best mood can easily reach a factor of 10 when it comes to my output. People think that they are serious because they get themselves to grind, but a really serious creative would look at all the people burning out around them and think about ways to avoid that. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, because it is obvious that people who play don’t burn out for instance.
The thing about this list of things is that it is just that, a list. Ultimately changes in life are far more unpredictable, and also far more subtle. It's about shifting your relationship to yourself and what you're doing, not just adding more stuff to do. But the problem with subtle shifts is that they're difficult to convey. For instance, my inner dialogue changed so much that it is difficult for me to even remember what it was like 5 or 7 years ago. 12
So I don't really know what I would say to someone who was really deep in that. In an important way, I never was, so I think it is crucial to make a distinction between "reasonable problem" advice and "really traumatic" advice. I do the former and not the latter, because I’ve never experienced the latter.
But as a simple starting point, I think any practice that puts you more in touch with your body is very good, though I wouldn’t recommend exercising in a way that is too overwhelming because that has a way of making you more disembodied actually. But for instance, intentionally making your breaths longer is useful. Long inhales and exhales with some pause in between, which connects you back to your body and allows you to see the contents of your mind more clearly, and not take every thought too seriously. The mind is very powerful, but more powerful than that is the ability to shift you attention to whatever is most useful at any moment, and sometimes the mind just spouts nonsense which is best to completely ignore, like background noise.
People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life. Successful people always credit "hard work", which gives the impression that they spend hour after hour, day after day, forcing themselves to do stuff they don't feel like doing. That may or may not lead to a better life, but it always leads to burnout.
The actual secret of highly successful people is that they're obsessed. It would be nice if super-achievers would stop pretending to have moral virtue, and admit that they put in the hours for the same reason as stalkers and video game addicts, and they're just lucky that they happen to be obsessed with something that society considers worthwhile.
From Ran Prieur’s 067.
Obsession can never be the admitted reason, and so I completely agree that it's a common factor between high achievers in our world, because as pointed out, if you have to force yourself constantly to do things, you will inevitably burn out. But there does seem to be a difference between the obsession of let's say Michelangelo and someone like Jeff Bezos. 13 Businessmen are mainly concerned with their own wealth, which can of course lead to genuinely helpful changes in society, but isn't the main focus, while artists, especially the great ones, are overall concerned with something beyond themselves. As Keith Johnstone says:
We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God.
So while I am not an obsessive type of person and prefer doing things at my own pace, I don't think it's a good idea to necessarily view all of it as a bad thing. The type of obsessions promoted by the modern world: workaholism, video games addictions, niche hobby infatuation and the likes, are toxic because they are escapes. But work isn't necessarily an escape because it can simply be something you really want to bring into the world.
I was in Seattle over the weekend. It's having a problem that a lot of popular cities are having: the cost of housing is so high, that too many residents are either rich or homeless—and both of those demographics suffer from mental illness. The difference is, homeless people are homeless because they're mentally ill, and rich people are mentally ill because they're rich.
From Ran Prieur’s 058.
I won't comment much on this one because I simply don't know any rich person personally, but I am keeping that one because of the fascinating juxtaposition between homeless and rich people. Some people are fucked up, but then within that group, some are functional because they match the demands of society, while others aren't. Very intriguing to think about, especially with regards to the normalized obsession discussed above.
Don't really have much to add to these, I just think they are nice so I’m saving them.
Laziness" means holding out for activities that you find intrinsically enjoyable
From Ran Prieur’s 065.
I think that's on point. That being said, I think a coercion-free life is quite unrealistic to expect when you haven't developed a steady income stream yet, so it's a bit much to expect that all activity you engage with will be intrinsically enjoyable in our current society. But still, it is worth noticing the lack of fit between modern work and our motivation source, which usually takes the form of impacting something directly in front of us, as opposed to the abstract and complicated work we have now.
Cannabis resets the kind of memory that causes boredom.
From Ran Prieur’s 066.
I don't do weed, or any substance really, but the idea of a certain type of memory causing boredom is interesting. I think it has more to do with attention, similar to one of the entry above, but they are very much related. Because when you're bored, or really apathetic, you're in this sense that everything around you is already familiar, which means you don’t need to be paid attention to anything. It's what we could call the tyranny of the familiar.
Then I started thinking about attention again, and came up with this: boredom is the absence of anything that earns your attention; pain is the presence of something that demands your attention without earning it. So having to listen to your boring uncle at a family dinner is not actually boredom, but pain.
From Ran Prieur’s 066.
School is painful, like genuinely painful. I wonder if that's why people's legs get restless when they are forced to sit in a place all day long. They have all that energy and curiosity in them, and yet they're forced to listen to a boring teacher talk about boring things.
A ritual is an engine for turning activity into motivation.
From Ran Prieur’s 061.
I think it undersells the whole dimension of rituals being enchanted and putting you in contact with an experience you wouldn't normally have, but I think that's a very good summary nonetheless.
So litter happens when people feel alienated from their own locality.
From Ran Prieur’s 079.
I used to not think much about litter, until I realized that it creates a positive feedback loop where poorly maintained places create this sense that it's fine to litter, so it keeps piling up, and it becomes more and more demotivating to start doing something about it. So now I take cleanliness more seriously, especially in my own spaces.
Steven Wright line: "I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world."
From Ran Prieur’s 075.
Related: people hoard stuff because they no longer belong to the Universe at large, or once again because they feel alienated from their own locality.
Lately I've made some progress on managing anxiety, with a practice that I call expanding into pain. Every self-help guru will tell you, expansion is good and contraction is bad. What they don't tell you is what exact thing you're expanding, because it's really hard to explain. Another thing they don't tell you is that expansion feels terrible. If it felt good, we wouldn't have to be told to do it.
But for me, the pain is the key to the practice. I usually do it in the morning, when I'm still lying in bed, making the mental transition from the world of dreams to the world of earthly responsibilities. I'll be thinking about something that feels bad, and the practice is, never mind the thing, focus on the feeling, and amp it up, as strong as I can, as long as I can."
From Ran Prieur’s 066.
Noting this down because I'm interested in the idea, though I don't really do this practice at all. But who knows, if I have time I might play with it. My main shift with regards to discomfort has been about acknowledging it immediately, which I would say is another form of expanding into the pain: you allow the attention to get down into it and do something about it.
If I feel some pain in my wrists, thumb, or tension in my belly, shoulders, neck or lower back, then that's worth paying attention. Rarely is it something worth panicking about, but I immediately want to move into a stretch, or assess my posture and see if I can shift into something more pleasant.
It can also be something more subtle, like being in a noisy environment that makes me more and more tense, or noticing that I'm putting off some type of project, and at least verbalize what's going on: I am procrastinating on this thing because 1) maybe I haven't given it a specific instruction, and it's too vague in my mind 2) maybe I don't want to do it, and want more play right now 3) there is some specific discomfort related to putting my stuff online, or some other reasons.
Or maybe something happened that makes me feel worse than I would like to admit: a comment that feels somewhat rude and which I'm taking way too personally, a sense of rejection I get from other people, etc. Acknowledging the pain immediately is very helpful because otherwise it will just bubble up and become worse and worse.
For many of the most effective authoritarian systems, controlling the thoughts of the ruled is secondary to shaping social cleavages in the population.
Ordinary humans do not choose their political positions out of rational thinking or even self-interest, but for social reasons: they want to believe the same stuff as their in-group, and the opposite of their out-group. And even in a supposed democracy, the ruling interests understand this and use it to control us.
From Ran Prieur’s 066.
The main social mechanism discussed in the referenced article is that if someone trusts a political candidate or political party, then he will go on to shift all his other positions to be in accordance with that view. In other words, humans prioritize belonging to a group over developing their own worldview, or even having a coherent view in general. This is quite obvious when it is pointed out, but it is difficult for me to say how unhealthy of a dynamic this actually is.
On one hand, the examples provided in the article are clearly problematic, as they all revolve around a sort of identity game that starts from a rather shallow connection. Let's say that someone (A) identifies as right-leaning because they benefit from focusing on their personal agency and individual freedom, but they don't feel too strongly about all the ideas related to genders that the left and the right love to argue about. But then, one of the person (B) he admires talks about how homosexuality is completely degenerate and such and such. Then A will feel compelled to follow that belief as well, because they get something from listening to B, and it feels like there is too much cognitive dissonance from holding two, seemingly, conflicting ideas. In truth A could have also listened to the personal advice from B, and discarded what he doesn't find useful, but that is not the usual path that tribe-seeking humans tend to go down.
On the other hand, picking individual beliefs because they suit you has a way of making you ignore what you actually need in the moment. Let's say you are someone who tends to avoid commitment because you're utterly afraid of it, then you will tend to “magically” resonate with ideas of open relationships. Which is not to say that anyone who is in, or considering one, necessarily tends to be avoidant, but I merely wish to point out that the dynamic of picking what suits your ego the most is very tempting when you have the freedom to do so.
At the end of the day, the name of the game is discernment, not something we can prescribe in every situation. But it is worth noting that most collectives do not want you to think clearly.
When I was in high school and college, back in the 1980's, I don't think I even once heard the words "social anxiety". I mean it existed, but it wasn't enough of a problem that ordinary people gave it a name. Now it's everywhere, and I don't think it's limited to the millennial generation, because I've got it too, and worse than when I was younger. So where does it come from?
Yesterday, on weed, I wrote this: "Does the internet cause anxiety by normalizing a socially easier simworld?" In more words: The internet is an unprecedented global artificial world, in which social behavior has looser rules and less serious consequences than the world of modern society. If you're at a job interview, or at a party, or even just going to the store, the rules are tighter and the stakes are higher than when you're goofing off anonymously in some comment thread.
So what happens to someone who spends more time on the internet than out in society? The easier world becomes the new baseline, and what used to be the normal world now feels difficult and frightening. As the social internet grows, this happens to more and more people.
From Ran Prieur’s 057.
I think this is right on point. People are socially anxious because the consequences of being online are next to nothing, while real life has visceral intensity. There is a fantastic story written in 1909 called "The Machine stops", written by E. M. Forster, which not only predicts technological developments like the internet, which allows people to stay in their room all day long because they can get everything delivered to them, but also the inevitable collapse of that world. Incredibly prophetic considering how long ago it was written, and now more relevant than ever. One aspect described in the story is the fear of direct experience. For instance, quote:
And yet—she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born. It curved—but not quite as she remembered; it was brilliant—but not quite as brilliant as a lecturer had suggested. Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
I think it's fair to say that Forster also predicted the fear of direct experience, which manifests itself as social anxiety, amongst other things. Direct experience is scary because it pokes the bubble of safety and control that the ego wants to live within. But the problem with safety is that the more desperately you cling for it, the less safe you feel.
I saw a discussion on reddit where people were disagreeing about whether life is hard, because they weren't clear about definitions. I would break it down like this: in the 21st century first world, compared to most human societies and all wild animals, it's really easy to stay alive, and really hard to be happy.
If we keep going in this direction, eventually any death not from suicide will be global news. Suicide might even be normalized, so if you're above a certain age, and you say you're going to kill yourself, no one will even try to talk you out of it. Suicide might become a necessary safety valve, taking people out of the equation who would otherwise drag the system down or destabilize it.
I used to think collapse would come from physical factors like peak oil. Now I think there's no crisis we can't tackle if we're sufficiently motivated — and we're not.
Where does motivation come from? The popular assumption is that it comes from some magical virtue that lives inside individual people. I think motivation is a matter of fit: the fit between what's in our hearts to do, and what society wants done. And right now those two things are really far apart. How many times have you heard someone say that success is about hard work and not talent? It's a big cliche, and it seems to be true, but we wouldn't need to say it so much if we didn't start by assuming the opposite.
I think in our deep ancestral environment, thriving was completely about talent—and of course luck. There was so much overlap between what they felt like doing, and what was in front of them to do, that they didn't need the concept of a work ethic. It's not that hard work makes you successful, but that our culture had to invent success to reward invented activities that hardly anyone feels like doing.
Sometimes I wonder why there are no colleges or employers that target underachievers. They could be like, "We want talented people who just seem lazy because they've never been in an environment as exciting as ours." This is the path to revitalizing our civilization, and no one is trying it. Instead everyone says the opposite: "We want people who are already highly driven, and we'll just teach them to go through the motions of doing our thing."
You know who does recruit underachievers? Terrorists, and cults, and other dangerous movements that I'm mostly against. But that's the hard logic of every human society: if it goes too far astray from human nature, the people who want to keep the game going will be outhustled by the people who want to end it.
From Ran Prieur’s 056.
I very much agree with the part on “it's really easy to stay alive, and really hard to be happy”. One major aspect being of course that success within society has very little to do with genuine happiness, as opposed to nominal happiness, the stuff that is called happiness around us but isn't actually so. So our environment is geared towards the growth of the system, not giving people meaningful or inspiring work, or helping them with their quality of life. This is why motivation is such a problem, because the work you do has very little tangible results on your own personal environment, the people around you, your quality of life. It's energy thrown into a bureaucratic endless hole, which gets you tokens like money or a follower count but not any tangible satisfaction.
And I think his conclusion on how underachievers are being recruited by dangerous movement is very much on point. It seems clear to me that the current iteration of society will collapse under its own weight of complexity and stuff people don't want to contribute to. But so what do people willingly put their energy into? The main ways I see unfolding around me are 1) entertainment 2) movements that provide people with a clear sense of direction: cults and terrorists as he mentions, and other political movements 3) and within 2), rarely but by far the best option out of these 3 so far, the type of movements and small communities that actually address needs of belonging without feeling the need to attack some out-group or destroy something else, by helping people deal with issues and grow as people, not just individually but with one another.
I think the only people who will be able to thrive in the coming decades of societal decline are those with a supportive social environment, or what I like to call a “social exoskeleton”, which is just a fancy word for meaningful relationships in their lives which form a network they can rely on, and can contribute to.
The trends of burnout, nihilism and addictions strike me as being downstream of the total lack of fulfilling relationships. People burn out because they know deep down that their energy doesn't actually go to anything real in their immediate life, they are nihilistic or become addicted because there is no one else to live for, no broader context that makes life feel important.
So is life hard? It is when you are all by yourself. And sadly this is a trend that keeps getting more and more common, but at the same time, it also creates a swing to the other side of the pendulum when people can clearly tell that something is missing from their lives and pursue it.
An imperial crown cannot be one continued diamond; the gems must be held together by some less valuable matter.
—Dr. Johnstone, The Lives of the Poets, gathered while reading The Literary Wasteland by Darren Allen.
Similarly in the composition of a painting, only some areas can be focal points, because if every part of the painting is flooded with details that attract your attention, then nothing sticks out from the rest.
One major difference I see from people who know their craft from those who don't is that the former can distill the most important things you need to focus on in only a few points, whereas the latter tend to give you massive lists of guidelines and principles with no prioritization whatsoever. Reality is not uniform, it is structured in a way that you can focus on 20% of the stuff and get 80% of the results. 14
In fact what I often see are people who would benefit from trying to do less things. Have less projects, learn less stuff, prune the to-do list, and be less ambitious, 15 but focus more on what you already know and have. In our constantly distracted environments, you get a lot more from being able to focus on less, rather than learning more scattered information.
The Apocalypedia has in fact too many gems to quote, but here are some to finish this journal entry.
Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.
—Alphonse Karr
Nothing is more beautiful than cheerfulness in an old face.
—Jean Paul Richter
Image of Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin series.
1 If I really cared about understanding the examples given in the quote, Trump, Kanye West and Elon Musk, I would have spent some time reading their tweets, but I'm going to be perfectly honest, I don't want to spend my time doing that. It also strikes me as unhealthy for the mind to read what those people have to say quite frankly.
2 Other senses that a mass collective lacks I'd say:
- A sense of continuity in time/attention: remember all those viral things which no one talks about now?
- A sense of coherent will: for instance any large group spends more and more of its time in inner conflict as opposed to solving real problems
3 Without diving head first into hedonism that is. It is remarkable the extent to which addictions are fueled by simple boredom.
4 As intentional as large collectives can act in the world, which is to say not evenly distributed in their hierarchy, because the decisions probably only come from the top and not from the workers who actually have to implement them and actually perceive the impact on performance and the state of a bloated system.
5 Obviously taking any idea to its extreme can lead to similar conclusions, but my point remains that “eliminating suffering” is a very bad goal even within reasonable bounds, because it directs all your attention towards what you do not like.
6 Darren Allen explains that very well in his essay the Technological System. Basically, an increase in power never stays local for long, and eventually becomes integrated in the system as a whole, which keeps getting more and more powerful, better at controlling people to prevent them from pursuing any alternative, on and on.
7 See again Darren Allen on the Technological System.
8 Not saying that they will be gone, but that the energy required to extract them will be far too much to provide any reasonable return on investment.
9 Not my phrase but it's from a tweet made by an account that frequently disables their account. I reference it here.
10 People usually talk about drawing from "imagination" but I find that term very misleading. In truth you are not only imagining, you are mainly using your memory and your ability to manipulate something in your mind, through moving the camera so to speak, or changing a pose or the setting. Composing something out of building blocks you are familiar with, in your mind, strikes me as very different from imagining something in its entirety. There is certainly an element of imagination, but it's more so about manipulating basic elements I would say.
11 Which for me is not the same thing as meditation because I do not try to focus or breathe a certain way or hold any particular pose.
12 I tried reading older journal entries of mine, and even though I understand the words, I don’t really relate much with my mindset. The overall vibe I get was that I was feeling pretty desperate about several things, and would keep spinning in circles because I was too afraid of simply confronting reality.
13 I do not know exactly how much he works, but the early days of his business did seem to involve long hour days, and basically no holiday whatsoever. This isn't specifically about him anyway, this is about businessmen working long hours.
14 By the way, the 2 numbers don't need to add up to 100. It could be the 60/20 law and it would still make sense, such as: 20% of the people do 60% of the work, because the two proportions relate to different things.
15 "Sometimes the most ambitious move is to be the least ostentatiously ambitious one in the room, but the one most optimized for survival + long game. Then you watch as one by one each of your competitors crumble, burn out, give up, quit, and you're casually the last one standing" from this tweet by Visakanv.
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2024-08-25
