Today was an earlier morning than usual. Slept a little earlier than usual. It is clear that sleeping early- before 11pm, from my experience- leads to bettee quality sleep and less sleep, too. Once you start to notice this pattern it’s hard to go back on it because it means a couple of hours saved over many many days… in the long run better sleep literally extends your wakeful life! Also I am clear-headed- relatively speaking- and immediately felt like writing this the moment I got on the train. I could be too quick to claim some sort of behavioural change here- all real change takes time- but I’m happy.
I notice though that when I wake up early I’m not sure of what to do, and I sort of laze around unproductively. Now I’m not a ruthless optimizer and I don’t believe that every waking moment should be spent working- I love to laze around, but only when it’s well earned, when it’s deep and restful. I think I’ve spoken about this before- work hard, play hard, even ‘rest hard’. The worst thing is when your rest is not restful- this is what’s often left out of criticisms of busyness, I feel. Just as there are several kinds of busyness so there are several kinds of idleness, some pleasant, some not so pleasant.
I find myself drawn to using music as an analogy. Learning to live well is like learning to play music. You can sort of learn as you go, but there’s no substitute for deliberate practice. Yes. This is what I got out of an exchange with one of my engineer colleagues about evolution and robustness- we marvelled at how human consciousness allows for accelerated evolution.
It works like this: Instead of depending on random variation and natural selection (which takes a lot of time), human consciousness allows us to imagine, and to execute. Our tools allow us to make copies of things, to deliberately try different things in different scenarios and to see what works, what breaks, what crumbles under scrutiny.
Elon Musk mentioned that when theory meets reality, reality typically wins. Isn’t that entire process cool, though? Rather than relying on random fumbling around, we can deliberately navigate the darkness, make hypotheses, test them, refine them and make better hypotheses. Fat better than stumbling around. The human mind- the collective- functions as a sort of crucible for accelerated ‘fitness’ (if that is the ‘purpose’ of evolution- purpose itself of course being a self-serving human construct).
Regroup. Within the chemical limitations of the mind we are wired to have fun ‘living’, and while the downtime between strenous activities and thought can be pleasurable, persistent idleness isn’t- because then you aren’t living, you aren’t learning, you’re stagnating. I’m not saying that it’s somehow intrisically good to live and to learn- I’m saying that it FEELS good, and as humans, it’s nice to do what feels good as long as it’s sustainable and not harmful to self and/or others.
So the point of that is- nature is like this giant computer that figures out what works and what doesn’t, at a very slow pace. It ‘learns’ (using human terms to badly describe an ultimately indescribable process- the source of spiritual ecstasy and connection). Consciousness emerged as a computer within the computer as a tool for ‘accelerated learning’. And consciousness built language, and consciousness and language built industrialization and computers- tools for building and learning, just as consciousness itself is a tool for building and learning.
That’s a horrible horrible and incredibly vague and imprecise paragraph of horrible psuedo-knowledge but it’s just a vague sense of how I make sense of things. I plan to refine it over time.
Kill abstraction, back to concrete living. Somehow the incentives are nicely aligned such that learning to live better (vague) is pleasurable. So to get to really mundane stuff- I’d like to wake up early and have deliberate practices.
Ah, that was what I was grasping at straws for and went through so much nonsense to get to- the value of deliberation. Nature, as far as we can tell, is non-deliberate. It just is. There’s a certain continuum of deliberateness from simpler life forms simply ‘intending’ to propagate and multiply, to persist- and then we get progressively more complex intents. Monkeys are capable of deception.
Once we get to people- man, people are incredibly complex! We are capable of intent but we often don’t know why we do what we do. ‘Why’ is a uniquely deliberate and conscious phenomenon. Nature doesn’t give a damn about why. But nature made humans- randomly- and humans care about intent and causality and purpose. It’s interesting because humans shape reality- consciousness shapes reality. The human species functions as a primitive nervous system for the planet…
Fuck, I got out of my head again. Deliberate practice is accelerated learning. Learning is a kind of accelerated evolution. I have, all my life, grossly underestimated the value of deliberate practice. I suspect it has to do with an irrational distrust of myself. Had a chat about this with a couple of my colleagues- some scenarios are conducive to the development of trust in deliberate practice- such as studying in school- and others aren’t.
I really want to know- what drives smart kids to be unproductive, ‘lazy’? I’ve read a lot about this over the years- not too deliberately, unfortunately. The reasons tend to circle around fear of failure. We sabotage ourselves in advance. We are supreme cynics who don’t have faith in our own abilities, and we are afraid to reveal our own incompetence…
Why do I keep getting derailed, lol. The central point here is that there is incredible value in deliberate, mindful practice in all things and I have been, ironically, deliberately blinding myself to the fact. I’ll repeat an earlier post here- my ability to rationalize my own failure might be the most deliberately-practiced skill I have in my cognitive toolkit, and it’s outright toxic to my own well being. That’s sad. There’s a certain addiction dynamic. You hate yourself for sucking, ironically, because hating yourself is the one thing you’ve gotten really, really good at.
So the central challenge here is to subvert that- and it requires mindfulness and structural help because in the absence of mindfulness we fall back into familiar habits, such as self-loathing or rationalizing inaction and perfectionism and other lame excuses that fall away under scrutiny. Maybe I’m so eager to talk about life and the universe because I’m afraid or uncomfortable to talk about my own failings.
Well fuck you, brain! (Or neural pathways within the brain!) We’re here to talk about your scumbaggery. You’re preventing me from living a fuller and more productive life, and from contributing beyond myself to aid others on their quests! This is who I am in the light of mindfulness and reflection. The challenge is to kill who I am in the darkness of familiarity, until I’ve rewired my brain sufficiently. Now that’s the real challenge that I face in life, and that’s something I’m going to have to face, deliberately. You don’t scare me, bitch. I’ve had enough of you. And I will rip you out of my skull- or deny you nutrients, or WHATEVER THE FUCK IT TAKES. 23 years is long enough. I’m reaching work now. I’m going to work on a task I was tasked yesterday and then get to the blogpost I’ve been meaning to write. I will monotask.
If you’re reading this, what demons do you have in your head?