In the previous post I tried to think about how brutal and indifferent nature is, and how it generates its own suffering in total indifference. And then I tried to sort of contextualize that against day to day life in the modern civilized world, which is simultaneously a part of nature (for everything is a part of nature) and yet seemingly, strangely distant from it (because of all the elaborate things we have constructed by consulting and consorting with ourselves, recursively).
I tried to think about that and talk about that because I feel like it’s important to reconcile everything together into one coherent picture. I don’t think it’s good to have a seperate set of thoughts for looking at waterfalls, iceberg, glaciers and galaxies, another set of thoughts for human history and suffering and Nazi Germany and millions of deaths and oppression and the Middle East, and another set of thoughts for day to day social life interactions with mom and dad and wife and cats and the daily commute, the daily grind, and thoughts about pleasure and pornography and social status and buying new things.
All of these things are part of the same reality. Everything is part of the totality of things. While it make sense to focus on different things in different contexts, I feel like my mind is unnecessarily partitioned and that doing that somehow tires me out unnecessarily. I should be able to think about all of these things in a big, broad consistent manner that makes sense. I want to do that because I think that will bring me a sense of calm and consistency. I don’t need to necessarily spend time and energy worrying about whether I’m using the right lens for a particular scenario. I’d have fewer filing cabinets in my head that I need to worry about.
I find myself thinking about some conversations I’ve had with my boss about how everything boils down to cause and effect– there are complex chains and webs of causes and effects, and we’re practically guaranteed to misinterpret things, but the fact remains that there are things, there are states, and if you can figure out what the inputs are that went into a state, and if you figure out how they all work together, and you’re able to figure out how to manipulate those inputs, then you should be able to achieve a different end state by tweaking the inputs. You can change how you’re feeling right now by paying attention to the causes of your feelings, and taking actions to change the inputs. Of course, this is non-trivial. This is very hard to do. But the first and most important thing is to realize that it can be done. That if you’re feeling the same way every day, it’s because you’re going through the same pattern everyday. If you want to feel something different you need to change the pattern, do something different.
We’ve also talked about how everything is vague to a degree we do not realize until we attempt to make it precise– which is way more profound than I had originally realized (which is itself a proof of that statement– so meta and recursive, I know. It’s a statement that applies to itself, too.) So you’ll always have to calibrate your expectations, and it’s important to realize that this is how things are, get as much information as you can, and figure out what you’re going to do if things don’t work out the way you want to.
Okay, let’s rewind a little. What was the point of all of this? I wanted a sort of grand unifying theory or lens or perspective. I don’t want to try and solve everything for the world, that’s not possible, and that’s not even interesting to me anymore. I just want to try and solve my day to day problems, and I feel like I have been ill-equipped to solve these problems. And it feels like now’s the time for me to better equip myself. And I feel like part of better equpping myself requires me to be more efficient in the way I expend my cognitive resources. And I feel like I would be more efficient with my cognitive resources if I got rid of a bunch of mental filing cabinets. (I could probably write a separate vomit about mental filing cabinets. I’ll make a note of that in my workflowy right now.)
The next point I remember chatting about is how everything we do is to pursue some sort of pleasure, some sort of chemical hit in the brain. It might not be as simple as that, it might not be entirely reducible to that, but it’s astounding how far you can get just by remembering to factor that in. Human behavior. Seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. (Now I’m thinking about some of the procrastination stuff I’ve read.) Smoking a cigarette is pleasurable, participating in the social ritual (or individual ritual) of smoking is pleasurable. Withdrawal is unpleasant. Breaking out of the pleasure/pain landscape of a smoking habit is incredibly challenging and difficult, and most smokers fail at it over and over again, to the point where they resign themselves to their fate, where they think that they’re stuck where they are. (I’m thinking now of how I feel when I’m stuck in a video game, doing the same things over and over again, and how I deconstruct my approach to see where I might be able to do something different.)
Starting on a difficult task is painful. The consequences of not doing the task will be more painful later on, but later-on pain is much quieter than right-now pain. (This could be a whole other vomit too.) I’m thinking now about how one of my biggest problems is that I _still_ haven’t fully committed to recognizing this as a problem that I struggle with, and developing a legitimate prosthesis to use. I’m like the blind guy who refuses to use a cane because he doesn’t want to be the blind guy. But I am horribly short-sighted with respect to time and so I definitely need to keep a very close eye on my time. (Heh, language.)