I have a recurring thought that’s hard to shake, and yet hard to do very much about. I don’t think it should be shaken. In fact I’ve never succeeded in shaking it, only distracting myself from it. So I should address it, think about it, explore it. This should always be the case for all things that stay in the mind.
The thought is this: I must be wrong about a great many things. There’s something terribly wrong, vague, imprecise, inaccurate, invalid about the way my mind works, about the way I make sense of myself, my circumstances, my surroundings. I mean, Jon Kabat-Zinn is right when he says “As long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you.” I do think it’s therapeutic and helpful to reflect on that, to ensure that we don’t tear ourselves apart in anxiety and pain.
But once I am calm, I’m finding it necessary to do a scan. To take stock. To pause and evaluate. What do I see?
The thought that precedes “I must be wrong” is “I wasn’t adequately prepared for this.” For what? Everything. For life. For marriage. For employment. For home ownership. For having bills to pay. For being a citizen of a nation-state, with all the obligations that entails. For being more or less a part of all sorts of networks. For being an employee, for being a member of a team that’s working on a common goal. For being a husband. For being a friend.
And I feel like I’ve done a lot of reading, you know? I’m not entirely naive or ignorant. I’ve encountered lots of ignorance in the wild, and in my calm moments it’s easy to infer that I must be ignorant in a great number of ways, about things I do not realise, to a degree that I do not realise.
What are these things?
When I was in the shower yesterday, and this morning, and I was looking in the mirror, I was thinking… if I’m “right” about things, my life would be quite different from what it is now. I mean, I have a pretty decent life. But the life I imagined was seemingly richer. Seemingly more exciting. I recognise that a part of the problem is simply awareness– that life becomes richer and more exciting if we simply drop into awareness and observe it fully. But that’s not all of it. The other part of the problem is how I deal with reality. How I engage with reality. What I perceive, what judgements I make based on what I perceive, and what decisions I make– whether it be based on my conscious judgments, my subconscious judgments, or some whims that I don’t even perceive.
If I truly understand reality and myself– and of course nobody ever totally does, we only stumble towards developing better models of it– then I would be making decisions that help me further my self-interest. I do not do that nearly as much as I like to think I do. Or maybe I have some self-interest that is different from my stated, claimed self-interest, and I’m serving that– but either way, I don’t feel as happy as I’m pretty sure I’m capable of feeling. I don’t feel as satisfied and calm as I believe that I’m capable of feeling. [1]
I find myself thinking, “Yeah, meditation, exercise, healthy eating, many sleeping, all of that good stuff first, then after that…” but why do I keep thinking “after that” when I haven’t gotten the basics right yet? What’s stopping me from getting the basics right?
Right. I’ve been thinking about how we’re never really taught to speak our minds, to say what we really think, to talk about what we want, to ask for what we want. We’re always having to ask for permission and so on, and over time we just get bad at properly wanting things– apart from just buying indulgences and such. But what do we want to create, who do we want to be, what do we want to do that’s new and exciting and at the frontiers of humanity? Going into my rising-emotion rhetoric here without saying very much… what am I trying to say. I’m thinking that it’s interesting that I keep doing word vomits. Clearly this is something that matters a lot to me. Maybe I should up the stakes somehow. Maybe I’ll only do other things if they fit into the paradigm of “makes me a better writer”. It feels a little bit silly, and it also feels a bit… ‘wrong’, but hey, it’s the best thing I’ve got that works so far. Maybe I should just run with that. Maybe I should even think of my work as something that’s meant to make me a better writer. That’s just one lens, it might not be the right lens, but without any particular lens I just dawdle and linger.
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[1] I know one problem here might be just chronic dissatisfaction– some people are simply never satisfied, and we live in a world that encourages that. We live in a world that tells us we’re never good enough, we should own more, live more, do more, travel more, experience more, and so on. And I agree that the hedonic treadmill is something to be wary of. But I don’t feel like that is my main problem right now. The analogy I would use is this: It’s understood that there is a correlation between money and happiness up to a point. If you’re earning less than USD$75k/year, more money tends to correlate with more happiness. Beyond that, it doesn’t really make much of a difference.
I make less than half of that, but even then I don’t feel like trying to make more money will necessarily be what makes me happier. Rather, I do firmly believe that there are things I can do that will make me happier (up to that US$75k point), and those things will probably also make me more economically productive, and make me deserve to earn more. But it’s not about the money. It’s that I’m missing something that would allow me to create more value, even if it’s purely for myself. “Private value.”