VI - Ever noticed that? - August 2024
Working softer, focusing attention, exiting drama and the egoic resistance towards change
Gotta wagecuck at some point
I talk about office work and its tyranny, but to be realistic for a moment, I doubt that anyone who wants to live more freely can escape all form of soulless work for their entire life. I mean where else are you going to acquire a decent amount of money such that you no longer need any type of office work whatsoever in your life? Call me defeatist or cucked, but it just pays too well, and that's the state of the world we live in.
I would say that the major difference between an actual wage slave and someone who is merely an employee to get money in the meantime, is that the former needs the job to get a sense of meaning, and needs the structure of a job to be interested enough in something to spend their time on it, such that they would literally go back to a job if they no longer needed the money, because their life is so empty otherwise.
People love to complain about their job, but deep down a lot of them need it to be functional in life, as sad as it is to say.
Beware of deficient frames
Here are some examples of what I mean:
§1. Choose the pain of growth or the pain of staying stuck? Both of these lead to the very limiting conclusion that there is only pain in life, and that the only agency you have is in choosing the type of pain you prefer. That seems very grim to me, and also the type of idea that people would use to justify their pain instead of simply doing something about it. In my experience there is a lot of pain that is simply caused from living unconsciously, tension which for instance can be released by noticing it and which is only maintained because people don't pay attention to their body. You can literally get as much done, but in a softer and more pleasant manner.
§2. There are so many problems in society which could instead be framed as the need for something better: the need for new narratives, the need for more embodiment, the desire for connection, etc. Instead of focusing on the crisis, you can focus on the need that is expressed. You could say there is a motivational crisis in the world, because people don't want to work at soulless jobs that our system depends on, but you could also frame it as the call for adventure, or the longing for meaningful work, connected to a community that cares about you.
§3. Every incident in your life can be seen as a sign from Life with an upper case 'L' that you're not paying attention to something. Health problem? Maybe you haven't been paying attention to your posture, your diet, your sleep schedule, or your emotional problems. Relationship problem? Maybe you've been avoiding difficult conversations, taking your partner for granted or blowing insignificant disagreements way out of proportions. Plan not working out as intended? Maybe that's a good thing, maybe the plan was stupid in the first place and you will benefit a lot more from switching plans. Or maybe you are doing the right thing but not in the right way: too impatient, not enough time to do things properly, unrealistic expectations, not enough practice, etc.
Work softer
To expand on the “work softer” idea, you can relax your body and accomplish just as much, if not more in fact, in a way that is more enjoyable. You don't have to choose between enjoyment and productivity1, because you can simply allow your attention and body to become softer, or make your environment more enjoyable and with less friction, or surround yourself with more supportive people, etc.
A lot of the tension we carry in life isn't useful for anything: tense shoulders, tense eyebrows, tense wrists, tense lower back, none of those solve any problem whatsoever. We simply tend to tense our body by default because it creates a sense of emergency, and that is very often how things get done in school—using threats and deadlines.
And then those bad habits bleed into personal interests and life in general, even though they do not provide any advantage whatsoever. So you can allow yourself to work softer, and you will see how you can accomplish the exact same things without stressing out all the time.
Learning to work with yourself
It is a much healthier hypothesis to assume that you are fine, and that you simply haven't learned to work well with yourself yet. Society's homogenized program is not meant to be healthy, it is meant to spread itself through coercion. This means that if you don't feel like you fit inside the institutions or companies of our world, it's very likely that the problem resides in them, not in you.
This is not meant to be about passive resignation, this is about using energy in something that can actually matter. Fighting against yourself to do what other people expect you to can never work in the long term. It can be useful in the short term to get money for instance, but it could never be a viable way to live long term.
What does learning to work with yourself look like? Well there are many aspects, but I would say that the main one lies in being curious about yourself, instead of judging. As I've mentioned in the previous journal entry, as soon as you judge yourself you stop paying attention to what is actually going on. We judge ourselves because we constantly get judged by society, because this is how we get coerced into playing its games. But if you look at the whole thing, it is an incredibly ineffective strategy. Can you imagine a sports coach who, instead of giving precise observations and prompts to readjust your game, instead just yells at you every time you make mistakes? Because we are so indoctrinated into the whole judging mindset, some people might actually think there is nothing wrong with that! But in truth it just adds pain, it doesn't actually help become better.
Being curious about yourself is especially important with the parts that tend to resist your plans. It doesn't matter how sensible the plan or instruction is, if there is a lot of resistance, even something as plain as getting out of bed can feel difficult. The mind can yell all it wants about how easy it is to get out of bed and how good it is for you, if there is resistance, it won't happen.
I would call the part of myself that tends to resist the guardian of my inner fire. I used to call him my “inner rebel”, but I noticed that this label is already antagonistic. Instead, I want to understand what my guardian is defending against. He is intelligent in his own ways, so he sees something that I don't, and now it is a matter of establishing a dialogue. What I realized is that he doesn't want to give my energy, the fire, to anyone, because historically speaking it has been given to people who don't care about me, and what I want out of life. As a result my inner guardian started building a shell, a visceral no against plans, and which unfortunately also includes the plans of my mind.
I haven't come into a fully harmonious relationship with that part of me, but I have made a lot of progress. The main thing seems to be that I require activities that have a physical sense of feeling good, not just something that sounds good to my mind. Typically, exercising with light weights—not heavy weights because that feels overwhelming—is great because it gets my body moving and immediately feel the reward of doing things. This also means that I am more than okay to saying no to something that doesn't feel great either. It's either “fuck yes” or nothing at all for me. Reducing lukewarm commitments gives you more energy for the stuff you actually care about.
Another direction to go towards is to allow yourself to play, instead of being so anal about following up on rigid plans. I specifically worded it as allowing yourself to play, because it is not something you can force, and it is also something that comes up naturally with the right mindset and the right environment, since children do it all the time for instance. So for me it has been about removing expectations from my drawing practice, and making it easier and less structured in general. Playing with colors and lines, not trying to get anywhere. Drawing from references instead of trying to get a good result without any.2
The takeaway is that playing is energizing, not draining. What I've suggested is ultimately about doing what is energizing for you, which can look very different based on who you are, what your environment is, what your skills are and what you need at a specific point in your life, but the visceral sense is rather simple when you tune into it: a deep fuck yes to what you're doing.
And finally, just to throw some wu wu stuff out there to conclude: the 3rd chakra is related to power and ego development, and is associated with the fire element. Most notably, it is located in the solar plexus, a place which I have felt a tremendous amount of tension throughout my life, and which I would describe as a belly knot. The book Eastern Body Western Mind is a great introduction to the chakra system in a way that is more approachable to western minded people.
And another system that describes the energy issues I've had is the generator type in human design. Generators are all about using energy in a way that feels satisfying, and at their best they are incredibly productive. But when the activity doesn't align with the visceral yes I’ve been discussing, then things feel stale and you feel like you have to force yourself to do anything. See more in this talk for instance.
Our curse
'We're all cursed'
‘Yes, we are; but what with?’
‘Cursed to feel the same thing, every day, over and over again, forever and ever. No new feelings, just microscopic variations of boredom.’
This extract is from 'Drowning is fine' by Darren Allen, chapter 3. A hilarious and insightful story about the modern world, would highly recommend. Here are some other gems (far too many to list here, every starting line of a chapter or sub-chapter is insanely good for instance):
‘I’ve lived with him for a year now,’ says Toby, ‘and I know as much about him as I know about Pac Man.’ ‘Constantly consuming. Needs power pills to combat ghosts.’ (Chapter 3)
Are we all too sensitive for the office? Are we all too brilliant for the factory? Are we all nsfw? (Chapter 3)
The pain is interesting though; I mean the emotion. In some way it’s hardly anything, a very slight sickness across the chest, a weight in the neck. You couldn’t even call it painful, not really—and yet it is the pit of horror. (Chapter 4)
What classic games taught us
The life analogy with Pac-Man is pretty hilarious, so let’s try to extend that to other games:
Donkey Kong is about being the nice guy that will rescue the beautiful princess no matter the obstacles in your way, from the dumb “monkey”, i.e. not-nice macho guy
Tetris is about the inevitability of failure: you stack and stack and stack, but all your successes disappear and only delay the inevitable death, whereas all your failures pile up and up
Some beliefs I am letting go of
1) “Life should be easy”. Nope, life in the modern world has many difficulties, and that's just how it is. No need to make yourself miserable with this expectation that everything should be easy and great. When things go well, and the modern world provides enough stability for things to work, then that's great. But those things shouldn't be taken for granted. Prosperity is not the default state in life or History.
2) “I am a good person”. I want to live well and be honest, but I have no interest whatsoever in changing the world. I don't think that necessarily makes me a bad person, but in the eyes of many this doesn't make me a good one, and I'm becoming increasingly fine with that. I'm playing my own games my own way, and that's that. Less justifying myself, more doing.
3) “You should strive to be consistent with your work”. Being consistent really helped me with school, in order to get myself through classes in a way that didn't involve me doing everything last minute. With things I am personally interested in however, I do not find it sustainable, because it eventually leads me to force myself to do what used to come naturally. It seems to me that consistency and schedules can work for some people, but not for me, at least not over a long period of time.
4) “Saying yes is good”. I have been so bad at saying 'no' that this idea is pretty bad for me. Saying 'no' to things I don't care much about has given me a lot more energy for what I genuinely care about.
5) “You should strive for work-life balance”. I get energized from the right type of work. Treating all work as bad is a very limiting lens, but on the other hand, a lot of work really sucks, so this one has been somewhat useful too
Psychedelics and air/water types
Noticing how the people I know who are really into psychedelics don't have children. I wouldn't consider someone who has done them once or twice to be really into psychedelics, so I am specifically referring to those who take them regularly and often make it a part of their identity.
It seems to me that the exploration of the mind really appeals to the water and air types (referring to the 4 elements here): creatives, sensitive people, but that they tend to be too quick to throw away all traditional values such as the value of stability, discipline and commitment. On the other hand, that suspicion of traditional values arises in response to the awful rigid coercion of our world, so it is fairly understandable why it happens, but it also has its blind spots and shortcomings, unsurprisingly.
Belonging you don't have to earn
One of the great functions of churches was offering places of belonging that you didn’t have to earn
From this tweet.
I think the reason why people today are unhealthy—in a broad sense of the term, not just physical health—is that there is no fallback mechanism for many of our needs. For the social need it is pretty clear, as exemplified by the tweet. It is perfectly possible for someone in the modern to have zero interaction whatsoever with real people, and as such the floor for someone's sense of belonging is by default significantly lower than in previous societies. This is the same for physical health, since so many jobs are now intellectual or digital, which results in a lifestyle that doesn't provide any physical activity by default, as well as the abundance of unhealthy food around us.
What those examples show is that the default modern lifestyle is significantly worse for individual health than that of previous societies. It means you have to get out of your way to be physically healthy for instance, or have a place to belong to, or have work that genuinely impacts those around you, as opposed to having a default level for all your needs be provided by your environment. As a result, the vast majority of people are incredibly deficient in at least one key area of life, and because your general quality of life is bottlenecked by those deficient areas, it requires effort to address all your major needs. It doesn't matter how much money you make and how great the people around you are if you're constantly exhausted and have tons of physical problems. Likewise if you have a good income, nice relationships and are in shape, you might be miserable because your job feels so unfulfilling and doesn't provide you with any freedom.3
I think a lot of unhealthy situations can be seen in terms of them being the easiest thing to fall back to. People turn to porn because it's the easiest way to feel good in your body when you don’t have any fulfilling relationships or anything good going in your life. People turn to video games because it's the easiest way to feel agency in your life, by getting better at something. People eat junk food because they don't have the time and energy to take care of themselves.
The modern world focuses a lot on improving the top, such as pushing the frontier of technology or sciences. But ultimately, this is not sustainable if it leads to the floor of quality of life being lower and lower as the years go by, because more and more people feel left out, without a place to come back to.
How you are treated in school
I don't know if anyone had that experience, but I remember that I was absolutely blown away by how well I was treated whenever I was outside of school. Even when I was still a teenager it was like: "What would you like sir? May you have a good day." It was the typical polite relationship to a customer, which they get paid to do of course, but it was still miles better than how you are treated by the teachers and supervisors in school.
The latter always seemed to assume the worst possible thing about you at every time, about assignments, listening in class, obeying the rules, etc. And ironically, when people around you constantly assume the worst of you, then yeah you do start behaving as such. It seems to me that the main work of teachers and supervisors is to deal with problems they themselves create with their coercive institution. I guess they cannot be blamed for it, because school is part of a broader network of institutions which work for the system, but still.
Getting rid of the question
Why are so many young people depressed? It's because of smartphones obviously! Wait, but why do they turn so much to their phone in the first place?
Most people would answer the first question with the first answer, and simply stop their thinking there. Whatever you think the answer to the second question is4, I think anyone who thinks about the situation as a whole would see that the first answer isn't satisfying at all. It is an important factor for sure—I personally got rid of my smartphone for that reason—but it cannot be the whole story. This is one example of what it means to get rid of the question.
If you zoom back and examine society and what it promotes, you'd see that most of it is actually about getting rid of the question, not answering anything. The reason why is that obedience is more important to the system, which promotes top-down power, whereas curious examination dismantles dogma and stories used to build our social matrix.
Examples:
Replying to the curiosity of a child with disenchanted mechanical explanations, because you want the child to shut up with your explanation. “Wow rainbows are so beautiful” “They’re just the result of light being refracted on water droplets, it’s nothing special”.
The culture of entertainment and distraction produces people who are so busy being “entertained” that they do not ask questions in the first place. This is the “Brave New World” type of control of individuals.
Thinking you've answered philosophical inquiry with meter-reading science, like saying that “time is what a clock reads”. It is certainly a useful definition if you want to model the world, but not if you want to get to the essence of it.
A lot of thinking that revolves around explaining what the system is and why it is so horrifying is simply done so that people shut up and accept our reality. For example: "Humans are selfish" say the selfish people, or "Hierarchies are always needed" say the ones on top of hierarchies, or "It's a bad system but it's the least bad", in the context of democracy for instance, or "Do you want to go back to wild and be starving all the time?"
Institutions in general create implicit boundaries on the type of questions that we can ask. We can think about how to improve our system, but we can never wonder if the system as a whole is actually needed in our lives. As Thomas Pynchon said: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
Study says
The wording surrounding scientific studies is very interesting. It isn't a human being that wrote some words about some experiment they carried, instead, it is the study itself that says something. As if it was some Platonic entity beaming to us its rays of wisdom and we simply have to trust it. Here are some examples of what I mean:
New study says that Alzheimer's blood tests are more accurate
Latest shingles vaccine could help delay dementia, study says
Nutrition and exercise as good as therapy for mild and moderate depression, study says (yeah no shit?)
Drama hunger
There are people who are constantly hungry for drama, probably because their life is so incredibly boring. Examples of drama include:
Creating real drama of course: accusations, conflicts, spreading rumors
Constant complaining
Gossiping about others
Binging fiction that revolves around drama
The term “comfort zone” is very misleading when it comes to people's emotional lives, because for these people, drama is their natural state, and peace is something they utterly hate because they feel bored. They prefer that type of stimulation even if it disrupts other people's peace, because having nothing to talk about is in many ways a form of death, since the stillness of silence would lead them to examine their petty lives and petty concerns and petty problems, and thus to admit that they are ultimately petty people.
Unsurprisingly, trying to point that out in them will only lead to more drama. I don't think anything can really be done about them, the vast majority of people only change when it is too painful to remain where they are.
Ethereal boredom, the apathy of the familiar
The discomfort of boredom is strange. Whereas I can track in my body when I'm afraid—in the belly mostly—or angry—belly, face, and in my arms—or sad—throat mostly—I do not know what exactly is going on when I feel bored. There doesn't seem to be any apparent physical sensations associated to boredom. There is a sense of restlessness in the body—legs that want to move all the time for me—and my mind keeps talking and talking and showing me images at a frenetic rhythm, but it's kind of hard to describe the first person experience, it feels very ghost-like.
In terms of external situation, boredom occurs in my life when there is a sense that I want to do something, but am not, either because of a lack of clarity, fear, or just because I can't really be bothered to spend that energy on it, which I guess means I don't really want to do it. The situations when I am not bored on the other hand are when I am doing something engaging and meaningful, or when I am totally fine with doing nothing because I know that what matters to me is taken care of.
So overall, I would say that boredom manifests in my body as a lack of connection to my surroundings, but that this apathy doesn't have any vivid sensations because it is precisely the lack of said sensations. There is a said of restlessness in the gaze, in the mind and also sometimes in the body, but everything sort of feels numb, “known” and therefore not worth paying attention to. We could call this the apathy of the familiar, or simply taking Life itself for granted.
Fisbe, responses and inner work
I have come across an interesting model of how we relate to life, which is denoted by Fisbe (see video here), which can be stylized as FIsBe too: Focus, INner state and REsponse.
From this model, we could say that our loop of personal experience can be broken down as such: External world -> Focus -> Inner state -> Response. We focus on certain parts of the external world, not all of them, and that is where troubles can already start in our lives. Then that focus of attention leads to a certain inner state, which can be far more subtle than a like/don’t-like but often boils down to that crude binary. And finally, that inner state prompts a response from us.
The key insight is that we tend to react to our internal states, not so much a reality outside of our self. This post gives a great example of the distinction. The situation goes like this: someone's wife brings him his favorite meal as a surprise during lunch break, and she does so in front of his colleagues. Then his colleagues make fun of him for that, because it looks like mommy bringing lunch to one of her kids. Then when he gets home, the guy gets mad at his wife because he felt humiliated by the situation.
Here, what actually made the guy angry wasn't his wife bringing him lunch, nor even his colleagues making fun of him—these are two distinct external world events. It is ultimately the internal state of feeling humiliated, which we could say is “caused” by the last event, but only for him because many other people would have had a very different internal reaction in the same situation, and I'm sure some would be able to brush the taunting off because they care about their wife's affection more than what colleagues think of them.
So Fisbe is not some deterministic behaviorist model of how we interact with reality. It is fairly reductive because our internal world isn't so sequential, but it is useful to remember that how we react and respond isn't directly caused by the external events. There is a lot of past baggage that influences our internal states, which we could call trauma5, or in general it could simply be an overwhelm response that hasn't finished.
And finally, we could roughly map each of the 3 transitions in the Fisbe sequence I describe, and assign to each one a type of inner work/introspection:
Inner state -> Response is the Stoic attitude: we do not control the world, but we have control over our actions and how we respond to things
Focus -> Inner state is the area of trauma work or shadow work. Seeing the ways in which our inner states can be wildly out of sync from our actual experience of events, because of emotional baggage or limiting beliefs or stored tension in our body, amongst other things
External world -> Focus is something more subtle than the previous one, so I'm not sure what to call it. It has to do with perception itself, and how it can get fixed on certain things in favor of others, how it is tainted by our worldview, and also our fears. Perhaps we could also assign this to trauma work and shadow work, but I would say it is even more existential than that, so something like “perception shift”, the kind that you engage in with meditation and the likes, when your typical sense of ‘I’ changes.
Victim morality
Very similar to Nietzsche's slave morality6, the victim morality is the one that comes from being a victim and thus having no possibility whatsoever to improve your life. From that point of view, you are more virtuous because you are weaker and have no say in your life situation, whereas people with agency and power could change the world for the better but don't, so that makes them corrupt, bad, etc.
Another way to say it is that the victim morality deems someone as good or bad based on how much of their agency they are using to improve the world as a whole. If you have no ability to do that, then you are good because you are technically “doing your best” within your heavy constraints, but if you have resources, connections, skills, etc. but aren't using them to the fullest, then clearly there is something wrong with you, according to the victim morality.
Needless to say, I think it is a very toxic view. While corrupt people definitely exist, problems in society are more so structural and far more complex than how we tend to think of them. It is not as simple as “rich person could pour money to magically fix things”. The reality is that those with the victim morality often want power just as much as those who have it, but they simply don't have what it takes to acquire it, or the guts to admit that it is what they want. They construct their morality based on what reduces their cognitive dissonance, not based on what is true. Speaking of which.
Path of least cognitive dissonance
Broadly speaking, the mind when used unconsciously7, which is the default state promoted by society, tends to minimize cognitive dissonance. It is thus not concerned with having an accurate picture of reality—the mind by itself doesn't perceive reality, it can only project it and perform consistency checks on that simulation—but instead making sure you feel good about yourself, so as to not have to change yourself.
Examples:
If you fail it's because you didn't receive the right amount of help, or because someone else fucked up. When someone else fails it's because they are lazy or dumb. You are always justified in your shortcomings, whereas other people’s are clear flaws of their character. This is typical double standard.
If you can't get something in life it's because you didn't care about it in the first place. It's not because you are too afraid to actually try, such as with girls, money, creative work, etc. Likewise if you have something or are working in a certain position, then clearly it's justified. Academia is not great but it's still a functioning system, says the one who works in academia.
Bad things happen to you because other people are bad, or just lazy or dumb. It's obvious that you are a good person and have the right views, and that anything and anyone that doesn't help you get what you want is bad, stupid, etc.
More subtle but powerful than the lies I've provided so far is distraction. If you engage with bullshit you might actually admit to yourself that it's bullshit. But if you keep distracting yourself then you never have to interact with the cognitive dissonance in the first place. Lying is okay, but distraction is much much better if you never want to change.
Distraction includes not doing anything but talking on and on. Gossiping, or talking to yourself, which is really the same thing as gossiping but done internally and with only one person, or writing on social media.
Why must cognitive dissonance be avoided at all costs? Any big inner contradiction signals to the mind that something might have to change. Because deep change is difficult and plain scary at times, the mind prefers to instead change its picture of the world rather than telling you that you need to change. Speaking of which.
The biggest ego fantasy
The biggest ego fantasy is that you can solve the problems in your life while staying largely the same, by simply adding more stuff to your life: more techniques, more knowledge, more muscles, more money, etc. What ego recoils against is deep change, because ultimately that is a form of death. Unsurprisingly, because the system is built by the largely unconscious ego, this same dynamic appears in our collectives: the belief that we can solve the deep structural problems of society through adding complexity: bureaucracy, technology, regulation, etc.
The idea that fundamentally speaking, ego—respectively the system—cannot solve its own problems with more ego—resp. system—can never be accepted by an egoic person—an egoic system. Not very surprising when stated this way, but what this means is that people's ideas of what needs to be done tend to gravitate towards ways of buying time such that they can add more stuff—techniques, complexity, ideas, manpower, institutions, etc.—instead of addressing fundamental issues, because to do so would mean to stare right in the face of the fundamental limited nature of ego and the systems it builds. Everyone dies, but not within society apparently.
Thus, the biggest ego fantasy is that it can get what it wants, and those wants are unlimited as the fundamental problem of economics accurately perceives8, but doesn't have to change itself in doing so. Or if it needs to change, then it can simply tweak existing things, or add a bit of complexity here and there, learn one or two techniques, and all is good. The idea that there are limits, including death, or that change is painful and requires compromises, that is not acceptable for the ego.
The 3 components of change
I would say that the key components of change are 1) Clarity, seeing the truth in your life 2) Possibility, seeing what is possible and also where you'd want to go 3) Decision, the bridge between where you are (which requires clarity) and possibility, and the commitment to follow through.9
A lot is possible with simply clarity. For instance, when you notice that you talk too much, then you simply stop. You don't need to force yourself to stop, or learn what you have to do, it comes up naturally. But for more complex changes you also need some imagination in terms of what you can do, which is why you cannot simply quit an addiction for instance, and some skills to bridge towards that.
Expanding on that example, to quit an addiction you need to get a broader picture of the network of reasons of why you engage in said activity—dealing with stress and being bored are the main ones, but there is also avoiding pain and rejection, using it as social bonding and also getting a sense of achievement for some addictive loops—as well as think and commit to better ways of using your freed up time and energy, otherwise you're probably just going to default to your usual ways.
Need for easy control
On top of looking for the path of least cognitive dissonance, the unconscious mind tends to look for the easiest way to feel—not necessarily be—in control. For instance, procrastinating by playing video games makes you feel in control but doesn't really, but it's a much easier pathway than directly addressing the problem you're avoiding. Or repeating an argument you had in your head makes you feel in control of that conversation, even though it clearly doesn't do anything in reality.
Control is why the mind is so incredibly powerful: it can lock in on certain aspects of reality it can manipulate, so that it can benefit from it. But when the mind becomes detached from a broader context, through the softening nature of consciousness, it becomes egoic and thus is only interested in serving itself, even if it goes mad by only being concerned with itself.
Ego and addiction
Another direction that ego can get stuck in its own shell is with addiction. Here I use some entries of Darren Allen's Apocalypedia10, who describes addiction as the egoic self unable to soften to something outside of itself, and which only seeks more self: stimulation, power, status, distraction for instance.
There are many types of addictions, and some are far more socially acceptable than others, even rewarded for some of them. We can divide them into 4 categories11, with some examples of specifics addictions:
Physical: indulgence in the pleasures of the body such as food, sex, but also ways to numb yourself, such as alcohol, certain drugs, and distractions like loud noise and social media
Emotional: being hooked on drama, arguing all the time (even if they pretend they don't like it), the obsession with being right, seeking attention, clingy attachment, outrage porn and complaining
Mental: mental masturbation of course, which relieves intellectual people from having to do anything difficult, getting stuck in fantasies about what your life could be, constant worrying and replaying situations in your head, and social distractions like gossiping and groupthink
Volitional (related to will): constantly working, or pretending to do so by being busy, constantly exercising, being obsessed with winning, chasing superiority and acquiring status trinkets
The first person experience of addiction is one of utter unconscious behavior. It's almost like you're seeing someone else get hooked on video games, or porn, or anxious thinking, or social media, but you can't seem to do anything about it.
It might seem odd that indulgence in pleasure and numbing yourself are both seen as addictive, but in fact, the up—pleasure—and the down—boredom or apathy—are part of the same egoic cycle. It is precisely after you binge on your favourite addiction that you feel down, apathetic to everything. But often, the delay between the up and the down is long enough that you cannot easily make the connection, but it is there.
Outside of that up-and-down cycle we find a vast vivid, non-egoic, inner landscape. Being at peace does not lead to a down, neither does following your childlike curiosity, or doing work you genuinely find meaningful, or being with someone you love, just for the sake of the relationship, and not because you expect anything from them.
Distracted moms
It's really sad to witness how many mothers do not pay any attention whatsoever to their child. All glued on their screens. No wonder that so many people have incredibly troubled emotional lives, when the people who gave birth to you barely pay attention to what is going on in your life.
I do not wish to criticize mothers here, I mean for one fathers tend to be absent from a child's life in the first place, which makes them even worse. Parenting is very emotionally draining and time consuming, on top of managing your relationship with your partner and your personal life. What I wish to point at however is probably one of the most felt decline in the modern world, which is the decline of care: things are made mechanically and as cheaply as possible to increase profits, people don't really spend much time with one another, and when they are, they're on their phone, and no one is really present to anything, able to care about an experience for its own sake.
Modernity pushes this idea that all the big problems around us require big solutions, by which I mean more advanced technology, massive bureaucracies and institutions, all of which require tremendous amounts of funding and coordination. But what about the other direction? As Mother Teresa puts it:
Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
Is anyone actually paying attention
On the subject of love and care, one anecdote from when I was a kid: I was watching something on TV12 and a couple next doors, friends of my parents, came over. The husband remarked that the colors of the TV felt off, and they started discussing TV specs and that kind of stuff, which I obviously don't remember anything of. But what caught my attention at the time was how much they seemed to talk about the television, yet none of them really seemed to pay attention to what was on TV, too distracted to actually look at what was on there.
It is rather interesting how much people care about stuff that they ultimately don't pay attention to when they use it. It seems to me that a TV was a way of showing off to other people, and the same thing with an expensive car, or an expensive house, which one is too busy working to pay for to stay much inside in the first place. All that just to impress other people, which one doesn't even care much about in the first place. Go figure.
Tired folk
Everyone looks so tired these days, is it just me? Bags upon bags under their eyes. It probably has a lot to do with all those screens, and the busy-ness of modern life, which is funnily enough, rarely productive either.
Hard work mostly strikes me as a form of virtue signalling, a way of boosting your “social capital”—I hate that term but it describes the mentality of those people rather well—because those who actually do good work don't work “hard” or “grind”, they just work on what they want.
As a result, I'd say that people typically get stuck in this zone where they work hard at something they don't really care about, because they think that it is what being a good person consists of, and then they don't really rest either because digital media constantly gives you something to watch or listen to. Such that when people are done with work, they don't really rest, they “consume”—another term I hate but which once again perfectly describes the apathetic relationship to entertainment—or binge or go on stressful holidays that consists in filling a huge to-do list. Neither meaningful work nor peaceful rest, such is the state of modern man.
Where problems start
“The problem is that once there's ANY distance between your intention and your reward structure, bullshit slips in through that crack.” from some Facebook post I can’t be bothered to find again by Michael Smith (Morphenius) about incentives.
There are many examples of incentives that tend to reinforce collectives misaligned with their original intentions: companies that maximize profits instead of helping customers, charities that focus on pulling emotional strings instead of actually helping the cause they originally fought for, coaches that focus on milking customers instead of actually helping them solve their problems, etc.
Not only does this happen at all levels—individual to collective—but also in pretty much every domain. As Ran Prieur notes here: people often say that it isn’t money which is the root of all evils, but rather the love of money. But in fact, quote:
Money is totally intrinsically harmful. Whether or not you love it, money strips the meaning from physical items, from blocks of time, from human activities, and replaces those many diverse meanings with copies of the same meaning: this is a token which can be used to force other people to do shit.
So we could say that a vast class of problems occur when people lose track of what is actually valuable/meaningful and instead fall for the tokens we construct to organize our society. Money is the biggest one because it holds so much power, and we need it to survive in society, but it is not the only one: follower count is another major one of our times for instance.
This gap between intention and reward structure strikes me as incredibly fundamental but I feel like there is almost too much to say, so here are some crumbs for my future self to continue that train of thought if I am interested in that:
Collectives at a size significantly above Dunbar's number require complicated protocols/institutions to organize themselves -> this inevitably creates a gap between conscious intention and the reward structures of the protocols/institutions, because complicated structures cannot capture the entirety of a complex reality, which I would say is the deep reason behind Goodhart's law
Our world rewards people who are good at playing the game of rewards, not those who can stick to a conscious intention, as well as utterly destroying your relationship with what you personally want—school being the best example of that
The way people are manipulated is not through overt coercion or explicit propaganda, but by filtering who is allowed to have an impact in society and who isn't. This is the difference between disciplinary societies and societies of control, in Deleuze's terms
On an individual level, people burn out when their original intention has been replaced by a need to stick to protocols, or the need to conform to a shape that gets rewarded by external structures
Maps and climbing
Expanding on the map VS territory divide: talking to people who are always in their narrow mind-worldview while you have to directly interact with the territory is like being a mountain climber and having to talk to people who have no concepts whatsoever of what a mountain is, and who think that everything shown on a map can be traversed in a straight line.
This is an incredibly common problem between project managers and those who actually have to execute, especially when there's a large gap in knowledge, for instance in programming. The world inhabited by the project managers is one where everything is simple but things don't get done because people are lazy, whereas the one inhabited by the workers is one full of constraints, technical, social and monetary, but which are incredibly difficult to convey to those who don't have the hands on experience.
The divide between those who take decisions and those who have to execute on them is probably one of the most toxic aspects of the modern world, because it systematically creates scenarios where decisions are out of touch with reality, and also ones where personal short-term interests prevail over long-term decisions that would benefit the health of larger collectives.
Personally, I don't hope that this will ever get fixed in my life, and fully expect that society will go through a lengthy phase of decline, if not straight up collapse, within my lifetime. In the meantime, I want to move away from environments that have this divide, as much as possible.
Machine perception
More generally, when you change the method of perceiving, you have to change the rule, to prevent dysfunction. How fun would driving be if you got a speeding ticket every time you went 25.01 mph in a 25 zone?
From Ran Prieur's archives.
A lot of laws break down as soon as you introduce machine perception. The reason is that those laws were fairly reasonable (not always) when a human had to assess whether or not you were causing trouble or not, but as soon as you remove that human element, you now have a hard boundary, assessed by a hard machine, by which I mean that they lack any kind of sensitivity to a broader context. To contrast that, a soft gaze is able to take in your entire visual field, whereas a hard gaze ignores context and instead focuses on specific details to stare at.
To come back to law, imagine if something like jaywalking had an entire Big Brother-like installation to detect every jaywalker 24/7. Everyone would be constantly flagged, because people do it all the time. But it wouldn't really improve much our lives, because most jaywalking is done in safe situations (at least where I live), and in fact, I've seen many policemen themselves jaywalk right next to their police station because there simply wasn’t any traffic.
As soon as you introduce machine perception, laws that were once reasonable—such as disincentivizing people from walking recklessly on the street—become absolutely tyrannical. And you cannot count on the law to be changed accordingly, because they are as rigid as the world we live in.
Some underdiscussed fallacies
These are some fallacies which I have encountered in my life and have never seen anyone give them a name, up until now, because several of those are documented on Wikipedia. For instance:
The appeal to balance is the argument to moderation
The fallacy fallacy is the argument from fallacy
The appeal to balance
This consists in pointing out that a view is flawed because it isn't “balanced”. For instance, pointing out all the problems with the technological system will inevitably lead to some people preaching the virtue of finding balance within it, i.e. that we should strike the balance in terms of the complexity and amount of technology in our environment.
What the appeal of balance misses is that a situation can be so unbalanced in the first place, that temperance might consist in going all the way back to one side, or at least 95 to 99% towards it. I mean the easiest example is with slavery: what is the balance between slavery and no slavery? It's clearly abolishing slavery, because the two sides are not equally virtuous. We could argue that in practice, the marginal cost of trying to get rid of absolutely all slavery in a society, as opposed to getting rid of 98-99% of it, is not worth it—this is the optimal pollution cost argument—but still, my point is that the balance is not 50/50.
But to come back to the more difficult example with regards to technology: what does the balance look like? For me it is a relationship to technology where conscious decisions prevail in our world. In that regard, we live in a completely inverted world where most of our resources, time and attention go into maintaining and developing the technological system because we have no other choices to survive, as opposed to benefiting from it and naturally wanting to contribute to it.
This means that for instance, staying away from digital media, which is explicitly designed to hook you in and keep you scrolling for as long as possible, is much closer to a healthy sense of balance with regards to technology than those faux-centrist positions which keep moving their goalpost as every development in technology arrives.
The point of balance is ultimately conscious decision-making that is aligned with the context, not some abstract ideal middle point between made-up categories. Because the commonality between all the extremes is that they're stuck in something: emotions, the mind, or plain old unconscious behavior that reinforces itself.
Bullet point fallacy
Similar to the appeal to a false balance, the bullet point fallacy is when a comparison between two things is made, and it is assumed that having more bullet points in favor of one side means that it is better. Usually when people want to manipulate others into approving a decision, they come up with lots of bullet points in favor, and some bullet points against, to give the illusion that there is a fair comparison being made. But in reality, each bullet point does not hold the same weight.
For instance, when a company decides to reduce wages, they rarely do so explicitly. In my case, they instead give me a list of two or three new "advantages", which have been taken from my income in the first place. So the list of bullet points could look something like this13:
(-) Lose €50 a month
(+) Earn an additional €150 a year in meal vouchers14
(+) Earn €2 per day working from home
(+) An additional half-day of holiday
Of course the whole point is to make it difficult to tell if the change is net positive or negative, by for instance putting together daily, monthly and yearly figures like I did here. But usually if a company or government makes it ambiguous, then it is a bad trade for the recipients.
Fallacy fallacy
The idea that anything that contains a fallacy is completely wrong. This is a classic strategy adopted by people who want to tunnel on details so that they can ignore the main arguments, which probably reveal something uncomfortable about their own beliefs or even their own lives.
At this point there are so many fallacies that it is basically inevitable not to include a few of them. For instance: the appeal to authority can be said for anything that relies on a dominant position or source to derive its argument, which strikes me as an incredibly common and also reasonable thing to do if you don't exclusively rely on it.
Or the false equivalent and definist fallacy—when a term is defined in a biased manner such that it essentially justifies by itself the argument15—are so subjective that anyone with enough bad faith could call out an author for using them. “You say that the left-wing and the right-wing are essentially the same but that is a false equivalent because you are an anti-system anarchist who hates mankind and (...)”
Or take the ad hominem, where someone points out flaws in the author himself instead of the argument. Only people who are utterly detached from reality think that ideas can exist untethered from the people that believe in them. In truth, judging a tree by the fruit it bears is actually a much better strategy to navigate life than getting lost thinking about specific ideas all day long. Of course no one leads a perfect life, and that is why the ad hominem is a fallacy, when it is used as a misdirection away from a core argument in favour of focusing on details that benefit the other side. But the useful side of it is the ability to point out the bullshit and selfishness in egoic people, and deeper than that, the egoic societies that maintain them.
All in all, just take a look at the list of fallacies on Wikipedia, and try to imagine what it would take to write a text that doesn't contain any of them. The easiest way of course would be to say absolutely nothing of importance whatsoever, which in a way is what a lot of intellectuals seem to be doing these days.
Misdirections
Not so much fallacies in thinking, but more like pathways that the mind gets stuck in which aren't productive.
Causal misdirection
This is what happens when people become obsessed with understanding the cause behind something rather than doing something about it.
I keep giving this example but I find it so telling: after the 2021 floods in Western Europe, I heard many people trying to blame certain things, such as the way the dams have been poorly maintained, or climate change, or the lack of funding in certain areas, and so on. But no one really seemed to be talking about what to do to prepare for future floods, they just wanted to blame something or someone. I find that to be the likely direction of societal decline for the decades to come: a bunch of people more interested in pointing fingers than doing something about the problems
Doctors who think that their job is about finding a label to your symptoms as opposed to helping you recover and even live more proactively with regards to your health
Economists are notorious for only being able to explain things that have already happened, and worse than useless at predicting the future. The 2008 housing bubble wasn't predicted by mainstream economics, though in hindsight of course everything was “obvious”. This aspect of economics and in general society is discussed at length in Nassim Taleb's books, especially The Black Swan, where a black swan event is precisely the kind of highly unpredictable but also easily explainable in hindsight that economists love to jump on, to inform future reforms
What I notice about the people who fall for the causal fallacy is that they spend all their time living retrospectively, looking back for causes that would explain what is going on right now. But while they're doing that, they're barely paying attention to the present and how to prepare themselves for the future. Constantly fighting the old war, feeling smart about explaining the past, but ultimately never looking forward to what might arrive and doing something about it.
Obsessing about the enemy
Similar to the example I gave on identifying something to blame, this one is about spending all your time on identifying an enemy and listing out all of its problems, instead of improving your own situation.
It is clear that our culture is quite left-leaning in the West and in the media, and as a result, it seems to me that the main way the right defines itself is purely through opposition: look at how fucked up these people are, look at their internal contradictions, look at their mental health problems (which we definitely don't have by the way), on and on.
Europe does this with America, Microsoft does this with Apple, lower status people do this with higher status people, and in general most collectives and individuals have someone or something they like defining themselves against, as being better in some ways.
When you zoom out of this dynamic, you realize that it's just one massive waste of time. Nothing gets fixed by pointing the finger at some people you enjoy laughing at. You can decide to exit the circus, focus your time and energy on what you want, let go of the drama and the obsession with being right, and instead use your life to build stuff you want, and be with the people you love.
You only need to choose one thing at the expense of another when you are in a situation of Pareto efficiency, but I would say that no human has ever lived a Pareto efficient life: you can always improve one aspect without making any other one worse.
I think the people who can draw well without any references are quite rare and have decades of experience, and that it is quite toxic for people like me to try to replicate what they do. It just doesn't work, and it isn't enjoyable for me.
Related to this discussion about quality of life being bottlenecked by a single factor, see this post by Yudkowsky discussing UBI and why it wouldn’t magically improve it.
Here is my answer to “why do younger people spend so much time on their phone”: it is a combination of several factors, the first one being the addictiveness of the internet, which in many ways is designed to keep your attention stuck. But more importantly, it is the fact that life in the modern world is so unfulfilling because of how disempowering it is. People escape to play video games because they don't feel any agency in their real life. At least getting better at a video game is somewhat tangible and it's enjoyable, whereas being forced to learn things you couldn't care less about at school is meaningless and feels dreadful, especially for young children who have an incredible amount of energy and curiosity about life.
See for instance the 4 F’s model, which I find excellent to see the types of responses that we engage in when we are stuck in emotional overwhelm.
It might in fact be identical, I have never read Nietzsche and am simply using the terms that feel more natural to me.
A conscious usage of the mind would have access to conscious discernment, which would allow you to spot your own bullshit and thus calibrate your beliefs to fit reality, and thus have a clearer mental picture of it. Needless to say that this is quite rare because it requires a pretty deep epistemic and existential humility to admit that you are full of shit about pretty much everything, especially yourself.
It's actually hilarious that the fundamental problem of economics—that humans have infinite wants but finite resources—then prompts the study of economics, which essentially asserts that we should try to produce as many things as possible with those finite resources anyway. You would think that the insight into the infinite nature of wants would prompt a more spiritual inquiry, like: “huh, perhaps desires have something crazy in them, I wonder if we can have a more sane relationship with them?” But no, instead economics doubles down on desires, without trying to understand them.
Adding symbols to that, we could say that Clarity = Square, because the present reality is solid, since it is what it is. Possibility = Circle, because it is somewhat idealistic, there is no such thing as a perfect circle but we can still imagine it. And then Decision = Arrow connecting the two. Or in simpler terms, Clarity = Present, Possibility = Future, Decision = Bridge between the two.
The entries titled "Ego" and "Self" mainly.
The 4 aspects of the Self—body, emotions, mind and will—can be mapped to the 4 elements as such: Body = Earth, Emotions = Water, Mind = Air, Will = Fire
Completely irrelevant but I think it was Saint Seiya, which was huge in French speaking countries for some reason, but not so much in English speaking ones.
I made up this list just to give an example. In reality, things are even more complicated than that such that assessing the net result is even more difficult
This seems to be somewhat exclusive to a few countries, but the idea is simply that it is an alternative form of payment which is less taxed than regular income, but which can only be used on groceries and restaurants.
By for instance defining sanity as that which psychologists agree on, therefore leading to the conclusion that those who work best within our system are sane people.