The veil of triviality

The great filter of importance affects all conversations

People don't talk about what's important. This has been observed in companies, where meetings quickly brush aside the technical but crucial aspects of a project, and spend instead a disproportionate amount of time on trivial details.

The example usually given¹ is a meeting for approving the plans for a nuclear plant - a project so incredibly complicated and far-reaching that no one bothers discussing details, which would probably expose one's incompetence - and instead spend most of the meeting talking about the new bike shed - what color it would have, where it would be located, how much funding it would get, etc.

One does not need to talk about nuclear plants however to see the effect on essentially all conversations.

§1. People talk about being stressed and depressed by work, but they never seriously consider leaving their job, and living in radical ways so as to exit the awful environments they live in the first place.

Discourse surrounding work is always symptomatic, giving a label to the set of symptoms instead of actually examining the root cause and doing something about it. Thus students in school are given a whole host of labels of their mental health issues², but nothing is actually being done to address the root issues. You could never seriously talk about, let alone change, the basic fact that school is a coercive institution, one that traumatizes essentially every child that must go through it, and that there is essentially no feedback mechanism to insure that teachers are actually competent at their job.

Or everything is about gaining easy approval. "Yeah work sucks so much am I right guys?" does very well on social media. "This is what people should do to improve to address X, Y or Z" does well on certain corners of the internet. "This is what I could do to shift my life" is incredibly unpopular however. Doing the hard work of becoming more independent can never be the norm within society, instead people are numbed with shallow conversations, pills, entertainment (i.e. apathy).

§2. Politics gives the illusion of talking about important things and being smarter than others, even though those who engage fervently in it do little to change their life. Thus we see that underneath the shallow layer of triviality is the cycle of distraction: the way that society continually misdirects people's attention and resources.

As a result, you find people talking about energy issues, and their best plans consist in, wait for it, a transition to green energy. Not a significant downshift in energy usage and a corresponding overhaul of the entire structure of our society. No. Instead, the current paradigm - growth, cars, work as obedience, extracting nature and poorer countries - is taken as granted, and is dressed up with fresh paint and glitter to garner more approval.

Lots of people talk about the cherry, very few people talk about the cake itself, and even less think about why there is a cake in the first place, and who benefits from it, or even needs one.

§3. People love talking about what type of projects they would want to do - writing, art, music - but they very rarely sit down and do the damn thing. Once again, they want to get approval for "trying" - talking about it, not actually doing it - or they want to stay at the shallow level of not looking at what they're doing.

It is quite common to meet people who say "they've tried everything" to get their creative projects started and monetized. Very rarely do they actually show the results, much less discuss the specific strategies and work they did, mention their mindset and expectations, and so on. As Visa mentions in this great thread about ‘playing house’ as he calls it, it's like if someone said "I tried exercising" but they never discussed about the specific exercises they did, how often they went to the gym, what their initial situation and goals were.

Likewise, people don't want to talk about specifics because it risks exposing just how little or how unserious they are. Many are fine with telling themselves that they are 'dumb' or 'lazy' or have some type of mental illness. Very very few people, if at all, would ever admit they lack courage or that they aren't serious. Even though in my experience, those two are probably the biggest factors that determine one's success in their personal endeavors (different from society's definition of success).

§4. Much of society is a string of coping mechanisms linked to one another: food, porn, screens, video games, TV shows, drugs, alcohol, worrying, social media, fantasizing, livestreams, podcasts, texting, browsing the news, loud music. As expanded in §1, the root causes are never examined because that would expose the deeply unsatisfying lifestyles that our atomizing society promotes.

But even simply mentioning that all those coping mechanisms exist and have become far more socially accepted over the years because people need them to stay somewhat functional isn’t allowed. It’s simply far too threatening to point out that distraction and numbness are needed for people to tolerate the absurd living situations they are put into.

As such, you see people talking about even more symptomatic issues, like one how feels like a spectator to their own life and own body, how time seems to fly by so quickly, how one has this constant low-level anxiety in the background, how one cannot stay with themselves for a few minutes in silence, or how one is constantly tired by some unknown reason. Even the numbing mechanisms cannot be discussed in a lot of causes.

§5. Dating advice that consist in having a list of responses to get someone interested enough to sleep with you, as opposed to becoming an actually interesting person who knows what they want and pursue those things with integrity. Similar to the example of playing house in §3, the external situation of being in a fulfilling relationship is desired without considering the necessary condition of being the type of person that wants and can take part in such a relationship. It’s a bit like forgetting that you actually are taking part in the relationship as opposed to simply benefitting from it.

Very rarely do you see people suggest that someone should rearrange their entire life, from their beliefs to their habits to their expectations to their responses, if they desire X in their life, where X can be: a nourishing relationship, a job one is interested in, more peace in their life, amongst other things. But ironically, such an overhaul is probably easier in the long term because it actually works. All the shallow furniture-moving advice sound easy but because they never get down to the root causes and the fundamentals, they can never hope to produce solid results.

§6. Remember that you are going to die? Oh yeah, not a whole lot of people talk about that. I wonder why.

Within society, it's obvious why: thinking about death will make you think about your life. Not as some abstract thing, like the statistics that are thrown at us through the news, or "the story of my life". No, the actual day to day experience, how you use your time, what you feel like, the people you're with, the job you are doing - or pretending to do because it's bullshit anyway. Consciousness is deeply threatening to a world that is built on coercion and blind obedience, so that's why it could never ever be mentioned.

Within this world, death is an accident. When someone dies, it's because something happened that shouldn't have: a car accident, a disease that we haven't cured yet, a heart failure - it didn't do its job correctly! - or falling in the stairs. A doctor could never say that someone died because everyone dies eventually and living to 84 was quite respectable anyway. No, they must give a cause, a time and a place, such that it becomes a data point we can analyze and fix in our glorious social machine.

On the individual level, people don't talk about death because the unknown related to it is really really scary. Everyone stands naked in front of death, even though we spend much of our time building armors. The armor of the controlling mind, the armor against emotions, the armor of safety through acquiring money, the armor of our personas and habits, etc.

I can't say I've made much headway with regards to the fear of death, I'm still very afraid of dying. But I know enough to tell that running away from it won't help. I wouldn't say that death gives life meaning per se, I feel like that's a confused statement. I would instead say that connection (or love) is what makes life meaningful, but that death - as well as suffering and silence - is the best teacher of the value of living consciously and developing relationships with other people, and the Universe at large. It has a way of cutting through all the bullshit of human affairs and what’s trendy, and that's really important.

Conclusion

I think that ultimately, the law of triviality exists because genuine change requires deep examination, not just of the individual life, but also of the deeply unhealthy and coercive system we live in. It is very threatening to the safety-craving mind to come to the conclusion that our society is utterly unsustainable and that there are next to no constructive games within it. Thus I have found that directing my attention on what I care about to be the most beneficial set of practices in my life.

Fortunately, one does not need to wait to be in exceptional circumstances to practice it, since it can start with something as simple as deciding to not engage with bullshit found on the internet or everyday conversations. Or by gently reestablishing the connection with one's body, and thus one's ground and one's power. Or by removing all the clutter and excess that gets in the way of living life as one wants.

Whatever you believe will happen in the decades to come, I think anyone can agree that the forces at play will never value consciousness and deliberate attention, such that those abilities will keep becoming more and more essential to live a life aligned with one's values, as opposed to the system's.

1. See the Wikipedia page for instance

2. I would argue that mental health is symptomatic of spiritual health, but since our society does not have the vocabulary and even perception to talk about such things, it gets lossily translated into mental health.