Ran Prieur

September 16.

2016-09-16T16:40:04Z

September 16. Have the last few days been bad for everyone, or just for me and everyone around me? Anyway, for the weekend I have some quick thoughts about watching sports. It's not necessarily a waste of time. For me the key is to not care who wins or loses. It's a kind of meditation, to just watch for the performances and the unscripted developing story, and every time I slip into a preference for one side or the other, I try to notice and come back into balance. The funny thing is that TV commentators have to do this, so there's an example, right in front of us, of the best way to think about sports, and yet almost all viewers fail to follow that example.

One thing I've learned from watching it this way: as the level of competition gets higher, success is less about atheticism and more about focusing the mind in smaller and smaller moments.

September 14.

2016-09-14T14:20:36Z

September 14. Today a reader email says what I've been thinking lately: "The older you get, the more you realize how little you can actually do in the world for the world. Even reactions to it seem unnecessary. The focus is more internal, and then upon realizing how superficial that realization is, it becomes even more internal. Then, constant surgery."

I was going to say, I've wasted so much attention on social and political issues over which I have no power, when all along there were internal psychological issues over which I alone have power.

Last night I had a thought: what we call "the subconscious" is not some kind of nebulous intelligence, just a big web of unexamined habits. Most of our behavior is stuff we don't even know we're doing, or we know but we don't see other options. And what we call the "ego" is the impermeability of the membrane between self and other. To add a new belief or behavior, or drop an old one, you have to move it across that membrane, and this is a skill you can develop.

A valuable practice, which I've mentioned a few times before, is the "not that" meditation: Ask yourself "who am I?" and keep answering "not that" and looking deeper, until almost nothing seems like a necessary part of who you are. Another technique is ordinary meditation where you try to keep your mind blank, and when you catch yourself thinking about anything you notice and let it go. This is a lot like using the task manager on a Windows computer: you look at all the stuff running in the background and think "What the hell is that? Do I even need it or is it just eating up my CPU?"

I wonder how much of our identity is just a projection of unresolved internal conflict. A line from a song says it best, and I've had this at the top of my "about me" page for a few months now: "Does a man seek his own face for the flaws in shadows beneath?"

September 12.

2016-09-12T12:00:16Z

September 12. Unrelated stray links. Last week there was a fun thread on the Ask Men Over 30 subreddit: What are the 5 things that you most would like to have?

From the same day on reddit, a long comment about Vincent Van Gogh, starting with the Doctor Who episode and ending on some personal stuff about how to live well.

I had no idea: Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes, because bits of wire can get stuck to the grill, then stuck in the food, then stuck in your throat and they're damn hard to get out. Have they tried really strong magnets?

And a good article about a strange musical instrument, the glass harmonica's unlikely comeback.

September 9.

2016-09-09T21:30:40Z

September 9. From the New Yorker, a long and balanced article about Ayahuasca. There's also some good stuff in the Hacker News comment thread, including a link to this Onion article, Ayahuasca Shaman Dreading Another Week Of Guiding Tech CEOs To Spiritual Oneness.

My experience with psychedelics is limited. Psilocybin gives me a hard body trip but no head trip, and I've never had a source for anything stronger. I've done a lot of cannabis, and it has opened paths that I never would have imagined without it. But you still have to walk the path. The problem with expansion of consciousness is that stuff has been blocked from your consciousness for a reason, and it's usually not because society doesn't want you to know that we are all one. More often it's because you have spent your life making terrible mistakes, and living without those mistakes is really hard, but now you have to do it because you know about it. Ignorance is bliss, and to emerge from ignorance is to climb through pain.

I'm not surprised to find the same idea in this long reddit comment about antidepressants, by someone who has studied them through both neuroscience and personal experience. Edited excerpt:

It's a tool. It'll help you in your battle if you need it. Other tools work for other people. The trick is to not rely on it as an easy fix. Depression is hard as fuck to fix. It requires embracing the source of your suffering, the ability to admit your brain is thinking bad thoughts, the ability to reality check yourself, and constant behavior changes to make sure you're setting yourself up for a good life.

September 6.

2016-09-06T18:00:05Z

September 6. I've been thinking about the meaning of life -- not the conscious large-scale stories about the reason (or lack of reason) that we're in this world, but about the unconscious stories and value systems that guide our small-scale actions. A month ago on the subreddit there was a massive comment thread about MGTOW, men who "believe that legal and romantic entanglements with women fail a cost-benefit analysis." Now it occurs to me that cost-benefit analysis is an optional, peculiar, and mostly unexamined story about the meaning of life.

I mean it can be a useful tool, but it's not a good script to have running in the background all the time, constantly guarding against getting a bad deal. And yet most of us do it. That's why we don't like being cut off in traffic, or being in the slow line at the supermarket, or not getting the best possible price when we buy stuff online. But when is it enough? When do we say, "Okay, over the whole span of my life I'm sure I'm getting a good deal so I'm going to stop caring about that." Most people never say that, because it would leave a void where there used to be meaning. Instead, normal behavior is to skew our perception so we always feel like we're getting a slightly bad deal no matter how good a deal we're getting.

This is part of what Buddhists call attachment and Eckhart Tolle calls ego, but I want to call it incompetent self-gamification. Gamification is "the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts," often by big institutions as part of creepy social control. But we also do it to ourselves all the time, turning everyday life into little games where we can win or lose based on events we don't fully control. And if we really examined this habit, we would find that the excitement of the game is not worth the suffering of losing.

But wait, isn't that a cost-benefit analysis? Maybe my point is that we apply cost-benefit analysis too much toward the outside, and not enough toward the inside.

September 2.

2016-09-02T14:20:29Z

September 2. Some fun stuff for the weekend. This silly quiz is actually a good execution of a good idea: What Garden of Earthly Delights Abomination Are You? My result strangely nails the deepest tension in my life, between my desire to simply have a good time, and my unseen role in some mysterious tale in which I'm supposed to be doing something or other, and if I try to have too much of a good time I get smacked down. I can relate even better to this 2014 Onion article: Man Hates Being Put In Position Where He Has To Think, Feel, Or Act.

And this might be the greatest joke ever told, Norm MacDonald's Moth Joke. It's actually an old joke that he puts his own spin on. Where other comedians play within the rules of comedy, Norm MacDonald plays with the rules of comedy.