The Desperation Cycle

Many Eastern philosophies advocate the reduction of desire in order to prevent suffering. The logic goes that if you desire little, there will be much less to disappoint you, and this is true. If you care about nothing, not even your own life, then what could possibly upset you? But by the same token, what would ever excite you? If taken to the extreme, the elimination of desire effectively throws the baby out with the bathwater, and merely makes your life quality more stable, but not necessarily better. But suppose you are after stability, perhaps because the pain is too much and you are willing to forego the pleasure. Even then, you must question whether the elimination of desire is even feasible. There are some desires that are so strongly ingrained in us that their elimination would require huge amounts of effort and strain, which would cancel the potential benefits. The most significant such examples would be social desires such as the desire for friendship and romance, which can lead to feelings of loneliness through the desperation cycle.

The key to understanding desperation is that it is not stem from just desire. You do not feel desperate just because you are alone, just as you do not feel desperate just because you are not rich or are not in Aruba right now. Desire is not enough, desperation requires the combination of desire with negative thought patterns based on non-present thinking.

Here is the basic mechanism of the desperation cycle. First you stumble on some desire, nothing painful or problematic, just a realization that you would prefer some other state to your current state. This desire inspires you to make a direct effort to attain the preferred state as quickly as possible. Sometimes this effort may succeed, but if it doesn’t you feel a bit disappointed because you lack control over the attainment of this desire. This lack of control creates a slight insecurity (in this case desperation), initially unnoticeable, but identifiable by the thoughts that it produces. Your planning mind considers the future and worries about what it would be like if you can’t find success. You may worry that your life won’t live up to the standards that you’ve set. You may even have fear of future regret - that you didn’t try hard enough and you missed out on a good opportunity. These non-present thoughts generate an artificial need which feeds back into your lack of control due to the fact that you have a perception of unmet needs. This cycle is what we call the desperation cycle. This process is illustrated in the state diagram below.

There is a way to avoid the desperation cycle without the elimination of desire, which can be found in the state diagram above. If you are in the cycle, you need to break out by detaching from the desire. This amounts to convincing yourself that what feels like a need is in fact just a desire. You can still be happy without it. In fact, psychological studies suggest that people can find ways to adapt to almost any conditions and find ways to be happy. Poor celibate monks, people who have lost their vision, and siamese twins connected at the head have all found ways to be happy with their lives. Our minds are just very bad at predicting future happiness [see Stumbling on Happiness for a thorough explanation]. It may help to meditate or use cognitive therapy to facilitate detachment.

Unless detachment training techniques are continued permanently, the original desire will likely sprout up again soon after the desperation was quelled. Naturally, there is a danger of falling right back into the same cycle. One way to prevent this is to avoid direct effort and instead use indirect effort. Indirect effort refers to the techniques of result detachment, where you put yourself on the path to success, but don’t consciously strive for it. The distinguishing factor between direct and indirect efforts is whether you would still want to perform the action if it was guaranteed that it would not help you in attaining your desire. If you would prefer to not do it, but you do it anyways in the hope of attaining your goals, then it is a direct effort. It may sound like a trivial distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world how you think of things. When using indirect effort, you don’t provide yourself with anything to fail at, and if you can’t fail, then you don’t feel a lack of control.

But is indirect effort as effective as direct effort? In general no, but it depends on what you mean by effective. For example, if you want to start a business, using direct effort will probably help you reach profitability faster. But if you use indirect effort, say by taking your time and exploring your business interests, you will more likely find an option that you truly enjoy. With romance, making a direct effort by going to bars every night may find you a partner faster. On the other hand, you could make an indirect effort by spending more time in social activities that you are really interested in, and increase the odds that you find someone you are truly compatible with. Even if you are not in the desperation cycle, there may still be times when your desire outweighs your other concerns. In this situation, it is probably best to optimize your indirect efforts. For example, you could find new activities to join or develop yourself in ways that make it easier to meet people. If you can learn to avoid creating expections, comparing yourself to others, and rushing for the future, then you will find that life unfolds moment by moment in a perfectly satisfactory way.

The Dilemma of Self-Revision

Our genes endowed us with a great power when they gave us an independent consciousness. Unlike probably any other species, we can use thought to change the program that we run during life. Other animals may be capable of some form of experience, but I think it is very unlikely that any non-human animal has ever thought “I would be happier if I took a vow of celibacy.” The fact that humans are capable of not only thinking such thoughts, but actually executing this kind of plan, means that we have the ability of self-revision, or in other words, the ability to intentionally fight our own nature. The dilemma thus arises: when should we self-revise?

First let’s try to get an idea of where this abilty comes from. Before consciousness, animals were confined to executing relatively simple algorithms that facilitated survival and replication in one way or another. Memory and learning can still exist without consciousness, but they are restricted to recognition of simple patterns that are probably preset in the brain. But humans have a whole set of mental functions that stem from the evolved consciousness or awareness. Awareness permits imagination - without awareness it would not be possible to imagine anything. When imagination is combined with intelligence, analysis becomes possible. Planning emerges when analysis is applied to memories from past experiences by extrapolation of patterns. Intention occurs when a decision is made based on the results of planning. When intention is steered by the value system created by the experience of pleasure and pain, desire is formed. If the self-modifying ability of the brain is used to meet this desire, then this is self-revision.

Note that in this diagram, experience is separate from awareness. This is an important distinction. Experience is the feeling of physical existence - seeing sights, hearing sounds, feeling pleasure and pain - it is all in the present. Awareness is the feeling of mental existence - abstract thought, mental chatter, planning - it is the inspiration for the concept of the soul.

Experience and awareness are separable. It is possible to have experience without awareness, like animals or when you are wrapped up in a movie. It is also possible to have awareness without experience, like when you are lost in thought. I once drove several miles with no awareness or memory of having done so.

These states of separation are not just illusory, the distinction between experience and awareness is supported by psychological studies. Psychologists have identified the pre-frontal cortex as the center of planning, which suggests that it may also be the source of awareness. [See the book "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert] Individuals who have had damage to the pre-frontal cortex through accident or lobotomy show an inability to plan for even the remainder of the day. Frontal lobe lobotomy was established as a treatment for severe depression and anxiety because it was found that it calmed patients down and made them stop worrying about the future. Surprisingly, it is not that easy to tell if a person’s frontal lobes have been destroyed. This is evidence that the ability to plan is not as necessary as many of us believe. Perhaps for some it is more of a liability than an asset. This is the idea behind Zen Buddhism - that one can relieve suffering by suppressing awareness. It is basically a program for simulating a frontal lobe lobotomy.

Why would our genes give us the power to override their commands? Basically because it is the only way they could allow general-purpose adaptation to occur within a single lifespan, unlike evolution which can only cause adaptation over many generations. And really it isn’t much of a sacrifice for the genes because they still keep us on a pretty tight leash through the pleasure and pain mechanism, at least for most people.

So should you fight your nature? I think everyone would benefit from fighting their nature in some instances. For example, you probably would be better off to not eat everything you are tempted to eat. Our genes just haven’t had time to adapt to the abundance of junk food in the world today. Another largely obsolete tendency in our nature is “approach anxiety”, which makes men nervous to approach and begin a conversation with a woman. This evolved for small communities where a bad rejection could mean social ostracization. Now there are so many people that rejection isn’t a big concern. But then there are cases like the fear of snakes, which is still a pretty good idea in general, so it probably isn’t worth fighting that one too hard.

So when exactly should you fight your nature? I think this is a difficult question. It depends on your values and how difficult it is to fight. It is complicated further by the fact that both of these factors change over time. Basically you have to weigh the costs of revising yourself against the benefits of the change. There is no doubt that self-revision can save you from a lot of suffering, but I think there has to be a line somewhere beyond which self-revision becomes self-destruction. I think the Buddhists have the right idea - moderating non-present analysis (planning and rehashing) really does make things better - as long as it doesn’t go too far.

The Psychology of Insecurity

Feelings of insecurity arise from a lack of control and confidence. When you have control of a situation, you aren’t so likely to get upset. If someone is giving you a hard time, you can just utilize your power to deal with it. But if you are relying on the cooperation of others in a way that you cannot effectively enforce, it can be very frustrating.

In a relationship, you can never guarantee that your partner won’t leave you, so there is a lack of control that can often lead to insecurity. This is why jealousy in relationships is so often a source of troubles. Even when the concern is rationally justified, the jealous partner often responds in an irrational way due to their insecurity.

When you have a large degree of confidence in something, it is less upsetting when someone disagrees with you. Even if you do get into an argument about something you are confident in, it probably won’t make you feel too disturbed and upset. Instead, you will probably just laugh when you hear something that you confidently know to be wrong. On the other hand, when you have a belief, but you are very unsure about it, you will more easily get agitated and defensive when people challenge you on that belief.

Once during a philosophical conversation, I told a religious believer that I did not respect her beliefs as much as my own because I thought hers were irrational. Logically, this should have been obvious already because it was already established that I was an atheist and of course I am not going to respect what I view as psychological distortion as much as what I view as the truth. However, my statement made her cry. This was strong evidence that she had some insecurity with regard to her faith. If she was absolutely convinced, she just would have thought that I was foolish and it wouldn’t have created an emotional response.

Insecurity induces irrational behavior that can threaten your life quality maximization. Insecure people also have a tendency to avoid situations that challenge their beliefs. Blocking things out like this can leave you in a fragile state that can be dangerous if you are accidentally exposed to these challenging situations.

It is possible to use philosophy to establish principles that you are confident in. Many insecurities stem from philosophical issues such as how to live. If you aren’t sure of your principles in life, you will always run the risk of thinking you’ve been doing things wrong and that someone else is doing it better. If you can decide on a solid set of principles to live by, you can relieve yourself of the problems that come with insecurity.

Future Worship

Religion is usually defined by its promotion of belief in some supernatural power. But more fundamentally, we could define religion as a system of morals and beliefs that skews one’s ability to properly compute their life-quality maximization function. According to this definition, there is a subtle and insidious religion thriving in modern society that is rarely discussed-the religion of future worship. Future worship consists of a set of beliefs based around the idea that one should worry about their future. The italicized words are each important. The beliefs suggest that if one is not worrying, then one should start worrying, and that simply considering the future is not sufficient, worrying is necessary. This worry is responsible for many important life decisions and thus produces a large influence on the way the world is developing.

The reason future worship is so difficult to recognize is that it actually does make sense to invest for the future sometimes. There is an ideal level of investment for each person and for each situation, but there is no non-arbitrary place to draw a line that will handle all cases. So by the principle of non-arbitrary distinction, there is no absolute principle that will tell you when you are making a reasonable investment and when you are worshiping the future. But because future worship is based on worry rather than reason, a systematic bias is created in favor of sacrifice and investment. People are led to become disciplined and to rush into things they are not ready for, which has the consequence of degrading their own life quality and making the world less enjoyable for others as well.

Mental discipline emerges as a result of the need to make sacrifices for investment in the future. Major investments like education and career goals usually require that specific actions are taken at specific times regardless of one’s mood. This situation creates a system of pressures and deadlines that can only be managed with a good deal of mental discipline. These pressures are not entirely a creation of modern society - even primitive man had to go out and work to obtain food every so often, which may not have always been the most enjoyable option available. But there are some fundamental differences with the current situation. We now have larger discontinuities in life quality due to our deadlines. If you miss a final exam, you might end up failing the class and be forced to go through a whole lot more suffering next semester. For primitive man, deadlines were generally flexible, meaning that they provided a continuously increasing negative influence on life quality. When a primitive man was too lazy to hunt or gather, he would become hungry, but he doesn’t die until about three weeks of strong, direct incentives to collect food have been experienced. During the better part of these weeks, his body would ensure that he was in the mood for obtaining food. The same is not true for most modern pressures. Your body does not understand the significance of income tax returns, so any incentives that you have to do them will be indirect, through a long chain of abstract, assumed connections.

Ideally, we want to feel like everything we do is for our personal benefit, not just think that it is for our personal benefit. This is the problem with jobs. You think that being in the job is beneficial, but you feel like everything you do while at the job is for someone else’s benefit. The discrepancy arises because there is a disconnect between your motives and your actions. They are only connected through a contract signed a long time ago. No matter how many times you remind yourself of how well you are getting paid through your employment contract, you are never going to be able to get over the natural feeling that doing someone else’s chores is not in your self-interest, even if this feeling is actually incorrect and merely due to the limitations of human psychology.

In addition to such problems caused by discipline, there are the problems caused by rushing. It is now common for many high school students to feel that going directly to college is the only option after graduation. This forces the student to decide on a concentration at just about the time they are sobering up from all the partying they do in their first year on campus. At this age, most students do not have a strong conception of what it would feel like to work full-time in the career they are choosing. By the time they find an internship a few years down the road, they already feel that it is too late to switch majors. Due to the high costs of college, there is a strong disincentive to starting over. So they convince themselves that it won’t be that bad and continue along the path they chose based on insufficient data. Other students might actually have chosen the best concentration for them, but don’t yet realize it and so end up resisting their education rather than enjoying it. And even the lucky students who truly enjoy their studies often wind up over-worked and over-stressed to the point of losing interest in their studies, especially during graduate school.

As a consequence of the discipline and rush induced by future worship, people turn out to be less interesting. Often they must temper their passions and natural interests to support their career goals. And after long hours of draining work, it is difficult to have enough stamina to do anything but to seek recovery through passive forms of entertainment such as television and spectator sports. Such a person is less fun to talk to because they don’t have many unique experiences to talk about, and they are less fun to be friends with because they are always either working or recovering from work. But the harm due to their mistakes is not limited to their acquaintances-it affects everyone in the economy. The future worshiper creates demand for junk television and supports the outrageous salaries of professional athletes instead of stimulating markets for interests that require more active involvement. This makes it more difficult for others to make a living doing genuinely meaningful things. Furthermore, the willingness of the future worshiper to work such long hours makes it much harder for others to live without working long hours. If everyone simultaneously agreed that they would refuse to work more than 20 hours a week and refused to take a pay cut, the world would adjust and still work fine. Of course GDP growth would slow, but the structure of society would not change too much. Why are we still working 40 hours a week then? It is simply because there are too many future worshipers. Consider the example that Bertrand Russell gives in his essay In Praise of Idleness: a factory employs workers for 40 hours per week to produce pins and one day a new invention comes along that doubles the efficiency of the factory. It would be possible to reduce work hours to 20 per week without changing anything else, but that is not what happens. Worker’s pay rates are not determined by their productive output, but by the labor market. The factory owner knows this and just fires half of his staff. Those who got fired find new jobs; all the workers continue working full-time and the factory owner pockets the increased profits.

Many commentators take this as justification for an attack on capitalism. Indeed it does seem that the harshness of free-market competition is responsible for the plight of the workers in this case. In a way, free-market competition is responsible in the sense that it is a necessary ingredient for the situation to exist. But capitalism is not the culprit here. Blaming the problem on capitalism would be like blaming the laws of physics for the bad weather. In both cases there is simply no other feasible option and blame relies on choice. Capitalism is just the way trade (and hence economics) works. You can either have capitalism or capitalism twisted by threats of violence (socialism), but both are fundamentally capitalism.

So if we can’t blame capitalism, then what caused this unfortunate situation? We can only blame ourselves. It is the way we behave that creates the world we live in. The motives for our future worshiping behavior can be explained with the following observations. Primarily, our genes make us competitive and sacrificial straight from birth. Our genes are not concerned with our subjective life quality-they don’t mind if we are constantly stressed and worried as long as that stress and worry is helping us to survive and reproduce. When it comes to survival, our genes’ interests are allied with our own, but from our genes standpoint, it is ideal to be safe and boring so as to make it easier to raise children at a young age, which is not entirely ideal for us. Furthermore, parents assist in the promotion of future worship because they don’t want to have to take care of their children forever. Even if their children would survive fine on their own, they know that they will feel the need to send money if their children are experiencing severe hardship, again due to genetic factors. But they would prefer to just get their children into medical school so they won’t have to worry about this potential burden. Schooling too biases children toward future worship because the whole educational system is setup to convince students that life requires massive sacrifice, and the process is started long before they are old enough to see through the wool that is over their eyes. There is also the factor that the wealthy benefit from the sacrificial behavior of the poorer classes, which encourages the rich and powerful to promote propaganda based on the idea that hard work is virtuous for its own sake (e.g. the Puritan work ethic). Along with such propaganda comes the insinuation that it is somehow bad to not want to work, which is an absurd value judgment. Another factor is that we don’t have good lifestyle options for those who choose not to work. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens are unnecessarily inconvenient. Under an ideal form of government like geolibertarianism, everyone would receive a living wage coming out of the nation’s property taxes, alleviating the compulsion to work and curbing the exploitation of the poor.

Conventional wisdom would say that if a person just does whatever they feel like doing, they would become extremely lazy and their life would be purposeless. Based on real-world evidence, I am quite certain that this is simply not true. It is just one of the many false assumptions that has been implanted into our collective consciousness of our society by Christianity, which declares sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. Though some people may be naturally more lazy than others, I believe that aside from a few depressed individuals, laziness is self-limiting and everyone will equilibrate to natural level of laziness that leaves plenty of room for productivity and purpose in life. People are often deceived by the level of laziness seen on vacations. Of course you will be lazy on a vacation from a hard job, you are in a sort of motivation debt from all the sacrifice that you have been making. But after all that debt is paid off, assuming your vacations was as long as you choose, you would realize that sloth is not as fun as engaging in interesting activities that provide flow experiences.

The obvious question at this point is: How can one actually escape from the religion of future worship in the real world where we have all kinds of financial concerns to deal with? All you really have to do is stop worrying, but of course that is much easier said than done. To stop worrying, you need to convince yourself that worry is unnecessary. This can be accomplished by presenting yourself with a potentially plausible plan and using reason to justify its plausibility and desirability. So here is a generic plan that seems plausible: Be greedy with your time, don’t let anyone take it unless if you have no choice. Start by saving up a year’s worth of living expenses as a psychological security buffer, then live modestly and work as little as possible to get by. Use your free time to pursue your true interests, some of which will lead you to new money-making opportunities that will allow you to reduce your working time further through freelancing and business. Don’t go to college until you find something that you are truly interested in studying. When you do go to college, don’t pay attention to grades. Don’t have expectations for the future, then you won’t be disappointed when your grades are not good enough for the nation’s top medical school. Don’t have goals for the future, just let your rational desires guide you through each stage. Goals are based on the notion that the future is predictable, which is not true, so goals just lead to frustration and disappointment. Following your rational desires is the organic and adaptable way to optimize your life.

The difficult step is to convince yourself that such a plan is in fact plausible and desirable. Since it is hard to predict the future, the best bet is to just try it, but that is not easy either. You need to realize that you can always change your mind. And even if you do change your mind, that doesn’t mean you were wrong. The situation is different and the right decisions in differing situations may differ. You can’t be wrong about lifestyle decisions if you are using your best reasoning. So fill in some specifics such as what type of work you might want to do and see if it is possible. Here is some additional reading that might help.

• In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell
• Life by Alan Watts
• Lectures by Alan Watts
• The Unabomber Manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski
• The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

The Principle of Non-Arbitrary Distinction

Absolute principles do not contain arbitrary lines. Here, the word “absolute” means that the principle is based on objective reasoning rather than the personal prejudices of its creator. So we can see why this statement is true because if there was a line being drawn in the argument for an absolute principle, there would have to be an objective reason for placing the line where it was placed. If such an objective reason exists, then the line is not arbitrary.

What we will find is that there are very few absolute principles. Principles are usually just handy guidelines that apply to contexts satisfying certain constraints. So whenever you find an arbitrary line being drawn, you need to ask yourself, what personal prejudices are being inserted into the argument?

This principle may sound obvious, but I believe it is very important to point out. It provides us with an important technique for refuting arguments. First you show that a spectrum exists, then you demonstrate that the argument suggests a distinction between the two ends of the spectrum, and finally you ask where the dividing line is drawn precisely.

Understanding Zen

Zen is a system of beliefs and practices deriving from Buddhism. It has two primary purposes. From Buddhism it inherits the goal of ending mental suffering through the refinement of thought patterns. In addition to this, Zen incorporates the goal of counteracting “oversocialization” with its own set of techniques. Oversocialization is a term borrowed from the Unabomber manifesto, in which it is described as follows:

“Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.”

In addition to moral concerns, there are many purely social concerns that cause similarly deblitating effects, such as constantly worrying about embarassing yourself or offending someone. After incorporating such factors into the definition of oversocialization, the notion behind the article on Fear and Maturity is obtained. In the following, the methods of Zen are discussed in terms of their role in supporting the goals described above.

Goal: End mental suffering. Buddhism utilizes several approaches to end mental suffering. One approach is to live in the present. The justification for this approach is found in the following quote (author unknown): “When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future. When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.” Fundamentally, the reason it is so important to live in the present is because everything else is primarily about self-control, criticizing past actions and planning for future actions, and as Alan Watts says “any system approaching perfect self-control is also approaching perfect self-frustration”, just as a thermostat whose heaters and coolers are set to the same temperature will fluctuate erratically.

To live in the present, one must learn to stop mental chatter about the past and future. For this Buddhism prescribes meditation, which is a practice based on the explicit goal of quieting mental chatter. Another method for living in the present is the adoption of the belief that the present is all there really is, whereas the past and future are mental abstractions. This idea is sometimes conveyed through the wave analogy - time is like a wave because the water in a wave is just moving up and down, but this creates the illusion of a quantity of water travelling.

Another approach to end mental suffering is to reduce desires and expectations. This is justified by the observation that the less you desire and expect, the less you will have to worry about or be disappointed by. In Buddhism, the reduction of desires and expectations is facilitated by the development of egolessness. Egolessness, in turn, is supported by the belief of non-dualism, which is the view that the separation of yourself from the world is an illusion. This illusion is known as subjective isolation and is thought to be responsible for the fact that people are more concerned about themselves than other things. The concept of non-dualism emerges from the vagueness in the division between volition and involuntary action. The best example is sexual desire. Is it your consciousness that has the desire or is it your body that is convincing your mind to think you have that desire? Perhaps the most reasonable answer is “both”. This suggests that our awareness is not just connected to the physical world through sensory data streams, but is actually an intergrated part of the physical world. This leads to the belief that our consciousnesses do not belong just to our bodies, but to all of the universe because physical reality is just a huge network of interactions without definite boundaries. The perception of a sight is the interaction of a scene with the eye-brain system. There is no convincing reason to draw a line to remove the scene from the picture (pun-intended).

Goal: Counteract oversocialization. The Zen approach to counteracting oversocialization focuses on the prevention of “blocking thoughts”, which are self-doubting or self-inhibiting thoughts about thoughts. For example, you first have the thought that you would like to make a joke, but then you have the blocking thought that perhaps it would be inappropriate. It can get even worse if you have another level of blocking where you question whether you should even be worrying so much about being inappropriate. These blocking thoughts are the symptoms of the memetic virus of oversocialization. It is natural that Zen would be a derivative of Buddhism because the fight against oversocialization is really just a special case of the Buddhist fight against the non-present mind.

Zen encourages the supression of blocking thoughts through the cultivation of unselfconscious spontaneity. Of course, this raises the question of whether this is even a safe idea. What is to stop one’s rude or violent impulses if not these blocking thoughts? The answer is that Zen is intended for audiences who have already internalized socially acceptable behavior. The ideal is to be able to function properly without conscious oversight in social contexts, daily work, and in any other practices.

Zen uses the Koan to teach students in spontaneity. Koans are riddles that have no real answer and usually don’t make any sense to begin with. Any intelligently analyzed responses will be dismissed because the master wants to be shown the answer. The point is to get the student to answer in a spontaneous and natural way, oftentimes without the use of words.

Another way that Zen helps suppress blocking thoughts is by teaching students to overcome intimidation. The practice of sanzen assists in this purpose. It is essentially a formal interview between master and student where the student presents their answers to Koans. The student will often feel embarassed at not knowing the answer and intimidated by the seriousness of the master. One of the underlaying objectives is for the student to be able to act as naturally in these circumstances as any other, which demonstrates the resilience of his mental frame.

So why does Zen have to be so mysterious, why can’t they just explain this up front? I think there are two reasons. One is that people wouldn’t be as interested. People generally need to be strung along to remain interested in something, just dumping the truth on them doesn’t work. In fact, when the truth comes too easily people will often not even bother to comprehend all the truth that is there. Plus, stringing people along allows the masters to get away with not doing any work because the student have to do it all. The other main reason is that the moment of awakening is spoiled if you can see it coming all along. It is just like how jokes are only funny if the punch line comes quickly - if you have to explain it, nobody is going to laugh. Therefore, Zen schools use roundabout means to push you toward awakening without telling you what to look for.

Dreams

Have you ever woken up from an amazing dream and thought “I should go back to sleep so I can get back to enjoying that dream.”? I said this to myself yesterday morning, but before I could get back to sleep, I had a sudden realization. I decided that this thought didn’t really make sense because once I went back to sleep, I (my awareness) would no longer be there to enjoy the experience. It is just my body that would be experiencing the dream. The experiences of your body do not affect your subjective life quality unless if your awareness is attached to your body, or in other words you are conscious.

To see this, imagine that we have a way to safely and painlessly detach and reattach your arm. Now say we detach your arm and carry it into another room where we prick it with pins, cool it to uncomfortable temperatures, and generally cause the neurons to generate pain impulses. These impulses never reach your brain, so they are not connected to your awareness and thus do not adversely affect your life quality, even though the same procedure would decrease your life quality if your arm was attached. The same argument applies to your entire body, minus the portions of the brain that are responsible for your awareness (if we assume that awareness emerges from the brain, which seems to be a safe assumption at this point). Now in the case of dreams, it doesn’t really matter what part of the brain they emerge from because awareness is completely disabled during sleep, so the experience of dreaming has no impact on your subjective life quality (though the experience of recalling memories of dreams does).

Our only awareness of dreams comes from the residual memories that they leave for us to recall when we wake up. These memories are artificial in the sense that they do not come from our conscious experience. In other words, we do not experience dreams; dreams occur in an unconscious body. Yet, we naturally believe that we were experiencing the dream just a few moments ago.

What if you actually are conscious when sleeping, but your memory of consciousness is disabled? This would mean that when you are asleep, you are completely aware and probably screaming “Ahhhh! My body is frozen! This is so boring! Get me out of here!”, but you can’t remember any of this after you wake up. Based on the science that I have seen, this seems less likely, but I don’t think it has been ruled out yet. But what happens if this is the case, should we include dreams in our life-quality maximization analysis? To answer this requires us to go back and look at the motivation for the rule of maximizing expected subjective life quality. This rule was formulated based on the geneticly-induced illusion of ego-persistence; the only reason we care about our future lives is because our genes tell us to care. And this genetic mechanism hinges on the mechanism of memory to convince us that our past experiences were part of the same life, and this in turn convinces us by extrapolation that our future experiences will be part of the same life. But without the memories to convince us, the illusion of ego-persistence breaks down. Applying this principle to dreams, we realize that even if we are conscious when asleep, we aren’t programmed with any convincing illusion that that awareness belongs to our life. Therefore taking on the burden of maximizing the life quality of this additional consciousness is a sacrifice that will reduce the life quality that does come with a convincing illusion (our awake consciousness).

Of course this discussion is more pedagogical than practical because we rarely spend much effort trying to improve the quality of our dreams. But I think this issue brings to light some important philosophical concepts.

Aphorisms on Happiness

I have been studying the topic of happiness for some time now. After digging through many books and articles on Positive Psychology, Buddhism, and Epicureanism, I think I have found a set of core principles that underlay these works. Each principle is accompanied by a famous aphorism that illustrates the idea.

1. “He who understands the limits of life knows that things which remove pain arising from need are easy to obtain, and furnish a complete and optimal life.” - Epicurus. The simplest thing you can do to find happiness is to be healthy! Poor nutrition or lack of sleep can deplete the neurotransmitters in your brain, making it impossible to feel happy regardless of your condition. Exercise is well known for boosting these neurotransmitters in your brain, which makes you feel happy for no other reason. On the other hand, physical pain makes it very difficult to maintain a peaceful mental state, so it should be avoided with preventative measures. Compromises of health are never as necessary as they seem. Be healthy and avoid physical pain.
2. “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” - Henry David Thoreau. At all times you have the choice to live in the moment or to live in the artificial world of your mind. In your mind, you dwell on the past, worry about the future, and execute analytical computations pertaining to the past and future. While this analysis can be useful at times, it is generally provides no immediate pleasure and usually accomplishes nothing anyways. Perhaps the best option is to isolate your analysis to one hour per week. In this time you can decide if your lifestyle matches your values, if your schedule supports your goals, and how much money to direct deposit into your off-limits savings account. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Don’t worry about missing out or falling behind. Let your feelings guide you through the decisions that analysis can’t readily handle. Note that doing analytical work does not contradict living in the moment because you are focused on the experience of the analysis, as opposed to being focused on some past or future experience. However, analytical work is dangerous psychologically because it reinforces the habit of being analytical. Meditation is the antidote. Maintain focus on the present.
3. “Misery is almost always the result of thinking.” - Joseph Joubert. If you have too much free time and too few constraints in your schedule, you will start thinking a lot, which makes it difficult to maintain focus on the present. This explains why psychologists have found that people are much happier when they have more constraints. Keep yourself occupied and establish constraints.
4. “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” - Epictetus. You are not in control of your life, you merely have influence over it. This is why trying to stick to a strict budget or setting a deadline for a big goal will usually lead to more disappointment than satisfaction. American culture is all for setting ambitious goals, but this practice leads to a never-ending chase after the phantom of success. Abandoning your desires isn’t necessary, but you should first try to understand them, then set goals that facilitate your desires without straining the power of your influence. For example, let’s say you have the desire to be rich. First understand the motivation for the desire. Perhaps you just want the power to control others that comes with wealth. You may decide that this isn’t a value you truly wish to strive for and you can abandon the desire. Or perhaps you want wealth so that you can explore the world. In this case, you might set the goal of finding a job that will make you rich enough to take a 3-month vacation in China, which almost anyone could do. Setting achievable goals doesn’t require ignoring your desires, you just acknowledge that there is a difference between what you desire and what you are presently trying to do. If your desire is strong enough, there is a good chance that you will naturally come within reach of fulfilling it through the small steps that you take. Eventually natural urges will compel you to accomplish what you are meant to accomplish, there is no benefit to trying to force the process. Reduce your dependency on external factors.
5. “The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods.” - Socrates. Cultivate your appreciation of easily attainable pleasures like natural beauty, food, music, and flow experiences. Flow experiences are created from challenges that properly match a person’s skill level and provide feedback about progress. Eliminate possessions that are not contributing to your happiness, they will just act as liabilities. Avoid debt as it is pure liability. Generally speaking, simplify your life. Reduce your dependency on material goods.
6. “Of all things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.” - Epicurus. Humans are social animals, so social interaction is heavily weighted in our mind’s valuation scheme. Expose yourself to people regularly, preferrably a community consisting of a small enough number of people that you will be remembered. However, you must be careful not to create expectations as this would contradict principle 4 since you do not have direct influence over other people’s behaviors. Instead, do what you can to build an interesting and balanced lifestyle while practicing good social manners and being open to people. This is the best you can do to establish friendships as trying to force the process is unnatural and does more harm than good. Expose yourself to people.

The Drive for Success

I’ve noticed an interesting psychological phenomenon with regard to people’s perceptions of their material desires. There seems to be a disconnect between the desire and the root motivation. People often feel that their desire is based on comfort or aesthetics, when really the primary motivation is social prestige. This is not too surprising from a psychological standpoint because of course there is the same sort of disconnect with sex–we don’t want sex just because we are thinking about making children. But it is somewhat surprising when you consider how civilized (i.e. unnatural) something like shopping seems. This is yet another example of how we humans are not rational actors, but survival machines for our genes.

Now I would like to discuss my viewpoint on materialism and the consequent “drive for success” because I have a slight distaste for these things, but not due to simple elitism like it may seem. In fact, I think having a drive for success has the potential to be a very positive thing. Unfortunately, there seems to be a tendency whereby the drive for success, in the context of our society, crowds out some very precious interests from the space of one’s concerns.

Certain values might be considered “more meaningful” than others, but really a better phrase is “more rich and deep” because they benefit more people and have a greater total impact. For example, writing a bestseller novel that appeals to mass audiences might make you more money, but writing a textbook on a field of medicine that helps educate a generation of researchers and indirectly leads to a cure for cancer will probably have a greater impact on the world. So is making a bigger impact on the world preferrable in some way? I would say: not necessarily, but it is related to something which is preferrable. The fundamental thing that is preferrable is fun. Fun is created when people team up and work together on a project they are passionate about, when people have interesting topics to discuss, and when people don’t take life so seriously that they can’t relax and just waste some time with a friend.

I feel that the drive for success in a highly competitive environment leads people down a path where much of the fun in their lives is subordinated to their work. This wouldn’t be such a problem except for the fact that since we are social animals, making one person’s life more boring makes everyone else’s life a little more boring. This effect is nothing to scoff at, the consequences are significant when enough people are affected. In my mind I can see a busy highway during rush hour filled with automobiles that each contain a single person. Many of these people are coming from jobs where they spend eight hours in front a computer by themselves, and are heading to a household where they will only be exposed to a small number of family members for the evening. This system has an extremely low level of social integration. I don’t think we humans were designed for this kind of system.

If people were usually close friends with their coworkers, then things would work out much better, but the culture of corporations isn’t the most conducive for friendship building. It would also help if people did more activities outside of work, but that would probably require shorter work hours or less draining work. In the end, any improvements over the current system would require some radical shifts in the way things are done.

To make matters worse, the drive for success is self-perpetuating. It’s not just about “keeping up with the Jones’ “, it’s about making a living in the first place. Whether you have the drive for success or not, you still have to find a way to make yourself valuable to others or else you will be denied access to the resources that keep you alive (ignoring welfare and charities). And if everyone else has their values centered on success to the exclusion of ideals and deeper purposes, then you may be forced to neglect your own values, causing them to wane until you are left only with the drive for success yourself.

Maybe most people were never meant to be idealistic and will never care about more than financial success and social prestige, so the line between these groups may never shift. But there is still the issue of personality. I believe that by balancing the drive for success with more natural human behaviors we can all maintain a rich personality and lifestyle, thus helping others achieve the same.

Life Traps

One of the main reasons I end up planning and analyzing too much is to avoid falling into traps. There are many kinds of traps that you can fall into. The common property that they have is that a trap is difficult to get out of. For example, a famous historical trap is the serfdom trap in which you take a job that requires a lot of work and pays just enough to survive on. When you enter serfdom, you don’t have the time to learn new things or find ways to earn more money, and you don’t have the money to quit the job, so you are stuck. In America today, true serfdom is essentially impossible due to the welfare system and its concomitant labor laws, but varying degrees of it still exist. The reason it can still exist, however, is largely due to the financial choices peope make. The biggest culprip is the decision to have children, which comes with both a financial burden and a significant time commitment. And this decision is not easily reversible. Perhaps the second biggest culprip is school loans, which can extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and is also irreversible. But this is much easier to manage than even a single child. Most of the remaining financial decisions are reversible issues with spending habits. People try to live above their means and end up living paycheck-to-paycheck. This is what we refer to as the rat-race. But the rat-race is not such a deadly trap. If you ever find yourself in the rat-race and don’t like it, all you have to do is sell all your expensive stuff and start saving and you will be out of the trap in no time. Even if you are in a low-paying job, if you are only working 40 hours a week, there is plenty of extra time to work on improving your situation.

Traps can be more serious if they come with psychological reinforcement, like the overachiever trap. Overachievers are not necessarily workaholics, but they constantly sacrifice themselves for their future, fearing that they will be miserable if they don’t have prestige and a six figure income. The reason this is such a nasty trap is that once an overachiever has set their course, they have trouble backing out because of the sunk costs associated with their sacrifices.

The dangerous traps are the ones you don’t realize you are in, like the pseudo-stimulation trap. The pseudo-stimulation trap occurs when you work at a job that mentally drains you without actually providing mental stimulation. Since you are drained, you are less likely to be interested in simulating activities after work, so you end up not getting much stimulation at all and you run the risk of intellectual atrophy. This can be hard to identify because pseudo-stimulating work can be challenging and seem like it should be stimulating. In fact, I would say that most well-paying jobs are pseudo-stimulating. Even a job that requires highly-educated and skilled workers, like software development, can be very mechanical and tedious much of the time. If you are just working according to a standard algorithm, then there isn’t much room for mental maneuvers. This can be an important trap to watch out for if you want to start a business or work on serious projects outside of your day job.

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