Pine Beetles, the Denver Nuggets, and the Yoke of Identity

I have an acquaintance who is a Spanish teacher. Whenever any topic of conversation turns to anything remotely related to the Spanish language or Spanish culture, he invariably interjects his opinion and will offer some sort of commentary or explanation. He speaks with a sense of authority. He’s a Spanish teacher. That’s who he is.

A few years ago, at a dinner party, the topic of conversation turned to the city of Barcelona. Someone mentioned they were going to Barcelona and he offered a few comments about the city and its inhabitants. He had spent three days there a few years previously.

Many years ago, I lived in Barcelona. Once for a semester in college and again after I graduated for two years. I took umbrage to his comments and tried to politely express why someone might take another perspective on things. He, without hesitation, shut me down, and told me, in front of the group, that I was just wrong and had no idea what I was talking about.

It was a curiously heated exchange for a dinner party. He was clearly annoyed that I had contradicted his opinion about something related to Spanish culture.

I was clearly annoyed that he was making blunderbuss statements about a city and its people, of which he knew only very little. (Or, less charitably to my sense of identity, I was annoyed that he was trying to claim that he knew more about Barcelona and Catalunya than I did, when I had lived there, and he had only visited.)

This is an example of an identity clash. It was a moment when my sense of identity publicly conflicted with someone else’s sense of identity. It was a casual dinner party, but to this day, I don’t really care for this person, and I’m certain he doesn’t care for me.

Even just writing down this anecdote, I find myself getting a little worked up. Just thinking about it gets some adrenaline flowing.

Now, why on earth why I get worked up about something so stupid? Why would I care what this person whom I see maybe once a year thinks about Barcelona? I haven’t lived in Barcelona in 15 years. He never lived there. Nothing about this conversation impacted my health, my livelihood, or my daily life, even in the most minuscule way. But clearly I cared. Clearly I still do care.

Why?

Often, when we’re upset, it’s because our sense of identity crashes with reality, or clashes with someone else’s identity, in a way we don’t like.

This is an underappreciated fact of human reality. By the time we reach high school, we construct a certain narrative around our sense of “self.” This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I like. This is what I know. This is more or less fixed, with some additions and subtractions. Occasionally, major changes happen. Someone finds religion. Someone abandons a religion. But for the most part, if you know someone at age 18, you have a pretty good sense of what they’re going to be like at age 50.

Identity can be constructed around anything, from one’s job (I’m a Spanish teacher), to what one knows (I’m an expert on Catalunya), to what one likes (I’m a runner), to where we live (Salida is the most beautiful place on earth!), to what we wear (Prana or Prada?), to what we don’t like (I can’t stand Trump), to what we eat (I’m a vegetarian), and so on. Each of us picks a few things that matter to us, and we filter our reality through this sense of identity.

Identity gives us a shortcut to make friends and to form groups. A lot of my friends are runners. Many of my friends meditate. When I was in high school and in college, I chose my friends in large part based on what music they liked.

From an evolutionary perspective, narrative construction and a sense of identity has a fairly easy explanation. The biggest threat to our survival and the survival of our genes is other people. We form a sense of identity to help us explain and justify our value to our social group. A strong person in a strong tribe has a good chance of survival. A weak person or a person without a tribe has almost no chance of survival.

We all have a deep, evolutionary need to play an important role. An essential role. To be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

But like many vestiges of our evolutionary past, this deep craving for a sense of identity is easily manipulated for profit and not necessarily as useful as it once was.

Let me give you an example.

I’m a fan of the Denver Nuggets basketball team. The Denver Nuggets basketball team has a star player who is from Serbia. The other leading players are from Canada, Michigan, South Carolina, Spain, and Louisiana. The coach is from New York. The owner is the billionaire grandson of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. He is from Missouri.

I don’t even live in Denver anymore. But somehow, for some reason, I still hold on to the notion that this collection of talented and highly compensated people from all over the world still represents me. My sense of identity is tied up in the Denver Nuggets.

It’s a complete and total fiction.

Our lives are built around such fictions. The politicians we vote for. The teams we cheer for. The clothes we wear. We like to think that these things represent us, and we are connected with them in some deep way. But they’re not. People exploit our sense of identity in an attempt to raise their own status or to acquire wealth.

This may sound like a strange thing to say, but your identity isn’t you. Your identity is a set of concepts and a narrative structure you tell yourself to try to make sense of reality. It’s mostly a work of fiction. Life just is. Reality just is.

Identity is a post-hoc narrative structure we create to make sense of it all, so that we have some people to hang out with and we feel a sense of importance and belonging. But for the most part, it has little or no nexus with reality.

Some of the pine forests around me are dying. It’s a result of the pine beetle carrying a fungus that kills the trees. It’s happening as a result of global warming, most likely. The winters aren’t as cold as they used to be here, and that means the beetle population is much higher, which means the fungus is spreading much faster than it ever has.

Around me, there are thousands of acres of beetle kill, in remote and hard-to-get to locations, often on the sides of mountains, and there’s basically no way to deal with it, other than to wait for a lightning strike or a campfire that causes a forest fire that burns the whole area down.

All of this is making the area around my home just a little less idyllic and beautiful. Once the big fire comes, it will probably make things, at least in the short term, a lot less idyllic and beautiful.

Driving up Monarch Pass near my home, I take this beetle-kill problem very personally. My sense of identity, of a person who has chosen to live in a wild, scenic, and beautiful place, is crashing into reality, which is that nature and global warming are doing their thing, and that thing is probably going to make my world less wild, scenic, and beautiful over the next 10 to 20 years.

It’s still very wild, beautiful, and remote. But there’s a very real blight there. It doesn’t really affect my health, my life, or my livelihood in any way. But it bothers me, because I now personally identify with those forests in a way that I do not with the tundras of Greenland or Siberia that are also affected by global warming. It’s as if global warming has started to create a blight on me personally, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Listen carefully when you hear people talk about their neighborhood and their homes. Almost invariably, the tone of their speech will get a little quicker. They’ll get defensive. They will offer some sort of explanation of why their corner of the universe is better than all other corners of the universe. We feel a need to justify where we live, what we do, and why.

Admitting anything to the contrary is an admission of a flawed or inconsistent identify. And our consciousness is designed, first and foremost, to provide a consistent narrative about who we are, what we do, and why.

Life is always changing, in ways we might like and in some ways we might not. I’m getting older; I’m getting wrinkles. My hair is turning gray, on my temples and in my beard. It’s getting harder every year to run and to stay healthy. The type of writing and entertainment that sells, the type of writing that people want to read, is getting farther removed from the type of writing that I produce and that I care about. The beautiful forests are dying around me. All of these things are happening, regardless of how I feel about them.

Reality just is. It doesn’t care whether it comports to our sense of identity.

This is neither good nor bad. But we decide that something is good or bad when we have some sort of hope or expectation for our identity and reality, and our hopes and expectations are out of whack with reality.

In my own life, more often than ever before, I’m trying to let go of the moments when I find myself having a strong sense of identity. It doesn’t do me any good to get into a pissing contest with someone about who knows the most about Catalunya, or distance running, or whatever else I’m identifying with in the moment.

There will be many moments in our lives when we’ll find our sense of identity at odds with the world around us. In those moments, we can choose to try to impose our sense of identity on the world, or we can get angry or frustrated at reality for not comporting to our expectations. Or we can just try to experience reality as it is, without judgment or frustration.

There is no right or simple answer, I think, about what to do with our sense of identity in every situation. But perhaps there is some use in noticing when our sense of identity gets in the way of our experience of reality. To observing what we identify with and why. And which of those parts of our identity, in the end, we want to allow to consume our experience.

Competing with Silence

There’s a lot of useless writing in the world today.

I’m not kvetching about grammar or style, but rather the content of the writing itself. Lots of writing is getting published that simply isn’t worth reading.

More often than ever before, I find myself disappointed with the first few articles I find when I search for something online. I’m curious about something, I search for information, I find a few articles, and the articles I find do not answer the question I have, or at least, do not answer it well. And it’s not just writing, it’s true with videos, podcasts, and other content as well.

Let me give you an example. Last week, I searched for the generic term “running” on YouTube. The first video I found was something along the lines of “5 Things You Need to Know When You’re Starting Running.” I clicked on the video. It started off with a beautiful drone shot of a woman running in an open space with mountains in the background. Very well produced.

There was then a close up on this woman running. It was clear from just a few strides: this person was not a very experienced or accomplished runner. When you know running and you’ve been doing it for a long time, you can tell almost instantly whether someone is a runner or is not a runner. A 2:10 marathoner looks different from a 2:40 marathoner who looks different from a 3:10 marathoner and down the line. The subject of this video did not look like a 6-hour marathoner—she looked like someone who almost certainly could not finish a marathon.

Either way, she was the author of the most popular video about running on YouTube.

What did she have to say about running?

Tip # 1 was “Get a good pair of shoes. Not too loose; not too tight.” Fair enough. Not particularly insightful, but not objectively wrong, either.

Tip # 2 was “Get a flip belt.” Now, I have run almost 50,000 miles in my life. That’s enough to circumnavigate the globe one and a half times. I have competed at distances from a quarter mile to 100-plus miles. I had never even heard of a flip belt. I Googled it and learned that it was something you put around your waist so you can carry your phone. Because God forbid someone run for 20 minutes in an urban or suburban setting without having their phone on them at all times.

You don’t need a flip belt to run. Running with a phone, most of the time, is superfluous and counterproductive. The author of this video did not have anything beyond the most cursory knowledge about running, but she had managed to produce the most popular video about running on YouTube.

Something similar happened last month when I searched for websites online about how to get started in meditating. The first few posts that I found on Google were by people who were very clearly non-experts on the subject. They were good at blogging and great at SEO, but their knowledge of meditation was unhelpful to the point of being counterproductive.

There is a near-zero cost to produce information online. It’s free or nearly free to start a blog, to tweet, or to make a video, so that makes it easy for anyone to write or make a video about anything. And with that increased frequency with which content is being produced, so too are we increasing the frequency of instances when uninformed, unhelpful content is drowning out the content of experts.

A couple of years ago, Tom Nichols wrote a book called the Death of Expertise. It’s about how experts matter less in a world of more information. People find information online that resonates with them in a superficial sense, but there is a growing divergence between popular sources of information and expert sources of information.

Even if you do care about finding genuine expertise online, there’s so much crap out there, it’s making it harder to find accurate and useful information. Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But the evidence seems to show that while they are very competent at providing us information that is relevant to our query that we will click on, often Google does not provide us information that is truly useful.

In addition to the examples I’ve previously provided, earlier this year, there were a number of reports showing that Google and Facebook were actually promoting anti-vaccination campaigns online. Even if you search for authoritative or medical experts’ opinions on the topic, Google and Facebook still recommended anti-vaccine misinformation videos.

Why? Because these inflammatory videos have high levels of engagement and medical experts citing actual facts are comparatively dull. And since these companies’ incentives are to create engagement and to keep you using their services for as long as possible, they are incentivized to provide inflammatory content rather than factual content.

There’s a famous Seinfeld story about writing every day that was published 12 years ago on LifeHacker. The story goes like this (as told by Brad Isaac):

Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

This strategy obviously worked well for Seinfeld. He was a very successful comedian and TV star.

And now, since Seinfeld was so successful and people like to follow the advice of successful people, the strategy has become famous and adopted by lots of non-fiction writers as well. And YouTube personalities and bloggers and so on. Just produce content, every day. The quality of the content doesn’t matter. Whether you’re an expert or not, it doesn’t matter. Produce content every day.

We now live in a world where it is a considered a commendable virtue to produce large amounts of content on a daily basis. And the cost of producing and publishing content is essentially zero.[1]

Decades ago, in 1971, Herbert Simon, a genius if there ever was one, wrote about the issue of attention scarcity. He wrote, “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better.”’

More from Simon:

Last Easter, my neighbors bought their daughter a pair of rabbits. Whether by intent or accident, one was male, one female, and we now live in a rabbit-rich world. Persons less fond than I am of rabbits might even describe it as a rabbit-overpopulated world. Whether a world is rich or poor in rabbits is a relative matter. Since food is essential for biological populations, we might judge the world as rabbit-rich or rabbit-poor by relating the number of rabbits to the amount of lettuce and grass (and garden flowers) available for rabbits to eat.

A rabbit-rich world is a lettuce-poor world, and vice versa. The obverse of a population problem is a scarcity problem, hence a resource-allocation problem. There is only so much lettuce to go around, and it will have to be allocated somehow among the rabbits. Similarly, in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Just like Simon’s rabbit-rich world, we now live in a very content-rich world. A world with far more content than anyone could ever consume in one life time.

To provide just one more example, I recently started looking for Podcasts on the topic of Zen. Now, mind you, Zen philosophy actively discourages people from writing or talking too much about it. For the most part, Zen is to be practiced, not analyzed.

Regardless, after just a few minutes of searching, I found more than a half dozen Zen Podcasts from legitimate experts (and at least another dozen by non-experts). I subscribed to a few, and now my Podcast feed is populated with more Zen podcasts than I could ever realistically find time to listen to in my life.

A rabbit-rich world, indeed.

In this content-rich world, it’s very hard to find any one producer of content. And so, if you are a rabbit and you want to get found, what do you do?

The skill of getting found is a skill unto itself; it is very different from the skill of possessing knowledge or developing expertise. Sometimes possessing knowledge or developing expertise will help you get found online, if other people link to you in just the right way. But very often people are found for all sorts of other reasons: successfully gaming SEO, the ability to draw attention to themselves, production value, or by provocative headlines or positions. It turns out, most of the ways you get found online are not correlated with expertise.

The end result of this is a very confused world. A world where people interested in learning to run are being told that they absolutely must buy a flip belt and where an increasing number of people think vaccines are harming people, instead of the single-most important reason that life expectancy in developed countries is now almost double what it was 100 years ago, and why the model year of death worldwide is no longer zero (almost certainly for the first time in human history).

It’s a world of pervasively crippled epistemology.

Previously, we lived in a very stratified world where expertise and social status were closely aligned. No longer is this the case. And, indeed, the democratization of information provided some benefits; no longer were titles or mere social class sufficient to control information. That’s a good thing. But when our filtering mechanisms do not select well for quality of information, but rather other traits, such as entertainment value, what we know and how we live started to get distorted.

There are consequences to a world of crippled epistemologies. If your running coach doesn’t know anything about running, you may hurt yourself and you will almost certainly never enjoy the benefits or joys of what it feels like to run well. If a significant percentage of people believe that vaccines do more harm than good, completely preventable diseases will make a comeback and kill many children. People with crippled epistemologies are prone to extremism, even terrorism. Only in a world of pervasively crippled epistemology does Donald Trump become elected to lead the most powerful country on earth.

To me, the search for the truth is a very important thing. Indeed, it is among the most important things. When I look for something online, I’m looking to find the guidance of a master craftsperson to help guide me through something I do not yet understand. I feel like this is getting harder to do.

And I do not want to contribute to a world where bad information is drowning out good information.

From a writer’s perspective, and particularly from an amateur writer’s perspective, this makes me think that there’s a bit of a moral component to writing and producing “content” online in the 21st century. The world is suffering from an epistemological crisis, one where people are struggling to distinguish truth from fiction and failing as often or more often than they succeed. If I write something, I need to ask myself if I’m adding to the world’s confusion by unintentionally claiming expertise where I possess none. If the answer is yes or even possibly yes, then I think that I, as a writer, have a moral obligation to write nothing.

Buddhists have a term called Sampapalapa.

It is a Pali term, and my understanding is that it roughly translates to “useless speech.” Avoiding useless speech is considered a very important virtue in Buddhism. And it strikes me that the more content-rich our world becomes, the more important this virtue becomes. Every time we add to the noise by mindlessly dumping more content into the world, we drown out the words that are most important, that are the most thought out, and that stand to help us to become better people.

I confess that I’ve spewed my fair share of Sampapalapa on this blog. I am guilty as well. But I am trying to reform, trying to be more mindful here, and trying to be more careful and judicious about what I write. Now, when I’m thinking about writing something new, I ask myself, “is what I’m writing or thinking of writing better for the world than simply saying nothing at all?” and “am I the best source of information on this?” The 21-year-old version of me thought the answer to this question was yes on nearly every topic. The 31-year-old version of me thought the answer was yes on many topics. The 41-year-old version of me is starting to think that the answer is no on almost every topic.

After more than two decades of writing, I’ve come to the conclusion that competing with silence is stiffer competition than I ever could have previously imagined.

[1] It’s worth noting that Brad Isaac, the person who told the world the Seinfeld “don’t break the chain” story, had a blog that was active from 2007 to 2010, where he wrote about such diverse topics as the price of gold, productivity, weight loss, and Vibram five fingers. His blog is no longer active.

Meditation: 20 Thoughts on Getting Started

Last week, a friend asked me where to begin with meditation practice.

It’s a great question. And I don’t have a good, concise answer (I rarely do).

Most of the resources I’ve seen for beginners fall into two categories: First, resources by those steeped in one of the many Buddhist traditions. These are usually written by monks and may be imbued with a religious or linguistic context that may be off-putting or foreign. Second, there are resources by persons who have more expertise in search engine optimization or marketing than with meditation.

If you’re going to pick one or the other, I’d start with reading the Buddhists. Even if you’re not perfectly comfortable with Buddhism itself, most monks will at least be experts in how to meditate. Even if you are secular (as I am) or believe in another religion, such as Christianity, I believe there is much value to be had in reading many of the texts of Buddhist masters.

In terms of the pure mechanics of how to meditate, I think this site is a good place to start. It’s simple, clear, and accurate. At the bottom of the page, there are links to detailed explanations of how to practice in the Zen, Vipassana, and Shamatha traditions. If you’re getting started, I highly recommend picking just one. Shifting from one style to another in the beginning will likely hinder your progress.

If you’re looking for more extensive reading on where to begin with meditation, I think Mindfulness in Plain English (available in full and for free at the link) by Henepola Gunaratana, is fantastic. Also, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh are also excellent introductions to meditation practice.

For what it’s worth, and perhaps with insufficient humility, I also have written a few thoughts below on what someone might experience in the early stages of a meditation practice. Last week, I wrote about the benefits of 100 hours of meditation. This week, I’m writing about how to get there. As the words of a non-expert, these thoughts should be taken with a huge grain of salt. But as I’m not so removed from this time myself, hopefully there might be something here that is helpful for someone.

  1. Start with where you are. I realize that this sounds like a one of the most banal, throw-away statements imaginable. But most Westerners start their meditation practice riddled with self-consciousness and self-judgment. Getting beyond this is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome initially. Whatever point you find yourself in life, with whatever gifts and flaws, that’s the perfect place to begin your meditation practice. Truly.
  2. Technically speaking, meditation isn’t just sitting. Meditation can be sitting, walking, moving, or engaged in nearly any activity. And the more you meditate, the more that the mental divide between the time you spend formally meditating and the rest of your life will start to blend together. That said, to initially experience what it feels like to meditate, for most people, the seated meditation is probably the best place to begin.
  3. Sit with your back straight, but not rigid. It’s best to start cross legged, but if that’s too painful, then sitting in a chair is fine (that’s where I do most of my meditation now, given my recent leg/ankle injury). I suspect there are additional benefits to meditating with certain advanced postures, such as in full lotus (I’m guessing, as I have never gotten there) or half lotus position (which I’ve done, however imperfectly), but there are still benefits to meditating with less advanced postures.
  4. That said, the better the posture, the less pain or discomfort that you will likely experience, so good posture is a worthy aspiration and something to keep working on. Meditating lying down or slouched is to be avoided, unless there is a serious health condition that prevents you from meditating in any other way.
  5. Pick a time to meditate, and then meditate for exactly that amount of time. I’ve seen people recommend starting points as low as five minutes per session, and many Zen practitioners throw beginners into the fire at 40 minutes per session, multiple sessions a day. Personally, I think 10 minutes, twice a day is an ideal starting point. I recommend once early in the morning (before caffeine!) and once before bed. That’s enough where it will definitely be challenging and where you will likely start to notice the true experience of what meditation feels like. That said, if that feels impossible to you, some benefits may accrue from meditating as little as five minutes per day.
  6. Sit, breathe, follow your breath. That’s it, pretty much. You will get distracted almost immediately (probably in the first five to ten seconds), and many times after that; that is ok. That is what happens. When you notice you have gotten distracted, that’s the first moment of realization. Just noticing how distracted our default state is, that’s the first stage of discovery. That’s the first moment of awakening! Our default state is to be lost in thought, almost all of our waking moments. So, as you begin, just try to follow your breath. You’ll get distracted. Again and again and again. Just try to notice when you do get distracted and then return to your breath.
  7. Don’t get down on yourself for getting distracted. Mentally celebrate (for a brief moment) the moments when you notice that you’re distracted. Then go back to following your breath. This is perhaps the first tool we acquire when we meditate: the ability to pause the endless and often senseless narrative that permeates as our default mental state.
  8. Seated meditation is, at its essence, just sitting without moving. Sitting without moving, over time, gets pretty uncomfortable, even downright painful. Accept and embrace the discomfort and even the pain. Don’t move or shift your posture to get comfortable, because in a few moments, that subsequent posture will be uncomfortable, too. It’s ok and helpful to try to relax or “unfreeze” any tense or uptight parts of our bodies, to try to relax whatever is tense, but it is best to move as little as possible.
  9. Learning to tolerate discomfort is another tool we acquire in meditation. One metaphor I think is helpful is “itch but don’t scratch.” An itch is uncomfortable, and scratching is our natural reaction to that itch. But you don’t have to scratch the itch; it’s just what we usually do when we get an itch. In reality, the itch goes away just as fast when we don’t scratch as when we do. The itching is probably an evolutionary strategy to get us to swat away spiders or bugs, but for people living in air-conditioned and anti-septic environments, scratching often isn’t necessary or helpful. It often makes things worse. Learning to observe the itch without scratching, and noticing how the phenomenon still passes, is a metaphor for the fact that we don’t always have to immediately react to all states of discomfort. That we can tolerate discomfort. That we can tolerate pain. That these are just sensations that come and go. We can just feel them and let them go. We don’t have to react to all uncomfortable states by trying to immediately make the discomfort go away. That when we turn on the TV, that when we reach for our phones, that when we turn for a drink or drugs, that this is what we are trying to do. These are short-term palliatives that hinder us long term. If we pay attention, we start to notice this.
  10. Whatever notions you have about meditation being about non-stop bliss—get rid of them. Often, meditation is a grind. It is incredibly difficult at first. It takes discipline to make time for it every day; it takes incredible mental energy to sit still; it takes energy to remain concentrated; it takes discipline not be hard on yourself when you get distracted; it takes discipline not to quit. It is not easy to meditate. But it’s a challenge to be embraced, just like working out or any other life challenge. For me, when I’m healthy, it’s much easier mentally to run for three hours than it is to meditate for one. Be prepared for that challenge.
  11. Whatever arises, notice it, and then return to your breath. As Joseph Goldstein says, “whatever has the nature to arise, must also pass away.” Meditation is simply the practice of observing life’s many phenomena happening before you, and then letting them unfold as they do, without judgment or clinging.
  12. Try to notice the many ways we are naturally inclined to “lean” into the next moment. When you meditate, try to just notice how often you are waiting or thinking about the meditation session ending. (Spoiler alert: This happens a lot!) As a default mode, we are always waiting for the next hit of experience to provide some form of relief, some form of ease. Our whole life, in a sense, is a series of moments when we’re waiting for the next moment to happen. Meanwhile, our actual life passes with us noticing precious little of what’s happening, failing to appreciate this moment as we anticipate the next. We’ve been doing this since we were children, but, without training, we continue to do this into old age, somehow thinking the next experience will be different from the last. So yeah, just try to notice the leaning, and when you catch yourself, celebrate that moment, too, and then go back to your breath.
  13. The worse you feel that you are at meditating, the more beneficial that meditation will likely be for you.
  14. You may notice random memories or even painful memories arising in your practice. That’s ok. I remember one memory that I had of teasing another boy in middle school until he started crying. In my life, I think it’s the meanest I have ever been to someone. And it kept coming to me in my early stages of meditation, for whatever reason. It was obviously an important moment in my life that I had failed to fully recognize or appreciate until I started meditating. It was only when I started meditating that I started to notice that I harbored feelings that this was a moment when I became a bad person. And I harbored tremendous self-judgment and guilt for years as a result. It took a long time to let go of that. Notice these memories, acknowledge them, feel them. Then return to your breath. Meditation isn’t about not feeling these things, but it’s not psychotherapy, either. It’s about feeling things, but not clinging to these things. We feel things as we always do, and often our feelings become more intense as we meditate, but as we meditate, we develop the power to let go of our feelings, painful and otherwise.
  15. Commit to 100 hours in your first year or so. That’s less than 20 minutes a day. That may seem like a lot. But if you do it, and stick with it, you will likely get that time back, and then some, by not wasting anywhere near as much time in other parts of your day. The average American spends five hours a day watching TV and four hours a day on their phone. These are not fulfilling endeavors in those quantities. When we do these things (at least in those quantities), we’re escaping. By learning to sit still with yourself, you will likely gradually free yourself from the need to run away from yourself at all times. In my personal experience, since I started meditating, I’ve reduced my drinking by 100%, my social media usage by 100%, my internet surfing by about 90%, and my TV watching by about 80%. All that gives me more than 1000 extra hours a year to work with, which is plenty of time to foster a healthy meditation practice. And I find the pre-bed meditation always pays for itself in terms of improved quality of sleep.
  16. Find a mentor or teacher. Some Buddhists have very strict beliefs about what this person should be (such as high stages of realization and a direct unbroken lineage to the Buddha himself). In my opinion, as long as the person has experience and is earnest and is not looking to profit from your practice (or sleep with you), they will likely have guidance that can benefit you.
  17. Meditation practice is indeed a practice. It’s not about gaining anything. After a while, it will be like taking a shower or brushing your teeth, just an essential part of your daily personal hygiene. If you’re always thinking about gaining something from your meditation, you will be less likely to reap its benefits. This sounds like a contradiction, but it hits at the essence of meditation practice.
  18. Over time, if you stick with it, you may notice that your meditation practice starts to infiltrate your daily life. Maybe you’ll be upset with your spouse, and you’ll be having a long monologue conversation with yourself about how wrong she is about washing the dishes, and you’ll catch yourself, and notice that you’re lost in thought. Or maybe you’ll be thinking about work stress and ruminating about a conversation you had earlier in the day, and you’ll notice you’re lost in thought there, too. But then, drawing from your practice, you return to your breath, and you’ll calm down. That’s when the first stage of realization, that our default state is distraction, but it doesn’t have to be, will start to benefit you. Over time, the boundaries between the thought processes in your seated meditation and the thought processes you have in your daily life will start to come together. You’ll start to let go of grudges, of anger, or of clinging to this thing or that, because you know that you can. You’ll then begin to meditate in life, as well as when you sit. And you’ll be practicing that every day, too.
  19. I appreciate that there are plenty of apps out there for this. People have meditated without apps for at least 2600 years. I think there’s something to be said for sitting with silence and without being tethered to our phones during at least some of our meditation sessions. I personally use an egg timer rather than my phone to avoid having to be at or near my phone before or after my meditation sessions. That said, I’m sure many people receive many benefits from practicing with apps. But I would encourage everyone who meditates to try to meditate without the apps at least some of the time. There is something to be gained from pure silence.
  20. If you get to 100 hours, start to explore and experiment more with your meditation. Try different methods, read as much as you can, personalize the process more. I suspect that all quotes from people who died 2600 years ago are apocryphal, but the Buddha supposedly said, “Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real.” That’s one part of Buddhism I have always taken to heart. Your meditation practice, if you decide to adopt one, will be a very personal journey. Try to follow the basics at first, because meditation without discipline isn’t meditation. Then, as you grow more comfortable with it and it becomes a habit, make the practice your own. As you meditate more, your instincts will become a better guide for your actions, and you should trust them to take you where you need to go.

10,000 Hours of Meditation

I suspect most people who read this blog have heard about Anders Ericsson’s 10,000-hour rule—made famous in the 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. The general gist is that most people who have achieved true mastery in any field have dedicated at least 10,000 hours or more of deliberate practice to those tasks.

Personally, I’ve dabbled in a lots of different “tasks” in my life, but only a few where I’ve made it to 10,000 hours: running, lawyering, and studying philosophy. I think that’s the complete list so far.

In the last few years, there has been one “task” that has become increasingly important to me, where I hope to approximate mastery some day: meditation.

I’m nowhere near mastery yet, but I’m spending a lot of time meditating these days, and it had me wondering how close I was to that 10,000-hour number.

And so this morning, I sat down and tried to sketch out an estimate of how much I’ve meditated in my life to date. I started meditating in 2011, and I began to get fairly serious about it in 2013. Since then, I’ve increased how much I meditate, and I think the benefits have increased as well.

But, for as much as it feels like I’ve meditated, by my count, I’ve still only done less than 2,000 hours in total. That’s a decent amount, but nowhere near enough to pretend I’ve reached some advanced stage.

That makes me think I still have plenty of room to grow.

I knew this already. If I were to describe my meditation practice now, I would describe it by saying that I have practiced mindfulness enough to know that most of the time I’m not that mindful.

But I’m much more mindful than I used to be, and I’m eager to keep improving.

If I live to see age 60, I suspect I’ll make it to 10,000 hours. Or at least that’s my current aspiration.

In thinking about this, I’ve tried to research whether there’ve been any studies on what 10,000-plus hours of meditation can do for you.

I found this article about just that topic. It turns out, there’s strong evidence that meditating for 10,000 hours likely changes nearly everything about how you experience life. I suspect that’s right, too.

The article also has a description about what happens after just 100 and (just!) 1,000 hours of meditation.

100 Hours

  • Less stress and anxiety
  • Less fear
  • Fewer feelings of loneliness
  • Increased optimism
  • Increased self-esteem
  • Increased focus
  • Improved immune system and energy

1000 Hours

  • Almost superhuman focus compared to coworkers
  • Sense of being driven, aware, intuitive
  • Will have experienced deep, psychedelic states
  • Increased capacity to experience love
  • Reduced need for sleep
  • Increased physical and emotional sensitivity
  • Much sharper in anything that requires intense concentration
  • Significantly higher tolerance for pain

I think this is largely consistent with my experience, except I wouldn’t say that I have “superhuman focus,” only improved focus. And I wouldn’t say I’m more driven than I was before I started meditating. On the contrary, I think I’m less focused on and feel less of a drive for external recognition or “success.” My motivations have become increasingly personal and present-focused, rather than trying to achieve or acquire something outside of my direct and immediate experience.

I would add to their list:

  • A decreased need for caffeine, alcohol, and prescription drugs
  • Less prone to overconsumption generally
  • Greatly improved ability to manage stress and/or challenging life situations (this might be the biggest change for me)
  • Improved relationships
  • Less prone to anger
  • Less irritable
  • Better listener
  • More patience
  • Better sense of empathy
  • Way handsomer!
  • Six-pack abs!  (ok, these last two are a joke, but the rest are at least partially true)

I still get angry and irritable. Sometimes I’m insensitive and a bad listener. I’m far from enlightened. Anyone who knows me knows that. But there have been real improvements, observable by me and others, attributable to meditation.

Picking up meditation has changed my life, in a way that other, even hugely important things to me, like running and studying philosophy, have not.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s anything magical about 10,000 hours, or 1000, or 100. But unlike most things in life, I have yet to find an upper limit past which more meditation ceases to be useful. In economic terms, I have yet to discovery the point at which there appears to be a decreasing marginal utility in more meditation.

For that reason and others, I’ll continue to prioritize meditation as much as I can in the years to come. For others that feel like they might benefit from what I’ve described here, I’d encourage you to do the same. Or, if you haven’t tried it yet, to perhaps give it a try.

Turning Off the Information Firehouse

[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it…. Our attitudes toward information reflect the culture of poverty. We were brought up on Abe Lincoln walking miles to borrow (and return!) a book and reading it by firelight. Most of us are constitutionally unable to throw a bound volume into the wastebasket. We have trouble enough disposing of magazines and newspapers. Some of us are so obsessed with the need to know that we feel compelled to read everything that falls into our hands…. If these attitudes were highly functional in the world of clay tablets, scribes, and human memory; if they were at least tolerable in the world of the printing press and the cable; they are completely maladapted to the world of broadcast systems and Xerox machines.

Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, 1971.

What’s impressive isn’t just that Herbert Simon wrote this: It’s that he wrote this before the dawn of the internet, a good 25-35 years before information overload truly got out of control.

Now, in 2019, what Simon mentioned in passing nearly 50 years is one of the defining problems of our era. Namely, trying to manage information overload.

Every time we go online, we’re like this poor kid.

There’s more new information being produced every day, useful and less so, than we could possibly process in any number of lifetimes. And the skills of purveyors of information in getting us to click and to engage that information are growing more effective every day, too. There’s no end to what we can click on and people looking to get us to do the clicking.

What Simon noted, and what is certainly more true today than ever before, is that there is a cognitive strain caused by constantly being inundated with more information. And that strain exerts a negative effect on our productivity, happiness, and well-being.

This phenomenon is relatively new. To my knowledge, Herbert Simon was the first to pick up on it 48 years ago.

And so the social mores and norms associated with the problem are new, too. Each family, social group, business, and organization must develop a strategy for how and when to process information. When do we use our phones? When do we check our email? Do we use Slack? If so, when and how do we use Slack? When do we use computers and iPads? When is it safe and socially acceptable not to check email?

Is it ever socially acceptable not to respond right away?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I’m plenty of others have been doing as well.

I’ve done a lot of tinkering with my approaches, professionally and personally. And I’ve found that the only way I can effectively organize my life with a manageable flow of information, is, for set periods of time every day and every week, to default to no information whatsoever.

Every evening now, at around 6 o’clock, I put away the computer, the iPhone, and the iPad, and I turn off the information firehose. And I don’t stop there. Only recently, I’ve also started to put away the books, the magazines, and the podcasts every night as well. And then, every weekend, I refrain from consuming digital online information. That’s another way of saying I don’t surf online anymore on the weekends. If I need to buy a plane ticket or look up a menu, fine. Sometimes I have to work. But I don’t go to the internet for my entertainment after 6 pm or on the weekends.

From 6 am to 6 pm, Monday through Friday, I am awash in news and data and information. From work and from life; from areas of interest and importance to matters of trivia and little consequence. The information almost never stops during that time. I suspect that’s typical for many information and knowledge workers today.

That’s 12 hours a day, five days a week, with near non-stop information. That’s right about 60 hours a week. Every evening, I stop it all. So I’m awake for four hours with no new information. That’s 28 hours each week. Plus, I turn it off for another 12 hours or so on the weekends. That’s a total of 52 hours with no information. That’s about 60 hours a week with lots of information and 52 without it. With exercise and breaks, it ends up being pretty close to a 50-50 split of information-based life and, well, actual life.

I will confess that I don’t follow this routine rigorously 100% of the time. But I know that when I do I feel better.

In lieu of consuming information, I hang out with friends, cook, clean, do yardwork, play guitar, do my physical therapy, take a bath, talk to my wife, cook dinner, eat dinner, play board games, write, or do any number of other things that do not require more information. Sometimes I watch a little tv. A lot of times I just space out.

I do more or less what people did 50 years ago. It’s nothing revolutionary, but I suspect it’s a habit that’s growing increasingly uncommon in the developed world.

I find that, with the possible exception of meditating, no other practice in my life has been more beneficial in making me feel more relaxed and less anxious.

And, because this is a subtraction process rather than an addition process, it doesn’t require me to do anything extra. It doesn’t clutter up my day with more activities. Rather, it frees up time for more activities. Or, I can just relax and do no activities whatsoever.

It’s pretty nice. I highly recommend it. If not for 50 hours each week, at least for some fixed period of time every day and every week.

I don’t expect this tactic is going to make me richer or more handsome. But I know that it feels right.

I have given up on the notion that I can go online without restriction and be judicious in what I do online. The attention merchants are too good at their jobs, and I don’t have that kind of discipline and will power.

For me, the only way to truly relax is make sure that, for at least part of the day, and at least part of the week, the information firehose is turned completely off.

The Tyranny of Minor Inconveniences

Perhaps the greatest measure of a person’s character is their ability to deal with minor inconveniences.

In some ways, minor inconveniences are harder to deal with than a major trauma. With a major trauma, we’re often able to muster up the strength and determination to measure up to the challenge. We know that our character is on display.

But somehow, at least for me, minor conveniences are often more insidious, because they’re just a slight divergence of reality from my expectations. I want so much for my life to go according to plan. And when it doesn’t I don’t always react well.

I’ve done better at dealing with job loss, death, and major injury than I have in dealing with stupid, trivial inconveniences. (Though I’m sure some would argue that that’s just because I haven’t experienced serious enough trauma. Maybe there’s some truth to that, too.)

Here’s when I’m at my worst: When there’s an accident, and I’m stuck in traffic for an hour. When my schedule gets thrown off by ten minutes because of some factor outside of my control. When I’m playing a board game and someone violates a minor rule. When someone does something online that disturbs my bubble. If I’m inside, and it’s slightly warm or slightly cold (for some reason, I don’t get worked up about the weather when I’m outside). If I’m going somewhere, and I forget something at home. If I get lost on a road trip or when traveling. If I’ve been working on something for two hours, and my computer crashes.

It’s the stuff that won’t matter a week from now, much less a year from now, that gets under my skin. It’s these little things that cause me to lose my shit.

If I look at the times when I’ve lost my temper, or most mistreated the people I love, it’s not because of some major life event. It’s because of some very minor change in plans. Some minor shift in the way life is from the way I want it to be. Some very minor inconvenience that sets my mind tumbling in the wrong direction.

It’s the million little ways that life diverges from expectations that most cause me to show weakness, cowardice, intemperance, and other personal flaws.

And so, I’ve been trying to focus my attention lately on these little divergences. To just be aware that life not being exactly the way I want it to be is not the end of life as we know it.

I know that I can handle pain, even severe pain. I feel confident that I can overcome loss.

But can I deal with the tyranny of life’s many minor inconveniences with equanimity? That’s still an open question.

Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the Principle of Least Effort

Last year, I made a bet with my brother: My brother bet me that in ten years, more than half of all jobs that involved driving would be replaced by autonomous vehicles. I bet that they wouldn’t.

I have no unique insight into the development of self-driving cars and trucks. I have no special knowledge of labor-force changes and how fast they will  take place in the transportation industry.

But I do have one strongly held belief: when in doubt, bet on the status quo. When someone tells you an entire industry will be eliminated in less than a decade by some thing that does not yet exist, it’s safe to bet against it.

***

Bryan Caplan has an excellent betting record. If you break down his bets, they follow one consistent pattern. Some pundit makes a prediction that some unexpected radical change will occur in some short period of time. Or, that an unusual state of events will continue for an extended period of time.

Bryan Caplan pretty much always bets that the status quo is more likely. Given 50-50 odds on these bets, Caplan almost always wins.

It’s not that Caplan is a psychic or has some extraordinary insight into the future. He just knows that radical changes usually don’t come to pass. Headlines direct our attention to things that seem startling or unusual. But most of today’s and tomorrow’s occurrences follow a trend that is consistent with yesterday’s patterns.

If the Golden State Warriors were by far the best basketball team in the NBA last year, then it stands to reason, if they have more or less the same time this year, that they’ll probably be the best this year, too.

It’s basic Bayesian logic. Place a strong emphasis on your priors. Update prior information with new information, but give strong deference to the large weight of prior information over small amounts of new information.

Most people far too heavily weigh new information and disregard prior information. And when you do that, you’re usually going to be wrong.

***

Last year, I learned about the Principle of Least Effort. It’s so simple, but yet so pervasive and helpful as an explanatory mechanism.

If there’s one underrated, over-arching principle of human existence, it’s this one.

If you want to know why the average American watches five hours of TV every day; if you want to know why processed foods are invariably more popular than real food; if you want to understand why people shorten words in texts and why emojis are overtaking traditional language in online communications; if you want to know why times gravitate toward round numbers in long-distances races; if you want to know why online communication has evolved away from blogging to microblogging: It’s all because of the Principle of Least Effort.

People do the least they can to achieve the goal they have in mind. It’s simple, but important to remember.

***

This idea was most famously (although not that famously) articulated by Harvard linguist George Zipf in 1949. Discovered in the context of language, Zipf observed statistically that that the most commonly used words in all languages also tend to be among the shortest (In English, the, and, a, or, it, yes, no).

He then broadened his study of this concept to other disciplines and noticed it seemed to apply everywhere, from cities to business and to universities. In essence, what Zipf observed, is that all things being equal, people’s behavior will gravitate toward the path that requires the least amount of effort.

***

Here’s my corollary of the Principle of Least Effort: We should be deeply skeptical of proposed changes that require an extraordinary amount of effort. This is true on an individual or institutional level.

If you want to guess what a person’s workout routine is going to be like next year, look at what they did last year.

If you want to know what the US government is going to look like ten years from now, observe what it’s doing now.

Real change, if it’s going to happen, almost always happens incrementally. Attempts at non-incremental change almost always end badly.

Inertia is a powerful force. So is path dependence.

Unless a meteor strikes or World War III begins or another Black Swan event changes the way we view the universe, life tends to peter along, much like it did yesterday, with only minor updates and revisions.
***

From 2008-2016, Republicans howled about Obamacare. But when tasked with coming up with a workable replacement in 2017, they made one half-assed effort to change it and then gave up. It’s not that they don’t still dislike Obamacare, it’s that they realized that it would have taken a lot of work to replace it with something better.

And so, after about 100 days of putz-ing around on the issue, they’ve moved on to simpler issues to implement, like tax cuts and symbolic issues like immigration walls. Overhauling the country’s medical-care infrastructure is hard—nearly impossible. Talking about building a wall is easy. Both issues appeal to the same voters. They campaigned on health care and then moved on to immigration. It’s easier!

Republicans talked a big game about what they were going to do about health care when they weren’t in power. And now that they are, they aren’t doing much of anything.

So what are Democrats doing now?

Talking a big game. Medicare for All. The New Green Deal. The former would eliminate the entire private health insurance industry. The latter would largely eliminate industries that develop fossil fuels.

If either change were attempted, it would face massive opposition from entrenched industries. Entire industries—and the state and local government officials where those people are employed, don’t take kindly to being eradicated.

But the pattern is similar to what we saw from Republicans earlier this decade.

Talking a big game is easy. So go for it! When you’re trying to get into power, you need to draw attention to yourself!

Implementing major changes, though, is nearly impossible—they require too much effort! So on the off chance that a pro-Medicare-for-All politician becomes president, expect backtracking a few months after they take office.

***

This is why I am deeply skeptical about the Green New Deal and Medicare for All (at least the version of it that eliminates private insurance markets). Regardless of whether you think these are good ideas from a policy prospective, they would require enormous amounts of time, political will, money, and energy to implement. Nothing in the last 70 years of American history suggests that either party would be capable of effectuating such a change. Nothing in American history suggests that our government has the resolve to legislate out of existence an entire industry.

Think about how hard it was for Obama to implement the relatively modest changes associated with Obamacare in 2008, when his party controlled the Congress, the Senate, and the White House.  He used nearly all of his political capital to get Obamacare passed. Think about how much pushback he got, for the better part of a decade, after he did it.

***

To enact the Green New Deal or Medicare for All, its proponents would have to: 1) achieve political consensus to enact these reforms (which does not currently exist) 2) maintain that same political consensus for long enough that all these changes would actually be implemented (the Green New Deal would take a couple of decades to implement, which almost certainly means it would have to survive a Republican administration or two. Good luck with that.) 3) effectively implement all these changes in a way that didn’t turn political consensus against them at any time. (Eliminating the health insurance industry in one fell swoop would likely increase the waiting time for major medical procedures, at least in the short term, by a couple of orders of magnitude. That might not go over well.) and 4) survive any attempts to sabotage the efforts to change from populist minority oppositions groups like the tea party (who lost their shit over a very necessary stimulus package to help this country survive the great recession) or the gilets jaunes (whose greatest political contribution was to veto by temper tantrum a rather modest increase in the cost of gasoline).

***

This post isn’t about politics, even though I suspect most people will interpret it that way. It’s about how people underestimate how hard it is to change anything that’s deeply entrenched, and how most deeply entrenched things don’t change that much. 

People who support Medicare for All point to other nations that have single-payer systems and say, “they have it in Taiwan/Canada/South Korea, so there’s no reason that we can’t do it here.”

But it’s not just a question of trying to pick a better system. It’s a matter of undoing an existing system and replacing it with a new one. That’s much harder than creating a new system from scratch.

Maybe it’s safer to drive on the left side of the road than the right side. But if your nation already drives on the right side, changing the entire system of cars, traffic, and transportation to make the change still might not be the safest course of action. And even if it were, it would be very hard to do. To change an already-evolved system requires a lot of undoing. The larger, the more entrenched, and the more evolved the system, the harder it is to undo.

Most of us don’t understand the inner-workings of how medical care is distributed, but imagine how challenging it would be if our government decided we were all going to start driving on the left side of the road next year. Implementing Medicare for All or the Green New Deal would almost certainly be much harder, and much more expensive, than making that switch. Maybe 10x harder. Maybe 100x harder. Maybe 1000x harder.

That’s why they probably won’t happen.

***

To the extent Democrats sincerely believe in Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, they lack sufficient respect for the Principle of Least Effort.

To the extent that these policy proposals are simply aggressive negotiating tactics or ways to draw attention to the people who propose them, they might be on to something. As anyone who has spent any time on Youtube knows, saying and doing outlandish things is an excellent way to draw attention to yourself.

But should we take these claims at face value? I wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, I’d confidently bet against it.

You Could Fall at Any Time

I recently heard an excerpt from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, via the wonderful Joseph Goldstein, that said:

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

That struck me as such a beautiful way to articulate the importance of living life with a deep sense of urgency.

We all know that we are mortal, that life is short. But who among us does not waste at least part of our days, doing things, even in our own estimation, that feel like a waste of our precious time?

Most of us have things we want to do, things we want to say, and things we’d like to accomplish, that we push off indefinitely, thinking we’ll have time to do them later. They get swept away by the busyness of life’s daily activities.

But we are all leaves, destined to fall some day. Whether we fall before we do what we think is important is likely beyond our control. But the only way to give ourselves a good chance is to get started on the important stuff, to say and do what we think is important, right now.

On the Edge of Agony and Ecstasy

On Saturday, I broke my leg running a trail race in Moab, Utah.

I’ve been running since pre-adolescence, but I have never experienced a violent running injury like this one. It wasn’t a situation where I had to decide whether I could keep going. It was a situation where I could no longer put weight on my right leg for even an instant.

The first ten minutes were just sheer agony. Pain more severe than I had ever experienced. As a lifelong trail, mountain, and ultramarathon runner, I think of myself of someone who has a richer tolerance for pain than most people have. But this incident took the pain to another level—to a level altogether unfamiliar for me.

Initially, it was just a matter of trying to get situated. Finding a place where I could sit; finding a blanket to keep warm; asking for Advil; asking for a cell phone so I could call my wife and tell her what had happened.

And then, after that, it was just pain, and lots of it. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. I was completely dependent on the good graces and decision-making of other people around me.

Because of where I fell, in the rugged trails of Moab, Utah, at the top of the Gold Bar Rim trail, getting me out of danger wasn’t going to be easy. Very few cars and drivers could get out to where I was. It was not accessible by normal means. No emergency vehicle could get within four miles of me. And so the only way down was on a super bumpy jeep tour, with a driver whose job it was to provide such tours (This video provides a visual of where I was).

The guy who drove me down is among the best in the world at driving on treacherous roads. Driving on these trails is his job. So good is he at the task, that he was recently featured in car commercials whose purpose it was to show off the off-road capabilities of their cars.

So I was in good hands, insofar as it was possible to be in good hands in such a situation. But there was no way to make the voyage less bumpy. And with a badly broken leg, the last thing you want to be happening is to be sitting in a moving vehicle that is violently and abruptly shifting from side to side and up and down every few seconds. But alas, other than a very expensive helicopter ride (that probably would not have been able to land anywhere near me anyway), this was the only way I was going to get to a hospital.

All this is to say that the ride down the trail was painful—excruciatingly so. Just sheer agony. A Wagnerian opera of powerful physical stimuli.

And it was going to be a long trip, as well. More than an hour. So I had time to think about what was happening.

After the first few minutes of the journey, I attempted to control my breathing and turn my thoughts to mindfulness training.

I practice meditation for 60-90 minutes every day. And I read and study the insights of more experienced practitioners nearly every day as well. I’ve been doing this for about five years.

This was a moment, perhaps even the moment, when the mindfulness training was supposed to help me.

I tried to bifurcate the pain and the suffering.

There is the sensation of pain, of course. There is no way to avoid that. Particularly in this moment.

But there is also our natural reaction to this pain, namely the internal monologue that says, “oh my god, oh my god, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. Why me? Why me? Why me?” This creates a natural tendency to tense up. The combination of our labeling (this is bad) and the tensing up and rejection of the experience exacerbates the pain we feel. It is a force multiplier for our pain. It converts our pain into suffering (or so some mindfulness practitioners would have us believe).

A Buddhist would probably say that the first sensation, pain, is unavoidable. But that suffering is something we can escape. If we just sit with the pain, rather than reacting or judging it, we can keep our pain, no matter how severe, from turning into suffering.

That’s what I tried to think about in the back of the jeep. Sitting in the back, feeling the bones in my leg move with every drop and bump of the jeep over the slickrock.

Ultimately, my thoughts coalesced onto a passage I read somewhere, that said something along the lines of “in the moments of the most severe pain, if you look closely enough at the pain, the agony you feel, you may notice is actually indistinguishable from ecstasy.”

I read this years ago. But I was never in serious enough pain where I had a personal opportunity to personally verify if it was true.

I tried to look at this moment with curiosity, rather than judgment. I tried to relax every muscle in my body that I could relax (while still gripping the roll bars in the back). Sure enough, I noticed that the compounding effects of pain and the rejection of pain seemed to ease a bit.

And I began to notice the views all around me, views that I hadn’t noticed much as I raced up the cliffs in the first place, or, perhaps logically, in the moments after I had fallen. If I was going to injure myself and force complete stasis, I would be hard pressed to choose a more beautiful backdrop for it.

And as I began to appreciate the views, for a brief moment, I felt a powerful, warm, flowing sensation throughout my whole body. More like an epiphany than a pain experience. I had taken a few Advil, but it wasn’t that. Indeed, what I felt, for a few brief seconds, was indeed closer to ecstasy than it was to agony. Whether it was endorphins or adrenaline or something else, it was an overwhelmingly positive sensation, as hard as that may be to believe.

Like the constantly flowing and evolving sensations of pain, the feelings of ecstasy were temporary, too. But they were and are very real, every bit as real as the pain.

The passage I read years ago now appears, based on my own experience, to be at least partially true. The greatest moments of pain, if you look at them from just the right angle, without judgment or resistance, may seem indistinguishable from ecstasy.

The opportunity to experience such sensations are rare—and best avoided. But pain is at times unavoidable. When you find yourself staring at the face of minor or major misfortune, perhaps take a moment to try to let go of your own judgments. Just look closely. It’s a heckuva thing.

What’s My Thing?

Robin Hanson recently wrote:

I prefer to talk to people who “have a thing.” That is, who have some sort of abstract claim (or question) which they consider important and neglected, for which they often argue, and which intersects somehow with their life hopes/plans. When they argue, they are open to and will engage counter-arguments. They might push this thing by themselves, or as part of a group, but either way it matters to them, they represent it personally, and they have some reason to think that their personal efforts can make a difference to it.

This made me wonder, what is my “thing”? Upon reflection, I was able to formulate a few “things” that I think might meet Hanson’s criteria. Here’s what they are:

The hyperevolution of hyperstimulus

This is among the most popular posts on this site, and I think it might be the most important as well. It’s about how the things we consume and what we use to entertain ourselves are improving at exponential rates (or at least at logarithmic rates), and that our brains just can’t keep up. The inability to resist temptation, and particularly technologically enhanced temptation, is making us constantly anxious, more likely to succumb to addiction, less attentive, less likely to breed, and perhaps less happy and fulfilled, in spite of increased prosperity and improved technology. And this is probably just going to get worse, and the rate at which it will get worse will continue to accelerate, for as long as we have a stable civilization.

Orthogonal living

This is like contrarian investing, but for lifestyle. Most people live in cities. I live in the mountains. On the front range of Colorado, every Friday, huge hoards of people get off work between 3 and 7 pm and heads to the mountains, sit in traffic for hours, and then sit in lines at ski lifts, and then sit in traffic as they head back on Sunday afternoon or evening. If there’s a holiday weekend, traffic gets worse and the whole situation gets even more exaggerated. This applies to many situations in life. If you go to Paris, Rome, or Barcelona in July, it’s just not pleasant or fun. There are simply too many people trying to go to the same places and do the same things.

To get the most out of life, you have to think and live orthogonally to the way the majority of people think and live. If you don’t, expect to spend a lot of time queuing up behind people.

The battle of the 1%

First-worlders are far too concerned and spend far too much of their time obsessing over their relative wealth compared to other first-worlders. According to the data, if you make more than $33,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of incomes worldwide. I have written about this a few times, but does it really make sense to be perpetually concerned or righteously indignant over where you fit within that remaining fraction of the top one percentile?

We are hardwired to be concerned over relative status, and we always compare ourselves to our immediate neighbors, not other people on the other side of the planet. But if you think about these things on a global scale, if you make over $30k a year, you’ve already won the lottery. Be grateful for what you have; best not to obsess over winning more lotteries.

Be an animal first

We share about 84 percent of our DNA with dogs.

If you put a dog in a cubicle, made it stay there all day, and then had it sit in a car, and then plopped it in front a TV, without letting it outside for more than a few minutes a day, well, the dog would be miserable. Why would any human ever think that happiness and fulfillment would be possible by following that same routine?

Dogs are happiest when they get to run around in the snow and the dirt and the mud and get to run around off leash. Humans need to get off leash on a regular basis, too.

Dogs aren’t happy being trapped in small spaces staring at screens all day and neither are people. We just get sucked into our screens and our status games because they appeal to a small fraction of our nature that we do not share with dogs. But we’re better off, for a far greater percentage of our day than most people think, listening to the far larger percentage of our nature that does not give a shit about what’s happening on those screens.

Food and water in reasonable quantities, shelter, stimulation, socialization, some affection, and plenty of time outside. I think that’s as good of a recipe for a fulfilling life as anything else. For dogs and for people.

Meditation is still underrated

I know that every second article on the internet is about the benefits of mindfulness and how we should all be meditating more. I still think meditation is incredibly underrated.

According to the data, fewer than 10% of Americans meditate. To me, that’s like hearing that fewer than 10% of Americans exercise. The ability to control the focus of our consciousness is within our grasp, but nine out of ten people don’t even bother to try. Freedom from suffering is within our grasp, but few have the strength to begin. And of those that do, only a small percentage meditate enough—say more than 30 minutes a day, where the real benefits start to accrue.

The average American finds 5 hours a day to watch TV, but the vast majority do not meditate at all. Meditation is still incredibly underrated.

Also, if there is any hope of winning in the battle of the hyperevolution of hyperstimulus, it’s through meditation and mindfulness. It’s a source of hope for humans, individually and collectively.

If the idea of meditation appeals to you, but you don’t know where to begin, perhaps start here.

Governments are not well equipped to regulate technology; government regulation of technology has never been more important

As Cass Sunstein once said, governments are “singularly ill-suited” to regulate technology. But regulate technology they must.

It’s increasingly apparent to me that governments have no clue how to regulate technology, and so I’m dedicating a separate blog to just this issue. More to come.

Mountain running

I do a lot of that. It’s the thing that makes me feel most alive. To read more, go here.