humanity

Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them

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There are a few words that raise a red flag when I catch myself saying them, at least when I’m not totally preoccupied.

Not that all instances of these words are dubious, but I do find I that whenever I need to make use of them, there’s a good chance I’m being at least a little presumptuous, simple-minded, or sneaky. They raise a similar red flag when I hear or read them too.

They aren’t “bad” words, but they do lend themselves to a certain kind of self-deception. They often hint at more going on.

“Wish”

I find myself using the word “wish” when I’ve decided I don’t like something the way it is, yet I’m not actually doing anything about it. There’s no real reason to declare my wishes. Whenever I start a sentence with “I just wish…” feel free to ignore me, I’m only wasting your time. My whiny face has probably made you tune out anyway.

Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be happy if they were like this. So there.”

Not only is it useless for changing the circumstances, but it reinforces the myth to which I’ve momentarily fallen prey: that my happiness is dependent on my circumstances only and has nothing to do with my attitude. It’s a bitter little plea that life isn’t what I want it to be in this particular moment, and a dead giveaway that I’m not prepared to do anything about it right now.

Wishing is a desperate, self-defensive behavior. It gives you a little hit of relief from a reality you don’t want to deal with, but it sure doesn’t move things along.

Of course, in those moments, I’m too consumed by my fantasies to see that my attitude is usually the biggest and most damning feature of the present circumstances. If my attitude sucks, the circumstances suck. But acknowledging that would mean I have to be responsible for it, and it’s easier to instead wish for the cavalry to appear on the horizon and save me.

“Try”

I don’t know about you, but I know I insert the word “try” into a sentence when I’m not actually willing to take on the responsibility of promising I’ll do something. Yet I’m still willing to pretend I at least have the intention of doing it — somewhere in my mind.

I’ll try to call and ask about that. I’ll try to exercise every day. I’ll try to get it done on Friday after work.

It means: I might end up doing that if it’s easier than I expect it to be. Read More

by David on April 25, 2011
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The Thing That Makes This All Happen

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How many times in my life have I stood with four or five strangers at a street corner, waiting for the pedestrian light to change? 2000? 5000? Who knows. But I do know that in almost none of them do any of us want to be precisely there.

It’s the sort of moment that has a distinctly “in-between” character to it. It feels like a necessary but boring preamble to a more ideal moment which seems to be waiting for you somewhere across the street, but is really only in the mind.

Most moments are like this. Which means, of course, that most of human life is like this: not where we want to be. It’s mostly in-between.

If you could divide a human life up into two parts: the time spent feeling a sense of in-between, and the time spent feeling a sense of “arrival” I’d bet the proportions would be staggering — certainly 90-something percent “in-between”, probably closer to 100 than 90.

We share a lot of those kinds of moments with other people, even though the experience usually feels like a rather individual one, and we’re unlikely to think much about the others in it. Waiting in elevators. Going through the motions at work at 2:27 on an idle Tuesday. Riding the bus, again.

The “in-between” character present in the vast majority of our moments is created not by the moment’s actual details but by the persistent state of preoccupation of the person experiencing it. Preoccupation is the typical human experience, and it’s nothing other than the experience of an abstract past, future, or hypothetical moment in the mind stealing your attention from the one that’s really happening.

I’ve long believed that tedium is only a pattern of thought, not circumstance.  Boredom is never a situational reality, only a self-defeating way of relating to the moment at hand, which always contains more detail and possibility than you could ever explore.

Again, this is normal. So my state of mind — I can’t speak for you — isn’t always receptive to the freshness and magnificence of “mundane” moments, even though I am now convinced that those qualities are always there behind my preoccupations.

But depending on the intensity of the preoccupying thoughts, I’ve found there are some pretty reliable ways of tapping into those qualities, even when the present moment is of that archetypal, in-between type you find in parking lots and waiting rooms.

An example from work: I often find myself at site meetings, which typically take place in a boxcar-sized field office, around a collapsible table with plastic folding chairs, populated by a handful of contractors, engineers, surveyors and developers. These meetings have a very predictable dynamic, with everyone waiting for a chance to bring up their biggest concern, nodding impatiently while others bring up theirs. They have a predictable, tired vocabulary (working days, “mobilizing”, change orders, tie-ins, inverts, grades, quantities) that seems to blur countless past and present and future moments together as if they are one indistinguishable, perpetual scene with no real unique characteristics and certainly nothing to feel and wonder or excitement about.

These patterns, if you experience them every day (and your workplace certainly has its own) can become almost unbearably ordinary. If you can somewhat imagine what a tax accountant feels like this time of year when they look at yet another T4 or a W2, or what a McDonald’s employee feels like when they come back to the same fries smell after two weeks off, then you know the stifling feeling of over-familiarity I’m talking about.

At this recent meeting, perhaps the tedium hit a breaking point in me and I slipped into a genuine recognition that behind those boring patterns, right in the room with me, was a damn miracle.

Eight beating hearts.

All the over-familiar talk in that room, all the annoying jargon, the impatience, the endless dialogue about construction schedules and the state of the industry, was the product of something truly astounding and humbling. Every instance in that scene of someone getting quietly worked up, getting self-righteous, getting talked over — or getting bored — was driven ultimately by one of eight beating hearts. And each was driving its owner to something. Some action, some attitude, some thought. Only because that’s what it does.

Why did the chicken cross the road? A beating heart, no other reason. Read More

by David on April 14, 2011
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How to Make Trillions of Dollars

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Before I get into it, I must say that I don’t recommend that you do this. I’m sharing this strategy for information purposes only, so that you can understand the playing field you’re working with, and can make better personal choices for how you make and manage your money.

I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that’s something that interests you. If it’s billions you’re after, I’m a bit suspicious but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Aspiring to trillions, though, is the domain of the wicked alone and we won’t be able to be friends any more.

The big money isn’t in creating products, it’s in creating customers. A single, lifelong customer who lives his life spending the way you want him to is worth six or seven figures. A single one. Creating millions of these is the only way to make trillions.

You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something. Read More

by David on January 26, 2011
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A Day in the Future

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I awake in bed. I’m warm and safe, like every morning. Outside it is twenty below zero, but from inside my home winter seems far away.

As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all.

I buy all my food — I wouldn’t know how to grow it or hunt it. Three or four hours’ pay gets me a week’s worth. It’s a pretty good arrangement. I’m thirty years old and I’ve never gone a day without food.

My soreness is actually from my leisure time, not work. I spent yesterday sliding down a snow-covered slope with a board attached to my feet. After that I was pretty worn out, so I went to a friend’s house, drank beer that was wheeled in from Mexico by another person I never met, and watched a sporting event as it unfolded in Philadelphia.

I don’t live in Philadelphia, but my friend has a machine that lets us see what’s happening there. I have one too. Almost everyone does.

The sun won’t rise for another hour, but I don’t need to light a fire or candles. I have artificial ones, mounted on the ceiling. Hit a tiny switch and I can see everything, any time of day.

I bathe while standing. The water comes out whatever temperature I like.

I use a few machines in my kitchen to get my breakfast ready. It takes about five minutes. Toasted buckwheat groats with raisins, almonds, dates and sunflower seeds. I don’t know where it came from but I’d be surprised if it was from anywhere near here. Read More

by David on January 12, 2011
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If The World Was Populated by Six Billion of Me, I’d Totally Be Gay

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Even now, I do it. After ten-plus years of struggling to be less stupid with my thought processes, when someone else’s bad behavior gets to me, I still catch myself thinking “Now, if everyone thought like me, the world would be a much better place.”

People wouldn’t stop and chat in doorways. Nobody would enter a quiet room loudly. Nobody would drive 49 in a 60, or 79 in a 60. There would be no littering, and definitely no chewing with your mouth open.

I do remember coming to that exact conclusion one day: that everyone should be like me, and then the world’s problems would be solved. I was maybe eleven.

I don’t remember what triggered it exactly but I had certainly just been wronged somehow, maybe by some kid who had chained his bike across the whole bike rack, leaving me no choice but to lock mine to a stop sign (which everyone knows you can just lift out of the ground).

Why didn’t he think about all the other kids with bikes when he did that? I knew I would have recognized the critical importance of leaving as much space for others as possible. It should have been the first thing on his mind, no matter who he was.

Whatever the offending act was, at that moment in my life I was fervently convinced that my thinking and behavior was damn near perfect, and that the world was imperfect exactly insofar as other people were unlike me. It seemed so obvious.

Seeing as how at the time I had about as much insight into my behavior as, say, George Costanza — who, in a short-sighted moment of his own, almost certainly would have elected to have the world populated with six billion of himself — in my fit of righteous indignation I was unable to see that a world populated with six billion of me would be a freakish and frightening place. Read More

by David on January 6, 2011
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Does Charity Leave You Cold?

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Last month I bought myself an espresso machine, when for the same price I could have instead cured someone’s leprosy.

I was in a position to do either, and the decision wasn’t that hard. Somebody will continue to live with a horrendous disease — however — now I can make my own lattes.

Why did I do that? Why don’t I feel that bad about it? What will stop me from continuing to choose small luxuries for myself when I could be making enormous changes to the quality of life of other people?

Honestly, I have always been a little uncomfortable about giving to charity. I wondered if I was alone here, so I did a bit of poking around on the web and found that a lot of people have a similar ambivalence about it. The most common reasons people cited for not giving much to charity (or feeling weird about what they do give) were:

“Who do I help” syndrome – Why cure one person of leprosy, when I could provide polio vaccines for dozens? Should I help the homeless in my own city before I help the homeless in Pakistan? Who is suffering more? Does it matter? Should I give to the most popular causes (think Katrina, 9/11, Haiti) or avoid them in favor of neglected ones?

“Where do I draw the line” syndrome — Even if I had chosen someone’s leprosy treatment over my private cappuccino party, how could I justify only curing one person, when I make enough in a year to cure over a hundred? I could make some lifestyle changes, and maybe swing ten with some planning and sacrifice. But even then I’m still neglecting people whom I could save if I was willing to eat bulk spaghetti twice a day. There are some established guidelines for giving to charity. The traditional tithe is 10% — though that’s to be given to your church, and historically it hasn’t always been a voluntary contribution. The 10% mark is a real stretch for most people; the typical American household contributes 2.1% of its annual income to charitable causes. But each person’s “line” is ultimately arbitrary.

“Into the void” syndrome – Most of the time, when we donate to charity, we have no way of seeing how our contribution helps. It just disappears into the coffers of a charitable organization, and there’s something unsatisfying about that. I know I shouldn’t need the personal gratification of actually seeing somebody’s life change because of me — that’s not really the “proper” spirit of giving — but maybe I’m kind of vain and that’s what I want. Read More

by David on December 15, 2010
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A Shocking Revelation About Human Nature

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The results were horrifying. Nobody suspected it could be that bad, not even close.

In 1961 a controversial experiment was carried out that made some chilling discoveries about human nature. Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how it was possible that so many people co-operated to commit the atrocities of the Second World War. They couldn’t all have been sociopaths, yet thousands and thousands of people did unspeakable things to innocent people, and millions more looked the other way.

Is it really that hard to stand up to authority?

Milgram devised an experiment that went like this:

Forty subjects were recruited to participate in an experiment “on learning and memory”, having answered a newspaper ad offering a modest payment for an hour of their time. Each of the subjects were informed that they would be compensated fully as long as they showed up, regardless of their performance in the experiment.

Upon arrival, each subject met with two people. The first was a man in a white labcoat purported to be the scientist conducting the experiment. The second was another person who was supposed to be a fellow subject, but whom was actually an actor. The two subjects drew slips of paper to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” in the experiment.

It was rigged: both slips said “teacher,” so the real subject was always given the role of teacher, though he was under the impression that he’d had an equal chance of being the learner. The actor always played the learner.

The experimenter then announced that the learning was to be reinforced by electric shocks, which would be administered by the teacher on the learner whenever the learner gave an incorrect response to a simple memory test. Each teacher was given a 45-volt sample shock to get an idea of the shocks they would be giving.

The teacher was intentionally allowed to witness the learner being strapped to a chair, with electrodes fixed to him, before being ushered into the adjacent room, where he would be stationed in front of an electric shock generator. The experimenter sat behind the teacher, holding a clipboard. Read More

by David on October 27, 2010
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Do You Make a Moral Issue Out of Being Inconvenienced?

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I think I inherited it from my Father’s side. Nothing makes me lose my mind more than when I’m walking through the mall and somebody steps out of a store right in front of me and walks slowly. Why didn’t they look? I would have looked. I do look.

It might only take less than two seconds for me to skirt around and resume my regular mall-cruising speed, but that’s enough time to make my eyes harden and my teeth clench. It’s enough for my mind to start getting self-righteous.

If I’m not careful, I end up in an internal dialogue about certain basic courtesies people should uphold in public, or maybe a half-daydream about how the oblivious lady in front of me must live a life of total obliviousness, wandering into busy streets or onto active construction sites, all without a clue that she may be affecting people’s lives with her deplorable lack of awareness. In either case, I end up feeling agitated, and slightly better than her.

The basis of my internal rant always seems to surround how people ought to behave in public. In other words, I make a moral issue out of it.

In a situation like that, my distress seems to be that I am simply yearning for a world in which people don’t stand in the way on sidewalks or step out in front of people at the mall. But it’s really a clever self-deception; what I am really yearning for in those moments is a slightly easier version of my present moment — one in which there is nothing in my way.

Though I’m not always aware of it, my own personal inconvenience is what I’m really railing against, not some worldwide epidemic of rudeness. My objection is purely selfish, under the guise of a noble appeal for a better world. But I’m not really looking for a better world, only a moment that contains no difficulty for me — no oversight I must excuse, no mistake I must forgive. Read More

by David on September 28, 2010
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Who You Really Are (Pt. 2)

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This is part two of a two-part post. Monday’s article explained that you are not your mind or your body, but the aware space in which your mind and your body (and everything else) exist. You’ll have to read the first part to understand the context of this post.

So if you are in fact the space in which all things happen, how come you don’t always notice this space? Why does it often seem like it’s just the things that exist? If the space is you, wouldn’t it always be apparent?

Not necessarily. Think about it: you are that space, so when you are not aware of that space, it only means the space is not aware of itself. But it can still be aware of the things happening in that space, without seeing what it is that is aware. It’s a major oversight, but it is also the normal state of human existence — complete identification with form, with things.

We usually don’t recognize the space in which the tangibles of our lives happen, so we figure we must be one of those tangible, perishable things, or some combination of them. The thing, or collection of things, that we normally think we are is called the ego.

When you lose sight of the space that contains all things (including your ego) you are lost in things. You have lost sight of yourself, and the play of things seems to be all there is. Things become supremely important, because they’re all you have.

That’s a shame, because all of those things are doomed by their very nature. They’re nice when they’re around, but they are fleeting and perishable. So it’s no wonder that when we become identified with things we feel a persistent uneasiness. They are all fleeting — very certainly, inarguably, on their way out, and some part of us knows that. When life is only a race to manipulate material things into the most preferable arrangement possible before you die, it feels like a losing battle. It is.

This is how most of us live, utterly identified with our thoughts, under the impression that life is nothing but things, and that we are nothing but one of those things. Read More

by David on September 9, 2010
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Who You Really Are

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Okay, this post is the last thrust in our trip down the proverbial rabbit-hole, which so far has looked at what the ego is, and how the late Douglas Harding can help us answer that big, big question — who are you, really? This is part one of a two-part post.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Back in October, I arrived at an island retreat called Hollyhock, to take what I thought was a five-day course on Buddhism. I didn’t know we would spend those days in uninterrupted mindfulness, without speaking, and that we’d spend about six to eight hours a day in formal meditation.

After the initial welcome at the main hall, our teacher led my group up the path to our meditation hut in the forest. On the way there, he stopped us and told us to look up. It was a still and clear night, much darker than we city dwelling visitors were accustomed to. I had never seen stars like that.

“Please be aware,” he said, as we all stared silently, “that you are seeing.”

He repeated himself. I was transfixed on the stars, but I remember thinking, “Well, duh,” when his comment registered. Of course I’m aware I’m seeing. How can you see without being aware of it?

His comment echoed again in my head a moment later, and I realized what he meant. For the first time, I recognized that I was normally only aware of what I was seeing, and had taken for granted that I was seeing at all. My awareness had become preoccupied with the content of existence, not the fact of existence itself. Suddenly, it struck me as so peculiar that there was stuff out there to see at all, and especially peculiar that there was something present — me, evidently — to see it. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me there was anything odd, or at least curious, about this arrangement.

In that instant, the stars became more real, more imposing, though I can’t say their appearance changed. It was something like admiring a photograph of a tree, and then realizing you were looking at a real tree. This experience definitely had an effect on me, but I didn’t grasp its relevance right away. Read More

by David on September 6, 2010
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