Month: April 2021

Tynan, a blogger I have followed for years:

The biggest thing I learned is that people will like you for who you are. This sounds obvious and simple, but for years I just figured that there were one or two “very likeable” archetypes, and I wasn’t one of them. Media and pop culture set this trap and it’s an easy one for anyone to fall into.

What I found was very nearly the opposite. Someone acting cool is not scarce or interesting. Someone being genuine and authentic and presenting themselves through the clearest lens possible is extremely rare. These people are so rare that when you meet them you immediately like and respect them, even if you don’t have much in common with them or even want to be friends with them

This is a lot easier if you know who you are, know what you believe in, know what you stand for, and know what your values are. Imagine that you know all of those things and you know that you are doing a reasonably good job living by them and are striving to get better. If someone thinks negatively of you, you can know for sure that they just don’t know you well enough to know the truth. You have the proof that you are living up to the standards you have set for yourself.

– How to Be Secure

Some of this occurs naturally with most of us as our life ahead of us recedes, piling up year after year behind us: as the possibilities of what we can do with our lives shrink, we unconsciously end up making peace with the person we have become.

We can also be proactive – we can be deliberate about how, with who and in what we spend our time. Not only does it slow down the passage of time, it brings each of us face to face with the person we’ve become, and presents us opportunity after opportunity to adjust course. This turns passive acceptance into active shaping.

As you become aware of yourself as a person – your likes, dislikes, successes, failures, warts and virtues – you feel more secure. This is the essence of Tynan’s post. I also think being deliberate about how you spend your time helps you discover and shape yourself, accelerating your journey to self-assuredness.

“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”

– Louise Miller, Twitter.

As my internal model of the world evolves, I find this to be increasingly true.

Introspection and time form links between loves near and far. The more these nodes, the richer my model gets, the clearer the patterns that form, the more obvious the truths that emerge, the more visceral their understanding becomes, and the fewer the conflicts I experience.

This writer called off her wedding, but finds it hard to escape being constantly reminded of the relationship. On This Day photo reminders, anniversary emails, recommended topics to follow – all features that were previously welcome have now made her online world an emotional minefield.

When engineers build ad retargeting platforms, they build something that will continually funnel more content for the things you’ve indicated you’re interested in. On average, that’s the correct thing to do… [b]ut these systems don’t factor in when life has been interrupted. Pinterest doesn’t know when the wedding never happens, or when the baby isn’t born. It doesn’t know you no longer need the nursery. Pinterest doesn’t even know if the vacation you created a collage for has ended. It’s not interested in your temporal experience.

So much of our software has become more than a tool. Because the majority of popular software is either ad-driven directly or indirectly, many features now serve both the software provider and you. Re-surfacing old photos as ‘memories’ is meant to have you, the user, use the app by responding to the notificaton, a notification whose timing has been chosen to maximise the probability of you tapping it.

This is no longer a simple photo organiser that you use. Both you and the software’s maker are using each other.

This is deeply uncomfortable for me, not just on principle but also because in mere weeks or months I will face an event that’s will turn many past events into painful memories, and I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.

Olga Khazan says you can be a different person after the pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opinion/covid-personality-change.html

After all, the person who emerges from quarantine doesn’t have to be the same old you. Scientists say that people can change their personalities well into adulthood. And what better time for transformation than now, when no one has seen you for a year, and might have forgotten what you were like in the first place?

… now, it appears the idea that our personalities are immutable is also not quite true. Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality — extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness — within just a few months.

Like almost everyone around you, you have lost, gained, stressed, adapted. Some change in personality is going to be inevitable, I think. You may not even have the power or drive to be deliberate about it or influence it. The only question then is how conscious you will be of this change. So that over time, in less trying circumstances, you can mould it forward or backward.

(Via Jason Kottke https://kottke.org/21/04/you-can-be-a-different-person-after-the-pandemic)

(Part 1)

None of this is to defend or criticize meditation. Nor do I have easy solutions – or any solutions – to mitigate the risks that the articles vividly describe. These are my observations of the difficulties I’ve faced in my own years of practice. More of us need to understand that not only meditation a hard journey but also that breakthroughs are vastly more powerful than we expect.

The academic I K Taimni, in the preface to his masterful exposition of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, had this to say about people embarking on the practice of Yoga:

[the pursuit of the Yogic ideal] can be undertaken only on understanding fully the nature of human life and the misery and suffering which are inherent in it and the further realization that the only way to end this misery and suffering permanently is to find the Truth which is enshrined within ourselves, by the only method which is available, namely, Yogic discipline.

It is also true that the attainment of this objective is a long-term affair and the aspirant should be prepared to spend a number of lives—as many lives as may be required—in its wholehearted and single-minded pursuit. No one can know in the beginning his potentialities and how much time will be needed. He can hope for the best but must be prepared for the worst.

It cannot be, as he says, “undertaken as a mere hobby or to find an escape from the stress and strain of ordinary life.”

(ends)

I came across two recent articles (one, on BBC’s website and two, Harper’s Magazine) that described the ill-effects of meditation, including profiles of people who’ve had terrible experiences after meditation – both mindfulness and transcendental. I suggest you at least flip though both of them.

I credit meditation – along with a couple of other things – with helping me get through years of depression. Having had a regular meditation practice in the past, here are some observations:

• For months into my mindfulness practice, I attempted to pay attention to everything around me. The act of trying to notice everything at once caused immediate anxiety, and the rush of sensory input was overwhelming, and made for dozens of hours of unhappy sessions that left me more frazzled than when I began. It was months later that I learnt to notice only what my brain was already filtering in, without trying to manipulate those filters. That was a step-change in the quality of my practice, and therefore the effect it had on my well-being.

• I also attempted to breathe evenly and deeply. Oxygen over-saturation is a real thing, and it causes me to become light-headed, with a tingling sensation on my nose, fingers and toes. I worsened the feedback loop by attempting to notice the tingling even as my brain dealt with the light-headedness, and that led to some light hallucinations and a spike in stress levels.

• Finally, while mindfulness eventually does help you form a more sustainable relationship with yourself and the world around you, the path doesn’t appear to be simple. Some of the realisations I had felt like gigantic crises, the storm before the calm of acceptance and understanding. I can see why people who are hit with the sudden clarity of just how insignificant they, their lives, their stories are feel broken. To me it’s quite possible that their brains create automatic defence mechanisms that could manifest as paranoia or mania. I’m not sure how to tackle this: whether meditation is to be performed in the same sorts of careful setting that psilocybin is administered in some parts of the world today, or whether there are forms of Meditation Lite that ease practitioners into understanding.

(Part 2)