I've just recently started practicing more with Headspace and have realized this is what I am being guided towards.
I wonder has this affected the way you feel more positive emotions like happiness, joy? Or what about empathy?
I wonder has this affected the way you feel more positive emotions like happiness, joy? Or what about empathy?
Like taking away the kind of frazzledness you would associate with stress, inner city pressure, burnout etc—so it’s like going for a hike in some mountains, camping by a lake, waking up early and feeling like everything kind of flows more easily, or at least that would be the ideal when you imagine such a hike. If you stub your toe you scream but quickly come to your senses, so you don’t dwell unnecessarily, but it’s not like sitting around a campfire would be less joyful. A calm mind seems to be a good state for joy and empathy. Also it does seem reasonable to say that the default mood towards other people, without any “acute” emotions going on, is a peaceful, relaxed, curious affection—so maybe kind of cleaning up the emotional noise leaves you with a natural good mood.
Thus, I seem to have formed an addiction to screens and seem to have constantly a state of mild anxiety about what work I will have to do next. If I wasn’t ambitious I could scale back, but we are almost at the inflection point so now is no time to turn back.
My anger etc. (unless I am sleep derived) is minimal even without meditation. Very rarely do I “lose it” and even then it’s rational and with plenty of self deprecation and conflict resolution attempts which the other person has to reject for something to escalate.
I’m a while past my 20s and I’m not married and don’t have kids yet. I feel I am behind in some ways. The past few years of 6 days a week work from home (with normal hanging out w friends etc.) have left me in a curious state.
Here is my question. I feel pretty apathetic when I’m out, like I’ve already done everything. Camped, hiked, been on rooftops, been in comedy clubs, saw concerts, saw plays. Like it’s more of the same. The best thing for me emotionally is jiving with people who are easygoing and have a good sense of humor. Then it’s not where you are but who you’re with.
But I still have this overall sense of “nothing matters”. Like even you have a good time with friends, you’re just on a conveyor belt getting one day closer to the time of death. Sure you can distract yourself with nice conversation on the way but that’s all. No matter how much you accomplish, or do, once you’re not around to see it, it’s in a way totally pointless. I wonder all the time about what consciousness is and study theory of mind and Abrahamic religions. I try to understand what it means and why I am ok with not having been around before a certain year. Now that I am here I find the idea demotivating that one day it will somehow be just like a fictional universe that we are not able to experience. Existence itself is, to me, related to some conscious and possibly intelligent observers.
I have gone as far as I can work wise. If I had been doing the same thing day in and day out I would have long ago thrown in the towel and found something else to find meaning in, but my work has reached millions of people and I continue to build a snowball year after year. I realize everything about my life is pretty optimized for my work — I have cut out a commute, I don’t do various prayers and rituals that Jews do daily etc. I just can’t seem to bring myself to do many repetitive things every day unless I know exactly why I am doing them. But I am told by most orthodox Jews they are like meditation.
Billions of people live in communities. They uphold traditions those communities have trained them from a young age to do. They accept them. I grew up in individualist USA, live on my own, have no siblings, and have yet to start a family. This has caused this melancholy all the time. I can feel emotions in the moment but when I calm down I am aware it’s all meaningless. And I’ve done most things so the emotions are kinda dulled as well.
Sure I can take up a new hobby or busy myself with some other thing. I did those too (and of course they tended to be “productive”). Last summer I built a tent w furniture, for my local Jewish community, and I painted a giant mural w friends by the side of a highway. Things I had never done before. They were fun but now they are in the past.
And so we beat on, boats agains the current... borne ceaselessly into the next day.
Thoughts? Advice? I don’t think I am depressed, I am just always aware of the futility of it all. Perhaps I should read Ecclesiastes or Seneca.
What helped for me was a refresher of the evolution theory (Dutch book so no point recommending I guess), which suggests that you are here simply because you are here. There is no grand goal, no epic mission to fulfill, no gods to please. You are here because your parents were optimized for reproduction and raising children, who existed because their parents were etc. While this might seem depressing at first, I experience it to be very enlightening, as nothing indeed matters at all indeed. Things are what they are, nothing more, and thinking about whether it matters or not is hurting yourself (as it gets you into empty/unpleasant mind settings).
I think the proceeding stage of both that attitude and meditators in a "local minimum of realization" is that you start sitting back more, just observing. Enjoy the sound of the leaves during your hike, and instantly forgetting that when the sun hits you and you starting observing the heat. When the thought of "noting matters" hits you just observe the thought instead of letting it take you, it's bound to go away again anyways. It's a very basic way of handling the world, but extremely satisfying in a way that sensory pleasures aren't.
On an intellectual level, it helped to read a wide variety of philosophy & religions from people who seemed to have mastered the "art of living" (if you can call it such a thing). A rabbi predicating hate is a completely different one from a rabbi predicating love and kindness, even if they teach the same scripts. Below the surface, they all point towards the same "thing" that is in line with what I tried to explain above.
I hope it's in some way useful. Sorry if it's kind of vague, it's a concept that is hard to put into words :)
Couple of books that helped me: - The unthethered soul - Core books of taoism (lieh-tzy, chaung tzu, lao tzu) - Yoga sutras - Buddhism (sutra's and thich nhat hanh in example) - Stoicism (marcus aurelius, seneca)
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also outlines the same idea, and tries to explain how we got that way. Read it when I was a lot younger, but the concept has stayed with me.
You can be on the boat, day after day, and enjoy the feeling of wind in your hair, feel childlike irritation and curiosity at the sunburn forming, jump in the cool water before climbing back in, all without losing sight of the inevitable.
For a while I was near to settling in as a "Buddhist," I recited vows and so on, but I walked away from that identity and those collectives for various reasons. Actually I think a lot of Western Buddhism comes from trying to find a solution to meaning-related breakdowns in our societies, which is why it grew as part of the general counterculture of the '60s, etc.
Considered as a way of dealing with meaning crisis, breathing meditation looks like a pragmatic and direct technique. It just decreases anxiety in the body through stillness, deep breathing, and various calming stuff (incense, bells, serene architecture, etc). Like a really good sauna without all the sweating. If this doesn't solve the question of ultimate meaning then at least it directly improves your daily experience of life. It's designed to deal with existential confusion by showing thought in general to be ephemeral and nonessential. You pay attention to what your experience is like aside from the discursive, ruminative, extraneous thinking processes, and so loosen your attachments to those processes, which leaves more cognitive space for the senses, activity, participation, the "present moment."
This would be hard to justify from a meaning-searching rational perspective because it's basically an impulse to turn down the volume on rational search for grand meanings beyond the current experience. But it feels good and wholesome, like exercise or sauna.
David Chapman talks about "meaningness" as the structures and drives and satisfactions that occur despite our mortality, despite knowledge of mortality, in basic reality rather than ultimate reality (well, leaving place for imagination, devotion, even faith), without need or hope for eternity or final justification. This kind of meaning is hard to escape.
Maybe family, community, ritual, religion provide abundant and straightforward daily meaningness. Work, too, kind of. Maybe it's also good to diversify your meaningness portfolio. If one day you suddenly doubt your church, say, you might just want to focus on the gym for a while.
> "I feel pretty apathetic when I’m out, like I’ve already done everything. Camped, hiked, been on rooftops, been in comedy clubs, saw concerts, saw plays. Like it’s more of the same. The best thing for me emotionally is jiving with people who are easygoing and have a good sense of humor. Then it’s not where you are but who you’re with."
As far as I can tell it's okay to be somewhat apathetic. Hiking is just walking around on a trail eating nuts and complaining about mosquitoes or whatever. You might find a nice spot to sit and have coffee. It's a decent way to spend time. Maybe this is an easier way to think about it than as an "experience" that has to be meaningful or somehow outlive itself.
Actually in my experience hiking is very similar to meditation in that the presence of thought and language becomes somehow annoying after a while. I've resorted to saying mantras over and over while walking because I just get tired of my thoughts. They kind of ruin the view sometimes. If you're out for longer then you naturally get quieter, especially for example your thoughts about work might fade away. There's these rhythmic bodily activities and a certain exhaustion and vivid presence. And the purity of nature. So it's quite a lot like a meditation retreat.
Sorry that there's no overarching point to this long comment... I'm up too late!
I don't know if it is meditation or more my studying of philosophy (both in college and on my own time) that has led to my ability to control my emotions better. I would also say my emotions are ephemeral, but that's really because I understand them better. When they are justified, and helpful, I can nurture them and encourage them and indulge in them just fine. And if they're not, usually I can let them pass. There are exceptions, of course, for deep-seated things that I need more repeated attempts at suppression to change. Emotions are essentially a trained response, after all. Even if you intellectually know they're nonsensical, it has to be retrained.