How to Exist
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind of work given our 200'000 years of task-based genetics versus 150 years of time controlling your action.
And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.
TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
> We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers.
It's nice to think that our ancestors didn't have to work as hard, because it justifies our own desire for more leisure time. IMO that desire is justified anyways; but premodern subsistence farming/any sort of self-supported lifestyle is incredibly labor-intensive compared to modern agriculture, regardless of whether you're a serf or a freeholder.
This reads like, "My job is very complicated, yours is very simple."
> modafinil
Militaries once issued coca, while opium was sold at markets as recently as the 1930s (over-the-counter).
Across the board it seems like things were rougher and cruder “back then” whenever ever back then was.
They had more freedom in other ways.
And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.
Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.
… what?
No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.
I understand that you're saying:
> [slavery] is not representative of farming as labor
But I disagree, since it clearly has been. Military, prison, servitude, employment, even the tyranny of "the man of the house" - all these hierarchical authoritarian social structures (whether or not they were ever noble or righteous, or useful) have improved ethically over time in the lives of those subjected to the violence of these systems - the conditions used to be a lot worse, across the board.
Labor is not solved in terms of ethics, but it's a lot better now.
What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?
I’ll take now
I’m just suggesting a world where jails and prisons are literally replaced with batteries and datacenters. It’s a medieval institution at best.
You would work dawn til dusk, but you would: milk the cows at 06 AM, have a walk/chat/game with friends, bring the animals out, have breakfast, have a nap, refill water for animals, do some weeding, go have lunch with the other workers, etc. Then in the evening you bring the animals back in. So while you had a "15 hour workday" on the clock, your day is not consisting of actions and improvements without an end that can be done indefinitely, but by tasks that arise gradually at certain moments. All the time between the tasks is "time off" in the modern interpretation, and then you have a completely different view of work, because there is no pressure to produce at any point.
I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars.
I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.
There are still jobs like that, but living standards have increased so much that they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones, to the point that it's considered like a "boomerism" to suggest doing jobs that people in other countries are happy to take to live at a 1970's standard of living.
Even in the US there are seasonal blue collar jobs like that. Youth generally last until 25 or so now though, and that's partly just a skill issue/matter of mindset, because it didn't sound weird for a 20 year old to work in a factory or on a boat back then like it does now.
IMO the giant difference between now and then is the massive gap in income/wealth between people just starting out or working 1970's style jobs, and jobs with global reach and high leverage (ie the most capable produce 2-100+ times the value, but the average person produces nothing of value or negative value). There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's. I think that's what causes most of the angst tbh, that there is so much more opportunity cost and variance in outcomes now because of global trade/technology, if you just want to work to live you're not going to the same results as people who live to work, or people living places where they literally have to "work to live".
To be honest I don't think the boomer mindset of just working to live and play with your expensive toys was ever a very good one, because it led to the consumerism that makes people think they need $10M to retire or seek $200k jobs right out of college without actually wanting to do those things enough to achieve them (and not needing them anyway)
This is not a new problem and does not lay at the feet of job seekers. Manufacturing trades are a few decades ahead of software development in this respect. Before off-shoring, being a tool and die maker was one of the most consistent paths to getting a really well-paying job. It took a long time to get into it: often a decade or more of on-the-job experience and only the best machinists qualified. But they’re crucial to most manufacturing, so most companies, even small ones, had a path to progressively bring new, inexperienced people into the trade, build their skills, and turn them into the people that companies needed. Then, off-shoring meant that they didn’t need as many tool and die guys as they used to have, so they mostly stopped taking apprentices. As time progressed, they had a seeming never-ending stream of experienced people to fill those dwindling roles, but now, there’s a problem: almost all of the people from the original system are retiring, and almost nobody’s been training apprentices, so the entire industry is at risk of losing that crucial manufacturing skill. Meanwhile, China has tens of thousands because 80s executives sent all of our knowledge over there in the 80s and 90s and they just kept progressing. As an aside, anybody who says “there will be new jobs,” as a response to the possibility of AI-driven job loss should visit the rust belt. There were new jobs— we as a society just didn’t care enough about the people we discarded to help them see the benefits of that.
Companies in the US right now, tech notwithstanding, largely see no commitment to helping maintain a labor pool, or help individual workers progress into more useful workers. They think it’s immoral to spend a dime on anything that isn’t going to contribute directly to this quarter’s bottom line.
> there are jobs like that
Yes I understand this. I’m a tradesman and I encounter all levels of blue collar workers far more frequently than just about anyone around here.
> they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones
People don’t hold out on those jobs. I see people doing them all the time. They’re no different from uber or DoorDash. You just don’t see people doing those jobs as a career because they can’t provide you, let alone your family, with basic necessities.
Firstly, those jobs aren’t stable enough to bet your housing on, let alone with kids or whatever. Secondly, they never offer health insurance, which is an absolute must in the United States where your kid breaking their arm could put a low-wage family in the red for literally years. Let alone getting cancer or something.
> living standards have increased so much
Standards of living have not universally increased- the cost of convenience goods, electronics, entertainment, clothing, and other things have decreased. The cost of many necessities, such as housing, health care, and education, have all increased much more quickly. Go look for some visualizations that juxtapose the basic cost of living with wage growth since the 1970s— life, in general, was SO much cheaper then. It was SO MUCH EASIER for young people to get their adult lives started. Then look for a visualization that shows, for each year, what the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of the federal minimum wage was since the 70s. Blue Collar wage growth peaked in 1981.
> There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's.
To whom, how many jobs are there vs the population size, and how long does one basically need to be floated to get into it surely enough to make it a career? One of the biggest correlating factors among people who successfully founded businesses was having enough family support (money, connections) to float them through multiple failures and get a foothold. Even if there are more people for whom that’s true, that does not mean it’s a generally viable path. It requires starting on second base.
The amount of wealth concentrating in the higher echelons and the widening chasm between them and everyone else show how little those opportunities avail themselves to most people.
Life has gotten much better for the wealthy. Everyone else is hurting and cheap flat screen TVs don’t change that.
Hard pass, I'd rather talk to his union rep.
A hundred years is not a long time ago. its post industrial revolution, so after the cultural (and often legal) switch to work being measured by time spent. What about a thousand years ago? A lot of claims I have read for more leisured times in the past go back to hunter-gatherer cultures so much further back still.
Sticking to a thousand years ago, it would be task driven. They also had cultures, and usually religions that encouraged time off work, and with practices that encouraged not focusing on work. Religious holidays, sabbath day rules, payer, especially meditative prayer, but also formulaic prayer and pauses, periods of silence, hymns and so on. Even the meditation described in the article sounds like a secular version of religious meditation.
Feeding yes.
The agricultural examples are not representative of the human past that forged our genetic structure.
Hominins are about 5 millions years old. Humans, 2m years. Modern humans, 300k years. Agriculture appeared around 10k years ago in the Middle-East, later in other parts of the world. So most of the human past is about hunting and gathering.
Apart from this detail, I wonder if there are well established scientific argument that make that "genetics of behavior" the main factor in our modern behavior. At first glance it looks like a wild theory, created by a journalist who wrote self-help books and held a psychology column.
Could you expand/explain this more?
This is because there is no guarantee that you can keep living the same routine till the day you die.
Also, humans are builders. Doing nothing and waiting for the seasons to change like cows in a field might not be in our DNA. Restlessness is our natural state, that's why we have all this stuff.
Something accelerated the restlessness, perhaps language?
Look up David Harvey's work, I think it was less language and more certain economic patterns demanding acceleration.
Great book, but I have pinned down my obsession with action to my daily single cup of coffee habit. The idea of relaxation doesn't exist. When I sit down, it takes a minute before my brain desperately tries to find something to do. Guilt soon overcomes me. Even in the extreme anhedonia of the first days of caffeine withdrawal, I am able to glimpse a state of mind where idleness is both natural and restorative. I strongly feel that my creativity suffers because I am unable to allow my mind to drift, daydream, laze around on the couch without immediate goals other than the contemplation of life. Too bad I am too brain-washed (and lazy) to go through the unpleasant mental phase to drop the brew.
It is no wonder that our caffeine-addicted society is all about action, and we are unable to truly relax.
Necessary disclaimers given the topic and the constant disinformation: yes, I have ADHD. No, caffeine does not relax anyone's brain due to its mode of action, and any claim of doing so is misunderstanding the chemical pathways involved. The vast majority of us are too addicted and not self-aware enough to notice the effect coffee has on our lives, yet are ready to claim it's the miracle brew that only has positive side-effects
You won’t feel like coffee, because you feel terrible.
You won’t notice the withdrawal symptoms, because the flu symptoms are the same but much worse.
Caffeine withdrawal takes only a week or so, so by the time the flu is gone, the addiction is as well.
Just (“just”) remember to not get that habitual cup of morning coffee on the first day you feel kinda OK again, that’s the only hard bit really.
The reason you can't is because in this sentence, you are saying you can't (or won't).
The "cup" measure of coffee is a blunt quantization. My ideal amount is approx 3-4 oz.
It's amazing how productive I believe I am when I drink coffee, yet my attention is all over the place and I think a lot of that feeling of productivity is placebo and/or chemically induced euphoria. Next I want to try tea to compare.
One thing's for sure: I used to meditate best, for longer and deeper, when I was taking dexamfetamine medication and was abstaining from coffee. Caffeine for ADHD is overrated and I will gladly die on this hill.
I still get the restlessness. It’s just easier to sleep at the end of the day.
15 years of social distracting your timed action
1 years of agents driving your untimed actionAll minus 13, https://www.fanbolt.com/161001/pluribus-explained-how-the-hi...
the hive mind’s biggest weakness might just be the concept of “or” in a world that only understands “and.”For most of humanity's history, these tasks weren't so labor-intensive. So, evolutionarily, perception of these tasks evolved as a form of relaxation, not a job.
It is like you have a full time job of every waking hour, but that job on 80% consist of scrolling tik-tok, hanging out with friends and playing sports
Farming will keep you very busy (as a few people have pointed out), but it's mostly caring for projects you personally own. As the title of the book suggests, Graeber is more concerned with why people don't seem to be content in hourly jobs, but he's an anthropologist not an economist so he says a lot about historical work too.
It had a counter of your current uninterrupted streak. (Meditating every day) I kept at it. First for 5 minutes a day. Soon for 10m a day. Then 20m
Then twice a day at 20m.
Then semi-guided, and in the end unguided (only a beep at the end).
I never felt anything from it. Truly. Nada. Not better, or worse or calmer or more present or really really nothing.
Yes while meditating I would catch my mind drift, I would come back to the breathing and continue the count.
After this has been on for over 6 months and my counter of my streak was nearing 200. I decided to skip a day, only to see if I would get back to it if my counter was back at 0.
Result?
I never meditated again. Could it be that did it wrong? Possibly.
Could it be that it just doesn't work on me? Possibly and this is the one explanation I'm going with
The whole thing is just...nothing
My theory: I'm a very non-anxious, relaxed person, hardly affected by stress. So mindfulness did nothing for me, I don't need more calming down.
What I tried next was transcedental meditation (I think it's also called mantra meditation, basically pick a word and kind of focus on it) and this was when meditation got really interesting for me. I fell into different states, and came back from it with intense focus and energy. This was the first time I felt something from meditation and it was way more interesting.
Unfortunately I also stopped that after a few months. Also talking to an experienced friend, wanting more interesting things or trying to achieve different states in meditation is an antipattern, you shouldn't wish for anything, so I guess it's just hard :)
Maybe it's not what you needed at the moment, especially if you're not an anxious person. But these days most people are anxious or stressed out, and the barest amount of meditation can help tremendously. Or it might do nothing, everyone is different.
There's a whole other vipassana side of the spectrum focused on insight. The way it's been described to me is that the concentration side, while having its own merits, is often used to support the insight work, rather than necessarily being a goal on its own.
Respects to you for being able to stick with meditation for that long without seeing a result, perhaps the plain mindfulness didn't do much for you since you already had a mentality that was capable in the way it would've helped.
If you were mainly focused on that one app though, if you have any remaining curiosity / patience for this what I'd suggest is experimenting with all sorts of practices for a short period of time each and just see if you feel particularly pulled to any of them. They all are "meditative" and involve specific ways of directing your attention/awareness/consciousness, they're all different paths to the same place, and I believe that different people are meant to take different paths.
Here's some areas you can look into and what you might be able to receive from it:
- There's contemplative practices of reflecting inward not to notice thoughts but to notice that which is doing the noticing. It's trying to seek out your true nature by taking the argument of "I can notice my thoughts therefore they are not me" further than that to "I can notice the noticing of thoughts too, so I'm not that either, so what am I?". The app "Waking Up" has some guided stuff in this area. Aside from simply an exercise in curiosity, there's a difference in how you move through the world and feel moved by the world as your understanding of what "you" are changes, just like how understanding that you are not your thoughts can be a radical change for someone. Advaita Vedanta is a whole field of philosophical inquiry around this type of thing if you're more attracted to that logical side.
- There's all sorts of breathing practices that can calm you or energize you or bring about all sorts of subtle changes that are really hard to put into words.
- There's chakra-based practices which rather than having to entertain chakras as a real thing you can interpret as just "this is a practice that is meant to produce a specific type of effect around what the chakra represents". You can think of them as categories of practices like exercising different muscle groups. Whether they work in the way they're described or not who knows, it's something you can just experiment with.
- There's practices that help with restfulness and sleep like Yoga Nidra, where it genuinely (scientifically proven, some people call it NSDR) can bring similar benefits to sleep
- There's the whole space of Yoga and Tai Chi if you want something more physical or flowy
So perhaps "the whole thing is just... nothing" is true for "the whole of what you tried for you", but the _real_ whole is much much more than just that.
Though in your position I'd be far too lazy to try these lol, I'm lucky in that starting off with the app _did_ feel like it produced a notable mental benefit so I had the reinforcement loop to keep exploring.
The one that had the most distinctive effect for me is zhan zhuang. Song Gao has a really excellent instructional video on YouTube about the basic method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCVUojtpS80
Remember that the people who teach this type of stuff (when they aren't fraudsters) put a huge amount of time into learning the technique well and need to find at least a few people that interested to pass on the technique but if you aren't working towards doing that you can get a lot of benefit in much less time. Song Gao recommends in a different video doing zhan zhuang for at least 30 mintues a day, but I would say (agreeing with the tai chi instructor whose blog pointed me to these videos) that just doing it once for 15-20 minutes (it may take some time to work up to that) provides a lot of benefit (in my case including both a distinctive feel of enhanced perception and eliminating, for at least a couple of months until it came back less intense than previously, the fairly minor pain I would get in my shoulders when I end up standing at a computer for a few hours nonstop, though of course I still try to move around more often). I started doing it a bit more often a few months after that first time so I can't say how long the pain reducing effect would retain some effect not doing it again but it is clear to me that you don't need to do it anywhere near daily to have major positive effects. While doing it I've noticed both muscle soreness in a number of places and had mild panic attacks but unless it gets too severe it seems like the brain can work through it just by holding the pose (I have a couple of times needed to stop due to increasing pain). I didn't the first time but since then often listen to music which I suspect like with qigong is not offically correct (though the videos I watched didn't say one way or another that I noticed) and likely reduces the meditative aspect in some ways but makes it easier and I enjoy it.
The article mentioned how we have a tendency to want to move on to the next thing even when doing something we enjoy, which I have definitely found to be the case (though I am disabled and have more time available than most people and already do almost everything more slowly than most people). One potentially impactful form of mindfulness would be to just focus on this part and try to be more present in the moment when doing whatever it is you enjoy. As I understand it this is a major focus of tantra (where the thing it is know for in the US is just one possible application, nothing intrinsic or even common). I haven't tried any formal methods around this but have found it valuable to intentionally be more mindful and at times consider and untangle the related ideas of satisfaction, fun, enjoyment, etc.
It's like saying you heard about this food thing and tried eating beans every day for months and didn't see what the fuss was about. But maybe you just needed to try bread and butter!
I switched to a five minute breathing exercise to encourage deep sleep, and that actually has been profound.
Getting 7 to 8 hours of good / deep sleep every night is quite literally one of the best things you can do for yourself.
Maybe give it go.
I thought it was an interesting discussion.
It’s not to say that listing to it will help you or someone else to change anything about it. But it’s a known observed phenomenon that some people don’t get what meditation is and don’t get why would you do it.
I see this study cited often, and I always reject this interpretation. I'm perfectly content sitting for long periods, with or without my thoughts, but if you give me an electric toy I've never seen before, of course I'll play with it! Can I make muscles twitch? Move my arm? Are some parts more sensitive/conductive? What happens at the limits?
For me, the pain would be the cost of playing with a new toy that gives me novel sensations. I would do it even if I had other, less painful activities available. It's not necessarily a way to avoid boredom or whatever else the common interpretation claims.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1oo299...
What I learnt is, recent generations have too much of self awareness, causing the communities and groups to become weaker, compared to the tribal settlements that helped humans to dominate other species.
do you happen to be the narrator of notes from the underground?
For example, people in my community are mostly known by their family name, and not by individual's name. Family name alone is used as far as possible. My grandpa never liked to be called by his own name.
The idea is, as long as there is someone to carry the family name, individuals should not matter.
The "individual" is short-hand for negative freedoms, and from this you can derive many of the same values as the "community" types want.
For example, you can say that carbon pollution is an infringement of an individual's negative freedoms. You can also say that it's bad for society's functioning and public health. This is one example where the lens of the individual and community give the same result.
Typically these two words point to different resolutions of analysis, one concerned with a unit of analysis that can be more easily understood and more credibly ascribed rights (the single suffering human), the other concerned with the global system dynamics where the analysis is more difficult but can also reveal some emergent phenomena (sociology, economics).
under what circumstances is it beneficial to have less awareness of oneself?
Like, when you're at a party, not having fun, but instead thinking: "I am drinking alcohol to lower my social inhibitions at the cost of worse sleep and long-term health benefits, because I think in the long run the possible connections made here and the subsequent rise in social status will be worth it"
Awareness is about the senses, as well as having the experience to predict what will happen next, and plan accordingly. Awareness is 100% about balancing the sensing and the planning.
The sensing is important, but not for its own sake. If you overcorrect in that direction, it's just self-indulgence and hedonism.
One thought I had while reading it: isn't trying to get more comfortable with doing nothing just another thing to do? isn't it another form of changing what already is?
EDIT: I'm advocating and practicing mindfulness but I always have this thought on the background and it's a real dilemma. Any thoughts?
It's my favourite puzzle about meditation. You have to approach it sideways, but if you really try that it won't work. So you try hard not to that instead, which won't work either. It's kind of funny how focusing on your breath tends to work, but... don't hold that thought.
It's a contradiction, and that's okay. Get comfortable with it ;-)
None of those things are doing meditation wrong, they're just things minds do. The mistake is in focusing on them instead of focusing on the process generating the changes.
The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.
Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.
It became clear to me at some point that meditation was another way I was creating some standard for good or bad, and comparing myself to it. Would be annoyed at myself if I weren’t “mindful enough” etc. I think even if you don’t have this tendency, but you’re still meditating with the intent to be in a certain state or arrange things a certain way, you’re still doing a minor version of this - how I was before, not good, how I am now, better.
What I do now instead of meditating is to just sit without doing anything on purpose. I don’t try to prevent myself from thinking or direct my intention in any way. So I just am as I am - maybe my mind wanders, maybe it doesn’t. This way there’s no contradiction. When I’m anxious, I’m anxious. When my mind wanders, it wanders. When I think about cheese, I’m thinking about cheese. If I think “I’m feeling kind of present right now”, then there’s “I’m feeling kind of present right now”. And before I know it, it’s something different
Then don't. It's exactly the point to not do that. Meditation needs non-attachment imho. Because when you're attached (I need this to feel a certain way, something must happen) you can't really be observant of your thoughts and sensations, you're one with them.
All that said I think if someone wants to choose to meditate, or to spend time being aware of feelings or whatever form of meditation they choose, they’re totally welcome to do that. And I agree that if you do that, it’s helpful to focus on the process rather than the outcome.
A side note: the experience of meditation alone and in groups is very different. There’s a reason why people who are “serious about it” (or seriously interested) do it in community.
A common occurrence is the thought that oneself is thinking or labeling too much. This is close to the recursion / self-reference you are referring to. The practice thereof is to simply accept that (and your labeling of inner activity and all wrapped up in that) and carry on abiding. The inner chatter that you are not meditating well enough is a funny one.
Liken it to brushing your teeth: you can't really judge it. You probably did it good enough. It's more important to keep doing it steadily every day than to evaluate progress.
Meditation, in the Therevada tradition at least, never claimed to be nothing, it uses doing to undermine it.
"If Sunday afternoons were extended for months, where would humanity get to, liberated from sweat, from the weight of the first curse? The experiment would be worth the trouble. It is more than likely that crime would become the sole diversion, that debauchery would seem candor, shouting melody and jeers tenderness. The sensation of time's immensity would make each second into an intolerable torment, a sublime firing squad. In hearts imbued with poetry would appear a blasé cannibalism and a hyena's melancholy; butchers and executioners would die out—of lethargy; churches and brothels would split with sighs. The universe transformed into a Sunday afternoon... it is the very definition of ennui, and the end of the universe."
I don't have difficulty with this. Doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and simultaneously feeling perfectly at ease just comes naturally. I know that my experience is not universal and that many people do struggle with this. If you struggle with this and you were wondering, serenity really is very nice, and I wish I could share it, and I'm sorry that I can't.
It's not.
> I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function
It isn't.
> I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable
Not having an opinion about everything for 3 minutes != vegetable.
The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new. Neither is the polarizing fascination/dismissal it entails.
Quite the elitist thing to say and a bit obsolete in the type of overly-connected world we live in today. Perhaps the author just shared personal experience; they did in fact write that the word „meditation“ was deliberately omitted.
The second rule conflicts with the first making this impossible.
Any experienced meditator knows that to 'be content' isn't a passive action. You have to think to do it.
If you truly practice no thought, there is no 'content' to be.
As an experiment, just get in a nice running shower, so your sensory system will get external stimulation. YMMV, but for me three minutes pass quick. I just did that and when I decided to check the time it was almost 5 minutes already.
Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be, just chilling out and observing whatever is happening without actively participating - and three minutes is a pretty low mark for that, unless we’re talking about fellas with ADHD.
> Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be
Yes that's it. That's what Zen, wu wei etc all point to.
I've looked at this a lot and my current view point is any actual concept of enlightenment was probably something invented by an 'influencer' in meditation circles thousands of years ago.
Before kids I was on and off into meditation,my place in the world, being calm or w/e.
Sure, I spontaneously zone out sometimes, but purposely meditating is always the experience above.
I'm fine with doing nothing for a long time[0], but know friends and family members that struggle with not filling idle time with their phone. I do think this is learned behavior that people can adjust over time with practice (i.e. meditation).
0: I'm a voracious reader, frequent solo traveler, and was a paid photographer for a bit. Sitting, observing, and thinking is something that I do on a daily basis and comes naturally to me.
Is that an example of how to exist? How not to exist? I can see an argument for either one lol.
Whether or not that's what they had in mind idk, but it's what it immediately made me think of. I traded near absolute freedom for money, but that's just something you have to do as you get older I guess.
It’s clear when you see the picture of the cat in the article that the cat has none of these concerns.
I’d consider this to be a form of meditation - still containing ideas of “this, not that”.
Something that has felt much more rewarding to me is to really just exist, but without any ideas of being present, or things you must do or not do. I just sit and take a break from doing anything on purpose. My mind might wander, or it might not. When it does “wander”, and I realize that it’s been wandering it almost feels like a miracle - how is this thing doing this on its own? But that’s not really the point either. Whatever is here now, is here now, whether you notice it or not. And by the time you notice it, it’s gone. So what difference is there between thinking and not thinking?
Since then, two things happened. One is that I completely lost interest in meditation. The second is that I feel I've become a lot better at emotional regulation and self-awareness. It's hard to tell whether meditation actually played a role in this, or whether it was other things I was doing, or just a natural consequence of aging and accumulated experience.
Now my thoughts on meditation are that it's probably moderately beneficial, especially for someone like me prone to anxiety and depression and lacking in healthy lifestyle habits. But I'm skeptical of claims that it has unique benefits when compared to any other focused, rigorous activity like physical training, serious reading and writing, or playing a musical instrument. Or for that matter, eating a healthy diet and getting enough sleep.
This isn't always true. It's likely true only when there is no pressure. However, when there is pressure, one can "do nothing" for long periods. If you haven't experienced that, you've lived a blessed life, and you have more to learn.
Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair?
I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion.
I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity when achievable (which, as the author acknowledges, these things sometimes aren't). But I am slightly miffed by the implication that any failure to reach such state is an inability to attain something as fundamental as "existence".
(end rant)
Obviously it is trivial to merely exist. All of us are doing it with (for the majority of us who are healthy) minimal effort.
The author is taking artistic license with the word as a shorthand for a specific form of existing well which is something that many people struggle with, and that many people would readily associate with this use of the term.
Depends on the specific definition of the verb existing we are talking about, right?
90% of "I'm too autistic"-insecurities boil down to words being not clearly defined (or them being clearly defined, but either people using them without care or you not being aware of the definition they use). A word isn't magically stuck the the abstract concept it refers to, people can mean different things while using the same word. In philosophy for example it is very apparent that one author's definition of existence (or any other abstract concept, like freedom) may differ fundamentally from another author's.
We can all agree that sometimes the use of an word has unfortunate side effects, like turning something simple like existence into something you can suck at. This often boils down to (A) a use of the concept we are not aware of, e.g. if Paul Satré used the word existence, he has writen thousand page book on his specific meaning of the word and the author having read Satré unbeknownst to us refers to Satré's definition or (B) the author just chose a word that sounded cool and picked somewhat imprecisely.
I think here (as so often) it is the latter, but to cut them some slack: colloquially people will say things like "I feel like I am not even existing/alive". And what they often mean by that is that their life passes in full automation mode, with them barely having any present thought at any moment — wake up, commute, work, rinse, repeat. If that is your problem, doing something that gets you out of that automation state is good.
However I believe that many pasttimes can do that, e.g. playing music, climbing, a walk through an unknown landscape, etc. I am pretty certain there are indigenous people out there who probably don't even know of this problem to begin with, they simply just exist in their present moment. So this isn't generally hard for a human being. But it can be hard to some.
It's pretty obvious from context that the author means "do nothing other than exist and experience that feeling" when he says "exist". Why does the author use that specific word? Because he liked it better than other words, and I do think it makes more sense and flows better in the context of the article than something line "stasis."
I don't know if you're actually autistic or using the word as a generic term to describe your personality, but if it's the former, my input is that it's generally beneficial to give people the benefit of the doubt, steelman their position, and just move on when you notice minor things you dislike. Filling the world with negative feedback for minor quibbles doesn't make anyone's life better.
But people are not happy with it just being message, they want to espouse it as a religion or something that will fundamentally change your thinking etc. But imo an asshole will still remain as asshole even if they medidate everyday.
If you just look at the mechanics of breathing and thought control, they can be pretty useful to apply especially if you are prone to high anxiety. But there is nothing in it that will make you a better person or help you exists or whatever
There's a lot of woo around meditation and mindfulness, but I genuinely believe that one of the most valuable habits I've acquired is just sitting still for a few minutes in the morning with zero distractions and observing where my mind goes.
9 times out of 10 it tells me exactly what it wants/needs to deal with that day, and if I want to stay emotionally balanced and pursue my deepest callings, I need to follow its suggestion.
If I don't do this I become out of touch with my inner state, less focused, less intentional, and over time, emotionally erratic.
The article's caution about doing this exercise if you have a condition like PTSD is very good advice, because eventually, the real shit you need to deal with will rear its head.
Everything you need for self-understanding and balance is there in your mind, speaking to you, all the time. Most of the time instead of listening we pull out our phones and distract ourselves. Or maybe we do what other people have told us to or follow some other drive.
But if you can and do set all that aside and just listen to the mind from time to time, it's almost a superpower. I suspect that many of humanity's greatest works have come about this way. Someone listening to what their mind just wouldn't shut up about, creating the conditions for hundreds or thousands of hours of flow state, and then just following its lead.
> See how long it takes before you’re dying for it to be over.
This is actually true and it shows that they have properly done the exercise correctly. The reason is that daily living creates psychological sludge which somehow gets embedded on the level of feelings. Those stuck feelings are what give that sense.
Once the thought layer is peeled focus comes on feelings and then let's just say there's one more layer beneath into full blown Presence which is blissful. Why it's blissful to this day I still don't understand.
Alternative interpretation: my existence is not about sitting there, getting mouldy on the sofa. It never crosses my mind that I should feel unrest because I can't / don't want to just sit there and do nothing, nor does it feel like a revelation to think about it. Maybe it also says something about you if this is something you worry about on some deep level.
If something happens, and I allow it to break the flow of things, I become stressed and worried and time flies. When I allowed myself to simply exist for a week, without a crazy planned-in-advance vacation, the week felt like a month. No joking.
Where this urge to always rush comes from is a good question. I imagine it's very much cultural, we're expected to rush and be busy.
>Each year, roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson in North America, often on multiple counts. Most often they are young, new firefighters, frustrated by the lack of action.
Is someone tricking LLMs into writing articles about firefighter arson?
Fundamentally you can be at ease with city noise just like you can be with mental distraction. One of the big misconceptions about meditation for example tends to be that it's about avoiding or actively quieting noise be that internal or external. It's not about changing the content of your conscious experience but your relationship to it.
Profound insight that really gets to the root of rumination.
> By “don’t do anything,” I mean don’t move, don’t fidget, don’t indulge any thoughts or daydreams.
It’s a bit tricky because sometimes you get caught focusing on being the observer and letting sensations pass. It’s a more subtle thought but as you practice those subtle sensations become more apparent. It’s a useful sensation in the beginning to let the more “coarse” sensations and feelings go but eventually you need to let that go too.
You can have the experience without it too, just sit there for a long time and follow the instruction you shared. Yes keeping the rule in your head is a thing to fixate on, but there's a little trick.
You see people spin balls or beads in their hands, or sometimes do a little puzzle in their mind, and claim it aids with meditation. Well, sometimes a small repetitive thing to focus on can be just as good as pure silence. This is the basis of mantras. If you do the same thing over and over and over and over it's the same unchanging rhythm as the background silence you're trying to achieve. It's only when we have all these decisions dragging us every which way that it's not possible to fall into the meditative state.
So what is it - the "state" - it's basically when you forget you're there. The longer, the more psychedelic of an experience that is. You've probably already achieved it sitting bored in class, or staring off while tired. That's it.
You can become better at forgetting yourself and "slipping into it" (or rather out of mental thoughts and into the abyss of relaxing nothingness) on demand, and get better at doing it for longer, or you can use inebrients to aid in the process.
Sometimes when you come to - you had basically a dream. That can feel profound enough for some to build a religion around this kind of thing.
That has been my experience at least
--Pascal
I wonder if maybe there’s something of a swelling ocean full of people suffering from low-level PTSD, even just from the trauma of staying alive and well in a society that you feel increasingly untethered from, as if stuck in place while the universe expands farther in every direction. The arriving tide of midlife crises for a generation of Palahniuk’s “middle-children of history”, those who had the wherewithal and luck to avoid serious addictions and hereditary alcoholism, but who still can’t really afford to be sufficiently medicated under a doctor’s supervision, either. So we resort to the permanent morphine drip of distraction, mainlining dopamine via headphone IVs.
The bottom half of a socioeconomic bell curve that’s being aggressively flattened, as if there were a pandemic of mediocrity and wasted potential. Stuck between a misspent youth, and an increasingly uncertain future.
TLDR; I think this is a very good first step for a lot of like-minded somewhat damaged folks. I ultimately took a similar approach—mindful meditation with breathing exercises—to treat my own PTSD, it worked better than Xanax to tamp down the anxiety attacks.
P.S. - Anyone who points out my em dashes can go sit on dem dashes. This comment was boutique, artisan, 100% organic bullshit. No memory prices were harmed in the making of this comment.
It sounds like the author drinks too much caffeine. This definitely isn't unusual in rat race culture, but it's also by no means the universal human experience.
Especially long runs do wonders, I get into a relaxed trance like state which sticks even after running. Maybe it's the exhaustion or the fact that the energy is spent somewhere other than my brain, but I don't care, it feels nice.
- Rene Descartes
I think this is way over-philosophizing and missing the basics of modern life.
Many people live in capitalist societies and are well-adapted to continuous 1) consumption and 2) production, both of which keep the economy spinning and neither of which involve doing nothing.
Whether that's good or bad is up for debate, but to attribute the difficulty of "doing nothing" to the fundamental human condition is a huge stretch.
"Try doing this thing."
"No."
"You can't do it because of your deficiencies."
"I won't do it because all you've done is spout a bunch of pseudoscience."
Sun up to sun down just sitting or standing doing nothing. Occasionally yell at their dog which has never been to a beach or park, both of which are less than 1 mile away. Blaring loud music, the same rhythmic narcissism over and over, just sitting around without a single creative or productive thought “chillin”
Hey what are you doing?
“Chillin”
Why? Your life’s in shambles
“Huh? No I chillin”
That’s how most are already spending their ~80 years.
So, I kinda hate meditation. I like building things, playing in the ocean, creating, writing, traveling, eating ice cream with friends getting caught up on their lives.
I’m LIVIN! Not chillin or meditating.
I don’t want to be a human being, but a human doing!
I think all these people are escaping the same thing - their own mortality.
but I appreciate your comment regardless
I am not a professional and I'm not trying to be dismissive here, but I'm pretty sure you're just describing general anxiety.
Nobody truly has a hard time "doing nothing for 3 minutes" if they time it right. Morning and night tend to be when it's easiest for me, but others may differ. You should instead investigate what makes that time of day different from the rest of it. That's where the answers really are. You can and should adjust the flow of your day to make it happen naturally and unconsciously.
> This is a form of meditation, but I almost want to avoid that word because it makes people get nervous and overcomplicate it. Just think of this practice as existing without fear, for a few seconds at a time. Minimum effective dose is one half-breath.
This is already way too complicated. Nothing at this level of detail needs to be described. We already know what "nothing" is. Being too deliberate has a way of pushing the emotions elsewhere until they come back to bite you. The goal of trying to make this possible on-demand is unrealistic at best, or a self-help trap to keep people buying advice at worst.
I found myself "meditating" all the time on accident when I took on less and gave myself more time to do things. When you need a break, you need a break. The most important part for me was letting go of trying to impose control over this. I very strongly disagree with the notion of deliberate meditation. It's not a matter of "doing it right". It's just bullshit. The state of mind and results are identical when you stop listening to anyone's advice and just let it happen.
You assume others have had your experience and learnings from it. That’s clearly not possible so how else would you put it for them? Maybe you should contribute your own experience. But don’t expect everybody will allign to it 100%.