Tag Archives: Belief Systems

Forgetting who we are

Our identity exists at the core of everything that we do in life. Our sense of self, as hard as it is to discuss in language and science, is fundamental to everything we experience.

How is it possible then, to forget who we are? You might be thinking about the various forms of amnesia present in studies of psychology and sensationalized in our fiction. Anyone with personal experience with the loss of a friend or family member to any form of amnesia or dementia understands how deeply painful it can be.

Here I am talking about the everyday experience of forgetting who we are. I am talking about the sense of losing touch with our innermost desires and dreams. I am talking about how the external demands of the world can drag us further and further from a state in which our wishes and hopes for our lives are being realized by our actions.

Who are we?

If you ask someone who they are, they might tell you their name and what they do for a living. Pressed further, they might tell you about their family situation and hobbies.

Who are we really?

This question has nagged me for years. It was in the writings about humanistic psychology that I found the answer that has satisfied me the most (so far). The self is not a thing to be identified and scrutinized. The self is an evolving experience.

So you and I, or at least our sense of our selves, is a set of continually transforming experiences. We experience our innermost self – and the outside world – simultaneously. For most experiences, these two worlds are inseparable.

How can you forget an evolving experience?

You might ask, “Well, if I accept your claim that my ‘self’ is an experience, how is it possible for me to forget who I am?

You are happening every day. Every time you make a choice or think a thought, you are happening. Every time you feel happiness, pain, or sadness, you are happening. Every one of these experiences resonates with your being to greater or lesser extent.

We all have activities that we prefer over others. Broadly speaking, each of us will have a set of experiences that we identify as pleasurable, and a (mostly distinct) set that are painful. We generally organize our lives around the idea of maximizing our well-being in whatever manner seems right to us.

Our dreams and aspirations are often deeply connected with those things that we like to do or states of being that we would like to enjoy.

We forget who we are by forgetting to experience those things that resonate deeply with us.

Acting towards our dreams

Our choices shape our experiences. With every experience, we are becoming something new. Some experiences are deeply connected with our dreams and aspirations while others are not.  If our actions are aligned towards the achievement of one of our dreams, then our experiences will be filled with some of the pleasure that pursuing our dream gives us. This experience reinforces our choice if it is pleasurable, but can cast doubt on our path if it is painful.

A painful process can cause us to give up on a dream – for good reason! If our best assessment of the situation is that the pleasure we might attain in the future is not worth the pain we feel and foresee, it is a very sane choice to allocate our efforts elsewhere.

This can be particularly painful if we are chasing a prerequisite to a dream. Perhaps we think we need a degree in order to work in a field that we love. Perhaps we feel that we need to save up a lot of money so that we can be safe. Perhaps we don’t want to go hiking before we get in better shape. The list of prerequisites can sometimes seem endless.

Attaining prerequisites can be painful, as many of us know from our own experience. This pain often brings with it feelings about the meaninglessness of our pursuit. It may be that we don’t actually want the degree or the knowledge, we just want the job. Perhaps we don’t actually want money, we just want to feel safe. The pain involved in attaining our prerequisites can be enough to cause us to give up on the dream itself.

Again this can be a completely sane choice to make. What we have to guard against is the feeling of disconnection from our dream that we experience because we are preoccupied with the present moment. The process of attaining a prerequisite might feel very different than the experience of the dream itself. Being a student during your achievement of a degree often feels very different from the experience of working in the field you have chosen.

If we aren’t experiencing a facet of our dream, we are slowly losing connection with it. Dreams can be tenacious, holding on for years or decades without substantial attention. I believe however that it is in our personal best interest to keep our deepest dreams alive and happy with experiences oriented towards them.

If you are getting a degree, remember to save some time for reading about, or volunteering in, your field of preference. Find media that inspires you, and create a stash of it that you can use to bring back the feelings that galvanize your passions. Stay in touch with the dream so that you can remember who you are.

Forgetting

When our experiences are consistently not oriented towards the attainment of our dreams, we begin to forget what that taste of our dream feels like. We begin to forget what it feels like to be in the process of becoming who we want to be.

How does this happen?

These answers will not be surprising. Tales of the soul-deadening 9-5 job are rampant. University professors continue to express the sentiment that more and more students are simply doing the minimum they can to get by and finish their degree. Almost everyone knows a person who is so caught up in the concept of money that they cannot enjoy what they have – or would have – if they would loosen their death grip on their life a bit and learn to spread their wings.

Rigid, or unyielding, demands on our time can slowly erode our ability to be ourselves (as we knew ourselves to be). We forget a lot of who we were if we consistently do things that are not congruent with the dreams and passions that we held.

Realizing that you have forgotten

Have you ever had a very intensive section of your life – perhaps final exams, deadlines at work, or a crisis among family or friends – after which you found that you did not know what you wanted to do with your time?

Have you ever worked a very hard day, or week, and returned home to unwind, only to find yourself unable to muster the energy to do anything but watch TV or movies?

Individual occurrences are not indicative of a problem. If you are truly burnt out and want to just zone out, who is to argue with you? In these cases we tend to placate ourselves with those things that take very little energy. This in part explains the enormous appeal of all forms of passive entertainment we have access to in the modern era.

The problem is that habits quickly form to fill the gaps in your time. Many of us work jobs that we aren’t particularly passionate about. We then have to use our limited free time to pursue those things that make us genuinely happy. Instead of watching TV you might really actually want to be writing a play, painting a canvas, studying physics, or doing yoga.

If you want to spend your time in ways that you believe serve your long-term happiness more, then pay attention to those little twinges that you feel deep down. Grab hold of the twinges and genuinely examine them. Do you really want to practice your dance steps? Yes? Well, fire up some music and get to it. Do you really want to read more? Yes? Grab that book that you are two thirds of the way through and make a sprint for the ending.

I have often felt guilty when I feel those twinges, but guilt is not something we need to hold on to. Learn what you can from your past, and let go of the guilt. If you are genuinely trying to pursue the things that you care the most about, I can guarantee that you will be able to minimize the intrinsic guilt you feel about your actions or inactions.

One of the best pieces of advice I have heard regarding guilt of this sort is: think of it as a success. If you are feeling guilty, it means that you have successfully remembered that you wanted to do something differently. Try to use this as an encouraging thought. Next time you will be able to remember earlier, and perhaps feel more strongly that you want to make a different choice.

I have forgotten

What is the problem with forgetting? Can’t we just dig through our memories and remember what we were passionate about before?

To some extent this is true. You will likely be able to remember what you were passionate about in the past. You may even be able to recollect a bit of what it felt like. However, it is most likely that these remembered passions will feel hollow compared to what you feel they should feel like.

Why? Because you have fallen out of practice in experiencing your passions. Our experience tends to be very emotional and transformative, while our recollections of the past tend to be inexact and fleeting. It can be very difficult to recapture a passion that you have ignored for some length of time.

Passion is hard to muster on demand. If you have been slaving away at other aspects of your life for a long time, your previous passions can feel dessicated and empty. Be patient. Give yourself some time to take it easy and explore what you are feeling. If you enjoy yoga or any form of meditation, those can be a great tool for letting your experience of yourself come into sharp focus. If you remember what you liked before, try to tiptoe back into those activities. Patience is key because unreasonably high expectations tend to directly lead to negative self-evaluations that damage one’s self-esteem and cast doubt on what might be a deeply-held passion. So your first golf tee shot flies off into the shrubbery? That’s life, and you know it. Try to hold off negative self-evaluations as you explore, or re-explore, your experience.

Stay in touch or reconnect

I believe that in order to truly live the life we want to, we need to actively follow at least some of our passions. The best case is that in which we can stay in touch with them throughout our lives. In this case we are in no serious danger of forgetting what it feels like to pursue our dreams.

However, life happens. Whether we like it or not, many of us have had the experience of losing touch with those activities that we used to love, and the dreams that we used to chase. If we don’t make efforts to stay in touch with our passions and remain open to new ones, we may end up living a life that we honestly think is pretty empty and unsatisfying.

If you are headed down this path, I implore you: Take some of your time and put it towards rediscovering yourself. You may find oceans of buried passions that can help you fill your life with meaning. You may find that you have grown and changed. The ideas that once inspired you may have faded, and unexpected thoughts may have replaced them. You may have lived half your life since you last really gazed within, so it may not be surprising to find that you have grown into someone new. You will, however, still be the authority on who you were, and who you are. Your choices dictate much of how you will grow from this moment forward.

You might like to create a list for yourself. What are some concrete activities that you can do this week that will reignite your passion? Post that list right on your TV screen or computer so that next time you sit down for some passive entertainment you are reminded of your other options – options that will be more invigorating and remind you of who you are, and perhaps help you glimpse who you want to be.

Now

Experience yourself as you are. The past is useful for understanding, but experience always exists in the present moment. All of us experience at least mild amnesia. No one’s memory is completely perfect. To some extent, our past is hazy to us all. While the future tends to be even more inscrutable than the past, it is the future over which we have some control.

Knowing ourselves can only take place in the present. So what are you doing right now?

Excellence relies on opportunity and hard work

I recently read the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.

The book focuses on people whose abilities and successes are so far outside the scope of normal experience that our society tends to consider them lifeforms that are fundamentally different than the rest of us.

The central message of the book is that these people, while appearing so different from the rest of us, owe their success to a combination of talent, luck and good opportunities. Gladwell points out that our society is fixated on the concepts of personal initiative and intrinsic talent, despite the inability of these two factors to truly explain the spectacular success stories that we are surrounded by.

Talent vs Practice

When I talk about talent, I mean the differences in natural (innate) abilities among different human beings. Defined in such a manner, talent definitely exists. Human beings are different from one another in a myriad of ways. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say “Thankfully!” to this obvious fact.

Where things get a little bit hazy is when we consider to what extent talent predicts our level of success in life. On one extreme there is the argument that talent predicts all of our success in life. I am not really going to consider this argument in great depth, since it seems unable to explain either the facts of which I am aware or my personal experience. If anyone is passionate about the concept of talent/potential, I recommend the movie Gattaca.

I think most people will admit that success has something to do with both talent and practice. All other things being equal, those who work harder tend to be more successful. The main question is, to what extent does our ability or skill depend on talent, and to what extent does it depend on practice?

First of all, there are some abilities that are pretty much entirely innate, such as physical height. Assuming good nutrition, the adult height of a human being seems to be based entirely on genetic features. I would rather call this sort of quality an ‘attribute’ rather than an ‘ability’. For this analysis, I will focus more on the term ‘skill’, which I would regard as a subset of ‘ability’.

Ericsson and Charness

Gladwell cites some famous research on the subject of expert performance. K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness have researched this subject extensively, and their work is regarded very highly in social science circles. In fact, during my psychology degree I had to read one of their papers: Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition. I thought it was an excellent read and recommend it to anyone who finds this subject interesting.

I would summarize the research in the following way: Most of the observable difference in performance (in almost any field) is a direct consequence of the practitioners spending different lengths of time engaged in deliberate practice. The more you practice, the better you tend to be. The effect of practice seems to massively overshadow the effect of talent in the subject areas that Ericsson and Charness studied.

Additionally, Ericsson and Charness found that the amount of dedicated practice necessary to achieve grandmaster level skill (equalled only by perhaps a few people in the world) is remarkably constant across all skills and cultures: 10,000 hours. This averages out to about 3 hours per day for ten years. Someone who dedicates themselves to this amount of practice will, at the end of ten years time, be among the best in the world at their chosen skill.

I would like to add a qualification to this conclusion based on my own experience and knowledge. When considering elite performance such as Olympic athletes, it seems clear to me that even slight advantages offered by genetics can be telling when two dedicated athletes go head to head. It is a well-known fact in most athletic endeavors that gains in measurable ability tend to be large for beginners, but very small for experts. A small difference in ability that is due to innate factors could be as important as months or even years of training in certain skills. When exploring the ultimate reaches of human ability, even small differences in talent can be important.

Human Intelligence

Gladwell argues that in some areas of human endeavor, we encounter what are called threshold effects. His most extensive example of this is human intelligence. It has been estimated that Albert Einstein had an IQ of around 150. There are actually a fair number of people who have been measured to have IQs higher than this value. Does this mean that they are ‘smarter’ than Einstein?

IQ does a relatively poor job of differentiating between very intelligent people. Once into the genius range above IQ 120 it is very difficult to predict test performance or academic success using the measure of IQ. Gladwell calls this a threshold effect. Once people are above IQ 120 or so they are smart enough that other factors begin to be more important if we are to try to predict their level of success. For more info on this subject, read the book! 🙂

Opportunity

Perhaps the central theme of the book is opportunity. The people who are recognized as being the most successful in our world tend to owe their success to important opportunities that they were offered during their lives. Gladwell draws on examples from a variety of industries including law, high-tech computing, and science. In every area he shows how these now-prominent people were offered important opportunities at a time in their lives when they were able to take advantage of them.

In closing, Gladwell knits together the various threads of this work into a cohesive picture of how we can try to make our society better. Primarily what he is driving for is a change in the way we perceive achievement in general. Great achievement is accomplished through a combination of practice, luck, and talent. If we as a society accept this broader view of personal accomplishment, it will be possible to improve our lives in many meaningful ways. Gladwell cites a number of specific examples, along with his supporting data.

Current academic and sport selections all too often confuse ability with maturity. Thanks to the cut off dates for each year’s class or competition, the children who are the oldest in a given year have a very notable advantage in both academics and sports. In part this is because we tend to provide more advanced schooling or training for the more advanced children in each year. This leads to a widening gap in ability that started as only a small difference in ability that was primarily based on age.

If we wish to create the environment that is most conducive for development of our children, we will try to challenge them to think for themselves, split their yearly classes and sports leagues into at least 2 or 3 sections according to age, and make a distinct effort to prepare them for the opportunities that our society will offer them (intentionally or unintentionally) in the coming decades.

Overall, I think this is a book well worth reading. Gladwell’s look into the nature of success and achievement is worth considering. It is interesting to see how our conventional wisdom about human development so often fails to explain the reality. Outliers attempts to convince us to look more closely at how we, as both individuals and as groups, choose to structure our lives, institutions, and societies. We can all help to improve our collective lot in life if we understand more about human development and the role that our collective culture plays in our progress.

Reading on the Internet – Good, Bad?

Reading on the Internet has its ups and downs. In this piece I will first go through some of my favourite aspects before I dig into the things that bother me.

Positive Qualities

Searching Power

It is easy to find information on topics that I know I am interested in. If I know what I am looking for, I can generally find it. The only problem sometimes is one of wording or word choice. For instance, in a recent example with my friends, we were looking for a specific topic using the search terms “loss of forests” rather than “deforestation”. Until we looked for the latter, we were floundering.

Skimmable

Internet material is often very easy to skim so that you can pick out the useful facts and ideas. Many people who write for the Internet realize that their readers are not likely to read every word.

Speed

News on the Internet is astonishingly fast and interconnected. I can learn more from the Internet in the same amount of time than I can from either Radio or Television.

Levels of Depth

You can read the Internet at many levels of depth. For instance, if you are reading the Google News headlines, they will give you a snapshot of some of the major events that are going on in the world.

Want to learn a bit more? Open up the major news items and read them. If your thirst for knowledge goes deeper yet, it is time to start following more links and searching for related terms. You can tailor your information gathering to both your level of interest and the time you have available.

Dialog

On the Internet, you can end up in a direct discussion with the creator(s) of the content that you are consuming. Unlike most other mediums, on the Internet it is often possible to directly engage the author of a piece of information. No other medium has such vast powers for connection and discussion.

Dangers

Confirmation Bias

You tend to find what you are looking for. This can contribute to the confirmation bias, the natural tendency of people to feel that information that agrees with their preconceptions is somehow more trustworthy than the information presenting the opposite side.

The Well-Informed Illusion

The speed of reading and the brevity of writing on the Internet can lead to an illusion of deep understanding. Many people fall prey to the often mistaken conception of themselves as well-read because they keep up-to-date with Google News or a social bookmarking site such as RedditSlashdot, or Digg.

While Google News provides an overview of some world issues, the social bookmarking sites generally highlight sensational, inflammatory, and opinionated works of note on the Internet. Neither of these approaches is necessarily well-suited for the acquisition of high-quality information about the world.

This topic is particularly close to my heart, since I am the founder of Vision of Earth, a website attempting to provide high-quality information to the general public about practical ideas for developing the unrealized potential of human societies.

You might also be interested in my broader article about the misleading nature of all media forms.

Reading Books – The Good AND The Bad

Despite the growing power and spread of the Internet, there are still some reasons that I often prefer to read books. Unfortunately, I have slowly begun to comprehend the scope of the problems with books as they are today. In this piece I will attempt to show you the good and the bad, as I see them. I hope you will stick with me to the end, because I think this topic is of prime importance to each and every one of us.

The Good

Editing and Fact-Checking

Books generally undergo more intensive editing and fact-checking than the average Internet source. Both books and websites vary in quality a lot, but in general I can expect a book to be more cohesive and clear than an average Internet source. It is also less likely to have blatant typos.

Single Voice

Authors develop a powerful voice in a book in a different way than they do on the Internet. Very few websites have changed my life after I read a lot of their content, but several books have. Sometimes a single perspective is incredibly valuable. Sometimes the finest of insights would be watered down or corrupted by bringing in multiple authors, each with their own voice.

That said, one of the finest-written books I have ever read was written by four authors. The book “Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society” was written by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers. This book changed the way I look at both the concept of change and my own life.

The Bad

As far as fiction books go, I divide them into two distinct categories:

  1. Just for the fun of it fiction. If you enjoy it, read it. There isn’t much of an underlying motive other than the telling of a good story.
  2. Illustrative and evocative fiction, designed to make a point. These books create a set of circumstances through which the belief system of the author is articulated. For example, I recently read the libertarian industrial epic Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In this book she creates (and destroys) a complicated world to illustrate her beliefs about the world. Despite my problems with this style of writing, I believe that the book is actually a good read. It is definitely the responsibility of the reader to realize that a contrived world is not ‘proof’ of a concept. While fiction can be educational and illustrative, it is not the real world.

Most of my problems are with non-fiction books. Here we go.

One Perspective

One author, or a set of authors, are presenting a single viewpoint on their subject. I claim that this often leads to the subject material of the book being presented through the lens of a single perspective.

This can have disastrous results for our public discourse when the topics are important and multi-faceted. To be fair, some book authors do an excellent job of presenting their considerations of multiple points of view on their topic. This is not to say that all points of view are equal; it is to say that even a single issue can be validly approached from a number of directions, each of which might lead to a different interpretation.

The best non-fiction authors will draw upon data and experience to knit together a clear picture of the way the world seems to be. These authors will consistently refer to externally verifiable data sources of the highest quality.

Publisher’s Control

High quality content might be watered down by the editing undergone in conjunction with the publishing house. The publishers are the gatekeepers of content. While the systematic effects of this may not be as evident today for the most part, it was certainly the case in the past that publishers exercised great control over what they would allow to be published in the books that they printed.

This is perhaps more important in other forms of media, such as television, where most of the market is controlled by a few major players who exercise great control over all of the content that they deliver.

Slow Spread of Knowledge

Books are now a relatively slow way to spread important knowledge. Compared to the Internet, they operate at a snails pace.

Consider the following scenario: You hear about a book you like. You acquire it either at a bookstore, or at a library, or perhaps even an ebook from either an online bookstore or library if you are tech savvy. Getting the book might take minutes to weeks depending on the situation. You then read the book, find it to be excellent, and start to recommend it to your friends. You could give your copy away to one other person, and recommend that other people also buy it or get it from libraries.

The problem is that there are definitely limited quantities of books to be ‘consumed’ and all have time limitations on how they can be acquired. Other than the case of an e-book that can be acquired instantly online, all other forms of books have delays in their spread and acquisition. On the other end of the spectrum, if you read something you like that is publicly available online, you can send the hyperlink to your friends via email and they can access the content instantly.

Out of Date

Unless revised and reprinted, books do not change with the times. While many books can be startlingly relevant for a very long time after publication, I claim that this is the exception rather than the rule.

You may also be interested in another piece of mine that looks more broadly at the misleading nature of all media forms.