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On Gaslighting Myself

You might notice that I’ve been writing a lot more recently. I don’t know if this is going to continue, but if it does, I think it is the consequence of an interesting new activity that I take part in: gaslighting myself. 

Let me give you an example.

If you had talked to me maybe three months ago, a year or two ago, I might have told you that exercise, or pretty much any repeated habit, was a challenge to upkeep because it’s a matter of discipline and willpower. 

Today, it is automatic, efficient, and it feels wrong if I don’t optimize every single second and minute of it.

To be fair, I don’t blame my past self. Such an idea, or a notion of a person working hard and struggling, appeals to the emotion. I don’t just mean mine. I mean those of the vast swath of people whom I know. 

Tell a person that you work hard, or show that you work hard, and it is natural that they would respect you – because succeeding at working hard over a long period of time is a very rare activity, people, statistically speaking, are unlikely to succeed in doing that themselves. It becomes the petit objet a: the thing that, because they are unable to achieve it, they look to it as something worth admiring, imputing any number of positive characteristics upon the person who, in their estimation, has managed to succeed in accomplishing this (the thing that they themselves cannot do).

On my part, I get where that comes from. At the same time, I don’t think the logical way of attaining that standard is to go with that intuition, which I’ve observed again and again and which I’ve evinced from the way that people speak about hard work across a thousand different compliments. (Thank you for them, but I’m not going to allow them to make me complacent.)

Instead, I think the better way of getting there is, as I suggested, to gaslight yourself, to play a mental trick on yourself, and, oddly enough, to get closer to appreciating the true temporality of this world – not by working hard, but by creating small habits that make it so NOT working effectively is inconceivable and fades out of the realm of possibility both in theory and in practice.

The animating insight for this thought comes from what might seem like a somewhat unexpected source on my part: the contemplation that the world is beset by a condition of impermanence. 

Time is finite. It dissolves away into the sands, which flow out one grain after another into the hourglass. 

Given that the world is in permanent flux, everything will pass. Therefore, it does not matter what you do. Everything will happen in due course. 

All these too shall pass. 

One way of thinking about this is that it doesn’t matter what you do at the end of the day, because only one thing is certain: we will all die. 

Another way of thinking about it, though, is that a lot of things may happen naturally to produce the conditions of life, and I can treat all effort as nothing but that, which is natural and would have happened anyway. 

In practice, that is how I live my life, and there are some forms of triggers to make it as such. 

Timers, as you know – or if you didn’t know, you discover now – populate my day with small triggers that automatically take place when I am exercising, for each step, for each progression. 

I have routines for reading and exercise at regular cadences designed to ensure that when I get out of a flight of fancy (which, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your opinion, is quite common), the structure is manageable – it is not broken up into chaos – and these routines trigger now with an increasingly slight relation to what I consciously think.

The net effect is that it feels as if things naturally pass by, sets go by, reading proceeds, a video is made, an ad completed, and exercise is done – and even if it seems that a lot of things happen unceasingly at a pace that a lot of people would not be able to handle, it feels like nothing more than a relaxing jaunt in the park for me. 

Of course, if you think it seems strange or silly for you to say this, you’re entitled completely to feel that way. It would be best for me to try to differentiate myself without anticipating any objections.

What I will say is that what I record here is just a record of my experiences and my observations of people and how they behave, and it is interesting to watch – I wonder what’s going to happen with this routine getting repeated over and over again for the long term. 

Given how effective the gaslighting has been on myself, I don’t think it’s likely that I’m going to notice all that much. There was a time when I did not look forward to the future, or I faced it with fear, trepidation, and the unknowing sense of dread that comes along with every fearful and forward-looking contemplation. It seems that that era has passed. 

There are still many things that I do not know, but I look forward to seeing what the future holds, in line with that old Taoist injunction by Lao Tzu, which asserts that nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished – a little aphorism so captivating that I guess some of you know that it is my WhatsApp status message. 

Insufficient but Non-Redundant Unnecessary but Sufficient

One of the biggest boons that has ever come to me is the realization that, in all too many cases, laziness is not the problem for me. Clarity is.

I don’t want to generalize this to all of humanity on the drop of the hat but it feels to me that that is likely the case. 

It is hard not to think so when it is obvious that people have ambitions inside them and how obviously a part of them was pushing them to accomplish the things that their ambition dictated. The desire existed within them, a push of the soul, if you will, to say that they never really wanted to accomplish the things that they aspired for is, I suppose, to negate the driving force of that initial will.

Implementation is a much more difficult thing than mere wishing and most people never cross that boundary in a true or Sufficient way, and of course this can happen in the way that so many other failures happen for a million different possible reasons:

– Diversion because of life events

– Actual flagging in willpower

– Lack of a system

– Deviation from one’s word

– So many other things

Unfortunately, the world tends to collapse all these things into laziness. If only a person had tried harder, then they would succeed. To be fair, such a mentality is entirely psychologically coherent and understandable. You were unable to succeed. The method did not avail itself. You could have done a whole list of things in order to make sure that you would actually accomplish your goal.

The thing about these could-haves is that they lie in a future that was not realized, and that seems subject to a possibility only if. Also, if you weren’t able to accomplish your goal through a series of linear steps, one after another, I suppose it is normal to then blame yourself, even as you never reach the outer edge of what is really necessary. 

I suppose one of the problems here is that when we talk about success, we have a tendency to imagine causation in an incredibly linear way. You worked hard, therefore you succeeded. You did not succeed, therefore you did not work hard enough. It is a very clean story and perhaps that is part of why it is so attractive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the world has any particular obligation to make itself quite so clean for us.

Consider hard work for a moment. Obviously, hard work matters. It would be absurd for me to suggest otherwise. But it is equally obvious that hard work by itself cannot be sufficient for success. You can work extraordinarily hard at something that does not work. You can spend years implementing a terrible plan. You can possess tremendous discipline while moving in completely the wrong direction. You can even do almost everything correctly and discover that some circumstance outside your control has decided that none of it is going to work anyway.

Planning seems to suffer from precisely the same problem. A perfect plan that is never implemented accomplishes nothing. Implementation without a plan can result in a great deal of movement without a great deal of progress. Clarity without action is useless. Action without clarity may simply allow you to become extremely efficient at accomplishing something that you never actually wanted to accomplish in the first place.

So perhaps the mistake is to imagine that any one of these things is the thing.

This was what led me back to something that the philosopher J. L. Mackie called an INUS condition, which is one of those philosophical terms that sounds considerably more complicated than the idea that it is trying to express. Mackie describes a cause as an Insufficient but Non-redundant part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition.

That is quite a mouthful, but the underlying idea is remarkably useful.

Suppose that success requires, in one particular case, hard work, planning, competence, feedback, persistence, and the right opportunity. Hard work by itself is not enough. Planning by itself is not enough. Persistence by itself is certainly not enough. Yet remove one of these things from this particular combination and perhaps the whole thing falls apart.

At the same time, this particular combination need not be the only possible route to success. Somebody else could arrive at exactly the same destination with more talent and less planning, more capital and less time, better connections and less effort, or through some combination of circumstances that was never available to you in the first place.

This, I think, is where the idea becomes extremely important.

Hard work can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Planning can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Clarity can matter enormously without being sufficient. All of them can be indispensable parts of one route while still not being indispensable to every possible route.

And once you see success in that way, the statement that you simply “didn’t try hard enough” begins to look rather strange.

Perhaps you didn’t. That certainly happens.

But perhaps effort was never the missing condition at all.

As I move forward with the entire constellation of different things that I’m learning at the moment and the goals that I’m trying to compress and distill my time for, I suppose I’m hit up for a few possible causal configurations. It is not always certain to me which new ones will take shape, but what is clear is that a lot of this is coming to me intuitively, even as the structure materializes with increasing clarity each day. 

On cognitive switching

One of the things that we discover throughout the course of life is that there’s a distinct difference between thinking that you are being productive or useful and actually being productive and useful. 

One of the key parts of that is what we call cognitive switching, which is a phenomenon that I find deeply fascinating for the simple reason that it can either be performed to detriment or in the name of good, depending on how you do it.

It really is an art, though, and let me illustrate why. If a person were to switch from one task to another naturally, what happens is that they lose focus on the task that they were previously doing to go to the next one. They also have to adjust. Typically, there’s going to be a certain adjustment period before the mind finally acclimatizes itself to the next task, and as a result, productivity drops during this time.

For that reason, pundits and thinkers declare that multitasking is fake, saying that if you switch from one task, naturally your focus goes away. When it goes away, then there ends the possibility that you get anything done.

Now, I’ve come to realize that there is a certain degree of truth to that.

Try to split up your attention too much between different competing priorities, and perhaps you will never commit sufficient energy to any individual one of them, so that you’d be able to do any of them. It’s then easy to just end up in tunnel vision.

There may be a time at which there are diminishing marginal returns for every hour of effort that goes in, suggesting that perhaps it is only true that the returns to scale of continuous effort in a specific area can actually hold. After which, it would not only be advisable but also eminently logical to switch to the next task. 

I’m learning this right now. I’m understanding how to balance practicing hard on one task before proceeding to the next one, while at the same time dedicating adequate focus to every single instance. The thing I’m investing myself in is really a balance, and being able to make sure that everything can actually be done is, at times, apparently a miracle. It gets a little easier the more our skills improve along the way.

I find it fascinating that cognitive matters can be parceled out in this way, though. It does make me wonder about what the absolute best way of doing things is, such that it’s possible to attain the best possibilities in each case. To me, it seems like something magical: the result of being able to split up one’s mind into multiple parts and to be able to summon them towards one’s overall advancement.

Far be it from me to be able to claim that I can actually attain the depth of mastery necessary, or adequately profound, to attain what I aspire for in this lifetime. It feels like I am on a journey, and I am just scraping the edge of what is possible. 

Far be it from me to proclaim that this is not anything more than just a small experiment in consciousness for personal use, rather than a route towards an enlightenment the world has not known. It is interesting, unique, and personal to me as part of this process of experimenting with consciousness, tinkering around with it as if in a lab with instruments, and seeing what happens along the way.