Yet another one of my thoughts on consciousness – a lot of these recently because the topic is interesting, and paradoxically…
Today’s post is on the subject of not thinking.
Seems weird, right?
Yes, I suppose so – but I think it’s one of the most profound insights that I’ve had lately, even if it’s a little weird to talk about thinking about not thinking.
Here’s the drip:
Almost anything that is worth doing or accomplishing requires intense and sustained effort over a long time, and while it seems normal to imagine that this means long held suffering or pushing forward, I have found that it is usually easier to accomplish my goals… By not thinking about them.
Let me be a bit more specific.
When human beings come up with goals or things to achieve, a little churning starts happening. The mind sees a vision of the future, and before long, in almost every case, some sort of action ensues; my suggestion is that, over time, what a person really wants to do is to build the architecture so that the churning or cognitive dissonance associated with the goal is reduced to the minimum.
In other words, I think the best way to achieve goals is to think about them as little as possible.
If it seems a little strange, I don’t blame you. After all, a lot of gurus teach us about the importance of having a clear view of our goals, where we are going, and what we will do to get there. In fact, we are bombarded by tons of self-help that tells us that we have to gaze at the world and push forward. This is, in its purest essence, what hustle culture is about – If you are not getting to where you want to go, it’s because you don’t have enough passion, you are not looking clearly enough at the prize, and you are a bad person.
By the way, the intuition behind this is not necessarily wrong, but that is also true for a lot of self-help. We’re not even talking about how each person interprets books in their own unique context, or why my thoughts should necessarily be externally valid for all scenarios.
One example that I can relate from my own life is my weight loss journey.
Perhaps some people are aware that I lost something to the tune of 20 kg ever since November of last year while maintaining my muscle mass.
I have yet to take obnoxious pictures to hao lian what I currently look like, but that’s not the point; the point is that it is a clear example of accomplishing that goal over a long period of time, to a degree that most people don’t imagine is possible – and I assure you, once I get over my fear of male perverts sending me heart emojis on YouTube or otherwise (lmao it is a real concern, and I am not a homosexual), I will start sharing!
My experience tells me that what I did this year (not thinking about what I was trying to do and constantly being self-conscious and staring at myself) was actually what I needed to get here.
It reminded me that you need less emotional pumping and internal squabbling – you need a lot more of actually getting stuff done that furthers your goals within your constraints of time and energy, and to design environments and systems so that that can happen.
On my part, I needed systems that would make it so I would automatically do what I needed to do (rather than spend time thinking about it, bearing frictions, and ultimately ending up with more stress and less done) – to work consistently toward a goal rather than catch myself in a cycle of guilt, stops and starts, and ultimately end up half past six and nowhere even close.
For me, this took the form of taking a couple of lessons here and there from places like James Clear’s Atomic Habits as well as a lot of other types of reading and reflection that is perhaps a little less cliché, rather than sitting around with a vague vision of how I would work hard that was actively taking up mental bandwidth at the opportunity cost of progress every single time I took part in self pity or any of that testosterone-pumping YEAHHHH HUSTLE thing (that I’ve always found a bit distasteful, tbh) – a lot of small fine-tuning, upskilling (I would like to write a blog post about the relationship between skill and production soon), speed increasing, and really just integrating things into my life that I didn’t imagine that I would integrate but that ultimately were both non-costly and beneficial towards my chosen evolution as a human being.
If it seems like I’ve done quite a lot of thinking to discuss how I don’t think, I think that’s a fair observation – It is one of my qualities, whether good or bad, that I tend to externalize my thoughts. This is both in the hope of conveying something and in the hope of pruning and strengthening the things that I consider meaningful.
Ever since I started living like this, approaching the world like this, or perhaps thinking about approaching the world like this, a lot of things have started becoming more automatic, weight loss has just gone on, and in other areas and concerning the things I care about, things seem more naturally integrated into the fold of my life.
No longer do I feel stress about trying to reach the next level; rather, my instincts animate me to attain that which I aspire for – rather, I’ve gained a new confidence about my mind as an operating system that seems to be autotelically unfolding itself in response to my inner wishes as it reaches constantly for new levels.
On the practical side, generally, I’ve found myself with more time, energy, and space for different things, like this reflection that, ironically, I fill up with even more things along the way in order to pick up the slack of all that spare capacity, whether it’s because a part of me is bored or because there are internal parts of me that have innately come to realize that there are more things to do, see, speak of, and pursue.
At this point, I can’t help but make the observation that this fits into the pattern of my favorite Taoist ideology: nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
I am far from a Taoist scholar, but with reference to everything that I’ve written here, I will say this: goals are far away, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It is a noble act of ambition to go on that journey when one could have chosen so many others as well. One might even stake their life on reaching the end point of that journey.
In the wake of goals that are immense, it is not the passionate ones who have nothing more than passion to offer that will persevere. Rather, it is those who will push forward day after day. Society, art, and literature suggest that these people are the ones with the greatest of passions, the ones who, like Sisyphus, will push the rock up the hill by the consequence of an undying will.
I deny the romance of that assertion. To me, the journey is not primarily about appearances screaming about how hard one is working. Instead, by pursuing the onward journey without even thinking about it, perhaps, if I am to appropriate the mantle of the old masters in speaking out of turn, the way to complete the journey is to become the journey: to never think twice about going on the journey, but to have it become your very life, your soul, the equilibrium around which your movements converge.
