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. 

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. 

Every morning I’m in the gym, I call out:”Hey Siri, one minute!” – and every five minutes I run, I say “Five minutes!”.

It’s been like this for a while, as part of some process of systematization that’s started happening in my head sooner than I could say any lickety-splits or even consciously question why it should be like that.

If it seems a little robotic, rest assured that I think the same – but that if I try to look back onto how I became this way and why, the explanation seems simple:

It seems to be a result of my matured understanding of what freedom consists of.

Perhaps that seems a little paradoxical, but it becomes a little easier when you quantify the result in this case: An hour and a half of exercise in total, continued weight loss, muscle retention, as compared to three hours doing the exact same thing and then getting fatter.

In other words? Less expenditure for a better result.

I suppose if I look a little deeper within and across this externalized record, it becomes more clear how this came about.

In late June, I wrote The Value of Time, in which I talked about how I feel every second now, how it all passes and comes by – how I refuse to waste the seconds as they flow into minutes; if I were to expand on that, I guess I could say that time is after all how we experience life in its shades – at the end of the 3600 seconds that make up the next hour from this word on, an hour of my life and your life will be gone – and how we experienced that hour is an experience we earned with our time and that we will never get back.

A. Do I want to experience that hour either trying to accomplish the goal that I set for myself to accomplish in far excess of what is actually needed in order to accomplish it?

B. Do I want to experience it in that state of loss where I am yet to reach it and therefore yearn for it, putting myself back into the cycle of A), or do I prefer to spend it in the confidence that I was able to accomplish my goals?

I suppose B) is a lot better – but that’s also why I started using the timers – the extended feeling of efficiency, the feeling of unloading of a cognitive burden – the realization that suffering would happen and time would pass regardless of what we did and that therefore, planning out a reality where as little time was spent so that we could have better choices and options with our time might make a little more sense than slogging away and trying to reach something that we never were working for in the right way.

In a weird way, the timers produce abundance – the discipline produces freedom.

This is one of the many strange and small contradictions that the world permits, I suppose.

There are probably many more of them that I’ve yet to know, experience, have thought about, or processed.

I wonder what they consist of, and what experiences will trigger me to think about them and then level up.

Whatever they are, I look forward to meeting future me. 🙂