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.
