Author Archives: Life In The Jazz Lane

I write about growing smarter, stronger, wiser and happier.

Accept The One And Reject The Other: being good means choosing better

Welcome back. I write a lot, here and on X, about being good. What “good” means in an absolute sense, and what getting better means in a relative sense.

You need both. If all you have is relatively better or worse, you can do objectively bad things while telling yourself those acts are better than a hypothetical alternative – these are lite cigarettes, diet sodas, not the really hard drugs, and I don’t drink as much as these other people.

“Better,” as an idea, might hold you over for a time – but “good” is the only way you can truly hold your head high.

Similarly, if all you have is a kind of Platonic “good” floating out there in the ether, painted on a ceiling somewhere in Italy (oh, Italy), it never quite connects to the decisions and actions and plans that you make today.

“I want to be good, and I make that happen by choosing better.” That, right there, is the relationship between the two: “better” is the filter applied to decisions, and “good” is the overall sense you get when you make decisions correctly more often than not for long enough.

The road to goodness, therefore, is walked one decision at a time, and this is the tricky part:

Getting better means understanding more than you used to, literally from one decision the next, one day to the next.

What that means, of course, is that the picture of what it means to be good is always evolving over time – or, rather, it is evolving for the person who is getting better.

This why it’s so difficult to continue improving: you always have to give up some idea of what “good” means to you. The immature idea has to be surrendered when the more mature idea is presented.

And that is what “better” actually means: the more fully matured understanding and application of “good” between the two or however many options you have.

To get better from there is to repeat that process, and this, by definition, always requires a willingness to add on to or replace what may have worked just fine at a prior juncture.

This requires flexibility. It also requires humility, which is actually indistinguishable from flexibility: move according to what is truly necessary, rather than in the limited ways that best please you.

A failure of flexibility, for example, would be to reach a certain degree of goodness and say, “ok, this is good enough for me.” If you’re looking for the day when you give up this tedious business of getting better, and finally pat yourself on the back for being good, you’ll find it, but it will be your invention.

I should know. This was my main preoccupation for some time. I liked feeling confident that I was good, and I liked hearing it from others. Unfortunately, I was neglecting those daily decisions, those daily acts of choosing better than before.

That requires scrutiny. It requires a clear image or vision of a goal, and sustained attention on it. You have to be looking for the opportunities to continually fork off in a different direction in order to continually make progress.

It is impossible to muster that potent panacea called “sustained intention” for something you don’t truly want. You have to want it, like a teenager wants sex, or else there’s just no way.

Why say all this? Because most people want to be seen and regarded as good, by themselves and others, far more than they actually want to get better. Getting better is work!  Nothing but work! Needing to feel good is, and here I’ll say something embarrassingly obvious, often at odds with the will to work hard.

I believe my lengthy preamble has led me to a declaration of intent for the remainder of the essay:

Let’s really make the important distinctions surrounding this topic, this business of betterment in the pursuit of the good, perhaps not once and for all, but certainly with due rigor. Certainly, we can and should advance the conversation to the point where we can say a seed has been planted, and an irrevocable step in the right direction taken.

To accomplish this, I turn once again to my old friend Lao Tzu, who lays this out with perfect clarity in chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching. Close to halfway through the eighty one chapters, we are handed a subtle but thorough accounting of the distinctions I’ve just begun to discuss. Here we go:

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

Let’s go through it one idea at a time, because we want to actually benefit, not merely appear sophisticated to an ignorant person.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

Trying is not doing. Becoming is not being. Even if the former may eventually lead to the latter, it is not a guarantee, and there is a fundamental, rock solid difference between enough and not enough.

In today’s world of lowering standards for the sake of sparing the feelings of mediocre performers, this could not be emphasized enough: trying to be good does not make you good. It makes you someone who is trying. Good on you for doing so, but keep it up, and expect no rewards until the goal is achieved.

A hunter cannot feed the village by advertising the fact that he is pursuing the bear or the boar, and there is no such thing as incremental progress to be celebrated: up and until the food is placed on the plates, nothing of value has been delivered.

A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

This doesn’t mean that trying to be good is foolish. It means that it is not the good man who must try to be good. The good man is not aware of his goodness, because he is aware of no delta, no change, between the state of folly and the state of goodness. He is profoundly established in goodness like, and I’m sure you saw this coming, a fish is established in water.

If you are contemplating your goodness, it can only mean that the memory of folly is still so fresh in your mind that you are surprised, relieved, perhaps and hopefully even overjoyed and grateful, that you have at last found goodness. Total goodness is marked by the cessation even of this.

A truly good man is unaware of his goodness, and is therefore good. To have goodness and to be unaware of it is to truly have it, to be truly good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

This idea is best understood as an extension of the previous idea: to “do nothing” does not mean inactivity, but, rather, activity that is so perfectly natural that it is utterly unremarkable in the eyes of the doer. Again, if you ask a fish what it was doing all day, I doubt it would say “swimming.” And yet, swimming took place.

At the highest levels of proficiency, actions become invisible even and especially to their doers. Actions done with the maximum skill “leave nothing undone.” They accomplish their objectives totally, as if a problem had never even emerged, let alone been solved. Like a dinner so completely consumed that you can look at the plate and wonder if there was ever food on it in the first place.

Contrast this with the foolish man who is always doing, yet much remains to be done.

The first thing to understand here is that this is not a denigration of the foolish man, but simply a delineation between foolish and good: the foolish person is the less skilled of the two.

The fool speaks words that create confusion, requiring further clarification or resulting bad instructions, misunderstandings, and offense.

The fool cannot do tasks as well, requiring supervision, or intervention, or correction, lest sub par word be admitted.

All of this looks like a lot of activity, because it is. It is so much more than would be necessary if a truly skilled, a truly good person were in the place of the fool.

The worst thing a fool can do, then, is give up. It takes time to get good, and much of that time is spent in tedium. Again, the objective has to matter to you very intensely: you have to want to do it right more than you want to feel good. You have to be willing to forgo superficial comfort long enough to taste the satisfaction of real accomplishment.

Eventually, you must forgo even that much: an actual fish receives no medals for swimming, and yet out swims everyone. If you are truly committed, this is where you are headed.

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.

It is clear enough that the chapter creates a ladder of understanding that progresses as one line allows the next. The truly kind man is not exactly the same as the truly good man, because, while they both leave nothing undone, the truly good does nothing, while the truly kind does something.

The difference between truly good and truly kind is, then, in the sense of going out of one’s way. Making a special effort. Or, perhaps, in the necessity to do so. The truly good is presented as the highest form, with the truly kind coming in second.

What is the deeper significance of this, and why does it matter? Because, while the person making an effort in ways we can recognize might seem more praiseworthy, it only means that the person who is so advanced that the same task can be accomplished without effort is all the while going unnoticed.

This is meant to, perhaps, slightly or duly chasten those of us who like to congratulate our high achievers. To those high achievers, hear the subtle message being passed along here, implied by nothing more than the ordering of Lao Tzu’s observations: to become the very best you can possibly be, you must become good to a degree that will be unrecognizable to those who nurture and encourage you now.

It will mean a sacrifice, not merely on your part, but on theirs: they will feel as though they are losing something, even if this is not the case in reality.

Goodness is invisible, but kindness looks good. And, it is good.

When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.

What are we to make of this?

It’s one thing to distinguish between a good man and a kind man, which is already difficult enough, but it seems a lot to grant that a just man is not quite the same thing as a good man. In many circles, the good and the just are tautologies.

What can it mean, then, to say that a just man leaves a great deal to be done, and more than even a foolish man?

Because someone who goes about dividing the world into camps of innocent and guilty, with the innocent and guilty functioning as accounts receivable and accounts payable, respectively, is someone going about creating more work for everyone, work the judgmental “just” man has no intention of completing himself.

How can I say this? Because Lao Tzu has implied as much but the stratification of the good, the foolish, the kind, and the just.

The good is good,
The foolish tries to be good,
The kind can achieve goodness with effort,

And the just man is placed outside of all this. The just man is neither good, striving for goodness, nor occasionally achieving it. And yet we call him just. What then is the meaning of just, since it is not equal to good?

The one who assesses the relative goodness, kindness, and folly of others, in a way that creates problems, and does not necessarily solve any.

What happens at one step lower than this?

When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.

Again, the relative placement tells you what you want to know. The nature of the disciplinarian better explains what is really meant by “a just man.”

If a disciplinarian is someone who doesn’t set an inspiring example, but simply tells others how to behave, and even employs intimidation tactics (he rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order), then the step preceding this would be, it seems, a preoccupation with the moral failings of others, rather than a focus on one’s own choices.

A just man, then, is a disciplinarian in the making: someone standing on the sidelines of life, critiquing the plays on the field but having no influence (no one responds).

And why do the words and actions of a disciplinarian fall flat? Why does no one respond, and why is that met with escalation, rather than reflection and adjustment?

The all too obvious answer is that no one likes or respects a disciplinarian very much, because, again, obviously, the strategy of a disciplinarian is off putting. People don’t like being told that what they’re doing is wrong. They don’t like being micromanaged and intimidated, and, if they comply, it is not truly voluntary.

Perhaps, and this is inference on my part, not elaboration based in the text, many a foolish person fails to become good because they fall victim to disciplinarians, rather than come under the tutelage of a truly good or kind person. They encounter too few exemplars of goodness, and too many meanspirited people who pick at their faults like vultures.

Let’s continue.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.

This both summarizes and advances the discussion, and with remarkable economy (writers, take note).

If “when Tao is lost, there is goodness” sounds like an indictment of goodness, it is and it isn’t. Let’s revisit my pedantic illustration: fish don’t hold swimming lessons, and even anthropomorphic fish wouldn’t have a word for “swimming.”

Goodness both emerges as a concept and becomes the stratum on which we settle when we lose the Tao. When we lose the way.

What exactly does that mean? That total integration is, to borrow a title, beyond good (and therefore, by necessity, beyond evil as well) – beyond a moralizing worldview, and therefore beyond a moralistic approach to behavioral prescriptions.

What is good if not that which redeems the bad, which stands above it, and orients, organizes, and stratifies us as a society?  Good only has a relative meaning: better than bad! As basic and obvious as this sounds, and is, we have to spell this out if we are to so much as point at the Tao as something beyond it.

To be above and beyond good and evil is to be amoral (not immoral). Almost nobody you will talk to has a working model for amorality that isn’t, actually, just immorality hiding inside a word salad. Amorality is not and cannot be nothing more than an attitude that fails to separate good from bad, and therefore fails to achieve what only good can – the mitigation of suffering.

A Taoist conception of amorality has to deliver something better than anything a dualistic concept of good possibly could, and that can only be the chiseling away of self congratulation and addictive clinging in response to the good on the one hand and self chastisement and compulsive aversion in response to the bad on the other.

It can only mean discernment purified of the clouding emotionalism of moral judgment. “Good” is what works, and “bad” is what doesn’t: in this way, the Tao overcomes the inevitable clash and competition between varying moral systems.

One need only observe the difference, and choose accordingly: feeling proud of good and ashamed of evil ends up being nothing more than an impediment to the free exercise of discernment and agency, because they burden the perceptions of both with excess conceptual baggage.

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.

We can afford a bit more brevity here in light of what has already been said: we now descend a ladder made up of more familiar steps:

Simply being nice can only be called the highest aim of someone who knows naught of real good, and this can only be because he has neither witnessed nor tasted of true evil. Good as such is, just as light and dark are born of one another, born of evil.

It is no great leader who can conceive of nothing higher than niceness as an answer to meanness.

By all means be nice – but it is no answer to evil, and I will not go into battle under the banner of “nice.” That is suicide. Why do I say that? Because good people have to be prepared to kill truly evil people, and that is not within the repertoire of a “truly kind man.”

When we lose kindness, after having already lost goodness, we harden into clerical judges. We don’t lead, but only administrate. We no longer nurture each other, but only indemnify.

This is the path to ritual, described here as the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. This is not unduly portentous. What do you have left when people can no longer identify and promote the truly good, can no longer persuade through kindness, and cannot even articulate the difference between right and wrong, cannot even properly outline systems of rewards and punishments?

You get ritual: we do what we do because it is what we do. In other words, an argument from tradition. A fallacy. Why is it like this? Because that’s how they did it back then. Senseless, empty parroting!

And, why is this the beginning of confusion? Because rituals are our way of acting out our values, acting out how we distinguish good from bad and enshrine the good. The rest all flows from there, from those values. Without goodness and the rest, you have the husk of faith and loyalty: halfhearted performances, mere appearances, and no underlying and pervading essence.

You have people doing things for no good reason, because the reasons are unknown to them. They therefore go through the motions without the intention of representing and advancing goodness – what is advanced, however, is conformity, the stock in trade of the disciplinarian.

An inner spark of faith in one’s own goodness begets loyalty to the path of goodness, the continual choosing of better over worse, day in and day out. It is self sustaining, self renewing. Enforcement wears people down, leading them to seek not redemption but escape, distraction, and oblivion. This, surely, is the meaning in saying that ritual is the beginning of confusion, rather than, say, the articulation of goodness.

Or, perhaps, this is what ritual becomes when it is all we have left. I shall return to this at the end.

Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.

What follows this last couplet is the summation of the chapter, and so this is the last truly new idea laid out to outline the edifice that is about to receive its finishing coating of sealant, so to speak.

Knowledge of the future… is the beginning of folly.

Not quite folly, but the start of it. One step in a foolish direction. What I find interesting is that Lao Tzu does not appear to negate the possibility of obtaining such knowledge, but implicitly grants it, and explicitly equates it with folly.

This implies something somewhat shocking: some knowledge is foolish. Bad. The information is not incorrect or unreliable, but both its pursuit and possession are nonetheless not to be counted as good, and, by implication, to be desisted from.

This anticipates the moral question hanging over today’s technologists like the Sword of Damocles: can we truly say that there are forms of knowledge, and therefore entire skill sets, that are better not to have at all?

Lao Tzu here says, unmistakably, yes. There is such a thing as a road better left unexplored.

Due to the positioning of this statement within the chapter, it is fair to infer that the sorts of people who seek destructive knowledge are those who have already been reduced to ritual, reduced to husks of their true selves. This seems entirely accurate.

Those who can no longer distinguish between good and evil, between kindness, politeness, fairness, and corrective scolding, who are simply held in their social roles by peer pressure, and who have been reduced to pantomiming rather than expressing society’s ideals – what is there for them to seek? Transgressive knowledge. Cleverness. Cunning. They seek their own advantage in a corrupted world.

When there is no absolute good to strive for, one can only strive to get ahead of one’s neighbor, and this leaves the door open for sorcery, for magic, for the knowledge and know-how of manipulation. This, you might say, is what becomes of better when it lingers on after the death of the good. It falls down a ladder from better to more to merely different. Novel. Stimulating. Extreme. We have all seen what happens to people who can only appreciate novelty.

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

This puts everything into perspective, and is the perfect summation of what has come before.

What is the relationship between ritual and the Tao, or true goodness? The relationship between what is real and what is superficial.

Therefore, the surface is not real, or at least of no real value. It may or may not correspond to an inner depth of virtue, but this presumption of correspondence is the basis of the allure we have for the surface.

This was later expressed by 18th century French novelist Stendhal: “beauty is the promise of happiness.”

Poignant, poetic, and all too familiar. Promises can be broken.

A truly great person knows the difference between hard assets, so to speak, and a promissory note. A great person can find happiness without being misled by mere beauty.

The final exhortation, therefore accept the one and reject the other, drives home yet another defining characteristic of a great person: he or she does choose. Does say yes to some things and no to others. It is neither a universalizing yes nor no to the world, but a selective acceptance of substance and a rejection of shallowness. One cannot have both, because it it were possible, a philosophy by which one might do this would have been given here.

We do have to look past the awkward words to hear someone’s true meaning and intent.

We do have to look past appearances to discern one’s character.

We do have to reject what is merely palatable for what is richly nourishing.

We do have to reject what is merely comforting for the sake of what is edifying, challenging, and rewarding.

We have to reject what is stimulating, seductive, charismatic, and charming, and accept what is truly worthy of respect, commitment, and trust.

The validity of this message lies in its straightforward acknowledgement of what all experience teaches us: that all is not one, that the world is indeed made up of diverse elements, and though all are equally real, they are in no way equally desirable, or of equal depth and value.

Substance is better than appearance.
Kindness and understanding is better than conformity born of fear.
Goodness is better than mere politeness.
Unostentatious virtue is better than a victory parade.

We have gharish, vacuous images on the one hand, and subtle inner essences on the other. They are never found together, and it is therefore unacceptable to avoid the decision between the two.

To reject the superficial for the sake of the real is what it means to choose what is better, and what it means to be good, even great.

Choose wisely.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Do Or Die: rewrite the rules and become exceptional

Welcome back. This week I want to look at a theme that goes by many names, one that I’m certain you’ve discussed and read about before:

Raising your expectations for yourself, and getting better results, more frequently, in the process.

It seems reasonable enough to say that a higher standard of living is synonymous with better quality of life.

It also seems reasonable enough to say that making improvements in one’s overall quality of life is difficult for many.

The reason for this difficulty, in my view, has to do with a distinction that was touched upon in last week’s article: the exception on the one hand, and the rule on the other.

People who get swept up in new year’s resolutions, who make a sudden push in January only to find themselves right back where they started by March, have demonstrated that they see the better behaviors as exceptional, for example.

Therefore, going with this framework, a person who successfully makes changes is a person who rewrites the rules.

Today, then, I will lay out both the process and the mentality by which one rewrites their own rules for the better.

A bit of trite verbiage if you will: exceptional people are not making exceptions, but playing by the rules. They take the rules very seriously – much more seriously than those who are frustrated and underperforming. Said another way, the winners, the people we rightfully admire, have the strongest command of the fundamentals, and therefore the strongest foundations.

I want to lay out some of these fundamentals now, and I intend to do so a bit rudely. Rudely, because rudeness is necessary: people do not change unless and until they can no longer afford to remain where and as they are.

My rudeness is the rudeness in saying YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP as you’re sleeping through your alarm the day of the big job interview. From rudeness with love.

Rule Number One: results must be delivered

Let’s begin with an anecdote. Plutarch, famed Greek philosopher, historian, essayist, and priest (at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the site of the famous inscription, “know thyself”), compiled many of the famous sayings of both named and unnamed Spartans, who were notorious for their terse and acerbic wit.

For example, when asked to come and hear a singer who could perfectly mimic a nightingale, a Spartan declined by merely saying, “I’ve heard the bird.”

The particular quotation that concerns me right now, however, is attributed to Eudamidas:

When told that an old man was “a wise old man and one of those who search for virtue,” Eudamidas replied, “and when will he make use of it if he is still searching for it?”

It is easy to say one is studying something, seeking something, or working on something. These days, we hear people say that they are working on themselves, trying to learn patience, or, god help us, trying to learn humility.

Remember the piercing question of Eudamidas: when will he make use of it?

In other words, does someone who thinks of himself as a seeker also expect himself to find and utilize the thing being sought? In my experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”

To self describe as “seeking” is dangerous: it normalizes incompetence. It normalizes falling short. It’s okay to not be there yet, because you’re “working on it,” you’re “trying,” and you’re, worst of all, “doing your best.”

If searching is the rule, acquiring and utilizing is the exception. Results are the exception. This is the definition of mediocrity.

And, it is more than merely mediocre: it is ignorant. One acquires not by seeking, but by doing. Some examples, to better make this distinction:

Suppose I see someone who is remarkably strong physically. I don’t seek strength, I do things that require strength. I increase the demand for strength, by lifting weights, and the strength is supplied. I eat more, I sleep more, I drink more water, and I religiously avoid anything that diminishes the efficacy of my efforts. I don’t seek strength, I exercise the strength I have, and consume the resources necessary to produce more of it.

Suppose I listen to an interview with an author like Robert Greene, and wish I was as knowledgeable, well spoken and as well read. How would I seek those qualities? By reading more books, writing more often, and having more conversations with more people about the sorts of ideas that interested me. Where is the seeking in this? I see only the exercise of one’s capacity, and the resultant expansion of capacity.

Finally, what does being a better musician mean to me? Does it mean searching for better musical ideas and hoping to one day find and execute them? No. It means parting ways forever with this kind of mousey modesty, and being ever more assertive: writing more songs, spending more time practicing them, recording them more frequently, giving more direction in rehearsals, spending more time listening to music that exemplifies the qualities I wish to promote in my own, and applying more scrutiny to what I’m hearing, rather than merely enjoying what I’m doing.

In short, it means demanding results and delivering them, without exception. Let go of the notion of searching and hoping, and take up the way of having and using. Whatever it is you have right here and now, resolve to extract the maximum use from it on a daily basis: you will inevitably discover that this is the means by which you find whatever you were previously seeking.

Rule Number Two: have only the highest regard for yourself

I here exhort you to redraw your entire cosmology: you do not possess original sin, and you are not awaiting salvation. What you possess, rather, is tremendous potential that must be realized at any and all costs. Think of yourself less as someone trying to find his or her way in a vast world and more like a child of royalty placed prematurely on a throne: the role for you is the role before you now, and you must only grow into it.

Again, there is nothing for you to seek: you are here now, and there is a life for you to live right here and right now. Seeking negates having!

Redraw your cosmology: the sun, the sky, the steady passing of time that exposes the consequences of all actions, the people who brought you into this world and the others who educated and mentored and befriended and challenged you – all of this is an endorsement of your existence, confirmation that you are here, that you belong here, that space is made for you wherever you go. Even and especially when others disagree, resist, or reject my ideas, this only proves I am a force that must be contended with, must be answered and countered in some way by others.

Until you are prepared to grant this much, and to take it to be the normal state of affairs, you will always be wondering about and seeking to establish or convince yourself of what is actually nothing but the backdrop of all life, the simple fact of your existence.

Grant yourself some importance, some respect! Not in an egotistical sense, but in the sense that there is important work that awaits its completion by your hands, and it will not settle for another’s.

In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “why should the Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots act lightly in public?” You do so little, try so feebly, adhere so inconsistently, because you believe it doesn’t matter anyway. You matter to the extent that you treat yourself like something that matters.

As for me, I wrenched my life from the jaws of self defeating ideas and decided to claim as much meaning as I possibly could from the time that remains, and I will continue until some insurmountable force appears before me to say: this is it, there is no more knowledge, no more insight, or accomplishment, or improvement, or understanding, or maturity, or contribution, or love and companionship and friendship and cooperation and collaboration for you to partake of. There is a ceiling, and this is it.

Are you where you are because some such force has appeared before you, like Christ at the Mount of Olives, or are you simply not even trying?

The wise seeker knows,
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self effort,
AND NO FATE NOR GOD
SHALL ORDAIN IT OTHERWISE.
Vasistha’s Yoga, trans. Swami Venkatesananda

Rule Number Three: embrace hatred.

We return again to my beloved Spartans, conveyed to me by the pen of Plutarch.

Before I reprint and expound on a series of pungent quotations, however, I should back up and justify what appears to be an unjustifiable, even irresponsible use of words: embrace hatred.

It’s not what you have, but how you understand and utilize it that matters. To the determined, resourceful person, anything and everything can be and is employed toward the end of perfection: of oneself, one’s life, and one’s every undertaking.

If you were short, should I tell you, “don’t bother, shorties can’t win?” Should I tell you the same if you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or someone attracted to the same sex? Should I say that something about you disqualifies you from the contest altogether? No. I should say, learn to play by the rules, as skillfully as you possibly can, built in handicaps notwithstanding, and you’ll receive whatever marks you earn fair and square.

This extends to attributes of the psyche as well. If you are loving and kind, you can win. If you are cunning and competitive, you can win. And, I dare to say it, if you are hateful, you can win.

To reiterate: what disqualifies you is a violation of the rules, or what you do. Not who you are or how you feel.

I believe this is clear enough.

Another concept we are going to need: the yin and yang symbol as a model for a binary system. A world of black and white opposites, but not so rigorously segregated as “black and white” implies. A little bit of black in the white half, a little bit of white in the black half, creating balance within each half, rather than balance existing “on the whole.” The Yin and Yang Binary represents the appropriate integration of opposing energies at the local level, not merely at the level of abstraction.

This matters, because nobody actually lives in the average household, with the average family and income and budget and back problems: we only occupy the particular, which merely contributes to a sense of what is average. “Average” as a data point does not truly exist.

Why say all this? Because hate has a place in your life at the local level. It isn’t simply the case that all the perfect woke coastal snow angels of love and empathy have to balance out the hateful idiots in fly over states – YOU have to strike the appropriate balance between love and hate within yourself.

This is impossible if you cannot admit to being in possession of hatred.

Back, then, to the Spartans.

“When asked how one should remain a free man, [Agis, song of Archidamus] said, “by despising death.”

“Questioned as to how he gained his great reputation, [Agesilaus] said, ‘by having despised death.’”

“Certainly when somebody asked what gains the laws of Lycurgus had brought Sparta, [Agesilaus] said: ‘contempt for pleasures.’”

When someone was asking [Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas] why the Spartans do not dedicate the spoils from their enemies to the gods, he said: ‘because they come from cowards.’”

“As some Athenian was reading a funeral eulogy in praise of men killed by Spartans, [Ariston] said: ‘what, then, do you think was the quality of our men who defeated them?’”

A picture has surely emerged, by now, of the sort of hatred I am referring to, so that we might finally understand what it means to “embrace hatred.”

A love of life that is given an intimidating ferocity by the attending hatred of death. A love of strength and vitality that is inseparable from a hatred of weakness. A love of victory that is tempered by a disdain for the evident inferiority of the defeated. A deep sense that some people are simply better than others, that superiority can be proven by contest, and that better people are entitled to more, and entitled to rule.

Said another way, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that “an honorable man is a disdainful man.” I believe the meaning of this statement has been made clear enough by now.

It is not enough to like the idea of one day achieving something:

You must hate the thought of failure
Hate the thought of being right where you are now in another ten years,
Hate the thought of your parents or spouse or children making excuses for you,
Hate the thought of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself and others,
Hate the idea of squandering your potential for the sake of episodic pleasantries,
Hate the idea of wasting your life.

When I start to falter on my path, an icy, humorless auditor within me rises up to scowl and cast a rigid index finger down like a punishing lightning bolt as if to say, get back up, get to work, and get it done.

I wish to close with a poetic representation of precisely this kind of wrathful contempt, embodied perfectly by Wallace Stevens in his poem Puella Parvula (Latin for “quiet little girl”). I can only say this so well, but Stevens says it perfectly:

Puella Parvula

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,
The bloody lion in the yard at night ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch, O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins…
Flame, sound, fury composed… Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

In summary,

Part with excuses and demand results. Come to view results as normal, and lack of results as abnormal.

Hold yourself in the highest regard, and then ceaselessly demand that your behavior rise to meet your own standards.

Finally, you must have contempt for whatever is beneath you, that threatens you, that brings you down, that would seek to poison you and strip you of your sense of purpose, that would tell you you are unworthy of your aspirations and potential. Let that contempt become that which fuels you, like the mighty imagination that triumphs like a trumpet over the blaring elephant on the roof.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

The Truth In A Calm World: choosing reality over fantasy

Welcome back. Today, I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism.

I want a model of reality that I find credible, yet also provides me with some buoyancy in the face of life’s entropic forces.

What I don’t want to do is commit suicide unto the faculty of reason, which is how Albert Camus described faith.

Allow me to elaborate: I refuse to take refuge in something I know I don’t believe, just because it sounds reassuring. I can’t pretend to be convinced when I’m not, and, if I did, the internal conflict that would ensue would be far worse than living with the honest admission of uncertainty.

If you can get on board with that, or at least take that for a test drive from now until the end of my article, I think we can have an interesting discussion.

Before proceeding, another word of clarification: the reason pretending to believe what you do not is worse than whatever alternative honesty would bring as a consequence is that pretense is unhealthy.

Begin building on a foundation of falsehood, and, with every passing day, the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness only grows in intensity. When the time comes to assert what you actually believe, to stand up for your principles, there will be no weight behind it. You will have no credibility with yourself, and what should ring true only rings hollow.

So, we can’t cling to what we don’t truly believe, and, instead, we have to admit to our true beliefs.

One of those true beliefs, one true statement I can make now, however, is that beliefs drive behavior, and I therefore want the beliefs that will drive the right behavior. I want a good life, meaning that I want to live in such a way that I can look in the mirror and see a good person.

My fundamental beliefs about life, the world, and my place in it are what determine my actions, good or bad.

This is obvious: my beliefs about the weather govern how I dress myself.

If I want positive outcomes, then, I need positive beliefs that facilitate them.

So, if dishonest positivity is not an option, but some positivity is required, then neither is cynicism an option. Cynicism could be here defined as the belief that all positivity is dishonest and therefore not to be engaged in.

I gave a good overview of Negativity Bias in a previous newsletter, which I encourage you to read, but I’ll summarize here by saying that our biases make it hard for us to adopt a positive mental attitude: negative information is seen as more important, more true, and more sophisticated.

If faith is the suicide of reason, as Camus said, then I say cynicism is death at the hands of reason: an airtight explanation that nonetheless makes life impossible.

A brave and daring person, then, should insist that life’s horizons be kept bright without giving any insult to the faculty of reason in the process. Win win or no deal.

This brings us back to what I said at the outset: I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism. The most believable and the most uplifting, simultaneously.

I encountered an excellent prospective model for such a belief system in chapter 39 of the Tao Te Ching, which I will now reprint in its entirety, and proceed to analyze.

These things from ancient times arise frome one:
The sky is whole and clear.
The earth is whole and firm.
The spirit is whole and strong.
The valley is whole and full.
The ten thousand things are whole and alive.
Kings and lords are whole, and the country is upright.
All these are in virtue of wholeness.

The clarity of the sky prevents its falling.
The firmness of the earth prevents its splitting.
The strength of the spirit prevents its being used up.
The fullness of the valley prevents its running dry.
The growth of the ten thousand things prevents their dying out.
The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall of the country.

Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.
The low is the foundation of the high.
Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.”
Do they not depend on being humble?

Too much success is not an advantage.
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like stone chimes.

Before going through it in more detail, let me just tell you, in broad terms, what it is I believe you’ve just read: a presentation of a harmoniously interconnected world.

A world that is healthy, thriving, morally upright, and responsibly governed, where those who occupy the highest positions are humble because they are enlightened: they understand the inextricable link between what is above and what is below.

Here’s where we get to do a bit of what salesmen call “objection handling.”

It’s clear enough that the world isn’t perfect, or, at least, that kings and lords do not appear to “depend on being humble.”

It’s clear to anyone with eyes that there are plenty of problems at the level of governance, and that it is far from “whole,” as the text appears to state.

Here’s where I come to another important point about what it means to find the intersection of positivity and realism:

You have to be capable of stating and advocating for your ideal in the face of less-than-ideal circumstances.

I am certain that Lao Tzu did not believe all rulers everywhere to be whole and upright – he criticizes bad rulers frequently in other chapters.

What is being presented here, then, is the ideal that may never be realized, but toward which the real can always be nudged.

The key to being both honest and optimistic is to be in possession of a clear ideal: the 39th chapter of the Tao Te Ching presents one perfectly. Scanning all of creation from top to bottom, and praising it for its wholeness, its cohesion, its dutiful integrity. Everything performing its part perfectly because it is perfectly intact.

What is the benefit of accepting the image of the world put forth here?

I’ll answer with another question: If you saw the world and everything in it as whole and good, how would that influence your behavior?

A good world doesn’t need to be changed, only taken care of. A good person doesn’t need to be changed, only cared for.

Good people don’t always do what I want them to do,
Good people make mistakes,
Good people can stall out in their development,
Good people can get angry and say things they don’t mean,

And still be good people.

Similarly, the world contains death, disease, malevolence, tragedy, ruin, and baffling wastefulness,

And none of this constitutes proof that the world is broken in any way. These things are real, and the world contains them.

The notion that the world could and therefore should exclude things that are undesirable is to misunderstand what the world is: the world is the arena of cause and effect, the gallery of what is real. Presence in the world is conditioned only by the presence of prerequisite conditions: if it has been caused, then it is.

Whence comes the notion of incompleteness, then? The world as I have described it is perfectly sensible, perfectly complete, and perfectly good: all causes are entitled to their corresponding effects. That is fairness, that is wholeness.

People are who they are because they are elements of a world governed by actions, not by moral judgments.

Rather than decry the world or humanity for its ugliness, then,

And here is the leap into wisdom,

Recognize what is perfectly complete and fair in its ugliness.

The existence of something, the incontrovertible fact that you have experienced something is proof only that the world admits this, too, through its gates.

Where is the fault, the brake, the lie?

You should by now see what I have done:

I began by granting that the description of a whole and upright world was merely an abstract ideal,

Only to go on to prove that it is no mere ideal, but the actual state of affairs. You would have done the same, were you in my shoes.

There is nothing wrong with the world,
Nothing wrong with humanity,
And nothing wrong with you.

Believing something to be wrong turns you into a kind of impotent god, equipped on the one hand with superior knowledge (you know how everything should be) and lacking any ability to bend anything to your will on the other.

To believe that something is wrong with the world, humanity, and yourself is to hold a belief that leads different people down different avenues,

But never done the avenue of knowledge, never to enlightenment.

If you think a thing to be incomplete, you leave it to go in search of what might complete it, all the while neglecting it. Were you to operate under the assumption that all the puzzle pieces had been put back in the box, however, you would simply set about putting it together straight away, as no necessary thing is missing.

By knowing the world to be complete, you are free to engage it completely.

The disparities of the world do not prove the world to be broken.

Let us look again at the chapter:

Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.
The low is the foundation of the high.
Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.”
Do they not depend on being humble?

What does this mean, the low is the foundation of the high?

Nothing can be raised up unless there is something else above which it is raised. That is what being raised means in the first place.

To have contempt for what is beneath you is like the treetops having contempt for their own trunks and roots, contempt for the soil on which it stands. The earth gave you something to stand on, gave you something over which to aggrandize yourself.

I can only say I am literate because others are illiterate. If I’m tall it’s because I’m taller than others, and their relative shortness is the basis of my status as tall: they gave it to me by creating the disparity.

This is the inextricable link between what is above and what is below. Great people only have value because of the mediocrity of others. Their greatness is owed less to their own accomplishments than to the relative lack of accomplishment of others.

This is why Princes and Lords “depend on being humble” – they are rulers because they are not subjects, the same way that night is not night as much as it is “not day.” One’s entire identity, everything you might claim for yourself, is created, even as a concept that can occupy your mind, by the reality of a disparity between one state and its opposite.

We have now revealed the meaning of the opaque closing lines, then:

“Too much success is not an advantage.
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like stone chimes.”

Too much success is what you have when you forget that you only have success in contrast to those who are less successful, including your previous self. I cannot spurn the thought of myself as a helpless infant, because the level of change between my infantile state and my present state constitutes the sole basis for my sense of pride in how far I’ve come.

Headaches handed the billions to Advil.

Therefore do not posture and peacock, do not boast and tinkle and clatter: you only insult that which made you, which gave you everything you have.

How does any of this solve real problems for real people?

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the solution of the problem of life is seen as the vanishing of the problem” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521).

The disappearance of the problem, not the appearance of the solution.

The Tao Te Ching is not a book that offers solutions as much as it accelerates the dissolution of problems. It offers a series of common sense perspectives that, when put together, taken deeply to heart, and applied assiduously, remove self created suffering from your life.

To be able to look around at the world, at humanity, at yourself, and see that all is as it should be – including the unceasing demands for attention placed upon you by all three – is to be at peace.

To think of the world, humanity, and yourself as broken, incomplete, and morally flawed is to live in misery: your best efforts amount to little more than putting lipstick on a pig.

When all is as it should be, nothing need be added, but the sense of moral condemnation is automatically subtracted. You live in a household that must be continually set in order. Things drift into disorder of their own accord – simply attend to disorder as and when you encounter it.

No, it does not minimize the scale of any problem to state it so plainly. What it intentionally minimizes is the self aggrandizing sense of drama that people are, evidently, eager to tack on to the problem. The drama frames the problem as exceptional: I tell you now, it is the rule.

To see the world as it is to be the exception can only mean that the alternative model for the world you hold in your imagination is, to you, the rule. The thing to which the present aberration must eventually yield.

“The humble is the root of the noble.” What is humility, but the ability to relinquish your private reality and submit to what is literally right in front of your face? Surely, this facilitates frequent and thorough attention far better than holding onto a fantasy into which you retreat in ways and at times that are not fully within your control, and are certainly detrimental.

The humility to relinquish one’s fantasies for the sake of reality. Fair enough, but, in what way is this “the root of the noble?” Because, and here I’ll be a bit cute if you don’t mind, the road to attainment is paved with engagement. Let the fantasy world wither so that the long neglected garden of the real might now flourish. The more you abandon self aggrandizing fantasy for the sake of humble toil, the more you take on the quality of nobility: skilled, accomplished, influential. Someone of substance and consequence.

To earn the respect and cooperation of others, perhaps even their admiration and deference, takes time and effort. “Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.”

It is the person who tries to circumvent this process that eagerly declares himself a success, “clattering like stone chimes.” Eager to announce and gloat in his superiority over the humble, he is a plucked flower without roots, destined only to wither. This is the fundamental distinction between fantasy and reality: the presence or absence of these humble and prosaic foundations.

See the world before you as the right one, the real one, the better one, and do what it requires of you: this is the path to nobility.

And that, I believe, is as honest as it is encouraging.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

The Long Way Home: overcoming drugs and alcohol

Stay in school,
Eat your greens,
And say no to drugs.

Yup, this is the letter where I talk about drugs and alcohol, my path to total abstention from both, and why I recommend a zero percent participation rate for everyone.

Before I go on to outline exactly what it is I’m going to talk about, permit me to clarify in advance what I’m not going to do, and where it is that my statements are not coming from.

I’m not here to give some kind of “tell-all” story about my past, and everything I share about myself will be for the sake of making a larger point.

There are people who reach a place in their lives when they can no longer hold back some kind of terrible secret and have to bear their soul to the world to overcome their shame. That is not me, and this is no such performance.

I’m also not here to hound people who are simply living their lives and aren’t looking for a change. I’m going to be quite blunt, mercilessly at times, about my assessment of the effects of drugs and alcohol on people’s conduct, conscience, and maturity – if you were to feel personally attacked, you would be mistaken.

Alcohol has been part of civilization for millennia: the phrase “write drunk, edit sober” was not coined by Bukowski but by the Egyptians, according to the Histories of Herodotus. Similarly, there are all manner of psychoactive herbs that people have discovered deep in the forests and jungles, chewing on them and making teas, since as long as we have existed as a species.

It is an arrogant blowhard who judges the world and judges humanity. What I’m interested in is clarity of understanding, and I try to convey what it is that I understand in the clearest language possible.

With that said, here’s what you can expect in the paragraphs that follow.

A summary of my own history with D&A

The sorts of character flaws that made me vulnerable to an unhealthy relationship with D&A,

All the ways D&A made me a worse person living a worse life,

Everything that changed for the better as a direct result of completely quitting D&A.

Some general observations about the nature of substance abuse, and a guardedly optimistic finale.

So, consider this week’s letter as you and me having some “real talk” about life’s ups and downs, and what setting the world aright has looked like in my own life.

I leave it to you to reflect on my experiences and observations, assessing where you do and don’t find parallels in your own life or the lives of those close to you. This is, as the kids say, “my truth.” We may have much in common, or be worlds apart. That’s your own private assessment to make, and I assume nothing.

Part One: Why did it become a problem for me?

I’ve talked about this in earlier newsletters, but I used to be deeply uncomfortable in my own skin, and didn’t make friends very easily.

Plenty of people go through that at some point in their life, but they soon outgrow it. I didn’t. The root of it apparently went much deeper, or, perhaps, the mechanisms that usually kick in to move someone beyond it were short circuited in my case.

It’s hard to say for sure, but the result is that I adapted to, rather than outgrew the discomfort. I put very high walls around myself, neither letting anything in fully, nor fully issuing forth anything of my true self either.

A lot of my “intellectualizing,” while it later bore real fruit, was initially wrapped up in the search for tools with which to distance myself from other people, to feel superior, and in which I might bury myself so that I could avoid those uncomfortable feelings.

What I want to get across is the extent to which I was holding up a compensatory edifice. If it was born of anxiousness and self loathing, it only made for more of the same.

This would be an example of the ideal conditions for someone to respond abnormally well to alcohol and drugs (cocaine in my case). By abnormally well, I mean liking it a bit too much.

A normal person takes pain killers and just gets an upset stomach. A person in tremendous pain, on the other hand, feels euphoria. I felt euphoria.

It’s hard to say no to euphoria. It’s hard to push it away in favor of being left to grapple with an agonizing existential void, without any tools, understanding, or people around you who speak the language of self development.

Conversely, it’s easy to find people who want to get inebriated.

During a particularly bad chapter in my life, drugs and alcohol took hold to a greater degree than they ever had before. I had gone through a divorce, having been on the receiving end of verbal, psychological, and physical abuse for the better part of six years, only to jump into a new relationship way too quickly.

All that unprocessed baggage on my end culminated in acts of infidelity that ended the relationship and left me without a place to stay. As this coincided with me failing out of a Multilevel Marketing Company, I found myself out of a job as well.

It was as though my whole life had “bottomed out.”

My ex wife and daughter had moved in with her parents in San Francisco, but there I was, in Southern California, looking around at nothing but the wreckage of what had been my life.

So, I threw all my stuff in the car, abandoned the rest, and drove to San Francisco to co parent my kid. I lived in my car, and drove lyft 10 plus hours a day, six or seven days a week. I had 7000 passengers in 18 months, if that puts in perspective.

I say all this to say that I felt, and, in many ways, was completely outside society at that point. It felt like my life had split off into some parallel, alternate universe. I knew that, somehow, I would get out of this situation, but I had no idea how, and I didn’t make any plans.

Looking back on it now, of course it could have been solved relatively easily. I had tunnel vision, and lacked the courage to truly face the reality of my situation. I buried myself in the daily grind, avoiding larger questions and problems.

It was under these circumstances that drugs and alcohol gradually crept back into my life. I say “crept back,” and that’s probably confusing. They had been in the picture before, and I’d kicked them to the curb and kept them out for years, but the underlying issues were never truly resolved. Now, I was in the most vulnerable place I’ve ever been in, feeling like I wasn’t living a real life, and that I didn’t quite matter to the world in the way that others did. I felt like a complete failure, although I wouldn’t have had the courage to articulate that at the time.

So, they crept back in, and gradually took over. When I got rid of them this last time, I knew this had to be about more than just not using them. I had to remove the cause. The cause of my twisted love affair with them.

Here is something that I wrote, years ago, reflecting on that “love affair”

It feels like I’ve known you all my life

I met them at a party years ago
And they were so interesting
Interesting like when you hear
John’s solo on Giant Steps
For the first time.
Interesting like the first time
A girl puts your hand somewhere
And you don’t know what to do,
Yet surprised at your unhesitation.
We were fast friends,
Me and these interesting strangers.
They took me everywhere –
Introduced me to ex black ops
Operatives who showed me
Their black handguns,
Introduced me to ex pro athletes
With black curls tight as a drum
And speech as chiseled as their bodies once were.
Introduced me to women I’d always looked at
And could never talk to,
Sometimes three or four at a time,
Took me to house parties full of mid-six lawyers,
Rooftop bars, artists’ lofts,
Black cars idling in parking lots.
My friends were interesting –
Like an electric shock
Like an epiphany,
Like a conversation that
Blows your fucking mind out
Like jumping into bed with a girl
When the other two friends
She came over with
Are sitting and drinking at your kitchen table
And nobody cares.
We’d stay up all night, and when the sun rose
They were gone without goodbyes
But they always called again.
They were there
When she stopped texting back
When I had a bad day at work
When I had a good day at work
When a date ended early,
When a date went unexpectedly well.
I stopped being surprised when my new friends
Already knew them, and brought them along
When they I couldn’t find them on my own.
They stopped leaving at dawn,
Had nowhere else to go,
And maybe it’s because I too was interesting now.
But time went by, and I never saw them eating.
I asked them about it one day,
And they lifted up the hood,
Lifted up the rug,
Opened up the walls,
The bank accounts,
And my ribs,
And showed me
Everything they’d chewed through.

I said this wouldn’t be some gut wrenching tell all tall tale. I’m dangerously close to breaking that promise, so let’s step away from the precipice. I hope I’ve conveyed the tone and tenor of the whole thing, the causes of my particular vulnerability I had to it, the sorts of pain it was medicating, and feeling of being robbed of one’s dignity that comes from being eventually ruled by an addictive substance.

Part Two: Life After Drugs

I don’t touch anything anymore. I put my foot down and got through it. More importantly, I got to the root issues. I’ve discussed all this in previous newsletters, but I’ll summarize here by saying that I gradually acquired tools with which I could face my own demons. It wasn’t with sheer courage, but frameworks.

Initially, I just needed regular doses, if you’ll pardon the word, of positivity. After years of running away, I was left in an empty windowless room with my own feelings of worthlessness. The advantage, however, of arriving at that confrontation later in life, after having lost so much in a vain attempt to cover it up, is that there was no longer any fooling myself: the resolution to this could be nothing less than total. The enemy had to be utterly annihilated, the reversal of course comprehensive, and the reforms unequivocal. There was no going back, no half measures, and no second thoughts. I had to become, as I have now said a handful of times, totally solid all the way to the core.

I started listening to positive affirmations, and guided meditations. For people who are interested in and receptive to this kind of thing, here are the links to the morning and evening meditations I listened to religiously.

I started exercising regularly as well, first at home, and eventually at the gym. I’ve only gotten more serious about the gym as time’s gone by. It’s fun, even if it does not look or sound like I am having fun. It looks and sounds like a horror movie, but now I look great naked, which is its own reward.

I discovered the joy of honoring myself, treating myself like someone who matters, and backing that up by keeping promises to myself. Doing what I set out to do, not doing what I said I wouldn’t do.

What I discovered for myself is the power of self credibility. I discovered the joy of earning my own respect and approval. Because I know what it means to live without both, I have a special appreciation for it now.

At first, I would defend it militantly. Now I’m a bit more relaxed and dare I say charming about the whole thing now. But, at first, I still had little bits of the gravel of the underworld in my teeth, still not totally sure if the nightmare was over.

I can now say that it’s over. The first time I quit, I was taken in by “the spiritual community.” The Kundalini Yoga people (did you think I just happened to be a non practicing Jew from Berkeley with no Indian ancestry and coincidentally named Jaswinder Singh? Guess again).

It’s not a bad way of life, but I traded in my hot mess of a life for dogmatic rigidity with the support of a religious separatist community. I was not holding this up on my own, and far from it. This is why the underlying issues never went away, even if they were dormant for many years.

The second time I quit, I did it all myself. I made use of resources, but not one human being lifted a finger or offered a word of support. I made sure nobody had the chance, or even knew of the undertaking. This had to be my own doing, every step of the way. I had to know every step of the road leading from insanity to sanity, ruin to accomplishment, failure to success, misery to happiness, unhealthiness to radiant vitality. I had to acquire an absolute command over myself, and my life depended on it.

So far, so good.

Progress begets progress. What began as just trying to get through a day without consuming soon led to more positive endeavors. I missed being serious about things, so I started reading books again, practicing guitar to a metronome, and taking every opportunity to clean up the messes I had made in the past.

Eventually, I stumbled onto the methodology that would change my life forever: spending the entire month of December to plan the entire following year. I’m on year 3 of using this system, modifying and refining as I go.

It was all driven by an insatiable urge to take my life back. And, once I had regained control of it, to fashion it into something that I could proudly call my life’s work.

That’s the project. That’s what we’re doing here: trying to win the game fair and square, but at any cost. The right thing, done the right way, for the right reasons, at any cost.

Part Three: impolite observations

This is where I rattle off some general observations about what drugs and alcohol seem to do to people.

This is also the part where I speak with judicious pitilessness when I deem necessary. You’ve been warned.

They destroy your credibility with yourself.

Cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and a bad diet are all examples of things we know we shouldn’t do. If you wouldn’t want your own child consuming them, then you know damn well that you shouldn’t be either.

The result of this is moral compromise: on the most basic level, which is your relationship with yourself, you put things into your body that you know perfectly well do not belong there because they are poisonous.

I am telling you now, it is really quite simple: when you do things every day that you know you should not do, you do not respect yourself: “ignoring knowledge is sickness.”

It is probably also the case that you’ve walled off the acute awareness of that fact, because it hurts, behind a bunch of what we colloquially refer to as bullshit: rationalizing, excuse making, empty promises about someday, hand waving (“yeah, I know”), and willful blindness.

Again, not behavior anyone can respect, least of all you. Imagine having to live with someone who constantly lies, ignores problems, actively contributes to his or her own deterioration, and acts like none of it is a big deal.

They make you
selfish,
isolated,
impulsive,
arrogant,
and delusional.

They don’t call it “self medicating” for nothing. Drugs and alcohol turn you into a very self involved person, your energy and attention always directed toward yourself, your high, your buzz, your hangover, your comedown, your cravings.

Self serving behavior is isolating behavior. Whether or not you’re around other people, you’re not truly with them as much as you are using them. Using them to facilitate the experience, as an outlet for your disinhibited loquacity, and, most of all, as an excuse to engage in the behavior: you’re having a good time. Cut drugs and alcohol out of your life, and see how much fun those same people are to hang out with.

Just as selfishness and isolationism are linked, impulsivity and arrogance are also linked. Drugs and alcohol create the illusion of power: I can make these bad feelings go away with my magic potion, so why should I deal in a serious way with the root causes of bad feelings?

The root causes of social awkwardness, the surprisingly frightening nature of being presented with real love and intimacy, the discomfort of not knowing what to say or do, and the sundry causes of feelings of inadequacy, which are quite often valid (meaning, yes it is quite often the case that you are inadequate, because life is not easy and cannot be managed successfully without real depth and maturity, all of which must be obtained in the face of discomfort) – why grapple with any of that when I can numb myself to it all by simply consuming drugs and alcohol?

Here’s where the arrogance comes in: it isn’t that you merely aren’t aware of the consequences of the fact that you’re being avoidant: you know, and you don’t care.

And that means that you never truly deal with people as humans, but always as a kind of threat: are you going to stay within the bounds of what I can tolerate? Of what I find pleasant and agreeable? Or is our interaction going to bring something to the surface that will trigger a craving?

The mind of an addict says: I don’t have to listen to you, because I have ways of burying your signal beneath a mountain of noise. A high, a buzz – it is 100% noise.

The noise gives rise to delusion. Delusions, because you’re getting less and less signal from your environment, and you’re living more and more within a totally private experience of your own making, but over which you do not have any real control.

Your own little world of pseudo intellectual “insights,” wild experiences, and the sense of being cut off from and in some way superior to others.

All fucking rubbish.

Let’s end on a positive note, shall we?

The main reason substance abuse is bad, axiomatically, is because it cheats everyone of the person you might have been, had you chosen the path of courage, contribution, and creativity. It cheats your parents of a son or daughter they can be proud of, or at least stop worrying about. It cheats your teachers of the feeling of having actually elevated someone into a self reliant adult who loves to learn, grow, and achieve. It cheats you of the possibility of fulfilling your ambitions, your dreams, your yearnings for a life of deep connection and meaning.

It’s that potential that I want you to focus on. That’s what matters. That, if I may, is the purpose of life: to grow to full maturity. To find out what you’re capable of. To draw out the insights buried in the recesses of your mind. To see how you might build upon the achievements of your forebears if only you had read a little more about them and understood where their work has run aground.

Like it or not, someone is looking to you as an example of what is possible. Will you be a role model, a cautionary tale, or a corrupting influence? You have to decide. I had to decide.

You’re not a victim. Nobody did this or anything to you: your life is a series of events, none of which could possibly constitute an excuse for being a selfish piece of shit. I wasted far too much of my life being like that, despite having every opportunity laid at my feet, and being surrounded by loving and supportive parents and mentors since as long as I could remember.

What sobriety represents to me is the choice of life over death. The choice of what is real and shared over what is imaginary and private. The choice of being good over being clever, and the choice of seeing it through over quitting.

In closing, I want to say that if you stop treating yourself like someone who can’t handle life, you might be amazed by what your life can now become. I already am, and I’m just getting started. Give it a try.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

Technique, Creativity, Artistry: how to become remarkable

If you listen to the title track of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut album, “Are You Experienced?”, you’ll hear him ask “have you ever been experienced?” And then the answer: “well, I have.”

You and me both, Jimi.

The tree of experience bears many fruits, and among them is discernment. The ability to make distinctions. When you have experience with something, you can differentiate between the many forms of that something. The many contexts in which one engages with it, and therefore, the range of responses that might be offered.

Discernment is critical to success in any endeavor, because it’s an example of a foundational virtue.

I like to discuss foundational elements, because everything on top of the foundation is up to you. It’s your life, and you should direct the course of it based on an internal locus of self worth, an inner sense of self and purpose. I try not to provide input there – it has to come from you.

What makes for a strong or weak foundation, however, is not up to you. These are the non-negotiables nobody can get around. My working definition of a failure is someone who pays attention to everything but the fundamentals, thinking they understand them already, or barely thinking about them at all, and always having a rationalization for why this time is exceptional and exemptive.

You might say I’m being pedantic here. I would say that conceptual groundwork is better verified than presumed.

See, like Hendrix, I also ask and answer questions to myself.

I would like, then, to better distinguish between three things that people often confuse, and unlock the potential growth that might spring from better understanding each of them.

Specifically, I’m going to spend some time defining each of them, and then provide some guidance about how to cultivate them.
These three are:

Technique
Creativity
Artistry

I see people conveying deep confusion about all three, so often, and in ways that clearly represent self-limiting beliefs, that I would like to spend some time delineating each of them.

Becoming the best you you can possibly be does indeed require all of these virtues. I spend a lot of time on all three, and, wow does it pay off.

A quick overview

Technique, skill, and productive capacity are all, in this context, synonymous: your ability to do something. The difference between walking down a sidewalk and climbing up a mountainside is one of technique.

Charisma, the ability to make eye contact, smile, intone one’s voice, and carry oneself in a way that elicits attention, consideration, admiration and deference from others, is a technique.

The ability to sew, type, play guitar, or use an Eisenhower Matrix – all techniques. All craft, all skill.

The word technique comes from the Greek tekne, “to know how to do.”

Creativity is related to, but distinct from, technique. Creativity is defined by Oxford Languages as “the use of imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.”

I have little to add to this definition, except to draw attention to the word “especially,” and point out that it does not mean “exclusively.” I’ll come back to this.

Artistry is defined, also by Oxford Languages, as “creative skill or ability.” While in no way inaccurate, I find it quite insufficient, especially in this context. The difference between being creative and being artistic is something which, again, I’ll spend some time outlining.

First, what is technique?

Exactly what was said moments ago: tekne, or how-how.

Let’s expand on this by introducing a new idea: signal-to-noise ratio, henceforth “SNR.” “Signal” equates to what is intended, “noise” to whatever substance accompanies the signal, but is unintended and perhaps undesired. In speech, the various parts of the sentence are the signal, while the ums, ahs, likes and y’knows, are all, like, totally just noise, ya know?

Technique is the ability to deliver as much signal with as little noise as possible.

Some more examples:

If someone makes valid points, but does so in a rude manner that ultimately eclipses the argument being put forth, noise has drowned out the signal, and this is bad technique.

If I buy a meal that contains ideal amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but is heavily processed, gives me indigestion, has little bioavailability, and gives me constipation, this, too is an example of signal (the macronutrients that my body needs) getting drowned out by noise (all the negative effects of mass production on the quality of the food). The manufacturer is technically bad at feeding me.

If I sit down to write my newsletter, the amount of time I spend typing words into the doc would be “signal,” and the time I spend clicking away to respond to texts, or scroll through social media, would be “noise,” from a time management perspective. Good technique, then, means spending my time productively.

Now it’s time for an important distinction:

The best possible technique is not equivalent to zero noise. A degree of noise is desirable, and, in many cases, necessary.

Examples:

The difference between my voice and your voice is not one of signal, but noise: the different shapes of the roofs of our mouths cause a variance in overtone distribution, which make our voices unique and easily distinguished from one another.

The same process of audio physics, variance in overtone distribution, is the reason a clarinet, oboe, violin, and timpani all make recognizably different sounds.

The difference between the bullet-point plot summary, though totally correct, and the experience of reading the entire novel, is one of signal to noise. Style is noise! Individuality is noise! Strip away noise and you have something totally robotic, alien, and devoid of feeling.

Finally, a so-called “bedside manner” from a doctor, versus someone blurting out “you’re gonna die,” is the difference between desirable noise and unbearable signal.

A good technician, then, maximizes signal within the range of productive returns.

I just brought in another concept, the law of diminishing returns. In short, it refers to the point at which more of a particular resource begins to confer less benefit. The point of negative returns indicates the point where more of the same resource now begins to strip away benefits, not merely cease adding to them.

Technique is about maintaining the SNR that confers maximum benefit.

Logical arguments brought to life by emotion, not hijacked by them.

Meals that are both nutritions and palatable, not hyper palatable with zero nutrition.

Time spent productively, but regularly punctuated by periods of rest, inactivity, and even boredom.

How to cultivate technique:

In any activity, clearly define what constitutes signal on the one hand and noise on the other.

Repeatedly practice producing signal.

In the beginning, there will be a lot of noise. In my case, as a writer, my earlier newsletters have weaker arguments, non sequiturs, unclear wording, and a lack of formatting.

Refinement of technique leads to a greater command of signal production, and, concordantly, noise reduction. One day, you will notice you’ve removed too much noise. You’ll feel empty and alienated by your own work.

Now you know where the line is.

In order to properly maintain the right balance of signal to noise, you need to consume material that exemplifies a good SNR.

Read good writing. Read the western canon, not blogs. There is a saying: great film composers listen to classical composers. Bad film composers listen to film composers.

I write blogs, but I read the classics. And my girlfriend’s text messages. Promptly. See how I threw in some noise right there?

If you’re always going to be a few steps behind your heroes, at least pick heroes who are ahead of your own competition.

Read, watch, and listen to the masters. And then iteratively participate in the fundamentals of the craft.

Now for creativity.

If technique is the productive application of skill, creativity is the inventiveness that selects the correct technique in the absence of outside direction.

Driving is a technique; improvising a new route when you hit a roadblock is creativity.

Playing in an orchestra requires technique; playing through the same parts without the use of your right index finger requires creativity.

Writing coherent sentences and paragraphs requires technique; deciding what to say next requires creativity.

I could go on, but I think you see the point. When you have to forge a path yourself without outside input, or with merely suggestive guidance, this is creativity. Having an idea and then struggling to bring it into material form is the process of creative endeavor.

Jobs that are not repetitive, where every day is a journey unto itself, are creative jobs. Maintaining mystery and romance in a marriage requires creativity. Correcting people without embarrassing and discouraging them is creative. Coaching people is creative. Software engineers and people who write code, contrary to the opinions of some, are highly creative.

The bottom line: knowing how to do something is not the same as being able to figure out what to do. The difference between technique and creativity is the difference between execution and selection.

The reality is that technicians who lack creativity will always require the supervision of creative people: they cannot think on their own. Similarly, creative people often rely on the sheer manpower of technicians.

Can you raise your level of creativity through intentional activity? I say yes, because I have increased mine, and fairly systematically.

To point you in the direction of greater creative expression, I’m turning now to the work of Carl Rogers, a pioneering psychotherapist. Why? Because creativity is about the flow of ideas, not linear and mechanical thinking. The flow of ideas is amorphous, and that makes people uncomfortable. Why does it make people uncomfortable? Because, for many, whatever cannot be controlled, or easily defined, or shut off, is seen as threatening. Things that are unlike you, or unlike your inflexible notions of who you are and what you do, are threatening.

Creativity is about openness, welcoming what is different, and being willing to undergo change in the process of engaging with that new and different something, whatever it is.

In order to think and act in new ways, you have to be able to trust yourself, and locate a source of inner guidance. This is more than instinct, but something at the core of personhood itself.

I mentioned Carl Rogers. In writing about his decades of clinical work, he links an increase in openness, in fluidity, flexibility, and creativity, with becoming more psychologically mature.

Essentially, people who better understand themselves, and don’t use rigid intellectual constructs as a means of holding the complexity of reality and of their selves at an arm’s length, are both more authentic and more creative.

They look for much more specific and novel ways to use language from one moment to the next, preferring not to follow well-worn repetitive grooves and instead to respond inventively to all that is unique to this present moment.

How to be more creative

Enshrine the qualities that, according to Rogers, promote psychological maturation:

Authenticity: start to care more than you do right now about the words you say and how you say them. See what happens if you actually admit to being bored during a conversation, or that you don’t know what to say, or that you’re feeling uncomfortable.

Do not tactlessly blurt out whatever comes into your head, but pay attention to when your words and your thoughts are veering away from each other, and speak in a way that brings them into alignment.

That the outer is reflected in the inner is what is required, not that everything on the inside be brought out. Lord, no.

Unconditional Positive Regard: do you like yourself? Do you encourage, support, and advocate on behalf of yourself? Or do you do the opposite in some way? Are you living life like it’s a game that can be won fair and square, or do you, beneath the surface, think of yourself as a kind of loser? Someone who’s already defeated?

For a long time, I thought that the best of what life has to offer is meant for people very much unlike me, and my best bet was to just get lucky. This had very negative consequences on my willingness to try, and to face challenges, and to put myself out there.

I’m happy to say that’s no longer the case, and that I’ve made a full recovery, so to speak. Part of that change was that I adopted an attitude of unconditional positive regard toward myself. Meaning, I’m fundamentally operating from a place of self advocacy: being a good person, doing good, and receiving good from others and from life is something I now view as completely normal and expected.

You’d be amazed at how much falls into place when that belief is truly operant within a person.

How do you cultivate that? By learning to keep promises to yourself, and treating yourself like someone who’s future has value. Little by little, day by day, you acquire more and more self regard in this way.

Understanding: this is downstream from authenticity. Understanding yourself means parsing what you really want and value, who you really are, from all the ideas about yourself that have been foisted on you by others. These others aren’t limited to your parents. Your teachers, peers, romantic partners, messages from television and social media – they can all become examples of introjection – ideas about life and selfhood that come from someone else, but are adopted so uncritically that they are mistaken for your own.

Social media tells you to be outraged about, say, an event happening all the way around the world in a country you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. Suddenly, social acceptance seems to hinge on parroting the new slogan that’s circulating around – no blood for oil, believe women, silence is violence – and now you believe it, too!

That’s introjection. You have no idea what you believe – beliefs are whatever the evidence has convinced you of. The apparent contagion of social values is called introjection. The real you may or may not share those beliefs, but how would you know?

To understand yourself, start by finding the contradictions between rigid ideas of who you are, and actual examples of your behaviors, words, and thoughts that contradict “the narrative.” Have the courage to admit them to yourself. Just like you gain credibility, rather than lose it, by admitting to a mistake, owning up to these contradictions in the moment you observe them earns you a great deal of credibility with yourself, and the channels of understanding only continue to open as a result.

Finally, you need acceptance.

Acceptance, in this context, means relaxing whatever rigidity has hitherto prevented you from engaging fully with the information that the enterprise of understanding has confronted you with.

The water in a river does not maneuver around the rocks in its path – it makes contact, and the contact itself is what guides the water around it. As tired of a metaphor as “be like water” might be, the notion that you cannot simultaneously avoid and integrate something is not a tired observation.

By definition, you are enhanced, not diminished, by accepting new information. Again, definitively, you have only diminished yourself to the extent to which you have shut out reality.

Acceptance is the embrace that annexes more of the knowable into your domain. It is not resignation, but acquisition of resource and, therefore, power.

Now to address the glaring objection:

Why approach creativity from this angle? Why not simply prescribe some linear but effective exercises to develop creative thinking, like beginning each day by making a list of 25 new ideas, all addressing some area where your thinking has been stuck (you’re welcome to use that!)?

Because the method I’ve just outlined represents a hardware upgrade, or an investment in your systemic capacity, rather than merely handing you newer and better software, or thinking tools, to run on your otherwise unchanged hardware.

Ultimately, the various thinking exercises that foster creative problem solving are themselves techniques.

To invest in psychological maturation is to widen your mind from a trickle to a river, and from a river to a vast ocean.

I got serious about this kind of work, and, a few short years later, almost nothing feels like “work” anymore. This is the difference between “mindset hacks” and actually growing up. One is a content creator’s gimmick, the other is what your dad was trying to impart to you.

At last: what is artistry?

If technique is knowing how to do something, and creativity is knowing which of the things you know how to do to do(forgive me), then artistry is here defined as knowing why you are doing what you do in the way that you do it.

Artistry is vision: not merely being able to know how to use tools, and how to select the right ones, but having a vision of oneself as participating in the continuity and development of civilization.

The apex of this mentality, as I have here defined it (which obviously differs greatly from the conventional working definition, which I say is meaninglessly similar to “creativity”) was put forth by Friedrich Nietzsche:

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Artistry, here, is categorically beyond creativity. In the same way that my approach to creativity is not an extension of technique, but an enhancement of the entire technical capacity, artistry is an enhancement of the entire creative capacity. Creativity governs the way in which technique is exercised, and artistry governs the way in which creativity is exercised.

There is no sense in avoiding it: artistry is for those who dare to work as the authors of culture. My approach to creativity involves an expansion of the sense of self, so my approach to artistry expands the concept of the world. You see yourself the way you do, in part, because of your beliefs about the world.

Let me be a bit pedantic: you are a person living in a world.

If you were to just get better at being the sort of person you are in the sort of world you’re in, that’s technique.

If you expand your sense of self to the point where being a good person means more than it did yesterday, that’s creativity.

If you expand your concept of the world in which your person is operating and expanding, that’s artistry.

Growing in technical capacity is about daily habits.

Growing in creative capacity is about striving to unlock the locked doors within yourself, and may take time. For myself, I would clock the process at about two years.

Growing in artistic capacity is a lifelong enterprise because it is limitless.

So, how do you grow in artistry?

As a technically competent creative person, set about expanding your horizons.
Read more.
Learn more about the world.
Read philosophy, read history,  and study art, music and literature, rather than merely consuming them (consuming them is still necessary!).
Ask yourself questions like how did the world come to be as it is now?
Go and read Plato and Aristotle, and then go read the criticisms of both of them. Read about the Persian War, read biographies of great composers, and the history of whatever artistic movements you’re fond of.
Start asking why, and dig for answers.
Whatever you hear people talking about, go and pull the data: go beyond accepting the opinions of others and try to come face to face with actual information as often as possible.
Strive to live in objective reality, and let the fire of knowledge consume the deadwood of groupthink.
The best advice I ever received, in this context, came from Munir Beken, a former professor and mentor of mine: a composer is interested in everything.

Be interested in the world in the way a God might be interested: this all belongs to me.

The world isn’t your property, but it is yours to explore. Permit yourself a bit of grandiosity, but make sure not to become smug and arrogant. Be grandiose in the sense of daring to take on the eternal projects of humanity: making sense of ourselves and our place in the world.

Form ideas of your own about where meaning is located and how it is communicated. Imagine yourself as someone after whom your chosen enterprise can never be the same.

The Bach cello suites languished in anonymity for years after his death, and Nietzsche was not widely read during his lifetime. If you need instant gratification and reinforcement, seek it in the application of technique, where the daily victories are made.

Artistry is for the long haul. Artistry is eternity and immortality.

Forgive the greatly expanded tirade I’ve set before you today. See it, perhaps, as a prospective cosmology for you to adopt. A ladder taking you from human to angel to God. Dare to create a world from which you will one day retire and leave to others, who may or may not ever know you existed: you will be a better person today and tomorrow and every day unto death if you choose this for yourself.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

You Need A Clear Target: how the Tao Te Ching describes wisdom

“Eastern philosophy.” Oh, boy. Here we go.

In keeping with my perennial theme of weeding out non serious people by referencing books like The History of the Peloponnesian War, or using terms like Episodic Future Thinking, today’s topic is similarly weighty, if not vastly weightier:

The Tao Te Ching.

Right away, I’ve confused some of you. Yes, the “Ts” are both pronounced “D.” No, I don’t make the rules here. No, you cannot speak to a manager.

The Tao Te Ching is the foundational text of Taosim, attributed to Lao Tzu, a man who lived in ancient China roughly 2,500 years ago, supposedly a contemporary of Confucius, who, legend has it, declared that Lao Tzu was “a dragon.” I will grant the presumption that Confucius was speaking figuratively.

I was introduced to this text, oddly enough, during my freshman year of high school. We did Chinese history, of all things, during our first semester. The only thing I remember from the course, however, was reading and becoming instantly enamored with the Tao Te Ching.

It was wise. It was cryptic. It was insightful. It was laconic. It seemed to be animated by an effortless mastery of life and all it’s governing and competing forces, seen and unseen: whoever it was who wrote this ancient text clearly got it – the ability to define, with the appropriate subtlety, the scope of what can and cannot be said, what can and cannot be known, and the best way to convey both without inviting a two dimensional reading.

Many years later, in 2022, I came back to this book with more than a casual interest: I set myself the goal of memorizing it, which I achieved in 162 days. For several months after that, I would repeat the entire text, out loud or silently, every day.

Sometimes I did this in one sitting, like a ritual to start the day. Other times I would do it in batches, grouping the 81 chapters into 3 groups of 27. Sometimes I would use a random number generator to prompt me to do the chapters out of order.

Why did I do this?

One word comes to mind: wisdom.

I knew that wisdom was in the text, in literally every stanza, and I also knew that I was unwise. I knew I was unwise, and I also knew that something rash had to be done to disabuse me of my lingering arrogance, immaturity, selfishness, willful blindness, moral weakness, and my willingness to disappear when holding the line was inconvenient.

I had to straighten out my life, and become someone solid and sincere all the way to the core. And, I knew that hammering in these exact words, until they could be recited verbatim without glancing at the text, would set me on that path.

So, I memorized one chapter every two days, learning 81 chapters in 162 days. Then I set about making sure I had all of it rock solid, backwards and forwards.

I have better things to do than spend all day complimenting myself, but I do feel grateful to my previous self for conceiving and executing that plan. It changed my life for the better, and set in motion many of the changes that have brought me to where I am now, which is a place in which I’m happy to be.

What I’d like to do today, then, is take some lines from the text and elaborate upon them. Why? Because wisdom is what we are after in life. Having it makes everything better, but lacking it makes everything worse. In many ways, your life is only as good as you are wise.

No situation is so bad that it cannot be redeemed by wisdom, and no situation is so good that it cannot be brought to ruin by ignorance. I have seen both take place, by my own hand, and so I know what I say when I speak this way.

In many ways, this entire project being undertaken here could be reduced to the following goal: to make wisdom more attractive. Let’s see how we do today.

In light of the above “mission statement,” let’s start with Lao Tzu’s first protracted description of a wise sage, which constitutes the entirety of chapter fifteen.

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.
The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable, we can only describe their appearance.
Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?
Who can remain still until the moment of action?
Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by the desire for change.

When I say there is a lot here to think about, I say it as someone who repeated, and dwelled upon, and summoned up those words on a daily basis for probably over 365 consecutive days.

He is telling you exactly how a wise person behaves, and appears to a “normal” person like you or me.

Let’s go through it one line at a time, which is how I memorized it in the first place.

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.

Note the way he intentionally places the image of the wisest of us in an undefined point in time – “ancient.” This is no accident. It is effective to think of the ideal as something abstracted from our daily life, suspended in a “somewhere out there.” So, he makes it clear that these were real people, but that their time has long since come and gone.

This is not trivial. Were he to frame the ancient masters as angels, it would only reify the idea of an afterlife. That is not the project here. An exceptional human is a viable role model that we can be moved to emulate, while supernatural beings represent an unattainable level of perfection: we can only submit to them in our inferiority.

Subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.

The meaning of the first three adjectives is expanded considerably by the fourth. “Responsive” suggests that the subtlety, mysteriousness, and profundity is all a measured response to events unfolding in the present. The ancient masters are not withdrawn into an unseen world to which we have no access: they see the same world we do, are party to the same events, conversations, and relationships.

Again, they are not from an afterworld, nor have they sought refuge in one. They have mastered the real world. Our world.

The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable, we can only describe their appearance.

To someone who has never eaten an apple, your knowledge of apples is unfathomable: no words can possibly impart direct experience, and the understanding that springs therefrom. What we can do, however, is look at the way people who have a specific form of knowledge seem to behave differently from those who lack it. Before disease could be defined, for example, an unhealthy person could be observed.

Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.

Watchful and alert. Treat this like an elaboration of the previous “responsive.” The sense of high stakes is important: treating everything like it matters. Nothing is casual – there is a difference between right and wrong, because there is a difference between safety and danger. There is a difference between crossing a winter stream and falling into it, the latter being potentially life threatening.

I take this to mean that all actions are undertaken with the awareness that mistakes have consequences, and that no consequences are trivial.

Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.

The similes are so informative here. Let’s break them down to a level that is almost pedantic.

A visiting guest is not necessarily a friend or neighbor or relative, but an outsider who has temporarily come into the private space of someone else. Etiquette is how trustworthiness is communicated, and there is no place for overfamiliarity. When the encounter is over, each will return to his or her own life, of which neither other person is a part.

Why laboriously spell this out? Because it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that other people are sovereign over their own lives, and every encounter we have with other people is like momentarily becoming a guest in their presence.

A wise sage is someone who observes rules of etiquette and behaves courteously, because it brings out the best in his host. It reminds us all of the distance between us, making us more conscious of how we present ourselves.

Seeing others as outsiders to our lives automatically puts us in the role of representatives or ambassadors.

“Ice about to melt” is one of those many unforgettable lines that fill the text. About to melt – not melted! Not a pushover, not formless and in a state of unquestioning acquiescence, but about to melt. Solid, but not rigid. An ice cube resting on a surface that can be easily moved when force is applied.

Resistance only invites greater force. To yield is to make the continued application of force unnecessary. However, yielding does not equate to “capitulating.” Think of the difference between considering a request and granting it. To reference the previous line, a guest is not a slave! And yet a guest is not a master either. To walk this line at all times is to have self respect and the appropriate level of consideration for others simultaneously.

Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.

An uncarved block is the inverse of the unmelted ice. An uncarved block has not yet acquired a shape that will both determine and limit its future use. It is a symbol intended to convey unrealized potential, and the flexibility to steer that potential toward the appropriate ends. The knowledge of the appropriate end to which one should direct his or her potential is only available to someone who is totally present to what is happening in the moment. The ability to become what one must in the face of reality’s demands is to be simple, but by no means simpleminded.

Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

I take these lines to mean that a wise sage is not harboring some private inner world, but is an empty vessel into which the reality of each moment can effortlessly flow.

Fair enough, you say. But why also “opaque?” Because you cannot peer into the mind of a sage. In this case, outer behaviors are not windows into something deeper. They are what they are. The sage’s behavior does reveal something: the subtlety of the situation at hand. It reveals nothing, however, about the sage’s “motivations.” The sage’s motivations are to live in reality: reality is the determinant of activity, not “motivations.” Thus the sage appears opaque.

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?
Who can remain still until the moment of action?

These questions are immediately answered by the concluding lines,

Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by the desire for change.

Meaning that people do what they ought not to do, which is to act prematurely and incorrectly, because they are swayed by the desire for change. If you can accept the situation for what it is, you can do what must be done. If you cannot do this, then your actions will be driven by a self centered search for fulfillment.

Observers of the Tao, which simply means people who live correctly, do not seek fulfillment. Why not? Perhaps they are already fulfilled. They understand their own needs, and are capable of fulfilling them without imposing on others, or in ways that conflict with other pressing matters.

I want to close by elaborating on this.

When you know you are strong, your strength is available to help others.

When you are unsure of your strength, you want to prove it by defeating others.

Fulfillment, self confidence, accomplishment, the private cultivation of virtue – these allow you to remain still until the moment of action. Again, why? Because your worth is not at stake in each and every situation. Your worth has been built up, and power can now be expended and expressed toward worthy ends that become self evident to opened eyes with nothing behind them.

Imagine how you might conduct yourself if you were not swayed by the desire for change. Imagine what you might do, and, equally important, what you would have the power to cease doing, if you were freed from the pursuit of self fulfillment.

How do I free myself from this, you ask?
Start by contemplating the gap between your qualities and the sagely qualities described above. This is what I did, what I still do. You close the gap by staring at it, acknowledging it, and aiming for what you can glimpse on the other side of it.

Daily, hourly, one moment at a time.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Unfreeze My Life: a three pronged approach to anxiety

Welcome back. I’d like to jump right in: today, I’m talking about anxiety, and sharing the strategies I employed to overcome it.

Yes, I’m speaking in the past tense. This will already bother some of you.

Permit me a brief rant, for the sake of framing the proper perspective with which to consume the advice that is soon to follow.

In our current social climate, in our current climate of social discourse, we talk about problems as being lifelong companions that we have to “manage a relationship with.”

What I hear less and less often is talk of actually solving problems.

Well, let me qualify that: I quite often see wildly hyperbolic click bait headlines on YouTube thumbnails along the lines of

“Try this for 15 minutes and you’ll never struggle with procrastination again.”

But when you watch videos like that, you usually find a generalized strategy filled with caveats and disclaimers: no one is really promising you the moon.

What they seem to be promising, actually, is a robust new social identity as someone “living with X.” For example,

I read a book about fixing my handwriting, and it leads you to believe that you need to be writing out the letter J for an hour a day if you want to cultivate self love (no, I am not joking). The author, at one point, casually mentions that she’s been working on the letter Y for 20 years.

Why this raising of the hurdle, rather than lowering it? Isn’t that what help with a problem is supposed to mean? Not when you’re being sold advice by people who are trying to make a career out of marketing their content. They’re looking for subscribers, followers, and students. In other words, lifelong customers.

What the pharmaceutical industry has done to illness is exactly what the content industry, the “attention economy” has done to confusion and indecision: made it into something more profitable to “manage” than to solve.

I’ve dug up a larger topic than either of us want to exhaustively explore right now, but I think you see what I’m getting at here:

Problems do have solutions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling renewable purchases.

As I go on to discuss a three layered approach for combating anxiety, then, always hold a clear destination in view: we’re not heading into the labyrinth of “working on yourself.”

This is continuing education: you have workable skills, but they’re limited. Better skills make you less limited, and expand the scope of your days and years.

The methods I’m about to impart, then, might require intensive focus and a large amount of time at first, if the problem is acute, but should reach a state of occasional maintenance once you’ve righted the ship.

Layer One:
Learn to see anxiety as your (error prone) friend.

Anxiety is something you have. It is not an event happening to you. You are not a victim of it. We evolved the capacity to feel anxiety so that we could manage risks. If we couldn’t feel pain, we wouldn’t know to withdraw our hand from the stove, and yet our skin would still burn. In exactly the same way, the person who feels no fear or anxiety is no less at risk just because he or she doesn’t perceive it.

In this way, anxiety is here to save your life the same way the pain receptors in your skin are here to save your hand.

So, anxiety is your friend in the same way that pain is your friend. But, as I mentioned earlier, our friend is prone to error.

According to Randolph M. Nesse, in a 2022 article for Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health, natural selection makes valuable features essentially impossible to “debug.” With all of our heritable traits, we cannot stop, wipe the slate clean, and begin again. We can do nothing to refine features and eliminate bugs. Natural selection is bound up with maximum gene transmission: all our traits are vying for renewal. Heritable traits don’t improve in response to environmental factors to which they are totally blind.

Your body thinks your life is in danger when really you’re just uncomfortable at a cocktail party with the friend group of your new girlfriend, or you’re late for work, or you can’t find your headphones and the Uber is leaving soon, or your apartment is cluttered, or your finances are a mess.

In all of these examples, anxiety would be maladaptive or simply pointless.

I am no stranger to feeling anxious. I know what it feels like to have nerves that won’t settle, a sense of safety and belonging that never arrives, and a need to fill the empty space with words, steering a moment rather than letting it be.

If this is something you struggle with on any kind of ongoing basis, meaning if you’re prone to suddenly having a freeze response, shortness of breath, elevated heart rate, jumpiness, and feeling unsafe, and you know that there is no real threat to you,

Then do what I did: tighten all the loose screws. Go through your life from top to bottom, and

Deepen what is shallow,
Strengthen what it weak,
Organize what is cluttered,
Systematize what is random,
Take inventory of what is uncounted.

Start with the big three: food, sleep, exercise. I’ve said plenty about all three of these, but here’s the bare bones minimum version of my advice, which I follow:

Sleep for 7.5-8 hours a night.
Walk as often as you can, ideally 30 min a day.
Eat single ingredient foods 80% of the time.

Until you can learn to respect your body, you don’t deserve to be free from its constant warnings. You need to heed its warnings and alter course. That’s step one.

Step two is to spend a few minutes cleaning and decluttering every day. Listen to podcasts or music while washing and putting away dishes, throwing away paper, filing paperwork, folding laundry, cleaning desks and sinks and mirrors.

Now your body is less angry, and your mind is less angry because your home environment is orderly, and conducive to thought.

Now that you’re handling these things, explore other areas of your life that need to be resolved into a system.

Every week, do a brain dump into a doc or a sheet of paper of everything currently unresolved in your life. I promise you, they all matter. Identify them, make plans for dealing with them, and put those plans on a time table.

A good rule of thumb: try to do one thing every day that you have resistance toward doing. The resistance is what’s stopping you, but not overcoming resistance is causing the anxiety, which cannot be overcome. The cause must be removed. Every time, no exceptions.

Over the next several months, your anxiety will go down. You’re getting your life together. It should feel good, and it does.

That’s the first layer. Walk around the perimeter of your life and reinforce the borders. As it says in the Tao Te Ching, “the man who knows how to live…has no place for death to enter.” Do you leave openings for disaster in your life? That might be why you have anxiety. Set those aright and watch the bad feelings diminish.

Essentially, you feel anxious because you feel threatened by something you don’t feel strong enough to confront. You need more confidence. Confidence makes you inclined to confront your troubles, rather than run from them or play dead.

Now we go to the second layer, which is more targeted at the level of your body.

Breathwork, stretching, vigorous exercise, and exposure to heat and cold.

Strenuous exercise like calisthenics or weightlifting helps the body to break down excess stress hormones, increases the production of endorphins, increases energy and alertness, and has been proven to significantly reduce anxiety if made into a regular practice.

Stretching reduces muscle tension, increases blood circulation, increases serotonin levels, and helps with lymphatic drainage. It improves sleep quality.

Long deep breathing reverses the state of fight or flight response, lowers the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, reduces lactic acid, balances oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood, improves the immune system, and improves mood and general well-being.

Taking a cold shower for just 2-3 minutes can improve circulation, lower perceived stress, raise immunity, diminish depression symptoms, help with muscle soreness, and improve alertness.

Sitting in a sauna for 30 minutes lowers cortisol levels in the blood (the stress hormone) by as much as 40%, insulates the brain from stress-induced harm (by promoting BDNF levels), has an immediate antidepressant effect, and increases endorphins (just like weight lifting).

How frequently should you do these activities?

You can and should stretch daily. Five minutes after waking, five minutes before bed. You can do more, and more is better, but five and five is fine.

Ditto for deep breathing. A modest daily practice beats inconsistent marathons.

You can take a sauna and a cold shower seven days a week as well.

Weight lifting is different. I did 6 days a week for about a year, began regressing, and gradually scaled back to one session every five to seven days. I made a lot more progress that way, because my recovery capacity had a chance to build back up. Now I’m back to three days per week. Start slow and find what works for you.

My routines with all of these have varied over the years, but these activities, especially having all of them in your life on a weekly basis, are life changing. They will utterly transform what it feels like to live in your body. The brief feelings of discomfort that come with all these activities is a small price to pay for the feeling of being able to handle whatever comes my way.

Lastly, and this is our third layer, I want you to tackle anxiety by broadening your behavioral repertoire. You freeze up for two reasons, which are closely related but not identical: you don’t know if you can handle what’s coming, and/or you don’t know what to do.

To put it in perspective, I do everything in the first two layers, and that doesn’t mean that I magically know what to do all the time.

Weight lifting and decluttering and eating simple food does not endow me with the knowledge of how to fix a tuning issue with the bridge of one of my guitars.

What they endow me with is the predisposition for action, rather than avoidance. I’m more inclined to Google something, call the manufacturer, search for a YouTube walk through, or simply jump into motion in the assumption that the next steps, the proper solutions, will reveal themselves simply by engaging with the problem (they quite often do).

So, your homework is twofold:

Start by making lists.

Create a numbered list up to 25. Write a pertinent “what can I do about X” question at the top. Populate the list.

Examples:
What can I do when a conversation seems to be stalling out?
What can I do when I feel off track?
What can I do when I can’t think straight?

By the time you get to 25 legitimate answers, you should be excited to try them all out. Instead of feeling like you’re out of ideas, frozen in place, you now have 25 ways to choose your own adventure.

The second part is simpler:

Ask yourself, when you feel anxious: what would a perfectly normal person do right now? Notice how you immediately had an answer? The mistake everyone makes, aside from not asking the question to begin with, is assuming the answer that comes to mind couldn’t possibly be good enough. While someone else, including your own future self, might have better answer, this is the answer you have to work with now.

So, work with it.

Prove to yourself that you can summon from within yourself something that is good enough.

You can do this. You can decide on a way forward, implement it, and put the current scenario behind you.

To summarize before closing, I’ve put forth a three pronged approach, each building off the other.

Firstly, we need overall stability and health. Fix your sleep, fix your diet, and get moving every day. Attack clutter on a daily basis. Then attack “clutter” everywhere in your life. It always takes a lot of work at first, and eventually very little at all to maintain it.

Secondly, we dive deeper into your ability to manage anxiety at the physical level. Weight lifting, cold showers, hot saunas, stretching, and breathing deeply. You need at least two of these on a routine basis. Frankly, you need lifting and stretching no matter what. The other three are for people who really enjoy being nice to themselves.

Thirdly, now that you have the capacity, the self credibility, and tenacity, attack your inability to take action, and concurrent tendency to freeze, are the local level: specific to the problem at hand. While you’re at home, feeling calm and collected, brainstorm 25 ways to deal with a specific problem. When you’re in the moment, simply ask yourself “what would the person who knows what to do be doing right now?” Lo and behold, you do know.

Put all of this into practice, and it is very hard to feel like a victim anymore. When you know you have your life together, and you feel physically strong and healthy, and know how to break through the fog of inaction, it is very difficult to feel anxious. When it arises, you know it is a signal originating within yourself, not a disaster happening to you.

Thank for you reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

Stay On The Right Side Of The Empire: a lesson from Thucydides

The short version of today’s newsletter can be expressed in two words:

Read more.
You want three words? Read more books.
Four words? Read more history books!
If you need a lot more words, you’ll find them below.

To read history is to safely accumulate synthetic experience without the necessary risk of actual experience. You quite literally learn the lessons of the past by doing this. You see the eternal struggles of mankind, our virtues and vices, and the ways in which we’ve changed.

When I read about the past, I can see myself in the characters, in the events, and in the voice of the historian.

I read something about a nineteenth century French painter and realized that my own process as a guitarist and composer seems almost identical to his, and that comforts and emboldens me.

I read about the feats of engineering that allowed the Golden Gate Bridge to be realized, or that the San Francisco Bay was a dry valley as little as fifteen thousand years ago, and I can never look at either the same way again.

My mind has been opened, my horizons have been expanded. I believe I live in a fuller, brighter world because I step away from it long enough to read about it, and this is why I make endless exhortations to you to do the same: read, and see that thought is joy.

Why the long preface? Because today I’m discussing a text that would probably scare most people away. And, if you ran from it, I would understand.

We are talking about The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

I read this for the first time in 2022. Why did I do this to myself? Why did I read this book when I didn’t have to, when I didn’t have a grade riding on it?

Because I watched an interview with Robert Greene, where he said that the single most difficult thing he ever did in his life was to read this text in the original Greek. He went on to say, and this was the part that goaded me into action, that you are simply not a serious student of history if you have not read this text.

Well, then.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the sort of person who cannot let that stand. You’re calling me a non serious person? You’re saying that until I’ve accomplished a specific task, I really don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, I guess it’s time to get to work.

I got to a point in my life where I couldn’t bear to casually float along, in any way, for one day longer. I had to do this thing for real. So when I heard him say that, throwing down the gauntlet, so to speak, I was somewhat relieved – relieved to know exactly where to start.

This, in fact, became the beginning of the reading list I charted out for myself in one or two sittings: my best guess as to which texts would expand and improve my mind in ways that would be meaningful and rewarding to me personally.

It all started with Robert Greene saying that, until you have read The History of the Peloponnesian War, you are kidding yourself. If anything, I am done with kidding myself.

I read it, and it truly changed my life. It changed my confidence in my ability to take on challenges (it is not an easy read, even in English!), it gave me an understanding of what actually happened between Athens and Sparta, which, by the way, is utterly fascinating, and it showed me, most importantly, what I have actually inherited as a westerner. The two strains of western civilization, the two wings of the swan, you might say, are ancient Greece and ancient Jerusalem. Hellenic and Judeo-christian values. I saw the foundational stones of our civilization in the descriptions of these people, the recordings of their speeches, their deeds, their terrible mistakes and stunning victories, their mercy and their cruelty. I saw that I was a part of it, a point along a lineage of thought, culture, and a way of existing in the world.

I cannot possibly convey that experience to you here. You may read it yourself and experience nothing of the kind. What I will claim to attempt, then, is the distillation of one moment of epiphany that I had while reading it.

(Just one. I wanted to write four, but by the time I had written out just one point, I already had the longest newsletter yet, and I’m already past my own deadline.)

What I’ll do, then, to get this point across, is briefly frame a large quotation from the text, and follow up with my own elaborations. I’m providing entire paragraphs for the sake of context, so don’t expect one liners. The depth of understanding comes from context, not from the abstracted snippets.

So, as they say, let’s get into this.

Strength requires the rejection of convenience.

The History of the Peloponnesian War is the story of Athens, the world’s first representative democracy, becoming enmeshed in a violent conflict with Sparta, an authoritarian police state.

The seeds of this conflict were planted during the Persian War, when the various Greek peoples united for the first time, out of the necessity to repel the invading Persians, led by Xerxes.

The Greeks were ultimately victorious, but their societies would never be the same again. In facing down an empire, they themselves became more like an empire, with Athens at the helm.

Athens had the superior navy, which was the key to victory. This placed them in a position of authority, which they leveraged to bring the other polities under their control.

This originally began as an adaptive response to the threat of Persia, but Athenian hegemony did not go away once the war was over.

Thucydides explains this in detail below.

“So Athens took over the leadership, and the allies, because of their dislike of Pausanias, were glad to see her do so. Next the Athenians assessed the various contributions to be made for the war against Persia, and decided which states should furnish money and which states should send ships – the object being to compensate themselves for their losses by ravaging the territory of the King of Persia. At this time the officials known as ‘Hellenic Treasurers’ were first appointed by the Athenians. These officials received the tribute, which was the name given to the contributions in money. The original sum fixed for the tribute was 460 talents. The treasury of the League was at Delos, and representative meetings were held in the temple there” (p.92, Book One, part 96).

What we see here is that Athens could not organize the other Greek forces without becoming, essentially, an accountant for a makeshift Athenian empire. Someone had to lead, and that meant the consolidation of resources scattered across various islands ruled by various peoples. This meant the imposition of costs, and enforcement in the face of delinquency.

The second and final quotation shows the downstream consequences of such an arrangement, and how it simultaneously provoked and stifled dissent.

“The chief reasons for these revolts were failures to produce the right amount of tribute or the right numbers of ships, and sometimes a refusal to produce any ships at all. For the Athenians insisted on obligations being exactly met, and made themselves unpopular by bringing the severest pressure to bear on allies who were not used to making sacrifices and did not want to make them. In other ways, too, the Athenians as rulers were no longer popular as they used to be: they bore more than their fair share of the actual fighting, but this made it all the easier for them to force back into the alliance any state that wanted to leave it. For this position it was the allies themselves who were to blame. Because of this reluctance of theirs to face military service, most of them, to avoid serving abroad, had assessments made by which, instead of producing ships, they were to pay a corresponding sum of money. The result was that the Athenian navy grew strong at their expense, and when they revolted they always found themselves inadequately armed and inexperienced in war.” (p.93, Book One, part 99).

We come, then, to the point I wish to make: strength requires the rejection of convenience. But, why is this the message I believe the above passages illustrate? Read that one clause again: “the Athenian navy grew strong at their expense.”

The allies were given, quite shrewdly, the choice between contributing money or manpower. Those who had the luxury to contribute money did so, while the Athenians used that money to reinforce themselves physically.

The Athenians chose the path of risk, of effort, of trial and error, of reinvesting in their physical capacity, while their allies passively financed it! This is how “allies” became “subjects.”

The lesson here is that you will be left behind, will be outmatched and outclassed, if you retire from the arena. Whoever fights on your behalf will one day be too strong to be fought off when the seasons change.

Do not become the person who gave away his or her power in the belief that another’s protection was guaranteed. In the words of a later Greek figure, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, we must learn to despise what is not under our control.

And, to be a bit of a Petersonian, the adoption, not the shirking of responsibility, is how one grows stronger. By taking control of what can be controlled, you grow in both experience and capacity – in efficiency and effectiveness.

You might read what I’ve just said and say, so what? I’m not at war, I’m not funding an army that might one day subjugate me, I’m not even hiring a pool cleaner that I might one day return home to find in bed with my wife. What does this have to do with me?

What this has to do with you is the difference between producing (the Athenians producing victory in battle) and consuming (the allies consuming the protection of Athens for a price).

Consumers finance producers by purchasing their products or services. Athens’ passive financiers benefitted from Athens, but Athens benefitted far more – they grew in productive capacity, in skill, and in technological sophistication.

The beneficiaries of their advances, however, did not grow in these ways. They may have even regressed, growing complacent under the aegis of Athens. They may have felt as though they were a part of something, but truly it was Athens alone that was on a journey of self edification. The moment the allies tried to act against Athens, the ever growing chasm between them was revealed.

We live in a world of unimaginable comfort and convenience. But just because we benefit from very sophisticated technologies does not mean we understand them, or are ourselves growing in productive capacity simply because we are using increasingly sophisticated tools.

To become powerful in any meaningful way, you must become a creator, a producer, of something.

In business, you could design a product or service (learning and employing all the relevant skills), and then sell it to the public (learning and employing sales and marketing strategies).

In artist pursuits, you could write the book, the article, the post, the script, paint the painting, design the logo, write the song, sing it yourself or find a collaborator, even write an entire symphony and guide the orchestra through its performance using the art of conducting.

In terms of thought and philosophy, I think it’s the difference between absorbing ideas second hand through casual conversation and, yes I’m making this point again, reading the books yourself.

I pick out the books I read on the basis that they take me beyond a casual relationship with my interests. I think happiness means, at least partially, becoming more interested in your interests. A person who cannot be bothered to read a damn book is simply not that interested.

I read, and read, and read, and ideas taken from disparate corners of books are fused with observations I’ve made in my own life, conversations, existential dilemmas, and things from other books.

The difference between the wisdom that comes from literature and the wisdom that comes from life is that literature gives you the isolated form: you are only focused on absorbing the information. In the rest of your life, you are first and foremost living the story. Most take precious little time to read over it, so to speak. The act of reading conditions you to pay attention to your own life as you would a book.

I consider this a creative act because you are far more active in your distillation of experience into wisdom this way. You are producing knowledge, not merely consuming sensory stimuli.

In the world of fitness and wellness, you could actually apply what you see on YouTube and Instagram and discover what works for you, what your body needs, and what your actual goals are. You literally create your physique by doing this.

Until you get out there and start creating, you are, sorry to say, nothing but a consumer. Some of you are fine with this. But not the person who’s read this far.

Until you get in the game, you are merely supporting the achievements of others. Always have something on the line – something you are trying to achieve, complete, and submit for the consumption of others. Otherwise, you lose your edge. Otherwise, all the prizes in life will go to others.

Not sure where to begin? Start by saying what you really think and feel more often, more openly. This, too, is a creative act.

You might have read all this and still be thinking, is this an urgent concern?

It may not be urgent today, but it is important. Important in the sense that if you start doing something about it, such as gradually bringing more and more of your life under your control, and outsourcing less and less of it, you will, over time, become more self-sufficient, more the author of your destiny.

The reverse is true, also. The more you outsource to others, the more conveniences you embrace, the less capable you are of taking care of yourself. This is just as important now as in the days of ancient Greece. Everyone is striving to provide you with greater comfort and convenience, in more and more areas of life.

While technological advancements are self-evidently positive, they also come with costs, some not so obvious. Something that can occur when taking nutritional supplements, for example, is the phenomenon that when something is supplied from the outside, it is no longer produced from within.

The negative consequences of excessive convenience, then, can be understood in these terms. The more that is done for you, the less you need to do. The less you need to do, the less of your own capacity you put to use.

This path terminates in total atrophy: people who are incapable of doing anything for themselves. People are losing their social skills, the ability to meet friends and romantic partners, their handwriting, their attention spans, and their knowledge of the world, all because of technology and the atrophying effect of the conveniences it affords. This is real, and it’s not going away.

The rule we can extrapolate from these quotations of Thucydides, therefore, is what has already been said twice: strength requires the rejection of convenience.

In conclusion, I’ll simply say that life is activity. Life isn’t a thing you have, but living is something you do. Mine is a doctrine of action. The result comes to the one who acts. To those who wish to employ others to act on their behalf, ultimately you will receive whatever they decide to share.

Take the risk and reap the reward.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

If I Only Had A Brain: the basics of a neuroprotective lifestyle

Arthur Fletcher famously said, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This sentiment was later echoed by then-Vice President Dan Quayle – “what a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind.”

Now that I’ve indulged in an esoteric dad joke, there is a lot to say about safeguarding, not wasting, the treasure that is your mind.

Your brain controls everything your body does, and is of course the seat of your entire perceptual and conceptual life: every thought you think, every observation you make, every moment that life pours in through your senses, begins and ends with the brain.

Let’s have a look at everything the brain actually does, according to biofeedback-neurofeedback-therapy.com:

While I’m interested in the brain, and it’s a subject that is touched on in my newsletter about Episodic Future Thinking, I do not have a technical background in medicine, neuroscience, or neuroanatomy. Therefore, I do feel not unduly hesitant to continue “talking about the brain.” Googling does not an expert make.

What I do want to talk about, and what I feel perfectly qualified to talk about, is the journey to reclaiming my own mental power, and what I’ve learned along the way.

Like many people, at some point in my life I realized that I didn’t feel as mentally sharp as I used to. That my mind wasn’t filled with exciting thoughts. That I couldn’t remember the name of the last book I’d read, and that even reading silly articles shared to Facebook felt like a chore. I remember seeing large blocks of text and glazing over, just like some people must feel when they stand at the bottom of a long flight of stairs – I can’t do this.

I’m happy to say that I’ve remedied this. I took my mind back, so to speak, and I use it every day to enrich my life.

  • Whether it’s reading challenging books,
  • Researching, planning and writing newsletters,
  • Reading sheet music and learning new music,
  • Writing music,
  • Improvising guitar solos with my band,
  • Or listening to music analytically,

I put my mind to work every day. The more I do the sorts of things I listed above, the happier I am. Not just that, the sharper my mind becomes, and the greater the variety of ideas I consume and consider and digest, the more reasonable I become.

I listen better.
I speak more fluidly in conversation.
I consider opposing opinions and different sorts of people more easily.
I have a better attitude about work,
a better attitude about resolving disagreements or addressing complaints,
and I generally think that I’ve become a better person the more I’ve invested in my mental and intellectual fitness.

According to Britannica.com, intelligence is defined as “the mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to control an environment.”

So, you don’t have to share my idiosyncrasies or niche interests to put a value on your brain power. I mostly listed off my own because I knew it would make you think of your own preferences in contrast or congruence to mine. Your preferences, your ways of thinking, are what I want you to be thinking about here: think of all the reasons you cherish the incredible gift that is your mind.

Because it is a terrible thing to waste, and, indeed, it is terrible to lose it, I want to share the practical Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots of mental acuity.

What are the habits and lifestyle choices that keep your mind right beside you like a faithful servant? What are the things that degrade and vitiate it, that you really need to stop doing?

Let’s start with the helpers.

STEP ONE: THOU SHALT

DIET
A “Mediterranean Diet” is considered to be neuroprotective. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, olives, and fish.

I’ve gradually moved more toward this diet over time, although I eat more steak than fish. The foolproof rule to follow is to eat single ingredient foods.

Today, for example, I ate a salad with Swiss Chard, red butter lettuce, grated carrots, and a simple dressing of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and lemon juice. Then I had a burger seared in an air fryer. I’ll have an apple, an orange, and a banana after that, and then another protein dense meal (let’s be honest – it’ll be another burger, cooked “war crime rare”), and that’s it. That’s all the food I’ll eat today. Two meals, with some fruit in between. Zero snacking.

I also use things like ginger, turmeric, black pepper, ground cumin and coriander, all the chai spices (cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove), and raw honey as well.

I eat a lot of food every day. I get plenty of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and micronutrients. I never really feel hungry in an unpleasant way, but I never feel uncomfortably full either. I don’t feel bloated, sluggish, or, god forbid, brain fog. I feel clear headed after I eat. I’m writing this newsletter right after finishing a meal, and that’s because of what I eat and how I eat it.

If you tailor this to your specific tastes, you’ll feel wonderful. I do, all day long.

Quick caveat: I’m not even touching the domain of supplements, herbs, or nootropics in this article. It’s a standalone subject that requires its own newsletter. For the time being, it should suffice to say that eating clean, whole foods, plenty of animal proteins and fats, and good carbohydrates from fresh fruits and vegetables is a, pardon the pun, no brainer.

EXERCISE
Both cardiovascular exercise and strength training play an important role in your mental well-being.

Think of yourself as the thing you really are: an aggregate of various systems that ultimately make up an organism called a human.

A human is, at bottom, a primate that is tasked with surviving and thriving in its environment.

Physical activity tells your brain that your body is laboring to survive. Supply and demand, my friends: voluntary exercise levies demands, and your brain responds with the supply.

The supply of what? Of energy, alertness, and the availability of memory, vocabulary, and whatever other behavioral tools you will need. The law of the body is use it or lose it.

SLEEP
When you sleep properly on a nightly basis, you live in a heaven of your own making. I discuss the ideal nightly routine and how to optimize your sleep in a previous newsletter. Right now, I simply want to impress upon you the ways in which respecting your body’s need for sleep will reward your brain.

According to Kathleen Digre, MD, in a June 2023 article for The University of Utah, sleep helps with five distinct areas of brain health:

  1. Restoration and repair
  2. Memory consolidation
  3. Cognitive performance
  4. Brain development
  5. Emotional regulation

Read her whole article, which I’ve linked above, for a deeper understanding.

Now, whenever I talk about sleep, I invariably receive pushback in the form of I don’t have time. Let me address that with a bit of an aphorism:

You can have anything, but not everything.

Time is finite, but sacrificing sleep only sacrifices your quality of life, and should only be done out of real necessity. For most people, it happens because they don’t know how to end a day.

I can’t spend all evening writing, working out cool ideas on my guitar, reading about art history, catching up with a friend over the phone, watching a movie on Netflix, and tidying up at home.

I have to make choices.

I have to say yes to something and no, not to something else, but to everything else. For every one activity I’m doing at a time, I am abstaining from every other possible activity at that moment.

By the time I have died I will have done what I’ve done, and will have not done vastly more. I can’t read every book I want to read. I can’t write every song I want to write, I can only have so many conversations with the people I care about.

Life is about making room for YES by first saying NO. See the NO as a creative act, as the primer that goes on before the paint. The paint of YES.

ACTIVITIES
There are some hobbies that do wonders for your mind. Things like

  • Chess
  • Learning a musical instrument
  • Dancing
  • Puzzles
  • Developing a new or existing skill
  • Meditation and breathwork
  • Eating unfamiliar foods

All aid in the development, and slow the aging of your brain. Other activities include brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand, alternating between reading aloud and being read to (this requires a partner), adding up loose change in your pocket by feel alone, and rearranging or even inverting household objects. Read more about “neurobics” in this medically reviewed article by Laurence C Katz and Manning Rubin for thehealthy.com

BILINGUALISM
Lastly, speaking more than one language, or bilingualism, has been widely studied in the context of its positive effects on the brain.

According to a 2012 article for Trends Cogn Sci by Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik, and Gigi Luk, bilingualism aids brain development in children, and delays the onset of neurodegenerative illnesses like dementia in older people. Bilingual people perform better at both verbal and non verbal tasks, and studies suggest that the ability to suppress one language in the act of selecting another boosts their agility to discriminate between essential and nonessential information and stimuli. Read the whole article right here.

Simply put, start learning a foreign language. If you already know one, use it more often. Write, converse, journal, read, watch movies, and listen to music in another language. Is this easier said than done? Of course. But make it fun. You are sure to expand your horizons by doing this, which avails you of another brain-benefitting activity, forming new social connections.

PART TWO: THOU SHALT NOT

Now that I’ve given you a number of ways to be kind to your brain, here are some quick reminders for things to minimize or eliminate. I’ll keep this brief, as most of these are common sense.

AVOID PROCESSED FOODS
If your food has fine print, just say no. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, “people who eat diets high in ultra-processed foods, such as packaged cereals, frozen meals, and sweets, may have a higher chance of feeling depressed and anxious than those who eat fewer of these foods—and they may also have an increased risk of cognitive decline.”

The same goes for alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Usually I would mount more of an argument here, but I’ll keep it simple and say you know perfectly well that these things are bad for you. You know they make you feel bad, and think poorly, and that your life would be better without them. Why should I spend time convincing you of what you already know?

A perennial theme of writing, of my philosophy, is to obey your own conscience. The body of these articles is nothing more than elaborations on that sole commandment.

MINIMIZE SCREEN TIME.

I think we can agree that smartphones and social media are double edged swords. They’ve forever changed the way we learn, communicate, connect with others, and develop subcultures. They are also uniquely detrimental to emotional and psychological health. Social media use has been compared to gambling and drug use with respect to its effects on the brain (read the study here). Here is a chart from Michael Sandberg’s Data Visualization Blog

Social media makes you crazy.

In an interview with Michael Rich, MD, and director of the Center for Media and Child Health at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, Debra Bradley Ruder writes:

“The growing human brain is constantly building neural connections while pruning away less-used ones, and digital media use plays an active role in that process. Much of what happens on screen provides ‘impoverished’ stimulation of the developing brain compared to reality.”

The article goes on to discuss the effects of blue lights from screens on sleep quality, and the deteriorating effects of social media use on the reward centers in the brain and impulse control.

Author and associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, has said repeatedly in interviews and podcasts that, unless you use social media for your job, you should delete it altogether. And, if you use it for work, you should remove it from your phone. He speaks of social media on your phone the way most of us think about smoking cigarettes: an indefensibly bad habit. Listen to him discuss social media here.

IN CONCLUSION

The path to a lighter, stronger, happier mind is one laid with life affirming choices.

Say yes to eating well. To sleeping 7-8 hours a night, every night. Say yes to being active, to learning new things, doing familiar things in new ways, changing up your routines and your environments. Say yes to exploring another language, and the entire world that opens up to you. Essentially, say yes to a life of both exciting challenges and self care.

And also, say no. Say no to bad food. No to bad sleep. To smartphone and social media addiction. Use screens for learning, and for focused periods of entertainment, but not as a way to avoid boredom. Let your mind wander, and don’t feed it non-stop digital junk food.

The good news about the road to a healthier brain is that the journey is the destination, the same way that running itself confers the benefit, not the crossing of the finish line.

That’s all for now. Take care of yourselves.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

What You Need Is More Clickbait: how to use open loops to sustain motivation

I recently went to see Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and The Heron.” The boy, Mahito, moves to a house in the countryside with his father, Shoichi, following the death of his mother, Hisako.

The sullen and grieving Mahito soon encounters the titular heron, a talking half-bird-half-man, who eventually leads Mahito into a parallel reality (or series of parallel realities) in search of Hisako.

Without spoiling the film (I recommend it), let me say that it shares some important qualities with another of Miyazaki’s films, Spirited Away: outlandish, unexplained occurrences.

The movie is filled with magical realism – fantastic creatures, sorcery, and supernatural forces that both operate within and govern from without the entire world-within-a-world that Mahito traverses.

Nothing is explained, and much of what is unexplained is not even named – you see things that defy the laws of our world that are not even acknowledged by the movie’s characters.

Even the ultimate resolution of the plot is shown in superficial glimpses, without the exhaustive summarizing clarity of, say, Hitchcock’s Psycho, where someone literally sits down to explain what you just witnessed. This is the opposite.

And, it worked. I enjoyed it, and, more importantly, many of its scenes and images still float through my mind.

What Miyazaki utilized here, something of which he is a master in general, is something called an open loop. Something introduced, perhaps even extensively developed, but not concluded. Click bait headlines and cliffhanger endings are both examples of open loops. The words “to be continued” create an open loop. The effect is perfectly familiar.

What you probably don’t know is that this phenomenon has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect, named after the Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik who discovered it in 1927. To quickly summarize: recall of unfinished tasks is 90% greater than that of finished tasks. The famous example is of waiters who can remember complex orders right up until the moment the food is delivered. Once the food is delivered, the loop is closed, and information is almost entirely discarded from the memory.

As you’re about to learn, however, open loops are more than just an effective storytelling or marketing technique, more than a quaint finding to explain the behavior of restaurant workers.

An understanding of open loops can be nothing short of life changing. If you think I am exaggerating, read on.

Have you ever had a dating prospect ghost you? Have you ever felt uneasy as you waited for a reply to a text? Or while waiting to receive a letter of decision from a university admissions department? From an employer? The results of blood work? The results of a sporting event that you bet on?

Have you ever felt haunted by a conversation that you never had but needed to, and now the opportunity to do so seems lost forever? Have you ever abandoned a project, or given up on a hobby, or run away from a challenge, only to find yourself haunted by thoughts of what might have been?

These are also open loops. While they are a part of life, they can also build up to the point that they cause nontrivial emotional distress. Neuroses, anxiety, preoccupation – at the extreme end, these can cause workplace mishaps and car accidents.

More commonly, too many open loops cause people to procrastinate and feel defeated. The unresolved past is overcrowding your synaptic real estate, and there is little of you left to enjoy and contend with the present moment.

That’s life with too many open loops. Think of it like mental congestion. There is, however, an optimal amount of open loops to have in your life. The same way a good mystery keeps you engaged as the pieces gradually fall into place, you need unanswered questions driving you on. You need some unfinished business in your life to motivate you.

We are about to explore, then, the two ends of the open loop: how to open them, and how to close them.

How to create healthy levels of anticipation to keep you
motivated,
interested,
inspired,
focused,
and enthusiastic,

And how to clean up the past so that you can move through your days with a clear head and heart. Opening loops takes initiative, but closing loops takes emotional courage. We will discuss the cut and dry behaviors required for both.

PART ONE: OPENING LOOPS

How to open a loop: just start, don’t finish.

There’s no step too small for you to consider yourself to have started. The only step that doesn’t count is the one you don’t take. Do something. Do something, and leave it unfinished.

Here are some examples.

The bill arrives. You have to check your balances or possibly move funds around to pay it, but you also cannot procrastinate on it. Open the loop by writing out the check the second you open it, but don’t sign it or seal the envelope. Now you have something mid process nagging at you.

You receive a text you know you need to respond to, but can’t do so right now. Start typing a reply and abandon it mid sentence. It will be at the top of your messages.

You know you need to start prepping dinner? Open the refrigerator door. How long can you endure the fridge door left open?

If you’re a student, a writer, or someone trying to make more time for reading, use a pomodoro timer and stop mid sentence when your timer is up, for both reading and writing. It’s mildly annoying, and that’s the point.

I’ll bullet point some more ideas:

Put a plugged in vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room.

Put the book on the desk, opened to where you left off.

Turn the metronome on. That gets annoying fast.

Open the disorganized drawers. No longer “out of sight, out of mind.”

You’ll notice that this is a different approach from the “one and done” method of simply taking something all the way across the finish line in one sitting. Sometimes you can do that. Not every time. This method forces things into the front of your mind and raises the price of inaction. Open loops drive you nuts. Who was that man trapped inside the body of the heron?

PART TWO: CLOSING LOOPS

And that’s also why you have to close them. Having a small handful of open loops can make life interesting, challenging, and in a state of seemingly perpetual motion. There’s a fine line here, however. It’s really easy to fall behind. New things pile up quickly, but the unfinished business still sits there, eating up your mental energy.

Unfinished business from the past can weigh heavily on you. It can cause you to stagnate intellectually and emotionally, and make you unable to see the present for what it is – part of you really is trapped back there in an unfinished event from the past.

Here are just a handful of ways you might resolve some of them, freeing yourself to move on, removing the “bad debts” from your ledger.

Make a list.

This is simple enough. Spend a quiet afternoon writing down the various things you wish you had completed. Think of it as a brain dump: your job is to catalog as many unfinished things as possible, and nothing is too remote in time or too small. Dig it up, get it out, write it down.

That was probably exhausting, so take a walk to clear your head. Listen to some nice music. Smile at a dog. Remind yourself that there’s a whole world outside of your head waiting for you. We are clearing out the mental clutter, this time deep in the attic, for the sake of your participation in that world.

Come back to your list. Go through the items one by one and write down what a resolution for each of the items would look like. Only you know the answer. But write down the answer. And then assign a timeline to each of these items.

Put them into your calendar as tasks, and assign a reminder one week in advance, and then one day in advance, then the day of.

Spread these out so it doesn’t interrupt your life too much. Depending on what’s involved, give yourself a year.

Maybe you need to go through your closet and let go of a whole lot of things.
Maybe you need to repot plants,
clear out a drawer,
organize a garage,
repair or replace something,
address something from the past,
apologize to someone,
forgive someone,
pay someone back,
return something you borrowed,
or tell someone how you really feel.

In the words of therapist Adam Lane Smith, most people are just one serious conversation away from a better life. That conversation is probably long overdue, and you probably think about it often.

The subject of resolving what is unresolved from the past is a rather ambitious topic for the second half of a short newsletter. I barely scratched the surface here. Some people deal with this on an ongoing basis with the help of a therapist for years.

My attitude about it is simple: something is better than nothing, and you would be surprised by how capable you are once you get started. Over time, I’ve learned that things can be resolved. Sometimes that means formally declaring something to be finished. Nothing materially changes, and no conversation with another person takes place, but you say to yourself, this is where things are, and this is where I leave them. That is clarity. It defines the known unknowns, so to speak. It closes the loop: you are certain that no further action is called for.

In many cases, however, you can do something. You can fix things. You can go and do the thing left undone, in most cases, even if much time has gone by. And it feels good to do so. It lightens you, and reminds you that you are good, and effective, and that your actions have meaning. What you do matters, and it’s never too late to do the right thing and finish what you started.

If you were to tie up one loose end each month, for a year, how would you feel by this time next year?

There’s only one way to find out.

So to tie things up here, to close this loop, let’s review what we’ve discussed.

You need open ended questions driving you forward in your life. That is life. Life is about you moving forward through time in search of the thing that matters to you. You can systematically open these loops, these main quests and side quests, to direct the flow of your life.

You can also systematically go back and close the loops that were opened and abandoned for whatever reason. I dropped out of college in 2004. I went back and finished my degree years later. It felt wonderful, and I’m so glad that I did that for myself. Not just me, but for my parents as well.

I’ve repaid debts, apologized, forgave, and acknowledged the past to people who would never have brought these things up to me, but were very grateful that I took initiative.

What I gained from all that was peace of mind. And, in a very real way, permission to have a future. There was real energy and willpower of mine tied up in those unresolved events, and when I resolved them, I gained back that energy. Little by little, I was able to direct that energy toward future goals. I had the wherewithal, the credibility with myself, even a sense of moral worth, that had been lacking until the past was cleared up. I had no idea it was holding me back to the degree that it was.

I say this because while the past does not determine the future, your relationship to it does. As long as it matters to you, somewhere in your mind, then it’s real. You can’t talk yourself out of what your conscience tells you is important: you have to face it.

Do it, then, and watch the future open up to you. We only clean yesterday’s dishes to cook tonight’s dinner anyway. Get to it.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas