This piece eerily parallels a lot of what I've been experimenting with the past few days. Singletasking. Being bored. Walking when I'm walking; brushing my teeth when I'm brushing my teeth. I'm bad at it, and often find myself doing two or three things at once when I meant to do one, but I'm finding what you found: once I stop ingesting content and ideas, my brain starts flooding with ideas, some of which are pretty good. Maybe the anti-book could be titled Just Don't Do Things. More of a directive (and a sharp response to Nike's entire marketing approach).
"Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t?" -- this feels like acting from a place of tension. It's what I learned from your husband as tanha (or, in my weak paraphrasing, desire attached to an outcome).
I love the idea of yin and yang ideas. It brings to mind this metaphor popularized by Google X when approaching their most ambitious projects. Imagine you’re trying to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal in the town square. Two tasks are competing for your time, attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.
The first thing to do is identify the bottleneck. It is not the pedestal; it is the monkey. Training the monkey is orders of magnitude harder than building a pedestal. I’m reading your yin book as, Don’t just build pedestals. And your yang book, you can just train monkeys.
Definitely get this urge a lot when podcasts and blog posts stack up after a busy week. It's too easy to fool yourself with the illusion of learning when you rush through things. Gotta have the strength to say no.
Reading your bit about axes made me think about Vipassana and how 10 days of it removed my axes entirely. Removed the I, the observer, completely for a few seconds, which was enough. It was the mental vacation I'd been searching for with drugs, action, learning, therapy etc. Exquisite.
Cat’s Cradle, also my favorite book. I have always had trouble explaining why. For that you have converted me to a paying subscriber. I look forward to your book
Oh no. How do you write this after I’ve been working so hard on resting and being more balanced? I feel like you’re right, the yin book would help me more at this point. Maybe can I ask you or the commentariat for recommendations?
This resonates with something I learned on my Mahamudra retreat, that to achieve the best concentration, we were instructed to put some effort in for a little while, and then very gently and gradually release the effort while maintaining awareness of whether or not our concentration was wandering. After a few tries, I landed into an effortless concentration state; I was just in concentration and not actively concentrating. Same happened later with a non-dual view.
This hit me hard as a pointer to what I had been doing wrong in life this whole time - believing that more was always more and that somehow the diminishing returns were a signal to try harder.
I started using an app called Mindful Glimpses today, and in the first series of sessions the guy who runs the app Loch Kelly basically described atelic activities and it made me realize that I don’t do hardly any atelic activities. The only one I could think of off the top my head was watching TV dramas focused fictitious criminal organizations. It’s like the only thing I regularly do because I enjoy that makes no sense and I’m not doing it to get content out self improvement or some other end out of it. Anyway I enjoyed this.
Yes I have tried Waking Up and Headspace and the VA mindfulness trainer and Insight Timer and nothing really stuck, but I really like his approach.
Breaking Bad and Sopranos are fantastic. But if it has people of dubious morals and big egos sin precarious situations ettling scores I’m in: Peaky Blinders, Snowfall, Narcos, Suburra, Ozark . . . I am not sure I was explicitly aware of this before this essay haha.
Evidence for your thesis: Having given up on finding my left earbud to read this, I discovered it was in my hood.
This piece eerily parallels a lot of what I've been experimenting with the past few days. Singletasking. Being bored. Walking when I'm walking; brushing my teeth when I'm brushing my teeth. I'm bad at it, and often find myself doing two or three things at once when I meant to do one, but I'm finding what you found: once I stop ingesting content and ideas, my brain starts flooding with ideas, some of which are pretty good. Maybe the anti-book could be titled Just Don't Do Things. More of a directive (and a sharp response to Nike's entire marketing approach).
"Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t?" -- this feels like acting from a place of tension. It's what I learned from your husband as tanha (or, in my weak paraphrasing, desire attached to an outcome).
I love the idea of yin and yang ideas. It brings to mind this metaphor popularized by Google X when approaching their most ambitious projects. Imagine you’re trying to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal in the town square. Two tasks are competing for your time, attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.
The first thing to do is identify the bottleneck. It is not the pedestal; it is the monkey. Training the monkey is orders of magnitude harder than building a pedestal. I’m reading your yin book as, Don’t just build pedestals. And your yang book, you can just train monkeys.
I like it!
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast :)
Definitely get this urge a lot when podcasts and blog posts stack up after a busy week. It's too easy to fool yourself with the illusion of learning when you rush through things. Gotta have the strength to say no.
Reading your bit about axes made me think about Vipassana and how 10 days of it removed my axes entirely. Removed the I, the observer, completely for a few seconds, which was enough. It was the mental vacation I'd been searching for with drugs, action, learning, therapy etc. Exquisite.
Cat’s Cradle, also my favorite book. I have always had trouble explaining why. For that you have converted me to a paying subscriber. I look forward to your book
So many beautiful bits of philosophy in it!
I'm really looking forward to the book (and towards the anti-book!)
Oh no. How do you write this after I’ve been working so hard on resting and being more balanced? I feel like you’re right, the yin book would help me more at this point. Maybe can I ask you or the commentariat for recommendations?
This resonates with something I learned on my Mahamudra retreat, that to achieve the best concentration, we were instructed to put some effort in for a little while, and then very gently and gradually release the effort while maintaining awareness of whether or not our concentration was wandering. After a few tries, I landed into an effortless concentration state; I was just in concentration and not actively concentrating. Same happened later with a non-dual view.
This hit me hard as a pointer to what I had been doing wrong in life this whole time - believing that more was always more and that somehow the diminishing returns were a signal to try harder.
I started using an app called Mindful Glimpses today, and in the first series of sessions the guy who runs the app Loch Kelly basically described atelic activities and it made me realize that I don’t do hardly any atelic activities. The only one I could think of off the top my head was watching TV dramas focused fictitious criminal organizations. It’s like the only thing I regularly do because I enjoy that makes no sense and I’m not doing it to get content out self improvement or some other end out of it. Anyway I enjoyed this.
Oh cool, I didn’t know Loch Kelly had an app! Coincidentally I’m watching the finale of Breaking Bad rn …
Yes I have tried Waking Up and Headspace and the VA mindfulness trainer and Insight Timer and nothing really stuck, but I really like his approach.
Breaking Bad and Sopranos are fantastic. But if it has people of dubious morals and big egos sin precarious situations ettling scores I’m in: Peaky Blinders, Snowfall, Narcos, Suburra, Ozark . . . I am not sure I was explicitly aware of this before this essay haha.
How can I preorder your book?
We’re still pre-preorder, but you can sign up to be notified here! https://mailchi.mp/44578760e686/book-preorder-signup