For the last two years I almost hadn’t used my Facebook account, but until a couple of weeks ago I kept it out of nothing else but inertia. I thought that even if I didn’t use it, it couldn’t hurt me keeping it active in case one day I wanted to contact someone that I couldn’t reach otherwise.

But it wasn’t too difficult to see the trap in that reasoning. First, the chance for not being able to reach someone by a route different from Facebook, given how increadibly easy it is to find anyone today on the Internet, is negligible.

Second, and more important: if it’s true that Facebook is the only way to communicate online with someone in particualr, and if it’s true that for a couple of years we haven’t even made a mutual effort to exchange email addresses… then our connection is simply not genuine enough and our “friendship” on Facebook is just an illusion that’s not worth maintaining any longer.

Because at the end of the day that’s what Facebook is all about: trivializing the use of the Internet and the connections that can be established through it, to the point of becoming a virtual game where we compete to see who’s able to accumulate more “friends” with whom we have nothing in common from which we can create a minimally constructive and enriching conversation. Fostering a numbing culture of adherence, conducive to inescrupolous commercial exploitation and political manipulation galore. Promoting that soporific state that leads us to do things by inertia, just like television turns so many viewers into zapping-addict zombies, susceptible of purchasing anything advertised to them regardless of whether the stuff truly anhances their quality of life.

Keeping my Facebook account, even if I didn’t use it, would have been as contributing my grain of sand for the success of a media business model that collides head-on with many of my most deeply rooted convictions. If nothing else, the number of registered users is still an important metric for reaching hyperinflated valuations in the capital markets.

And besides all that, whatever time I did spend on Facebook was becoming increasingly toxic. The vast majority of my contacts posted most of the time about issues that for me were nothing else but noise. To make matters worse, I know many of them in person, and given the growing paranoia about what it means for someone to “stop being your friend” on Facebook I found it quite uncomfortable to dissociate from anyone in particular, lest they would take it as an insult.

So for now I just keep my account on Twitter. I find it to be much simpler, with a platform that is less amenable to rampant marketing manipulation, and where I can more freely decide who I follow, regardless of whether someone follows me or not. I also keep an account on LinkedIn by way of CV and list of professional contacts that I want to keep in touch with for any reason.

So there it is: one more small step towards a life with less informational noise, less superfluous relationships and less passive contribution to organizations opposed to my beliefs.

One more small step towards existential minimalism.

Since then, Time, the song of the album that Juan commented in his post, pops up in my head from time to time. And because it doesn’t go away until I listen to it at least a couple of times, I was forced to collect as many version of it as I could find out there.

And the truth is that despite much searching arround, I realized that nothing, NOTHING, surpasses the original:

But a couple of days ago I realzied that the persistence of the song had to be due to something like a subconscious association of several of my recent readings, as they all have in common the concept of time as central theme.

Or to honor the urban legend, arguably the song played a doubly ironic game on me by using the concept of time, which is the dimension where the phenomenon of synchronicity is supposed to happen, to make me stumble synchronistically on a number of issues

In any case, here are the topics I’ve been thinking of and the readings they come from:

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone” by Hakim Bey

Bizarre but fascinating book, part of the Indiano itinerary. Bey‘s central argument is that given the formidable hegemony of the nation state and the network of social control structures that derive from it, freedom is attainable only through ontological anarchism: freeing our minds of the predominant social control mechanisms is not only necessary, but sufficient to be genuinely free.

But the state of liberation can only be fully experienced transiently: any attempt to make the experience permanent will necessarily steal spontaneity from it, structuring and stifling the creative impulse. Hence Bey proposes the temporary autonomous zone, a social relation space inspired by the revolt and the identity party, as the ultimate environment to fully experience freedom.

Bey’s ontological anarchism and temporary autonomous zone at times reminded me of the powerful notion of La Boétie’s voluntary servitude; they also evoke a lucid, poetic intuition about our ability to forge spaces of freedom in the shadow of an oppressive social system by simply ignoring it, preventing it from stealing our ability to live our lives the way we want to despite its overwhelming, yet decadent power. The two concepts reverberate with the libertarian legacy of the sixties and its creative splendour (Time starts banging on my head again), but also with all its new age nebulousness, revived in the late 80′s alongside the electronic rave culture.

It doesn’t take much analysis to realize that the latter two have contributed more to reinforcing the evasive impulses that are part of the inventory of pathologies characteristic of decomposing societies, than to genuinely inspiring libertarian movements capable of becoming engines for meaning and social cohesion.

“Present Shock” by Douglas Rushkoff

I didn’t read the book, only this summary in PDF format. Rushkoff paraphrases the phenomenon that Alvin Toffler predicted in the early 70s in his book “Future Shock”: the rate of technological change becomes so rapid and radical that it exceeds our capacity to cope, driving us to a paralyzing point of psychhic and moral overwhelm.

According to Rushkoff, rather than a world changing too fast, technology has imposed a way of being and perceiving the world where everything seems to be going on simultaneously; a sort of “presentism,” of immediacy-addiction exacerbated by a relentless barrage of pings, text messages, Twitter feeds and Google alerts.

The truth is that from what I’ve read from Rushkoff, this is what I liked the least so far. On one hand, it seems that Rushkoff admits that the problem is not the ubiquity of technology itself, but the misuse that it is subjected to in the typically authoritarian context of large, centralized organizations that still predominate in a form of capitalism that hasn’t fully come out of the industrial age:

The thing that gets me anxious is not the email piling up in the inbox – it’s the expectations of the people on the other end of those emails. It’s the expectation that I’m supposed to respond in seconds or minutes. It’s the boss who thinks a computer is a good enough reason to watch every one of his worker’s keystrokes.

But then Rushkoff seems to contradict himself, concluding that as technological change intensifies and the economy transitions towards a P2P mode of production, in which there’s no room for large hierarchical organizations, the trend towards exacerbated presentism is also intensified, as if it were an inevitable consequence of the nature of technological progress.

Rushkoff also seemd to underestimate the ability of people to self-regulate their use of technology. Even if it were true that the ubiquity of teconology itself would contribute to disturb our psyche in the context of an economy in which distributed networks predominated as an organizational form, it seems reasonable to expect that this type of society, precisely because of its distributed communications structure, would generate useful ideas to address the problem and facilitate access to them as it would have never been possible in the context of the communications structure of industrial capitalism.

For example, the theme of existential minimalism, which has flourished in recent years thanks to the first truly distributed media that is the blogosphere, is largely about learning to minimize the potential negative impact that information technology can have on our ability to concentrate, our attention spans, intellectual capacity, stress levels, and other aspects of our psyche.

Much of this theme revolves around the concept of how to exercise our capacity for mindfulness. And actually, it’s not an essentially new problem: from the moment we started using the written word as a communication technology, we suffered a cognitive revolution that disturbed our psyche, generating hyperreflexivity (rather characterized by a compulsive fixation in the future, instead of the present), our modern neurotic tendencies, and our exploration of techniques to recover our capacity for mindfulness.

It would be also interesting to see whether the pathologies Rushkoff talks about in his essay are much more prevalent in centralized communication networks like Facebook or Twitter than in distributed networks like the blogosphere. At the end of the day, the culture of adherance seems to feed and be fed by this propensity to submit passively to invasive informational pushing and shoving, which exploits the behavioral patterns that evolved throughout centuries of hegemony of centralized (or at most, decentralized) communications systems. Rushkoff himself seems to hint at something along these lines when explaining the reasons that led him to close his Facebook account.

“Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” by David Graber

In this essay, Graeber also references Toffler’s Future Shock, but directly contradicts Rushkoff’s opinion that we are supposedly “immersed in the shock,” arguing that we never actually reached the state of technological development that Toffler predicted. He thinks the book was so well received because it resonated with the theme that concerned political and business elites the most during the late 50s: how to institutionally regulate technological change so that it had as little impact as possible on the power structure that protects the social values and oligopolistic rents of corporate, industrial capitalism.

Unlike the kind of capitalism that prevailed in England during the industrial revolution and until a century later, characterized by a combination of high finance and small family businesses, corporate capitalism was created by the United States and Germany, the two powers who spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two wars to snatch England’s role of dominant world power, wars that culminated in governmental scientific programs with the primary objective to see who was first to discover how to produce the atomic bomb.

Since then, most technological research and development is carried out by large bureaucratic organizations, with the aggravating circumstance that with the end of the Cold War’s space race, the only research area that represented serious competition to weapons technology in the allocation of governmental funds, was shut down — today the Pentagon carries out 95% of robotics research in the United States. On the other hand, most corporate investment in research and development is carried out in medical and information technologies.

This, coupled with schemes such as “intellectual property” that enclose the knowledge commons, and the systematic statist attack on social movements that propose alternative schemes to generate cohesion and solidarity which could cushion the traumatic period of technological transition, greatly hinder the materializtion of revolutionary innovations such as the total robotization of industrial production, household chores, and other forms of dehumanizing routine work that would bring radical, genuine increases in our quality of life. Graeber reminds us that many of these ideas were present in what Abbie Hoffman imagined as a utopia back when Time was enshrined as one of the super hits of all time.

But Graeber believes that the worst of all obstacles is the pernicious effect that the bureaucratization of society characteristic of neoliberal capitalism has had on our ability to imagine alternative economic systems consistent with a complex technological society. And to accomplish this, it’s also necessary to eliminate our ability to imagine a radically different technological future.

That’s why the dominant ideology promotes the illusion that technological progress continues, that we live in a world of technological wonders, but these wonders take the form of modest improvements (“the latest iPhone!”), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear we’re going to have flying cars pretty soon”), complex ways to juggle information and imagery, new drugs like Prozac to calm the symptoms of alienating work, and still more complex platforms for filling out forms with computers.

Graeber calls this the end of “poetic technologies”: the use of rational and technical means to make our wildest fantasies come alive. Paradoxically, despite the catastrophic consequences of so many of their social engineering projects, the Soviet bureaucracy marked the climax of these technologies: from the dream of world revolution to attempts to end world hunger by cultivating the ocean with spirulina, or launching hundreds of gigantic solar-power platforms into orbit and beaming the electricity back to earth.

By contrast, neoliberal bureaucratic culture, with its growing interpenetration between the state, corporations and universities, has led everyone to adopt the language, organizational forms and sensibilities originated in the corporate world. And although this gives it an edge over the Soviet bureaucratic culture for creating marketable products, the consequences in terms of incentives for truly original research are catastrophic.

No wonder then that Graeber sees the light at the end of the tunnel in the innovation model characteristic of the free software movement, 3D printing, and other forms of small-scale entrepreneurship with truly bold visions: islands of poetic techonology within an ocean of choking corporate prose.

“The Futures to Come” by David de Ugarte

The book’s central message is that the ability to imagine a liberating future for humanity as a whole that Graeber cherishes and that was so progressive at the dawn of the industrial age, has no place as a mobilizing force in a world increasingly organized under the logic of distributed networks. Such a notion of the future is part of the universalist ideology that emerged with the birth of the nation state, and provides it with an ideological framework in a similar way that bureaucracy, as Graeber so aptly points out, gives it organizational structure.

Those who were able to take advantage of the decreasing optimal scales of production, the opening of markets and the exponential growth of the Internet from the 90s onwards, formed a new petty bourgeoisie who identify themselves and interact more closely with their peers scattered around the world than with their nations of origin, to the point where universalist logic no longer has a hold on their minds and souls.

But most of the middle class was left at the mercy of a process of decomposition: the state, on the one hand, increasingly captured by corporate elites and interest groups who refuse to risk their privileges, prevents the deployment of globalization to a level that allows the bulk of the population access to capabilities for competing internationally, but due to the drainage caused by the capture, the state also loses its ability to keep the extent of patronage networks that hitherto kept minimum levels of social cohesion.

Like the new petty bourgeoisie, those left behind by globalization can no longer believe in the discourse that sustains democracy: the harsh reality of crony capitalism is too evident for them to rationalize. But unable to get rid of the universalist ethos, are fodder for new political and social movements that try to revive it constructing discourses that manipulate the basic feeling on which ideologies that conceive the world from large aggregates are necessarily based: fear. In these discourses the idea of a universal future, of a new tomorrow either luminous or catastrophic for everyone, is of fundamental importance:

That which generates the Tea Party in the U.S., generates Chavismo in Venezuela and Hamas in Palestine. What in Somalia opens the road for a local al Qaeda, Al Shebah, in Michoacan leads to the family; what produces the Putin phenomenon in Russia, manifests itself in the U.S. and the EU as laws that tend towards the control society.

In this context, it’s not surprising that a parallel and equally regressive phenomenon has been triggered on the Internet, with the rise of books of faces that exploit the inability of the masses to build empowering conversations and interact with independence from the increasingly strident political agendas that drag them towards a culture of adherence.

In his essay, Graeber sees the postmodern sensibility–the feeling that we are entering an unprecedented historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless–as a desperate attempt to take what would otherwise have been a bitter disappointment and dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. David interprets it as our consciousness of the end of the Enlightenment project, as its last, tragic moment of clarity.

That’s why David agrees with Graeber that the innovation model of the free software movement and the entrepreneurship that blooms with the reduction of optimal scales of production that already makes a large part of the global petty bourgeoisie is supremely hopeful, but stresses that the nostalgia for a universalist notion of the future is radically inconsistent with the ethos that serves as its motor.

The only notion of future compatible with those who have ceased to believe in the ghosts of universalism is of a communal anture: a particular future constructed with the few really important people with which we build our daily lives. A notion of the future based on real communities.

If the distributed networks of the 21st century are to rescue the technological poetry that Graeber longs for, it’s precisely because they thrive on organizational cultures based on lyrical narratives that seek conversation, not adherence; exactly the opposite of the sacrificial and quasi-messianic epics that conform the universalist myths of the left since the seventies.

Or as expressed by that character who went around shaking the world with ideas as irreverent as the black leather jackets he wore during those days in which Time reverberated with all its psychedelic echoes (the emphasis is mine):

Talk of a “whole of society” outside the only form we know, is to dream from the elements of the eve. It is too easily believed that to ask experiences, strategies, actions and projects to take into account the ‘whole of society’ is to ask the minimum. The minimum required to exist. I think on the contrary that it is to ask them the most, that it imposes an impossible condition on them, since “the whole society” works precisely in a way and with the purpose that they can not take place, succeed, or perpetuate. “The whole of society” is something that should not be taken into account unless the intention is to destroy it. Afterwards, it is necessary to trust that there will be nothing that resembles the whole of society.

Paradoxically, focusing our energies on creating a future for our real communities in the context of increasingly interconnected and freed markets, gives us a much more rational basis to believe that this communitary model will eventually spread throughout the world like a virus of abundance, through an “invisible hand effect” of sorts in which self-interest ceases to be as narrow as that of the traditional homo economicus, but is only widened to the point which can sensibly be expected, given the limits of our cognitive and emotional nature to create bonds of genuine fraternity:

We are taught in school that these sizes do not count in the grand narrative, that they do not change things. But this is not true. That great theogony of our time that is the history we are taught in high school forgot to tell us that the monasteries that occupied the pages about the Middle Ages rarely reached one hundred members, that the famous guilds usually were composed of a dozen artisans. Like them, real communities today who are able to think, act and grow without alienating abstract social objects have a strong impact on their environment. They need, of course, two tools that are revolutionary in a context of decomposition: a resilient communitary economy and free, market-mediated interconnection.

I have noticed a tendency among some practitioners of minimalism to believe that degrowth is its logical collective consequence.

But the truth is that the reasoning that explains degrowth as a result of minimalism is very weak:

• Minimalism embraces the power of productivity, and of technology and creativity, to generate abundance. Degrowth denies it. It’s difficult to imagine a more elegant way of translating the concept of productivity (the ratio of the total quantity produced to the means used for obtaining it) to the architectural realm than Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more”: a creative process that maximizes aesthetic impact through the minimization of ornamental elements. Existential minimalism is the philosophical generalization of this concept: a creative process for discovering what’s truly important, and discarding the unnecessary, for a fully meaningful life. Degrowth, by adopting a vision of such little faith in the power of productivity to generate resource-saving economic growth, is incoherent with the minimalist celebration of productivity. In fact, degrowth seems to propose going back to a primitivism that denies technology, the primordial engine of productivity, as a fundamental area for creative expression.
• Degrowth assumes that the only viable form of production is that which causes most of our current environmental and social problems: industrial capitalism. On the other hand, existential minimalism is consistent with an optimist attitude regarding the creative power of technology to minimize the optimal size of production units, maximize the standard of living (although not necessarily the value of gross domestic product as currently measured) with minimal environmental impact, and create the basis for a deep cultural change.
• Degrowth proposes poverty as a virtue to fight consumerism. Minimalists see consumism as a symptom of a life without meaning, so they propose to radically focus our attention, time and energy on those few people and projects with whom we can build a fully maningful life. If we manage to discard everything that doesn’t contribute to a life aligned with meaning, we won’t need a terribly high standard of living to achieve self-actualization; but that standard of living is surely still much higher than what billions of people can afford nowadays. In contrast with the scary population-reduction proposals that degrowth theories tend to converge towards, minimalism is perfectly coherent with an abundance-generating mode of production that tends to raise everyone’s standard of living towards that minimum necessary for self-actualization. And there’s also nothing in existential minimalism that implies a ceiling for whatever amount of wealth anyone wishes to accumulate beyond that indispensable minimum — as long as that amount is compatible with a maningful life for whomever decides to accumulate it.

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Photo by hooverine

I just finished reading Pekka Himannen’s The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age.

Discovering the book now despite being a bit old for fast-as-lightning, information-age standards, made me feel that I read it just at the right moment I needed to. It helped me integrate and crystalize a lot of ideas related to the role of meaning as the key for truly fulfilling work on which I have been reflecting for more than three years.

Himanen reminds us that a hacker isn’t necessarily an open-source software programmer; the term is applicable to anyone who sees work as a passionate activity that allows her to generate value for the community through the creative use of her talents.

By emphasizing creativity as the source of meaning for the hacker’s activity, the book rescues the concept of innovation as a force of revolutionary change; a cocept that has been sadly devalued through endlessly repetitive advertising campaigns and legions of books written by management gurus during the last three decades.

The notion of innovation used and abused by business schools and their gurus almost always boils down to a refried version of Schumpeterian creative destruction, which conceived as it was in the context of the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, is therefore conspicuosly blind towards how the patent system makes the process much less destructive, and much less creative than it could be in a world of markets freed from “intellectual property rights”, in a society predominantly organized through networks and the economic system that it entails.

Actually, the centrality of free access to information as a value of hacker ethics and its concomitant promotion of the fight against the patent regime, imply a discourse that questions one of the ideological bastions that protects the power structure of industrial capitalism. And given the role that business schools have played in the legitimation of the technocratic ideal since the beginning of the 20th century, and of the professional class to which most of the cronies who enjoy the rents generated by the system belong to, it’s not surprising that “intellectual property” is such an axiomatic assumtpion for a version of innovation diluted of its power to corrode the iron-clad structure of artificial scarcity.

The Schumpeterian version of creative destruction is consistent with what Himanen identifies as the ideological basis that sustains industrial capitalism: the “protestant work ethic”, as denominated by Max Weber in his seminal essay The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905): the notion of work as a duty that must be complied with regardless of what it consists of, whether it makes use of the personal, creative talents of the individual, or is aligned with her most cherished social values.

Still, technology kept advancing at a fast pace despite the formidable institutional obstacles, triggering, specially after the Second World War, the trend that promises to blow up the current economic order into pieces in a much more drastic way than whatever can be conceived within the Schumpeterian framework: the drastic reduction of the optimal scale of production, preparing the ground for the transition towards the networked society.

The most fundamental message I absorbed from Himanen’s book was that in order to confront the inevitable turbulence of the transition resilliently, and actually, as a condition for being able to flourish in the upcoming network-based capitalism, it is inevitable to suffer a process of individual self-transformation that liberates us from the protestant work ethic.

In this sense, the great majority of traditional management literature is useless. Himanen does a great job deconstructing the ideas proposed by the self-help movement led by authors like Anthony Robbins and Stephen Covey, showing that they are not more than a rather vulgar re-adaptiation of the protestant work ethic, agiornated with “self-programming” computational metaphors that are more useful for surviving in ladder-climbing careers within the increasingly irrelevant corporate hierarchies than to flourish in the networked society; not to mention other mega-hits such as “¿Who Moved my Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson, which recommends in quite blatant terms that the best way of navigating the storm of changes necessary to overcome the current social decomposition is to avoid thinking about its fundamental causes.

Regarding the even more crucial problem of how to build new relations with others and new ways of interacting with our environment during the transition, popular management literature is, in general, even less useful. Once the prevalent social incentive structure and its inevitable tendency towards decomposition is understood, it’s impossible to avoid seeing the oxymoronic nature of concepts like “corporate social resposibility”, and the conclusion that it can’t contribute anything valuable to the discussion of how to build new forces of social cohesion, new resillient communities that not only cushion the impact of the crisis, but that are strengthened by it.

In order to exorcise ourselves (no pun intended!) from the protestant work ethic, and progress towards embracing hacker ethics, the very first step is to stop rationalizing the profound disconnection that we might be feeling towards our work, and accept it for what it is: the inevitable consequence of a deeply disfunctional, decomposing social system.

At least in my case, that first step gave me the courage to take the plunge towards radically re-orienting my career, and my life, towards meaning.

It’s a hard process because once we accept our insatisfaction and learn to discover all the aspirations that we have left behind, and the aspects of our personality we have repressed in order to conform to conventional work, we tap into a deep source of psychic energy that is, again, essentially destructive, because it gives us the strength to tear down our attachment to a flawed paradigm; but if we don’t manage to transmute the destructivity of that energy into creativity and growth, it can overwhelm us, and drawn us in a sea of confusion and crisis.

Once we acknowledge the necessity of change, it’s imperative that we focus on reinventing the way we relate to others and how we interact with our environment. For this, there are few better things than starting a blog and getting ourselves to write; because through writing we not only learn to find ourselves, but also to tell better stories about ourselves. And telling stories about ourselves through a blog is the most fundamental and pure way to start establishing genuine connections and building the communities in which we can learn to fully embrace technological change together. True weapons of creative destruction that we must learn to use at once.

The daily checklist is perhaps the most basic tool for minimalist productivity. I have been using it in some form for the last couple of years with varying degrees of results.

But for 2013 I want to take a more systematic approach to it, built around the following principles:

1) Building a list strictly limited to a maximum of 5-7 tasks conducive to building a positive habit, and most importantly,

2) the tasks I choose to include in the list are not only conducive to significant, positive change in the most important areas of my life but also,

3) there is a synergy among them so that doing one task somehow creates momentum that facilitates doing any other of the tasks in the list.

In other words, as simple as it is, building a good daily checklist is an art that requires a bit of careful musing in order to get it right.

So here’s how my own daily check list currently looks like, and the reasons why a chose each one of its habit-building tasks:

1. Stick to a gluten-free diet. I have already been gluten-free a couple of times during the last couple of years, and I have permanently and considerably reduced my gluten intake over that period; but the truth is I have always failed to stick to a totally gluten-free diet, even though it is perhaps the dietary habit that has had the most dramatic and positive impact on the way I feel. So that’s it: 2013 is the year when gluten will be forever off my diet, period.

2. Run or swim every day for at least 20 minutes, but not more than 45 minutes. Despite being a fairly active person, I have for the last couple of years focused on strength training and limited my aerobic activity to a few minutes per week of interval training at the gym. And although this has been good enough for my overall health and fitness, some time towards the end of last year I started going out running at an ecological reserve nearby home and realized how different the impact was on my mental state. I had almost forgotten how refreshing and energizing it is to sweat it all out outdoors, breathing fresh air and taking in the sun. The impact on my mental clarity was incomparable to anything I could obtain from the gym, from my capacity to concentrate to the boost in my overall mood, to a subtle zen-like feeling that accompanies me for the rest of the day.

This last aspect is crucial. Running, swimming or any other exercise that involves repetitive individual effort, specially when performed outdoors, in as close contact with nature as possible, is very similar to a moving-meditation exercise. And meditation is, of course, not only the mother of all habit-forming habits, but also the fundamental source of peace of mind, spiritual enlightenment, and all that other stuff that sounds much more esoteric than it really is. (I will eventually go back to a formal meditation practice later on this year, starting slowly at about 10 minutes a day. But not until all the habits in this list are fairly ingrained in my daily rutine.)

3. One heavy-weight workout per week. I will be following Arthur Jones’ general recommendations for one-set-to-failure from the Colorado Experiment, but with lower frequency and at least 3 minutes of rest between exercises, as recommended by Tim Ferriss. I will not be paying attention to concrete results in muscle-gain or fat-loss, at least for the first couple of months; this would require cleaning up my diet beyond eliminating gluten, which I don’t want to do just yet; my priority for the moment is simply to re-introduce and ingrain the strength training habit in my weekly routine.

4. Free-write 750 words every single day. This is the simplest way I can come up with of introducing a minimum of what Rosanne Bane calls “process” in her book Around the Writer’s Block: a daily habit of creative play that gets our creative juices flowing and lessens our resistance to get our writing done. I will aim for 750 words every day, but will be flexible enough to substitute it at times with other forms of creative play such as listening to music (listening fully and getting lost in it) for thirty minutes, taking pictures, or daydreaming.

5. 15 minutes of structured writing every day. Another tip by Rosanne Bane’s book: set a humble goal of structured writing for 15 minutes, and sooner rather than later you will be writing effortlessly for much longer than that. Writing seems to be one of those things for which getting started is more than half the battle. I have been using this technique for about 8 weeks now and it seems to be working, so I will stick to it and see what happens.

6. Keep my dinners light. “Light” here means simply to keep portions small more than anything else. I already eat well-ballanced, nutrient-dense meals by default, so no point in introducing much change in those departments yet.

Synergy

The synergy among these tasks is straightforward. Among the numerous well-established health benefits that a gluten-free diet has, is a much better digestion, which immediately translates into a much clearer mind for work in general, and particularly for intellectual, information-processing work (such as writing). A gluten-free diet also enhances nutrient absorption, which contributes towards higher energy levels for work and exercise.

Having a light dinner allows for much better sleep, which besides being healthy per se, has an impact on writing and overall work productivity, and again, on physical energy levels, which boost strength and endurance during outdoors exercise and gym workouts. Outdoors running or swimming, because of its quasi-meditative nature, has a big impact on our capacity for mindfulness, which enhances mental and physical performance. Finally, writing also reinforces our capacity for mindfulness.

The power of the bare minimum

The daily checklist is meant to contain the bare minimum of daily tasks necesary to make consistent progress in the most important areas of our lives through the gradual introduction of positive habits in our behavior. It’s not the end of the world if one cannot perform all of them in a single day, specially a particularly busy one; in my view it is much more important that at least one of these tasks gets done every day, specially during horrendously unproductive ones in all other respects. We all have some of those days. But knowing that we have made a minimum of significant progress in specially meaningful areas of our lives, allows us to trust ourselves that we will eventually get the truly important stuff done.

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Note: Besides the daily checklist, I still use a personally adapted version of GTD to manage the progress of all the other business and personal projects I might be involved with at any point in time. It has evolved considerably since I last wrote about it, so a follow-up post is coming soon.

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Photo by justin.z

So here are a few practical tips that have helped me exercise my “humility muscle” throughout the years.

I hope you find them helpful too:

Practice failure

Regardless of what you have heard from self-help and management gurus, failure will never be fun, no matter how many times you go through it. But it’s still necessary to take initiative that brings us out of our comfort zone regularly enough, so that we fail as many times as necessary in order to feel, well, comfortable with it. In my view, the reason we are eventually able to become comfortable with failure if we practice it often enough, is that our expectations are healthily adjusted in the process.

By failing at something, we learn as much about our strengths as about our weaknesses, which allows us to not overestimate the former and/or underestimate the latter for the next challenge that comes our way. In other words, by failing often enough, reality shakes us up to the point where we are able to take a humble approach towards achievement, which will increase our odds of success at whatever we do next. A great way to get started is to purposefully failing at many small risky initiatives in a determined period of time and tracking the results. This gradually builds the courage necessary for gradually taking on bigger risks due to the fresh self-knowledge that ensues.

Meditate

One of the well-documented effects of meditation is its capacity to exert a powerful influence on the ego, making us less self-centered, more empathic, content with what we already have, and most importantly, with who we already are. And being content with who we already are usually lowers our defenses and allows us to take a better look inside. All of a sudden, it becomes easier to not feel too proud of our strengths, but also not too bad about our weaknesses, or overwhelmed by the hard work that mitigating them might require. This in turn allows us to take a more objective sort self-analysis and discover other strengths and weaknesses in the process.

Contemplate the immensity of the universe

This can be done in several ways, either by looking at a clear, star-filled night sky, by meditating on the notion of infinity, by studying the work of astronomers and other scientists that deal with the immensity of the universe, or reading literature inspired in such issues. They are all good ways of grasping the enormity in which we are inserted. It helps put our problems in perspective, giving us a sense that no matter how terrible they seem at the moment, they really don’t matter much in the great scheme of things; but it also infuses us with a sense that it’s truly miraculous to be such a tiny, apparently insignificant bit of something so humongous, and at the same time be fully aware of it all. And from the combination of that sense of smallness and meaningfulness usually arises a warm feeling that is exhilarating, but also, for some hard-to-explain reason, is deeply humbling.

Contemplate great works of art

One could argue that contemplating great achievement in any field is an enriching experience, but at least in my case, I find that seeing a great athlete perform, or a great craftsman do her thing, is exciting and delightful more than anything else. On the other hand, seeing great examples of what we most often call the visual and performing arts and literature can have a thoroughly integral impact on our being that somehow humbles us to our core. There’s a whole discussion of what exactly is a “great work of art,” and it’s a good discussion to have, but it shouldn’t inhibit us from letting ourselves be guided by our common sense and our aesthetic feelings more than anything else.

History and tradition are always good guides of course. You can rest assured that if you read some Tolstoy, go to a couple of Picasso exhibitions or watch a few Stanley Kubrick films, something will blow you away sooner rather than later. Still, this is not at all a reason to stick to the mainstream, especially with an ever increasing infinity of marvelous and yet-undiscovered artists peddling their wares on- and off-line, for whom it might be even easier to blow us away due to our not expecting them to as we would from Cervantes or Pink Floyd. The whole point is that the feeling of “being blown away” has, after all, an inherent elemento of deep humility to it.

Have your arguments smashed every now and then

The effect of this practice is similar to that of a an exercise I proposed a couple of years ago for becoming less judgmental, but instead of an introspective, meditative exercise as I proposed back then, this is a general attitude to assume whenever we are engaged in debate. It basically means taking the risk to be totally frank about what we believe, focusing our efforts on conveying the truth as we understand as clearly as we can, and allowing for the possibility of being wrong to the point that the other might completely smash our argument. If we manage to open our minds up to the point where we see the smashing of our arguments as an opportunity for learning and growth instead of a lost fight, we will surely have strengthened our humility muscle, along with our intellectual emotional ones as well.

The reason this misunderstanding is so widespread is that genuine humility is not functional for getting ahead within the large, hierarchical organizations that are currently prevalent in our societies.

But deep technological forces are setting a trend towards the obliteration of hierarchies and the emergence of networks as the prevalent organizational form, in which genuine humility is flourishing as a key virtue for personal success.

False humility

Humility is way too often confused with submissiveness. This is the concept of humility that prevails in hierarchical institutions, as it serves their stability by keeping the lower ranks from questioning the allegedly good judgement of the higher-ups.

But its influence goes beyond authority relations and serves as a destructive weapon among people who perceive each other as social peers.

It’s the typical sick put-down with which members of a herd usually attack the non-conformist black sheep that dare do anything remarkable, anything that raises above established mediocrity. It’s usually accompanied by a detestable, equally false sort of self-deprecating humor that reinforces the sense that no one should ever dare step out of the crowd. This is in direct contradiction to the real, healthy, empowering sort of self-deprecating humor.

It is very effective in undermining our sense of self-worth and creating all sorts of pathological insecurities.

Genuine humility

There are two complementary ways of understanding genuine humility:

1. As behavior, humility is the lack of haughtiness and arrogance.
2. As attitude, humility means being aware of our weaknesses.

Obviously none of the above imply submissiveness or lack of self-esteem.

It can also be argued that humility is as much about not overestimating our strengths as it is about being aware of our weaknesses.

Fallibility

Humility is crucial for keeping ourselves aware of our fallibility.

Regardless of how much experience, knowledgeable or skill we might have in a particular field, we always need to keep a minimum of open-mindedness towards alternative, potentially superior courses of action than the one we are currently committed to.

It’s impossible to know beforehand all the alternative means to an end. Usually the most valuable knowledge about how to do something emerges serendipitously while we try do it.

But we won’t detect the value of that knowledge if we aren’t minimally ready to admit at any point that we might be wrong, and that we need to change course.

Following through with confidence towards the achievement of a goal is important. But humility is more important than confidence.

Self-control

If humility is the virtue that allows us to be aware of our weaknesses and limitations, then it is a fundamental tool for self-control.

It is always hard to create good habits, but the best way to start is taking a humble, small-goals, baby-steps approach.

More in general, our arrogant drive to conquer the world and take on as many challenges as we can possibly handle is a a recipe for failure, because willpower is a finite resource — the bigger the ego, the worst the ego depletion.

Controlling others

Humility allows us to accept that it is impossible to control others, even when we think that our controlling them would be for their own good.

Your friend, your sibling, your parent, even your children once they’re old enough will be the ultimately responsible for deciding whether they want to change anything in their lives and to take action accordingly.

It is true that if you really love someone, you should let them free. But the reason this is easier said than done is because in large part our capacity to love depends on our capacity to give up our arrogant pretension to mold the other to our liking; to fully accept others as they are.

Hubris

Arrogance is compounded and quickly turns into extremely irrational hubris when the impulse to control others is boosted by the incentives people face within a given social institution.

At a macro level, economic central planning not only leads to rampant authoritarianism, but also to economic collapse due to the fatal conceit inherent in the idea that those at the helm of the state are able to collect and process the vast amounts of local, inarticulate and constantly changing information that the price system translates into an efficient allocation of resources.

This is not an argument that applies exclusively to the unworkability of soviet-like authoritarian socialism, but to a large extent, to contemporary capitalism as well. The Dilbertesque reality of the corporate behemoths that thrive in the global economy is the direct result of big, powerful states subsidizing economies of scale.

As the quintessential form of political endeavor, war is the area where the hubris of state chieftains is seen in its crassest form. Throughout history, the drive for conquest, for extending the reach of grandiose imperialist schemes to every corner of the world has caused immense, unnecessary death and destruction.

“The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness– the intoxication of power… I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of cast social disaster.” - Bertrand Russell

Humility in the 21st century

As the dominant technological substrate we rely upon shifts from industrial- to information-related technologies, genuinely free markets will thrive, providing the economic incentives for networks to flourish as the predominant organizational form.

The extreme horizontality of networks makes genuine humility an invaluable character trait, as seen in the ethics of open-source hackers. More generally, the organizational culture of networks can be characterized by a predominance of the humility of lyrics versus the arrogance of epics.

Again, today we see the clearest example of the hubris of hierarchy and its disastrous consequences in war, with the world’s mightiest military machine stubbornly refusing to accept the No. 1 rule of modern warfare: Many and Small Beats Few and Large.

Embracing radical change for positive personal and social transformation is necessarily a humbling experience. And exactly for that reason, today more than ever, it is also extremely empowering.

In this article I will argue that, paradoxically, writing is also the ultimate tool for getting back our capacity for mindfulness if we engage with this timeless technology in the right way.

But let us first summarize Professor Miró’s fascinating argument:

Sound versus sight

The invention of writing took us from a world of oral speech where audition was the predominant sense for manipulating human language, to a world of language of predominantly visual symbols.

Audition functions in the acoustic space

A diffuse space of echoes where sounds seem to lack a material support. Sounds seem to exist only in the here and now.

As much as they are evanescent, sounds are enveloping. We feel as if we are in the center of our auditive space.

Sounds connect us with others through conversation in a particularly strong sense

When I speak to you and you listen to me, it’s as if we automatically conform a new unitary structure. As if we were opposites being harmonized by the magic of sound.

Audition as an integrating force

These attributes of sound as the primary means of communication tend to reinforce a strong sense of inner unity and the perception of the world as devoid of boundaries between living beings, and between these and the cosmos.

The separateness of visuality

On the other hand, a world of written language imposes a visual organization of human consciousness that contributes to a sense of being separate from the information transmitted through language.

From being at the center of our auditive space, information seems now to be in front of us. There is a sense of distance between us and the information we are manipulating.

The kingdom of dualism

This sense of distance and detachment strengthened our capacity to observe the world as an inherently external phenomenon. To the extent that we felt connected to the cosmos, it was by means of an immaterial self or a soul separate from our physical bodies.

This later led to dualism, the notion that mental phenomena are immaterial, and ultimately strengthened our impulse to observe nature and the creation of the scientific method.

Exploring the inner world

Our increased sense of detachment from language facilitated introspection, which paved the way for the notion of individualism; but it also led to the intensification of religious experience as mysticism.

Storage problems

In non-writing cultures, people only know what they can remember, so it’s only natural that they would be so adept at using repetitive, rhythmic, pleasurable formulas of vivid imagery to facilitate the memorization of knowledge.

Concrete thinking is supreme in these societies. The Illiad and The Odissey are prime examples of concrete knowledge arranged in a sort of tribal encyclopedia that prescribed how to function in life’s most diverse circumstances.

“The Particularity of orally remembered discourse has the continued effect of calling a shovel a shovel, and not an excavation instrument.” ~ Eric A. Havelock

Abstraction

Whereas in the oral tradition concreteness was king, writing gives way to abstraction and the de-contextualization of language.

We see this in the dialectical method: Socrates and his contemporary philosophers isolated language from the speaker, questioned what was said, and invited the speaker to say it in a different way, so as to “break the spell” created by the emotional attachment that people naturally developed towards ideas learned through the repetitive formulas of the oral tradition.

The printing press put this whole process on steroids

With the massive production of books, reading became an individual, silent and inner experience. There was no need to share the single manuscript in town with the rest of the community listening together to a single reader pouring its contents out loud.

The perception of life as a continuous, uniform and linear space to be filled with content is also a key metaphor reinforced by the book.

I think, therefore I am

The Cartesian notion of the utmost certainty of the existence of the self, of being overwhelmingly conscious of an “I” over everything else in life, is a particularly prominent example of the revolution of consciousness caused by written language and exacerbated by the printing press.

The subjectivity of experience was now the new thing

I am myself the matter of my book

Montaigne’s immortal phrase also captures this feature of modern consciousness to perfection. He was perhaps the foremost example of the writer that wrote from a profoundly personal perspective.

The emergence of the modern novel was also nurtured by the exploration of the inner world, with Cervantes and his Quixote as the quintessential example of man’s struggle with an outer reality much in contrast with an imagined world nurtured through reading and rumination.

The lure of the future and progress

The exacerbation of the tendency to project our inner private contents was matched by our modern disposition to give a predominant position to the future in our lives. After all, the future is the quintessential domain of pure cognition — of imagination.

The notion of progress was born directly out of this predisposition to imagine.

Our tendency to imagine a better future unleashed the creative power of our minds on an unprecedented scale

But also brought about upon us a marked tendency to contrast the present moment as it is to what we expected it to be.

This tends to produce hyperreflexivity — the plenitude of the present moment is lost, constant tension ensues, and with it, our modern tendency towards neurosis.

Electronic communications: curse AND blessing

There is no doubt that the advent of the internet and electronic communication has the potential to further damage our already unhealthy relationship with information.

But it is also true that today, more than ever before in the history of humanity, we have access to the ultimate tool for mindfulness, which is, as paradoxical as it may sound, writing itself.

The ubiquity of the personal computer and its centrality in modern work and play means that the capacity to put together coherent strings of text is more than ever indispensable for functioning in the world.

As much as the written word might have opened the can of worms and inserted us in the vicious hyperreflexive circle of modern neurosis, when done well, it is the ultimate tool for eliciting and articulating the diffuse and confused ideas swirling in our subconscious.

Here are some ways in which writing can lift enormous psychic weight from our shoulders and and get us back on a path of mindfulness, personal growth and meaning:

1. Emptying the mind. Intellectual confusion is one of the main causes of modern anxiety. There is so much contradictory knowledge out there on such an overwhelming variety of topics that our basic sanity depends on our capacity to systematically stop ourselves on our tracks and give some structure to our intellectual chaos. Writing down our stream of thoughts on a given subject is the most effective way of doing this. And while there’s obviously no guarantee that we will reach the ultimate truth about anything, writing will at least allow us to understand what our opinions are about something; or equally important, how we feel about a particular issue. Every time I write down and articulate my thoughts I feel it is easier to focus on the present moment in all the other areas of my life. This is similar to the “mind like water” principle that ensues when we empty our minds of pending to-do’s by means of organizing and recording the progress of our projects on an external device such as a GTD personal productivity system. Furthermore, by eliciting and clarifying the unstructured ideas in our minds, writing not only reinforces the knowledge that we already have, but allows us to create new associations between ideas and therefore create new knowledge. Writing is an inherently creative process.
2. The power of literature. Literature is very much the art of telling stories with the vivid imagery that characterized the ancient oral tradition. Novels and other works of fiction are probably the most characteristic in this sense, but the beauty of the writing craft is that it can produce all sorts of ambiguous cross-pollination among genres, giving birth to such wonderful creatures as “magic journalism,” epitomized by the work of geniuses like Ryszard Kapuscinski. But if reading literature is powerful, writing some is genuinely transforming, and you should give it a try despite your stubborn ideas about your lack of literary talent.
3. Read less, write more. A great part of our modern pathological approach to information arises from our compulsive approach to reading. Web surfing can lead to the worst type of addictive, endless consumption of unconnected bits and pieces of information, but books themselves, on paper or electronic format, can immerse us in a Quixote-like world if we use them for evading ourselves from the outer world. My take is that we should produce at least as much text as we consume. A good way to start balancing the equation is to write essays about the books we read, or at least take notes and organize them in a coherent summary. The first approach is probably better for fiction, the second for non-fiction books.
4. Write at least 750 words a day. You can do this with pen and paper of course, but if you are like me and the countless millions that are hopelessly dependent on a keyboard for stringing text together, then try 750words.com. If the prospect of writing 750 words a day overwhelms you, start with half of that. Still too much? Free write for 15 minutes a day, 5 times a week. This means simply writing whatever comes to your mind without editing or polishing at all. Once that habit is ingrained, try adding 15 minutes a day of more structured writing (working on a short story, essay, article or blog post). Rosanne Bane, author of Around the Writer’s Block, uses these simple techniques for breaking the resistance of writers of all levels of expertise. Leo Babauta says that writing even one sentence a day will eventually get you going. Tim Ferriss never tries to write more than two crappy pages a day when he is writing books.
5. Write for flow. Flow is nothing else than a particularly strong state of mindfulness, and with some practice, writing will get you flowing relatively quickly. We can achieve flow writing almost about any subject. Free writing is particularly helpful for this. Write about your cat, the landscape in front of you, the girl next door or whatever otherwise trivial subject you can think of, and take it to an art form by the literary transmutation performed by the written word. Or write about something you care deeply about, something that makes you angry, or anything that stirs your passions in some way or another.
6. Kill your demons. To get him off drugs, Stephen King King’s family and friends staged an intervention, dumping evidence of his addictions taken from his office including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, cough medicine and marijuana, on the rug in front of him. William Burroughs was a heroin addict and accidentally killed his wife during a drunken game of “William Tell”. Balzac could drink almost 50 cups of coffee per day. Edgar Allan Poe’s alcoholism is legendary, as well as Rubén Darío’s; and Jack Kerouac’s, who died at the age of 47 due to an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. Dostoyevski developed a gambling addiction which led to financial hardship and an embarrassing period of begging for money. The list of tormented, addictive, eccentric and downright crazy geniuses of literature is endless. They have usually declared that writing is the only activity that kept them minimally sane. Perhaps their minds were in such a constant whirlwind of ideas, of associations among the most disparate aspects of reality (this is in the end the essence of creativity) that it was probably too much for their psyches to handle. While you and I are surely not at the same level of creative genius and/or existential torment, we all have demons deep withing that need to be tamed by letting our creative expression run free. Actually, writing can help us realize many of those demons exist within us, just like it helps elicit other forms of knowledge from deep within our subconscious.

We can let electronic communications interfere with our mindfulness, or we can use them to enhance it. It’s really up to us to decide. ~ Anonymous common sense

]]> http://www.alanfurth.com/paradoxical-rel-writing-mindfulness/feed/ 2 http://www.alanfurth.com/google-stupidity/ http://www.alanfurth.com/google-stupidity/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:56:49 +0000 Alan Furth http://www.alanfurth.com/?p=1175
“I will use Google before asking dumb questions” by Andréia via flickr, used under a Creative Commons license




BlogLess brought to my attention Nicholas Carr’s cover story on The Atlantic about how Google, and the Internet, can make us stupid:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that… My mind [is] changing. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy…. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages… The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer… But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media… supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

I have experienced something very similar to what Carr describes. But ever since I started meditating and studying Tai Chi Chuan I noticed that I have re-gained much of my capacity to concentrate for long hours, and what’s more, my overall appetite for information consumption has shrinked. This had a big impact on my websurfing habits.

Nowadays I am much less likely to get stuck for hours roaming in cyberspace. I read a much lower number of blog posts and articles on a given session, and the ones that I do read are much more likely to hold my attention from beginning to end.

This attitude blends well with my recently-implemented, Evernote-based GTD system. Whenever I come across an interesting headline, I clip the entire page to my Inbox with the click of a button, where it will sit until I have the time and mindset to process it. Only then I will decide whether it merits a full read.

Somehow meditation has helped me to strike a much better balance between a confidence in what I already know, and what I feel I need to know.

I wonder whether there is a broader principle at work here. While much of the Internet is designed in a way that is conducive to scattered patterns of attention, in my view this is both a cause and a consequence of the frenetic overall lifestyles prevalent in modern societies. As Carr points out, the more frenetic our websurfing, the more dispersed our attention will become in other areas of life.

But I also feel that the more we modify our offline lives through meditation, long weekends in the beach or mountain, shorter working hours, and simply doing less stuff overall–and the more aligned our society is with these lifestyles–our websurfing habits will change accordingly: We will spend more time at Project Guttemberg, read a lower number of pots per session, finish reading the posts we have started, and favor bloggers who write longer posts.

It may be true that media has the power to influence our cognitive processes down to the biological level. But there are strong grounds to believe that our lifestyles and societies do so too.




Google’s creepy ideology

What I found most revealing about Carr’s article is his observation of Google’s ideology as a crass form of information-age Taylorism:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google… speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back… In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ…

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

This is the sort of intellectual hubris that pervades so many science-based industries. As I have argued before, it is the same ideology that led Wall Street to believe in mathematical models that yielded triple-A ratings for bizarrely complex financial instruments they didn’t truly understand.

If the power of money corrupts people by stoking their instinct for greed, scientism corrupts them by excessively inflating their drive for understanding, predicting, and ultimately controlling the environment, society and other human beings.

As a Taoist, I find the idea of trying to do away with ambiguity particularly disturbing — there seems to be not much of a place for Ying-Yang paradoxes in Google’s view of intelligence.

Carr is afraid this ideology might lead to a world similar to that of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odissey.

And I thought Google would prevent Microsoft from taking us there. Sigh.




]]> http://www.alanfurth.com/google-stupidity/feed/ 4 http://www.alanfurth.com/getting-things-done-gtd-and-the-zhuangzi/ http://www.alanfurth.com/getting-things-done-gtd-and-the-zhuangzi/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:25:43 +0000 Alan Furth http://www.alanfurth.com/?p=1091
“Effortless,” by jacksonpe via flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

 

In my previous post I argued that there was a striking match between Getting Things Done (GTD) and the way Taoists see the world.

I woke up early this morning with the memory of a bunch of Taoist metaphors that further clarify this match. So I picked up my copy of Edward Slingerland’s outstanding book on efortless action, which compiles and analyzes these metaphors in an exhaustive way.

 

Emptying the mind

As Slingerland points out, the very first step for achieving effortless action according to Zhuangzi is the “emptying” of the heart/mind, understood as loosening our attachment to ego-related concepts such as social rewards, social values and rigid pre-conceptions of right and wrong.

At a deeper level, the emptying process also implies freeing ourselves from the effects of our biased perception, getting rid of knowledge, and at the highest levels of enlightening, of the existence of our physical bodies.

While this sort of emptying of the mind might be achieved through meditation techniques and contemplation of the scriptures within the Zhuangzi, the mundane act of writing down our to-do’s in a comprehensive system, and setting up reminders that allow us to “forget” about all the stuff we need to keep track of in our day-to-day, is what amounts to “emptying the mind” in the GTD paradigm.

 

Mind like water and the mirror-response

As discussed in my last post, David Allen argues that the key benefit of emptying the mind by implementing GTD is achieving a “mind like water” state that allows us to react in the appropriate measure to the challenges we naturally face while pursuing our goals:

In karate there is an image that’s used to define… “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact…

The Zhuangzi metaphorically describes this mental state of appropriate response to the environment that comes with the clarity of an empty mind in terms of the functioning of a mirror:

The Perfected Person in using his heart/mind is like a mirror: he does not lead, nor does he welcome; he responds… but does not store. This is why he is able to win over things and not be harmed.

This is how Slingerland interprets this passage:

… a mirror works only because it is itself “empty” and merely responds spontaneously to what is put in from of it. Similarly, the heart/mind of the Perfect Person–once emptied through psychic fasting–is completely open and responsive to things. The mirror response is thus the behavioral correlate to cognitive emptiness or clarity.

 

The workings of Spirit

According to Allen, once mind like water is achieved, a large amount of psychic energy is freed up and one should experience a spontaneous increase in the creative ability to deal with higher order, meaningful goals:

Many executives I have worked with during the day to clear the decks of their mundane “stuff” have spent the following evening having a stream of ideas and visions about their company and their future. This happens as an automatic consequence of unsticking their workflow.

There is a clearly analogous process portrayed In the Zhuangzi. Once an empty heart/mind is achieved, the Perfected Person not only achieves a mirror-like mind that responds appropriately to the world, but also experiments a spontaneous shift of focus towards a spiritual perspective. This happens as a direct result of the workings of the qi, which was believed by Daoists to gain an increased dynamism within the body when the mind was emptied through meditation and other forms of physical cultivation.

Furthermore–and this is a key theme of Taoist thought in general, not only of the Zhuangzi–, this spiritual awakening provides the person not only with inner peace and joy, but is the key for effortless achievement of higher-order goals through inspired work.

Allen doesn’t talk in terms of spiritual awakening of course, but he does believe in a spontaneous process of inspired action that, trhough the workings of the Reticualr Activating System of the brain, provides a sort of automatic, subconscious “guidance” for goal achievement. To illustrate this, Allen cites a passage by Maxwell Maltz:

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

 

Butcher Ding

The spirit as a fundamental force for inspired work that goes beyond technique or intellectual skill is perhaps best illustrated in one of the most important metaphors of the Zhuangzi, that of butcher Ding cutting up an ox.

Butcher Ding was cutting up an ox of Lord When Hui. At every touch of his hand, every bending of his shoulder, every step of his feet, every thrust of his knee–swish! swoosh! He guided his blade along with whoosh, and all was in perfect tune–one moment as if he were joining in the Dance of Mulberry Grove, another as if he were in a performance of the Jingshou symphony.

Lord Wen Hui exclaimed, “Ah! How wonderful! Can technique really reach such heights?”

Bucher Ding put down his cleaver and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond mere technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now–Now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My sensory knowledge is restrained and my spiritual desires are allowed to move/act. I follow the Heavenly pattern, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my movements to the fixed nature of the ox. In this way I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint…

Lord Wen Hui exclaimed, “Wonderful!” I have heard the words of Butcher Ding and from them learned how to cultivate life!”

 

Woodcarver Qing

A similar theme is found in the story of woodcarver Qing, who creates bellstands of such beauty that people think them the products of ghosts or spirits. He explains to the Marquis of Lu how he prepares for his work:

When I am going to make a bellstand, I am always careful not to exhaust my qi in the process, so i fast in order to still my heart/mind. After fasting for three days, I no longer dare to cherish thoughts of congratulations or praise, of titles or stipends. After fasting for five days, I no longer dare to cherish thoughts of blame or acclaim, of skill or clumsiness. After fasting for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a physical body. Once I’ve reached this point, there is no more ruler or court. My skill is focused and all outside distractions dissappear. Only now will I enter the mountain forest and observe the heavenly nature of the trees. If I come across one of perfect shape and form, then I am able to see the completed bell stand in it and simply apply my hand to the task; if not, I let it go. In this way I am merely taking the Heavenly [within] and joining it with the Heavenly [without]. This is probably why people suspect that the final product was made by spiritual beings.”

 

The notion of freedom in the Zhuangzi

Another way of seeing the striking similarity between GTD’s mind like water state and Taoist philosophy, is through the very particular notion of freedom implied by the Zhuangzi.

Just like GTD states that a mind like water allows one the flexibility to deal with the day-to-day stuff without underreacting or overreacting, and a simultaneous state of focused inspiration to pursue our most meaningful goals, Slingerland argues that according to the Zhuanzi, the freedom that comes from spiritual enlightenment doesn’t imply that the sage completely transcends the material realm,

… but is rather for the first time actually able to perceive and spontaneaously accord with its dictates… [This is well illustrated by] the feeling of inevitability that accompanies certain artistic achievements: when an artist is successful, it often seems to her that the lines she has drawn and the colors she has chosen could not be otherwise. This sort of activity is felt not so much as a creation of order out of nothing, but the discovery of something–of the proper way pigments on a canvas are to be combined to reflect a landscape, or the way a knife is to be wielded if an ox is to be butchered. As Alan Fox 1996:64 notes: “[Butcher] Ding does not decide where he wants to cut–he finds the space between the bones.” The freedom that Zhuangzi advocates is a freedom to act properly in response to a given situation, and thus represents a subtle combination of freedom and constraint. (The bolds are mine)

It would thus not be accurate to say that the Daoist sage is free to do anything whatsoever that he wants; rather, he is free to do what he must, and do so with joy and a sense of ease.

In exhorting people to “use to he fullest all that you have received from Heaven,” while at the same time realizing that it is necessary to act in the physical and social realms, Zhuangzi is calling for a metaphorical “walking of the two paths” with regard to the Heavenly and the human.

The Zhuangzian ideal thus somewhat resembles the vision of being “in the world but not of it” presented in the New Testament (John 17).

 

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