Skepsis #32: This is all there is
We're always caught up in the past or the future but all we really have is the present.
What I'm thinking about
What if this is all there is?
The key insight about mindfulness is that the present moment is really all there is. Our conscious experience of the current moment is all we have - whatever its contents. And that experience is enough. It has to be enough.
Yet we constantly seek a change of our conscious experience. We look to feel better; longing for relief from misery or for a revelation of bliss. We are future-focused, always looking forward to better times. Always on the hunt for that satisfying moment that never truly arrives. And should it arrive, it’s never as satisfying as we thought it would be.
This dissatisfaction with the current moment is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. It’s what drives us forward and enables us to achieve amazing things, but it’s also what keeps us in a state of perpetual discontentment.
We think - we assume - that happiness is something we will have once we… [fill in the blank]. But once we do that thing we thought we needed to do to be he happy, it’s still not enough.
I think the lesson, then, is that we can never really be happy unless we learn to be happy with what we have right now. And the only thing we really have is our conscious experience in this very moment. And if that is not enough, then what is?
So, you cannot become happy, you can only be happy.
That's why we must recognize that this is all there is. Right now, right here. What you feel now... and now... and now. This is you, this is it. Accept that and you will be closer to the fleeting feeling you are always looking for, but never able to fully seize.
What I'm Reading
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.
Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.
The difficulty of learning from our past experiences and improving the quality of our decisions is that it's easy to confuse causation with correlation when considering the results of our actions and decisions. In the poker world there's a word for what you do when you’re looking only the outcome of a decision rather than the process that got you there: "resulting". The danger with resulting is that you can trick yourself in to thinking you made a good decision just because the result was good, but you may in fact have been mostly lucky.
The second lesson from the book is that we need to avoid black-and-white thinking. Most things in life fall on a spectrum. We're rarely 100% certain or know something to be 100% true or false. Recognizing this and communicating our relative certainty with regards to our beliefs is not only liberating but also makes us better communicators. When you catch yourself saying, "I'm sure that Budapest is the capital of Hungary", ask yourself : "What would I bet on that belief?". This question forces you to consider the strength of your belief along a spectrum of certainty and uncertainty. In other words, you'll want to assign a probability to the belief based on what you're willing to bet on it's truthfulness. “Thinking in bets” liberates you from having to be 100% right and allows you the intellectual humility to be wrong - or slightly wrong - without losing face.
Chess is often heralded as the game for strategic thinkers and smart people, while poker strikes most of us as a gamblers' folly. But life is a lot more like poker than chess.
What I'm watching
Our intuitions don’t get us very far. Get ready for some serious science.
What I'm listening to
Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy
Audrey Tang is a different kind of politician. They[*] are the first transgender digital minister of Taiwan, a deep and smart thinker, programmer, democracy advocate and gamer, among other things. I found this conversation really enlightening and am positively surprised to know that there are people like this in politics.
Audrey joined Tyler to discuss how Taiwan approached regulating Chinese tech companies, the inherent extraterritoriality of data norms, how Finnegans Wake has influenced their approach to technology, the benefits of radical transparency in communication, why they appreciate the laziness of Perl, using “humor over rumor” to combat online disinformation, why Taiwan views democracy as a set of social technologies, how their politics have been influenced by Taiwan’s indigenous communities and their oral culture, what Chinese literature teaches about change, how they view Confucianism as a Daoist, how they would improve Taiwanese education, why they view mistakes in the American experiment as inevitable – but not insurmountable, the role of civic tech in Taiwan’s pandemic response, the most important remnants of Japanese influence remaining in Taiwan, why they love Magic: The Gathering, the transculturalism that makes Taiwan particularly open and accepting of LGBT lifestyles, growing up with parents who were journalists, how being transgender makes them more empathetic, the ways American values still underpin the internet, what they learned from previous Occupy movements, why translation, rotation, and scaling are important skills for becoming a better thinker, and more.
[*] Singular they, a pronoun now commonly used when referring to people in a gender-neutral way. I’m so woke.
Podcast appearance
I got the opportunity to come on the popular tech podcast Pocket-lint for a short interview during a recent episode. We discussed the history and future of esports, my company Challengermode and the new console generation. [Starting at 08:43].
Sunflower
As always, stay safe out there.
/Phil