See then Nudge

Acceptance is difficult. I have always been a bit of a “try hard”. That was what we called people at school who were constantly doing something. The implication being that you are trying to impress the teachers. Like the idea of a “Teachers Pet” or “Brown Nosing”.

The world is structured towards encouraging activity, and the conspicuous things that we can see. We look for cause and effect, so that we can control our environment. The assumption being that we are the reason for things, and knowledge will allow us to act with dependable outcomes. By acting, we further our goals. Which seems logical, and Cartesian. We think, therefore we are. Think then do. Try.

Through Josh Waitzkin, and his book “The Art of Learning”, I was introduced to the idea of Wu Wei, which means action through inaction. You start by seeing things as they are, rather than living in our minds. Rather than living in how we want things to be. See then nudge. A less anxious way of engaging with the chaos.

Seen and Unseen

“Drsta nusravika visaya vitrsnasya vasikara samjna vairagyam” Yoga Sutras

"Vairagya, or non-attachment, is that state of consciousness in which the cravings for objects both seen and unseen are controlled by the mastery of will."

Our waves of anxiety don’t deal just with what is in front of us. Worries come from within, from our dreams, and from conscious ideas about what we want, should want, what can happen, what might happen, what we expect, what we expected that didn’t arise, and all the flavours in between. Yogis explain the types of waves through the three Gunas. Tamasic thoughts are the ones that bring us down. Like periods of being unemployed or struggling to find clients. Rajasic thoughts are like periods of being too busy, with no space for self-care or focusing on what is important in the long term, because you are putting out short term fires. Sattvic thoughts are the ones in between. The ones we want to pay attention to. Even though they are also temporary. Thought waves and problems (should) come and go. With changes in the supply of and demand for solutions.

The Eye of a Red-tailed Hawk

Well Covered

My rule of thumb for insurance, is to buy cover for the risks you can’t handle, while building capital to handle as much of it as you can yourself. Perhaps it is the Self-Reliance that was beaten into me by South African folklore. I push back hard on most people who talk of being “against hand-outs” when it comes to charity. Most of the time that push back doesn’t come armed with a mirror. The boundary between a hand-out and privilege is unclear to me. Privilege is compounded entitlement made invisible. Before you can start building breathing space, you have no choice but to rely on others. No one is self-made. Gradually, you can reduce that reliance. By building Capital. The only way to build that self-reliance is by snapping the connection between income and expenses. Self-reliance is a privilege. It is also one that frees you up to give back. If you get to the point where you no longer need to consume everything that is coming in. Separating consumption and creativity is the key to sustainability. The key to handling risk.

Team Sport

Delayed Gratification is a powerful investment tool. Warren Buffett talks of multiplying the price of anything by ten to see if it is still worth buying. This is because spending money is functionally equivalent to firing it. if you think of money as Capital you are a custodian of, rather than your spending budget. Spending money means it can’t grow. Buffett backs himself, given enough time, to turn a dollar into ten. There is some pleasure in this kind of discipline. Seeing the number grow. You don’t “get” anything, but the “score” gets bigger. It is obviously much much easier to be harsh on yourself in this kind of way than on others. This is why building and investing is a team sport. It is easier to spend less if your friends and family are spending roughly the same. Otherwise the self-discipline required multiplies because the choices take on emotional content. Conspicuous Consumption is a particularly dangerous virus to spread. Conspicuous Consumption is a stupidity tax. That’s fine if you have cash to burn, but not if you are just starting on the path of wealth creation.

Not Sexy

I built myself an Engine. This is Capital which acts as my breadwinner so I can be a homemaker. I didn’t do this through a quick fix. I picked off the menu with the skills and privileges I had. I studied hard at university for a degree I knew would get me a well-paid job. A degree an Insurance Company was willing to pay, and to support me through my studies with mentors, for. I then did further professional qualifications and invested half my earnings. I tapped out early because I prefer time and relationships to money, and cut back dramatically on my expenses. There is no magic here. I don’t know what other people’s menus are. My special talent is (often excessive) delayed gratification and self-discipline. I create (sometimes ridiculous) made up rules and stick to them. Not sexy. But it did free me up eventually. This isn’t a choice everyone would want to (or can) make, but I suspect there are rhyming decisions people can make to build the kind of life they want to live.

Corporate Trev

Who are you?

I find shows like West World, and Black Mirror, disturbing because they seem not that detached from reality. When they start dipping into what it means to be human. A book which also messed with my head is Homo Deus. Part of what it looks at, is how people and Artificial Intelligence will interact. Where will decisions be made? 

Right now, the lowest unit of decision making is the individual. But we all know we have a committee of competing desires (long term, short term, rational, emotional, cultural) in our head. What happens when decision making gets pushed down a level? What happens when decision making gets co-ordinated as we extend our ability to communicate? What happens when we hand over different parts of control?

When we start seeking out 'who we really are', and 'whether we have free will', things get messy. These questions drive us forward. Motivate us. West World simplifies that down to Three Key Drivers and a Backstory. This allows our days to be a loop. A bunch of habits that we repeat every time we wake up. Then, depending on how we get bumped by the world, we respond.

What Drives You?

What is your Backstory?

What is your Narrative?

This is how I understand Free Will and Privilege. Like a Galton Board/Bean Machine where we are presented with a number of choices. This creates the illusion of us being in control, because we feel like we are choosing to go left or right many times a day. The choices are presented to us by the world. We can't break the rules of physics, or the society we are in. Where we start - country, region, city, parents, wealth - matters.  Our drivers matter. Our backstory matters. Our narrative matters.

Bean Machine/Galton Board

Battle-Mode Mirror

All advice is autobiographical. Advice reveals more about the person giving the advice, than it does about the receiver. We are only able to see the world from our own perspective. This kind of feedback is incredibly powerful. Criticism becomes a double-edged request for help from someone struggling with the same thing. You're that. Like me. We are normally irritated most, by the things that matter most to us. As a little chap, I was argumentative, easy to rattle, and passionate about finding the truth. I have worked hard at getting better at listening, banter, staying calm and tolerating/valuing alternative ways of seeing the same thing. I still lapse into battle-mode, and so battle-mode irritates me in others. That irritation is a mirror.

Long Grass

I am comfortable being lost in the grass. A lot of my thoughts are scattered, confusing and unrelated. Instead of trying to see the path in advance, I try and connect the disconnected. If there is a path in advance, it is that creating enough connections will create a path. Even if I was bold enough to plan in advance, we don't control the unintended consequences. There is a  big disconnect between our plans and the way things play out. Even if by chance the two rhyme. We fit a narrative to how things happened, as if we were in control of the cause and effect. The world is complex, ambiguous and uncertain. It is also incredibly beautiful and I love those connections. If I love enough connections, a path will take care of itself.

Setting Boundaries

There is a real conflict between what we want when we are cool, calm and collected, and when emotions get involved. Emotions are awesome. They are the stuff of life. The juice. However, they mean that in the moment, we are not going to make the same decisions we would if we were an avatar. If we were controlling ourselves from a distance. If we had Self Control.

Controlling an Angry Avatar

I am relatively good at getting up in the morning when I am forced to. I probably fall into the morning person category, even though I love sleep. When I was doing the daily commute thing, Morning Me used to battle between the very unpleasant tube journey if I slept in, and the very comfy bed if I didn't move. Being squashed against some sweaty, hairy, bearded man doesn't sound attractive to me. So I got up.

Another example of useful self-control was snacking and Yoga. I used to get home from work just before a Yoga class at 8pm. From 5pm onwards Tummy Me would be weighing the yumminess of various snacks on offer versus the feeling of arching your back, holding your ankles, and rolling around on your stomach. Yoga is fantastic when you feel light. Not so much when you are stuffed. It wasn't a rational choice that stopped me from getting those ridiculously yummy, chocolate filled doughnuts from Leon. It was a tummy battle, and feeling great in Yoga won. 

Everything in moderation, including moderation

I think we can set traps/constraints for ourselves to control for the situations where we don't do quite what we would want. Like parenting our inner toddler, not providing any boundaries isn't freedom. Sometimes constraints allow for more creativity. We can script for situations where we know we usually don't behave in the way we want.

I started taking the bus on the way home, partly because being above the ground was more pleasant, but also because the bus didn't pass a stand with chocolates. On a commute, I knew that after a long day at work I always 'deserved' a chocolate. Today I had always 'worked really hard'. My inner toddler is adorable. I love my inner toddler. There is no way I can so no. The bus meant I didn't have to.

My inner toddler still wins lots of battles. I still, weirdly, don't eat messy fruit. But I am getting more cunning. Slowly.

The Spiral and The Apes

The magic of Mandela was the brave choice to say enough is enough. Despite the efforts of others to light the fuse, he symbolised the ability to hold people together and start to rebuild. The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is awesome, but it is not a movie that suspends reality. No amount of talking apes makes you think that the truths of this movie are not real. The evidence points to the world moving in the right direction. No one wins in wars. As Sting said, the enemy love their children too. Figuring out who started things doesn't help. I am not even convinced prosecuting war crimes helps. I am an optimist and would love data on how many instigators there are driving the majority of the world's remaining tragedies. At some point, hopefully the spiral stops. For now, we have to comfort ourselves that it is a shrinking spiral.

New Habits

I have recently returned from a month long Yoga course. It is the second of its type I have done and on both occasions I have come back feeling awesome. Life is not as controlled an environment as I was in, and the challenge is adjusting back but keeping some of the good habits. Life is a collection of habits after all. When we repeat things, we start doing things automatically so we can focus on other things. Stating the obvious, it is easier to keep good habits in environments that lend themselves towards good habits.

"Those who showed the greatest self-control reported more good moods and fewer bad ones. But this didn’t appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations — it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations that might evoke craving in the first place."
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/06/24/self-disciplined-people-are-happier-and-not-as-deprived-as-you-think/#ixzz2bxGMMAm4 (HT - Marginal Revolution)

I have written posts before about attempts to create simple good habits like making my bed and eating more fruit. On those two accounts, I continue to be atrocious. When I came back from the first Yoga course, I tried being a weekday vegetarian to cut down my meat intake. I lasted about 6 months but then fell back into my normal routine.

My plan now is to try adding things rather than consciously taking away. To try and create new habits rather than trying to stop old ones. Part of that plan is in cooking. I am going to try making healthy cooking a hobby. Perhaps the simple act of being excited about learning a new meal will reduce the habit of curry and pizza.

Let's see.