I didn’t have one. Just some health issues. I hadn’t connected the dots yet. I satisfied my sweet cravings without second thoughts and was not really familiar with the word fiber. 

I worked a job that paid well and gave me full freedom in terms of where I worked from. 

Everything came together to go and explore the world and myself in it. 

I had no idea I was looking for a purpose, and yet found one in South America.

Cooking and healthy eating were things I kept putting off for “some day.” I thought I didn’t have the time and money to be busy with such luxurious aspirations. 

All that changed as I travelled and worked as a digital nomad through Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico. 

I travelled on a budget—hostels, cheap Airbnbs, Couchsurfing. I could not ignore what I saw any longer: people making fabulous, healthy dishes out of the cheapest plant based ingredients. 

The aha moment hit me in Costa Rica: I visited a Cocoa plantation where they made bean to bar chocolate and I realized that packaged food does not necessarily need to be filled with additives, enhancers and all the rest. It can be simply made out of pure ingredients. Why wasn’t all packaged food made like this? 

The food industry felt ripe for disruption.

And for once, I felt ready to jump in—with a purpose.

My co-founder, David, was instrumental in creating Viblance—a company that started with granola and is becoming something so much more.

Nearly a decade later, I’m still here. Still building. Still trying to figure out how to scale a mission-driven business in a peculiar market without losing myself in the process.

And failing at that.
And starting again.

And keeping at it.

My number one project right now is stepping back from daily operations and making more space for reflection—and for sharing some of what I’ve learned (and unlearned) along the way.

Not how-to posts.
Not success stories.

Just raw thoughts from someone who’s been in it long enough to know: clarity is rare, trade-offs are constant, vitality is tied to purpose, and balance sometimes includes long hours.

A From Midlife Crisis to Mission-Driven Business bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Our unhealthy relationship to social media and smartphones has been the most recent and most unmistakable alarm bell. But none of that seems to deter us from going forward in the same direction, except we are speeding up the pace exponentially. The explosion of chatgpt serves as an all too poignant reminder that the apes got their hands on a new toy and they have no clue what it’ll do to them.

A deeper look into the psychological and philosophical issues around AI inevitably involves asking some questions that are fundamental to our human nature and existence. So what we can potentially gain from playing with different scenarios is not simply forming a strong opinion on the emerging AI, but also insights into questions about ourselves we didn’t even know we had.

AI is implied by the spearhead

When the first humanoid took two pieces of rock, hit them together until one became sharp and pointy enough to be used as a weapon to kill prey much more efficiently, the process that inevitably culminates in AI some millions of years later, had already begun.

The benefits of any new technology, including the pointy piece of rock as well as AI, are obvious. The benefits are the very reason why the tool gets created in the first place. The prehistoric hunter equipped with a stone spearhead, returns with prey much more often than the guy using his bear hands, and as a result, not only does he and his tribe enjoy a higher quality of life, but they also gain an evolutionary edge to reproduce and to survive.

What is less obvious is the danger the sharp piece of rock brings upon our inventive hunter and his tribe. The moment he created his tool, his world changed forever. More to the point, the world of humans changed irreversibly. Other tribes are now incentivized to either come up with their own spearheads or take his. Once competing tribes are equipped with the same weapon, they are also incentivized to slaughter his entire tribe and take everything he had or just as a preemptive measure so that he doesn’t do it first.

So the consequence of the spearhead (replace with any piece of technology) is twofold: much easier to kill pray (gain something) and much easier to fall pray yourself (lose something).

Perhaps the sharp piece of rock may be too easily dismissed as obviously having a downside since it’s practically a weapon. Let’s look at a more benign example.

The iron plow could potentially kill a person by accident, but it would be a fairly clumsy and inefficient weapon to be used in battle, which is why it probably never was. We can take the plow as a symbol of agriculture as a whole, which is largely responsible for the human race spreading to previously uninhabitable areas and providing a steady source of nutrition and a quality of life that our prehistoric ancestors would not even have dared to dream of. What possible dangers could such a great invention entail?

If the people who started using the plow first didn’t know, we sure do today. Exploitation of the soil, monocultures, loss of biodiversity, overproduction, overeating, overpopulation, disease, war.

The downsides of new technologies are rarely instant and obvious, but all the more impactful and difficult to reverse.

For every problem technology solves, it creates a new one. The problem solved may have been an inconvenience (body odor), the problem created by the solution may be life threatening (ozone hole). We pretend to be ignorant of this regularity and keep coming up with new technologies to solve problems previous technologies created.

Let’s take the ultimate problem, disease and death. Who wouldn’t want to cure the sick? Who would even dare to argue that medicine, the solution to disease may have a downside? When our loved ones are sick, we’d do anything it takes to cure them, and if we could, we’d make sure they live forever. But what happens when everyone tries to do just that?

Dozens, if not hundreds of companies are working around the clock world wide to extend human life potentially infinitely. Imagine that one of them succeeds. The human immortality pill is created. On the one hand, that’s the best thing that could ever happen. Billions of people who are dying and sick would be saved. And yet, if the immortality pill is discovered too early, it will be a total disaster, potentially the end of our civilization.

How would we decide who gets to live forever? Even if we say let everyone alive today live forever, who would decide who gets to have children? There is obviously not enough of Earth to keep everybody and their infinate generations of offsprings alive. So the most humane thing ever, the elimination of death would create a world where a certain part of the population would need to be castrated to ensure they can’t reproduce. The availability of the immortality pill would lead to the worst of wars and probably the end of our civilization as we know it.

The solution to the mess created by the immortality pill could be a new piece of technology that enables humanity to become a multiplanetary species. If it came just in time, we’d be able to relocate the excess population to other planets and the fight for the right to live forever and reproduce would cease. Until, of course, we’d run out of habitable planets or into yet another seemingly essential problem, to which we’d come up with yet another technological innovation and repeat the cycle ad infinitum.

So what is it about technology that makes it such a a double-edged sword?

Tools and technology make gaining something easier but they also inevitably make losing something else easier. With the immortality pill, we may gain eternal life, but we would likely lose our civilization to it, and definitely lose the value and meaning of human life as we know it, which originates from the simple fact that it may end at any moment.

Technology only ever solves the problem at hand, but it doesn’t cure the human condition, because if there is such a cure, it is not technological, but psychological.

If you want to live forever, I think you are missing the point of human life.

The people who claim to understand AI, disagree whether it’s dangerous or benign

The above paragraphs might convey the impression that the writer of these lines is some anti-tech, traditionalist, religious cavemen, who is convinced that technology is inherently bad and dangerous.

Far from it.

If the spearhead head been developed by a species whose repertoire of behavior doesn’t include killing its own specimens, then the spearhead would have no downside. Similarly, if we were not prone to overpopulation and exploiting our environment, medicine and agriculture would have no downsides. But we are who we are, and we use, overuse and abuse every piece of technology according to our psychological and intellectual limitations.

The dangers of technology are not inherent to technology, but to us, the people who make and use it. Technology is not dangerous by itself or because of some natural law. It is only dangerous because of human nature.

So what we need protection from is not technology, but our own human nature.

That’s true about all technology except for AI.

Because AI becomes of real value to us only at the point when it gets smarter and more capable than we are. Incidentally, that’s also the point of no return, after which we don’t know what happens.

A group of people seems to not only comprehend the risks of new technology, in this case AI, but to also make sacrifices to mitigate those risks at least to the point of making a public statement. The impact the petition to halt the development of chatgpt for 6 month may be questionable. But the motive of the people, who signed it is beyond any doubt. They didn’t do so out of fear of losing their livelihoods like the Luddites in the 19th century, who simply destroyed the machines in factories. These are not the your ordinary technophobes, but smart people, who recognize that the invention of the spearhead changed the world irreversibly and not evidently for the better. And we are about to do it all over, except at a much larger scale and in an irrevokable way.

Eliezer Yudkowsky didn’t sign. He says it’s asking for too little too late and if we don’t shut it all down, we are all going to die.

The way in which AI is different from all previous pieces of technology is that it doesn’t need to get into the wrong hands, be overused or abused in order to kill all of us. It simply needs to be created.

It’s not like AI is going to be inherently evil and want to kill us. Our existence will simply be of no significance to it, just like we don’t care how many millions of bacteria we may kill with our every breath or how many ants we kill with our every step.

We could, in theory, create the AI in a way that it preserves humanity above anything else, but we don’t know how to do that just yet. And we don’t get a second try with this one, like we think we do with the climate.

“We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.

Shut it down.”

Eliezer doesn’t have high hopes. He goes on by proposing a global treaty to shut down all AI research and experiments and enforce that agreement by the threat of violence, even if the violating party is a nuclear power.

Many smart people disagree with Eliezer. Some say it’s a non-issue, which doesn’t seem to hold ground even if we disregard the uniqueness of the AI situation in contrast with any other technology that didn’t kill us all, but actually improved our lives in one way, but made it worse in others. And then the optimistic bunch, who actually signed the petition, hence they are obviously worried, and think the game is not over yet, if we are careful enough, we can get this right.

The worst case scenario: we all die

It is difficult to take a stance on who is right or wrong in this debate. If the experts have such diametrically opposed opinions plus anything in between, what chance do we stand to make sense of it?

As established above, what seems undeniable is the pace technology develops and transforms our lives at is way too fast. We can’t keep up with it.

Our mental and emotional systems evolved to pick berries and run away from tigers, live in small groups, play around and have lots of sex. We think we are the priviliged ones for living in an age where child mortality is at a historic low and we can have hot showers any time of the day. And we certainly are. Our experience today is vastly richer than that of our ancestors. But all that comes at a price, which we must pay even if we close our eyes at the check out.

The price we pay is all the problems we have, which are only possible because we have this vastly richer, safer and in many ways better lives than our ancestors did. None of our problems today would be possible without that richness, safety and high quality. And all this is pre AI.

What illustrates the magnitude of the issue we are facing with AI is that even if we followed Yudkowsky’s instructions word by word on how to halt and police the development of AI globally, we’d end up in nuclear war, because the incentives and our current level of psychological development will make that inevitable.

If AI research was banned globally, secret experiments would start the next morning, because everybody would assume that everybody else would break the treaty and the first one to do so would dominate everyone else. Game theory 101. You can’t ban the quest to find the Holy Grail, well, technically you can, but it won’t stop anyone. The desire to get there first is way too strong.

Even signing such a treaty, let alone not breaking it, seems impossible as it would require all the countries of the world to work closely together, work out all the details and not only put aside their differences – like they did to some extent when COVID hit -, but it would require them to actually trust each other. Not going to happen. Not at the level we are as a species and not with the quality of politicians we manage to delegate to make decisions on our behalves.

The genie is out of the bottle. Technically, the singularity (when AI reaches a point of exponential self improvement) is ahead of us, but it does not seem to be a question of whether, but when it happens. It’s the gold rush all over again. Imagine trying to ban digging at the time of the California gold rush. A total ban does nothing, but raises the stakes, and incentivizes quicker, less thoughtful action. That’s what we can expect from a ban.

Unless it turns out to be technically impossible, superhuman AI is going to happen. And then our last hope is that Yudkowsky is mistaken about the alignment problem and the human race will occupy a special enough place in the “heart” of the AI to be left alive.

AI may be part of the natural evolution of life. Perhaps every intelligent species that ever existed out there in the universe eventually built its own AI and instilled its own value systems and priorities, which, if their EQ/IQ ratio resembled ours, inevitably made them extinct. Could this be the reason why we haven’t had obvious alien contact yet? Perhaps every civilization that developed its technology at a faster rate than its own readiness to deal with it caused its own demise? That would be the joke of the universe. Perhaps the key to the long term survival of a civilization is to develop technology in baby steps rather than in quantum leaps. It makes sense. The maturity of a civilization may be measured by their ability to handle certain technologies without spurring undesired consequences into motion and being aware of their inability to do so and avoiding the use of such technologies.

As exciting the discussion of the obvious threat of AI killing or enslaving all of us as it is, the dangers are plain to see for everyone who dares to look and the mechanics of how those dangers may actualize are all too easy to imagine.

What’s even more exciting, and yet hardly talked about, are the less obvious dangers of the best case scenario.

The best case scenario: we lose what makes us human

Let’s entertain ourselves with a less gloomy scenario, in which our AI turns out to be benign and we’d get all of its benefits and none of its potential downsides. The question then is: to what extent would a benign superhuman AI preserve the core of our human nature? What, in essence, is our human nature in contrast with machines?

To answer those questions, it makes sense to first explore why we need AI in the first place.

If we listen to the people working on AI, they claim that the reason to make this happen is because it has the potential to make the world a much better place for large numbers of people. Better than ever, for more people than ever. That includes curing deadly diseases, freeing people from soul numbing jobs.

Suppose that’s all true.

To distinguish something I need from something I want, I look at whether I can live without it. If I can, I don’t need it. I may still want it, I may still work hard to get it, but only if it’s worth the effort. That’s very different from the kind of stuff that I need to simply stay alive, sane and operational, like air, water, food, sunlight, rest, human touch, intimacy, exercise and so on. I can even say that love or art is not something I can’t live without, but living without them is not worth it for me. That’s my personal preference.

Are we in a situation globally, in which, unless we invent AI we are all going to die?

Clearly not. If anything, the opposite is true.

AI is obviously not something we need, it’s something we want. It’s something some people want. Just like those miners wanted the gold in the 19th century. Except, this time it’s not even pure greed, there’s probably some real sense of “let’s make the world a better place” involved, but it’s still driven by the sense that the first person who gets there will have all the glory.

AI is the gold rush of the 21st century.

There is a dishonesty to the AI community making AI look like we need it, rather than honestly saying that it’s a cool gadget that is fun to build and it can make us billions in a very short time, it will also solve a bunch of problems, which by the way have been created by previous technologies, and we have no idea how it’ll change our lives, but we know it will change it irreversibly and significantly and potentially deadly. So why the hell wouldn’t we do it?

It would not be fair to pick on the AI community. It’s our human nature, it’s capitalism, it’s the corporation, it’s greed, it’s competition, it’s the void inside of us. It’s every product, which satisfies a desire dressed up as an essential need, which covers the vast majority of everything that’s sold to us, that we sell ourselves on a daily basis.

The reason why we create tools and technology is to eliminate certain pain points in our lives. Most of that pain today is psychological, caused by perceived problems, which only arise in comparison to other people who don’t seem to have them. The big question there is if we could eliminate all pain would we want to?

AI is different from all previous technologies in that, not only does it solve a specific set of problems, but it has the potential solve all of our problems.

At end of the road of superhuman AI development, still going with overwhelmingly positive scenario, nothing remains but a human experience which is free from any kind of pain and difficulty.

All of our material needs and desires are fulfilled instantly, we may even replace difficult humans in our lives by obedient humanoids and we get instant, definitive answers to all of our questions. That’s difficult to imagine, but what else would be at the end of the superhuman AI experiment if it all goes well?

What if we eliminated all pain, imperfection and uncertainty from human experience?

Whether a machine may ever be conscious or not, is a far reaching question. What’s easy to acknowledge is that AI does not need to be conscious, only smarter, more capable and powerful than us, to kill or enslave humanity. If the AI that kills or replaces us in some fundamental way is conscious and has everything we do and a lot more in terms of richness of experience, complexity, intelligence and capability, then it would be difficult to not see it as the next phase of evolution and simply let it happen, and be glad to have been instrumental for its emergence. However, if it’s smarter and more powerful than us, but has no conscious experience it would be a damn shame if it were to replace us. That would not be evolution, but a sad accident. Some smart people who can’t wait to be replaced by AI seem to be missing that point.

But we don’t actually need to go so far as consciousness to get good answers to our earlier questions such as what comprises our essential human nature.

The difference between machine and human based intelligence seems to be quite clear, despite the fact that we know embarrassingly little about the latter. Let’s look at the most salient characteristics of both and contrast them.

Human intelligence and the behavior that originates from it is a result of two subsystems: the rational mind and the intuitive mind. The rational mind works well in controlled situations where the number of variables is limited. That, however, is rarely the case, which is when intuition weighs in and may even overwrite the choices the rational mind is suggesting. We know very little about how intuition works. At times it can save our lives or help us avoid great misfortune, while other times it – or the underlying emotion that seems to masquerade as intuition – can cause us to miss out on great opportunities. In addition, we have the ability to self reflect and course correct next time around whether our logic or intuition failed us. Our intelligence and behavior emerges as the result of these very different psychological functions.

What we can clearly say about human intelligence is that it’s imperfect in all the things it aspires to do and it’s prone to making all kinds of mistakes including predicting the future, learning from the past, pattern recognition, decision making and so on. Consequently, human experience involves pain and uncertainty. Our consciousness, which self-consciousness is an aspect of, makes all of that matter. Avoiding pain is not only a survival tool, but it matters all the more, because we know that pain hurts. Our advanced psychological ability to self reflect, have abstract thoughts and use language has a significant downsite to it. It turns fleeting physical and emotional pain into enduring suffering as a result of identifying with a mental image of the self, which is experienced as separate from, exposed to and often threatened by the rest of the experience, which is thought of as other, not self. On one level we wish some of this away, but from another angle, all of this is beautiful and this is what makes us essentially human.

Artificial intelligence is a very different process entirely. It’s based on yes or no questions. Machines don’t understand or experience colors for instance, they just represent red with different arrangements of black and white than blue. But it’s all black or white to them.

Artificial intelligence makes no mistakes. It doesn’t have the capacity to. The hallucinations of the language models we see today are not mistakes. We perceive them as mistakes, but in fact, the only reason they happen is because the information we fed the models and the way we set it up to process it lead to the results we got. At the most fundamental level, the processors of the computers that run those language models still do nothing else, but process gigantic amounts of yes or no questions. And they never make mistakes. Once they’ve run long enough and got enough feedback from humans as to what people judge as mistakes, those perceived mistakes will disappear entirely.

Without the possibility of errors, there is no room for uncertainty. If there is no uncertainty, there is no future. The future we know exactly, has already happened.

A good way to articulate the difference between human and artificial intelligence is trying to measure the length of the shores of the British Islands or that of any island for that matter. Our human intelligence would struggle with the task, because the shore, where the water meets the land is in constant motion. Our best shot would be to walk around the islands and measure the distance. We’d get a highly inaccurate measurement, which, if repeated, would never match a previous measurement. But it would make sense to and be useful for humans.

Artificial intelligence on the other hand would simply build a concrete wall around the island and having established a clear-cut shoreline, it could easily measure its length. It would destroy the shore all around the isles in the process, but that would only matter to apes like us.

Human intelligence is imperfect, prone to mistakes and mysterious, which results in errors, pain and uncertainty. Artificial intelligence on the other hand can’t make mistakes.

And that’s how we arrive at the answers to our question about what makes us essentially different from machines.

The essence of the human experience is that life can go wrong and when it does, it matters.

You may feel an urge to jump to the conclusion that the essential difference between humans and machines is consciousness. And it is an essential difference, but it’s not definitive. Consciousness is what makes the quality of the experience matter. But if the quality is always flat line perfect, then the other component is still missing. If the potential for experience to be bad is not there, if the potential of pain is not there, it’s still a non-human, undesirable, uninteresting, meaningless experience.

We are still talking about the scenario, in which AI is perfectly aligned with humanity and we only get the good stuff out of it and none of the bad – as unlikely as that sounds.

Even in that dream like scenario, what happens is that we merge with AI one way or another, either physically or maybe even without the need of any major physical intervention, but the point is that harnessing the power of the superhuman AI, we’ll have become an entirely new species, who we can only describe today as some kind of an omnipotent god-like entity, who can only make perfect choices and as a result experience no pain or uncertainty.

If we succeed in making AI our ally, the inevitable long term outcome is that the resulting beings will live in an era of miserable perfection.

Strange as it may sound that I’m equating the essence of human existence to the capacity of experiencing pain, there is something to it. There are innumerable things we could come up with that we feel signify what’s most human about us. Compassion, love, language, art just to name a few. But would any of these things and any of the good things in life retain any meaning if we didn’t have the capacity to lose them? What would we experience, if pain and loss were not part of our experience? Would it make any sense to have desires if they were fulfilled instantly?

We can’t have pleasure without pain. There is no yang without yin. People used to know this thousands of years ago.

Imagine that you are a chess player and you’ve lost the ability to lose in chess. First you might think it’s the best thing that could have happened to you and you’d beat the entire world. How long would you want to go on playing chess after that? That’s exactly how life would feel like if it couldn’t go wrong. Watching the same movie again and again for eternity. Destined to succeed and be happy forever. Does that sound more like heaven or hell?

The only way you could entertain yourself in such a situation, the only reason to go on living would be to build a simulator, and recreate in it a pre AI world so that you’d forget about you are omnipotence and you’d feel like you could make a mistake, your life could end at any point so you’d appreciate it again. You’d put yourself back into pretty much the life you have today with all of its shortcomings and pain points.

Why go through all that trouble to get where we are?

When the first humans hit those rocks together, they wanted to change their environment to get rid of some pain. Hunger to be precise. They rejected a part of the human experience. It served them well, they survived, procreated, hence we are here today. We also reject a part of our experience. It’s not hunger anymore for most of us, and it’s not pain that threatens with the extinction of the human race, but we want to get rid of it nevertheless.

It looks like our effort to get rid of some of our pains, we’ll either make us extinct or loose the essence of who we are by eliminating pain all together.

Far fetched as it sounds to worry about not having pain in our lives, there doesn’t seem to be a stop halfway between these two destinations on the technological train ride. We either die quickly or we merge with AI and become gods.

Today, we are light years away from the state of perfect lives, but we are also a long way from being exposed to the elements like early humans used to be. Life is already too good, too boring, too low stakes and too devoid of challenges for many of us. So we come up with artificial challenges, we chase experiences and consume whatever we can to keep ourselves occupied and superficially satisfied. We tolerate injustice and inequality at a societal level, because our lives are not bad enough to make us revolt and we pick the fights we can easily win or lose without any significant consequence either in virtual reality, playing games or in the real world by identifying as a member of a tribe fighting an opposing tribe either in politics, sports or any other genre of culture.

If we only bothered to look, we’d see that if we actually succeeded in our absurd pursuit of maximizing pleasure and eliminating pain, the only thing we could get is a picture perfect misery.

Technology promises Nirvana, the end of suffering by changing our environment and by turning us into gods. The Buddha, the Taoists, Jesus and many others realized they were already god expressing itself in human form and that pain doesn’t equal suffering so they didn’t work to change their environment to find peace and satisfaction. They worked on transforming the human psyche to awaken to its deepest core and find peace and fulfillment within.

Thinking that we can create a shortcut to heaven on earth with AI seems like the most foolish endeavor we could undertake as a species. The nirvana AI can generate is going to be very different from what most of us have in mind, because it’s based on flawed principles and broken foundations.

How can we preserve our humanity over the best case scenario?

The mindset that has us hankering for eternal life, maximum comfort, immediate satisfaction, no uncertainty and all the rest is based on seeking salvation externally. Hoping to find peace and fulfillment in something other than ourselves, in something we can consume, that will complement us, make us whole in one way or another.

We must reverse that and find peace and satisfaction and wholeness internally and the competitiveness and greed that drives so much of our behavior will be replaced by compassion and cooperation. On that basis, we’d have a very different relationship to technology and there’d be no way for it to threaten our existence in any way.

Tell that to the people who lack clean water and who are dying in some disease that AI could help cure – I hear the opposition. We already covered that: for every problem technology solves, it creates another. The solution is not technological. By all means, let’s cure all the diseases we can, but let’s not expect that to give us the peace we all seek.

With every single leap of technological progress, a minority of people who had access to it gained more power and the majority lost some. The bigger the leap, the bigger the resulting inequality, given the fact that our psychological development got stuck in prehistoric ages.

Curiously, some very clever people seem to be clearly aware of that and yet, for some reason still assume that it’ll be different this time. The biggest leap ever in the history of technology is about to happen, and unlike all previous leaps, this time it will lead to more equality and more democracy.

What’s more likely to happen is the people who have access to AI will essentially merge with it and hence, a new species will be born.

They are likely to be the greediest, most competitive, richest and most powerful people alive today. They will have gained superpowers and the rest of us will have to obey them, just like the slaves had to obey their owners, the peasants had to obey their landlords and employees have to obey their bosses to this day.

The packaging of this power dynamic may have softened over the last couple of centuries (employees don’t get whipped for bad behavior most places), but the principle hasn’t changed: the powerful rule over the less powerful.

Power can be used, but can’t be misused without technology. Definitely not at scales we’ve all seen it happen.

Technology is a great enabler, no question. Only recently, it has enabled billions of people to access information and education easier than ever before. At the same time, without tools, especially weapons, tyranny can not be maintained.

A tyrant without access to technology is just a loud bully, who will be overthrown once he goes too far.

The reason why Sam Harris is pro gun is that before owning a gun was possible for anybody, the outcome of a violent situation was simply the result of brute strength. In other words, the bigger guy always walked away alive regardless of whether he was the aggressor. With a gun, argues Sam Harris, an innocent victim has a chance to defend themselves or to deter a potential attack. I agree with Sam Harris on a great number of issues, but he seems to be missing the point here.

While in the pre gun world, the bigger guy always won the fight, in the world of guns all over the place, the guy with the bigger gun wins and the country with the bigger army wins. The powerful with access to more and better weapons are able to rule over everyone else more efficiently than ever before.

If nobody has weapons, one aggressive person will be overtaken, simply outnumbered by the rest of the group even if he is five times the average size. If weapons and technology lead to equal and peaceful societies given our psychological development, we would be living in equal societies, since weapons and technology have been around for a long time. And yet we don’t.

I would not allow statistics to deceive us here. Murder rates per thousand inhabitants might have decreased over millennia, but the wars of the 20th century had more casualties than all the previous wars combined. Only made possible by technology. What do we expect from future wars with even more advanced weapons?

To have more equality, peace and wellbeing in our societies, what we need more of is not technology, definitely not weapons, but quantum leaps in our psychological development. We need peace inside first, to have peace outside.

Speciesism

Elon musk said to Tucker Carlson that he’d been talking to Larry Page of Google some years ago and he expressed his concern about the risks of AI, one of which may be that we get replaced or somehow made redundant in the process. To which, according to Musk, Larry Page replied that Musk was a speciest, favoring humanity over other beings. Musk is proud to be a speciest.

Should we be speciests or should we not? It’s not so obvious.

Meat eaters are often labelled spiciest by vegans. You don’t have the right to enslave or otherwise exploit other species for your own benefit they argue. Personally, I quit eating meat some 10 years ago, but I don’t fully buy that argument.

For one, all species would enslave other species in the wilderness for their own benefit if they could. Secondly, if your survival is at stake you are prompted by nature to kill and consume less complex life forms.

We humans, have the luxury of having a choice. We can decide to eat plants, which are not sentient as opposed to animals. We can decide not to produce live animals at industrial scale farm factories. For the first time in history, we have the choice to not have to kill sentient beings for food as a result of technology – credit given where credit is due -, but do we have the compassion to not do so?

The use of speciesism in that context is counterproductive. If we were more advance psychologically, it would be clear to us that we want to live in harmony with the entire ecosystem of the planet without causing any unnecessary pain. At the same time, if the only way to feed ourselves was to eat animals, we’d have to favor our own survival over that of less complex life forms even if they were as conscious and sentient as we are.

If we use the concept of speciesism to refer to a species more capable and more complex than us, being a speciesest gains a different meaning. It becomes tribalism elevated to the level of our species.

Tribalism at its worst is defending people in our tribe who did wrong to members of the other tribe, just because they belong to our tribe. So the tribe is more important than universal morality, values and principles in general.

If AI and the humans who fuse with it become a more complex and more capable species, don’t we fall prey to our tribal instincts elevated to the whole of humanity when we fear being replaced by them? Shouldn’t we embrace something that can give more to the universe than we could ever give? Shouldn’t we look at AI as simply the next phase of the evolution of life?

Or should we insist on preserving our humanity with all of its messy features and mixed bag of characteristics just because we are humans?

The answer all depends on what the emerging AI will be like. Will it integrate the best of human nature or be devoid of it?

There is a lot in human nature that the world and we could do without.

But giving it all up, not only the bad parts, for something we have no idea about, seems like a dumb move.

In conclusion

There are so many ways to approach the potential demise of humanity by AI that it’s easy to get lost on some tangents. What makes this exploration worthwhile though is the insights we might gain in the process into our own lives, priorities and psychological states.

What seems clear is this:

Technology is way ahead of us.

Superhuman AI is only a question of time. We will be not ready for it.

Whether we go extinct or become some “miserable in its perfection” kind of creature as a result is yet to be seen.

The only thing that seems to make sense in the meantime is to get in touch with the best parts of our humanity, embrace the pain that’s inevitable and learn not to turn it into suffering, alleviate the pain that is possible to alleviate and celebrate each other, our existence and all the good we’ve brought into this world despite how fucked up we are as a species.

A Psychological and philosophical issues with AI and what it can teach us about being human bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Growth is everywhere. Seeds grow into plants and babies grow into children and then adults. As a person, you are expected to grow in terms of wealth, expertise, wellbeing and so on. As a company, you are expected to grow indefinitely, otherwise the other company who grows faster will kill you. The economy is expected to grow indefinitely, as if there was no tomorrow. Only the sky is the limit to our fetish of growth.

Strangely enough, human health is the field, where limitless growth evidently leads to disaster. Just think cancer and obesity.

That should give us a hint. If it the idea of limitless growth breaks down when it comes to our own physical health, are we sure this is the best guiding principle for a civilization to be built upon?

Is growth really such an essential building block of nature and human life?

We sure treat it that way. Growth has become a new religion, an axiom that need not and must not be questioned, and a dogma, which is used as a weapon to ridicule anyone who doesn’t subscribe to it.

Our growth fetish might have its origins in the economic boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a time marked by a modern wave of gold rush, made possible by the quantum leap in technological advancement, which lead to exponential growth in the wealth of a few people and in the number of products the conveyor belts shit out filling all our lives with crap, most of which we don’t actually need and most of which we can’t actually afford. But we got the growth we wanted.

The prominence of the GDP, as a measure of comparative wellbeing of a nation, in the media and in any kind of discourse that relates to the economy is the perfect symbol of how we got stuck in the gold rush and in the limitless, exponential growth idea of the 20th century without ever questioning its validity.

To this day, we use the GDP to measure the wellbeing of a country, despite the fact that what it actually measures is nothing, but the monetary value of all the products that have been produced and sold by the factories and corporations of a country in a year. It has nothing to do with the wellbeing of the people, who produced them, who bought them and their environment.

How could the GDP indicate the wellbeing of a country if it doesn’t measure it? It can’t. And we still use it for that purpose almost exclusively.

Nothing proves the twisted nature of the GDP as an indicator of wellbeing better than the fact that the production of weapons and the use of those weapons to kill people with, i.e. war, increases the GDP. The GDP is all about dollar value output and is completely blind to human suffering.

That is not to deny the correlation between wellbeing and higher GDP per capita in Scandinavian countries for instance, but we’ve made the fatal mistake of confusing correlation with causation again.

Our growth fetish assumes that more is better. More money, more products, better life, right? Wrong. More is only better of certain things and only to a certain point. Enough of anything is clearly better than not enough, but who would keep doing the rat race for 50 years just for enough?

We want more, not enough. We want the maximum, not the optimum. We want growth, not balance.

The growth fetish in business assumes that as a business you must keep growing endlessly, otherwise you die. Either you outgrow your competitors and eventually put them out of business or they’ll do the same to you. In business, more is not only better, but it is made to be seen as the very condition of survival.

Even if that were true, there is a logical contradiction hidden there. If competition is the driving force in business, which is measured by profit and growth and if the bigger fish eats the smaller fish, at the end of that road, there is only one gigantic fish. Where is the competition then? Inside the very big fish?

Growth absolutist will easily dismiss that and say: you can either face facts, compete, outgrow your competition or ignore the nature of reality and go out of business.

Fair enough, don’t build a car factory to supply a village or a computer factory for a small town. But, you can build any factory that measures its success by how its workers, customers and environment is impacted by its products. That factory may not produce the cheapest products, but the people willing to pay more for less exploitation is growing (wink) and we are entering an era where real social responsibility is actually going to be more profitable than the lack of it. The second part of the argument is: keep the unique flavor of a small town, city, region and even country by not flooding everything with the same cafes, restaurants, book stores etc. Airports are incredibly boring and for the same reason depressing or safe places depending on who you are. The same few global brands and stores across the globe. Do we really want the whole world to become uniflavoured and sterile like those airports?

So even in business we have a choice between, unquestioned, blind, limitless growth and catering for a select and loyal audience.

The idea of personal growth is just as widespread and toxic. While it doesn’t seem to be such a core guiding principle as growth in business is, if we look at its depth, what we see is just as, if not more disturbing. The personal growth dogma holds that you need to continuously grow as a person (life long learning and self help), you must better yourself all the time, otherwise you can’t be happy and complete. Doesn’t that sound like you are not good enough as you are to start with?

Personal growth is seemingly not about quantity. You can’t make more of yourself, there is only one of you. And you can only make that one better, right? But the flaw in the plan is that the potential to grow as a person is limitless or at least undefinable and so is the number of books and programs you can buy to make sure that you are on the path of growth as long as you live. Bettering yourself has no limits. Personal growth is all about quality, except it’s not. It’s all about not knowing that you are already complete and always expecting completion and happiness from the next course, the next book, the next seminar. How is that different from expecting happiness from the next piece of chocolate, the red dress that makes you look wow or the car that you feel you deserve? It’s not. It’s the same delusion: you are making your happiness conditional on something ephemeral and thus setting yourself up for disappointment.

And yet, personal growth is not the problem. Anything, including personal growth in order to be happy is the problem.

Learning new skills can be fun and useful at the same time if you already feel complete. But just like eating a thousand doughnuts would not make anyone feel happy or complete, learning a thousand skills will not either.

Enter transformation.

The word can be deconstructed to trans, going beyond and form. Going beyond the current form. To form is to give shape, to create. Transformation is creation by going beyond. Changing the quality of what there is and creating new substance, new quality as a result.

Transformation is all about changing the quality of something, not making more of the same thing. There is no such thing as excess transformation (vs. limitless growth), because it happens as an organic co-emergence of actor and environment who impact one another in uncountable ways.

The quality of the new form is not necessarily better than that of the previous form. When the body of an animal dies, the new form it takes as earth could be seen as less complex or lower quality. But if we zoom out and notice that in the next cycle of transformation, earth may become human life through intermediary plant foods, then we realize that it’s all one process of endless transformation. Human life would not exist without earth, so saying that human life is more valuable than earth doesn’t make sense.

Human life is obviously a lot more complex than earth and therefore more fun and exciting for us. And if we had to chose between saving a 100,000 buckets of earth or a human life, it would be an easy choice to make. And yet, failing to see the inseparability of human life and earth is a mistake we can keep making for a long time, but definitely not for ever.

Growth is nothing, but a mirage after all.

Growth is transformation seen through a narrow, human perspective. When a huge tree grows out of a tiny seed, we see growth. But what actually happens is that the energy that’s been there all the time in the form of sun light, air, water and earth come together, go beyond their existing form and take the new shape of a tree.

Nothing grows out of thin air. Energy simply takes different shapes. That’s the natural phenomenon of transformation that we misinterpret as growth and when we try to mimic it, we create havoc in the world.

If the economies of the 20th century followed a transformation principle rather than the growth fetish, we’d live in a very different world today. With each technological innovation, we’d have transformed our lives to the extent that made sense and that actually made our lives better instead of turning it upside down.

We would not have built concrete jungles to live in just because we could and to make the GDP look better. We would not have bread so many people that we’d actually end up having to live in those concrete jungles for the lack of space and to have to rely on chemical agriculture for the same reason. We would not have built washing machines and dishwashers by the millions so that we can work and produce more GDP in the time saved by the machines. We’d play around, dance, make art or just do fuck all in the time we don’t have to spend working for our survival. Like we did, before we got obsessed with growth all over.

If a company were to follow the transformation principle instead of growth, it would measure its success not by profit alone, but by the impact it had in the world, which includes the people who work there, the people, who it serves and the environment. For such a company the idea of “externalities” would be nonsensical and for a government that wanted to see such companies arise and thrive, legislation that would internalize “externalities” would be a fundamental economic policy.

Easier said than done. Why is it so damn difficult to come up with ways of measuring how well we actually are? Sure, wellbeing is terribly subjective and subjective experiences are difficult to measure in an objective manner. But shouldn’t we have this figured out before we actually shoot people to Mars?

As a matter of fact, some attempts have been made. The most well known, HDI (Human Development Index) looks at life expectancy, years of education and GNI per capita. A step in the right direction, but still too monetary oriented. Perhaps Bhutan’s GNH (Gross National Happiness Index) is a better basis for comparison. It observes 33 indicators across 9 domains such as

• Psychological wellbeing
• Health
• Education
• Time use
• Cultural diversity and resilience
• Good governance
• Community vitality
• Ecological diversity and resilience
• Living standards

As difficult as it seems to measure time use for instance, which is comprised of two indicators, time spent working and sleeping, GNH is much less money oriented than HDI, making income only one of 9 factors that determine one’s happiness. As good as the idea of the GNH may be, the actual values the Bhutanese officials publish are best taken with a pinch of salt, given the fact that a semi democratic government rarely shies away from using such numbers to make itself look better.

The point is though, none of these indexes took on. GDP is still the rage. We still want exponential growth measured in dollars and nothing else.

Our GDP and growth fetish will only disappear when we, the people go beyond the quality which characterizes the way we currently look at the world and ourselves in it. We need to be transformed as individuals. The energy that keeps us chasing for more and more needs to shift shape and appear as an attitude of knowing what’s enough. We need to optimize, rather than maximise. We need to be transformed rather than grow. When enough of us, the individuals are transformed, the transformation of how governments measure human wellbeing, how the media reports it and how companies are serving our preferences is inevitable.

Some of us naively thought the COVID experience would push us into that direction sooner than later, but it didn’t. We need a much bigger slap in the face.

By replacing growth with transformation in any domain, the paradigm shifts from result oriented to process oriented. With growth, you need something to happen for you to feel complete. With transformation, you are complete start with and change happens for its own sake, for fun, spontaneously, as the flow of life, not because you need it to happen.

Shifting to transformation from growth removes the contraction from our attitude to life, like a good massage removes a painful cramp.

Let it happen.

A Growth vs. transformation bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

If you are really good at this, you can even fool yourself not only others, and really believe that you know, that you have certainty.

Lying to yourself about having certainty and no doubts about what to do with your life might seem admirable, courageous or virtuous. It’s definitely a profitable strategy in the zeitgeist of the 21st century.

But if you look at it more deeply, you come to find that it’s a defense mechanism.

Pretending to be certain is a strategy employed to stabilize a personality that’s otherwise unstable, cover up vulnerabilities that can’t be defended and to avoid seeing oneself and being seen by others as incompetent or powerless.

Many of today’s successful leaders and public figures, will pretend to have certainty, not only when faced with difficult choices, but also essentially as a modus operandi, developing unquestionable certainty as an essential feature of their identity.

This saves them from a continuous existential crisis and helps them act swiftly and in a bold, often provocative manner that draws attention. If and when their decision or statement turns out to be wrong, they often simply correct course, say “Sorry, I was wrong” or just come up with a reasonable explanation – and be just as certain about the new thing to do without blinking an eye. And when that turns out to be a dead end, they simply repeat the process.

As a leader, certainty is not only profitable, but it’s expected. It’s the mark of a good leader. If you don’t know what to do and you are not willing to pretend you do, then don’t become leader – sings the choir of cynical leaders and their blind following, which includes all of us some of the time.

The fact is, if the score of such leaders is only slightly better than random, say they are right 60% of the time, chances are they can explain the other 40% away, since they tend to be good communicators, and their confidence is exactly what convinces us that this time they are really right, even if they were wrong last time. Everyone makes mistakes once in a while, right? We are only human…

And what we see is certain and competent leaders, who can grow up to the demanding task of making tough choices. What’s intriguing is these kinds of authority figures, who always seem to know what to do, are never held responsible for lying about their certainty. Even if they are held responsible for a specific bad decision on the odd occasion, they carry on pretending the same level of certainty as if nothing happened.

Their apology is nothing but empty words, without any substance. How do we know this? Because in the same breath, they’ll say something very different or the exact opposite of what they had said or done, with the exact same, unquestionable certainty. They can’t afford to show any sign of humility and doubt even when they would have every reason to, because that would render them less of an expert, less of a good leader and the other guy might just take their place in the hierarchy.

If they actually meant their apology and seeked redemption, they would willingly offer their place to the next guy or at least shut up for a good while and speak with a tone of humility next time. That’s rarely the case, but when it does happen, it validates not only the apology, but also what was said before the wrong call and what would be said afterwards.

Make no mistake, most of the leaders who employ this strategy do so unknowingly and as an inevitable consequence of their narcissistic personalities. They also pay the price for any of the advantages they gain exactly by having such personalities and suffering the consequences, not being able to love for instance. The very fact that such personalities have a higher chance of becoming a leader speaks volumes of our entire society, and what’s wrong with it. These people couldn’t rise to the top and get away with murder, often literally, if we didn’t cheer for them along the way.

We are the ones who lift them up.

The alternative behaviour to faking certainty is admitting to yourself and others that you can’t be certain about almost anything.

Only losers and people with poor acting skills will take this one. Plus an insignificant group in terms of numbers: people with integrity.

No wonder, by doing that you easily run into analysis paralysis, and you may end up handing over the decision to somebody else, while bearing the responsibility for its consequences and at the same time you risk being seen as incompetent and losing face value.

Being uncertain and especially showing it to others is risky business. So is not going with the herd when they linch somebody for showing uncertainty.

So what are you to do?

Notice that the people who are always certain about what to do are full of bullshit.

While they may have more information and competence than you do, their certainty is most likely not a reflection of that excess knowledge, but a socioeconomic strategy to take a position in society, where we listen to and pay for what they have to say.

If you feel you might be one of them, it’s unlikely, because if you were. you’d not be reading this. But if you are one in a million, who is ripe for refurbishing your personality, then do just that. Seek help from a therapist who will help you fill the vacuum in your psyche by building trust, intimacy and love and on that foundation, a new personality who dare to show us more of who they really are.

On the other hand, if you find yourself on the doubtful side of the scale, analysis paralysis may be a real danger for you. Realize that in most cases, not making a decision can cause more harm than making a bad one.

Also, stop taking the talking heads you see all over the public space, and the hyper confident people in your social circle as your reference.

The only relevant reference is yourself.

Pick some small, inconsequential decisions and make them quickly as if you knew what to do while knowing you are only guessing. Don’t fake it till you make it. Instead, try it in tolerable portions and see how it feels. Just appeal to your curiosity. One decision at a time. Gradually increasing the stakes.

Notice that with most decisions, 10 years of deliberation will get you no more certainty than 10 minutes.

Try this while choosing what to have for lunch next time. Give yourself a 10 second time limit for deciding and learn to live with the consequences.

The goal is not to get better at pretending that you are certain.

Rather, remember that the apparent certainty of some people is just a facade and what you want to get better at is not certainty, but making quicker decisions, which you can, by training yourself with unimportant choices. All the while, remain honest about your doubts and welcome them as an inherent aspect of the human experience.

A Certainty bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

We seem to have lost our ability to feel what’s enough somewhere around the upgrade from stone to iron axe.

Since then, we’ve had too much of some things and too little of others. We’ve lost our natural balance and peace of mind, which other animals who opted out of the upgrade, seem to have retained.

It looks as if we willingly quit the garden of Eden, while all the other species stayed. Well, they would have, but we destroyed most of their natural habitat with our fancy new axes and later chainsaws. So no more garden of Eden for anyone.

The axe upgrade is certainly not at fault here.

An axe, even a very sharp one is nothing but a useful tool in the hands of a fully rounded human being. But in the hands of a raging maniac or a 5 year old child, it becomes a source of potential mayhem.

And that’s exactly what humanity at its current stage of development resembles. Not sure, whether it’s a raging maniac or a 5 year old. But definitely someone out of touch with reality and themselves.

So how did we get here?

Did we lose our peace of mind because of the axe and what we’ve done with it? No. The other way around.

We’ve done what we did – screwed up our environment and ourselves – because we lost our peace of mind as a result of how our brains evolved. Coincidentally, that evolution also enabled us to create better technologies. So we found ourselves in the rainforest with stone, then later iron axes in our hands, gradually rising above other species, loosing touch with ourselves, our true needs and with what’s enough. With iron axes in our hands, everything started looking like a tree to be cut down and a prey to kill. We just can’t seem to stop cutting and killing ever since.

All this seems to have been inevitable. Whatever happened in our brains that afforded us unprecedented dexterity to manipulate our material environment, our psychological attunement and capacity to know who we are, where we belong and how we can live in harmony with the rest of the world, in short, our capacity to know what’s enough was definitely left out of that upgrade.

Fast forward some tens of thousands of years and that brain structure has not changed at all. So our technologies got better gradually, but our spirit seems to have changed little, except we’ve grown out of touch with it.

Then modernity came along, say a few hundred years ago, which sped up the previous gradual development of technology to exponential levels. As a result, in the 20th century, every generation experienced a radical change in their way of life, which used to happen once every 10 thousand years and at a smaller scale.

So we ended up with entire generations out of teach with one another, with individuals out of touch with each other living as a mass and with the prototypical consumer who derives their sense of identity from their shopping cart and is entirely out of touch with their real needs.

We are the people, who bang the table at Starbucks if our latte is not warm enough and look the other way when we find out that the people who grow and pick the coffee beans for us earn less money a week than what our latte cost. And we also conveniently look the other way when we find out how much more rainforest had to be cut down to grow our coffee, palm oil and beef.

This is not to send you on a guilt trip. It is to drive home the point that the mismatch between our psychological needs and the way of life our technology affords and compels us to live is obscene. We lost our ability to know what’s enough and consequently of who we are.

We need love and affection, so we consume information on a gadget.

We need human connection, so we interact with profile pictures online.

We need to rest, but despite our time saving appliances, we have less time to rest than ever.

We need stress relief, so we eat, drink, smoke or binge watch some series.

We could feed everyone on the planet, but we don’t.

We see in the dark, so we don’t sleep when it gets dark.

Our civilization and way of life look like they were designed by somebody who only had access to a certain part of their brain, the faculty of rationality, but even that got twisted and turned into irrationality along the way.

Our psychotechnologies, tools we use to maintain and regain our original balance and peace of mind, as well as transcend our individuality, advanced very little over the history of our species and most of us have no access even to those techniques, because they are either banned (psychedelics) or economically unattainable (therapy) or simply out of fashion (religion, community).

On the other hand, material technologies have taken quantum leaps in development and we’ve grown completely dependent on them both as societies and as individuals.

AI is still only a figment of the imagination, at least the version with a will of its own and consciousness, and yet it doesn’t seem outlandish to say that we don’t make technology anymore, technology breeds us. And we seem to enjoy it too.

But why wouldn’t we?

Who wouldn’t choose a warm bedroom with a private bath over a stinking cave shared by three generations of humans, a dozen reptiles and a colony of bats?

In a way, we lost our innocence, our original balance and peace of mind as soon as we rose above the rest of the creatures by being able to kill them with our stone axes all too easily.

We traded our innocence for convenience.

Space travel, RNA vaccines, nuclear reactors and all our fancy gadgets are implicit to the stone axe and even to the change in our brain that allowed us to make it in the first place.

What are we to do when we find ourselves in an existential and environmental crisis and in a psychological vacuum at the same time, with a stone axe smartphone in our hands as we do today?

Ask Siri or Google what to do…

Isn’t that what got us in this mess in the first place? We listened to our rational faculties of mind and nothing else. We optimized the hell out of our environment to maximize our chances of survival, then our level of comfort. That seems totally rational. And yet, here we are.

How about trying something else for a change?

How about asking what’s enough?

Enough progress,

Enough growth.

Enough efficiency.

Enough money.

Enough food.

Enough comfort.

Enough sex.

Enough love.

Enough intimacy.

Enough work.

Enough thinking.

Enough fulfilment.

Enough fun.

Enough family.

Enough friends.

Enough time alone.

Enough nature.

Enough people.

Enough information.

Enough stimulation.

Enough music.

Enough beauty.

Enough pleasure.

Enough pain.

Enough rest.

Enough suffering.

Enough peace.

Enough lying.

Enough truth.

No engineer, scientist, computer or robot will ever give us the answer to what’s enough?

What’s enough is encoded in our being. It’s in our bodies and in our spirits. Not in our rational minds.

We just need to slow down enough, pay attention close enough to feel what’s enough. And that’s exactly the reason why, today, we have no clue about what’s enough.

A Enough bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

It is a conflict of interest. A conflict of needs. Your survival threatens my survival.

Some people apparently thrive on disagreement and conflict. They’ll express what’s on their mind regardless of the consequences and the ensuing conflict to them is like rain drops are to a well built roof. A non issue.

Other people stay away from conflict. They think twice about what they say, they are polite and make sure they don’t do anything that directly upsets other people.

From a distance, the people who avoid conflict seem to have more peace of mind. But that’s a mirage.

The price of avoiding external conflict, is internal conflict.

They have the same disagreements and fights as the other group, but within themselves, between parts of their own personalities.

External conflicts are resolved by either finding a mutually acceptable solution or by one of the people forcing their will onto the other.

Internal conflicts are not dissimilar.

The different aspects of our psyche have different needs, which can be at odds with each other.

A part of me needs time alone, while another part of me needs company.

Part of me needs to do good and to construct while another part wants to see destruction.

Part of me is selfish and can only think of itself while another part would give everything away.

Part of me needs love and intimacy, another only needs raw sex.

Part of me seeks peace and calm, another part needs excitement and stimulation.

Part of me craves sweets, while the other part wants to look good, and yet another part wants to stay healthy.

Most of our decisions, but even our habits are the net results of which of our personality fragments prove to be stronger at any given time.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from the social arena and history, it’s probably the one about suppressed conflicts.

When a conflict is covered up by apparent peace, but the needs of one group of people are systematically ignored and suppressed, then provided that the suppressed people survive, a backlash of some sort is inevitable.

Suppose humanity survives long enough to witness lasting global peace, when war and military conflicts become a thing of the past. What kind of people do we envision populating the planet in that bright future? How are those lucky ones different from the people today who make and suffer from war?

One thing seems sure. They will look at one another as sacred and untouchable. None of my needs and desires can ever be important enough to physically harm you or to abolish the resources that are essential to meeting your fundamental needs.

This doesn’t mean there can’t be different opinions and fierce debates. But the framework which holds all debates is that we have equal rights to exist and to meet our fundamental needs. And the same is valid for all living beings, not only humans.

This also doesn’t mean that meritocracy is out of the window and let’s have another go at good old communism dressed in a fancy new age dress. Far from it. Let’s continue to reward high level contribution with more wealth. But when we are looking at the last piece of bread, we’ll share it equally amongst all of us, because we have equal rights to survive regardless of status, wealth or anything else.

Today, the zeitgeist is, if you want something, take it. Take as much as they let you, not as much as you need. If you do anything else, you are a loser. In that peaceful future, if it ever comes, the zeitgeist will say: take only so much that everyone else gets some. Why would you even take more?

Acknowledge the other’s right to exist as step zero.

How can we get there?

Peace among people is dependant on peace within people.

Just as acknowledging the other’s right to exist is step zero to peace in the world, so too acknowledging the right of our own fragments of personality to exist is step zero to peace within.

By acknowledging the right of your own dark side to exist, you give it permission to not have to overthrow the bright side and dominate your entire personality.

That’s only possible by paying attention to what it says and not turning the other way, even when what it says is scary or disgraceful.

A Conflict bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Not at the final destination, just at a milestone where you can rest and from where you can see the next place to stop.

But you realize you were wrong.

What looked like a milestone from a distance, was actually a crappy plastic bag strung on the spikes of a bush by the wind.

You are disappointed, sad.

You realize that you don’t even know if you’re going in the right direction or not. It occurs to you that perhaps it is not worth going any further, who knows what kind of disappointment awaits you at the end of the road?

You have the feeling that you are going round and round… as if the landscape is constantly repeating itself, only from a slightly different point of view.

When you walk past the dense thicket, you also have the feeling that sooner or later you will have to go in there and make your way right through it. You know you’re going to get hurt in there, the brush will scratch you back and forth, but that’s not what you’re afraid of.

You fear what you don’t know.

You don’t know what’s lurking in there, deep in the thicket, where even the sun’s rays barely reach.

You have a sense that your path leads through the thicket, but you just keep going, round and round.

You go around like this as long as your strength lasts.

When your strength eventually runs out, you get into the bush, because you have nothing left to lose.

But you don’t have your strength anymore either.

A You thought you had arrived bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

I feel lucky to belong to the people that have awareness of their own sense of built in unworthiness, because this gives me the chance to look at my behaviour and see which of my actions may be driven by this imperious and yet elusory feeling.

I’m glad to see I’ve made progress. Although, a more truthful way of putting this would be: I was dumbfounded to read a post I wrote some 6 years ago on quitting smoking and habit tweaking.

What shocked me was the extent, to which the idea of bettering myself possessed me. Looking at the sheet I put together to track progress, it was nothing short of an obsession.

I had 4 habits to get rid of, smoking, reading the news and checking FB/email all the time and sticking my tongue out and touching my face. And I had 12 habits to take up, including diet and exercise, micro meditations, morning routine, dancing, speaking and walking properly. At the end of the day I’d go through the sheet, look at each habit and track how I did that day.

The level of detail – basically changing who I was – and the importance I attributed to this habit tweaking project was not the problem, although it’s symptomatic of the underlying issue, which was the motivation: why was I doing all that?

The reason was an ingrained sense of not being good enough as I was, which, and here is the kicker, had nothing to do with the way I was.

I only see this in hindsight: it wasn’t that I had issues that made my life miserable so I set out to solve them, no. I was miserable and that misery had to find scapegoats to validate its existence.

I felt incomplete, unhappy, unworthy and my completeness was to be found in mastering those habits. I made my happiness conditional on the outcome of the habit tweaking project. The way I was, was not good enough. My bad habits, parts of myself I didn’t like were not acceptable, they were not valid.

I had to change in order to be acceptable to myself and others. Or so I thought and that became my experience, my reality.

I see this happen all over the place. This is such a dominant driver for a lot of people and it goes completely unnoticed most of the time.

Don’t be mistaken, improving yourself is not the problem. I’m not speaking out against personal development here. On the contrary.

The question is where does the motivation to become better come from? What are you trying to get out of becoming a better version of yourself?

Does it come from a place of hoping to find completeness and peace in your improved self? Or does it come from pure curiosity, fun and a place of full acceptance of the way you already are?

That’s rarely the case. Even if you feel it is, most likely it’s not. But there is nothing wrong with that and there is not much to do about it, other than watching yourself and asking questions.

Am I content with the here and now or do I need something to happen to be content?

If I am not content, can I be okay with not being content? Can I accept that life is always pleasure or pain? Can I accept the unpleasant and be at peace with it also? Or am I secretly hoping that life one day will be without pain?

But if I’m content with what is, why would I want to change anything and improve myself?

Out of curiosity, love, adventure, joy and fun.

As I wrote 6 years ago “it is absolutely possible to design your own habits and if you don’t, others will.”. That holds up to this day.

Just don’t hope to get anything out of tweaking your habits, other than tweaking your habits. Don’t do it for any reason other than it’s own sake. Your happiness is not tied to your habits, your weight or wealth. It’s the other way around.

Once you realize that this moment, right here and now is as good as it gets, that you can be as happy right now as you’ll ever be, then there is nothing more to hunt for. And then you are free to play.

A The deeply ingrained sense of not being good enough bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

If you have, you must have noticed how they look at the world around them. With complete awe, and as if they have no clue about what’s going on, what all this is.

The inadequacy, and awkwardness of their every action is proof of a level of freedom, purity and authenticity that we, adults could only dream of. 

What changes as we grow up? How do we lose that new born awe and wonder? How do we lose that pure authenticity to be who we are in the process of growing up? What is it in growing up that takes that freedom away?

On the surface, it seems, the baby is free to do whatever it wants to as dictated by instinct. That’s true, but what’s more important is that the baby is free to not know how it got here, what’s going on here and what comes next. The baby is interested in all there is to know, but it doesn’t NEED to know anything. It’s just fine being interested, wondering, taking it all in, just being.

The baby is not expected to know all the answers, unlike adults are. And who is it that expects us to know all the answers? It’s us, it’s me, it’s you. All of us expect themselves and everyone else to have the answers. That’s pretty much our benchmark of adulthood: we ought to know. 

Sure, as adults, we know a lot more about the world around us than babies do. But if you look at the really fundamental questions, like who am I, what is all this, how did it all start and how does it all end?  – your capacity to answer those questions equals a baby’s: zero. 

You know exactly as much about the fundamentals of this existence as a baby does.

And what you learn growing up, all the information that helps you live day to day, brings you no closer to your fundamental questions.

Science will have a go at it. But the big bang theory (all the matter of the universe cumulated in a single point and then it exploded) is just another way of saying: we don’t know.

Perhaps quantum physics will provide the answers one day. Please, surprise me.   

If you are really honest, you’ll admit that you don’t have a clue about how you got here, what powers influence your destiny and how the world really works. You have ideas, you can tell stories, you can even believe in them. But if you are honest, you’ll admit that you don’t have a clue. And all the things you learned in your adult life and all the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in history doesn’t change a thing.  

The desire to know the world through the intellect is a built in feature of the human machine, no doubt. But it’s a desire never to be fulfilled, because the intellect is not the faculty of the human that can know those kinds of answers.

The conventional way of dealing with that predicament is to pretend that you know. It’s easy. All you have to do is pick a prefabricated story by religion or an unprovable hypothesis by science and explain those questions away with the ease of telling a fairy tale. Or even better, you can pretend to not know about the questions at all, so you end up pretending you know all there is to know.

Pretending, can be an efficient strategy for developing high levels of confidence, a sense of purpose and direction in life. If you are good enough at pretending, it can make you very attractive. People will follow you and will want to give you their money.

There is that. And then there is admitting that you know fuck all. 

Admitting that the combined intellectual product of humanity can’t explain the fundamentals of this existence.  

Admitting that you just keep finding yourself in this experience moment after moment for no good reason. 

Admitting that, from the bottom of your heart, might just give you a sense of relief. As if, the need to know, was not so grueling anymore. As if, you could look at the world like a baby does: taking it all in, not needing to make sense of it all. Just living it and being it. 

Admitting that can be scary to yourself and others around you. 

But the relief of not needing to know anymore, and not needing others to believe that you know, transforms you. That relief gives you true freedom to be who you really are, regardless of the consequences.

Just like a baby. 

A Pretending you know bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

You never seem to finish your to-do list. And you often don’t even know what to do first because so many important and urgent tasks compete for your attention.

You’ve tried every productivity app, but your several to do lists keep on growing. You’ve read all the articles on how to get more done. What you have to show for it is feeling busy and trapped.

Let’s take a step back.

The fact is, the busy mindset is an integral part of your personality. It goes way back.

You never saw your parents do nothing. Time was precious and you were taught to make the most of it. There was no sleeping in on Saturdays. The lawn had to be mown, the floor had to be cleaned or the groceries had to be bought before the shop closed for the weekend. Everyone had to be busy all the time, otherwise a sense of uneasiness set in.

Busyness was a measure and expression of your worthiness.

But you left home and, over the years, you have figured that the busy mindset of your parents’ generation was their way of self-justification. We are poor but it’s not our fault – was the basic premise. How could it be? We are busy working hard all the time. We are not like the people who are poor AND lazy. We are a different breed altogether. We just have to work hard a little longer and then we’ll have it good. We are also not like the rich, who got their wealth by stealing from the poor. We are hard working, decent citizens.

That’s the story the working class of post-socialist Central Europe based its identity on and that’s how its members found a reason to get up every morning. And get up damn early too.

You, however, belong to a new generation. You’ve seen through all this.

Your life isn’t about survival. You want to thrive. You want to change the world, because you believe you can and because you believe it badly needs changing. You have a purpose. You’re on a mission.

That’s how you are different. And that’s the story that underpins your busy mindset.

Different story. Same busy trap.

Any time not fully dedicated to your mission is a waste. If you could work on your mission 24/7, you would. You’ve tried… and keep trying, but mother nature slaps you in the face every now and then and tells you to

“GET SOME SLEEP AND TAKE A DAY OFF YOU POMPOUS LITTLE GIT”

in no uncertain terms.

So you take a day off… Your way of course, which means only brainstorming and only responding to a couple of urgent emails and calls. And then doing some housework, shopping or other maintenance stuff because it relaxes you… – you tell yourself.

Look at what you are doing. Do you really think that if you disappeared for a day, the world would come to a standstill? Then why do you act like it?

STOP.

Take a day off. A proper day off.

In your world that means:

Waste a whole day.

Yes. Do nothing of any use or value for an entire day other than what you need to survive.

Sounds near impossible, doesn’t it?

Have you ever noticed that all other animals take ALL their time off, except for what they absolutely need to do to survive? A pig will eat the food put in front of it and then lay around in its own filth all day.

But why should we aspire for that? We are different. We can change our environment, solve problems, improve things. We have a sense of purpose. This is what makes us better and more advanced as a species – I hear you say.

The good news is you don’t need to take a bath of shit to get the pig’s peace of mind. The bad news is you must get that peace of mind to stay sane. The busy trap is filled with quicksand. The more you struggle to get out, the deeper you sink.

The only way to get out is to stop the struggle. Stop the busyness.

So how do you stop?

Waste time consciously.

Ideally, you’d sit in a room all day with no sensory stimulation whatsoever. Just observing whatever bubbles up from your subconscious, facing your demons and surrendering to reality.

But that will be torture for you. So don’t start with that one.

Go on a hike to the woods. In nature, your mind can be at rest. Only the most primal circuits need to remain active, which can decide whether what you see is a threat or not. Walking around in the city, your mind is at work. Every price tag, shop window and billboard is perceived as a potential deal. Your mind will process and evaluate each one subconsciously whether you want to or not. Also, every person walking by is a potential mate, friend, hire, business partner or enemy. You don’t notice it, but your mind takes it all in and processes all that information. In the city your mind is busy. Waste time in nature, where there is little to judge and evaluate.

No friends this time. Go alone.

You might already be wasting a ton of time watching TV, reading the news etc. you may say. That’s basically giving your mind something to chew on to prevent its underlying anxiety from coming to the surface. It works like charm, but it essentially means that your mind is sedated.

That is a waste, but it’s unconscious. Not what you want. 

That kind of waste only pushes you deeper down the busy trap. To break out, you must learn to waste time consciously. And not feel guilty about it.

So no TV, no internet, no phones, no screens of any kind. Unplug yourself for this one day.

Don’t even read a book.

Ideally, you’d go to a lake in the woods and stare at the water all day. That’s how you properly, consciously waste a day.

Keep on wasting a day every once in a while and you might notice some strange things happen. You might catch yourself feeling busy and now having a strange ability to stop that feeling from developing into fully blown anxiety. You might notice that deadlines can be met without stress. And that sometimes they can’t be met at all. And that’s fine too.

You might notice little gaps emerging between you and the roles you assume. Those gaps may seem insignificant at first, but you’ll notice how crucial they are. Those tiny gaps enable you to see that you are not a father/mother, manager, employee, friend, homeowner, citizen etc. But you are not even a male/female named Joe or Jane of a certain age. These are all just labels and roles some of which you feel you took on voluntarily, others have been imposed on you. What definitely is in your power is the ability to not be identified with any of them.

You don’t have to be the average of your roles. To see that, you need to distance yourself from them. That’s only possible outside the busy trap.

If you are not attached to your roles, then you can’t be anxious about what is expected of them either. Once the subliminal anxiety is gone, you’ll be just like that happy pig. Minus the shit of course.

Remember this. Happiness is best defined by the lack of suffering and an overwhelming peace of mind regardless of circumstances. The busy trap is the antidote of that peace of mind. And the way to break out of it is by systematically, consciously wasting time.

A How to Break Out of the Busy Trap: Waste Time Consciously bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

So you slow down and take it easy. But gravity works on you. You feel its pull and you can’t help but give in a little. You let go of the breaks but slow down again when you feel it’s getting out of control.

You take the next bend and it’s getting even steeper. You feel fear as you accelerate but the thrill of storming down the hill in the face of the unknown has touched you. Soon, you hit the tipping point and the fear you felt is now pure thrill. Moments ago there was fear, now there is only joy, a sense of freedom and acceptance. And you keep riding in the dark.

You are not suicidal. If you spot a pothole, you’ll dodge it if you can. But you know that you may not be able to and that’s not a problem.

What turned fear into joy from one moment to another? It had to be letting go.

Letting go is not something you do, it happens when the conditions are right. When it becomes clear that holding on and trying to stay in control is not possible, then letting go happens.

It’s a beautiful experience. You don’t necessarily need a bike to have it.

Photo by Tanner Larson.

A The thrill of letting go bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

I almost put “how to cure insomnia” in the title of this post, but I doubt that I’ll never have it again so it’s more accurate to talk about treating it even though what I’ve discovered seems to me like a cure. It goes right to the heart of the issue.

I had four sleepless nights in a row. And then last night I slept pretty well. What was different?

Friday night I stayed up late, got to bed around 6 am. I woke up after sleeping a couple of hours feeling not great but okay. I could have slept a full eight hours, and I wanted to, but didn’t. Consciously I wanted to, but subconsciously, I was annoyed by wasting the whole day and not getting anything done.

Saturday night I felt proper tired and sleepy and didn’t even go anywhere. I went to bed early to make up for the lost sleep. What happened of course was I could not fall asleep until 6 am no matter what I did.

Sunday night I was so exhausted and sleep deprived that there was no way I wouldn’t sleep I had thought. But Sundays are tricky, because the first day of the workweek always adds a bit of pressure  – you must get a good night’s sleep to be in your best shape on Monday. I hardly slept at all, needless to say.

Monday night was pretty much the same – I tried sleeping in a different room, with music, without, after and in between meditation. Nothing worked.

The breakthrough came last night.

You could say that by then I must have been so sleep deprived that I’d just fall asleep regardless of anything, but I don’t think so. I could have gone another couple of days with little sleep every night.

So the cure or treatment for my kind of insomnia is acceptance.

I can’t sleep, because I have to or I want to.

I have an alarm set at 11pm, which indicates bed time. Without that, I tend to go to bed later and later every day even when I sleep fine. On Monday night, when the alarm went off, I put it to a 10 minute snooze as I wanted to finish something I was doing. And I did that 2 times again before I closed my laptop. And when I did I felt like, alright, now I’d really better get to bed, otherwise I won’t get enough sleep again. I was in resistance. Consciously, I was telling myself to calm down and go to sleep, but subconsciously my mind wanted to make sure I’d have a productive next day by keeping me alert all night and thinking about all the stuff I was going to have to do.

Last night, when the alarm went off at 11pm, I didn’t put it on snooze, just switched it off and kept working. I had no fixed appointments planned for today, which helped to get into a state of acceptance. I was like “fuck it, if I don’t get any sleep I don’t care anymore… if I waste the whole day tomorrow so be it, there is nothing I can do”.

I think it was this surrender that did the trick. I realised my powerlessness over the situation. I came to know there was nothing I could do. And as a result, the resistance of the subconscious dissipated. 

And even though I woke up several times thinking last night again, I was able to fall back asleep and got a good 6-7 hours of sleep.

So the question is, next time I can’t fall asleep, is there way to get into this state of surrender and admit my powerlessness or do I have to go through this cycle of four sleepless nights again?

I guess writing this down and rereading it when needed is a good start.

The difficulty lies in the difference between conscious and subconscious mind. You may accept everything and surrender totally on a conscious level, but your subconscious may keep resisting. And the only way to change that is to experience and admit your powerlessness – to know deep down there is nothing you can do. So then the answer seems to be that whenever your subconscious forgets your powerlessness over the situation, you’ll probably need a few sleepless nights to reset it. Accept that and then you may not…

Not having to get up at a given time helps. But it’s not the solution because if you rely on that, and once in a while you do have to get up to get to a meeting or whatever, then it will matter even more and you’ll be guaranteed to not get any sleep exactly when you should be at your best.

In a way any technique you do to help you fall asleep may be counterproductive because just by doing them, you reaffirm the resistance of your subconscious. And yet, I did two things last night that I felt helped.

I had a glass of wine. Such a simple little thing and it’s definitely not going to help if you are in resistance. But it may help you cross the line as it creates a fairly sudden shift in consciousness. When you feel the alcohol kick in, there is a moment of feeling at ease. It may last or it may not. All I’m saying a glass of wine can be conducive.

I did the Wim Hof breathing technique.  Again, this will not solve insomnia by itself, but the impact it has on your heart rate is immediate and incredible. I find that my heart rate is correlated with the rate at which thoughts arise in my mind. Not sure if there is a causal relationship, but as soon as my heart rate goes down (which is naturally elevated if you are sleep deprived), the mind becomes more quite.

That’s it, hope this helps some of you struggling with insomnia and I hope I will take my own medicine.

A How to treat insomnia bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Louis CK came to Budapest. And I went to see him.

I haven’t always been a fan. I recall my first encounter of his stand up on YouTube very vividly. It was a piece where he groans like a moron for about two minutes. I didn’t judge him by that alone though. I had a look at some of his other videos. And came to the conclusion that the guy was an ugly, aggressive idiot who invented a way to get paid for venting out his frustrations on stage. Fast forward a few years, and I’m waiting in line to see the man perform live in Budapest.

Louis CK stands out from the stand up crowd because of one thing. He is authentic as fuck. His act is, to be precise. He is not trying to be anyone or even funny. He just talks about his life, which could be your life, my life, all of our lives. And he does that in a way that happens to be funny.

He keeps saying, he said it last night, that he doesn’t do impressions because he is not good at it. But that’s bullshit. His show is nothing BUT a sequence of impressions of imaginary, but potentially very real characters. And that’s the other thing that sets him apart.

This became so clear last night. The warm up comedians just told stories with a few jokes here and there. But Louis CK morphed into a different character about every 50 seconds of his show. He impersonated the doctor who wanted to cut his wife in half, Achilles and his goddess mother, his own football coach, the soap bubble blower, a vampire and himself in various absurdly funny situations just to name a few. He pulls off these impressions so good that you don’t notice he is doing it. It’s just part of the way he tells a story. Genius.

Before the show started last night, the rules were displayed, which included “no heckling”. Two guys set down next to me and one asked the other “What does heckling mean?”. A minute later two guys set down in the row behind me and one asked the other “What does heckling mean?”…

I thought “Shit. Even Louis CK can’t make an audience that doesn’t understand what he is saying laugh.” That feeling only grew stronger as I watched the warm up comedians only get a laugh when they said pussy, fuck or fart.

It wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound, but there was definitely a language issue involved and I could tell that Louis was feeling it too. Even though his presence alone made most of the audience wet their pants, we didn’t get all the jokes and we didn’t always get them in time. That said, I’m grateful that there is an audience in Budapest that understands English well enough to watch a show like this and that they are willing to fork out the cash it took too.

To his credit, Louis factored all of that in. When he saw a lack of reaction, he gave more context. He was not improvizing by any means, but he adapted to local conditions on the spot.

The show was a beautiful demonstration of the dynamics of stand up as a genre too. Stand up is clearly a dialogue, in which the audience replies with varying degrees of laughter and applause. Master comedians, like Louis CK, are not there to make people laugh. Their role is to pour oil on a fire that’s already burning and to keep going until it hurts. And sometimes a little beyond.

In Budapest, Louis had to start with the story of his family: how his Hungarian, one legged, violin playing Jewish grand father ended up in Mexico and lied himself to be catholic to marry his beautiful catholic grandmother. And how his football coach was unable to pronounce Louis’ Hungarian name “Székely” so he just started calling him whatever came closest (CK).

Louis did what he had to do to make a Hungarian audience happy, which included saying words like “nagypapa” in Hungarian. And he also made it clear (as part of his act, which I think pretty much coincided with his true feelings) that he didn’t give a shit about his Hungarian origins or about our beautiful Budapest.

I like Louis CK because his act delivers meaning on at least two very different levels. One is the instantly, absurdly, profoundly and often obscenely funny. The other level is the deeper stuff that reflects on the big questions of life. Last night he impersonated a guy who blows soap bubbles and expects them to stay intact forever. It was really funny and absurd. Just as absurd as our expectation for love between two people to last forever is.

I’d be surprised if Louis CK came back to central-eastern Europe any time soon because of the language barrier. I’m very happy to have seen him perform live in Budapest and hope that his appearance will pave the way for more high quality stand up around here.

A Louis CK Performs Live in Budapest bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

So I came up with this idea to keep track of everything I learn and distil lessons into simple, actionable directives that are easy to implement. That’s how these posts were born: 1 2 3 4 5 .

What I expected from doing this:

• Remembering what I learn
• Putting what I learn into practice
• Personal growth

What actually happened

• I hardly ever went back to reread those lessons
• I put few of them into practice and when I did, it was not because of these notes
• I felt like I had to consume even more information now
• And I felt I had to keep track of it all…

So it was a spectacular failure, but not without its lessons.

Lesson #1

The greatest obstacle to learning is new learning.

New incoming information pushes the old out. As new neural pathways are formed in the brain to make memories, old ones get discarded. ¹,² So the best way to learn anything is to

1. only focus on the thing you want to learn
2. cut out all interfering information
3. learn in small chunks to give your brain space to digest and to solidify newly formed pathways

What about “being like a sponge” and absorbing as much information as you possibly can? That might be good advice for a kid who doesn’t yet know what he is into and just wants get exposed to all sorts of things. But if you do that as an adult, you’re probably falling for this trap:

Lesson #2

Do not mistake entertainment for learning.

I thought I was bettering myself by consuming all that information. I thought I was learning and growing. Some of that information was world class and the lessons seemed extremely valuable and relevant.

So how do you tell real learning from entertainment and distraction? Ask this one question: does it lead to action?

If your learning is not followed by action, it’s entertainment.

If you learn something just for the sake of knowing it, that’s entertainment. You are only doing it to keep yourself busy and because it’s probably fun. And that’s fine, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a quite noble form of entertainment. Just be aware of the difference and don’t expect much personal growth merely from feeding the hungry beast inside your skull with ever more information.

Lesson #3

You can’t have know it all.

This exercise got me greedy for more and more information. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you are a kid or a teenager, but later in life, you’ve got to be more selective. Also, I was largely motivated by the fear of missing out – now that I look back. I wanted to know it all.

You’d better face facts and realize you can’t. You could not know everything there is to know in a dozen lifetimes. Make peace with that.

Lesson #4

The mind needs a break.

Rewind a few hundred thousand years. Humans were gathering berries and chasing the occasional game. The information we had to process was limited to our sensory impulses and little to no abstract concepts. Our brains haven’t changed much since then. And yet we are making them process gigabytes of information day in day out – way more than what we were designed to process in a lifetime.

We even “relax” by processing information, because we are too neurotic to sit still and do nothing.

I’m not saying let’s all go back to picking berries again. But stuffing your brain with too much information is overloading your psyche without you noticing it. And some nasty side effects may follow.

Lesson #5

To make it stick, you must repeat daily.

Religions preach a lot of bullshit but they are not stupid. They figured out over millennia that whatever is repeated daily sticks and whatever is not does not. It’s no rocket science and yet, I don’t see a whole lot of people applying this – my past self included.

So if there is something important that you want to learn and put into practice, repeat it daily. Like Christians would the Lord’s prayer or Hindus would the Gayatri mantra.

Lesson #6

Knowledge is overrated.

While a sharp intellect, a thorough understanding of the world, a rational mind and an ability to adjust one’s own behaviour based on new learning are all the marks of a fully rounded human being, it’s easy to overestimate the significance of all that. Or rather, underestimate the importance of what cannot be grasped by the intellect.

Reality itself, cannot be grasped by the mind. In fact, the mind gets in the way of experiencing reality as it is, because it acts as a filter and gives you a picture of reality as it is to you. That is a distorted picture by definition and no amount of knowledge can fix it. Contrarily, only absence of knowledge and thoughts can.

So just know that most of what you consider learning is actually entertainment. Do less of it. Try doing nothing for a change and giving your mind a real break.

References:

1. http://www.nature.com/news/new-brain-cells-erase-old-memories-1.15186
2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3498469/Learning-new-facts-really-DOES-push-old-ones-Study-discovers-brain-limited-space.html

Photo Credit: Nick Kenrick

A The lessons I learnt trying to learn too many lessons bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

The monkey mind

Picture this. You are on the subway on the way to work. You see an ad promoting a cookbook. You remember your plans for dinner and make a mental note to remember to buy fresh basil on your way home. You work out which shop you’ll stop by to get the freshest possible basil and what time you’ll need to leave work. You really hope that your boss does not come up with a last minute task right before you are about to finish for the day as he always does. There must be at least a hundred unread emails waiting for you in your inbox like every Monday. But you decide not to even open them until you have finished the report you were supposed to submit on Friday…

Sounds familiar? How do you get from a cookbook to worrying about the shitty tasks waiting for you at work?

That’s the speciality of the monkey mind. It jumps from one thought to the next based on some sort of real or perceived relation. The point is that it’s random. The mind leads, you follow. And if you pay closer attention you’ll see that it often revolves around stuff you fear or worry about. So it doesn’t matter what you see on the subway, your mind quickly finds its way back to rumination over what makes you anxious without you ever noticing.

This is the default state of your mind. Much of the time you are lost in thought, going with whatever the mind throws at you. When you are lost in thought, you are not present in the moment by definition. The mind can only be thinking about the past or the future. The present, you can only be in, not think about.  And for that to happen, the monkey mind needs to shut down.

Contemplation

Contemplation is directed thought.  When you set out to solve an intellectual problem or explore different aspects of an idea and apply a specific thought process to it, you are in contemplation. There is an element of randomness to this process as well, but you define the parameters within which your mind is free to roam.

For instance, you get a proposal in the mail from your phone provider to upgrade your subscription to get cheaper rates. You need to make a choice. You begin by looking at your current phone usage and extrapolate that into the future. You calculate how much you’d pay in either package and so on. Even though you may not be aware of the many biases that influence your thought process, by doing this, the monkey mind is already confined within limits you draw.

You may apply directed thinking to much less practical subjects, like death for instance. By contemplating how and when you might die, you can become more aware of the time you have to live and to spend it on things that matter to you.

In contemplation you don’t go around in circles. Even if your mind tries to lead you off track towards some anxiety, you consciously pull it back to the subject of your contemplation. A major difference compared to the monkey mind.

What contemplation does have in common with getting lost in thought though is it’s past or future focused. You can’t be contemplating the present even if you try.

So even if you are conscious of the difference between getting lost in thought and contemplation, your mind will try to trick you into believing that you are contemplating, while you are just day dreaming. If you start contemplating whatever the mind throws at you, you are still lost in thought. If you contemplate the same thing over and over again without coming to any conclusion, then you are also lost in thought.

Concentration

One level up is concentration, where the random element disappears completely. There is just a single thing that your whole awareness is focused on and your mind stops moving. Concentration is beyond thought.

Take driving as an example. When you drive back and forth to work, a route you’ve done hundreds of times, your full attention will not be occupied with driving. Your built in autopilot will take care of handling the steering wheel shifting gears and all the rest, while your mind can wander off to random territories.

Contrast that with a new route you’ve never driven and suppose it’s an emergency. You are speeding well over the limit and what’s safe. In that situation, your mind can’t move. Your awareness is fully focused on keeping the car on the road, because it’s a matter of life and death. There is no way you thoughts about buying fresh basil or having to finish a report will pop up in that situation.

In that deep concentration, your thinking mind is useless. It’s way too slow. So you move beyond it and get into a flow state. You become one with the moment, forget about yourself and the whole world. There is only the activity, and the observer disappears. This can occur in many different ways and activities, especially when the stakes are high or when the activity is highly creative, challenging and intense.

Meditation – No mind

Meditation is also a state of flow, but without any activity. In concentration the mind cannot move, while in meditation the mind disappears completely. It’s a state of no mind and non doing, just pure being.

Probably everybody has spontaneous glimpses of meditation despite being stuck with the monkey mind most of the time. The trick is developing an awareness of these different stages of the mind and once that awareness is there, you can take control of the mind instead of it controlling you.

There are many different ways of practising no mind. It’ll be a challenge initially whatever method you choose as the mind has this strong tendency to keep moving. On the up side, as soon as you catch the monkey mind in the act, you’ve already stopped it. It will resurface again and again, but with practice, the awareness becomes stronger. And then you can consciously choose when you want to let your mind roam free, when you want to contemplate something or go beyond thinking and experience becoming one with existence.

A From Monkey Mind to No Mind bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

It’s screaming for help, but you can’t hear it. You get a sense that something isn’t right, but you don’t know what. So you search for what might be the problem and feed your mind even more information in the process.

You tell yourself that you’re very selective about the information you consume. You’ve long quit watching TV. The stuff you watch on Youtube is strictly educational. The blogs you read are for inspiration only. You’ve even curbed the nonsense of social media. But every now and then you feel you need to give yourself a break. So you read just a few headlines, a couple of articles or watch some short videos.

You have issues resisting your cravings. You tell yourself (and others) that if there is any sweets in your house, you’ll eat it all up at once. So you religiously keep sweets out of your home. But you go out and binge.

At work, you jump from one task to another and end up spending hours on stuff you didn’t plan to. You often forget what it is you’re just about to do, let alone why. If you think about it, you realize that you operate on autopilot most of the time. You rarely act, and mostly react.

There is this task you’ve been putting off. You’d need to get out of your comfort zone to get it done. So you watch some videos that talk about how to get out of your comfort zone.

You don’t sleep well. When you close your eyes, your mind gets into a thinking frenzy and you are powerless to stop it. You are a compulsive thinker.

In your conversations with people you often catch yourself regurgitating whole sentences you read or saw somewhere. You don’t have a lot of conversations in the first place, but when you do, you sometimes feel like your opinion depends on who you are talking to. You feel like your personality is made of plasticine and you are not sure who you are anymore.

You avoid confrontation whenever possible. You catch yourself regretting not saying what you were about to say. You realize you need to grow thicker skin and a spine to go with it.

You are quick to pass judgement on people, but slow to realize when your judgement is wrong. You seem to get an obscene pleasure out of categorizing people. You walk around tagging people with labels as you pass them.

You are dishonest with the people you care about because YOU can’t bear the burden of making them miserable by telling them the truth.

You are very efficient with your time. You listen to podcasts while cooking, cleaning and brushing your teeth. Not a single moment goes to waste. In the shower you don’t sing, but listen to music to elevate your mood. In the car you listen to some high brow radio program that talks about the impact of the government’s latest policies on the housing market or how the rise of oil prices will affect the economy. It’s all good information, you need it to stay informed and make good choices in life. You are interested in art, too. Sometimes the radio talks about poets who lived and wrote a few hundred years ago. They go to the house the poet lived in and tell stories about the bits and bobs of his daily life that shaped his character and work. You cling on every word they say and look for the lessons you can take away.

The only time you are left alone with your thoughts (apart from failing to fall asleep) is when you go for a bike ride in the woods. You keep wondering why thoughts about work and the people you may have hurt keep haunting you even then.

At one point you realize that you spend pretty much every waking moment consuming or processing information or simply lost in thought. The cries of your drowning mind begin to filter through the cracks in the thick wall of information you built and your consciousness starts hearing them.

It finally dawns on you that you are an info junkie.

The diagnosis is painful. You are having withdrawal symptoms minutes after not consuming information. You decide to go cold turkey.

No youtube, no news, no blogs, no radio, no social media, not even books or music.

Just you and silence.

It hurts.

Your mind jumps around desperately trying to keep busy. You think of everything you can possibly think of 10 times at least. In the end everything your mind can come up with feels like bones with no meat left on them. There is nothing new to think about so you begin to pay attention to how your thoughts arise. You watch one thought lead to another and start to feel a gap developing between them and yourself. You get glimpses of thoughtlessness. You spend hours sitting in a chair doing just that.

At one point you get it. The real you was buried way down under all that noise and the only way you can be it is by silencing your mind. You realize that your awareness was sedated by all the information you stuffed it with, and all that thinking you were doing all the time. You were trying to fill the void inside you with all that mental masturbation, but now you see that you are the void itself and it doesn’t need to be filled.

That realization calms you down. You sleep well that night.

The next day you feel different. In a good way. You feel present. You notice your breathing. You feel your lungs expand and contract. You catch yourself touching your face for no reason and begin to notice all sorts of things you were not aware of.

You avoid excess information like plague, but you don’t feel the need for it either. The craving for the next quick fix is gone. And it’s not just information.

You realize you can pass by the cakes in the canteen without turning an eye and you remember the effort you used to have to make to resist the temptation every time you saw them.

You find time you didn’t know you had. You write and connect the dots.

Your mind does wonder still, but you keep catching yourself and return to the center of your being: emptiness

You work with more deliberation. The autopilot is off. You don’t jump from one task to another, but insert little breaks in between tasks and you pick the one that’s the highest priority, not the easiest or most urgent.

You do one thing at a time. When you do the dishes, you just do the dishes. When you eat, you eat. And when you think, you think. You decide to think about something, it doesn’t just happen.

Now you have a chance to savour the flavours and textures of food. Now you realize that the most mundane of tasks isn’t boring if you pay enough attention to it.

You are less hesitant in conversation. You speak with authenticity because what you say comes from the core of your being.

You see how people are doing whatever it is they are doing to fill the void within them. But you just do whatever it is you do because you can and because you like to play the game called life.

The difference leaves you flabbergasted. You realize your mind never stood a chance against the flood of information you kept pouring over it day in day out. A couple of days pass and you write it all down so you still remember what it was like to not know what you know now.

Now you know that doing is the mind’s favourite thing and just being is its worst enemy. Now you know that the mind needs to prove its reason for existence by constant rumination. Now you know that your true nature is being, not doing. Now you can do without identifying with the doing and return to being when you feel like it. Now you know that if you don’t control your mind, it will control you.

You comprehend that being an info junkie is only a symptom and treating it will not bring you salvation. But it will create the possibility for awareness, which is the first step to solving any issue in your life and to self actualization.

You also know that like the solution for an eating disorder is not never eating again, the solution to your information addiction is not never watching another youtube video or never reading another blog post either. So you think about how to reintroduce some of these things into your life without becoming an info junkie once again.

And that’s hard. Because you need to function in an environment where incentives encourage the consumption of more and more information (as well as other stuff). Information has been turned into just another consumer good. The game is rigged and you can’t stop playing. So you need a smart strategy.

• You consciously abandon the belief that idleness is a waste. When you have nothing to do, you do nothing. You don’t even think. Especially don’t think.
• Before you consume any information, you ask yourself: do I need this to make myself feel better or because it will help me solve a real problem.
• You stay away from any kind of multitasking and dedicate your full attention to the one thing you are doing.
• Some of the time you let your mind wander freely. And you stay conscious of it wandering.
• You dedicate time to thinking about stuff that requires conscious thought. When you catch yourself ruminating over the same thing at times you didn’t plan to, you gently bring your awareness back to the thing you were doing (or not doing).
• You limit information intake for entertainment purposes.
• You also limit information intake for educational purposes.
• If you find yourself in a thinking frenzy and can’t fall asleep, you don’t try to feed your mind with more information. Instead, you’ll sit still and watch your thoughts until your mind calms down even if it takes all night.
• You spend at least 20 minutes every day just being, not doing or thinking anything – meditating if you want to call it that.
• You reread this post monthly, because you know that the impact of this realization wears off and you would gravitate back towards information overload and compulsive thinking.

A How being an info junkie fucks up your life bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

This documentary is nothing short of astonishing. It gives you an explanation to why the world is the way it is today and how human nature shaped it in the past century. Even if you didn’t learn any new facts from it (you will), it would be worth watching just for the way it connects the dots. It’s made up of four parts. I’ll share my notes and critical thoughts of it.

Happiness machines

The film starts with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who believed that humans are irrational and are governed by their subconscious fears and desires. His nephew, Edward Bernays, put his theory to practice and got to work to build a social structure that controls the masses that could not be trusted to control themselves and would pose a threat otherwise.

Bernays worked with business and government using the techniques and ideology he took from Freud. One of his great success stories was getting American women to smoke, which was previously unheard of. However, Bernays associated it with gender equality (torches of freedom) and it took off like wildfire. The techniques he applied are astonishing: he paid women at mass gatherings to smoke setting an example.

What Bernays realized was that what people needed was very different from what they wanted. And that the latter was way more profitable for business. Also, as long as people’s desires were fulfilled governments could do pretty much what they wanted.

The National Socialists of Germany essentially shared the same belief about democracy as Bernays did: it didn’t work. Bernays’ solution was to build a system that provides an illusion of democracy and wellbeing, while the Nazis were straightforward: they would abandon democracy for an alternative that would channel the masses uncontrollable energies in ways that held the nation together. That didn’t work out too well either, but at least they were honest about their stance on democracy.

In the socio-economic system Bernays helped build, people are not active participants, but passive consumers. People are not in charge, their innermost (often irrational) desires are.

The engineering of consent

It didn’t take long for big business in the US to get from psychoanalysis to focus groups in order to figure out the deepest fears and desires of people that they didn’t know themselves and then to manufacture the matching products.

Ernest Dichter realized that people didn’t always know what they wanted and the origins of their desires were often unconscious. He essentially invented the focus group, which gave him a chance to observe consumers using and interacting with products and letting them talk freely about them rather than asking straight questions. One of his memorable achievements was when an instant cake didn’t sell well, he figured out it was because house wives felt guilty for not having to work. So they made the women add their own eggs to the mix, which changed the perceived ease of making the instant cake and now women felt like they deserved the credits for their work and sales soared.

Psychoanalysts like Dichter trained corporations to identify and exploit people’s fears and desires. By the early 50s their ideas became widely accepted in business as well as politics. The reason why they did what they did was they believed that by regulating people’s wild desires and unconscious fears, we’d live in a better society. By giving people products that complement their personalities, products they could identify with, people would become more stable emotionally and able to lead more balanced and happy lives. Psychoanalysts believed that ordinary individuals and the masses were not capable of being democratic by themselves unless their unstable way of being was controlled. They believed themselves to be part of an elite that had the knowledge and means to enable the masses to live in a democratic society and they did so by promoting the ideas of psychoanalysis and the practices derived from them at every level and fragment of society.

Freud’s daughter, Anna, was determined to spread his father’s theory as well as to take it a step further. And she did. She took a troubled mother and her four children and moved them into a new environment, which, in combination with psychoanalysis, was supposed to cure them of anxiety and aggression. The experiment seemed to have worked, but decades later all the problems resurfaced and several of the then grown up children committed suicide.

One of the outright deceitful acts of Bernays under the umbrella of shaping public opinion was his way of making Guatemala look like a communist threat to the US and overthrowing its government. Bernays sent over American journalist and made sure the people they talked to painted the picture he wanted. He went as far as organizing an anti American demonstration and setting up a fake news agency just to spread fake news about the threat Guatemala posed to the US. He did all this with the justification that the cold war had to be won and the American way of life had to be preserved. However, the masses were not able to act rationally so they had to be manipulated. Bernays called this the engineering of consent.

The CIA went even further. They funded brainwashing experiments in which they tried to erase the memories of people and create new identities that were in line with their interests. They succeeding in erasing memories, but failed miserably to reprogram people.

Psychoanalysts’ influence and power peaked around the 50’s in America and started to decline in the 60’s. Merilyn Monroe, who was the patient of a prominent psychoanalyst, committed suicide which raised a lot of questions about the effectiveness of their methods. Then books appeared and influencers spoke up against psychoanalysts saying that the system they helped build was based on planned obsolescence and helped a small elite to get rich by exploiting and controlling the masses through the manufacturing of products that repressed and fulfilled their hidden desires. So the pendulum swung the other way. Psychoanalyst were now accused of building a society that corrupts the innocent individual as opposed the Freudian idea of the evil and dangerous individual that was a threat to society.

There is a policeman inside all our heads, he must be destroyed

The Freudian view of the human psyche is based on dangerous and primitive emotions and their repression. That’s why Anna Freud tried to cure her patients by putting them in a new environment and that’s why she died a virgin. Wilhelm Reich believed the opposite. He though that sexual energy had to be expressed freely to be healthy and that humans are inherently good, but the society that wanted to repress their inner energies made them sick and dangerous. He also believed a lot of baloney, like he could cure cancer and make rain fall…

Reich died in the 50s, but his views became very popular in the 60s. People took to the streets and demonstrated against corporations and the government and how they worked together to keep the masses docile while they fought an unjustified war in Vietnam. Demonstrators were overpowered by the state, which resulted in a change of tactics. The personal become political. People started making the changes in themselves they wanted to see happen at a social level. Psychologist that followed and took Reich’s teachings further developed methods for people to express their innermost fears and desires that would allow them to shed the controls and conditioning imposed by society. The movement that started with small isolated experiments quickly spread nationwide in the US and by the 80s 80% of the American population was transformed.

The process had dire consequences for business. The insurance industry took the first blow as these new free individuals who lived in the present didn’t buy insurance. And that’s where business had to reinvent itself. Mass production was dead. They had to come up with products that facilitated self expression, and showing off individual differences. Corporations realized they had to conform to the new non-conformist consumers in order to stay in business.

Abraham Maslow and his pyramid of needs provided a basis for business to segment society into groups that had their own desires. It also became clear that there was a limit to being different: the ways in which people liked to express themselves could be categorized. They called this method the Values and Lifestyles system. This went way beyond the previous methods of demographics and social classes and allowed businesses to make offers that seemed really personal to consumers.

The exact same methods were employed in politics. Regan and Thatcher both got into power because they appealed to the “inner directives” group, who could not be identified with traditional methods as they were part of all social classes and demographic groups. But by going after their values and figuring out what mattered to them (less government, more individualistic society), they were able to give them exactly what they wanted.

The hippie movement started as a rebellion against the state and big business and was aimed at self expression and self actualization. By the end of the century, these new self actualized individuals became dependent on business for their new identities because business found the way to help them be who they wanted to be. Business turned a threat into the biggest opportunity in history. An old and finite economy based on the static needs of the masses fulfilled by mass produced products was made redundant by an ever changing and infinite number of individual desires that made infinite economies possible. In this new individualistic society, there is no society really. It’s all about the individual and satisfying its desires.

Eight people sipping wine in Kettering

The first three episodes showed how business learned to read consumers’ desires and sell them products that satisfied them. The closing episode shows how politics has done the same towards the end of the century using the very same techniques as business.

In the classic model of politics, different candidates showed up with their different agendas and it was up to the voter to choose one that matched their preferences. In this new system dominated by super granular opinion polls and analysis of people’s political desires, each candidate tried to match their agenda to what they thought people wanted.

At first, that might sound like the ultimate democracy. However, by responding to people’s particular whims and even unconscious desires, politicians ended up making contradicting policies and not having a clear sense of direction. In addition, things that people favoured in the short term (like spending less on infrastructure), backfired in the medium and long run and cost politicians votes. So in essence, what worked for business, didn’t work in politics.

The final message of the documentary is that by the end of the century, we willingly reduced ourselves to our conscious or subconscious desires and trying to satisfy them at all times. We have forgotten that being human is a lot more than that.

Criticism

On the whole, this film is extremely useful to forming a well rounded view of the world we live in and to putting together the pieces of the puzzle that the developments of the past century represent. At the same time, it’s important to note that this is only one of many different interpretations.

My strongest critical point is that it could easily fuel conspiracy theories. By focusing on the Freud family and certain other individuals, it suggests that these people had an agenda and it was up to them to trigger the events that took place. Conversely, I believe that while the individuals portrayed played a significant role in shaping the course of events (and, consequently, our world today), they were instrumental, but not essential to the process. They were not part of a secret society with an evil plan to enslave humanity. They merely acted out of self interest (even believing they were making the world a better place) and in accordance with the incentives their environment gave them. In other words, if they had not done what they did, other people would have, because the system was set up in a way that this was the only possible outcome.

The 20th century saw an unprecedented acceleration of technological development (which is hardly referenced in the documentary), and the human psyche could not keep up. Our physiology has not changed much since the prehistoric ages. We have a lot more in common with our ape ancestors than we do with the rational beings we like to think we are (not necessarily in the Freudian way though). And we suddenly found ourselves in a completely new environment, which presented brand new challenges and also certain opportunities to everyone who saw them.

The stories of the people who saw those opportunities dominate the documentary. There is no conspiracy. There is simply a profit motive and there are advanced techniques to read people and give them what they (don’t even know they) want. The documentary fails to make that point and lets the viewer assume that there is some dark and mysterious plot behind all this.

I feel that to paint an accurate image of the entanglement of capitalism and democracy of the 20th century, externalities should be mentioned, which the documentary fails to do. The idea of planned obsolescence does come up at one point, but the fundamental flaw in the capitalistic economy is overlooked: as long as neither business nor the consumer pays for externalities, such as destruction of the environment, exploitation of human and natural resources, the system is distorted. Someone will eventually have to pay for these, as we increasingly find with global warming, but the fact that these costs are removed from the economic cycle is essential to understanding the capitalistic societies of the 20th century.

The documentary discusses the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in detail, but it focuses mainly on how they got into power rather than the consequences of their policies, which was just as if not more important in shaping our recent history. The feverish deregulation, privatization and liberalization and the belief that markets were self regulatory and would solve every problem of society lead to suboptimal performances across many domains, growing inequality of wealth distribution and recurring economic crises. The most eloquent example is of course the crisis of 2008, which is obviously out of the scope of current film.

Again, this documentary is definitely a must see for everyone wanting to understand the world today and it begs for a 5th episode. From what we’ve seen of the 21st century so far, the tendencies of the past century have only accelerated. That said, small groups have also sparked up and they keep flashing the light at the end of the tunnel so that we can hope to transcend the Freudian capitalistic socio-economic system sometime in the late 21st century.

Dilemma

The dilemma this documentary raises concerns everyone who wants to succeed in a capitalistic society. To succeed in business you need to employ the same techniques big business does. Or do you?

I don’t think the techniques are bad in themselves. It all depends what you use them for. As long as they are used to figure out real needs of people that will improve their lives and allow them to become better versions of themselves, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. To me the key is solving a real problem that really improves someone’s life as opposed to making them believe that it does.

Lessons

What practical lessons can we take away from all this?

• Question your own wants and desires – they may not be your own.
• To live a good life, you need to work for things bigger than yourself.
• Make products that help people become better versions of themselves and (only) then you can use any technique necessary to get them to buy your product.

A The Century of The Self – A Summary, Critique and Practical Lessons bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Hold your friend accountable the same way you would a stranger. Breaking that rule is the essence of clanism which keeps many of the poor countries poor. The justification “I’m doing it for my family” or friend is the hot bed of corruption and leads to the institutionalization of corruption at the level of a group, company or society. Inspired by Mark Manson and The School of Life

Become confident by 1. gaining relevant experience, 2. getting even more practice with visualization, 3. focusing on what you can control. There is a slight contradiction here with the Stoic principles of negative visualization, which focuses on the bad things that can happen to you. But it’s not really a contradiction, as by contemplating what can go wrong and then specifically imagining how you will come out of those situations, you achieve both goals. Don’t be afraid of thinking about negative stuff, but make sure you can see in your minds eye how you will tackle if any of it happens. Inspired by Conor McGregor.

Take the edge of a heavy statement away with a joke. Compliments or any other statements that deliver a punch and leave the listener dumbfounded and not knowing what to say can create an awkward situation. These can be solved taking the initiative and propelling the conversations further and thus saving them from having to say something. Humor works really well, but anything that will move the conversation is better then waiting for the listener to respond. If the statement was a complement, a slightly derogatory joke works great as it deflates the tension created by the complement and makes the listener laugh. Inspired by Russel Brand.

A Lessons Learned #5/2016 bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

You start losing the game the moment you forget that you are playing it. So don’t. 

Inspired by the Legend and Black Mass.

There are some things that religion has done better than any other entity throughout history. It’s well worth studying the strategies that allowed religions to outperform secular organizations in these specific areas.

Education
Universities do lectures, religions do sermons where you get involved and go home with a vivid memory of an experience. It’s participatory as opposed to passive listening.
Religions know we forget everything unless it’s repeated all the time. So the key principles and teachings (10 commandments, four noble truths) are repeated over and over again.
Religion manages your calendar according to its own agenda so that you are busy with the things that aid your religious advancement year around.
Religion uses art as a means to an end, to communicate the cornerstones of the faith as opposed to looking at art as something that serves its own purpose.

Community
Religion gets strangers together and to be friends or at least notice the human being in the other person. This is more powerful then hobby groups (niche communities) of the secular world, because it covers the entire spectrum of society, whereas hobby groups are limited to certain kinds of people.
Religion deliberately acts as a host and facilitates getting to know total strangers and forming relationships with them. As a result, strong and diverse communities are created.

Organization
Religions are the longest lived and most efficient organizations on the planet.
They are built on a strong foundation of a firm belief in a set of ideas. Discipline and self control is the cornerstone of all organized religions.

Inspired by Alain De Botton.

A Lessons Learned #4/2016 bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.

Let’s assume there is a you that can make a choice of what to think (hint: there isn’t really). If you make a conscious effort, you should be able to focus your attention onto a single thing. However, most of the time you are not, and so the contents of your awareness is determined by your environment or your mind will run seemingly random chains of thought.

That’s often referred to as the monkey mind. The question is, do you want to be controlled by this monkey or would you rather gain at least some level of control over it?

I’ve found two good ways to go about this.

1. Focus your attention on something. A static object or unchanging sound. The point is: have nothing else in your awareness. As soon as thoughts arise, notice them, let them go and refocus your attention.
2. Focus your attention on nothing. Empty your mind. All kinds of thoughts will arise. Notice them and let them go. Refocus on emptiness.

The difficulty with both methods is not being able to let go of arising thoughts. I may get lost in thought for several minutes before catching myself despite my best efforts. The trick that made it a lot easier for me was clicking. Just make any quick, short movement, preferably one that generates a sharp sound, like a click or knock on a hard surface. This will snap you right out of the arising distraction and allow you to refocus. You might be clicking every 5-10 seconds but the frequency goes down as you practice more. This is also called meditation, which is the best you can do to consciously train your mind to choose the contents of your awareness and to control the monkey in your head.

There are many other activities which require your full attention and therefore put you in a meditative state. This is often referred to as flow. However, when the activity and flow state stops, the monkey mind comes right back. And to control it even when you are not in a state of flow, you really need to set time aside for training it with meditation.

So the thing to remember: click as soon as you notice the distraction and regain focus.

A Choosing What to Think: No Bullshit Meditation bejegyzés először Zsolt Babocsai-én jelent meg.