playing with fire
Everyone takes risks everyday. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly weighing tradeoffs between two or more things, whether that’s investment versus return, pain versus comfort, challenge versus ease. Sometimes, the way we weigh our choices will pay off and it does indeed improve our lives. Other times, the opposite is true.
Sometimes, the outcomes of our choices are immediately visible and quantifiable. Other times, the sum of the outcomes of small actions with minimal individual impact compound over time into something we can retrospectively identify as a mountain of progress that we’ve just climbed… or as a slow descent into a hole we passively dug ourselves into. The worst is when we find ourselves in that hole, and we have absolutely no fucking clue how we got there.
Some kinds of life-choice postmortems can be easy to suss out, such as checking your credit card statement and realizing that maybe ordering delivery sushi everyday isn’t the most sustainable way to feed yourself. Others require a serious amount of self-reflection, a potent cocktail of brutal self-honesty and self-compassion, and potentially even therapy. I’ve gotten stuck in seemingly unbreakable negative thought loops which send me to the counselor’s couch more than once, but it became much easier to hit the brakes on the downward spiral once I was able to understand the pattern of negative reinforcing I had locked myself into.
My “aha!” moment the first time this happened was when my friend pointing out to me that I was literally addicted to a fantasy that would never be realized. She was right on the money. The dissonance between reality and fantasy was causing me a great deal of pain, and it was completely self-inflicted. I was miserable. I had taken up smoking as an avoidance mechanism. I had humiliated myself in front of friends. I cried all the time. I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed and go to my classes. And I couldn’t snap out of it because I had immersed myself in a world where everything reminded me of my pain. I had done it by design— the fantasy was beautiful, and the pain was its intoxicating foil.
But the dissonance was getting old, not to mention unsustainable. I was missing out on opportunities to make my life into something different and potentially better than the fantasy. Something had to give. And when I was finally able to wrap my mind around the notion that thoughts patterns and feelings could be addictive, I started looking into therapeutic treatments for addicts.
I don’t remember exactly how hypnotherapy got on my radar, but my logic at the time was approximately: “if this can work for chronic smokers, it can work for me.” The same friend who pointed out the (now-)obvious happened to know a reputable hypnotherapist in town, so I went to her for a handful of sessions. I probably went through a tissue box each time; the hardest part for me was to sit still and keep my focus turned inward.
I had always wondered if I was a maybe bit too unofficially ADD to be hypnotized. As it turns out, I am actually quite susceptible to it. I don’t remember much from the time I was “under.” Generally, the therapist and I would talk about my problem and its context for the first twenty minutes, and then she’d spend the rest of the hour presumably sorting things out in my subconscious for me. I remember focusing on a point of light by her face, or perhaps her pen. I remember her voice counting to ten, at which point I went into what I now realize was a deeply meditative state. The only thing I vividly remember was a relived dream I once had as a child about swimming in an alpine pool and being able to breathe underwater. The water was that kind of crystal clear that lends itself to zen hues of blue and green. I was totally alone. It was silent but for the sound of a waterfall pounding down from above, as well as the currents around me. It was peaceful. It was beautiful.
Beyond that, I have no waking memory of what we did in my mind. She would pull me out hypnosis by counting down from ten, at which point I’d feel very exhausted, but cathartically so. She’d give me affirmations to say to myself daily as “homework,” which I mostly thought were silly but I did them anyway. The desired effects took place eventually. It took time and patience to break all the bad mental habits I had developed that were weighing me down so heavily.
Looking back on it now, I realize that I didn’t go to hypnotherapy to break out of my fantasy loop. I went because I was dangerously close to concluding that peace, strength, and stability could not be found within myself. Sorting out all the external events and emotional associations that contributed to my complex was extremely helpful, but finding the strength to do what needed to be done to reverse course was the real crux of the matter. In my case, I realized that listening to EDM and trance music (not as ironic as you may think) was the main way I’d slip into my daydreaming habit, so I had to quit that cold turkey until the associations had diminished. It took about two years until I could enjoy that entire genre of music again.
Which, if you’re still with me (and thank you if you are, I know I’m long winded), brings me to the entire reason I wrote this. Our minds can be incredibly sharp instruments, but they are still very much a double-edged blade. Hypnotherapy was a great solution for me and I was fortunate to find a therapist who wouldn’t take advantage in some way or another while she was tinkering around in my subconscious, like a mechanic under the hood of a malfunctioning car. Like computers, our minds are very much input-output machines. What we put into them invariably affects how they operate and what comes out. We engage in various states of flow and hypnosis almost everyday. Although I am not an expert, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this subject this year, and I’ve realized several things.
That when I find myself spacing out, I’m going a few levels within myself and my attention is focused inwards— it’s a near-meditative state.
Scrolling absent-mindedly through Instagram and watching endless stories for a quick content fix is near hypnotic.
When I’m wholly engaged in a movie, or I’m wasting the day watching Netflix for hours on end— the films supersede reality to some degree. Hypnosis.
When I zone out while playing ping pong, or my Matrix response kicks in and I dodge a bee like Neo dodges a bullet or catch something I nearly dropped swiftly and cleanly— I’m in a brief episode of flow state. I’ve always known that I play my best ping pong when I let my brain take over as “autopilot.” I don’t even think about my shots and I’m at my most formidable. Now, I realize I’m letting my subconscious/intuitive/right brain both process and react to the information I’m seeing faster than my conscious/analytical/left brain ever could.
We can affect what goes into long-term storage in our right brain via the relative grind of mundane practice with our left brain— you know, the one that gets frustrated and can’t seem to nail that one aerial move you’ve been trying to learn, but then a week later you come back to it and you’ve got it down perfectly.
We can also affect what goes into our subconscious by being extremely aware of the kind of content we consume. For example, ousting toxic people from your life is a great way to reduce toxicity in your psychological intake. Similarly, content in the form of movies, TV shows, cable news, Twitter, and music can also be toxic.
Let me be clear about something here though because this is a big big caveat: there is a huge difference between things that are toxic and things that just don’t feel good. It may feel like your best friend has turned toxic on the topic of your relationship with your boyfriend, but what if she’s genuinely trying to look out for you and gently extricate you from a bad situation that you don’t see because you’re too close?
Unfortunately, we live in a world that might as well be governed by Schrödinger’s cat in the sense that the facts have either been thrown out the window in favor of personal “truths” or have been upgraded to narratives rife with bias supportive of narrator’s position. Furthermore, the people who want to deceive you have gotten very good at twisting perceptions of the facts. I have a sneaking suspicion that posterity will view the 21st century as the time when humanity was so dizzy from competing narratives that we somehow found ourselves in a near-constant state of being gaslit by someone or something. In short, we’re in the “post-truth” era and it’s here to stay for awhile. It’s a psychologically and spiritually miserable time, but here we are.
What has helped me most, especially over the last six months or so, is this methodology I’ve developed to help keep my head above water as I navigate this sea of information, influence, and instability. The following are practices that I strive to adhere to at any given time.
Hold space for healthy, respectful skepticism, the kind that draws conclusions slowly and is open to falsifiability. Exposure to new things and ideas is by no means a bad thing, but acceptance of all new ideas that come your way is overkill. As someone who probably wasn’t Aristotle once said, “The mark of an intelligent mind is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it.” It pays off in the long run to at the very least understand the epistemology of something, even if you don’t draw the same conclusion yourself.
Be vigilant. Always be asking yourself how do the media you’re consuming, the people you surround yourself with, and the things you do align with your values? This one can be scary because it means taking a good, long, hard look at your values and making sure that they are in alignment with one another. Do you strive to be consistent in your behavior and beliefs for the purposes of avoiding hypocrisy, but you make note of a peer who has a pattern of behavior that seems to contradict the values they claim to hold? Be aware of how their behavior influences you: people naturally want to conform in order to feel that they belong.
Stand tall. If you cannot make your own decisions and stand by them, someone else will start making them for you. Do you want someone else to govern your life choices? I sure don’t. The scary thing abut this one is that when you make the best decision that you can, there’s still a good chance it was the wrong decision or that something will derail your plan. Therefore, it should follow logically that this tenet of my approach to sanity involves taking responsibility for the outcome of our choices and learning from them as we go. Which brings me to….
Stay humble. If we’ve done screwed up, we’ve done screwed up, and covering our asses is usually a pretty transparent effort that makes us look worse than if we just owned our mistake. Don’t just be ready and willing to admit when you’re wrong— be enthusiastic about admitting when you’re wrong. But don’t admit that you were wrong about something just because the world is telling you that you’re wrong. You have to come to that conclusion genuinely for yourself. Stick to your guns until if and when that happens.
In an age where the two sides to almost any story live in such vitriolic and diametric opposition to one another, it is extremely tough to stay sane. This is especially true when you factor in the character assassination culture of platforms like Twitter and the hive-mind phenomenon that exists wherever a significant subset of the populace subscribes to the same highly-coordinated sources of information.
“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
-Joseph Goebbels
I include that quote not because I’m a fan (I vehemently am not), but because it lays bare one of the most prevalent mechanisms of modern evil in the world today. I’ve personally had to take a step back from almost everything and everyone so I can recover that stillness, that strength to trust my own bullshit detector, and decide for myself what actually makes sense. That’s why I particularly live by the fourth item in the list above— every time I genuinely come to the conclusion that I was wrong about something, I’m one step closer to getting to the bottom of whatever it is and I know I’m genuinely seeking the truth, because in the immortal words of my favorite author:
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
-Atlas Shrugged
Back to Schrödinger’s cat— it’s a quantum physics concept that suggest by way of example that as long as the box is closed, the cat exists in a dual state of being alive and dead simultaneously. But when we open the box, that cat is either going to be alive or dead. Outside of the quantum world, it cannot be in both states at once. This is what it means to hold space— we do not know. It could be one way, or it could be the other.
In some of the most important questions of our lives, it is imperative that we seek strength and guidance from within (and dare I say “beyond?”) our immediate environment. I firmly believe in the existence of free will, but we cannot access it if we allow ourselves to mainline our values, beliefs, and decision matrices from the culture into which we increasingly find ourselves plugged.
“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”
-Matthew 16:26
Our minds are our most valuable asset in our time here on earth, but they are also the most hackable piece of hardware we have. Just ask Yuval Noah Harari.
So, will you let your flame of free will be snuffed out by the external entities that look at you as a puppet? Or will you protect it, harness it, and use it to guide you through your life independently?
To be in the world or of the world?
The choice is yours.
