The Lady In Red
I’ve recently spent a week with new and old friends absorbing the Portuguese sun and dancing to the rhythm of Alan Walkers Darkside. It was all about feeling and spreading the love, strengthen old and creating new connections. Music, people, sun and alcohol, a literal dance on the edge between chaos and order. I’ve been on autopilot, not worrying not thinking, just feeling.
Now I’m back at the desk. Back in a predictable, ordered and rational environment typing away on my keyboard. The feelings battery is completely recharged, and its time to take advantage of that by going deep to see whether new thinking is leading to new insights.
This post is dedicated to The Lady In Red who was the cherry on the cake that week by sparking the thought process leading to this article. Listen to the song and lets get to it.
The beginning of this post is following up on “the search for truth” that I described in this post as the following:
You need to learn continuously and learn for the sake of learning, by taking in new information about the world you live in. This learning is a search for the truth.
Back when I wrote this statement it seemed to make the most sense but since I’ve published it, it just felt wrong. It felt selfish and individualistic. It did not feel right when trying to generalise it. Should everyone really just spend their lives learning for the sake of learning or is there something else that is universal and applicable to more people and their individual lives? To be honest “learn for the sake of learning” almost sounds to me like “knowledge is power” which makes me sick in my stomach. And imagine if this statement actually led to the truth. Holy sh*t, this life would suck.
So here I am giving it another shot. Where is truth to be found? What I would like to propose is the following statement:
The search for truth is thinking about how to think and what to think about. By practicing the search for truth, the path of truth emerges.
Thinking about how to think:
The most reliable predictor for accurate long term predictions and good judgement is in fact how much a person thinks about how to think. This is important for people in jobs trying to understand and forecast the future, make policy decisions or take financial bets. It applies to everyone trying to forecast the future but it becomes more and more important the more complex and unpredictable the environment you are trying to forecast is. The reason being that complex environments have more variables, unknowns, possible scenarios etc. You need to be able to anticipate it all, which is not possible for humans or machines at this moment in time. For instance, there is no one that can predict the exact movements of the financial markets and there is no one who can predict with certainty how, when and why the war in Ukraine will end.
[my original statement “learn for the sake of learning” basically emerged from the above reasoning. In other words, learn for the sake of learning so that you are equipped with knowledge that allows you to see different possible scenarios of the future. There is 2 problems with this:
It assumes that all you are trying to do is forecasting while that mostly applies to people with specific jobs or ambitions, not to the regular persons and lives more broadly.
Adding better fuel to a shitty car doesn’t fix the car. In the sense that, your existing framework of how to think about things does not change by feeding it with new information. Your thinking needs fixing all the time or do you assume your thinking is perfect and everyone else is wrong? Stay humble my friend (talking to myself here).
]
So here we are now agreeing that thinking about how to think is more than just learning for the sake of learning and forecasting. Forgive my naivety.
“How to think” has has to do with “the choice of what to think about” which has to do with “how to define what to think about” which has to do with “consciousness”.
How to think:
It all starts with thinking about how to think. Most commonly, this thinking is forced on you by something external. Consider the following examples:
Your mother dies in an auto accident. The pain is unbearable. Your life is filled with darkness. Why did that happen to me? Why my mother? Things are incomprehensible to you. After months of grief you start to feel better, you couldn’t come up with a reason of why your mother had to die but you have accepted the fact that it happened and that life needs to go on. A few months later things get better and better and after a few years you are able to think about your mother without an overwhelming feeling of sadness or tears pouring down your face. So what happened here? You have not been able to come up with a logical reasoning explaining what happened. What you have been able to do is to think about the situation differently. You might have started to believe in a higher force, in God. You might have come to belief that where she is now (in heaven or the sky) she is happy and can watch over all the people she cares about and loves. Whatever you might have come up with, it is at it’s essence a transformation that has been taking place about how you think about the death of your mother. This transformation has been driven by the unbearable pain that you felt and that you needed to overcome.
You are 3 years old and play with other kids on the street. Even at that age you can’t just follow whatever pre-defined thinking framework you got in your head. To get along with the other kids and “play”, you need to learn how to adjust to the other kids. You grow up and over time, while having loads of interactions, you adjust the way you think.
You are in a love relationship. Love relationships most commonly consist of 2 individuals (trouples, I hear you). As an individual you are 100% of yourself and 50% of the couple. For the couple to exist and to last, both individuals need to understand each other. Since the other person is not you and I assure you, does not think like you, you are forced, to some extent, to question your own thinking to understand the other person and the couple. The situation, forces you once again to think about how to think.
You are in a love relationship and your partner breaks up with you after 3 years. You are heartbroken and confused, maybe angry, and in a lot of pain. You don’t know what the hell is going on and whether you will ever get over it. The other person seems stupid, mean, and has no clue of what he/she is missing out on. You are trying to understand what went on in the other persons head to break up with you or what might be going on in the other persons head right now. In the end you figure out a story that helps you to move on. That’s how people usually get over breakups but actually never really understand what happened in the other persons head. Moving on after a break up is less about understanding what happened in the other persons head but more about changing how you think about the breakup.
How to think is mostly forced on you through life events and scenarios that you might find yourself in over time. These events are almost life and death situation for yourself cause what would a life be in a sad, depressed, painful state. You would be miserable and not able to function in this society.
The next step and what should emerge out of this “how to think” scenarios is the skill of “what to think about”.
The choice of what to think about:
I’m convinced that to give yourself the chance to understand something you have to experience it. To know that you can change your thinking you need to experience how your thinking is changing. A change in how to think does not guarantee the experience of the change, for that experience to happen you actually need to be aware of the change. All of that, just to say that this post or other attempts of the past that tried to explain the importance of thinking about how to think, might just be futile. If you have never experienced a change in your own thinking, explaining to you “what to think about” might just be mission impossible.
The default setting or “the default thinking” is the program each of us is running on a day in, day out basis. Realising that the default setting is not the only setting and that you have the ability to chose what that setting should be, is “the choice of what to think about”. You are able to choose your own thinking.
To choose what to think about on a daily basis is hard and it takes attention, discipline and awareness. However, if you a re able to do it, you have the freedom to choose what reality is, what meaning is and what to worship. You are able to decide what your story is and what adventure you want to go on.
I’ve been intrigued in the past by why sports play such an important role in society. Sports are actually not providing any tangible value to anyone and yet society values top performers way more than 99.9999% of people on the planet. I’ve slowly come to believe that the admiration comes less from the fight, competition, entertainment or raw emotions but from a sophisticated display of discipline, attention and awareness. The best of the best are the masters in these areas and the sport itself is a beautifully entertaining way to present it to the public. These athletes are the masters of turning of the default setting and to do everything necessary to be the best and that is what people admire. Other examples of default setting transcendence are those people that in miserable situations are able to spread love and support although they have lived through the same things as everyone else or those people that never get intimidated or demotivated by rejections and just keep on working until they get what they were going for.
I’ve no intention of insulting anyone here and what follows is just my observation not my opinion or personal feeling towards obese people. I tend to believe that obese people are seen by society as an embodiment of the default setting. They represent the incapability of being disciplined with food, the lack of attention for their personal health and unawareness of the simple fact that they are obese and considered less attractive. Obese people are not the only ones though. You could argue the same for lazy, moody, depressed or grumpy people. Basically all people that show indications of being “not well adjusted” in changing environments and scenarios. Contrary to that, you admire and are attracted to people and scenarios transcending your default setting and deep down by admiring something, you want to make it a part of yourself. You are breaking away from your default setting by admiring others, even if its just for a brief moment.
How to define what to think about:
I believe that what should guide you in defining what to think about is your unbearable and unbreakable desire to know the truth. It is the north star that will always remind you to think about how to think and ultimately what to think about.
Most scenarios are not life or death scenarios. Therefore, you are not forced into how to think and what to think about. Noticing the scenarios where you actually have a choice becomes key. The higher the number of scenarios where you are able to do it the closer you are getting to the truth. This is the embodiment of discipline, attention and awareness.
If you look back at the examples I gave in the “how to think” section earlier on. It becomes clear that these scenarios are all in some way related to feelings, the feeling of love, loss, belonging, pain etc. They are also related to people and relationships between people.
Feelings only exist in the relationship to other things or other people and are the essence of making us think about how to think. For this process, not to remain an unconscious change in the default setting, you need to understand the process and understanding comes from experience. Once you understand, you can let yourself guide by the truth while paying attention and being aware and disciplined. Notice how I mentioned the word “unconscious” above? Is this process what defines consciousness?
Before digging deeper into consciousness, I should discuss what NOT to do when defining what to think about.
Thinking about yourself: Why would you think about yourself? Do you really know what’s best for you or what in the long term is good or bad for you? Are you living in the future? On top of that didn’t I just discuss that how to think has to do with feelings and feelings only exist in relationship to other people. Maybe you yourself would be better of by thinking about other people, your relationships to other people, and what you could contribute to other people’s lives. Ultimately, there are many ways to put that into practice.
Thinking about what’s good or bad: Can you really predict what’s good or bad? How come that no one can predict simpler, more concrete things such as the markets, but you assume that you can predict what’s good or what’s bad in this world? Defining what’s good or bad is the job of morality and morality is not an objective truth, so are religion and culture and all the other tools that exist for social organization. If you really think about it, everything that happens is good for someone or something. Things only become good or bad once you define them as such.
Note that all I’m describing is about thinking and how to think. Saying it out loud and acting on it is whole different story that I’m not addressing here. That story would need to include geography, laws, rules, rituals, cultures, religion, morality etc. These things should have nothing to do with “simply” how to think.
Now back to consciousness.
Consciousness:
I do not know what consciousness really is or where it comes from. Listen though, cause I’ve some more things to say: If we humans are different to all other species or things on this planet, then because we are conscious or at least because we seem to have a higher consciousness than every other being on this planet that we are aware of. So what does that mean?
I believe, and probably I’m completely wrong, that there is 3 components to consciousness:
feeling: exists through the interaction with other beings
reason: some kind of computational process taking place in all beings
understanding/awareness: the capacity to think about how to think and what to think about
We all reason and feel to some extent, no matter how weird we are. What sets us apart from other beings is our capacity to take a step back and to observe, to experience and to decide what we think, even if only really occasionally. This is what being a conscious human being is about, and if you don’t do it you are in a way no different than a sloth hanging on a tree or the tree the sloth is hanging on.
Final words:
New thoughts and ideas are just the act of dissecting, recombining and processing already existing thoughts and combining them with personal experiences & feelings.
I’m 26 and don’t know anything about life. I’ve hardly experienced anything. So consider most of this the work of the following people.
David Foster Wallace, Charles T. Munger, Jordan Peterson, Philip E. Tetlock, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Itzler, Marc Andreessen, Lex Friedman, Roger Penrose, Paul Kalanithi.
Some additional thoughts and ideas might have come from some other people, books, stories, conversations I’ve gotten familiar with in the past, but I couldn’t locate them.
The lady in red:
If you have made it till here it’s because you are still wondering what’s up with The Lady In Red. Well, I’m getting inspired by the most surprising situations and sometimes I only need one small thing that triggers a whole cascade of thoughts.
Besides the fact that The Lady In Red was gorgeous, and beauty is for sure a source of inspiration, she short circuited my brain for a moment by telling me that she was working as a paediatrician.
This is probably making you even more confused, but if you followed my reasoning throughout this post really carefully I believe you can put one and one together. I will leave it at that.