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[ironjohnredcognition]

Impressions

h/t @afx626

They excluded you for reasons that have little to do with you. You do not really know them, and they do not really know each other, or you.

All of you have formed impressions of one another through imperfect senses. What you are reacting to is not their behavior, but to what your impressions of them have surmised are their motivations. But your impressions are imperfect. Perhaps they wanted to let you be. Perhaps you did something that one of them found annoying, which you are not even aware of. (And perhaps you really did that thing... and perhaps not. Their impressions are just as fallible as yours.)

Young adults in dorms and other shared housing often find themselves shocked at how their roommates behave. After all, they are raised to expect a certain set of rules. But other people grow up in houses with other sets of rules. One person expects to be able to crank up the music at 3AM. The other expects peaceful silence all the time. Each hates the other because an unspoken, assumed contract has been violated. Because their parents reacted to such situations with authoritarianism and demands, that is what they do as well, as this is the behavior that their parents modeled for them. And so they lock horns.

It is hard to brush off this perceived sleight. Do it anyway. Do not think of it past the point at which it yields any additional insight. If you tell yourself "they hurt my feelings" fifty times, you have wasted at least 49 thoughts because all you did was repeat to yourself what you already knew. Now you are tormenting yourself, not on behalf of them, but your impressions of them, which are in your own mind. The person holding the whip is not them; it is a part of you with which you must seek to educate. But first, you must understand that that thing you hate is not the other person, but a part of your own mind that is effectively "walled off" to the point that you can't perceive what it really is.

An impression should not be feared. You should not seek revenge against it. You should not seek to punish it. You should regard the impulse to hate it with extreme suspicion. It is a part of your mind that you have been fooled into thinking is another person, through lack of education. Well, here is your chance. You have a situation that demands that you find a better solution. This is the only way to integrate philosophy into your life: to use it when it is sorely needed. That is the only thing that puts it to the test and forces you to burn off ineffective thought patterns.

The proper use of an impression is prediction. If I do this, what will they probably do? You interrogate an impression as you would interrogate a spreadsheet or a search engine. If you confuse an impression for what it represents, you don't see that it's in your mind. You think it's outside your mind. And as a Stoic, that means you don't try to control it. Therein lies the corruption, and that is what you have to learn to remedy.

At that point, the stage will be set. You will have the lemons; now to make lemonade. Find a quiet place to sit, and bring three things:

Paperback copies of books. Meditations, Enchiridion, Seneca's letters, etc. (Not digital copies. Your phone is a slot machine. Put it away. A Kindle might be okay if it's strictly a reader, and not a Kindle Fire with dozens of apps to distract you.)

A pack of writing tablets.

A box of pens or pencils, whichever you prefer.

I deliberately specify a pack of writing tablets and a box of writing utensils. Not just one of each. This is not a fast process.

Read, transcribe that which jumps out at you, and follow those transcriptions with your own notes.

This is a very relaxing, centering process. Those parts of your perspective that are useless will be unlearned, replaced by wisdom that's so on-point that people spent thousands of hours transcribing it by hand during the long millennia before printing presses.

The skills you learn will be applicable to small problems at first, and with practice, to larger and larger problems. It takes months to get sort of OK at it; after all, there are a lot of useless thought patterns in your head, ingrained by decades of repetition, and these are not shed overnight. With adequate practice and contemplation, you can replace them with better ones.

Writings by modern authors can be useful, but they certainly haven't endured the test of time as the ancient works have. In particular, be very skeptical anything with a title in the integer-noun-promise format. Whatever you buy, put ten times more weight on negative reviews than positive reviews. A lot of people who write these reviews are desperately looking for answers and become star-struck very easily, writing glowing reviews before they have had a chance to see whether the advice is good or not. Many authors specifically target such people because that is good for revenue.

[ironjohnredcognition]

The Directing mind

h/t @afx626

In all of these occasions, you are summoning impressions in your mind and then reacting to them as though they were real.

The Stoics taught of the ton hegemonikon ("directing mind") as an entity unto itself. Aurelius established it as being the uppermost authority within the mind. The important thing about this is that the mind contains the directing mind, and other things, which could be called lower faculties — such as impressions.

He did this often. If something in your mind that is not your directing mind should be in discomfort, he said, that is its concern. (Paraphrasing.)

One of the main "powers" granted by Stoicism is that you begin to realize that your mind is not one monolithic thing, but many components that interact. (Prescient of them. There isn't one modern neurologist who would dispute this.) Moreover, your Directing Mind is free to disagree with other parts: not merely to repress them and lie to itself about how the feeling doesn't exist, but to acknowledge that it is there, and incorrect.

The sense of nervousness you speak of isn't "you." It isn't correct just because you feel it. The only reason you take it for granted is that you never learned how to do otherwise.

Imagine this: You feel nervous, and instead of recoiling and getting your heart rate up, you merely interpret it as a signal. You don't let your thoughts run away; if dire predictions arise in your mind, you quiet them down so that they don't distract you. Now you can think a little more clearly.

It's hard at first, so you start with something easy. It's easier to dismiss your anger over the supermarket not having your favorite Lunchable than it is heavier matters, so you practice on little things like that. And when you check out, if you stumble with your words and feel silly at the cash register, you remind yourself on the way to the car that your stumbling has already been forgotten by the cashier, who has already heard fifty people misspeak some word today, and will hear the same thing many more times before the sun is down. The sense that other people are intensely interested in your every tiny mistake is, I'm happy to report, largely misguided, and not worthy of the trust you invest in it.

Over time, you try this technique — this deliberate, conscious granting or withholding of assent (agreement) to your impressions — and you get better and better at it for larger and larger troubles. You find that things that troubled you to no end don't seem so severe as they did before.

Ultimately, an impression (like "the cashier thinks I'm a dork") is a tool to be used, not an oppressive phantom to run and hide from — and certainly not to be mistaken for a guaranteed fact about reality. If you think the cashier thinks you're a dork, so what? (Even if it is true!) Does it change how you use the credit card machine or how you push your cart through the doors?

"You are just an impression. You have given me (the Directing Mind) information. That is your purpose, and that purpose is now complete. What I do with that information is not your concern, but mine. Isn't that why you gave it to me in the first place?"

Essentially, you are de-automating processes that have been running automatically, so that you can retrain them with better information and strategies.

There is no thought in your mind that doesn't owe you an explanation for why you should think it instead of some other thought. Remember that.

A tenet of Stoicism is that most of what we think and do is unnecessary.

An impression says, "I wish I had these capabilities I had before!" Then you dwell because for some fucked up reason our minds are set up to allow us to think that dwelling is a subset of "doing something useful," which it isn't.

You have already had the thought that you wish you had your former capabilities. This thought was worth having at most one time. Every time you re-think it, you tell yourself what you already know, without surfacing any new useful information.

Maybe you can do something about this, and maybe you can't. I suppose the place to start would be to try to recognize when it's happening, and see if you can't prevail upon yourself to replace that thought with another.

When an ancient philosopher — I forget who, might have been Diogenes — was getting old, he fell; and on this, he chastised the ground: "Don't be so greedy! You'll have me soon enough!" He didn't fight it, so it didn't seem to make him nervous.

It's hard for me to give more specific advice because I don't know what you have to work with, and my best advice is to talk to someone who knows what the hell they are talking about, like a psychologist who specializes in TBI.

If you can't afford that, I — a person who does not know what the hell he's talking about — would suggest observing these things, learning how to predict their arrival, and allowing some part of yourself to say, for example, "Ah, Mr. Hyde is nearly here again. I should preemptively go sit somewhere quiet until he has left me, and then I can go about the rest of my day." Or, "I can't remember... Probably won't be able to for a few hours... I'll write it down and come back to it later."

I would not tell myself that I have accepted it. I would be more interested in observing evidence that suggests to what extent I have perhaps accepted it. It isn't a light switch. Acceptance comes in gradations.

You really, really ought to know a few things about the architecture of your brain. That can clarify a lot.

Paul Ekman (Emotional Awareness), Gerald Edelman (Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness), and many and others have written a lot on this subject. I can't type the entire contents of those books into this post, but I can give you a somewhat crude synopsis.

A few inches behind each eye is a brain structure called an amygdala. This is often cited as the "fear center" but that's like naming a gallon after a single drop. Amygdalas generate emotions, but they also play a part in facial recognition, recall of the social relationships between people, and many other processes. The amygdalas also have the distinction of terminating the olfactory nerves directly, and are naturally involved in smell.

They are not considered to be a part of the conscious mind, but they wield massive influence over it. One of their main activities is to write information directly to the prefrontal cortex. They have a generous amount of bandwidth and access with which to do this. (They have to because part of their job is to save your life during emergencies.) The primary route into the PFC (and functionally the conscious mind) is the amygdalofugal pathway.

The amygdalas are also privileged to early access to sensory data. They can "see" and "hear" things a fraction of a second before your conscious mind becomes aware of them. When you recognize a relative the very instant you see them, without any delay whatsoever, you have your amygdalas to thank. They are also capable of seizing control of your PFC and issuing mandatory commands. If you've ever found yourself dodging (or directing your car) around an extreme and sudden hazard, with unusual agility and clarity, and almost feel you're not the one doing it... yep, that's your amygdalas.

The amygdalas can write an impression directly into your conscious mind. It will arrive seemingly out of nowhere, and usually without context. Their advantage is that they're optimized for extremely fast reaction, and because they have early access to sensory data, they can get the drop on your conscious mind.

But...

Your conscious mind can also form its own impressions. It's a fraction of a second behind the amygdalas, but it does have one advantage. When you have a behavior you want to modify, you can train yourself to "smell it coming." There is always some series of triggering events, and these can be consciously detected and intercepted. If your PFC steps in before the amygdalas take control, it has a chance to assert itself. With adequate practice, it can get quite good at this.

Now you have a very rough, basic framework for understanding the fundamentals of where impressions come from, and how they can be managed — what it means to manage them, "behind the curtains." What the wetware is actually doing.

One of the corruptions of the Directing Mind mentioned by Marcus Aurelius is "this thought would be superfluous."

You can't dismiss certain unpleasant impulses, like anxiety. They nag at you. Good! That's supposed to happen! What's missing is this:

Interpret the unpleasant impulse as a signal (and nothing more!) that something is not quite adequate.

Figure out how to remove the impulse's reason for firing in the first place.

Once the impulse has fired, you can acknowledge it and do something about it. "You want me to do something? Fine, I am scheduling two hours tonight to work on this." The part of your unconscious mind the impulse came from wants it to be addressed, just like an impulse indicating thirst comes from a lower faculty that will be watching to see whether you appear to be moving toward water, and will flog you more and more aggressively if you do not.

That which originated the impulse is looking for either immediate action or reliable future action. That action must be predicted as having an optimal chance of success. If these conditions are not met, the impulse will not leave you alone — unless you have trained yourself to dissociate from it, which is really not a good idea. The impulse is a tool to be used; or if not useful, refined or repudiated. It is not something to be hidden from.

This is one of the pitfalls of Stoicism. "What is outside my mind is nothing to it" doesn't mean you ignore your problems. It just means you don't let them get on top of you, or forget the best use of your mind, or have an unrealistic expectation of what life will give you. There are concepts of "preferred indifferents" and "unpreferred indifferents." If the outside world was completely meaningless, there wouldn't be two kinds of indifferents.

It may be that you interpret the impulse as spurious. "I already set aside time for this. Why are you bothering me again?" Or, "The impression behind this impulse is based on a previous understanding of my relation to the world, but I have internalized a better one now... so what am I supposed to do with it? You must have come to me purely out of habit." Or,  "I already failed at this thing, and it's obvious that I should try that thing instead. Why are you motivating me to work on an obsolete problem? What is the useful output?"

There is no thought in your head which is immune to interrogation. All thoughts must be able to answer: "Why are you useful? Why are you the best thought for me to think right now?" "Ah, but I feel anxious!" "So what? I'm already doing all I can."

[ironjohnredcognition]

Marionette

h/t @afx626

If you want to make the other person powerless, you need something from them. That thing you need is where the weakness is. That is what I would chisel away at next. Aurelius would say that the world is full of evil people. Therefore, you should expect to meet them, and should not be surprised when you do, and should not take it personally.

This is a tall order. Let me explain.

Neither of you can directly perceive the other. You have to take in images and sounds through noisy, distorted sensory channels, combine this with faded memory and enormous piles of assumptions (which are never wholly accurate) and social impulses that seemingly arise out of nothing, and then form impressions from this morass. Those impressions are what you are both actually mad at.

You are both playing with marionettes that you have confused with reality. The thing you want to deprive of power is entirely within your own head, and has nothing to do with the genuine article. You may as well throw darts at a picture of someone.

The more you internalize this, the more you will genuinely not care. If that is your only goal, then your only concern will be that which is within your power, and the weakness of having to get back at someone will not be there.

Until you get there, that impression you have formed of the other person will be free to torment you. It will come after you with a whip. You better get back at them! You better take their power! But it isn't really them. You are being pursued by that same marionette.

If the other person (the actual one) wants to torment you, you are doing their work for them. If you got them all wrong and they're not interested, it's somehow even more ridiculous. That is the mental machinery that you have to dismantle and replace with something better.

One of the primary tools of the Stoic is to withhold assent (agreement) with impressions. An impression says "homework sucks lol" and you answer it with "living on a sheet of cardboard under the freeway sucks more lol."

Practice withholding assent in easy matters to get better at it overall. Do you eat two scoops of ice cream or will one do? How about one. You feel the impulse to take your phone out, and you don't. If you spend too much time on Reddit or whatever else, set an app timer. You feel the impulse to disable the timer? "Not today, Satan."

It would frankly take hours to look up all the references, but here are a few concepts from Aurelius:

Your mind is a fortress. What is outside it cannot get inside. (NOT JUST WHEN YOU STUB YOUR TOE. This applies to gravely serious matters as well. He had over a dozen children, and had to bury many of them. And he lived through a plague, and so on.)

Your Directing Mind exists at the apex of consciousness.

Impressions exist to serve the Directing Mind. If one of them is troubled, that is its concern, and not the Directing Mind's problem.

The Directing Mind should put to use every resource before it.

And, of course, Aurelius, and Epictetus, and Xeno, and the rest, spoke of the power of assent (prohairesis), the ability to decide whether or not to believe an impression, even if it seems patently obvious that it must be true.

How I came to array these concepts and connect them together: Hard times + ancient Stoic literature + intense journaling.

There were some other things that helped, such as The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz. (He may well be a plastic shaman, but that book taught me not to believe everything I think.) I also figured out many years ago that within a brain, information is generated in one place and interpreted in another, and that other place could theoretically reject the information as invalid, no matter how convincing

You form an impression of this creature and the heinous thing they have done, and another impression rises up and directs hate lasers at it. Now two phantoms are fighting in your head, filling your blood with cortisol, and you're spending all your energy on that instead of figuring out what to do.

Instead, you can interpret the anger as a signal, and let its energy drive the strategy with which you will respond. Think of it this way: you can do a wicked person's work on their behalf and let your impression of their doings drive you in circles, or you can lay plans and bring them to fruition. Not to satisfy your hate, which can NEVER be satisfied, but to produce the best outcome.

Your job is to remove what is generating that signal in the first place. Hate really means "do something, do your best, remove my reason to exist as a signal in your mind." You have to be somewhat analytical about this.

Your impression of the evil person can be turned from a hate magnet into a useful tool. You can interrogate it. What are this person's motivations, weaknesses? If you do some particular thing, what is their likely response? Think also of the victim. What can you do for them? The most just thing is the best possible outcome for them and that's not about you or your feelings or impressions. Place yourself at their service.

It is the difference between you using your tools, and them using you. Let your compassion for the victim serve as motivation to convert hate into resolve. Hate is like a band saw, great for a very limited set of tasks, but not something you just want to leave running while you run around flailing your limbs. The moment you're aware of it, it has already served its purpose.

Aurelius said that evil people exist, and to suppose you'll never meet one is foolish. It is an EXPECTED part of life to encounter them, and to have to figure out what to do about them. Don't focus on the "wrongness" of what they do. The second you think it's wrong you already know your opinion about it, and dwelling on that has no useful output; you are just telling yourself what you already know and bathing in the awfulness of it. What you do in response is all that matters.

[ironjohnredcognition]

Deadlifts

Lifting heavy on deadlifts and squats should improve your back in your later years, not the inverse.

The homosapien is the only bipedal vertebrate mammal. Vertebrae are meant to counteract shear force; that is, force applied perpendicularly to the spine. That is how vertebrate mammals evolved, and that is why all of them except for one walk on four legs (or fly in a path parallel to the ground then hang upside down to sleep). The spine can last for a long, long time as long as compressional force is not applied to it, but because humans are bipedal, we apply compression force to our spine all the time. Bulging disks occur because of compressional force. Scoliosis occurs because of compressional force. Rounded shoulders, nerd-neck, anterior pelvic tilt; all compression-force based compensations. The spine begins to structurally deteriorate basically the moment you stop growing. So how do we avoid being crippled at age 30? Our spine is not the main structural component of our posture. Our muscles are.

Humans have the strongest proportional glute muscles of any animal in the kingdom. No other animal (besides corgis) has the booty of a human. That big fat ass holds our pelvis in place, which in turn holds our spine upright, but that's not all. The lower back muscles on a human are the strongest muscles we have. That is why the deadlift is (usually) the strongest lift. The lower back muscles, those powerhouse lumbar rods, hold and support our spine for out entire lives.

It is imperative that everyone works these muscles through progressive overload and strength training. You don't have to pull 600 pounds from the floor, but you should on a weekly basis load those muscles in an intelligent and safe way for the future health of your back. People with bad backs who lift a lot of weight either trained heavier than they should, or more likely, they created imbalances in their muscular structure that caused the hamstrings and pelvic muscles to overcompensate for proportional weaknesses. This same imbalance is caused by doing nothing at all, and sitting all day on that fat ass god gave you.

The end of my little rant here is that you will always end your life with a bad back if you get old enough. We are predestined to have these problems. The question is... when? Do you want to be in a walker when you're 60? Hell no. You could be pulling 400 when you're 60, 300 when you're 70, 200 when you're 80, and by then who really gives a fuck just die already.

[ironjohnredcognition]

Mental Models

We’re constantly interpreting the world around us each and every day to make sense of it all–frantically untangling untold raw information from our own experiences into sensible conclusions that we can make sense of to better understand the game of life. 

To combat faulty thinking, we’re highly dependent on our ability to filter information through successful frameworks that we’ve picked up in the game. These frameworks are called Mental Models, and they’re tools that we can collect throughout our life to enhance our ability to reach accurate conclusions and execute sound plans.