Relief comes not from the absence of discomfort, but of your relation to it. Boredom in meditation isn’t a sign of failure. It’s an honest glimpse into the noise of the mind, and how resistant it is to seeing itself.
One reason suffering feels so persistent is that it’s always referred back to a self: my pain, my failure, my restlessness. This “self” we defend and try to improve is not a stable entity at all. It’s a process, a shifting collection of memories, habits, sensations, and reactions. When you look closely, there’s no fixed point you can call “I” apart from the contents of experience itself. The sense of a solid self is an illusion created by the mind’s constant narration. And if the self is not what it seems, then neither is the suffering that revolves around it. This doesn’t erase pain, but it puts it in a different frame, as something arising within awareness, not something happening to a permanent subject.
We do not choose to be angry, or elated, or depressed, or in hysterics. These emotions arise naturally. And, given enough time, they evaporate. We don’t have the capacity to feel as sad, happy, or angry, as we organically felt in the moment of whatever surprised us and produced the impassioned sentiment. This means that we didn’t control or choose it to happen either. We simply witnessed our brain produce the sentiment. It produced anger and we mistakenly thought, “I’m angry”.
But you as the witness of your thoughts and sentiments are only a part of the brain that produces them. That shift in understanding is not dramatic, but it can be a radical step in minimizing suffering by grasping your place in the nature of your mind.
>the sort of Substack that largely works by catering to the prejudices of its readers, telling them over and over again how noble and brave they are and how their enemies are morons and assholes.
Well THAT narrows it down to "most things on the Internet."
I didn’t expect or ask for my immune system to go sideways to develop lung disease and pulmonary hypertension. I didn’t want to have to hide from sunshine or being around people because my immune system is fragile. I don’t want to have episodes of explosive coughing that cause me to cut my tongue on my teeth. Those are the Bad Things that are happening to me. It’s what I have to deal with. I get through my days with the grace of God, the support of my family, and recognizing all the GOOD things I have going on. Could it be better? Of course. Could it be worse? Absolutely, far, far worse. I am grateful for every day that it is not.
That list of likelihood of bad things happening doesn't rank how bad each thing is; acne is not as bad as Guilliame Bare syndrome. Speaking as the mother of a child with a 1 in 100,000 rare disease, its rarity exacerbates the tragedy of the symptoms. And it makes it absolutely clear that while everybody may hurt to some degree, some people suffer to a far greater degree far more of the time.
The biography of the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho sounds a lot like Cameron, including the part about not feeling pain. Pyrrho, however, gave a recipe for his disposition; the fullest description we have of it is in book one of Sextus Empiricus' "Outlines of Pyrrhonism." The most important part of it is to never consider anything to be inherently good or bad.
I laughed off meditation for 50 years. My wife tried to get me into it 9 years ago and it only made me angry. I found my own path to it eventually (you, Tamler, and Dave were on that winding path) and it has been life changing. It took a long time to stick, it’s like learning a new sport, only using your brain. My journey required a lot of time, openness, and self compassion. The pandemic gave me the time and openness came through a lot of reading and sitting.
A related calculation: if you have a good friend for many years, the odds are quite high that they are going to say or do something *very* hurtful to you at some point in time.
Suppose there’s a 97% chance they won’t say or do anything terribly hurtful to you in a year. That seems pretty reasonable, since there’s always a tiny chance that they fall into pretty unfavorable circumstances that trigger their insecurities, faults, or weaknesses, and they end up lashing out at you since you were available and they weren’t in control of themselves. Part of being psychologically wise is realizing that truth about humans.
If you do the math, you’ll discover that over a roughly 20-year period there’s about a 50/50 chance they will eventually do or say something really hurtful to you. They might be your spouse, your sibling, your parent, your child, your favorite neighbor, or coworker. Prepare yourself.
"Be pitiful, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Thank you for providing the source for this quote. I've seen it attributed to Plato a number of times (replacing "pitiful" with "kind"), and I was certain that it was not Plato.
re substack charging: what charge for substack membership maximises your income? At £65 pa I might subscribe to a single feed. At £6.50 I'd more likely subscribe to 10.
re your envy: how much is that cos of his no of followers and how much is it your disdain at his output [his goat was never alive!]? If his stuff was as good as yours would you still resent it? Perhaps only in a self-pitying "why not me?" sense.
BTW: I'm envious of your writing skill but I still wish you every success and lots of paying followers. Long may your goat continue to lay its golden eggs!
Regarding yesterday's writing about the doctor, my first thought I didn't end up sharing was about statistics. Not formal statistics, but the personal accessibility to an intuition of the scaling volume and possibility quickly. This isn't the same thing as pattern recognition as Kahneman defines it.
I thought you may be worried you may be referring to an having an unwanted admirerer MD.
I've had an issue with an otherwise lovely female doctor after my appendectomy a few years ago.
The scans showed some inflammation which she attributes to a bacterial infection. She was, "99% sure," she said with rhetorical gotcha flourish.
I think she saw that I used to drink too much and assumed sexual recklessness. I agreed to the harmless tests but said I thought she was wrong. She was wrong. To her credit, she sounded embarrassed and apologetic in her follow up phone call.
I still don't know the cause. I keep meaning to try cutting out coffee for tea as taking the evolutionary path to unexplained inflammation.
I've experimented on myself previously to disastrous consequences, though.
I think there's such a thing as positive envy. Maybe that's a term asking for confusion. I don't think I could care enough about anything to be negatively envious. I could be upset to find out I've been mislead for years.
As for sensitivity, you have a point. I imagine this can be a problem in families if they aren't equipped to explain their experiences on the relevant level. Prescriptions, fashions and statistics can only be of so much use, particularly if you want to live creatively.
That's why I love Evolutionary Psychology. I'm only upset I didn't find it sooner. Which is why I complained about DEI, somewhat erroneously, as I immediately saw that I had been imprisoned by my own sensitivity to operationalized language biases. SEL outside of Catholic School and Suzuki had been more the center of my relevant confusion in Classical Music.
I'd never have thought that my boundless desire to learn, practice, study and create would have needed to negotiate a labyrinth of incoherent figurative gatekeeping.
I wonder if AI could demonstrate an understanding of Deleuze? I'm detecting the Freud and Kahneman.
It's all just so absurd. It's not envy. It's applying Sociology to Physics to apply Sociology again. That said, I'm grateful for finally being introduced to Naltrexone in 2019.
I'll tell you where I really don't have any real envy? For other people's musical talent. Any discomfort to my security is only opportunity to explore and learn.
Offer a sale! The few Substacks I pay for are $50 a year, and never go up. Perhaps I was grandfathered in or something. The only one that is higher is justified as a donation due to his ace investigative reporting.
A. Some people suffer and then don’t want anyone else to suffer.
B. Other people suffer and then want everyone else to suffer.
C. Still others have never really suffered and have very little empathy. They assume life has been great for everyone, and the rest of us are just whiners.
The distinctions between these types of people aren’t always obvious at first, but these different life experiences lead to big differences in any long-term relationship – partnership or friendship.
A notable feature of the first example: you judge the writer's success to be unfair or unfitting, given the (relatively) low value of their work. If your judgment is correct, then it's not clear to me that a desire for their newsletter to fail is inappropriate or vicious. It could just be a desire for literary/intellectual work to receive recognition in proportion to its value.
That would be the "good reason," but as a teacher of psychology, I think Paul sees what is more likely the "real reason." Although maybe he's being too hard on himself- I'd like to think that.
Relief comes not from the absence of discomfort, but of your relation to it. Boredom in meditation isn’t a sign of failure. It’s an honest glimpse into the noise of the mind, and how resistant it is to seeing itself.
One reason suffering feels so persistent is that it’s always referred back to a self: my pain, my failure, my restlessness. This “self” we defend and try to improve is not a stable entity at all. It’s a process, a shifting collection of memories, habits, sensations, and reactions. When you look closely, there’s no fixed point you can call “I” apart from the contents of experience itself. The sense of a solid self is an illusion created by the mind’s constant narration. And if the self is not what it seems, then neither is the suffering that revolves around it. This doesn’t erase pain, but it puts it in a different frame, as something arising within awareness, not something happening to a permanent subject.
We do not choose to be angry, or elated, or depressed, or in hysterics. These emotions arise naturally. And, given enough time, they evaporate. We don’t have the capacity to feel as sad, happy, or angry, as we organically felt in the moment of whatever surprised us and produced the impassioned sentiment. This means that we didn’t control or choose it to happen either. We simply witnessed our brain produce the sentiment. It produced anger and we mistakenly thought, “I’m angry”.
But you as the witness of your thoughts and sentiments are only a part of the brain that produces them. That shift in understanding is not dramatic, but it can be a radical step in minimizing suffering by grasping your place in the nature of your mind.
Reminded me of a blue cliff record koan:
Sickness and medicine are in accord with each other.
The whole world is medicine.
What am I?
>the sort of Substack that largely works by catering to the prejudices of its readers, telling them over and over again how noble and brave they are and how their enemies are morons and assholes.
Well THAT narrows it down to "most things on the Internet."
I didn’t expect or ask for my immune system to go sideways to develop lung disease and pulmonary hypertension. I didn’t want to have to hide from sunshine or being around people because my immune system is fragile. I don’t want to have episodes of explosive coughing that cause me to cut my tongue on my teeth. Those are the Bad Things that are happening to me. It’s what I have to deal with. I get through my days with the grace of God, the support of my family, and recognizing all the GOOD things I have going on. Could it be better? Of course. Could it be worse? Absolutely, far, far worse. I am grateful for every day that it is not.
That list of likelihood of bad things happening doesn't rank how bad each thing is; acne is not as bad as Guilliame Bare syndrome. Speaking as the mother of a child with a 1 in 100,000 rare disease, its rarity exacerbates the tragedy of the symptoms. And it makes it absolutely clear that while everybody may hurt to some degree, some people suffer to a far greater degree far more of the time.
The biography of the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho sounds a lot like Cameron, including the part about not feeling pain. Pyrrho, however, gave a recipe for his disposition; the fullest description we have of it is in book one of Sextus Empiricus' "Outlines of Pyrrhonism." The most important part of it is to never consider anything to be inherently good or bad.
I laughed off meditation for 50 years. My wife tried to get me into it 9 years ago and it only made me angry. I found my own path to it eventually (you, Tamler, and Dave were on that winding path) and it has been life changing. It took a long time to stick, it’s like learning a new sport, only using your brain. My journey required a lot of time, openness, and self compassion. The pandemic gave me the time and openness came through a lot of reading and sitting.
I’m still working on the self-compassion.
A related calculation: if you have a good friend for many years, the odds are quite high that they are going to say or do something *very* hurtful to you at some point in time.
Suppose there’s a 97% chance they won’t say or do anything terribly hurtful to you in a year. That seems pretty reasonable, since there’s always a tiny chance that they fall into pretty unfavorable circumstances that trigger their insecurities, faults, or weaknesses, and they end up lashing out at you since you were available and they weren’t in control of themselves. Part of being psychologically wise is realizing that truth about humans.
If you do the math, you’ll discover that over a roughly 20-year period there’s about a 50/50 chance they will eventually do or say something really hurtful to you. They might be your spouse, your sibling, your parent, your child, your favorite neighbor, or coworker. Prepare yourself.
Of all the people I follow on Substack you are the one I would most like to have a beer with.
thanks, kind of you to say!
"Be pitiful, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Thank you for providing the source for this quote. I've seen it attributed to Plato a number of times (replacing "pitiful" with "kind"), and I was certain that it was not Plato.
re substack charging: what charge for substack membership maximises your income? At £65 pa I might subscribe to a single feed. At £6.50 I'd more likely subscribe to 10.
re your envy: how much is that cos of his no of followers and how much is it your disdain at his output [his goat was never alive!]? If his stuff was as good as yours would you still resent it? Perhaps only in a self-pitying "why not me?" sense.
BTW: I'm envious of your writing skill but I still wish you every success and lots of paying followers. Long may your goat continue to lay its golden eggs!
Beautiful, Paul Bloom.
Regarding yesterday's writing about the doctor, my first thought I didn't end up sharing was about statistics. Not formal statistics, but the personal accessibility to an intuition of the scaling volume and possibility quickly. This isn't the same thing as pattern recognition as Kahneman defines it.
I thought you may be worried you may be referring to an having an unwanted admirerer MD.
I've had an issue with an otherwise lovely female doctor after my appendectomy a few years ago.
The scans showed some inflammation which she attributes to a bacterial infection. She was, "99% sure," she said with rhetorical gotcha flourish.
I think she saw that I used to drink too much and assumed sexual recklessness. I agreed to the harmless tests but said I thought she was wrong. She was wrong. To her credit, she sounded embarrassed and apologetic in her follow up phone call.
I still don't know the cause. I keep meaning to try cutting out coffee for tea as taking the evolutionary path to unexplained inflammation.
I've experimented on myself previously to disastrous consequences, though.
I think there's such a thing as positive envy. Maybe that's a term asking for confusion. I don't think I could care enough about anything to be negatively envious. I could be upset to find out I've been mislead for years.
As for sensitivity, you have a point. I imagine this can be a problem in families if they aren't equipped to explain their experiences on the relevant level. Prescriptions, fashions and statistics can only be of so much use, particularly if you want to live creatively.
That's why I love Evolutionary Psychology. I'm only upset I didn't find it sooner. Which is why I complained about DEI, somewhat erroneously, as I immediately saw that I had been imprisoned by my own sensitivity to operationalized language biases. SEL outside of Catholic School and Suzuki had been more the center of my relevant confusion in Classical Music.
I'd never have thought that my boundless desire to learn, practice, study and create would have needed to negotiate a labyrinth of incoherent figurative gatekeeping.
I wonder if AI could demonstrate an understanding of Deleuze? I'm detecting the Freud and Kahneman.
It's all just so absurd. It's not envy. It's applying Sociology to Physics to apply Sociology again. That said, I'm grateful for finally being introduced to Naltrexone in 2019.
I'll tell you where I really don't have any real envy? For other people's musical talent. Any discomfort to my security is only opportunity to explore and learn.
Offer a sale! The few Substacks I pay for are $50 a year, and never go up. Perhaps I was grandfathered in or something. The only one that is higher is justified as a donation due to his ace investigative reporting.
Excellent article, btw!
Recognize the three types of people:
A. Some people suffer and then don’t want anyone else to suffer.
B. Other people suffer and then want everyone else to suffer.
C. Still others have never really suffered and have very little empathy. They assume life has been great for everyone, and the rest of us are just whiners.
The distinctions between these types of people aren’t always obvious at first, but these different life experiences lead to big differences in any long-term relationship – partnership or friendship.
(From https://www.losingmyreligions.net/)
Great essay!
A notable feature of the first example: you judge the writer's success to be unfair or unfitting, given the (relatively) low value of their work. If your judgment is correct, then it's not clear to me that a desire for their newsletter to fail is inappropriate or vicious. It could just be a desire for literary/intellectual work to receive recognition in proportion to its value.
That would be the "good reason," but as a teacher of psychology, I think Paul sees what is more likely the "real reason." Although maybe he's being too hard on himself- I'd like to think that.
I never really got the stoicism until I read "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William Irvine. Give it a look.