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Being mindful means not being distracted by your mind, emotions, fears, or concerns but being in the present, undistracted.
The conundrum is to consider the undistracted state, mindful, as "mindless" since we are not actively engaged in thinking or doing. However, to give yourself over to a torrent of emotions and frivolous thoughts is an animalistic state, mindless and without control, completely captured by impulse and reaction.
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The Right embraces victimization as much as the Left, in part because it allows for idiocy to continue: you can’t criticize me while I’m oppressed (by you.)
It’s obvious the Left reveres victims to the extent that they extend and create categories from which shelter from reality or logic is provided. (Because you are/were marginalized, all concessions should be made, we should all accommodate your hardship.) On the Right, tribal/national tradition and faith-over-facts create a populist shelter that regresses. (Because I am normal, I shouldn’t have to change, and am offended you suggest it.)
The new reality then exists: you must be oppressed to be listened to and valued, leading to “oppression as social privilege.” Yet, the focused attention that grants preference is fickle, swayed by novelty, and so to retain attention victimization must escalate into the fantastical.
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Create something to uplift your spirits—it won’t be a masterpiece, but the simple act of creation can anchor you while discharging the ruminative loop of your thoughts.
Engaging in a tangible, attentive activity (a concrete action) is a small step toward agency and a reminder of one’s ability to shape your environment, which in turn can shape one’s mood.
Oddly, the physical item (the remnant of action) embodies your time spent, mapping it into the real, while so much of our time is spent scrolling or pontificating with no memorable results.
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The nature of postmodernism is to decohere big things into fragmented things, or at least destabilize them enough to provide room for skeptical reconsideration.
The outcome is atomized selves that have difficulty finding coherence. To stabilize this fragile self, people reach out to others to care about them, finding support through a validating network.
Unfortunately, the ‘concern of others’ is a resource drawn from equally fragmented fellows. As you need care, they need care, and attention is an economic resource pulling concern to novel avenues, making your care network precarious.
To re-engage your base your pleas must become more shrill or desperate, more excessive, prompting self-victimization as a means to gather attention, which feels like care.
This descent inverts into ascent: self-scapegoating for living martyr status.
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We have more choice options than ever, but local color is falling into abeyance with standardized, mechanized consumer units.
The pound, the 12 pack, 6 flavors, or 3 finish options that can define you as a person: a set of limited, standardized gold-plating requiring your focus, functional blinders, preventing you from deciding who you really might be if you designed yourself without the ability to purchase.
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Being a distracted driver by using your cell phone is more dangerous than driving drunk.
How did we reduce drunk driving? By increasing pre-driving pressure, social ostracization, and outrageous fines. The social component targeted people before they got in the car, crowd-sourcing concern as a form of communal policing.
However, social pressure cannot alter our phone behavior once we are alone in our car: we feel autonomous and bored inside our sheet metal and glass bubbles hurtling down the highway, though we are amongst others.
A reversion to heads-up awareness and concern for the safety of others (and yourself) seems unlikely.
The only solution (it seems) is auto-driving vehicles (expensive) or cell phone blocking (unlikely), which will only put more money in the pockets of the companies that created the problem in the first place.
From Matthew Crawford
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One way to alleviate rumination is to focus on projects: go fix something.
One way to screw up a relationship is to fix it.
Applying “project management techniques” or “goal-based achievement” to relationships distracts us from our mutual humanity. That is, we are still avoiding our deep-seated problems by distracting ourselves, a.k.a. getting things done or being productive, which allows us to feel better for a moment.
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What you pay attention to matters. It is in the end, who you will become.
Participating in petty politics or inflating mundane worries at work shapes you. Similarly, ignoring your friends isolates you. Where your attention is (or is not) is who you are right now, but it also shapes you.
Once you know who you want to be when you die (a person at peace, without regrets) any other behavior compromises your goals: keep your focus.
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We swing into action to purge our negative feelings, making things worse.
We claim it comes from “love” or “justice” when it comes from the impossibility of sitting with something painful until you figure out who you are and what’s really going on.
