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Look over your shoulder to ensure a slip, trip, or fumble today.
Naturally, we consider the past to do better in the future. (Do this when you are alone.)
When you are with others, remain in the present: with one foot in the past (fretting about a former fumble) and the other in the future (envisioning a repaired reputation), we sabotage the present.
Straddling ensures stumbling, providing us with a new awkward encounter we can never rectify.
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Future you is a stranger, and we seldom empathize with strangers distant from us.
To improve your future life (by having discipline now), you must empathize with your future self enough to make them real: make them a vivid companion, full of your hopes and dreams, a friend that you talk to daily, writing letters into the future, and receiving them back.
Your imaginary friend who makes you better should be your future self, not your past self or your present devil.
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Either the individual can self-regulate (manage/order/pain) or self-allow (entropy/pleasure/excitement), and it needs to be a combination of both to live fully.
We crave pleasure, which was originally an evolutionary trait to promote survival, but today our survival requires restraint.
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When something new is born into the world, it is an abomination: a mutation.
It may serve some utility. Utility is what makes us accept it.
In a simplified stance, new is “evil” in terms of disruption, but after an encounter, you cannot help but accept aspects of it as a new reality.
From that point on, removing all traces of this foreign injection from your altered life is almost impossible.
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Digital reality (if it is to thrive) requires a knot, a point of chaos, at the center, which cannot be made to make sense: it is not cartesian and, therefore, can give birth to chaos and dreams that can save a world from the mathematical impulse of control.
This allows not for linear time (once again cartesian) but circular time with variation, Aeonic or Aion time.
In this cycle we find infinity, and this singular point (the knot of chaos) reminds us of The Aleph, where we can see and comprehend everything in the universe.
However, seeing worlds within worlds, such as digital reality, reminds us of the unimaginable excesses that the brain cannot fathom or grasp, an abundance we do not have language for, and thus cannot remember. Our recall is to only see glimpses recalled hazily (dreams), and from this chaos, we begin to create.
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The brain struggles to make decisions. First, it asks, “What should I do?” and, with a lazy sleight-of-hand replaces ‘what’ with ‘when’: “When should I do this?”
This mechanism has been studied, but suffice it to say: if you ask the question your brain attempts to turn it into an imperative.
This is why what you ask yourself, what you fantasize about, is who you become. Simply by asking, and entertaining, your brain starts making it so.
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You might expect the tyranny of time to be it’s resolute march forward without empathy, yet it is our social mass adoption of it as a governing system that transforms it to brutality.
Time is not relentless or uncaring. Time is shared mass consensus, and so it is a reflection of ourselves.
You can ignore time, as some Amazonian tribes. Or, while you’re asleep it ceases to matter. But upon awakening in our society the time prison of the clock manifests devastatingly real effects.
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We frame our happiness with conditions, such as, "if I have this job and these comforts, I can be happy." And yet, once we get them, we find a new required provision to amend the "I will be happy when" clause.
We strike a bargain while altering the terms continuously. This is obviously sabotage.
What we want is not happiness, but a goal to pursue: we want the struggle when we could stop at any time and simply be happy.
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In electrical systems or motors, peak performance is achieved by reducing interference. That is, to reduce friction.
In electricity, voltage and current align by peaks and valleys syncing together. Interference is a misalignment where they end up fighting each other.
However, we do not always want peak power immediately, so by intentional misalignment, you can create a “soft start” before ramping up to peak power. We intentionally introduce friction at the beginning.
Psychologically, we often say we want smooth-functioning non-interference and contentment as fulfillment or happiness. But this pushes us to desire non-interference (no friction) rather than peak performance (productive goals.) It fails to overcome the early “interference” for more significant later benefits.
This derives from a slippery reversal: reducing all friction is very efficient -perfectly aligned- but is entropic. This path lowers peaks and valleys to a flatline existence: no goal means no failure, but also there is no longer voltage or current.
A misunderstanding is at play: Our rational brains substitute more frictionless concepts during the initial misalignment, allowing us to reframe our goal as a symptom. Achieving the symptom is easier than curing the problem or achieving the goal.
“Contentment” and “efficiency” may come from optimizing performance, but first you must struggle (encounter friction on your path) toward a greater purpose.
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When you are snubbed socially, the impulse is to regain your position in another way: if you are laughed at, you prove social worth by over-indexing on utility value (you increase your productivity) to compensate.
This operational and social alignment means if someone wants you to work harder, they leverage social exclusion: the more they snub you, the harder you work.
The clever manager or bully only pushes so far, then allows a taste of the good life before resubmerging you.
