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- Backwards Law, Memento Mori, & More
What will sharpen your thinking today:
Makes-You-Think Tweet: On schooling and homeschooling
Mind-Expanding Concept: The Backwards Law
Cool Quote or Question: Memento Mori
High-Signal Content: The Perils of Audience Capture
Makes-You-Think Tweet
Have a friend who speaks to his kids like adults. They developed an advanced vocabulary early on.
Then they started kindergarten. At school, they were surrounded by kids with limited vocabularies and "baby talking" teachers.
When their speech degraded, he started homeschooling.
— David Perell (@david_perell)
12:32 PM • Dec 12, 2022
Mind-Expanding Concept
Backwards Law
Generated by Midjourney | Alan Watts - upscaled
Something we learn early: there's a linear relationship between effort and reward. The more you focus your time and energy on pursuing something, the more likely it is that you'll get it. If you want to get better at basketball, practice it as much as you can. The same is true for playing piano, learning math, and ironing clothes.
For many other things though, pursuing them makes it less likely to achieve them. More effort means less of it. That's right. Sleep is one such example - the more you actively try to sleep, the harder it gets. What else? Mark Manson argues that that's the case for psychological and emotional things.
The more you try to be confident, the less confident you seem. The more you seek validation from others, the needier you look and the less validation you get. The more you try to be happy, the more miserable you feel. But why? Why there’s an inverse relationship between effort and reward for things in our minds?
“When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float...insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.”
The pursuit highlights the lack of whatever you're pursuing. The more your mind desires something, the more salient it is to the same mind that you don't have it. And that sucks. And that messes up with your plans.
The beauty of this law is that it works both ways. If you stop pursuing these things, you are more likely to get them. When you stop trying to be rich, you can soon become rich, not because of some cosmic chain of reactions but because you become content with what you have. And anything on top becomes a bonus. You just genuinely don't need more, which is being...rich. That is not to say that we shouldn't pursue things. There are many reasons to do so. We just shouldn't expect that they'll bring us happiness.
If we were to generalize: the more one tries to escape the negative experiences in life, the more negative the negative becomes. The more one tries to have only positive experiences, the more evident the lack of positive experiences becomes.
What to do then? Don't try.
Cool Quote or Question
"I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived and dying I will tend to do later."
Epictetus is definitely the most ironic and humourous stoic. Here he’s alluding to a quintessential stoic mediation, Memento Mori - "Remember that you will die".
It’s an ancient practice of reflection on the shortness and fragility of life. Its goal is to push ourselves to focus on what matters and not waste time on trivial things. It helps us clarify our daily motivations and reminds us to act with virtue. It ultimately brings us in harmony with the nature of reality.
On a less philosophical and more tactical note, it works best for me by thinking about the death of my loved ones. Not a pleasant thought (to say the least), but one that can instantly inject perspective on the worst of days.
It pairs well with another trainable reflex I learned from Sam Harris’s mediation app, which is that we can always begin again. Had a fight with your spouse? Begin again. Got angry because of some asshole in traffic? Begin again. If the meeting is not doing well, if the conversation is boring, if you’ve been lazy at the gym, you can notice it and begin again. Right there. It’s a choice. Choose to do so and go back to what matters.
We can leave life at any moment. Memento Mori.
High-Signal Content
“This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.”
See you next week,
Filipe
Meme