Everything is the same thing
The concept of being interesting in dating versus in business got me thinking again about how everything is literally the same fucking thing.
Written on 17/02/2022
The concept of being interesting in dating versus in business got me thinking again about how everything is literally the same fucking thing. Or at least very few things.
Then thought about this in the concept of optimization. If everything boils down to the same thing, why don’t we spend most of our waking hours optimizing that one thing? We get lost in the noise, that’s why.
(that thing is VIBES btw)
Anyhow, “optimizing for vibes” does not sound very actionable and I have concepts that try to solve a real-world issue but end up failing because they are too abstract. (Academia as a whole is basically this and that is a big part of why I do not identify with that field)
Let’s try to break everything down to a few more actionable subjects, palpable if you will.
3 dominant areas jump to mind: Body, Mind, Social. (physical, mental(?), collaborative.)
I’m sure there are more fields from which we could start, but these are the more obvious ones to me.
Body is about the physical world and our interaction with physical things (Oh yhea I should clarify that I am approaching this subject from the frame of one’s development within the world, hence my thought process being started from dating and one’s interestingness)(I could also approach this from the more holistic view of things outside of what we normally define as “us” being the same thing). How we LOOK is probably the most important component of our physicality, this assuming that you are attracted to bodies that are generally seen as healthy, but let’s set health sort of aside because I ain't no doctor. To look good AGAIN I KNOW NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SAME PREFERENCES OK? SHUT UP. you generally only have to follow certain basic rules: exercise regularly; drink water; sleep a decent amount of hours; eat natural things (McDonald's does not grow on trees and I am a big believer in respecting our genetics that has evolved through millennia, so the lyndier the food, the better).
This all sounds extremely simple BECAUSE IT IS yet the majority of people fail in doing it, including me very often. But the goal today is not to go after what prevents us from succeeding.
Mind is about things that are not visible to the naked eye. You sort of know they exist and feel them, but have never seen any of them. (“mind” might not be a good word, I’ll try to come up with a better one). These include the way you think, feel, react, problem-solve, ask questions…
Even though I am convinced that the majority of people go their entire lives without trying, it is very possible to train the mind. AND USEFUL. And no, I am not talking about meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, or any other specific methodology you wanna use, these are all useful but irrelevant in the bigger discourse I’m trying to think about. ONLY HOW YOU THINK AND HOW YOU FEEL ARE RELEVANT. Taking care of the mind is more subjective, or at least I haven’t understood the concept well enough to boil it down to its essentials, but some of the things I find more relevant in doing so are: Relieving stress; consuming content that aligns with the way you ought to think and feel (aka “focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of”); Setting aside time to think in a structured way (structured does not mean “rigid”, it is more about setting a goal for a thinking session and achieving it);
Social is about the way you relate to things that you do not consider to be yourself. Whether you only consider your mind, your body + mind, or your environment yourself is up to you. Some people go through life with a 3rd view perspective of their own bodies and consider themselves to be everything that surrounds them, which is beautiful, in that case social is about how you integrate new things into the system that is you. This part is important because even though life might seem like a single-player game (I am still having internal arguments about whether this is true or full multi-player mode is the way to go) we interact with a ton of things and people on a daily basis. How we interact with them causes us to move forward or backward in this game of life. If progression is of any value to you, the way you handle social should be too. To take care of social I believe that the best approach is to follow the scientific method, which really means fuck around and find out. More than anything, molding the ways in which I interact with the world has been an iterative process where I fuck up in spectacular fashion and retrospectively look into the ways in which I did it. Eventually you get to a point where you can spot those fucked tendencies in real-time or even before they happen. (I’ve managed to correct some of my undesired behaviors through this method.) oH MAKING FRIENDS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. We are a collaborative species and nobody truly gets far and happy while alone. Some level of connectedness social skill only derive from true connection with others and no amount of shallow interactions can ever replace it. (I have learned this the hard way (also the notion of being vulnerable is important here but I’ll write about that some other day))
Anyhow EVERYTHING IS THE SAME THING
One might argue that the mind is the most important part of the triad to train because all meaningful changes start there as some form of ideation or creativity. While this is mostly true and I believed it to be 1000% true until very recently, this belief comes from the assumption that thinking, choices, and decisions are only made using the mind, which is false. A lot of our thinking is done in the body prior to us ever noticing that we are refining our decision-making patterns. An interesting part of this body-mind crossover is that even though the mind is generally thought to live in the brain we often forget that our brain has a very real physical presence with physical needs just like an intestine or heart. THIS MEANS that to achieve our goals (or at least mine) of near perfect decision making and thought processing, taking care of the body is as important, if not more, as taking care of the mind. And GUESS WHAT to take care of some physical parts of your brain you literally need to be social or else they will stop functioning. So IT IS ALL THE SAME
Actionables:
exercise regularly;
drink water;
Sleep;
eat natural;
Relieve stress;
Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of;
Set aside time to think;
Fuck around and find out;
Make friends;
Have fun;
Can you think of anything that you can’t achieve by doing these things? Cuz I sure think that this is the way to achieve pretty much anything.
What is irritating, infuriating even, about these things is how simple they are. To quote Leonardo here “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” and thus there is a lot to uncover behind these simple things, but what makes them unique and different from other seemingly simple things is that they are ACTIONABLE. There is literally nothing stopping you from going any or all of these things that is more than a mental barrier. (which are fake btw) OH YHEA HAVE I MENTIONED THAT EVERYTHING IS FAKE BECAUSE THAT IS ANOTHER AWESOME TOPIC
Let’s go back to everything is the SAME THING tho I wanna get deeper into the ultimate unification of things:
Energy
God
Chakras
Gut feeling
Stomach pain
Vibes
Call it what you fucking will, but if there is a hill I can die on is that everything revolves around one form of energy that we do not understand. Even scientists agree with this and call it “dark energy” (oh wait there is a great twitter thread on the concept of dark matter = informational weight, let me find it…
https://twitter.com/exGenesis/status/1220752740659466245
). I have no interest in discussing the linguistics of such phenomenon, hence “Call it what you fucking will” as long as people are intelectually honest enough to discuss the topic without bringing to the table all their socially pre-conceived stereotypes associated with words like “god” that only end up being noise in the discussion.
You just FEEL stuff, you know? It’s kind of weird, ridiculous, awesome, overwhelming, and simple at the same time. Can’t you feel when something is off? When something is amazing? When something is just right? All of these feelings come from somewhere and have to disagree with the idea that they are 100% evolutionary results from optimization for survival and procreation (all that matters to any species).
So let’s assume that I am right and our sense of reality does not in fact come strictly from an evolutionary POV. Where does it come from?
An external entity of some kind?
I’m very biased here because I believe that we do have control over our lives and thus that forces me to discard this option. imo It is not an external entity forcing anything onto us. You might wanna look into this yourself tho.
What do we know about this unknown phenomenon?:
Unknown;
Kind of hard to explain;
Universal;
Body-related (in a body-mind way);
The only real clues here are the universality of it and its relation to the body. Is there anything that is universal but not biological to the Human race? IDEAS IDEAS IDEAS IDEAS ARE UNIVERSAL and there has been multiple times where people who had no contact with each other had the same new (nothing is new) idea at the same time like when Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell invented the phone at the same time without ever knowing or earring about each other. There is a kind of famous worldview that says ideas own Humans, not the other way around. We are just biological bootloaders or whatever. I am not entirely dismissive of this idea. LOOOOOL AS IF I COULD DISMISS IT IF IT OWNED ME
Universal + body-related takes us back to biological evolution. Could I be overthinking things and all of this just be a matter of evolution? Possibly. Wait nonononono that does not explain dark energy or WAIT IS JUST HAD AN INSIGHT WHAT IF I AM SAYING THAT EVERYTHING IS THE SAME THING BUT IN REALITY I SHOULD BE SAYING THAT EVERYTHING WITHIN MY CONSTRAINED VIEW OF THE WORLD IS THE SAME THING BECAUSE 99% OF IT IS INTERACTION WITH OTHER HUMANS, HUMAN SYSTEMS, AND HUMAN CREATIONS HOLLY SHIT THAT WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT
Everything is the same thing -> Everything within my constrained view of the world is the same thing because 99% of it is interactions with humans, human systems, and human creations.
This needs to be simpler:
Everything is the same thing -> Everything within my constrained view of the world is the same thing because 99% of it is interactions with humans, human systems, and human creations. -> Everything in my life is the same thing because most of it is interactions with human-made systems, objects, and humans themselves. -> Everything feels like the same thing because all I do is interact with humans and their creations.
AND THUS NOT EVERYTHING IS THE SAME THING BUT MY LIFE IS ONLY HUMAN INTERACTIONS THUS IT FEELS LIKE THE SAME THING
MY LIFE IS HUMAN INTERACTIONS -> my life is not everything tho -> but MY LIFE IS ALL THE SAME THING
and my life is all I care about, I have no desire to understand things outside of it, only to broaden its scope and increase its intensity. (broadening my life’s scope is different from caring about things outside of it because the former starts from within one’s scope while the other starts outside of it)
If my life is about human interactions, could all lives be about human interactions? Yes, I now believe so.
LIFE IS ABOUT HUMAN CONNECTIONS
Does this mean that all the vibes, energies, whatever, that we feel are a biological byproduct of enhancing our interactions with each other and the world that somehow are still extremely relevant when facing modern problems? Very likely. Are our problems even modern? *insert Maslow's pyramid here lol*
Holly shit so not everything is the same thing but life is about human connections… I’m still processing because honestly I did not think that this would be where we ended up.
Okokokok Life is about Human connections.
What do I do with this now?
The list that I made before about things to do to achieve a great life is obviously still relevant based on my 21 years of experience in the field lmao but I need to look at it through a different scope. The scope of enhancing and facilitating human connections.
4 distinct kinds of connections come to mind:
Connections with self;
Connections directly with others;
Connections with human-made physical things;
Connections with human-made systems;
(of course any of these can be broken down into waaaaaaaay more specific bits but I am trying to get this done, get a broad grasp of how shit works, and go back to my life ok? I ain't no Nietzche)
Let’s separate the previously identified important actions into the different kinds of connections:
Connections with self:
exercise regularly;
drink water;
Sleep;
eat natural;
Relieve stress;
Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of;
Set aside time to think;
Connections directly with others:
Make friends;
Have fun;
Connections with human-made physical things:
Fuck around and find out;
Connections with human-made systems:
Fuck around and find out;
Make friends;
It is funny how most of the things I listed are related to connections with self, which I guess makes sense since that is by far the most common kind of connection we do. Also related to that is the fact that all other interactions also require interaction with the self, thus self-mastery eases the process of dealing with any other kind of interaction. The most common way in which people express this knowledge is by saying “You can only be good to others when you are good to yourself”
Btw I just realized that the word “connection” does not FEEL great and I’ll be changing it with interactions.
LIFE IS ABOUT HUMAN INTERACTIONS
Where does this leave me? (It’s 4am and I need to get some sleep so let’s wrap up)
> Started with the idea that everything is the same thing.
> Divided “everything” into 3 categories: Body, Mind, and Social.
> Came up with a list of actionable things to make those 3 categories (everything) better.
> Concluded that everything revolves around one form of energy that we do not understand.
> Concluded that this energy appears entirely from biological evolution;
> Realized that not everything is the same thing. I just perceive it as such.
> Made the distinction between “my life” and “everything”.
> Realized that my life is almost entirely Human interactions, thus feeling like the same thing;
> Divided human interactions into different types;
> Adapted my previous list of actions to the new world-view;
> Realized the list is still solid and actionable.
New world view + actionable list to make life better.
This was a solid session.
NOW JUST MAKE THE FUCKING THINGS FOR GOD'S SAKE BECAUSE NO AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE WILL EVER SUBSTITUTE THEM
(my plan was to write something very different from what I just wrote)