2023 mental inventory
ideas that I'm keeping with me, and beliefs that I'm letting go of
Life has been moving really fast recently, all suddenly happening after a period of more or less stagnation. I was certainly doing a lot over the second half of last year, but it didn’t necessarily feel like I was taking steps forward or feeling a sense of movement in my life, if that makes sense.
Recently though, it feels like things have been kicking into a different gear. I feel like I’m either in the midst of or on the precipice of pretty significant life movement. It’s exciting and scary; there’s a lot of life changes on the horizon that will present me with a fascinating set of challenges to navigate, and only time will tell what these circumstances will mean for the overall trajectory of my future.
Regardless, with the new year and the onset of these circumstances, I felt like it’d be a good time to do a little inventory of some of the thoughts that have been floating around in my head. I broke them up into these broad categories:
Ideas that I’m eager to explore
Beliefs that I previously held that I’m letting go of
My intentions for the near future
I guess I’ll just jump right in.
Ideas I’m exploring
1. The distinction between thought and feeling
There’s always two layers to anything going on in my head: 1) the narratives circling around, and 2) the actual emotion that underpins the narrative.
Let me give an example of this. Let’s say I get cut off on the road by a driver. I typically immediately jump to attacking that driver for reckless driving, shocked at their audacity to make such an outrageous move on the road. This “narrative” already makes several assumptions about what’s going on in the situation for the other driver, preventing me from creating any space for forgiveness or empathy for the other person involved. The reason for this (that usually flies below my conscious awareness) is that this narrative and series of assumptions is rooted in my own feeling of anger and rage, biasing my assessment of the situation and preventing me from having any empathy for the other person.
At a high level, I think this means that a lot of our perceptions of the world or understandings of the world are biased or colored by the feelings and emotions we’re dealing with. This isn’t a groundbreaking observation by any means; it’s pretty obvious honestly. The challenge I’m setting for myself is to constantly stay aware of this principle and not invest myself or my energy in the narratives I or others create; to remain in the realm of feelings and emotions instead of thoughts. Whenever I catch myself creating or defaulting to assumptions, I’ll use that as an opportunity to reflect, and whenever I see others project their own narratives onto me, instead of engaging, I’ll push myself to view it as an expression of a deeper emotion which I want to have empathy for.
2. The homogenization of contemporary taste
Over the last few years (and decades honestly), there’s been a tendency towards sameness:
Language and culture - The eradication of languages and culture is yet another mass extinction that rarely gets talked about; we’re losing unique languages, folklore, stories, and wisdom at an exceedingly rapid rate as the whole world continues to get Westernized and more and more people are pushed towards the English language. There’s a massive loss here!
Design - Buildings are increasingly starting to look the same. Areas across the world are losing the distinctive architecture they’re known for, and most modern day websites all default to the same principles. Even in homes, most follow the same interior design patterns, built by just a few construction companies that replicate the same home patterns over and over again. Where’s the room for individual taste and distinctiveness?
Fashion - With the growth of social media and the rise of influencers, everyone’s fashion ideals are blending together since everyone shares the same set of fashion models plastered across worldwide media. It’s no surprise that every single outfit is starting to look the same, that every single clothing store’s branding is starting to look the same, and that every single store is starting to carry the same assortment of clothes.
Knowledge - Top-10 lists are everything these days. Top-10 nonfiction books to read, top-10 podcasts to listen to, etc. Since we have an increasingly scarce amount of time to dedicate towards reading or learning, why would anyone invest their time in a suboptimal source when they could just read what everyone else says is super important and good? Unfortunately, if everyone’s knowledge sources are the same, everyone will start to think the same way. We’ll lose the ability to have dynamic conversations that incorporate multiple perspectives. This isn’t good for anyone.
Food - There are so, so many varieties of individual types of food that are no longer bred because all food production is centralized by a few corporations. Additionally, each individual country has lost their self-sustaining agricultural systems because it’s most profitable for them to specialize in singular cash crops. This is awful for our overall health and our worldwide biodiversity.
I think the common cause of all of this has to do with capitalism, optimization, and centralization. Regardless, the challenge for me is going to push against this wave of sameness; to find spaces for individuality and identity so that I can cultivate my own taste intead of falling into mimetic patterns and following what’s trendy.
3. The hidden price of everything
When we make decisions, they're rarely strictly rational; they’re always colored by our emotions, and we rarely discuss the emotional price we pay. When we purchase luxury goods, it's not strictly about the utility we get from the higher quality we’re promised, it’s also about the feeling we’ll get of wearing a premium and highly sought-after product, and we tell ourselves that this exhilirating feeling will justify the guilt of paying the high price. When we lie to our parents, we tell ourselves the freedom we get from doing what we want will justify the guilt we feel from being deceitful and the fear we feel that our parents will be right. There’s an emotional accounting at play in every single decision we make. When deciding whether to lie, you’re balancing freedom, pride, and excitement with honesty and following wisdom. What are you willing to give up, and what choice will lead you on the path to greater happiness?
It’s hard to make decisions like this, and that’s why I belive there’s a folklore at the heart of every single religion or community; it was created by elders to help instruct youth about the hidden costs at the heart of every decision. When we’re young and lack experience, it’s easy to be reckless without understanding what could happen; you don’t know what choices will lead you to greater happiness in the long run. That’s what all these stories serve to do; they give you a richer inventory of experiences from others that’ll guide you when facing challenging situations.
However, even when we’re armed with all these stories, it’s really hard to follow their wisdom without having actual experience. For example, even though I was told all my life that hard work equates to success, I slacked on my college applications and got rejected from almost every one I applied to. This experience and the feelings I dealt with made me understand that the pain of rejection after not putting my complete effort towards my goal is not a price I’m ever willing to pay again.
What’s all this an argument for? Well, at this stage in my life, it’s an argument to be extremely experimentative with the decisions that I make; I want to build my experience and learn the full emotional price I pay with every decision I make. This emotional and experiential context will help me better understand the costs I’m willing to pay in my future.
4. Physical health as a barometer / lagging indicator of emotional health
I’ve recently become consumed by literature that points to chronic stress or physical pain that we experience as an indicator of emotional repression and unhealed trauma that your body is begging you to become aware of and to transcend. This mirrors findings preached by ancient Eastern practices for ages, and Western science is finally starting to come around to it.
What does this mean for me? Well, it means that working on my emotional health is as big a component of my physical wellbeing as hitting the gym is. Those practices are intertwined, and for me to truly achieve peak health and enrich my physical body, I’ll need to incorporate both practices, or else I’ll always be chained.
5. The implicit rules that we set for ourselves
We typically play by an implicit or tacit set of rules in the game of life. One common rule that most people in Western societies play by is that maximizing wealth, status, and prestige gets you closer to winning the game. Another common rule is that your attractiveness is linked to the size of your muscles. Everyone has their own set of rules, and everyone plays the game their own way.
But the key realization is that these rules need not be static and often cause suffering. For example, a large rule that I’ve been playing by my whole life that has caused me a lot of pain and stress is that my self-worth and my abilities are tied to the amount of recognition, external validation, and adoration I receive from others. Typically in the past, when I’ve been missing those elements which I assumed to be lagging indicators of my self-worth and my ability, my self confidence would plummet. I’m now constantly working to let go of that rule and the idea that my self-worth can ever be encapsulated by anything outside me. All it does is chain me to the whims of the people around me.
Beliefs I’m letting go of
1. There’s a correct way to practice
I spent a lot of time this past year trying to find a single source of truth for a mysticism-oriented meditation practice; I wanted to figure out the right way to practice to set me on the path to having the enlightenment experiences hailed in many texts. As I dug deeper, I learned that there’s always been a high degree of conflict and disagreement between practitioners about the “right” way, and that no universal “right” way exists. The belief that a perfect practice exists is a fantasy; it's just another form of attachment. It’s my task and responsibility to be open-minded, experiment, and learn from a diversity of sources to figure out what works best for me.
I think this applies in a lot of domains outside of meditation. I often get caught up in finding sources of material instead of just doing the work itself (don’t get me started on how much time I spent researching about the perfect gym routine before I hit my first squat). This is yet another reminder for me to not get caught in the intellectual exercise of what’s right and wrong, but to simply go out, do the work, gain experience, and let that experience guide me towards the next steps.
2. An ideal life has consistency from day to day
I spent so much of my life hating myself for not being able to follow a strict and productive daily routine. Even though I had some days where I was fully wired and achieved a riduculous amount, most days were spent with little to no motivation to do much of anything productive. I always resented myself for lacking consistency.
I think I’ve finally started to listen to my body and learn that perhaps my body doesn't operate on a 24-hour cycle. Some days are meant for rest. Some days are meant for work. Some days are meant for socializing and meeting people. Not every day is meant to be the same, and it’s my task every day to listen to my body, accept what I need for the day, and give myself nourishment, patience, and love. I know I’ll be able to meet the demands of all my responsibilities better if I give my body what it needs, and I now recognize that those needs evolve on a day to day basis.
3. I can predict what my future self will want
At the start of high school, I thought I wanted to be a Quiz Bowl maestro. At the start of college, I thought I wanted to work at Big Tech or a premier consulting firm. At the start of my working career, I thought I wanted to work for the same company for an extended period of time, dedicating myself to people who took a chance on me.
Every single time in my life that I’ve made extended commitments to what my future self would want or what would be best for my future self, I’ve been wrong. Following those incorrect assumptions has usually led me down paths that made me miserable.
Now I’m letting go of the idea that I know what my future self will want or that I know what my ideal future looks like. Instead, I’m putting my head down, going to work, and orienting myself around my core values, trusting that those will take me to the places I need to be to experience the feelings I want to experience.
4. Seeking to add to myself or my routine will improve my life
I spent a lot of my life believing that adding to myself would make me better. Adding a workout routine would make me fitter, adding 30 minutes of reading would make me smarter, etc. It never really worked; it was so hard to continuously add, and all it did was make me feel insufficent.
The model I’ve started to work with now is that my only task is to get out of my own way. I trust that my instict and natural curiousity will guide me towards the things that I need to invest my time in, and that my only task is to create space within my days and within myself to allow that inspiration to flourish. This means that my focus isn’t adding a workout routine to my life, but removing junk food and sitting, and my focus isn’t on adding 30 minutes of reading per day, but substracting chunks of empty media consumption.
Basically, my focus now isn’t what I can add to my life, but what I can cut out.
My intentions for this coming year
1. Cultivate a greater degree of presence
I want to stop experiencing and interpreting the world with my head; I want to fully experience it with my senses and my body. I want to fully feel the ground, hear all the sounds around me, and appreciate the beauty of the sights around me. I can’t do that when I’m caught up in my head, giving me a sensation of floating and drifting; I want to feel fully alive in every second, and that means escaping the trappings of my mind and letting my senses color my experiences.
2. Eliminate the word “should” from my vocabulary
I never want to do things out of obligation. Everything I do, I want to do because I feel a full sense of conviction behind it. Every feeling of dissonance between what I “should” do and what I actually want to do presents me an opportunity to either set stronger boundaries, or to reflect on my emotions to figure out what’s causing me to act out of alignment.
3. Be radically honest about what I want
This is mainly a radical honesty to myself. For example, if I’m being radically honest, I know that I don’t want money itself that deeply; I just want a large spacious house or the status that comes with having wealth. The more honest I can get with myself, the more I can orient my life around building the things I actually want, and the more I can let go of desires that I know don’t serve me. In the example above, I know the desires for a large house and status don’t serve me. Honesty and awareness of those desires in myself helps me to let go of those and create space to orient myself around my desire to experience love and fulfullment.
4. Cultivate spaces for art and beauty
There’s a quote that I came across recently that hit really hard with me:
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat
Isn’t that beautiful?
It’s a constant reminder that the beauty of the world is best experienced through art and music in their many forms, and I want to create space every single day to experience that beauty.
It’s crazy how much can change in a year. A year ago, it had been years since I’d written, let alone since anyone else had read what I’d written. I was enmeshed in a completely different set of circumstances and dealing with a completely different set of emotions than I am now. So much has changed that it’s hard to remember what it felt like back then; it seems like all the memories I have of that time happened to a different person. It’s a reminder that things can change really, really fast. And I need that reminder; right now I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time, and I don’t want to get so caught up in life that I forget to savor this feeling. I want to let the taste of this moment linger, to feel this feeling throughout my body so that I never forget it.
When I look back at the biggest difference between the start of this year and last year, it’s the level of faith that I carry myself with. I spent most of last year seeking to understand why I was feeling the things I was feeling and why things happened the way that they did. I don’t feel like I’m searching anymore; I feel like empowered to freely engage with life with the full belief that things will come together in the most beautiful way possible.
The start of this year has already greeted me with a couple of minor miracles. At a time in which I seeked to get Lasik and learn how to bartend, I discovered a world-class Lasik institution and a world-class bartending institution within 30 minutes of my house. Miraculous!
I’ll respond to these miracles in the same way I want to respond to everything in my life; with grace, gratitude, humility, and nonattachment.
There’s a lot of work to be done this year, and I am so excited to dive in and continue building the life that I want.
🤙🫡