To Become Wise, Do Less(leveragethoughts.substack.com) |
To Become Wise, Do Less(leveragethoughts.substack.com) |
I am a minimalist (Essentialist) by choice, but a maximalist regarding knowledge and experience. Try and do everything you can, that way you know what does and doesn't work. Done. Anything else is overly reductive. You can't know how to do anything if you do or experience close to nothing.
Leisure is good, I am a ferverent advocate of Veblen philosophy, but if you want to be wise use your leisure to do the maximum you can and want to do with that time. Leisure is different for everyone, reading, gaming, sitting on the beach, making art, but if you want to be /wise/ with your leisure you have to do everything you want to do! Focus a lot, or focus a little, you just have to do everything possible to fuck up as much as possible.
I don’t know about other people, but I often have the experience of banging away at some problem for a few hours, then going away and not thinking about it for a while then a simple resolution pops into my mind without much effort.
Continuing to push hard when you aren’t getting any where on an intellectual puzzle isn’t always the best approach.
And there are some fields of inquiry where deep concentration and deep knowledge is useful. For instance, rather than recreating all the knowledge by your own trial and error you can read and then make truly novel mistakes.
This phenomenon is explained by focused vs. diffused modes of thinking, which I first heard about in Learning How to Learn MOOC [0]. There are many popular articles on the Web explaining the concept.
Yeah, lots of people have noticed that when their brain is not busy (taking walks, taking showers (/r/showerthoughts), in a hammock), they frequently come up with creative solutions to their problems - and at least one kind of leisure that GP mentioned (gaming) generally pretty strongly occupies your mind and prevents this exact kind of (uh, "diffuse"?) subconscious thinking.
Ars longa, vita brevis [1]
While I agree that experience by doing is the way to learn, the thing is we have finite resources and time while the things which we want to do are infinite. Which means when you choose to do something you are choosing not to do something else - think of it as an opportunity cost.
And merely doing without reflection is also not useful - and one can also reflect on the deeds of others too so that one can learn without a direct harm to ourselves.
"Fools learn from their mistakes. I prefer to profit from the mistakes of others."
There is a reason all education depends on students trying and failing to solve problems, that is how we learn things properly. When you stop doing that you stop learning new things at a deeper level.
the best solution usually involves studying the problem, dissecting it in smaller problems, finding a way to do the same thing brute force does, by doing much less (work smarter, not harder).
Which also means you have to slow down at first, to be faster when you encounter the same (or similar) problem again.
i.e. become wiser
Maybe people who do nothing and think all day assume they are wise, but it's the other way around. Experienced people are wise.
Thinking alone just creates false assumptions in your head. It's the doing part that will teach you, it's life itself that will be your toughest teacher.
One needs to be deliberate on understanding what works and what doesn't, otherwise they'll keep doing the same mistakes. Being deliberate requires slowing down, in my experience.
There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once.
Gotta grind for that success. But don't grind too much. Also, remember to meditate. Disconnect from the internet. But don't become too disconnected, because you have to stay up to date on current events, because otherwise you can't keep up with the twittersphere. Which you should avoid, because it's toxic, by the way. But not too much, because important people say important things there!
This article is particularly bad. It's only a few paragraphs, and it still manages to be so self-contradictory that if you actually read it through, you're literally no wiser in the end, because the advice boils down to "Sometimes you need to relax, but you can't relax all the time." Gee, thanks. Pretty ironic, considering the subject of this article.
At 71 (I am still working) I have had an unusual career. Since I was 25, for the most part I stopped working full time, capping my work at 32 hours a week. I was able to do this at some great companies working in great teams. My boss from 40 years ago visited me [1] from out of town 6 weeks ago and I apologized a little for causing him any hassles because of this. He laughed and said that while it was true that I was missed in my no work Mondays, that I was the easiest person he ever managed because I really focused on my 4 work days.
[1] so far this year, I have had 4 visits from old coworkers who traveled to my town, ranging from working together 1 year ago to 40 years ago. I like to keep in touch with people.
I did give up 20% of my salary and occasionally when there was an emergency and everyone showed up Saturday morning to make a delivery, I would also show up and not bill for those hours. This only happened a few times a year.
If you don’t ask for stuff, you are unlikely to get it.
Why can't we just be in the middle.
Use your common sense to choose where best to focus your limited time and energy, listen to yourself and not others.
Or adapt to what the current situation demands of us. Sometimes I do want to get up early, go for a run and work a 12 hour day.
Sometimes I want to stay in bed until 9am and mooch around not getting much done.
No two days have to be identical.
Thinking alone won't get you there. That will turn you into an "Intellectual Yet Idiot", as Nassim Taleb calls it.
I don't know why, maybe because we perceive knowledge as a pure thing, that can be shared, embraced and understood out of thin air, that we can be pure minds or something along those lines.
Yet, from personal experience, being taken down from your high horse and beaten down to earth by life itself (ie, this 0.0001% probability event that is 100% for you), well... It takes more than a fool to not take a learning out of it.
On wisdom, I am reminded of the Serenity Prayer- "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer)
Wisdom is linked to a life-long experienced person. No one can be said to be "wise" at 15.
And doing random things expecting to get "wise" is like moving frantically and randomly your limbs & expecting to learn kung fu.... Time has to make things decant.
Prime example worth studying: Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore
It is important to emphasize that while this may be a consequence of wisdom, it is not what leisure is for the sake of. To reduce leisure and wisdom to instruments of productivity is to miss the whole point. We do not make leisure so that we may work, so that we may be more productive; we work so that we may make leisure. Wisdom is an end in itself. Work is not. "Productivity" is not. Work exists for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. (We must also not confuse recreation with leisure.)
Josef Pieper's book "Leisure: the Basis of Culture" makes exactly this point. Something Pieper covers in the first chapter and worth noting here is that the word "school" comes from the Latin schola which in turn is derived from the Greek σχολή (skhole) which is the Greek word for "leisure" (indeed, the absence of leisure characteristic of work was defined negatively, askholia in Greek and negotium in Latin). Modern education may make this difficult to comprehend, but this is more discernible in classical education. Similarly, the "liberal" in "liberal arts" refers to the freedom to pursue leisure, and these are opposed to the so-called servile arts. And lastly, Pieper draws attention to the prevalence of religious feasts during the Middle Ages whose essential function wasn't to stuff your face with food and drink yourself under the table, but leisure. What could be more "leisurely" than religion, that which is, after all, concerned with the ultimate end and the highest good?
We moderns live in what Pieper called the world of total work (he was writing this book in the postwar period, so this affliction is nothing new). To be sure, we must toil and till the field in which wisdom will grow, but we do not live to till the field; we till the field so that we may live. What is it that we live for, that we ought to live for? Perhaps it is our modern nihilism that frightens us enough to invert the relation between work and leisure, leading us to lose ourselves in work to avoid the realization.
Which actually means practice (or perform) thinking more and probably reduce "less meaningful" work (not just "meaningless")
Increasing efficiency & accuracy in thinking and performing actions
Above are my very rough thoughts.
Right.
Well yeah, different people have different views of how to accomplish stuff. You should have to reason a bit about what you read to figure out your own approach
I find what is crucial when it comes to taking advice, is figuring out when advice makes sense to you — and try to synthesize it as food for thought within your world view (or not).
That is to say, it's not true! but over millennia, humans have found it to be useful. Try not to get annoyed by writing that isn't meant for you (assuming you don't get any value out of it, it's a tautology that you are not the intended audience.)
Not saying IceDane is doing this, and ironically I find this line "Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue" ... profoundly accurate.
I'm afflicted by an innate desire to assert my own personal brand of intellectual profundity, but I can't settle on a platform (bike shed) from which to broadcast.
I am having difficulty parsing your comment. You are equating Tao Te Ching and astrology in the same bucket ? One is a philosophy, a way of looking at life - the other I don't know what to call it. And if you say that both are ways of looking at the world then we can apply that yardstick to everything and it doesn't get us anywhere.
>> That is to say, it's not true! but over millennia, humans have found it to be useful.
What part of core ancient philosophies about how one should conduct oneself are not true but useful ?
How could it be otherwise? There is nothing new under the sun...
"... blindly raging industriousness brings riches and honour but at the same time deprives the organs of refinement that make it possible to enjoy the riches and honour; also, that this chief antidote to boredom and to the passions at the same time dulls the senses [0] and makes the spirit resistant to new attractions. (The most industrious age - our own - doesn't know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money except still more money and still more industriousness, for more genius is required to spend than to acquire! Well, we'll still have our 'grandchildren'!) If education is successful, each virtue of the individual is a public utility and a private disadvantage with respect to the highest private end - probably involving some deterioration of the spirit and the senses or even a premature demise: consider from this standpoint the virtues of obedience, chastity, piety, and justice."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 21. To the teachers of selflessness
The title of the article describes the merit of deliberate inaction to gain the virtue of wisdom. Wikipedia (universal standardized knowledge database edited by verified "wise" people?) defines it as the "ability to contemplate and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight."
I agree with the author, Jideofor Onwugbenu, that there is utility in the pensive reflection required to digest the broad spectrum of memories accumulated throughout each period of labor. But he/she has produced other articles with titles such as "Tactics to Accelerate your Career" and "Pensions, Exponential Growth, and Investing" which seem to promote the concept of restlessness.
Mr/Mrs Onwugbenu claims that he/she "labors" in yet another remotely located "financial technology" startup which is a synonym for "banking" which is the sector that rides the ("Leverage") waves generated by productive societies. Ever since I saw my tax dollars swallowed by the bloated "financial sector" after failure to enforce restraint among it's mortgage lending "talent" in 2008 (followed by the American coin mint authorization to spend even more of my tax dollars to change the back of the penny, stamping dies used for only one year), I've had to develop a necessary skepticism of any information broadcasted. It makes sense that a person on a computer all day is going to arbitrarily advise us to "do less" [1].
"... a Soviet scientist, Shafarevich, who has nothing to do with religion - he is a computer scientist - did a very intensive research on the history of socialist countries. He called socialist, or communist, any country with a centralized economy and the pyramidal style of power structure. He discovered (actually he didn't discover - he just brought to the attention of his readers) that civilizations like Mohenjo-daro (in the river Indus area), Egypt, Maya, Incas, and Babylonian culture collapsed&disappeared from the surface of Earth the moment they lost religion. As simple as that - they disintegrated. Nobody remembers about them anymore (well, distantly). The ideas moving society and keeping mankind as society of human beings. As intelligent, moral agents of God. The facts, the truth, the exact knowledge, all the sophisticated technology and computers will not prevent society from disintegrating and eventually dying out... " [2]
After I made the decision to spend my limited attention reading what a banker has written about the merit of idleness, I see that the Convenient Almighty Recommendation Algorithm has projected the option to play-back footage of Bishop Fulton Sheen telling me that "Most of us live below the level of our energy, and in order to be happy - we have to do more. Now, we can do more, spiritually and every other way than we are doing as is proven by hypnotism..." [3]
But the pocket computer is a statesman's dream: gps/microphone/camera/accelerometer in every pocket? Yes please. The SysAdmin(s) Among You that desire to play God seek omniscience. And with "helpful" Youtube videos showing how to "employ" surplus devices [5] - you too can add [6] to the chaos of moral dearth by getting paid (wide net indirectly cast via venture capital fueled dot-com-bubble-2.0, transponder switched off [7]) to pretend to be the guiding hand of the calculated opinions of millions of "real" people. A list linking you to digital profiles (proof) "who" have clicked "like" is not available to the user, unlike any stage performer who spends "all this time running around" personally inspecting the "legs and limbs, millions of eyes [8]" - instantly accessing their user base by gazing upon a sea of movement. Fake (virtual) engagement can raise or lower the reception metrics displayed next to the content of both your impressionable children and their teachers - this is the closest thing to centralized hypnotism.
Since the most funded organization of Sol-3 is the United States Military, global hegemony can be challenged by circumventing it's strike capability. Subvert their civilian labour via the shiny trojan horse pocket device:
"... if an enemy is bigger and heavier than yourself, it would be very painful to resist his direct strike... the Chinese and Japanese judo art tells us what to do. First, to avoid the strike, then to grab the fist and continue his movement into the direction where it was before. Until the enemy crashes into the wall... in every society there are people who are against the society. Simple criminals ideologically in disagreement with state policy, conscientious enemies, psychotic personalities that are against anything, and finally there is a small group of agents of a foreign nation (bought, subverted, recruited). The moment all these movements will be directed in one direction - this is the time to catch that movement and continue it until the movement forces the whole society into collapse and crisis... We don't stop the enemy - we help him to go into the direction we want him to go." [9]
It would be "wise" to destroy the conditions that led to the availability of "Rosie the Riveter", that is, the dutifully disciplined daughter descended from strong family values, with her meticulous/patriotic/productive precision operating the industrial equipment providing the steady stream of reliable asset reinforcement to be operated by her beloved man with his high pain threshold staged throughout multiple theatres of engagement.
"... to take advantage of these movements, to capitalize on them... religion, education, social life, power structure, labor relation unions, and Law&Order. These are the areas of application of subversion. In case of religion - destroy it, ridicule it. Replace it with various sex cults [10] which brings peoples attention away from the purpose of religion - to keep people in touch with a supreme being..." [11]
Promote sexual promiscuity disguised as "revolution" across a few decades. The cinema, mass produced televisions, and those that curate their broadcasted content could be considered thrifty foreign military assets because the "useful idiot" does the bulk of the subversion work for free by responding to where the money flows and what the traditionally reliable institutions are projecting.
"... We think a subverter is a person who is going to blow up our beautiful bridges. No - a subverter is a student who comes for exchange, a diplomat, an actor, an artist, a journalist like myself... " [12]
Since the men will eat the apple of "knowledge" because their women insist, then they are aiding their own subversion by having their Goddess Bound by ideology delivered by the voice who moves slowly therefore undetected:
"It's everywhere, it's everything, it's everyone, It's anywhere, its anything, it's anyone , It's a neighbors saving face, by saying grace, Today for yesterday's behavior" [13]
"... Education - distract them from learning something that is constructive, pragmatic, efficient. Instead of mathematics, physics, foreign languages, chemistry - teach them history of urban warfare, natural food, home economy, your sexuality, anything that takes you away..." [14]
A "painless" genocide in slow motion - gender swapping sterilization will be your own "revolutionary" idea, a combination of post-surgery anesthesia and infinite "news" scroll sedating your natural reaction to this final blow. Put it in the credit card commercials, corporate literature circulation, entertainment screenplay dialogue, elevate it to the top of news feeds by social engineering internal FAANG operators via high salary - the bribe to turn the blind eye of the state official is a small price to pay, but an unnecessary expense when a pocket device can show 40k+ zip codes the same story of "progress".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821762
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-pers...
[2] https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g?t=3542
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e5oPIHnHQs&t=210s
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THJfNJk08ds
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_leaflet_propaganda
[7] https://youtu.be/2yV3Uj8qbCU?t=51
[8] https://youtu.be/GQ9MnaocJvk?t=929
[9] https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g?t=663
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe
[11] https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g?t=788
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE&t=229s
"... Normalization. At that stage, the self-appointed rulers of the society don't need revolution anymore... Stabilizing the country by force. So all the sleepers, activists, social workers, liberals, homosexuals, professors, and Marxist/Leninists are being eliminated. Physically sometimes. They've done their job already, the are not needed anymore. The new rulers need stability to exploit the nation, to take advantage of the victory." [15]
Prevention is possible via fellowship, but their "freedoms" are the same as yours, which allows you to more easily identify these casualties of the lawless information distribution avalanche. We are "redirecting the blow" in our own way by allowing the termination of susceptible lineages in humane fashion to create "lebensraum" for the citizens who understand that strong family means the human duty to yield/educate/endow your replacements to carry on the mission because "non est ad astra mollis e terris via".
". . . so the answer to ideological subversion, strangely enough, is very simple. You don't have to shoot people, you don't have to aim missiles and Pershings and cruise missiles at Andropov's headquarters - you simply have to have faith, and prevent subversion. In other words, not to be a victim of subversion. Don't try to be a person, who in judo, is trying to smash the enemy, and being caught by their hand. Don't strike like that. Strike with the power of your spirit and moral superiority. If you don't have that power - it's high time to develop it. " [16]
The proponents of ideological infiltration do not want to be your enemy. Out of necessity, you must be kept in check, since your displays of opulence, gluttony, sloth, wrath (et al) are not the same motivational forces that has long been the prompt for the strong minds&bodies of all nations to seek immigration into the pioneering American ranks. They are seeing their hero fall ill, and it arouses a suspicion and skepticism to fill the void of inspiration and keeps the long chain of human existence intact.
"... you're essentially absconding your position in the great chain of civilization. Every individual is the result of a lineage that goes back a billion years, from the very first organisms to you, and you're like 'I don't need to carry on that chain, abolish all of that. I am going to live off other peoples effort and energy.' What makes you think you have the right to be like 'I don't need to do anything about upholding this civilization by producing future generations for it. I am going to get myself sterilized, drink my wine, and live off the fruits like a conqueror.' This is a totally unsustainable attitude. It's not going to last. You're going to be miserable." [17]
It is the same energy as found in Locker Room Talk. The jeer/insult/defiance in the absence of the Coach is meant to size you up and prove your worth, to probe for your eligibility to bear the conch shell. Your teammates don't push you around because they despise you - they want to know that you can be trusted in the heat of the moment. If your scheming reaction is to "cancel the bullies", then you've failed the test. The drill sergeant draws salary for the sole purpose of introducing you to chaos so that you are far more durable than ever before.
"... It has to be stopped, and it's easy. They won't be offended, mind you. As a matter of fact - they will respect America more." [18]
[15] https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g?t=2649
[16] https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g?t=3712
Capturing irony in all it's glory takes planning.
What you are describing in the opposite of wisdom - that's just perseverance.
Note, I am not saying that it is unwise to read docs, but you don't become wise by reading docs, you become wise by making mistakes. Wisdom isn't built by following wise advice.
>> Let go of all attachments. You find this in Hindu, Buddhist and even some stoic philosophies. It doesn't mean you literally don't feel for any thing/objects in life, leave every thing and become an ascetic.
In fact it is the opposite - immersed in your life, you recognize the attachment you have towards the person/object, feel the joy/sadness(and everything in between) that you derive from it, yet don't be consumed by it, don't make it the center of your life. Don't get attached to being reciprocated or the results as these are out of your control. Learn to let it go if it is not part of your life anymore.
Life finds a way, as Dr. Malcolm would say.
At least that is how I see it.
And then there are the 'sales type'-guys if you know what I mean. They just talk and do: have their finances more or less straight, have a family, lots of social connections, ... .
I agree that both thinking and doing is best (as hopefully most here are doing). But if I have to choose, I would choose doing over thinking.