Avinash Rajput

“Live every week like its shark week. And nothing is impossible except dinosaurs.” -Tracy Morgan to Kenneth on 30 Rock

One of my favorite books is the four hour work week. At the risk of oversimplification, the point of the book is that time is your most valuable asset. The author, Tim Ferriss, has a blog, and a while ago he posted a really cool essay entitled The Shortness of Life by Seneca the Younger. Seneca the Younger was one of the fathers of the essay as a literary form and was a very opinionated man. Its a bit of a read, but if you’re in a bit of a time rush or only want to read the good stuff, Tim bolded the portions that he thought were most important and you could scan through it in less than five minutes. In this essay, Seneca refers to preoccupied people as people who have unnecessary worries and fears over the past and future and are unable to live in the present as a result.

“Life is divided into three periods—that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain… The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.”

I agree to an extent with the above quote. But I think the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to live in the moment by changing what you’re doing, but by changing how you’re thinking about what you’re doing. Circumstances can prevent you from being free to do what you wish. But I think its rational to believe that you can be free to feel whatever you want whenever you want. Of course, its also important not do something out of fear or anxiety, but out of love or duty. Motivations should be positive, and if you can be free to feel or think however you want, then you can set a positive motivation for whatever you are doing.

Viktor Frankl was a great champion of this philosophy. An Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist, he was a Holocaust survivor and went on to publish many influential papers and books in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, and neurology. One of his most famous books was a review of his experiences living in a concentration camp, entitled Man’s Search for Meaning.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I think the most popular and influential quotation from this book was the following:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I haven’t read the book myself, so I hope I’m not misrepresenting what he wrote, but a lecture I had heard had the same summary of his material, so this is hopefully correct.

There are really many parallels between these philosophies on life and the traditional Eastern philosophies on life. Its just that in the Eastern traditions, there really isn’t one person that these ideas can be traced to.

I guess the point I wanted to make was twofold. First, time is a gift, and its important to make sure that we don’t squander it with meaningless preoccupations of the mind because they are a waste of the gift of life. Second, while we may not really have control of our surroundings, our freedom lies in our response, and its important that we at least make the mental responses that we truly want to make.

According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of “I.” Psychology and neurology discovered that the “I” is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many “i”s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

- Kevin Kelly’s “The Technium”

This will (hopefully) be the first post in a series examining the idea that we are free. Are we free to choose what we like? Do we choose how we act? Is there a way for us to be more free? Should we care? … The tone sounds like the end of Lupe’s album Food & Liquor… This was initially motivated by a BBC documentary I watched entitled, “How Art Made the World”. This series won’t be regular, but hopefully within a few short articles, there’ll be some interesting, thought provoking information

The first episode discussed the first human works of art. The first human figurine/statuette, entitled Venus of Willendorf, clearly has very exaggerated features.

One of the first discovered human made figurines

The question that the documentarians asked when seeing this was, “Why would the first recreations of the human body not look like a typical human body?” To find the answer, anthropologists looked towards neuroscience research done with herring gulls. The relationship between the two disparate fields was actually by pointed out by Professor VS Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience at UCSD. He has a pretty interesting TED talk that’s worth it if you have a spare twenty-five minutes.

Scientist Niko Tinbergen discovered that Herring gull chicks habitually tap the red-striped beak of their mother to be fed. He further realized that the tapping response of the chicks could be triggered without any beak at all.

In place of the beak, the chicks responded to a yellow colored stick with a red strip painted on its side. Further, if the number of stripes were increased, from one strip to three stripes, the chick’s enthusiasm for tapping the stick and demanding food increased proportionally.

- How Art Made the World
So the idea that Ramachandran had was that as people gained the power to create, they created what they liked the most. And in doing so, they created what stimulated them the most. The artist in Willendorf made his beak with three stripes. But the relevant question for us is whether the artist chose what stimulated him the most, or whether it was a result of his nature or environment.
It seems as if the word “stimulated” is loaded with a connotation that seems a contrary to our traditional view of “liking” something. Almost mechanistic, like putting an electric current to a dead frog’s leg and watching it kick. Going to back to the blurb by Kevin Kelly, Bruce Mazlish believed that Freud started the collapse of the idea of “I”. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but his belief that most of adult personality could be traced back to childhood experiences would really appear to limit the freedom that individuals had to change their own personalities.

The traditional idea of the Self (no idea if this is really the traditional idea) seems to be rooted in some type of freedom of thought by an individual. And if the choice of what one likes, a freedom that is so central to our sense of Self, is not actually a choice at all, then what does that say about our self-view. Are we really capable of making “free” choices”? Maybe “the most important parts are the one that are unseen” and Lupe couldn’t help but like his Gold Watch, Guilty Brotherhood polos, and goyard bags. Sometimes it seems as if such airtight explanations of our nature leave no space for any personal choice. The explanations do make sense though. And if we don’t choose what we think, its conceivable that we might not choose how we act, or anything else. Maybe its true, “Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks.”

Kind of a pointless discussion, because i guess it wouldn’t necessarily change how you live. But it seems important to know. Not sure what I believe.