Finding signal from Noise

If I have one intention at the moment, it would be to declutter, to let my mind reach inbox zero again and find awe in the simple beauties of everyday life. I feel desensitized, jaded even and a bit disenchanted by my life in San Francisco despite how from the outside you couldn’t want more — 32, healthy, somewhat successful, job that I love, incredible friend group.

My taste buds are burned from too much fine food if that metaphor could apply.

You reach a point where you can have everything and suddenly everything loses it’s magic. Not to presume that I have reached that point in the least but I think on some basic level I am dipping a toe into that pond. Fine wines, fine clothes, fine parties, dinners with fine people, rich conversations, a constant cascade of stimulating trips and content, the best movies, the best dinners, the best conversations, the best podcasts. High grain inputs have flooded my brain and dulled my senses.

I can’t escape the idea that even writing this is a luxury, that to experience too much luxury is a luxury, what a luxury to write about desiring a life without luxury. But even romanticizing days living above an auto body shop in an apartment without heat or a dishwasher or washing dishes in a kitchen my arms covered in the filthy leftovers of “fine students” makes me jaded. Of course I would have coming-of-age stories…every “fine person” does.

So here I am — what seems to be a stereotype of Silicon Valley — riding on a train from Zurich to Zermatt from my fancy tech conference — wondering “what’s the point?”/ “what is real?/ “what is worth living for?”

Well for one, it’s all “real.”

Our brain is a reduction valve on reality, evolved in three core parts like three little ice cream scoops, that developed against the imprecise evolutionary machine. In short:

1. Reptilian brain

2. Limbic, mammalian brain

3. Cortex

If we were pure cortex without the limbic part, life would be highly rational but we wouldn’t “feel” anything. It would seem as though life had no point to it. Our emotions add depth to this experience but the chambers are not well integrated. One hijacks the other in a constant battle between reason and feeling. If we had the limbic and cortex but no reptilian brain, life would be emotional and we’d have the ability to reason about things, but there would be no “clock,” no living barometer or reminder that this life is finite. Our breath, our gut, and our hearts are the clocks of our existence, ever-beating and giving life its constraints. Without a drum beat, music lacks a fundamental dimension. Without a heartbeat, we are music without rhythm.

So here we are reducing reality into a set of patterns and projections, feelings, and rhythms, navigating through this life looking to fulfill our evolutionary objectives. The pursuit of these objectives is governed by a simple set of rules … .maximize pleasure, avoid pain ….we navigate from point to point against the gradients of pleasure and pain.

We often reach local maxima. The greatest enemy of long term pleasure is short term pleasure.

So we have to unwind from our pleasure mountain and descend but that descent comes with pain. If you look at the pleasure system, the reduction of pleasure is in-fact perceived as pain.

What happens if we reach a plateau where there is no gradient? We are surrounded by “fine things” and “fine people”? Little luxurious on every corner erode all gradients in sight. Life will feel pointless if you reach the global maxima in the same way it will feel hopeless in a world surrounded by pain.

Huxley said that it would not be some dictatorship or oppressor that would imprison us, but rather we would imprison ourselves. Give us enough free time and we will all be in a vat doing drugs, pumping our brains full of pleasure chemicals and overloading the signal so much that we forget what good signal looks like.

Pascal said that all the world’s problems stem from a man’s inability to sit alone in a room for 30 min. What happens in that 30min? We suddenly realize how out of control our minds are, all our greatest fears, all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our senses, come cascading into us. Normally we dull these with everything conceivable — little distractions, “fine things.” Each time we do that, scars form over unaddressed mental and emotional knots. Layer enough scar tissue together and the channels, the rivers of thought that in aggregate form our minds, become clogged. The reduction valve becomes clouded and reality warps into a delusional construction of fears, desires and narcissism.

If we clutter our minds we create mental structures that support and reinforce clutter. If we clutter our lives, we build infrastructure that supports clutter. If we surround ourselves with clutter — bad relationships, bad job, bad habits — our lives become all about maintaining clutter.

There is a song that keeps ringing in my head as I write this….”closer to fine” by the Indigo Girls, a lyric in particular. “Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” Ain’t that the truth. Pursue hunger — hunger for money, pleasure, sex, fame, fine things, even, apparently, not fine things — and you will consume yourself.

So how to find a light that’s hard to hear? Is this light on my “gradient plane” or on some other dimension?

I don’t believe in a soul, i’m not sure I even believe in some distinct consciousness. Some say consciousness is a single candle light in an ocean of existence. A phrase I’ve always said to myself is “life is a vacation from the eternal abyss.” Conscious or not, I am here swimming through some ocean of existence between birth and ultimately towards “candles out.” Often times, we find other voyagers in the night, they join our vessel, and become passengers through this existence. Finding another to join your vessel is one of the great pleasures of life, the deeper the relationship, the deeper the intimacy, the more you can pull back the layers of reality together and truly see that other mind navigating in a vast ocean with you. You form a universe together, and all the little habits, ideas, thoughts, shared experience shape the edges of that universe. Parting ways from your passenger is a painful experience. You’re literally eradicating a universe that could have been and venturing back out into the ocean alone.

I’m not sure why or or if it’s some delusion I have, but I do believe there’s a path or state of being that emerges when you allow the senses to recalibrate, when you sit alone, forget all the fine things, and unplug yourself from the Huxlean pleasure vat. You suddenly see the beauty in the state that is navigation between these small pleasure/pain hills. That trajectory you choose — that has peaks of joy and valleys of struggle and sadness is the meaningful way. But I’m not trying to maximize pleasure or reduce pain. Well I am in some sense…..to reach some optimal place where I don’t have too much pleasure or too much pain. Damn you goldilocks!

So is the conclusion of my wandering through the little ice cream scoops of my mind, departing from my overstimulated world — to “recalibrate the mind?” That feels a little cheap. For what? / To what end?

Doesn’t it feel a little cheap to have some optional answer at the end of this stream consciousness? That the right way to navigate through the ocean of existence is to optimize my pleasure/pain gradient cycle…..do good work, wander around reflect on life, and repeat? You’re goddamn right it is! Or not. I’m not sure. I’ll let you know when I find out.

There seems to be something to “journey before destination” (If you know that reference you know what it is to read good literature). But a journey without a good destination feels pointless. We need some destination worth journeying for don’t we? Or is the destination the eternal abyss and the journey, life? I guess it doesn’t really matter…we choose whatever destination we want and the journey forms to get us there. But overly direct your reduction valve at the destination itself and you’ll reach it without savoring all the beauty and dimensionality of reality along the way.

This brings me to another tangent. To be happy, we must be at peace. If we have a destination we’re striving for, it is remarkably difficult to remain at peace. If we have three destinations, good luck on happiness or getting to one at all! So a single destination at a time seems like a good thing. Most of us aren’t trying to be happy though…we’re trying to get somewhere — to some vision of success, some vision of happiness. And this is totally fine. We need a destination to get anywhere and we should seek to reach states where it is in fact easier to control our exposure to pain and pleasure. But I don’t want to live in a constant state of despair nor do I want to be an opioid junkie living from high-to-high.

So we must choose a good destination and we must prioritize the journey over destination, and that destination cannot be a plateau if we don’t want to saturate the signal. Ideally we find a fellow voyager or many as well. And as we go, we must sit alone in a room for 30 min or wander off into the woods to let our minds recalibrate, to savor the details.

I wish we had a word for it that was better than happiness but I’ve always found that the thing we all seek is right in front of us when we let our minds calm. A kid finds satisfaction in a pile of dirt, so I don’t need some cascade of high definition instagram reels, cold plunges, ground up vegetable leftovers, fancy dinners, or train rides across Switzerland — to find it. This isn’t to say those aren’t great things but to over fixate on these things is to miss the space between all things. And in that space, we do find bliss.