Hi David, I'm new to substack because I listened to Modern Wisdom podcast episode with you and I find your content very interesting so I wanted to read more.
Anyway, I've been trying to meditate on and off for a long time, and thinking a lot of doing more recently and really learning how to do it, because I don't think I really know how, but never have I ever felt happiness when I was practicing meditation, mostly I was just being bored or distracted by my own thoughts. Happiness wasn't even my reason why I wanted to do it. I just wanted to slow down my thoughts, be in the present and learn how to focus and not be distracted all the time.
An interesting exercise for you would be one that Dr. David Burns invented to increase motivation at the start of therapy. It’s called paradoxical agenda setting. It’s described here and involves a magic button...
For your case you’d write down all the reasons that not meditating to be happy make you an awesome person, say something positive about yourself or have a positive effect. Examples might be: I’m awesome as I am -- I don’t need to meditate. There are more important values to me than being happy. I save time for other things by not meditating.
Next, given all of these awesome things about not meditating, ask yourself why change anything at all. It’s at this point that the person begins a conversation with himself on whether change is really worth it. He might say, yeah those things are all true but it would be nice to be a bit happier so yeah I’ll do your stupid exercises/meditation/whatever.
Great thoughts and recommendations, David. I read Why Buddhism Is True a few years ago and loved it. I've somehow still not read Wright's other books, though. The links you shared at least moved a few of them onto my reading list.
On the meditation front, I hear you. I do think meditation is about more than just being happier, though. (Being more aware of our own bullshit, as you pointed out, being more focused, seeing where our thoughts and emotions lead us astray—which I guess is also about being more aware of your own bullshit—etc.) The time spent meditating is not a practice to get better at the time spent meditating. It's a practice to get better at navigating the rest of the day's bullshit. I.e., applying the awareness gained from a meditation practice to one's non-meditative hours. If you can do that, a formal sitting practice might not be needed anymore. If you can't, it could be a sign that you maybe should meditate more, even if/especially because you don't want to, or it could just be exactly what you said, that you'd rather do other things. I'm not trying to prove anything or convince you either way. Just sharing my thoughts, for whatever they're worth.
I also hear you loud and clear on the politics front. When I was a kid, I had no idea what my or any of my friends' or family members' political leanings were. It wasn't until I moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Chicago and made friends with progressives that I, like you, felt ashamed of my lack of interest in politics and became a progressive (for a time). And to be totally honest, I was very uninformed. The more complex the issue was, the more I looked to them for clues about what I was supposed to think about it. In other words, I was totally full of shit, unbeknownst to me at the time. But hey, people liked me, so there was that. It wasn't until years later—after moving far away more than once, putting in the work to inform myself, developing awareness and writing practices, going depressingly deep into the messes of politics and society and status and signaling and the cultural forever wars—that I started to wise up and see it all for the panorama of bullshit that I now believe it is. I'm more informed than I once was. But you know the song: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know (or however it goes). I'm not sure if the road here was worth it or would have been better spent in ignorance, but I can say for sure that I'm now happily and wholly allergic to absolute political affiliations and ideologies. If anything, I share your "vague sympathy for anarchy."
Thanks, Brian. I like your way of framing it—that it’s more about becoming aware of one’s own and others’ bullshit, and perhaps becoming more patient and compassionate about it, than becoming happier. I’ll have to remember that. I did meditate a couple times since your last comment—you encouraged me. I think it really depends on having a community to support and encourage the practice, and probably the reason I stopped was because I didn’t have one. Also, I’m glad to learn I’m not alone in my feelings of political alienation. Nice to know there are others out there. Cheers.
I agree that community and encouragement help. (Likewise, yes, you are not alone in your political alienation, and it's encouraging to me to know that I'm not, either.) I hope whatever encouragement I supplied in my last comment was of the positive sort. It hit me after replying that my thoughts might have read as harsher than intended. Hopefully not. But just in case, let me explicitly say that I come in peace and good faith. Your posts seem to always give me a lot to think about and leave me with many thoughts of my own that I feel compelled to share (for better or worse), which I appreciate very much.
I meditated for a long time and also reached a point where I was a lot more content and at peace, and it was boring so I stopped. I think that's the main issue here - happiness is boring. We've evolved to constantly explore, be on guard for threats, move around, and do stuff. Just sitting quietly in contentment seems like a gentle death. Someone should write a satire where you die and go to heaven, and after a while everyone is miserable and creates chaos just to have something to do. I think that also explains a lot of the faux populism and revolutionary cosplaying we see on the Internet today - its great fun being a socialist, or trying to overthrow the deep state, or whatever else you want to do when you're generally safe, fed, and protected by a large and powerful government. Being at peace is boring and so we'll invent drama just to have something to do.
As far as not caring about politics, isn't that just a debate about what the word politics entails now? Humans have always cared about "morality" and "ethics" - essentially what the rules of engagement with are with each other and how we should redistribute resources. In the past, those discussions were more focused on our families and local communities but now life has become more atomized and national politics has overwhelmed all other discussions of local politics thanks to technology and the power of the federal government, so it's natural to obsess about it and think about it even though the likelihood you'll affect anything on a national scale is close to zero.
Maybe it's not about happiness but our evolutionary need to conserve energy/calories. I know that taking a walk in the morning with my dog makes me happy but I still have a hard time doing it. Meditation, exercising makes you feel better but it takes energy to do it, while eating a bag of potato chips gives you more calories.
Yea I agree we evolved a desire to conserve energy, and that’s why exercising is hard. But I’m not sure that applies to meditation. It’s just sitting around doing nothing. Plus it tends to be relaxing so it might even require less energy. I think we just didn’t evolve to pursue the feeling of happiness.
Went to a meditation course. I didn't manage to meditate at all. "Beside the sea" - mind busied itself on tide, erosion. "A quiet forest" - mind filled again busily, understory, any storm damage, smells. Even that busy I was bored. OTOH I'm genetically political in general outlook & pattern of observing while skeptical & becoming ever more so about politicians and their patent remedies for the ills of society.
Yea I found that if my mind was busy with thoughts, the best thing to do was meditate on the thoughts themselves—try to focus on what exactly they are and where they come from. That tends to make them vanish. As for your genetically political inclination, maybe that’s a thing. Maybe I have the opposite genes. I won’t begrudge your genes if you don’t begrudge mine.
I meditated to find something "more" than me; instead I kept knocking into my own suffering. If mediation makes one happy, it's probably being done wrong lol.
Hi David, I'm new to substack because I listened to Modern Wisdom podcast episode with you and I find your content very interesting so I wanted to read more.
Anyway, I've been trying to meditate on and off for a long time, and thinking a lot of doing more recently and really learning how to do it, because I don't think I really know how, but never have I ever felt happiness when I was practicing meditation, mostly I was just being bored or distracted by my own thoughts. Happiness wasn't even my reason why I wanted to do it. I just wanted to slow down my thoughts, be in the present and learn how to focus and not be distracted all the time.
Hi Johnna, welcome and glad you enjoyed the modern wisdom episode. Have you tried guided meditation? Fwiw, this guided meditation audiobook, particularly the last chapter where you meditate on sounds, really cracked it open for me: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0084510JS?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp
Hi David, loving the blog - what is the name of the guided meditation audiobook please ? that link doesn't work from the UK for some reason.
Thanks, Dave. It's called Guided Meditation: Six Essential Practices to Cultivate Love, Awareness, and Wisdom by Jack Kornfield.
An interesting exercise for you would be one that Dr. David Burns invented to increase motivation at the start of therapy. It’s called paradoxical agenda setting. It’s described here and involves a magic button...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jqTeghCJ2anMHPPjG/book-review-feeling-great-by-david-burns
For your case you’d write down all the reasons that not meditating to be happy make you an awesome person, say something positive about yourself or have a positive effect. Examples might be: I’m awesome as I am -- I don’t need to meditate. There are more important values to me than being happy. I save time for other things by not meditating.
Next, given all of these awesome things about not meditating, ask yourself why change anything at all. It’s at this point that the person begins a conversation with himself on whether change is really worth it. He might say, yeah those things are all true but it would be nice to be a bit happier so yeah I’ll do your stupid exercises/meditation/whatever.
Very interesting, thanks! I love the paradoxical nature of this—sort of like using our fear of narcissism as a motivational tool. I’ll give it a try.
Great thoughts and recommendations, David. I read Why Buddhism Is True a few years ago and loved it. I've somehow still not read Wright's other books, though. The links you shared at least moved a few of them onto my reading list.
On the meditation front, I hear you. I do think meditation is about more than just being happier, though. (Being more aware of our own bullshit, as you pointed out, being more focused, seeing where our thoughts and emotions lead us astray—which I guess is also about being more aware of your own bullshit—etc.) The time spent meditating is not a practice to get better at the time spent meditating. It's a practice to get better at navigating the rest of the day's bullshit. I.e., applying the awareness gained from a meditation practice to one's non-meditative hours. If you can do that, a formal sitting practice might not be needed anymore. If you can't, it could be a sign that you maybe should meditate more, even if/especially because you don't want to, or it could just be exactly what you said, that you'd rather do other things. I'm not trying to prove anything or convince you either way. Just sharing my thoughts, for whatever they're worth.
I also hear you loud and clear on the politics front. When I was a kid, I had no idea what my or any of my friends' or family members' political leanings were. It wasn't until I moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Chicago and made friends with progressives that I, like you, felt ashamed of my lack of interest in politics and became a progressive (for a time). And to be totally honest, I was very uninformed. The more complex the issue was, the more I looked to them for clues about what I was supposed to think about it. In other words, I was totally full of shit, unbeknownst to me at the time. But hey, people liked me, so there was that. It wasn't until years later—after moving far away more than once, putting in the work to inform myself, developing awareness and writing practices, going depressingly deep into the messes of politics and society and status and signaling and the cultural forever wars—that I started to wise up and see it all for the panorama of bullshit that I now believe it is. I'm more informed than I once was. But you know the song: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know (or however it goes). I'm not sure if the road here was worth it or would have been better spent in ignorance, but I can say for sure that I'm now happily and wholly allergic to absolute political affiliations and ideologies. If anything, I share your "vague sympathy for anarchy."
Thanks, Brian. I like your way of framing it—that it’s more about becoming aware of one’s own and others’ bullshit, and perhaps becoming more patient and compassionate about it, than becoming happier. I’ll have to remember that. I did meditate a couple times since your last comment—you encouraged me. I think it really depends on having a community to support and encourage the practice, and probably the reason I stopped was because I didn’t have one. Also, I’m glad to learn I’m not alone in my feelings of political alienation. Nice to know there are others out there. Cheers.
I agree that community and encouragement help. (Likewise, yes, you are not alone in your political alienation, and it's encouraging to me to know that I'm not, either.) I hope whatever encouragement I supplied in my last comment was of the positive sort. It hit me after replying that my thoughts might have read as harsher than intended. Hopefully not. But just in case, let me explicitly say that I come in peace and good faith. Your posts seem to always give me a lot to think about and leave me with many thoughts of my own that I feel compelled to share (for better or worse), which I appreciate very much.
P.S. Thanks for the Christopher Freiman book rec. It's also (high) on my list.
I meditated for a long time and also reached a point where I was a lot more content and at peace, and it was boring so I stopped. I think that's the main issue here - happiness is boring. We've evolved to constantly explore, be on guard for threats, move around, and do stuff. Just sitting quietly in contentment seems like a gentle death. Someone should write a satire where you die and go to heaven, and after a while everyone is miserable and creates chaos just to have something to do. I think that also explains a lot of the faux populism and revolutionary cosplaying we see on the Internet today - its great fun being a socialist, or trying to overthrow the deep state, or whatever else you want to do when you're generally safe, fed, and protected by a large and powerful government. Being at peace is boring and so we'll invent drama just to have something to do.
As far as not caring about politics, isn't that just a debate about what the word politics entails now? Humans have always cared about "morality" and "ethics" - essentially what the rules of engagement with are with each other and how we should redistribute resources. In the past, those discussions were more focused on our families and local communities but now life has become more atomized and national politics has overwhelmed all other discussions of local politics thanks to technology and the power of the federal government, so it's natural to obsess about it and think about it even though the likelihood you'll affect anything on a national scale is close to zero.
Maybe it's not about happiness but our evolutionary need to conserve energy/calories. I know that taking a walk in the morning with my dog makes me happy but I still have a hard time doing it. Meditation, exercising makes you feel better but it takes energy to do it, while eating a bag of potato chips gives you more calories.
Yea I agree we evolved a desire to conserve energy, and that’s why exercising is hard. But I’m not sure that applies to meditation. It’s just sitting around doing nothing. Plus it tends to be relaxing so it might even require less energy. I think we just didn’t evolve to pursue the feeling of happiness.
Went to a meditation course. I didn't manage to meditate at all. "Beside the sea" - mind busied itself on tide, erosion. "A quiet forest" - mind filled again busily, understory, any storm damage, smells. Even that busy I was bored. OTOH I'm genetically political in general outlook & pattern of observing while skeptical & becoming ever more so about politicians and their patent remedies for the ills of society.
Yea I found that if my mind was busy with thoughts, the best thing to do was meditate on the thoughts themselves—try to focus on what exactly they are and where they come from. That tends to make them vanish. As for your genetically political inclination, maybe that’s a thing. Maybe I have the opposite genes. I won’t begrudge your genes if you don’t begrudge mine.
I meditated to find something "more" than me; instead I kept knocking into my own suffering. If mediation makes one happy, it's probably being done wrong lol.