A Veil Upon the Ocean
Why serenity is the secret to surviving the world that is still to come
“Do you have any tips on how to deal with the overwhelm that accompanies seeing the world moving in the direction it seems to be heading? Simply ‘turning off the news’ is no longer enough when the price I paid for gas today was $4.66/gallon! My nephew who graduated with a compsci degree from the University of Chicago just got laid off by Oracle a couple months ago because his job has been replaced by AI and he has been pounding the pavement ever since. How does a person not give in to hopelessness and catastrophizing the future in these circumstances? Any perspective will help…”
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This is something that is rarely said. Perspective is a matter of proportion.
It requires one not only to clearly see what is happening - but to clearly see what else is happening. And to hold these in the right balance without distorting the significance of certain events over others.
Yes, gas is $4.66/gal - I do not mean to minimize the impacts that will have on your wallet. Yes, your nephew has lost his job to AI and I can only imagine how deflated he must feel so early in his career. But what else is happening? What are those aspects of your life that are not escalating or degrading?
Is your heart still faithfully pumping? Are your knees still reliable? Does your spouse still smile when you say something silly? Does your dog still look at you like you are god’s gift to humanity? Did the sunlight stream in through parted curtains, casting your bedroom in a radiant glow, when you opened your eyes this morning?
The attention is designed to move towards where the pain is - be it physical, financial, political or otherwise. Your mind will seek out sources of pain and discomfort and want to linger there. But what about those aspects of your experience that are not problematic? That are not breaking down? That are not causing you to suffer? Don’t they deserve attention too?
To be clear, I am not advocating for bypassing your pain by ignoring it. I am suggesting that the problems of your life occupy a disproportionate amount of your attention. And since attention shapes the nervous system as well as how the mind thinks - the way in which attention moves within you is the real determinant of your experience of life and not the events that are occurring.
The negative feedback bias is a well documented and studied cognitive bias that has evolutionarily emerged as a means of processing environmental risk in order to promote our survival as a species. The brain of a primitive hunter deep in the woods was trained to tune out the whistle of the wind and the sound of birdsong and instead to amplify the snapping of a twig or the muffled sound of padded footfall - indications of a predator in the vicinity.
Focusing on threat and pain were paramount - since our threats were localized and the pain was deeply personal and intimate. More importantly, they were threats and pains that we had the power and access to directly address. The wolf that preyed on our sheep could be hunted. The fire that caught on the roofs could be collectively put out by the villagers.
Today, most of the threats we perceive exist on a scale that we have very limited means of influencing. You can put out the village fire - but how do you bring down gas prices? What influence do you have over Iranian policy in the Strait of Hormuz or over the fact that the UAE just pulled out of OPEC? And even if you were to argue that your vote as a citizen has at least some small impact on such outcomes - what influence do you have on the technological acceleration and ubiquity of AI?
None. Zilch. Nada.
So to paraphrase a cliche - your brain is writing checks your body can’t cash.
Meaning: the evolutionary programming that fixates your attention on the pain points of your life is glitching. It is causing you to spiral into distress precisely because you have no way of actually addressing these issues in any meaningful way.
They are not local. They are global.
And the human brain was not designed to address global pain. It cannot tell the difference between the emotional impact of your teenager not cleaning his room and the Fed not cutting interest rates. It does not differentiate between the shock of becoming unemployed because the manager didn’t like you or because your job has been made redundant by AI technology.
“The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic brains, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”
―Edward O. Wilson
That is the real problem.
Our technology evolves at a pace that our institutions can’t keep up with. And both evolve at a pace that our brains and our emotions simply aren’t designed to keep up with.
Therefore, the real survival skill as we move forward into a world of unfettered and accelerated access to just about everything is one of discernment.
The ability to trim the fat. To separate the wheat from the chaff. To parse the relevant from the irrelevant. To tell signal from noise.
Yet, the approach to developing this discernment is not as simple as developing critical thinking, seeking out balanced sources of information, or practicing gratitude. Those provide tertiary support.
The real solution is a more counter-intuitive approach.
