Pain, Pleasure, Purpose, Perspective // Variant Perception #27

Mental tug-of-war, fear of death, exponential complexity

Consider the most accomplished individual you know. They're seemingly on top of the world - sophisticated, successful. They have it all zipped up, nice and neat. Yet, even they have grappled with loss of control, emotional turmoil, and self-doubt. Why? Because it's the gritty reality of the human condition.

We’re the only animal (as far as we know) that has a high conscious awareness of our thoughts and emotions. We have the unique ability to create myths and use stories to communicate across time and space. We plan for the future and agonize about the past. We engineer, innovate, build, and destroy.

We’re also animals. We have instincts that unconsciously drive behaviors. We’re birthed with thousands of years of behavioral patterning from our ancestors. We react, we bypass, we dominate, we lash out, and we lose control.

Our species has existed for ~300,000 years, yet we still struggle with baseline emotional components of life. Unlike the incremental progress of technology, emotional technology we forget and relearn countless times over.

We can map the family tree of almost all hard tech and scientific discoveries back to their origins. This experiment led to this discovery which led to this invention which led to this question which led to this new experiment and observation.

Why does this same knowledge tree not exist for cultural or emotional innovations? Who has tracked our abilities to cope with grief, experience more joy, or regulate our emotions? This information tends to be hidden in esoteric spiritual texts, parables, myths, and scripture.

Renowned author Tim Urban writes about our two distinct types of cognition: the primitive mind, akin to our 'lizard brain,' and the higher mind. Our primitive mind governs survival instincts and automatic functions like breathing. It regulates fight or flight responses and controls our reactionary behaviors. The higher mind is home to our evolved cognitive capabilities - self-awareness, planning faculty, reasoning, and complex emotional processing.

It's the primitive mind that takes over when we dramatically react to situations, 'blowing our lid' and ‘seeing red.’ The higher mind allows us to reflect on the past and imagine the future.

These two minds often find themselves in opposition. When we face challenging emotions or experiences, our primitive mind grasps the pain tightly, looking for a source of blame. Conversely, when we encounter experiences of love, pleasure, or joy, the primitive mind seeks to maximize these feelings, always fearful of scarcity. It's like stocking up for a long winter, fearing that good times are fleeting and won't last.

Ultimately, our challenge is to recognize this ongoing tug-of-war between the primitive and higher mind, seeking an awareness of what activates the primitive mind and breaks the control of the higher mind.

As we recline in the creature comforts of our modern world, we're pushed into the unprecedented territory of human experience, ever detached from our ancestral realities. Amid this shift, we’re encountering more and more realities that activate our primitive minds. Advertisements, movies, tweets, reels, billboards, brands, or conversations, it’s all an avalanche of activation that the modern human faces every day.

When you asked someone what their dream life consisted of 100 years ago, what would the average answer be? I bet it would’ve been simple. A dream life is a life where I don’t need to worry about putting food on the table. All my children grow up to be healthy. I live to be able to see my children and grandchildren grow up.

Except, now, more than ever, young people face a barrage of fantasies that prey on the primitive mind. We’ve become more detached from the realities of the historical human experience. How much has easy international travel, Michelin star meals, sports cars, designer clothes, and social media changed the answers to what makes up a dream life?

The happiest people in the world tend to live wholly mundane lives. Their best memories are not one individual peak experience but a daily ritual like making breakfast with their kids or playing cards with their grandchildren. That’s what people remember when they’re at death’s door. It’s what I remember when I think of my grandfather, who passed away a few years ago.

Compare that to the biggest celebrities of today and the heroes of history, from Alexander the Great to Kanye West. Celebrity, fame, and renown at the peak of the human pyramid means a life of struggle, pain, brutality, tragedy, and betrayal. Many times estranged from family, not knowing true friendship.

Fame, greatness, and celebrity do not bring deep purpose or meaning even though we glorify it. Contentment is more simple than that.

In the face of rapid change and complexity of modern life, we grapple with a fundamental disquiet - the unease of impermanence and our innate fear of death. Not just physical death, but also death in its broader conceptual frame, as renowned Buddhist spiritual guide Pema Chodron describes:

Our suffering is so grounded in our fear of impermanence.

Our pain is so rooted in our lopsided view of reality. Who ever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable…

Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

Comfortable with Uncertainty (p. 94).

Chodron's words reveal that 'death' in this context extends beyond the physical. It applies to the demise of our visions, ideas, and self-image. It's the often violent removal of who we think we are and who we think we could become, collapsing expected paths forward.

Stepping onto a stage to deliver a talk you’ve been working on for months, only to receive tepid applause, can feel like 'death.' The version of you who you thought you could become, the doors you could’ve walked through evaporate at that moment. A part of you dies, leaving embarrassment, shame, and self-doubt.

It also works in reverse. You get up on stage, deliver the best talk at the conference, and receive a standing ovation with people lining up to talk to you afterward. That’s also death, just one that we’re conditioned to enjoy because you get to climb higher up the chimpanzee pyramid of status and success.

This fear of death drives much of the decision-making for all of us. Whether or not you decide to publish your first YouTube video, become an entrepreneur, or get up on that stage to conquer your fear of public speaking.

Death surrounds us. The death of our identities, the death of our hopes and dreams. The physical death of our loved ones, too.

As the complexity of our society increases, so does the encounter with the death of our identities, hopes, dreams, and visions. The grapple with the fundamental aspects of our human experience will continue. The need to engage our primitive mind to relax among the chaos of modernity and our higher mind to organize the complexity into order only becomes more important.

As the influences of our modern world redefine our concepts of a 'dream life,'’ it is crucial to remember the simple pleasures and the mundane joys that truly bring contentment.

As Pema points out, to reconsider our views of pleasure and pain, what constitutes a challenging experience or a joyful one, we need to understand that they are inseparable - parts of the spectrum of our lives, emotions, and experiences. We should not shun one and chase the other but rather accept and understand both.

Acknowledging our fear of death - not just our physical end but also the death of our visions, hopes, dreams, and identities - can lead to profound insights and personal growth. Death surrounds us, and it is not a punishing force but a transformative one.

These deep truths lead to more profound clarity of our human journey. We learn to navigate modern living with balance and perspective, not let our struggles control us, and embrace the complexity of our existence. Bringing more awareness to these fundamental realities of the human experience, like atoms are in physics, helps build a reality that's purposeful and intrinsically meaningful, encouraging a bolder, brighter worldview.

Life will always be a continual journey of understanding and accepting our existence's complexity while striving for a meaningful, purposeful life.

-Jared

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