One of the things that we discover throughout the course of life is that there’s a distinct difference between thinking that you are being productive or useful and actually being productive and useful. 

One of the key parts of that is what we call cognitive switching, which is a phenomenon that I find deeply fascinating for the simple reason that it can either be performed to detriment or in the name of good, depending on how you do it.

It really is an art, though, and let me illustrate why. If a person were to switch from one task to another naturally, what happens is that they lose focus on the task that they were previously doing to go to the next one. They also have to adjust. Typically, there’s going to be a certain adjustment period before the mind finally acclimatizes itself to the next task, and as a result, productivity drops during this time.

For that reason, pundits and thinkers declare that multitasking is fake, saying that if you switch from one task, naturally your focus goes away. When it goes away, then there ends the possibility that you get anything done.

Now, I’ve come to realize that there is a certain degree of truth to that.

Try to split up your attention too much between different competing priorities, and perhaps you will never commit sufficient energy to any individual one of them, so that you’d be able to do any of them. It’s then easy to just end up in tunnel vision.

There may be a time at which there are diminishing marginal returns for every hour of effort that goes in, suggesting that perhaps it is only true that the returns to scale of continuous effort in a specific area can actually hold. After which, it would not only be advisable but also eminently logical to switch to the next task. 

I’m learning this right now. I’m understanding how to balance practicing hard on one task before proceeding to the next one, while at the same time dedicating adequate focus to every single instance. The thing I’m investing myself in is really a balance, and being able to make sure that everything can actually be done is, at times, apparently a miracle. It gets a little easier the more our skills improve along the way.

I find it fascinating that cognitive matters can be parceled out in this way, though. It does make me wonder about what the absolute best way of doing things is, such that it’s possible to attain the best possibilities in each case. To me, it seems like something magical: the result of being able to split up one’s mind into multiple parts and to be able to summon them towards one’s overall advancement.

Far be it from me to be able to claim that I can actually attain the depth of mastery necessary, or adequately profound, to attain what I aspire for in this lifetime. It feels like I am on a journey, and I am just scraping the edge of what is possible. 

Far be it from me to proclaim that this is not anything more than just a small experiment in consciousness for personal use, rather than a route towards an enlightenment the world has not known. It is interesting, unique, and personal to me as part of this process of experimenting with consciousness, tinkering around with it as if in a lab with instruments, and seeing what happens along the way. 

Every morning I’m in the gym, I call out:”Hey Siri, one minute!” – and every five minutes I run, I say “Five minutes!”.

It’s been like this for a while, as part of some process of systematization that’s started happening in my head sooner than I could say any lickety-splits or even consciously question why it should be like that.

If it seems a little robotic, rest assured that I think the same – but that if I try to look back onto how I became this way and why, the explanation seems simple:

It seems to be a result of my matured understanding of what freedom consists of.

Perhaps that seems a little paradoxical, but it becomes a little easier when you quantify the result in this case: An hour and a half of exercise in total, continued weight loss, muscle retention, as compared to three hours doing the exact same thing and then getting fatter.

In other words? Less expenditure for a better result.

I suppose if I look a little deeper within and across this externalized record, it becomes more clear how this came about.

In late June, I wrote The Value of Time, in which I talked about how I feel every second now, how it all passes and comes by – how I refuse to waste the seconds as they flow into minutes; if I were to expand on that, I guess I could say that time is after all how we experience life in its shades – at the end of the 3600 seconds that make up the next hour from this word on, an hour of my life and your life will be gone – and how we experienced that hour is an experience we earned with our time and that we will never get back.

A. Do I want to experience that hour either trying to accomplish the goal that I set for myself to accomplish in far excess of what is actually needed in order to accomplish it?

B. Do I want to experience it in that state of loss where I am yet to reach it and therefore yearn for it, putting myself back into the cycle of A), or do I prefer to spend it in the confidence that I was able to accomplish my goals?

I suppose B) is a lot better – but that’s also why I started using the timers – the extended feeling of efficiency, the feeling of unloading of a cognitive burden – the realization that suffering would happen and time would pass regardless of what we did and that therefore, planning out a reality where as little time was spent so that we could have better choices and options with our time might make a little more sense than slogging away and trying to reach something that we never were working for in the right way.

In a weird way, the timers produce abundance – the discipline produces freedom.

This is one of the many strange and small contradictions that the world permits, I suppose.

There are probably many more of them that I’ve yet to know, experience, have thought about, or processed.

I wonder what they consist of, and what experiences will trigger me to think about them and then level up.

Whatever they are, I look forward to meeting future me. 🙂

One of the things I used to do a lot more often is get angry on the internet. The drill was simple:

 1. Go on social media.

 2. See what people are writing.

 3. Find an objectionable comment.

 4. Fly into a rage because of how ill-considered it is and how many people support it.

 5. Respond and repeat.

Want to see how that behavior manifested? 

Just look at the fact that I posted one video almost every single day for the past year, leading up to July.

I suppose some of you are now wondering why I’m not doing that. 

The answer is simple: I don’t think people who are obsessed with race and religion are ever going to change. 

They are incompetent, they will stay that way, and they will keep on hating the world while even their own God abandons them while their mediocrity continues, as it did when they were born and until they die. 

Such people can fly into any number of rages as they want, but their lives will never change for the better – The world is and will always be justified in looking down on them, treating them as if they are animalistic automatons – and why would it not be? Such people are animated by very simple instincts that reflect lower-order consciousness at best.

They continually are caught in this weird schizophrenia where they tell themselves that they are amazing, one moment realize their incompetence, act out, expect respect, fail to receive it, and then continue to fall into depression and hide it because they cannot escape the delightful fate that they built for themselves. 

When you look at all these people who are constantly talking about race and religion, about how they are superior day in and day out, do you think their lives are going to progress?

No, they were inferior. They are inferior. They will stay inferior every single day of their lives, and it will stay that way until the end of time even as their mediocre individual lives expire, each generation tells themselves that they will be better while screaming about stupid and obscure films and so-called fake jati diri that nobody cares about while convincing themselves that they are wonderful or that they are on a track such that people will think of them as wonderful while pursuing the petit objet a to get others to acknowledge or even elevate them for nothing even as they run an uninspiring operating system. 

Consequently? It doesn’t matter what they say, what they don’t say, or what they think or do not think even as they tell themselves that they are so truly incredible while internally, you see them look down on themselves while pretending they are truly incredible. 

Just look at them – watch them tell themselves that they want to be respected by the world, play Ella’s “Standing In The Eyes Of The World”, failing to respect others, declaring that they are amazing, defaulting to their private feeling that they are not running on vapor day in and day out.

This they do while screaming that they are the original people, their mediocrity continuing to cut themselves deeper than anyone else ever would even as they come up with elaborate fictions about their history, justifications about how they knew how to fly, taught people kung fu, and experienced any number of social problems that they try to hide. They act like they are moral, presume that they are superior, while manifesting inferiority in every single sphere of life and trying to maintain a fiction that they cannot justify.

The conclusion? Nobody who matters actually cares whether they exist or they do not apart from their own unaccomplished and equally unhappy ilk, and in the light of the grandness of humanity, they are a gigantic nothing. 

Do you seriously think it’s worth listening to these people, discussing things with them, feeling that their opinions could possibly ever change anything? 

I don’t.

Do you seriously think they are going to change? 

I don’t.

If I thought they were going to change, if I thought there was the possibility that they could actually advance in this world, if I thought that what they said actually mattered, then maybe I would care. 

But really, I don’t.

You can quote Orientalism or Homi K. Bhabha and scream about how that is an unfortunate stereotype, culture is to be negotiated, fixed images are unproductive, but as I go forward with life, a resounding conclusion echoes out to me: to the extent that people are obsessed with race and religion and keep on playing out their neurosis, they will stay unhappy, agitated, constantly fighting, and there is no meaning in emulating such people or having anything to do with them, or in any way being jealous of them, for whatever they think they have in their hands, they do not – differing from King Midas, whose touch turned everything into gold, everything they touch will just turn into garbage. 

Can it be otherwise for people who are obsessed with race and religion? 

They keep on getting betrayed by their own race, pretend to unite with one another, continue to betray one another, and end up in a mess where nobody can be trusted just because they are of the same skin color. At the end of the day, even if they want to choose another direction, they cannot escape. 

I don’t think they can advance, and I don’t think they will matter – however much they try to inflate themselves and say they matter, I know that they will keep on realizing that people look down upon them while this cycle continues to compound. They keep telling themselves that they are the best in the world, but internally, little parts of their psychology break.

What’s the net result? 

All they are here to do is consume energy, have a couple of activities that resemble brain operations run, and produce garbage from those operations. 

It doesn’t matter whether they receive paradise or wonder, or whether people are kind to them or horrible to them. The only thing that is going to happen as a result of their conversion process is that they end up producing unusable refuse regardless of what they say, think, or do.

I do not consider it meaningful to talk about these kinds of people, or to get too caught up in what they say or what they do not say, even as I encourage you to be true to your instincts – there is no reason for you to restrain yourself if you feel strongly about things that are happening in your society, if you feel that it is meaningful to engage with such people because you think it is somehow worthwhile to change their minds, all I would really ask is this: is there anything inside to actually change? 

I suppose these people will choose to maintain their fiction that they are super superior while dragging everybody down who will interact with them. They have never known how to build anything and never will, regardless of what they say, do not say, or think, if even the warblings and ravings of their existence can be considered thinking.

I really think engaging with the rage machine of socially awkward reprobates with no capacity to adjust themselves to human society is not a good investment. Such people were never consequential for the fate of the world. They are not consequential, and they will never be consequential. That is their fate, in the same way that Odysseus’ men died in the aftermath of eating the cattle of the sun god by an act of choice.

I have and continue to have a good relationship with many people around me, of every race and every religion, but I do not feel that there is a deep need to be concerned about race baiters or their insecurities. If they will destroy themselves with their own insecurities while pretending that they are happy, that is entirely up to them. There is no meaning in pretending that their insecurities should affect you as a person even as we acknowledge that, whether we like it or not, such people are a part of our society (the albatross dragging us down), who are valid as a source of social commentary even as it remains unclear that they will ever improve, be worthy of respect, or ever matter to the planet, when, across all probability, they will never except as corruption intrigues in the Wall Street Journal, or in their own eyes as they scream about how colonialism is bad in the company of an aging cacophony of mediocre people who will stay that way even as they mouth words about their illusionary virtues.

There are more interesting things to engage with out there.

I know it, you know it, and I think we all know it. I suppose it’s time to discover that in more depth.