As part of my daily routine for 2019, I’ve started reading Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic, which gives you one nugget of Stoic philosophy every day of the year.*
Today’s entry is about the power of saying “no” to things. He makes an interesting point when he refers to feelings of anger and excitement, among others, as “time-consuming emotions.”
I’ve never thought about it like that before, but it is true in my experience. When you let your mind get taken over by your emotions–good or bad–you are basically turning your brain into a time-share property. And nobody likes time-shares, right?
“None of these impulses feel like a big deal by itself,” Holiday writes, “but run amok they can become a commitment like anything else.”
We are each given only so much time on this planet, so it only makes sense to choose wisely how we use it. (By the same token, I believe that one can spend too much time worrying about how one is spending one’s time, but I digress.)
This is another lesson I already began learning long ago from my dad, the Unexpected Stoic. He was often one to say no to new things–books, TV shows, political discussions, etc.–often to my consternation. It was only later in life, as I began to accumulate more interests as well as more responsibilities and obligations, that I realized the wisdom in saying no. And now I have a name for it: Embracing avoidance.
Saying no may be hard to do, and it may turn people off of you. But as Epictetus said, “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” Be prepared to make a few enemies. Anyone who abandons you because of your philosophy was never a good friend in the first place, and any good friend will come to understand and appreciate you all the more.
But even if the world forsakes you because you say ‘no’ too often, you are doing so in service of your own betterment. And there’s no greater purpose than becoming your best self.
*For some reason the publishers thought it would be a good idea to date the pages from Jan 1 to Dec 31, making it difficult for someone mildly-obsessive like me to start reading the book any other time of year. I downloaded the book several months ago but had to put it back on the digital pile until the new year rolled around. I had forgotten about it, but luckily I happened to be looking through my collection the day after the new year started and came upon it again. [Of course, now that I’m talking about it, it occurs to me that I could have just started the book on whatever day of the year it happened to be when I first picked it up, and then just circled back to the beginning of it at the start of 2019, but…that’s just not how my brain works, ok?] Aaanyway…
Letting go of your thoughts can become a lot of fun, and a great relief. Often I’ll find myself suddenly getting wrapped up in a thought–maybe something stressful, maybe something obsessive, just something that I can feel eating up all my mental computing power–and then it occurs to me, like the clouds parting to reveal the sun, that I can just stop. I don’t have to hold onto those thoughts.
And suddenly they are gone. They hold no power. And I feel like I can breathe again.
It’s like using a muscle that I’m not used to having. Imagine spending your whole life locked in a room, just wandering around, until you realize that the one rectangular part on the wall is actually what’s called a “door,” and you can just open it and walk out anytime you want. Suddenly a whole new part of the world is revealed to you! But sometimes as you’re wandering around you find yourself stuck in a room again, and it takes you a while to remember that you can open the door.
That sense of relief you would feel suddenly remembering what you already learned about opening doors would hit you like a wave. That’s how it feels when I remember that I can let my thoughts go.
The goal, of course, is to someday never get stuck in any rooms–but that’s not realistic. The human mind is always finding itself stuck, that’s just its nature. But it’s also within the nature of the mind to find the doors and let itself out. Eventually, after you do it enough, you recognize the doors more and more quickly, and you spend less and less time stuck in rooms.
Naturally there are some thoughts that are easier to let go of than others. Thoughts that are laced heavily with emotion are the hardest, no matter if they’re happy thoughts or sad ones or angry ones. (I personally find particularly difficult are the thoughts laced with a certain mix of hurt and anger. If I feel like I’ve been unfairly rebuffed or I’m being ignored, it’s very hard for me to really get my mind to move on.)
What are some of the thoughts and emotions that you have a harder time letting go of? What are the easiest ones?
I had forgotten about this, but many years ago at my old job I started a little controversy when I introduced the concept of #NothingButFridays.
Looking back on it, it was one of the earliest instances of me using a perspective shift to make life more pleasant. I basically decided one day to treat every day of the week (not the weekend) as if it were Friday. Rather than being bummed out that it was Monday and I had the whole week ahead of me, I’d go through the day with the blissful feeling of being on the verge of the weekend. I didn’t see any harm in it, and in fact it did lift my mood quite significantly. It’s not like I would wake up the next day and think it was Saturday, and miss work because of it.
Surprisingly, though, some of my coworkers found it incredibly annoying. I’m not sure if they were just being playfully antagonistic or if they really couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of changing your mind about how you feel about the day of the week. It seemed to really frustrate them.
I feel like that’s kind of how most of the rest of the world sees things, though. Things are what they appear to be, and “changing your mind” doesn’t actually fix anything. People like that don’t understand the Vulcan Buddha (or, indeed, the Stoic) way of life, that feelings and experiences come from within.
If you understand it, though, then consider it a blessing–and a vocation. Do your best to help others see their emotional lives in the same moldable way that you do.
Last night I had a pretty epic dream, I suppose. It’s funny the amount of things that can happen in one of my dreams and still not cause me to question my reality. Clearly I need to work on my skepticism. At one point, I was trying to climb onto the wing of an airliner that was cruising down a set of train tracks in the middle of the freeway before it took off. (My dad was driving.)
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. This isn’t a post about lucid dreaming, actually. It’s about love. Unconditional love.
It’s about how to achieve happiness, really, but in particular a sort of happy harmony with the people you surround yourself with.
I can’t remember all the specifics, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the takeaway message that stuck with me. Essentially, it’s this: We are all responsible for our own–and only our own–happiness.
If the person I love wants something that will make them happy, then who am I to get in the way of that? I’m not here to stop them from being happy, or to make demands on their happiness, or to expect what makes them happy to change.
If I don’t like something that my significant other does, or something that my significant other likes, then I have to ask myself how much it matters to me. If it matters enough that it’s worth talking to them about, then that’s what I should do. At that point, it’s up to them if they want to change anything.
I’m being a bit vague, I know. Let me try to give a more concrete example…
Let’s say my wife really likes wearing angel wings when we’re out in public–you know, the kind you can get at stores around Halloween that strap to your back?–and I find it really irritating that she does.
Many people may assume that, because I am her spouse, I have some authority over how she dresses–or, more commonly, that she owes me some kind of obligation to consider my feelings in the matter. But in fact she doesn’t owe me that, and I don’t have any authority.
What should happen, in order to maintain a healthy and respectful relationship, is that I tell her how I feel about her wearing those wings out in public. But it’s important that I tell her without attaching expectations of her behavior changing at all.
It’s equally important that she hear my words without attaching any labels to them, like “complaining” or “demanding” or anything of the sort.
In other words, it’s important that we both approach it dispassionately and without attachment. I say “I don’t particularly like it when you wear your angel wings in public, because I feel like it looks ridiculous,” and she hears just those words and nothing more.
Then it’s up to her to decide if she gets enough enjoyment from wearing those angel wings in public to supersede my feelings about them. If she does, then that is entirely within her rights, and I should be accepting of those feelings.
Note, though, that it doesn’t have to end there. Knowing her feelings about it, it’s entirely within my rights to choose how I respond. I cannot, and should not, force her to change, or expect her to for any reason. What I can do is decide about my own behavior from that point on. If the discomfort I feel from her wearing her angel wings in public is strong enough, then maybe I will be compelled to end the relationship. Odds are, though, that it won’t get to that point.
Most things, as you’ll find if you approach things in this dispassionate, unattached way, are not worth getting bent out of shape over. Either her love of wearing angel wings won’t be so strong as to overrule my feelings on the matter, or my love of being with her will be so strong as to overrule my negative feelings about the angel wings.
Relationships are compromise, almost by definition. It’s just a matter of finding the points you are willing to compromise* on.
A note about compromise: Some people tend to think that a compromise has to be mutual. For example, “I will stop complaining about you wearing angel wings if you agree to only wear them when I’m not around.”
But that is compromise only in the simplest, schoolyard sense, and it is taking your relationship down the wrong road. Rather than truly being dispassionate and detached, you are attempting to divorce your feelings from the matter by applying a kind of boardroom justice to it.
The truth is you shouldn’t have feelings about it, understand? It’s not a matter of keeping your feelings from interfering, it’s about keeping your feelings from even mattering in the first place.
In reality, it rarely works that way. A compromise is almost always one-sided in real world relationships. That’s because it’s not a compromise between the two people in the relationship, it’s a compromise between your expectations of the relationship and the reality of the relationship. I expect my partner to be perfect, but they aren’t; but I want to be with my partner, so I have to compromise my expectations and settle for reality instead.
When you’re in the car and someone cuts you off, and you find yourself getting mad, try to remember that you don’t know anything about the person in the other car.
You may think you know who they are. They’re a jerk. They’re thoughtless, careless, selfish, reckless.
But you don’t know that. The person you’re imagining in your head is a composite of all the drivers who have ruined your day in the past. It’s as if whatever car is used to perpetrate the moving injustice against you, it’s always driven by the same nebulous, nefarious roadway villain with a blurry face and not a care in the world.
Truth is, though, you probably don’t know what the person who cut you off looks like. You don’t know if they’re a man or a woman, in some cases. You certainly don’t know their name, where they came from, if their parents are still alive, if they know someone who survived cancer–or someone who didn’t survive. You don’t know their favorite album, their favorite movie, their favorite kind of food.
And if you don’t know any of those things about this person, how can you possibly know the one thing that is actually relevant to this situation:
Why did they cut you off?
Are they really selfish? Were they distracted? Are they just a bad driver?
Instead of applying any of those possible scenarios to them, which only serve to fuel your anger, be gracious and give them the benefit of the doubt. Remember that you have undoubtedly cut someone off in the past, probably more than once. Maybe you didn’t realize you did it. And maybe neither did this person.
Maybe you had a really good reason. And maybe does this person.
Maybe it was the one and only time in your life you ever did anything like that and you later regretted it.
And maybe the same goes for this person.
The truth is, getting angry at someone on the road for how they drive is just about the most futile waste of mental energy ever invented by mankind. It’s literally shouting in the void–or into the traffic, as it were.
It’s futile. It accomplishes nothing. It’s anger for the sake of itself.
So next time you find yourself fuming at another driver, stop and ask yourself what you really know.
One thing that I’ve always done in life, even when it’s been to my detriment, is to acknowledge the reality of situations I’m in with other people. This means calling out uncomfortable emotions (my own), or openly speculating about others’ emotions, as well as marking, out loud, the absurdity or awkwardness of whatever situation we’re in.
I didn’t read about this, or learn it from anyone (as far as I know). It’s been a byproduct of, I guess, my shamelessness and belief in the importance of honesty. No, that’s probably giving myself too much credit.
The fact is, I’m not a good liar. I never have been. And when you can’t hide very well, the best thing to do is burn down all the cover so nobody else can hide, either.
That’s the more pessimistic way to explain why I am so eager to lay bare everything. Another good analogy is the dog that lays down to expose its belly. At the very least, I hope to demonstrate a humility that will hopefully be disarming; at best, I’ll get some tummy scratches.
See, we all live like actors in a play who can’t acknowledge the script or the scenery or the audience even though we all know that we all know they are there. When someone has been rude to us and we don’t know if it was on purpose or not, we spend our waking hours (and even our sleeping ones) trying to read their minds, discern their motivations.
Instead, it’s much easier for everyone–even if not at first–to simply ask the other person about their own intentions, and do it in such a way that they don’t feel the need to hide them. It cuts to the chase. It gets to the issue at hand.
So much time can be saved this way, and so much stress and anxiety and heartache. Just tell people how you feel, or tell them you don’t know how to feel, or tell them you felt one way but now you feel another way. And then ask them how they feel.
Open up to them. Talk about the reality, don’t just go through the motions. If there is a fire on stage, don’t just keep performing the play for the sake of maintaining the illusion. Deal with the fire. Talk about the damage. Investigate the cause.
Explore the stage, question the script, change the lines if you see fit.
Don’t get angry, but we need to talk about emotions.
On second thought, get angry if you want. Don’t let me tell you how to live your life.
But it’s not going to do you any good.
Being angry–just like being jealous, being anxious, being disappointed, and even being sad–is just a bit of mental indigestion.
Ok, now I can tell you’re getting angry again, because I just suggested that when you were bawling your eyes out after Aunt Henrietta died it was basically like stomach cramps in your brain. How dare I! Aunt Henrietta was a saint, and she deserves to be remembered that way.
Listen, I didn’t know your Aunt Henrietta, but I’m sure she was a wonderful person. She probably had some flaws that you didn’t know about, but maybe you’re right. Maybe she was a saint. Anyway, she’s not the point.
The point is that you felt sad when she died, and that’s perfectly understandable. It’s natural! It’s unavoidable, even. Wouldn’t you say?
Ah, and now we’re getting closer to my point.
When she died, did you choose to feel sad? Did you think to yourself, “Everyone else always seems ‘sad’ when people they love die, so I guess I’ll go ahead and be ‘sad’ too.” Unless you’re Patrick Bateman, that’s probably not how it happened.
This guy struggles with emotions, too.
You didn’t choose to be sad, the sadness happened to you. We know this is how emotions work, because we say things when we feel strongly about something like “it came over me” or “it welled up inside me.” We recognize that feelings aren’t something we do, but something that is done to us. It’s a state of mind that we are put into.
Doesn’t that seem strange to you at all? If you aren’t the one who decides to be sad–or angry, or jealous, or even happy–then who is? How does it happen?
More importantly: Why do we let it happen?
If you know anything about Star Trek, you probably know Vulcans don’t feel emotions. That’s a common misconception by the uninitiated, actually. The truth is, Vulcans are extremely emotional people, but they learned long ago to control their emotions for the greater good. They embrace logic and reason, rather than feeling.
And they’re in good company. Long before Vulcans were invented by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, the Stoics were espousing the virtues of remaining unemotional in the face of challenges. Folks like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius recognized that when one lets their emotions dictate their decision-making it more often than not leads to poor choices. Rationality–logic and reason–was the path to true happiness in life.
It’s a nice thought, of course. Generations of fans have watched Vulcans in the various iterations of Star Trek and thought, “Gee, it sure would be nice to be able to control my emotions like a Vulcan.” And the introspection stops there.
“I’m doing it! I’m Vulcaning!”
Because we are conditioned to believe that emotions are important. Particularly when we feel them. How many times have you sworn you wouldn’t get angry about something and then found yourself getting angry anyway.
“Well I wasn’t going to get angry but I didn’t expect you to say that!” It’s like we are slaves to our feelings. We don’t even question it. When we’re caught up in an emotion, positive or negative, it feels like it takes over our body and our thoughts. We really are trapped by it.
But we don’t have to be. That’s what this post, this blog, this entire lifestyle, is all about.
Are you familiar with the Buddhists? Leaving aside the unfortunate dark side of the religion-slash-philosophy, pretty much every version of Buddhism espouses the benefits of meditation. Why? Because it’s a way to get your thoughts under control.
Most of us walk around our entire lives thinking about all kinds of things, and never questioning where the thoughts come from.
“They come from me,” you might say. “I think my own thoughts, obviously.”
But do you?
“I am, therefore I think. I think.”
Think of a city right now. Any city will do. Just think of a city somewhere in the world. It could be someplace you visited, someplace you want to visit, someplace you’ve seen on the news… It doesn’t matter what city it is.
I’ll give you a moment.
Do you have it? Have you got that city in mind?
Great. Now, why did you think of that city in particular? You could have picked literally any city in the world, right?
Well, actually, no. You couldn’t pick, for instance, any cities that you don’t know exist. In fact there’s only really a handful of cities famous enough around the world for most people to know about. There are countless cities in every country that have never appeared in print, never shown up on the news, and are never visited by tourists. You couldn’t very well pick one of those cities, could you? You can’t think of something that you don’t have knowledge of.
So why did you think of that city in particular?
You may have picked the city you got married in. Or the city your favorite TV show takes place in. Or you may have thought of a random letter of the alphabet first and then just picked the first city that came to mind that started with that letter. (Notice the use of the common phrase “came to mind.” That’s an instructive phrase.)
But even if you had your reasons for picking the city you did, why did you think of that reason? If you picked the city where you went on vacation three years ago, why? Why didn’t you pick the city you went to last year? Or that you want to go to next year?
I won’t belabor this exercise anymore, because I think I’ve said enough to make my point: You can give all sorts of reasons for why you thought of what you did, and even give reasons for those reasons, but at some point you have to recognize the fact that you didn’t choose to think about what you thought about. At some point, the thought just “came to you.”
The above exercise came from philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. He uses it to demonstrate the illusion of free will, which isn’t that different from what I was doing. But my point isn’t to disavow you of your illusion of choice (that will come later), but rather to emphasize the point that your mind spontaneously creates thoughts. It’s only after the thought is created that you attach meaning to it.
As the meditation practitioners like to say, “Thoughts think themselves.”
I say, “Emotions feel themselves.”
Can you recall a time in your life when you were just having a really rotten day? Hopefully that’s never happened to you, but unfortunately for most of us it’s quite commonplace. Remember your rotten day, and how everything just seemed to be going wrong. The world seemed at odds with you. People were extra rude, the weather unpleasant, the food you ate wasn’t as good as it usually is.
You know what kind of day I’m talking about. You end the day feeling worn out, angry, and victimized by the universe.
But ask yourself now, in the light of rationality, if you really believe that the world was different that day? Is it possible that the universe really did conspire against you? It is likely that somehow, in this cosmic lottery, your name came up as the one to get punished?
If you don’t believe in God, then you shouldn’t believe that’s true, either. Doesn’t it make more sense, instead, that something was off about you? Rather than everyone around you being rude, suddenly, wouldn’t it make more sense that you were just more sensitive to them? Instead of the weather being unusually unpleasant, doesn’t it seem more likely that you just didn’t like it?
I’ll answer for you, since I can’t actually hear you talking to your computer screen: Yes, it is almost without a doubt that you were the problem.
It wasn’t the world that was different, but your perception of it. And guess what? You had no control over that. You couldn’t have predicted you would wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and that things that normally didn’t bother you would suddenly be cause for extreme irritation.
It happens to everyone sometimes.
Like the thoughts you think, the emotions you feel come from within you. They are not a direct reaction to stimuli, but a spontaneous event that can cause a reaction. Here’s a thought experiment:
Imagine an experiment in which a subject can be unconscious but have their eyes open. The brain is functioning, the neurons are firing, but there’s “nobody home.” The experimenter holds up a picture in front of the eyes of the subject, and it’s a picture of someone the subject has said they hate. It’s Hitler, or Simon Cowell, or, god-forbid, Caillou.
Everyone hates Caillou.
Do you think the subject will become angry? Will their blood boil because this picture is in front of their eyes?
Certainly not. Even if their brain registers some kind of unconscious reaction to the picture–a spike in activity in the area that controls emotions–the reaction is meaningless without a conscious agent to act on it. The “feeling” isn’t a feeling, because it’s not being felt. It’s reduced to nothing more than an automatic chemical response–because that’s all it is.
Much like indigestion. (Yes, we’re back to Aunt Henrietta.)
When we get indigestion, we can feel uncomfortable, and it might even cause us to make choices (like taking some antacid). But we don’t attribute meaning to it. We don’t treat the indigestion as important in an of itself. And we certainly don’t attach to it as if we were the authors of the indigestion.
You don’t choose to feel angry, you don’t choose to feel sad. The feeling happens to you.
What you do get to choose is what you do with that feeling.
If you’re a Vulcan (or a Stoic), you recognize it for the meaningless bit of mental indigestion that it is, and you let it go.
If you’re unfamiliar, let me introduce you. All you need to know about Kirby is that he’s a sort of of pinkish blob who goes around defeating bad guys and collecting coins. Kind of like Mario, except for one very distinct difference: Kirby sucks.
No, I mean literally. Like a vacuum cleaner. That’s why they named him Kirby, get it?
In order to defeat bad guys, Kirby opens his mouth wide and sucks them in with incredible force, and then he spits them back out to smash barriers, knock out other bad guys, trip traps, or pretty much anything else. (He can also float for a time by sucking in air, like a balloon.)
Actually, there’s another trick Kirby has, and that’s what prompted me to write this article. Kirby doesn’t have to spit out the enemies he engulfs. He can also, well, swallow them.
He sucks in a bad guy, and if he so desires (more accurately, if you, as the player, desires), he can sort of squash his body down, and the enemy simply vanishes inside his soft pink form. I suppose it’s swallowing, but it could be a form of matter annihilation. Who knows?
The other day, I was getting irritated about something that happened to me. Someone said something very rude, and my instinct was to come back at them with the same tone. To meet rudeness with rudeness.
It’s what many of us are hard-wired to do.
But then I thought of Kirby, and I realized there was another option. I could just swallow that feeling down. Destroy it. Obliterate it within myself, like it never existed.
The same thing is true for any emotion that rises up inside us–because, of course, the “rudeness” I felt coming from the aforementioned person wasn’t really coming from them, it was being created inside myself in response to their words.
They didn’t implant anything inside me that wasn’t already there.
So when anger forms, or jealousy, or regret, or just plain old irritation, just remember you have a choice. You can either open your mouth and let it fly, and see how much damage you can do. Or you can squash it down, swallow it, make it no more, and go about your day.
I prefer the latter option, personally. What you put out into your environment, you have a 100% higher chance of running into again; but what you keep inside, and digest, you remove from your life forever.
Some might criticize this advice, saying that what I’m advocating is “stuffing your feelings down” and “forgetting about them.” They would say that’s unhealthy. It’s much healthier to let things out in the open.
I disagree, obviously.
First of all, I’m not suggesting anyone should hide their feelings like unwanted broccoli under the kitchen table. I’m not advising you to bottle things up. That, certainly, is very unhealthy.
But there’s another option to dealing with unwanted emotions that doesn’t involve subjecting anyone else to them, and that is to simply recognize them for the formless, powerless blobs of thought that they are, and to force them to dissipate.
Emotions aren’t real. They don’t exist. They don’t come to you from outside sources, and they cannot exist outside of your own mind. You may use words laced with emotion, but those are only suggestions to the people who hear your words that they should create corresponding emotions inside themselves. (Think of the transporters in Star Trek. When Kirk steps onto the pad and gets “beamed up,” the transporter isn’t physically taking his particles from one place to another. According to some sources, at least, what the machine does is break down the particles of Kirk, record the information the contain, and then transmit that information to the destination, where a whole new set of particles are put together to make a copy of Kirk.)
Emotions are not real. I can’t stress it enough.
And you can’t bury something that isn’t real. You can’t hide something that doesn’t exist.
What you can do is turn your flashlight on it and realize that there is no there there.
Or, to bring it back around to my original metaphor, you swallow it down and make it disappear.
Next time you feel something unpleasant, ask yourself where the emotion came from, and if it’s worth putting out there in the world.
And when you realize it’s not, just Kirby it.
PS – Christians may equate what I’m saying to “turning the other cheek,” but there is an importance difference in philosophy to address here.
While I do sympathize with the sentiment, turning the other cheek implies accepting abuse. In fact, the thought isn’t so much implied as it is stated clearly in Matthew 5:39, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
I’m not interested in advocating masochism. I see no reason to open yourself up to more abuse from “an evil person.”
In the Stoic’s eyes, there is no such thing as an evil person. Marcus Aurelius might say that there are only people who cannot recognize good from evil. Assuming we’re talking about a metaphorical slap here, if someone slaps you on the right cheek, just understand that their feelings are not your feelings; their path is not your path; their injury is not your injury.
Because, as Aurelius says, “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
Christianity advocates not only accepting oneself as being a victim, but in making oneselfa victimin the first place–neither of which are necessary, or even possible, under Stoicism.
Wait, wait, hear me out. I know this is a totally original, never-before-stated concept, but I promise if you just keep reading it will start to make sense. Life isn’t an actual river. You’re not swimming right now. Relax. Sometimes metaphors are hard, and since this one is totally new and, like I said, original, I’m sure it will take some getting used to.
Okay, so. Life is a river.
You are in a boat as you venture through life, floating down this river. The river is extremely wide and unending, but it is filled with obstacles. Rocks jutting up from the depths, branches floating broadside, all manner of terrifying creatures and monsters that lurk under the boat.
But generally it’s a calm river.
Along with all the aforementioned obstacles, the river is also filled with…debris. Stuff. All shapes and sizes, all colors and textures. Not dangerous stuff, per se. Just…stuff.
It floats along next to you, close enough that you can reach out and grab it if you want.
And you do, because you do want. The things, some of them, are shiny. Or they’re pretty. Or they seem valuable.
They can look any way you imagine, but when you see them floating along by your boat you know you must have them.
So you reach down, over the side of the boat, and you pick one thing up. You examine it. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s what you’ve always wanted.
You sit with it in your boat for a long while, filled with a happiness you didn’t know you could feel.
And then you spot another thing! It’s a little ways away, over there, but luckily you spotted it in time that you can steer your boat towards it. You intercept the thing, scooping it up out of the water easily as you pass by.
It’s different from the last thing. Not better or worse, just different. You put it on the floor of the boat between your legs, with the first thing. No sooner do you do that than you see yet another interesting thing on the horizon. You steer yourself towards it with relative ease, and now you’ve got three different, equally-cool things in your boat.
The next day, the first thing you spot is another thing just like the first one. It’s close by. You scoop it up and add it to the collection. Soon after, another thing, like the second one.
You add it, too.
Then another one like the third thing. It joins the rest.
You’re finding that the feeling of happiness you had is now more than that; it’s beyond just pleasure. This is a purpose. You must find more of all of these things!
You start scanning the horizon all day long, day in and day out, watching for more of them. After a few days, you’ve collected five more things, a few from each category. You spend your nights admiring your collection, and your days searching for more.
A couple of days go by without finding any more of the things you’ve been collecting. You start to wonder if you got all of them. Suddenly another thing catches your eye. It’s different than the others, and you haul it in.
It’s also very cool. Suddenly that feeling of worry you had just been experiencing has been replaced with newfound joy.
A new project! More things to collect!
Now you have four different kinds of things you’re on the lookout for. Within a couple of days your collection has grown wildly. Your boat is almost overflowing. What’s more, you have added more categories to your collection still. Every time you are looking for one of the things you already have, you find another cool thing!
This is bliss! You are finding so many cool things!
By now you have taken to sitting atop your pile of things, because it’s too tall to see over. You perch up there and look down at the river around you, carefully spying to find more of your precious items.
You see one off in the distance. It’s far, but you think you can make it.
You spend a minute carefully climbing down the pile, back to the aft of the boat where the rudder is. Finally there, you push the handle and the rudder turns…but the boat barely moves.
You try the other way, and the boat rocks a bit but still maintains its straight course.
It only takes you a moment to realize what’s wrong: The boat is too heavy. The weight of the pile, your excellent collection, is too much. It’s now that you realize the water line next to the boat is quite high. The boat is riding very dangerously low. Unable to steer very well, you watch helplessly as the cool thing you were going to get drifts by you and into oblivion.
You look at the giant pile and wonder what can be done.
While you wonder, you climb back up to the top to sit and wait. Surely another neat thing will come by, and the next one will be closer to you. You just have to accept that the things that are far away are too difficult to get to now. It’s the price of having such an amazing collection.
As you’re looking straight ahead, fixing your field of view only on the objects that your boat will directly intercept, you spot dark shape in the water. At first you think it’s some kind of interesting object, and you wonder if you could scoop it up.
But then you realize that’s not an option. It’s a rock, jagged and menacing, piercing up through the tranquil surface.
And it’s growing ever closer and closer.
Without being able to steer, you will have no choice but to collide with it.
Now you realize that something must be done, and it must be done immediately.
You have to pare down your collection. You have to make the boat light enough to steer.
But how much weight will you have to get rid of? And, more importantly, which things do you toss overboard? What items in your collection are you willing to part with?
You frantically start digging through the pile. You pick up the first item your hand grabs, and you look at it. You remember where you got it. You had so many plans for it. It’s such a cool thing! You can’t get rid of it just yet.
You set it aside and keep going. Surely you’ll find some things that aren’t important enough to keep.
You’re still digging through the pile when the prow of your boat splinters against the unyielding rock. You tumble down off the pile, landing on the rock with a painful crack of bone.
Conscious but in pain, you helplessly look up as the boat sinks before you…and with it, your precious collection, which disperses into the water and vanishes into a thousand pieces.
You are on the rock alone, and this is where you will die.
Kind of a bummer ending. Sorry about that. The good news is, it’s a metaphorical rock, and a metaphorical death.
And you can avoid it by paying attention to what you put into your boat. Control your impulses, and you will be able to control your vessel.
That’s what VulcanBuddha is all about. An impulse is nothing but a thought wrapped in an emotion. Your impulse to eat ice cream isn’t your body telling you it needs dairy. Sorry.
It’s your subconscious telling you that you’ll be happier, if only for a moment, if you eat the ice cream; It’s telling you that you deserve the ice cream because you’ve been working really hard; It’s telling you that it’s not unhealthy for you to eat the ice cream, because you’re special.
It’s a thought (I want ice cream), wrapped in an emotion (I deserve ice cream).
Or maybe it’s an emotion wrapped in a thought.
Either way, if you are the kind of person who–when you’re not around ice cream or craving ice cream–doesn’t want to eat ice cream anymore, then you owe it to yourself to learn to recognize that emotional thought–a.k.a. impulse–and let it float by.
This goes for buying sports cars as much as watching YouTube videos as much as messaging that girl at 3 a.m. who you just met. It’s all about impulse management.
Your Past Self has made an agreement to become your Future Self, but the only one standing in the way is your Present Self.
Listen to your Past Self, not your Present Self, because your Present Self is notoriously fickle.
The Vulcan Buddha 