Tag: choices

So you don’t believe Determinism?

Photo by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash

You don’t believe Determinism? Great, differing opinions are what makes the world go ‘round. Let me ask you this: When did you decide that you don’t believe in it?

Oh, I see. You didn’t really decide, per se. It’s just how you’ve always felt. I see.

What do you think caused you to feel that way? Any idea? Was it something you read? Something someone said to you? Maybe just the way you were raised?

No, it’s ok that you don’t have an exact answer for it. There are lots of influences that bring us to the beliefs we hold, aren’t there? Ironically, though, my belief in determinism has a very direct cause. It began with a lecture I listened to, on the subject of free will, and it made a lot of sense to me when I heard it. Much the same way that it doesn’t make any sense to you.

Now, I have to ask myself, why did it make sense? Well, I have no idea, do I? I don’t know what about the lecture caused this idea to click in my head, to answer the unasked questions in my mind. Can you tell me why it doesn’t make sense to you?

No, I don’t mean a list of reasons. Those reasons are just subjective, aren’t they? I realize they may seem like objective facts, but an objective fact still has to meet with our ability to understand it, right? If I said water is wet and you didn’t think that was true, well, that’s an objective fact but for some reason it doesn’t sit the same in your reality as it sits in mine.

So when I say, “Why doesn’t Determinism make sense to you?”, I’m not looking for a list of objections, I’m looking for the reason it doesn’t make sense. Or, to put it another way, I’m looking for the reason that those objections do make sense to you. Follow?

I’ll give you time.

Can’t come up with a good answer? That’s totally understandable. I couldn’t either. If you asked me why ‘water is wet’ makes sense to me, I couldn’t come up with a reason. If you asked me why ‘I am alive’ rings true to me, I also couldn’t come up with a reason. If you asked me why determinism makes sense to me, I couldn’t tell you. I could just as easily have felt like you about the matter had circumstances in my life conspired a little differently. Do you agree?

Determinism isn’t the belief that we cannot make choices in life, or that the choices we make don’t matter; it’s the belief that we cannot choose what we are going to choose.

Put another way: We can make a choice, but our choice isn’t random. It’s determined.

We cannot choose how things effect us.

Our actions are based on how things effect us, and we cannot choose how things effect us. Therefore our choices are determined by forces outside ourselves.

If we choose to act opposite to our best interest, that is still a choice based on circumstances. Why did we choose to act that way? We wanted to be contrary.

But why did we want to be contrary? To prove a point.

But why did we want to prove that point? Because we believe we’re right.

But we do we believe we’re right? Etc. Etc. Etc.

Eventually you run out of causes you can attribute to your own conscious will.

Meditation #78: Another one about choices

You want to be a better person? That’s easy: make the choice that a better person would make.

Bam, you’re a better person.

It’s really that easy. You are as good (and only as good) as the last choice you made. Not the next choice, because the future doesn’t exist yet. And not the choices you made last year or last week or even yesterday.

All that matters to who you are as a person is the last choice you made.

Ok, so the last choice you made was to order Coke instead of Pepsi? That’s not exactly life-changing, sure, but it still serves my point: You are the kind of person who drinks Coke. Oh, you’re not? You drink Pepsi every other time, it’s just that because reasons you chose to order Coke this time? Sorry, nope. You are a Coke drinker.

I’m not saying you’re always a Coke drinker. You’re thinking about this wrong if that’s what you think. You are right now a Coke drinker. You can’t pretend it’s otherwise, based on some fictional future or remembered past. What matters is now, what matters is this choice.

More importantly, though, this applies to things like being honest, being reliable, being healthy, being responsible. If you want to be an honest person, all it takes is to make the honest choice. Want to be reliable? Make the reliable choice. And so on.

It’s not about changing your life, or fundamentally rewriting your personality. Those aren’t possible, anyway, because your life and your personality are both just the choices you make. So if you want to change something, make a different choice. Not next time. Now.

When will we change?

If you picture yourself in the future and you have different habits and values, are you striving for those values today? If not, why not?

There are only two useful responses to seeing yourself as someone else in the future: Let it go, or do it now.

I often imagine myself in an ideal future scenario and I’m basically being a different person than I am now. I’m not caught up in things. I’m not checking social media. (I don’t even have social media by then.) I’m not playing video games. In my opinion, the version of me I see is a Better Me.

While seeing this future me is nice because it feels like I have something to strive for, and it makes me feel like “someday it will be better,” it’s actually not helpful. I either need to change my behavior now, today, to match the version of myself I see in the future–in other words, quit playing video games, meditate more often, do yoga, etc.–or just stop imagining that I’m going to actually ever be that version of myself.

There’s nothing wrong with the latter option, either. If I had some idea that I was going to be, say, an astronaut at some vague future time, that’s not a very realistic goal at this point in my life. I’m nearing 40, I’m pretty out of shape, I’m not an astrophysicist. There are a lot of reasons it’s just not gonna happen.

So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say, “I should probably just let that notion go,” especially if thinking about it creates some negative feelings about myself right now. Comparing myself today to this Better Me in the future is no more useful than comparing myself to anyone else. That person in my vision might as well be someone entirely different. By ceasing to compare myself with him, I can actually begin to accept myself the way I am today. Instead of feeling like a loser if I sit and play video games for an hour, I can smile and say, “Yeah, this is who you are. Love it.” And I can start adjusting my expectations to better match my reality. The future version of me, wherever he ends up, very well might also love playing video games some times and hate doing yoga.

However, that’s not the only option, and it’s not even the one I’d prefer. I don’t want to give up on that future, apparently-happier version of myself. But comparing myself to him is unhelpful, as we’ve already established. So what to do, then? Become him.

Instead of waiting for that person to come into being, I can make the choices today that create him. If that version of me is happy saying no to video games, for instance, then I need to say no to video games today. (And if it’s impossible for me to say no to video games today, then it’s going to be just as impossible for that version of me in the future, and I need to accept that truth and account for it in my expectations of myself.)

Rather than continuing to perpetuate the struggle between the Current Me and the Better Me, I need to bring the two of them together and realize that the Better Me isn’t someone who exists in a few years, or even in a few days. He exists on the other side of the next choice I make.

Choices, Choices

I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately, and about how they are the building blocks of who we are. Our destiny is the choices we make, as I heard someone say once.

The choice you make now, and now, and now, becomes the habit that you fall back on later, and later, and later, becomes the way you live your life–becomes the way you are remembered.

We are creatures of habit. No, I mean it. More than you think. We don’t just pick up habits, our whole existence is a perpetual state of…habits. Habit-having? (I want to say ‘habitation’ but that’s not the right word, is it?)

Habbiting.

We have so-called ‘good habits’–the ones that promote flourishing and help us become our best selves–and so-called ‘bad habits’–the ones that pull us back, drag us down, make us less effective. They make us do things we regret. They keep us from achieving the things we want. To put it quite dramatically, they destroy us.

But this is all there is, I’m convinced. Only these two polar opposites. At any given moment of any given day, we are either enacting a bad habit or a good one. There’s no neutral zone. There’s no Switzerland of habbitting.

If you want to improve yourself, improve your station in life, flourish, whatever you want to call it, then it’s not enough to start building good habits. You have to undo the bad ones. You have to put good habits in place of the bad ones.

Anyway, bringing it back to choices, which is where I started: The habits you build come from the choices you make in any given moment. A habit isn’t an unhackable program. It’s not so powerful that it can’t be swayed with choice.

But we tend to think in the long term when we want to break a bad habit, and that makes it feel impossible. “I’ve been drinking soda for twenty-five years of my life. How in the world can I possibly choose to not drink it for the next twenty-five?” The bad habit has too much momentum behind it, it seems, to be re-directed.

So don’t think of it long-term. It’s not about never drinking soda again (for example); it’s about not drinking soda this time. And then the next time you are presented with the choice, it’s still about not drinking soda this time. And this time. And this time.

Pretty soon you can say, “Well, I haven’t had soda for the last six months. I’m not about to start now!”

Always look at this choice. Not the next one, not the last one. Because this choice is the choice that matters, the one that is going to make you the person you are going to be.

Everything is a choice

Choices become actions
Actions become habits
Habits become The Way We Live
The Way We Live becomes Who We Are

Who you are comes down to the choices you make in the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. Made a bad choice this moment? Don’t dwell on it. Make a better one in the next moment.

Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be; what he will become in the next moment. – Victor Frankl

Don’t like who you are right now? Become someone else by making a different choice. You only have to do it once.

Once!

Can you believe it? Every choice you make you only ever have to make one time.

Want to quit going on social media? Choose not to right now.

Done. You did it. You made the choice.

Next time you are presented with the option, it’s a different choice. It’s not the choice you made before; It can’t be. That choice was before. Different time, different place in the cosmos. Different you.

This is a new choice. You can choose to be a new you, again, now, or not. You won’t be the old you, though, no matter what. Don’t worry. You can’t be, understand? You changed into a new you the last time you made a choice about this thing. You already are a new you.

In other words, don’t be hard on yourself if you aren’t consistent with your choices. In fact, celebrate it. If you’re inconsistent, then at least it means you’re thinking. You’re trying something new.

You may never develop a habit from inconsistency, but you also won’t develop a bad habit.

Think about that.

Meditation #46: Tranquility

Seek tranquility, not happiness.

Happiness is impossible to maintain, and to predict. What made you happy yesterday, like eating an entire chocolate cake, could make you sick today.

Tranquility, unlike happiness, isn’t a feeling you get from the things that happen. It’s a feeling you hold no matter what happens. It’s under your control, and you can call it up anytime, anywhere.

So next time you are wondering what to do to make yourself happy, take a look inside your mind and ask if you’re tranquil instead.

Meditation #44: The “Two Lever” argument.

If you’re struggling over whether or not you made the right choice, take heart in knowing that you couldn’t have chosen any other way. Ask yourself which, if either, of these two things you were in control of at the time:

  1. The prior state of the universe. The arrangement of all the atoms and subatomic particles that make up all of existence.
  2. The laws of physics that control those atoms and subatomic particles.

Unless your name is Dr. Manhattan, or Q, I can guarantee you don’t have control of either of those aspects of reality. Therefore, you could not have “chosen” any differently than you eventually did when you made your decision, therefore you are not truly at fault.

This concept comes from philosopher Daniel Meissler, who (as far as I know) invented it, and called it the “Two-Lever Argument Against Free Will.”

Meditation #33: Every new moment is a chance to turn it all around.

Every new moment is a chance to turn it all around.

Your past is only as strong as your attachment to it.

The past has no hands, only handles. We are the ones holding onto it, not the other way around. That which does not exist cannot exert force, and the past does not exist.

Let go of your attachments to every moment except the present, because it is the only time that exists. It’s the only moment that matters, because it’s the only moment where change can happen.

 

Meditation #10: Try not to complain.

Try not to complain. This is for several reasons. Most importantly, it is generally an ineffective way to bring about change. (And in fact that’s usually not the intent of complaining, anyway. The complainer usually just wants others to feel sorry for them.) If you want your situation to change, take steps to try to change it. If it can’t be changed and you know it, complaining is useless, so instead direct your energies at finding ways to cope.

The more pragmatic reason to curtail complaining is simply that you never know where your words might go. It may seem like harmless venting, but the person you are complaining to may have different ideas about what you’re saying. They may intentionally use your words against you in other company, or they may do so accidentally. But the point is you never know what will happen to the words you say once they leave your lips.

Don’t complain; act. And if you cannot act, cope.

In other words, if you cannot change your circumstances, change your mind.