2025-03-02 11:36
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Reference
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/05/dont-surround-yourself-with-smarter-people/
Notes:
This essay literally explains all of what I experienced with Vivint and the subsequent years.
I’m particularly interested in this Insomniac Philosopher idea, it seems like the Notes from the underground kind of insomnia and my own of the forces keeping one who is philosophically aware of finite games and so makes them afraid of stepping into any such one. Perhaps Good Will Hunting is another example.
”.. a domain-specific ability to see reality in unsentimental ways, and act on reality in appropriate ways.
Appropriate needs some qualification. I don’t mean socially appropriate, technically appropriate or somebody else’s idea of what’s appropriate in a given situation. I mean in the sense of the zen idea of the ripples in a pond in response to a tossed stone being appropriate.
The stone-in-the-pond metaphor describes behaviors that are neither under-reactions, nor over-reactions, nor irrelevant or superfluous in relation to the situation. The pond is your mind and the ripples are your subjective experience of what you’re doing. The ripples are completely determined in a physics sense, but paradoxically, are completely free in a subjective sense. You suffer no anxiety due to dissonance between expectations and reality. There are three principal components to this non-dissonance:
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Knowledge: In part this sense of freedom is due to knowledge: you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold. If you fire somebody, they’re going to be upset, and if you know that ahead of time, you can be all pond-like about it. Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.
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Detachment: Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.
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Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack. Yeah, the tooth is about to get painfully pulled. Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.”
If freedom-to-win leads to an economics of pricelessness, freedom-to-keep-playing leads to an economics of worthlessness. A good literary image to keep in mind is my favorite Lord of the Rings character, Tom Bombadil. The one person both unaffected by the One Ring, and immune to its power. To him, it is philosophically worthless in the sense of a parrot, a non sequitur that can exist without a value being attached to it. This is not the same thing as a finite-game idea of worthlessness, which is simply zero in-game value.
Freedom to win strives towards an ultimate win defined by an equilibrium of pricelessness: a utopia. Freedom to keep playing, on the other hand, is a Bombadil-like equilibrium of worthlessness: the un-valued here-and-now. You can move freely and naturally through it. Smooth and striated become one. Piece-of-corn and piece-of-gold have no necessary relationship to one another.
This equilibrium is a naturally unstable one. The trick to getting there is not being afraid to fall out of it. This is why children are good at it. When everything is a toy, everything is at once worthless in the infinite game and priceless in the finite game, because its worth can be a function of how you’re playing with it. In one game, an empty cardboard box can be priceless and an expensive doll worthless. In the next game, the roles can be reversed.
But once you grow up, you become afraid of losing yourself in a finite game because you lose the ability to stop playing.
** The child playing with the toy seems akin to the kind of equilibrium you can reach on mushrooms. Every game is in alignment with what you are doing in the moment.
“The most common emotion people retreat from is some sort of identity insecurity. The most common emotion people retreat to is simmering resentment towards those who provoke the insecurity, which often drives a complex redemption-and-revenge life story.”