Selective Memory

And the millennials absolutely believed they had solved sex — that they’ve solved everything. And I’m raising two kids of the younger generation, and it’s been widely reported everywhere, but yes, the Generation Z find the millennials literally excruciating, even perhaps more excruciating than they find us, which is amazing.

But to me, it doesn’t have to be this kind of violent battle. The thing I’m so moved by is my generation, because they’re my time cohorts. They’re my people. I love everybody else, and good luck to you. But I’m talking, when I’m writing, foremost to the people I came up with. We’re going through this life thing together, and I’m like, well, how are you doing? This is how I’m doing. How’s this striking you?

I’m talking to them, and I’m delighted if anyone younger or older listens in, but I am explicitly talking to my people and those are the people who came through these years with me. They’re meaningful to me.

Zadie Smith, on the NYT

These are my highlighted passages from Sanity and Sainthood by Tucker Peck. It’s perhaps one of the best introductions to meditation I’ve read, and it helped many concepts click into place for me. It reminded me of Already Free, especially in how it explores the way meditation and therapy can deepen and support one another. My sense is that most people probably benefit from both. I’m reminded of something that, I think, Sasha Chapin said: that meditation becomes far more useful once your main psychological issues have been addressed.

While it’s an oversimplification to say, “Dharma is about focusing on mental processes, whereas psychotherapy is about focusing on mental content,” this is close enough to true that I think it’s a helpful heuristic to keep in mind as you’re reading.

“Focus on mental processes when you can and mental content when you have to.”

The Buddha famously says, “O monks, when I say karma, I mean intention.” If we ignore the mystical implications around reincarnation, we can quickly define karma as “What you do determines who you are, and who you are determines what you do, in a constant cycle.”

It might seem counterintuitive that non-harming is the opposite of delusion. But if we recall that the delusion is separateness from other beings, then treating them as though we’re all in this together might help overcome delusion.

So I think of the last precept as avoiding the deliberate cultivation of states of mental dullness, which is much harder to follow than not ever taking a sip of wine or liquor.

The traditional formulation is to take all the good states you have and improve them, and take all the bad ones you have and decrease them. Similarly, take the good ones you don’t have and get them, and continue to avoid the bad ones you don’t already have. That means noticing that when anger arises, we let it arise but invite it to go whenever it’s ready (which might be soon or not). When love arises, we invite it to stay as long as it’s willing (which, of course, might also be a long time or a short one).

Never suppress anything—just concern yourself with what’s in the center of your attention. Overcoming these two obstacles takes the average student several years and multiple retreats.

If our goal is racing toward enlightenment, one problem is that we’re racing toward something we don’t understand. What does it mean, for instance, to see through the illusory nature of having an ego? If you know what it really means, then it’s already happened to you, and there’s no need to chase it. If you don’t know what it means, then it’s a giant question mark, and it’s pretty hard to stay motivated for all that long if you’re chasing a giant question.

One mantra I use to help with balanced effort is “If you can’t do something, don’t.”

The one that I use most frequently, if you’ve noticed, is that you should focus on internal processes when you can, and on internal content when you have to.

I like to sum up the purification cycle by saying, “Most of your problems will go away if you skillfully ignore them—and the adverbs most and skillfully are the important words in that sentence.”

The idea of anti-healing is to practice meditating in such a way that you assume you won’t ever feel any different.

I had one student who was particularly obsessed with making all of his bad feelings go away. I gave him the mantra “I’m the kind of guy who _______.” The idea was that when he would feel anxious, he would think to himself, “I’m the kind of guy who feels anxious.” This statement, which attributes permanence and self to the emotion, would actually undercut all of his desire to kill the emotion. This actually worked so well for him that shortly afterwards, he felt better and didn’t need regular meetings anymore.

Getting used to inhabiting the mind that you have, rather than trying to replace it with a new and better mind, will be both true and useful for your practice.

What falls in the center of attention tends to have this egoic quality to it.

We know that the nature of the body is to age and die. It’s not a stellar feeling to be trapped in it, or as Warren Zevon wrote while he was dying, “I was in the house when the house burned down.”

TMT posits that the one thing we know for certain is that we’re going to die and everything we care about will be destroyed. This is at once deeply obvious and totally unacceptable, so we need some psychological mechanism to cope with this.

When things are OK, the sense of self and sense of what’s happening in the world feels wider, and when things are rough, the sense of self feels tiny and clearly defined in only one way.

Because there may not be any way to tell the difference between physical and psychogenic pain, the best thing to do when you experience pain is to find the most comfortable posture that will allow you to stay awake and focused during your meditation—and then don’t move, even if it hurts.

The Pali word for this type of conceptual elaboration that leaves you increasingly confused is papaňca. For instance, you might feel sad. This then leads to a memory of childhood and someone’s misconduct. That then leads you to feel angry, which leads you to thinking about how to help abused children, which leaves you thinking about the strategies for setting up an NGO where you live, and so on. Rather than processing the emotion, you’ve just gotten lost in a series of perceptions that are increasingly fictional (as in, you’re not founding an NGO right now; you’re just feeling sad).

You’ll recall from earlier that one of the main functions of the ego is to suppress content that it thinks is too dangerous, and that one of the main functions of Dharma practice is to weaken the power of the ego.

The second clue is that when the body “talks,” it tends to have limited vocabulary, like a small child. It not only uses simple words, but it often uses very few words. By contrast, discursive thinking uses lots of words and has the same level of vocabulary that you use in daily life. If you ask the question “What do you need?” the mental talk that arises when you focus on your head might write an essay on the topic. However, the mental talk that arises when you focus on your torso might say something like, “Help,” “Mom,” or “Sad.” Its vocabulary may be so limited, in fact, that it technically doesn’t answer the question.

In the first section of the book, I estimated that around 70 percent of psychological content resolves through meditation. The content in most cases just needs to be listened to in order to heal, but we can’t hear it without spending lots of time in silence. Meditation causes an increase in sensory clarity of the body, which leads to hearing our emotions more clearly. Meditation also leads to a decrease in the suppressive power of the ego, so not only can we hear our emotions better, but the part of us telling the emotions to shut up gets weaker. This allows us to listen to the emotions, and that causes them to heal.

Most of what we’re trying to do in Buddhist meditation is find balance in the mind, and there are a bunch of dimensions along which we’re trying to find that balance. Balance is the central point, or the middle way, between two extremes. One of the most critical and challenging dimensions is an axis with spiritual bypassing and numbness on one end and being reactive, emotional, and unable to cope with life’s constant ups and downs on the other. For an easy rhyme, we could label one extreme feeling “hazy” and the other extreme feeling “crazy.”

The rule here is: If you’re feeling hazy, do practices, like mid-range body scanning, that increase the volume of emotional sensations. If you’re feeling crazy, do practices that deconstruct (vipassana), distract from (samatha or brahma-vihara), or move away from (just sitting, shikantaza) emotional sensations.

One student of mine suggested that evolution selected for humans that were the maximum amount of insane that wouldn’t preclude survival and reproduction. If certain people experience levels of mental health better than that, it’s just a lucky bonus.

By the end of the year, 99% of the code written by Anthropic will be written by Claude.

One of the many things I learned from Heidi Priebe is that being securely attached doesn't mean you are at a beach on a bright sunny day. You are still in the middle of the ocean. It's just that you have tremendous swimming skills. Something about that resonates with me when I think about a certain type of religious people. As much as I'm surprised by those who have unquestionable faith, I often find myself much more drawn to those who question, who are doubtful. It's like they don't run from it. They swim in the ocean of uncertainty. I thought about this looking at the paintings of Mexican artist Alfredo Castañeda.

About 30,000 years before anyone thought to plant a seed instead of chase an animal, someone sat in a cave and spent weeks carving something that has never existed and could never exist: a being with the legs of a human and the head and torso of a lion. This is the Lion Man, found in a cave in what is now Germany, roughly 40,000 years old. To carve it required flint tools and an estimated 400 hours of work. That's not an afternoon's distraction. Which means the community around this person had to support them, had to believe that making this impossible thing was worth the time, worth the food it took to keep the carver alive while they worked. Whatever this figure meant, it mattered enough to organize life around it. The hard to miss but on second thought astonishing fact is the ability for this first person to imagine a lion with human body. They had to reach across the boundary between two categories of reality and fuse them into a third thing that transcends both. That is not a small act. That is the first evidence we have of a human mind doing what mystics have always done: perceiving and projecting a reality behind and beyond the visible one.

If someone did ask what you were doing, you’d say you were reading this book. Why? Because of all the things you’re doing, one of those things especially feels like you, while the others feel like they’re just happening. And why, of all the mental and physical activities occurring in this moment, does reading feel like the real thing you’re doing? Largely, the answer is because it’s in the center of your attention. What falls in the center of attention tends to have this egoic quality to it.

Peck, Tucker. Sanity and Sainthood: Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy (p. 83).

I always thought Philip Roth had the most brutal quote about aging: “Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre." But yesterday I read an equally strong one by Warren Zevon, written while he was dying: “I was in the house when the house burned down.”

When to use iconography:

• To create recall - An icon that builds on recognition over time, removing the cognitive load to understand the icon/interaction in a single instance, and allow the user to move more quickly through the product (eg. main menu)

• To assign meaning - Icons assigned features unique to Lyft, build off past interactions by indicating a familiar flow about to be initiated (eg. scheduled rides)

• To parse text/lists - Icons used to add legibility by breaking up text into smaller pieces, and indicating where each new concept begins (eg. value propositions)

• To add clarity - Icons leveraging universal meanings to create a more accessible product by visually reinterpreting text (eg. forms) • To set tone - /cons used to indicate a pass/fail state of a flow, and remind the user to slow down and read their options carefully (eg. alerts)

When to avoid iconography:

• As a decorative element - Icons should not be used as a purely visual element, to fill up space

• In combination with illustration - Text should only require one visual interpretation, and more than one creates tension that distracts from the call to action

• Below 9px - Icons below 9px need to be designed differently because of a drop in legibility, and should be avoided whenever possible

• Above 48px - Icons scaled beyond 48px pull too much weight away from the call to action, and a custom illustration should be used instead

• In a crowded space - Iconography should be avoided in content-heavy spaces, as they can can distract from critical information when they share the same weight as the text

[From Lyft]

The IDEO design team had to design an Emergency Room for a hospital. Instead of just researching how other Emergency Rooms operate, they looked at similar high pressure environments. One examples was Formula 1 pit stops. They learned teams would prepare kits with the tools and parts needed to fix typical problems they had to deal with during races. That meant when the issue arised, they didn't spent time looking for the right tools and parts to fix it. IDEO introduced the same idea of having kits for emergency rooms most common scenarios, such as a drug overdose or heart attacks. [via Mat Abrahams]

Design is not an isolated individual screen. Prompt to UI misses a lot of the conventions, edge cases, how flows connect, all of the accumulated design decisions that results in the experience of a software. You can't capture that in a prompt. Perhaps the future is going straight to code, where context management is easier and already in use (claude.md)

[via Dan Grover]