Could it really be this simple?

Happy Saturday!

Lars here, friendly neighborhood thriller author.

Here's something I've been working on for several years in my own life, and I thought now might be as decent a time as any to share.

It's related to improving the quality of our lives.

Not in the sense of acquiring a bigger house or a nicer car, or in the sense of increasing our income or reducing our debt.

More in the sense of the quality of our moment-to-moment experience.

In keeping with all the clickbait headlines we've become accustomed to seeing, let's call the topic of today's note something along these lines:

"One weird trick to improve everything about your life."

Or maybe:

"Try this little-known secret to make everything better."

Or possibly:

"Can this strange ritual end all suffering?"

Funny thing is, as hyperbolic as these 'headlines' sound...

They're actually fairly accurate.

Here's what I mean.

Things happen within us and around us. Let's call them Real Events, or RE's for short.

These Real Events, or RE's for short, cause photons to enter our eyes in certain patterns, or cause compression waves to impact and vibrate our skin and eardrums. Or maybe these RE's cause an internal pressure differential inside our bodies.

Our bodies convert these pressure and/or electromagnetic waves into electrically-charged ions. These ions move through our nerves, and cause changes in the way other cells in our bodies behave.

Some of the cells that are impacted most by this movement of electrically charged ions, which again is ultimately caused by RE's happening around us or even within our own bodies, happen to be our brain cells.

Our brain cells work together to process this movement of ions. What results is an interpretation of the RE's.

This interpretation is our experience. 

The actual event itself -- which produced photons that hit our optic nerves, or which produced compression waves that wiggled our eardrums, or which produced pressure changes in our chest or abdomen, or which produced pain signals in our arthritic big toes (it's surprisingly painful, I'm sad to report) -- is not something we can experience directly.

This is important and not entirely intuitive, so it bears repeating:

We have no capacity to experience reality directly.

We only have the capacity to recognize patterns of ion movement through our brains and bodies.

We make meaning out of these ion movement patterns, and we arrive at this meaning through two important ways:

1. Trial and error. Through the miracle of memory, we learn something from most of our experiences.

2. Social conditioning. We believe what we are told, even without desiring to believe it, even when we try not to believe it, and even when we know it is false.

(What does all of this have to do with thriller novels? Not much. But I'm on a mission to improve the world and alleviate suffering, and this is arguably the most important place to begin.)

This is nerdy stuff, so let's recap:

1. Real Events (RE's) occur in the world around and within us. 

2. Our senses pick up photons and/or pressure waves, then convert them into electrical signals.

3. Our brains create meaning out of these signals.

4. The meaning we create depends on what we have experienced, but mostly on what we remember being told about certain categories of experience.

We don't naturally evaluate facts, statistics, and probabilities, it turns out.

We don't use much logic.

We don't do much research.

Instead, without much intention or reflection, we simply grab the nearest cognitive object that might roughly match the current pattern of electrical signals zinging around between our ears. And no matter how rough this match might be, we believe it wholeheartedly.

And here's the kicker:

We assume that this rough match is, in fact, an accurate interpretation of the Real Event. 

But it's not.

Not necessarily, anyway.

Especially if we've been watching too much cable news, for example, where they tell us that every tiny little thing happening in every little corner of the globe is Irrefutable Evidence of the Other Side's Endless Treachery and Villainy.

Because our brains are not structured to evaluate things critically, logically, and rationally.

Our brains are structured to recognize similarities between the electrical signals we're currently experiencing inside our brains and bodies, and the electrical signals we once experienced at an earlier time. 

If the patterns match, plus or minus, we file things away in the "appropriate" bucket and move on, convinced that we don't need to make any adjustments to our worldview.

This serves us beautifully in simple situations, like hunger, pain, tiredness, reproduction, and the like.

It doesn't serve us that well at all in complex situations.

We misinterpret important signals, causing us to make critical and catastrophic errors in judgment.

Does this mean that we are doomed to continue making horrible decisions?

Not at all.

We can improve the quality of our thinking.

Not by changing the way our brains create meaning. If that's even possible, it doesn't seem a likely outcome of any of the interventions I've yet come across.

Instead, we can improve our experience and alleviate our own suffering by doing Two Simple Things.

(Yes, the clickbait headlines above were all about "One Weird Trick". But I try to over-deliver, so I'm going to give you Two Weird Tricks for the price of one.)

Here we go:

1. We can learn how to observe our own thoughts and feelings.

This should be done in the simplest language possible.

"I feel very angry right now."

"I feel afraid that I'm not good enough."

"I feel afraid that my neighbor wants to destroy my country." (Yep, this is actually a prevalent fear right now, despite its utter absurdity.)

When we do something as simple as placing a label on our mental or emotional state, we disentangle our "selves" from the emotion. Like magic, the emotional state simply passes like an annoyingly loud train rumbling and rattling and clattering down the track, leaving us free to choose an action that aligns with our values.

Really.

Here's the second weird trick:

2. Improve the quality of the ideas that we allow inside our brains.

This is critical, because our brains do not evaluate things critically. Instead, our brains just interpret the current experience as being similar to something we heard recently.

So if what we heard recently was, for example, an overpaid and undereducated "News and Entertainment" person ranting on television about how our neighbor wants to destroy his own way of life...

We're likely to view the current situation as further proof of this (manipulative and stupid) point of view.

Instead, if what we've heard recently was something more along the lines of, say, a lengthy and nuanced conversation between two educated experts who make claims that can be tested with reasonable objectivity...

Or along the lines of a talk given by someone outlining his or her path to freedom from addiction...

Or maybe an article that covers how to use mental models to understand a complicated situation in a comprehensive way...

Or possibly a newsletter that outlines how to improve our daily habits in order to improve our outcomes...

Then we are far more likely to create a meaning out of the current pattern of electrical signals zipping around our brains that will improve our experience, and that will also, by inevitable extension, actually improve the Real Events that we happen to create or influence.

In other words, garbage in = garbage out.

And quality in = quality out.

So whether we realize it or not, we're constantly participating in our own personal evolution.

We can continue to spend hours in passive self-indoctrination at the hands of our favorite News and Entertainment channel, wallow in our confirmation bias, and develop an ever more cynical and jaded view of everything and everyone around us...

Or we can -- slowly but surely -- wake the fuck up.

:)

XOXO, 

Lars

PS: Thanks for reading this far. If these ideas make sense to you, please feel free to forward to a friend.

PPS: My daughter starts college soon, so please go buy a new thriller. :)