Recently, I’ve started to experience some mad volatility. Actually, I think this “recently” can be traced back all the way to therapy last year - but it really intensified with my flight back to Australia, continuing through the new job. What it comes down to is this:

There’s more anxiety, more overwhelm, more general lost-ness and convolution in my mind.

If you were to frame this hedonically, you could say that I feel “bad” much more often - and that this is a bad thing.

But frame it from the standpoint of a vivid, human life and you find that this is actually a measure of growth.

For the longest time, all I felt was wonderful grooviness. At least on the surface. Obviously, I wasn’t completely immune to struggle, but I just made myself feel good through it all. What a foolish endeavour. I can vividly remember Lisanne calling me out on this but I didn’t wanna understand - or rather, I couldn’t at that stage. But these days, I struggle. I have days of doubt, days of deep insecurity - and I feel those deeply.

Now, the question is this: Has this change resulted from an actual downturn in my life’s trajectory? According to my old metrics, one could make an argument for that. But I’ve arrived at a point where those old metrics just seem a bit one-dimensional and flat.

Yeah, feeling good feels good. But it also gets old. And - more importantly - it limits your choices substantially. When optimising for “feeling good”, there’s lots of stuff you just can’t do. Diving into the world of complete uncertainty I’ve been finding so incredibly invigorating, for example, is a pretty stupid choice if your only metric is hedonic pleasantness. Put simply, I wouldn’t be here if I were still optimising for that metric.

What has brought this change about then? I think it was understanding (and experiencing repeatedly) what Buddhist philosophy calls “mutual arising”. This gets rather funky, but put super-oversimplified, it’s the idea of “You can’t have one without the other”.

We have this amazing capability to, by limiting the scale of perception, create the illusion of separate entities. Look at the ocean: From our everyday perspective, we see a wave and assume it to be “a thing” of its own. To a degree, that’s true - we can measure the speed, angle & size of the wave. We could even give this one a name if we wanted to - let’s call it Roger. But give it 15 seconds and it’s gone, broken and washed away. What happened? Roger was here just a moment ago, and now he’s gone?

Look at Roger - surely he’s a full-on thing, right?

Well, it only takes a change of scale and watching the ocean from above - hopping on a plane, for example - that you realise what we called “Roger” was merely a form of the current northeasterly swell. Moreover, by studying the aquadynamics of waves, one realises that water isn’t really moving towards the shore - It’s just moving up and down creating the illusion of a moving object.

As much as I love Roger, he’s not really going anywhere…

The thing that appeared as a distinct entity moments ago now reveals itself to be no thing at all - merely a changing appearance, a form. The “Roger” breaking on the shore contains none of the water molecules of the “Roger” 5 seconds before. Therefore, he’s not an object, but an action. There’s no separation between the ocean and the wave - the ocean is just waving.

Or is he? Adjust the scale of perception again and we can keep playing this game for the ocean, too. Integrate the geological and meteorological influences on swell systems and you see the separation between Ocean and Earth becomes pointless too. Roger is inseparable from the ocean as much as he is from the current Hurricane in North America and the current position of sandbanks on the beach. So in that sense, it’s not the Earth that’s waving - it’s the whole planet. Or repeat the same process to include the necessary heat energy from the Sun needed to fuel weather systems and you can expand the scale indefinitely. So what we call Roger is just the Universe waving. How lovely for Roger, but what does that have to do with my hedonic addiction?

The point here: You can’t lift a phenomenon from its context and expect it to remain the same. I mean, you can for everyday reasons - It’s fun to call a wave “Roger” and give it a personality. It’s rather practical to point at a piece of ceramic full of bean infusion and just say “Can you pass me the coffee?” instead of drowning in the overwhelm of causes and conditions that lead to the universe “coffeeing” at this point in time. That’s a fun exercise to find appreciation for the cup of coffee - because wow, there’s hundreds of people involved in getting you that very cup you (and I) tend to sip so casually. Side notes aside, this long excursion into the world of Roger & friends sets up the central idea that helped me recover from my addiction to “positivity”.

You see, if one assumes that there are distinct entities called “waves” that could be lifted from their context and remain the same, all sorts of funky stuff happens. Catch me crying about the death of Roger: First he broke, then he disappeared - and now he’s gone forever. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, right?

But here’s the thing: At some point in my upbringing, I developed the assumption that there are distinct entities called “emotional states”. With the scale of perception small enough, this makes total sense: Ask me at any given moment “How do you feel?” and I’ll give you a nice little made-up name. Instead of “Roger”, I’ll say “excited”, “exhausted”, “bored”, or whatever I feel like saying. And here’s the thing: I’m not saying that’s not real.

These states are real the very same way Roger is real: I can measure Roger’s height at any point in time - He’s really 2m tall. I can jump into an MRI scanner at a point in time where I’m really content & the elevated activity in my anterior cingulate cortex will tell you the same thing - I’m really content*.*

But you can probably tell where this is going: Adjust the scale of perception and you see that my current contentment is inseparably linked to the rest of my experience. It’s not a thing, it’s a form - a momentary state in an ever-changing interdependent system. The human nervous system can only perceive through contrast - it’s how we see, how we smell - and how we feel. The same way you can’t smell your own perfume after 30mins because your senses have adapted to the new normal, constant contentment would quickly become a bland, flat nothing.

Therefore, trying to hold on to this state forever, attempting to lift it from its context and replicate this point in time as a constant, is an exquisitely pointless endeavour! Let’s make it practical: