Non-duality as an Adaptation to Separation

Human psychology evolved for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but for many thousands of years most of us have not been living that life.

If you've ever been on an expedition or part of some intense team experience that lasted three days or more, you will probably have experienced a significant loss of "ego": far fewer thoughts about your "self" and your personal story and far more spontaneous responding in the here and now. Maybe you felt it at Burning Man, on tour, or during that week when your whole team was holed up in the office finishing off (or starting) a project.

Over recent millennia life has become more and more separate for most of us: the teams have become progressively smaller, the strangers more numerous, the cooperation less intense.

Chances are, if you're reading this, you are alone right now. The way you are living would cause profound anxiety to a hunter-gatherer, who would interpret the situation as fraught with danger.

You may even be living alone. That means cooking alone, washing alone, and cleaning alone. You've got a complete set of home conveniences which previously would have serviced a multi-generation household. And several generations before that there would haven't been any of those conveniences.

Things have gotten particularly "bad" in the past 70 years. Average household size in most countries is plummeting and will soon be below 2. In fact, household size is as good a proxy as it gets for how "modern" or "progressive" a country is. The larger the households, the more "backwards" or "traditional" the society.

In their unadjusted state, humans are bound to suffer in this unnatural lifestyle, like a polar bear at the zoo who endlessly paces back and forth in its cage.

But there is an upgrade, a "tweak," and it's been around for thousands of years — presumably as long as cities have been around: the experience of non-dual oneness.

Non-dual oneness is a shift in the experience of the self from a separate, localized self to a self which is impersonal and universal. It is the mental hack that frees you from the anxiety of living separately while being surrounded by throngs of strangers.

Without the mental upgrade, modern living is bound to leave you low in oxytocin, serotonin, and other neurochemicals, and high in anxiety. From a hunter-gatherer perspective, you are trying to get by on your own in a hostile universe. You're basically ostracized from your tribe.

But these feelings aren't based in reality. There is no one out to kill and eat you. All your needs are met. And nobody has ostracized you. But without the non-dual "hack" you cannot fully assimilate this truth. You may understand intellectually that there is nothing to worry about, but your subconscious doesn't believe it.

With the hack, you can continue your apparently "separate" lifestyle with no loss of neurochemicals and no persistent anxiety or stress.

Some of the first to systematically figure this out were hermit monks who would spend months living in inhuman conditions in caves to train themselves to produce oxytocin without human contact, serotonin in the absence of social support, and all the other neurochemicals they needed to feel good. Of course, to reach this level they had to first undergo extensive training — typically years of special mental exercises. An untrained person would wither and die from the experience.

Today interest in the "hack" is growing proportionally to the apparent dysfunctionality of modern life.

Could there come a time in the not-so-distant future when the non-duality patch comes installed by default?

p.s. There is at least one other "hack:" pets! :-) But it's not as complete a hack as non-dual oneness.

Functional Spirituality

There is a fascinating trend in western societies that I refer to as "functional spirituality": using techniques from religions and spiritual traditions to achieve specific psychological results in the absence of religious faith.

Functional spirituality has become possible due to advances in neuroscience and accumulating research on mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Today there is an increasing number of exercises one can perform to improve one's well-being in specific ways that have been proven to work:

• calm anxiety through meditation, visualization exercises such as "responsibility transfer," and body language manipulation
• feel connectedness to other people through visualization exercises that activate oxytocin production 
• improve outlook and mood through gratitude and other mental exercises and through manipulation of facial expressions and body language 
• recover from illnesses by applying proven placebo methods

Thanks to science, it is now possible to isolate the specific benefits and techniques of various spiritual practices and reduce them to their essential components. Pareto's Law can now be applied to obtain 80% of the benefits from 20% of the effort. This was possible in the past to a degree, before anyone knew anything about neurochemicals and brain waves, but it required a great degree of experience and intuition.

Furthermore, it was very difficult to test different approaches and determine which was better. Few people went from religion to religion to test the efficacy of different prayer and meditation techniques. There was so much "other stuff" that came along with religions that one could not easily isolate the techniques from the dogmas and the social conventions.

Today, with more and more knowledge of the effects of different practices on human well-being, one can theoretically put together an effective, individualized spiritual practice based on one's personal needs and life situation. For those with a degree of conscious control over their lives, it would seem we are entering a golden age of personal spirituality.

Today it is conceivable to establish social groups that perform certain rituals together for the express purpose of obtaining the psychological benefits associated with religious activity — without any religious subtext. However, if the group espoused a particular ideology that they discussed in the context of their practice — such as "we follow the best practices offered by science" — then over time it could certainly develop into a quasi-religious organization.

But one does not have to believe in anything supernatural to do any of this. If science demonstrates that belief in the supernatural is psychologically beneficial due to "responsibility transfer," then one can simply engage in "benevolent Universe" or "benevolent supernatural Being" visualizations to obtain those benefits. One might even say, "I practice belief in order to lower my anxiety levels." The triumph of Reason over Faith is now so complete that virtually all the advantages of faith can be incorporated into a reason-based existence.

Living Well — Catalog of Sources

I've realized recently that my study of psychology (including socionics), physiology, nutrition, etc. is all based on an interest in living well. By "living well" I am talking not about standard of living or material success, but achieving as high a degree of happiness and contentment as is possible.

Different facets of good living have interested me at different times. Perhaps due to upbringing, my interest in mental and interpersonal aspects initially far outstripped my awareness of influences from the body and nutrition. Now these last two have become very important, and I am slowly becoming something of an expert on them and have had a fair bit of success implementing my knowledge of them in my day-to-day life.

Here is a kind of catalog of good and very good books I have read recently that may be of interest to readers. Following each book I assign it a category in parenthesis and give a very short summary. I heartily recommend all these books.

Rick's "Living Well" Catalog

(last update Aug. 9, 2013)

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (psychology, lifestyle) — proven contributors to happiness according to scientific research, plus some philosophy

The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (general psychology) — the seven basic emotional systems, their origins and operations

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (lifestyle) — what to do to get your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual engines running properly

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It (general psychology) — facts and studies that illuminate how our minds work and how we are able to concentrate and focus our will

The Highly Sensitive Person (psychology) — people who are prone to overarousal, the challenges they face, and the individualistic lifestyles they lead

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! (skill acquisition) — the principles and practice of skill acquisition with a number of practical examples

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (physiology) — developing our bodies' potential through wise nutrition, training, and technique, supported by abundant research and self-experimentation

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (nutrition) — study of traditional societies, their overall health, and what they ate

Preview of My Changing Views on Personality and Relationships

(This post started out as a response to Jonathan's comment on my previous post, then grew to article length)

Part of why it may seem I'm going a little too far in turning away from socionics (I acknowledge that's possible) is that I haven't yet talked about the views that are taking the place of socionics in my mind. That's because I wanted to first do a methodical run-through of socionics before getting to my new perspectives, but it's going slow because I have almost no one to discuss it with these days. Hence this post, which is a kind of preview of my emerging ideas — "convictions," you might say — on phenomena previously described by socionics.

At this point, allowing myself to skip past some of the methodical stuff and cut to the chase will probably be useful to both me and my readers. Here are some of the main points in no particular order: 

1. Identifying people as "the same type" is useful only when they have significant obvious similarities. I'm done with sticking highly sensitive or highly intelligent/creative/refined/whatever individuals into the same type as people with a completely different background and sensitivity just because they share some esoteric "information preferences." If other people don't see obvious parallels between two people, then calling them the same type does more harm than good (this conviction comes from personal experience). 

2. This inevitably suggests a different set of types — either a similar number of types but with a much more uneven distribution, or a greater number of types. I personally don't care much anymore to name the types or create a consistent system such as socionics. However, identifying and describing the important common traits between two people I still find to be very worthwhile. 

3. The brain is not organized into socionic functions the way socionics suggests. The contents of our ongoing stream of conscious mental activity cannot be categorized by socionic function. In other words, the majority of the time, you will not be able to clearly relate what you're thinking about — or how you're thinking about it — to some socionic category. Rather than trying to force a socionics categorization, I'm more interested in just letting the information speak for itself and kind of self-categorize based on principles of pragmatism.

3.1. I would find it interesting to go through some of the music we once examined (back in 2007) using socionics terminology and allow different kinds of categories to emerge from that exercise. The questions I would start out with are, "what effect does this music have on the listener, and what does this music say about the composer's personality and state(s) of mind, and possibly the culture in which he/she grew up in?" Along the way we might discover that some music is just "better" than other, that level of sophistication is just as important a factor as the "states of mind" we were trying to describe using socionics functions, or that we come up with a number of states worth describing that does not equal 8.

3.1.1. I almost forgot to acknowledge, however, that Jung's and Augusta's idea of dividing up thought processes and basic traits into co-equal mental functions is a powerful and liberating idea that teaches one to see the other side of things and identify possible alternatives to nearly any approach to anything. That makes for a very useful mental tool, even if the details are not strictly correct. 

4. A result of point #3 is that interaction mostly does not occur on the basis of socionic functions. I believe that applying a general psychology/science perspective in examining specific cases brings one to different (simpler and better) conclusions than socionics about why people do or do not get along.

5.1. There is still something to functions and their impact on relationships. It's like they are bundles of values, but not actual mental processes or modules of information perception, processing, and output. 

5.2. There is still something mysterious about why people who are so different can sometimes get along so well. What socionics has done, however, is to put complementary differences on a pedestal. For the most part, people hang out with people of similar personalities who — perhaps — differ from them in some more subtle (and perhaps simpler and physiologically definable) way than being "a completely different type." 

6. Duality as described by Augusta is basically equivalent to falling in love. Remove the love, and duality is more mundane a phenomenon and barely preferable — on average — to other relationships. In modern culture, we expect and even require love for long-term relationships and generally prefer any relationship with love to one without it, regardless of the intertype relationship. There are good reasons for this coming from the logic of biological success.

6.1. Love does not obey the "laws" of intertype relations, and the idealizations that people project onto objects of passion do not necessarily come from the person's supposed Super-Id (dualizing) functions. That is, if you listen closely to what people want to have in an ideal partner — not just their conscious preferences but their emotional reactions to different people — I think you see that the preferences are 1) indeed significant and generally there for good reason; 2) not reducible to an "ideal dual"; and that 3) some people are [much] more universally desirable than others, and again, not because people are stupid and don't know what will make them happy, but because there are [nearly] universally positive and negative traits, habits, and life circumstances of great signifance to human interaction to which socionics is blind (see point #8).

6.1.1. It could be true that dual relations are more often magical than others. However, the fact that they tend to be described as magical feeds a tendency to see duals any time there is magic. Furthermore, a "magical" dual might have more in common with a "magical ___ type" than with a non-magical dual. 

7. There do exist particularly potent combinations of people that socionics is unable to predict (because its model of the psyche is not just incomplete, but fundamentally incorrect). The cause of the potency is unknown to socionics but can be discovered on a case-by-case basis and then, perhaps, generalized into a set of patterns and general rules. I would speculate that these combinations are highly symbiotic on grounds that are more or less permanent (constitutional) rather than situational (e.g. your specific current needs complement the other person's). Such pairings are consistently able to elicit symmetrical positive emotions in each other. Why? I don't know, but I'm now quite confident it is not socionics.

7.1. People with more extreme traits may have different patterns of interpersonal compatibility than those with traits closer to the norm. In particular, they may experience incompatibility much more often and have greater unmet needs for understanding and connection. The causes of this are fairly straightforward and obvious and probably have little or nothing to do with socionics.

8. There are many very important universals that socionics is blind to. For instance, that some people are almost universally annoying while others are almost universally liked/admired. There are not 16 strategies of success, but rather just a handful, plus variations. People achieve success not only by relying on unique strengths, but also by developing universal qualities common to most varieties of success. Trying to follow a somewhat contrived and esoteric type-specific path to success seems to me generally less useful than working on improving the universals.

8.1. For the most part, our lives are dominated by universals — standard situations that would elicit similar reactions in most people. Socionics suggests the opposite.

8.1.1. However, there are definitely times when a person needs to focus on discovering and enhancing the individual and specific. Socionics can give some broad hints, but nothing more. So can other typologies. So can non-typological empirical psychology.

8.2. There are "better" and "worse" states to be in that are remarkably universal, but these states are hard to describe from a socionics perspective. "Type development" is a clumsy and unparsimonious way to describe it. Modern science now has a ton to say about what contributes to happiness and well-being, and research results don't obviously suggest a typological approach.

9. The territory that we each stake out in life and build our self-identities upon is mostly based on unconscious calculations of our probability of biological success in the various roles/niches we have tested or know of given our existing investments and available energy and resources. These roles are often continually changing as different actors come and go and resource allocation patterns (i.e. the economy) evolve, since these things affect our personal prospects. While there may be patterns in which personalities gravitate towards which kinds of roles, situational and non-typical factors are generally more important. Since our connections with people are to a large extent determined by these roles, the things that bring people together and create a bond are best described using non-socionic language because socionics plays a small part in it.

9.1. I think lasting interpersonal conflicts can be parsimoniously described as reflecting threats to self-identities, current roles, and biological success. If you are a sadist and want to cause people psychological pain, don't nerdily attack their hypothetical "point of least resistance"; instead, doubt their self-identity, jeopardize their current roles, and question their biological success. 

- - - - - - - -

That's a glimpse of where my ideas are taking me.

Back to Augusta...

An important question I ask myself is, if things really are as I have suggested here, how can Augusta and so many followers have thought for so long that the system worked? I think that a key to the longevity of many not-quite-true (I don't mean that perjoratively) idea systems is their complexity. The structure and sophistication of systems of thought often have the effect of aweing their adherents. If the ideas are complex and extensive, they may take a very long time to prove or disprove. I, for one, only feel confident in calling socionics "inaccurate" as of the past 6 months.

A long-lived idea system must also be at least reasonably accurate at some level — or impossible to disprove. The fact that thinkers have been identifying types of people for millenia suggests that there is some basis for this approach. It is also plainly evident that different combinations of people are more or less compatible, and that once-established relationships and attitudes toward each other often last for a long time. However, our limited consciousness seems incapable of understanding why this is the case without the help of science. One of Augusta's errors (and mine too) was overstating the role of permanent, constitutional differences in personality. Her model treats people as essentially unchanging actors and isn't well suited for describing short- and long-term development. This error, as well as its opposite — that everything is situational — are easy to make if you are unaware of the last 30 years of psychology research.

Augusta attempted to explain phenomena which are still clouded in mystery — namely love and interpersonal attachment/rejection patterns — and did a half-decent job at it. Good enough to make a lot of people excited about the discovery. Because there are so many types and varieties of intertype relations, a place could be found for any person in the universe revolving around any particular person. To find points where the system breaks down requires comparing overlapping universes to see how the predicted relationships and perceived personalities play out. Like I said, this can take a lot of time — years and years — as one tries tweaking typings and one's understanding of socionics to see if things can be made to fit after all. 

Developing Physicality

Socionics suggests that some types are innately more "physical" than others and are more in tune with their bodily sensations and physical interaction with the outside world. Other types tend not to register these things consciously and tend to lack physicality, focusing attention instead on verbal, emotional, or mental interaction with the world.

This is how I saw things myself, until I gradually came to a recognition of the importance of physicality and vitality in my life and realized that I must take responsibility for these things myself. My personal experiments and research have convinced me that all [basically healthy] people are designed to be athletes — regardless of personality type — and to lead a life that is much more physical than that of most modern urban dwellers. 

This subject is very broad, so I will break the post into two parts: personal history that readers will no doubt find as interesting as the information in part two, which will be about developing physicality and vitality in general. 

Part 1: adventures in health and physicality

Despite my [presumably] personality type-related inclination to neglect my physical needs, I have always been mildly physically gifted, with naturally good coordination and endurance and a good degree of trainability. While most guys seem to begin their physical decline right out of college, I had kept in the same reasonably good shape by periodically starting and giving up exercise regimens, by frequently walking in the woods, playing frisbee, and by developing my hiking and biking hobbies, which provided me with the connection to nature that I craved. 

Over the years, my attempted exercise regimens gradually evolved to something more and more appropriate to my actual needs and abilities. Things like resolving to go to the gym X times a week and perform there a certain set of exercises tended not to work for long. Trying to do a set of exercises at home on a Total Trainer was only slightly better. Taking a one-minute detour on the way home to do pull-ups worked better, and I kept that up for some months, but that was just a single exercise. More successful still was combining enjoyable activities; leave the apartment in the morning, walk or jog in the woods, sometimes taking a quick dip in the lake afterwards, and finish up at the exercise bars at a nearby school to do a set of 5 exercises. This allowed me to ease into the exercise part by first doing something intrinsically enjoyable and getting my body warmed up. Note that this worked much better when I lived 2 minutes from the forest as opposed to 5 minutes, leading me to formulate some of the principles I wrote about in Willpower as a Limited Resource.

Around 2007-2009 I began to take much more interest in diet and health and finally began to understand something about nutrition, which until then had seemed like a contradictory and structureless field. I got into what you might call "lightweight speed backpacking" and long-distance backpacking, which are essentially athletic activities. Again, the reason I pursued this was not to improve my fitness, but to experience nature on a deeper level. Keeping fit came to be almost synonymous with experiencing nature. But, as far as upper body was concerned, all I did was occasionally do strength exercises. I didn't really have intrinsically rewarding activities for the arms and torso.  

Starting in 2009-2011, I began to be aware of mild, but nagging, health issues: problems getting enough sleep, digestive issues, frequent colds, and often struggling with the blues and compulsion-like behavior. These gradually increased or remained steady for several years, though I noted that they seemed to go away during backpacking trips, leading me to believe that they had to do with aspects of my city lifestyle. 

Then, in March 2012, I passed out and could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning after a long shower as a result of a faulty gas water heater installed in the kitchen of the apartment I was renting. I eventually came to, feeling absolutely horrible, and was barely able to crawl around to find my phone and call friends and ask them to bring an ambulance with them. I was lucky and did not develop any long-term neurophysiological sequelae, which often plague victims of acute CO poisoning. 

I was extremely alarmed by this incident and began recording all the physical and emotional complaints I had after that to better discern whether my quality of life was affected by the accident. I felt I had to take better care of myself and not let something like this happen again. The CO poisoning wasn't my fault, but on that day and the preceding one I had eaten very little and at first had thought my collapse was from low blood sugar. The symptoms and my subsequent research, however, confirmed it was indeed CO. A bit later, I found a house cleaner and cook who made my life a lot easier. Eventually I concluded that it wasn't healthy for me to be living alone (for the first time in many, many years), and I moved into a room in a shared apartment and immediately recognized the subtle emotional-physical benefits — as long as there is not too much tension among house residents. 

I found this exercise of writing down how I felt very useful for focusing my attention on this side of life, and developed it further during my next visit to Ukraine. First, for a month I wrote down everything I ate, my sleep times, and how I felt that day. Then I created a sleep spreadsheet where I applied a formula for calculating my sleep deficit. (I'm a real numbers geek, so I'll give it to you: 8.5 hrs. is my observed ideal sleep duration, and 0.8 is the coefficient by which I multiply yesterday's accumulated sleep deficit before adding to it today's deficit or proficit. This means that if I sleep on average 8 hrs. a night, then I will on average feel like I'm missing about 2.5 hrs. of sleep due to the accumulation of deficits. This is not always entirely true, but it's usually a good approximation). Along with sleep times I recorded my level of alertness on a scale of 1 to 5 to see how it correlated with my supposed sleep deficit.

I liked the idea of rating aspects of life, because it meant that I paid attention to them during the course of the day. I often translate quality of life questionnaires for use in healthcare in Ukraine, so I am used to the idea of rating these kinds of things. So I started adding other aspects of life that clearly contributed to my overall wellbeing, and had them average up to produce a quality of life index for each day. 

At first these were purely physiological indicators such as alertness and presence of physical complaints (illness, pain), but soon I added psychosocial indicators such as "speech apparatus" (ease of speech and communication; voice tembre), "acceptance" (how accepted by others and free to be myself I felt), and general emotional state. These were clearly very much intertwined with health and wellbeing. Later I also added a couple intellectual indicators: "flow state" (how much of the time I was in an engrossed, pleasurable flow state) and "breadth of awareness." I realized that neglecting my personal work activities (writing and site development) for weeks or months on end had been having a subtle harmful effect on my ego and self-confidence, so I added "professional development" to the mix of indicators. In the end, I've got a set of 12-13 indicators that approximate many areas of life that actually determine how I feel — about myself and life as well as physically. In addition, I began writing notes next to the number regarding significant factors that had influenced the individual ratings that day.

Turns out I am hardly unique in this sort of quantitative approach to improving well-being. There is a whole movement that espouses these methods, called "The Quantified Self." 

I found this practice to be a massive leap forward from typical records that people keep when they have some self-development goal, which usually involves contriving a goal that you think will make your life better and writing down your results for the day. 95% of the time, the results are not what you planned, and efforts are abandoned within weeks. I sigh when I see people start up a new "watch me lose weight" or "watch me get fit" self-delusion blog that will almost inevitably contain no more than 3-5 posts. This time, rather than deciding what should make my life better, my approach necessitated from the beginning that I observe my own body and see what was happening to it, with no implicit goal in mind. And yet each of us has the same organismic goal: to increase quality of life — happiness. Finding out more about what brings you happiness causes you to do better at seeking those things out and integrating them into your life. 

When I went to Crimea for over a month, I decided to finally get serious and see some doctors and take some tests to address "everything that had ever bothered me in the past 10+ years." A lot of online research was also involved. I read about nutrition, vitamins and minerals, psychosocial factors, mood, stress, and fitness. Before that, I had read the well-researched and fascinating book The Four-Hour Body and had read about the Mediterranean diet, the Paleo diet, and the benefits of sprinting-like exercise and "evolutionary fitness" (listen to interview here). After some research, I began to suspect my diet was deficient in some vitamins and minerals and began to correct those by adding a variety of nuts and different foods. Turns out deficiencies tend to cause apathy and depression in addition to physiological problems, but the symptoms are often vague and can easily be confused with other things. (My hunch about the deficiencies turned out to be correct). 

While in Crimea I would go to the beach every day with my friend, going down a 170 m. high cliffside via a cement staircase. Soon we started running down and walking back up the stairs as fast as possible. Needless to say, we also swam in the Black Sea, each of us developing his own kind of bathing routine that started with just going 5 meters out in the water, taking a dip and thinking, "what do I do now?" and eventually evolved into (in my case) a 15-30 minute swim up and down the beach using different swimming strokes and enjoying the views of the beach and cliffs and the increasingly cold early-autumn water. I also spent a lot of the time minimally dressed, my skin exposed to the fresh air and sun, both on the way to the beach and back and around the house and yard. A pull-up bar is welded into the balcony, so I also did chin-ups whenever passing by, inventing stranger and stranger ways of doing them to involve more muscles. After about a week of this, I experienced a new jolt of alertness that would override any sleep deficit I had, i.e. thanks to some kind of hormone injection I was now getting from my rigorous daily physical activity. 

Then, in the midst of this idyllia, I received a large translation assignment. Over the course of the week that I was preoccupied with it, I observed — through my rating system — how my quality of life plummeted in almost every way. I had no idea this type of stress could have such a powerful disruptive effect on everything. This led me to read and reflect about stress response and what kinds of stress the body is or is not designed to handle well, due to our evolutionary past. I realized I needed to watch out for and steer away from potential negative stressors. I also managed to work out a routine that helped me deal with potentially stressful computer assignments. The solution was to inject physical stimuli and pleasure by taking breaks and doing something physical every 20 minutes, which I'll talk about more in Part 2. 

I had to give up my intense beach-swim-sprint-shirtless living routine when I left again for Georgia, but after a week of chaos I've managed to settle into a new one that's just as good except for the shirtless part (Georgians are more conservative). On the weekends I'm usually backpacking, and during the weekdays I meet a good friend every evening to go bouldering at an indoor rock-climbing place, where there are also a few workout machines and bars. We often follow this with a visit to a restaurant or bar for relaxing conversation. I also have started playing ultimate frisbee twice a week with another group of people, and other physical, but non-strenuous activities are also part of the physicality menu. Key here is that all these activities are pleasurable, playful, require skill development, and involve other people and socializing. 

I can say that at age 35 I am the fittest I have ever been in terms of both strength and endurance, and that I see physical development as an essential part of life of the same degree of importance as intellectual and social development. 

In Part 2 I will write about why all this is necessary,
and what it does for you (cascading effects and so on).

Products of Our Time

(reposted from my personal site because I think this is somewhat relevant to this blog)

We are products of our time — unwitting manifestations of processes that are difficult to recognize due to the small timescale of a human life.

We grow up in cultures that form our basic attitudes, which some people begin to question in early adulthood. But where does culture come from? Many elements of culture "just evolve," much like languages, in a kind of self-reinforcing way.

Ultimately, no all-encompassing answer can be given to questions such as, "why do men wear ties to work?" A satisfactory answer would have to include the history of labor and clothing, the economic factors affecting this history, and a scientific discussion of the psychological and biological basis of conformism. Even then, there's no guarantee that we've actually found an answer. There's no guarantee that if we rewound history and started the game over, by the year 2000 men would be wearing ties to work. In the rerun, some "butterfly in Texas" could flap its wings a little differently, and in the end men would be wearing turtlenecks with stripes down the front instead of collared shirts and ties. If a whole flock of butterflies flapped their wings, maybe today men would all paint their fingernails, grow pointy moustaches, and wear kilts.

But there are other, more significant, elements of culture that are much less arbitrary and have traceable material causes. I would like to discuss a few of these causes in this essay: urbanization (overpopulation), information technologies, and fossil fuels.

1. Urbanization/overpopulation

We are products of overpopulation. Most of us spend our lives surrounded by strangers and packed into urban centers — conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. Higher population density translates into more complex social structures and societal institutions, as well as more information in general. This greater complexity takes more time to understand, and more information must be assimilated before one can become a "productive member of society," so we study longer and delay creating families later. Equipped with a strong exploratory instinct, in urban conditions people can't help investigating all the options, finding out what there is in society, what goods are available, getting to know more people, and trying out more things. All these actions "distract" us from reproduction. We extend our education, pass more time investigating options before settling down with a career, and spend years picking and choosing among potential mates before finally creating a family.

Overpopulation also causes an underlying stress related to continual interaction with complete strangers. We develop conventions for formalizing superficial interactions with strangers in order to reduce stress. These include handshakes and other forms of greetings, etiquette, and conversation patterns. Once surrounded almost exclusively by close community, Homo Sapiens now spends a great share of his time among strangers. This leads to conventionalized interaction, ignoring, and avoidance. People whose natural shyness would be easy to overcome in a communal environment find themselves easily isolated in an urban setting. Even naturally gregarious people find themselves susceptible to feelings of isolation as nobody has time to spend with them.

Reproduction begins to lose its value and allure in an overpopulated society. The economics gradually change to favor small families and even bachelorhood. Land, infrastructure, and education costs rise, requiring people to spend more time working to pay their own way and, consequently, less time working to feed dependents. Children become progressively more expensive and less useful to their parents.

Despite the rising costs and risks of reproduction, the reproductive instinct remains as strong or nearly as strong as ever (due to mild chemical suppression). Furthermore, continual contact with attractive strangers provides constant low-level sexual stimulation. In addition to developing anti-contraceptives, society channels this energy into increasing autoeroticism and voyeurism (viewing sexual behavior but not engaging directly in it yourself). Nonreproductive sexual behavior is increasingly accepted and encouraged, with a plethora of goods and services available to make it easier. This ultimately serves to lower reproductive pressure and hence population. So-called moral decay, then, actually serves the noble purpose of reducing population pressure.

Population pressure is also reduced through increasing acceptance (prevalence?) of homosexuality and by the rising prevalence of psychological problems inhibiting the formation of stable relationships. The causes of relationship problems at first glance appear unrelated to population density, but I would argue that they are by-products of urbanization. Commitment avoidance, for instance, traces to societal complexity and an overwhelming amount of information and opportunities. Emotional intimacy problems probably trace to excessive contact with strangers and insufficient contact with family. In addition, modern urban life presents difficult financial and career decisions almost unknown to previous generations.

2. Information technologies

We are products of the telephone, TV, and Internet. Increasingly effective communication technologies have allowed us to maintain increasing interconnectedness despite increasing isolation. Thanks entirely to telephones and, later, the Internet, each individual now maintains a staggering network of instantly available contacts, many of whom he will never see again in his life due to the vastly increased mobility of individuals (thanks to fossil fuels — see below).

As a result of increasing access to information, modern urbanites are now incredibly knowledgeable about things that have little to do with their personal circumstances. Our innate curiosity receives outlets that previous generations couldn't have dreamed of. Any question can be answered, any fact discovered, with just a few mouse clicks. A side effect is impatience with lack of knowledge — our own or others'.

Quick and easy means of communication favor short, spontaneous interactions. Messages become shorter and generally more mundane. Gone is the art and practice of letter writing. We lose our sense of distance; each friend or contact with Internet access becomes equidistant. Eventually all our friends are "contacts," and all our contacts are "friends."

A result of the growth of information technologies is information overload. The TV has more channels than you can watch simultaneously, and TV programs run round the clock. Everyone is available at the same time via phone or Internet. The Web never sleeps, and its content never stops growing and changing. Our biology predisposes us to become "information exchange junkies," and it's easy to become a genuine addict with information "fixes" so easy to obtain.

As a result of all this information, we're spending less time than ever on physical pursuits, and our minds are often overstimulated while losing some ability to focus. The more information there is, the less time we spend digesting each portion of it. A bit of depth is sacrificed to breadth. But the new breadth is incomparably vaster than the old.

Information technologies also feed our increasing autoeroticism and voyeurism by offering personal sexual and emotional adventures whenever we want through online pornography, chat rooms, and socializing. This can translate into decreased motivation to pursue person-to-person sexual and emotional contact, which contributes to the depopulation trend described above.

3. Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels are the reason why widespread urbanization (overpopulation) and the development of information technologies were possible in the first place. Fossil fuels have also produced their own unique set of unique culture-forming circumstances, described in my article on fossil fuels and their influence on communities and health. The main derivatives of industrialization are sedentarism, individual mobility, and rootlessness.

It's hard to fathom how much our attitude towards our bodies has changed as a result of industrialization. Our bodies have become basically irrelevant to our professional success. Healthcare has become institutionalized as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and advances in medicine and is no longer the full responsibility of the individual. At the same time, our outward appearance is still important for developing relationships, perhaps more so than ever now that we spend so much time among strangers.

The functionality of the body — that is, its ability to perform various tasks — is no longer of much economic significance. Those who continue to develop their bodies do so more for aesthetic than for practical reasons. Freed from the constraints of daily physical labor, the body has become a kind of art form to be honed and looked at by others, or simply be kept hidden under a layer of clothing. At the same time, industrial society presents formidable obstacles to maintaining a physically healthy lifestyle, and many people are unable to keep their bodies in good aesthetic shape. Orthodontics, cosmetics, and clothing today allow one to make a good impression despite an undeveloped physique.

Mobility — made possible by liberal capitalism and modern transportation infrastructure — allows us to choose from a greater number of life options than ever before. Not only can one choose from a plethora of professions, but one can also live almost anywhere one wants. More options means more time needed to make choices. Mobility contributes to delays in reproduction and increased social isolation mentioned above. Society-wide effects of mobility are discussed in the article linked to above.

One of those effects is widespread rootlessness. People who can go anywhere they want tend to have weaker ties to place. Furthermore, national culture becomes more uniform through deep-level cultural interchange facilitated by large-scale movements of people. A rootless person becomes, statistically speaking, more cosmopolitan, less devout, and less patriotic with regard to his land of birth. On the other hand, the personal benefits to be gained are often irresistible: professional opportunities, economic gain, and adventure.

Conclusion

Urbanization, overpopulation, information technologies, industrialization, and fossil fuel-derived mobility have formed a new kind of person — the individualistic, independent yet financially indebted, information-consuming, erudite, autoerotic, voyeuristic, morally decadent, rootless, highly mobile yet sedentary, aesthetically physical, emotionally isolated but socially connected Modern Urbanite.

This process is taking place across the entire globe and has reached an advanced stage in places as diverse as New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Moscow, and Sydney. Chances are, if you're reading this, a good two-thirds or more of what I've written applies to you.

Individual Differences in Focus and Attention Span

I have observed considerable differences in people's ability or desire to focus and the frequency with which they tend to move from one object of focus to another. The chart below sums up my observations in a sort of typology. In reality, both dimensions form a continuum, and each person is capable -- to some degree -- of operating in each state. But many or most people will be able to identify a primary state or two that they tend to spend most of their time in. I presume one's childhood personality can provide clues to help identify one's main operating quadrant or at least one's location along the continuum.

The chart below lists types of activities that correspond to different states of mind as well as broad personality traits. I think these traits are inborn, but it might be that childhood mental stimulation patterns (e.g. TV viewing, computer and video games, etc.) can permanently alter (shorten) one's attention span. Furthermore, people may go through periods (particularly their high school and college years) where they are more mentally focused, but then leave this state behind them after graduation.

The chart might also help identify the necessary state of mind to develop for a particular type of activity that one wants or needs to do. For instance, effective book study requires a highly focuses, undistracted state of mind (quadrant II). Achieving this will be easier for someone of this type and harder for people of other types. One can improve one's chances of success by choosing a time of day and environment when one's mind tends to be sufficiently calm and distractions are minimal. Also, there are useful tricks such as underlining, highlighting, and outlining that can improve one's ability to absorb complex information.

People who are typically calm and nonverbal may have problems getting to state I, which requires an active mind and mouth and quick reactions. Likewise people from quadrant I may find the idea of slow, repetitious activities almost unbearable, while people of type II may find them enjoyable and relaxing as compensatory activities. People in quadrant III may have a hard time building up the energy and concentration to engage in the solitary, focused activities of quadrant II, and people of type II often feel lost when in a type III environment.

In general, it seems that people move fairly easily between adjacent quadrants (i.e. from I to II or from I to III) but have difficulty engaging in activities from diagonal quadrants (i.e. IV from I). Again, both dimensions are continuous, so this pattern is most obvious for people at the extremes.

My next observation is that this typology is only loosely related to socionic types. For instance, among ILEs and IEEs types I and II are both common. Differences in attention span between people of the same socionic type can be especially drastic. One ILE manager and entrepreneur confesses to "never reading any books" while another spends many hours a week engrossed in personal study. The first speaks rapidly, is constantly communicating with other people formally and informally, answers dozens of e-mails a day (sending short, carelessly formulated replies), browses the Internet several hours a day, and spends little time alone. The second speaks more slowly and deliberately, spends many hours a day alone studying and writing, is meticulous and analytical, and spends only a few hours a day with other people, mostly choosing companions who share one or more of his interests.

I think what I am calling "short and long attention span" basically corresponds to what modern psychology terms "extroversion and introversion."

As a type II person, I enjoy my type IV compensatory activities and my occasional forays into type I, but type III people are as if from another planet. When I find myself "wasting time" on casual unfocused activities that are the norm for many other people, I feel disoriented, often disheartened, and need time to recover and get back into my usual groove. I imagine the same would be true for them in a type II environment. One way I have created a better environment for my mostly type II life is by eliminating TV and Internet at home -- two instruments that break down one's attention span and ability to engage in productive activities for extended periods of time. My type I acquaintances don't understand my decision because they aren't so easily disoriented by high levels of stimulation.

An interesting consequence of this typology is that people of relatively incompatible types can end up in the same quadrant. Quadrant II, for instance, can include both IEEs and LSIs, IEIs and LSEs. Quadrant I often has SEEs along with ILEs and ESEs along with LIEs. The solitary, meticulous work of accountants requires focus and attention just like the solitary research of an academic, even though the two activities are very different and two people of these professions might not get along. Type II can include both rigid and liberal individuals.

There is probably a tendency for more women to be in quadrants III and IV and more men to be in I and II. Author John Gray has written extensively about women's more open and receptive consciousness and men's greater focus, while recognizing that some women possess more "masculine" qualities and vice versa. In traditional cultures it is commen for women to get together to engage in light repetitive handwork (weaving, knitting, etc.) while engaging in conversation and social bonding. This would correspond to quadrant IV or III depending on whether more emphasis is on the physical activity or on socializing. Of course, if some guys get together for jogs through the park, that is also quadrant IV. Among the specialists of quadrant II males clearly predominate. Here you find people whose main purpose in life appears to be skill acquisition or knowledge production. Women can also be found in quadrant II, but their biological program requires them to be capable of letting go of personal pursuits for a while and be receptive to the needs of their dependent offspring. It should be noted, however, that the degree of gender differences varies from culture to culture, with masculine cultures (Japan, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, U.K., USA) exhibiting greater gender differences than feminine ones (Scandinavia, Chile, Portugal, Thailand, Guatemala, etc.), according to researcher Geert Hofstede (who unfortunately left many countries out of his analysis, particularly the Soviet bloc and the Arab world).

Some readers may note similarities between my quadrants and the time management matrix of Stephen Covey (i.e. urgent vs. non-urgent and important vs. unimportant activities). I also noticed this, but I don't think the two systems have that much in common.

Thresholds and Psychological Types

I think the concept of thresholds might be important in unraveling the mysteries of different psychological types.

A threshold is "the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested" (MacBook Dictionary).

Thresholds are already a working concept in neuropsychology, and some types of thresholds -- such as pain thresholds -- have already been well-researched. Some people react to pain at lower pain levels, while others are more resistant. The lower a threshold, the greater one's sensitivity.

Could it be that socionic types essentially differ on the basis of their thresholds for different kinds of stimuli? Or might threshold levels at least be a partial answer to the question, "what are the significant mechanistic differences between people?"

I see this "mechanistic approach" to personality as the opposite of socionics' more traditional "abstract logic" approach where logical categories are established and phenomena (people, interaction, information, behavior) are classified according to these categories, but 1) there is never absolute certainty as to whether the established categories are actually the most useful ones, and 2) the actual mechanisms by which the categories exist and operate are unknown.

The pitfalls of socionics' dominant methodology are well-known and far-reaching, and I feel like I talk about them in every other blogpost. The shortcomings of the mechanistic approach are 1) the slow pace of scientific progress and 2) the possibility that the results obtained through research will be too disorderly to be of much use to laymen. In my opinion, many socionists have a gut fear of disorderly scientific findings messing up their clear mental picture of things socionic.

But I digress. The mechanistic approach must be developed in socionics to bring it back to life and make it something more than a scientific conjecture (that is treated as fact by many of its proponents).

When looking for thresholds that may be significant determinants of interpersonal behavior and compatibility, I see no reason to assume that there must be 4, 8, or 16 such thresholds, or that the level of the threshold can be only "high" or "low," making it convenient to divide people into two discrete groups. Or that each threshold must be independent of the others (such as the four Jungian dichotomies), making it convenient to create a typology.

I would prefer to work from the bottom up, observing individual people and looking for thresholds, and basically any traits in general, that seem to play a significant role in their interaction with the world around them.

It is easiest to start with myself and people with a temperament similar to my own. From what I can tell:

- well-developed planning faculties, but unwillingness to make long-term plans (commitments) due to impulsivity (see below) and changeability of one's state

- low short-term self-control (things like leaving the house on time, abstaining from eating free cookies, or redoing one's work), but fairly high ability to make rational longer-term choices

- impulsivity as a result of low short-term self-control and changeability of moods and desires (a low threshold to a certain kind of stimuli?)

- waves of productivity as a result of impulsitivity; someone like this typically has to find a way to exploit one's changeable mental states in order to be productive, for instance by choosing an unstructured lifestyle and developing productive activities for each recurring state, and then engaging in each of them as the states change

- generally high threshold to signals from one's own body and to sensory signals in general; can easily take a mental interest in these areas via study or mentorship

- strong tendency towards mental absorption, which is a positive emotional experience; this absorption is often stronger than the demands of one's physical needs and almost always stronger than one's self-control, leading one to "overdo" things and neglect one's personal needs and external duties, if any

- great interest in information exchange with other people; a need to know what's going on in the spheres one is interested in and exchange information about it with other people

- low novelty threshold, and novelty is associated with positive emotional experiences; mental activity is easily stimulated by anything unexpected, unusual, and unfamiliar (however, this applies only to things that can provide mental stimulation: news, information, facts, activities, people, capabilities of other people, characteristics of the environment)

- as a result, one tends to use novelty as an "upper" to stimulate positive states and motivate oneself to act; lack of novelty is associated with boredom, lethargy, and indifference

- avoidance of pain and potentially painful situations (low pain threshold?), whether physical or interpersonal; this can lead to avoidant behavior patterns and an unwillingness to deal with problems

Clearly, this temperament "signature" is not unique to myself. Furthermore, it is clear that it has an evolutionary basis and serves a valuable societal function.

The observations above might be summarized as follows:

Societal purpose

This type is oriented towards the satisfaction of a certain kind of mental needs -- one's own and of society (hence the drive to exchange information). It specializes in the detection, processing, and conveyance of new and potentially useful information (news, trends, useful skills, tricks) and accumulates and exchanges this knowledge and skills with others, largely passing by information that is not easily conveyable. Where there is too much information available for one person to keep track of and process (such as in a complex society), a person of this type tends to develop niche interests and disregard other areas, in order to conserve energy.

Thresholds

Other, competing classes of needs -- physical and, to a lesser degree, social -- take a second seat to mental needs. This is probably accomplished through thresholds: mental states having to do with the presence or absence of new, interesting information (boredom/absorption, mental excitement level, a sense of prospects or the lack thereof) have low thresholds, meaning that they affect behavior powerfully, while physical needs have high thresholds (with the probable exception of one's pain threshold) and social thresholds are at medium levels.

Lifestyle

This type is poor at making commitments, exercising continual conscious discipline, or submitting to structure and external demands due to impulsivity, changeability of moods, lack of self-control, and high susceptibility to mental absorption. At the same time, the type is good at engaging in a wide range of activities fitted to its different states of mind.

In addition…

Challenges

Find ways to become an information specialist and exchanger without overstimulating yourself mentally and weakening your body and social relations. Develop a lifestyle that capitalizes on your high mental absorption potential and lack of self-control while steering you away from addictions (see earlier post).

Who complements you

Most likely, people with high novelty thresholds, low physical thresholds, and medium social thresholds, who are also moody, changeable, and impulsive.

Some ideas

I would need to do some research on physiological and neural thresholds to build upon or revise what I've written above. However, I do have some ideas that might be applicable to socionics.

One is that types are fundamentally interested in information exchange, while what types are interested in can less easily be called "information" in the traditional sense of the world. It's more an experience or process, or perhaps a way of seeing things.

Another observation regards different types' response to what I call "novel information." Most types I can think of seem to have a much more reserved, somewhat negative (mistrustful) response to novelty. They are more resistant to the influence of new information and tend to accept it only after it has ceased to be novel (at least in their particular social circle). Again, we have to be careful about defining "novel information" (which I won't try to do here).

It is tempting to try to associate each socionic function with some kind of threshold, and I try to resist this impulse. Nonetheless, I wonder if one might have a low threshold not only with the 1st function, but also with the 4th. The difference might be that the motivation with the 1st function is to embrace, while the motivation of the 4th is to avoid. In other words, the 1st function is easily stimulated with the purpose of embracing, while the 4th function is easily stimulated with the purpose of avoiding.

It is also tempting to continue on in this classical socionic spirit and hypothesize a "new socionics model" (whoop-dee-do) where each function number is assigned an approximate threshold level (High, Medium, or Low) and a positive or negative sign:

1: L+

2: M+

3: M-

4: L-

5: H+

6: M+

7: M-

8: H-

You analytical types can now pick that apart in search of symmetry and asymmetry and make it more elegant, but I am still convinced that this type of model gets us nowhere. It just teases a certain brain module without providing any real answers. Progress will be made by working from the ground up, collecting data, and trying to understand how specific neural mechanisms work.

So, it is more useful, in my opinion, not to look for thresholds that correspond to socionic categories, but rather thresholds that correspond to directly observed phenomena.

I find myself moving away from the classical socionics ideas that information can be divided into 8 categories and that when two types interact one function somehow conveys information to the same function in the other person. I'm not sure these concepts have much practical potential anyways (can they ever be tested?).

When thinking in terms of thresholds we can see that some bit of information might be "novel" and hence stimulating to one person and yet "old news" and hence uninteresting to someone else of the same type. Thus, it could be treated with interest or disinterest for reasons having nothing to do with type. The novel information (or old news) might be conveyed by a person of any type (imagine hearing a phrase such as, "have you heard about ________?"). Thus, something novel might be gleaned from someone who had no idea that he possessed novel information or qualities.

Note also that I am suggesting a definition of quite different from Augusta's definitions: "the inner content and structure of an object" and "the object's potential energy." In practice I find that types (ILE and IEE) are more about gathering, trying out, and conveying new and novel information than about "studying underlying phenomena" and "grasping the inner substance" (traits of analytic minds, perhaps?).

Asceticism in a Modern Setting

For millenia individuals and groups of people have chosen to forego pleasures and comforts in order to obtain physical, psychological, and/or emotional benefits.

Learning to cope with physical hardships and deprivations has been a key aspect of entering manhood in many indigenous cultures. In learning to deal with pain and hardships, a young man developed valuable masculine qualities such as stoicism, willpower, and the ability to make sacrifices for the greater good.

In many religious communities, initiates have been taught to forego sensual pleasures -- sex, physical comforts, wine, and good food -- in order to direct all their emotional excitement towards worship or meditation.

It seems that asceticism has existed primarily as a cultural undercurrent; only rarely has it become a dominant cultural feature -- for instance, in ancient Sparta. Typically, mass culture is quite hedonistic (enjoyment and comfort oriented), and ascesticism is practiced among individuals and small groups out of the public eye. Even when some variety of asceticism becomes the official ideology -- for instance, in a highly militarized and/or fundamentalist state -- most people maintain a lackadaisical attitude towards the ideology and practice a milder form of it in their personal lives.

This suggests that self-discipline and abstention from indulgence is not for everyone, or that people are capable of it to different degrees. It could be a useful tool for people suffering from addictions, but the power of their addiction may be stronger than their ability to exercise self-discipline.

Self-discipline and some form of asceticism are common themes in the life histories of famous people today and in the past. It typically (but not always) requires discipline and concentration to achieve fame, and with fame come additional temptations that can lead to one's downfall if one relaxes one's vigilance (Elvis Presley comes to mind as a typical example).

Is asceticism relevant in modern society?

I would say yes, more than ever. Thanks to the immense and cheap energy of fossil fuels, industrial society was able to release most people from the inconvenience of hard labor and provide them with all sorts of comforts and pleasures at very little cost or effort.

This disruption of the human "power process" (the process by which people gain a sense of personal power or empowerment) was well described by Theodore Kaczynski in his treatise "Industrial Society and Its Future." Industrialization made the innately empowering vital activities (direct provision for one's needs) unnecessary and replaced them with surrogate activities ("jobs") that people pretend are vitally important but deep down feel that they are not.

Given the abundant cheap energy of modern industrial society, diverse forms of need satisfaction have been developed that an easily generate dependencies and addictions. This is an ideal way of making money for producers of goods and services. I'll start with things that are not traditionally associated with addictions.

1. Food. Food producers play on our natural biological impulses to generate addictions to their products, which contain sweeteners, fats, and excitotoxins that make us eat more of something than we really need, and also generate cravings. Since super energy-dense food was a relatively rare treat in our evolutionary past, we seem to be programmed to eat as much of it as we can when we come across it. Now this trait is kicking us in the butt, so to speak.

2. Comforts. In this category are all kinds of appliances and comforts that reduce one's expenditure of effort, and, of course, the automobile. On the surface they appear to make life easier, but beneath the surface they make us less resourceful, weaker (physically and psychologically), and more isolated. Once one is in this state, continued use of these "comforts" is almost inevitable.

3. Entertainment. In the electronic age it is now possible to spend many hours a day stimulating one's entertainment needs while putting forth very little physical and social effort. Myriad computer games, movie and TV program viewing, virtual social networking, information browsing, and virtual sexual stimulation are all easily addicting activities that can gobble up mental and physical resources. Since empowerment occurs via the achievement of results through the exertion of effort, entertainment activities produce little or no empowerment and actually tend to make one less physically and socially robust.

4. Traditional addictions. Drugs, booze, gambling, compulsive behaviors such as shopaholism, etc.

The typical member of a modern affluent society has mild to severe addictions in one or more, or even all of these areas: food, comforts, entertainment, and traditional addictions. In general, modern society provides decent mental development, is rather weak in emotional development, and is utterly pathetic at developing the body's physical capabilities.

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of idealizing pre-industrial society, which may have been far from ideal. Contact with rural communities in Ukraine and elsewhere suggests that such societies are prone to a different set of addictions, for instance alcoholism, domestic violence, and gossip.

Sometimes I wonder if most people in pretty much any society are basically doomed to spend their lives trapped by various addictions in an act of voluntary self-suppression that indirectly enables the self-realization of a few, more empowered individuals.

Addictions are a major obstacle to self-realization. Self-realization requires focus, dedication, passion, and, of course, concerted effort over a long period of time. Food addictions sap our physical strength, willpower, and self-esteem. Comforts remove us from the natural world and make us more helpless and dependent. Easy entertainment distracts us from personal goals that require effort and focus. Traditional addictions can rob us of our willpower and eventually of our friends, work, and families.

Socionics and addictions

We could take a brief socionics detour and discuss which types are more prone to different types of addictions. I'm not sure the correlations are great enough to warrant a separate discourse on the subject.

Certainly there are predominately "male" and "female" addictions. Males tend to gravitate to traditional bad habits (alcohol, gambling, drugs), to competitive games, sex, and food. Women seem to accumulate addictions to entertainment with social and emotional content, physical comforts, food, and drugs.

I'm sure there are also type-related patterns. I've seen a few SEI hedonists with dependencies on drugs and unhealthy food. ILEs and IEEs seem to easily get attached to online information gathering and dissemination, which can quickly become a meaningless activity if overengaged in. I'll bet there are plenty of ethical extraverts with Facebook addictions, as well as SLE alchoholics. I haven't peeked enough into the private lives of different people to recognize unequivocal patterns, though.

Asceticism as an empowering force

Addictive tendencies and unhealthy behaviors can be managed to a large degree by removing or altering the facilitating factors and adopting a more austere regimen in trouble areas.

This requires honesty to be objective about yourself, self-reflection to identify facilitating factors in your environment, courage to take steps that other people may perceive (at first) as strange and unnecessary, and a good dose of self-love to even care about it all in the first place.

Let me share what my wife and I have done to nip some problems in the bud. You may find our solutions unconventional and eccentric, but they have improved our quality of life and personal power.

1. Food. We keep no unhealthy foods in the home and consume no sugar (sometimes we use honey). We've replaced sources of saturated fat with olive oil and adhere to a Mediterranean diet whose health benefits are amply supported by scientific research. Sometimes when we are with other people or need to buy something to justify our use of wi-fi in a public cafe, we'll buy some food that we wouldn't consume at home, but we never buy this food at the store to bring it home. Any tendency towards unhealthy compulsive eating is kept out of the home. We've come to really enjoy our choice of healthy, largely unprocessed foods, and find that we never feel like pigging out because it lacks the substances and combinations that stimulate this behavior. We are also experimenting with growing food in our own apartment.

2. Comforts. We do not have a car and get around by public transportation. We've chosen a place to live where it is convenient to do so. We don't have a washing machine or dishwasher and have learned to do these tasks quickly (just as quickly, actually) by hand, which saves resources and makes us more flexible as travelers. Our attitudes towards comfort and cleanliness have become more natural as we've foregone expensive appliances and technology and learned how to do things effectively ourselves. We feel more capable and resourceful as a result.

3. Entertainment. We have no TV, radio, or Internet at home. This is perhaps the most radical lifestyle choice with the most unexpectedly positive consequences. Living without mass media promotes independent thought and the ability to engage in self-directed activities for longer periods of time. We spend more time talking and doing things together as opposed to being passive recipients of entertainment. No Internet at home means no compulsive Internet use, a better sleep schedule and sounder sleep, more time together, less chaos in the home, conditions more conducive to writing, a more physically and socially active lifestyle, and greater frequency of face-to-face meetings with friends and groups of people with common interests.

To deal with her dissatisfaction with superficial online interaction, my wife has chosen to go back to writing paper letters and mailing them to people who are important to her. She's removed much of her information on Facebook and no longer uses it to socialize. This hasn't been a problem for me, so I continue to use Facebook as I see fit, but not at home.

Whenever I get a new computer, I immediately remove all the built-in games to avoid compulsively wasting time on them. I have no games to play in the home. This isn't a problem for my wife, so she doesn't worry about it.

To get online, we go to one of several places in town or at friends' houses. This, I feel, puts the Internet in its proper place. If you have unlimited Internet access at home, as the years go by you will almost inevitably find that its role in your life has become too large and that in some ways you have become a slave to it. Of course, different personalities have different susceptibilities.

4. Traditional addictions. These have not been a problem, so we haven't needed to take any steps to fix it.

As you can see, our life is pretty austere in several ways. I believe that austerity is often needed to keep one's natural strengths from turning into compulsions that control your life. As I have probably written elsewhere, one's strengths are often related to involuntary behaviors -- things that you "can't help doing."

For instance, I can't help gathering and sharing information. When there are no barriers to this activity, I can engage in this compulsively and excessively online to the detriment of other areas of my life. I also can't help concentrating on something for long periods of time. This means that I can end up spending too much time on one activity past the point of exhaustion. Improving my basic habits and keeping the Internet out of the home reduces the likelihood that I'll have episodes where I have wasted many hours of time and end up feeling wasted myself.

In short, one's weaknesses are often outgrowths of one's strengths. If some asceticism is introduced to create some obstacles for these weaknesses to develop, you can enjoy and benefit from the strengths without overdoing it.

If you're a natural connoisseur of good foods, you may find you'll need to limit yourself to a strict diet where you may experiment only with natural, wholesome foods or where you are only "allowed" a gourmet meal once a week.

If you are wasting your life on computer games, you might remedy the situation by getting yourself an old computer that is too slow to run any interesting games.

If you have a habit of running up credit card debt, you might want to close all your bank accounts and adopt a cash-only policy.

Some people may think you're strange, but don't listen to them. The benefits to be gained from freeing yourself from dependencies are well worth any minor inconveniences.

On Melancholy

I just read (skimmed, actually) an interesting article called "Depression's Upside" at nytimes.com. Chances are, if you end up reading the entire thing, too, then you must be melancholic yourself.

Depression is one of those age-old phenomena that has been taken over by commercial interests who would like as many people as possible to think they have a problem that requires treatment. I prefer to divide what we today call "depression" into two categories -- pathological "depression" and normal "melancholy." Melancholy is the historical and more accurate term for what so many of us experience on a regular basis.

The article talks at length about research that shows that melancholy is associated with greater focus, creative output, and analytical thinking. It states,

In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Wonderful. Surely this should be included as one of the "7 habits of highly effective people." Actually, it may already be implied. Who else would be predisposed to ruminate over their long-term goals, form "personal mission statements," and to spend time analyzing their behavior, attitudes, and assumptions? I'm sure Stephen Covey is himself depressed -- just look at his writing output. Something is clearly bugging him! In fact, all the people I know who've really gotten into Stephen Covey have been melancholic. Hmmm....

I laugh at this topic because I am myself a writer, am prone to introspection and extreme focus over long periods of time, and am highly analytical and generally perceived as a creative person. Melancholy is a normal part of my life, a valuable resource to be utilized but not overexploited. I owe many great ideas and wonderful decisions to my propensity to think long and carefully about things, introspect, and distance myself from social stimuli. I wouldn't trade my melancholy for a million dollars (indeed, to earn a million dollars in the first place one would have to be melancholic).

While I scoff at the thought of ever thinking of myself now as "depressed," there have been a few times in the past when I would have certainly qualified for the term. In each case there were objective causes -- always interpersonal -- to my protracted malaise.

Thanks to socionics, I became aware of the kinds of interpersonal factors that might have been causing my multi-month blues. I came to believe that the types of the people around me were having a great effect on my general emotional state, and that results could be obtained by changing the types in my environment by choosing more carefully whom I lived with, worked with, and was emotionally close with. This strategy worked! It took a couple years to make my "type environment" the way I wanted and to learn to stop nagging people with the "wrong" types to try to get them to start understanding and validating me. But since then, I have never had anything that I would call full-fledged depression.

And yet, the melancholy continued to come and go even as my life circumstances improved. I believe it has a physiological component that is built into my temperament, whereas my "depression" was the result of external factors that could be influenced or removed.

I observe that melancholics can be of any socionic type, and that many IEEs are not melancholic like I am. Melancholy seems to be something that is mostly or fully independent of type.

My experience is that melancholic IEEs tend to be introspective, slower-paced, and share more original thoughts. Those who lack the boon of melancholy seem to easily lose their train of thought, jump from topic to topic, and engage in more superficial conversation and gathering of random but "potentially interesting" data. They are more sociable and spend less time alone, thinking or working.

In general, melancholic individuals of any type seem to be a bit distanced from society, which is virtually a prerequisite to doing most kinds of creative work. One of the challenges in life for these individuals may be connecting with other people. At the same time, when they do connect, it may seem to be a deeper kind of connection than non-melancholics enjoy.

Most melancholics seem to need things to be "a certain way" so that they can work productively. Their special demands may make it harder to find a spot for themselves in the workplace, where conditions are adapted for the average person's needs (at least theoretically). On the other hand, given ideal conditions, the melancholics can be particularly productive and creative.

In terms of interaction, too many melancholics or non-melancholics together may be a bad thing. Melancholics may tire of the excessive seriousness, while non-melancholics may tire of the lack of substance. Both groups have something important to offer, and they tend to intermix to a degree.

Basic Human Psychological Needs

My experience hiking the PCT in 2009 provided me the perfect setting to reflect upon basic human psychological needs. For over four months I lived a scaled-back existence comprised of simple tasks like walking (for roughly 12 hours a day), eating, sleeping, basic hygiene and gear maintenance, and basic logistics. In addition to the simple everyday tasks, I spent much time talking to other people and sharing experiences. Our conversations alternated between the mundane, the humorous, the raunchy, the social, the personal, and the philosophical.

Here is a summary of the needs I discovered through introspection and comparison with "normal" city life.

Physical needs
(I leave out obvious needs such as "eating, drinking, sleeping, sex")

1. Physical interaction with one's environment. We have bodies that our built for physical interaction with our surroundings, and we feel better (physically, mentally, and emotionally) when we use them in this way for at least a couple hours a day. This includes large body movements (working out, physical labor, sports, dancing, etc.) and fine motor movements (arts and crafts, playing musical instruments, building things).
   
2. Outdoor visual stimulation. It is a natural thing to want to go on a walk and look at the world around you and see what's happening in one's habitat. A stroll through one's neighborhood or a large outdoor market or any place where people congregate is enough for more socially oriented people, while others need to have more natural visual backdrops and need to take walks in parks and forests. 20 to 30 minutes a day is about the minimum.

Social needs

1. Friendly interaction. The basic minimum is one conversation with a friend per day (for me at least). A "friend" is defined as someone with whom you can let down your barriers and speak and act spontaneously. After two full days with no friendly connections mental fatigue sets in. Normal activities lose their allure, and one really starts to feel down.
   
2. Superficial interaction. It turns out friends are not enough. One needs to interact with other people at different levels of intimacy. 4 or 5 superficial interactions a day with strangers or people you don't know well can fill this need (for me at least). You practice developing your social persona, being useful to strangers and receiving utility from them, and sharing information with a wider social circle.
   
3. Solitude. Not surprisingly, one tires of continual social interaction. I personally prefer to spend about half of my time alone "doing my own thing." Not getting enough solitude leads to irritability and moodiness. Getting too much of it leads to mental fatigue and deprivation. Solitude does not necessarily mean the absence of people. If two or more people are comfortable enough with each other to not have to always talk or otherwise interact when they are together, then one may attain a state of solitude in the companionship of others. Solitude allows one to think clearly and deeply, engage in complex activity, and feel centered.

Intellectual needs

This category seems to be the weakest of the three, meaning that one can forego them the longest with the least ill-effects. They are also very hard to tease from social needs because they are usually filled through social interaction.

1. Exchanging information independent of the present time and place. A long but accurate definition. One finds oneself actively discussing topics that have nothing to do with the activities and needs of today. Backpackers inevitably find themselves engaging in social and political criticism, discussing the history of religion, and arguing about how to live a healthy life -- in addition to more proximate concerns such as food, gear, inflammation, and trail logistics. These "abstract" concerns exercise the mind's ability to think generally and convey information that might be applicable to other people as well as oneself.
   
   There were very few things besides food that I craved while hiking the PCT, and they were intellectual outlets. Despite my very frequent intellectual conversations, I craved stimulating books and the opportunity to write. While I did learn to pick up books (paper and audio) along the way and listen to or read them while I walked, I did not figure out a way of satisfying my need to write. I would have been very happy to have 2 hours a day to write about various topics that I spent so much time mulling over. Journaling can satisfy some of this need, but I simply did not have enough time and paper!
   

Conclusion

The needs described here may differ a bit from person to person, but I believe they are universal. One of the main things I took away from my experience was that I need to, and want to, organize my life in such a way as to fill every one of these needs. This realization solidified my resolve to not live a typical suburban American lifestyle, which I came to view as even more inadequate as before. Such a way of life is not nearly as good at fulfilling basic needs as a long-distance backpacking trip. Needs for physical activity and interaction are typically very poorly met unless one's work is physical. Also, 8-hour day jobs often overload your need for superficial interaction and fail to meet your needs for friendly interaction and for solitude.

Clearly, I will have to continue shaping my own counter-culture lifestyle to fill my basic needs. Physical needs can be met in an urban setting by rigorous exercise and physical activities (music, dancing, cycling & walking to one's destinations, etc.) or by taking a physical job that leaves the mind free to enjoy substantial amounts of solitude and moderate levels of social interaction. With a bit of land, my wife and I could practice some agriculture to enjoy a physical connection with our environment. Social ties need to be enjoyed more by developing connections with people who share our interests and values and have time to do things together.

At any rate, a typical urban 9-to-5 job with its ensuing lifestyle demands seems out of the question for me. Physical activity needs to be built into one's lifestyle rather than performed as a guilt-driven afterthought. There need to be many hours a day available to perform interesting, non-compulsory work. Friends need to be drawn in closer, and antagonistic elements need to be moved further away.

That is my formula for leading a happy life and filling my human needs.

Afterthought
I don't mean to suggest here that everyone's happiest lifestyle will be just like mine or that giving up a 9 to 5 job is a prerequisite to being fully happy (though it probably is for a significant number of people). The most important thought here is that our individual psychological needs exist and are quantifiable. In this post I have tried to quantify my own and speculate how they may differ somewhat for different people. I wish everyone could have an experience such as my own (not necessarily backpacking) where they are in near-ideal circumstances for the development of personal happiness over several months. With a bit of reflection, perhaps, this could lead to long-term changes in how you live your life.

Socionics on the PCT

Some of my readers may know that I spent the summer hiking the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail), a 2660 mile long trail through the great coastal ranges of the West that starts at the Mexican border and ends at the Canadian border. My journey lasted over four months and provided ample time to reflect on many different things, including socionics and other psychological topics. Here's my write-up of the adventure, if readers are interested. 

I began the trip alone but quickly met dozens (actually, over 100) of other long-distance hikers who began the same day I did. I noticed that while I was in the stage of just getting to know people, the mere half-thought of trying to guess their socionic types was revolting to me. This continued for quite some time; I actually began to wonder if perhaps socionics had finally lost all relevance to me. People's types clearly weren't important to me. I needed to make some friends and alliances quickly, and doing so based on instincts and largely unconscious criteria is the best way to do that. 

However, in just a couple cases, a kind of "deja vu" sensation would strike me when found myself talking to someone in a very familiar and intimate way. "Probably, this is a dual," I would think, particularly after noting some common SLI traits such as practical-mindedness, an affinity towards animals and the natural world, an ability to simultaneously bring out both my intellectual and my comical sides, etc. In all other cases, however, I didn't care to even think about socionics. 

At first, I found it a challenge to connect with other thru-hikers (the standard term for long-distance hikers). I didn't know what to talk about and was turned off by many of them, especially those who quickly banded together in groups or seemed to focus too much on smoking or drinking. I was quite often lonely and keenly felt my lack of belonging to any group. Events near the start of the hike had also put me days behind all the people I had begun to make friends with, so what few connections I had made were promptly lost for the time being. 

After a few weeks, things began to turn around. The "herd" had had the chance to spread out a bit, and the number of thru-hikers in my immediate vicinity dropped to a low enough number that I was starting to recognize people I had met before. No longer did I feel I was trying to break into a hopelessly large group of people; instead, I was seeing individuals with whom I might or might not have something in common. 

Somehow, I gradually learned how to talk to other thru-hikers. Over the next few months, starting a conversation became more and more natural, and just a month or so into the hike, I was able to dispense with all typical formalities when meeting other thru-hikers. Introductions were shortened and often just skipped over until the end of the conversation, and I (and other thru-hikers) would begin expressing our true thoughts and feelings almost immediately, even if we had never met the other person before. So, a conversation might go like this:

- Hello.

- Hi. You must be a thru-hiker.

- Haha, of course. How's your hike going?

- It's going great. I just had the most awesome experience...

etc.

This openness and spontaneity would also often carry over onto interactions with day-hikers, weekend hikers, and people in trailside towns. Needless to say, it brought a freshness to conversations that I had rarely experienced before outside of close friendships. I hope it stays with me. It feels like a more harmonious state of mind that is less concerned with appearances and conventions and more centered on emotional experience and realizing one's personal desires. 

After a month, I was more or less at the front of the pack and had just a dozen or two other hikers in the vicinity. I soon built up a history of interaction with almost all of them and felt comfortable (though in slightly different ways) with each of them. At some point, the thought of identifying their types occurred to me naturally, and the typings came easily. From here to the end of the trip I was able to identify the types of people around me with fairly little effort, provided I had time to have at least a few good conversations with them.

What I found was that every, or almost every type could be found among thru-hikers, even though, on the whole, most thru-hikers shared a pretty specific set of traits: intelligent, articulate, individualistic, liberal, anarchistic, agnostic or atheist, interested in natural science. Yet these same general traits could be found among many different types. There were also differences between hikers at the front of the pack and those who were in the middle of the "herd." Those at the front tended to have even more of the listed traits, and also to have a more serious attitude about their hike, having generally done more planning, training, and more careful gear selection. 

The only types I do not recall meeting (but could easily have missed) are EII and LII. Unexpectedly, I discovered an apparent predominance of irrational types -- as much as 2/3 of the thru-hikers I got to know. Among these, base  and  types seemed most common. Irrationals seemed to be very flexible in their group alliances and more prone to join up with or ditch someone on the spur of the moment, whereas rationals seemed to hike much longer with the same person, or to even do the entire hike without ever teaming up with anyone for more than a few hours, because they would not adjust their pace or schedule for anyone. Irrationals, on the other hand, tended to fall out of spontaneously formed groups not because of their rigidity and singlemindedness, but because of their ever-changing sleep schedule, daily mileage, eating habits, hiking speed, etc. I myself was a perfect example of this, never permanently settling on any particular hiking style. Instead, I tried to learn to adjust my speed and schedule to what my body felt like doing rather than try to have my body do what I decided it ought to do.

I met many people who seemed to be "typical" representatives of their type ("typical" is in quotation marks because anyone is atypical when viewed from a certain angle), such as ESEs who welcome vast numbers of thru-hikers into their homes and treat them with great hospitality and unwavering good cheer, or a voluptuous, husky-voiced SEE girl whom others assumed (wrongly) was "sleeping her way" down the trail. However, even more common were the openly atypical: an oldish ILE with a very muscular, chiseled frame, an effeminate LSE male, a rail-thin ESI girl with incredible speed and stamina, etc. Who's to say what is typical and atypical in socionics, though? What I mean to say is that while there is certainly -- theoretically, at least -- some elusive set of "core" traits for each type, experience with real people constantly whittles away at any preconceived notions about what the types should look like, what things they should be interested in, what talents they should have, etc. 

I found that in the setting of a long-distance hike, type did not seem to be as important for establishing a connection with someone as shared attitudes and shared hiking styles. Simply for practical reasons, another hiker who walks the same pace you do for the same amount of time each day will be easier to connect with than one who hikes faster or slower, no matter how psychologically compatible he is. If another hiker has chosen to use ultralight gear, like me, that automatically gives us something to talk about. Furthermore, by this time in the hike we have all been through so many similar joys and tribulations that there is enough material to talk about with nearly any other thru-hiker for at least an entire day. 

This and other thoughts left me in a quandary. I still don't know to this day whether socionics is at all worth promoting. To so strongly oppose faith-based worldviews on philosophical and psychological grounds and then promote socionics seems hypocritical; as no proper proof of socionics' claims exists, adherents must take large portions of it on faith, which spawns a culture in which people declare things as if they were true and easily forget that no one actually knows for sure that they are. Socionics' proper place in science is as a conjecture -- a hypothetical answer to the questions "how do people differ?" and "why are some relationships good and some bad?" To promote socionics as something much more than a conjecture would be intellectually dishonest of me. At other times, I would think about approaching the subject in the spirit of classical socionics, but with copious reminders that this is just a hypothesis that remains to be proven. Still other times I would think, "to hell with socionics!" and prefer instead go back to square one -- the basic questions of personality and interaction -- with a purely empirical approach, speaking of socionics only in a critical light.

Some of the books I read or listened to this summer during my hike have strengthened my interest in the third approach. For instance, I have read William James' famous work The Varieties of Religious Experience and was quickly convinced of the superiority of the strictly empirical method of study, applied with unwavering neutrality to even such subjective phenomena as religious experience. Certainly that same kind of thinking could shed much light on the muddled topic of individual differences and varieties of interaction. I have read (listened to) Nietzsche's The Antichrist and have reflected upon the general effect of socionics upon the human spirit: is it something that strengthens the spirit -- the "will to power," as Nietzsche would put it -- or weakens it? The answer seems to be that it largely depends on the person; socionics can be a tool to achieve a useful end, or a means to reaffirm one in one's weaknesses using a whole new set of excuses clothed in fancy technical jargon. Yet I can't help thinking that there is something in socionics that generally spawns weakness. Perhaps it is the tendency it brings to analyze what must be lived -- to apply conscious thinking in place of instinctive doing. Surely this cannot be an effective formula for augmenting one's personal power. Unless, that is, the student of socionics previously suffered specifically from a lack of mental analysis regarding himself and his interactions. 

In a word, I'm more uncertain than ever about what to do with socionics. I don't know if there is much personal value left in it for me. My hike left me with a resolve to promote ideas of real importance, such as routes to achieve greater personal freedom and happiness, reconnect with the natural world, and increase overall fitness and health while reversing our society's runaway consumption. Now, socionics appears to me to be an intermediate step towards something greater, a temporary training ground for bigger and better things. If socionics were widely accepted as the final answer, our world would quickly become intolerably stuffy and restrictive. 

 I find myself increasingly drawn to wholly suspend socionic categories in my analyses of things, because there is more to be learned that way (for me at least). And yet, socionics has trained me to pay close attention to psychological phenomena in the first place.