I've stopped meditating again
I really gave it a good go this time! Alas
a brief history
of Dan meditating (this is for my own sake, tbh):
- 2007-08: a guy taught “zen meditation” at college. Sounded cool. None of us had any idea what we were doing. One guy burst into class one day declaring he was enlightened and never came back. Ok.
- ~2010: saw a “Buddha Dome” at burning man. They had a chanting practice. I sat with them and then they connected me with a Seattle group. They were friendly enough but I didn’t like their beliefs: “prosperity gospel megachurch but Buddhist”. Soka Gakkai, a mostly pretty chill cult.
- ~2010-11: found another local group, Bodhiheart Sangha. Lovely folks. Sat with them weekly and on my own daily for a while. Read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, got real excited.
- 2011-12: traveled a bunch. Did some retreats in India, incl a 10 day Goenka, and Netherlands.
- 2012-14: grad school, depressed, off and on. Retreat at Bhavana Society. Disillusioned, mostly quit.
- 2016-19: met Kenneth Folk, got taught by him for a bit. Daily practiced. Eventually got disillusioned and quit.
- 2021: Jhanas got popular on Twitter! Meditated daily for 4 months through force of will trying to get there. Disillusioned, quit.
- 2023-24: Brightmind and coaching from Toby Sola. Daily practice. Disillusioned, quit.
Looking at this list, I feel like an alcoholic who keep trying to quit, but instead of alcohol it’s “not-meditating.”
now
At any rate, I’m not-meditating again. A couple weeks ago, paraphrased:
Me: Come on, I’m still at the same place I was a year ago, this sucks and I hate it, what the hell
Toby: Yeah, that’s true… why are you doing this? Is it possible it’s not helping you you right now?
Me: It’s absolutely not helping! What the hell!
Toby: Er… right? You don’t have to meditate.
(I mean this entirely complimentarily to him; he’s been a great support and I’d recommend him, and from an outside point of view I think he’s probably right!)
And I think this was the permission I needed: someone who knows his stuff telling me “nah, this isn’t going to magically start working for you right now.” (I wonder if this is what Kenneth was thinking too - I got back in touch with him in 2021 and had one call with him, then he ghosted me. :shrug:)
so what’s the problem
Why am I even doing this? What am I trying to get out of it? Answered this in a chat a couple weeks ago:
- stream entry (and beyond?)
- reliable access to jhanas
- whatever Shinzen Young’s got1
- whatever it is that psychedelics do, without drugs
- not be depressed
Ultimately these all boil down to #5. Life is so painful! I don’t want it to be2 Right now I see a couple ways out:
- feel good, then the questions of meaning don’t come up
- feel like your life is meaningful
- idk get enlightened?
I can do #1 if everything is going well and my life is easy enough. Obviously, perhaps, that’s unstable. My life is not easy enough right now. Drugs can give you #1 but they’re not good enough. I don’t know if I can do #2. Some people seem to have a career that gives them meaning, or deep connections to their family that are enough for their life to feel meaningful, or a relationship with God, or something? I just don’t and I don’t know how I would. So that leaves #3.
So why not just meditate a lot? I just can’t seem to. It’s so painful. And I say this not as someone who’s just trying it and “ohh sitting still is so hard”, I mean, I’ve got between 1000-2000 hours sitting. It’s so painful because it feels like so much work for nothing. Almost absolutely nothing. There’s never been any payoff. I would have more payoff if I had been watching reality TV the whole time (except, then I couldn’t make this exact complaint).
I don’t do well learning/practicing without feedback. I can do weights: number goes up! I can do guitar: I used to not be able to play something, now I can. I can’t do “repeat daily for years, assume that it’s working, even though it never feels like it.”
So, I guess I’m getting off path 3, “meditate a lot”, again. Feels bad, but staying on it feels worse.
“If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer–I’ll take the one day of enlightened living. IT’S THAT GOOD, DUDE.” - and if I had a dollar for every time I footnoted this quote… ↩︎
I guess there’s also the reason: “If it is that good, then I’m really missing out!” but I guess that’s pretty related to reasons 1-5 here. ↩︎
Life Satisfaction: a Wrinkle
I keep trying to figure out how to measure “how good is your life.” (e.g. here, here, here.) My current best idea is: your life is good iff1 you want more of it; your life is bad iff you want less of it.
So instead of rating your life (or day, week, month) on a scale where “1 is bad and 10 is good and everyone will always say 7”, we can go from -5 to 5. 0 means “if I knew tomorrow would be as good as today, I would be indifferent about living it vs. magically fast-forwarding through it.” +1 means “I would rather live that day than fast-forward”, -1 means “I would rather fast forward. And then beyond that, we can measure how good or bad those days are by what you would give up to live or not live them.
How do we measure what you’d give up? Can’t be money/possessions, or human connections, or whatever, because those are all different for different people. But we all start life with the same amount of time. So I propose: +2 means “I’d give up one day of my life, e.g. die one day sooner, in order to live this day.” -2 means “I’d give up a day of my life to avoid living this day.” Then it’s roughly exponential: maybe +3 is “I’d give up 2 days”, +4 is “I’d give up 4 days”, +5 is “I’d give up 8 days”, and similarly for the negatives. (I guess the scale goes on to +6, +7, and beyond, though they’d be pretty rare)
But there’s a problem with this: as your life gets consistently better, the days you’re giving up get better too. If my days were all +5, I’d never give up 8 days of my +5 life to live a +5 day!
Hmm, back to the drawing board. I do like the concept that you’ve got to compare to something, otherwise you just get “+3 is really good, +4 is super duper good, +5 is incredibly amazing” and everyone will converge on +3 again.
(Money’s pretty natural, and maybe it’s decent within a short period of time: “would you pay $100 or $1000 to live this day again?” can compare today vs last week or last month. But you can’t compare your current $1000 day as a professional (very very good!) to a $1000 day when you were a poor student (has to be the best day ever!), and you can’t compare across people.)
“iff” means “if and only if” ↩︎
Parties
A sad thing about being late 30s is I haven’t been to a *party in a while.
I don’t know what I mean by “*party” but to give you a vibe: Fred Again.. rooftop set. Apparently Fred, a very famous DJ, just invited all his longtime friends to a London rooftop party. Such a beautiful setting and great music!
Here are some characteristics of a *party:
- some people you know and some people you don’t
- you by-and-large respect the people there and they respect you
- some sense of losing yourself (this is often, but does not have to be, dancing)
- some sense that you’re the coolest people in the world
It seemed easy as hell to host a *party in college; we were young ambitious successful young people in college, of course we were the coolest people in the world. And you could have a good mix of people you do and don’t know, you’d always be losing yourself (maybe dancing, maybe sneaking into some building on campus or playing some prank or even just walking around at night).
Some examples, besides college parties, that either made it or just missed:
- Our wedding. Failed #1 but we didn’t care.
- We threw exactly 3 parties in our house in grad school. They all met this bar.
- I saw Dan Deacon play last weekend. It failed #1 and maybe #4
- One time Broken Social Scene was playing at our school, and some of them knew a friend of a friend and so that person threw a party and we hung out with them
- Academic conference parties, surprisingly. As you’re trying to grow in a professional field that’s networking , you have 1, 2, and 4 almost by default. 3 is the only one lacking.
- Similarly, tech company holiday parties, surprisingly. Fails 3.
- Burning man is close. For me, because I went with like 4 friends, it failed 1 and I’m not sure about 2.
- I went to Vibegala, basically a bay area house party, once. Failed 1 (I knew ~nobody) and 2 (~nobody knew me)
I don’t know if this is a wholesome impulse from my soul or just ego tripping. Certainly when there’s celebrity or money involved, that helps, and that makes it feel fake. But there’s a part of me that feels like I Matter when I’m in a scene like that, and there’s a part of me that needs the magic of such a *party. Maybe it’s even wholesome ego tripping.
- How Did I Get Here?
- Transcendent and Worldly Modes
- Kids and Ego
- More Mental Mental Models
- Quick Thoughts About Parenting That Have Come To Me Recently
- Why Do I Care to Measure Depression
- Low Agency
- checkpoint
- What Are All the Tanks
- Some things I learned about antidepressants generally and Effexor particularly
- Infinities
- How Much Does Media Affect You
- Budgeting: Where I'm At Now
- How To Handle Bad Waves
- LeBron, Manziel, Atticus, Shackleton, or?
- How I think about investing money
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