Take Quality Things As Your Objects of Thought
Human beings are very good at both thinking and avoiding thinking. When we choose to, when we “put our minds to it”, we are capable of powerful thought-of analysis, of leaps of imagination. The old cliche that “we only use 10% of our brains” is very likely patently untrue, but it is true that we avoid thinking when we can.
The writer Stephen Pressfield, in his book “The War of Art”, situates “Resistance” as that which keeps us from doing powerful, creative work. Resistance is an implacable enemy, determined, and always present. Resistance is also that which keeps from thinking, truly thinking, about things that we find “hard”.
Resistance is ever present. You have met the modern resistance if you have ever found yourself, like me, mindlessly thumbing through your social feeds for the 42nd time that day. Your brain is numb, but you do it anyway. It hurts you, but it sustains you. It damages you, but you need it. It takes you away from the work you need to be doing. It alters your mind.
Social media is but one example.
Perhaps there is some evolutionary vestige deep in the structure of our brains that makes us save our brain power for when it really, truly matters (figuring out how to survive, in earlier times), or perhaps we have just really, truly, figured out how to procrastinate. Procrastination is likely hardwired in to the human brain by this point in time.
Avoiding thinking about smaller things (where you left your keys, how to turn on your car, the result of 8 x 3) is useful, but what sorts of things deserve to be thought about?
It’s probably not the same people arguing about the same things on my Twitter timeline that they have for the last number of years. It’s not Facebook status updates.
It’s not the latest ramblings of the celebrity known as Kanye West.
What deserves to be thought about?
One simple principle is that you could try, more often, to:
Take quality things as your objects of thought.
It is easy to spend time on gossip, for example, which we could broadly define as “spending too much time thinking and talking about what other people are doing.” For the most part, these matters are trivial, and we can train ourselves not to worry about what our neighbours, or the people at the next desk or in the next cubicle, are doing. We can train ourselves to block out the constant noise of our social feeds, and the news media.
Gossip keeps us from thinking about things that truly matter, and it is just one example. Gossip belongs to the resistance. If you think it will matter to you one week, or one month from now, what your cubicle neighbour or coworker is up to, you are kidding yourself. Will you remember what that celebrity said on a specific date, at a certain time?
Who cares about all that. Think about quality things, however you define “quality”. I spend lots of time thinking about lots of different things, and not all of them are quality things. Some of them are fluff. Some of them are distractors. Some of them keep me from doing deep and interesting work.
We can, to a certain extent, choose what to think about, and our lives will be better if we choose quality objects of thought.
Think of it this way: consciousness is a river. You are fishing in that river. You, the fisherperson, can decide what to keep, and what to throw back. Can you let the smaller fish pass you by, and only reel in the bigger ones?
