The Power of Selective Ignorance

There is an interesting logic to be found in the Buddhist Noble Truths. I am paraphrasing:

Suffering is caused by desire, attachment, and general craving. Eliminating craving reduces our suffering.

Craving decreases by removing its cause. Ignorance is the root cause. Ignorance is a deep-seated cognitive and perceptual blindness that causes beings to misinterpret reality.

Ignorance is an interesting word if you consider this context. There is ignorance in the sense of not knowing, which has the negative connotation of being dumb, and ignorance in the sense of ignoring or not paying attention.

We can ignore things we want to possess, ignore interests we have, so we can focus on the essential things, and ignore things we think we need to know-achieving the most literal form of ignorance. This act of selective ignorance can be liberating, freeing us from the burden of unnecessary information.

This concept of ignorance can also be reframed positively as ‘selective ignorance’ -choosing what to focus on and what to ignore to reduce mental clutter and suffering.

Focus and Ignorance

In our ambitions, we compare ourselves to others. We observe and envy their achievements and judgments. Neither is helpful.

Robert Greene writes in Mastery about how the masters in their fields- the people he writes about in his book- focused on their strengths. This focus on personal strengths empowers them, giving them the confidence to pursue their goals.

…ignore your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be more like others. Instead… direct yourself toward the small things you are good at.

In Advice for Living, Kevin Kelly shares reflective wisdom about worries over other people’s opinions:

Ignore what others may be thinking of you because they aren’t thinking of you.

Attention, Media, and Ignorance

In today’s world, we crave news. Watching the news makes us feel powerless against the deeds of a small number of evil people. We crave better news, more updates. News agencies respond like cigarette manufacturers: they fine-tune their products to our craving needs with negativity bias, sensational headlines, and continuous breaking news.

Oliver Burkeman convinces us in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that the media are stealing our attention:

The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you-that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself-that might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated without your realizing anything’s amiss.

We are addicts. But we can help ourselves by exercising ignorance. We can ignore and switch off notifications, consuming news sources less frequently.

We may be better off finding a news source that does not thrive on instantaneity but on the long-term perspective. It will not be free because it is not our attention that pays for these services, but the value they offer to our happiness, which we give money for in return. This shift in perspective can be reassuring, knowing that we are investing our attention in something that truly matters.

All the Lovers in the Night: On Isolation and Connection

All the Lovers in the Night
Mieko Kawakami

A strange mix of loneliness, connection, and love come together in All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami.

Fuyuko is a reclusive proofreader at a publishing house. She has virtually no social life.

One day, Fuyuko comes into contact with Hijiri, who persuades her to go freelance. Fuyuko more or less befriends Hijiri and is somewhat taken out of her isolation by this friendship. Fuyuko learns to drink alcohol, but without any measure.

She meets Mr. Mitsutsuka, an older man, when she attempts to enroll them in a course. She starts meeting him more frequently after an initial reluctance. They have special and increasingly intimate conversations. A strange, affectionate relationship develops.

Not saying a word, just standing there, Mitsutsuka looked like he was waiting patiently for my tears to settle. I heard a car go by, not very far away from us. Using my palm, I wiped the tears dripping down my chin, then rubbed my eyes, covered my face, and started crying again. Mitsutsuka lifted his free hand and rested it on the crown of my head. I thought I could feel the heat of his hand entering my skin. With his palm still on my head, I asked Mitsutsuka if he would spend my birthday with me, in a voice that was almost all sob. Will you walk through the night with me? And will you listen to that song with me, just the two of us?

The character Fuyuko bears resemblance to the strangely named Natsuke in Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Women who cannot ground themselves in this world, or at least in Japanese society, and live socially isolated lives. Where in Earthlings an unbearable burden develops in the protagonist Natsuke, Kawakami’s story is more loving, and Fuyuko manages to maintain a certain lightness and optimism.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the artisanal and techno-dissatisfaction

Douglas Coupland predicted that the crafted object might become the emerging “technology” of modern art. Analog experiences are where art is enjoyed.

In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores technology and art from the perspective of fragility. Technology is designed to replace older, inferior technology.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology.
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So it may be a natural property of technology to only want to be displaced by itself.

But not all technology disappears. The Lindy effect applies to technology.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
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But in general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.

People experience new technology like a treadmill effect.

People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. So, when you “upgrade,” you feel a boost of satisfaction with changes in technology. But then you get used to it and start hunting for the new new thing.

Taleb states that this effect does not apply to classical art, as well as to analog and physical experiences. These experiences appear to be exempt from men’s hedonic decline in satisfaction.

But it looks as though we don’t incur the same treadmilling techno-dissatisfaction with classical art, older furniture—whatever we do not put in the category of the technological.
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I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment.

The big differentiator, according to Taleb, is the infusion of the maker’s love in the created art object.

But consider the difference between the artisanal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisanal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don’t have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics. It also so happens that whatever is technological happens to be fragile. Articles made by an artisan cause fewer treadmill effects. And they tend to have some antifragility—recall how my artisanal shoes take months before becoming comfortable.

The medicine against our technology addiction is not the upgrade to the latest. The medicine is the downgrade to the analog, real-life experience, and the physical object.

Neil Postman on Huxley and Orwell: the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman discusses the consequences of a culture transitioning from orality to literacy to visual media.

The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).

The Internet and smart phones have shifted the focus from TV to the Internet, but not the total amount of time spent on these media.

Postman looks at the great literary dystopians Orwell and Huxley, who must have foreseen such developments and the dangers they bring along.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
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Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”