States of Being
Table of contents:
What I mean
State of mind and state of feeling
Smells, music, locations and associations
The modern hamster-wheel that limits you without you ever knowing
How modern consumerism keeps you in a state of rigidity and psychological inertia
What you choose to say or think about reinforces what’s real to you and therefore significantly influences your state of mind
Ties to strategic self-deception
How your vibe with someone influences your actions, such as influencing how you pick and choose what nuances to apply to the context of that person/your specific engagement with that specific individual
It’s not about the lesson, it’s about the impact of the lesson. Or simply, the impact on the individual target. You can manipulate someone to change their internal state to something that will likely serve some value to them.
Other “worlds” on the same planet
Niches of people in particular states of being associated with their context
Like hoodlams in NYC
The implications of all this, what you’re missing out on and what you can do about it
Neurology - the dissonance between my view of pornography in a non-triggered vs triggered-currently watching and strengthening the neural connection state
What I Mean
Your state of mind. Your headspace. Your state of feeling. The nature of how you presently perceive things.
State of Being = State of Mind and state of Feeling
What influences your state of being?
Smells, music, locations, colours and associations.
Familiar smells from times where the entire context of your life made you feel a particular way (how this relates to trauma will not be explored here). E.g. smells near your old high school.
Putting on that one song immediately makes you feel a certain emotion.
Going back to your childhood homes
As for music, people often think that you listen to music that aligns with how you’re feeling. Like you get the urge to listen to sad music when you’re sad so you can process those feelings.
Music is possibly the biggest control mechanism for your state of being. Later we’ll talk about how this relates to strategic self-deception (both a positive and negative thing).
The Modern Hamster-Wheel That Limits You Without You Ever Knowing
How modern consumerism keeps you in a state of rigidity and psychological inertia
This is where we speak about modern consumerism. However, we’ll not get into the rabbit hole that is western capitalism and its apocalyptic dangers.
Modern consumerism keeps you in a state of rigidity and psychological inertia.
What do I mean by that?
Imagine the day in a life of Joe:
Joe wakes up on his day off, and first things first goes on his phone. He does this for 35 minutes.
Joe then gets out of bed and eats cereal for breakfast.
He sits at home and watches TV until 11am, since that’s what he’s done for years.
He drives somewhere for an hour or so. To a fish n chips shop and walks in a park.
He comes home, because he’s not accustomed to doing anything or going anywhere besides this park, and maybe the local beach. Although he usually avoids the beach unless it’s not too busy.
He watches TV again at home, makes dinner and hangs out until bedtime.
You might say Joe’s day sounds fine. You might think “if that’s how he wants to spend his time, so be it”.
Except that this isn’t necessarily how Joe “wants” to spend his time. And no I’m not talking about the possible epidemic we’re in where people en masse engage in high dopamine activities because their brain perceives it as good, while silently wishing they were doing healthier, more productive, more interesting things.
I’m talking about the habits Joe’s fallen into.
Sometimes when a particular way of living becomes your normal, everything associated with that life feels like all there is for you.
Joe feels “this is how I live my life”.
Yet if he started recognising his habits and rituals, he could try different things and possibly live a much different day than he’s experienced in a while, which may result in him feeling more alive!
Here’s Joe’s alternative day in a life:
Joe wakes up (on his day off) to an alarm set at the unusual time of 6:43am.
He makes some coffee at home and sits outside on the ground drinking it. He even sits inside on the floor and drinks it for a bit.
He brings a tent and drives to nice spot in a park where the beach is in view and pulls out his laptop to play Minecraft.
He then goes down to the beach and dives in the cold water for a bit.
He puts earphones in and lays on the sand listening to music.
He then takes them out and just sits there for an hour.
He drives for 1.5 hours to a friend’s house and on the way stops at a cafe for his first meal of the day. He continues to the friend’s home and just knocks on the door. Friend says they’re busy but can talk for a bit. They sit outside on the front porch and chat. Friend goes back inside and Joe heads off to the local indoor bouldering gym and pays for a day pass. He climbs for a bit and leaves once he’s tired and happy with his experience.
He drives home, makes dinner and writes stuff he’s thinking about and posts it online.
I’m going to reflect for a second. ONE second.
I’m implying that a habit-based day is bad and a subjectively more interesting one is better.
This is not true. The only thing I really want to highlight is that Joe could find himself living the same day for a long-time, where he misses out on some unique experiences, underestimates the power of his free will and ends up feeling a weaker sense of “alive-ness”.
Let me show you some images:
Feel the images. Imagine the world they come from and put yourself in that atmosphere.
Here are some more examples:
Listening to Do You Think We’ll Last Forever by Caroline Rose, a state of being comes up. I imagine being 7 or so, with a mother’s group being active at the time and JP, V’s Mum…
*names are abbreviated for privacy*
Maybe a period in life of people and nothing else, and being paid attention to without needing to do anything?
Another state:
Nighttime, mildly cool, sitting on the lounge with the cold white sheet on it on the balcony at (1220 powerhouse road) a male friend like S (S and C - these are abbreviated family friends) or another male family friend with perhaps someone else over, with both my mum and dad there. Quiet night, arms down on the lounge by my sides. Food has previously been set out, available to pick from downstairs at a rectangular table with about 6 chairs on either side and 1 on each width, not a full dinner. Music both mum and dad and the family member(s) like is playing far in the background and they’re all downstairs eating a little, laughing and having great conversation. It’s years before some big problems and unfortunate incidents occur for some of these adult individuals. I’m not an adult at this time but I’m happy.
Implications:
How you spend your time
Your happiness
Your values and priorities (feeling the importance of people in a moment, over many other “important things”)
How much of life you get to experience
Your empathy and understanding of other people
Diversity of feelings you could have to feel more alive
Choice and Perception
What you choose to say or think about reinforces what’s real to you and therefore significantly influences your state of mind.
If I say that I want to kill myself, that makes me think “wow yeh I really am at my breaking point I guess it was all too much for me”. I then am in a depressed state for hours.
If I internally judge myself too much for giving into an urge to watch pornography, I feel like shit and I attribute that to the porn. But no, it wasn’t that. It was me fixating on the fact that I watched it that made me feel shit. Now I’m in a state of mind that makes me more likely to eat junk food, watch Instagram reels, watch adult content yet again and significantly reduces the likelihood that I’ll do something interesting with my day and to-some-degree decreases the chances I’ll engage in social events even if invited. I know all this from experience.
So when you think a lot and fixate on things you don’t like about yourself, that you didn’t like about your day, or when you say negative things about these things out loud, you might:
See everything as worse than it is
Not engage in particular endeavours like socialising, activities that differ from your usual routines or anything adventurous.
Oh dear.
Ties to Strategic Self-Deception
Near the beginning of the post we spoke about music being one of the best control mechanisms for how you feel. Just put on a particular song and instantly change how you feel. Try it now! I just did, first with “My Own Summer” by Deftones and then a completely opposite song “Sunsetz” by Cigarettes After Sex.
You can use this to put yourself in the hustle mindset. Some hardcore music and you can life weights at the gym at the same time and convince yourself you’re that guy. Partly because the sick music makes it feel like that's your current life soundtrack, partly because you’re doing something hard. You can do this regularly and things like it and do the whole identity thing too, which means to say “I’m the kind of man who [insert positive traits]” whenever you do something that technically makes that true, even if it is benign.
As for “States of Being”, your state changes. You may be more inclined to go talk to women, to try and be productive in study or business, seeing torrential rain outside no longer makes you want to curl up in warmth, but makes you want to immediately run out of the house and run through the rain, even sprinting eventually. And you do it. I did this multiple times over the years I was in hustle mindset.
NOTE: Strategic Self-deception like this can lead to a lot of problems in your life, but may happen as a transitory phase. I’m using it as an example for how music contributes to state of being.
Other “Worlds” On The Same Planet
Look back at the images from earlier.
“Feel the images. Imagine the world they come from and put yourself in that atmosphere.”
Let’s take these two:
If I put these together, I can imagine starting in primary school, with kids that do drugs just outside the school. I know people who sell drugs and people talk about it. There’s concrete everywhere. When you think of recreation, you think only of the dingey outdoor basketball court you have in the school, the local cornershop and causing trouble in the town hanging out, loitering, being loud.
Why? Because it’s a town with little things to do. There are shops that sell basic goods and liquor, a barber shop and homes. As a minor, whatever bar that exists in the town is barely known to us and is full of 50+ year olds anyway, primarily men.
The residential homes don’t inspire you to be creative or make money through ambitious means. They’re just one story and are often made of boring brick, with a small, unappealing lawn, even if some are well-kept. The grass is dry.
With the same drugs above but in the ghettos of New York City (NYC), I imagine a constant smell of cigarettes and piss, knowing that many people you see on a daily basis around the alleyways would stab you if they felt threatened for whatever reason or wanted to take your shit.
You have some connection in a weird sense during adolescence as you and your friends buy and take drugs. Some of your friends are strays - homeless without parents. But now that you’ve stayed in the same place as a mid-twenties adult because it’s “where you’re from” and so you think thats how it works, just to stay, you don’t feel that same connection. Old “friends”, most of which you wouldn’t even call friends, suddenly weren’t around, died or were imprisoned. You feel like you’re 60 years old and that this is all life is. You say “this is life”. You don’t hear the same political discussions as someone in the heart of NYC. You aren’t on social media. You haven’t played and don’t know anyone who’s played Minecraft and the most famous musicians on the planet you’ve somehow never heard of. You only listen to underground ghetto hip hop artists who aren’t very good and post only on Soundcloud.
I remember the feeling back in primary school, in Wollongong. The feeling that it was a hot day, but not feeling painfully hot. The smell of mowed grass in the big field we had behind the school. A state of existence that made the idea of mowing lawns horrible to think about. In high-school these smells persisted in my suburb within Wollongong and when combined with the non-painful concrete restriction in my body from spending much effort to go anywhere, made spontaneous adventures rarely something I wanted to do. It was usually when it was cooler and the smell of grass was absent and Mum wasn’t obviously locked in doing work that I felt I could go hop on multiple public transport pieces, go to a party and end up God knows where.
These are States of Being - things you can’t connect to and have never empathised with simply through a lack of awareness, but which exist on the very same planet as you.
Vibes and Nuance
How you vibe with someone influences your actions, such as influencing how you pick and choose what nuances to apply to the context of that person/your specific engagement with that specific individual.
For example, I might generally believe that owning no furniture and minimal belongings is awesome for me personally. If I were to get into a romantic relationship and move in with that person however, this general belief may need to change. I may need to buy a table for us to sit at together and eat food, a desk so I can do work at home instead of always needing to go to a cafe. But until then, my belief can stay the same.
Or can it? Self-help marketers say “your current identity needs to align with the life you want and it’ll come true. Otherwise you’ll never achieve what you want”.
I just don’t think this is the case, and this is coming from someone who believed this stuff more than anything else and was one of those marketers.
I can feel a special way with this girl and buy the furniture and purchase a car if we decide to have children. I still believe that owning little can be awesome, but for this girl I want to make sure we’ve got what we need and what she needs to help our relationship flourish.
Nuance: The Lesson
It’s not about the lesson, it’s about the impact of the lesson. Or simply, the impact on the individual target.
You can manipulate someone to change their internal state to something that will likely serve some value to them.
Implications, What You’re Missing Out on and What You Can Do About It
Your state of feeling impacts what you’re inclined to do tomorrow (hopefully some cool new different fun stuff) and impacts how you generally spend your time and day and night and life. If you’re not in that state of mind though, certain possibilities and realities never feel authentic and they never become things you even want to pursue.
Your current state of feeling while reading this makes everything you’re currently attuned to, feel or believe, feel like all there is. If I try and feel into other states of being, all of a sudden other people’s beliefs I thought was ridiculous actually made sense, or beliefs I previously had felt egotistical and clearly incomplete, such as the idea that people need to take accountability for their lack of money. In reality, that perpetuates the systemic issues that have led to many people financially struggling, so it’s not obviously the “right thing” to do.
Neurology
A massive part of what influences your state of feeling, your awareness and your actions is neurology.
Neurology is the study of neurons. Neurons facilitate all brain function. They hold significant responsibility for:
Memory
Habit associations
Skills
Emotions
Thoughts
Learning
Reinforced feedback loops
The dissonance between my view of pornography in a non-triggered vs triggered-currently-watching-and-strengthening-the-neural-connection-state
To be continued
…
Reality isn’t what you think it is, it’s everything you’ve never thought about or had the opportunity to feel.
Good luck,
R