Why Do Things?

TL; DR

The tweet below is the essence of this post and says everything that I have taken so many words here to say.

No matter how much you think or read or listen you won't get to this level of wisdom which can only be attained by doing, for very long, and for the sake of doing and nothing else https://t.co/5NDlj8foHP

— bhadva bhindi (@AtrangiSatsangi) May 10, 2023

Why is This Post Relevant?

It’s probably not. You should probably just tl;dr or jump to faqs. This discussion is entirely devoid of any real-world or any other world utility…well, at least for most people. For me it underscores everything I decide to do (and more importantly - not to do) in my life.

I attribute my obsession with whys to the five years I spent in utter misery studying accounting, taxation and costing. I did very well in the first two years but when every new achievement made me marginally sadder I knew that something was wrong. I didn’t fully comprehend it then but I stopped doing things that I knew were not going to bring me joy. Five years of solitude and suffering is the price for developing a bespoke taste, a custom-made, fully-owned hierarchy of the world. Five years of slavery is the cost to properly price freedom.

Barring survival and duty I don’t see any other reason for you to do something that doesn’t make you forget (and eventually relish) the morbidness of existence. These days whatever I do - after I have ensured my survival - is very conscious and at my terms. I have the luxury of choice and if you don’t you should stop reading this post. After completing mandatory education, I haven’t read a single thing that I didn’t want to read or pursued anything that I didn’t really want to pursue.

The prevalent modus operandi for decision making is something like this:

I make case for this general approach:

FAQs

Bold Assumptions, A Moot Point & Impossible Aims

bold assumptions

All of this post (and also life, universe and everything else) assumes that -

1. Things/actions have value
2. Some things/actions are more valuable than others
3. And that pursuit of valuable things is desirable

These are not as matter-of-fact as they appear. The will to life is the only real and natural fundamental force. Survival is the only thing with any intrinsic value. Not dying is the sacred and the only divinely ordained duty of the living. All the contraption that we see around us is to optimize this singular end. What is left to do then when this end is secured? debauchery, because nothing is not an option for most people.

a moot point

At the same time it is a moot point spending too much time dwelling on this because even if life is a futile exercise devoid of any higher meaning how do you plan on spending your time? You have no choice because time needs to be filled. The sake of having fun is sake enough and boredom is reason enough for doing things. Doing is the best anesthetic to despair, because thinking is the cause of all the pain and doing is an escape from thinking.

impossible aims

If this is so obvious why do I have to tell this to myself again and again? Because the case for action is weak and only self-delusion and gaslighting can push us to do hard things once shelter, game and mate is secured. All of societal infra emanates unconsciously precisely from this issue. A buffet of very potent games have emerged naturally to address this problem. You, sweet reader, is sure to perform poorly in these games because you have committed blasphemy of breaking the fourth wall and questioning the rules and the need for these games.

The playing field is skewed sharply towards those who have never questioned the merit of their borrowed beliefs. They are healthier, happier and better at sex than you ever will be. They will sleep sounder sleeps and feel more content by excelling at games with constrained and defined rules, never venturing into the territories of whys and relying on the robustness of time-tested motivators.

What is in store for you (and me) then? Does being bad at games make us special? Can we devise our own games? What will happen if no one chooses to play with us? Would we still need their validation?

The synthesis of a new set of ends is extremely hard, if not impossible. It is hard because it stands on very shaky assumptions.

Case Study: This Post & This Site

I spent weeks designing this site, setting up a static site build and automatic composition process - for what?

I fought the urge to try and make something come out of it. A personal site is an exhibition of your work and skills and is maintained with an objective of attracting professional suitors and build productive liaisons. The posts are a formality - something that has to be done to demonstrate basic competence and establish base-level legitimacy.

I don’t think these are the best set of aims to come up with the best quality post. The writing of the post should be divorced from the accolades it might bring. I spent the first twenty five years of my life thinking about how the things I build will be received by others. I would fantasize who would shower me with what praise and how I would react.

If the post is the end, all other ends will have automatically been achieved, sooner or later, in some form or the other. But even this line of thinking is not optimal. As soon as you start fantasizing about the fruits of your action you can be sure that they are not going to materialize, like the Schrödinger’s cat, but opposite.

But is aiming for nothing but the perfect execution of the task strong enough to move us to the kind of erudition required? What were the masters thinking when they were working on their magnum opuses? Were they imagining the glory that awaited them? the cheers of the crowd? the recognition of their peers?

It seems like they were driven singularly by the quest for truth, and even more by their inexorable curiosity.

My motivations are not nearly pure enough and they never will be, if past is any indicator of the future.

Evaluation of Ends

I think money is a reasonable end given the immense leverage it can afford in pursuing other, non-utilitarian, ends. However, almost nobody whose primary motivation is money, is working towards earning enough money. Some are working to earn more than their peers, some more than everybody else. In most cases money is a proxy for other more stronger desires, like status, respect, approval, validation, fame and power. I still find money a more benign force than the craving for status, because it is, after all, aimed at self-sufficiency.

The status-philes (or the laal batti fanatics) are more sinister and insidious. Making money is not enough to compensate for their insecurities. The desire for status is also the desire for power. And what is power if there is no one to exercise it over? So the motivation is not power in the absolute sense, it is power over other people. Among all the ends I find this to be most petty, unproductive and unworthy of human efforts.

Education is not a real end in India. It is always a front for some other dull aim like money, status or safety. It scores big in people’s value chains because it secures safety. I have not met a single person who actually seriously treated eduction as an end in itself. The more number of prestigious colleges in a resume the more weakly developed are their own beliefs. There is a smugness and a complacency in the faces and attitudes of the highly educated. This kind of conviction can only come with complete a subjugation and bankruptcy of owned beliefs and outsourcing beliefs to outside ideals (but this saves the overhead of thinking and helps in achieving other worldly goals). Educational qualification is a signal of existence of competence at some span in time. Competence is worth little. It is often a net negative. We don’t know what drove that person to their achievements. Maybe it was mindless execution of the protocols of the coaching classes. All of this reveals nothing about the insubordination of minds and the freedom of thoughts.

Knowledge and understanding are nobler than organized education because here the subject at least has some autonomy and is not just following a system-defined action plan to fulfill some other hidden motivation. For the first time in our analysis of ends, the focus shifts from the doer to the doee. Or does it? I don’t think so. Not completely. Knowledge is again a survival aid, accumulated with the aim that it would come handy some day. In some quiz or to maneuver out of some obscure eventuality.

Respect, recognition and their more flamboyant relative, fame, don’t seem as toxic to me as money, status and power. These imply that the person has outsourced their worth and valuation to the council of the public. You can safely assume that the public has no valuation methodology of their own derivation. Developing guts to self evaluate and respecting your judgement is hard and so people succumb to the evaluation of the mob. It is strange that the more I obsess about things other than myself, the more confident I get of my own worth.

I am apprehensive about the no defined end cases. Maybe you don’t know what you want, that does not mean that you don’t want anything. Things only happen because a different state is more desirable than the current state. I also share similar skepticism about the fun and curiosity motivations. Nobody does anything hard solely for fun. I don’t have anything against curiosity, except that it is unserious (or not serious enough). “What is the need to be serious?” you ask. There’s no need. It depends on how important you think your ideals are.

All of the above motivations are influenced and corrupted frequently by the volatility of the libido, that horny agent of the will to life. I would say that you can attribute more than half of any motivation of every person at any time to the horns. This percentage vary widely from subject to subject but is always the dominant force.

In light of all of this, what do I think we should work toward?

Doing Things for the Sake of it

I cannot possibly put it better than this (read the entire thread!):

Will is a sux, it's a faux, it's a jox. Growth is subliminal, latent, unconscious. It is only there when you are not looking. It happens when the brute animal motives are tame and subdued and the divine takes over. Or the flow state, in normie-speak.

— bhadva bhindi (@AtrangiSatsangi) April 11, 2024

Bonus

What do you think are the motivations here?