Sean Goes

Calmness.  A sense of loneliness necessarily accompanies it.  I don’t feel at all any obligation to confront it with some bombastic media, TV show, or music; it brings with it the harsh reality of the present, allowing me to contemplate my inaction.  In front of me, an unlit, empty TV screen juts out from the dimly-lit beige wall, provides every mechanism to do so, but I choose to reflect in silence, alone.

I need a moment of rest, I tell myself.  Despite my few short trips to the bazaar recently, I cling to a sense of security.  At a certain point in my travels, I became averse to risk-taking.  I don’t kid myself; I know exactly the moment this happened.  All it took was a run-by with the prospect of dying alone on top of a mountain to push me back into the confines of the shell I so desperately wanted to escape months earlier.  The finale to my escapades atop innocent, snowy mountains in Kazakhstan, what seemed like a calm retreat to explore them, quickly transformed into a desperate race to get to the finish line before a tour group member, the quiet German, would miss her train to Uzbekistan.

The memory of trudging through the mud and rain, dizzy eyes and heavy coat, tied ineffectively to my waist — it all makes me shudder.  Eight hours of non-stop hiking with a group that will easily abandon me just as quickly as they will guilt me into taking the next step to higher heights, lest I prevent the group from the experience they paid for.  It only took seeing the social media influencer falling on her head for me to value inaction so strongly.  The blood dripping down her face could have just as easily been mine.  Had I taken one misstep, slipped on a loose tree trunk, or left caution at the wayside to try to make the desperate German punctual for her train, I could have been laying in the back of an EMS truck, curled in the fetal position, cowering at the impending humiliation for both the million-dollar cost of the helicopter evacuation and the mockery from the group.  No way travel insurance would ever cover that.

So to escape this feeling of depressing anxiety, I tell myself that I need time to recover for the next part of my trip — and failing that, to save money.  Somehow, I made it out safely from the intense marathon, and I just need a breather.  It seems like nothing, in comparison, to ask myself for a few days of rest.  I turn to myself to make excuses for my inaction, and in response, I enter long sessions of self-reflection.

At a certain point, I became sick of exploring new areas.  I try to pinpoint exactly when this happened and land on the one-month marker of my departure.  Is that the magic number? I ask myself.  Initially, the Kazakh people were nomads, but they eventually settled down.  I try to convince myself that no one is truly a nomad, that eventually these so-called “nomads” had to settle down.  I need to understand myself, and more importantly, how my opinion on travelling changed so radically.  I do this the best way I know how:

By looking to psychology.

In the late 1800s, a change in psychological thinking emerged — one which later led to the inhumane experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and later, the emergence of Pavlovian behaviourism.

The idea was simple: treat humans like birds, mice, or other test subjects; teach them through raw conditioning, leveraging the reward response system to prefer certain actions over others.  Do this enough, and no matter how much the “subjects” want to abstain from doing the ill-conceived action, they will still do it.  Repeat, rinse, and repeat — until the neural pathways have been constructed, making the test subjects crave that next dopamine high.  Until the “control group” takes pleasure in electrocution, embracing raw sadism, laughing maniacally as the other test subjects tremble and shake at this unearthed viciousness with each longer iteration of the shocking phase.  The dark yet raw approach to molding and changing our relationship with morality shifted the psychological landscape to focus on our innate barbarism and deep-seeded animalistic tendencies.  A key pattern had been unearthed from the human brain, and it was only a matter of time before corporations exploited it.

It only took the better part of sixty years to put an end to the psychological trauma test subjects inevitably faced for their candid participation in trials.  Carl Sagan emerged victorious in the mid 60’s with a more tame approach to understanding the human mind, one more focused on the natural sciences, radical behaviourism.

But no matter what, psychologists still harboured a deep-seeded appreciation for the experiments carried out in the early 1900s; the intense trauma these subjects underwent outlined a core concept ethicists wanted to cover up.

Conditioning works.

Malcolm Gladwell knew this too, in his book Outliers.  Do something ten thousand times and gain proficiency; do something twenty thousand times and become an expert.  It doesn’t matter what it is, whether shooting a basketball or learning a new language.  At a certain point, life is just a numbers game.  Maybe you get born at the right time and place, maybe hockey players born in February are more likely to rise to fame.  But that doesn’t change the fact that repeating something copious amounts of times leads to proficiency.

The human mind, fittingly inconceivably complex, has still evolved to favour the less nomadic, and moreover, those with stability.  Patterns.  You can easily imagine our caveman ancestors clamouring for social recognition of potential mates with their clubs; who emerges victorious: the moving, nomadic caveman or the stationed, secure caveman who knows his hunting spots?

Evolutionary biology keeps us moving to find food, to find mates, and to form social groups.  It enforces its own a kind of Pavlovian behaviourism — radical behaviourism — encouraging us to seek security and repetition.  Safety in numbers, and more aptly, safety in repetition.  Just like evolutionary biology itself, those who repeat activities emerge victorious because they survive; those who unpredictably leave for “joy rides around the world” die off, with no friends or family to support them.  It’s not rocket science; it’s evolutionary biology.

It seems all too fitting for me to want to slide back into a world of 9-to-5, menial tasks, and family obligations.  An innate social desire exists in me to conform to my biological roots, to embrace a system — one where I can ensure the safety of my potential offspring.  Indeed, just like the deep-seeded desire for social acceptance, I crave some level of consistency to mask my loneliness, to proselytize to myself that I’m not alone.

Try this:

Move your left thumb up.  Slowly.

Now move your left index finger to match your thumb’s height.

Try it again.  Do it slowly.

Focus.

Do you feel it?  The delay.  Focus on moving them slowly.  Sometimes, your thumb will even falter a slight amount — as if to confirm that you have no motor control over your body.

Try again.

It seems trivial, but if you focus enough, you will see it: a psychological phenomenon now proven in the scientific world: a microsecond delay exists between the ATP action potential of firing neurons and the central nervous system’s ability to preform muscular actions.  Ever burned yourself accidentally on a hot stove?  Notice how your hand retreats from the hot surface even before you feel it’s hot?

In his 2009 book, McGill researcher Daniel Levitin writes:

Most scientists and philosophers agree that human consciousness is qualitatively different from animal consciousness – we have a unique type of self-consciousness, and ability to contemplate our own existence.  Consciousness is not a thing to be separated from the normal workings of our brain, the comings and goings of thoughts, perceptions, and mental states.  As essayist Adam Gopnik says, ‘consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of machinery’

Daniel Levitin, 2009

It begs the question of free will.  And now that science has caught up with philosophy, what does any of this mean?

Nothing.

We look for meaning in life when it will comes from within ourselves.  The only value we can ever derive comes from our own perceptions of the world and other peoples’ reactions.  Whether or not we have control over our actions has no bearing on how we experience the world.  Just like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we can easily take comfort in our menial lifestyles without venturing out of the beaten path and derive just as much pleasure.

I think back to Schdodinger’s box, albeit a more dark version: imagine yourself tied down in a dungeon, forced to submit to your captor, unable to talk, to move, or to even leave.  Sentenced to a life in prison from birth and without knowing what lies beyond, would you believe an inmate who claimed a better life exists beyond the confines of the prison?  An old philosophical writing on this exists, titled What Mary Didn’t Know.  In what eventually amounts to, in the philosophical world, The Knowledge Argument, a women is observed confined for life, from birth to death, in a room without colours.  Would this hypothetical woman, Mary, ever be capable of understanding the concept of colour?  What does it mean to be “red”, really?

Frank Jackson argues Mary can’t know.  She can’t ever know, not without exposing her to what we deem as the colour “red”.  In a semantic twist, what we really mean by red is limited to the expressive ability of language — and more pragmatically, to a group’s interpretation of “redness”.

In his book, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes:

[…] think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked ‘apples’, then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word ‘five’ and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words—”But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used

Wittgenstein

Mary certainly doesn’t know what the colour “red” means, but if you hand her a description of what red apples look like, then ask her to identify a red apple on a black-and-white screen, she might just succeed.  She probably will, if she has any wits about her.  Then she might derive some form of satisfaction, having completed a task requiring knowledge she epistemologically can never have.

Mary doesn’t have to learn the meaning of the colour red.  In fact, she never did.  That the rest of the world acknowledges its existence doesn’t have any bearing on Mary’s existence, her understanding, or her well-being for that matter; Mary, for all psychological purposes, will live an equally content life, maybe even happier because she has one less thing to consider.  Who was it who said: “ignorance is bliss”?

Enjoyment is relative.  You will find meaning in anything.  Or maybe you won’t, and you’ll decide to punish yourself with hours of self-reflection.  Either way, if you never leave the house, if you live in a Shrodinger box, completely isolated from the rest of the world, nothing else ever matters except your immediate surroundings (or rather, your perception of them). 

That we do tend to punish ourselves with knowledge that a better life exists irks me.  It really seems counterproductive and unpragmatic to dwell on things we can never have.  Perhaps it’s that innate drive in us to explore, to forage even further, that curiosity, that causes us to look outside our immediate surroundings for a better life, however unattainable.  Perhaps existentialism, evolutionary biology, and radical behaviourism do go hand-In-hand after all.

After all, it’s the experiential highs and the lows that determine our emotional highs and lows.  Knowing a better life is out there damages us just as much as it helps us ascend to the next level. 

Just look at social media: the virtual epicentre of our modern-day social inadequacies.  Every Instagram post a blurred Polaroid photo of a manufactured experience, overblown saturation and clarity, for the world to see; Photoshopped posters of women with overblown eyes of mascara, celebrating to the tune of a top-40 song, dancing in a yacht club with boisterous males for her eager followers to see.  We flaunt our deviance to try to differentiate from the society, yet really, we wanted to do the opposite.  In our search for patterns and repetition, we’ve steered away so harshly from realty that we only seek to self-engratiate to people we don’t even know.  Ironically, in a quest to fit in, we’ve steered so far away that we’ve done the opposite: create elaborate fantasies about our identities to try to become people we can never be.

Perhaps I am no different.  Perhaps I never needed to find the colour “red”.

I consider that perhaps instead of free myself from the monotony of everyday life, I have done the opposite.  Perhaps I wanted all along to conform to society, embracing the life of simplicity most of the world lives.  Yet instead, I opted to travel the world in search of something I would never find, flaunting my wealth and unconventional lifestyle in the faces of less-fortunate locals.

We don’t need to have everything.  We can’t all get rich and make it big.  Happiness is not a drug you can buy; it’s a dedication to habits, to loved ones, to structure.  Having excitement and the possibility of disaster around every corner only complicates things.

As all this wisdom from self-reflection settles in, I think back to the lyrics of Chris Martin’s popular top-40 song, Something Like This:

But she said, where’d you wanna go?
How much you wanna risk?
I’m not looking for somebody
With some superhuman gifts
Some superhero
Some fairytale bliss
Just something I can turn to
Somebody I can kiss

Chris Martin, Something Like This

Occam’s Razor: sometimes simpler is better.

In life, sometimes you have to settle for the more realistic option.  You can’t have everything.  So take the easy way out: don’t travel the world in search of some better version of yourself; make peace with what you have right in front of you, right now.  Don’t complicate things — because black and white is almost always more than enough.