Why life gets worse until you realize it’s getting better

Two books I recommend reading when you have time:

• The Molecule of More, by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Mike Long
• Scarcity Brain, by Michael Easter

The more we learn about the brain, the more fascinating (and terrifying) our instincts become. That’s because they are not really your instincts. Your brain develops autonomous patterns that sometimes have nothing to do with what you would actually want. It’s what the brain thinks you should want and therefore you want it.

Anyways, the last ~3 weeks have been quite an adventure.

I’ve stayed off the map almost entirely. No travel, no big projects, very little writing, and a lot of sitting and thinking. I started noticing something happening in my brain that I didn’t like. A bit of “normalization” was happening, and I started noticing (subtle, but definitely there) a lack of gratitude.

David Levari describes a psychological phenomenon where this happens. As the actual problems decline, our “definition” of problems expand to include milder or previously ignored problems. It’s almost like our minds don’t want us to not see problems (which makes sense)… but this creates a problem.

As your life gets “better,” it doesn’t automatically feel better — instead, we just get better at finding newer, milder, less extreme problems. Our lives get “safer” but not “better.” Levari called it ‘prevalence-induced concept change.’

It’s a sort of reversed hedonic treadmill. During a routine weekly review, I noticed that I wasn’t exactly experiencing the kind of gratitude that I should be experiencing. Instead, I thought to myself, “I am so annoyed by this and that and everything over here.”

It is not a good idea to live like this. So I pushed pause and started to reframe. It requires effort, a bit of uncomfortable silence; you have to poke and prod and ask yourself questions that you don’t want to answer. The safer a society becomes, the more bothered they become by stupid things that don’t actually matter.

This is important as we progress — a question I’ve had to ask for myself: “How much ambiguity am I willing to tolerate to make it where I want to get to?” During seasons of chaos, busy-ness, or stress, one of the first things to go is your sense of “clarity.” Things become ambiguous and destabilizing…

That’s the first place people quit. If they can’t see it or control it, they’re out. But this is a form of normalization. There were moments in your life where you had no control and no optics and yet you enjoyed yourself and moved forward. Then something happened, you got a bit of a reprieve, and you adjusted your “normal.”

You thought, “I must always have this level of clarity, that’s what it means to be on the right track.”

Disqualified. And we don’t even realize it.

Why do people in developed nations report higher levels of anxiety and dissatisfaction than people who live in third world, poverty-stricken places?

It’s not because we’re “ungrateful.” It’s neuroplasticity at work. Our brains re-organize around patterns, predictive tendencies take over, and it evolves to detect new threats (because the old ones have been eliminated). In America, you are most likely not going to starve to death.

So the brain goes, “Threat eliminated. Find the next threat.” And the optics expand and widen — all the sudden, someone looking at you in an odd way on the train “classifies” as a crisis-level threat. You feel like you’re going to starve to death if you don’t neutralize them or deal with them.

And then you’re unhappy. Not because your life isn’t good, but because if the qualification for a problem in your life is that low, you’re going to be neurotic and depressed. This is a problem of normalization.

Addicted to Problems

Here is the secret to changing this: focus on it.

The good news is that the brain, body, spirit, etc can all change. The bad news is that it will not change unless you focus on it. These things require energy to go in and rewire everything.

For me, the process has been simple.

• Prod for gratitude: expanding the scope of gratitude, not the scope of threat-detection
• More silence: longer sessions walking or pondering (deeper thinking to assess my belief systems)
• Less stimulants: coffee, nicotine, etc – in much smaller doses (or no doses)
• More sleep: and pre-sleep routines such as journaling opportunities for the next day and accomplishments from the current day
• Better questions: asking questions forces the brain the identify patterns (which it loves to do), but the types of questions you ask it determine the patterns it will identify; make sure these are optimistic and inspiring rather than the reverse

If not trained otherwise, humans become addicted to problems. It’s not because we like them, it’s because our minds are untrained to live without the threat of constantly dying.