How Have We Become So Impatient?

Sometimes the deep cause of our woes is something as simple as something we already acknowledge in us but fail to take it seriously enough to do anything about it. Lately, I have been trying to take breaks between work to play the long-term game instead of getting burnt out from intense short-term sprints; however, I kept failing to recharge after any one of them. Work of course takes effort but at the same time tearing myself away from it feels just as effortful. How can this paradox even exist? Shouldn't I naturally want to take breaks and go and enjoy life?

The Dilemma of the Modern World

Ironically, even though we do not want to keep on working, we find ourselves nonetheless wanting to. Obviously something is at play here, and it doesn't take much thinking to identify it. It's our expectation and desires that are pulling us onwards to keep working. Whether it is perceived wealth gains, rise in status, fulfilling our external-driven goals, or all of these fused into one hyper-beam, these forces may become so rooted in our minds that it seems to impossible to avoid them.

We have the infamous trend of "burn out" but how is it even possible to overwork ourselves from our own volition? In the past, there were numerous unfortunate tyrannical regimes that coerced people into pursuing arduous hours, but, if you think about it, there is no one telling me to do anything. You may aptly disagree, but really think about it. If I just drop everything and sit in a bench at the park the whole day and keep myself clean enough that I do not appear homeless, no police, no family, no government official can come drag me away. Okay, granted, after some time, someone will get suspicious and will inquire, but my main point is the way we drive ourselves to keep working is a choice we have made.

It is easy to blame an outside entity, of course. "Oh, my parents expect me to be a successful businessman" "I want a girlfriend and nothing has worked in my life so it seems I must become wealthy" "If I don't achieve results, then the belief people had in me would go away"

In all those scenarios, the speaker (not me of course, those are just examples of a hypothetical person...) framed it as if he had no choice, but in reality, he chose every single one of those situations. Well even if your parents want you to be a successful businessman, you could just ignore that want completely. Even if girls only care about wealth (which you can't blame most of them, biological evolution of the past would point to this but, fortunately, since women have much more freedom today, they can become the breadwinners too), you don't have to play the dating game, no one is forcing you to. And Mr. Speaker (again, totally not me), you certainly never asked people to believe in you, that's completely their problem.

Applying this to our subconscious mind

It's easy to read this and go "that speaker is so silly! I'll never be like that", but I'll bet you one of my Pokemon cards that you and me have frequently fallen prey to this already and may continue to do so. Why? It's because of the power of the subconscious mind. Well, first note, I used subconscious mind instead of unconscious because I believe we have some control over this and can improve ourselves on this front over time. Of course, this iceberg goes deep into our unconscious mind, but who knows what's floating in those depths, so let's ignore that for now. Second, when we are consciously aware of this phenomenon, we are highly likely to avoid it. The problem is we are bombarded with so many inputs all the time (see Which Voice Is Actually Yours?) that it is easy to let one slip through the guards of our prefrontal cortex (which is the hub of the conscious mind) and into our subconscious and further into our unconscious. Then, this trash that slips by eventually begins to accumulate and now you will find yourself going "damn, if I had a Ferrari and looked better, she would've said yes, huh, I'm gonna work so hard, just you watch... oh shoot, I'm back to it". (Also rap music is one of these garbage emitters that will deliver this straight to your brain at obnoxious frequencies. Though rap music can also deliver motivation, it's not all bad, you just have to be careful what it's doing to you)

So how can we become better at keeping our mind clean? Well, getting rid of all inputs could certainly work and that is why monks and their monasteries exist, so people can minimize the inputs going into their minds. However, I'm not sure if that's actually a positive thing. As much as I hate certain things in the world, those inputs have also constantly helped me rethink and become

I read a lot of books, but sometimes I make the same mistakes as I would have if I had never read the book at all. The only benefit I had from the books was that afterwards I could recognize it. This is when I began to realize the importance of actually grasping this and embedding it as a piece into my mind rather than just feeling good I learnt something and then forgetting about it. There were some elements of false ego here in that by reading, I felt superior to others, and thereby I felt I was already more capable. Now I realize that in order to develop it into true ego, it takes time and repeated practice of that skill. Books are the first step but that is not the end of the journey. In fact, even after continuous practice and integration, the moment you go soft, that is when you start to revert into old habits. Though to add some optimism here, at a certain point, it naturally becomes a habit where actually doing the opposite feels really painful and forced. Sound familiar? Ironically, for many people today, not working is what is hard to do.

Transitioning the mind

The struggle of switching my mind from a work state to a break state is what started this whole dissertation, and this brings me once again to the main point why I think it is so hard: impatience. Phew, finally! I think this rumination was necessary however to establish why impatience has intricately become such a hidden foe.

With all these hidden promises we have made in our head, is it no wonder we feel impatient to accomplish them all? We aren't fools, and that is where this gets even darker. We know how much our parents and grandparents have accomplished... and what they had done in their lives does not seem enough for us. In today's comparison world of where more always seems better, how can having raised a family on a normal job ever seem fulfilling? We want to get the best, the most comfortable, the risk-free life now! Chop, chop, I have to hustle and get these things done. Back to work!...

This is why it is just so intrinsically difficult to take a break. Unless one meditates on this over time and unearths this shadow in their mind, it will be forever like Sauron's stare on you. Yes, this subconscious force has gotten this dark, and I used to find it frustrating people do not acknowledge these deep-rooted factors. They think the consequences of their light-hearted actions are nothing, as if a 5 hour screen time per day is just a normal part of life (I am not exaggerating). It's so cliche yet everyone simply shrugs and goes back to their scrolling. People keep cowering behind the superficial "#mentalhealthcrisis" we apparently have today (which probably does exit, but not for the reasons all these people claim it does) and will instead keep on putting on the SpongeBob colored bandages of "burn out", "covid", "" to cover up the real issues. Ironically, for those people who these things are actually real issues (workaholics, covid patients, ), I have found some of those people do not take these events as seriously as the ones who are so called "the most affected" by them.

The strength of these subconscious promises multiplied by the quantity of them has led to ingrained rocks in our head that would take great pains to unravel. It is almost scary: a single opening of Instagram leads to another shipment of stimuli into our brains. If your feed is populated by philosophy and books, this will create further reinforcement in this direction in your life (albeit, even this depends on what type of philosophy and books you are being presented with). Unfortunately, it seems to me that the majority of the population has another type of feed that it almost disgusts me how people even take pride in all of this. Guys comparing the symmetrical structures of the faces of women between their feeds, girls pointing out different fashion trends, and other such stereotypes are becoming more and more common. I feel great pity for the teachers who would have to deal with this incoming barrage of children. I got my first phone at 7th grade but around me I would see people already hooked on these cycles... and today, I see third graders whipping out brand new iPhones of their own and already training themselves in this dogma.

Hope

Well, first I want to preface, I think hope is not a privilege for everyone. I must admit I have also had the right amount of positive and negative incidents to have given me these perspectives. I suspect with virtual reality we would have the power of giving people more profound experiences (i.e take the class safely on a field trip to a war torn country rather than to the local zoo), but I also suspect people will find ways to misuse vr for other purposes as well (i.e. when Instagram or TikTok launches an update for the Vision Pro).

I must say I am not against both these tools. They are simply that, gadgets. It's more so sometimes their marketing tactics (mainly network effects at this point) seem to be fully aligned towards profit generation rather than towards empowering people. Being able to receive positive information is great but being able to receive cute photos of men and women is not as much (at least, not hundreds of different people every single day given the current biological limitations of the human mind).

Mindfulness is another one of those trending cliches, but I see very few people adopt this. Heck, I am not sure if my own 10 minutes of meditation a day coupled with my no-music times is enough for me to have a fully clear mind. All I know is I kind of enjoy this journey moving forward of seeing how much I can change and how far I can go. It does sometimes make me wonder why we are not all this way, but perhaps with time I will get to learn more about that.

Anyhow, as to the core theme of this blog, impatience... I don't think it's something easy to fight once it has built up. Just like how once you've fallen in love you are screwed, impatience is similarly a powerful army that musters over time. We have to think about where it's gathering its forces from and how we are funding it. Without this awareness, there is no hope of ever surviving its "surprise" attack (similar to those attacks in Sid Meier's Civ IV). However, with our radars adjusted, we could then begin to create plans for ourselves and learn to begin mustering armies of our own. Not just temporary militias but long-standing policemen of internal peace and forward progress. With this newfound internal order, what we can then bring to the external world will further reflect this inner tranquility and it will all merge into one concordant harmony.