A life unlived through slow surrender

A Captain-less Ship

My greatest fear is that one day I will wake up 30 years from now and realize that my life was wasted. Not just wasted, but slowly siphoned and depleted without realizing it. On any given day I do not feel like I am the captain of my ship. I feel as though I am drawn by the currents of life being taken to a destination I never agreed to go.

These decisions are rarely active. I am asleep at the wheel, going through the motions of habits and whims I did not purposefully cultivate.

These aren’t just momentary lapses of judgment. The lack of judgment is the habit. The insidious nature of these minute decisions is that they are practically harmless individually, but taken altogether, they are devastating.

What I find maddening is that this reasoning is used to justify inaction in our own lives. I might be complaining about spending 3 hours on my phone last night, but it can always be worse! I mean some people probably spent 6 hours. Or worse. At least I didn’t do drugs!

It is quite sad that the bar nowadays is that as long as I’m not doing drugs, the coping mechanisms I have are passable. I’ll agree so far as to say that I’m thankful that at least I’m not addicted to cocaine.

My frustration with this thinking and my own experience is that we all seem to have given up. We don’t fight against the forces in our lives that bring us unhappiness. This is how we become the architects of our own misery.

The Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex

I came across this moment in a Huberman Lab podcast that touched upon something extremely profound.

There is an area of the brain called the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex that has recently been a hot area of neuroscience research because of its relationship to willpower. Huberman interviewed an extremely fitting person for this discussion. The one and only David Goggins, whose persistence and willpower are probably matched only by a few people in history.

The main takeaway from this segment is that willpower is not so straightforward. Many of us have probably heard how willpower is a finite resource, look no further than the Stanford Marshmallow experiment. However, what is extremely interesting about this region of the brain is that it seems to be directly involved with willpower. Essentially, if you don’t want to do something and you do it anyway, this region of the brain grows dramatically. Additionally, as this part of the brain gets “stronger” it releases more dopamine in response to pain and pushing yourself in uncomfortable situations.

You, me, and everyone else on planet Earth have probably been gradually eroding our willpower through easy hits of dopamine from our phones, fast food, you name it. I have honestly reached the point where I almost feel pain (which is probably withdrawal) if I try to eat a meal without having some form of entertainment in front of me. This is like a giant blinking warning sign that something needs to change. I need to relearn what it means to struggle.

Unable to Articulate Our Unfreedom

The biggest threat to my own well-being and happiness today is a lack of decisiveness.

I have decided that I can live and make peace with terrible decisions as long as I choose this life. What is unacceptable to me is to live a life of indeliberate decisions with consequences I have to live with anyway. This is the only real kind of regret that exists, the one where I never made a decision at all.

One quote that I have not been able to stop thinking about is from the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. [1]

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

This theme was also explored in 1984 by George Orwell. The powers-at-be completely reworked the language to make dissent and rebellion impossible to be conceived.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten?”

We’ve all experienced indescribable feelings that we don’t have the vocabulary to articulate. Here is something I have struggled to put into words for a very long time.

The definition of freedom that people are accustomed to is simply as much variety and lack of restriction as possible. But I will argue that not all freedom makes you free.

I will take a controversial example, like mandatory masking during COVID-19. The absolute most primitive understanding of freedom would state that reducing the choices available to people infringes on personal freedoms. However, let’s actually look at the consequences of this freedom. If you reach the brink of death, become permanently bedridden, and are hooked to a ventilator, does that make you more or less free? You can of course argue about probabilities and transmission rates. But if you were a purely self-interested human being, for your own sake, wouldn’t you want to minimize potentially life-altering levels of unfreedom by giving up some of your freedom today? I think the answer is obvious.

I will be the first to say that trying to apply this thinking to a societal level is fraught with abuse and challenges. Firstly, who is to say what makes people more or less free? I won’t attempt to expand my thoughts beyond the personal self because people much smarter than me have probably more insightful things to say.

But if we engage with this idea from a personal perspective, there are clearly things that take our freedom without our permission or even realization. You might see where I’m going with this.

I believe that our time on earth is sacred. It is truly priceless because time has infinite potential, as long as we can actually tap into it. But every single thing in front of us is begging for attention. We carry the most egregious instance in our pocket all day.

For me personally, this unfreedom stems from the erosion of my willpower and motivation to do meaningful things like writing, reading, and art as a result of the consumption of social media, video games, and a few other things I won’t mention. The collective number of hours I have spent doing all these things represents approximately 20% of my waking life based on some back-of-the-napkin calculations. Not only am I losing time, I am losing the will to do better.

Infinite choice and entertainment that are accessible at all times may make me “free”. But this is not a freedom I want, and one I would gladly give up.

Life Used to Be Easier

I want to conclude this post by giving us all some credit. Trying to make the most of every moment is not easy, and in fact, it has only been getting harder. We’ve all thought “Wow how did people in the past survive without the technology (aka entertainment) we have today?”.

The thing is, it was actually so much easier back in the day. It’s kind of hard to be hopelessly dependent on your smartphone for quick dopamine hits if the latest invention was the cart and horse. Who knows. Fifty years from now Neuralink might invent the dopamine-stimulator feature where for 1 cent a hit, you can experience constant euphoria. It certainly is very easy to choose not to live with the Neuralink implant because in 2025 we don’t have access to begin with.

The much more challenging question is “How do we live like people in the past despite having all the distraction we have today?”.

We have to choose. What freedoms do we have today that we must choose to give up?