Truth and Focus.

Focus. Are you focusing right now as you read this blog? Focus is something which has been well documented to improve decision making, higher degrees of focus and presence correlate with higher levels of happiness and it intuitively makes sense to say that the more one concentrates on anything the better they will do at it. 

Focus and concentration are also scarce. After all you have only 24 hours in the day and however many limited amount of years in your life. A rough estimate of the amount of focus can be the intensity with which you focus at something multiplied by the time you are working at it and it also intuitively makes sense that this quantity would be correlated with the progress you make at any task or any aspect of life.

Focus is an important resource, perhaps the most important one an individual has to offer. Companies now operate in an economy of attention, coming up with better and bigger algorithms to keep us hooked onto these sites, to advertise to us, and to eventually get us to give them all our attention, focus, value and money. A substantial amount of people even know that this is happening, yet we are still not able to break through these cycles (If you didn't, then now you do). What is going on?

Entitlement and Narcissism 

Look over your actions of the past few days. Don't consider the rationalizations for your actions, but only the actions themselves. Most people spend a large chunk of their day doing things that they don't want to be doing, they don't believe will help them and also makes them feel terrible afterwards. Even if you're not doing so explicitly, it's highly probable that a large proportion of your time is spent in an institution (e.g. office or school) where you're being held back by inefficiency. If you're not even working on the things that you think that you should be working on, isn't it highly entitled and narcissistic to believe that you deserve to achieve everything you want? Yet this is a sentiment is ubiquitous in society. It breeds resentment and I have often fallen prey to this too. There is no basis for the assumption of entitlement in life.

Sustaining Focus

Have you ever tried to deeply sustain your focus for a long duration? (a la Deep Work by Cal Newport)

Sustaining focus is no easy task. A lot of opposing thoughts start creeping into one's mind and even if you get caught up in any one of them you lose your focus. Even if you try to battle the thought, the thought has won as it distracted your focus. Some common excuses I've noticed in myself (you might have similar ones or different ones)

• I can't do this anymore, I'm tired (even before I've actually reached my limit, my resilience starts being tested)
• Why am I even doing this? What's the point of it all? (Nihilism)
• Nobody cares about what I am doing and they'll hate me for this (Loneliness, fear of not being validated)
• This is easy, I can just do this later. 

The last excuse is something that's often blinded me. In the story of the rabbit and the turtle, where most people recognize the turtle's consistency and hard-work, there is also a tragic tale of self deception.

Not Real

What's the truth about those excuses?

• You CAN continue. Humans achieving their maximum potential anywhere for any thing is a much rarer experience than your ego will have you believe.
• Why are you doing this? What else would you be doing except losing focus, reveling in hedonism, narcissism, validation, self hate and self pity? Whenever you're conscious you do realize that giving your full attention to life is the best way to approach it so why forget it?
• Nobody cares about what you are doing even if you conform to their expectations. They are much more occupied with their own lives. Even if they did actually care, is conforming to expectations more important than accomplishing your own dream?
• This is not easy, this is the challenge life has given you in the present moment. Even if it is easy, isn't that an opportunity to do it fast or excel at it and finish it once and for all?

As you can see, they just don't reflect reality.

Truth

As observed earlier, lying to ourselves and others has advantages. It keeps our ego and others egos intact. It reinforces and maintains the societal delusions which keep society running. While saying the truth can help us rise initially, to actually cash out at any level, we often need to start believing in things which don't reflect reality, if only very subtly.

A direct example is a politician not standing for the promises they made before getting elected. As a more subtle example, Social media selects for more polarizing opinions, so you may have to lie about the degree of confidence or certainty with which you know something just to get more engagement.

Whether you lie brazenly or subtly depends on your level of self awareness. To lie to anyone else, you must lie and convince yourself first. If you are more self aware it will be difficult to fool yourself and lie consciously, though you might still end up doing so unconsciously.

Conclusion

Continuously striving to speak the truth as it is has similar properties as sustaining focus. Both of these actions have the ability to dissolve the ego and hence there are evolutionary disincentives to doing them. The ego perceives its dissolution to be synonymous with the death of the organism itself (which is the fundamental deception). Self deception thus becomes a process which is constantly changing and evolving.  

Speaking the truth is often considered a moral virtue. To actually start speaking the truth we should dispense first with the delusion that most of us want to speak the truth. If you speak the truth and sustain your focus even when you've reached a sufficiently high point, there will be exponentially more incentives to cash out (and danger if you don't). In reality we only speak the truth in so far as it aligns with the goals of the ego until we are controlled by it. Truth is like a fire which can cut through your delusion but going too close to it will also burn you.

If one actually wants to speak the truth or focus for a reason (Even if that reason is for the sake of truth itself), then there is a motive behind it and it becomes impossible to not lie subconsciously or to give your fullest attention. This is probably the best we can do consciously.

This whole blog post sounds like a preachy journal entry to myself, and I even feel scared about whether my future actions will stand up to the self awareness exhibited by these posts (because I might deceive myself), but I want to be more truthful and hope you found something of value from reading it as well.