Thought and The Problem of Livelihood

 I read a quote somewhere recently which went along the lines of "Smart people get paid to do what they like". It reminded me of something I'd read (probably in the Almanack of Naval Ravikant) about how having competition itself indicates a kind of inefficiency when compared to authenticity(he probably mentioned it in more succinct terms or caveated it but that's how I remember it). The basic idea here is that authentic creativity which flows from the individual is something that no one can be better than that individual at. I thought a bit along those lines and this is what I ended up with.

In our society, we're basically compensated with money proportional to how much we change the world around us. The percentage of money out of this which we keep for ourselves is dependent on our own needs or desires. This seemed well and good prima facie without deliberating about it but then I realized that it doesn't quite cover all scenarios.

Many (probably in fact most of us) don't get paid for how much we change the world, but rather how much we affect it. There's a subtle difference here, but one worth noting. By thought in the following lines I mean thought which is representative, metacognitive and uses memory to transmit information. It is this same thought which is transferred from me to you through these words, or what is passed from generation to generation through cultural traditions and practices and also the conditioning which you have in your mind, your ego which you deliberate on and which causes most of your suffering. It is not only psychological, as monuments are built and wars are fought on the basis of thought. If we consider society as being organized and expressed through such thought, which it is, then what we see is that most people are just trying to fix symptoms of thoughts which are wrong in one place in another place.

I might have lost you there, so let me explain with an example. 

A social activist clamoring to corporations to reduce carbon emissions is really just fighting against a facet of human thought which considers nature as nothing but a tool for exploitation, or one which values the achievement of personal ambition or the fulfilment of material desires over the health of everyone around them at the very least.

 As another example, we see that many doctors interact with people to solve the lifestyle diseases they have acquired. The acquisition of lifestyle diseases is a problem with thought which gives an incorrect prescription about how much we should eat, how much we should exercise etc. and when this thought becomes mainstream and our actions are in accordance with it for a long period of time it's only natural for people to get lifestyle diseases. The prescription of drugs to fix the symptoms of the diseases and the ignored advice of doctors after all sessions (exercise more, eat healthily, be more hygienic) also interestingly transmits a certain type of information in thought; the thought that we will fix any symptoms which arise due to the incorrect actions instantly through creative insight when they come up. Now, I'm no doomsayer nor do I want to get into any political implications, but at the very least there's no basis for actually thinking that we'll have a solution to problems like climate change before it becomes an existential threat. We can look at precedent in scientific discoveries, but creative solutions are independent of time and so it's hard to put a timer on the type of technology we will definitely have by some time in the future. 

Though the implications of interpreting thought as that kind of system are diverse in how they can be applied to the world (Which David Bohm talks about in his book of the same name), I want to focus on one aspect now, which is the problem of livelihood and how it relates to creativity.

First, I need to take another example of a discipline that will be considered creative by most but I am of the opinion that it is routine in many cases, merely at a meta level. A computer programmer may write a code which automates a certain process of analyzing, repairing etc. Though every problem they encounter in their work is new, and requires a different solution, what they are doing in most cases does not involve a radical shift in perspective. This is rather similar to an artist or a musician. Whenever one expresses creativity which arises, by that very process of expressing it linguistically or artistically, the creativity becomes no longer creative. True creativity which is just the quality of the mind which has pure potentiality in silence, on expression becomes knowledge or thought which is basically the dead corpus of insight which we hold on to for some semblance of stability in life. 

I see incorrectness in thought as an inefficient thought loop. It is when presence or attention is trapped onto any objective experience apart from itself and keeps spinning around, like a computer making inefficient usage of its RAM. Thought anywhere on expression produces self similar copies of itself. Anyone inside whom thought has gradually rid itself of a certain falling point, for example different types of social othering or fallen into another, like someone who has developed a certain radicalization or started believing in some dogma without justification will start multiplying and producing self similar copies which are transmitted to everyone around them. In a sort of evolutionary heat diffusion equation it's transmitted to everyone where it conflicts with the thought they have already acquired and they accept it or reject it based on that conflict. This fragmentation and the arising conflict is a quality of thought itself, fundamentally arising because if two individuals have different conditionings they see the same truth in different ways.

I've gone on quite a long tangent but there's another important thing to add. Presence and attention can extract the correct meaning from thought, making it "alive" in a way even on transmission. Though it's difficult to explain this, because we don't really have words for it, it is something I have observed, and it is what I feel the word Beauty originally meant to express. In listening very intently to someone explain a concept which suddenly clicks, In reading certain poems or scriptures, In playing sports when your body responds by itself to a certain stimulus or while playing music while you feel totally in tempo. In all these experiences there's a certain quality of deep attention and also of aliveness, which is also deeply connected to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow state. Though words on a page are a dead way to transmit information, somehow through deep attention they can also be creative instead of just being self similar copies.

phew. Finally I have somewhat laid the groundwork for what I started thinking about (seems rather narcissistic to say). The problem of Livelihood stated clearly, which most of us have to encounter in our lives whether we notice it or not is as follows:

How to affect thought in the world in such a manner that it reflects back radical changes, at least locally, and to do so in a manner in which the thought of the world (your conditioning) doesn't take the central place (otherwise you would just be reflecting the conditioning of the world, which although dark is tantamount to killing yourself at least from a consequentialist perspective)

Locally of course doesn't need to mean spatial proximity, just around your environment which may be digital if you work online. Though I haven't quite solved the problem for myself yet, there are some preliminary observations .

1. Change requires energy for transformation. If one never gives all their attention to change for extended periods of time, there is no base work for any transformation. To earn a livelihood requires a great deal of energy.
2. Your body is technology, Your resources are technology. One of the functions of technology is leverage. Radical perspective shifts in presence are transmitted and amplified into the world through means of different technologies. A problem with technology is that it is constant conflict in a way, and has hidden assumptions. The more complex the technology, the more attention is required to handle it. Technology has a tendency to end up replicating or mirroring itself in your action if it is not paid attention to (e.g. Your body wants you to survive. If you don't pay close attention to it, the mechanisms which are conducive to survival can become maladaptive and cause suffering instead. As another example, social media and most modern technology has the aim of making you a fat and depressed consumer. If you use it without attention that is how you will end up). To earn a livelihood requires a precise usage of technology.
3. An inefficient or incorrect loop in thought can be termed a problem. To earn a livelihood, you need to solve problems. Creating a problem or benefitting from the looping of society in similar patterns isn't a livelihood earned, rather it is a livelihood stolen or cheated.

This is the reason I dislike influencers. Human thought as a whole has a tendency to want to follow; (Nietzsche's slave morality again) to be lazy or to be scared and to expect someone else to solve one's problem for us. We deify people who do so to a large extent (He helped me, maybe he can help you too) and this is amplified by the superficiality and spread of social media. Instead of allowing people to see the futility of projecting responsibility, or to see their own loneliness, to confront their own nihilism, they want to keep them in the same thought patterns so that they can exploit them for their own livelihoods. Of course, I don't blame them for it, because social media technology has divisions built in to it; divisions between the rich and the poor, the attractive and the ugly, the creators and the consumers,. Instead of totally destroying these divisions and utilizing technology in better ways such as for accelerating knowledge acquisition to unheard of levels(at this instant with an internet connection you have almost all the knowledge available in the world at your fingertips), to develop genuine connections with others, they're incentivized to propagate the system. 

TLDR- Representation is Thought, Earn your keep through creatively solving problems, Use technology wisely, Influencers bad.