Hard Work.

 As someone who just recently finished school, the phrase "someone is working really hard" is something that has been thrown around a lot for students, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that hard work or to be more precise, self-flagellating effort is pretty worthless and is in fact indicative of some deep rooted problems which need to be resolved.

Now, just saying this probably has some alarm bells ringing for you, since as a society we romanticize such activity a lot, but once I explain my points I think you would have a better understanding of what I mean. 

The Stories we Tell ourselves

Our personality and our social interactions are mostly made up of stories; stories we tell each other and stories we tell ourselves. The fact that stories are convenient fictions created to derive meaning from objective reality does not deter them from having profound effects on that same objective reality; Money for example, is a story that we tell ourselves, but a huge proportion of all interactions everyday are guided by it. 

A language is a story. A mathematical proof is a story. Any system of logic which is built upon some axioms and then derives things from that is a story. The fact is that objective reality, when we strip it of all the meaning we attribute to it, is a flux of interactions moving in harmony and constantly changing. Anything which makes sense of this flux can be called as a story. To confront this flux as it is is beautiful, however the sheer dynamicness of its nature is also terrifying. This is why a story fixes the sense perceptions of a certain moment and provides meaning to them through symbolic representation.

Anyway, some of the most important stories are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Of course, like all stories these are necessarily false, and not isomorphic to the sheer richness of the flux which the mind-body is capable of. However, due to some reason (or perhaps something beyond causality), as we grow up from children, we accumulate a lot of societal stories and programming. This is necessary to survive in the world, but all these stories are adaptations for survival, not happiness. When some of these adaptations are responses to events that no longer happen in reality, we may be termed neurotic.

The Mechanism of Stories and Action

These stories we tell ourselves are deeply connected to how we conduct ourselves in the world. In fact, they are the only way of telling us how we should orient ourselves in the world apart from reacting to each moment (or perhaps that is a claim stronger than what I have evidence for). Stories are deeply connected to the frameworks I mentioned in the last post, in fact stories can be considered as a way of encapsulating and transmitting frameworks which also hold the content of said frameworks inside them.

Stories are also deeply connected to thought; Thought is nothing but a collection of stories of different kinds and these stories also qualify the conditions for being thought i.e. they are representative, metacognitive and use memory/symbols to transmit information. The mechanism of how stories relate to action is rather interesting. If you interpret the world to be a certain way then you act in accordance to those beliefs; you are attached to that belief. If the world corresponds to how you feel you feel positive reinforcing emotions and if the world doesn't correspond to how you feel your belief is shattered. It is like your brain is in a constant state of confirmation bias or looking for some patterns to find some semblance of comfort. We are evolved to minimize some sort of objective function, i.e. to perceive the world in such a way that helps us to evolve, not to perceive the world as it is in itself. 

Emotions and actions accompany beliefs which affect the outside world. We have a tendency to get caught up in self prophesizing because what we believe, we enact and those are the results the world ends up reflecting on to us. 

Hardwork and Self Sabotage.

The stories we tell ourselves don't really reflect reality. They are delusional to different levels basically depending on how conscious we are of them as they operate on us and our emotions. Holding a grudge is nothing but telling yourself a story repeatedly about how someone wronged you, and acting suspiciously or isolating towards that person. As an adaptive mechanism it would make sense; why remain in the company of someone who hurt you? There is a chance that they might do it again which is what leaves you constantly suspicious and anxious. 

Since we are programmed from so many different sources since our childhood, these stories often also tend to tell us different stories about different things. For example, while a societal story of upward mobility might tell you that you have infinite potential if you utilize it correctly, your upbringing or early interactions at school might have told you that you will never be good enough and don't deserve the company of others. Though it may seem ridiculous to you that people hold such beliefs, it is highly likely that you are deceiving yourself and also hold such similar ridiculous sounding beliefs on the inside. 

Now, hardwork is another such story we tell ourselves. Remember a time you thought you worked extremely hard. That sense of intense hard work is actually nothing but a conflict between a self sabotaging story you tell yourself and another story which tells you to aim up. Forcing yourself to wake up at 5 am everyday or studying for 10 hours is avoiding the broader problem of confronting the programming which sabotages you in the first place.

Hard work does indeed have the ability to change a person's life. If you submit to authority long enough, or practice violence upon yourself long enough, it is possible that that belief will be eradicated (though it is much more possible that it will transform into a different more twisted form), but even then it is much more inefficient than directly confronting those beliefs. It is therefore much more important to know who to work with and what to work at. 

Real Hard Work.

What does real hard work look like? Real hard work to me is like playing a sport. In a sport it is not optimal to continue to complain about how unlucky you losing a point was, or holding on to anger instead of transmuting it into intensity.  What is necessary is immense quiet intensity, total responsibility and unbreakable lazer sharp focus. A degree of playfulness, fun and creative expression is also involved which leaves you ecstatic when you are in the process and totally drained when you are done. Though society tells us it is possible to do this 8 hours a day 5 days a week (after which we get burnt out and destroy ourselves for 2 days), A much healthier system would be 4 hours a day every day of the week. 

This is why I think that we get exactly what we want. Not what we think we want, but what we want deep inside. If you confront yourself and let go of self limiting beliefs then only the part of you aiming up remains. However, self flagellating effort is at best an inefficient and violent way to deal with these beliefs and at worst a prime reason for burnout. 

We struggle to deal with these beliefs which are adapted for our survival directly because there is extreme fear in letting go of something which helps you survive. It is almost a form of death and change, which we slowly need to learn to accept. Dying is alive but to live on is to die.