John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

That we are not pure engines of rationality is actually one of the most obvious things in the world — on logical grounds as much as on empirical grounds. There are, after all, an infinite number of possible logical strings of reasoning that can be followed. Why then do we not pursue these? Why are the set of topics considered by humans so few? Why are we not all mathematicians, pursuing questions as abstruse as algebraic topology? Because those things do not interest us and they do not interest us because they do not seem to offer us anything.

Remember, after all, that logic requires axioms and the logic that informs which set of reasoning we pursue with our thoughts is based on our emotions as axioms.

To understand the effect of the emotions on our decisions, consider how much more work we are willing to do in a day if we exercise intensely as our first activity each morning. Why is this? Because we are not spiritual things, but animals with a definite physiology. And that physiology insures that laziness perpetuates laziness: we think things are not worth doing when our heartrate is too low or when our adrenaline level is too low or when our testosterone level is too low or because of the balance of dopamine or seratonin in the brain. This self-perpetuation of laziness is one of the most dangerous and trapping feedback cycles in the mind. (Yet, when grapsed, it becomes one of the most powerful and liberating.) Bear in mind that our feelings are born of our physiological states and that we can regulate our physiological states with our choice of activities. And these feelings then lead us to our thoughts and the themes we spend our time thinking about. Daily, rigorous physical exercise is one of the best things we can do for ourselves regardless of whether we hope to become great musicians or great mathematicians.

And how dangerous are our emotions when left unregulated by reasoning, when blindly followed. Remember that it is our emotions, for instance, that lead us to our tendency to divide the world into those naturally blessed and those who are not so lucky — and that this tendency does a great deal of damage to us as it tends to radically underestimate the importance of daily activity, prior experience and previous investments of effortful practice on achieving success. Far beyond the effects of erraticly distributed innate talent in individuals, our real inheritance as individual humans is a universal, shared by each of us (though to differing degrees and with differing effects): we are all born with a disposition towards avoiding doing meaningful work and a tendency to follow the course inertia keeps us on, slowly heading into stagnation and increasing entropy. Some of us waste our lives sitting on couches watching television, others pursuing meaningless activities that relieve our overflowing nervous energy.

More specific examples of this failure? Take the belief that successful artists are those born with natural talent, rather than those who have carefully practiced and pursued excellence. Successful artists tend to be those who put in hard work — and the set of genetic traits that lead to hard work may have more to do with the innate talent found in families of the successful than anything else. Great artists, after all, tend to be those who are exceptionally focused, single-minded and unrelenting — often to the point of totalitarian brutality to those around them. (If you need convincing, read stories about Beethoven’s intense violence towards his servants, Einstein’s absolute insistence on quiet in his house for the first hours of the day or Frank Herbert’s merciless treatment of his children.) Hard work does produce results and often it seems that the success of many artists is more proportional to the number of hours they have spent practicing in their life than to anything else. For example, Charlie Parker, widely considered the greatest saxophonist of all time, supposedly spent 3 years practicing 16 to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course there are examples of artists succeeding in spite of little effort and the life of artists after achieving success especially suggests indolence and inborn talent, though more often the truth is that years of struggle bring artists who have won acclaim to a point in which they sit on their laurels because they are exhausted and already contented with the results of their hard work.

Or perhaps more clearly a misjudgment on our part is the notion that those in good physical form are blessed with better bodies naturally, as if a large part of the population naturally had perfectly shaped muscles and no body fat. In spite of this belief, when you talk to people in good shape, most of them work out more often and do harder exercises than those who are not in good shape — usually, they work harder by an enormous degree. (Say running five miles a day versus not doing any exercise at all.)

Why do we get caught into this trap so often? Because we never see all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes: we never see the seemingly endless number of drafts artists produce, the hours spent running on treadmills and lifting weights. We see their effortless performances, attempt to mimic them, fail and thence fall into a despair because we attribute the difference to some magical trait — what philosophers once called a qualitas occulta. But there is more behind our supposition of this magical entity called talent that accounts for all achievement. The belief in talent exculpates us for our failures. By creating a false fatalism, we can go on complaining about our bad luck rather than knowing much of what we do not have we do not have because we could not be bothered to go out and get it.