021: Change the lens to change the experience

545 words.

Our state can be exactly the same, but because our perception has changed, our response to it has changed as well. This has the enlightening implication that what we experience doesn’t matter, more so how we interpret. Being able to hack this lens is an immense power, since our agency can never be surrendered without our consent.

I wonder whether it means to be more mindful about how our environment affects us, since negative experiences are so when we tacitly agree to allow the experience to be negative. At the risk of sounding like a clockcuckoolander, every experience has a possible silver lining to it.

Notice the use of the word ‘experience’ instead of the term ‘event’. Again, this is returning to how the core issue for many of us is the experience of the event instead of the event itself. Emphasise on the impact the event has on us.

What else are the implications? There is a post-process that impacts how we interpret the experience, as some silver linings may take a while to spot. Maybe with a lot of peering and rotation.

As I write this, I imagine a scientist turning a cube around, trying to spot a speck of ‘blessing’ or ‘miracle’.

Being able to make the best of every experience is a superpower rarely people have, perhaps the most important one of all. For all the noise being made in your environment, maybe 70% can be cut out once people (including yourself) can change your lens into a rose-tinted one.

There is a tension between being able to appreciate what has happened versus striving to make progress. What motivates the drive to improve, if not the dissatisfaction of what has gone on before? This dissatisfaction is the core of what pushes some to make things happen. It is either at how the event has happened, or desiring a different impact to be created.

How to navigate this tension? The two ends of the spectrum also seem to be linked to ‘community-optimising’ and ‘individual-optimising’. Rose-tinted lens carries the maximum short-term payoff for the individual, with 0 cost and potential unlimited upside. Profound dissatisfaction carries the maximum long-term payoff for the community (barring the protagonist’s closest circle, maybe. Permanently dissatisfied people are dissatisfying to be around). The protagonist does bear the cost of the immediate dissatisfaction, and whatever they do to resolve the situation.

Within a short time, we have constructed a spectrum between optimism vs pessimism, community vs individual, long-term vs short-term. Although the latter two are surface tools anyone can use in their analyses.

Also do recognise that it takes time to develop skill in use of any tool. What matters is the willingness to keep getting at it. This word vomit is a one after a long stretch of nothing. I was fooling around with voice notes for a fair amount of time, which is much more accessible than sitting down at a device to key these words.

There are compounding benefits to the writing though. Even though I see some bloat in it, there is demand to focus and make sure line-by-line, whatever that is being written is logical from the previous line.

Until next time.