Moments of Clarity

You know what I mean - those moments when suddenly something that used to be all blurry and confusing suddenly makes perfect sense.

When something that you were telling yourself for a long time suddenly either crystallises into focus, or else gets turned completely around, and you understand why.

When even though nothing special occurred as such, you feel like you've just lived through some big life-changing moment.

When it feels like part of you will never be the same again ...

I'm not actually sure what happened tonight qualifies, but I'll see how I feel about it tomorrow, after sleeping on it. No huge revelation really, just a bit of a shift in how I'm perceiving the value of work, "career", and the meaning society assigns to it - and how it relates to my own journey over the past two and a bit years.

At War With Labels

Yes, this again...

I've been having more and more conflicting thoughts about my use of the "demisexual" label and identity. Not that I've really actively "come out" much in real life - but mostly in the sense of an internal conflict.

Should I use it, or not?
Is it really something particularly unique, or not?
Isn't everyone's sexuality unique anyway?
etc

The last point there is what really gets me thinking sometimes. "Sexual" people on AVEN mention this a lot too - that even among highly sexual people, what attracts people to each other (and what they're "into" sexually) can vary so widely that it can be just as much of a compatibility issue as being somewhere in the grey-asexual/demisexual area.

The core of my problem is basically this though: not experiencing primary sexual attraction is a fairly big clash with stereotypical male heterosexual culture. It's just assumed that straight guys go crazy for random "hot chicks", enjoy the likes of strip clubs, are excited by women "showing lots of skin" in public, that sexual imagery in advertising works on us, that all of us are potential sex industry consumers if it wasn't for moral qualms about it, etc etc etc. When you don't experience the fundamental drive behind any of that at all, it's really a bit like being a whole other "kind". Not really a "normal" heterosexual male at all. And at the moment, about the only way to present yourself as not appreciating these things is via some kind of ethical or moral concerns about it - which of course are a completely separate issue. When you're "demisexual", it doesn't even get to the point of having to consider that, because you're not even seeing anything sexually alluring in that stuff in the first place.

I guess I just find the intellectual dishonesty of the above frustrating. And I don't like being put in that position where a whole heap of cultural baggage is assigned to me because I'm a "straight male", when I'm effectively nothing like what appears to be a far more typical way to tick.

Of course, I could drop all labels and explain my sexuality as an individual thing to people who need to know on a case by case basis - and just ignore the issue of being wrongfully assigned stereotypical heterosexual male cultural baggage. But on the other hand, it's nice to have the concept captured in a single word, both for personal purposes and for that social identity.

Ack. Stalemate.

The Paradox of Choice

I just finished reading Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less".

There are a lot of things in here which overlap quite a bit with certain ideas about materialism and simple living which I've already had in place for a while. Either from socialistic aspects of my upbringing, Buddhism, or general study of philosophy.

From my interpretation - much of the problem with too much choice comes down to the "hedonic treadmill", and how even though this is something nearly everyone can understand in theory, it's very hard to fully grasp and put into practice - learning to stop these mind habits from stressing us out.

It's very easy to think "If only I could have such and such, then everything would be awesome". But then when we get the thing and get used to it, there is always another "such and such" to strive for. Rinse, lather, repeat. Meanwhile we're just stressed and depressed and not enjoying the simple moments of our everyday life.

"Satisficing" and Balance

Of course, there's nothing wrong with having goals and ambitions, but when you're in a mindset where they cause almost nothing but constant stress - maybe with the occasional high for a short while when we "get" something - maybe it's time to step back.

Many of the arguments in the book essentially come down to cultivating a mindset of "Satisficing": just choose what's good enough for a given purpose, and then forget about it - don't question it again. Don't stress about other paths you could have taken if only you did just that little bit more legwork - it almost inevitably leads to more stress than it's worth. Not because any one given decision you made was necessarily objectively good or bad, but because the sum total of all the decisions we make all the time is just so overwhelming these days, that the process of "maximising" all of those decisions adds up to a life of stress, subjectively. Potentially even spiralling down into a feeling of total loss of control, if not clinical depression.

One of the key suggestions the author makes is that we should think of important decisions as irreversible. eg. When you buy a car, don't stress about other makes and models that might be slightly better, and that you might have bought instead if only you did a bit more research. Just enjoy the car you have for what it's worth. 

I would take this a step further: think of ALL decisions as irreversible.

Irreversible Decisions

Not literally.What I mean by this is a bit more subtle, and captured by Impermanence. Every moment of every day is unique, never to be repeated again. So in a sense, by definition every decision we make is irreversible. And even the tiniest decisions can have knock-on effects which change our lives, if only we are mindful enough to see it at the time.

But of course, this doesn't mean that we have to keep doing things which are obviously going in a very bad direction (eg. Just two weeks ago I started and then quit a job 3 days later - because it turned out very unsuitable). It's more about not nit-picking and second guessing all the time when things are in fact good enough (there's that "satisficing" mindset again). As well as learning from "bad" decisions in a way which is mentally channelled into feeling like a positive life lesson rather than a negative nagging feeling of regret. 

In short: with the right attitude, I think all our decisions and experiences can actually be made to feel like reasonably positive life lessons, rather than an endless treadmill of hedonic failures and dissatisfaction.

Anyway, these are the main things I got out of it. A highly recommended read.