stream of consciousness

How to Make Your Mind Unhackable

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Park benches are like messengers from another world. Day by day, they noiselessly preside over the wharf, or over a church yard somewhere off to the side of a windstrewn hodgepodge of grave markers. At the church we attend, there is a bench with a message emblazoned on it. Having always assumed it said something like, Rest in Peace, Laura, I never stopped to take note of its message. At least 90 percent of park benches are inscribed to someone who’s deceased, which makes them all the more ghostlike.

Then the other day I took the time to read it. It has that old line, ‘Use your hands for service, your heart for love, your mind for truth, etc.’ It seems an entirely appropriate blurb for a church that claims John Wesley as its spiritual ancestor. So wholistic. John Wesley sought to be a Christian who is both pious and concerned about helping others. I can sign on to that. That said, it does seem like Methodism, in an effort to be wholistic, has become almost too unoffensive, if that’s possible. Someone called it the Canada of the Christian church. (By the way, wholistic and holistic are both valid spellings. I’m just trying to be a good Methodist and acknowledge both spellings.)

Back to park benches, what do you think of the quote? I know it has the ring of a cliche, and that it is almost trite enough to write inside a fortune cookie. But that bit about using the mind for truth is quite salient for anything it may lack in originality. Especially so, given the unprecedented amount of bad and deleterious information out there. Truth, my friends, that’s where it’s at. Just hold onto truth and you’ll be okay.

Of course, I say this tongue in cheek, because who could ever purport to know truth. Jesus said you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Here’s a mini-syllogism for you: I know very few people who are really free all the time, so that must mean most of us haven’t really found the truth yet. Most times when we find a ‘truth’ that sets us free in one area, it brings with it a fresh bondage. For instance, if you become a billionaire, it will free you up to travel and enjoy all sorts of nice things, but you’re no longer free to be happy-go-lucky about your wealth. You’ll have to manage and invest it. Most billionaires also have to hire security detail, which is a phrase that, to this day, doesn’t intuitively make sense to me. Why the hell do we say security detail? The phrase sounds almost as de-humanising as the concept.

I’m probably being self-indulgent to pick on the rich, but I reckon Elon Musk is an example of someone who doesn’t use his mind for truth. He likes to put forth the image of being a modern day Nikola Tesla, but do we realise we cannot attribute a single invention to him even if we wanted to? But why would anyone want to? Fawn over a person who creates such vast economic injustice. He didn’t personally invent the electric car, internet payments, or any kind of underground tunnels, nor did he personally make any advances in rockets. At least with Grubhub, some dudes named Matt Maloney and Mike Evans invented something: online takeaway websites. But they did it quietly and regally, like park benches. They didn’t launch campaigns to convince the world they’re epochal geniuses. Also, they didn’t con governments into subsidising their failing businesses.

It’s also true that Elon Musk has mused repeatedly that the world could be a simulation video game that he’s playing. It’s not overly comforting: he is the person in charge of more of the world’s resources than any other individual in history, and he sees the millions of people deprived of life’s basic necessities as mere pawns and not even real pawns at that. And yet these same pawns in his game will happily put out for him in marches. How easily we are bamboozled into trusting the very people who have our worst in mind.

The current American president is the quintessential con artist. How was a billionaire huckster whose companies filed for bankruptcy six times able to get half the country to vote for him not once, but 3 times? His personal wealth has doubled since taking office the second time in 2024. How could he be for the working class? He also facilitated the most expensive U.S. House race in history at 35 million dollars to unseat one of the last principled, citizen-centred legislators in America.

It can feel like like a losing battle, but it is important to name and shame people like Trump and Elon, if for no other reason to maintain our own grounding in a reality that still assumes right and wrong. Clearly, these two snake oil salesmen extraordinaire are not operating from reality, at least not the reality that seeks to create justice and flourishing for all people on earth.

We must, however, exert significantly more energy into righting that which is wrong in our immediate sphere of influence. Whatever the best way is to think of the devil, the Christian faith teaches that he is the father of lies. How has he messed up our own minds and made so that we aren’t, as the park bench advises, using them for truth? I find that if I can harness my mind as an ally, the quality of my life improves by orders of magnitude. I desperately need a mind attuned to truth. Every time I turn around, some new lie awaits me. A vast chasm still separates what I want from what I need, from what nourishes me. Wasting two hours on the internet feels like the right thing at the time, but one feels truly horrible afterward. Running 20 kilometres feels unpleasant during the run, but you feel amazing the rest of the day.

My current top 5 hacks for making my mind unhackable:

  1. Do things that are more body-centric. I’ve been acquiring simple physical exercises I can do in my living room, such as glute bridges, planks and sit-ups. None of the activities in my repertoire are terribly fun at first, but I have found some that are habit-forming and not too strenuous. Other activities, push-ups, for example, I find even less fun, so I mostly avoid them.
  2. Breath and breath prayers. Scrunch up the muscles in a given area of the body on the one breath, and luxuriously release them on the out breath. Pray, ‘Jesus, Son of David,’ on the in breath, and, ‘Have mercy on me a sinner,’ on the out breath.
  3. Positive distractions. I try to keep an assortment of interesting podcasts and audiobooks, so that when there’s a lull, I have something I can turn to. I find it good to keep a to-do list of manageable, bite-sized activities around the house.
  4. I like to log on and allow myself one game of Scrabble online against the computer, then note down new words the computer plays. My goal is still to reach a 1700 WESPA rating by 2030. Woogle.io is ad-free, and the best site I’ve found so far.
  5. It’s worth it to pause and get into another person’s orbit. Make eye contact with them and empathise with their problems. Musk is wrong, life is not a simulation. Having a solipsistic outlook makes me miserable. I will schedule a walk or a jog with a friend when I start feeling disregulated.

What Humility Is and Isn’t (But Then I Could Be Wrong)

Gideon Yutzy1 Comment

Humility, much like life itself, is a treacherous maze.

On one hand, we don’t want to view ourselves with self-loathing. What kind of lame-o (fun American epithet) would go through their decades of existence on this crazy planet of ours and never come to terms with who they are. Not me, that’s for sure! No, seriously though, I want to stand in front of a mirror and say, “I like such and such thing about myself,” and for that to feel perfectly acceptable. Or with some quirk I have, to enjoy it and say, “I’m really glad I do/think this.” The problem is that we all tend to veer off into self-absorption, and nobody likes a prick, now do they?

Nothing is more attractive than humility, and nothing is more unattractive than pride. Someone who is humble is self-aware, which is worlds apart from self-absorbed. In fact, we are drawn to people who are self-aware. A self-aware person may realize they have a talent most people in the room don’t share, but they also understand the context of why that’s true. They know that every desirable trait comes with a trade-off. They are equally aware of what they have and what they don’t have. They know that if they have a special gifting, they probably lack something else, unless they’re flippin’ Leonardo da Vinci. That guy could do it all.

Humble people know any human feat comes with a lot of luck, with a lot of stars aligning. It awes me to no end to see someone demonstrate a near god-like knowledge or ability that I hadn’t even known they possess. It’s very un-American to do that. We Americans just plunk our cards onto the table. We’re often bombastic and averse to subtlety (unlike the ‘b’ in subtlety, it’s very subtle), whereas Europeans can be so annoyingly mysterious. A German, for instance, might apologize for not having better English, but then it will emerge that they hold a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the English language than we could ever hope to have, along with fluency in at least three other languages. But then we Americans gave the world Scrabble, and that’s not nothing. A gentleman by the name of Alfred Butts invented it, during the Great Depression when money was hard to come by. You can check Mr. Butts’ story out for yourself if you are so inclined.

Once when an old friend of mine was training to become a pilot, I was having dinner at his house and we were discussing it. His dad happened to be there, too, and he made a joke–at his son’s expense, really. He posed the question: “How do you know when there’s a pilot in the room?” Then looking at his son out of the corner of his eye, in a slightly non-self-aware manner, he delivered the punchline: “They’ll tell you.” He had a point. I still feel incriminated to this day, although I have never even once pretended to be a pilot. Rather, I know that when I speak to you about some topics, I’ll exhaust the extent of my knowledge or ability in fifteen seconds, rather than building up to it. Sorry about that! I promise to work on it.

I read a book by a Buddhist monk who said we stay humble by remembering that we’re all interconnected and we’re all equally mortal. Each passing day brings us that much nearer to the day of our death. All of us. And we all die alone. How’s that for a bit of uplift on a Monday? We struggle into the world alone, and we shall also struggle out alone. You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/you’ve got to walk it by yourself. Thus our lives are bookended by suffering, by crushing, poignant suffering that is more than any mortal should have to bear, let alone billions of us. It should make us all more compassionate toward each other.

And you’d think it would. Make us more compassionate. Knowing we are all finite mortals who could easily keel over this very day at the drop of a hat, you’d think it would. It behooves us (which is a semi-archaic expression that can also be written behoves us) to be less judgmental, less competitive, and ultimately less proud.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little healthy swagger. Humility doesn’t have to cancel out swagger, and in fact swagger can be endearing, in small doses, though Elon Musk probably overdoes it. His main achievement was becoming the world’s most memorable man-child, a difficult feat given today’s crowded field of contenders. Yes, yes, electric car corporations and clean energy and all that, but let’s not forget that he, as the man who controls more money than any other individual in history, bought the votes needed to elect a squat ogre with a front-butt as president, the latter being an individual I don’t necessarily hate, I just see the role of volunteer parking attendant for a mid-sized town’s summer parade as a better fit for him than US president. That said, some pretty strange people have occupied the office in the past. Anyway, that’s sort of off topic. Back to legitimate swagger, you know who really deserves to swagger? People who can parallel park an electric car, or a chip-oil car, or any car really. I find it oddly impressive to watch them look into their rearview, doff their hair suavely, and then coolly navigate into spaces nobody else even attempts. That way they spend less time searching for parking spaces and walking to their appointments. Something like that, if you swagger about that, you’ve earned it. I respect good parallel-parkers with just the right amount of swagger, if you want to know the truth.

Humility also doesn’t cancel out dignity. Dignity is different from arrogance. Every time we meet another person, we set out our stall. We greet them, in subtle ways (at least if you’re European), announcing to them our vision of reality. That’s not pride, that’s dignity. That’s bearing the image of the Divine faithfully, to the best of our current understanding as to how it should be borne.