prayer

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.

April Musings

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

It’s never been surprising to me why Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world. He has obviously worked on the skill of conversation–not easy amid all the preachiness and outrage of today. His pacing is good, people don’t talk over or past each other, and you get a sense of who each guest is as a human being. Every week he keeps millions of listeners engaged with episodes that are nearly half as long as the average audiobook.

But over the last year or two I witnessed, in real time, a tragic change in the mood of Joe Rogan’s podcast. His signature ability to host people with a variety of views, the very thing that made him interesting, has practically vanished from his show.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see someone who I knew held different political views than those Rogan has been championing so vociferously in almost all his recent episodes. Great, I thought, Joe is finally getting out of his slump. But alas, in that one episode he avoided the subject of politics–and any opportunity to be challenged.

My takeaway is not so much that Rogan is a coward, but that few media personalities can withstand the terrible self-reinforcing feedback loop that goes with the enterprise. It traps them into telling their audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. Audience capture is the neologism that describes this phenomenon–a term that, tellingly, has entered the parlance since the advent of podcasting.

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The Christian faith teaches us to pray and then say, “Praise God,” even if the answer is different from what we wanted. In the words of Daniel’s three friends, “God is able to save us but even if he doesn’t we will stay true to him” (Daniel 8:17-18).

As a practicing Christian, something about that teaching has always sat heavy with me because it can feel as if it lets God off the hook. But recently I heard something that brought clarity to the conundrum. A group of us from church watched a short presentation by Pete Greig. He believes God does answer prayer but that we all exist in a labyrinthine ecosystem of 3 W’s: World, War and Will.

World–Our world has to work a certain way for life to continue. Except for occasional miracles, God must remain true to the laws of nature or we would experience utter chaos. This affects how our prayers are answered.

War–Satan (original meaning: the accuser) works against God in individual situations, although Christians believe Satan will ultimately be defeated. This also affects how our prayers are answered.

Will–Despite our best intentions, our perspective is finite, and sometimes we are praying outside the will of God. Again, this affects how our prayers are answered.

While the 3 W’s don’t eliminate all the tension–tension is an integral part of faith–it reminds us that we do not exist in a vacuum. Each prayer we breathe is interrelated to countless parts of our lives, not to mention the lives of people around us.

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One of my personal goals is to be less judgmental and that people could feel mercy and acceptance from me. It occurred to me the other day that I often feel judgmental toward people because I feel indignant toward them. How can they do or think or say that, and I don’t! Sometimes, if we’re honest, we are judgmental because we secretly wish we were experiencing something of what they’re experiencing. If you think about it, a close relative of judgment is envy.

Of course, if the other party’s actions are truly wrong, the end results can never be attractive. Once we see things as they are, we either accept the merit of those we have been judging and join them, or we see the pain they are headed for. Either way our heart softens toward them. We certainly don’t get bent out of shape with any form of judgment, or of envy, which is its evil twin. Compassion and goodwill are the beautiful antidotes to judgment.