Willing Control

Section 1: Growing out of the Chaos

As children, the world around us seems vast and chaotic. The relationship between geography and culture, seems obscure. The realm of science, mysterious, and we don’t understand why politics are a certain way and why it matters. We have no clue how to manage our time, nor do we control our emotions. Lastly, we have no sense of urgency. As kids, our days are spent waiting for the weekend to see our friends to hang out, or we just live on a day to day basis. This, in a sense, is a chaotic view of life as we end up living reactionarily, instead of working to establish an order from the medley of stimuli around us.

Aging accumulates responsibilities and soon, we begin to see that there IS indeed an order to the world around us. A job means we have tasks we need to finish within a certain period and the relationship we share with our friends ages with us as well. As teens, we spend more time “chilling” or “hanging out” but in adulthood, or with the progression of maturity, we begin to seek the deeper meaning of friendship, trying to live richer experiences, digest richer forms of media, and have deeper conversations. This is further highlighted if we’ve gotten past an event of awareness throughout our adulthood or life.

A period of awareness, or an awakening, as some call it, is any circumstance that causes a person to re-evaluate their perspective in life; some grand, eye-opening realization that hits you and you’re never the same again. This can come in the form of an achievement (perhaps after finishing a degree), a traumatic experience (whether near death for the individual or the passing of a close friend or relative), transference (you see another person changing their life around and you decide to change yours), aging or any such event that causes a person to “blink” and see the world with new eyes and under a new understanding.

I believe that this sort of event is inevitable. The human mind is designed in a way to think upon itself and its logic as it rewires itself and evaluates its choices; if not at the age of 30, then perhaps by the age of 60, or perhaps just before the moment of death when our lives flash by before us. Eventually, the past catches up with us and we’re forced to think about what we chose to do to get us to where we are.

Under The Speakback Cycle, we get our brain to acknowledge the words it uses to help us create a better, internal environment for clear thinking. The clearer thinking then provides us with a new vision that allows us to delve deeper into the information we readily speak and hear. For example, the phrase “guilty pleasure”, allows us to live in a chaotic state where it feels like something is truly out of our hands. We use the phrase to express something that we enjoy and feel bad for doing simultaneously. Phrasing it that way, we convince ourselves that that’s how we feel. If we spend some more time thinking about the phrase, we realize that the two feelings of “Pleasure” and “Guilt” are mutually exclusive. You can’t feel good about something that makes you feel bad. In taking time to analyse the statement, we begin to take the first step to realizing ourselves. Once this realization of the duality of the phrase is made, the helplessness that surrounds the feelings associated with guilty pleasures changes almost instantly. In acknowledging a guilty pleasure’s paradoxical nature, either we accept this thing or habit into our behaviour as a pleasure we enjoy, or we stop doing it to avoid feeling guilty. To continue practicing it and calling it a guilty pleasure is to be content with living in an illusion.

In establishing a relationship between ourselves and our actions, we take responsibility for what we want to occur. Then, if we behave appropriately, and work towards our desires, e.g lowering our weight, being more social, we reaffirm our control over our environment and move closer to our desired future. All the sudden, we realize that we could have always lowered our weights if only we kept at our diets for longer, or found a different approach and ignored the stimuli that prevented us from achieving our goals. We could’ve gone to more social events if we just put off the video games or TV shows for and went out with our friends. If we don’t feel like attending a social event that people are going to, we don’t feel bad for sitting it out as we have other things on our mind and we realize that our time is valuable. This is essentially what becoming an adult feels like.

While humans are social creatures in youth, aging moves us slowly towards a sort of solitude in which we put ourselves before others. This is the crux of the quarter life crisis: intimacy vs isolation.

Teenagers identify themselves by who their friends are, and to what clique they belong. They have their inside jokes and they support each other as a pack. This is intimacy. Adults, having gone through their childhood and experiences, identify themselves by their own terms and beliefs. An adult considers their own desires as primary to others’ and tend to keep only a few people very close to them. This is isolation.

However, in the face of so many social events around us, and especially since it’s easier to stay in touch with people in 2018, how do we control these two opposing methods of life in which we keep our friends and our social life while maintaining our own path towards our goals?

In our day to day lives, we are either in a state of work or rest. Work here is identified as spending time/energy doing the stuff we want to get done or spending time/energy doing stuff that has to get done. This can range from fulfilling obligations at a job to practicing a hobby. It’s spending time to fulfill the challenges you take on in life and accept. On the other end of the spectrum, is rest. Human beings not only fatigue but we also require a certain mood to work happily; sometimes we want to take a break and rest. rest is ultimately how we choose to spend our time not “working”. Striking a balance between work and rest is the key to reaching your goals; simply put, it’s time management.

Working as we grow up means different things at different ages. When younger, it might be centered around academics, or finishing tasks our parents give us. As we grow up and gain independence, we begin setting our own schedule and even something like gaming can become work, if improving at the game is so important to you. We also become less likely to compromise not doing the work as we care about the results of the work. We realize that we only have so much time in our lives to accomplish what we’ve always dreamed of achieving. The idea that work is tiring, and play is fun, slowly shifts such that we enjoy working because we enjoy productivity. If not at a formal job, then at least when we spend time with ourselves or spend time finishing challenges we set for ourselves. We also begin noticing what is considered work and what is play and how often we are spending time doing one or the other. This instills a sense of accountability for the results of our life. After all, if we spend all our time participating in play or rest (practicing hobbies, meeting up with people, watching movies, napping), who can we blame but ourselves when there’s work to be done and we haven’t done it?

In short, it’s up to us to manage ourselves once we establish that we can either work towards our goals or take a break from working. Life starts off chaotic, but with age we gain competency, maturity, intelligence, accountability and other traits that allow us to control our course; shifting the complicated reality to a manageable tangle of necessary actions.

Assuming we play while in a state of rest, work and play, then, are just categories for actions we take and our mental state while taking them. Some people compete in video games to an extent that playing the video game and improving in it, is work, not play. Likewise, there are people who practice sports for fun and consider them play, not work despite their being professional athletes. Additionally, we can always reassign our goals such that we spend our time doing what we newly consider work. This is akin to dropping one hobby for another or taking new interest in a subject. So long as we are thinking of where we want to go and what we’re currently doing to get there, we can gain better control over our work and play cycle. However, there is an additional layer to the order that doesn’t work out so nicely all the time.

Emotion plays a large role in directing our actions towards work or rest. People who lack motivation will be tempted to rest more often as the energy required for play is less than that of work. However, it is precisely getting work done that gives us motivation to work in the first place. Human beings love being productive in the things they deem worthy of producing. Nothing feels greater than committing to a goal and achieving it. Once we define an endpoint to move towards, stepping in the right direction makes us happy and proud of our own attempts, even if we fail.

The truest dread I feel one can experience, is finding themselves unable to work on the things they want because they find it easier to spend their time playing or resting. The psyche ends up keeping that person in stasis until finally, they muster up the desire to begin, provided it’s not too late.

What if that desire to work were easier to control that we imagined, and work could become more enjoyable than previously thought?

Perhaps all that’s needed is to approach it from a different angle.

Section 2: Emotional Willfulness

Emotions grow with us, and similarly, emotions go through phases of chaos and control as we age. When we are very young (<10), our emotions are ephemeral, and we don’t dwell too long on what had happened yesterday or a week ago, as the passage of time seems slower; what happened a few days ago seems like ages past. As we grow into teenagers, our feelings of longing for others, and wanting to belong to a group of friends or a clique, increases significantly and our sense of time becomes slightly faster. A couple of days might not feel too long, but we still consider a month a long time. Teenagers will focus more than children or adults on smaller interactions that either would take for granted, like holding hands or embracing in a hug. As we go about our separate routes into adulthood, our emotions become so personal until eventually we find it difficult to share our emotions entirely with people as teenagers would, also, our sense of time becomes faster and now, even a month or two isn’t that far away. Our own experiences collect sentimental value until we are confronted with the problem of intimacy vs isolation, when our views triumph over what other people think. We accept that we feel a certain way and others feel different.

Concurrently, our prioritization of different tasks changes with time. As a kid we might focus more on playing and having fun, as teenagers we might be further interested in learning new skills to impress others or trying stuff out for ourselves to learn and make mistakes. As we become adults, our view of the world is so severely changed that I believe it necessary we take time to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask who we have become and what we want to be. Most people who believe they’ve reached adulthood seem to think it’s an endpoint of growth, blind to the fact that it’s just another point on an endless timeline. To your 50-year-old self, your 30-year-old self is still a kid that has much to learn.

I’m nearly 30 and I can say, with certainty, that I feel different than my 25-year-old self. One thing that I was able to grasp well, was emotional control. Obviously, some people require anger management and some traumatic experiences make it impossible for people to control themselves. I, however, found that my journey to controlling my emotions started with controlling bad habits. I recall playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, and like most people who are familiar with the series, I would utter profanities when someone sneaked up on me and killed me, or I was close to getting a kill streak and died. One day, on a whim, I decided to try and suppress that reaction. It took a few tries, but not very many, and just like that, I felt myself become much calmer. That calmness has never left me and since, I’ve expanded it to other forms of anger. In my current understanding of the emotional spectrum and feelings, anger is the opposite of patience, and perhaps I’ll expand on that in another post, but what I want to get at is that emotions can be controlled if we truly intend to control them, but you need to want it deep down inside yourself.  You need to be wary of the reaction you have to the stimulus and you need to be conscious of the adjustment you’re trying to construct. With these two things in mind, you will find that changing for the better isn’t that difficult to do.

We all have pangs of emotions we are unable to control, and life can be quite stressful sometimes, but my request is not that people control their emotions immediately, but rather, become familiar with both their own emotions and feelings. Recognizing reactions to pieces of information, people’s behaviour as well as our own behaviour, will be the first steps to realizing how to control our emotions and become in tune with our feelings.

Emotions are the mental aspect of being and cover things like happiness, sadness, remorse and pride. Emotion occurs in the mind and it evokes a reaction unto the body or an action from the body. Happiness makes us feel light, excitement makes us giddy and remorse puts that pit in our stomach. When I talk about emotions, I’m talking about the mental portion of our feelings. Feelings are the physical manifestations of the emotions we carry, and will include things like “butterflies in the stomach” and that pulling feeling you get before a scary test you haven’t properly studied for. When I talk about feelings, I’m talking about the physical result of your emotions. These are two sides to the same coin and changing one will change the other because they are co-dependent. When we realize we’re feeling upset or agitated, we might feel fidgety, irritable, or uncomfortable due to the sensation of rage. If we can think about the emotion we carry, and why we carry it, we define the origin of the feeling, and we can then work on resolving the emotion, to clear our negative feelings. This is basically what happens when something enraging occurs, and we think to ourselves “It’s okay, this is going to be fine”; we are attempting to replace the emotion of anger with serenity, and many times, it’ll work, dissipating our anger and allowing us to maintain our composure.

You might not be able to switch your brain from sad to happy in an instant, but once you can recognize that something makes you feel one way or another, you can begin either scheduling or avoiding that stimulus to change how you feel, or you can try to analyse your reaction and work on changing it. When I tried to stop cursing while playing videogames, I would think the thought but not utter anything at first; or I’d get the tensing up of muscles, characteristic of rage, and mentally wonder why a video game was causing my body to behave so erratically.  Your mind and body are not separate, but rather, live in an intricate web of feedback loops we call behaviour. From the chaos of childhood, we all sink into a system that works for us. When younger, we are not in control of our emotions, nor our feelings, nor do we recognize the relationship between the two and our actions. This can make teenagers behave in an unpredictable way for reasons they don’t understand. This is part of the reason why teenagers want to do their own thing, frequently going through rebellious phases or behaving atypically.

When I was a teenager I’d wear a trench coat (actually, a black raincoat) nearly everywhere I went. I had a logo that symbolized who I was at the time stitched on the back and I loved wearing that coat. I’d also wear 11 bracelets on my arm and I’d give out some of them to people who left an impression on me, but weren’t close friends, then I’d replace the gifted bracelet with another to get the number back to 11. My brother dyed his hair blonde and spiked it, and many other teens have done weirder stuff. These sort of habits or tendencies die out when we’re old enough to question what we want to do with our lives and why we are living a certain way. As a kid, we might do something dangerous for the adrenaline rush, or say something obscene to get a reaction out of people. However, once we are old enough to analyse our emotions and feelings, we realize that that sort of thing is not what we are after in life, we desire something grander and it’s up to us to find and retrieve it. When we become more attuned with our emotions and feelings, we are able to prepare better for coming events; A teenager might attribute the sinking feeling they get before a test to the difficulty of the subject, but an adult that recognizes this feeling inside them would just prepare for the subject until they felt ready to take the test, prepared to compromise their social outing or free time to ensure they get the grade they’re after.

This brings us to the emotion that allows us to commit to decisions in our life: willfulness or intention.

Willfulness is the emotion we have that sets us onto something. Whether it is willfulness to set up plans with an individual, intention to start a company or willfulness to argue; willfulness is the emotion that allows us to commit our mental energy to carrying out an act. Willfulness is what allows us to exert effort. If we are unwilling to commit an act, then we do not put effort towards the act. The manifestation of willfulness is the closest thing I could describe “Free will” as; that feeling you get when you know for sure, this is what you want to do, and you’re committed to doing it for as long as it takes.

Keep in mind, sometimes humans succumb to akrasia, which is when one does something against their better judgement, e.g a person on a diet eating a cookie. In my mind, free will is the opposite of akrasia. One is adhering to the choices you make for your future and one is abandoning those same choices. Furthermore, just like other emotions, our will is not constant. There are moments when we are tired or overwhelmed that we don’t have free will as we cannot perform the acts we truly desire.

Firstly, if we recognize that we are feeling under the weather and aren’t behaving the way we wanted to, it’s a start to try and push ourselves into doing what we consider the right thing, even if we don’t feel like it in the moment.  As mentioned in The Speakback Cycle, our desires should transcend feelings as we desire things in the infinitive, and emotions are only felt in the present. Secondly, while I find that thinking in total self allows me to stay focused on my desires and maintain my drive for longer, it is up to each of us to figure out what is required of us to maintain our own free will. If not, then we surrender our actions to the forces that push us into doing one thing or another, potentially by means of akrasia; we keep partaking in the guilty pleasures or making excuses for why we haven’t done what we told ourselves we intended to do.

Albeit tricky, if we can stay awake in mind and wary of emotion and feeling, we can take this concept of emotional willfulness and apply it inwardly upon our thoughts (and by extension, our behaviour) to arrive at the question of whether we are willing to feel a certain way about something or not. This, in turn, can lead us to questioning the habits we formed so long ago (as teenagers perhaps) and allow us to take initiative on rewiring our brain.

We can will to remove the bad habits we said we’d stop practicing for so long, we can will to start achieving the stuff we’ve always wanted to do, and we can will our behaviour into the order of our choosing so long as we set ourselves up to will our desires over other possibilities.

We set our environment and our environment in turn, affects what we do.

Section 3: Imagination and Entertainment in the Work Play Cycle

Even though it seems like productivity should be the main thing humans do (we get stuff done in life, right?) it is necessary to take time off to rest our cables and kick back and relax. In Some way, the human mind is hooked up to enjoy alternating between these two states of work and play (or rest).

Work isn’t satisfying unless we can get some time off for ourselves, otherwise we suffer from stress and fatigue, but resting isn’t fun if we haven’t gotten any work done because then we feel lethargic and bored.

Surely enough, there must be some sort of a levelness of these two modes of operation that supplies one with the satisfaction of achievement and the excitement of play.

The method in which we choose to rest has a significant impact on the way that we work. Currently, the term “Entertainment” has, in a way, replaced “Fun” for many people. With the larger production budgets of TV shows, the internet, and higher production in video games, and other forms of entertainment, people can spend an infinite amount of time watching TV shows, movies and playing videogames whenever they choose, never reaching the end of the produced media. However, this infinite stream of entertainment can also become limiting, as entertainment drains us of imagination when it comes to the way in which we use it to have fun, and how it interacts with our brain.

The requirements for having fun from our internal source (imagination) is very different from the requirements of a person to have fun from an external source (entertainment).

Put into simple terms, with reference to play, imagination is when we get enjoyment from the process of mental creation. This includes things like playing musical instruments, drawing, writing, playing sports, cinematography, photography, etc. Imagination in a sense, requires that we use our brain to generate the pleasure we experience. There’s plenty of evidence for the effects of imagination on growing children in terms of their mindset, performance and motivation. The wider imagination they get from playing with action figures or make-believe play allows their brain to expand significantly, and there’s no reason to believe that adults should lack imagination. imagination for the most part, is an active form of pleasure.

Entertainment is when we get the enjoyment from an external source. This includes watching TV shows, videos (YouTube), attending a concert, attending a play, playing video games, browsing art on the internet, digesting memes, etc. Because these forms of enjoyment typically require nothing on part of the audience member, except that they sit back and enjoy the show, taking in the story, characters or game play mechanics; with time, a part of the human brain that could be used to generate its own fun diminishes. Entertainment for the most part, is a passive form of pleasure.

Some things we do might not necessarily fall easily into one of these two categories. Video games can be designed for creative use in which one could argue they’re very imagination driven. Minecraft is essentially virtual Lego and one can create all sorts of complex structures with opening doors and hidden walls. Similarly, some books are difficult to read and could be argued to be considered in the imagination category based on how hard your brain needs to work to understand them or piece them together. Furthermore, a movie director watching a movie could be watching in a completely different way that it goes from being entertainment, where you merely watch the movie, to imagination, where you might be focusing on cinematography and how it could’ve been different, or the editing and how you would have changed it, or some other aspect of the movie and how you could utilize or modify it for yourself and your own production.

Ultimately, I think it depends on the individual to sort out what they believe their forms of pleasure fall under; the point of making the distinction is to get the individual to stop and think about what they’re doing when they partake in a decision to play. The distinction I make between imagination and entertainment is whether the thing is being created or digested, a book, regardless of how difficult it is, is entertainment to me, and the largest sandbox game is still entertainment, unless I’m the one creating it.

Imagination, as a form of play, is, in this sense, an active form of rest, and that has tremendous benefits to the mind. In balancing your time with some imagination, you allow your mind to work as it rests. Bodybuilders and athletes will advise people to actively rest such that they do stretches in between exercises, rather than merely stop exercising, because this small activity improves muscle relaxation and resistance. Similarly, the day following a hard workout, it’s advisable to go for a light swim or an easy walk instead of just staying at home resting, because the low-level activity helps the body unwind as it’s building itself. Entertainment allows us to relax our brain like a person standing idle in between exercises, but imagination allows us to use the brain while it rests, stretching our thoughts to their limits. This in turn, sharpens our mind and strengthens our emotional willfulness as imagination requires that we express ourselves, or at the very least, dwell on our emotions, which I believe gives us a better understanding of ourselves. Following that understanding, we begin to visualize what we want for ourselves and compasses us towards our goals.

Furthermore, many people who allocate time to practice a hobby, while holding down a job, or going through academia, will vouch that the time they make for practicing their hobby actually helps them perform better at their job. When a person spends their play time digesting entertainment, it can slow down the brain after a while, more so if the person frequently binges on entertainment or plays video games extensively, both of which have become a normal thing to do. Eventually, it can even become difficult to focus on something that isn’t entertaining; everything that isn’t immediately fun suddenly becomes boring because the mind isn’t supplying any of the fun, it’s depending on the external source to bring in that emotion, and by extension, the feeling of excitement.

Entertainment is easier for people to get into because it is a ready-made thing. This explains why so many people think of entertainment more than they think of imaginative fun. You do not need to learn anything to watch a show, you need merely begin at the beginning. Furthermore, with genres so readily defined and maintained, people know exactly what they’re getting into when they go into entertainment: “It’s a new Rom-com!” “It’s a new horror movie!” “It’s an FPS”. Entertainment also requires a lower level of imagination by comparison to the process of creation. This doesn’t pertain to fictional worlds created in a work but rather, the imagination required on part of an audience member to watch a movie or show; it requires more imagination to understand how to perform a dance or how to draw a figure relative to understanding a story or a world presented in a work of fiction. Entertainment can also take up a lot of time without providing sustenance to the brain.

Imagination is harder for people to get into as it requires hours of preparation, a certain pattern of thinking, and being in a certain mood. Unlike entertainment, imagination isn’t just switched on or attended, it’s performed, it’s carried and created from inside us. There are no real genres in terms of what people will imagine together nor for our desired locale; some people find physical activity fun and others find indoor activities fun. Imagination is difficult to predict. When two musicians decide to meet up and jam, they don’t really know what they’re getting into, but that becomes part of the excitement. Furthermore, you’d need to be a good enough musician to go jam in the first place, but no expertise is required to listen to an album. Additionally, you might not be able to create from imagination if other things are happening in your life. Surely enough playing tunes on a guitar can help chase your blues away, but if you are feeling down, you might feel it easier to just pop in a movie and watch it, unless you get some momentum going into the music. Perhaps you’re not a creative person and the idea of learning how to use your imagination seems absurd or difficult, but surely enough, with time, I think anybody can become more creative, provided their intentions make them practice or seriously seek the given skill.

Imagination allows us to develop our own skills and discover our own fun, but entertainment brings with it new ideas we might never have considered. Imagination is easier to practice if you’ve been raised to do so, but it’s also never too late to learn to become creative. There are people who started coding at the age of 80 and some musicians start very late in their life. Imagination and entertainment are merely two types of play that we participate in while resting, and a balance between them should be reached at an individual level to properly rest and foster the brain. Sometimes you need to put the instrument down and watch something or read a book, this way, your brain doesn’t get tangled up in musical keys or whatever else your hobby entails; taking a rest would probably help you compose music as it helps avoid a writer’s block. Contrastingly, sometimes you need to learn to be comfortable alone and get familiar with your emotions and feelings.  Only then will you sort out how you feel and gain insight to what your intentions are and how to express them. You can not escape your inner thoughts by drowning them in entertainment, and your inner thoughts are precisely what will grant you control over your actions and emotions as you establish your desires to yourself.

To summarize:

The chaos of our childhood, teenagerhood or early adult life becomes dominable once we acknowledge that we possess the strength to become stronger (or better) from our life experiences. Eventually, we can become strong enough to even consider taking charge of our life, both in terms of our actions (accountability) and emotions (maturity). If something bugs us, we can consider whether we really want it to get under our skin or not, even if that’s difficult to do at first. If we consider not reacting to it, eventually we won’t because once a consideration is made, the mind allows itself an opportunity to change. Consideration is exactly how akrasia finds itself into our behaviour (You consider having a cookie while dieting), and if we deliberately reverse that emotion, we can achieve emotional willfulness (You insist that a cookie isn’t what you want as it doesn’t help you achieve your desire to lose weight.)

However, with knowledge of self, and an awareness of our emotions and feelings, eventually, if our intention can become to gain control (by considering taking charge of our life before hand), we begin to hold ourselves accountable for the attempts we put forth in life. If something you are doing is interfering with your desires, then you either change your goal or you stop doing the interfering action. Our attempts in life are then dependent on how well we take care of ourselves, working to nurture our willfulness such that we are not sitting idle when we’d rather be active.

Sticking to our own desires, and avoiding akrasia by looking out for it, we begin to see the importance of acting within a certain time frame, developing our sense of urgency as we don’t want to miss out on opportunities that might pass us. We then need to strike the balance between work and rest, as well as take note on how our method of rest or play affects our mind. This gets us to fulfill our intentions for longer periods of time, and that fulfillment allows us to enjoy the ride for as long as the journey takes us.

Then we become aware of the patterns in the surrounding chaos and realize that we’ve taken our capability to understand for granted. We see things clearer once we begin to sort ourselves from the inside out. That order we maintain then becomes a force, the coagulation of age, memory and experience, that drives us into seeing the world anew as we consider:

We are stronger than we’ve ever been, as young as we will ever be, and the only person who will make us what we want to become is ourselves.