Good morning!
You are what you eat. And your world is what you install.
We are a filtered reality; the data that hits our senses is filtered by our unconscious mind before being consciously processed. This is where your own personal sim and comes into play, and where the mods of our lives shape our worlds.
The recruitment I worked on these last 12 years mostly focused on a technology called deep reinforcement learning, which was the closest we have to how humans learn. The idea is that you give a machine a +1 whenever it gets the right answer, and you allocate it a certain amount of rng / randomosity in how it goes about finding that answer. I have lots of rng.
In our worlds, the +1 is the dopamine value which encodes salience. This is how we learn to predict both reward and threat. We find a bush that has berries and we get a +1 so that we go back to get more. We find a bear in a cave and we get a +100 so that we never go back again.
I saw many people on 40 million yen who were miserable as hell, and others on 5 million who were perfectly happy. In Southeast Asia I saw plenty who lacked all but the most basic of sustenance but who were happier still.
Don’t be envious of the rich and powerful; they’re some of the emptiest people around.
Not all of them, mind. The ones who don’t surround themselves with greed and anger do not become like this. But it’s hard to get to the top without fighting your way there, and fighting is what makes you sick.
I tried things like gratitude journalling many times but they were like water of a duck’s back. I would sit there and write and wrack my brain and write some more and go through all the motions but it never worked. There was no +1. I was just repeating the code but I never really *installed* it, because the dopaminergic encoding was not strong enough.
My memory was full, and my system had learned to prioritise threat over reward. This is our default state, but it is cranked up if you have had trauma in early life.
If you look at our evolutionary priorities, ‘not getting eaten’ is a step or two above ‘find food’ and ‘procreate’, so we get a stronger encoding response to threats than we do to rewards. This is the crux of things. This is why trauma goes so deep.
This is also why we sit there and chew ourselves up with self-criticism and catastrophising rather than getting stuck in looped thoughts of ‘oh how nice this flower is’ or something. This is the nature of the beast and it will not change; it is in our system-level code.
So over my life I changed the narrative around a lot of negative events. Getting kicked out of the UK I flipped into being our choice, for example. This ‘worked’ for a long time, but eventually my memory got full and I had too much internal conflict to keep it up.
In hindsight this is because of the level of reward salience I had remaining to allocate to these positive narratives I was choosing. As I cranked up the achievement at work and in athletics, the +1s became +10s and my little attempts to talk myself around stopped working.
It’s all about motivators - what is the evolutionary drive for your action? In the case of reprogramming around traumatic events and keeping on keeping on, the motivator is pretty high so you can maybe add a +10 and block it from memory; lay some road over the sinkhole.
If the motivator is food or shelter or procreation, as is often the case with money and power, the motivator might be +5. For me, at least; for some they may feel their literal survival depends on it in which case it’s a +100.
If the motivator is to become a nicer person and enjoy your life a bit more… well… the is no evolutionary motivator for that whatsoever, really. The encoding is weak.
You need to feel a certain level of threat and urgency in order to encode properly, and then you need to repeat the code to install it.
This is why we tend to get stuck in thoughts of fear and anger - they are self-preservation and they give us a +10.
Or we get stuck in obsessive thoughts about possession or sex - these are procreation and prosperity and they get a +5.
Then we have the desire for friends and stability, which is more like a +1. It’s nice to have people in your tribe. Being nice might work, but my life had shown me people respond to money and respect, not to kindness.
And that’s because the people I encountered in recruitment were like that; they had shaped my sim, and I had unwittingly installed the mods they handed me.
But it is possible to change this sim in a conscious manner, on a very fundamental level. So I will try to explain how to go about it.
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