Author: Sam

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Loving Kindness

Struggling to come up with something to write about this week, I found some inspiration, as usual, from Sean. I recommend reading his most recent post first. It’s real and raw.

How do we deal with living in such a tough world? Our lives can feel hard and tragic, but then we look out the window, or on the internet, and realize how lucky we are. And that can make us feel even worse, for feeling bad about our “minor” problems. How can we stop that cycle of shame? And what can we do to impact the world we live in in a positive way?

I’ve been reading Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. I keep returning to books about mindfulness, meditation, compassion and how our internal mental processes work. It’s so easy to fall out of gratitude and presence, and reading a bit on these topics each day helps keep it present in my mind.

I want to share something I’ve practiced before that Brach goes over in her book, and something I’m sure we’ve written about before: the lovingkindness meditation. It seems simple, even cheesy, but can have a noticeable effect with consistent practice.

Here’s the process.

Sit comfortably. Relax. Feel the breath going in and out.

Remember your basic goodness. Whether it was helping someone out last week, or the joy and compassion you had as a child. Remember it and feel it.

Choose four or five phrases that are meaningful to you. For example:

May I be filled with love and kindness. May I accept myself just as I am. May I be happy. May I know the natural joy of being alive. 

You start with yourself, just like in an airplane when the oxygen masks drop. Repeat the words in your mind or in a whisper.

Then envision your loved ones, family, your partner, close friends. Think about them in your mind and then repeat the following:

May you be filled with love and kindness. May you accept yourself just as you are. May you be happy. May you know the natural joy of being alive. 

Repeat it for a few different loved individuals.

Then bring to mind someone neutral, that you interact with but have no strong feelings for. Repeat the words again towards this person or group of people.

Then think about someone you have a difficult relationship with. Maybe you don’t like them or they don’t like you. Maybe it’s for a good reason. Even so, repeat those words again, in their direction.

Finally, try to open it up to everyone in the world. Each person is real and filled with emotions and struggle and goodness and pain. Repeat the following:

May all beings be filled with love and kindness. May all beings accept themselves just as they are. May all beings be happy. May all beings know the natural joy of being alive. 

Then rest in openness and silence. Breathe in and out and recognize how you feel.

Tara Brach has guided meditations on her website, and a guided lovingkindess meditation can be found here.

This may seem too passive. You’re not directly helping anyone, you’re just thinking thoughts. But think of it as priming yourself to act in a kind and loving way. It doesn’t mean you’ll be perfectly serene and understanding. It’s just meant to open you up and create some more awareness to take with you. You’re loading up for the day ahead.

The root of the practice is in recognizing that other people are real. It’s easy to walk by a homeless person on the street or wait behind an obnoxious asshole in line and dehumanize them as other. But that person is real. All people, no matter if they’re saints or monsters, want to be happy and loved, and they want to avoid pain. This practice can at its heart open you up to recognizing the basic goodness in another person, even if they’re not showing it. Whether they’re numbing themselves with drugs, or striking out at another, they’re actions are rooted in trying to avoid pain by whatever means necessary. This doesn’t excuse a behavior. But it can open up your mind to at the very least, see them as a fellow human being, a real person, who’s suffering and doesn’t know how to deal with it.

You’re not going to change the world with this 5-10 minute practice. But you might change yourself.

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Lady Bird

Man I loved this movie. Funny, real, surprising. Every character, small or large is wonderfully played and realized. The dynamic between Lady Bird and her parents felt intimately familiar. I’ve been catching up with all the Oscar contenders this past month and they really are all incredible and beautiful in their own way. 2017 was an extraordinary year for movies, and I would have a very hard time trying to rank them in any order. So I won’t. I’ll just enjoy them. And I still have a few left to check out!

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The Shape of Water

This felt like such a perfect movie. Romantic, mysterious and suspenseful. The mood and music, the physicality of each performance, and the beauty in every shot propels you forward. Sally Hawkins and Dough Jones (under amphibian disguise) convey so damn much emotion and feeling without ever speaking.  And the supporting cast elevates it to another level. Michael Shannon and Octavia Spencer are perfect in their roles, and Michael ‘Scene Stealin‘ Stuhlbarg is far and away the reigning character actor MVP of our time.

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Phantom Thread & Call Me By Your Name

I did a double feature of these two movies and they had an oddly satisfying contrast to each other. Both movies are about love, but have two very different entry points (and conclusions). I wouldn’t say either was my favorite of the year, but I liked them both a lot, and could appreciate the masterful direction of each.

Phantom Thread of course was made by the Master himself, Paul Thomas Anderson, and played to perfection by a fellow master, now retired thespian Daniel Day Lewis (hey, they both have three names). It was claustrophobic, luxurious, tense, and at times unbearable. It was precise and harsh and I really, really liked it. Day Lewis’s character’s name is Reynolds Woodcock, so there’s another selling point.

Call Me By Your Name was straight up gorgeous, lusciously shot in Italy, and depicts viscerally the agony of discovered sexuality, the ecstasy  of its realization, and then back to that familiar agony. Chalamet and Hammer are excellent, but the scene that struck me the most was towards the end, when Chalamet’s father, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, delivers such a heartfelt, measured monologue to his son. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen displayed between a parent and child on film. Just pure understanding and love. It was really touching.

The music in each of these is immaculate.

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SamPostJams Vol. 1

Here’s what I’ve been listening to the past couple of weeks. Some new, some old. If you ever have any music recommendations, send ’em my way, and feel free to follow me on Spotify.

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The Horrifying Wonders of the Human Mind & Body: Hangovers

I suffered from my first hangover in quite some time at the end of 2017. I spent the next morning moaning in bed. As I lay in bed agonizing, I decided to follow my curiosity and try to learn about the science of a hangover, what’s happening in the body, etc. Two things struck me.

The first seems obvious: when we drink, we get dehydrated. Alcohol is a diuretic. This is the overarching reason for hangovers. But the process itself that causes us to become dehydrated is pretty crazy. “Alcohol…reduces the production of a hormone called vasopressin, which tells your kidneys to reabsorb water rather than flush it out through the bladder” (1), and, “according to studies, drinking about 250 milliliters of an alcoholic beverage causes the body to expel 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water; that’s four times as much liquid lost as gained” (2). So, drinking a single beer can cause four times the amount of water in your system to just be dumped out, rather than used as it should be. This is why you pee so often while drinking. You’re jettisoning water, and along with it, lots of important vitamins and minerals.

The second, and even more horrifying fact involves the headache the next day. The cause is dehydration again of course, but the reality of what’s happening is…pretty disturbing. You’re so dehydrated that “the body’s organs try to make up for their own water loss by stealing water from the brain, causing the brain to decrease in size and pull on the membranes that connect the brain to the skull, resulting in pain.” Holy shit! You’re brain is rung like a sponge in order to feed water to the rest of your body, and it literally shrinks, resulting in that awful headache you’re stuck with. That’s gnarly.

While learning about this process, most of the search results dealt with hangover cures. There is no real, instantaneous ‘cure’. You need to re-hydrate with lots of water and replenish those minerals you lost, like potassium and magnesium. There is of course the trick we’ve all been told, but rarely follow: drink a glass of water between each drink. This way you’re not running such an extreme loss of water, compounding your own hangover the next day.

As for me, if the hangover wasn’t enough to keep me from drinking for another long stretch, the knowledge that I’m shrinking my brain each time certainly will.

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The Horrifying Wonders of the Human Mind & Body: The Unconscious Mind

All the ways in which the human body actually functions are astonishing, and for the most part, completely overlooked by all of us. The brain is where my interest first started, and since learning about it, whenever I’m curious about a part or process of the body, I do a quick Google search to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I wanted to start sharing what I learned to shed light on how mind blowing these processes and functions are, and how completely oblivious we are of them. Today we’ll start where I started, with the brain, and I hope to explore more aspects of the human body and mind in the future. 

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The brain is incredibly complex and there’s so much interesting, crazy stuff going on in it, that it’s hard to know where to start. Neuroplasticity and cognitive biases are two of my favorite areas, but there’s something else that’s seemingly straightforward, yet baffling, that I want to highlight here. I learned about this probably a year ago and it’s only really hitting home now.

This seemingly simple, scientifically proven fact is:

The brain decides before “I” decide.

That seems obvious. Of course decisions arise from our brain, that’s where all thought processes come from. More specifically put, the unconscious mind decides, then the conscious mind, or “I”, decides. The distinction is important, as we’ll see. Your brain decides, then you decide. The more you think about it, the more questions arise.

Before we go on, a quick distinction between the unconscious and conscious mind. The unconscious mind does things automatically, without the need to even be aware of it happening. Our breathing and our digestive system are two examples of this unconscious process. We don’t need to focus on or even think about these things for them to run properly. The unconscious mind also contains desires and fears that we may not be consciously aware of, but nonetheless direct us. The unconscious mind is completely inaccessible to our conscious mind. The conscious mind is actively thinks or acts. It plans our dinner later that night and what ingredients we want to use, it  chooses between two movies, it lifts the barbell for another rep. Our conscious mind makes decisions. Or so we think.

In Sam Harris’s book Free Will, he makes the case that we do not truly have free will. One of his main arguments for this point is that through scientific lab studies, “fMRI techniques show that our brains indicate the choice we are going to make 700 milliseconds before we are aware that we are going to make the choice.” These conscious decisions that we feel we came up with, that we’ve decided on, were actually made by our brain, milliseconds before, unbeknownst to us. 

700 milliseconds might not seem like a lot of time, but the fact remains that the brain makes a decision that is completely unconscious to us, THEN, milliseconds later, we consciously seem to “come up with it”. But “I” didn’t actually “make” the decision. As Harris lays out, “the intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness. Rather it appears in consciousness. As does any thought or impulse that might impose it.”

All sorts of thoughts and questions sprout from this one clear fact. Our idea of free will is certainly different than how we think of it, if it exists at all. It distinctly shows the power of the unconscious mind over the conscious mind; the unconscious mind decides, then makes it appear that the conscious mind has chosen. We have all of these unconscious thoughts, feelings and desires, which we are completely unaware of, until the unconscious decides to almost  plant them in our conscious mind, making us feel that we determined it. It helps explain why it’s so hard to change a habit or escape from an addiction that we so clearly, consciously want to change, because they are rooted deeper, not in the conscious, but in our unconscious.  It casts questions over the nature of consciousness itself and the power and control we assume we have over our lives. 

This is a tricky one to wrap our heads around. Like I said, I learned about this a year ago, but only after recently reviewing a summary of the book, did the subject sort of click it in my mind. Sure, “I”, this human body that is Sam Post, is still making the decisions, but it’s not necessarily coming from the “I” I imagined it was, that conscious self I identify as. It’s coming from another layer in, the unconscious part of my mind that I, nor anyone else, has access to. So who the hell is running the show that is ourselves? The better question might be, what shapes the unconscious mind and what determines it’s desires and feelings that prompt our actions and behavior?

The genes we are born with determines a lot, anywhere from 20-50%. But once born, our environment, our conditioning, how and where we were raised, and much more, all form and shape our unconscious mind. And the really interesting part, and the hopeful part, I think, is that it is possible to change our unconscious mind, even if we can’t access it directly. It can’t done by our conscious thinking. It can only done by taking action and by changing our behavior in the real world first. 

This is where I think Sam Harris’ argument against free will starts to show it’s cracks. While thinking about change and consciously desiring it does very little to impact our unconscious mind, directly changing our behavior in the real world has a much more powerful effect. This is where the principles of habit change, or the concept of “fake it till you make it”, comes in. By forcing yourself to do something enough times, even if it’s at first uncomfortable or challenging, you’ll eventually form a habit, or put another way, a behavior that doesn’t need to be directed by your conscious mind. The behavior becomes automatic. It has become a part of your routine and can be done without even thinking about it. One example would be learning how to drive a car. At first it seems very complicated and hard, but after enough experience, it seems to take very little conscious will power to get where you’re going. 

Harris’ argument to this would be, well, this person that eventually changed, had whatever factors already set in place that allowed them to change in the first place. His genes or his brain had the capability to do so, and it finally did. That seems a bit to deterministic to me, and for an atheist like Sam Harris, it just seems to run too close to what others might call “fate”. But he is much smarter than me. That’s just the way I choose to look at it now, maybe because it’s more comforting and encouraging.

All of this has gotten me much more interested in the unconscious part of our mind, that we all basically ignore, understandably so, because we aren’t even aware of it in the first place. We literally can’t be aware of it, until we start to pay closer attention to and examine our thoughts, actions and behavior. The unconscious mind and it’s importance has appeared countless times throughout my reading, from great thinkers like Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell and beyond, and I’m only now feeling like I’m able to grasp what it actually means. After reviewing Free Will’s book notes, I found another book James Clear summarized titled Strangers to Ourselves, and it helped clear up some of the confusion I had. I ordered that book and can’t wait to dive in. Maybe I’ll return to this topic after I learn more. But for now, I think this simple fact, that there’s a lag between the unconscious brain deciding, and then ourselves feeling the conscious decision, is more than enough to ponder. At the very least, maybe it can make us a little more thoughtful, or questioning, or simply awed, the next time we’re making a decision, whether it’s what we’re having for dinner, or what we want to do with our lives. 

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Habits Towards Goals

I’m personally a big fan of the end of the year. You get to reflect on what you liked about the last year and what you didn’t, what you want to continue and what you want to change. The new year allows you to start with somewhat of a blank slate, fresh to pursue new goals, experiences and adventures.  I’m spending the end of 2017 thinking about what I want out of 2018, what I want to add to my life and what I want to leave behind. One thing I’m going to try to do, beyond just identifying my goals, is identify the habits that will help me achieve my goal. Having goals is important,  but you need to know how to get there, and for real, sustainable change, you need to change your habits. Below is something I previously wrote on habits that I’ll be reviewing and trying to instill as I pursue my goals in 2018. Best of luck with whatever you set out to do and have a wonderful new year!

https://www.tumblr.com/sampostlives/146708370885/habits

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My Year in Reading 2017

Books

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

This was my favorite book of the year. I’d heard about Tobias Wolff before, from two incredible writers who are huge fans, George Saunders and David Sedaris, but based solely on the name I figured he was Old and Boring. Boy was I wrong. I picked this up and couldn’t put it down. It’s essentially a memoir of his childhood with his single mother and eventually a step-father that did not treat him very well, to say the least. He also spends plenty of time talking about all the trouble he caused as a kid and it was vividly familiar. His writing is beautiful, funny, and honest, and I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough.

Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 by David Sedaris

I got into David Sedaris in 2016 and read even more of his books this year. He released a large collection of his diaries in March and as an avid journaler I loved it. He’s one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read and seeing his raw diaries be that funny was both inspiring and exasperating. What struck me most about it though was the casual harshness he encountered throughout the late 70’s and 80’s. Sedaris is a gay man growing up in these times and he routinely witnessed or was the victim of constant harassment, where you could get mugged, be called a faggot, or have something thrown at you from a car all in the same month. While we clearly still have a long way to go, the misogyny, racism, and homophobia all seemed to be so much more out in the open and blatant back then, ready to greet you at any street corner.  And this wasn’t the 1950’s, this was all happening in the decade or so before I was born. While the shitstorm of the last year has revealed how much more we still need to reckon with as a society, it’s important to recognize the ways life has gotten better, but even more importantly, that we’re always going to have to work to make it better and uphold the good, even if it is hard, often demoralizing fucking work.

(My other favorite by Sedaris that I read this year was Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. Yup, that’s the title. But you’re not gonna go wrong picking up any of his essay collections, they’re all hilarious.)

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia & Discontent and its Civilizations by Moshin Hamid

The first a novel, the second a collection of non-fiction essays, both show the incredible strength, intelligence, and versatility of the writer Moshin Hamid. I learned more about Pakistan than I’d ever known and about a culture that was completely foreign to me, but at the same time Hamid expertly shows all of the striking similarities of desires and conflicts that they share with all people regardless of location. ‘Immigrant’ and ‘minority’ is a word thrown around so often but so few of us who aren’t ones ever actually learn what the experience is like. These two books have the same power and affection that Americanah, The Sympathizer, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao gave me the year before.

Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

Principles by Ray Dalio

These three were my favorite “intellectual” reads of the year. I set out not to finish these books, but to get what I thought was interesting and useful from them, and in that I succeeded. All three give you a  better understanding of the world we live in and why the way things are the way they are. Seeking Wisdom is one of the best books on cognitive biases I’ve read, and uses great examples from Charles Darwin all the way to Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger to show you the ways human beings trick themselves.

The Story of Philosophy was very interesting and really readable thanks to the great Will Durant (check out him and his wife’s short book, the Lessons of History. They are beasts.) I learned many of the most important philosophers’ thoughts and ideas about society, religion, science and government, and on that last point, it was somewhat reassuring to see people trying to figure out how the hell to organize society and running into the same problems for millennia.

Finally, Principles was extraordinary, with a ton of useful, practical, yet mind-blowing principles you can apply in your own life. I’d recommend checking out Ray Dalio on the Tim Ferriss podcast where they go over some of the book and his story. Dalio seems like an incredibly intelligent, humble, caring guy who’s also massively successful. The best thing about these books is that I’ll be picking them up and learning from them again and again in the years to come.

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

I read a few memoirs on addiction and recovery this year, but this one gobsmacked me. David Carr was a highly respected journalist for the New York Times (he passed away in 2015). But before that he had been an abusive crack addict. With this book he not only writes about his past, but investigates it, just as he would with any other piece of reporting, going back and interviewing the people he ran with at the time and researching and fact checking. The book is about addiction and recovery, but even more so about memory, what we choose to remember, and what we don’t, and how the way we see ourselves often lines up with a view that allows us to move on and live our lives as best we can.

Killing Floor by Lee Child

The first Jack Reacher novel in the series and the first I’d ever read. It was a great, pulpy tough guy novel and a blast to read.

Comics

These comics all blew me away and showed me just how wide-ranging and powerful a comic could be. I’d put these selections up there with any book I read this year.

X-Men Grand Design by Ed Piskor

I’ve been excited for this book as soon it was announced. I wanted to get into the old school X-Men mythos earlier this year but all the books I picked up felt dated and too convoluted. Then I heard about this project by Ed Piskor, a one man cartoonist who writes, draws, colors, and letters the whole dang comic. He was going to streamline the entire early history of the X-Men in how own style for a modern read. This was exactly what I was looking for. I read his previous work (mentioned below) and loved it. I had high expectations awaiting the first issue, which finally came out on December 20th. It wildly exceeded my hopes. The first issue goes over both Professor X and Magneto’s early lives and how they became who we know them as, and wraps up with the recruitment of the original X-Men. I expected it to look dope and be cool, but I did not expect the trauma and pathos each character goes through on their way to becoming the heroes we’re familiar with. Piskor doesn’t shy away from these harrowing trials and tribulations and each one is conveyed with simple but powerful visuals. The pace is breakneck and I can’t wait to re-read it again before the next issue comes out in just a few days on January 3rd. If you’re into the X-Men at all go out and grab this book!

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

I wrote about these two earlier in the year. Click the links for my thoughts and praise of HHFT and MFTIM.

Uncanny X-Force by Rick Remender

This book is so badass. I  was lucky enough to borrow the omnibus from a friend in 2016 (shoutout to Kyle!) and took my time with it, finishing it early this year. It’s basically Wolverine leading a team of assassins against any threats the X-Men wouldn’t necessarily have the stomach to handle. The team includes Deadpool, Psylocke, Archangel, and Phantomex (some sort of robot/artificial assassin James Bond-type that I still don’t fully understand but was instantly memorable). It’s a brutal book and puts each character through the ringer, all for a sprawling look at what it means to take life and death into your own hands.

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Airplane Mode

Tech and social media continue to worm into every crevice of our lives, for good and increasingly bad. One of the things I consider bad is the incessant pull to check our phones, with no real purpose, just an unconscious (and addicting) desire to occupy our mind with something at all times. In an effort to fight off the bad, and to maintain some peace in the mornings, I started tweaking my routine.

First, I moved my phone charger from my bedside table to the desk across the room. This way I couldn’t just pick it up whenever I wanted and disturb my sleep with a glowing rectangle. It also forces me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off and start my day. Then I began putting my phone on Sleep mode before bed. No vibrations to wake me up or tempt me. I also wanted to stop checking my phone in the mornings so I could start my day off on the right foot with some peace of mind. But I’d usually wake up to some text or notification that I ended up checking, and then I’d check another app, and then that peace was gone. So, when I heard Tim Ferriss puts his phone on Airplane mode before bed, that seemed like the logical next step. And it’s surprising how effective it is, and how much nicer my mornings have been. I don’t see any texts, I don’t know what’s happened in the news overnight, and I  have no temptation to check anything. That’s the key I think. Just by blacking out my phones network capabilities, I remove the temptation and the pull to check it. My mornings have been a lot more peaceful, and I can flick on the world in my phone whenever I’m ready.