Tag: abundance mindset

  • Planning for spontaneity

    Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom (1941) has been my favourite read this year. The book was largely meant as an explanation for the rise of Nazism, but by tracing historical patterns of man’s interaction with society, it ended providing some fantastic perspectives on the self. Specifically, man’s contradictory needs of wanting to conform and wanting to be free. As Fromm points out, across ages, we have attained a variety of ‘freedom from’ (nature’s whims, Church etc) but have also systematically discouraged the expression of emotions, our spontaneity.

    He lives in a world to which he has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has been instrumentalised, where he has become a part of the machine he has built. He thinks, feels and wills what he us supposed to think, feel and will; in this very process he loses his self upon which all genuine security of a free individual must be built…

    By conforming with the expectations of others, by not being different, these doubts about one’s own identity are silenced and a certain security is gained. However the price paid is high. Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life.

    Fromm explains how spontaneous activity is the means by which we can attain “freedom to”. This is positive freedom.

    Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realisation of his self, man unites himself anew with the world – with man, nature and himself.

    The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness.

    Somewhere in all this, I sensed the indirect presence of a favourite topic – the abundance mindset. Specifically, in the idea of spontaneity. In my immediate circle, I know three people who are quite spontaneous. Interestingly, they also share an abundance mindset. Yes, correlation, not causation. But maybe…

    Let me unpack the connections. One reason to not be spontaneous is conformism. But I have never really been a conformist. (I have recently figured out the probable reason, but that’s a different story.) However, there is a wrinkle, perhaps best explained by this:

    If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.

    To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. 

    The Lonely City, Olivia Laing

    I’m still working out the paradox, but while I am nonconformist in most things, I also avoid getting judged. It doesn’t help that I am shy and introverted. My trade-off has been similar to Laing. Rather than conform, I clam up, as a shield against judgement. But it also means that I am forgoing chances of a genuine connection beyond a handful of close friends, and yes, this blog. Clamming up and spontaneity don’t mix well.

    “…to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

    ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

    There’s another factor that works against my being spontaneous – a scarcity mindset. My reaction to it, instinctively to begin with, and by design later, was to create predictability by planning my life. Or, in the insightful way that Khaled Hosseini has framed it,

    But I had a plan for spontaneity. My thinking was that by making many things routine (clothes, diet, finances) etc, I can use choice avoidance to have the space and the mind space to be spontaneous. (read) But the extreme is a bad place to be, and in my case, I not only became a slave to routine, but also got upset if it didn’t happen in a certain way. As it goes, the neurons that wire together, fire together, and over a period of time, it also led me to seek efficiency in everything.The instrumentalisation of life, in Fromm’s words. Also, the crowding out of spontaneity.

    Before we get to possible solutions, a few reasons I need to solve this. At a human level, the combination of non-conformity and the slavery to routine and efficiency is practically a fool-proof way to push people away! Also, the uncertainty in things around us is only rising. Trying to have a plan that covers everything is just hubris. As a species, we will have to draw upon the innate strength that got us here – adaptability. And finally, there is philosophy

    People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

    Joseph Campbell

    So what’s a possible fix? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that we can behave in a certain way until we get to the mindset. Intuitively, and from experience, that seems relatively easier than theoretically changing a scarcity mindset. If one isn’t blessed enough to have an abundance mindset, maybe behaving like one does – spontaneity to begin with, will get one there. So, if spontaneity is the behaviour change, I have to go oxymoronic – force myself to be spontaneous! In other words, use my nonconformism to unlock the ‘freedom to’ be spontaneous. Hopefully, its positive results will temporarily override shyness, introversion and the desire for efficiency, and an abundance mindset might find a way in. The first baby step is to watch myself when killing spontaneity. I also have another clue. Money is a factor that has a disproportionate influence on my mind, and I have discovered that when something doesn’t make a dent there, I am more amenable to spontaneity, and joy.

    At a daily level, to quote from this fantastic read on happiness, “any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward centre” of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – monitors actual reward minus predicted reward.” In my efficiency play, I will have predictable happiness, which will get normalised to practically zero happiness over time. I have found a couple of ways to engineer prediction error – one is not to plan the minutiae of travel, and the second is to spend more time with people who are spontaneous. Or as Venkatesh Rao puts it, ‘differently free people’, in this fantastic post. The good news is that I have three readily available ones and I am now ‘awake’ enough to spot others when I find them. Predictable unpredictability!

    Thus the idea is to go from choice avoidance based on efficiency to choice avoidance based on the freedom to be. As Venkat so brilliantly put it, “Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not.” I have solved it in terms of conformity (freedom from) I now need to solve for spontaneity (freedom to). To live for an in-the-moment version of the want in Hosseini’s quote.

  • An impulsive path to freedom

    One of the things that I have been very interested in recently is the abundance mindset. The internet offers many definitions, but at this point, “I know it when I see it”. It is also something I don’t have. Yet. Or at least, it is sporadic. And that’s something I want to remedy.

    I know at least a couple of people who display it in most circumstances. They are calm like Stoics, but I think they embrace life and its flavours much more. And I have seen that this mindset makes their lives better – both professionally and personally. This is reason enough, but something I read recently also gave me an a-ha moment – George Saunders’ convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013. 1

    What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

    Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

    (more…)

  • Comfort Zoned

    I think it was in a Taleb book that I read that writing was born because of accounting. In my case, as I have chronicled here earlier (2010, 2017), my account books pretty much tell the story of our life. Towards the end of the second post, I wrote “the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity….Wild zigzags giving way to smooth curves and then straight lines.” This is because our routines, and therefore, expenses were predictable. The last few months have obviously meant a few changes, but the ballpark is the same. This stability has also meant that the usage of xls/sheets have increased at the expense of the book. I suspect this change is permanent, and it does make me sad.

    What it has also made me think about is the subject of the “comfort zone”. My work domain is marketing, and there’s no way I am getting into any comfort zone there. But for all practical purposes,  in my personal life, my perception is that I have hit a comfort zone. Many of my posts in the Flawsophy section have been about my own approach on living one’s life – happiness, success, signalling, the idea of freedom in daily life – and learnings and changes. I think it’ll show that I have a fair idea of our needs and wants, what it takes to get there, and a plan. It has helped that we have avoided lifestyle creep quite a bit, and kids completely, and disproportionate spends are on things we actually enjoy. Self image on that last bit was a challenge until recently, but I think that’s over now. None of these are things that happened overnight, and obviously a work in progress but we’re comfortable with where we are, and where we want to be. (more…)

  • A space-time freedom continuum

    Spoiler 1: This has nothing to do with science! Signs, maybe.

    Spoiler 2: This has a lot of quotes. What can I say, smart people have already framed things so well. 

    I got an interesting response to Change Signalling – Sriks7 asked me what are the values based metrics you are thinking of for yourself? He also mentioned that in his case, they are seen to boil down to where to spend your attention and time. I can relate to that. In the words of Dylan, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” I have noticed that my overall sense of well-being goes up when I allow myself unstructured time. I watch random things, torture D and twitter with bad wordplay, listen to music, and sometimes just watch clouds float. The last one is slightly more dynamic than paint drying. 🙂

    But my answer would have at least one more layer.  Though time is definitely a key element here, I think of it being part of a broader umbrella – freedom. My working definition of freedom is related to one of my favourite quotes “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl. Freedom, to me, is that space – to be able to choose a response that I can live with, always. Or, to paraphrase a bunch of Jean-Paul Sartre’s quotes, freedom is nothing but the existence of our will.

    As I wrote earlier, one approach that I have used is to reduce the stimuli. But increasingly, I find that there’s a limit to that.”The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.” ~J.R.R.Tolkien. My introspection therefore, has been in the direction of the response. I have found that my power to choose a response depends on how secure I feel. I further explored this “security” and realised that it boiled down to money. It seems like when I can afford it, and that’s almost literal, I am nice to those around me. When I feel that our financial independence plan is threatened, I tend to react badly. It doesn’t help that I am blessed with a scarcity mindset.

    My belief is that by the time we are ready to activate the plan, I would have an abundance mindset. That is based on the changes I have seen in myself in the last few years. But I am also reasonably sure, from experience, that though there are these small wins that happen organically on the way, a mindset switch requires effort. A couple of challenges are immediately visible. One, since I do have a few more years of a full-time professional life left, there are trade-offs on a daily basis, and they require a balancing act between knowing who I am and being who I need to be. The challenge is being rooted on the first while executing the second. Two, while the ego might have been reasonably tamed, there is self image which has its own demands. In this dual tussle, there are choices and actions that might derail me.

    When, between changing circumstances and myself, I have learned to increase that space (in my earlier definition) I’d have achieved the freedom I desire. I do wonder about Loki’s (surprisingly) deep thought though – “Freedom is life’s great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.”