Issue #2 - The Modern Mind

Get in kid! We are going to unleash our minds and our bodies. Invite your fellow warriors. We are in this together.

Hello, hardeners. Apologies for sending this issue this late. I recently quit my job to work on this project full time. I haven’t decided on the cadence for the issues yet. So, request you to bear with me here. Nonetheless, expect more frequent issues in your inbox moving forward. :)

In this issue, we are going on a journey to get a high-level overview of the modern mind. Although the workings of our minds remain the same from an evolutionary perspective, it’s the adaptability of our minds to the changing environment that determines our success in life. So, what has changed? I think our minds ceased to catch up with the pace with which technology is speeding around the time of the information revolution. Yet, we still expect our minds to work with the same efficiency as before. This leads to a lot of distress in the contemporary scene.

Let us look at a typical set of situations our modern mind found itself involved in regularly -

• The overwhelming virtual world of the internet in our minds

• The unbounded and ceaseless flow of information through our devices

• The paradox of choice for the inconsequential things

• The constant upskilling required in your career to keep up with the rapidly evolving job market and urban lifestyles

• The normalization of stress, anxiety, depression, etc with no conducive map to navigate through

• The state of physical infra and degrading nature around us signal an impending dystopia

• The state of parents feeling cutoff from this hyper-connected digital sphere

• The state of FOMO due to social media and all the effects it has on our minds

• The productivity porn culture expects you to keep juggling between tools and techniques with no end in sight

I can go on without stopping and the list will not end. No matter what your life circumstances are, I’m sure you can relate to a subset of these scenarios pretty closely. The list above itself is a subset of all the possible scenarios I can think of. We are trudging through all of these problems without any map as such. The difference with the previous generation here is not that they did not have problems in life. The difference is that the solutions were pretty limited. There was not so much information in the first place to pick and implement. So, in hindsight, life was easier mentally. It demanded more physical effort than mental. The situation got reversed in the current generation. We are crippled in our mental lives which then cripples our physical relations with reality.

The other problem is the fragmentation of realities. The abundance of information has created this perceived reality where tend to think that we can solve all of our problems independently. It creates a false sense of competence inside us. Information is deemed as the solution. We get into this fallacy that we can control every aspect of our lives since all the raw materials are available on the internet. You are required only to put in an honest effort. I call this the “how-to-pandemic”. For any trivial life problem, you have people on the internet telling you how to solve it in a step-by-step manner. More often than not, it is a copypasta of aggregated information picked from the internet and sold as self-help content. Since we have no conducive map to navigate the complex modern life and our minds are already overwhelmed with a lot of inconsequential shit, we tend to fall prey to these cheap sources of relief.

Not only is this visible in the content space, but also in the product and services space. Mental health-based products start pretty well. Initially, they provide solutions based on data collected from a wide variety of people. But in the pursuit of scale, people end up as mere data points behind an interface. It’s not a problem of execution. They consistently look over an intrinsic problem - apps only can’t solve lifestyle problems. What ends up happening is the optimization of the interaction between people and the interface. The real problems of the people are forgotten. The solution to lifestyle problems can’t be generalized. They can’t be captured in data and algorithms. Life problems are not utility problems. You can’t solve them in the standard way of building consumer utility products.

But in the pursuit of scale, people end up as mere data points behind an interface. It’s not a problem of execution. They consistently look over an intrinsic problem - apps only can’t solve lifestyle problems.

Solving the problems of the modern mind requires skin in the game. It requires real people to listen to each other. Sharing and relating to each other’s experiences. How did they fight through their problems and how can solutions can be extracted, learned, applied, and adopted in this shared and empathetic environment. In contrast, apps generalize your life story with that of the masses, trying to solve these unique problems at scale, only to end up solving nothing. A product should only act as a bridge to bring people together and all the logistics required to achieve that. Ultimately, people are going to solve the problems of other people. This is the core aspect of the problem and yet the most neglected one.

A product should only act as a bridge to bring people together and all the logistics required to achieve that. Ultimately, people are going to solve the problems of other people.

Let’s run through a typical example to see the absurd situations our modern minds can get into. Everyone uses note-taking apps to some extent for our unique use cases. The primary use case of note-taking is to take the uncharted and unstructured thoughts in your head and put them on paper (apps) into words. This is a huge feat for a large number of people. But the benefits are tenfold. Most thoughts that we have on a typical day are inconsequential. Through the act of putting them on paper, you automatically put a value on those thoughts. It doesn’t matter if you look at them again or not. The fact that you spend time and effort doing that itself provides you with some perspective on what you value in your life. Doing the same even semi-regularly can keep you in check of what matters to you daily. Through this practice, you are building a rough albeit unique map to navigate your own unique life.

What we end up discussing and wasting our time on is the meta stuff. again, the culture of productivity porn kicks in. We end up obsessing over which note-taking is the most efficient in organizing our thoughts. Which app provides the most features to the variety of use cases. Which app has the most integration with other services? Which app provides the best in class sync across platforms. What a waste of our time. I don’t blame the products and services themselves. It’s the narrative that we find ourselves caught in that bugs me. These products will create a narrative around why their product is the best for you. But who is taking the toll here? Our minds. We wanted to free the mind from our thoughts to gain clarity and structure in our lives. What we end up doing is having this false sense of satisfaction that we are using the best tool for the job. The whole purpose has been misplacing without us realizing it.

I can map the same pattern to a lot of other scenarios in our lives and they will converge to similar results. Nothing useful is achieved in the end and the toll of nothingness falls upon our already overwhelmed modern mind. We just end up creating another unseen problem for our minds by not being fully aware of the downstream effects.

Now, we can’t stop indulging in all the activities that we are involved in. Sudden reflexes are hardly ever the solution. It can work for some people but the risks are not worth the payoff. Talking honestly, this approach is not practical for a lot of people without having a safety net around them. That’s where hardening comes. The goal is to see through the absurdity of modern life, the scenarios that our modern minds are involved in, accept the reality of it, and find the solutions within. Our minds are capable of great feats if we can narrow down the problem domain and bring it to focus. Rather than shoving our problems in a dark corner, we need to light the area around where we stand. The aversion and negligence to see our problems in their entirety cause them to run in a passive mode. Ultimately self-sabotaging itself. Escape is never the solution. Holding the ground is.

Our minds are capable of great feats if we can narrow down the problem domain and bring it to focus. Rather than shoving our problems in a dark corner, we need to light the area around where we stand.

In the next issue, we’ll try to establish what the hardening of the modern mind means. How to change our perspective toward the modern problems that we find ourselves in? How to observe and make sense of large forces that are at play in our hyperconnected digital habitats? What are the mindsets and practices we can cultivate that can unleash the full potential of our minds? Until then, grind on.

What thoughts arose inside you after reading this. Share with me at letsharden@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter @poetofgrindset. Don’t hold back. I assure you that I’ll get back to you. But you have to take the first step!

We are in this together and we are going to win ourselves.