Note: This is a follow up to “A Solution To the Underground Mind” it can be read in isolation but is more useful together.
In 2019 my wife and I were traveling India by train for 2 months (yes I know, I’m exhausted just thinking about it again)
During the long journey we both were reading Taleb for the first time, Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, and Antifragile.
At the end of every chapter, we would talk to each other about it and see if we could find examples of the ideas in our lives.
One of Taleb’s most important ideas in antifragile is the idea of optionality.
The most relevant explanation for Optionality might be
“you benefit if you’re right, but you’re not harmed if you’re wrong”
“freedom to pick between/do something but with no obligation”
A few days after I coined the phrase “fake optionality”
What does fake optionality mean?
When you are in a situation where it seems like you have options but it’s always fake or conditional, you don’t have real options.
“you can do whatever you want in life” – We’re going to judge the shit out of you and always subtly say you should have become an engineer/doctor/lawyer.
“you can marry anyone you want” – but we’re going to throw shade if they’re the wrong profession/gender/color/religion
“how’s that hobby of yours going” – when anyone starts a business
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is an example of a fake optionality so are the villains in the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged illustrate.
But best summed up with:
What do you want to eat?
“Wherever you pick. I’m good with whatever!”
All of these are fake optionalities, they aren’t real questions or even real beliefs.
One of the things I’ve optimized my life around is not ever being surrounded by or tolerating fake optionality.
Ps. Good time to remind you that fat people who pushed vaccine mandates in 2021 were retarded and still are. They didn’t care about health else they wouldn’t be fat. Notice how quickly the whiny bitch people in your life stopped caring about health. I digress :) ✨
Now let’s apply this same idea to positivity.
This conversation needs to start with the quote “Better The Devil You Know”
It’s human nature to hold onto a bad certainty vs risk a good/neutral uncertainty every single time.
“It’s better to have bad friends rather than no friends.”
A tough perspective for many especially globalized westernized people to swallow is that if you go to a small village in a remote country to the funeral of a wife beater.
The wife is probably the most distraught person you’ll ever meet.
Cause this piece of shit abuser is the largest part of her world that has now disappeared.
Does your worldview include this reality or do you bargain and say it doesn’t exist?
If it does, you’ll notice a mild version of this in everyone around you.
Now this is an extreme example that highlights this most vividly to get a point across, but every time you hold your tongue because you’re afraid of losing your friend or offending someone’s thin skin, you’re optimizing fake positivity.
Now it’s hard to know how real positivity can feel if you’ve never experienced it.
If you’ve never experienced it you default to assuming that fake positivity is the only positivity that exists.
Just like the woman crying over her abuser, she hasn’t experienced anything else.
There’s a part of you that wants to go to her and shake her and tell her what it’s like to have a loving relationship but words are never enough to understand something she’s never felt.
When was the last time you walked down the street & everyone smiled & greeted you?
Has it ever happened?
Did you need a baby/dog to make it happen?
Do you believe it can happen?
Do you believe it is something you can control?Yes, location matters. But also, you are in charge
— Jeremy Noronha (@JeremyNoronha) November 19, 2024
This is not a perfect comparison but I’ll share how the first year of my relationship went here:
I met my wife on a hike in Borneo, on the day we met we walked and talked for nearly 6 hours.
Over the next year, we did around 50 hikes and 10+ of them were over 8 hours long.
So what’s the idea of a “normal” first year of a relationship to me?
Hiking and talking for 1000 hours with someone you like, no phones, just each other’s company.
Now I remember during that year I said yes to visiting some family. I remember that half the day was the “people sitting on their phones in a room, occasionally looking up and saying a sentence and going back to their phones” Maybe a normal conversation was had for 30 minutes over a whole day.
So after this contrast nearly half a decade ago I never do #2. It doesn’t matter whose feelings are hurt.
I don’t ever want to waste my time in situations like that when we live in a world where hike talks are possible.
Replace Hike with dancing, pottery, run club, diving, music etc. based on your interests. It’s not about hiking.
I just use hiking for this example cause everyone who’s ever had a conversation on a long hike knows that there are 10x normal conversations.
Even hiking fights! Hiking fights are more therapeutic than therapy fights.
JBP advice on how to have a good relationship is “to fight”, don’t keep issues festering in the shadows, bring them to the surface, and deal with them.
Unnecessary fights are still pointless.
In that case, my advice to you is “hike and fight!” You resolve things 10 times faster.
Imagine if almost all your conversations are hike conversations… that’s a choice you can make.
The quick rebuttal is if you did this if you burnt down all your fake bridges, you’d be all alone.
Yes. Good.
Do that.
Cause it’s just for the short term, all you’re doing is opening up space in your life for real positivity.
Burn The Ships
One of the issues with the idea of optionality is that useless or bad options take up space, waste your thinking capacity or time.
Remote work is the best example to get this idea across.
When I was 18 I said I wanted to travel the world, so I started to look out in the world for opportunities that would make that happen.
The obvious was “Worldwide Remote only” companies.
Yes, remote-only companies were only 1% or so of the economy. But it’s still 10s of millions of jobs.
So at 18 I just said that companies that aren’t remote only don’t matter. Just like I said, companies that care about degrees don’t matter.
Now my attention and focus are completely free to focus on the 1% of companies that work remotely only with a college dropout and then it was super easy.
Tada ✨ remote work is normal, because I just didn’t care about the other 99%.
I said they don’t matter, and guess that’s exactly what happened. It never mattered.
If you think remote work needs the whole world to go remote, 10 years from now you’re still going to be stuck just as you were 10 years ago.
You chose your world, the world rarely needs to change to get what you want.
If I wasted my time keeping that optionality open, I wouldn’t have dropped out and wouldn’t just wasted so many years.
Keeping doors open does come with the cost, it’s often your time.
Same with relationships, because I close doors to people who don’t consider a 6-hour hike “normal”, I ended up getting married to the most interesting person I know.
Because I spent 8 years holding my tongue less and less, I don’t have any friends that I can’t speak to without a filter. I intentionally put the Ps at the start to filter out bullshit-world people.
I’m able to write the way I talk and talk the way I think, in my own name publicly, which is incredibly freeing.
I wish everyone could do the same, because the reality is over the long term none of the “downsides” that you think are downsides exist.
All the ships I’ve burnt were going to places I didn’t want to be.
Optimizing Fake Positivity
At the start of this year I decided to upload a video of my yoga routine.
I overcame the annoyance the rest of this section is about and decided that helping the 3-5 people who’ll do yoga thanks to that idea were worth the effort. (it actually worked!)
A couple of months later a friend of mine said something very undergroundy.
You telling me to do yoga didn’t work, you uploading a video and it getting views on twitter did.
I don’t resonate with this point of view at all. To me it’s the worst version of self awareness you could ever have.
I believe it comes as a side effective of optimizing fake positivity.
Resentment is an emotion I talked about in the previous article, fake positivity leads to is resentment.
Not knowing the solution is a bit sad, but knowing the solution and not doing it… that right there is the recipe for resentment.
Now there are multiple ways I can explain this, skip the one that doesn’t resonate with you.
If you understand preference falsification but you live a life where you have to falsify your preference, you’ll be resentful
If you understand the Balaji/Thiel/Weinstein (leave the polities aside) illegible but nuanced world, but you’re not a Balaji/Thiel/Weinstein, you’ll be resentful
If you knew the vaccine was unnecessary but you shut your mouth, you’ll be resentful
If you know your college degree won’t help you but you still waste you time, you’ll be resentful
If you live in a world where you have to smile and nod when a stupid person says something stupid, you’ll be resentful
Naval’s quote perfectaly sums it up “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”
The opposite world then be, a resentful archetype is a person who claims to know a solution but their life clearly doesn’t reflect it.
Now there’s a sub type here of the stupid effective markets folks who say you need a business idea before starting a business. They come up with complex theories to make up for their inability to do simple things. Shut the fuck up and go to the gym.
Going back to that quote from my friend I remember saying “it’s mimetics 101, that’s why I made the video. But observing that is basic, go further, if you’re smart enough to observe that you’re affected by mimesis in this way, I’m sure you’re smart enough to be free from it.”
Basically tradeoffs only exist in inaction land. The real world rarely has personal tradeoffs.
What does this mean?
Basically if you can see a trade off/bias, all you need is a bit more confidence, self esteem and belief in yourself aka the “Oomph/just do it” and it’ll never be a trade off for you.
The majority of the anger of Indians to their parents (or millennials to boomers) isn’t at the bad (wrong- with the best of intentions) advice they got.
It’s that they knew better. Deep down they all knew they were optimizing bullshit. But they still compromised cause they didn’t believe in themselves.
Let’s get you to integrate that perspective from the past so you don’t have to repeat it going forward.
Mimesis 101 Lectures (watch the entire series 2x times minimum.)
Why does the intelligentsia tolerate the literalists
A few months ago I walking thought Santa Cataline monstary in Arequipa when I came across a section full of military medals. The history of religion and it’s closeness to power came to mind.
Then I walked to a separate section and found a room full of vivid religious drawings. I’ve spent a few years revamping how I look at religion after I started reading Girard.
For a long time I’ve thought about the idea of literalists and the intelligentsia.
Literalism: The belief that religious ideas literally happened. Water literally turned into wine. A person literally died and was reborn.
The question I had, Was there ever a time that the “thinking” population didn’t believe in literalism?
The more time I spend reading about religion, the more I start to think NO. Even in the debates of Constantinople 2000 years ago the intelligencia believed in the metaphorical version of religion.
Basically, if you go to the old records when the bible was rewritten the smart people didn’t believe in religion literally they believe in the metaphorical version.
”The 10 commandments can be summed up as the precursor to common law. Basically Moses was the head of the tribe, he had to deal with people’s problems every single day and help resolve conflicts. As he resolved 100 and 100s of conflicts he started having a rule of thumb. One day as he sat by himself he was able to codify those rules of thumbs from a decade of conflict resolution in heuristics. Those are the 10 commandments. And he kept that simple so everyone could follow them.”
That’s an example of the metaphorical process that led to the foundation of common law in Western societies.
Now, most people can’t keep up with that conversation. Try to have that religious + common law conversation with any of your friends. Good luck.
Smart religious people were always post literalists.
So the question I have left in my mind is, How does someone who knows those scenarios are not true talk to someone who believes Noah saved only 2 of each animal?
Or rather, a better question, why doesn’t the intelligentsia dismiss the normies?
Shane Gills had a phase to describe this type of conversation “you’re forever at level 1 at a video game, you can never go further”
I think I have an answer, If you did that you have nothing.
Girardians without Christians without literalists isn’t a religion, it’s a book club that one will ever remember.
You have 0 power, 0 community and 0 impact on history. with a religion that doesn’t cater or 1 dimensionalize itself for the masses.
Covid really made me understand this,
It was obvious to me that “everyone has to get the vaccine” people were stupid.
But it was just as obvious that the other side “unvaccinate sperm” “majority of heart attacks/cancers/miscarriages were the vax” had to chill
The vaccine was *probably* net negative and the total excess deaths data of the past 4 years makes it seem like it didn’t save a single life. (basically didn’t matter if the deaths happened in 2020 before vax or 2022 after vax over 4 years deaths everywhere were the same adjusted for health infra, age and comorbidities)
But it also probably wasn’t that bad either, it probably didn’t shorten most people’s life. The higher stress was probably worse.
The reason I mention this is and it might not be clear to many people who read this, but in quite a few communities from fitness to hippies, not getting vaxxed in 2021 onwards was a status symbol and a filtering mechanism.
As Canadian supermarkets were preventing unvaxxed people from entering, Hippie Villages in Peru did the same for Vaxxed people. Yes, both extremes happened together.
That higher status is misplaced and just as bad as the mandate world, it’s catering to the lowest common denominator.
“I got the vaccine cause I care about health”
“i didn’t get the vaccine cause I care about health”
are both stupid ideas to hold onto.
It’s 2024, tell me how many days you slept 8 hours and if you went to the gym 100 times this year? No? Cool, neither of you care about health.
Let’s dive into how we could end up here:
In 2021, most people who didn’t get the vax were ostracized. They were alone and everyone called them crazy for questioning reasonable things. (eg. the vaccine was never tested for transmission.)
When that happens Can you stand alone? Or do you need a new community at your back?
Well, if you’re me (lmao!) the answer is yes. I had no problem standing alone. – Now this time I wasn’t alone, I have my wife and a few other friends who lived in the “this shit is obvious” world.
To highlight how big of a deal the examples I tend to repeat in, it’s been nearly a decade and there’s yet to be another Indian (in a country of 1B+) to drop out at 18 to travel and I only know of 1 other Indian who didn’t get vaccinated.
But most people can’t stand being alone, hence they compromised especially if they have an audience. They tied their wagon to a car with smoke coming out of it because it was the only one going in that direction.
Devil’s Advocate: Now one of the reasons you also don’t want to dismiss the extremists is because they tend to be right once in a while.
Community as Compensation
In startup land, there’s an idea called “job titles as, compensation” where if you give people a title that carries a higher status in society they will accept a slightly lower salary.
This is why 25% of Goldman Sachs employees are “Vice Presidents” lmao. yes 25%.
Ps. Saying “at least I don’t work in a bank” only works in a world where bankers are making money. None outside the executive class are anymore. Salaries are flat over a decade.
Similarly during our modern loneliness epidemic we live in a “community as compensation” world.
Where people will hold back on their perspectives and their ideas as a way of “keeping the peace”.
Just talk to any influencer in person and they’ll tell you that they’re always filtering themselves for their audience.
The community is the compensation.
So you have a choice here just as you have in a startup. If you care about the status you’ll accept the title and become a “manager”.
But if you’re anything like me, it’s a “keep your stupid title, give me money” world
Similarly I don’t think I can accept community as compensation, I prefer truth ala go further/more nuance.
Which is why I’ve always been a tourist of every community, never a settler.
This is always a personal choice. Value is subjective and just because I don’t think community is a fair compensation doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone.
The solution here is to define your goals, cause if you know what you want you’ll filter out noise and fake goals.
The intelligentsia have always let the lies spread because if they stopped them in its tracks there’s no religion for them to be the intelligentsia of.
The larger the community the more the ideas will end up in the “Explain like I’m 5” world and never in the “You’re not 5, turn your phone off and get a normal attention span and read a book” world
My view on this is a bit like smoking, people are allowed to do whatever they want, but you clearly don’t want to be sitting next to a smoker.
When the conversation only exists at the extremes (2021) take a break. Stop holding on a shared reality.
Maybe learn new skills, travel to interesting places, lift weights, improve your health, wealth and close relationships.
Come back later and people have either gassed out, moved on or showed everyone how they didn’t care about health at all.
A quote from my 2022 article “I could stay free longer than the system could be insane”
Now I believe giving up community as compensation will only work for some people.
If your response is “history won’t remember your name” – this perspective won’t work
This is a solution for someone that believes “history won’t remember anyone’s name but can still help others.”
Somebody To Lean On
Lean on me
When you’re not strong
And I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on…
For it won’t be long
Till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on
I was 19, in the mountains somewhere in India.
I had just finished dinner and was walking back, as I passed a shop where people were playing music and dancing.
I said high, I was invited in and we all danced as we got high.
High as a kite, I went back to the place I was staying. I was camping in the hills nearby when the waiter at a cafe talked to me during breakfast and when he heard I was camping offered me the attic to crash in.
I had a negative bank account balance and only $20 in cash, the attic felt like a luxury.
Today when I arrived back there was another guy there. He was the brother of the waiter and he owned the restaurant.
We talked and he seemed a bit serious with everything. I half understand the language so I don’t understand what was happening.
I tend to laugh to lighten the mood often and when he said “why are you laughing HA ha ha?” I knew he had a bunch of drinks.
He asked me where I was and I told him about the shop I was just at. He told me to go call the shopkeeper because he knew him.
I didn’t think much about it and just went out and called him.
As I sat down, and was just my normal “try to reduce the tension in the room” self the shopkeeper came in.
They spoke barely 2 sentences when the brother slapped the guy so hard that he fell down on the floor.
I had no idea what was going on, the other people tried to stop him but he kept on whacking the shopkeeper and everyone else near him.
He raised his hands to everyone in the room and then gradually his brother was able to make him go away.
I still don’t understand what happened that day, I met the shopkeeper a week later and he just said that the guy owes a lot of the businesses here and had too much to drink.
I just sat there in the corner, I waited for things to settle down and then I crept to bed. I sat in bed for hours thinking that night.
The next day I told the story to another cafe I was talking to and they offered me a room in their yet to be open guesthouse.
I moved in, having to walk through burning nettle but it was my own room in a peaceful area and I had my first sign of relief.
I remember staring over the hills that first evening thinking…
How did I end up here?
Just 6 months ago I was a normal kid in an engineering college in Goa, I had food every single day when I came home and a comfortable bed.
It wasn’t circumstances out of my control that got me here.
I made the choice.
I chose to drop out.
I chose to leave with a single backpack.
I chose to not take any money from my family.
I chose to take my phone off for 2 months.
I chose not to ask for help.
I chose to burn all the bridges or at least act like the ones that weren’t burnt didn’t exist.
When this happened in July 2016 I had 10s of friends who’d allow me to live with them for months if I just asked.
Why not throw in the towel and just go back home? Mom would have sorpatel cooking if I just asked.
I didn’t allow myself to think that was an option.
I had an idea of what I wanted out of life and I couldn’t get it going back.
Why did I take $0 from my parents even when I was broke?
Because the money was always conditional. The first $50 might seem free but then I’m used to it and then the creep of the conditions keep on layering. I wanted to cut that codependency completely.
I was tired of conditional relationships, I didn’t want fake positivity. I wanted something real.
So that’s why I did what I had to do, from $50 contracts for a website to $500 contracts to $5000 contracts.
Don’t throw in the towel, just build, just do, a 1000 facebook posts, a 1000 comments and hundreds of messages.
Everyone wants to and searches for people that will be there for them when the going gets hard, not just in the good times.
As the years have gone by I’ve started to have those people in my life, but it all started with me first being that person for myself.
I had to run away and just burn all the false positivity and just be by myself before I could find a life of real positivity.
I don’t often share the stories from my struggle years that often because I think too often people wallow in the “why me” world.
The struggle stories also often make people believe that they’re going to have to struggle even more, you probably won’t, you’ll have it easier than me.
Everyone is dealt a different hand and its best to lean into your lucky breaks.
It’s a brand new day today, what world are you going to pick to live in?
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