The Second Biggest Reason People Fail At Life: Distraction, Supernormal Stimuli, And Kosmic Beetles

[TJ Reeves]

I've been practicing how to write over the past few months. This is a small sample. 

WISH: to go after what’s worth our time; to not hesitate; to not get lost on our journey; to use our time effectively; to experience things to their fullest

OUTCOME: die knowing that we stopped to smell the roses; die knowing that we didn’t waste time hesitating; die knowing that we used our energy effectively

OBSTACLES: supernormal stimuli, the paradox of choice, multitasking

PLAN: take things in moderation, make as many constraints as possible,  develop deep work principles

-------

2012 – Bronnie Ware leans on a wall and sighs. “Stay strong, Bronnie - you can do this.” Bronnie just found out that one of her favorite patients died. Now she has to meet the next patient with a smile as if nothing happened. Bronnie wipes away a tear, lifts her head up, and walks through to door to find Bob, a 65 year old gentleman with no family present. “Hi, Bob, I’m here to help you.” Bob’s just happy to have someone to talk to.

All of Bronnie’s patients die. Bob will be no different. It just is as it is. She’s a palliative care nurse – her job is to comfort patients and talk them through the grieving process. Often, they talk about the good times. But just as often, they talk about the bad times – in particular, their greatest regrets.

After years of conversations with her patients, Bronnie noticed that when it comes to regrets, “common themes surfaced again and again.” She’d began documenting her patient’s greatest regrets, analyzing them with statistics, and publishing the results on a blog. Eventually, She turned her findings into the best-selling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

These are the things people regret most about life, in order:

0.     ‘I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.’

1.      ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’

2.      ‘I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings’

3.     ‘I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends’

4.      ‘I wish that I had let myself be happier’

We already talked about the number one regret during the section on leaving the comfort zone. We’ll also talk about that last regret in the next chapter. For now, let’s focus on regrets 2, 3, and 4: working too hard; not expressing your feelings; and not staying in touch with friends.

These are all symptoms of one thing: Distraction. In particular, we constantly choose to distract ourselves with things we think bring us happiness during our current run-through of Life In-and-of-Itself, even though they don’t. Worse, we don’t realize it until it’s too late.

There are simply too many forms of distraction to list them all here (it would be a distraction from our journey). So, we will only talk about the ones pertinent to the top regrets of dying. I’ll make sure to keep things light while we do.

Supernormal Stimuli: Kosmic Beetles, or why you work so hard for so little

1983 - springtime in the deserts of Western Australia. Entomologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz wander the dirt roads looking for insects to observe.

On their way, one of them kick over a “stubbie,” a golden brown beer bottle common to Australian culture. It isn’t anything out of the ordinary to find a stubbie out here – many people throw them out as they drive across what’s essentially the middle of nowhere.

Rentz picked up the bottle to help clean up the environment. To his surprise, he found a male Australian Jewel beetle hanging off the bottle’s side. The biologists were excited to add the such a rare find to their collection. The beetle surprised them as they tried sliding it off the stubbie and into their container: wouldn’t budge. The tried picking the bug off with their fingers, shaking the bottle, and spraying water on it – nothing worked. This was one persistent little dude.

What makes a beetle so adamant about clinging to a stubbie? Zooming in closer, the biologists saw the beetle’s penis extended outwards and poking the edge of the glass over and over. This was one confused - albeit persistent - little dude.

They laughed and kept walking, this time making sure to examine any more stubbies they found. Lo and behold, they found three more stubbies and two more male beetles. That made for three confused – albeit persistent – little dudes.

The researchers decided to run an experiment. They took the four stubbies they’d found so far and laid them out in the open next to each other for a period of 30 minutes. Would other beetles come to use their ‘stubbies’ on the stubbies?

They did. Six beetles - all male - ran over to cling to the stubbies. Specifically, they made their way to same part of the bottle: a part studded with bumps on the brown, hard, glass edge. One of them clung hard even as ants crawled up the side of the bottle and bit its penis off. That last beetle makes for a confused – albeit persistent – little dude who gives no fucks whatsoever (as he gives fucks).  

To figure out what was going on, the researchers then sought out the female beetles. This proved itself as the hardest task during the research project. The females, you see, like to hang out in the shade, away from the Australian desert sun – so, when they do come out the males see it as an almost once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Most importantly, the female jewel beetles are larger than the males, colored the same way as the brown stubbie-glass, and have bumps on their back that look almost exactly like the ones found on the side of the bottle.

Except, the stubbies felt better. And that’s the real key here. The male jewel beetles are nearly blind when it comes to sex: they can see the overall shape and color of their mate, but they rely on the feel of the female’s back bumps to know where they have to go to get it in. So, when they feel someone or, in this case, something that has bigger back bumps than usual, they take it as meaning that they have stumbled upon super attractive mate – the equivalent of thinking you matched on Tinder with the girl next door, only to find out your fucking Kim Kardashian instead. Jackpot!

For their work, Gwynne and Rentz won the Nobel Prize. Their work demonstrated the phenomena known as supernormal stimuli. According Wikipedia, this is when “there’s an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.” In normal people speak, it’s when something promises more than it actually delivers.

Supernormal stimuli exist everywhere in nature. Examples include:

·      Sea turtles confusing Hotel signs with moonlight and travelling the wrong way

·      Small birds taking care of fake eggs the size of footballs while ignoring their real, golf-ball sized eggs because they only want to put their energy into the ‘healthiest’ offspring

·      Moths diving into candle flames because the infrared light given off resembles that of female moth pheromones

Supernormal stimuli also exist everywhere in modern society. Examples include:

·      Processed food – replacing non-preservative, non-sugary, ‘normal’ foods.

·      The TSA – replacing actual security measures through a series of theatrics

·      Video Games - replacing real-life adventures and growth

·      TV shows – replacing friends, education, and proper relationship networks

·      Porn – replacing sexual companionship

·      Drugs – replacing positive feelings or meditative contemplation

·      Instagram, Facebook, and Forum likes – replacing real-world achievement

·      Pets that look extra cute – especially cats – replacing human companionship and slowly taking over as feline overlords

·      The Kardashians – especially Kim - replacing human companionship and and slowly taking over as reptilian overlords

(I’m excited to see the clash between the last two as they try to battle for the position of overlord. My money is on the cats, frankly. My cats kill lizards all the time, so I think they’ll have no problem against the lizard people known as the Kardashians.)

Anyway, those are just some of the more obvious supernormal stimuli that exist. A primer, if you will, for the real shit. See, my main point isn’t gross addictions – that stuff is easy. We all get that that stuff is ‘bad.’ No, my point is about the subtler things: the supernormal stimuli that are so supernormal we can’t even realize that they have replaced everything that’s normal. (Note: you really have to read this in Matthew Mcconaughey’s voice): We’re all just Kosmic Beetles trying to fuck the Stubbie of Spiritual, Career, Relationship, and Cultural Success, thinking that we’ve hit the jackpot.

The biggest distractions come from the things that go far beyond specifics and go into the realm being ethereal or conceptual. I’m talking about toxic values. I’m talking about valuing things like:

·      Money In-and-of-Itself

·      Fame In-and-of-Itself

·      Being Loved In-and-of-Itself

·      Sex In-and-of-Itself

·      Being Right In-and-of-Itself

·      Morality In-and-of-Itself

·      Ideology In-and-of-Itself

·      Success In-and-of-Itself

·      Competition In-and-of-Itself

·      Power In-and-of-Itself

·      Attention In-and-of-Itself

·      Judging Others In-and-of-Itself

·      Arguing In-and-of-Itself

·      Security In-and-of-Itself

·      Excitement In-and-of-Itself

·      Love In-and-of-Itself

·      Society In-and-of-Itself

·      Achievement In-and-of-Itself

·      Being Perfect In-and-of-Itself

·      Self Esteem In-and-of-Itself

·      Acting Cool In-and-of-Itself

·      Spirituality In-and-of-Itself

·      Mystical Experience In-and-of-Itself

·      Feeling Accepted In-and-of-Itself

·      Following Rules In-and-of-Itself

·      Tradition In-and-of-Itself

·      Opinion In-and-of-Itself

·      Fitting in In-and-of-Itself

·      Enlightenment In-and-of-Itself (we’ll talk about this later, but yep, you the promise of Absolute Truth can easily serve as a distraction)

·      Core Values (if they’re taken to the extreme, making one disregard other Core Values)

·      And basically anything you’ve learned from your culture, including this book In-and-of-Itself.

All of those things start out as things worth pursuing, but they ultimately ruin you by making you work too hard and stop focusing on your Core Values, ultimately preventing you from accessing Pure Simple Being. There’s no amount of these things that you could get where boom you suddenly feel fulfilled.  

Toxic Values leave you feeling undervalued, overworked, unfulfilled, and make you want to quit the game of Life Itself

Core Values leave you feeling invaluable, reinvigorated, fulfilled, and make you want to play the game of Life Itself more than ever. That is the difference.

And I get it: the toxic values seem “normal.” That’s because these are the types of values that get thrown around by the media, your friends, and society almost everywhere you look. Specifically, these values are upheld because culture upholds them to serve itself.

Let me say that again: Toxic values are there to help culture serve itself, not you.

Culture does not give a fuck about you because culture can’t give a fuck about you, only itself. That’s the whole point of culture – it’s a series of ideas that propagate themselves regardless of the individual. Its like a cold, lifeless conceptual virus.

Here’s how Culture Viruses work in a nut-shell

1.     Take something that relates to the Core Values-In-Action

2.     Create super stimuli. Take one aspect of that thing and focus on it so that it stands out and catches eyeballs. Make it so that people get things done easier, faster, or better than before. Promise way more than whatever actually happens in real Life Itself. Make sure to hide the defects. Always promise Pure Being as a result.

3.    Market the super stimuli. People will naturally come like desperate beetles trying to get a nut. Do this so that you create, grow, or protect that culture. In particular, make it so that people either bring in more folks to grow the culture or have those within the culture fight those who oppose the culture’s existence.

4.     Repeat

I’m not just talking about any one culture in particular – I’m talking about all culture:

·      Wall-street culture

·      Hippie culture

·      Black Culture

·      Zen Culture

·      Redneck culture

·      Buddhist culture

·      Christian Culture

·      Goth Culture

·      Star Wars Culture

·      Comic Book Culture

·      Bodybuilding Culture

·      Nerd Culture

·      Book-writing Culture

·      Academic Culture

·      College Culture

·      Los Angeles Culture

·      Alaskan Culture

·      Asian Culture

·      Bald Men’s Culture

·      Bald Women’s Culture

·      Deaf Culture

·      Trans Culture

·      Cis-Gendered Culture

·      Every. Single. Culture.

Culture mindlessly throws out Super Stimuli for you to start giving useless fucks about the same way Drunkards driving down the desert throw out stubbies. Almost the entirety of your motivations in life are about as ridiculous as a beetle fucking a stubbie while getting bitten by ants. And then on your death bed, you sit there next to Bronnie Ware, wondering where it all went while your family and friends are gone – you worked yourself dry as you suffered thousands of ant bites, positive that you hit the jackpot, only to never bust that all-forsaken holy nut because you didn’t even bother to look at where you were sticking your dick.

This is why distraction is an obstacle.  

So how do we plan for that? Wait till the next chapter. 

Edited August 5, 2017 by TJ Reeves

[harisankartj]

Its scary how true all of this is...and how i am a slave to my surroundings. 

 

But great write-up though! Waiting for the next chapter.

[Truth]

Good stuff! But I'm curious, what is your first biggest reason(s) one fails at life? Looking forward to hear more.

[Echoes]

@TJ Reeves Thank your for this

[Danka]

I'm curious though, how can you work too hard? 

 

I mean the people that regret working too hard, maybe they regretted it because they compared themselves to current hedonist culture and they wish as old people that they could've indulged more. But now I look back on regrets like these that often get mentioned, I actually wonder if worrying about wether you work too hard or not is a good thing. Reason is most of the time I think people worry about wether they work too hard or not, is because hedonist values get reinforced and emphasized alot from my perspective. 

The idea that you should squeeze as much good emotions as you can with whatever means (aslong as it's not illegal drugs) out of every moment. The thing is this mostly results I think in people watching Netflix, lazing around, staying in comfort, playing vidya, travelling etc.. also talking about my own primitive mind here. 

 

let me know what you think.

[Truth]

@Danka They were working so hard that their life was passing them by. It's the trap of success, the addiction to doing instead of being, sleep walking through life, they'd even come home and get sucked into their TV, pigging out for hours on end on their couch after a long days work. How can you make time to just sit and be conscious when you're in a constant state of progress and doing. You miss out on a lot, this is why consciousness is so damn important. 

Edited August 6, 2017 by Truth