It's been around five years since I've been working 100% remotely. On one hand, it's nice being at home and not having to commute, but on the other, the lack of community can sometimes be a bit depressing. Seeing people in person, and more importantly stumbling upon them by accident, is something that just can't be faked when working remotely, or at least not with the current processes and culture my employer has adopted.

One interesting thing about always being remote is meetings. I frequently find myself getting so caught up in them, sometimes even stressed. It's fun to reflect on how I'm really so "into" this social situation when in reality it's only me in the room. Of course, I rarely have the presence of mind to realize this while in the meeting, but it is a thought that has brought me comfort, usually when I'm preparing for one. Whenever I have to give presentations or whatnot, I reflect on how it's really going to be just me talking at a display, no one else in the room but me and my cat.

We could argue that even though the people in the meeting are not physically there, they're still present in some fashion and that the social repercussions of your actions still take place, but the point I'm trying to make here is that sometimes these meetings feel so real, so viscerally there as a social situation, when in reality it's just an illusion, an imitation of the real thing. There's no one else in the room, no need to feel so uptight about the whole thing.

I sometimes like toying with the idea that I have no real proof the people on the other side of the screen are real. As far as I know, they're imitations, or recordings, or (nowadays even plausibly) AI agents imitating my coworkers. Of course, I don't truly believe this, but it is a fun way to try and reshuffle my perspective.

I wonder, what other areas of life are we so enchanted by that we don't see they're not as they seem? I'm sure there are many, more than I could list, possibly even the whole of life if we believe the worldview that everything we experience is, ultimately, a construct of our own minds1. If we follow this line of reasoning, we will eventually get to the conclusion that nothing exists as it seems, but that's not very practical. A better, more useful interpretation of this phenomenon is that we don't have to believe things the way we already believe them. It's a bit circular as a statement, so we could try and simplify it as: we don't need to keep relating to things in our life in the same way as we've always done.

(This reminds me of a book by Derek Sivers (which I haven't finished listening to yet, though I mean to) where he talks about how we're free to choose what ideas to keep believing. There are some ideas that are useful and some that are not, but none of them are ultimately true, so we're free to decide what things we want to believe in. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much exactly the same concept I was talking about in the last paragraph.)

This sounds nice and quite straightforward, right? There's really no universal constraint for us to believe what we believe; we can change those beliefs, and no universe police will come and put us in conceptual jail. Easy. But the reality is that changing beliefs is not a simple matter, especially for that most insidious kind of belief that we're not even aware we have.

Of course, I'm talking about what you think of yourself, that idea that tells you you're such and such a person with these likes and dislikes. Ideas that relate to things outside of yourself (e.g., Twilight was a decent book but a terrible movie) are easy to change, or at least to reflect on. But what about the idea that you have of who you are? It's like trying to change contact lenses while looking for the thing to change outside yourself, and in many cases not even being aware that you're wearing lenses! Your idea of yourself does, in fact, color every other concept that flows into your mind; it changes how you relate to it.

How do you even manage to see that? I guess that's why things like meditation and psychedelics offer such an opportunity for personal growth, since they (sometimes) allow you to see yourself from outside yourself, experience things from a different point of view for a bit.

Or maybe I'm wrong and things are actually simpler than they seem; it's not a single all-pervasive belief, but actually it might be a series of small beliefs that come together to form our Self.

For instance, let's take a harmless example. I see myself as someone who doesn't like to eat seafood. Not sure why that is, though. I don't especially dislike the taste; I do have some ethical qualms about how some of these are prepared (e.g., oysters being cooked alive or octopuses being crazy smart), but otherwise it's no different than eating chicken or beef or any other animal, so why not eat seafood?

I remember while growing up I used to at least be partial to clams, but at some point something happened, and now I won't touch seafood if I can avoid it. This is just an idea of me, of "I'm not the kind of person that likes seafood." Analyzing it in this way, I see that this idea of myself has absolutely no ground to stand on, and I feel somewhat motivated to at least try out seafood next time.

The tricky bit is that I still feel pressure within myself NOT to eat seafood. It's like I'm attached to this idea that I don't like it, and I'm hesitant to let it go. Maybe ideas and concepts have a sort of momentum that we need to break through, that we need to go against, in order to overcome. That makes sense, and I can intuitively see how that might be so.

This flips the question of "how you see yourself" a bit. Most people are like a stone going through the river of life, being shaped by the different bumps and currents they encounter along the way. But if we really have more agency in deciding how we see ourselves, then the metaphor could be changed to that of a lump of hot iron being hammered by a crazy smith. What if we replace the smith with our own agency and, through care and effort, manage to hammer the lump into the shape that we want?

This, of course, opens the door to the question "who is it that wants me to be such and such" or "who is my agency" in the example above. Well, being a humble blogger, and already having exceeded my target word count for today, I'm thankfully under no obligation to answer, so I'll just leave the question as an exercise for the reader :)

Footnotes

  1. Independently of whether there's actually some phenomenon happening out there, all we experience has already been filtered by our senses and enriched/classified by our subconscious before it even makes it into our conscious minds. ↩