Corollaries of Pixel Life

There’s this semi-famous blog post floating around on the Internet called Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel . It’s famous in the sense that I could search “pixel life blog post” and it showed as the second result in my search engine of choice. It’s semi-famous in the sense that the blog post isn’t $celebrity.

If you haven’t read the post, you should read it. If you don’t want to, you should know that I’m mildly disappointed in you, as in, U+1FAE4-style-disappointed, but I’ll give you summary anyway.

The blog post is about the following: Whoever you are, you’re reading this now. And in this second sentence, now is still now, though time advanced. And it just keeps being now, and so on (I’ll keep the italics for a bit; sorry if they’re annoying). You can’t exist outside this current slice of time and therefore your quality of experience is only dictated by how you feel inside this now – you can have thoughts about the future or the past, but you can’t think a thought that is due in 10 minutes, can you? Although the future exists (ostensibly), it’s sort of fake like that.

Yet, we spend significant time envisioning awesome future events, yearning the day we’ll finally retire, find a spouse, learn an instrument, etc.. By the time this event rolls around, it’s happening in the now. That big ball of positive emotion we’ve been imagining? We’re now inside it and it’s happening slooooooowly, spread thin over multiple hours or even days, depending on how long the impact of the event lasts. And at some point it inevitably passes, leaving us in the emotionally neutral now again. In Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel , the pixel is the now, and the picture is how your brain summarizes your life events: predictions, fears, plans, anticipation, traumas, financial worries, retirement plans. Our brain is excellent at summarizing, but we don’t really live in the summary (the picture). All we truly experience is an infinitesimally thin slice of now (the pixel).

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this post is that I would like to share three of my own corollaries that point out why this picture-pixel-discrepancy is a problem (I was gonna write “and how we can use it to our advantage”, but as I’m noticing in my final pass, I really only mention problems. Maybe if I feel like it (I probably won’t tbh), I’ll cover a more positive outlook in a future blog post). Even though I have no statistic to back this up, I’d claim that these problems are becoming worse; I’d guess mainly due to technology, i.e. social media.

Corollary 1 – Long projects are more boring than you imagine

Have you ever been excited to start some big project and then woke up bored of it one week later? That’s the effect of pixel life at play. Let’s take the example of an avid language learner…

So you want to do something big like learn a new language – wow, what a great idea; your friends and family will be impressed, your teacher will be impressed, you’ll wield the language like a native, you can brag to your relatives, you’ll speak that new language while on vacation in a foreign country—

Stop.

Do you see what your mind is doing? Present you is attracted by this heap of positive emotions. Notice what has happened to your perception of time as you were reading the above paragraph:

• “Your friends and family will be impressed” – they won’t be for quite a while. It’s cool you’re learning a language and all, but you’ve invested a total of 0 (zero) minutes so far.
• “Your teacher will be impressed” – what, like, from now on and all the time? Unlikely. Perhaps a few minutes each lesson if you’re doing well, so maybe 0.03% of a week or so.¹
• “You’ll wield the language like a native” – after thirty years, if you’re lucky¹.

You can see how time has become contracted. If you operated on only these ambitions, you’re going to be real disappointed when you set foot in a classroom and realize that the positive thought, which your mind conjured up in 0.05s, will in fact take two weeks to maybe kick in. Someone who identifies with the above statements likely suffers from shiny-project-syndrome. They jump from project to project, seemingly never finding the motivation to see them through to the end.

This has an interesting implication: Someone suffering from shiny-project syndrome is not necessarily undisciplined! They sure seem undisciplined because they quit projects left and right, but I don’t think this is the case for most people. The problem is rather that they start projects that aren’t worth it to begin with. In fact, if you started learning a language operating on the motivations listed above, it makes perfect sense to quit. You should quit, because you simply miscalculated: You can imagine all these ambitions within the thirty seconds it took you to read the above paragraphs. That’s a lot of emotional energy compressed into a short window of time, which seems like it would feel great if you got to experience all of it now. It’s too bad that “now” is fed to you in six hundred four thousand eight hundred second-slices during just the first week of learning.

Ambitions such as “wielding a language like a native” are devastating: It takes years to reach a native level in a language, and if you can’t find a different source of enjoyment along the hill, it’s better to give up. That hill of positive emotion flattened over five years will be as shallow as a puddle.

So… Depressive, right? Yes. The secret to beating shiny-project syndrome is to not start new projects. More accurately, it’s about assessing how much fun a project is going to be three months from now. Will it still fill you with joy? If so, then do it, if not, stop.

In summary:

Corollary 2 – DON’T PANIC

Would’ve been nice to write this section title in large, friendly letters, but markdown won’t let me.

As I’m writing this, I have five large projects (essentially hobbies) I really want to work on and become better at. Large means large: About 4000 hours work each. This blog isn’t one of them – it’s maybe priority eight or nine. Then I have another twenty-ish project ideas I’d in theory enjoy to work on but have never put a single hour into because I’m lacking the time, or rather, the ability to direct my energy in a way that would let me work on them. A rational solution would be to implode.

Luckily, there’s another out: you can sorta just exist.

This the sort of trick doctors hate you for, but it works. Notice that in the now, you’re always only working on one project. Or rather, you’re reading this blog to procrastinate working on a project and I’m the one actually working on a project, haha, sucks to be you, but still, you’re doing only one thing. The now is too short to do more than one thing.^{2 3}

If you think about this fact from time to time and focus on how it feels to be you during a slice of now, you’ll notice something. This slice is indeed very, very thin. There’s not much in it – a thought, maybe some sensory inputs (most of which you’re tuned out of, if you’re focused) and an emotional backdrop, which is roughly your “mood”. Even if your mind is racy, jumping from stimulus to stimulus, you can’t experience more than a few thoughts at once. Your mind sort of sums the rest and it becomes your emotional backdrop: “I’m anxious”. This emotional backdrop can feel thick because it’s slow to change, but honestly, try and look at it and you can really see it for what it is. One thought, two thoughts, three thoughts. It’s a bunch of moments in series and you only need to live through one of them at a time.

Back to the original topic: Let’s assume you’re “working on too many projects at once.” Well, you’re not working on them at once, are you? Because right now, you’re reading this blog post. Even if you weren’t reading this blog post, you would be working on one and only one project. All these other projects are projects you’ll be working on in the future, and your mind is holding them in your head for you, panicking about it, but look: It’s fake. These are only future instances of now that your brain has summed up into a bunch of nervous emotion. You don’t need to worry about them… Except, that’s still easier said than done, because the panic will make it physically (neurologically) harder to focus. It would be nice if you could just rid yourself of them, but unfortunately, this takes practice. Breathing techniques can help with this. A good one is Kapalabhati Pranayama (“Meditation To Calm Anxiety”, by Dr K). You don’t need to buy into the spiritual components of yoga or meditation for this; even if you just treat it as a physiological trick, it will work well enough.

Corollary 2 is the dual of corollary 1. In corollary 1, I claimed that big awesome projects suddenly become boring when you see them up close, because a big project will be spread over a long time period (by definition). Corollary 2 is about big scary projects. If you ever see a giant hill of negative emotions in the future, notice that just like the big positive hill, this is also fake. You’re looking at a hill, but by the time it arrives in the present moment, it will have been flattened into a puddle. Let me restate this without the analogy: Future projects literally can’t hurt you. You can feel nervous about them, which is a true feeling in the now, but that feeling is not how a project feels when you actually work on it. The nervousness is a projection of the mind.

Corollary 3 – You can only start now

This corollary is the scariest one. Luckily, by now you’ve learned that this scariness will be presented to you one thought at a time, so you’ll be fine. Anyway…

Just as we can only feel in the now, we can only act in the now. This has an obvious conclusion: Every single task you do in your entire life, you have to do in some instance of now. That is, no matter how gruesome the task, you’ll live through this gruesomeness at some point.

People who procrastinate (me) hate this fact. I can spend weeks putting off a task because I don’t feel like it until eventually I do it anyway by some godly intervention, or I become so stressed about it that I have no choice but to do it. It’s usually the latter, and this makes the present moment that I have to live through even worse than it would have been initially. Master procrastinators can use the fear of a problem getting worse as fuel for procrastination on its own, which is a pretty impressive feat (this is a subtype of the problem I outlined in the previous corollary).

Of course, you know this. No one who procrastinates thinks it is a rational thing to do – it’s in the word’s definition itself: The good kind of procrastination is called “taking a break”. If you procrastinate, I do think there’s a good chance you’re starved for proper breaks, but perhaps that’s material for a different blogpost.

There’s a relatively simple thing you can do right now to help with this. I won’t claim it will solve everything at once, but it can help with one particular instance of procrastination. Perhaps applied over time, it will help with everything. But procrastinators hate things that need to be done multiple times, so we’ll do it once right now in this very slice of time.

Envision a task you’ve been putting off. Close your eyes for ten seconds, if it helps, and just bask in the stress that comes with it.

You got it?

True master procrastinators will have envisioned their exam, which is taking place in six hours from now and that they still have to study for, so your mind should be in complete panic mode right now. Doesn’t matter, just stare it straight in the face. The exam can’t hurt you right now, literally, because it’s only starting in six hours. I mean sure, the exam’s gonna happen to you, but if it was hurting you right this very time slice, your procrastination wouldn’t be effective at avoiding it, now would it?

Either way, just stare at the fear with full attention and feel what your body is doing: Increased heartrate. Squeasy stomach, maybe shorter breaths. Perhaps you feel like moving.

Now that you’ve stared at it for a while, you may notice the fear loses some of its shock value. It doesn’t go away, but you may have gotten accustomed to it, like you would to cold water.

You can literally play with it: Try thinking about closing this browser tab and starting with your task right this very second, and – OH SHIT, there’s another prod of fear.

This is the emotional hill you’re fighting against. We’ve been through this, but let me reiterate: This emotional hill is fake. Sure, the fear of the task is real. But the task is due in the future, not now. The physical act of working on the task feels different than your fear of it.

Let’s do the game again: What if you started the task right now? How would it feel? Notice the fear that comes with this thought; it’s horrible, but how would the task itself feel? First you have to stop reading this blog post, so you’d close this browser tab. That’s pretty easy, you put your finger there or move your mouse over it. Then you’d open your book or whatever. Very easy, you just move your hand. Then you’d study for six hours. OH SHIT, THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE.

Well yes shit, of course this is impossible. You cannot study for six hours right this very second. You can only study for a very small instance of time each, six hours in a row. That’s very different, because your mind is trying to trick you and is trying to make you feel all the gruesomeness and sleep-deprivedness and coldness and nervosity and panic of the coming six hours all at the same time. In reality, you’ll have six hours to cope with this, and it will even be intermingled with a bunch of other feelings, perhaps even fun. (And that fun will be followed by immediate shame that you didn’t start sooner, because if it’s fun, why the hell didn’t you do it earlier? Oops. But you have a pretty good excuse: You can’t start something in the past. You can only start now.)

If it worked, you’re not even reading this paragraph anymore. If you’re still reading, I’ll leave you with another trick; we’ll do it again: Envision closing this browser tab and doing what you should. Your mind hits you with fear. Ask yourself why you’re not starting the task. Now your mind comes up with rationalizations: It’s too hard, it’s too scary, I’ll do it sometime else, I’m sleepy, I don’t feel like it, I’m a pee-pee poo-poo baby. Instead of engaging with these thoughts, just stare at them, right in their dumb little thought-face. Keep looking at them and keep entertaining the idea of starting the task. And now keep rereading this very paragraph until you do start. Your mind can’t win if you trap it in an infinite loop.