(Generate 🔄 Avoid)

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Time is reality’s way of (generating 🔄 avoiding) itself

Do you ever think about time?  Probably a lot, right?  Like, all the time eh?  Okay, sorry for that one.

But you know what I’m saying - we can’t escape it.  It’s the dominant constraint on our lives and livelihoods.  And when people truly pack everything into their lives that they feel they need or want, it feels like there’s not enough of it.  But that’s just because it’s filled up.

What do you do with your time?

I think I know the answer, because the answer is actually the same for everyone.

There are two answers, and the second is a form of the first.

They are:

1. Activities that you hypothesize to be worthwhile

2. Activities performed to avoid an undesirable result

So, you either pursue pleasure or avoid pain.  This is not exactly a new insight I realize, but look at your moments sometime and see if you can find an exception to that principle.

If you didn’t expect your current activity profile to yield dividends you would change it.  And avoiding pain, often by doing things that are also painful but less than the anticipated punishment, are a form of pleasure.  And pleasure is a form of minimizing pain.

I once heard a financial planner and investment expert make a grand statement about human behavior, which is that it all seeks “up and to the right”.  He was referring to an asset graph.  The line zigs and zags, but if we didn’t expect it to net up and to the right we would do different things to align more closely with that pattern.  And, actually, that’s what guides all of our behavior.

But, here’s the deeper pattern.  And it’s either going to be incredibly inspiring and illuminating, or depressing and demoralizing.  I don’t have any other gears, and much of what I share can have either, and often both effects!  It’s weird.  Just remember that, however it feels to consume these ideas, I’m the one who must simmer in them all day.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…. There.  See what I mean?!

Okay.  So, we know that time is our ultimate constraint.  It limits our possibilities. We only have so much canvas each day, year, life, generation, epoch, era, etc. before it ends and/or resets.

And what is time?  A succession of moments, right?  Can you find the moment?  Do you see it?  Did you catch it?

I don’t think you can.  And all claims to center in the present moment actually merely succeed at observing the flow of time at the smallest human-perceptible scale.  There are much more granular frames than that, but we’re speaking of human awareness for this framing.

As soon as we see the moment it has actually been replaced by a new one.  Did you catch it?  It won’t stop, you can’t stop it, and you can’t stop.  Time carries you along with it.

Now, metaphysics.

Is time a component of Being, or a property?

Really quickly.

Is Being a lump of matter and space that exists within the sweep of time?  Or is it a grander system that includes time within a wider metaphysical boundary?

I don’t know, and I think different interpretations probably exist.  But large language models can track that question, which means it is meaningful to a certain degree.

Here’s an example: https://claude.ai/share/d8e59120-6de7-4b9f-9b93-ede80e7be187

Now, either way, the nature of time tells me the same thing.

Here’s what it tells me:

BEING IS NEVER SATISFIED

Got it?

Here’s another way to put it:

1. Being seeks a better state and then tires of it.

2. Being is constantly trying to escape itself.

3. Being becomes itself in each moment and then quickly tires of itself, seeking yet another state.

And, crucially, Being has conscripted you into the process.

Those 3 points are true of you, and they are inescapable to your psychological function and well-being, so you must find harmony with them.

This moment can’t last.  Being won’t stay there - it immediately avoids itself and seeks a new state.  You are carried along, and your choices give the illusion of agency within this grander process.  But make no mistake, that’s what is happening.

If you try to freeze time you will quickly see that you are dissatisfied with yourself, and that you are on the way to somewhere new.  It can’t be helped.  And the behavioral sets that you cultivate at various levels of time are all attempts to create a consistent cycle of being and becoming that resonates with your instinctive frequencies.

When behavior changes too quickly for our resonance we experience anxiety.  Too slowly and it is boredom.  But people have different frequencies, and I think these must be deeply connected to the nature of values and valuation at a structural level.

So, if you feel “out of sorts”, try that framing.  What is changing too much?  Too little?  With whom do I find the most resonant cycles?  Is my organization at peace with its cycle?

Which organizations am I part of?  Family, company, city, state, nation, world.

Inhabiting time is not optional.  It’s either around us or part of us, but we participate in it along with the rest of Being.  And, as such, we are conscripted into the perpetual process of (avoiding ourselves as we generate the next iteration, which we then avoid…♾️)

(Generation 🔄 Avoidance)

That’s the cycle of Being.  And you.

How do you feel?