On the Scarcity of Mental Space

I had a phase in my life where I regularly experienced an anxiety: that my mind was disproportionately occupied by things that are trivial and do not matter (such as housework).* The starting position is that my finite mental effort is being expended on thoughts and problems which, when being thought about, brings about the minimal amount of utility or meaning to my life. These would mostly be general thoughts about certain subjects, such as:

• Utilities and bills
• Shopping, groceries, and meals
• Housemate is not doing his / her fair share of housework
• I cannot find my favourite t-shirt
• I need a haircut
• My computer Desktop is a complete mess
• I have too many unread books
• How much money am I saving each month

Reviewing this list, it seems clear that there is something in common between these trivial thoughts: they tend to either have something to do with the domestic, or are related to the desire to be tidy and organised. This list may somewhat reflect on my personality as being somewhat obsessive with tidiness, but it is entirely possible that one may have an entirely different list of unproductive thoughts e.g. unhappy or envious thoughts triggered by social media, or something like "my annoying neighbour has a much better car than I do". In any case, what I had been experiencing at the time was a genuine frustration that these useless, unproductive thoughts were like mindless termites chomping away at my precious time.

I believed that there is a genuine finding about life behind all this frustration, and I suppose there is no harm putting this in a neat premise-conclusion format: 

P1: My mind can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. Whilst there may be unconscious thought processes (such as the reading of facial expressions) which can run in parallel with your conscious thoughts, it is a reasonable assumption that generally the conscious mental facility is not fit for multi-tasking, say for instance that it feels impossible to multiply 15 x 16 and 17 * 24 in your mind at the same time; you have to do them one after another.  

P2: The amount of conscious time is finite over one's lifetime. This is a relatively simple and uncontroversial premise as long as we are not trying to interpret time as a fourth dimension or  in the context of Relativity. Given roughly 17 waking hours every day, 365 days a year, and an average lifespan of 70 -  the maximum amount of conscious thinking time is roughly 434,350 hour. This doesn't even discount times of the day when the mind is less capable than usual in reasoning or conscious thought (say when a human is aged between 0 and 3, drunk, or on drugs)

C1: The amount of conscious thought is therefore finite over one's lifetime. This is P1 + P2. I refer to the mental capacity for processing this quantifiable amount of conscious thought personally and in my own writings as 'mental space', but I have also discovered that the equivalent term in popular psychology is 'mental bandwidth'. 

P3: Some conscious thoughts are better than others, where 'better' can be taken to mean that is more capable of delivering greater utility to one's life. A more direct way of saying this is perhaps that some conscious thoughts are better than others at making you happy or making your life more meaningful. Regardless of which conscious thoughts you consider as being better, we can agree that not all conscious thoughts are the same. For instance, thoughts about relationships with people who are important to you are (I hope) superior to thoughts about spam emails which are clogging up your inbox. 

C2: C1 + P3 - In order to maximise utility or happiness, we should, as a proportion of our overall conscious mental capacity, maximise the number of 'good' conscious thoughts and minimise the number of unproductive conscious thoughts. 

Having said that, it can be dangerous to go right down the rabbit hole of singling out 'unproductive' thoughts to stop thinking; the idea that one simply alter the proportion of one's thoughts should ring alarm bells. I think the solution to the problem comes in two parts. 

The first part of the solution to remedying my frustration is that I could accept these thoughts and worries as a necessary part of life and view them as one of the necessary things that you have to experience in life, rather than something that I should desperately get rid of or spend too much thinking about. For one, it is virtually impossible to not think about money at all as one goes through life. For a period of time I did actually find this to have quite a soothing impact on my mind, and it made me feel better about how my mental space was being used. 

The second part of the solution, which is also what I believe to be a promising and practical part of the solution, is inspired by the book goodbye, things - on minimalist living by the Fumio Sasaki. One of the central theses of Sasaki's book is that by reducing the number of possessions that one owns to only the possessions which are most important, a significant amount of mental effort will be saved on these trivial worries, particularly ones related to tidying. If you do not own a lot of travel souvenirs, you would not have spend time tidying them and organising them; if you do not own electronic devices with duplicated functionality (e.g. cameras, smartphone, and a calculator), you would not need to worry about the additional cables and chargers which little by little take up your mental space. This is a really good and easy read which I managed to finish over a weekend, and I thoroughly recommend this if you have similar feelings that your life is littered full of trivialities and inherently meaningless things. I think there is something truly valuable behind the book's recommendations and how one might live a good life whilst being surrounded by the culture of mindless consumerism. Going back to my solution, I think that one promising route to get out of the avalanche of 'thought clutter' is to reduce the physical objects which induce these thoughts, i.e. disposing or giving away things which do not matter. With regards to this part of the solution it is still a work-in-progress on my part: I have started throwing away all the obviously useless things and bulk deleting emails/files, but already it feels great now that I have made the first step. It won't be a short journey, but I believe finally I have found a promising and practical solution to the problem of the scarcity of mental space. 

*Even now this occasionally happens, which is one of the reasons that prompted me to write this post.

On Hausarbeit

How much time do we spend on doing housework over a lifetime? (A very mundane subject, I'm aware - but the general concept of work / labour is something that I have become very interested in lately)

Instead of going down the good ol' philosophers' route of asking "What is housework", I start by asking a similar but relevant question - what counts as housework?

We can draw a distinction between the more tedious type of housework (e.g. doing the dishes, taking out the laundry, wiping down surfaces, vacuuming) and the less tedious type (e.g. cooking, tidying and arranging stuff, doing the weekly grocery run). A general rule-of-thumb is that we're far more likely to enjoy the latter but loathe the former type of work.

For the sake of comprehensiveness, one may even wish include what one might call 'digital housework': organising/clearing personal emails, deleting useless files on your Desktop, backing up phone data, or calculating your monthly expenditure. But for the sake of simplicity, let's leave these complications aside for now; let's assume we're only concerned with the more tedious type.

Assuming we spend an average of 7 hours a week in total - one hour every day - then that is equivalent to 365 hours a year.

Assuming a lifespan of 90 years, and taking 20 years off for the beginning and end years where (for those born lucky) we may expect others to do the housework for us, we will be spending 25,550 hours throughout our whole life - equivalent to 1064 days or 34.9 months - on tasks like this. Using the same base of 90 as our lifespan, housework on its own would take up 3% of it. Yes - 3 per cent - that's a lot, since it is an activity many of us would like to rid ourselves of.

Perhaps to some of us, the idea that housework is both time-consuming and a displeasure is neither a surprise nor something worthy of concern. One might say that this idea isn't worthy of concern since - very well yes, 3 per cent, but what can we do about it? It is almost impossible to avoid housework, one might argue, as avoiding housework would result in either or the conjunction of the following situations:

• it is immoral (leaving the work for someone else to do it instead)
• it is expensive (paying someone else to do the work)
• deterioration of living standard, with likely subsequent impacts on your psychological and physical health  

It is not unknown in history that technological innovations and streamlined work methods can significantly reduce housework volume, most notably the invention of the washing machine and well-known principles such as 'soak your dishes before rinsing'. The washing machine, the dishwasher and vacuum cleaners etc., have in particular contributed to the liberation of women from their traditional domestic roles and introduced the concept of leisure time to the masses (hitherto only familiar to the well-off and the nobility).

From our perspective as individuals, however, these innovations come neither easy nor often; even if you are a particularly bright engineer, the time and effort you are investing to produce a mechanism for reducing housework itself incurs an opportunity cost. One might also suggest that we have reached such a stage in domestic technological innovation that we are already faced with diminishing returns to scale in the time-savings that we can get with household gadgets.

Taking on the two assumptions that housework is ineliminable and essentially painful, I have a non-ground-breaking two-part solution to the ancient problem of there is too much housework and I hate doing it:

1. Understand the other aspects of housework, such that any work is not seen purely as a means to an end, but an end in itself. For instance, cleaning could be understood as an activity which on its own strengthens discipline and one's identity as a self-reliant un-materialistic individual. Buddhist monks and ascetics are generally inclined to view tedious work in such light.
   
2. Embrace the idea that housework is an ideal multi-task activity for the mind and body. As the body works, the mind reflects, imagines, dreams and philosophises. If one struggles with spontaneously coming up with mental material, listen to podcasts and music and allow your mind to travel and wander, as your body carries out the routine.

One can only hope that this makes the 3 per cent of our lives slightly less meaningless in our pursuit of meaning in what we tragically deny as our meaningless lives.

...

...but what of those who do housework as work?
 

 

The Blog Writer's Existential Problem

What is the purpose of writing, if no one else is to read what is written?

Perhaps writing is therapeutic. But why write it in a blog?

Perhaps the writer hopes that someone else would read it. But why the half-measure? Why not market the blog?

Perhaps marketing the blog is self-defeating - it takes away the therapeutic effect of writing. Marketing blogs is an activity that is stressful... and mundane.

Then why write it in a blog?

'Fetch' analogy, meta-thinking, and the is-ought gap

The Game of 'Fetch'

In a typical game of 'fetch', the master tosses an object, typically a stick, some distance away, and the dog responds by retrieving it. Once the dog retrieves the stick and returns it to the master, a round of 'fetch' is completed and the master tosses away the stick again and again for many more rounds until he or she feels bored enough to stop. It is worth noting that typically it takes the dog much longer than the master to reach a stage of boredom in this game of fetch. In the pursuit of the stick, the dog derives utility and purpose (I assume so; it explains the pleasure they display when they chase the stick). Only when the dog realises the tediousness and the absence of intrinsic meaning of the game, arguably so, does the dog cease taking interest in the game. Such behaviour finds its analogous counterpart in the human's own pursuit of worldly goals: the accumulation of wealth, power, fame, knowledge, physical beauty, and so on...where the 'stick' for the human can take on infinite possible forms. The human, like the dog, does not at first realise the emptiness of such pursuits, until at due course some occurrence or train-of-thought leads to the human's painful realisation that such pursuits have been in vain. It is at this point that the human begins to reflect more warily about the meaning and purpose of his or her actions, and life in general. Insofar as we carry on with our lives without reflecting, we would feel that our lives have been exciting and worthwhile; but once we start reflecting and realise that we have been playing an intrinsically meaningless game of 'fetch', some of us enter into an existential crisis, and resort to various means (like religion, or simply ignoring the whole matter) of solving it.

The 'Pleasure' solution

While the comparison of the dog playing a game of fetch and the human in pursuit of worldly goals may seem to paint a pessimistic picture of the human condition, perhaps it could be seen that the game of fetch is not, on the whole, an utter waste of time. For 'fetch' yields the dog utility and perhaps a false sense of purpose, and it is hard to see how the dog would fare any better in the attainment of utility in not participating in the game of fetch. In terms of the human condition, this means that realising the hollowness of pursuing material or impermanent aims (such as vanity) need not cast us into depression, so long as we are happy with what we do. This is, of course, relying on the assumption that utility, or happiness, is the sole and final aim of living (for both the human and the dog). Neither does the idea of 'pleasure is the only thing that matters' relieve us of all our restlessness, for it gives us no good reason not to simply engage in a drunken pleasure-cruise. We want our lives to be meaningful and purposeful (for some reason), and hedonism just won't cut it; more or less, the 'fetch complex' - the existential problem - stays with us.

The Is-ought gap

Perhaps we can retrieve some comfort from David Hume's is-ought gap. The idea is that there is a gap between what is the case and what ought to be the case, and you can't infer what you ought or ought not do based on what is the case. Even if it really is so that our lifelong pursuits are like a dog's stick-chasing, intrinsically meaningless and usually in vain, that alone says nothing about whether we should keep chasing sticks, or whether we should stop. It doesn't make an actual improvement to the human condition, but at least it means we don't have to act in a different way. We don't have to become pessimists, or give up our lifelong dreams, just because we see a mirror of our own lives when we see dogs chasing down sticks in parks.

Costs of meta-thinking

From this analogy also arises the 'costs' of meta-thinking. To reflect upon the purpose and the nature of one's life, or specific actions, like the human in coming to terms that his or her life-goals are ultimately derived from the vain pursuit of nothing significant, would be an example of meta-thinking. Meta-thinking can be understood as 'thinking from the outside the framework', or self-reflection. Such meta-thinking does appear to bring along a sort of 'deeper meaning' into one's understanding and perception of life, as it did for the dog and the human. But here is the worry: the consequence of meta-thinking, regardless of whether the process is voluntary or not, is to strip the being (dog or human) of the utility and purpose that the being had been enjoying from the metaphorical game of fetch; unless the being chooses to ignore the conclusions of the meta-thought, of course. An existential crisis cripples the man, stripping him of his energy and purposefulness. At the end of the day, the question to ask is this: would the being be better off in the end had there been no engagement in any meta-thinking from start till finish? In other words, would the dog be better off playing a perpetual game of fetch, without contemplating the nature of the game itself? Is it really the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, or is it the case that 'foolishness is bliss' (糊塗是福)? Philosophers are generally inclined to agree with the former, but it's not always clear if there is always a good reason to, since we can never be sure whether knowing the truth brings us overall more pleasure or more pain.

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