Mental Clarity

Someone recently told me 'You think too much'. I wanted to snap back, 'Maybe you don't think enough'. Who said it or why they said it is not the focus of this post. Instead, I want to explore why I got irritated by it instead of simply shrugging it off.

I meditated on this question while on a stroll by the beach on Sunday morning. Why was I so reactive to a simple remark? I came to the conclusion that when someone judges me—'You think too much'—or gives me advice—'Don't think so much'—I have to decide whether that judgement or advice helps me or doesn't help me. If I cannot decide, that's a problem. Because it means I'm not clear in my own head what I want from life / what my goals are. And getting irritated and being reactive is a symptom of lacking mental clarity.

I think having mental clarity requires more deliberate effort and introspection today than at any previous point in human history.

Because I have more options to choose from than ever before. When I was in middle school, my parents and I would rent a movie from an Asian grocery store. We could only afford this luxury on Friday or Saturday night. And often the store wouldn't have the movie we wanted because it was checked out by someone else. So we'd have to settle for another movie or pass on the movie that night. Whether we'd be able to get the movie we wanted was a fun little guessing game we played on the drive over. Today, these constraints have largely vanished. Anyone who has opened YouTube or Netflix can relate to the decision fatigue that follows. Optionality is everywhere: from what programming language to use for my next project to which beverage to order at the cafe. I don't think I can even name all the different kinds of coffee-based drinks.

Even if I succeed in making a choice, I'm constantly bombarded with conflicting advice which makes me second guess those choices. Studies have shown that people are objectively less happy with a choice they made if they had several other choices available because they're more likely to think they made a suboptimal choice. This makes it harder to stick to a chosen path. There's an old joke that if you ask ten different economists their opinion on anything, you're going to get eleven different answers. I feel like this is no longer unique to economists. I see this first hand in health and wellness space. YouTube "experts" with sizable followings disagree on how often to train, how much to rest, what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat, whether to fast, whether to take supplements, and the list goes on.

I've come to realize that optionality and engagement with the external world are obstacles in the path towards mental clarity. Some of the most lucid periods of my life were when I didn't keep my options open. When I quit my six-figure day job, I gave myself only one option: build a SaaS business that can cover my basic living expenses. The next three years were some of the best years of my life, although people looking in from the outside would've considered it monotonous, dull, uncomfortable, and borderline crazy. Today, my life is more visibly exciting and I'm more comfortable, but if someone asks me what I want out of life, I wouldn't be able to write a simple answer like I could back then. And I think this is connected to why I reacted irritably that day.

Aside from our need to sleep, there don't seem to be any natural guardrails on the amount of information we can consume or the amount of choices presented to us. The apps serving us information will never say 'stop, it's enough'. Can you imagine Netflix freezing your account for 24 hours if you take more than 10 minutes to commit to a movie or show? Their stock price would plummet. We're pushed to accumulate more wealth which leads to abundance of choice and FOMO. There's no finish line. In The Harried Leisure Class, Linder argues that, contrary to commonly held belief, economic prosperity translates to less leisure time not more, because the opportunity cost of leisure increases. And I think leisure time is vital to attain mental clarity.

So, if mental clarity is my goal, then unfortunately the modern world is not on my side. I'm swimming against the current. Still, what can I and you do about it? Here I draw on Patanjali's yoga sutras, a collection of 196 aphorisms which are believed to provide a solution for all of life's problems. But like all self help, the hard part is not reading the words but putting it into practice. Verse 1.32, eka-tattva-abhyasa, which translates to 'one-pointed practice', provides insight on how to deal with mental fog, restlessness, and a scattered mind. Patanjali advises to occupy the mind with a single objective. He says, 'A mind occupied fully with one thing has no room to fragment'.

He doesn't specify what the objective should be. That's for us for decide. I think it should be something we already have fun doing, but level up the intensity. Since energy is finite, increasing the intensity for one thing will force us to cut other things from our lives. This may lead to restlessness and boredom, but we have to stick with it, because at the end of the tunnel is clarity. This approach will also simplify thoughts. There will be less asking ourselves 'should I do this or that?' which Patanjali describes as 'duality', the reason for a troubled mind. And when someone gives advice or makes a judgement, it will be easier to decide whether it helps us or not, and thereby ignore if it doesn't.