Comments on “In praise of choicelessness”

Since choicelessness is a very satisfying practise, it would be a waste of operating in the fluid mode to not incorporate choicelessness where it is most practical and beneficial.

What difficulties does the fluid mode have when trying to replicate choicelessness?

I think the difficulty with incorporating choicelessness is that traditional choicelessness requires an unspoken hegemony that has always been, or a communal experience that’s too busy doing what the community is doing to ask why.

Consistently questioned and upturned authority is the norm in the west, which makes unspoken hegemony alien and undesirable. Communal experience is primarily voluntary and interest-based now - “Why do I want to participate in this group? To further [interest] of course!”. The very premise for participating in a contemporary community prevents choicelessness.

To attempt incorporating Choicelessness 2.0 in a contemporary setting, you’d need to replicate the effects of traditional choicelessness. The effect of just doing things that you do, because that’s what you do.

I propose that to do Choicelessness 2.0 without hegemony or a survival community, you need consistent long-term action for the conditioning to make it practical, and the mental ability to avoid dismantling the conditioning with “Why?”.

I feel that I have accidentally incorporated choicelessness through what was just a very enjoyable hobby - Fighting Games(Street Fighter et al). I have been engaging in the process of consistent improvement, practise, competition, playing and theorising on this area for so long that “Why?” is an almost laughable question. I have more important things to think about, like fireballs.

However, the more I think about this as I’m typing it out, the less solid the choiceless hold feels. I’m used to choicefulness. Exploring the “why” of choiceless action removes some of the glue that holds it together. I’m not very good at avoiding or steering direction of my thought yet, so in self-interest I’ll stop pondering this.

Choicelessness 2.0 is a fascinating idea. The one thought that occurred to me is the potential similarity between the feeling of choicelessness and flow. The feeling of “natural smoothness” I experience when sufficiently engrossed in some task or experience is what I imagine it feels like to participate in a society where “whys” aren’t relevant or necessary. Maybe we can find ways to scale flow to do more, for more people, more of the time?

As an aside, the description of what it felt like for you to manage a business :

Briefly, in managing a business, I learned to divide my energy finely, and to send out the fragments of my being to animate all the minute details of a complex enterprise—leaving as little as I possibly could within my own body.

Rings really true to me. I wish I had the words for this sooner! I’ve suspected for a while that this is the feeling when “you’re doing it wrong” in regards to the management, but maybe everyone is experiencing it this way. This is one of the factors driving me to leave my current business! Thanks again, David

In your “gigantic chart” choicelessness begins to end around 1450. However, I would think that while the vast majority of people lived in the choiceless state during the middle ages, among the small group of educated people the choiceless state ended much earlier, with the beginning of the high middle ages and the development of universities. Scholasticism is definitely systematic, not choiceless.
When Christianity emerged, it did so in a world of competing religions and cults, i.e. in a situation of choice. It was originally a small sect. In late antiquity, there was definitely religious choice. Think of St. Augustin switching from Roman paganism, then to Neo-Platonism and Manichaeism and finally to Christianity. Only at a later time (and this marks the end of late Antiquity and the beginning of the middle ages) did the majority of people (at least in Western Europe) dip back into the choiceless state. Probably, some of the culture of Antiquity survived all the time, in Byzantium, Persia and some other places.
So the choiceless state may secondarily emerge, among the uneducated.
I don’t think that something like Choicelessness 2.0 can work. We had that in the inquisition and we have it among the Taliban. There is a knowledge of alternatives, combined with an attempt to base society on a single creed or ideology. This will always lead to suppression and violence because there is knowledge of alternatives and so there will be dissenters. The secondary choicelessness described above was partially a result of breakdown of economy and civilization, leading to people becoming uneducated and analphabetic, but partially also of violent suppression, e.g. at a certain time, pagan temples where closed, all non-Christian religions where forbidden, certain competing forms of Christianity (e.g. Arianism) where forbidden and the Platonic Academy was closed.

And yet change, sometimes radical change, comes to traditional societies also. Or we would not have non-traditional societies. Supposedly choiceless human beings walked out of Africa 70,000 years ago and founded colonies around the globe. They might not have chosen to colonise the globe per se, but something made them keep moving a mile up the road every couple of years for the next 700 centuries. So if “choiceless” really the right term?

At the end of my four month retreat in fairly basic conditions in the mountains of Spain, where I had few choices, I could not wait to get back to choosing for myself. The first month was blissful - peace, quiet, nature, simple life, loads of meditation, grand rituals, blah blah. The middle two were down hill into hellish states and I sometimes wished I could die, let alone leave. The last month dragged on but I found something to occupy my free time that kept me sane. I found shady spot, a bottle of PVA glue, and mended every book in the library that needed it - i.e. I rediscovered my autonomy, because after 3 months of having hardly any, I was hating it.

Even if choicelessness makes sense in a culture where most major things are already decided when you are born; enforced choicelessness generally sucks. Ask a refugee. They are not jumping for joy because all their options have suddenly disappeared and they have no choice but to run for it or die. A certain level of choice/autonomy would seem to be optimal.

You chose temporary choicelessness, but you always had the choice of walking away and a life to go back to. A holiday from being bombarded with unnecessary choices was probably always going to feel good for a short period, especially then the extreme novelty counteracted the lack of choice to help keep you buoyant. Had you been seriously ill on your retreat and had no choice of medicine you might have come to quite different conclusions. Had you been taken prisoner and deprived of all choice you almost certainly might not have enjoyed yourself quite so much. Throughout your experience of “choicelessness” you were choosing to stay, choosing to participate, and so on. You never lost the ability to make choices and you continued to make them. You were never in the same position as the people you lived with for that short period.

I recall reading research on this that suggested that there is an optimum level of choice and correlated level of autonomy. The Amish are closer to the optimum that the USA generally. Most other American have to make too many choices and it makes them miserable. Back in Jan 2000 when Martin Seligman was President of the APA, he edited a special edition on Positive Psychology and choice featured in several articles. You might find the article Self-determination: The tyranny of freedom. particularly apposite on this subject.

I built a small tech company without any external funding and without any mentoring or social support system, and scaled it to the point where I would have needed to add a layer of professional management to grow further, which would have meant taking VC money, which I didn’t want to do at the time. I passed my stress limit before selling it, which was nearly disastrous. On the other hand, I and the employees kept all the equity.

I have two questions. First is trivial and it’s okay if you don’t answer.

Q1. Out of curiosity, what business was that? And how many employees in total?

Q2. I’m running my own business now. There’s no employees or partners. Just me and a pillar customer. I have read the cofounders before https://meaningness.com/cofounders-in-relationship but I think that was more of a example in order to explain the evolution towards meaningness. Less of a how to get better at business via meaningness. I am wondering and this is my question: how to incorporate choicelessness/meaningness and how much in order to run a successful business and life.

I’m not interested to sacrifice one for another. Your statement about “dividing energy finely, and leaving the body empty” strikes a chord in me. If I could, I’d like to run a business for as long as possible while living a happy life the way you describe in the choiceless mode you experienced in Tibet

Or a passenger cult, I suppose. To quote the most relevant paragraph:
“This is a recurring issue. After years of me blogging about Amtrak’s odd boarding procedures, we finally got an Inspector-General inquiry into it, but all the IG turned up was that nobody could explain why they do what they do. Amtrak officials had previously represented to me that it’s a security requirement but could not provide further details. They didn’t want to lie to the IG so they admitted this isn’t really the reason. But they didn’t come up with a reason. And then they also didn’t change the process.”
The hilarious duality of the situation is that because this cargo cult happens to inhabit the corpse of a modern system, its theatric props and customary rituals function well enough that some cargo reliably keeps turning up, just not very much of it.
(excerpt from https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-experts)

In the U.K, government ministers have “red boxes” containing the documents they are supposed to be working on.

The story has it that:
A) they are lined with lead
B) no-one knows why

Note, not that the reason for the lead is classified and so can’t be divulged to the public, but really no-one knows.

Organisations can acquire procedural cruft like that, when the reason for a rule has become totally lost.

(I am half expecting this story to be an urban legend. I learnt of it in the context of reading about computerisation of government procedures. So, ok, we need to replace the old paper procedure with an online equivalent. The old paper procedure involves a lead lined box. So naturally, the analysts want to know what the actual requirement for the lead box was so that they can meet the same requirement digitally…)