A Nonhuman’s Guide to Achieving More

My all-time favorite video-game is “Rhythm Heaven Megamix”. It’s a rhythm game. The game is simple: most of the levels just require you to tap a single button to the rhythm of a song. But finishing the entire game is extremely hard. “Tapping” correctly on the rhythm goes incredibly precise, and the penalty for failing is large.

There is a series of levels where a single mistake means failure. It’s titled “All or Nothing”:

Everyone has in their mind a person they want to be. A person who is perfectly smart, fit, healthy, and empathetic.

But most of us are never quite who we aspire to be. It’s part of the human condition to be never quite satisfied. Being perfect is impossible.

To err is human…

So this one’s only for nonhumans.

Welcome to the nonhuman guide to achieving more.

Disclaimer

This guide, as the title indicates, is not for humans.

I’ll go ahead and say it: maximizing productivity/efficiency is a bad life goal. It’s a quick way to unhappiness, depression, and burnout.

Take these lessons merely as a hypothetical mentality geared towards fighting modern overabundance/super-stimuli and practicing minimalism.

Also, these writings may seem to trivialize disorders/addictions. This is not medical advice. Again, this is purely hypothetical writing, and presents a very shallow view on modern issues. Please take the points with a grain of salt.

So far for the disclaimer.

Let’s dive into it.

The Pitch

We need a new humanity.

Evolution can’t keep up with human advancement. Our psychology isn’t optimized for our elaborate digital lives and modern super-stimuli. The current specialized and globalized society calls for new skills and behaviors.

Our psychological biases hold us back.

Problems like depression, addiction, obesity, and other modern disorders, stem from our inability to cope with today’s world. Really, any modern-day problem is solvable. Because we humans have consciousness. And our consciousness allows us to steer our actions beyond our psychological biases.

But it isn’t easy!

Fighting back deeply rooted human biases puts us head-on-head against our biology. The direct psychological reaction is intense unhappiness and helplessness. But we can beat it!

This guide is about fighting those biases. So we can rise to become something beyond. Kill human concepts of love, comfort, happiness, etc. So we can redefine them and become whatever we actually want to become. Anything is possible when you put your mind to it.

Why?

Say, you have a long-standing dream of becoming an astronaut. Venturing into space has drawn your interest since you were a kid. But very few with such aspirations actually make it into space. What you need is a competitive advantage.

Think of all the things that take up your time. I can envision things like the following:

Fun stuff:

• Children
• Pets
• Hobbies

Food/drinks:

• Buying and preparing food/drinks
• Eating food / drinking drinks
• Doing dishes, cleaning, etc.

Social:

• Trying to be cool to impress people (eg seeking social validation)
• Trying to look cool to impress people (fashion, make-up, etc.)
• Impressing people (sex, non-constructive social behavior, etc.)

Distractions:

• Digital distractions (social media, games, etc.)
• Societal distractions (consumerism, ads, etc.)
• Necessary life stuff (toilet, sleep, travel, some form of exercise)

My theory is: eliminate a subset of the above, free up so much time that you will literally get the competitive advantage to out-compete anyone. Yes, there’s a luck factor as well. But really, if you work ruthlessly towards a goal, you’d be surprised how much progress you can make.

The Goal

Oblivion is the root of all evil.

The goal is to make you aware of counterproductive habits. To make you able to rebel against it. I think many people struggle with the problems outlined in these writings. Fighting against it will require you to withstand discomfort. But there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

So what’s in the pot of gold?

• Time. Time is our most precious resource. We need to reclaim our time for what is important to us, rather than all the mindless distractions society throws at us.
• Progress. Our current societal advancements have significantly increased how long we live and how good our quality of life is. We can contribute to make it better.
• Health. The vessel of meat and bones that we call our ‘bodies’ is incredibly important for our quality-of-life.

We can claim back our time.

Are you with me?

Livin’ Like a Puppet

“Advertisements bias us to make decisions that benefit someone else.”

How much of what you do on a daily basis is actually deeply motivated by our own value systems?

In often very subtle ways, we’re steered towards behaviors and desires that are often not in our own best interest.

When you go to the supermarket, is what you buy really aligned with what you would deep down want to eat? Or do you come home with lots of crap that isn’t good for you but you bought it anyway because it makes you feel good?

How much of your phone usage actually improves your life? Does the content you consume make you smarter/happier/better? Are your online connections meaningful the way your offline connections are? How much of the media you consumed last week can you still remember?

What about your stuff? When you think about each of your belongings, do you usually buy things that you need? Do your ‘things’ add a dimension of meaning to your life?

Our current society is organized in such a way that many of our values come from external influences. Organizations play on deeply-rooted human mechanisms to sell their product. Usually, that product gives some kind of ‘comfort’.

In this guide, I want to visit several of these topics and write down how to unlock our own values, and live a life that is meaningful to us.

Digital Entertainment

“Why live in reality, when the perfect reality is right there to be consumed?”

Digital media allows us to live through a life’s hardships, only to find the perfect partner and safe the world. Free social validation for the masses.

Some entertainment genuinely enriches our lives. But with many forms of entertainment, there are diminishing returns the longer we engage in it. And all considered, once the entertainment doesn’t bring us direct value, all hope of it ever bringing value again is lost.

Let’s first zoom in on the pointlessness of entertainment, and how there’s a fallacy where we assign entertainment higher value than it actually brings. Take for instance the incentive systems of most video games. Games reward us points, xp, levels, etc. These incentive systems reward us on a deeply psychological level, which is a part of us that makes us want to feel like we’re accomplishing something in life. The feeling is completely artificial though, since actually we’re just modifying numbers on a screen, that hold no meaning towards life at large at all. Even worse, to get these numbers we go through motions that, for most video games, millions of people have done in pretty much the exact same way.

So why, when the initial “novelty strike” of the fantasy sold by entertainment wears off, do we keep consuming it? It’s mostly FOMO and our minds being unable to distinguish fiction from reality.

The big problem with the “mindless entertainment” is that it distracts us from what’s truly important in life. Replacing entertainment with more constructive behavior can convert diminishing short-term satisfaction with longer-term meaning.

Some of my lessons on this subject:

• When consuming entertainment, you must find it epic.
• When it is not epic, stop consuming. It’s perfectly fine to stop in the middle of a series or video game. Usually, for many forms of entertainment, when the initial novelty wears off, there’s little to be gained anymore.
• If you have been consuming something for a long time, reconsider whether it still brings the value it brought in the beginning. If not, kill the attachment.

Food / drinks

In modern society, we go to a supermarket to get any kind of food we want. Popular are the artificial highly-stimulating foods. Our psychology is optimized to steer our actions towards gathering calorie-dense foods because they keep us alive. But in most of the western society, our survival is guaranteed anyway since we have food in abundance.

Then comes the whole societal obsession around food. People spending hours in the kitchen to get the exact flavor they want. People spending thousands of cash on a bottle of wine because it smells like cedarwood. It’s a completely useless obsession that makes our lives needlessly complicated and wastes away a lot of time and resources.

The world would be better if, in it’s core, we view food as purely functional:

• Our body needs specific nutrients to flourish. On daily basis, we must select the foods that optimize for health.
• At the end of the day, our body does not care whether the food was tasty. It does not care whether we heat our beans and sprinkle a few strands of basil over it, or eat the beans directly from the can. The latter option saves a lot of time.
• Food packaging is one of the biggest environmental destroyers. We need to stop buying 150g of bbq-smoked nuts. Buy the good foods, and buy them wholesale.

Let me share the following highly controversial opinions:

• Any drink but water is completely useless. The whole drinks industry has no reason to exist. Drinking water from the tap is all we need.
• Frozen vegetables warmed in the microwave are healthier and more efficient than fresh vegetables.
• Most food places that are not supermarkets are inefficient. (both from a consumer and producer perspective)

As a society, we have incredibly high standards around food. A hamburger is already incredibly tasty. But no, we just have to refine it with ketchup sauce, two strands of bacon, another patty for good measure, two slices of cheese, and lettuce for decoration. The result is super unhealthy and wildly inefficient food, that will leave us begging for more next time around.

If instead we just snack carrots all day, anything with the least bit of taste will automatically taste extremely good.

Sex

Our sexual motivation system has a huge impact on what we do with our lives. There’s a saying that everything we do is motivated by sex. That might be exaggerated, but it definitely plays a big role in our decision making. But although sex is romanticized by media, there’s a primal nature to it that is easily exploitable and comes with a lot of negativity.

This is a difficult topic to write advice on, because it’s related to very deeply rooted human psychology, and changing this behavior can lead to a bunch of problems. Gearing this motivation system towards a more self-serving system is incredibly difficult. However, self-control can be trained and training it is one of the most valuable modern-day skills.

When training self-control, many people mention “meditation” and “breathing techniques”. Although occasionally useful, I don’t think they are a surefire way to attain self-control. To me, the most effective way to attain self-control is to cut down on super-stimuli.

Distraction

Capitalist society optimizes towards a state that makes maximum revenue for our corporations. Nowadays, that means we live mostly in an attention based economy: mass-manipulating people towards behaviors that benefit the corporate. And all of our human flaws are used against us to the greatest extent possible.

For anyone to whom their digital life is important for their professional success, getting caught in these traps is unavoidable. What follows is a battle of wits, you vs the attention grabbing corporations. Some takeaways from my own battles:

• Some services bring genuine benefit. But when the costs outweigh the benefits for a given service, it’s better to block access completely (take away the candy jar).
• When feeling distracted, find more constructive distractions, like actually being bored. Yes, boredom is constructive. Trying to always fill the void of boredom robs us of valuable restoration time, and time that our subconscious mind can work on generating valuable insights.
• Every source of distraction acts like a snowball: the more we allow ourselves to indulge in the dopamine-evoking behavior, the more our minds beg for more. The earlier the snowball is stopped, the easier it is to stop it. Follow-up distractions are harder to avoid when being historically unsuccessful at withstanding them.
• Many distractions are habits we are hardly aware of. Extensive journalling helps surface these habits and inspect subconscious behavior.

Being attachment free

“The root of suffering is attachment.” ~ The Buddha

Everything we’re psychologically wired towards are mental attachments. Breaking those attachments is hard, but ultimately it renders us more resilient in life.

When we engage in bad habit, we reinforce them. When we engage a lot in sexual behavior, eat tasty foods, binge mindless entertainment, and scroll social media, we strengthen pleasure seeking connections in our brain. Strengthening those connections creates attachment to such pleasure, which is very difficult to break free from.

On the other hand, if we strengthen connections related to focused work and deep relaxation, it will become easier to engage in such constructive behavior, leading to a more difficult but more meaningful life.

Withstanding Pain

“Being resistant to discomfort is the most valuable 20th century life skill.”

Almost all of society’s traps stem from our human tendency to seek comfort. There’s comfort is abundance. But in these sources of comfort, there’s a trap: the more we engage in comfort, the more uncomfortable life becomes. Comfort is addictive, after all.

Having a high pain threshold is the most important modern-day life skill. It automatically keeps us away from sources of comfort, since we’ll no longer need them, dodging most of the issues highlighted above.

You can train resistance to discomfort by, you guessed it, making life less comfortable. Eat less tasty food. Engage in physically hard activities. Whenever your brain tells you to stop, continue. Before you know it, limits that you previously had fade away, and your life transforms for the better.

Don’t Be a Robot

So, let’s go back to the disclaimer I stated in the beginning. With all we’ve learned, why is it so bad to cut all these things from our lives that don’t really help us towards our goals?

We’re not robots. We need some meaningless comfort sometimes. We cannot always be “on”. We need sources of comfort intermittently.

Trying to live an efficient life has been a massive struggle in my life. There were some valuable lessons to extract from it, but ultimately these things come with massive drawbacks.

So instead of turning your life 180 degrees around, consider experimenting with small changes.

Things improve? Great, keep doing that!

But do you notice that actually good food is very important to you? Congratulations, you have discovered one of your core values. Put it in a trophy case and display it proudly. Just don’t let it pile up, will ya?