Mastery - (Part One: Time)

Advice For Self-Expression

Times are hard.

Shit got real.

The Orange One’s rebarbative tariffs have upended the global order. Who knows where it will end as globalisation disentegrates under the weight of ego-driven populism.

But any historian looking back at the last decade of international politics, from Brexit to the US elections, will be unable to separate these events from technology (read: social media).

The reduction of complex issues to soundbites, tweets or memes designed to incite prejudice & hysterical polarities ripe for exploitation, has landscaped much of present day existence.

Our brains are undergoing a transformation in the bowels of it - even if the digital extensions that have caused us all to split, doppelganger-like, into our virtual & ‘real’ selves are only in their Kurzweilian infancy.

More on his second book, The Singularity Is Nearer, at a later date, but Robert Greene’s Mastery is the subject this week, primarily for what it might teach us about our relationship to technology and time.

Karl Marx once said that man’s mind is directly related to his work; thus seeing an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness.

In the early twentieth century, amid the fog of rapid industrialisation, the reality was that many people ended up in jobs that were no match for their personalities - enslaved by the working week; doomed to labour under the capitalist system for uncaring coporations.

Their work became external to them - a source of alienation, rather than one of meaning & self-actualisation.

Recent years, particularly the latitude imposed on employers during COVID & beyond, the rise of individual branding and peer to peer business; the flexibility of digital nomading, even the rise of AI, have offered a utopian hope that, one day, every person might have the opportunity to fully manifest and master something dear to their heart outside of the archaic 9-5 corporate model.

But the truth is that technology may already be mortally wounding our capacity to capitalise.

Let me offer an example, one likely familiar to all.

My partner & I were at the cinema last week, midway through the film I felt compelled to bark at someone in the row in front to put their phone away.

They managed it. For two minutes. And when this person pulled out their device again, I couldn’t help but watch every moment of the interaction, just to see what was so urgent.

But there was no message, no picture, no flashy breaking news or even an email, no, instead this person swiped through and closed several apps (including a dating app where there had been no reply) before turning their phone off again.

This action was repeated.

And repeated.

A bizarre form of maintanence; a digital ritual that exposed a brain unable to fathom a moment’s boredom or delay the impulse to gratification. I might have forgiven them (I probably wouldn’t) if we were three hours into a period drama, but this was a short - supposedly - tense, thriller.

And, just before the end, I spied more people in the front row doing exactly the same thing.

These weren’t moments of meaning, education, or even enjoyment - but an idle forage for dopamine or new age form of pacifiying - the term behavioural psychologists use to refer to the actions people rely on to soothe themselves in moments of mild or intense stress; touching your hair, rubbing your chin, toying with your earlobe, playing with your necklace etc.

The printing press was a unique moment in history, not merely because it allowed for the rapid dissemination of information, but because it changed man’s mind - in order to interact with a book, people had to learn how to read and, crucially, concentrate for long periods at a time.

Something which, allied to social complexity, has had a profound effect on our brains.

These days the evolution is in reverse - longform content is dying, in the attention economy everyone is desperate for eyes, even if it is only for a 20 second soundbite, the length of a cat meme or the newest addition to Insta Baddies, unleashing a form of mass ADHD (a condition unsurprisingly on the diagnostic rise).

And time collapses in the bosom of it.

Because the lesson/habit formation therein is not effort = reward, but rather idle scrolling = reward; shortcuts become the essence of interaction, one utterly anathema to the way you might wish to develop as a human being and learn your craft.

We are all powerless in the face of this digital tsunami, because engagement is driven - as anyone who has watched the Great Hack or spent any time on social media will know - by weaponised passions, the stickiest of which; fear, anger, outrage, even trauma, which I argued recently, has become a commodity, are corrupting the very purpose of emotions: to guide our attention in a meaningful way.

Here’s Greene:

In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.

But these qualities are under attack.

Gandhi once said ‘there is more to life than merely increasing its speed’, yet this vortex of exponential technological increases fuelled by feedback loops and ever cheaper electronic components (maybe Trump will save us after all) has inaugurated the painful dualism of our age - at no point have we had access to so much information, yet the very nature of our interactions with it harms us in the pursuit of our goals; damaging our attention span, flooding us with shortcuts & dopaminergic spasms that hijack our consciousness and hobble our capacity to fully express.

That’s before you even look at the effect of information overload itself - how confusing, stressful and draining it is to exist in an ‘always on’ environment - or its impact on people’s ability to truly connect.

Neural plasticity means that the brain changes by experience - at any age - so our very habits become the basis of our character, but:

This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain. It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it.

Of course, these claims are not new - every generation fears the one that comes after, especially as it pertains to technology. It happened with printing (Socrates worried it would ‘create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories’), it happened with radio (‘children developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker’), with TV (though you might say that Trump’s rise, the way in which American politics has metastasized into reality-tv-style entertainment, has already validated fears about the vulgarisatioon of life by television), but I would argue that the difference with a phone is that every one of these mediums, and other, newer mediums, are contained within it.

Pandora’s Box. Digital Crack. The Siren’s Song. Call it what you like - but the smartphone has thrust a power on us all we are utterly unequipped to wield.

Any parent or teacher will have far more examples and causes for lament, but if we are unable to concentrate for long periods, and instead are at the mercy of these listless mind states, then our character-forming habits begin to exist directly in oppostion to the path of self-actualisation, to our own ‘inner calling’.

You may choose a career path based on what peers and parents tell you, or on what seems lucrative. If you lose contact with this inner calling, you can have some success in life, but eventually your lack of true desire catches up with you. Your work becomes mechanical. You come to live for leisure and immediate pleasures. In this way you become increasingly passive…. You may grow frustrated and depressed, never realizing that the source of it is your alienation from your own creative potential.

Time is of essence here. Not in the sense that we should act with the kind of awful urgency & sociopathic relentless ushered in by hustle culture & the like, but that we should truly learn how to exploit it as the days pass by.

You simply cannot learn anything in any meaningful way without a commitment to small steps over a long time frame.

Why? Because time spent learning a skill renders it automatic, freeing up cognitive bandwidth to focus on other, higher, tasks related to the deepening of ability.

Greene references hunter-gatherers who, having mastered the art of specific skills like tracking prey or using tools, developed intuition - thought below conscious awareness.

The longer they spent observing something, the deeper their understanding and connection to reality. With experience, their hunting skills would progress. With continued practice, their ability to make effective tools would improve. The body could decay but the mind would continue to learn and adapt. Using time for such effect is the essential ingredient of mastery. In fact, we can say that this revolutionary relationship to time fundamentally altered the human mind itself and gave it a particular quality or grain. When we take our time and focus in depth, when we trust that going through a process of months or years will bring us mastery, we work with the grain of this marvelous instrument that developed over so many millions of years. We infallibly move to higher and higher levels of intelligence. We see more deeply and realistically. We practice and make things with skill. We learn to think for ourselves. We become capable of handling complex situations without being overwhelmed.

Perhaps our intuitions will develop in lockstep with these new technologies, perhaps, if Kurzweil’s claim (and Elon Musk’s incessant attempts) about the merging of the real and the digital through neural implants and cloud-based computing come to fruition, one day it will be possible to flit endlessley between different mediums and their messages without any negative impact on our mental and social well-being, on our focus, and our minds will truly expand.

But regardless, there simply is no shortcut to mastery beyond the current architecture of our brains.

To the extent that we believe we can skip steps, avoid the process, magically gain power through political connections or easy formulas, or depend on our natural talents, we move against this grain and reverse our natural powers. We become slaves to time—as it passes, we grow weaker, less capable, trapped in some dead-end career. We become captive to the opinions and fears of others. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.

You might wonder: who needs mastery in this day and age?

But mastery is more than just the development of skills, it is development of the soul: even if it takes you a while to work out what your true inclinations are, these inclinations are a reflection of your uniqueness.

With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish. This intense connection and desire allows them to withstand the pain of the process—the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack.

Leonardo da Vinci - polymath

A bit of work, every day, focused on simple and immediate skills, using emotion to fortify persistence, not stymie it, is the best way to scale the proverbial mountain or fell the oak tree and fully become what you are.

The good news is that no matter your age, you have time to assess what you want and chase this dream.

At any moment we can choose to shift our relationship to time and work with the grain, knowing of its existence and power. With the element of time working for us, we can reverse the bad habits and passivity, and move up the ladder of intelligence.

It certainly isn’t easy. But it is attainable.

For all of us.

But to even think that way in the modern day, is to go against the grain of all that we interact with, and the manner in which we do it.

Life, for many, has become all reward and no effort.

Science fiction is often obsessed with externalities; flying cars, robots, AI bad actors and the like, but despite modern day advances, a lot of these material expansions are probably still quite far away.

Instead, as with the printing press, the greatest transformation through time is likely to be internal - the evolution of this fundamental relationship between hand and mind, and it’s here where technology is beginning to expose the frailties of our biology.

The attention economy has led to so many of us being dumbfounded by a hegemony of the worst passions. Complexity eschewed for the ‘dirty’ and quick answers.

In the post-truth, age nuance rarely gets attention. Nuance may be dying. And the increasing speed and intensity of super-charged engagement is leaving us all bewildered.

But always remember, no matter how loud or incessant the clamour, that you do have time to develop the deep focus that will nourish you.

Even if your very habits make you believe otherwise.

As Greene says:

This is not mastery for the purpose of dominating nature or other people, but for determining our fate…. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.

‘The devourer of all things’ as Ovid once referred to it.

So make time work for you; not against you.