The Odyssey of Change

June at Eirene Cafe

Jun 01, 2024

In June, we explore change as an odyssey rather than a mirage. This letter is the first part of this month’s series.

Since January, I have been proposing monthly themes as a way to foster deeper and more genuine interactions during our gatherings. An intimate group of kindred souls has formed and comes together regularly every Tuesday morning for Clarity Pages, to ponder over the concepts and ideas these themes carry as cloaks. I didn’t notice an evident correlation between them until recently, while I was doing a retrospective to assess what could be next. I believed the choices made in the past few months were rather casual and instinctive. Here is what we had:

Intention in January

Transition in February

Patience in March

Belonging in April

Essentials in May

But as I look at them now, they surely make a certain logical sequence. I can even write a sentence:

Intention and patience are essentials in the transition towards belonging.

The core revealed itself. It needed to be expressed in a group, as a group. We don’t need more self-help; we need support. While these gatherings are not therapy sessions, they surely are therapeutic at a degree. It’s not unusual to gently touch some sore scratches and bring relief as we share our stories in a considerate way.

For curiosity, I went to ask AI what would be the natural continuation in that list. Growth, it blurted out. For Christ's sake, please don’t bring up growth with its ill-defined ideology of resilience. Give me an alternative, I wrote. Flourish, it came back. Thanks for the pop psychology vibes, AI.

Somewhere in my mind, I have a dark cellar where I stash away words that have been overused and abused. I open that door sporadically to toss in another term: organic, authentic, unique, growth, empower, creative, successful, along with the ten CTAs that have been circulating in Instagram ads for the past few years. It's my attempt to find alternative expressions and protect my thoughts from contamination with the pervasive influence of marketing tactics. Reluctantly, I'm about to consign retreat to that pile as well, as it has become yet another casualty of a money-making trend of the relentless commodification of the wellness machine. Another beautiful word, stripped of its essence.

But flourish kept coming back to my mind

As a more inclusive concept, not entirely focused on the outcome, I contemplated the notion of change as a metamorphosis instead. Aesthetically, it’s less pretentious than flourish and can be closer to the not always graceful transformation human life is made of. As a process, it contains important elements such as energy fluctuations and reorganization.

At first, it felt elusive and too generic. Like a vast entity that could only be grasped and dominated with the clarity of a well-educated, composed, and organized mind—something I definitely don’t have. I was afraid that it would fail to translate into real-life, small pieces of supportive structure to gather around, and that we would end up with annoying platitudes.

So I made an effort to be systematic. I started digging and defining the concept. It came down to change versus changing. And did I discover some very interesting theories, phenomena, and scientific explanations.

I surely went through a lot of change in my life, but how much of it all led to changing? From a philosophical standpoint, “if we define change in an object as temporal variation of its properties, we are faced with the problem that some properties of an object may alter without there being a consequent change in the object itself”.

Dang! When change is imposed, we don’t have a choice but to adapt. But does adaptation to external factors necessarily mean inner changing? If “change in general may be defined as the variation of properties (whether of things or space) over time”, does “temporal variation” constitute change?

We can also flirt for a moment with absolute idealism. As in Christianity, there is the same doctrine that change is contradictory and basically unreal: the Absolute is changeless. Supporting this idea is the fact that any scientific explanation of change will proceed by finding an unchanging law operating, or an unchanging quantity conserved in the change, so that the explanation of change always involves identifying what remains unchanged.

Poignant. My head spins. I’ll stop the torture here.

December 2023

I resolved solemnly that in the new year, I was going to walk almost five times per week. Science was telling me it was very good for my well-being. I also resolved I’d be reading more and spending less time on screens. I knew from personal experience how beneficial that would be for my mental health. Additionally, I planned to do 30 minutes of meditation with visualization every morning before or after consuming my protein-rich breakfast.

I was determined to make changes.

So, I was supposed to put on my running shoes one morning in early January and go out for a walk. I did it twice. Then, my body started having physical reactions to the thought of doing it again, with invading fatigue. The doom-scrolling continued because I couldn’t maintain deep reading concentration for more than five minutes. The same went for the meditation.

I started to doubt my willpower. Then, I began beating myself up for not being determined enough. This led me to the conditioned conclusion that I’m a failure. It confirmed my doubts that I lacked perseverance. If I couldn't even create a habit as simple as walking daily for 30 minutes, how would I ever accomplish anything? Additionally, I reasoned that since I'm entering middle age, little will change from now on. I resigned myself to the idea that I’ll spend the rest of my life facing daily this woman with a bland attitude and a lack of self-determination.

I —> willpower —> achievement/change

This is usual mindset, especially among Westerners

I followed that decades-long behavioral and individualistic trend that predicates that I is in control, relying on iron grit that everybody is supposed to have mastered to the point of excellence.

But folks, this very popular indoctrination is actually a very dangerous trap. It’s good to remember that when we stumble upon something that looks and feels narrow and linear, it’s because someone is trying to take advantage and easily profit from our deepest needs. The formula above is easy to sell. You can embellish it with some positive psychology hype and voilà — you have a viable product. Considering it now from the point I stand, I realize it never really sat well with me because it felt exaggeratedly unnatural.

“There is nothing noble to be superior to your fellow man”, Hemingway once wrote. Instead, he argued, “true nobility is being superior to your former self”.

Change and changing are subjects of many misconceptions in our bewildering digital era. Change is seen as the ultimate good and has become vulnerable to idealization by the masses subjected to the wellness machine. The concept has become a special edition box, as blatant as the 2-in-1 shampoos of the nineties, sold ad nauseam. Scientific findings are being taken out of context and manipulated to create a false sense of credible validation. Some attempts to market change as a product are pure scams, which can lead to change—just not the desired kind.

We should know better

We should understand that change is far from a three-point linear crescendo that can be replicated at will. I prefer to call these misconceptions imaginary friends because they end up being just one more coping mechanism for those already grasping for a moment of relief. Here, I briefly touch on just a few of these dangerous spreads:

1. The over-reliance on grit. Willpower is essential, but not sufficient for change. Willpower is not an auto-regenerative ability; it needs to be curated, cultivated, and nurtured. So before talking about willpower and grit, we need to talk about energy levels. Willpower is, in practice, an act of liberating a certain amount of energy through a given behaviour. Low energy? Low willpower.

2. Goal setting. Contrary to what motivational speakers try to convince us, this strategy as an engine for change is largely unsuccessful. It forces us to focus on what we lack in life, which breeds negativity. Our brain is naturally wired to focus on negativity. So, instead of focusing on the 'ideal self' or the 'ideal life' laid bare on our list of goals, our brain will continue to pull our attention towards the dividing gap. The result? Demotivation, hopelessness, and impaired performance.

3. The end of history illusion. Oh, I love this one. It’s so deeply rooted in our collective legacy that we take it as a natural outcome of growing old. It brings to the surface a very interesting phenomenon: young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believe they have changed a lot in the past but will change relatively little in the future. I’ve been there. There were periods in my life when I firmly believed I had become the person I was supposed to become. End of history. But fellow scientists did their homework and discovered that in the next ten years we will probably change more than we’ve changed in the past ten years. Cherish this knowledge.

4. The doctrine of predestination. This Protestant idea, stripped of its religious context, is very diffused in certain subcultures. It claims that our life roadmap will begin to emerge as soon as we figure out who we really are. Supposedly, we can determine our authentic selves by answering some questions. The problem? Being defined by a limited number of our emotional dispositions at a certain time and place. Every time you label yourself as artistic/adventurous/introverted/pessimistic, you’re fixing those attributes to your personality. 'Adventurous' may sound cool, but eventually it will wear you down and become an image to preserve instead. So, just add 'at the moment' to provide some reasonable credit to the circumstances and to remain malleable when needed.

What is coming this month?

Gatherings

Our opportunity to meet and ponder together on certain existential questions. Believe me, these blended conversations with journaling sessions pave the way for real relationships, despite their virtual nature.

Clarity Pages

Tuesday 4, 11, 18 / 10.00-11.30 / Online

Clarity Canvas

Thursday 13 / 12.30-14.00 / Online

Lit Salon

Sunday 9 / 17.00-18.30 / Online

Letters

I’ll be bringing more food for thought to the coffee table throughout the month of June in epistolary form. I don’t know how many, but ideally four. My willpower aches to dive deeper into change and changing. Obviously, I’ll have to find a way to stay in the mercy and grace of the Energy gods.

Thread

At The Cafe you will find a month-long open conversation with questions as starters. It’s experimental, to see how our reasoning and associations evolve over a month, depending on momentary situations and further insights. And hormones, of course. And the willpower disruptions they usually affect.

How to join?

If you want to comment under the letters or to participate in the conversations at The Cafe, you need to create a Substack account. You may or may not want to download the app, but I can assure you it’s a relaxing, ad-free environment, and the notifications are at your discretion.