Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Life

  • Set

    This is surfing…

    Years ago, on vacation in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, I awoke at dawn to go for a walk on the beach, and I saw a curious sight. A guy on a bike was pedaling across the parking lot from the street, pumping away with one hand on the handlebars and the other gripping a surfboard perched precariously on his shoulder. The board was at least twelve feet long. 

    I glanced seaward and saw six or so surfers out in the cold, gray, early morning waters. NSB is known for two things: surfing and shark bites. 

    The cyclist chained his bike to a post and carried his board over to where I was staring out at the early-bird surfers. Some were prone on their boards paddling out into the breakers, some were sitting straddle-legged, bobbing in the swell, just beyond the whitecaps, looking out to sea over their shoulders towards the rising sun.

    I stood there for a few minutes watching, when I noticed the guy with the ultra-long board hadn’t budged. I said, ”Aren’t you gonna join them?”

    He kicked at some sand, kept peering intently at the sea, and said, ”Nah man, there’s no set.”

    I realized I hadn’t actually seen anyone up on their board riding a wave yet. Waves were breaking but the kids in the water kept re-positioning themselves, occasionally paddling furiously to try to catch a whitecap and giving up. 

    ”That’d just be a lot of wasted time,” the leather-tanned surfer said, squinting into the morning sun, ”Maybe later.” And with that he turned and padded barefoot back to his bike.

    That morning has stuck with me as a metaphor for wasted effort. The people in the water weren’t ”surfing”. They were wet, they had surf boards, they were cresting whitecaps, but they weren’t surfing. Surfing happens when you match your timing, positioning, and skill with energy that the wave provides. And when the waves are broken and irregular and without a ”set”, you spend more energy than the ocean does.

    Mr. Longboard had come to surf, not just to get wet. Since the conditions weren’t cooperative, he wasn’t wasting his time and effort. He was experienced enough to know it would have been a lost cause.

    Similar events happen in our lives. Times when we are maxing out effort but there is no flow, and few results. We’re busy, but not productive. Sometimes, it’s a conversation where the other person just isn’t hearing, no matter how many different ways you try to say it. Sometimes, it’s adverse market conditions. Or when the environment makes it impossible to concentrate and do your best work. And sometimes we give it our all, but things beyond our control prevent the results we’re hoping for. It’s important to recognize that it isn’t always about you. 

    We can learn to maximize the return on our efforts. We can be aware of opportunities to meld effort, skill, and timing to get the best results. And we can learn to spot when there is a ”set” and be ready to ride.

  • Do Not Waste Emotional Energy

    # 10 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Do not waste emotional energy over anything you cannot control. This does not apply to sadness or grief over tragedy or loss.

    My favorite athlete to watch in an individual sport is Rafael Nadal. He is currently second behind only Roger Federer in number of Grand Slam tennis titles won. If you don’t know who he is, you can look him up.

    I like him because he is the rare combination of innate talent with an unmatched, ferocious work ethic. He is also humble in victory.

    He is known for his relentless, never give up, never-quit-on-a-point effort. That, and his weird OCD including a ritual of pre-serve tics, and precision water and juice bottle placement. It’s fascinating to watch him place his juice down and give it an eighth of a twist to get the label pointing in just the right direction. As if that will matter.

    Rafa never argues calls that go against him. He never complains about points he loses. He just moves on to the next point. When asked about the apparent discrepancy of being meticulous about juice bottles and yet not arguing even questionable calls, he said, ”I don’t waste emotional energy on things I cannot control.”

    That.

    In a life with finite energy available. It’s better to spend it twisting a bottle you can control, than to argue with a referee you cannot. It’s very important to recognize the difference.

    You and I will never be Nadal. It’s rarified air to reach the summit of your field or profession, so that’s likely out of reach, too. But we can learn from him where not to waste our emotional energy.

  • Exploration vs. Exploitation—Why You Should Know How To Do Both

    # 95 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Learn when to explore and when to exploit. Know how to do both.

    I first heard the concept of Exploration vs. Exploitation in the 2016 book by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths called Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions.

    Briefly, exploration involves the discovery of something new.

    Exploitation involves mining a previously discovered pleasure to extract more pleasure.

    Both have their uses. Both are valuable to a life well-lived. A good life consists in large part in the enjoyment of good experiences. Those experiences must first be discovered. Once found, a determination is made about whether it should be tried again.

    We are each living on borrowed time. Time that is ticking away. Do we explore? Or exploit?

    Back in the time when we could safely venture to do something as dangerous as eat in close proximity to total strangers in a restaurant, did you prefer visiting different restaurants or going to a favorite? Once there, did you like to try new items on the menu or did you order the same thing every time regardless of how tempting another selection might be?

    When contemplating a vacation, (another on the list of past dangers) do you yearn to see a place you’ve never been, or do you crave the experience of a familiar beach, bar, and scenery?

    The authors of the book suggested that the younger one is, the more likely the scale will tip towards exploration. I think they’re right and that this is part of why the young have had a much harder time with Covid isolation.

    This seems obvious, right? The younger one is, the more every new experience is virgin territory. Our younger selves don’t know what is worth exploiting. But, I think the inverse may also be true. Youth causes exploration, sure, but exploration also causes one to remain youthful (in outlook at least). Each new thing, even a new idea, is something tried out for the first time. It hearkens back to the time when every thing we tried was new. 

    On the other hand, exploitation is a key component of a contented life. I am not interested in a life I feel the need to escape from once or twice a year to go and live for a week or two the way that I really want to be living. What kind of life is that?

    I want to craft a life surrounded by books, music, coffee, wine, bourbon, foods, a best-friend-who-is-my-lover; a life that can be exploited each day for the simple pleasures that are just as rich at the hundredth or thousandth tasting as they were the day I discovered them.

    I’m the guy who finds a restaurant and eats the same thing on the menu each time. Now, I may like 20 restaurants, each for 20 separate things; but I can’t thing of a single restaurant where I’d be interested to try 20 different things from the menu believing each one would be as good as my favorite thing, the selection that keeps bringing me back, the one I exploit.

    How about you. Do you prefer exploring or exploiting more? Has that balance changed as you’ve aged? Time’s a wastin’!

  • Wealth

    A few months ago, my soon to be 23 year old son asked me, ”Dad, what can I do to be rich?”

    This led to a more thorough conversation about what constitutes riches and wealth.

    I shared one of my favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes, ”That man is richest, whose pleasures are the cheapest.” 

    I have often spoken to him and to all my children about learning enough of themselves to know what they can be satisfied and contented with in life. I’ve warned them against becoming prey to fad and fashion and to advertisers whose aim is to probe at discontent. 

    I talked to him about ”necessity” using analogies from camping, when that which is necessary can be carried on your back. I told him my own view that whoever spends the least amount of time to provide for essential necessities is wealthiest.

    We talked about the simple pleasures of life. We spoke about the gratitude that can arise moment by moment from savoring the morning’s first sip of coffee, the beauty of a sunrise, the ability to take a walk. 

    We spoke about the comparative value of health, time, knowledge, character, and money. We agreed that it would be no blessing for a sick person to be granted endless days, or endless money, if their sickness could not be cured. And I think I was able to convince him that true wealth is immeasurable, but that it is very, very real, despite being subjective and not easy to quantify.

    I asked my son, how would I put a dollar figure on your kindness? Or on your ability to listen to your siblings and friends and me and share the insights you’ve already gained? Or on an hour of your life?

    But the main thrust of my conversation was to steer my son away from the futile effort at amassing the kind of riches that can be measured, and then measuring himself by that sum. A man may have money in stocks and in cash, but have no knowledge of the kinds of experiences that make it worth the effort to have amassed it. 

    A person can be so ignorant that they think the medium of exchange is a worthy end to pursue, failing to recognize that it is only a means to arriving at some other end, the most valuable of which cannot be purchased with money.

    As Thoreau also said, ”Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

  • Filtering

    I’ve always been curious about reality. I can accept that I am sitting in my office chair, my own hands stretched in front of me, touching hard plastic keys on a bluetooth keyboard, each touch producing a change that adds or removes squiggly marks on the screen in front of me, carefully engineered to look like a sheet of white paper suspended in portrait view. Because I’m not using full-screen mode, I can see my background wallpaper on what is called my ”desktop”. Of course, I know it’s not an actual desktop because my keyboard and my coffee cup are sitting on my ”real” desktop. If I tried to place them on the one in front of me, they’d slide off in a crash because the one with the squiggles is 90° perpendicular to my actual desktop, the wooden one that is parallel to the floor. The flat one in front of me, in 5K-retina-display-glass-and-electricity, also has some fancy hard drive icons on it. These represent physical hard drives, but they are not the ”real” hard drives, just graphical user interface (GUI – pronounced ”gooey”) representations of the ”real things.

    I’m beginning to think that the ”real world” is probably a bunch of gooey icons too. See if you catch my drift.

    The virtual desktop has a ”wallpaper” of nice colors on it, except I know for a fact those colors don’t really exist anywhere except in my own brain. Light is getting in through the specialized openings in my head called ”eyes”, and that light has a variety of wavelengths (all part of a spectrum called ”white light” that is human friendly) that gets interpreted in some fancy way by another part of my brain that is doing the actual ”seeing” (Eyes don’t really ”see” anything at all). Anyway, the seeing part of my brain allows me to perceive the variety of colors, and it fools me into believing the colors are happening on the screen and not in my head. This same deception also happens when I look out the window and see  ”blackness”. (It will happen when the sky changes into vanilla cotton candy in about an hour too, unless it’s foggy, then I’ll get deceived into believing there is such a thing as ”gray” out there.)

    I had to take a break and walk to the master bathroom for a moment to say good morning to my girlfriend. The tile was very cool on my feet. I remained upright without tilting or leaning. On the way back to my office chair, I felt the brush of my cotton pajama pants against my thigh. Sitting here now, I can’t feel these pants at all. (I am still wearing them) I can’t feel the waistband of my boxer shorts. With a little focused attention, I just made myself become aware of the soft collar of my Life Is Good long-sleeved tee shirt. I can feel the luxuriously soft cotton lying soft as a feather against my shoulders, and the barely noticeable cuffs tickling the hair on my arms at my wrists while I type. As soon as I stop trying to notice it, those sensations will go away.

    I just became vaguely aware of some yellow-white and red lights moving slowly from left to right outside the window in front of me, accompanied by a vague whoosh of sound and a slight low ”grrrr”. ”Car,” says my brain. And, I’m just now noticing the muffled white noise of what has to be the shower running in the bathroom, which is on the other side of the foyer wall to my right. In another minute, I’ll be oblivious to it again. 

    Reality is different than my perception of it, or your perception of it. It’s probably as different as your computer file icons are from the gibberish of ones and zeroes that make up the actual files. Philosophers debate this stuff. There is a school of them that suggests there is no matter at all, only ideas presented to our brains giving us the illusion of matter. I dunno, that’s a bit of a stretch, but I digress.

    You know the way you cannot ignore the sound of waves rhythmically crashing when you first climb out of your car at the beach, only to be completely deaf to the sound within minutes? The waves don’t disappear. The sound is still being generated because the force of water is vibrating air at a specific frequency that is still vibrating the cilia inside your ear canal, which tickles your ear drums to begin the transmission of signals along dendrites and neurons to reach the sound processing part of your brain for some info on what those vibrations mean. 

    ”Ahhh,” says your sound engineer., ”That’s waves…we can safely ignore that. Unless you just want to pay attention, then I can also flip a switch to let you hear those gulls that have been circling overhead the last five minutes you’ve also been deaf to. And for good measure, here’s the sounds of some children laughing.” 

    (Sidenote: It is said that people living in proximity to Niagara Falls do not hear it.)

    That’s the way our brain handles everything, all the time. We may think our conscious selves are being presented with all the information that’s available in our sphere of awareness, but in truth, the normally functioning human brain is a gigantic stimulus gatekeeper. It filters out way, way more than it allows to knock on the door of awareness. It only lets through what it determines is really essential for whatever it guesses you’re most likely to need to navigate the next microsecond successfully. It does this so quickly, that many neurophysiologists believe that most of what we perceive as ”real” is actually the brain’s moment-by-moment predictions of what is ”real”.

    Like your computer icons, the predictions represent reality sufficiently for you to interact without having to sort through the messiness of what’s being kept from you in DOS or UNIX world. Meaning, the perceptions we have of reality are our brain’s predictions (icons) about what the next moment holds in store, which means we are all caught in a milli-second lag and never quite able to…catch…the…present…moment. 

    Sidenote2: (This is what makes improvisational Jazz, or the creativity of a Grateful Dead jam so much fun…they are sonic efforts to catch up to the elusive NOW of things. And the effort is happening between the band members, and between the band and the audience.)

    The brain captures and catalogues all incoming stimuli, maps it, creates a baseline, stamps ”reality” on it, feeds it to the interpreter part of us that needs to know where the edge of the bed is in a dark room, and then starts filtering out extraneous info while feeding the predicted-hallucination-labeled-as-reality back to the interpreter part. The brain is very, very good at picking up on subtle shifts in the catalogued stimuli, but it acts with equal speed to quickly put new information into the existing ”reality hallucination” unless the new stimuli is so disruptive that it requires the generation and presentation of a new hallucination, such as the refrigerator suddenly making ice and the brain has to feed you a reality that tells you:

    1. the fridge is making ice, or 
    2. Someone is breaking into the kitchen through the door leading to the garage.

    OK. Enough of that. You get the general picture, right?

    The gist is, there’s just too much information to pay attention to all of it at the same time. Our brains, somewhere along the line, determined that all the sensory info doesn’t have the same level of importance, so it creates a hierarchy to give the part of us that pays attention a break, since it’s a known fact that dude in charge of paying attention cannot focus on one thing for very long. 

    This is a GOOD THING, because we cannot give equal attention to all things simultaneously for very long and remain what is commonly referred to as ”sane”. 

    So…the brain filters. It predicts. It predicts based on what I guess is a learned history (possibly an innate pre-wired assumption) of the spectrum of ”normal”. From this baseline, it follows that the picture of reality shown to the owner should not be changed very often, and should not be changed very abruptly, or dramatically, unless such measures are unquestionably called for. 

    The other day, I was on a walk. I wasn’t consciously paying attention to the landscape I’ve walked through a hundred times, caught up instead in listening to an audiobook, when I glanced into the empty field with the dead tree beside the sidewalk I was casually descending, and for a hair-raising moment I saw a knee-high tall coyote standing about 20 yards away. Its tail was up, its head was swung in my direction, eyeing me. I had that brief explosion of of WTF adrenaline…you know that explosion? Then, in the next instant, the coyote vanished and became a perfectly aligned clump of dried brown grasses and a scraggly shrub that had been the coyote’s bushy tail only a second before. 

    This was funny. And it was revealing. I’m willing to bet you’ve had the same thing happen before. Maybe you walked into a room and there were some clothes thrown over a chair in a way that for an instant startles you into believing a person is sitting there, and you have that momentary panic. The brain filters out most data that reaches our conscious ”pay attention to this” ops center, but it has no qualms throwing out a hallucination of a coyote (or an unexpected person sitting in a chair) to protect you if needed. And every time your head shifts, whatever new information comes into your visual field has to be scanned, categorized, assessed for threats, assembled into a new hallucinatory reality puzzle, labeled ”real” and ”ok” and fed to the ops center. 

    I’ve jacked with this whole system and this whole process quite a few times in my life. Not too recently, but I can remember. Oh boy, can I remember…

    But think with me, even if you’ve never done acid, or mushrooms, I bet you’ve been sitting in your car stopped at a traffic signal when all of a sudden you have the distinct feeling of moving when the tractor trailer beside you rolls forward. Right? You haven’t budged, but your brain interpreted the new stimulus of the moving trailer as YOU moving, and gave you all the accompanying physical sensations just to complete the hallucination for you. It’s so ”real” you press hard on the brake to stop your unmoving car from ”moving”. Tell me that’s never happened to you.

    That same brain that can make you feel like you’re moving, is making you feel like you’re sitting still, or standing, or whatever right now. And that’s cool. It’s ok, but it is very, very subjective. 

    Your filter, is not my filter. I cannot feel your clothes. I do not see the same sky you’re seeing. I do not hear the same sounds. Studies have shown that even people who look at say the color ”blue” will perceive variations in hue, tone, intensity, depth when asked about ”blueness” on a more granular level. So…the conclusion is we don’t all see the same blue. That’s because there is no blue OUT THERE…your blue lives in your head and my blue lives in mine. 

    I know, weird stuff, right? But, I’ve always grokked out on this kinda stuff. And let me tell you…it has IMPLICATIONS. But…that’s probably enough for today. 

  • As It Is In Heaven

    “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done; on earth as it is in heaven…“

    I wonder how many stop to think how the will of God is done in heaven. 

    Some pray these words as if they are inviting God to impose His Will on the citizens of earth…even upon those who don’t want it.

    But the ”as it is in heaven” part. Does anyone imagine that there is a single inhabitant of heaven who does not want the Will of God to be done? That there are perhaps some residents whose obedience must be coerced by law, and who must be cowed by fear?

    I think not. In another place we are taught, ”Perfect love casts out fear for fear involves punishment…he that fears has not been perfected in love.”

    As a much younger man, I was willful and self-governed. I was free and un-fettered. I used my freedom to explore the boundaries of life, both external and internal. I discovered that life has an edge that one can fall off. I followed my will and used my freedom to strut right up to that edge on more than one occasion. Being persuasive by gift and curse, I convinced others to march to the edge with me. And I knew some who fell in, either outwardly or inwardly. 

    But in a place where I was not looking for governance, I was found by the Governor. I was found in a time when I was so sick of my own lies, that I was quite literally begging for Truth, so blinded by my errors that I stretched out my hands to be led. Like a lost and frightened sheep, I was found by a Shepherd who could see further down the road than I could see. One who knew where to find green pastures I could lie down in, and gentle streams I could drink from. One so strong, that when my enemies appeared, He would declare, ”Let’s eat!” and set out a table before me, so confident in His own ability to protect, defend, and keep me. 

    I learned by experience that God is Love. And what does Love require, but a lover? …I became determined that He need not look past me to find one.

    After many years, I still want to be governed. I need to be governed. I crave and value and relish and happily submit to the governance of my Redeemer. When I stray, He doesn’t have to threaten me. He doesn’t have to whip me. He doesn’t have to ridicule me, or exclude me. He loves me back to Him. And when the sunshine of His Love bursts forth, I am still determined that it will not hit me in the back. 

    Ive found that God Loves me better than I can. I’ve found that I can trust Him more than I can trust myself. I found that His Kingdom must start in me and when I enter heaven (whatever that may be), I won’t need any convincing to kneel, or to bow, or to worship. I won’t need a New User’s Manual. 

    God’s will is done in Heaven by inhabitants who are delighted by that will; by those who want nothing more, and who would be satisfied by nothing less. His will on earth (if done as it is in heaven) is done by the persons with the same heart. Not by imposition, but by supplication. Not by people having it legislated upon them, but by people who cannot get enough of it. 

    That is what the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer means. It is a crying out for the God who is Love to suborn obedience to His Will by that Love. For God to love the disobedient into submission. For God to win hearts and minds into the voluntary servitude of delight in His pleasure.

    God already governs the Universe, but the Peace of that government, the wholeness of it, is only enjoyed wholly by those who want to be governed, and happily yield. God governs, not because it is good for Him, but because it is good for us.

    How are they who do not know these things to find out? By law, by threats, by the sword? There are other religions who employ such methods. My God would rather be stabbed than stab. When He finds one who will not yield, He is the one with tears in His eyes.

    No-one will be dragged into heaven kicking and screaming. And every single unfortunate soul who falls into hell will fall there against every power God can wisely wield to prevent it. 

    The only place that the Kingdom of God can be found on earth and where His will is done, ”as it is in Heaven” is in those of us, like our counterparts in Heaven, who crave it so badly for ourselves we can’t get enough.

  • The Problem With Anger — It Will Not Achieve The Result You Want

    Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

    ~ James 1:19,20

    # 19 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Anger will not achieve the result you want. If you’re angry, keep your mouth shut.

    I beg those of my readers who don’t consider themselves to be adherents to the Christian traditions, or see themselves as convinced by an appeal to scripture, just bear with me. Follow my thoughts with an open mind to the end, and with an eye towards your own past experiences.

    I can attest to the truth of the above verses in my own life. I’ve had more dramatic scenes of anger, wrath, and righteous indignation than I care to count. Times when I could not hear. I could not see. I could not think straight. A few instances in particular stand out. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, no one involved had any doubt about my emotional state.

    Anger has never achieved my desired result

    But NOT ONE TIME have I lashed out in anger and achieved the result I really wanted. In my entire life. Not…one…time.

    Search your own memory banks. Remember the last time you were so angry you couldn’t see straight? You struck out in the throes of that feeling, so certain of your righteousness that no argument could convince you otherwise. How did that situation turn out? Did it go the way you wanted?

    Your mileage may vary. I can only testify to my own experience. 

    When I feel angry now, I am immediately certain that if I speak or act, I will be wrong. When I am angry now, it is an indicator that I am far from the kind of person who can be a vessel of the righteousness of God.

    I’m writing this because our nation is torn apart. We treat each other, Americans, even ones who grew up together, as if we’re sworn enemies. We’ve been co-opted into believing that anyone with a different political view is a villain. We’re told that the “others” aren’t American, and they aren’t putting “America First”. That they are “taking your country”! We’ve lost our collective minds!

    I challenge you to watch the events of January 6th with James in mind. Listen to the run-up. Listen to the speeches playing upon fear, prejudice, paranoia, just stoking up the anger to a boiling venomous cauldron. Are these people quick to hear the other side? Slow to speak about them or to them?

    I’m not sure what those who marched on the Capital thought they were doing. They were acting like they believed their anger would produce the righteousness of God.

    The words of Scripture above reveal that deception for exactly what it is.

    I just want to ask you…my brother…my sister…are you angry?

    “Well, You say you want a Revolution, you better change your mind instead.”

    ~ The Beatles: Revolution

  • We

    The framers of the United States Constitution faced a daunting task. In 1787, fresh from the heady, yet costly victory of the nine-year Revolutionary War, they met in Philadelphia to formulate the charter documents. After months of debate, sometimes heated, sometimes personal, they penned the preamble to the foundational document of the burgeoning nation, with these words, “We the People…”. 

    Taking an even more granular view, it is evident that the first of these most cherished words is the simple word, pregnant with profound meaning, “We.”

    If enough of us would stop and consider this simple fact, if WE would think of the implications of the use of that word, WE would instantly begin the process that, if followed, would achieve the re-uniting and healing of the Country.

  • To Facebook, or not to Facebook? That is the question.

    Last night I reconnected to Facebook after a multi-year hiatus. I left in anger over the revelation of Facebook’s secret mental health experiment in 2012 that targeted 700,000 users.. Facebook developers decided it would be interesting to see if they could alter user’s behaviors by creating algorithms to display articles, ads, and pages with emotionally negative keywords.

    It turns out they could affect behavior. Specifically, the more users saw negative keywords in their Facebook feeds, the more they began to create posts with similarly negative content. I was outraged. I have a daughter that was in the midst of some severe mental health challenges and I knew she was addicted to Facebook.

    She may or may not have been one of the 700,000 guinea pigs in Facebook’s “research”, but the fact remains that what we are fed by social media algorithms affects what we then “produce”. It turns out that even in the digital world we are what we eat.

    Here we are, years later, now in a toxic political environment threatening our nation, and once again, it’s fueled in large measure by social media. It turns out that the political radicalization has occurred by Facebook suggesting and feeding extreme groups to users based on their past usage patterns. We are all just a “digital profile” based upon the aggregate of our clicks, likes, and time spent on a video, images, etc.

    I’m here for now, but I’m aware and I will keep one foot out the door.

    The story linked below from 2014 has more details about the psychological experiment, and how it was justified by Facebook.

    https://abcnews.go.com/Health/consented-facebooks-social-experiment/story?id=24368579

  • Which Do You Prefer?

    Every person, myriad times throughout each day makes decisions about what to say or do from the menu of options available to them at the time of the choice. 

    This bears unpacking a bit. You are reading this right now. You could have chosen to do something else instead. But reading this showed up on the menu of choices available to you and you chose to do so. This process was in play before you knew about it, and it will continue now that you do know about it. 

    Not all options are available to choose at all times. Neither of us can fly to the moon, or even across the room under our own power, for instance, even if we desired to do so. And, to be certain, there is a catalogue of historical debate amongst philosophers and behaviorists over whether or not any of us is truly free when we choose any action. That is the age-old debate over ”free-will” vs. determinism. I am unqualified to dive too deeply into those waters, though I have taken a swim in them from time to time.

    I’m writing to bring attention to the fact that when we act as if we are free to choose, there is something driving and impelling those choices. That something I will call ”preference”. There are two or more options available on the menu; and the one we choose is the one we prefer. How could it be otherwise? 

    I’m writing this now, at this moment, rather than doom-scrolling through Twitter, crawling back into a warm bed, going for a walk in thirty degree drizzle, reading news, turning on the television, etc. I’m writing because it is what I prefer to be doing with this slot of time, energy, and attention more than anything else I could be doing. You are doing the same thing.

    It is important to note that preference does not equal desire. I have desires that I may actually prefer more than my current choice, but at the time of my choosing they were not on the available menu. I desire to be walking a secluded beach with my girlfriend in seventy degree weather with a light breeze in our hair, watching the sun come up over the ocean. But that is not on this morning’s menu. I’m sure you have desires like that.

    Our choices are driven by our preferences. This phenomenon is a fact we experience over and over. This is what makes the concept of free will feel true. Seen in that light, no one can take away another’s free will, because there is no power that can be exerted to take away another’s preference as long as more than one choice is available. You may severely limit the menu of options available to an individual. You may wickedly create for them a reality that is a constant choice between the lesser of two evils. But you cannot take away their ability to choose what they prefer from the remaining options.

    This realization has helped me interpret both my own choices and behaviors as well as those of  others. Watch what someone does or refuses to do. Listen to what they say or refuse to say. You are seeing the external manifestations of their internal preferences, moment by moment, event by event, day by day.

    I am overweight because on the whole, I prefer it to the effort and attentiveness that is necessary to lose the extra pounds. I work for my self as a commissioned salesman, with all of its accompanying risks, because I prefer it to a rigid schedule and losing autonomy in my workday.

    The example of overweight-ness is illustrative of the fact that preferential choices happen in the moment. They are myopic. They are not contemplative of the long game, unless…unless you put that contemplation on the menu. Because to be sure, I prefer health to obesity, in general. I prefer activity to lethargy, in general. I prefer self-control to sloth or gluttony, in principle. 

    A key then to making better choices, is to pick those which will be a balance of preferred outcomes both in the present and into the future.