Bonjour! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special "mind explorer" edition, because we discuss the importance and benefits of mental exploration, some potential mental exploration journeys, and even substances that people often use for mental exploration (and avoidance ;D).

This week's topics include comparing drugs, intellectual humility, an expansive view of religion, the art of solitude, and how to appropriately allocate your fucks given. Enjoy!


Source: Giphy

• TOPIC OF INTEREST - DRUG HARM, ADDICTIVENESS, AND CONTROL - Social norms and laws for drugs are not well correlated with their actual harm and addictiveness.
   
• ARTICLE - Vox: Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong by Brian Resnick - We all have cognitive blind spots and make mental mistakes, so we ought to caveat our convictions with appropriate curiosity and humility, and reward others who do the same.
   
• ARTICLE - New York Magazine: America’s New Religions by Andrew Sullivan - Our core human desire for meaning leads everyone to adopt some form of 'religion', whether that is traditional monotheism, a political party, a philosophical framework, or something else entirely.
   
• BLOG POST - The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You by Zat Rana - We have an opportunity to face the fear of boredom and silence, to embrace our solitude and enjoy every single scarce moment that life gives us.
   
• BLOG POST - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson - 'Not giving a fuck' is the opposite of indifference, it is actually caring a lot about a very small number of things, so much so that you do the work necessary despite adversity, risk of failure, and feelings of pride and ego.

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• Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life
   
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• [Intellectual humility] is a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?
   
• ...there are three main challenges on the path to humility: 1. In order for us to acquire more intellectual humility, we all, even the smartest among us, need to better appreciate our cognitive blind spots. Our minds are more imperfect and imprecise than we’d often like to admit. Our ignorance can be invisible. 2. Even when we overcome that immense challenge and figure out our errors, we need to remember we won’t necessarily be punished for saying, “I was wrong.” And we need to be braver about saying it. We need a culture that celebrates those words. 3. We’ll never achieve perfect intellectual humility. So we need to choose our convictions thoughtfully.
   
• Much as we might tell ourselves our experience of the world is the truth, our reality will always be an interpretation. Light enters our eyes, sound waves enter our ears, chemicals waft into our noses, and it’s up to our brains to make a guess about what it all is. Perceptual tricks like [Yanny or Laurel] (“the dress” is another one) reveal that our perceptions are not the absolute truth, that the physical phenomena of the universe are indifferent to whether our feeble sensory organs can perceive them correctly. We’re just guessing. Yet these phenomena leave us indignant: How could it be that our perception of the world isn’t the only one? That sense of indignation is called naive realism: the feeling that our perception of the world is the truth.
   
• To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe. Again, that’s not easy.

• By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion... [P]hilosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.”
   
• Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism... Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning... But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs.
   
• Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes.
   
• So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be... They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.
   
• People who have lost religion and are coasting along on materialism find they have few interior resources to keep going when crisis hits. They have no place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to. Many have responded to the collapse of meaning in dark times by simply and logically numbing themselves to death, extinguishing existential pain through ever-stronger painkillers that ultimately kill the pain of life itself.

• “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction, and we can’t help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false comforts of the mind. The issue at the root, essentially, is that we never learn the art of solitude.
   
• Worse yet, the less comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you won’t know yourself. And then, you’ll spend even more time avoiding it to focus elsewhere. In the process, you’ll become addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free. Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn’t mean that this discomfort goes away.
   
• The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear — like any fear — is to face it. It’s to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self.
   
• Everything that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us. We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more alone.

• The point is, most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.
   
• Developing the ability to control and manage the fucks you give is the essence of strength and integrity.
   
• When we say, “Damn, watch out, Mark Manson just don’t give a fuck,” we don’t mean that Mark Manson doesn’t care about anything; on the contrary, what we mean is that Mark Manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals, he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble... [S]ay “Fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather... to everything unimportant in life... [R]eserve [your] fucks for what truly fucking matters. Friends. Family. Purpose.
   
• There really is no such thing as not giving a fuck. The question is simply how we each choose to allot our fucks.