“My hunch is that the most significant cause of stress at present is this: the deadly duo of indifference towards others and obsession with ourselves.”
You got that exactly right, Sam! Reminds me of these wise words from Joseph Campbell:
“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
I have learned more about human nature (my topic of fascination) from Joseph Campbell, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln than anyone else. And none of them were “psychologists”. There’s probably a good lesson in that!
Sam, check out the ancient skit that Monty Python did a couple of times with a couple of different members of the crew, “The Four Yorkshiremen” it is a real send up, but touches on the themes of today. Initially we hear our country calling, it is an amorphous call at first. We want to “serve our nation.” Pretty open ended. Then we get to the surface Fleet or Fleet Marine Force and find reality. The unit working up to a deployment is on one footing, those returning on another and the rest trying to figure out how to elude boredom in garrison settings. In the units working up to the potential of fighting in a contested area of the world, everyone’s groups tighten up, after all, this is what we really joined up for, we/me are going to find out just how well we/me are gonna do when hot lead, IED’s and other nasty stuff is flying around loose. It seems two things happen, the attenuation to detail picks up several notches, you don’t need to explain as much as a leader, the gang gets it and perhaps subliminally takes extra precautions to do the chores of war well. The other is that in the amorphous call to serve, something big changes, as you write, it is now not my nation, it is the Marine or SEAL on my right or left. As Stephen in Braveheart in the first big battle scene pumps up William Wallace, “The Lord says he is pretty sure he can get me out of this mess, but he’s pretty sure you’re Phucked!” To your point the literal gallows humor in the middle of a fire fight is impossible to describe to most people. A Gunnery Sargent that I served with was at the Battle of Hue’ and he explained just how long and horrific it was, then “Ya know lieutenant, after a month in that mess, I had had enough, so I slumped down behind a wall and put my hand out, around the edge of the wall and started moving it up and down slowly and shouted out “shoot me, shoot me.!” We both looked at each other for a nano second then burst into gales of laughter. The truth was comedy on steroids. In order to confront fear, it seems we need to move to it, we don’t conqueror it, we just adjust and maybe move closer to it. One might say that is learning to deal with stress, maybe. Maybe it is important to push into stress to deal with it. Well, we can’t really go from bar fight to bar fight these days, but we can push ourselves physically, sitting on an ergometer that relentlessly reads back how poorly you are doing at achieving a preset goal, creates physical and mental stress, not the heavy kind, but is a honing of sorts. It is a good fight, and like all bar fights, the guy who knocked down the other dude and brags he won, is sort of delusional, the evolving shiner under his left eye and split lip tell a different story. But, he feels better than the other dude whose buddies are dragging out of the bar room.
Wonderfully said. Your Gunnery Sergeants example sums it up perfectly. Guys like that are what make the thing into not just misery, but a sort of enlightened misery. Thank you Charles. I have some more digging to do in Monty Python, but my favorite skit is still the Lumberjack Song. I cry laughing...
Bryce, I’m not following. Sagan never struck me as fatalistic, but deeply hopeful as reminding us we get one chance here and to screw it up. I never would have thought Agent Smith was based on Sagan. I can’t imagine Agent Smith working on the Voyager mission for example.
Oh, I enjoyed his Cosmos. Way better than what Tyson did. Bit of humour. He’s sort of fatalistic yet hopeful. I don’t recall his actual full applie pie speech, but what Agent Smith was based on was his mannerisms and what some people see as a cynical view. Smith in The Matrix hated the world that AI made, it’s smells, sounds, the people and wanted to obliterate it.
My own take on Sagan is mixed. I do think he’s a bit cynical and still a lot better than whoever is science buddy today. I would describe my own sense of humour as obvious, malformed and a bit gross.
The pop culture kind of skews everything and I didn’t really get that across.
A good piece and well said. Having played around with the psychological drives for right action, My current assessment is that reciprocity expectations are a cancer that undermines my efforts, a scorekeeping that leads to frustration and less good done for the world. Though kindness does beget kindness sometimes, I am not friendly so that I will be befriended, nor do I help so that I might be helped, nice as all that would be.
Instead, I focus on being the person who does what's right because that's who I am and what I want to create in the world. Though I'm aware of and comforted by the large body of psychological research showing disinterested good actions change us and lead to what might loosely be called eudaimonia. So the unreciprocating receiver of a good deed is shooting themselves in the foot as effectively as if they choose Cheetos over chickpeas or the couch over exercise when they do not find a way to pass on the good. The only real question is if I want to shoot myself in the foot too by holding back.
There are many ways to achieve the same end, and I’ve witnessed as many different ways as there people to try them. We are in a unique position, because to your point we have the opportunity to pursue a truly positive outcome here and do so authentically to ourselves.
Nailed it. It's also useful to consider that 20 years ago, you fully expected your luggage to get lost. Hell, even 14 years ago, It was at least a 30% probability my luggage wouldn't make it through. We planned for that and never really stressed when it happened. Now, it's much more rare and so the same event isn't prepared for.
Another way to describe this issue is the purple dot problem where we balance risk homeostatis. Simply put, when things become less risky, we elevate the percieved risk of what remains and soon, the risks are so patently trivial it produces a secondary stress because we feel like we are missing the actual big risks.
This risk homeostasis model is excellent, and elegant. You're almost converging it with the FOMO model built into us by evolution. This is a great thread to pull on.
The example of reciprocity is also one of the Cialdini’s persuasion strategies. To be effective, one has to be first to initiate it. The sales lady providing first the keys to her BMW and hoping that someone reciprocates in the future to her daughter fits that criteria. Sometimes there is no expectation of anything in the future, just the obligation of righteousness, not even a religious component of a commandment. The story of Irena Sendler, who repeatedly performed a true example of Righteousness is a good example. She was a Polish social worker who during World War II helped to rescue 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Her guiding principle was:
“If you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.” She jumped in day after day knowing that if discovered, the penalty was death.
That is an incredible story, thank you for sharing it Barry. I would place Irena in a separate category altogether. The challenge of totalitarianism she had to face is very different from the challenge of small tribes attacking each other. I imagine it is far far more difficult not to slip into a different form of indifference which all too many did. Hers was true courage, something the rest of us could only hope to live up to her in her position.
You’re clearly thinking differently if you leave a comment like that, starting off with calling the prescriptions naive (are you familiar with his background and where his perspectives come from?), where you then make points that are either irrelevant or mischaracterizations of what Sam wrote.
If you welcome debate, you approach it in a very unfortunate manner. Seems you’d benefit from more awareness of how to approach a disagreement respectfully rather than judgmentally and what appears to be quite ignorantly.
I appreciate your comment and understand your concern.
My intention wasn’t to dismiss the author or misrepresent his ideas — I respect Sam’s background and work deeply.
When I called the prescriptions “naïve,” I was referring to them in an evolutionary sense, meaning that human biology often overrides conscious prescriptions, not that the author’s thinking lacks depth.
I welcome disagreement and different interpretations — that’s where genuine dialogue begins.
Tone can be easily misread in text, but my goal here is philosophical exploration, not confrontation.
Thanks for taking the time to engage — it shows you care about the nuance of the conversation, and I value that.
Agreed. Tone and subsequent intent can be quite difficult to determine in text. This is why word consideration is essential, something LLMs struggle with.
Initial comment read quite awkwardly. I’m sure agree on far more than we disagree based on this most recent one.
Awareness is essential and stress is natural. Sam’s post wasn’t about either of those points.
Stress, must be managed, especially for anyone who wants to thrive. Considerations to thrive in modern times using ancient and personal lessons is where Sam continues to explore and his post today was on a few considerations to manage inevitable stress. Not sure where/how/why your perspective differs based on your responses.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the great questions — those carried by religion and philosophy for centuries, with each generation hoping to see them a little more clearly. Yet the deeper I went, the more I realized it wasn’t the answers that evolved, but the questions themselves. Every layer of understanding revealed not resolution, but a more intricate labyrinth.
Eventually, I reached a point of unsettling clarity: the human being cannot transcend the framework evolution has built. Evolution never aimed for truth — it engineered survival. The very mind we use to seek meaning was designed not to perceive reality, but to detect threat.
This realization changed everything. As long as we operate within this biological circuitry, even our most refined debates spiral back into the same loops. What we call intellectual progress is often just the same mechanism repeating itself with greater sophistication.
That is why I speak of Human 2.0 — not as a technological ascent, but as an awakening beyond the survival algorithm.
My purpose here is not to prove anything, but to explore, to refine these ideas through discussion, and to test my own thinking against other minds.
Because truth matures not in isolation, but at the intersection of different layers of awareness.
Sublime bit of writing dude!
Thank you Enda!
“My hunch is that the most significant cause of stress at present is this: the deadly duo of indifference towards others and obsession with ourselves.”
You got that exactly right, Sam! Reminds me of these wise words from Joseph Campbell:
“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
This is it! It is amazing how deep Campbell went into psychology and then beautifully laid it out in story form. So much wisdom.
I have learned more about human nature (my topic of fascination) from Joseph Campbell, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln than anyone else. And none of them were “psychologists”. There’s probably a good lesson in that!
This is epic!
Sam, check out the ancient skit that Monty Python did a couple of times with a couple of different members of the crew, “The Four Yorkshiremen” it is a real send up, but touches on the themes of today. Initially we hear our country calling, it is an amorphous call at first. We want to “serve our nation.” Pretty open ended. Then we get to the surface Fleet or Fleet Marine Force and find reality. The unit working up to a deployment is on one footing, those returning on another and the rest trying to figure out how to elude boredom in garrison settings. In the units working up to the potential of fighting in a contested area of the world, everyone’s groups tighten up, after all, this is what we really joined up for, we/me are going to find out just how well we/me are gonna do when hot lead, IED’s and other nasty stuff is flying around loose. It seems two things happen, the attenuation to detail picks up several notches, you don’t need to explain as much as a leader, the gang gets it and perhaps subliminally takes extra precautions to do the chores of war well. The other is that in the amorphous call to serve, something big changes, as you write, it is now not my nation, it is the Marine or SEAL on my right or left. As Stephen in Braveheart in the first big battle scene pumps up William Wallace, “The Lord says he is pretty sure he can get me out of this mess, but he’s pretty sure you’re Phucked!” To your point the literal gallows humor in the middle of a fire fight is impossible to describe to most people. A Gunnery Sargent that I served with was at the Battle of Hue’ and he explained just how long and horrific it was, then “Ya know lieutenant, after a month in that mess, I had had enough, so I slumped down behind a wall and put my hand out, around the edge of the wall and started moving it up and down slowly and shouted out “shoot me, shoot me.!” We both looked at each other for a nano second then burst into gales of laughter. The truth was comedy on steroids. In order to confront fear, it seems we need to move to it, we don’t conqueror it, we just adjust and maybe move closer to it. One might say that is learning to deal with stress, maybe. Maybe it is important to push into stress to deal with it. Well, we can’t really go from bar fight to bar fight these days, but we can push ourselves physically, sitting on an ergometer that relentlessly reads back how poorly you are doing at achieving a preset goal, creates physical and mental stress, not the heavy kind, but is a honing of sorts. It is a good fight, and like all bar fights, the guy who knocked down the other dude and brags he won, is sort of delusional, the evolving shiner under his left eye and split lip tell a different story. But, he feels better than the other dude whose buddies are dragging out of the bar room.
Wonderfully said. Your Gunnery Sergeants example sums it up perfectly. Guys like that are what make the thing into not just misery, but a sort of enlightened misery. Thank you Charles. I have some more digging to do in Monty Python, but my favorite skit is still the Lumberjack Song. I cry laughing...
I love me some of that good ol’ Saganistic depresso fatalist why bother world view. Almost as much as we’re made out of the shit of dead stars.
Even better, Agent Smith, ultimate AI nihilist, was based on Sagan.
Bryce, I’m not following. Sagan never struck me as fatalistic, but deeply hopeful as reminding us we get one chance here and to screw it up. I never would have thought Agent Smith was based on Sagan. I can’t imagine Agent Smith working on the Voyager mission for example.
Oh, I enjoyed his Cosmos. Way better than what Tyson did. Bit of humour. He’s sort of fatalistic yet hopeful. I don’t recall his actual full applie pie speech, but what Agent Smith was based on was his mannerisms and what some people see as a cynical view. Smith in The Matrix hated the world that AI made, it’s smells, sounds, the people and wanted to obliterate it.
My own take on Sagan is mixed. I do think he’s a bit cynical and still a lot better than whoever is science buddy today. I would describe my own sense of humour as obvious, malformed and a bit gross.
The pop culture kind of skews everything and I didn’t really get that across.
There is a world to dive into here. The Matrix is still immortal and increasingly becoming real.
Totally tracking on the humor front. Not the first time my intuition was to take a comment seriously and rack my brains trying to figure it out.
Yeah, bit of a prescient movie. Begs the question what is real or not.
A good piece and well said. Having played around with the psychological drives for right action, My current assessment is that reciprocity expectations are a cancer that undermines my efforts, a scorekeeping that leads to frustration and less good done for the world. Though kindness does beget kindness sometimes, I am not friendly so that I will be befriended, nor do I help so that I might be helped, nice as all that would be.
Instead, I focus on being the person who does what's right because that's who I am and what I want to create in the world. Though I'm aware of and comforted by the large body of psychological research showing disinterested good actions change us and lead to what might loosely be called eudaimonia. So the unreciprocating receiver of a good deed is shooting themselves in the foot as effectively as if they choose Cheetos over chickpeas or the couch over exercise when they do not find a way to pass on the good. The only real question is if I want to shoot myself in the foot too by holding back.
There are many ways to achieve the same end, and I’ve witnessed as many different ways as there people to try them. We are in a unique position, because to your point we have the opportunity to pursue a truly positive outcome here and do so authentically to ourselves.
Nailed it. It's also useful to consider that 20 years ago, you fully expected your luggage to get lost. Hell, even 14 years ago, It was at least a 30% probability my luggage wouldn't make it through. We planned for that and never really stressed when it happened. Now, it's much more rare and so the same event isn't prepared for.
Another way to describe this issue is the purple dot problem where we balance risk homeostatis. Simply put, when things become less risky, we elevate the percieved risk of what remains and soon, the risks are so patently trivial it produces a secondary stress because we feel like we are missing the actual big risks.
This risk homeostasis model is excellent, and elegant. You're almost converging it with the FOMO model built into us by evolution. This is a great thread to pull on.
Ah, yes. As Al Capp once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Fittingly put for a cartoonist. Without an enemy, many of us—myself included—make of ourselves an enemy.
The example of reciprocity is also one of the Cialdini’s persuasion strategies. To be effective, one has to be first to initiate it. The sales lady providing first the keys to her BMW and hoping that someone reciprocates in the future to her daughter fits that criteria. Sometimes there is no expectation of anything in the future, just the obligation of righteousness, not even a religious component of a commandment. The story of Irena Sendler, who repeatedly performed a true example of Righteousness is a good example. She was a Polish social worker who during World War II helped to rescue 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Her guiding principle was:
“If you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.” She jumped in day after day knowing that if discovered, the penalty was death.
https://www.holocaustmatters.org/irena-sendler/
That is an incredible story, thank you for sharing it Barry. I would place Irena in a separate category altogether. The challenge of totalitarianism she had to face is very different from the challenge of small tribes attacking each other. I imagine it is far far more difficult not to slip into a different form of indifference which all too many did. Hers was true courage, something the rest of us could only hope to live up to her in her position.
All these prescriptions are born of naïve optimism.
Stress is not a problem to be solved; it is an integral function of evolution’s perfect design.
For millions of years, the system has used pain, fear, and pressure as its calibration tools.
To “eliminate stress” is to declare war on the very mechanism that keeps life adaptive.
The organism does not malfunction — it evolves.
Every anxious pulse, every restless night, every surge of cortisol is a message written in biological code: adapt or decay.
The modern mind’s attempt to manage this through comfort or moral advice is absurd.
No species has ever outsmarted its own blueprint.
The only real path is awareness — to study the machinery, to see its precision, and to stop confusing feedback for failure.
Freedom begins the moment we understand that the system doesn’t need fixing.
It only needs to be seen.
Please take your LLM nonsense elsewhere.
Anyone can copy and paste a ChatGPT readout.
Not many can actually think.
I understand your reaction.
But this wasn’t generated by a language model — it’s part of my own ongoing framework where I analyze human behavior through an evolutionary lens.
The phrasing might sound structured, but that’s because I write in layered systems of thought.
I’m not copying; I’m thinking — just differently.
Appreciate your honesty, though. Debate is always welcome.
You’re clearly thinking differently if you leave a comment like that, starting off with calling the prescriptions naive (are you familiar with his background and where his perspectives come from?), where you then make points that are either irrelevant or mischaracterizations of what Sam wrote.
If you welcome debate, you approach it in a very unfortunate manner. Seems you’d benefit from more awareness of how to approach a disagreement respectfully rather than judgmentally and what appears to be quite ignorantly.
I appreciate your comment and understand your concern.
My intention wasn’t to dismiss the author or misrepresent his ideas — I respect Sam’s background and work deeply.
When I called the prescriptions “naïve,” I was referring to them in an evolutionary sense, meaning that human biology often overrides conscious prescriptions, not that the author’s thinking lacks depth.
I welcome disagreement and different interpretations — that’s where genuine dialogue begins.
Tone can be easily misread in text, but my goal here is philosophical exploration, not confrontation.
Thanks for taking the time to engage — it shows you care about the nuance of the conversation, and I value that.
Agreed. Tone and subsequent intent can be quite difficult to determine in text. This is why word consideration is essential, something LLMs struggle with.
Initial comment read quite awkwardly. I’m sure agree on far more than we disagree based on this most recent one.
Awareness is essential and stress is natural. Sam’s post wasn’t about either of those points.
Stress, must be managed, especially for anyone who wants to thrive. Considerations to thrive in modern times using ancient and personal lessons is where Sam continues to explore and his post today was on a few considerations to manage inevitable stress. Not sure where/how/why your perspective differs based on your responses.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the great questions — those carried by religion and philosophy for centuries, with each generation hoping to see them a little more clearly. Yet the deeper I went, the more I realized it wasn’t the answers that evolved, but the questions themselves. Every layer of understanding revealed not resolution, but a more intricate labyrinth.
Eventually, I reached a point of unsettling clarity: the human being cannot transcend the framework evolution has built. Evolution never aimed for truth — it engineered survival. The very mind we use to seek meaning was designed not to perceive reality, but to detect threat.
This realization changed everything. As long as we operate within this biological circuitry, even our most refined debates spiral back into the same loops. What we call intellectual progress is often just the same mechanism repeating itself with greater sophistication.
That is why I speak of Human 2.0 — not as a technological ascent, but as an awakening beyond the survival algorithm.
My purpose here is not to prove anything, but to explore, to refine these ideas through discussion, and to test my own thinking against other minds.
Because truth matures not in isolation, but at the intersection of different layers of awareness.