I’ve spent a large portion of my efforts and energy over the past twenty years teaching kids in various contexts (public school, parkour, martial arts, summer camps).
In part, I enjoy teaching kids more than e.g. the adults I taught at CFAR workshops because there is a certain kind of aliveness that tends to show up at both greater frequency and greater intensity in younger populations than in older ones. The upper and lower bounds of aliveness seem the same for kids and adults, but the bell curve for adults is shifted, to the best of my ability to judge, toward “less of it.”
This saddens me. A major part of what I try to accomplish as a teacher is handing the students in my care swords and shields to wield against the slow erosion of their aliveness, by the structures and systems around them. I try to bolster them, shore up their defenses, help them to preserve what they’ve got longer than they otherwise would.
(This is often pretty straightforward—simple things like saying “yes, you’re right, this sucks” or “no, you’re not the crazy one” or “there might be nothing you can do about it, but that doesn’t make it fair” go a surprisingly long way. Like, just counteracting Asch-esque conformity pressures, and validating what the student already knows but is in danger of losing contact with.)
But one thing I have not done is spend a lot of time looking at the flip side of the coin. If there is a process which a supermajority of humans go through, it is at least plausible that this process is adaptive, somehow. It could be that the expected loss of aliveness over time is like aging, in that it’s just something that there failed to be sufficient pressure to overcome. But it could also be ” “good” ” or ” “correct” ” in that it is a convergent and viable response to the realities of the environment.
---------------------------------------
An intuition pump:
Imagine that you have some particularly strict dietary restriction. You are vegan, or you have celiac disease, or you have a rare and strong allergy to some common ingredient like soy.
Imagine also that you are a part of a circle of (slightly oblivious or self-absorbed) friends who like to go out to eat and then go to a movie or a club or some other activity every weekend. Sometimes it’s burgers, sometimes it’s pizza, sometimes it’s wings, sometimes it’s Thai or Indian or Chinese or Olive Garden—more-or-less typical Americans-going-to-a-restaurant fare.
I claim that there is something dangerous (with a small “d”) for the person with the strict dietary restriction, if they try to get excited, each week, about the food.
If you are a vegan, and you are not particularly pushy, and your friends are not particularly attentive, it’s going to be really really easy to end up at restaurant after restaurant where the vegan option is basically lettuce-covered lettuce with a side of lettuce.
And so, if you open the menu each week with something like eagerness and hope and excitement, those emotions will be reliably dashed. The reality of the situation will be like cold water in your face, week in and week out.
Not always! Sometimes you will have a rare surprise, and there’ll be a whopping two whole choices, both of which are good.
But most of the time, it’s genuinely unwise to let yourself ramp up in the first place. Expect little, and all your surprises will be pleasant.
“It’s fine. I like hanging out with my friends. I’ll just eat my own food, at home, and when we go it, it’s about the company and the experience. No, really, I promise, I’m fine, I’m not hungry.”
There’s a sort of preemptive deadening, a holding-back-from-wanting, that is straightforwardly sensible, because the alternative is repeated disappointment.
Indeed, as a teacher/mentor with an interest in preserving aliveness, if I had a student or protégé who kept ending up sad in a situation like this, one of the first things I might suggest to that person is “maybe don’t go into it with such high hopes in the first place?”
Local deliberate deadness, in other words, is a tool or strategy that I might explicitly teach to someone, to make this dynamic go less poorly. It’s an adaptive and useful patch, if one cannot solve the underlying problem more directly.
(I think this is aliveness-preserving on a grand scale, because it’s not-giving-oneself-training-data that whenever one bothers to have hope at all, one will be disappointed.)
---------------------------------------
In the past, at CFAR alumni workshops, I often gave the above anecdote as preamble to asking the participants to let their wants come alive anyway. To asking them to take the particular risk of bothering to have hope and excitement, even given the very real chance that it might not pan out.
(Original creative credit for this whole mini-lecture/opening session tip largely belongs to Anna Salamon and Steph Zolayvar.)
The reason that telling the story of the serially-disappointed vegan is good is that it validates the current default strategy of not-letting-one’s-wants-come-alive. It’s a primitive, fumbling attempt to pass the participant’s ITT—people get randomly exhorted to hoist enthusiasm all the time, and if they know from their own experience that doing so is a bad bet, they will tend to simply refuse (and possibly discount the judgment of the person making ill-considered demands of them).
But by acknowledging, up-front, that local deadness could indeed be a sensible strategy, you make it more credible that you are offering a specific and justified recommendation in this one case. It helps distinguish “look, seven times out of ten this is a bad idea, so I get why you usually don’t do it, but I think this is one of the three” from “I am blind to this whole class of problem, so my claim that there’s no danger here is not particularly reassuring.”
---------------------------------------
General form: if someone seems somehow cauterized or cut-off or not-particularly-alive, start by assuming that there is a reason *why* having those nerves active was bad or traumatic or problematic. Until you address that underlying cause-for-concern, bids for just bluntly upping the aliveness quality will not only fall flat, they may be actively alienating/counterproductive/hurtful (especially if they *work*).
Accurate. My own aliveness was deadened for very pragmatic reasons; it’s what’s enabled me to endure my life. There are some advantages, such as greater rationality, but it was very eerie and disturbing noticing the capacity to feel strong emotions gradually weakening over the course of my teenage years. I don’t know if that will ever come back.
Related, copied from this FB post:
Accurate. My own aliveness was deadened for very pragmatic reasons; it’s what’s enabled me to endure my life. There are some advantages, such as greater rationality, but it was very eerie and disturbing noticing the capacity to feel strong emotions gradually weakening over the course of my teenage years. I don’t know if that will ever come back.