This post is both descriptive and aspirational at the same time. It describes “input mentality”, which has been a positive influence on my life, while acknowledging that having a better “input mentality” is still an area of opportunity. I published a version of this in 2016 and it has stood the test of time so far.
It’s a little easier to describe the opposite of “input mentality?”, which is “output mentality”. In the current culture, we focus a lot on “doing things,” or producing stuff, or accomplishments. Software written, stuff fixed, tasks taken care of. These accomplishments are the “outputs” of a physical causal process that is you.
This is well and good, until we encounter the following question: “What happens if you are fail to produce stuff in line with yours or society's expectations?” Well, you might create a poor description for yourself, such as “lazy,” you might feel an inability to fit into the demands of modern life.
How would you solve the general problem of “your outputs are not in line with society’s expectations”? An “output mentality” would say something like: “produce harder,” “use willpower”, etc. Other slightly less terrible pieces of advice include: “move to a job you like” or “delegate things.” However, what a lot of these piece of advice have in common is the general thought process of “I am producing X and Y, while I want to / need to / should produce X, Y and Z instead.” Whether you are attempting to change your outputs or move to a place with lower expectations, note how “output” focused that is.
A better mentality that is halfway between output and input mentality is the “inner mentality.” An inner mentality would ask the following question: “Which of my subagents are failing coordinate?” IFS (Internal family systems) is an example of an inner mentality. An "inner mentality" would ask the following question: "How can I fix my health?" Note, the end goal might still eventually be on being productive, but the attentional focus is on your health, rather than on the direct outputs.
However, while "inner mentality" is already an improvement over "output mentality", what this might end up creating is a yoyo situation where you focus on health to fix it up enough to "feel healthy" and then go back to work while breaking it again.
What I suggest as an option is instead "input mentality". What that means is paying attention to the inputs of the causal process that is you.
What are examples of inputs:
a) Food
b) Air quality
c) Things in your attention space, such as a clutter, tabs on your computer
d) People you interact with
e) Content you consume
f) Rest / absence of interaction
g) Other physical inputs, such temperature in the room, noise, music and air quality, absence of overstimulation (example is having a dark room while sleeping)
h) Meditative feedback mechanisms of any kind, especially selffeedback. An example of selffeedback is directing attention to the breath or a feeling of a part of the body. My current hypothesis is that this aspect become the "endgame" of both input mentality, and inner mentality as simpler problems are solved.
What does it mean to "pay attention" to these things? It would mean noticing patterns like: "after I eat this food I feel very sleepy" or "if I sleep in a dark room, I wake up more refreshed". If you are very output focused, it might be easier to connect your productivity or lack there of to inputs. If you have writer's block it might be worth asking: what inputs did you receive before doing good writing in the past? Was it reading good authors to emulate them? Reading bad authors to surpass them?
The mentality here is not really about any new knowledge or statements. People might disagree what food is good for them and people might have different triggers. The mentality is more of a "mental stance" or a "mental posture" that is aware of correlation of information that is coming into you along with the effect it is having.
There is a series of seemingly obvious statements about the physics of you that might be helpful.
1) You are part of physics. You are not a disembodied idea of pure reason removed from the physical form. What this means is that things that affect your body affect you.
2) The notion of an "accident" is a pseudo-scientific confusion. Marco level events far above the quantum layer, such as car “accidents,” physical and mental diseases are all subject to causal processes. The notion of “X has a 20% chance of causing cancer”, if true, is not an inherent property of X, but rather a confusion about which causal pathways are present in the 20% of people that X can act upon.
3) One cannot "force" a causal process. If you want a ball to travel farther, then throw it harder. However, once the ball has left your hand, it will no longer be acted upon your will. While we can maintain the illusion that if we are ourselves the ball, we can will ourselves into doing things that contradict physics or human nature, this isn't the case.
Someone having a bad mood because one has not eaten lunch is an obvious hypothesis to consider. Someone feeling depressed because they have read too much news or encountered other harmful memes is another.
Generally if you try to pay attention to your inputs, a few things become clear.
Health issues cause a number of mood / attention / social problems. In my opinion the most common problems are a wrong diet and wrong structural issues, such as postural misalignments and muscle tension. However, not drinking enough water, not enough sunlight and lack of physical touch can be fairly serious as well.
Other issues include "attentional drains". Different ones affect people differently. Some people hate noise, some people don't like messes.
A common problematic input these day is reading too much news, as it likely engages too much messy fear responses in the body.
Social problems or opportunities are also an important part of input mentality. Certain people are very encouraging to talk to, even if they are not trying to be encouraging. Once again, this sounds obvious, but if you notice those people, try to spend more time with them.
In general fixing all of those is a book length topic, but the idea here is to notice what the inputs are and how they relate to both your inner states and outputs.
When I give a person the advice of “notice a negative feeling, ask what could have caused it,” some are a bit skeptical whether it is easy to isolate variables in your head. For me, a few possible answers generally pop into my head fairly instantly, but it’s possible you have a different experience.
There is also a *slightly wrong* way to use this mentality by saying things to another person such as "you made me feel bad." The exact question of how to resolve a negative social situation is tricky, but it's rarely such a blamey statement.
There is another wrong way to approach input mentality, which is to demand things from the world. Remember that the world “owes you nothing”. Asking for positive reinforcement is ok, if you are willing to get some back. Sometimes proper inputs are expensive, and the main constraint is some form of currency, whether social or financial. This can sometimes block the ability to get certain inputs at all, which is incredibly frustrating, however such is life.
A tricky issue is that the line between inputs and outputs is blurry
Sometime actions directed by the “input mentality” actually begin to look like outputs as well. You need to sleep well, so you need to turn off all the lights in the house so that your room is dark. That involves turning off all the lights in the house before going to bed. You are optimizing inputs, but you are doing something, or adding something to the "to do list" or focusing on “outputs.”
A way to resolve this apparent conflict is to bring your attention back to inputs through invoking smaller and smaller actions, until they don't feel effortful. For example, if you want to turn off the lights in your house every night, try to view the first step as an action of "becoming aware of the lights."
Input mentality could be used to solve slightly more mundane problems. Let's say you are debugging a piece of software and it's not working, and you feel stuck. A bad antipattern is to stare at the screen in frustration, creating a performance of productivity, but no progress on the problem. A better one is to keep trying solutions until one works. An "input mentality" would ask: what simple to acquire information would be important to determining the next course of action?
Of course, what you could have really needed at the moment is some sunlight.
To rephrase another poetic saying, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up yourself to collect wood and don't assign yourself tasks and work, but rather first teach yourself to long for the endless immensity of the sea. And you can start doing that by merely looking at the endless immensity of the sea. Or looking at another guy's pretty ship. To each his own.