A tip for thinking clearly…

I wrote the following as an email a bit over a week ago. I thought I would do well to share it more broadly. Read only the bold text for the tl;dr. Enjoy!

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, and I got lucky more than once along the way. Here’s the single most important thing that I have found:

First, some observations:

• You can only think about things that you can pay attention to.
• Your intentions restrict your attention (to the things you subconsciously suspect might help you bear out your intentions). Intentions are (fundamentally) the cause of tunnel vision.

Then, the kicker:

When you get stuck in thinking (and not for lack of trying), identify your intentions and change them, or abandon them entirely. (Don’t worry, you’ll be able to get them back later, at least if you can remember them.) Changing what you’re trying to do is the most powerful tool you have for putting your attention in new places. To get as much clarity as possible, completely abandon all of your intentions. Not trying to do anything lets you be impartial; it stops you from stopping your attention.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Identifying your intentions can be very hard (because you have to be honest with yourself about what you really truly are trying to do). Letting go of them can seem near impossible. The easiest hack that I’ve found for letting go of intention is to let go of preferences, of caring, of wanting. It’s very effective, but it comes at the cost of caring, which makes it harder to connect with others, harder to be compassionate, harder to sympathize with other people’s cares. I don’t recommend this route, except as an educational exercise. It is possible to care without having intentions, but it’s very hard to both feel empowered to act, to care, and not to have intentions. It is only by giving up on the feeling that I have the power to do anything, have I been able to both care and not have intentions, to gain clarity without not caring. Maybe there are other ways, I don’t know. I don’t have a proof.

So, if you want to think clearly, at least be mindful that your intentions strongly restrict your ability to think. If you want to let go of your intentions without letting go of caring — give up (and give up often). Giving up is very refreshing. Only after giving up (even temporarily!) can you really truly relax. I’ve found relaxation to be the most important thing in the world, for my mental health.

Thinking clearly is the most important tool that you have for being productive. But know that thinking clearly is not always the best thing. Thinking clearly can be a living nightmare. Not-thinking is a very powerful tool, and it regularly saves us from needless heartache and trauma.

There are lots of hacks and heuristics to productive thinking without changing what you are trying to do. Rationalist people develop them, making and memorizing long lists of logical fallacies. They build heuristics for being more effective at getting what they want. I used to be a rationalist, and some of my closest friends are still rationalists. None of these tools, I think, are nearly as fundamental as changing (or letting go of) what you are trying to do.