How to improve negative thinking in 13 easy steps
I try to get into mindfulness meditation every day with mixed results, feeling the present moment for a couple of seconds. I also try to practice so called Stoic meditation — negative and positive visualization. Mostly in the shower, while contributing to climate change. And mostly managing the negative visualization better, than the positive one.
So I thought to apply some science to it — namely the Richer magnitude scale for earthquakes. Magnitude means 10x difference, so e.g. the magnitude 3 earthquake is 100x stronger than magnitude 1 earthquake. The distribution of earthquakes also follows something like the Pareto distribution — a few strongest earthquakes make most of the total damage in history.
This is the essence of so called black swan events — The Second World War was one of those — killing about 50 million people. Ten biggest wars killed probably more people than the rest of the wars combined. The logic of this very skewed distribution is similar to the news like “ 8 people in 2017 owned as much as half of the global population combined”.
This is the beef in the Taleb vs Pinker feud — Taleb is furious that Pinker doesn’t get this long tail distribution — meaning the next WW3 war could wipe out not 50m people but 500m people. Then you can add Nick Bostrom in the mix, and understand that it is far, far worse if 100% of humanity died, then if 99% of humanity died. Because of the immense value of future generations.
So I was thinking about the magnitude scale of negative thinking (NT) with something like this:
NT13 — The whole galaxy gets destroyed today
NT12 — Earth gets completely destroyed today
NT11 — Whole humanity goes extinct today
NT10– 99% of humanity goes extinct today
NT9 — Europe disappears in nuclear rabble
NT8 — V4 countries and Austria are gone
NT7 — Slovakia disappears
NT6 — Bratislava is gone
NT5 — My loved one, whole extended family and friends are gone
NT4 — I cease to exists
NT3 — My whole career and personal life is in rabble
NT2 — I won’t complete anything meaningful today
NT1 — Someone will criticize my thinking on Facebook
…………………
And the Positive Thinking (PT) scale would look something like this:
PT13 — We will occupy other galaxies someday
PT 12 — We will occupy Mars someday
PT 11 — Whole humanity lives in abundance and generational extreme poverty is gone
PT10 — Majority of humanity lives in democratic and free societies, with no existential fear and severe suffering
PT9 — Europe is a leader in peace, technology and development
PT8 — V4 countries are global leaders topping charts like Good Country Index, Social Progress Index, Doing Business Index and SDG Index
PT7 — Slovakia is a leader in education, exports know-how on how to eradicate generational poverty with effective learning and equity crowdfunding and an alternative to UBI — something like Universal Scholarship // Slovakia is a leader in global tax justice and fighting illicit financial flows, money laundering and organized crime
PT6 — Bratislava is a global leader in social innovation
PT5 — My whole family, “tribe” and epistemic community is well and happy
PT4 — I accomplished something meaningful with a lasting impact
PT3 — Entity I work for started some meaningful and radically innovative project
PT2 — I accomplished at least 3 important tasks today.
PT1 — I did at least something today
