You’re Shamelessly Prostituting Your Mind

Michael.

Published in

The Coffeelicious

4 min readMay 13, 2016

We all know what prostitution is.

It really is a $40 billion market.

But this is not the place and the time to talk about it. So here is another definition for you.

To prostitute: to use (something valuable, such as talent) in a way that is not appropriate or respectable and especially to earn money

But hey, wrong guess, this won’t be another article about how you should immediately quit your job and stop “selling your mind” to the lord of darkness on the top floor of the corporate building.

I just really like the provocative flavour of the word “prostitution”.

So I will just talk about the different ways we prostitute with our minds. Every. Single. Day.

Romance And Prostitution

First of all, your mind is not something you can take advantage of every day and not put in any efforts to make it happy. Sorry, we still can’t rent minds to wear around every day.

Sometimes your mind needs romance. Some cuddling. A kiss on the cheek. Romance your mind.

It doesn’t want to be fucked every day and left aside. Yet, we all do it. We fuck our minds at work and then we forget about them until the next day.

And we expect our minds to be ready for another round.

We often neglect how our mind really feels.

We take our minds for granted. And we often lose them in our aim to survive another day.

Prostituting Your Mind With Bad Clients

I guess there are good and bad clients in the $40 billion industry. But there are also a lot of them in our 7.4 billion pool.

You know…these kinds of people, who don’t really care how our minds feel,or how we feel. They just want to do their thing. Share their worries. Gossip a little bit. Discuss dumb shit, because they’re bored. Or maybe they just need a favor.

So we bend ourselves and our own rules and let them do it.

Our minds are again exploited and left unrewarded.

You’re welcome.

The Art Of Prostitution

Probably one of the worst forms of mind-prostitution is when we involve it in trivial, static, repeatable activities.

Your brain is built on diversity. Just look at the billion cells it’s made of. The millions of neural networks that start from your brain…you know, these types of networks which help us do cool shit.

You know what, here is something more on the subject:

“Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse-basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.
Myelin ( a fatty white substance) ’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out.
When we fire our circuits in the right way-when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note,our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed.
The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

**from the book The Talent Code

And we still limit what we do with our brains (minds). We get sucked into our daily routines, we do the work we’re used to and do with ease and by no means challenge our creative capability. Which, unfortunately, deteriorates if we don’t use it often enough.

It’s like performing the same exercises in the fitness for 2 years. Eventually, the only effect they will have on you will be to tire you. (hmm sounds pretty much like the job I had at a call center).