Some people live with stock thinking; others live with flow thinking.
Stock-type people steadily work for the future — chasing market value as professionals, building skills and track records toward long-term goals.
Flow-type people, taken to an extreme, just want each day to be enjoyable. They focus on the present and live from there.
Neither is better or worse. The aim — maximizing total joy in life — is the same; the approach differs.
Ideas that get attention lately under labels like "mindfulness" lean toward the latter.
I've read a few mindfulness books; boiled down to one line, it's "focus on the now."
Fair enough — but when it comes down to it I'm a petty person, and I can't fully drop chasing my market value or living with calculation.
That said, maybe mindfulness's point is that even market value and future goals can be reached by focusing on the now. I don't understand mindfulness well enough to speak carelessly. Sorry if that rubbed anyone the wrong way.
Whether you're more stock or flow, I think people are chasing — to some degree — their own "truth" for getting hold of happiness.
"Focusing on the now is the truth" is one view, but it feels a bit thin to me. I have no interest in interfering with people who take that as their truth. I partly agree it's one truth of life.
Personally, it still doesn't sit fully in my gut. Life is long, so I have to keep thinking things through and get closer to a truth of my own.
On the other hand, the question keeps coming: once you have the "truth," then what? What even is truth?
Something like a general model — a thinking axis you can lean on when life throws problems at you?
There is no such thing. If that's what you want, you might as well join a religion from the start. Established ones have trust and track records. (Setting aside some cults.)
Whether stock or flow, a lot of people may be living as if some truth waits further down the road. (I do too.)
But there isn't. Probably not.
Recently I went to a large bookstore and saw an absurd number of books, and thought: even if I read all of these and found the truth — then what?
(That's a stock-type approach, by the way — trying hard to get smarter and become someone with valuable thinking, in crude terms, in order to obtain the truth.)
There are all kinds of theories of reading:
· Read because it's fun
· Read with a purpose
· It's meaningless unless you put it into practice
I agree with all of them.
Still, I suspect the underlying need behind reading is wanting to get closer to the truth of life.
But again: you found the truth — then what?
Becoming a critic who lectures others about truth wouldn't mean much.
The truth you finally reached through trial and error sits in your gut because it's yours. No matter how carefully you explain it, other people won't really get it.
I'm writing all this, but I'm not despairing about life.
As I keep saying: if you hoped that reading every book would give you reading experiences and knowledge that yield some highly abstract truth of life, you'd probably land on the bleak conclusion that no such truth exists.
This whole claim rests on the premise that people's purpose in reading, abstracted, sits on a subconscious desire to get closer to life's truth.
I was thinking: if, when you read, you're unconsciously hoping for truth — there's no free lunch like that.
© 2021 ZUUHE