Postcard: Vantage
No. 007 - on frames and perspective.
Postcard is a weekly curation of things I think are beautiful or interesting. Each postcard will be named after a word and contain something to listen to, something to look at, and something to think about. I welcome you to share any thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
Postcard: Vantage
vantage:
(n.) Advantage or superiority in a contest; position or opportunity likely to give superiority.
An opportunity; a chance. (Obsolete)
†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Something to listen to:
Something to look at:
Something to think about:
Living in a culture dominated by moral relativism, it is easy to become disillusioned or disenchanted with the world. This seems to be one of the default outcomes of the default culture. There are many cultural institutions—schools, journalists, Hollywood, advertisers, artists, churches—vying for the seemingly vacant role of AUTHORITY; to be the one who gets to say, definitively, once and for all, how the world really is. What everyone should believe. On this warpath of good intentions and imposed worldviews, truth and beauty are often the first casualties.
The power these institutions crave is to set your frame for you. When I say frame, I am referring to one of the many lens through which we view reality. Frames can be ideological, spiritual, religious, secular—anything that touches the vast spectrum of beliefs and values. Here’s an example of a framing: many kinds of activist will tell you, earnestly, that their cause is the most pressing and urgent cause in the world and demands immediate collective action. Obviously, this cannot be true. Some must be more important than others. To say nothing of material resources, we live in a reality constrained by both attention and willpower. It’s impossible to do everything, there are always tradeoffs. The straightforward conclusion here is these activists operate using false frames. We should not listen to them or take their word at face value.
Scaling down to us as individuals, what we focus our attention and willpower on is the most consequential decision in our lives. Something that I struggled with for many years was feeling the need to respond with urgency to other people’s ideas or emotions. When people express urgency, there is a normative human desire to reciprocate. Sadly, this fundamentally good and earnest instinct has been hijacked and weaponized by many of the cultural institutions I described earlier. If attention is powerful, then attracting attention is a form of consolidating power. Decades of hyper-optimization and technological breakthroughs led us to an unhealthy equilibrium where our human instincts are used against our own interests. Advertisers, teachers, activists, journalists… all want to lure you into their frame and keep you there.
Due to the nature of power, people who don’t care about your well-being will still try to set the frame of your reality. They will definitely try to set the frame of your children’s reality. Sadly, far too many people and institutions now view that as their God-given right, something they are morally entitled to. In the default culture, it seems one does not need to believe in God nor monarchy to claim the divine right of kings, to view other people’s children as potential footsoldiers to be recruited for their own ideological projects. Changing an adult’s mind about the world can be difficult, but children repeat what they’re told. Even if the lies crumble down decades later like a house of cards, as things built on lies inevitably do, the damage is done.
The cultural power these institutions wield is almost self-legitimizing. It feels so real. But once you wake up to the sophistry, you start to see the illusory arguments as they really are, statements propped up not by fact but collective delusion. No matter how loud a mob chants, “Wet streets cause rain! Wet streets cause rain!” it will not be true. Words may shape our thoughts and beliefs, but they do not shape reality itself.
The label is not the thing. It is the label.
Figuring out how to reject false cultural frames drastically improved both my base rate of happiness and overall outcomes in life. Holding my own frame and operating from it is a fundamentally empowering position. While the size of the effect for me was large, the actions required to unlock it were not. It was as easy as thinking about what I want to focus on—which can be a rational brain decision, a matter of gut intuition, or both—and then just… focusing on those things. That’s it. There is more truth, beauty, and goodness in the world than I could ever hope to perceive. I consider it a sin to take this abundance for granted (as I did for decades) by not actively looking for it. There are secrets under rocks, tender moss growing in sidewalk cracks, stars streaking across the sky if you make the time to look up in wonder.
Noticing beautiful things is practicing love.
Learning how to shift frames is an essential skill for the 21st century human, who is born and raised in the age of information. One of my greatest fears is that if we do not level up our cultural and spiritual antibodies, we will sink into an age of disinformation and disenchantment instead.
Disenchantment, after all, is the natural response to discovering you were lied to by someone you believed. Our default culture contains many falsehoods; some born out of convenience, some out of malice… some are simply old information. A map that hasn’t been updated to reflect changes in the territory.
The declining return on investment in college education in America is a great example; as college degrees lose their value, it becomes much more important to obtain it at a reasonable cost. Some people end up so far in debt to get something that has a value so low, we would use the word “scam” in any other scenario. Our present cultural narrative about the importance of college education simply does not match the current value received nor appropriately factor in the rising cost of education. It has been out of date for decades and we still show little sign of rewriting the message to reflect reality.
Now if you don’t fall for the lie in the first place, you won’t suffer any disenchantment…
… but if you do get tricked, it’s easy to reflexively become more cynical from the pain. This triggers something like a misguided immune system response, where out of the desire to prevent yourself from being hurt again your spirit starts rejecting good things too. Attacking itself. Humans are remarkably good at matching patterns, and if the pattern we’re trying to match with is unhealthy or out of alignment, we will sabotage ourselves with tragic efficiency.
The right to protect and nourish your spirit comes with the freedom to choose your own worldview, to set your own frames, and to reject what doesn’t serve you (or, of similar importance, what you don’t want to serve).
Everything in life is a matter of perspective. If you are not choosing your vantage wisely, it will choose you through the path of least resistance: the default culture.
Love this whole concept