positive and negative energy by Vincent H. '23

two years ago i watched the midnight gospel, a tv show where the dialogue for each episode is taken from a series of real-life podcast interviews. in the third episode, darryl, the interviewee, is an ex-convict who spent his time in prison practicing spirituality and magic. when i first saw this show i thought this episode was mostly nonsense. darryl often says things like:

“The reason that meditation is so important in magic is because whatever we fasten our attention on, that’s the direction our energy is going to flow in, so when you’re doing magic, you want to keep your mind as single-pointedly focused on whatever you’re trying to accomplish as possible.”

it took me another viewing to realize that much of the episode’s dialogue remains true regardless of whether you believe in magic or not. for instance, at one point the characters discuss how oral traditions are a way of transferring spiritual energy from the speaker to the listener, but you could just as easily interpret the discussion as saying that oral traditions pass physical energy (via sound waves) from one brain to another:

“When we’re talking about something being an oral tradition, we sort of live under this misunderstanding that that means it’s just a bunch of stories told, handed on. That’s not what this means. What an oral tradition is, it means the way this current of energy is passed from one person to another is through the voice.”

the part of the episode that hit hardest for me was this one:

“Most people spend their lives complaining about things they don’t like. So, you’re adding power to it. You’re giving it chi.

We’re supposed to focus on what it is that we’re wanting to move towards instead of away from. You don’t have to lie when something is bad. You know, if you have a cold and someone says, ‘Are you sick?’ that doesn’t mean say, ‘No.’ It means say, ‘I’m getting better minute by minute.’”

i don’t believe in chi, but i do believe that complaining about problems and being pessimistic about them can make them worse. sickness is a particularly relevant example because it’s one where your psyche can directly influence what symptoms you feel – for instance, i once had a case of food poisoning that spiraled out of control and resulted in a week of widespread nausea, largely because i kept expecting to throw up even though i never did. there are many other problems that can directly worsen because you’re pessimistic about them, like depression and social anxiety, and there are problems where the effect is indirect, like various kinds of doomerism

i’ve been thinking more about the line “We’re supposed to focus on what it is that we’re wanting to move towards instead of away from.” some people (i believe this started with social scientists studying migration?) call these push factors – wanting to escape something – and pull factors – wanting to move towards something. for me the more natural framing is negative energy and positive energy, so that’s what i’ll use for the rest of this post

most of my life has been dominated by negative energy. for example, throughout middle school and high school i knew that i wanted friends, but i didn’t really have a sense of what kinds of friends i wanted or what i wanted to do with them; i was more focused on trying to avoid being alone than on trying to find people i liked. similarly, there was a period in college where i was focused on trying to find jobs that paid as highly as possible despite not actually having much i wanted to spend money on; i think my pursuit of wealth was more about fear of not having money than about actually wanting money for something. in general i think the pattern of someone wanting something without knowing what they like about it or they want to do with it is a pretty good indicator that they may be motivated by negative energy, and it’s something i see pretty often in other people – for instance, people wanting to be in a relationship despite not knowing what kind of partner they want, or wanting to found a startup despite not having any problem areas or causes in mind

i used to think it didn’t matter what your thoughts were as long as they pushed you in the right directions, that it was fine to fuel yourself with toxic waste as long as you were able to compartmentalize it properly. i no longer believe this, largely because i think proper compartmentalization is impossible over long timescales. this makes sense from both a theoretical perspective – sandboxes don’t exist in the brain because memories and representations overlap heavily – and an empirical one – people seem to be bad at context switching and clearing their minds

take my previous post, for example. i’m pretty cynical by nature, so during high school and most of college i believed that people who worked in high-paying and uninteresting jobs did so because they cared more about money than everything else. at the same time, i was friends with a lot of these people, so i tried to wall off those beliefs and interact with my friends as normal people with normal values. i was actually pretty successful in doing this for… maybe three years? but by the end it was becoming increasingly untenable and i was having spillovers where i viewed everyone else in a similarly cynical manner. eventually i decided this simply wasn’t how i wanted to see the world so i began looking for alternate explanations, and that’s how i stumbled upon my current views – that people do care about things other than money, but often don’t have the mentorship or confidence to pursue them

(one of my friends recently told me a story similar in spirit: they were trying out various martial arts classes to learn self-defense, and there was one particular style that was extremely effective. the only downside was that you were supposed to imagine other people attacking you over and over in visceral detail as part of the training; in theory you should be able to compartmentalize this and only think about attack threats in martial arts settings, but in practice this bleeds into your regular life too. my friend eventually decided they didn’t want to deal with thoughts of being attacked all the time, so they switched to a different martial arts style even though it was less effective)

the point here isn’t to discuss whether one set of beliefs is more true than the other. i think they are both true, but one is much less harmful and more actionable, and that’s what i’m prioritizing right now