A Philosophical Cure for Mental Fog
After a stressful few weeks, I've been feeling a mental fog slowly creeping in. So I did what anyone would do and went to my group of friends for tips on how to get back to a sane state of mental clarity.
I thought they were kind of insightful, so it made sense to share them.
My friend Seneca told me to stop worrying about what I can't change. Most of what clutters my mind right now, he continued, are probably things I cannot act upon, so I might as well remove them to make space for those where my attention can effect a change.
The Zen masters (as we call the twins), always operating a few notches above, shocked me by saying that my mind is already clear--like, did you even listen to me--that clarity is its base state. If I am feeling otherwise, it's because I'm retaining thoughts that I should just let through. Only by unblocking the passage will the fog go away.
Heidegger got excited and started rambling in German about das Man. Get to the point, I said. So he put it this way: when your mind is full, ask yourself how much of this is actually yours vs. noise you’ve absorbed from others' expectations. You are probably attending to demands you haven't consciously chosen.
Finally, Wittgenstein reluctantly chimed in. He came forward and said that I was confused just because I can’t express myself (excuse me?). Sometimes clutter is the mind trying to articulate something that doesn't need words yet. Not only that, but by expressing my situation as "mental fog”, I am creating it. If I refrained from labelling the thought, I'd just have a bunch of tasks to get done. The point being: not everything needs to be resolved--some things just need space.
A grumpy friend who joined the group recently said something that settled the debate swiftly. Taleb said that clarity, like many of the important outcomes in life, ought to be achieved through Via Negativa: you can't get to it through a formula, a technique, a system, god forbid an app. You only get to it by subtracting. When you remove everything that should not be there (like things outside your scope of influence, expectations from others projected onto you), what is left is clarity.