The one job of our brain is to protect itself.
To that end, it tries to maximize access to food and safety. In the case of food, it banks as many calories possible as fat in order both to guard against inevitable food insecurity and to limit the need for high-risk activities to secure food. Paradoxically, feeding ourselves almost invariably involves risk. Our brain's ideal state is the all-you-can eat buffet. It's why bear brains like salmon streams.
This produces the agonizing conflict between safety and limited movement, against risk, activity, and the delayed gratification of acquiring the resources to generate food, protect it, and protect ourselves. In its core reflexive expression, our brain thinks diet and exercise are dangerous threats.
Even the psychoactive substances we consume to calm our brain from the constant awareness of how vulnerable it is at every moment, makes it less able to be aware of threat and less capable of defending itself. There's research that suggests people who are depressed have a more realistic view than those who are optimistic.
And in a universe laden with paradox, among the weirdest is that while our individual brain has no stake in the survival of the species after it's gone, as an excretion of the gene pool, it might risk everything to reproduce. Hence salmon brains leave the all-you-can-eat sardine buffet to risk death at the mouth of a bear.
Doing the absolute minimum necessary for basic survival is our core inertia, and nothing to be ashamed of. It's fundamental to sustaining our lives. And yet, this is occasionally countered by weird human drives to climb mountains, win gold medals (not edible despite athletes' urges to bite on them) and have sex.
Being alive is on the edge of impossible at best. Being alive with consciousness and metacognition in addition, brings us at best to the edge of madness -- with many of us living within the frontiers of madness, and not a few of us residing in madness's capital city.
Which brings us to the paradox of this post. I can't argue that ambition mediated by metacognition -- the ability to watch our brains at work and the essence of this essay -- is beneficial. At the same time, my life's work has been to push my ambitions to their optimum expressions, and to support others to do the same.
If we're going to move beyond our brain's basic survival instincts, we need to be highly aware of our brain's particular expressions and contradictions. Simone Biles's plus ultra achievements in the Paris Olympics are the result of ne plus ultra achievements in metacognition. She, and all those athletes, had to resist instincts and drive their awarenesses and thinking to profound levels to get their bodies into integration with their minds.
Anyone attempting to reach their optimum risks absurdity and death.
I think it's worth it.
Warm Regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Simone Biles's: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31847558-courage-to-soar
absurdity and death: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52319/constantly-risking-absurdity-15