A large fraction of our lives consists of rituals, mindless patterns, superficial appearances, make-believe. I used to think they were unnecessary. I am now increasingly seeing why we can't do away with any of them.
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Take away one of them (like wearing a suit to work) and you must replace it with an equivalent one. Without mindless patterns, you life must be lived as an unending expression of purposeful free will; our society must run on unending spontaneous good will -- neither is viable.
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Without appearances, only truth remains -- and the lack of meaning that it lays bare
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This feels like a cause of the slow, steady move towards small-c conservatism as we age.
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i would caution against assuming the universality of this tendency is all
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The more opportunities of choosing new patterns, the more likely to find optimal ones.
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Chess champions had established patterns that served them well
End of conversation
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You definitely see more routine or habitual behaviour once you start to look. Where people sit in meetings, stand on the metro platform, local routes. Guess most of these are not worth spending energy on. But it is almost "exciting" to occasionally change your own on purpose.
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The mindless pattern relieves us from the burden of decision making for every task, buying us more time. They bring some sort of order to the ever-increasing entropy of our lives.
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Your example might be carried out “mindlessly” (as you put it) by you. But by no means is it intrinsically so. The fallacy is obvious in that you can grasp and call it “mindless” in the first place — just as coming up with thought systems that create “meaning” about it.
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I agree with the general idea, but why would you replace it systematically ?
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