Popular Wisdom Is a Parasite Feeding on Your Potential

The first time I stepped foot in a factory, I decided right then and there that I would rather blow my brains out immediately than work there for the next 45+ years.

A fifteen year old with a visceral dread for what life would look like if he didn’t wake up and change things around.

See I have heard this type of story from a few successful people, and I stupidly made the connection only recently. Many won’t talk about it.

Truth is, if you don’t hate where you are, and as a result experience a high amount of pain from it, you won’t take on the painful path of changing your circumstances.

Any change in your life (=growth) is the result of hating where you are more than hating the pain to change.

That’s about it. We can keep looking for complicated stuff to explain why someone changes and others don’t, this frame makes it very straight forward.

Because a scary thing exists: if I hadn’t experienced that much hate for my condition right then, I could have very well ended up living that life forever.

Maybe I would have really disliked it, but thought “just a few years before I change things around”, thinking I would leave someday for a better thing.

Then I would have gotten used to the life, I would have my routine set up, it wouldn’t be that bad then? And at least I’m not one of these pencil pushers in corporate, I’m a real man doing real shit (that’s the moment you have to twist reality somehow and find justifications for your condition and to feel superior).

Then the wife and kids, and you’re “locked”, you can’t move anymore cause you have to provide.

Here are your 45+ years doing something you hate.

And that’s all there is: the pain of staying the same needs to be higher than the pain of change. Then change becomes inevitable.

So, what if I had found something that sedated the pain? What would have happened?

Because we optimized for this, in philosophy, in psychology, in our way of life. It’s everywhere now. A whole category of ideas whose job is to erase suffering, make life less painful, which is why they became popular in the first place, and this has nothing to do with them being TRUE.

That last part especially took me a while to understand, and it starts with something Richard Dawkins wrote fifty years ago.

You’ve got a song stuck in your head that you don’t even like. It entered without permission, it stays for two days, and maybe you hum it around someone else and put it in their head too. Nobody chose any of this, the song just moved in.

Dawkins wrote about this at the end of The Selfish Gene in 1976. His whole argument up to that point is that genes are not working for you, you’re the vehicle they use to get around, and the gene that wins is just the one that gets copied the most. Whether it makes your life any better is a completely separate question, sometimes it does, but it’s completely irrelevant to it, the gene just wants to survive.

Then in the last chapter, the one most important for us here, he says this same thing is happening with ideas.

He called them memes, way before the internet started using the word. Memes according to him are: a song, an expression, a way of building an arch, a religion, a philosophy, a business model, a way of raising your kids. They sit in your brain, they get copied into other brains through talking, writing, imitation, and they mutate a bit each time, so some versions get copied more than others and some die out. That’s evolution running on minds instead of bodies, and it runs very fast in comparison.

Most importantly: an idea doesn’t spread because it’s true, it spreads because it’s good at spreading. Those are two completely different things and we mix them up constantly.

Think about what you believe about money, or about work, or about what a good life is supposed to look like. You didn’t work any of that out from scratch, you caught it, from your parents, your friends, your country, or whatever you happened to be reading at 17. And the reason those specific ideas were sitting there for you to catch is that they were good at surviving in other brains before yours.

So popularity tells you an idea is contagious, but tells you nothing about whether it’s true.

This is the hardest part to swallow, because we’re so used to being attracted by popular things. We check the amount of views and likes before watching a video, we look at how many followers someone has to judge if they have sufficient authority/the quality of their work, etc, etc.

So what makes an idea good at spreading?

It has to get repeated, and people repeat what made them feel something, and most of the time that something is... relief.

An idea that makes you feel better about your situation gets said out loud all the time, to yourself in the shower and to your friend who’s going through it, and he says it to someone else the week after. An idea that tells you your situation is bad and you’re going to have to do something painful about it gets heard once and is quickly pushed under the rug.

“Flattery makes friends, truth makes enemies.” - Terence

So over enough copies the comforting versions win easily. Nobody consciously sat down and decided that, they’re just the ones that keep getting said, so they’re the ones still standing after a few thousand years of being passed around.

There is though selection pressure for ideas too, the same way it operates for natural selection as we know it. Reality might catch you in your fantasies. If an idea leads you to die (too quickly) then it will naturally be dropped and die off during hard times. True and useful ideas survive most during intense times of selection pressure.

When nothing is at stake, in good and peaceful times, like we have been living in the west since WW2, the feel good ideas spread very fast and take over. The useful ideas gradually get forgotten, this is when civilizations go from “hard work got us there” to “why are we working? let’s have a good time”.

Which means the ideas that reach you have already been filtered mostly for how good they make you feel, and not for whether they’re any good for you. That includes the stuff we call wisdom.

Especially the stuff we call wisdom.

Once you see ideas this way you stop asking “is this right”, which is hard to answer anyway, and you start asking why it’s in your head, what it did for whoever handed it to you, and what it’s doing for you right now.

That question is the whole rest of this piece.

Pain exists because it works.

You touch something hot and your take your hand out before you’ve decided anything about it, and you don’t do it twice. The animals that didn’t feel it walked into fires and got eaten and didn’t have descendants, so every single one of us is running on a curated system that spent millions of years getting good at one job, which is telling you something here is wrong, move.

Of course it doesn’t only fire for burns. It fires for being hungry, for being alone, for being at the bottom of the group, for your life going nowhere. Same signal doing the same job, telling you the situation you’re in is bad for you and you’d better change it.

Then we came up with ways to turn that signal off without touching the situation, which is the part evolution never saw coming. You can get the relief without doing any of the work now, and the thing that was wrong stays exactly where it was, still wrong, just in the background, far enough so you don’t hear it, close enough so you have to keep making noise to not hear it.

I know this one well because I lived in it for years. I started playing videogames at 11 and by the age of 14 I was doing it most of the day, and this basically through my whole adolescence.

When I finally pulled myself out of that at around 18, there was nothing underneath. Years of pure dopamine, nothing built, no skills, and now I could feel exactly how far behind I’d put myself.

That’s when I found self improvement, which really helped even though I kept falling back into binges, and then stoicism and meditation. These all worked in the way they were sold to me: I was calmer, less depression, less anxiety, less worrying and overthinking, I developed a way of looking at my situation that made it hurt a lot less.

But not much about my situation changed. I was reading good stuff and getting real relief out of it, the point is that the relief turned into comfort, and that was the problem. The more I turned the pain down and the less I had to do anything about it, so I stayed roughly where I was for a long time, although feeling much better in general.

What got me out wasn’t a better philosophy, getting deeper into understanding my shadow or enlightenment. I got hard into business two years ago, started my own thing a year ago, and that was it.

There’s more pain in my life now than there was in the stoicism and meditation years, deadlines, doubt, money, a future I can’t see the shape of, all of it, and I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now.

Which tells you the pain was never the thing that was wrong with my life. I spent years treating the symptom and calling it wisdom.

I want to put four things that have something in common next to each other. I’ve written about most of them separately before, and on its own each one just looks like me having beef with a particular thinker. Next to each other they look like something else entirely.

1. Buddhism says suffering comes from wanting things, and the way out is to stop wanting them. That’s the tradition describing itself, and the life it holds up as the highest one available to you is a man who has withdrawn from making anything and from having a family. So a philosophy built around not wanting produces people who don’t build, which isn’t a corruption of it or some watered down version, it’s the thing working exactly as designed.

2. Jung takes that same job and moves it inside you. The work becomes your dreams, your symbols, your shadow, and it never ends, because there’s no point where you can check whether it’s finished or whether it did anything at all. I’ve watched people do years of this, know themselves beautifully, oh it was beautiful, lots of explanations, and they were in the exact same place they started. (I go into my problem with Jung deeper here.)

3. Then there’s the therapy culture we’re all swimming in now, which is the biggest of the four by a long way. Self acceptance as the goal, your feelings are valid, healing as something you’re doing forever with no end date. Almost nobody in it ever says the thing that would durably help you, which is that your situation is bad and you should go change it.

4. Stoicism is the one I have the most respect for out of these. The actual doctrine puts your own action inside your control and tells you to go and do it, which I’m really on board with. In practice, the pile of stuff people file under “not in my control” keeps growing until it covers their job, their body, their city, their income, and turn them into a ghost in their own life, a spectator of it. (I’ve written about that at length here.)

Four traditions, thousands of years and half a planet apart, and they all land on the same foundation: eliminate suffering, and the solution is internal.

That’s what they share. Every one of them starts from a spot where changing your circumstances is off the table at some capacity, and once that’s off the table the only thing left to work on is your reaction. Which is a fine thing to do if you’re actually stuck. Most people aren’t stuck, they just haven’t tried very hard.

And go back to what we said about copying for a second. These are among the most repeated ideas in human history, they’ve survived thousands of years, they get quoted every day by millions of people who’ve never read a page of the source.

We said the ideas that spread best are the ones that make you feel better about where you are, and here it is, four times over, sitting in the ideas we respect the most.

Here, I’m obviously not telling you pain is always useful.

There’s pain you can do something about and pain you can’t. Someone dies, you get sick with something that has no cure, you lose years you’re not getting back. The literal laws of Physics (important!) won’t let you fix any of that and the pain from it isn’t pointing at anything, it’s just pain. That’s where these traditions are genuinely good TOOL, probably the best thing we’ve got for it, and I use them myself.

The problem is the man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

Once you’ve got a reliable way of making pain smaller you start using it on everything, including all the pain that was pointing straight at something you could have fixed that same week. A job you hate isn’t a death, being broke isn’t a death, being out of shape or in the wrong city or surrounded by people going nowhere isn’t a death, all of it is changeable and all of it hurts in a way that was supposed to move you somewhere.

You take the painkiller during the surgery, not instead of it.

Epictetus was born a slave, very little control over your own existence right there. Add on top of that the world they lived in, which was very limited not only in your ability to move around and do stuff, but mainly in your knowledge of said ability to move.

Switch to today, you’re not a slave, you aren’t chained and told to do set amount of work each day. But you keep acting like one, because you are still chained by what you think you can achieve.

You are not living in antiquity, or in the middle ages, you have your phone, access to a laptop and internet, to every book ever written and all the information at the few strokes of one fingertip, that would make the library of Alexandria a dump by comparison. You can focus for a year and create something that has the potential of making you rich and live a better lifestyle than literal kings of the past. Not saying this is easy but it’s a reality, people make it happen.

The conditions changed completely, the ideas didn’t. We’re still stuck with the same stuff circulating around in a world you have a ton of agency to change.

You are vulnerable to these ideas when you’re in pain, and this is when they latch on to you. Like a parasite settling into a host.

And it works, it provides relief to your pain. It pays you for its presence with calmness.

A state of weakness is prolific to these ideas, and that state starts using other means to spread.

Game Theory says we play games by using the optimal ways available to us to win.

Weak people that do not have a growth mindset but have a fixed one do not realize they can pick up new cards to play the game with, they think are stuck forever with their weak cards and this makes them want to start to switch the rules of the game.

Weak people with a growth mindset do not stay weak for too long.

And note what I said in the last section, because it’s the same thing seen from the inside. For Epictetus that fixed mindset wasn’t a mindset at all, it was an accurate reading of his situation, he really couldn’t change his cards. It only becomes a fixed mindset today, when the cards are there for the taking and you keep believing they aren’t.

This is when more vicious parasitic ideas/beliefs/memes find their place in that host.

Instead of rising out of its condition, the weak person then buries themselves deeper into it. They develop new ways to operate in: equality, justice, empathy, turning the other cheek. This is what Nietzsche called Slave Morality. You change the rules of the game because you cannot win in the game.

But the reason you cannot win in the game is because you have that fixed mindset to begin with.

I don’t blame weak people, I blame the ideas, the parasite that takes control of them, being the host, and uses them to spread and to survive.

And look at what the parasite is actually optimizing for here, because it’s not your death and it’s not your success. A host who fixes his life doesn’t need the idea anymore and drops it. A host who collapses completely stops spreading it. So the versions that make it through thousands of years are the ones that keep you alive and stationary, functional enough to keep going and comfortable enough to never move.

If you believe in an ideology strongly enough, confirmation bias starts operating: your views are constantly confirmed because you are looking for instances where they are, and you easily twist reality to get there.

It’s a downward spiral, vicious.

These ideas reproduce through the same operating principle, they are pain avoiding, because you being weak, and thinking you don’t have any ways of changing that, is freaking brutal. So you create whole philosophies, whole religions maybe, to counter this.

The relief is how it travels, the same way a cold makes you sneeze on someone. Nobody involved ever feels used.

And it spreads. Many never do, they die with their host at some point. Those who survive for millennia are especially great at surviving and providing answer to pain, whatever form it takes (lack of meaning, afraid of death, feeling powerless).

Gurus are amazing at getting their foot in the door, they may not create the state of things, but they are really good at farming it, many times with good intentions.

Whole businesses developed to take advantage of this, lots of incentives to keep the wheel turning. The forever subscription model is indeed better than being paid once and never hearing about the patient again. A customer who solves his problem stops paying.

Usefulness. I’ve mentioned it up there when talking about selection pressure. But this frame is different:

Does it produce or does it extract?

In my humble way, this is what I’m trying to do with this philosophical framework: put old philosophies that are parasitic in the trash in favor of a first principles approach to live a better life; the striving for greatness through the pursuit of a quest.

This is meant to create people who want to pursue great things, solve hard problems, and make the world into a better place.

Now, do anti-suffering philosophies, does slave morality produce or extract?

Here’s the test, and it’s brutal. Internal work does not accumulate. Every single person who wants the benefit has to build it himself from zero, and when he dies it dies with him, nothing carries over to the next guy. Two thousand five hundred years of men reaching enlightenment and the amount of permanent suffering removed from the world by all of it put together at the end is zero.

Now take Pasteur. One man, one lifetime, and it’s still running 150 years later for billions of people who have never heard his name and never did a minute of work to receive it. Your kid doesn’t die at 9 of something that used to kill kids at 9. That is what producing looks like when you stretch the timeline out.

So which one reduced suffering more, the man who eliminated it from the inside for himself, or the man who made the disease stop existing?

These are fixed pie ways of life. Fixed mindset. Stuck in a dimension that you can’t change anything about.

They are also, in the present day, selfish.

And nothing wrong with being selfish, we are all living for ourselves, we are all moving based on incentives. But think about it for a second. You work on your own happiness, your own peace, your own enlightenment all your life. And it produces nothing tangible in the real world.

You don’t have to become a martyr or to sacrifice your life for a greater good. But we have to call a cat a cat. This internal work is deeply selfish, aimed inward and backwards, with nothing moving in the real world.

Everything I mentionned about memes, the idea living a life of their own, spreading, and becoming parasites controlling the host.

Well, I discovered that all this shit has been written about before after I developed the idea by myself, brick by brick, which sucked because I thought I had invented a revolutionary framework. It’s possible I had heard of it before and then came up with it from first principles unconsciously.

Anyway, Daniel Dennett started speaking of this in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in 1995 and other subsequent works (he has a TED talk called Dangerous memes). Haven’t read his books but I wish I did a long time ago so I would have came up with the rest of what I’m going to talk about here sooner.

Because as he speaks of this meme problem as a civilizational issue, covering religion and politics, I have turned this into a sort of self-improvement mechanism that is actionable in your own life. But more on that later.

So what makes today’s world especially vulnerable to this compared to even 30 years ago when Dennett spoke of it? The reason is that today algorithms spread new ideas extremely fast and this is unprecedented. The feed is optimized for engagement and virality, not for usefulness.

What keeps you watching wins, and what keeps you watching is the thing that makes you feel understood, so the distribution of these ideas is no longer a slow drift over centuries, it’s instant and it’s targeted. The comforting version of any idea now reaches ten million people in a day.

All of this to say: what your phone shows you at 1am when you’re miserable is not what would fix your life, it’s whatever will keep you scrolling. Those are two different things and the machine only knows how to find the second one.

Additionally, selection pressure was a way to protect you from parasitic ideas that don’t help you, well now is the softest environment ideas have ever bred in, so we should expect the sedatives to be winning harder than at any point in history.

They are.

The weakness that lets the door open for these parasitic ideas to take you over as a host is not innate, but one thing is certain: the ideas make you weaker, and keep you in that state.

The ideas got in, but they can also be eliminated.

That’s the whole point of this essay up until now: to offer you a framework to get these parasites out of your head, and to replace them with ideas that make your life better, that work for you instead of feeding on you.

This obviously isn’t easy. You have spent your entire life being taught that feeling better is the goal, by everyone around you and by every idea that ever reached you. It’s human, it’s natural to want to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. You have in some ways to become anti-human in order to fight your original programming.

But this is necessary to get out of that trance you might be in, and to make leaps of progress in your life.

More importantly, you’re not choosing between suffering and peace, that choice was never real. You’re choosing which suffering you get. The one that goes nowhere and repeats forever, or the one that costs you something and builds.

There’s more pain in my life today than there was during my stoic meditation years, and I’ve never felt more alive and “happy”.

If you’re content with where you are in life, this isn’t for you. You’ve got the theory, which in itself is tremendously valuable, what comes next is the HOW to snap out of it, the practical actionable parts.

Let’s eradicate these parasites from feeding off of you.