I've always been drawn to the palpable aspects of life – theories, behaviors, and ideas that shape our reality and our place within it. However, this post marks a departure towards something more introspective and, perhaps, a tad spiritual. It's an exploration of personal philosophies that I grew attached to over the years as they have helped me get along in the complicated mess that is our reality, and our peculiar little existence within it. Maybe some people will find something of value in these framings of frustration, preferences and regret.
Granted, none of these ideas are particularly original, and you’ll easily find traces of buddhism, stoicism and other influences within them. But sometimes hearing a familiar idea in unfamiliar words can make all the difference.

Frustration

Frustration is a feeling all too familiar to many of us. Things do not go as planned, others behave in undesirable ways, sometimes it’s even ourselves causing our own frustration. It’s natural and kind of makes sense: we have some expectation of how things ought to be, this expectation gets violated, we’re unhappy. But what is this feeling really? In a sense frustration means clinging to a version of reality that is not actual. It’s a fundamental lack of acceptance of what is. Does this make sense? Clinging to something that doesn’t actually exist? Summoning unpleasant feelings because we disagree with reality?

One way in which frustration may indeed be useful is that it can motivate us to make things better. From an evolutionary point of view it makes sense that frustration emerged, rather than universal acceptance. If we never strive for the betterment of our circumstances, we eventually perish. And suffering, such as in the form of experiencing a feeling of frustration, is a great motivator. But we evolved to a point where we can actually make deals with ourselves. It’s possible to exercise acceptance, to let go of frustration, accept the world and your circumstances as they are, and simply go from there and make the necessary adjustments out of freedom and agency, rather than out of a place of frustration.

As noted before, this is nothing new. Similar claims have been made for thousands of years. Maybe we all need to get to this conclusion at our own pace. But even then, the conclusion itself is not enough – letting go of frustration is more than that. It is a habit, and not the easiest one. It takes courage and effort, it takes mindfulness, and maybe it takes occasional reminders from others, such as this one.

Surfing Down the Landscape of Preferences

I once was in an unusual state of mind. Where just an hour earlier I had seen dozens of little frustrations in my flat – dirty dishes, pieces of trash lying around, things my flatmate had used and not put back into their place, general entropy – I suddenly saw something else: opportunities for improvement, for shaping the environment in ways I would enjoy more than what I was seeing in the moment. There was so much low hanging fruit all around me to turning this flat as it was right now into a better one, a nicer one. So I ended up doing what I can only describe as surfing down the landscape of my preferences. For the next hour or so I was in the most amazing state of flow doing the most mundane things. And I realized that in principle this experience is always available to me. If I just accept the world as it is rather than internally fighting it, then many things that would otherwise frustrate me – at least those that I have control over – turn into something cool, into opportunities of betterment.

Now you might reply “but that’s very short-sighted! You’re treating the symptoms, not the cause!”, and in some cases this is true. If I dislike the state of entropy in my flat, the cause of that entropy is indeed my flatmate (and this is not just a convenient story I’m telling myself), then maybe resolving that entropy myself is not the best solution. Maybe the better approach would be to have a conversation, to set some rules together, or even for one person to move out. But I suspect all these options are better implemented in a state of contentment than in one of frustration. And we probably err on the side of seeing the problem somewhere else, even when a local solution lies neatly within our grasp.

Regret in the Multiverse

Lastly, another form our lack of acceptance of reality can take is that of regret. Regret about some past event – maybe something we did or didn’t do, or something that happened to us. We may ask Why me? Why didn’t I do X? How could I be so stupid? Or How do I deserve this? How can the world be so cruel and unfair?

Accepting reality means not to ruminate too much over such questions. It means only asking these questions for as long as it helps us learn, and, to the degree that we are able to influence things, not repeat past mistakes.

It can be difficult of course to behave in whichever way is the most useful, particularly when it comes to emotional and maybe traumatic experiences. But different framings can at times help put painful things into somewhat less painful perspectives. One framing I found helpful in dealing with regret is the following:

Let’s assume the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is right, and we live in a vast multiverse of ever-branching realities. More or less anything that can happen will happen in some subset of branches of this multiverse. That means some version of you was always bound to experience what you experienced. Your past decisions may have affected how many versions of you would experience the particular sources of regret that are haunting you. But there always were some versions of you that would have to endure this. And you happen to be one of them.

If we cling to the idea of there being one reality, and we are the only version of us that exists, and we inhabit that one single reality, that gives a lot of weight to everything that happens, has happened and will happen. Which in some sense can of course be a good thing. But what if we do live in a multiverse with unfathomably many other instances of each of us experiencing different timelines? All the undesirable things you can imagine will happen to some of your other versions. Personally, when I think about other versions of me “out there” who are experiencing all kinds of horrible losses and make all kinds of, sometimes extremely stupid, mistakes, I empathize with them. But I also, on some level, can appreciate that it’s fair for the multiverse to “explore” these particular branches, even if they are extremely difficult for the versions of me in them to accept. Still, I would hope that these other versions of me will manage to cope with what they’ve been given, and try to make the best of things going forward without dwelling too much in past events that are beyond their authority to affect. And I would wish the same to myself. Maybe past me did make some really, really, unacceptably huge mistake. Or maybe something extremely unfortunate happened to past me or somebody very close to me. But if I’m just part of an unimaginably complex cosmic experiment, and I happen to inhabit the part of that experiment where we explore this particular set of happenings, however much I dislike them, then maybe that’s something I can make a bit of peace with.