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I broke my own meditation practice the same way for fifteen years. Then an AI playing Atari Breakout taught me to tell a wall I should accept from a door I could walk through.
Show Notes
I broke my own meditation practice the same way for fifteen years. Then an AI playing Atari Breakout taught me to tell a wall I should accept from a door I could walk through.
Featuring: Reinhold Niebuhr, Dick Fosbury
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"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Reinhold Niebuhr
I broke my own meditation more times than I can count. Same mistake, fifteen years running.
The practice was working. So I poked at it. Maybe I could shorten the 2 hours. Maybe swap in something faster.
Then it fell apart.
- My decisions got worse
- Anxiety crept back
- Sleep degraded
The gap between the change and the fallout ran a week or two. Long enough that I blamed something else each time.
The 2 hours are a wall I stopped trying to move. I pay them in full or I pay in anxiety, sleep and bad calls. The price holds no matter what I try. So I leave it alone.
Some walls have a door. I learned to spot them from a video game.
In a documentary called The Thinking Game, a DeepMind program teaches itself Atari Breakout. Paddle at the bottom, ball rising, a wall of bricks up top. For a while it does the obvious thing and chips through the wall one brick at a time.
Then it stops. The program digs a narrow channel up one side, slips the ball behind the bricks and lets it ricochet along the ceiling. The wall destroys itself. The paddle barely moves.
That move sat in the game the whole time. Players miss it because they keep sliding the paddle out of habit. I named it tunneling: a trade-off you thought was mandatory turning out optional all along.
My own tunnel was hiding in the work week. Everyone accepts that running a business eats most of your days. I cut from two operations days a week to one and braced for the slowdown.
Email did slow. Support got faster. I switched support from something I check to something that reaches me the second it lands.
Half the admin time, quicker replies. The wall had a door.
Doors turn up everywhere once you look.
Dick Fosbury cleared the high-jump bar going over backwards. Everyone else sprinted up and straddled it face-down. The rule said clear the bar.
How was left to him. He took gold in 1968 and each jumper alive copies him now.
Malcom McLean stared at a loaded ship and saw weeks of dockworkers hauling crates by hand. The shipping world called that the cost of trade.
He put the whole truck trailer on the boat instead. Loading time and theft collapsed. The steel box he standardized carries most of what you own.
Some walls stay walls. A rocket burns fuel to carry its fuel and the math wins each time.
Sleep is the same. Trade hours of it for work and the bill lands in your body instead of your calendar. Physics charges the same however clever you are.
So the skill is telling a door from a wall. I treated a wall like a door for fifteen years, poking at a practice that broke each time I touched it. I treated a door like a wall for years, paying for a work week that had a shortcut all along.
If effort changes the price, it was a convention. If nothing changes the price, it's physics.
Accept the real walls. Tunnel the fake ones. Most walls are real and that's exactly what makes the rare door worth the search.
What's one cost you accept that you could push on instead of paying?