Manifesting Your Destiny is Opium

I’m not one for self help books although over the years I’ve certainly read a lot of them. Most of the mystic-guru-manifest-your-destiny-learn-to-love-yourself books are predominantly opiate for people who want to feel better about themselves without doing the hard work of change. With that said, however, human physiology and psychology should be taught in all the schools so that we could learn why we are really doing what we are doing which isn’t anything like why we think we are doing what we are doing and is primarily driven by the biology of dopamine and not rational thinking.

Only infrequently do I get non-fiction books from my local library system although I often browse the shelves. It’s almost always a disappointment as I feel like the offerings are there to brainwash me into a state of toxic victim-hood. The worst subjugation of all is being convinced that you are a victim because victim-hood removes any and all personal agency and renders you powerless. That’s a terrible state to be in. With all that said, I just read Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age ofIndulgence and it is well worth a read, particularly if you do not understand how dopamine affects every facet of our lives.

Right now I’m reading Gretchen Rubin’s book The Four Tendencies. This is less scientific than Lembke’s book but it is an interesting read and another window into why we do what we do. Rubin, of course, is mostly known for The Happiness Project. I’m not sure if that book made anyone any happier because as Rubin writes in The Four Tendencies, her own inclination (upholder) made it relatively easy for her to follow through on her goals and plans. You can take a short quiz – reminiscent of quizzes of old which used to appear in every issue of every women's magazine world wide – here and see what your tendencies are. Apparently, three million people have taken the quiz so it is plausible that Rubin has one of the best validated measures of psychological tendency around given that most psycho-social assessment tools are validated on college students.

The results may have some utility. It’s no surprise to me, or anyone who really knows me, that I ranked as a mixture of upholder and questioner. I’m not good with societal rules and regulations and never met a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) I did not want to burn on sight, but, I can and do adhere to my own standards with almost regimented rigour. Most of us know ourselves well enough that we don’t need a quiz to reveal our tendencies to us, but, it’s instructive (or at least it was instructive to me) to be reminded that other people have way different tendencies and this is possibly the cause of some of the inevitable friction that occurs in all human relationships.

It’s long been my contention that we all have our own “things.” Annoying habits - tendencies if you will - and personality quirks that make all of us at least a bit difficult (maybe a lot difficult in certain situations), and I try my darndest to let all that shit go. Not one of us is anywhere near perfect yet we must rub along together. There’s knowing and knowing, as they say, and while it’s good to intellectually know this stuff, a little reminder that we are wildly different and what I might find easy others might find difficult just makes letting all that shit go that bit easier.

Done Clean

This is me, not literally but certainly figuratively, only a travel schedule has not forced me to adapt my training. On Thursday I was pretty burned from Wednesday’s hard route climbing, but I only train strength twice weekly and am loathe to let any of those days slip away. For some utterly bizaare reason, I trained power instead by doing a lot of bodyweight plyometric exercises interspersed with some kettlebell swings and core work. I only do plyometrics every month or so which means DOMS is virtually guaranteed. Maybe I need to feel pain to find pleasure.

Friday I took my old Scarpa Rockette’s out bouldering in the bush. These are my absolute favourite rock shoes of all time but it’s been years – a decade or more – since you could buy them. Doesn’t that always seem the way under capitalism? Some great product comes along but the engineers and marketers tweak the product until it is just slightly worse than what came before. One of my friends was an engineer and used to say that engineers took a perfectly good product and tried to make it better until it was undeniably worse.

On Saturday, Doug and I rode the trails. I swear it was one of those days when the uphill seems to far exceed the downhill. Twelve kilometres and only half way through the day and we had done only one short descent, the rest was uphill, or at least that’s what my legs thought. Of course, in the end, as we rode a circuit, the elevation gain had to equal the loss but mountain biking after “leg day” guarantees fatigue.

There was frost about this morning, but it was a glorious day, the stunning winter weather continues. Doug and I went climbing and I was within a hairs breadth (or one foot that blew) of sending another project! There was a slightly painful slither down a slab, I’m sure glad it was winter and I was wearing long pants, but I got back on and finished the route but it’s not done until it’s done clean.

Try Hard, Don't Sag

You don’t have to be a rock climber to enjoy this video from the Wide Boyz. The thing I most like about it is how fffffing hard Tom tries. The effort is written in every straining sinew. Trying hard is a real and under-appreciated skill. It’s so much easier just to give 50% or 70% effort and comfort yourself by saying “Yeah, I tried hard.” If you are goal driven, dogging on the rope, falling off, and even climbing the route clean but not smoothly can all feel like a terrible failure, and failure is emotionally painful. It is easier to attempt routes that “fit your style” (as folk say) and can be climbed with relative ease. But, the only way to get better at climbing is to try hard routes. And the only way to keep trying hard routes is to rewrite your dopamine circuits so that trying hard is the reward.

It’s pretty much (unless you are looking at a terrible pendulum) impossible to get seriously injured on a top-rope but I still find myself sagging onto the rope rather than falling off because, despite trying hard, I did not complete the move. I’m working at it, but it takes hundreds, perhaps thousands, of repetitions to over-write the engrained “sag” neural wiring. One can only hope that I can erase the sag reflex with half as many try hard reflexes else I’ll be climbing the walls of the care facility I’m living in when I’m 97 (should I make it that far) trying to remember to try hard and not sag.

Chasing Dopamine

Dopamine, the misunderstood but ubiquitous hormone which is over-stimulated in the modern environment and the cause of both life enhancing and self-destructive behaviours. In one way or another we are all chasing dopamine, whether the outcome is positive or negative depends on where that dopamine reward comes from. But reward is the wrong term to use when talking about dopamine. Most people think of dopamine as a “liking” hormone, something associated with enjoyment, and, in a way, it is, but the more important role of dopamine is as a “wanting” hormone. Each “hit” of dopamine wires reward circuits in the brain and, in effect, says “that was good, do it again.” Maybe that is good if your “do it again” is “go for a long run in the forest,” but if your do it again is, as is more often the case, “eat another piece of black forest cake” (see what I did there – linked forest and forest), you might find yourself in trouble.

PC: DB

I’ve always thought my ascetic principles were just a natural off-shoot of my not very average personality. Both Doug and I enjoy doing without or strictly limiting things that the average person deems a necessity in the modern world: the piece of cake, muffin, or biscuit with morning coffee or as a reward for exercise (about the silliest idea anyone has ever come up with), heat in the house in winter, a glass or seven of alcohol daily, celebrating notable events with food, buying the new latest toy, joining the trendiest gym in town, getting the most likes on a social media platform, or, even worse, arguing with strangers on the same platforms.

For many people, this existence seems joyless and dull, but, I’ve always thought that the greatest joy in life comes from being freed from behavioural drives that over the long term lessen my quality of life. In this way, it has been a conscious decision to chase dopamine – and we all chase dopamine – from things that I consider life enhancing instead of detracting. That means my dopamine hits come from doing things that I find difficult, from things as small as going paddling on rainy cold days in winter because I’ve made a commitment to that, to engaging in activities/sports that are challenging mentally and physically – like paddling the west and south coast of Tasmania, or leading rock climbs that push my limits.

PC: HM

How can these things which, in the moment range from mildly uncomfortable to paralyzingly scary trigger dopamine release? Well, it turns out that:

Female rats housed for three months in a diverse, novel and stimulating environment show a proliferation of dopamine-rich synapses in the brain’s reward pathway compared to rats housed in standard laboratory cages. The brain changes that occur in response to a stimulating and novel environment are similar to those seen with high-dopamine (addictive) drugs.¹

I know, humans are not rats, but, reward circuits in rats and humans are scarily congruent. How else do you explain the person who is morbidly obese and yet continues to eat and eat and eat even as their functioning as a human being is reduced to such an extent that even basic activities of daily living (showering, leaving the house) become impossible? This is an addictive response to dopamine, and, the longer it is reinforced the more intractable becomes the wiring until changing the behaviour is well nigh impossible.

PC: DB

It turns out, that, in my obsessive desire for novelty, I have been wiring in dopamine reward pathways similar to those generated by more destructive habits. It’s always been frustrating to me that it is hard to meet like minded people: that is, folks who share an, at times, obsessive need to go further, go faster, or simply go different. It’s likely that this is explained by dopamine wiring. I’m wired to find novelty and challenge rewarding and the average person is wired to find chocolate cake at the end of a familiar bicycle ride that they have done 50 times rewarding. There’s no judgement here. I’m increasingly libertarian these days, wearied by the terminally nervous legislating what is reasonable to do (while they sit on their arses eating chocolate cake washed down with a litre of grog – socially acceptable ways to shorten your life and health span). You get to choose your poison reward; but you should choose with full knowledge of the implications of that choice.

1Dr. Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

Simple Pleasures

It’s drizzling as I tow the kayak trolley down to our local beach and perhaps part of my brain begins to understand why only one other person was interested in paddling on my (semi) regular Sunday paddles. I don’t think, however, the rain is the whole story. Conditions are, rain and low cloud notwithstanding, pretty good; the winds are light, the swell perhaps 1 to 1.5 metres, the sea will be lumpy in parts, but there are dolphins swimming around in the bay. It’s not a good day for rock climbing, the crags will be slick and treacherous, and it’s never a good day to sit at home doing not much of anything physical. I’d much rather be out paddling than I would be doing almost anything else on such a day.

We head south. To the north and east the cloud is so low that even the Tollgate Islands, only three or four kilometres off-shore are obscured. If we go south, we’ll at least have things to look at. We cruise along comfortably, AD paddles with a stick (Greenland paddle) but he’s a strong lad and keeps the boat moving easily. Some of the stick paddlers are really slow and it can feel tempting, particularly at the end of the day as they get slower and slower to say “For the love of all that is holy, just get a regular paddle.” I’m neither patient nor tolerant of fools but I am more of both since I got older. We’ve all got our struggles which we keep invisible from all but our closest friends and even then things are hidden from spouses and partners.

I like being out when conditions are kind of grizzly because when you get back home and take off wet clothes, stand under a hot shower, eat a hot meal and have a hot coffee or tea, these simple pleasures that are so easy to take for granted feel like such a gift. It’s that way today. By the time we land after three hours paddling, I’m starving (I have not eaten since the night before), I’m wet, and chilled, and I walk home dragging the kayak trolley still dressed in spray skirt and life jacket because my hands are too clawed up from cold to be able to manage the zips.

Peak 232

It was with some trepidation that I walked off Peak 232 in Mogo State Forest following a compass bearing and heading for an old overgrown skid trail (CPT187/5). I had been on CPT187/5 about five years ago and it was heavily overgrown then and barely visible. The idea that a simple compass bearing would take me right to the terminus of the road with no grid searching required seemed unlikely. It’s much easier to hit a trail (handrail if you will) like this if you can plot a route that crosses perpendicular to the trail as there is a bigger area to hit. Miraculously the bush was not very thick or very wet and in a very short time I realised that I had walked directly out to the end of the road in an exercise of flawless navigation.

Boulders and sun on Peak 232

Of course, navigating through the bush is much easier now than it was a decade or two ago. These days, almost everyone has some kind of mapping application (I have Memory Map) with topographical maps on their mobile pocket computers (phones) which not only display maps but also have a friendly icon (mine is a winking red hollow circle) that shows exactly where you are. Compass skills are still required as while it is tedious to walk on a compass bearing (and virtually impossible to do with complete accuracy), it is even more irksome to walk following a GPS device.

White out skiing with trees

Years ago, on a 12 day traverse of the Lillooet Icefield, the “leader” of the group insisted that, on a stormy day in a complete white-out as we skied blind through crevassed terrain, we should ski along following his GPS. Of course, even under those conditions we skied faster than the device could update so we lurched along left, then right, then right, then left, then more right, then right again, then correcting to the left. Finally, after someone almost skied right into a crevasse we gave it up and sat tight until the cloud had lifted a little.

Storm Bound on the Lilloet Traverse

GPS units and mapping software are great things but I worry myself about getting too used to dumbly following them and try to avoid this when possible. In Australia when you are travelling through thick bush along ill defined ridges or across flat land with few handrails, check stops or back stops, it is reassuring to be able to follow a compass bearing but also have a check every so often with the GPS that you are still on track.

A Group of KMC'ers somewhere in the West Kootenays

I once had a group of eight eager KMC’ers following me up a ridge in the arse end of nowhere on skis. We’d done a couple of runs and were heading for home when, in a fit of the most outrageously bad navigation, I led the group down the wrong side of the ridge, away from the highway and deeper into the wilderness. At some point, something rattled into my brain that there was something very off about this, possibly I’d subconsciously noted that the rapidly setting sun was in the wrong direction of the sky. On KMC trips only I carried a rudimentary GPS unit which gave only UTM coordinates. Checking these against the map, with some horror – the day was after all getting on and this would not be the first time I had led a KMC group out to the road just as darkness fell (or even after if I’m truth telling) – I noted that we were descending 180 degrees off the direction we should be. There is just no way to bluff through that as the entire group has to put skins back on skis and climb up, so it is best to confess the error immediately even if the remainder of the tour is spent with the skiers looking squint eyed at you with mistrust.

Wandera Mountain from Peak 232

But back to Peak 232, where I happily plodded out to a very vague and faint remnant of a track which was semi-easily followed to an obvious fire trail, back up over various hills and finally to the car.

No-One Fits In or Deep In The Woods

Life is up and down. Last week we had three rock climbing days which took me back to our days living in the mountains in Nelson, BC, where we had a half dozen different crags within half an hour of home and two massive mountain ranges. In Australia, climbing is much more spread out, and climbers mistrusted by government, media, the public, sometimes even each other. The pioneer spirit in Australia with it’s acceptance of risk died out a long time ago replaced by increasingly left wing authoritarian governments who behave more like nannies (hence the term “nanny state”) than legitimate governing bodies. Booze and junk food however, remain cheap and available, although I would argue the risk from both of those well surpasses the risk from outdoor activities.

Enough of politics, we’ve been deep in the woods this week and something about carrying heavy packs around and engaging in somewhat sketchy activities gives some clarity of mind. If you believe the media, not something I do as a rule, mental health issues are increasing rapidly in Australia’s youth. Of course, it’s not just Australia, other western countries are experiencing the same phenomenom. It is difficult to know what to make of this as mental health is neither a binary nor a fixed and immutable diagnosis. There are no X-rays, blood tests or scans that can accurately diagnose a mental health issue, instead, diagnosis relies on self report and – what is essentially – checklists from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). There is both conflict of interest (all those mental health counsellors need to be paid and they only get paid if they can document some kind of official diagnosis) and expansion of disorders. The two really go hand in hand. The more disorders that can be diagnosed the bigger the client base and the more money that can be made. I’m not suggesting that mental health counsellors are out to fleece a vulnerable population but the only people who ignore the profit motive are people who just aren’t very smart.

Mental health issues do seem to be everywhere even in the world of climbing. And increasingly, the people who feel they have mental health issues are younger folk. They have anxiety, dysphoria, depression or panic attacks, or maybe they are neurodivergent or believe themselves to be on the spectrum. For example, I just listened to a climbing podcast where the guest spoke for an entire hour about how she felt shame (about various and sundry things) and believed she did not fit in. These feelings are so overwhelming that this young lass walks home from a climbing day crying. This is not normal and not what I remember from my own youth. And, it’s downright sad. What should be a joyous experience is instead a descent into an abyss of dark feelings. It’s almost like young people need to learn that feelings are fleeting, changeable, unreliable and, in the end, within our own control. We are not our feelings.

Then there is the increasing fragmentation into smaller and smaller tribal groups. The ultimate fragmentation is, of course, the ever expanding categories of gender (or probably more accurately sexuality) which has now reached 11 with an additional + sign in case anymore come up (2SLGBTQQIA+). People in these communities often feel like they don’t fit in. Just like the female climber who thinks she does not fit in, this causes enormous distress.

Perhaps it’s the passage of time, perhaps it is differing expectations but the reality is, none of us fit in. I guess when you officially hit old age and you are looking back over half a hundred years of life, you realise that you didn’t fit in as an adolescent, you didn’t fit in as a young adult and you don’t fit in as an older person. None of us fit in completely because we are all unique and different and no amount of increasingly microscopic division into discrepant tribes improves that. Diversity is the magic of human existence and it is what makes life such an endlessly engaging and fascinating experience.

Young people, I think, have been given the wrong expectations. Somehow they all expect to find a magic tribe or secret niche where everyone lives in complete harmony with the same dreams, aspirations, beliefs and normative values but this place simply does not exist. The more we divide ourselves into incrementally smaller and smaller identity groups the more alone we feel and the smaller and smaller our zone of comfort becomes. This is no way to live this one glorious and precious life that has been granted to you. No-one is their feelings and the more focus is put on feelings the more obsessed, depressed, neurotic and anxious one becomes. There is tremendous freedom in simply being, simply acting, taking the focus off feelings and putting it on actions, looking for commonalities instead of differences, realising that one thing that binds all humans together is that none of us fit in.