Virtual Simulator
If you’re reading this in the developed world, I’m assuming that you’re as lucky as I am. We escaped the feathers of natural predation and hunger, we should be celebrating. But instead, we’re stressed out.
Let’s say for example that you can’t find your car keys. While looking for them, your mind begins to play out every scenario that involves not finding your car keys, and starts to stress you out about all the actions that you might have to take. How you lose your job as a result, sell your house and move to Mexico. But none of that comes true, since your keys were just in your jacket pocket the whole time. You’ve lived out all the emotional pain, without any of it occurring in reality. Ironically, the cause of much of our modern pain, is a very mental component that allowed us to ascend nature’s hierarchy in the first place — our virtual simulator.
We’re the only animal that possesses a highly evolved virtual simulator, which resides in the upstairs brain, and is obsessed with planning the future and analyzing the past. On the one hand, the virtual simulator allows for great innovation and creativity. On the other hand, however, it constantly projects in the future, and ruminates about the past, pulling us out of the present, and causing us to suffer.
But we’re no longer living in a hostile environment most of the time, and so these ideations cause unnecessary suffering. Psychologists have found that we spend about 46% of the day mind wandering, and many of those thoughts are negative on average. What a miserable existence. These statistics come from a Harvard study, which concluded that:
A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Simply put, we have an addiction to negative thinking. Most of our dissatisfaction occurs completely in the mind. Have you ever anticipated an event, actually feeling the pain or excitement before it happens, only to realize how inaccurate you were at predicting it? How about that time when you thought a red traffic light was going to ruin everything? Or you thought that promotion was all you needed to finally be ‘set’ for the rest of your life?
The virtual simulator creates expectations that shape our perception of actual events when they occur. It makes sense given that anxiety, say, anticipating lions attack, would’ve aided in our survival thousands of years ago. And rumination, or learning from past mistakes, helped us make better future decisions.
Although not all virtual simulations are negative, on the whole, they create an unnecessarily stressful existence today. When you combine the concepts of information overload, and fast paced time crunch in modern society, with our evolved virtual simulators, you get the perfect recipe for mental stress.
Imagination is wonderful, but often tainted by evolutionary desires and needs, skewed to cause suffering. To illustrate the virtual simulator’s ill-doing, let’s break down our thoughts into the past, present and future buckets to see what emotions they cause.
Get Jono’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Common thoughts about the past lead to:
Regret, anger, pride, insecurity, gratitude, grief, and embarrassment
Common thoughts about the future cause:
Fear, anxiety, despair, hope, stress and doubt
Meanwhile common thoughts about the present involve:
Sensations, calmness, affection, interest, appreciation and amusement
By categorizing thoughts in this way, it becomes clear that almost all negative emotions are results of our virtual simulations. Thoughts about the past and future cause only a couple of positive emotions, namely pride, gratitude and hope. But the vast majority of the emotions are unpleasant. A great deal of most people’s internal self talk is negative. From an evolutionary perspective, we have a negativity bias that helped the human species survive.
There are actually no negative emotions associated with the present moment. You might think boredom would be one, but boredom is just the inability to stay focussed on the present.
What about pain? Even in this case, neuroscience tells us the emotional anticipation of pain rather than the actual painful stimulus causes much of our suffering. The more present we become (through practices like meditation), the more we can enjoy our lives rather than getting sucked into an often unpleasant virtual simulator all the time.
Presence seems to be a casualty of the modern distraction era. What I mean is that in all the hustle and bustle we’ve lost the present moment. It’s a crisis really.
How much time do you spend truly focussed on what’s happening right here and right now? We’ve all had that feeling when the day goes by too quickly. You look back on the day and it seems almost nothing happened. I don’t have enough time, you think. Since the time is always now, without presence, then you do lack time. And when you’re thinking about the future, or living in the past, it’s impossible to form new memories.
Since the mind was shaped by evolution, it makes sense that we need to learn from our past mistakes and make future plans in order to survive. But in the modern era, it’s often not useful to live out of the present moment, since all the mental simulations and playback no longer aid in our survival. Despite your mind’s projections and replays, the time is always right now. The present moment is the only time that ever exists, and that’s not just a philosophical statement. Recognizing when the virtual simulator has taken us for a ride can free us from its trap and help reclaim the present moment.
