🧠 Your Brain's Activity Monitor 🛑
What it feels like to switch off background processes
I want to share something I am experiencing. Tell me if it resonates.
As a lover of Apple, I am deeply familiar with the Activity Monitor. It is the central app for inspecting & quitting the programs that are running on your computer. If you are reading this on a Mac, here is what it used to look like:
Then there was its simpler cousin, the Force Quit Applications utility:
The modern Activity Monitor can help you understand the overall system:
It can also help you see how your computer is communicating:
If you want to play with it, you can find it here:
🧠 What would an Activity Monitor for the brain look like?
This year has been a wild flow of physical explorations, loved ones’ deaths, friends’ newborns, business creations & intense journeys.
What has emerged from all of this something surprisingly useful:
I feel like I have an Activity Monitor for my mind
Whenever I am feeling or experiencing sub-optimal sensations, I am now able to pop open an auditing system, figure out the source of the problem, and Force Quit a bunch of the blockers.
It is not that I am totally blank. There are all kinds of processes running that I cannot control fully, but I feel much more aware of what they are. For example:
🪷 The sense of self is still very strong, for instance. I cannot seem to shake that.
🪁 Identifying with kiting & its addicting nature has dropped off a lot.
🌎 Attaching myself to regions of the world has drastically reduced.
🏰 Obsessing over the past has diminished enormously.
🫨 Fear of potential bad outcomes has subsided.
Mindfulness vs. Mind Emptiness
I understand that the term Mindfulness is very popular: but I have never liked it.
What I am experiencing from these teachings is simply more emptiness.
Less stuff is goin’ on in the noggin’.
A lightening, not an enlightening.
My days feel much more like play.
My sisyphean struggle is gone.
I am not pushing rocks uphill.
Just finding quests to go on.
It is absolutely magical.
A big shift in the mind.
Cleaned out of cruft.
Focused on flow.
Finding magic.
Onwards 🪄
