Infinity Art, Ghosting, Poverty, and Two Brains

Hello friends and welcome back to Life Reimagined, a free weekly elixir designed to make you feel good and live better.

This week, we’re going to talk about the world’s most successful living artist, the importance of tending to the survival brain, and what to do if you get ghosted.

👩🏻‍🎨 I. Artist I’m Enjoying

I became fascinated with Yayoi Kusama after experiencing her Infinity Mirrored Room in the Guggenheim Museum. I only had 45 seconds in the room, but I had the sense that I could have a profoundly spiritual and psychedelic experience if I had been allowed to stay for longer.

I looked up Kusama when I got home. It turns out she’s the world’s most successful living artist and has lived an unbelievably interesting and prolific 94 years of life. This snippet in her Wikipedia bio made me even more curious:

“Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems.”

An artist of Kusama’s caliber has been living in a mental health institution since the 1970s and producing art the whole time? Interesting. 

I decided to watch Kusama - Infinity, a short documentary about Kusama’s life and art, to learn more. It’s a wonderful film that’s definitely worth checking out even if you’ve never heard of Kusama and aren’t all that interested in art.

P.S. If you’re in the Bay Area or visiting in the next year, Kusama has an Infinite Love exhibit that will be in the SF MOMA starting in October.

😁 II. Survival Brain vs. Happy Brain

I’ve been thinking about my survival brain and happy brain recently.

The survival brain is the default biological programming that tries to keep you alive. It tells you when you’re hungry, alerts you of potential threats, and has all kinds of other tricks that keep you kicking.

The happy brain is the socially-constructed idea that the primary aim of life is to be happy. This idea has such a stronghold in modern culture because (1) most people have their basic biological needs met, (2) there are many products and services that can be sold under the rouse of making you happier, and (3) being happy and having happy people around you is an alluring ideal.

What I’ve been thinking about is how cultural gravity is constantly nagging us to try to be happy without appropriately valuing the needs of the survival brain. The result is that we’re less happy than we could be.

As an example, let’s imagine that you’re dissatisfied with your life.

If you follow the happy brain strategy for curing dissatisfaction, you will likely think that you need something different than what you currently have. You need to change your life. Maybe you need a new job, to find a new partner, to start a meditation practice, or to buy sexy clothes.

It’s possible that some of these things may increase your satisfaction, but how many times have you taken this approach of changing up your life, only to find that you’re still prickly and not as satisfied as you’d like to be?

If you find yourself in this pattern, I think the more effective approach is to nourish the survival brain. The survival brain keeps you safe, but it also contains ancient wisdom that reminds you of the essential needs of your body. And when you take care of those needs, the result is often more satisfaction.

Nourishing the survival brain is about getting back to the basics that we often ignore in the modern world. Drink more water. Get out in the sun. Go on a walk. Exercise. Laugh with people that love you. Rest when you’re tired. Eat whole foods. Stretch. Don’t stare at a screen for 12 hours a day.

Basically, take care of the basic biological needs of your body. Doing that is often a cheaper, easier, and more effective way of increasing your life satisfaction than starting a complicated morning routine, reading a bunch of self-help books, or trying to eat or buy your way to happiness.

When you listen to and answer the calls of your body, the disconcerting buzz of ambient fear, anxiety, and stress starts to fade into a barely perceptible whisper. And as your mind and body relax, your satisfaction builds.

If this sounds unconvincing, try it. For just one day, tend to the needs of your body. Let go of any desire you have to be a happy person and spend 24 hours focusing on the essential elements of what your body needs to thrive.

👻 III. Dear Cal: I’ve Been Ghosted

This week, a reader wanted to know how to deal with being ghosted.

Dear Reader,

You’re frazzled, and that’s understandable. Let’s break down the ghosting into a few components to see if we can untie the mess in your mind.

Why did she ghost you?

I’m sure you have many theories about why this girl ghosted you, but the truth is you can’t know for sure until she writes back. There are a few different scenarios, all of which have slightly different implications for the future.

1. Conflict avoidance. When faced with a potentially uncomfortable conversation, some people choose avoidance. I would not recommend this strategy, but there are a host of reasons why people deploy it, many of which stem from childhood.

So one scenario is that this girl is not talking to you to avoid potential conflict.

Maybe she does not like you all that much and does not want to tell you. Or maybe she has a husband who she was planning on leaving but who did something nice and changed her mind. And without you knowing, you got tangled up in the web of a messy marriage and she does not want to explain what happened.

That’s probably not what happened, but the point is that she may be avoiding you for some reason. If she does write you back and you continue going out, be on the lookout for this avoidance behavior in other domains. It’s something to consider for anyone who may be a life partner.

2. You really messed up. People sometimes ghost you because you made them very uncomfortable or scared them or did something that crossed a boundary. This can happen with you being totally unaware of it.

If something like that happened, this ghosting may be a strong initial signal that this girl does not want to talk to you. She’d be doing this not out of avoidance, but as a way to keep herself safe from bad situations in the future. Based on what you shared, this seems unlikely to be the case, but it’s a fairly common reason for ghosting.

3. She’s busy or going through something. I don’t know how long you’ve been “ghosted” for, but if it’s anything under 72 hours, I would not consider it a ghosting. This girl may be busy with work or life and not actively ignoring you. Maybe she’s not a responsive texter and will get back to you soon.

Or it’s possible that something bad happened unexpectedly, and she is picking up the pieces of her life. When a new romance starts to heat up, it’s pretty normal not to want to involve a new lover in bad news.

Imagine that her grandma died and she had to fly home to arrange a funeral. To preserve her sanity and take care of her family, she may have stopped responding to any nonessential texts. Or maybe she got laid off from her job and is having a breakdown. If she stopped responding to you because something bad happened, it’s not personal.

Regardless of the reason, you’ll suffer less if you accept that you can’t know what happened until she lets you know. And that leads us to the more important part, which is how to relax your mind in this state of not knowing.

How do I get this out of my mind?

Start by putting your phone down, and stop waiting around for a response. We’re talking about a new fling, not a kid that’s gone missing. She’ll respond to you if/when she decides to, and fretting over it won’t accelerate that process. It will only cause you even more angst and probably lead you to send a bunch of unanswered texts that will give off the impression that you’re needy.

I don’t mean to be harsh. I’m sorry that you’re spiraling about this, but try to put the situation into perspective.

When I find myself in the spiral of waiting for something I can’t accelerate, I do something intensely physical to stop thinking about it. If you’re able to do it, go outside and try sprinting for 30 seconds. Take a 1-minute break, and sprint again for 30 seconds. Repeat this cycle until you’re exhausted.

I used to do this sprinting technique in the first few months of intense grief over the loss of my mom. And while it did not cure my grief, it gave me a temporary reprieve from the hellscape of my grieving mind by allowing me to avoid dwelling and to move energy through my body.

If you can’t sprint or don’t want to, go do something you enjoy. Go on a beautiful hike in nature. Get lost in an enthralling novel. Call an old friend.

Or, as weird as it sounds, sometimes it works to go even deeper into your misery until you reach the point where you’re so sick of feeling bad that you start to bounce back.

If that’s your style, you could try opening a bottle of wine and reading poems about unrequited love while listening to melancholy indie music. That may send you deep enough into the pit of sadness that you spring right out of it.

🧠 IV. Something I’m Thinking About

I’m doing a deep dive into the issue of poverty in America. I started with Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. The book has some interesting takes on widely-held beliefs about poverty (like the one below), but suffers overall from weakly-defended claims and a self-righteous tone.

I still think it’s worth reading books like this when trying to get a broader understanding of different perspectives on societal issues. If you agree with everything you read, you’re not really learning anything.

If you have any books about the problem of poverty that you think are worth reading, I’d love to hear about them. I’m particularly interested in good theories about why poverty persists and politically-neutral analyses about the efficacy of various local, state, and federal initiatives to combat poverty.

That's all for now. Hope you liked the new segment. See you next Sunday.

— Cal

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