Alex Tarnava explains the philosophy behind StressHacked and The Stone Wall.
Check out a reading of StressHacked here.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: “Strategic pessimism” is quite the meme that you developed in your book StressHacked. I recall in your discussion with Dylan Gemelli (linked here), both of you agreed that “strategic pessimism” is a form of optimism if looked at a certain way. This is a way to live your life to optimize what you get out of it, so in that sense it’s optimistic. Can you describe strategic pessimism, where it came from, what influenced it, and what it means?
AT: I started my “money-making” career in the fields of sales and marketing. Basically all of the books, lectures, and “prevailing knowledge” within those fields pushes the notion that unwavering optimism is the key to success. I watched colleague after colleague collapse as they refused to face reality, blindly turning their back to direct challenges lest they admit there was a challenge that needed to be overcome—particularly challenges that created substantial doubt, or were beyond their capacity to resolve. I fell victim to this mind virus myself, watching what I’d built collapse on several occasions due to blind optimism.
So, I adjusted my outlook. I began presuming that everything will go wrong, but instead of letting that belief defeat me I used it as motivation to protect myself, my plans, and my operations against every potential failure point I could. That way, when the random chaos occurs, you’ve already set up redundancies and built the capacity to conquer the unexpected challenge.
This, at its core, is intrinsically optimistic. It centers around the assumption that your plans will eventually succeed, and that you maintain the capacity and ability to rise to the challenges presented, no matter how difficult, unexpected, chaotic, or catastrophic. It’s the paradoxical understanding that pessimism, used strategically, defends hopeful optimism.
VG: Strategic pessimism is not philosophical pessimism, as you state in StressHacked. Philosophical pessimism, which is represented by Arthur Schopenhauer and David Benatar (thinkers who you lay into viciously in StressHacked), holds that life is more bad than it is good and the bad things in life are worse than the good things in life by an order of magnitude. For instance, few people would trade 1 hour of the greatest pleasure they can imagine for 2 seconds of the worst pain they can imagine (at least speaking for myself, I would not make this trade!). A belief system like this—philosophical pessimism—arises from anxious people who wish to quell their anxiety. You critique this anxiety-centric view in your new book The Stone Wall. Can you say a little bit about anxiety, and how this fits into strategic pessimism?
AT: In short, I make the case in The Stone Wall that anxiety is the primary, default steering mechanism for our base cognitive engine, which is pattern recognition. This differs in a meaningful way from other philosophical assertions that all action is undertaken to quell anxiety. All action is undertaken to improve our statistical likelihood of surviving and procreating, anxiety directing us to the emergent challenges we must prioritize.
The problem is that when these base considerations surrounding our survival are satisfied, anxiety transmutes to curiosity. Curiosity leads us to meaning, and purpose, if we follow it. If we don’t, it transmutes back to anxiety, either through subconscious creation of problems our minds initiate to be solved (self destruction), or existential angst.
Understanding this delicate dynamic is key to moderate our anxiety. When our anxiety is moderated, it can be directed towards purpose.
StressHacked aims to build strength and capacity. I know I would personally take that trade every time, confident I can endure anything for a period that short (even one much longer), and that having sufficiently gained a grip over my emotional framing surrounding memories, I could potentiate the positive signals from the pleasure, and blunt the traumatic signals from the pain.
It’s all perspective.
VG: In The Stone Wall, you talk about a method you are developing to help people confront their emotions and control their emotions. Many of us do yoga to try to balance ourselves, at least for day-to-day stressors. Can you talk about your new method and how it differs from traditions like yoga?
AT: Practices such as yoga and meditation, particularly Western iterations stripped of critical depth, can paradoxically lead to better and more consistent temperament during expected situations, and collapse during the unexpected.
Some Eastern practices, as well as the Stoic premedatio malorum, help to visualize potential future trauma in order to inoculate against it, and expand the situations in which we remain consistent and avoid collapse.
The method I’m proposing, which is a blend of numerous concepts taken from different areas, backed by isolated evidence from evolutionary psychology and neurobiology, seeks to take command of our very responses, to create internalized training grounds we can use for incremental external practice.
It’s conjecture, but it’s worked for me in life changing ways. It has inherent risks and challenges, but I’m hoping that by putting my thoughts out there to the world, welcoming pushback, modifications, and corrections, in time we can work towards a better system to expand human capacity for emotional control, constantly seeking an ever-evasive mastery.
The Stone Wall, like StressHacked and every book to follow, will be free as a PDF and Audio book.
VG: In StressHacked, I believe the mission was for the reader to build capacity. We are in the middle of a Thought War—I believe you will agree with this—and we have to build ourselves up mentally and physically to confront existential challenges to our society. Can you talk about how The Stone Wall fits into this capacity-building? What do you want people to get out of your most philosophically-dense book yet?
AT: The Stone Wall is an extension of StressHacked: The Mind. It dives deeper into the self, and then wades into the abyss to challenge the ideologies most of us hold dear.
We are losing the Thought War, and only through the deliberate pursuit of increased capacity do we have a chance to alter the odds back in our favor.
VG: You are currently working on Manufacturing Minds. The title is perhaps a nod or homage to Manufacturing Consent, a foundational book of social criticism by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. You have choice words for Chomsky in StressHacked (calling him “loathsome,” among other things), and he is currently embroiled in a scandal related to his long-term friendship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Manufacturing Minds seems highly relevant to the kind of society we are entering or have been in for a while. Can you say something about this?
AT: I look at society as a whole from a systems lens. My first two books aim to empower the self, to help create an army of thinkers capable of resisting the lifelong onslaught of propaganda we are exposed to. Once capacity is being built, we must then look to these sources of mind control—the subject of my 3rd and 4th books.
We must endeavour to help ourselves, so that we can then create a better foundation for the future. We have always stood on the shoulders of giants, advancing civilization one step at a time. Certain events have been regressive, bringing these giants crashing to the ground. I believe our giants have been brought to their knees, and if we don’t act now, they will fall, leaving no shoulders for future generations to stand upon.
So, we must seek to become those giants ourselves, as egotistical as that sounds, even if it is just to elevate the giants of the past back to their feet. We must work towards giving the generations to come shoulders to stand upon.
VG: I don’t think there’s anything egotistical here. It reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement about the overman, that
Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The overman shall be the meaning of the earth! … Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness, with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!
Nietzsche further claims that “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil,” acknowledging the need to become intellectual giants through our learning. We had a testy exchange over the meaning of the overman in The Stone Wall. Nietzsche, following Heraclitus, likened the overman to a child at play. You remarked that this is dangerous. I think Nietzsche agrees, stating in The Gay Science that “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!”
Both of us are influenced by Nietzsche, though you are ready to criticize him at a moment’s notice. I think that’s fair—it’s part of learning from the loathsome, and Nietzsche said some loathsome things (such as about women) at times. Do you view becoming giants as something like what Nietzsche says about the overman—dominating others, though playfully—or is it about lifting others up? I think it’s the latter. You state that strength is the ability to uplift others and not dominate them.
AT: I would contend, quite strongly, against the notion that we are meant to overcome man, to become the “overman.” I think this is exactly the wrong mindset and framing, one that has led to suppression of the self in a quest to dominate the self. My journey to improve is one of understanding: understanding myself and understanding others. Through the constant pursuit of questioning, seeking to understand a little bit better day by day, I intend to unite my baseness with my higher cognition, in a loop that allows awareness of my various precognitive drivers, but also a pathway to intentionally use cognition to regulate and frame said drivers in real time. Critically, my path to being one with the self is a path that allows executive function to take over, at least so long as the base primality of the self is properly attended, and understood.
We can’t change the hardware of our physical being, but we can intentionally construct software that improves the function of the hardware, working within the confines of the hardware. In this way, the goal isn’t to become an “overman,” rather it should be framed as the quest towards being a “unified being,” conscious, aware, and satisfied with one’s perpetual state of dissatisfaction.
Through this understanding, we realize that we remain the pupil, always, even if we have nothing to learn from our original teachers—though I suspect this can never be the case, not completely—for we will always remain a diligent pupil to the self, our true master we seek to live in unity with.
VG: I agree here, and in fact I find Nietzsche’s notion that we can “reinvent ourselves” in a radical way fairly annoying. We can improve around the edges, to the extent that we are basically a new man, but this is not a reinvention. As you stated in StressHacked, “I like who I am today so I cannot logically regret my past.” I believe the path to self-improvement is one that builds on our previous accomplishments and our foibles as well.
