when thinking becomes cheap

When thinking becomes cheap, the biggest advantage you can have is to stop thinking.

Hear me out.

The AI noise was disturbing. As the world spoke about AGI galore, I went on an existential crisis: "What's next for me? What value can I provide when AI becomes as smart as me?"

There were some answers. Anu's "Taste is Eating Silicon Valley" article helped. But I still didn't get what that meant for me. That just shifted the question: what exactly is taste?

After some reflection, I realized something simple: if you strip away the complexity, taste is fundamentally about caring deeply about doing good work. It's complete devotion to your craft, whatever that craft might be. True taste exists without expectations about the output.

Tibetan Buddhists take this concept to the next level. They spend days meticulously creating sand mandalas—intricate geometric designs made from millions of colored sand grains. Each mandala requires extraordinary precision. Monks spend weeks working on it - using metal funnels to place individual grains with mathematical accuracy.

Yet they don't preserve or exhibit their creation when they complete it. Instead, in a ceremony, they methodically destroy it, sweeping the sand into a nearby river. It sounds theatrical. But they do it to detach themselves from the result. They believe that true mastery comes with that freedom.

There's another philosophy around this in Eastern culture: the idea of 'you' is flawed. The core teaching is that what you consider to be "you" isn't you at all. It's your mind. But you're not your mind. You're not your body.

So what are you?

You are the present. Whatever you're doing at that very moment.

When the monk creates sand mandalas, he becomes the process itself. Similarly, if you love design, you are the act of designing. This isn't metaphorical - it's about complete immersion. You devote everything to that process. Without the attachment of the result.

This realization helped me understand that what people call "taste" is essentially discovering what you truly are. But to find what you are, you must first identify what you are not.

We have spent our lives identifying with our thoughts, often to the point of delusion. The truth is that the mind is an essential part of us. It should be working for us. Instead, we've become servants of our own minds.

We struggle to turn off our thinking, like a broken faucet filling a tub that we can't shut off. Our thoughts wander constantly, consuming our attention and energy.

So, as machines improve at replicating human thinking, we cannot continue doing what we've already been doing. It's time to start maintaining a distance from thought itself. Keep it at arm's length.

It's time to quiet the mind. To understand that we're not our thoughts.

In a world where AI makes thinking cheap, it's time to explore meditativeness. To discover who we truly are. To know when to stop thinking altogether.