The Surroundings That Mold Us
It’s not until I get a hearty whiff in my nostrils before I realize, I can’t concentrate. For two months, instead of going to a normal job, stared and typed at the same piece of text, drank the same americano, at the same table, at the same cafe. It was perfect. I never thought to go elsewhere, but that place closed their doors… Now I’m at this cafe chain, trying to do the same work, but I can’t get started. There’s moving things in my periphery, flashing lights, incomprehensible babble in both ears, and goddammit, it stinks! Then it hits me, “Why could we do certain things, like exercise tons or get lots of sleep, at some points in our lives, but suck at them now?” Our surroundings — the places we live, work and travel through, influence whether we can do the things we want to do, to be who we want to be.
Our surroundings are everything from the background music in your supermarket, the colors of the walls, the air you breathe, and buildings and roads in your vicinity. In both senses of the word, our surroundings are everywhere. Our surroundings are like an onion whose layers wrap around us. These layers are our homes, or workplaces, wrapped within our city, within our country, with its own identity, currency, and language. Like trying to see stars through an overcast sky, we can’t see through all the layers of our surroundings, however, we feel their presence. The point where one layer begins and another ends blurs from one person to the next, yet we cannot deny that these layers mold, if not manipulate us.
If you knew you could live a happier healthier life doing the same thing you already do, just by living in elsewhere, would you move there? Of course, it’s impossible to know where that place is until we discover it, and eventually, we settle with where we are, because it’s familiar or ‘good enough’. But what if you could change your environment to benefit you without making any sacrifices? You can, all it takes is learning to look behind the curtain.
This article is part of a two-part series in understanding various ways our surroundings subconsciously impact our happiness, health, and perception, then in the second article, how to mold your surroundings to benefit you. But before we learn all that, we must learn how our brain tricks us into not seeing what’s right in front of us.
The Brain That Tricks You
Your brain is a complex pattern recognizing machine that weaves memories of the past, predictions of the future, and stimulations from the present into one continuous narrative — your perception. Consequently, your brain consumes 20 percent of your body’s energy, despite weighing 2 percent of our body weight. And still, you have blind-spots in your vision, which your brain seamlessly fills in. Your brain evolved for efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. It’s developed tricks not only to fill in these holes but to be more efficient.
You can see how your brain tricks your eyes when you look at optical illusions. What you see is not necessarily real, or even there, but a perceived representation. Our brain tricks us even when we know we’re being tricked. One of these tricks is the vanishing illusion. Stare at the black dot in the image below and see what happens.
After a few moments, you should have noticed how the colors vanished into the grey background. For efficiency’s sake, our brain notices only the things in our periphery that change, as a mechanism to ward off a potential threat. Everything else dissolves into a blind spot. For our brain to compute every single detail in our line-of-sight would be too energy expensive and unnecessary to our survival, so it takes shortcuts.
This illusion is particularly interesting because when you stop to look for it, you can see this it everywhere else in our perception and life. It happens to other organs, like your nose. Have you ever slept in a room then had someone enter the next morning and say, “It stinks in here,” yet it didn’t stink to you? It happened to me after I woke up at a hostel in a room full of males. Only after I left the room and came back did the stench hit my nose. Your nose doesn’t notice subtle changes over a long period of time like it does sudden ones.
Blind To Routines
More interesting is how this vanishing effect occurs not just on our senses, but our on our perception. I noticed when I got a good job that paid for food, rent, and beer money, I fell into a routine. Every week I’d cycle through the same places, had the same interactions. I got used to the things that made my days easy, comfortable, and completely unremarkable. I can’t recall any of the small details from that part of my life. If you ever wondered why it’s so easy to get stuck in routines, it’s because our brains hunger for certainty. “Like an addiction to anything, when the craving for certainty is met, there is a sensation of reward.”
Your brain is best at noticing changes. It notices new opportunities and threats and when you go through a routine, you adapt to it so well that you see similar variations of the same thing. Growing up, we go through life seeing things the same way we look at video games. It’s not until your conscious wake up that you realize you’ve missed what was right before you all along.
Fewer Threats
When we live in predictable routines, it’s easy to forget about the small things that make our lives easier and to appreciate them. If you’ve always had a roof over your head, food on the table, and clothes on your back, you’re not going to worry about it. It’s taken care of. Our brain only cares about changes, everything else gets shoved into a blind spot. We won’t know when and where we’re being deceived unless we train ourselves to notice what’s in our blind spots, which we’ll get into later.
Our life is so much easier than our ancestors’. We’ve reached a point where our biggest existential threats are ones of our own making, whether it’s diabetes, global warming, or nuclear war. On the other hand, technology has improved our lives in ways our ancestors couldn’t fathom. We live so blessedly now, yet our brains haven’t evolved to keep up. We’ve had cars, smartphones, and airplanes for so long now that we don’t consider what an amazing a feat of engineering they are. The latest and greatest becomes the default to measure everything else on. Just like our ancestors, we’re wired to notice opportunities and threats, we adapt to what we have, and we instinctively desire for more.
Because we’re human we’re wired to adapt and to be lazy, just like our brain is. If we’re given the choice between doing something and not, most of us will choose the former. Consequently, we forget the need to change our surroundings, especially if it means we’ll face hardships. Change is scary. I know because I was there. I chose a predictable job because I believed it would offer the least hardships. The only changes I made were slow and calculated, and as a result, things didn’t noticeably improve or get worse. Life was stagnant. Because my surroundings never changed, I never noticed them, and I never knew they were holding me back.
How Our Surroundings Mold Us
You don’t notice all the subtle cues in your environment, and how they affect you, but they do, and more than you think. I like to imagine my environment as an onion that wraps around me because just like sitting in my bedroom, I can’t see the layer beyond my room, but I can hear it, and sometimes smell it. I’m not aware of all the ways these noises, sounds, smells, and reflections affect me, but I can tell from past experiences living elsewhere that I’m not the same person everywhere.
The longer you stay in your environment, the deeper you immerse yourself in it and the more it subtly sways your perception, beliefs, desires, and values. When we’re born, we’re impressionable the way a strip of chicken will taste different depending on what it’s marinated in — its environment. The stronger the marinade the bolder the ideologies, beliefs, identity, and way of thinking that permeate into us. With enough time, we marinate through. If we stay in the same environment long enough, we adopt the mindset and customs of our surroundings down to our very core. Consequently, if we encounter something that clashes against our understandings, if we’re close-minded, we’ll repel it for as long as our beliefs hold out. And if we’re put in a neutral environment, we will radiate our beliefs outwards, the way a marinated chicken strip rubs off on the vegetables in the skillet. But when our surroundings never change, we find ourselves preaching the same ideas to the ones who taught us them.
Our beliefs and values are filters upon our perception of reality. If you stare through glasses with specks of dust on them, your brain will ignore them, but they’ll still be there. Even if you don’t notice the dust, doesn’t mean it’s not affecting you. The things we don’t perceive influence us just as much, if not more than the things we do notice. Subtleties like bad odors and background noises have very real consequences on our mood, concentration, and stress. It’s not immediately obvious how, but even something as subtle as the traffic noises on your way to work affects you. According to the National Institute for Safety and Health
“…ambient noise also affects people’s health by increasing general stress levels and aggravating stress-related conditions such as high blood pressure, coronary disease, peptic ulcers, and migraine headaches. Continued exposure does not lead to habituation; in fact, the effects worsen.”
Consider all the subtle noises, sights, tastes, feelings, and smells you encounter throughout the day and how they result in your well-being. If you live in a city or drive to work, consider all the messages your eyes glance past, whether on your phone or on a billboard. Maybe you don’t consciously register seeing each one, but then again, are you conscious every time you become hungry? I don’t. Sometimes I don’t realize it until I’m halfway done with my sandwich.
There are countless cues in our environments, some intentional, like advertisements, others are byproducts, like construction sounds, while others are natural, like strong winds and dense cloud forewarning of rain. Some stimulations cause stress, while others heal us, like white noise, which causes our body to release cortisol, a hormone that helps restore homeostasis in the body after a bad experience.
On top of the subtle ways our environment affects our mood, there are the countless ways our surroundings train us to react to opportunities and threats. If we face far fewer threats, our bodies will adapt to the comforts of our lives. I’ve noticed that I’ve developed a skill to distinguish the noise of a boiling kettle right before it finishes, so I know when to walk to the kitchen at the right time. I didn’t choose to learn this seemingly useless skill, it happened as a result of being in my environment. This is just one example from one particular environment, consider how many subtle habits you’ve picked up without being conscious of it. We spend so much of our time reacting to cues, unaware that that’s what we’re doing. In your surroundings right now, what do you see and hear in the background, what cues do you react to?
Creatures of Habit
Have you ever completed a familiar yet complex task while daydreaming about something unrelated? You can thank the basal ganglia, located in the center of your brain for that. All of us at some point go through part of our day on autopilot, reacting to cues in our surroundings, or pursuing primal needs. Without being aware of it, we know to brake before a red light and get in line at a fast food restaurant. Many of our habits take hold purely because of where we are, and many because they steeped into us through years of living in a culture.
To better understand our surroundings, we have to look at the challenges they impose on us, and how our habits adapt to them. Which habits did you acquire because of the geography around you, and which because of societal standards? Consider how your commute would differ if you grew up in a bike-centric country like the Netherlands than if you did somewhere in the States, where you need a car. In one place, it’s more convenient or quicker to bike to work, whereas, in the other, driving is. In one, the distances are short and the lanes are compact, in the other, the opposite. One commuter is getting exercise while the other’s getting dirty air and spending money on fuel. I’m willing to bet most people in both scenarios aren’t asking themselves, “How am I going to get to work today?” Most people make the choices they do because they made them before, and it worked for them then. In other words, we delegate many of our choices to autopilot, because the outcome is predictable. But are these the right choices?
Wouldn’t you like to be in an environment that encourages healthy habits, by making them more convenient? To learn which environments are healthy, you need to understand the habits your surroundings force on you, whether through challenges or temptations. Habits grow around problems and desires, and if you can recognize where your habits arise from, you can mold them to your liking. It helps to understand the social habits we’ve assimilated by being in one place long enough. What roles do these habits play on your life?
Habits are good for productivity and industry. Imagine how difficult and frustrating it would be without them. We’d have to learn everything anew every time we do it. Habits, however, do little to widen our perspective the way learning a new skill does. They allow our brain to either turn off or redirect attention elsewhere. Habits don’t teach us much, they make it possible to go on autopilot so our minds can go on a daydreaming vacation. Once the computer turns off it’s hard to turn it back on, and for better or worse and we get stuck in our routines.
If nothing changes in our environment because we’re repeating the same routines, we’re ensuring nothing will change, and if the details never change, they vanish from sight. If we’re not seeing the things before us, how can we understand how they affect us? If we offload all responsibility to our unconscious selves, we give up control and let life ride us, instead of riding it.
Need For a Wider Perspective
“Travel to get a perspective.” People say this, but what do they mean? A perspective isn’t something you can just go out and get, nor is it obvious what the hell it’s good for. It wasn’t until I lived in various cultures around the world that I understood myself just how broad its uses are, like a Swiss army knife.
One of the uses of a perspective is to be able to perceive the world through a fresh set of eyes, or a filter that bends the light in unique ways before your brain receives it. Everything you see, you see through your current lens, which you can switch out, to see the same things differently.
Another way to think of it, perspectives give you the ability to empathize. A good book or movie will put you in another person’s shoes to see and understand the world the way they do. A fresh perspective can make you notice the things you overlook in your blind spots, and it can make an ordinary experience beautiful.
Growing up in cities and suburbs I used to view rainy weather as a nasty flu that happened to the skies. They turn everything gray, your clothes wet and stinky, and your foyer muddy. From the perspective of a city dweller, it was a nuisance; it didn’t do any good. It wasn’t until I lived with people who depended on rain for eating, drinking, etc. that I saw it differently. Because I was dependant on them, I was dependent on the rain myself and I saw what a good thing it is. I got a new perspective on rain.
This past summer, much of Europe experienced a drought. For city people, it was an ideal summer. It was so dry I went on a bike trip. For two weeks I could camp under the stars without worrying about rain. It was sunny and warm. Then suddenly, it wasn’t… It. Rained. Hard. From a city dweller’s perspective, it sucked. I could barely see the road ahead of me as it soaked through my rain jacket. It was so cold I had to pedal to stay warm. As cold and shitty as it was, from certain perspectives it was beautiful. I knew the yellow fields of wilting grass would finally turn green again. The rain was a godsend for the farmers, it watered the fields (and my groceries), and it gave me valuable experience on how to better prepare for rain the next time I bike. The more perspectives I looked at it through, the more reasons I found to trick myself into enjoying it, and I did.
My brain’s not special, it’s malleable and deceivable like yours. You might think it’s in control of you, however, it has to endure the hardships of your choices. Depending on the consequences of your choices, it might get so tired that it chooses whatever’s easiest. We’ve all been so tired from work that binge on unhealthy fast-food, or binge watch NetFlix instead of doing errands. However, once you realize your brain always chooses the easy choice, you can fashion your own consequences, to make better choices, like getting rid of your internet so you can’t binge watch. If you’re delusional enough, you can trick yourself to believe whatever you want. For those of that aren’t that lucky, the only I know to trick yourself is through experiencing something new, that changes your understanding of something. With enough different perspectives, you fashion a convincing argument for making the hard choice, like delaying gratification because you know it’ll make things easier in the long run.
Biking through the rain wasn’t the comfortable choice. I could’ve booked a hotel another night, but I convinced myself that there was no alternative, other than to endure it. Once I did, my brain did what all our brains are good at, look for ways to ease a difficult situation, whether that means looking reasons to enjoy the things we hate or telling ourselves that it’s not so bad. In the end, my arguments won out and I survived yet another difficult experience which I’ll have to look back on the next time I’m in a similar situation. Memories of past accomplishments reinforce us with a sense of self-worth, “I did it then, I know what it would take to do it again.”
The Problem Solvers
Perspectives are practical for more than just convincing yourself to like something, they help you ask questions and solve problems. Unless you learn to ask yourself the right questions, you’ll spend years solving the wrong problems.
Before I lived abroad, I was a well-paid programmer. I only understood the American culture I grew up in. My perspectives gave me confidence that I could survive in cities as a developer, but I sucked at living a life that felt fulfilling. My burning desire to see the world didn’t fit within the constraints of a full-time job with ten vacation days. If you asked me then, I would’ve told you I was on the right path, working towards the retirement. I tried convincing myself I was happy. The fact that I’d still get depressed, meant I lacked the perspectives to convince myself otherwise. My limited perspectives led me to ask myself questions that stunted my growth. I was asking myself: “How much money do I have for booze after rent?”, “What am I gonna do this weekend?”, “Should I get a new job?”
Nothing changed until I quit my job. With two friends, we started our own company, and changed our surroundings because staying in New York was too expensive. Ironically, the easy choice then was to live in Asia, Europe, and South America, wherever it was cheap to live. Consequently, I lived with people who knew nothing of my culture, and I of there’s, yet I got used to living as they did, even if it meant always living around mosquitoes. Each new perspective was a bullet that shattered the beliefs and understandings, that earlier held me back. Living with a Sri Lankan family in a jungle village, for example, taught me that you don’t need a lot of money to live if you’re willing to put up with the hardships they face. Compared to the hardships of working a desk job that occasionally drove me mad, I realized I had other options. This realization and these diverse experiences expanded my ability to think bigger and ask myself deeper questions, like “Since I’m going to have hardships, what are the ones I want to have?” I didn’t need to wait to retire to reach these questions. The perspective travel gave me showed me a shortcut.
The beauty of a perspective is that unlike a yacht, home, or car, you can’t lose it, and it can’t break. You carry it with you in every future experience. It’s not something you can buy either. Even if you book a year-long vacation and go all around the world, it won’t guarantee that you’ll come back with new perspectives if you never open your eyes. That’s where awareness comes in.
Awareness is the state of consciousness where you can ‘see’ or witness yourself as if you were looking at yourself from the outside. Being aware is the opposite of being on autopilot. It means being in the moment. Awareness helps you see what’s in your blind spots. The beauty of awareness is that you can practice it anytime, from anywhere, and in many so ways. Like a Da Vinci working on his Mona Lisa, it’s something that you can always work on and improve. You can meditate, keep a diary, before you make decisions, ask yourself “why” three times, and most difficult, try catching yourself when you’re on autopilot. It’s such a vast subject, all I can say is why it’s needed.
The need for a perspective is just as much a need for awareness, you can’t have one without the other. The way a land surveyor observes features of a landscape, you can do the same to notice the subtleties in your surroundings and how you feel in them. Initially, you won’t understand how each detail in your environment affects you, however, by practicing awareness in various settings you will begin to see patterns. You may notice you’re happier when certain factors are always present, like being alone or around people. The only way to find out is to try something new and be aware of how it makes you feel. Like a game that never ends, you can only get better.
As you can see, I can only fit in several of the millions of ways our surroundings push, pull and poke at us. In the next article, we’ll look at ways you can widen your perspective, adjust and modify your surrounding to enable you. Also, we’ll cover some practical reasons to travel, instead of just to escape work, and different ways to do it. Til’ then!
