Mental jujitsu between me and the AI
A story of turning addictive content recommendations into personal growth
How can we use existing AI tools for personal growth,
not to escape into a virtual dream world,
rather to live fully in this one?
Analyze your patterns,
turn your interaction with the AI into an action in the real world.
Like you do with dreams.
It is early December 2020. Long nights of winter, that gloomy time when we don’t see the Paris sun for weeks. It’s two o’clock in the morning, I’m sitting on my couch, phone in my right hand, my left nervously grabbing the edge of the table. My body is tense. If I paid any attention, I would feel the adrenaline pumping through my arteries and getting stuck in my motionless muscles. My frontal lobe has long given up any control, probably went to sleep hours earlier, my fatherless finger has just enough agency to click on the next video proposed by Facebook’s recommendation system.
I’m in one of the hellholes of the internet. We can euphemistically refer to it as mixed martial art, but here let’s just call it cage fight.
Two men, sometimes women, protected by only tiny gloves, beat, kick, strangle, twist each other until one of them gives up the fight or the referee says enough. Few rules exist: for example, you can’t kick the groin or hit the back of the head.
What is happening to me?
Let us take a step back. Up to 2020 my relationship with Facebook was balanced, though not without conflicts. It made me feel connected, but it also asked for a lot of my attention. I was usually scrolling among the posts of people I knew and of some news aggregators I chose to follow, but, usually at night, I often wondered into corners of the internet that my conscious self would not have approved. Nevertheless, the dopamine, the hormone of feeling we are getting somewhere, rarely lasted longer than half an hour, my consumption was under control. Then in the winter of 2020, I found myself descending, following Facebook’s video recommendations, on a very precise spiral into the world of cage fights.
My addiction was brief but intense. I spent several hours on it every night, for about two weeks.
It was well-timed bursts of dopamine, which most addictive drugs target. But there was also the adrenaline rush, the fear-excitement hormone that unleashes your energy to fight. It was me in the cage. I was the one kicking and being hit. But of course, I wasn’t. My body had no means to process the adrenaline, it was stuck in my muscles. I was spasming and sweating. It was exciting and repelling at the same time. The morning after, my conscious mind was ashamed and hated Facebook with a vengeance, so the decision was easy to make: I deleted Facebook from my phone and never looked back. I couldn’t explain away my behavior or find an excuse, I felt Facebook went over a limit, I felt that it was unfair what it did with my defenseless subconscious.
There was another long-lasting consequence of the affair with the substance:
I realized that I wanted to learn to fight.
After a brief search, I chose jujitsu. I had always done a lot of sports, but never any martial art (not considering the two-hour mano a mano training that the Hungarian People’s Army graciously provided us in ‘88). At 51, I was the oldest and the greenest in the dojo. Jujitsu is the art of close combat of samurais, the ancestor of judo, aikido, and Brazilian jiujitsu. It’s a mixed martial art, we kick, we hit, we strangle, we throw, we grapple, and we fall a lot. We don’t beat each other to pulp, but it often hurts. Still, I have been enjoying every moment of it, the learning, the experiencing, the being in the present.
I must admit, I have another addiction: I love analyzing! In the rest of this post, I will look at this story with the eye of an AI expert who also knows quite a bit of psychology. The conclusion is that
I turned an AI system, trained to capture my attention, into an efficient therapeutic tool, which is free and literally at my fingertips!
AI as a therapeutic tool
Facebook is an ad company. From whatever angle we look at it, the more time we spend on Facebook, the higher their revenue is. Now, addictology research tells us a lot about how to efficiently make us stay on a site. But the real revolution, what these social media companies have figured out, is that
the easiest way to find out what chains you to the screen is the experimental method,
especially when they have billions of users to experiment on. And this is where AI comes into the picture. In this example, AI’s task was to map out my optimal dopamine patterns from my browsing history. What and when needs to be “recommended” to me, so I spend the most time on Facebook.
Cage fight seemed an extremely strong pattern, and neither I nor the AI could resist the temptation.
This is one side of the coin, but what if, as my partner usually asks me, I turn the angry accusing index finger towards myself?
I am not an innocent victim, I was the user, Facebook only dealt me my personalized fix.
And if I was in control, then the browsing went exactly in the direction I wanted to go, on the road paved by AI. Exactly what was this road? I have been discovering it only as I’ve been learning, playing, self-transforming by jujitsu.
How has jujitsu been transforming me?
I am back to my body. It has been my main mantra, ever since I understood that it is the way to integrate what I know with who I am. I don’t remember the last time being in non-sexual close contact, and definitely not with men. Maybe rough-and-tumble with my father, when I was a kid. I went from feeling awkward to completely comfortable touching, holding, throwing, hitting, kicking other guys in the dojo.
I am more self-confident. I can now stand straight, with a good stable open posture, without trying to hide my hands and swinging my balance from one leg to another.
I can contain my fear and anger and control my reactions to these powerful emotions. I love the adrenaline, hitting and kicking, and also being hit and kicked. I also love grappling. But falling and being thrown are tough. I get scared and tense up, which is exactly the opposite of what one should do. There is something in letting go the control that goes against my innermost patterns. I hated to roll over my head, I had a bad mental blockage, fear made me lose momentum. I could not perspectivally visualize myself falling. Now, after a year and a half, I can confidently fall, roll forward and backward, and start to develop the reflex of rolling when losing balance. The fear is still there, but I have started to enjoy the landing after a full throw.
I can sense my body and react to the world at the same time. I feel this is the king of transformations. Meditation, fully focusing inward, closing out the external world, has always been easy for me. I could also connect to the outside, but for the price of losing interoception, the awareness of my bodily state. Sparring forces me to do the two at the same time: the hits are coming, I need to react, but I also need to generate attacks from inside, keep my balance, control what I do. Just defending doesn’t work, just attacking neither. Jujitsu is one of my practices that forces me to face the dance, the yin-yang dynamics that can be best depicted by the horizontal eight, the lemniscate. I have other tools to walk this infinite path, being open to my inner and outer world, including ice bath, movement medicine, weight-flow contact, “yes, and”-like conversational techniques, and mindful sex. I’ll write about these in length.
To summarize, I used a harmful AI tool, developed to hijack my attention, to make a positive change in my life.
The beautiful irony is that the fighting pattern of jujitsu is exactly what I have just done, mentally. The word jujitsu means “yielding art”, it is about turning the energy of the adversary against himself, letting him overextend, come into your space, then pull him out of balance and disarm him. If done masterfully, it is like a dance that requires little energy.
As I was writing this post, a new video landed in my feed, Mark Zuckerberg practicing some MMA, likely jujitsu. Is this a coincidence, or one of those mysteries that keep popping up in this strange universe? In any case, it is real. There was a lot of ridicule surrounding the video; my positive take on this is that it is awesome news: Zuck is, after all, attached to this world and to his body. But the question lingers,
will this affect his desire, and the massive machinery he put in motion, to realize his childhood dream of escaping into the metaverse?
Further readings
Fully automated luxury Gnosticism by Mary Harrington
Mark Zuckerberg on Metaverse at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
On TikTok’s incredible efficacy on hacking your cognitive pathways, and also links there.