Why People Hate to Watch Movies with Me: Finding Balance in Productivity vs. Friendship

Most people hate watching movies with me. Let's just say that movie dates never end well... or even begin well for that matter. I tend to make crude jokes or get out of my seat and move around. But that's just girls being coy. It should be fine to watch an educational movie with a bro after working intensely on a project at 3AM in the conference room, right? Big mistake.

You see, I have several distinct methods for watching movies with different purposes:

• Entertainment - When hangout with bros, we would watch action movies and I'd make lots of dumb jokes during movies, and usually have alcohol on hand. A few years back, we watched Thor and Fast & Furious 5 back to back, and I had a running inside about how Thor and The Rock had 30 inch necks and I described their fictitious neck workouts in great detail during the movie. We had water bottles filled with rum and vodka in the movie theater.

We trash talked to each other: "You're pencil-neck who doesn't even lift!"

It was a fantastic time.

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• Immersive psychedelic trip - Sometimes I watch particularly trippy movies like A Scanner Darkly, Paprika, Inception, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on low dose ayahuasca or marijuana. This is done either with friends who are also tripping or alone in my bed. Typically, I'd be pretty quiet and still, but constantly take notes about my trip visuals and ideas on my phone.
  

My ex hated the note taking and talking during movies. She would tell me, "Don't be the cameraman! Become the character: be fully immersed and go deeper into the experience! Your focus on memorization is taking you away from focusing on the experience itself."

Maybe she's right, she sounds right. It sounds like something a Zen master might say. But maybe the note taking is part of the focus on the experience and the movie. I almost never reread my notes. Writing is just part of the internalization process and what I needed to do at the time. We really pissed off each other in heated epistemological debates when we completely dismissed each other's world views. I'm general entertained by debate, but she would get very emotional. I can see the headlines: "Sadistic Blogger Laughs While Verbally Abusing Girls to Tears".

• While eating or before sleep - I like to watch something on my phone when I'm eating or falling asleep. This is typically something light: a TV series, random YouTube videos, or documentaries about history or science. This is probably a bad habit, but for now, I'm going to excuse it as one of the least harmful vices out there.

• Video lectures - I take a lot of online courses. When I take an online course, I try to be as efficient as possible. I watch the video lectures at 1.7x to 3x speed depending on how fast the professor talks. In fact, I lose focus and can't even pay attention if it's too slow. While I'm watching the video lectures on one half of the screen, I am doing the readings for the course on the other half of the screen or taking notes on my phone or on Sublime Text. This is very exhausting. I tend to only do this during the time of day when I have high mental energy and the short burst sessions are often under half an hour and no more than 2 hours per day. But in these 2 hours, I could often get done a full week of course work for courses that claim to require an estimated 6-8 hours of course work per week.

It's not a linear approach. I would frequently pause and rewind. I would also skip some lectures and go back to watch past lectures. I would take lots of breaks and do relevant and unrelated readings in between. I would do workouts in between. I would take screenshots and make memes out of them. There is a method to this madness that optimizes my internalization of the knowledge in the courses. My core belief here is that knowledge should be a fully connected network, not just linear chains of thoughts. Therefore, to better understand topics and apply them throughout my daily life, I take a very nonlinear approach to learning. I have not written down a clear protocol of my learning method yet, but it is something I would like to refine and write about in more details in the future.

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My friend had told me previously that he would put certain movies in the background to set a motivational mood while he's doing something else productive. From this, I assumed that he'd just put the movie in the background while we do something else productive. That wasn't what happened, so I quickly shifted gears to perceiving the movie as a video lecture based on my perception of what he had told me about it. My mental energy was low, but I was thinking that I could probably go for 20 minutes and then just head to sleep. I wanted to watch the movie when my mental energy level was low as a part of my efficiency optimization system. I can't waste time when my mental energy level is high on watching movies.

I requested to watch the movie at 2x speed. Request denied.
He said something about some sentence I said being imprecise. I'm 99.9% sure that he misheard me and it was irrelevant anyway. He was irritated.
I requested to watch the movie at 1.2x speed. Request denied. Again.

This was starting to feel like watching movies with my ex. Not a good sign, but I ignored it and continued in my perspective of treating this movie as a video lecture.

At the start of the movie, I decided to I look up the movie on Wikipedia on my phone. A few minutes in, he got pissed off that I wasn't paying attention the movie, accused me of multi-tasking and inefficiency, and left.

This is pretty much the same behavior as my ex. I'm used to this. The difference is that she would get emotional, while for him, this was a rational observation and the logical course of action for him to take.

First, I will apologize for staying up while being tired rather than just going to bed. That was my fault, but beyond that, I have no regrets. You might interpret this as rationalizing excuses, but even after some self-reflection, I disagree. There is real value to be shared here.

I was not multi-tasking or inefficient. My goal is to get as much out of the experience as possible. That is why I was reading up on the background information. I was merely following my protocol for watching video lectures. He was merely following his protocol for dealing with inefficient situations. We have both optimized for efficiency. This confirms that humans have evolved for survival, not accurate perception of reality. Nobody is ever as rational or wise as they think they are. "Objective" metrics for productivity can be hallucinations. This is blasphemous to many intellectuals and they will ironically claim that I have no objective evidence. Well, I think that the fact that you can find strong disagreements among very smart and successful people proves my point.

Your ideologies about how the world works does not make you any better than anyone else. Most intellectuals have a cognitive dissonant aneurysm when you point that there are very happy and smart theist fundamentalists who have a bigger positive impact on the world than they ever will. For example, I don't give a shit that Ben Carson prays to an imaginary Sky Fairy all day and believes that the Earth is 5000 years old. He still objectively saved lives of kids in surgery and inspired kids to go to college through his scholarship fund. Yet tons of people show their jealousy and ego insecurity by only focusing on his superstitious beliefs and not the tangible good he has done. Ironically, these atheists are the ones focusing on an irrelevant abstract idea, while this guy with inaccurate perceptions of reality is doing more actual good in reality. This proves that accurate perception of reality is overrated. Perhaps he needed to have such practices and beliefs to motivate him to do what he did. In this way, I see the seemly superstitious beliefs having real tangible value, so I would never judge him negatively for them.

To me, the act of focusing on the movie itself is not the point. The point is to internalize the most important bits of knowledge and sentiments within the movie to apply to daily life in a practical way with high efficacy. I don't need to stare at the movie screen for that. I needed to connect the message from the movie to what I read about the topic in related articles and its effect on my body to form a fully connected multi-layer neural network to better encode the message. I get nothing out of staring at a screen when I have low mental energy. I needed to stay active and keep on switching tasks to prevent energy level from dropping lower and to build up the mental network. Perhaps eventually, I will change my method, but it needs to happen organically with one Pareto improvement at a time. I don't believe in following other people's systems just because it happens to be more effective to them personally.

All this analysis happened in my head in an instant, but due to my surprise of his behavior and my already low mental energy, I was not able to articulate it in the moment.

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My friend had an emotional attachment to the value of the movie. I valued his opinion enough to give the movie a look, but I was not convinced that the value of the movie deserved my top priority. If I had 2 hours to watch a movie with a high level of focus, I'd rather be finishing another week worth of video lectures on an online course. That was the opportunity cost calculation in my head.

He voiced his disappointment and loss of respect for me and how he wanted for forget the moment. I did the opposite. I thrived in the pleasure of the moment.

"I'm not always going to say things the perfect way, but I'm going to say things the way I feel." - Kanye West

There is something that most people forget about behavior psychology. If you consistently meet expections, you are actually less effective than if you keep a variable schedule of reinforcement. If you constantly provide people with a reward, they become entitled to it and the reward loses novelty. This is how people lose passion. The human brain is primed for being very receptive to stories and drama. This friendship had been too stable for me. I've never trash talked to him or created any drama... well guess what? We got too complacent and started to have false expectations. I needed to create some ups and downs to drive the momentum forwards. This is part of my system of long run efficiency. We have to cycle positive and negative stimuli on a variable schedule. I have sensed a sentiment of things becoming too sterile and predictable, and saw that it was my duty to disrupt that, even if it makes my friend temporarily dislike me. I've already disappointed plenty of people before. I have nothing to lose. Scott Adams has said that he takes every opportunity to embarrass himself. It is always an opportunity for new experiences. And according to antifragility, what doesn't break becomes stronger, so I have no worries.

What I learned is that we all want to experience life to the fullest, but what that actually means is very different for different people, even people with similar interests and visions. I'm not saying that what he's doing isn't right, but I'm also saying that my approach to life isn't wrong. Attachment to your thoughts is what leads to suffering. What you perceive to be important in your subjective reality is not necessarily important in someone else's subjective reality. Family and friends get angry with each other when they forget this. This is the dualistic nature of the universe. Differences and diversity drive progress forwards and creates many new and beautiful things, but it also creates conflicts and alienation. We are in an eternal struggle to find balance, both on a personal level and on a societal level.

There might technically be a false equivalence fallacy above, but I don't care. I've never met any happy people who cared about false equivalence fallacies. This is likely to be confirmation bias on my part, but it's not relevant to how I approach life now. I'm not afraid of being technically wrong or being in disagreement with smart or powerful people if I find pleasure and freedom in taking such a position. If something becomes more obviously useful or entertaining in the future, I will simply change my views at that time. I don't need to claim that I am right; I simply enjoy the way I live currently. Unlike my friend who seeks to become more impactful than Elon Musk in terms of effective altruism, I seek to be as entertaining and insightful as James Altucher, Tim Ferriss, or Scott Adams, who have done many stupid things, thrived in the embarrassment of failure, and still found a way to be financially well off and enjoy life.

I'm going to (mis)appropriate stoicism here:

"Pride is a master of deception: when you think that you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has your spell." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:13

I like Elon Musk. He is one of my role models... but he is just one of them who embodies a certain specific virtue. While in some ways, he might be doing the most important thing in world right now, I'm also not gonna let that influence my own mindset to pursue lofty delusions.

Ryan Holiday wrote a great article about this topic.

A few years ago, at a private event, Google founder Larry Page told a rapt audience that the way he evaluates prospective companies and entrepreneurs is by a single metric—asking them if what they’re working on something that could “change the world.”

It’s both an inspired way to look at things and also a clichéd trope. It also happens to be rather delusional.

Because that’s not how Google started.

...

The founding of a company, making money in the market, building a career are messy things. Reducing it to a narrative retroactively creates a clarity that wasn’t and never will be there. We must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened. As Paul Graham—writing not far from where Bill Walsh practiced the 49ers—we need to “keep our identities small.” Make it about the work and the principles behind it—not about a glorious vision.

To do otherwise is ego and folly. Napoleon had the words “To Destiny!” engraved on the wedding ring he gave his wife. Destiny was what he’d always believed in, it was how he justified his boldest, most ambitious ideas. It was also why he overreached time and time again, until his real destiny was divorce, exile, defeat, and infamy. A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.

I am building a startup, but I'm not building it the same way as anyone else. I used to have delusions of grandeur, but I have learned to reject it. No more business plans with huge empty promises and pretentious forecasts for me. I only focus on how my projects can deepen my own meditative practices, and if they happen to be useful for me, I will test if they are useful to others and expand from there. Have a plan that I stick to, but be extremely flexible to change courses in an instant when needed. This is a paradox that Jocko frequently discusses in terms of combat situations.

"When you're distressed by an external thing, it's not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment's notice." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8:47

I try not to judge others or let others' judgments of me influence my decisions. Of course it still happens occasionally. The purpose of this article isn't to judge my friend, but to become more mindful of all my different mind states when I watch videos. I thank him for bringing to my conscious awareness that I have different expectations when watching different types of videos and to deepen my awareness that the whole world is hallucinating (Totally not the point he's trying to make at all. Too bad. :P). These expectations can often serve as useful heuristics, but sometimes it can result in false judgments. I don't need to be correct, rich, powerful, popular, or smart to raise a middle finger to external influences and find my own enlightenment within myself. I hope that some readers may also find this helpful.