First Things First

Brazilian jiu-jitsu is not good for you but that’s precisely why so many people are addicted to it. Today we’re talking about simulations, soulcraft, and how to develop your sense of agency. If you like The Matrix, want to see some of the works that inspired it, and understand how that relates to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, this one is for you.

Spectacles, Simulations, And Survival

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

• Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

The quote above is in the opening of my copy of Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle. That book, along with DeBord’s contemporary Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, did their best to explain what some of our world’s coming issues. Namely, how we don’t really live in it.

Their ideas have been modified, popularized, and regurgitated through works like Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, and, more famously, the Wachowskis's Matrix series. The Invisibles is where I got the cover image for this article and if you haven’t come across it you should go read the series ASAP.

Parsing through the aforementioned works would require an article far longer written by someone far smarter. I’ll do my best to summarize a common theme from the four of them.

The zeitgeist driving our economy, and the technology it produces, is displacing what was the natural lived experience. These technologies are now so pervasive and easily enjoyed that we don’t know what they replaced, nor can we have an authentic physical experience.

But it’s not all bad. We’re safer and what we’ve gained in creature comfort has displaced…discomfort? Not a bad trade.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Much like Agent Smith told us midway through The Matrix, what we think will be the perfect environment can have disastrous, unforeseen consequences.

In The Matrix, humans’ brains could not accept the utopian reality simulation created by the machines because, as Agent Smith believes, human beings define their reality through suffering. This inability to accept a paradise resulted in almost all of those humans dying off while plugged into the matrix.

I don’t agree that suffering is how we define our existence. And I’m not going to be the one that claims we need to suffer.

What I will say is I believe suffering is a choice, a label that we can assign to, or remove from, our struggles. And I am going to include that struggling is directly related to how ambitious, and nebulous, our goals are.

More importantly, I am going to say that our ever-increasing artificial world lacking real-world stressors and struggles is having horrendous health complications.

Health Implications Of Our Simulation

When you don’t exercise your muscles atrophy. When you don’t go in the sun your body doesn’t make vitamin D. When infant mammals are starved from parental oversight and physical comfort they go insane and die.

The trend is obvious. A life lived absent from the real experiences our bodies were designed to take in ceases.

Why do we do everything in our power to engineer nature away? We eat artificial food in between staring at fake lights and feigning interest in activities we’re told are important for others we’re made to believe are even more important than us. Then we’re told to be grateful. And, in some respects, we should be.

I’m grateful I was able to drive to the hospital for surgery. I’m grateful I can go to the grocery store. I’m grateful my life is not constantly in danger of the threats posed by nature. I’m grateful that we have engineered a life that allows for more leisure than anyone born before the twentieth century could even imagine.

Still, for all the work we do to create technology that removes us from the world we still have to eat, sleep, and shit in it. While I’m grateful for medicine and its miracles, I’m not grateful for the fact that simply being healthy and feeling fulfilled has largely been taken out of many people’s hands.

I’m generally skeptical of the idea that we have figured out the best way to course correct for the product of billions of years of evolution. It’s a testament to humanity’s arrogance, not its ingenuity, that people assume we can out engineer nature. We don’t even know the variables and we’re expected to centralize planning of the the whole world? Arrogant. Insane.

While I would love to go to that rave in the center of what’s left of the real world in The Matrix, I don’t really want to live “free” trapped in a punishing reality I’m not adapted for, and will in all likelihood die quickly in. I do not dream of anarcho-capitalist utopias no matter how many times I go to Burning Man. I’m happy to leave the desert and return to my desert of the real with clean water, electricity, and a warm bed. For all its flaws, I value the world I live in.

In an all too predictable twist of fate, nature with the threats it contains is exactly what we need to feel good, and good about ourselves. Struggling for simpler goals like acquiring food, water, and shelter used to give us our sense of agency; the feeling that our actions leave us in the driver’s seat.

Autonomy, Artificial Intelligence, And Agency

In our ever artificializing world, our consequences and actions are being decoupled. Ordering Uber Eats doesn’t feel the same as finding berries to eat and your body knows it, whether you realize that or not. This makes us feel like we’re out of the driver’s seat.

We are losing our position in the world, and, with it, our sense of agency. Nature defines our sense of agency as “the subjective feeling of controlling one's own actions, and through them, external events”. Nature goes on to say “The sense of agency is a byproduct of human movements and also greatly shapes perception and behavior”.

The growing field of agency research has linked agency processing problems with a number of issues, namely unhealthy aging and schizophrenia. Agency research has alluded to the idea that things as simple as autocorrect and other automations will, potentially, reduce one’s sense of agency.

I’m not an agency researcher and I’m definitely not saying Clippy is conspiring with ChatGPT to give us schizophrenia. What I am going to emphasize is that a loss of agency is associated with poor health and quality of life, particularly in old age.

The idea we’re starting to brush up against is best summarized with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. According to him, our needs ascend through tiers labeled physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and end on self-actualization. Basically we need food and shelter before we can worry about our career and romantic relationships.

Simpler needs have simpler solutions. Nebulous, esoteric needs are slipperier and harder to satisfy. Regardless of how slippery one is, an unmet need still has consequences. This is the other side of the coin of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Now that I have freedom of choice and time, how I can be sure I’m making the most of it?

Food and shelter are relatively easily to come by for people living in the western world in the 21st century. That need is largely met, and leaves us starting on a higher need tier. That means we have much more nebulous and confusing goals than we are hardwired to reason through. In all likelihood, if you have the time and means to read this you have a more leisurely and luxurious life than anyone born before the 20th century.

The fourth tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, esteem, includes self-esteem. It involves feeling confident in oneself and seeing that your achievements and contributions have been recognized by other people.

Working on esteem forces you to ask the question, how do I fit in in this world? A more relevant question for today is, do I have agency and autonomy when I live in a world where I have to expend minimal effort to meet my needs and the system would function without me?

This question is as big as it is unhelpful but it can push us towards a more useful question to reinforce our sense of agency. What can I do to show myself that external events can be a byproduct of my actions?

How do we enjoy capitalist creature comforts while making the most of the of the body evolution blessed us with? Living outside of nature and reality threatens our agency and everyday health. What can we do to reclaim it?

Solutions, Soulcraft, And Mat Time

If a theme of the 20th century was, how far can technology extend our life, the 21st century seems to be asking, what stressors can we reintroduce to improve our vitality and healthspan? That’s partially why so many people have decided to singe their eyebrows in the sauna before risking cold tub hypothermia.

Others are looking for more active ways to engage their physicality. Some are searching for tangible crafts to trade time for income. In Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, he explains:

I don’t present this quote to say everyone should quit their job to become maple syrup farmers. I’m trying to say developing “manual competence” is one of the simplest ways to return agency to our lives and improve our likelihood of aging healthily. It’s a synonym for Nature’s definition of our sense of agency being human movements controlling external events, and it’s exactly why activities like Brazilian jiu-jitsu have attracted so many high income low agency professionals.

When you learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu you are faced with a very real, tangible problem. Someone is trying to choke you, injure your limb, or hold you down until you cry uncle. That experience itself carries its own sensorimotor stimulation that pushes you past the simulations of the 21st century. It reintroduces your need for safety, and forces you to be present and solve problems.

When you start solving problems, in this case, successfully defending yourself, you show yourself that you do have control over your external events. Then you try the same stuff against progressively better training partners. You lose at first, hard and often, but eventually you succeed. Then you succeed more frequently. Then you know what to do and understand how your movements have control over external events. You have successfully shown yourself you have agency.

This process is in no way limited to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, nor any martial art. I could have written this entire article about rock climbing, endurance racing, and any number of activities where the adrenaline tells you the problem you’re facing is real, and if you don’t exert at least a modicum of control over the activity you could face an even worse problem.

Participation in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, mixed martial arts, and the broader world of combat sports does not present many solid career opportunities. As Craig Jones says, jiujitsu has ruined more lives than it’s saved. So, no, I’m not saying you should quit your job to be a fighter, teach jiujitsu, or anything else related to combat sports.

Martial arts are a luxury of time for most. We use them to break up our boring days. The fact that they can help return your sense of agency while helping you build an internal locus of control is a blessing that can’t be ignored.

The fact that we have time to elect to developing crafts is something that we should be thankful for. I do think Crawford’s writing applies to finding a hobby as much as it does to career advice. I’d pass this same advice to anyone looking for a new way to break up their day, remind them they have agency, and live a healthy, fulfilling life.

I know what some of you are thinking. By acknowledging the simulated reality we’re living in and saying, “Just find a hobby” I’m giving up and giving in, and that participation in martial arts is just a by product of the simulation we’re trying to escape.

I don’t agree.

I think we need to do everything we can to remind ourselves that we do have agency. We can worry about how we want to engage with our simulation after that.

Truth be told, I don’t think that really matters. As Jack Frost breaks the fourth wall to tell us:

Citations & Further Reading

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