Mixing Mental Arts
Slowicism 2.0
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic takes Mixed Mental Arts to the next level by demonstrating how to begin fusing some of our foundational concepts into more advanced applications. It’s a master class for surviving the chaotic octagon of life, full of practical applications.
Modern life feels like it just keeps getting faster. From politics to technology to the economy to our health, it can feel frantic, frenetic, and frenzied. This feeling is natural as we are being inundated with so much information from so many different sources that it’s overwhelming.
The first line in our brain’s job description is to make sense of the world around us, and when we are inundated, we suffer what I call Infobesity. This is where we have too much information, without enough meaning, demands to act fast, and difficulty knowing the important information to remember. The result is the chaos many of us feel every day. And in that overloading, we risk treating everything as if it were important, which it isn’t, or we start ignoring everything as noise, which carries its own risks of missing crucial information.
While we can take action to avoid infobesity and control the flow of information, there are additional steps to take to manage how we react. We’re going to begin mixing some of the mental arts that we’ve explored previously. To kick us off is a mixed martial artist and frequent collaborator Andrew Smith who recently wrote Slowicism 1.0, where he describes the Stoic idea of reframing and retarding action instead of uncontrolled reaction:
Everything in your body is telling you to speed up, but Slowicism tells you to slow down. The challenge is that your heart is pumping blood through your entire body at breakneck speed, and that includes your brain. Your brain is going, going, going—but it needs slowing, slowing, slowing.
The underlying reason to embrace slowicism is simple because reacting more often leads to a loss of your own agency and can cascade into terrible outcomes. Andrew gives a visceral example related to martial arts:
This happened to me one notable time when I was competing [In Ju Jitsu], and the dude tried to yank free from a leglock. I felt his knee snap three times.
The panicked reaction caused an outcome significantly worse than the situation warranted. We showed a similar cascade of how even something as useful as empathy can become weaponized when we lose control over our reactions. Troll farms, fear porn, and algowhores leverage this to whip up online frenzies.
So, today, I want to dig deeper into Slowicism and build on Andrew’s work to highlight the two philosophical legs it stands on and add some additional practical applications.
Stoicism
The first leg is Stoicism. This ancient philosophy is also one of the most misunderstood. In the modern view, stoicism is the suppression of emotion. A fragile shell of masculine toughness that eschews empathy and radiates with cold pragmatism. It’s often described as uncaring and unloving.
But that’s not at all what stoicism teaches. It’s not the suppression of emotion; it’s their domestication. It’s not hard emotions; it’s honed emotions. It’s not unfeeling; it’s just not feeling what’s unnecessary. It’s not unempathetic; it’s targeted love.
Stoicism also focuses on intentional reframing, a core concept of systems thinking. Andrew refers to this as the Inversion, which takes an idea and flips it over to see whether your perspective changes. It’s a super powerful tool, whether it’s understanding how to be miserable, staring into evil, or being irreverent to understand proper reverence. Inversion forces you to slow down and reconsider what you think you know. It’s naming the negative you want to avoid so that your perception can be more positive about what you want or have.
Taoism
The second leg is Taoism, and one of the most powerful concepts in this philosophy is Wu Wei. It’s typically recognized as achieving a flow state, but there’s another element that’s critical, which is embracing intentional NON-action. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to be outraged.
Saying this is easy. Doing this… Well, have you looked at social media recently to see how well that’s going? There’s no topic mundane enough not to have someone clutching their pearls. It’s hard to tell what’s manufactured outrage, what’s performative, and what’s real. The point is that you don’t have to join them and your life will be significantly better if you don’t!
The other half of the Wu Wei equation is the flow state. The military special forces has the axiom Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast. It’s the recognition that focusing on the right things, maintaining the right discipline, and surrounding yourself with the right environment and people unlocks capabilities you didn’t know existed.
What’s interesting is that this concept applies everywhere. It works with technology design and development, where intentional and disciplined execution allows clarity of action. It also applies to politics, where Heaven is high, and the emperor should be far away.
Like intentional non-action, this flow is hard to do. Currently, I’m working with a program trying to move as fast as they can while studiously ignoring the proven capabilities that actually allow them to succeed. Similarly, in politics, too many people are collapsing into the hellscape of social media and then dragging the emperor to live rent-free in their brains. This is why I’m engaging with the topic again. We need it!
The cool thing about Wu Wei is that it even works with freediving, enabling you to swim deeper and longer. The key is not to force the effort. Doing so burns oxygen and shortens your dive. Instead, slow, controlled movements allow you to explore the most beautiful areas on the planet. Couple this with a little mind-over-matter stoicism, and it didn’t take long for me to achieve a five-minute and ten-second breath hold.
Summary
Slowicism 2.0 is a powerful mental model that combines both Stoicism and Taoism. Achieving slowcism requires constant study and intentional training because it’s battling the entropy of life and helps navigate the chaos. It’s a model that provides breathing room to focus on what’s important.
This requires slowing down, practicing intentional non-action to clear out the noise to allow deep and wide thinking, not fast thinking. This position enables flow, which creates compounding loops where, after each iteration, the chaos abates, and life becomes smoother, calmer, and returns your agency. Slowicism is a combination of Mixed Mental Arts that provides a masterful ability to grapple with complex ideas in the octagon of life.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
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I like how you put this: "It’s not hard emotions; it’s honed emotions."
This is the core and key for me: emotions shouldn't be buried or suppressed, but instead appreciated for the complex intuitive signals they are. This ain't easy, but it gets easier for me every year.
I love to see the thought torch going down the road a bit further! This is an excellent summary of how to pause/paraphrase/persist.
Thanks for the article! I've kinda backed my way into Taoism and Stoicism as two of my guiding philosophies, so seeing them packaged together as one concept was super enlightening. Keep writing!