Ink of the Day 🫟 Deep Reflection: Training the Good

On Neuroplasticity, Attention, and the Subtle Violence of Positivity 📚 #WritingCulture

The promise of neuroplasticity suggests we can rewire ourselves through attention, but what if focusing on the good becomes a moral obligation rather than a choice? This article examines how suffering quietly transforms into evidence of attentional failure, and how the self-discipline we call healing might be discipline's most sophisticated disguise. Through real-time psychoanalytic self-implication, the piece traps readers in an inescapable loop where even recognizing these patterns risks becoming another exercise in mastery, offering no comfortable resolution, by Ellis Zeitmann. For ThinkZeit. #WritingCulture #InkOfTheDay

We like the idea that focusing on the good rewires the brain. It feels active, responsible, almost ethical. Right now, even writing this, I notice how quickly the claim settles my body. A sense of agency arrives. I am doing something good for myself. That comfort is not incidental. It is the first thing that should make us uneasy.

Neuroplasticity promises that attention shapes destiny. Repetition strengthens pathways. What we rehearse, we embody. But notice how easily this slips into a moral architecture. If I feel better, I have trained well. If I feel stuck, I must have practiced poorly. The brain transforms into a ledger, recording my attentional virtue or failure, and suffering quietly turns into evidence of mismanagement.

I catch myself admiring the elegance of the model while it subtly evacuates context. Trauma, exhaustion, precarity, grief, these fade into background noise against a cleaner story about choice. Even as I name this reduction, I feel the relief of naming it. Awareness itself begins to glow, as if recognition were already repair. This glow is suspicious.

Focusing on the good is presented as balance, not denial. Yet balance can shift into another demand. To include the positive becomes an obligation, a corrective posture, a discipline. The nervous system is invited to relax only after it has proven it is attending correctly. Safety becomes conditional. Even now, as I write about this conditionality, I feel myself staging distance from it, as if critique were immunity.

Perhaps the deeper question is not whether attention reshapes the brain, but what kind of subject this promise quietly produces. A self endlessly monitoring where it looks. A self that must curate its inner weather to remain viable. The loop tightens. Even noticing the loop risks converting into another exercise in mastery, another pathway reinforced. I feel my chest tighten as I write this sentence, the same tightness I associate with getting something right, and wonder if this sensation is insight or simply another form of the pressure I am describing.

⁂ Reflection

When you train your attention toward the good, do you feel more present to what’s happening, or more responsible for curating it, and how quickly does your awareness of this question turn into reassurance?

A quiet gratitude to all who have tried to train their inner life toward safety, discovering that the self-discipline we call healing might be discipline’s most sophisticated disguise.

—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann @ ThinkZeit

#WritingCulture #InkOfTheDay #ExistentialThinking #GoingOnBeing #PhilosophyOfLife