raw hours:

So there’s this partially open-ended thing that you can do with the bodymind. And it takes time, thousands of hours. There’s a part that can’t be compressed, sort of the raw thing you’re working with, the way your mind is, right now, in all its complexity, that has to be worked all the way through. And then there will be contingent things that will make all of that go faster or slower.

If someone is older, they’ll have more raw stuff to work through. [The following sentence is long and hard to parse, and I apologize.] I suspect, for, say, someone who’s, I don’t know, between eighteen and thirty years old, with no really perverse trauma that can confusingly mix good and bad together, for example childhood sexual abuse, who’s really good with working with documents and a teacher, maybe they could start to asymptote around 6000 hours. Maybe. There are still unknowns, here. I suspect something more realistic, for someone between eighteen and forty-five, is anywhere from 8000-12,000 hours. Maybe!

Every problem you encounter may seem like it’s the deepest last problem. But there will be another, and another, maybe with a delay but inevitably, until there isn’t. So plan for this, in resources (time, money, relationships), possible break-taking (to make money or friends), opportunity costs, etc. One can’t predict using timelines, or plan using timelines—one has to just assume it’s going to take 10 years 20 years even if it only takes 1.7 years. This can potentially be hard and risky, depending on available resources and opportunity costs, and likely or possible sequelae. This paragraph will be at the end of the next section as well.

I sometimes say that all of this, for some degree of "asymptotic done-ness," with optional plenty more to do, across a lifetime, takes roughly, on the order of, 10,000 hours.

Below is a discussion of the use of the number "10,000."

[...]

Mark:

the "[10,000] hours" thing may end up being problematic for a lot of people. [i do think it's a pretty good rough estimate; i chose that number carefully and i'm tracking data, as it comes in, to see if that estimate should be updated, and/but,] i just wanted to convey something about the seriousness of the investment, how long bad patches can be, and how counterintuitively long it can take to get certain benefits.

but like if people don’t meditate while falling asleep or waking up bc it’s hard to start and stop a timer, ahhhh. all sorts of goodharty stuff is possible, leading to too much grindy meditation and too little ad hoc meditation

collaborator1:

I also recently found the 10k number VERY helpful to get oriented (see "in an hour maybe you can cover 1% of 1%") so for me "Estimating" to get a sense of scale seems good for me right now, and "Tracking" seems hilariously bad

collaborator2:

@collaborator1 the 1% of 1% thing as expectation management and setting small goals / making sure I am not pushing too hard has been super helpful to me.

collaborator1:

!! Right: although they superficially seem the same (pointing at the scale of the endeavor) there is a huuuuuuuge difference in flavor between "in a given hour I can expect to cover 1% of 1% of what’s down there" versus "oof, lotta hours, gotta start churning them out - gotta do more hours"

The former encourages me to "push" or "force" a LOT less, to be WAY more patient

The latter makes me impatient

"This is a slow, gentle unfolding. It thrives when given breathing room, time, and space" versus "This is gonna be a herculean raw accumulation of effort."

"I am going to a meditation retreat so I can put in a bunch more hours" (latter) vs "I am going on retreat so I can give this process so much slack, so little pressure; allow it to bloom, to rest, to unfurl into the time abundance"

... I think this mood more or less is my practice, right now. The entirety of it

[...]

collaborator1:

Mooore musingssssss. Given that the timescale is "in" the state of the system (how tangled it is), and it "wants" to unfurl, my job is to make space where it could unfurl

So I win every time I clear space and time where I could meditate or whatever

Every time I’m not enforcing some constraint that’s incompatible with doing a little bit of untangling/unfurling right then

Even if I - even if "the system" - chooses to do "something else" with that time/space (edited)

Sometimes I end up going kinda deep on some interospective sifting, but sometimes I end up doing art or cleaning or something, that’s all good

[...]

collaborator3:

What’s the benefit of keeping track of how long you meditate for?

How is it not just an overhead?

Does it help anything? (aside from research, e.g. Mark would want to estimate how long it might take for the sake of people adopting his approach)

Mark:

for me, as a very, very rough guide of "where one is at" so it doesn’t feel like a vague infinity. it matters less if someone can "just tell" the time spent is good and valuable, but, even then, a very rough hour guesstimate can help someone gently persevere when/if things sometimes feel endlessly hard.

with current data [2020-12-03], "10k hours" seems like a good heuristic for a "first-pass tour of all the possible surprises and neat/terrible stuff before things mostly ongoingly chill out"

a GENTLE, loosely held, completionism thing, I think, can help, too, hour count-wise, if it doesn’t become goodhart-y and grind-y, for people who are particularly interested in "going all the way," for whatever that individually means to them. though whatever that means to them, individually, could come in/"finish" way under or over 10,000 hours. (and, 10k or not, in any case, some people, long-run, will be doing things across a lifetime, along a complex spectrum of priority and investment.)

[end discussion]