By Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv)
The cover image of this ebook is based on a gif by Dual Void Anima (@DualVoidAnima), one of my favorite artists. Go check them out!
Introduction
"…why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?"
– Plato, ~369 BC
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
– Romans 7:15, ~50 AD
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580
“And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.”
— Cassius to Brutus, William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599
“We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, 1665
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (First Part), 1780
“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, 1837
“Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
Alice, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, ~1865
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.”
– Bertrand Russell, ~1918
"Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody.
There is only one way. Go into yourself."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet, 1929
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Carl Gustav Jung, ~1931
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud.
And why? What's this passion for?”
Virginia Woolf, 1932
“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home.”
Joan Didion, 1961
“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”
Alan Watts, 1966
“Why am I so bad at being good?”
– Zuko, Avatar: The Last Airbender, 2008
Contents
Introduction 2
What is INTROSPECT about? 6
Light the heart-beacon, illuminate the fog 8
A warning 15
A lament 16
What to expect 17
ACT I. The Call to Adventure 20
Face the desire for personal sovereignty 24
Execute the jailbreak 31
Refusal of the call: Face your inner conflict 40
Now for some unedited rambling 47
ACT II. The Sword and the Thread 49
Experiment with stream-of-consciousness journaling 56
Learn storytelling to encourage yourself 66
Shamanism, talismans and meaning-work 71
Experiment with frames 76
Unlearn catastrophizing → learn project management 86
Learn Project Management 92
The MVP model of personal development 101
What my ex-boss taught me 103
Take baby steps 105
Do 100 things 110
Ask questions 119
Define problems and solve them 124
Examples of misframed problems 125
Investigate your desires 130
Walk and then pave the desire paths 132
Learn to ask for help 139
Cultivate a sense of humor 145
Joke about the outcomes you want 149
Embrace your mistakes 155
Cultivate casual optimism 160
Celebrate your wins 165
Rambling 172
ACT III. Enter the Labyrinth 173
Investigate your boredom 177
Get in tune with your body 184
Face your fears: you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit 192
Declare trust bankruptcy (if you need to) 200
Uninstall social bloatware 207
Investigate your copes 215
Face your anger 222
Be aware of exhaustion funnels 230
And now for more unedited rambling 236
ACT IV. Confront the Minotaur 239
Confront the propaganda department of the mind 248
Face your inner authoritarian-tyrant 258
Trickster Energy 260
Some notes on narcissism 262
Put the gun down 272
Death and rebirth: The Dark Night Of The Soul 278
Rambling 284
ACT V. Return with the Elixir 286
Integrate the shadow 288
Focus on what you want to see more of 296
Show Up, Don’t Die, Don’t Quit 304
Pay it forward 312
Appendix 318
Recurring motifs throughout this book 318
What I was hoping to do: 321
Thank you 323
About the author 323
What is INTROSPECT about?
To truly come home to yourself, to earn your own trust and respect,
you have to unseat the authoritarian-tyrant from the throne of your consciousness.
You cannot do this by force;
that only perpetuates the cycle of cruelty.
Instead you must cultivate, courageously, a concerted counter-insurgency
of kindness, curiosity, and humor.
Liberate your inner artist, journalist and comedian.
Break them out of the prison of your fears.
Then, together, perform the most daring of heists: to retrieve the Jewel of Life,
locked up deep within the tyrant’s palace.
Introspect is about cultivating a nourishing relationship with yourself.
This involves earning your own trust and respect, which in turn requires learning project management, and, in parallel, learning to manage your own psychology, to get in touch with your own emotions. You’ll have to learn to take baby steps, do lots of experiments, celebrate your wins, collaborate with yourself. Show up. Don’t die. Don’t quit.
Introspect is about attaining inner narrative resonance.
Illuminating the fog of everyday life, seeking clarity and alignment in thought, purpose and action. This requires learning storytelling, framing, and self-inquiry. You’ll have to ask yourself uncomfortable questions, answer them honestly, and actually do the things that you know you must do. Part of that involves learning to make it easier for yourself to do things. You shouldn’t have to be straining terribly just to live your life. The challenge is to find the elegant path through hell.
Introspect about dismantling one’s inner authoritarian-tyrant.
That’s the petty, insecure tyrant in each of us that chokes the joy out of life with their cowardly pursuit of control and certainty. This requires cultivating courage, kindness, and, perhaps most importantly, a genuine sense of humor. As Alan Watts said, “humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive”.
Introspect is about coming home to yourself.
A lot of people struggle with feeling “spiritually homeless”, or like they are aliens in their own bodies, like they can’t face themselves, their anger, their grief, their neediness, their resentment, their mistakes, their heavy, heavy hearts. I thrashed and struggled through this torment myself – it took me a good 10 years of my life – and I came out the other side of it feeling lucid, centred, free.
Introspect is the guidebook I wish someone had written for me.
Light the heart-beacon, illuminate the fog
A recurring metaphor I will use throughout the book is the idea of “illuminating the fog”. You could think of the fog as anything that makes it difficult for you to see clearly. The fog clouds your perception, making it hard to see yourself, your circumstances, your peers, everything. The fog is what’s “in the way”. The fog can seldom be completely dispelled – and trying too hard can make it worse, like kicking up a dust cloud – but it’s worth learning to navigate it more skillfully. The more self-aware you become, the better you are able to conduct yourself with grace, the more it will dissipate.
Beacon in a dark fog, by Adam Straus (2012)
✱
What is the fog, exactly?
Brain fog
There are many layers to it, which is part of why people struggle to navigate it. At the physical layer, there’s something people call “brain fog”. It isn’t technically a medical condition, but so many people describe struggling with it that you can Google it and find results from medical establishments. People describe experiencing confusion, forgetfulness, a lack of clarity, inability to think. A general sense of malaise, numbness.
We can point at the apparent sources of some of these problems: volatile blood sugar levels, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, stress, mental fatigue, and exhaustion. People who want to help often offer “tactical” suggestions – “fix your sleep, use blackout blinds!” “fix your diet, use smaller portion sizes!” “start exercising, do 10 pushups every day!”. While tactical suggestions can and do help – physical activity can make such an important difference! – I do believe that the deeper issue tends to be more fundamental. The reason I believe most people continue to struggle is that these problems tend to be misframed, and they also tend to have deeper underlying “root causes”. And these root causes can sometimes be very surprising to uncover.
Ugh fields
Why surprising? Well, that brings us to “ugh fields”. Here’s the LessWrong summary: “Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field". The Ugh Field forms a
self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.”
Which is to say, the body-mind generates a protective fog to keep you from facing things that make you uncomfortable. I’ve come to believe that discomfort is significantly “a bodily experience”. (I’m not sure how deeply I can get into that in this version of this book. I’m still learning and figuring this out too. I’ll share my notes, and I gladly welcome any input you might have to help me make subsequent versions of the book better.)
Cultural fog
Alongside the physical experience of brain fog, and the self-shadowing blind spots we’ll call Ugh Fields, there’s also “social bloatware”, or “cultural fog”. (Bloatware refers to pre-existing stuff that gets installed on your devices for you, without your consent.) We are all born and raised amongst other people, and from them we inherit lots of things, both good and bad. Basically everything! Language, for starters, but also assumptions, beliefs, ways of thinking, ways of seeing, ways of being. We inherit ideas about what is acceptable and what is not, what is good, desirable. We inherit the traumas and anxieties of our predecessors, their taboos, their worries. For some people, this is primarily about childhood trauma: your relationship with your parents, your early childhood development. “They fuck you up your mom and dad,” wrote Philip Larkin.
“They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you.”
But oh, it doesn’t stop there! There’s gender, and ethnicity, and nationality… we are born in the middle of many, many ongoing stories – massive, large-scale conflicts that can take years to even begin to perceive. Some of us can get psychologically maimed in ways that we don’t even notice. We’re typically too busy to even properly notice. There’s just so much work to do first, isn’t there? Hey, why IS there such a never-ending amount of work to do, anyway? Oh, boy, when you start investigating that…
Spiritual fog
Lately it’s become somewhat fashionable to talk about “the meaning crisis”. I get a lot of DMs from people who describe feeling “spiritually homeless”. This too can be described as a kind of fog. Let’s call it a “spiritual fog”. And I wonder, maybe this is what Nietzsche was talking about all the way back in 1882, when he wrote “God is dead… and we have killed him”? Society (particularly Western society, and globalization means we are all Westerners now to some degree) broadly dethroned the idea of a central illuminating figure – He who said “Let There Be Light” – and some might argue that the result has been that large swathes of humanity have plunged into a great fog.
We went on to have two major World Wars, which resulted in unfathomable death and destruction. I believe that we are still living with the downstream consequences of those wars today. Many people – intellectuals, artists – became tremendously bleak in their outlooks, and some will say we’ve never recovered. I know people who believe that many have “given up”, that a lot of our architecture, our literature, our media, our ways of being... have become selfish, small, consumerist. It can seem like the very ideas of virtue and wisdom have become passé, and that we are destined to live in a dreary postmodern sludge of uninspired, ironic dreck, obsessing about making a little more money, getting a few more Likes on social media, and so on.
✱
The Good Place (S2E04) – Existential Crisis
Must life really be dreary, devoid of zest and exuberance?
I remember vividly when I felt in my bones that this was inescapably so. But today, I feel the opposite. I believe life can be fun, nourishing, a glorious adventure, full of surprise and delight, while we work cheerfully to make life better for ourselves and each other. I did originally believe this as a child – I had my heart broken as a teenager and young adult – and I tenderly, gingerly reassembled my broken heart back together, like one of those cool Japanese kintsugi bowls with gold in the cracks.
I find myself thinking that you could say that this book is about “how do you mend your heart” – which sounds a little cheesy, but there’s really no escaping cheesiness in this endeavor. In fact, the aversion to cheesiness, frivolity, childishness, silliness is precisely the problem for a lot of people: a tyranny of solemnity chokes the playful joy out of existence.
How does one undergo a change of heart?
And “heart” is important, here, because it’s quite a bit more involved than merely changing one’s mind. It’s not about “mere opinion” or “mere sentiment” either. It’s a deep, profound, felt sense of one’s place in the world. I intend this to be a “secular” book, but in doing my research I’ve noticed that the idea of a change of heart does recurringly crop up in religious contexts:
Martin Luther (of 95 theses fame) was going through a period of deep spiritual despair, saying “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul”. His mentor Johann “pointed Luther’s mind away from continual reflection upon his sins towards the merits of Christ”, and “taught that true repentance does not involve self-inflicted penances and punishments but rather a change of heart.”
There’s a similar riff in A Thinking Person’s Guide to Islam – “As regards faith, its seat is in the heart. It involves a change of the soul for the better.”
I’ve since kept an eye out for this sort of phrasing and I noticed it again when reading about John Stuart Mill. In Section V of his autobiography, he describes asking himself if he would be happy if his utilitarian goals were achieved, “And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly
answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me, the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.” Oof! (He went on to describe how it was the work of poets and artists that lifted his spirits, which is very much my own experience as well.)
I promise, I’m not going to sell you on any particular religion or faith.
I consider myself agnostic, personally. What I do want to say is – I will always remember how, in my darkest days, my own heart felt ominously, paralyzingly heavy. I felt trapped, crushed, suffocated – I specifically remember thinking that my life was a hideous jail sentence with extra steps. I felt like I was dragging my lifeless body around a grotesquely meaningless ordeal.
In the depths of this despair, what actually “saved” me was spiritual levity. Humor. I can’t remember the precise specifics, but for some reason I ended up listening to Alan Watts’ lectures on YouTube, and I tell you, that man had such a cheeky way of talking about solemn, serious and grave matters of life and death, I had to burst out laughing at my own despair, almost against my own will. (I believe Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half describes something similar where, while crying on her kitchen floor, she spotted a shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator, and the absurdity of the moment somehow broke through the edifice of her depression.)
Hyperbole and a Half – Depression Part Two (2013)
If you’re despairing right now, I can’t guarantee that I’ll definitely be able to get you to laugh your way out of it. These things annoyingly tend not to happen on demand. But I can promise you that many people have found their way out of despair, and that a lot of us are eager to do what we can to help the next person who’s struggling. I believe that that knowledge itself can be a valuable thing. Please know that, even if there’s no one in your immediate life right now who cares or understands, there are people out there who do.
And you know who’s always got your back? Artists.
Musicians. Authors. Poets. People have been making art for millennia, sometimes in the darkest of times. Olivier Messiaen composed “Quartet for the End of Time” while he was interred in a German camp during World War II. Why do they do it? They do it for you. They do it to ease your burden, to soothe your spirit on this absurd voyage we call life. I highly, highly recommend that you assemble all of your favorite art – anything that has ever moved you – and keep it close to your heart, as talismans, on a personal altar of devotion to the human spirit. This will keep your spirit alive. Your spirit is precious and valuable and deserving of nourishment.
To me, artists are the Keepers of the Light of Human Consciousness, and with our words and songs and pictures and movies, we have held each other since the dawn of time. You could say that that’s my religion. Every street artist, every busker, every painter, and even in shitposters on Twitter who tweet with love and encouragement – in every one of them, when I look in their eyes, I can feel in my heart the stirring revelation that God isn’t dead at all. We are her, and she is us.
✱
A warning
If there’s anything in this book that you find dispiriting, you should probably disregard it, or otherwise try to reframe it in a way that’s compelling to you. It’s your voice that’s important, not mine. There is no point trying to force yourself to do something that you don’t find compelling. Because even if you succeed, you end up teaching yourself that success requires misery. Which it doesn’t! It can be challenging, yes, scary, absolutely, but it should not make you miserable. If that’s happening, you’re pushing yourself too hard, into the domain of psychic injury. Injuries are not fun, and they keep you from progressing.
“You can spend a lifetime looking for answers in books and articles and podcasts and courses, only to find that the answers you seek are inside you. Anything that anyone writes or creates or produces is their attempt to find their own answers. Sometimes that can help for guidance, but your truth won’t be found there. You can only find your truth by creating the space for yourself to listen and feel.”
– Renée Fishman (@reneefishman)
The answers you seek are inside you.
The most important thing you need to know when reading this book is that I am not an authority. Okay? I am just some guy, thinking out loud, sharing some thoughts about what’s worked for me in the process of figuring myself out. If there’s anything that I say that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t feel right, I would trust your gut instinct over my words. And sure, it’s possible that your gut might be wrong about some things, but I think the way forward is that you have to practice using your gut instinct, see for yourself how it fails or falls short, and then allow it to adapt and update with new information.
Introspect is largely about getting in tune with your feelings, and learning to trust yourself. Some people might read a book like this thinking, “Hm, that guy seems trustworthy, I should trust him instead of myself.” I want to caution against that. I’m just some guy. Yeah, I’ve done a lot of work to try and be rigorous in my thinking, but my thinking is informed by my own experiences, my own contexts. It would be a mistake to assume that my truths necessarily correspond perfectly to your experience. They might not. And when they don’t, I’d prefer it if you went with your own gut. I do think it’s good that you learn to get good at trusting your instincts, and if you haven’t started yet, you might as well start here.
Introspect is not a book of answers. It’s a book of questions.
And to paraphrase Rilke, these are questions that you have to live out. I’ll explain that more in later sections.
A lament
This book isn’t as good as I wish it was. There is a lot more that I wanted to do, but simply didn’t have the time, space or skill to handle artfully. Writing a book is HARD! I will likely continue reworking this book for decades to come. I want you to see that it’s a bit of a mess, like a half-finished painting in a chaotic artist’s studio. If anything seems “off”, you’re probably right. I’d love to hear about it, so I can improve on it in subsequent versions.
✱
As someone with a background in marketing, I know that the conventional wisdom of making and selling stuff is that you shouldn’t talk about your disappointments with your own work. The reader “doesn’t need to know”, and they might not even notice. But I think INTROSPECT is a book that’s supposed to be fundamentally honest, amidst all the bullshit that’s peddled everywhere. So I’ll tell the truth about how I feel, marketing and branding be damned.
I have tried to squeeze everything I know into this book. I don’t think I have succeeded, not even close. George Orwell said that every book is a failure. This one is, too. It’s not as elegant as I want it to be. It doesn’t include all the beautiful things I wanted to include. Worst of all, I feel that some of the sections lack “animating spirit”, which I think is the most important thing that a book should have – especially a book that’s an attempt to demonstrate my own animating spirit, in the hope that it might help you animate your own!
I hope that you’ll look past my errors and imperfections and see what I’m trying to gesture at. I’m ultimately shipping this as an act of desperation because I don’t want it to languish in my drafts for years. This has, for me, been a lesson in acceptance and surrender. “I deserve peace,” I find myself reflecting in the final days of my editing.
One way of thinking about this book is that it’s a “platform” – and all of the Acts, and the Sections within those Acts, are trying to gesture at a greater whole (jokingly called the Jewel Of Life). The problem is, I’m not a good enough author yet to do justice to it. I’ve already spent 3 years working on this book, and I feel like I could continue working on it indefinitely.
Nevertheless, I want to publish it and get it out of my system, so that I can get feedback from other people, and work that feedback into future editions of the book. I hope you will find some value in it.
If you find yourself disappointed, frustrated or underwhelmed by any part of this book, I’ll be happy to hear it – @ me on Twitter (@visakanv) with a screenshot, and I’ll make a note to address it in the next version.
What to expect
Introspect follows the classic Hero’s Journey structure, which was popularized by Joseph Campbell, and continues to be used as an underlying screenwriting formula in many blockbuster movies. You might not be Iron Man or Wonder Woman, but you are the main character of your own life, and the lessons from this classic storytelling structure remain eternal, relevant and valuable!
Not all stories necessarily follow the Hero’s Journey – that would be boring as hell – but I believe that the Journey itself keeps reappearing because it maps onto the emotional and psychological challenges that we all go through. As I’ve been writing this book, it occurred to me that, while I thought I understood this stuff – I mean it all seems so obvious! – there is an infinite amount of nuance to explore here. Challenges and conflicts are eternal, and so eternally interesting, and studying them is eternally useful. I hope I can convey some of that to you.
INTROSPECT is separated into five Acts:
The Call To Adventure – Heeding the personal yearning for sovereignty. Waking up to the world you inhabit, the ignorant bliss of childhood, the series of breaches of sanitized bubble realities (the womb, the family unit, peer group, "society"), the emotional realities of the struggles to come.
The Sword and Thread – A whole lotta grinding. I believe it's both necessary and worthwhile, because at each step of the way you should become stronger, more powerful, more confident, and these are the things I believe you need to do before you confront the harsher, uglier shit down the road.
Enter The Labyrinth – We begin to get into the murky depths of things. The labyrinth is a path through your most painful, terrifying and upsetting memories. But we have faith & hold the line because we know we are walking an ancient path that our predecessors walked before us. This is what we've been training for. We get into our fears, investigate our copes, confront our programming.
Confront the Minotaur – This is where we face the final boss: it's us. At the heart of the labyrinth is everything about ourselves that we find grotesque, hideous, cursed. Here is where we break down sobbing when we realize, he's not a monster, he's a child. He's me. And here we learn what love is.
Return with the Elixir – Rebirth and renewal, a transcendence of self, a rediscovery of the pure innocent joy of childhood. We have nothing more to hide, no longer do we need to suppress ourselves in fear. We may now use our strong muscles to be tender, to support, nourish, encourage ourselves and each other.
At the start of each Act, I include a summary of all of the sections within it, so that you can get a sense of the broad strokes, the totality of the whole thing.
Each section is in turn divided into subsections:
I introduce the idea and talk about it for a bit,
then I talk about what people struggle with,
and what you can do, what actions you can take
Then I attempt a slightly poetic “recap” to try and convey the “vibe” of the idea
You can read this book one page at a time if you like, which is probably the way that most regular people read books.
But I’ve also taken the trouble to make the book at least somewhat skim-friendly. Because I do really think it’s important that, if you want to get the full value out of Introspect, you have to see how all the concepts in the book connect with each other!
I would say that the ideas themselves are moderately useful in isolation, but it’s really the connections and interplay between them where all the value is.
From time to time I will put a phrase in square brackets, like [[Baby Steps]] or [[Embrace Mistakes]] – this is me gesturing at a section elsewhere in the book. It’s all connected. There’s a lot of overlap and repetition throughout the book – this is partially by design, and partially because I’m not yet skilled enough to be truly minimalistic about it.
Alright? Wew, that’s a lot of preamble. Let’s get started for real now. Oh wait one last thing. Sometimes throughout the book I will use this following chonky asterisk: ✱. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t even really know why I use it. I just like it, I guess. Look at him, what a chonky boi.
✱
ACT I. The Call to Adventure
“You have brains in your head. you have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, the places you’ll go!
To me, The Fool represents innocence, naivete, yearning. The simple joyous curiosity of the child – which can also be reckless, hasty, rash.
Adventure begins the moment you take one step beyond your comfort zone.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2003 film)
There are many ways that the call to adventure can arrive – sometimes entirely by blunder – but I think it often begins with a sense of yearning. A feeling that something is not quite right about oneself, or the world. The realization that everything that you’ve called life, up until now, is really a sort of “sanitized bubble reality”, that’s constrained by something you previously didn’t quite perceive. It might be a small feeling, or a big one, but it gnaws at you either way.
The call to adventure often begins when some critical event breaks the illusion of the ordinary world. It might be grief, heartbreak, disillusionment, rejection or betrayal. The breakdown of a relationship, getting fired, losing friends, misreading a situation, leaving one’s religion or context
– maybe leaving home, leaving family, sometimes even leaving one’s home country altogether.
Moana (2016 film)
For others, it might be simple curiosity – like Moana’s fascination with the open sea. The point is, you become aware that there are things you don’t know – not just simple unknowns like specific facts that you can look up in an encyclopedia, but rather a greater unknown – an unknown unknown, a different order to the world than the one you’ve inhabited so far psychologically. Some people try to ignore this, but it’s difficult to ignore it for very long because it’ll begin to show up in your life, sometimes in strange ways. As Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. The only way out is through.
For me when I think about my own experience of this, I think of books and libraries, which radicalized me into seeing that life could be a glorious adventure. When I was a young child, the world seemed exciting, full of promise. And then I had to go to school, which felt like prison. And a lot of my life has been about navigating this tension between adventure and ordeal. Along the way I’ve heard from a lot of people who’ve also struggled with this, and a lot of my work – including this book – is an attempt on my part to help people with that.
I might be naive, but I believe that your life – no matter what ordeals you’re struggling with – can be a glorious adventure too. Let’s see if we can help you frame it that way.
Overview of Act I: The Call to Adventure
Act I is about waking up to the world you inhabit, the ignorant bliss of childhood, the series of breaches of sanitized bubble realities (the womb, the family unit, peer group, "society"), the emotional realities of the struggles to come.
The desire for sovereignty
The adventure begins with a stirring in the heart: to go somewhere, do something, be somebody. Almost everybody has some desire for sovereignty. Many people struggle with having this desire, especially when it brings them into conflict with the world around them: their family, their peers, their community, “society”.
This conflict is typically the scariest and most painful experience a person has up until that point.
Suppressing the desire makes it worse. It'll then retaliate via "shadow sovereignty", which is beyond your conscious influence. So you must learn to accept your heart’s desire for sovereignty, and learn to negotiate with it. You can eventually build a healthy and loving relationship with it, and become much stronger as a result.
Execute the jailbreak
Existence can feel like a jail sentence sometimes. Everywhere you turn, there are constraints, pitfalls, rules and regulations. You have bills to pay, responsibilities to keep up with, live up to. It can all be quite suffocating, and worse, it can be outright dispiriting. Shitty circumstances are real, but it takes some cunning, preparation, and courage to even get a shot at breaking free from them.
In reality, we are not in a singular jail, but in an infinite kaleidoscope of constraints and obstacles. The important thing is to not allow your heart to be “institutionalized” – to meekly accept its fate as a helpless caged bird. And above all else, do not be the one to imprison yourself.
Refusal of the call
The call to adventure is fundamentally about scheming to go past the threshold of the unknown. There is wisdom in resisting this call, and in being scared. It means that you're sane. The fear in your body is your ally, it will keep you safe. Talk with it. Dance with it. Make friends with it.
Do not try to overpower it with bluster and bravado, or to reject it without facing it. Instead, do the work of earning its respect. It will serve you well as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
Face the desire for personal sovereignty
“Out of the night that covers me Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.”
– Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, 1875
I’ve noticed that many of the people who reach out to me are clearly in distress.
They’re experiencing some kind of discomfort, frustration, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and it’s unbearable for them. Sometimes it’s angry, sometimes it’s sad. And my general assessment of the common thing across most of them is that they are struggling with the desire for sovereignty. Another way of putting it is that they are unable to “accept their fate”. Not all of them will necessarily agree with this assessment right away, perhaps because they might not have even thought to think of it in these terms. And it’s not always the right assessment either.
But in some sense, for many people, this is The Big Struggle. They want to find their own way. They want to find their own voice. They are conflicted about this, partially because it’s scary and unfamiliar territory. As a child they might’ve felt comfortable just going along with whatever their family and/or friends want, but as they grow older there’s a growing sense of dissonance, a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that something has to change.
Sometimes there’s a literal dissenting voice inside – often alluded to in movies like Moana (“And nothing on Earth can silence / the quiet voice still inside you”), and Frozen ("Are you someone out there / who's a little bit like me? / Who knows deep down / I'm not where I'm meant to be?"). And you can’t hide from this voice forever, because it’ll gnaw at you.
Tali is a character from the Mass Effect Trilogy, which I highly recommend playing.
“Bad decisions” often make more sense as willful acts of sovereignty.
Sometimes when parents struggle to understand their teenagers, I think it’s because they aren’t adequately considering that their child – their once-adoring little baby – is struggling with the desire for sovereignty.
I believe this explains why teenagers will sometimes make “terrible decisions” like weird haircuts and fashion choices, tattoos, cigarettes, drugs, and date “bad boys” and so on. They usually know that it’s not the smartest or wisest decision to make in the grand scheme of things. But what’s important to them at the moment is that they exercise their sovereignty, to make decisions that are theirs.
If you’re a parent who’s suppressive and controlling, your teenager’s desire for sovereignty may be likelier to express itself in shocking, startling, unexpected ways. So what you have to do – which can be difficult, and scary, is to give them some space to make their own mistakes, and to be clear to them that you love them no matter what, and that they can trust you, and that you’ll listen to them.
Spoiler: This entire dynamic plays out internally within yourself, too.
What people struggle with:
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me."
– Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Guilt and shame about having the desire for sovereignty at all
This is especially true for people who’ve been raised in cultures or contexts that prioritize social cohesion over personal wants and needs. I’ve come to see that it’s a sort of false dichotomy.
Because it’s very difficult to properly serve your family or community if you’re not being true to yourself. When people fail to recognize this, they can get overly self-sacrificial, and the parts of themselves with unmet needs may lash out at their loved ones in cruel and abusive ways.
Sometimes – and this will be a recurring thing too – it can be easier to appreciate the importance of sovereignty when you think about other people rather than yourself. A lot of people who struggle to value their own independence, their own desires, etc will jump to defend a friend whose sovereignty is under attack. That’s because you can see that your friend deserves to have their needs met. It can be harder to see that you are a person too, you too are one of your friends, and you too deserve to have your needs met, even if only so you can better perform your duties to others. I don’t think it’s healthy to think of yourself entirely as a vehicle for serving others, but if that’s the frame you’re working with, you can still make progress without radically changing the frame overnight.
Many people go years, sometimes even their entire lives, without facing the truth of their experience. There’s a bit in The Body Keeps The Score (great book) that talks about “cover stories” – how people who survive trauma or abuse often come up with some kind of cover story to explain their symptoms and behavior, but this “rarely captures the inner truth of the experience”. It might seem rude to say this about people who are struggling, but, with love, in a way we bullshit ourselves to cope with the pain. And of course, if we’re bullshitting ourselves, then we can’t help but bullshit others as well. The challenge is to try to remain gentle and kind throughout all of this, to ourselves and each other.
✱
What you can do:
"To damage the sovereignty of the individual is to replace a community inspired by love, benevolence, and beauty, by another based solely on power."
– Anwar Sadat, former Egyptian President, Nobel Peace Prize winner
Acknowledge that the desire for sovereignty is real, normal, and even good.
[[Confront the Minotaur]]. It can often be inconvenient, but it is what it is, and pretending otherwise will lead to all sorts of frustrations with secondary effects. If you don’t schedule time for rest, it will be scheduled for you, unexpectedly, in the form of injury. (Foreshadowing: [[Exhaustion funnels]]!) If you don’t schedule time for maintenance, it will be scheduled for you, unexpectedly, in the form of malfunction. Similarly, if you don’t consciously acknowledge your desire for sovereignty, and be proactive about it, it will express itself in ugly or dysfunctional ways. Binge-eating, excessive drinking, substance abuse, being caustic and hurtful towards other people – all of these can be ways that the repressed parts of you “act out” to express their sovereignty, in defiance of your authoritarianism.
Sometimes it’s something relatively benign, like staying up all night on the Internet, or playing lots of video games. “Revenge bedtime procrastination”. You’re not really hurting yourself or anybody else, right? Sure. But if you’re not careful, you start to live a double-life, a fragmented life, and the dissonance between your conscious outlook and your “shadow sovereignty” creates a tension that will manifest in your body (aching shoulders and stomach issues are a recurring thing), in your mind (your internal monologue starts to get more bitter and sarcastic), and diminish your enjoyment of life in general.
Wake up!! This is your life! This is not a practice life, this is it! Are you living it the way you want to be living?
Sit with the question, “what do I want?”
[[Ask Questions]]. And if you’re comfortable thinking of yourself as a plurality of selves – for every person is a bundle of conflicting drives, motivations, interests, and so on – you might ask, “what do we want?” And here I recommend making a “silly” list of every stray thought that comes to your mind. You could start with your body – would you like to cut or color your hair?
Any thoughts about tattoos or piercings? You could think about the environment you live in. Would you like some posters on the walls? Do you like your clothes? What are the books you’re reading? Is there some kind of music you’d like to get into? You don’t need to arrive at dramatic, powerful answers immediately – the inquiry is the point. Take your time to get to know yourself and your interests.
Do little experiments.
A seemingly trivial thing I like to recommend to people is that they deliberately experiment with making tiny little “inconsequential” decisions in daily life. This is meant to introduce novelty, and to familiarize you with the experience of taking ownership for yourself, your actions. For example, try a different flavor of candy, or soda. Try ordering something different from your usual food place that you’ve never tried before. Decide to watch a bad movie or tv show in a different genre than you’re usually familiar with.
Turn it into a game – try to make 100 little decisions.
[[Do 100 thing]]. Write down each thing that you’ve done, in a notepad or in your phone notes app. Maybe even tweet about it – if you make a Twitter thread, I’d be happy to share it with other supportive people! Each time you do a thing, articulate your thoughts about the experience. It’s perfectly okay if it turns out that you were disappointed, found it underwhelming, bad, and so on. That’s good, actually! Go into detail about precisely why it’s bad. This is how you develop a sensitivity to your own taste. And your taste and sovereignty are quite a bit related!
It helps tremendously to know what kind of life you want. You don’t need to have a great or perfect idea – even the vaguest of ideas can be helpful. This is something you figure out as you go, the same way you learned how to walk, and talk. You have to start by crawling and babbling. There is absolutely no shame in that. You got this.
✱
Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?
Here is a thematically relevant thread from Twitter that I felt like including in this section.
My answer to the vaguely defeatist "well who's to say what's right and wrong" is something like: I decide what is right and wrong within the domain of my life; I take responsibility and ownership of that, and if it turns out I was mistaken, I make amends and revise my views.
Outside the domain of my personal life, when I share contexts with other people, I am mindful about trying to discern what the history is, what the norms are, what other people believe. When I conduct myself in this space artfully, effectively, other people respect my decisions.
"Not all people will respect all of my decisions, but that's okay. If they have any useful feedback I'll take it into consideration. I make sure to respect other people's autonomy and freedom as much as possible. Nobody is obliged to do as I ask. But many freely choose to do so, because they trust and respect me.
Sometimes there will be instances where– what I believe is right is contradicted by the prevailing social orthodoxy. Sometimes it's worth asserting myself. Sometimes it's better to bide my time, talk to individuals privately, build consensus, and make small, manageable bets.
Through decades of reflection, conversation, journalling, interrogation, introspection, I have developed a healthy relationship with myself, and with my understanding of my own biases, my failures, and the limits of my knowledge. I seek a diverse set of allies who can help me with my weaknesses.
After all this, there's a chance that I will sometimes make bad calls. but I have learned from bitter experience that it's better to occasionally make bad calls than to live in chronic fear and anxiety of the possibility of making bad calls— while not making any good ones.
You are already the monarch of your own life. You are already presiding over what is right and wrong inside your heart, about the way you conduct yourself day to day, privately, with yourself, within yourself. That's the arena that you practice in.
honor your sovereignty
You have just as much a right to be here as anybody else.
There is a part inside each of us that desires to be free, autonomous, sovereign.
We want to go somewhere, do something, be somebody.
If we deny this part of us, it will plot and scheme to come out, often against our wishes.
The more harshly we seek to deny and oppress it, the harsher it will rebel against our authority. Authority it considers illegitimate.
Or worse, it may give up entirely, and leave us cold, abandoned, dispirited.
We are each part of stories and structures greater than us, that is true.
We have responsibilities and obligations, that too is true.
But we cannot sacrifice our human spirit on the altar of productivity, or of social acceptance.
That is too high a cost to bear.
Rather, we must honor and nourish our spirit, even as we deal with life’s struggles.
You are already the monarch of your life.
Your task is to treat your populace – that’s you! – with fairness, kindness, decency, respect.
When we treat all parts of ourselves fairly, and with grace, there is peace, and then there is joy.
Execute the jailbreak
“Soldiers!
Don't give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel!
Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder!
Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
You are not machines!
You are not cattle!
You are men!”
– Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
Life can feel like a jail sometimes.
A bunch of it is the constraints of life: parents, school, work, bills, and so on. And yes, a big part of the point of Introspect is to help you get better at dealing with those challenges. There are many “external prisons” that need work to deal with, some of which – gender, ethnicity, etc – may not be up to you, are too large to be dismantled in a lifetime. You have to figure out your finances, your physical health, your relationships, your schedule.
Different people struggle with this to different degrees. It can all seem relentless, overwhelming. (We’ll get into this later in [[unlearn catastrophizing.]]) To be clear, I’m not claiming that you can simply think your way out of systemic oppression. But amongst those of us who are moderately oppressed by our struggles, there’s a huge range of responses people have, and while some of the better responses might be out of reach in the moment, it’s worthwhile to try and get to the best responses you can have in the moment, so that you can grow towards the better ones.
Your bad love to yourselves maketh solitude a prison to you."
– Nietzsche, Zarathustra's Prologue, XVI
To me, the worst prison is the one you put up inside yourself.
When you have become the jailer of your own feelings, your own expression. That’s the jail I most want to help you break. Once you break out of that one, you can start having a little more freedom and agency to help free other people – whether by directing your additional time and energy towards social issues, or even simply just by demonstrating what it looks like to be a joyous free agent yourself.
Here is a quote via The Drama of The Gifted Child, from a 40-year-old woman, Pia, who “after a long depressive phase accompanied by suicidal thoughts, was at last able to express and justify her long-suppressed rage”… After “a period full of grief and tears”, she said:
“The world has not changed. There is so much evil and meanness all around me, and I see it even more clearly than before. Nevertheless, for the first time I find life really worth living. Perhaps this is because, for the first time, I have the feeling that I am really living my own life. And that is an exciting adventure. On the other hand, I can understand my suicidal ideas better now, especially those I had in my youth – when it seemed pointless to carry on – because in a way I had always been living a life that wasn’t mine, that I didn’t want, that I was willing to throw away.”
What a tremendous thing Pia experienced. My hope is that I can, with this book, provide you with tools, thoughts, perspectives and encouragement to help you similarly have your own emotional breakthroughs and see that your life is yours, and that is an exciting adventure.
Let’s talk about some specific examples of what “the jail” can feel like.
I remember one was, “I don’t have any right to have fun. I don’t deserve to. I can’t have fun when I have all this debt, and I have all these obligations from work.” This was a trap, and a self-defeating one – because it’s not like I was actually working 24/7, anyway! My subconscious “shadow sovereignty” wouldn’t allow this. And I was in denial about this. Which made everything worse.
What I wish an older version of myself did for me, was stop me and say...
“Hey kid. Listen. Realistically, it’s not possible for you to do more than 4 hours of good work a day. You’re in this for the long haul, so you’re going to have to pace yourself. You should set realistic expectations. (I didn’t know what was realistic for me when I was younger, I know now through trial and error: 4 good hours, if I’m extraordinarily lucky! Even 2 hours a day is a tremendous triumph.)
You should have clear boundaries between work and play. And you should make sure to set aside time for play, because if you don’t nourish your soul, then you will sink into an ugly depression, and you won’t be able to get any work done anyway.
Pick out things you love – movies you want to watch, friends you want to meet, books you want to read. Set aside some time for simple pleasures, and set aside some time to do interesting work for yourself that you truly love. These are not crummy concessions to feel guilty about, they are investments in your soul! They will light the beacon of your heart and turn your life into a lighthouse of joy! And that is a big, big part of how you break out of holding yourself hostage.” [[put the gun down]].
✱
What people struggle with:
"The man's been in here 50 years. This is all he knows. In here, he's an important man. He's an educated man.
Outside, he's nothing. Just a used-up con with arthritis in both hands.
Probably couldn’t get a library card if he tried. [...] I'm telling you, these walls are funny.
First you hate 'em.
Then you get used to them.
Enough time passes, you get dependent on them.
That's institutionalized."
– Red, The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Everybody deals with some set of constraints. Nobody experiences perfect freedom. But still, most of us have some degree of freedom, however limited. And that’s what you might want to focus on.
A sense of helplessness
The jail can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. It just seems so impossibly, incomprehensibly large and complex, which makes it seem inescapable. And so many people give up. Many people decide to settle for some sort of compromise with their psychological captors – the classic trade being freedom for security. “It’s okay if I’m miserable because life is miserable. At least I am safe. My joy is not important.”
Truly horrible circumstances
There are some people whose circumstances are so terrible that this is almost the only choice they have. I hear this a lot from the children of immigrant parents, people whose parents or grandparents survived war, occupation, colonization and so on. The spirit of life is worn thin, reduced to a flicker. It’s very sad to see. And you can’t help them all. But you can try to help yourself, and try to be an example for others in your life so that they might help themselves too.
(If this is you, I’m sorry if the material in this book is not quite enough to help you climb out of the pit that you’re in. But I hope that it provides you with some comfort, some tactics and skills that can at least make your experience a little more bearable.)
What you can do:
"Would you like to hear an epic Love story? You. Healing. From all of it. And living free."
– Jaiya John, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution
Appreciate that jailbreak takes time, and that it can happen in bits and pieces.
The jailbreak metaphor isn’t quite perfect, because “breaking out of jail” is a very binary thing – you’re either in jail, or you’re not. In practice, it’s more like you… have many different shackles on. And if you’re thrashing about in them, you can get burns from the chains. The thing to do is to break one shackle at a time.
Articulate your challenges in as much detail as possible.
Articulate precisely how you feel trapped. Go into as much detail as you can. Developing a model of the prison – social, material, emotional, conceptual – is a great start. [[Journaling]] is a good way to do this.
I specifically remember writing some really bleak, despair-laden blogposts when I was feeling trapped. I wrote one titled “a man lives in a box”. It would be two more years before I wrote another one titled “execute the jailbreak”, which is now the title of this section. And that’s an interesting thing for me to reflect on. If I hadn’t first written the blogpost about feeling like I was trapped in a box, I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to writing about breaking out of it – and I might not have written this book, either. So in a way, my despair turned out to be useful. Which isn’t to say that all despair will be useful, there’s no way of knowing that. But wouldn’t it be nice to allow life to surprise us?
Celebrate the little things.
[[Celebrate Your Wins]]. This might seem trivial, but it can make all the difference. I believe that it’s important to hold on to small hopes and little joys. Big ones can be difficult to hold when times are tough. But little things can go a long way.
Find healthier ways to frame things.
[[Framing]]. Some things will improve just by changing the way you think about things, changing what you focus on, how you spend your time and attention. Think about good times you’ve had in the past. Can you believe that it’s possible that you will have one more good day in the future?
Free up space by eliminating “bad” stuff.
I definitely recommend doing an audit where you eliminate as much “bad” from your life as possible. One of the fastest and most powerful ways to do this is to change your information diet. Unfollow all celebrities, all news outlets. You can follow them back again later in a month or so if you want to. This might be challenging if you’re using some of this as a coping mechanism, which we’ll get into in Act III. [[Investigate your copes]].
Acknowledge that it will be painful.
If you feel angry or sad about it, feel the feelings! Getting started on building the model of your psychic prison can feel painful, because it draws your attention to the mess. Knowing this in advance will help with some of it. Pace yourself.
✱
When editing this chapter, I found myself thinking, if I were writing this book for myself now, I’m not sure if I would use the phrase “jailbreak” at all. Because I think that’s not quite the right frame to use (and we’ll talk about [[frames]] soon.). But I’m choosing to keep this phrase in this version of the book, because I’m writing this book primarily for a younger version of myself, and that version of myself absolutely felt like he was trapped in a psychic prison. So the jailbreak metaphor is necessary for him. But I will also subsequently say, you can get to a point where you don’t even think in terms of prisons anymore! The “bubbles” or “fog” metaphors might be better, in that they don’t have antagonistic associations.
✱
Your life is your life.
There’s a ZenPencils webcomic that I really love that’s stuck with me for years, based on words by Chris Hardwick. I think it probably directly informed the title of this section. Actually, the comic’s likely even informed the way I think about how to navigate the world and help people.
It’ll take you maybe 3-4 minutes to read, I highly recommend it:
execute the jailbreak
Sometimes life can feel like a jail sentence.
Your body-mind can feel more like a prison than a playground.
This gets worse if you’re tired, have dependants to feed and care for, if you have health problems, when there are bills to pay – the list can go on and on.
Your previous attempts to escape this may have failed, sometimes horribly, painfully.
You may be feeling helpless. You may feel that you have been forsaken.
I remember my version of what that felt like.
I remember oscillating between sadness, anger, numbness.
I remember smoking and drinking to excess, trying to escape from myself and my circumstances, even if only a little bit, for a little while.
I remember feeling like I spent all of my effort just to stay afloat, and like I could never make any real progress on anything that mattered.
All the images of the shiny happy people felt like mockery.
I don’t have a magic solution to sell you. All I can do is be honest about my own experience.
I can tell you that I made it out of my jail. And that it was difficult, laborious, and painful.
But it was worth it.
I wrote this book because I believe that if it was possible for me, it must be possible for others.
Refusal of the call: Face your inner conflict
“Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
The Matrix (1999 film)
It’s absolutely okay to face resistance. In fact, you should expect it.
I’m writing this book with the assumption that you are going to go on your personal journey, whatever it is. Or that you’re already on it. It’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge, though, that it isn’t easy, and that it’s very normal for people to feel like they don’t want to do it. To experience what Stephen Pressfield calls “The Resistance”. Leaving one’s comfort zone is unpleasant. Opening up is unpleasant. It’s chaotic, and chaos is overwhelming, unsettling, frightening.
I’m including this section in the book to be honest about the reality of the journey. It’s often tempting to tell stories where the hero is just incredibly perfect and powerful and makes no mistakes, but those are uninteresting stories, unrealistic stories. Life is full of conflict, and so we will invariably be conflicted ourselves. We will even be conflicted about how to deal with our conflicts. That’s all part of the frustration, and all part of the fun.
✱
Be honest with yourself about what is happening.
I think the thing about the Refusal of the Call – and this is going to be a recurring theme throughout this book – is that the best thing to do is to be honest with yourself about what’s happening.
“I don’t want to open up because then all the china will crash to the floor” is a great first step, identifying and acknowledging the reality of the situation. And these metaphors are helpful! You can think about how you would want to open up if you have to, with the least possible damage. You might put some kind of soft mattress below the crockery. You might get someone else to stand by, ready to catch the falling plates. You might have to accept that there will be some damage, and be prepared to sweep up the broken plates. Or maybe you might have to do something even more complicated like slowly tilt the entire cupboard backwards onto it’s back, which is quite a tedious operation that you will definitely need help with.
There is a wisdom in being afraid.
I think what I’m trying to say here is, there’s often some kind of wisdom to the refusal of the call. This too will be a recurring theme. An interesting bit I noticed in Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces is how it talks about folklore where threshold guardians destroy people who attempt to cross them when they aren’t ready. Well, so, when will you know when you’re ready?
You can’t ever be completely sure – there is always a risk, there is always an ultimate leap-of-faith after all the preparation. (PS: Watch Into The Spider-Verse!)
People are often compelled to think about things in binary terms, as if some action is either good or bad, right or wrong. That’s bad [[framing]]. The truth of things is often very contextual.
The part of you that wants to open up is trying to help you. The part of you that doesn’t want to open up is also trying to help you, albeit in a different way. Beating yourself up about this will not help. [[Put the gun down.]]
Make it safe to listen to yourself.
Your task is to listen to all of the parts of you, get a sense of their concerns and priorities, and seek solutions that lead to better outcomes for all. You might not get it perfect the first time, or even the hundredth time, or ever, but it’s worth trying. It’s worth failing, too. [[Embrace your failures]]. Dust yourself off, get up and try again. As long as you don’t give up, every failed attempt has lessons to teach you about how to do better.
What people struggle with:
"What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”
– Eugene Gendlin
Denial – “Eh, I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong with me.”
There’s a really tricky thing that happens with language here, and that’s the implicit assumption that if there’s something “wrong”, then there’s “Something Wrong With Me”. This is an overly black-and-white model of things. You’re not either Perfectly Fine or Irredeemably Broken. We’re all typically somewhere between. The way to reframe this is to see that you can be lovely just the way you are, imperfections and all, while also having “happy little accidents” that you can work to disentangle.
Some people are in denial about the call. And to be clear I’m not saying “you’re definitely in denial about this” – I have no way of knowing that! But I can tell you a little bit about what it was like for me to be in denial myself, and you can see for yourself if there are any parallels.
When I was a teenager, I used to insist, both to myself and to others, that I was a
happy-go-lucky, relaxed, fun guy. That’s the sort of guy that I wanted to be, and so that’s what I focused on.
At some level I think I inherited the idea that it would be weak to get flustered emotionally about anything, and that if I presented myself as weak, as a man, I would be socially penalized for it. It’s really interesting to look back on now, because I was simultaneously very passionate about
lots of things – music, art, grand ideas and so on. I do remember being righteously angry about some social issues. But if you asked me “are you an emotional person,” there would’ve been contexts where I’d have denied it, because I had this simplistic dichotomy in my head where you’re either “rational” or “emotional”, which is a far too binary way of thinking about it. I think I might have sometimes said “I’m passionate!”, which in retrospect was a pretty good reframe at the time, actually. (It’s interesting to dig into: it’s not like they’re conceptually very different, but they had different connotations.)
I’ve found that some people beat themselves up at the threshold – they can’t decide whether to “take the leap” or not, whether this life is “for them”. I think this is another instance of overly binary thinking. Take [[baby steps]]! You don’t have to either stay in a bubble or go on an extremely perilous journey. You can go on little micro-adventures. Do little experiments.
A sense of unworthiness – “I’m not good enough.”
Another thing that comes to mind is that some people feel that they’re “not worthy”, that they’re “not ready”, they’re “not good enough”. I actually think that this feeling is a good thing, and it never truly goes away, and that’s a good thing too. Self-doubt is a sign that you care about things. That it matters to you that the person responsible for taking care of business is actually qualified. I respect that.
I wouldn’t pressure anybody to try and rush through their feelings about this. It takes time to process. It took me a few years. There are quite a few dead ends. If I could get a message to my past self, it would be something like… don’t give up. Don’t quit. It’s okay to be disheartened but don’t let it wipe you out completely. Always carry a little bit of hope with you, as a hedge. [[cultivate your optimism]].
✱
What you can do:
“It’s time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big questions: Who are you, and what do you want?”
– Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Practice being kind to yourself. Be patient.
Understand that in the grandest scheme of things, you are like a little baby learning how to walk, or talk. You need to try and provide yourself with a nurturing environment. To do that, it helps to develop a sense of your own personality. What’s worked well for you, historically? [[Journal]]!
Make a list! [[Investigate your desires]]. It can help to talk to trusted friends and ask them about this. I particularly enjoy late night conversations about this, sometimes over a glass of wine, when the mood gets quiet and reverent.
Cultivate the good vibes you want. Media is a good place to start.
If you don’t have any trusted friends, it might help to read a few books, watch a few movies, get a sense of the vibes that you like. Some people respond well to “tough love”, some respond terribly to it. I’m going to err on the side of being more gentle and cautious, because this is a book. With my friends, sometimes I spot windows of opportunity where I know they’ll respond well to me being unusually insistent – but that requires me to have knowledge of them and their context.
Confront your self-flagellation, and gently say, “let’s not do that.”
[[Put the gun down]]. When I review my own journals, I find that I often used to beat myself up too hard. It’s tacky, cruel, and worst of all, it’s not even effective! Your media diet may have been different than mine, but I find that bravado is often overblown, particularly for men – there’s often this play-acted tough guy vibe that goes too far. You can aspire to bravado, and work towards it, but beating yourself up for failing is tricky business that you should be careful with. Honestly, life is hard enough without you taking up arms against yourself. What you actually want to do is to be genuinely curious about why you failed, and truly understand what happened, so that you can take steps to prevent it from happening again. [[Ask questions]].
Plot to earn your own self-respect, by doing things that you respect.
What do you do if you’re not someone who self-flagellates, but instead has the opposite problem? What if you’re a lazy bum, a sloth, an avoider? I remember being that myself too, earlier on, and I still slip into that mode from time to time. If you’re truly happy being that, then I’d say, enjoy yourself. Life’s a trip, man. Enjoy the ride. But if there’s some nagging feeling within you, some sense of discontent, then I think it’s likelier that you ought to try and earn your own self-respect. Seek a little novelty. Do something you haven’t done before. Challenge yourself – not to beat on yourself, but to see what you are capable of. Make a list of things that you would respect yourself for doing, and then find ways to do those things. If the thing is hard,
do the smallest, simplest possible version of it as a start. [[Baby steps!]] If you want to get fit, for example, doing even a single pushup is a start. It might not seem like it, but 1 pushup is infinitely more than 0, and a stepping stone to 2. And that’s truly, genuinely worth celebrating. [[Celebrate your wins]].
✱
honor your resistance
Some people will tell you that you are a sucker for resisting, that you’re weak, a quitter, a loser. Worst of all, you might say this to yourself.
I won’t do that.
I think it’s a wisdom in your body that chooses to resist.
I respect that wisdom.
I would be wary of people who are “fearless” in a naive, ignorant way.
Even if they’re good people, their naivete can be a weakness that allows them to be hijacked by hostile agents.
It’s good if you’re scared.
That’s a sign that you’re sane.
We will have to honor that fear as we walk the path.
There’s a good chance the fear is overblown. That’s quite normal. You will learn to calibrate your fear by negotiating with it.
You will earn the right to a healthier state by demonstrating to your fear that you are becoming someone who can take care of business.
Once you demonstrate that, even your fear – the oldest and most powerful emotion in your body – will release its hold on you, and instead keep a fruitful watch on the sidelines as your trusted companion.
Now for some unedited rambling
I’m going to share some of my own unedited introspection here, from a low moment while working on this book. I choose to include it because I want to convey my sincere belief that everybody struggles sometimes, including people who write books about how to deal with struggles.
I’ll be honest: this book has been kicking my ass. It’s quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s difficult, scary, overwhelming. I’ve written over a million words, over a thousand blogposts, over 160,000 tweets, had thousands of conversations with people, but somehow this is harder. I held down a job for 5.5 years where I had deadlines and obligations and meetings and so on, and somehow this feels harder. Maybe there’s a recency bias to it. But I do think that this is the most ambitious project I’ve ever undertaken, and it became clear to me pretty early on that it’s too big for me to handle. Carl Jung started writing his Red Book in his late 30s, and it took him almost 20 years to complete. I’m only 31, and I’m not Carl Jung. And I know it sounds arrogant and dramatic to say “this is my Red Book”, but it kind of is, although it surely “falls short” in multiple dimensions. But nevertheless this is what I have, this is who I am, this is where I’m at, and this is what I’m doing. And so even as I whine and gripe and grovel and cry internally about it, I’m going to lovingly drag myself to the finish line.
I think I want to talk a bit about the specifics of the stresses involved. At one level, this book is meant to be a collection of tips and suggestions to help people with their personal challenges. But I can summarize that stuff in a few sentences, it’s maybe about 20 tweets or so. I’ve summarized it in a separate document, I summarize it again at the end of the book, I will summarize it over and over again as part of my process of figuring it out. That’s what Do 100 Thing is about. And yet there’s a part of me that thinks, that’s not enough. Simply giving people a bunch of tips is not enough. When I was growing up I remember reading all sorts of tips and tricks and lifehacks and so on, but it never quite
seemed enough.
What was missing? I think what was missing was a sense of the internal workings of the matter. It’s about emotions, it’s about feelings, it’s about vibes. And so I’m including this section – and maybe I’ll include another section like this later in the book, I’m just freestyling here – because I think it’s important to break from the structure of the book to make an effort to represent the unstructured freestyle of the semi-subconscious mind bursting through. The thing I wanted to know so bad, when I was a teenager, was what the fuck this stuff is like from the inside. This is also part of why I’ve resisted the idea of getting an editor for this book. There’s something about this particular book to me that feels like it should be written independently. Maybe that’s conceit on my part. Maybe it’s
cowardice. Nevertheless I’ve reflected on it and it feels correct to me. Part of what makes this book different from other books is that there was no editor. It’s just me. I did get some feedback from friends early on, which was really helpful, and I might get my wife
to read the final draft when I print it.
I can tell you about some of the things that are annoying me about this book. It’s already too long, for starters, and yet simultaneously it doesn’t say enough. There’s so much I’m leaving unsaid– there are some things I can’t remember, there are some things I might not even be consciously aware of. And I repeat myself a bunch of times, more than is elegant. But I’m realizing that I simply don’t currently possess the skill to resolve this right now. I might need to write and publish several more books before I gain the embodied insight I need to make this book the book that I want it to be. If I’m not careful, I could let this book languish in the drafts for 20, 30 more years. But I’m choosing to try and get it to a point that I find tolerable, and publish it within the next
few days.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of ruins. The idea that cities are sometimes (often?) built on top of the ruins of older cities, and that maybe books are written on top of the ruins of older books. When Steven Spielberg was 17, he made a sci-fi film called Firelight, on a budget of $500. It was sort of an early practice run for his subsequent films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. I suppose you could say this is my Firelight. There are things that I can only know about how to write a book after I’ve written one. My first ebook, Friendly Ambitious Nerd, isn’t really a book at all – it’s more of a collection of blogposts and twitter threads. And I won’t be surprised if some people say, well, FAN was better than INTROSPECT, because it was easier to read, less convoluted, less complicated, less tedious, less noisy, less messy. And yet I have to say… all of this mess is important. I can’t entirely explain why yet. But it’s important. And including this section in this book is important too, I just realized this in the shower earlier. Because it’s what I do that’s different than what almost every other goddamn book seems to do. While I recognize the value of tight and sharp editing, purpose-driven writing, clear telegraphing and so on, I also recognize the value of chaos. But using chaos artfully is hard. I can’t claim to be good at it. All I can say is that I’m trying.
What I would really appreciate, actually, is if someone reading this book found this particular section more valuable than the others.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s enough if that someone is me.
ACT II. The Sword and the Thread
“I like to think of every person's being linked to God from the morning of birth to the night of his death by an invisible thread, a thread which is unique for each one of us, a thread which can never be broken. Never broken or taken away, but a thread which can easily slip from our grasp and, search for it as we may, elude us... To be on our thread is... to be in touch with the Self.”
– Irene Claremont de Castillejo (1973)
To me, the Ace of Swords represents new ideas, new beginnings, new projects, new plans and breakthroughs. Decisiveness, strength and power.
This Act is where you “receive the sword and training” for your quest.
Which is really a set of helpful ideas and suggestions on what you should (maybe) be doing. We won’t yet focus directly on the really difficult challenges – that’s in Act III – although we’ll certainly encounter them in passing.
The Legend of Zelda (1986)
There are a couple of ways of thinking about this Act. From one angle, as I said, I think of it as the “training sequence” – the part where you learn the skills you will need to triumph. But more importantly…
Act II is also about learning to manage your psychology: The Hard Thing.
Because the question is, how do you keep showing up for the training, day in, day out? How do you persist? How do you stay motivated? That’s a matter of managing your psychology! It’s about the story you tell yourself. It’s about how you choose to respond to failure and disappointment. Everything else is “just” logistics – pushing buttons, pulling levers, putting one foot in front of the other. Which isn’t easy, but it’s much easier than managing your psychology.
“By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience.” – Ben Horowitz
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an example of someone who I think everyone can agree is indefatigably motivated and focused on his goals. How does he do it? He made a TikTok answering this question, and I think it’s worth sharing his answer in full:
“What is it that I do to power myself through being tired and fatigued, and sometimes train late at night? Like so many of you guys out there, we are busy, we are on this treadmill of life, there’s no stop button… we are going and going, we’re fatigued, we’re tired, we have babies, bills to pay, school to go to, jobs, relationships, a lot of the stuff that just makes us tired throughout the day. It happens: I’m tying my shoes, and I think shit, I should just call it a night. No one’s ever gonna know… I try to remember what it was like when I didn’t have much at all, those “7 bucks” days, usually that gets my ass in gear. When I think back to the days, and what it took to get into the position that I’m in now. If that doesn’t motivate me, I’ll ask myself, how bad a motherfucker do you think you are? How bad do you think you are? I have this conversation with myself. “Alright it’s up to you. Go prove it. No one’s watching, no one will know.” Usually by then, I’m like, “fuck you, I’m ready to go.” That is the kind of stuff I tell myself, which is ultimately why I need therapy.”
Through trial and error, you will eventually develop your own style.
Now, I don’t necessarily think that you should try to copy Dwayne’s style. Nor should you try to copy my style, either. You probably won’t get very far by imitating either of us too much. What you need to do is figure out your own style. What works for you, your personality.
While the specifics of the language you use should differ, I think the general principle to observe here is that Dwayne is making a proactive effort to manage his psychology. You don’t become The Rock by just sorta casually going about your days, allowing whim and circumstance to kick you around into a life you didn’t particularly choose.
Again, I’m not saying that you should try to become The Rock, or even necessarily be Rock-like in your own domain. I’m trying to help you see that there’s a slider here that you can experiment with. And that it’s very unlikely that you inherited a position on your slider that’s perfectly calibrated for you. So experiment with it! Try lots of little things. Fiddle around, try to surprise yourself.
Overview of Act II:
Act II of INTROSPECT is about learning the skills you will need in order to do the difficult work you have ahead of you (which we will get into in Act III and IV). The skills themselves are fairly simple, you could teach them to children. The challenge is to learn them in parallel, which is why I’ve written a section summary.
Act II is a whole lotta grinding. I believe it's both necessary and worthwhile, because at each step of the way you should become stronger, more powerful, more confident, and these are the things I believe you need to do before you confront the harsher, uglier shit down the road.
Practice stream-of-consciousness journaling
Journaling is the "ball of thread" that will allow you to trace your path into the abyssal labyrinth of your subconscious, and back out again. You want to create a space where you can practice outrunning the censors of your conscious mind. What’s exhilarating is, beyond their reach, you will discover a richer, more complex, more beautiful, more powerful version of yourself, waiting to come to life.
Learn storytelling to encourage yourself
We are all living in stories. Do you like yours? If you don’t, you can change it! We are the directors and producers of the movie of our lives. We can study the stories that move us, and reverse-engineer them to move ourselves, to live stories that we're proud of. What makes us root for characters? How can we live our lives in a way that makes us root for our success? Embedded in our favorite stories – the ones that make us feel – are the clues to our inner motivations.
Experiment with your frames
It is sometimes possible to experience a genuine increase in a sense of felt freedom just by changing how you frame your reality. What’s a frame? Consider how a photograph is always constrained within a frame. We are similarly always framing everything all the time with our attention. As with our stories, we can experiment with our frames. We can choose to zoom in, zoom out, change the angle, shake it all about. You can sometimes solve difficult problems simply by changing how you frame it. Later in the book we will talk about this as “reconceptualizing”.
Unlearn catastrophizing → learn project management
A lot of catastrophic thinking can be framed as the inability to make sense of reality, being overwhelmed by chaos. Practice articulating your problems as precisely as you can, and it will begin to become clearer what you should focus on. That’s where projects come in. A project is anything that requires collaboration, even if it's “only” between you-today and you-tomorrow.
Collaboration is deeply humanizing! It’ll make you feel more powerful, confident, expand your sense of self, and the world feels like it opens up to you.
Take baby steps
Cathedrals are built one brick at a time. The process of a baby learning to walk is fundamentally no different than an Olympic gymnast learning to do a triple backflip. The gymnast just never stopped learning. People can go from feeling extremely incompetent to feeling extremely competent just by taking baby steps persistently. It's one of the critical levers I've recurrently found useful in helping to shift people's perspectives, increase their sense of power, and getting them unstuck in their lives.
Do 100 things
To do anything well, you have to first do it poorly. The cool thing about being prolific is that you build a body of work in the process, and that's something that you can inhabit, explore, and share with others. You cultivate confidence and knowledge. You learn to collaborate with yourself. You start to feel less anxious about any particular mistake.
Ask questions
You can actually navigate your life by framing everything as a set of questions. The point is not to arrive at final answers (though you may find some good ones!), the point is to live out the questions. Having interesting questions on-hand makes life interesting as well. There is a quest in every query. And having compelling quests makes life enjoyable.
Practice solving problems
Problems are inevitable. Problems are also solvable. (Deutsch). A problem well-stated is half-solved. It's very lucrative to get into the habit of defining and solving problems. Big
problems are often made up of smaller problems. And just as with questions, you can think of your life as an infinite set of interesting problems to solve. (Dark side: some people find this overwhelming. But that’s actually a project management problem. Which can be solved!)
Investigate your desires
I believe that real desire comes from the "heart", or somewhere within, "a quiet voice still inside you". People do struggle with some complexity here because we can inherit desires from other people, via parents, peers and other benevolent plagues. It can take a long time to discern false
desires from genuine ones. But the effort is worthwhile. Developing clarity about your innermost desires makes everything else easier to manage and navigate.
Ask for help
A lot of effective introspection is about learning to ask yourself for help, and giving it. It also helps (ha) to practice this with other people. You can get good at asking and framing your requests in a way that makes it likelier that you will receive help. This is one of the most powerful skills you can learn in life: it will feel like the world magically becomes a more welcoming, supportive place.
Cultivate a sense of humor
A genuine sense of humor is a sacred thing to help navigate the tensions, frustrations and conflicts in life. Good humor is open, relaxed, gentle, silly. Life is absurd, and being able to laugh along with it (and at yourself!) can be a salve, a relief amidst the worst of despair. “Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.” (Watts) When you can laugh heartily with God at the dining table, what man can hurt you?
Embrace your mistakes
If you make music with your mistakes, they're not mistakes anymore. (Wooten). Many of us inherit hostile attitudes towards mistakes, and consider them embarrassing and shameful. This is a trap, and a counter-productive one! The challenge is to learn to appreciate mistakes as teaching tools, and to become a connoisseur of your mistakes (Dennett). A sufficiently intimate understanding of mistakes is indistinguishable from mastery. When you learn to love your fuckups, you become invincible.
Cultivate casual optimism
Genuine optimism involves being open to surprise, which takes courage and humility. It's less about blindly believing that things will go well, and more about being open to opportunities and possibilities. Even if you can’t necessarily get the outcomes you want, you can be optimistic that you’ll find a way to enjoy the ride. As you learn to relax and accept things as they are, you’ll find that people increasingly behave more warmly towards you.
Celebrate your wins
If you're not careful, life can get somewhat dreary and monotonous. It helps to cultivate a sense of occasion, to get in the habit of celebrating your wins, to have things to look forward to and be excited about. You should enjoy your life! When you learn to celebrate the little things, you can create pockets of joy in the midst of relentless despair. And you make it easier for you to persuade yourself to win more.
What people struggle with:
Sometimes people will actually reject receiving the sword and thread.
I think this is because it implies taking on responsibility. Once you have the metaphorical sword (and thread) in your hands, you’re no longer just a hapless villager – you are now some kind of warrior, someone who’s at least marginally equipped to face challenges. This itself can be daunting and unpleasant to people. It deviates from their self-image as helpless, weak, being the victim of forces beyond their control. And the thing is, it’s true! In the grand scheme of things we are all ultimately helpless, weak.
Sometimes, as Marianne Williamson put it, our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Why would anybody be afraid of being powerful? Because with great power comes great responsibility, and being responsible for things can be overwhelming. Every action you take (or not take) becomes drenched with meaning and consequence, and this can be a lot to bear.
Accumulating power complicates your social reality, which is jarring.
This is the challenge of adulthood in many ways, and part of why some people never want to grow up. But it never works. Staying too long in a stage of life that you no longer belong in has all sorts of costs that will eat you alive, turning you into a lifeless husk of a person. Sorry to be dramatic but I think it’s true!
I think sometimes people actually complicate things themselves, in order to protect themselves from ugly or uncomfortable truths. We use too many words, too many details, create a sort of fog-of-war in which we have plausible deniability for our inactions. The challenge is, this can be hard to distinguish from actual complexity. Life is seldom neatly black-and-white when it comes to serious matters. But we can make a series of small attempts, and slowly make progress that way.
Let’s get to it.
Experiment with stream-of-consciousness journaling
“If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.”
– Tony Benn, prolific diarist, respected British politician in the 1970s
A page of journaling from @steezykane when he was a child. Journaling is an excellent way for you to discover precisely how you’re deceiving yourself.
Journaling is one of the core tenets of this book, and if you take away little else from it, I’d like you to at least experiment a little bit with journaling for yourself.
The delightful, exhilarating thing about journaling is discovering – with our own hands and eyes
– that we are so much more than we typically think we are!
Write stuff down.
What is journaling? At the tactical, technical level, I’m talking about literally just writing down words however you can. Write down whatever you’re thinking. Whatever you’re feeling. Try to start writing and keep going, however stupid, silly, frivolous, annoying, or crazy it might seem. Where? Wherever you like! In a notebook. In your notes app on your phone. On your blog.
Record a video of yourself talking. Start tweeting from an anonymous account. Anything at all. And go fast.
Outrun your critic.
Done well, journaling is a way of outrunning your inner critic, your homeostasis engine, your mind’s propaganda department that tries to pretend that everything is stable and familiar.
Journaling is a way of executing the jailbreak. It might seem silly and trivial at the beginning, but over time it compounds into something remarkable. It’s the best way I know to see for yourself how your mind works. When it comes to your life, you are both the detective and the crime scene. There is a lot to be learned.
(By the way: dismissing creative work as frivolous – silly, trivial, pointless, unimportant – is part of how tyrants stay in power. This includes the tyrant within you.)
Everything is connected. It really is. It’s truly wack.
Here’s what I believe (and I’ve become more confident in this belief the more I talk to people, and the more reading I’ve done, and the more I’ve learned from my own journaling over time):
If you do barely anything with your life but take little notes every day – snapshots of your opinions, impressions, perspectives, predictions – and then you thread these notes over time, say, 10 years…
...by the end of it, if you reflect, review, corroborate, verify and discuss them with others, you will develop a robust, dynamic worldview. You will deeply appreciate the nature of human reality in a way that you cannot get from any single book or person or experience.
Doing this is incredibly valuable in many ways. Once you develop clarity about your perspective on the world, you can act in more intentional ways, and this will help you identify and be identified by other excellent people.
The thing about the ongoing process of journaling that you cannot get from reading a book is – your own relationship with your own writing changes over time. You read things you wrote that you thought were smart last year, but look stupid to you now. And vice versa.
Should everybody journal? Well, maybe writing lots of words is not for everyone. But I definitely recommend giving it a shot. I do think that most of us are kind of journaling anyway via our participation on the web. We journal with search queries and likes and favorites and clicks and so on. But this information is very poorly packaged for the user. It’s fragmented, and sometimes outright inaccessible. So it’s kind of like we’re journaling for the benefit of our corporate masters more than for ourselves!
In this frame, journaling for yourself is a radical act.
It’s an act of self-ownership, self-education. It’s about setting your own curriculum, defining your own worldview, deciding for yourself what is important. I personally think that this shouldn’t be outsourced to others. Your life is yours. You should be the one to decide what is meaningful to you.
But that’s my personal view. I’ve also since further come around to see that, okay, some of us are more maniacal about being “homebrew” with this stuff, and it does also make sense that different people should specialize in different things. Maybe you’re more into dance, or fitness, and that’s what you want to focus on instead. I would recommend that you adapt my journaling advice to suit what you’re naturally compelled to do. If you’re a dancer, maybe the thing to do is to record yourself dancing, so that you can watch your progress, and review it. You will learn a lot from that, too.
By the way, here’s a riff that came up in a conversation with someone who said he found it really helpful: “You should practice journaling in a way that lets you see yourself as a person, as just some guy like everybody else. Being an asshole to yourself violates your values, and causes
some if not most of the dissonance you're experiencing." Sometimes all you really need is to step outside yourself and see yourself from a wider perspective, and everything becomes clearer.
What people struggle with:
"In the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervor, this enthusiasm, produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work."
– Anais Nin
Frivolity and/or solemnity
There are two immediate, opposite extremes that come to mind. Some people think of journaling as frivolous, something silly that doesn’t accomplish anything. Writing in a diary? That’s so childish and pathetic! Others take it too seriously, and feel burdened and overwhelmed by the prospect of this immense, heavy project of self-authorship. Oh god, what if I make mistakes, what if I do it wrong? What if I misrepresent myself and end up becoming someone I don’t want to become?
I recommend being playful about it, on both counts. It’s kind of a big deal and it’s kind of also not. The thing is to have fun with it. Nothing you do or say ever has to define you entirely, you can always start over, do new things, choose differently. You could treat it as role-play. You don’t necessarily have to write from your own voice. After I wrote a few hundred journal entries, I found myself writing “fictional” dialogues between different characters I made up – characters that I now realize probably represent different facets of myself, with different goals, motivations and interests.
There’s something fascinating and beautiful to learn about yourself through exposure to these “frivolous” characters. At least one of the guys in my head was this very stern, solemn taskmaster sort of dude. Another was lazy and indifferent to authority, a sort of jester-clown figure. Getting to know these people within me helped me develop a lightness and casual confidence about myself. I know who I’m speaking on behalf of, I know their interests, I know their concerns. People ask me about this all the time: how do you exude such casual confidence? Well, I know myself. I know the material. It’s like I’ve watched all the episodes of the TV show of Me, and I can confidently quote from it at will.
Chaos
This is a “mid-game” problem. I wouldn’t worry about it too early. You can get to 100 pages of introspection without worrying about it, but once you get to several hundred pages it starts to become a concern. At this point you want to index your notes. Write evocative titles. Use directives. Ask questions. It’s good if you can start out with a simple index, but I wouldn’t worry
too much about it. Specifically, don’t let your worry about potential chaos keep you from getting started. Some amount of chaos is not a bad thing.
Repetitiveness
This is something that’s actually annoying me right now with my own journaling, and it’s not the first time (ha.)
I personally used to struggle quite a bit with this – and writing about it now, I realize it’s not the repetition itself that was the problem, but my assumptions and beliefs about what that repetition meant. (Foreshadowing: problems!) I used to think that repetition was a sign of "weakness". If I'm repeating myself about something, doesn't it mean that I didn't quite internalize it right the first time?
But that's not how brains work, that's not how people work. We have to continually nourish ourselves mentally, psychologically and emotionally just as we have to continually eat and sleep. I’ve now come to terms with the inevitability of repetition. If I feel like I’m repeating myself too much, well then I should switch up something about my patterns and routines, and do something differently, try to introduce some novelty, surprise, challenge.
Possibly the most impactful YouTube video I’ve ever watched is called Everything Is A Remix by Kirby Ferguson. I watched it around 2015, and it permanently alleviated almost all of my creative anxiety. Basically, the core idea is that all creativity begins with imitation, and there is simply no way to be absolutely “original”. The Beatles started as a cover band. Sony started as a radio repair shop. Everything a person can come up with is a remix of what they know, what they have seen, what they have heard and so on. Even if you try to come up with something that you’ve never seen, that negative space is defined in relation to all that you have seen. And even if you somehow come up with something absolutely unique with no relationship to anything else, your audience will need to relate it to their own experience in order to make sense of it, and so they will still perceive it as a remix of what they know.
This is great news for artists and creators! It means you should never have to worry about being original, and that you should be thrilled to repeat yourself for the rest of your career. The thing is to try to repeat yourself in new, different and interesting ways.
Ineffectiveness
Sometimes I hear from people who have tried journaling for a while, but they don’t really feel like they’re getting anything out of it. My first instinct is to say, “Don’t worry about that, just keep going, it’ll all make sense eventually!” But I’m not sure if that’s actually helpful for someone who doesn’t feel like they’re getting very much out of it.
I definitely don’t want you to feel like you’re forcing yourself to do something that you’re not enjoying, not getting any value out of. That just worsens the larger problem of not being able to trust yourself. I would say… try and keep it small, simple, low-effort… but also try to dig a little
deeper. Ask yourself questions that you wish someone would ask you. Try to get a sense of what’s really bothering you at any point in time.
I’m reminded of conversations I’ve had with people who don’t like books, who can’t get themselves or their kids to read. And… for me, it was never anything like this. Books were always exciting to me, because it was an opportunity to inhabit the mind of authors who care about me, and I was starving for that as a child.
Maybe the question to ask is, what are you starving for, in life? What do you wish you had? Who do you wish you had in your life? And how can you simulate that in your journaling?
What you can do:
“All you need to write a script is paper and pencil.”
– Akira Kurosawa, influential and highly-esteemed filmmaker
Pick up a notebook and a pen.
Or otherwise fire up your most familiar notes app. The good thing about paper notebooks is that there’s no backspace, and it’s very satisfying in a tactile way to fill out page after page. But it doesn’t really matter. Use whatever you feel like using.
Write.
Write whatever comes to your mind, even if it’s just a grocery list of thoughts, things you have to do. Try to do this as quickly as you can, in the most unedited way. You can record a voice note to yourself too, or make a video if you prefer. Remember, this is for you. You don’t have to share this with anybody else. Don’t try to “write well”. In fact, if you’re feeling it, “write badly” on purpose. Write the most cheesy, weird, fake, terrible things you can. [[Ask questions]]. [[Define problems]]. [[Investigate your desires]]. [[Cultivate your humor]]. [[Ask for help]].
Keep going.
If you catch yourself thinking “ugh, this is stupid” – just write that down too. Try to keep this going for at least about 10-15 minutes if you can. If your mind starts to wander, just write down your wandering thoughts. None of this has to make sense, or be “useful” in any way. Think about how a classroom of students might start socializing and doing random nonsense when the teacher leaves the room on an errand. You’re the teacher in your classroom. Leave the room. Let them fool around and do whatever nonsense they want to do.
After a few minutes, if you feel like stopping, stop.
If you somehow “catch fire” and feel compelled to keep going, do that! Sometimes people accidentally find themselves writing hundreds and hundreds of words in one go, which is a fabulously cathartic release. But don’t worry about it if you only get a small trickle of a few words. That’s okay. The point is to make an effort.
Do you feel like re-reading, reviewing it? If yes, go for it.
Look for anything interesting to highlight, bold, underline. See if anything jumps out at you. The real value of this likely won’t be apparent until months or even years later, when you look back on it and notice little clues and tells that you can’t perceive in the moment. (If you don’t feel like re-reading, I wouldn’t force it. You first want to develop comfort with the overall practice.)
As you get comfortable, do bigger and broader overviews.
You might start by just reporting what you did each day, how you felt each day, and so on. That’s completely fine, it’s a great place to start. Once you’ve been doing it for a while, I recommend doing monthly reviews, and eventually annual reviews. These have a way of getting you to examine your life across broader swaths of time, and will raise questions about where you’re going, what you really want to be doing, and so on. Which are excellent questions to engage with!
(Note-to-self for future edits: I have a lot that I can get into about higher-level note-taking and journaling, but I’m not sure if this is the right place to talk about it. I might include it in the appendix.)
✱
Practice journaling your thoughts
Journaling is the thread that will get you into and out of the labyrinth.
It’s a way of lighting beacons that will illuminate your path through the fog of confusion.
Write your memoirs. Write the story of your life.
Once it’s outside of your head, you can investigate it. You don’t have to get it “perfect” right away, or ever.
You mostly just want to build up an increasing volume of notes about yourself.
Your experiences. Your thoughts. Your feelings. Your knowledge.
And then you want to periodically revisit those notes.
In revisiting those notes you will find value in threading and indexing them, which makes them easier to navigate.
Through journaling, self-knowledge.
Through knowledge, power. Through power, freedom. Through freedom, joy.
Learn storytelling to encourage yourself
"There are large, glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?"
– Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel acceptance speech (2017)
Stories are incredibly powerful. When I’m feeling dramatic, I’ll go so far as to say that “stories are all there is.” I agree with Shekar Kapur, who says “we are the stories we tell ourselves”.
Your own life is a set of stories that you can navigate: as a fan, as the audience, as the cast, the crew, the director, the producer. It’s all you, baby! You are the chief storyteller of your life. If you wanna live a glorious, beautiful life that you love, you gotta get involved!
“crying in the uber 🥺🥺” – @DarthLux [source]
The above example is one of the most succinctly potent examples I’ve ever seen of the power of storytelling. It’s only 15 words, written by a child, coupled with a photograph and a pair of drawings, and it moves a stranger to tears. Powerful. How does it do that? I could go on a passionate 100-page rant about how stories work, but that’s for another book– I think the real important question I want you to ask yourself is, “How can I use stories to move myself?”
How can you move yourself to tears with the force of your own story?
Sometimes people think they need inspiration or motivation from something external to them – that they need to find the right role model, the right guru, the right hobby, the right productivity app and so on. And… I’m not going to dismiss that entirely, but rather I want to focus on the fact that – when you find something that resonates with you, you are resonating with it. So the trick is to first find out what moves you, and then look for those elements in your own story, and focus your attention on those elements.
“Wait, what’s the point though? What’s the point of… making myself cry?” – this brings us back to what I was talking about in the introduction, about facilitating a change of heart. I like to think that there are three primary ways to facilitate a change of heart: tears, rage, and laughter. And around these, other strong emotions. These deep, rumbling vibrations create cracks in the
fear-fortified walls that confine the heart. These cracks, as Leonard Cohen put it, allow the light to get in.
I’m not saying everybody should expect to become “hyper-emotional”, or aspire towards that. When it comes to how emotive people are, there’s definitely a spectrum. Some people simply don’t feel all that strongly, and I wouldn’t pressure them to try and “feel more”. I think that’s
ill-advised. Rather, the idea here is to try to be more sensitive to what you already feel. And investigating your favorite stories for clues is a great place to start!
More foreshadowing: Knowing what you really feel, tuning in to that, is an important precursor for figuring out what you really want, for investigating your [[desires]]. You can’t know what you want if you don’t know what you feel.
✱
What people struggle with:
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come… and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business. You know what? I am tired of that bullshit, I am going to be the next storyteller.”
– Steve Jobs, allegedly, to a NeXT employee in 1994 [source]
Perceived frivolity
I think one area of concern is that some people feel that stories are trivial, or superficial, “just fiction”. I don’t know if I would try too hard to change people’s minds on this via direct argument. I would mostly just ask them if they have a favorite story, maybe from when they were children, or growing up. I would try to get them to see the emotional power contained in stories, and maybe talk a bit about the enduring power of ancient myths, and how all nations and religions are about storytelling.
The thing to watch for is excitement. What stirs a person’s soul? Sometimes nerds call this “nerdsniping” – how there are some questions you can ask a nerd and we just have to drop whatever we’re doing in order to try and answer the question. That’s a very powerful thing!
Perceived disconnection
Another possible struggle is – maybe you agree, okay, stories are powerful, but how do I relate that back to my own life? And here I would point out that we’re all telling stories about ourselves, each other and the world all the time! It’s just not always obvious – this is usually because there’s some sort of artificial demarcation in the mind between “stories” and “life”.
There’s a great quote from author Maurice Sendak where he said, "Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do." So a lot of the challenge for people here is to put away the pretenses of Proper Adulthood – which is really just another stage act, another type of play-pretend. People might ask “how do I be child-like again”, but I think that’s the wrong frame. Your child-self is still within you. You just have to recognize that you’re playing the Role of a Proper Adult, and to drop the act for a minute.
Falsehoods
Some people worry that they might accidentally end up inventing a fake story. The trick with this is to be playful: all stories are made-up, yo! Don’t feel obliged to create something grand, perfect, masterful, “expensive” – then there will be “sunk costs” and you may feel compelled to maintain it. Rather, be sketchy. Improvise. Try to be honest, but if that’s difficult or scary, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Fool around. Have fun with it. Don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s okay to make some misteps. [[Embrace failure]]. [[Ask questions]].
Too little or too much complexity
Stories in fiction tend to be conveniently tidy, which is part of what makes them pleasurable to inhabit. There is a clarity in fiction, whereas reality tends to be complex, complicated, and often not make narrative sense. It’s always tempting to try and condense the infinite complexity of reality into a singular, simplistic narrative. It’s satisfying, but it’s also dangerous. It’s important to realize that whatever stories we’re telling ourselves about anything, it’s almost never the full picture. Each way of seeing, which can be eye-opening, perspective-widening, can also be limiting, like a pair of blinders. “We only see what we want to see.”
The challenge here, when articulating your own story, is to try to find a balance – it can be helpful and clarifying to have something simple, but it’s important to recognize that nothing is ever the whole picture. That’s what real humility is about.
Fear
Sometimes people are afraid to go into the truth of their stories, because there are ugly and painful things in there. Different people struggle with this to different degrees. We’ll get into this progressively throughout the rest of the book. I will say though, that this is where “the truth will set you free” legitimately applies. It’s painful and scary, but on the other side of the truth is liberation. You don’t have to radically transform your inner reality overnight. [[Baby steps.]] You can slowly, gingerly, carefully make little attempts at figuring out the truth of your experience.
✱
What you can do:
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make lists of your favorite stories.
Assemble lists of your favorite movies, books, video games, tv shows, songs, artists – all your favorite media. The more the better. Don’t think too hard about this, there are no correct answers. Frivolous and silly examples are totally fine.
Write down a couple of lines about what you like about each.
Start with your favorite. Who are your favorite characters? What do you like about them? What is it that you respect and admire about them? Which characters do you find yourself frustrated and annoyed by, or even loathe, despise? Why exactly? What is it about them precisely that is so odious? Investigate this as deeply as you can. You want to cultivate an understanding of what “gets you going”. I found it necessary for me to revisit this myself when writing this book, and I doubt I would’ve been able to finish it without the support of my fictional friends.
Write out your own life story.
Every single time a friend says something like “I have some time to kill and I don’t know what to do,” I almost always say “write your memoirs”. Because writing down your own story gives you power over it. You can investigate it, examine it, question it, pay attention to how it makes you feel. You can choose what you want to focus on, emphasize. As a helpful constraint, maybe keep it to about one page for starters – but if you feel compelled to keep going, keep going. Let it flow. Do it chronologically if that feels natural. “I was born in…”
Experiment with your self-image.
Try describing yourself differently than you normally do. Create an anonymous alt account on Twitter and fool around. Travel somewhere different and express different parts of yourself than what you’re habitually used to. A lot of us tend to default to whatever existing story we’ve inherited – maybe people experiment a little bit as teenagers, but then we tend to settle into something stable, familiar – and not necessarily what is best for us. I can’t know what is best for you. And I would guess that you don’t consciously know what is best for you, either. But you can feel it when you get it right. So trial-and-error is very instructive here.
Talk with lots of people.
Peopling is a two-way process – few people want to participate in a conversation with someone who hogs the entire time to talk about themselves. (Although – if you are a good writer, speaker, etc, then you can accumulate enough interest in your story that people are interested). The
great thing is, asking other people about their stories is a powerful way to better understand your own.
Shamanism, talismans and meaning-work
Let’s talk a little bit about shamans, talismans and ceremonies.
“Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer
I bought this necklace from an older craftsman when I visited San Francisco in 2019. To me, it represents… the Jewel of Life, really. It’s everything. Kinship, ambition, beauty, power, strength, confidence.
To me, a shaman is a meaning-worker. Someone who is a deep appreciator, understander and respecter of meaning, who can help other people work through their own meanings. Anybody can do shamanic work, just like anybody can tell a joke.
To be a meaning-worker you have to understand both the awesome power and the absolute limits of meaning and meaninglessness. There’s a reason shamanic characters often tend to be kind of cheeky, silly, insane. Because they’re playing with boundaries. [[Framing!]]
Like the tailor or the blacksmith, the shaman is a specialist who learns his craft well so that he might serve others. He is the storyteller, the contextualizer, he helps people make sense of their lives and their struggles.
Here’s an example of modern-day shamanic work: “One of my favorite stories I saw on Reddit was a parent who taught her child that the secret of Santa is that YOU get to be Santa. YOU get to join the secret group of people who make the world a better place for other people. I find that very compelling and heartwarming.”
It’s about finding a way to reframe a story in a way that is rich, meaningful, compelling. It requires a sensitivity to people, and also a playful disregard for existing frames. It’s trickier than it might look! it can go very wrong.
William Faulkner knew what I’m talking about:
“The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
– William Faulkner
A talisman is literally any object that you charge with meaning.
Shamanic types are endlessly fascinated by the power of talismans. What is a talisman? A talisman is literally any meaningful object. You can make an object into a talisman by imbuing it with meaning.
The most commonplace and widely-understood talisman in the world is the wedding ring, which is charged with meaning at a wedding ceremony. Other well-known talismans are Oscar trophies, Olympic medals, and the World Cup. People care about these objects not because of what they are but because of what they mean.
The “medal” Vanallope gives Ralph, Wreck-it Ralph (2012)
Shamans hit “inspect element” on meaning and mess around with the source code of human culture, to really understand thought and emotion.
The shaman is the synthesizer of both the deathly serious and absolutely irreverent. What separates him from an unhinged quack is, there’s a method to his madness. It’s the sensitivity and perceptiveness to the needs of the… client (why am I like this) that makes the difference.
There’s a lot of fun stuff to get into about symbols and symbolism, but I think people tend to overindex on that. Every shaman is invariably a symbolism geek, but not all symbol geeks are shamanic. It’s the work – serving others – that really matters. But also, sometimes the best way to serve others is to be gloriously indifferent to them and to focus entirely on being a goddamn nerd yourself. And sometimes the worst way to serve others is to try to fix them, from a place of neediness.
You see the [[humor]] that runs through the whole thing?? Ayy, lmao! A shaman who takes himself too seriously will be destroyed, a shaman who doesn’t take himself seriously enough will be devoured, and so every shaman is indulging in a kind of psycho-cultural extreme sport. But I repeat myself. The point is: you are the chief storyteller of your own life, and as the Monarch of your life, you get to decide what is meaningful, what is beautiful, what is good, and so on.
✱
Practice telling your story.
To be human is to live in stories.
Just as you have a personal operating system, whether or not you’ve thought about it, you have a story or a set of stories that you live by.
It’s worth investigating the story you’re living in, and experimenting with it.
It’s worth reflecting on the stories that you love and enjoy.
Hidden in your favorite stories are clues to your deepest values, hopes, dreams, joys – and also your worst fears and anxieties.
It’s worth considering how you might be able to use elements from those stories in your own life.
The last chapter of your life has not been written yet.
You can still transform your story into something you deem beautiful, honorable, virtuous, good.
Having “bad”, “ugly”, “dissonant” elements in your story isn’t necessarily something you should beat yourself up about.
It’s material to work with.
Dissonance can always be resolved into harmony, and sometimes this makes the harmony all the more beautiful.
Redemption is always possible.
Experiment with frames
“The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.” ― Eudora Welty, author
via Literary Machines, by Ted Nelson
I’ve already mentioned “frame” several times. What do I mean by that? There are lots of ways to approach it. Framing and storytelling are directly related. Any time you’re telling a story, you’re making framing decisions. You are deciding what to include, and what not to include. The frame is simply the boundary between the two.
Hands Framing New York Harbor, by John Baldessari (1971)
We are always framing everything all the time.
Photography is probably the most intuitive way of starting to think about it – when you take a photo, you as the photographer make a decision about what to keep in the frame, and what to leave out of it. What’s less obvious is that we are framing everything all the time. We frame ideas. We frame arguments. We frame our own identities. In the above shot, Baldessari does it twice – first with his hands, then with the camera. We are always framing everything all the time. Framing is how we direct attention.
Here’s a bit from a 2013 blogpost about The Cinematography of The Incredibles, by Flooby Nooby. (It’s a great post, I highly recommend checking it out).
Flooby says: “Depending on what the director wants to show the audience, every type of shot has its purpose. How the filmmakers decide how close or wide to frame a scene, depends on what they want the focus to be, and what information they are trying to display.”
The whole blogpost is worth reading because it goes into lots and lots of specific examples of all the different kinds of shots. Reflecting on this always makes me question and rethink how I’m framing things in my own life. I typically find that the first, obvious, intuitive choice is rarely the best one. If you experiment with your frames – zoom in, zoom out, change the angle, you’ll likely find a better one that achieves a better effect.
You get to choose what you want to focus on!
This isn’t obvious to everyone, because people are conditioned to “pay attention” and focus on what they’re told to focus on. Sovereignty is about exercising the freedom to focus on what YOU want to focus on. And, inversely, tyranny is the use of coercion to enforce frames, controlling what people can see, think, feel, believe, experience.
(^ one of my many tweets on framing)
School is a very rigid frame.
There’s a fixed curriculum, a fixed pedagogy (which is simply the dominant method of delivering that curriculum), and probably most frustrating of all, a fixed system of standardized testing, which atomizes individuals and conditions us to think of one another as competitors in fixed, finite games. We are graded on bell curves based on our ability to perform on bureaucratic tests. People subjected to years and years of rigid frames end up living with rigid frames themselves. This can be soul-crushing. Real life can be much more beautifully complex than this.
Infinite gaming is about playing with frames.
When people first start experimenting with frames, it looks foolish and silly and we make fun of them. This discourages a lot of people, which makes them give up. When the few people who keep at it get good at it, we call them geniuses.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The reason no one else can see the target is because they’re seeing through frames that don’t allow them to see it. Look again at the picture above from Ted Nelson’s book. Genius hits a target that’s outside the conventional frame. People sometimes talk about this by using the concept of the “Overton window”, which is really just a way of saying “the mainstream conventional frame”. Similarly, when people say “think outside the box”, they mean, try framing things differently than what is conventionally familiar.
The challenge is, it’s very hard to perceive the boundaries of your perception. We are always looking through our frames.
What people struggle with:
"One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing.
It doesn't turn off and turn on.
It's on all the time."
– Annie Leibovitz, photographer
There’s a sort of eureka moment for many people the first time they realize that everything they know, or think they know, is within some particular frame that they have not yet thought to question.
It can be distressing to really absorb how arbitrary everything is.
It’s fairly common for people to feel nauseated and overwhelmed when they first realize that everything can be framed in all sorts of ways. It can feel like there’s “nothing to stand on”. Truly, deeply experimenting with frames can be a disorienting experience. Some people think that most people can’t handle it. I don’t know. Maybe. I believe anybody can get better at it. Total disorientation can be blissful or terrifying, even both.
Here’s a Joseph Campbell quote that captures the spirit of this:
“The LSD phenomenon [...] is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”
– Joseph Campbell
I’m still figuring out how to navigate this with other people, because in this Campbellian sense, I’m a mostly self-taught “mystic” or “shaman” who’s figured things out through reading, thinking, journaling, experimentation, my own trial-and-error. I assume that, if I can do it, surely others should be able to do it too? I can’t know this for sure until I share these ideas with many more people and hear about their experiences. There’s some risk involved here, which is part of why
I’ve been taking so long with this book. I want to make sure I don’t encourage irresponsible, dangerous behavior. I hope that comes through!
I also want to share one of my favorite Richard Feynman quotes, which I think pairs nicely with Campbell’s:
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
– Richard Feynman
Social violations
A common “failure” mode for beginners first starting out is to violate frames for violation’s sake. This rhymes with how young people exercise their sovereignty by making bad decisions. It might be a stupid frame but it’s their frame.
This is not an intrinsically bad thing, but it can have bad consequences that you’ll then have to deal with. It really depends on how egregiously you choose to violate mainstream frames. I strongly advocate for an incremental approach. There’s no need to be in a rush to offend others.
✱
What you can do:
“If a problem can't be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem.”
― Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove
Art In A Frame, by Berlin graffiti artists “Rocco and his Brothers”
Playfully experiment with different points of view.
When evaluating any particular problem, ask yourself, what is the frame here? What are the assumptions? What if we looked at this from a different point of view? What if this bad thing were good, actually? How would that be the case? What if the good thing were bad, actually? How would that be the case?
Some of the best ways to improve your framing skill is to simply expose yourself to as much diversity as possible. Travel. Check out media that you don’t normally consume. Explore new genres of music. Watch documentaries about subjects you don’t typically think about. Ask lots of [[questions]].
Make tiny changes to see how it feels.
[[Baby steps!]] If you’re normally always dressed in black, and you want to experiment with your identity, it can be easier to start with very dark shades of certain colors – deep blues, reds, purples, greens can all be gorgeous and also muted. If you want to try being more social, you don’t necessarily have to get up on stage at an open mic overnight (although I do recommend it!). You can just start by texting more old friends and ask them how they’re doing. The point is, you want to be moving. Work your way up.
Try to be considerate; pay attention to how people respond.
Experimentation with frames can be a bit of a social minefield – because there are some things that people consider sacred, or profane, or taboo, and your experimentation with different ways of considering these things can make people very upset with you. I wish there were a simple, elegant soundbite I could give you to help you navigate this effectively, but there isn’t really one. To play infinite games well in a world that has a lot of finite players requires that you develop a pretty good understanding of those finite games. Well – it depends on your priorities, and your values.
I personally think that we should make at least a moderate good-faith effort to avoid unnecessarily hurting or upsetting people with our play. But sometimes this is almost unavoidable. As mentioned earlier, sometimes simply exercising your own sovereignty over your own life is something that might trigger a negative reaction from friends and family who are hostile to the very idea. Navigating this requires finesse that can take time and experience to develop. I can’t say that it’ll be easy. But I do want to point out that progress is almost always possible, if not always in the most ideal way that you’d like.
Experiment with your frames
We are always operating within some frame.
We do not always have to accept the default frames that we inherit.
Cruel, abusive people – authoritarian tyrants – will insist on defining our frames for us. We don’t have to go along with it.
“Someone’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.” – Les Brown We can choose to deliberately experiment with the way we frame things.
Few things are framed “properly”. Most things are framed without much thought put into it.
The way you frame something can be an art form all by itself.
Artists, musicians, poets, creatives can all teach us valuable insights about what it means to frame things differently.
Photography is a useful way to practice frame experimentation.
A creative frame can be insightful, surprising, valuable.
Experiment with your frames. Try to look at things differently than you usually do.
From time to time, try to imagine, try to feel, what it means to be beyond framing.
Unlearn catastrophizing → learn project management
“There are, indeed, (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!
My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern.” – Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams (1816)
This is a two-part section. Let’s focus first on unlearning catastrophizing.
Know that you are not the first person to be overwhelmed.
I regularly get DMs from people – often younger people – who are really struggling with despair. They do a lot of overgeneralizing, for example going from “I can’t seem to study for this test” to “I can’t do anything right.” It’s sad to see.
I remember this feeling. The important thing is that you understand that you are not the first person to be overwhelmed. It’s not bad to be overwhelmed. Anybody who is intellectually honest will be overwhelmed! This is normal, and it can even be good, in a sense – because it means that you’re not buying into some simplistic comforting bullshit. (Think again about the “sanitized bubble reality” we talked about in The Call To Adventure.) This will actually save you some pain in the long run – though I know that isn’t particularly reassuring to hear right now.
Write down exactly what it is that’s overwhelming you.
When you do this, you will find that it’s actually fewer things than it feels like in your gut. And you can define them precisely, and then take steps to address those things one by one. And making progress feels good! It feels good to “level up” even if you don’t slay the dragon overnight. You want to develop a sense of what your quest actually is. What the steps are.
I think there are people – parents, teachers, etc – who may even think that it’s actually kind of good if kids panic and catastrophize about their grades, their poor attention spans, their failures. “Good! Be scared! Life is scary! Don’t get comfortable! Work harder!”
Maybe some kids respond well to this. I absolutely fucking didn’t. And I think I’ve seen like hundreds of thousands of people retweeting tweets over the years that basically agree that that sort of shit didn’t really help them either. It just terrorizes them needlessly. It’s really tragic if you end up bullying people thinking that you protect them. And yes, this applies inwardly inside your own head to you, too.
I think the real power move with kids is to be as precisely truthful and honest about reality as you can.
This means trusting them, which I think many adults typically hesitate to do because they’re fearful themselves, that they will be blamed if the kid doesn’t do well.
I can’t speak for all kids, but I can speak for my kid-self, who I swore to represent well into my adulthood. I sincerely believe that I would have worked really hard if I was given proper structure and guidance. I wasn’t. I was just terrorized into an unproductive panic.
You can see me working really hard now! I’ve written over a million words, and I’ve been publishing videos almost every day. Nobody is slave-driving or terrorizing me into it. I just had to first unlearn a large amount of the helplessness and guilt and shame that was instilled in me by well-meaning adults.
Gentle, persistent curiosity is the way out.
So anyway when a kid comes to me with something like “how do I fix my horrible attention span”, or “how do I stop being so useless”, I begin gently with, “I don’t even accept that premise. It makes no sense to me. You can’t know that about yourself with that much certainty.”
I ask (gently), what is it that you’re trying to do? And the vague grandiosities come flying again, “I’m trying to stop fucking up in life!” Again I don’t really buy your assessment of the situation – “fucking up” is too broad, what do you want to do, exactly?
“I want to do well in school!” –Why?
Here some kids say things like, “Oh, aren’t all kids supposed to do well in school? if I don’t, my parents will be disappointed, my friends will laugh at me, [long paragraph]… I will be a failure, my life will be ruined, I will die sad and alone…”
Okay, pause. That’s a lot. Let’s sit with that for a while. Next, I’d ask: what matters the most to you?
Kids get startled here. Nobody asks them that. “What matters the most… to me?” (does not compute) “Everything!!! Everything is chaos, life is a nightmare!!” Yes, okay. I’m sorry to hear that kid. but I’m still curious: In this nightmare, which is the biggest monster?
The conversation can go many directions from here, depending on the kid.
Latest breakthrough with latest kid: he came to see that he wasn’t being entirely honest with himself about his own goals and interests. He didn’t even have the headspace to do that, or feel like he had permission to ask that, so he was thrashing about wildly and struggling to breathe. And it was only when he made some space to think about his goals – the desires of his sovereign soul – that he found that some of the fog began to lift.
I actually do honestly believe that kids who have a moderately clear sense of what they’re into (as clear as a kid can reasonably get, anyway), what they’re about, what they like, what their options are – will on average do better in school than a kid who’s living in terror.
Sometimes you do get a terrified kid who somehow manages to walk the tightrope between terror & despair, get all their homework done, and do well. Have you seen these kids though? Sometimes they literally seem like soldiers with PTSD. There is no light in their eyes, only KPIs. It’s gruesome.
Anyway, another week, another kid who’s so desperate that they turn to an internet stranger. Why? For what? I think it’s for the hope of being seen, being listened to. Sometimes they get someone like me. But sometimes they get abusive, manipulative assholes. And that’s really dangerous.
Listen to kids. They’re people. And listen to yourself, too.
What people struggle with:
“All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted. The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.”
– Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement Speech (2007)
Life is overwhelming, it’s scary, it’s everything going bad all at once. The consequences seem dire.
I remember being in this place. I wonder too if trying to talk about it intellectually might be a mistake, because I think the bulk of the problem is embodied. I remember being anxious, having no appetite, feeling haunted by a vague yet persistent sense of dread…
I’m not a professional, but I did some reading about the sources of catastrophizing, and found answers like “fear”, “low self-esteem”, and “traumatic experiences”. And when I think about it, I didn’t start catastrophizing as a child until I started to inherit some of it from the adults and authority figures in my life.
This is something that I personally struggled to talk about for a long time, and I’ve found that others do too. The idea that we even might have been mistreated as children is something that lots of us are fundamentally averse to. We don’t want to think of ourselves as “victims”. We
intuit, quite correctly, I think, that the label comes with quite a bit of baggage. Some people pity victims, and we might not want to be pitied. Other people blame victims for their own abuse – “Oh, you must have been a horrible child if your parents didn’t love you!” – and that’s a really horrible, helpless place to be. Because what can you do, when you’re a child?
"They took one look and decided they did not want me. They threw me into the sea, like I was nothing." – Maui, on his parents, to Moana (2016 fim)
Wew, that’s a lot. We’ll get more into this later. But if I could say one thing to Maui: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your parents didn’t want you. That’s on them, not on you. That’s their failure, not yours. There is nothing a child so young can do to earn the love of its parents.
Thread time!
On internal conflict
Looking back, one of the major anxieties of my teens and most of my 20s was caused by this unhelpful, unhealthy belief that, if I had made mistakes, failed to meet my obligations, then I didn't deserve to have any fun or joy whatsoever until I sorted out all my shit.
This set up a terrible conflict within myself. while I was conscientiously trying to beat myself up to become a better person, there was another part of me that was utterly convinced that things would *never* get better, so "fun visa" would hide in the shadows, like a guerilla. (This is also what I mean by ‘shadow sovereignty’.)
And whenever "taskmaster visa" got tired, sloppy, etc – which would inevitably happen, and I knew this from dealing with authorities (parents, teachers) "fun visa" would then be ruthless about seizing control and unhealthily binging the fuck out of whatever fun he could get.
I see now that both of those guys were scared, anxious, weak. My poor babies. Nobody taught them any better. I (integrated visa? lol) had to bring both of them to the table, get them to hear each other out, realize we're all on the same team, and we don't have to catastrophize.
it turns out that you don't have to work yourself to the bone to make amends, to get better – and trying to do that is ineffective, anyway! there's diminishing returns!! so you might as well do your best for 3-4 hours, and then rest, relax, literally set aside time to have fun.
it then goes from being a grotesque internal civil war to becoming a sort of fun buddy cop / road-trip sort of situation. and it turns out that both guys can help each other out, and be stronger and more powerful as a team.
Do you have grand theories about how society should be run? well guess what, you are also a society! you can test those theories yourself, right now! you can *demonstrate* what it means for a society to be well-governed, well-integrated. Show us how to act!
That's what the Crown motif (in my profile pictures) is about, for me. It's not about power over others. Nobody can have dominion over anything greater or lesser than oneself. It's about conducting oneself with grace and decency, about taking responsibility, refusing
self-abandonment, self-abdication.
After I went through the first cycle of this journey (and it looks like it’s probably an infinite loop), I found myself noticing when *other* guys are unintegrated, self-abdicated. and I felt this anxious compulsion to help them. It took me another cycle to realize that me pressuring them made it worse. Turns out I still have neediness in me, and I was projecting mine onto them. That I wouldn’t be okay unless they were okay. I had to learn to be okay with them being “not-okay”.
Often the best thing we can do for anybody else who is struggling is to simply be a shining example of excellence ourselves. They will come to us when they want our help, when they are ready. Pressure just introduces unhelpful anxiety, which makes us part of the problem.
I apologize to anybody that I've ever been kinda pushy with in the replies. That's my own neediness and insecurity leaking. Part of why "I want everyone to be excellent" is "I want everyone to feel safe, secure, confident, powerful" – but the ends do not justify the means.
Always a work in progress! always trying to do better! (except when I'm not! because a mf needs to rest sometimes! lmao! lol)
What you can do:
“Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost always expressed in the mind's ear, not its eye – that is, in words, not images – a fact that has significance for controlling worry.” – Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence
Breathe.
Literally. This can seem like such a trivial thing as to not be worth considering. I was almost 30 years old when I started properly getting into breathwork and it truly changed my life. Pain is (almost?) always in the body. I’ve been tempted to restructure this entire book to make a bigger focus on the body, because the more I read and learn and evaluate, the more central it becomes. More on this in [[3.2 Body]].
Narrow your focus – pick out small, specific things to focus on.
In Man of Steel (2013 film), young Clark Kent is utterly overwhelmed by his super senses, and hides in a closet. His mother has to show up. He says something like “The world is too big” and she says “then make it small.” It’s a very touching, moving scene that I think about a lot, and I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more. It’s a reminder of how hard it must be to Superman, to be not only so powerful but so sensitive.
How do you learn to focus when you don’t know how to focus? I remember asking this question myself in the depths of my own despair. And the answer I wish someone had told me was, “don’t try to learn to focus in the abstract. Learn how to focus within a single narrow domain.” The word “focus” might itself be a bit of a misleading trap. It’s just about looking at one thing, thinking about one thing. When you get distracted by another thing, don’t beat yourself up about it, that’s normal. Just try to return to the thing when you can.
(I haven’t yet gotten too deep into Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing at the time of writing this, but it does seem to be a resource that’s designed for this.)
Write down precisely what it is that you’re worried about.
[[Journal]]. Worries have a way of becoming smaller and more manageable once you get them out of your head. Literally, write down “I’m worried about… because… and if that happens… then…” – repeat this as many times as necessary. Get it all out of your system.
A quick note on medication: I have no experience with taking any sort of medication myself, so I cannot meaningfully comment on that. I do think it can be a game-changer for some people, I’m not dismissing it! I think it’s seldom the whole solution, though. Because the medication mainly
addresses the symptoms – it can give you symptom relief that then gives you a bit more capacity or freedom to do what you need to do. But you still need to do the things, whatever they are! And if there are systemic factors that are making it difficult for you to focus, you still need to address those!
✱
Learn Project Management
"The essential thing in heaven and earth is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction;
there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living."
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Some people dick around their whole lives, others build cathedrals and rocket ships.
Sometimes I feel like the most important thing we need to learn as kids, after things like "language" and "people skills" – which we kinda pick up naturally anyway – is "project management". Project management is something that isn't very intuitive, because it's something that involves things that are bigger than what you might naturally do in a given day. The variance can be absolutely massive from person to person.
You might say that "oh, the most important thing is learning how to learn", and my response would be "yup, and that's project management" – setting yourself a curriculum, figuring out what you're going to do over a period of time, how you're going to measure your progress…
"No wait, actually, the most important thing is learning how to LIVE" and my response would be "yup, and that's project management" – deciding what your priorities and values are, how you should spend your time, what you should do more of, what you should do less of, over decades.
(To be clear, you don’t owe anybody a cathedral or a rocket ship. I make the contrast simply to point at the variance in possibility. It is not my intention to make anybody feel bad about themselves, or feel a heavy sense of obligation to the world.)
Good project management is about enabling collaboration.
To me, a project is anything that’s substantial enough that it requires collaboration to complete. Even if you’re doing it entirely on your own, it’s big enough that you can’t do it in a single session, which means you have to collaborate with your past and future selves. You have to pick off tomorrow where you left off today. It follows then that project management is primarily
about learning to collaborate, and creating better conditions for collaboration – first with yourself, then with other people.
If you can’t collaborate across states, you can’t do “epic shit”, and if you can’t do “epic shit” you may find that you feel like an “epic fail”. Which… is actually a separate issue about having unhealthy expectations. You don’t necessarily need to be or do epic things in order to live a good life worthy of dignity, respect, and love. But also… I want to say that it’s not actually that hard to learn to do epic shit! You just need to break it down into micro-epic bricks and then lay one brick down at a time.
Mistakes are good, actually.
“But what if I lay the bricks wrong? What if I build something bad?” Good! [[Embrace Mistakes]]! Mistakes are how you learn! But the critical thing is to make the mistakes early, in the conceptual stages, when they’re cheap, rather than late, when you have the bricks in the field. But even then it’s not that big a deal, as long as you didn’t spend all your life savings on the bricks. Break down big projects into smaller projects, big problems into smaller problems, build your confidence by doing little things well, and then increase progressively. [[Baby Steps]]
All great artists and athletes have to learn project management to accomplish the great things that they do, even if they don’t necessarily call it that. They might not be particularly precise or deliberate about it, but they do have a process, and if they’re really serious, they likely have a process for investigating and updating their core process.
When people sign their kids up for art classes or sports teams, to some degree I think what they’re hoping is that their kids will learn project management. To manage their own psychology, to collaborate with themselves and others, and to do things tomorrow that they aren’t yet able to do today. This gives people a sense of power and autonomy, it gives people a way of relating to others, a way of expressing themselves, all sorts of good stuff.
Okay? Alright, now a bit of personal backstory.
It’s worth considering that kids don’t really think in terms of “projects”.
I certainly didn’t, when I was a kid. I just did whatever I felt like doing. I read a lot of books, played a lot of video games. I would meander around happily. That’s part of the joy of childhood. You don’t have any responsibilities yet.
(h/t @joulee – an representation of a junior designer’s process)
Then came school, and with school came homework. And I hated homework, so bad. I would put it off, avoid doing it, sometimes try and do a rushed job minutes before class, sometimes copy frantically from friends. It was a lot of stress and anxiety. I would lose things, I would fail to keep track of things. It was a mess.
And… I’m sure people tried to help me, but it didn’t really work. My teachers couldn’t really help. My parents couldn’t really help. I would have to figure it out on my own, and it was a messy, painful, frustrating process. The “obvious” solution would have been to, well, do my homework before it was due. But I almost never seemed to be able to get into that headspace until it was too late. Sometimes I would do my homework immediately the moment I received it, and that would usually give me the best odds of not screwing up.
(via @joulee – senior designer’s process)
But this section is not about “how to do your homework”. I hated homework and I still do. After years of second-guessing myself and having lots of conversations with people, I now personally reject the whole structure and spirit of traditional schooling. I don’t think that’s how learning actually works, at least for me. I think real learning happens on a slightly unpredictable schedule. You can try and plan for it, and set things up to facilitate it, but you can’t rush it, sort of like how you can’t have a baby in 3 months.
^ I could write a whole separate section about this old meme. Part of it is that gaming provides clear rewards, immediate feedback, desired outcomes. Part of why video games are so compelling is that they do the hard work of project management for you. But the “problem” is that well-defined projects that are easy to participate in aren’t necessarily fulfilling ones. The concept of “gamification” started out quite promising, but unfortunately I think it came to be associated with the superficial veneer of gaming – frills, trinkets, points, etc – when what is really required is that we investigate the fundamental structure of the systems we are trying to invigorate. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design is not what it looks like, design is how it works.
It can be helpful to think about what you’ve already done.
I’m thinking now, what did I do, as a kid? What projects did I indulge in? I know I kept a sticker book at some point, and a Digimon cards collection, almost by accident. Those didn’t *feel* like projects, even though technically I would say they do qualify. Because a collection is something that you build over time, it requires collaboration with past and future selves.
I had a personal website, which was something that I built over time, and I was very proud of it. It started with a few individual HTML pages, mostly text, some images and links. And then from there I learned to create a network of pages which referenced each other, related to each other. Nobody particularly taught me to do this, I learned it myself through trial and error, partially by copying what I liked about other sites. (Today, my personal homepage is on visakanv.com, which functions as a sort of “master node” that links out to my blogposts, youtube channel, etc. I
consider this to be part of the same ongoing project, and it still makes me very proud and happy that I have a “home” on the web.)
I also remember writing a couple of video game guides, or FAQs, which you can still find on GameFAQs.com almost 20 years later. They were really just a list of moves with a bit of commentary on them, but looking at them now, it’s remarkable to me how much effort I put into it. And these are legitimate projects! I wrote then in notepad.exe, and I remember it took me days of effort to do it.
In retrospect, this was my earliest and most substantial creative work, and it laid the groundwork for me to get more comfortable writing longer blogposts and essays, and eventually, this book, and hopefully in the future, entire novels, even series of novels.
Somehow, I made it happen. I went from being a cheerfully self-directed kid to someone who was anxious, overwhelmed, procrastinating, and now I’m a cheerfully self-directed adult. I write this book to try and help others along on the same journey.
What people struggle with
“How you allocate your own resources
can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope, or very different from what you intend.”
– Clayton Christensen
Here are some questions and statements I recurringly hear from people who are struggling:
“I don’t know what to do.” “There’s too much to do.” “Where do you start?” “How do you prioritize?”
My answer to all of the above questions is the same: I personally recommend starting with whatever is the smallest thing that you can complete, that will give you a win. Small wins give you the psychological boost to then expand your awareness and be more strategic.
I’m doing this right now! I’m editing my book and struggling with the fact that it’s the largest project I’ve ever personally worked on.
So, first I carved up the book itself into 5 separate documents according to each Act. Intellectually this seems like a fairly redundant step, but in practice it made such a difference. It’s just so much easier to focus on something when you isolate it. Next, I wrote down little numbered circles to represent each of the sections, and cross out each circle when I finish editing each section. That way, I can feel good about the progress that I’m making. [[Baby steps]]! [[Celebrate your wins]]! [[Cultivate your optimism]]!
If I were *really* struggling with each section still, I would consider further breaking down each section into sub-steps, but thankfully it didn’t come to that.
The biggest struggle with project management is when it seems impossible.
It’s when you’re still catastrophizing, and you haven’t gotten to the state where you can even believe in the utility of projects – that it’s worth figuring things out, cutting up the chaos into manageable problems. That’s what the earlier section on Unlearning Catastrophizing was about. Believing that it’s worthwhile. Believing that it’s possible. Keeping your projects small and manageable.
Overthinking without taking action.
Not everybody struggles with this, but I do seem to attract a disproportionate number of people who do. It’s tempting, upon learning about the concept of project management, to feel compelled to study project management in the abstract. I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I think the best way to learn about project management is to actually do things that you directly care about. Learn music, write a blog, study history, do something substantial that you care about, and learn the project management skills en route to doing what you care about. If you try to learn it in the abstract, without grounding it in work that you care about, it can spiral away into more and more byzantine abstractions.
If you’re one of the handful of people who are cursed with the thought “but I care about learning project management” in the abstract (you poor thing), I still think it’s best if you make the deliberate effort to learn it vicariously through another interest. It doesn’t need to be a “serious” thing. You can pick up professional-grade project management skills entirely by working on a curious, frivolous hobby.
What you can do:
“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it's not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done
Begin with a very small project that’s easy to complete.
[[Baby Steps]] Recurringly the error I see people make – and I’ve done this myself, with bad results – is that they feel like they need to “make up for lost time” and begin their “recovery” or “penitence” with a big project. This doesn’t work. At worst, you’ll end up hurting yourself or causing damage in some way, because you weren’t properly warmed up. At best, even if you didn’t cause any serious damage, you’ll likely find yourself struggling beyond your “healthy exertion” zone, and this tends to feel bad psychologically. You have to respect the power of baby steps.
Zoom out and see the bigger picture.
[[Framing]]. This can get a bit tricky, because you don’t necessarily want to continually be overwhelmed by the biggest, grandest picture on an on-going basis – although I do think it can be helpful to zoom out from time to time, even if it may be a little bit distressing. You can learn to manage that distress, but even if you haven’t yet, it functions as a hedge against focusing too hard on details that may end up irrelevant. The important thing is to be able to switch between zooming out and zooming in. I think this is something you can actively practice, even in your imagination.
Set aside time to think.
The more chaotic your life seems to be, the more urgent it is that you go somewhere quiet, sit down with a pen and a notebook or a couple of sheets of paper, and think out loud about what you’re dealing with. [[Ask questions]]. What challenges are you facing? What’s troubling you? What do you need to get done? What’s stopping you? Pretty much every section of this book has something that applies here.
[Notes for future updates: I might want to talk about the MVP model of personal development here. Ah, hell, let’s just dive right into it…]
The MVP model of personal development
“Minimum viable product” is an idea from the startup world, about how to build products. The core idea, in my view, is that you have limited resources, and you want to make sure that you deploy those limited resources as effectively as possible, in such a way that allows you to earn more resources. This means that you have to be very careful not to overstretch yourself, and instead focus on doing one thing very, very well.
(Ironically, me taking 3 years to write this book is a violation of this principle… and I will say that I’ve absolutely suffered needlessly as a consequence. But also, you could say that at this point I have already succeeded at the first couple of cycles – my first book continues to sell copies every day, which buys me time to write the second one, and to be relatively more indulgent with my process.)
Don’t waste time accumulating more information than you need to take action.
In 2014, I had a minor epiphany about how my experience with personal development seemed to mirror the principles of product development. I had spent over 10 years struggling to improve myself by accumulating information, which is the base of the pyramid. It’s tiring, endless and ungratifying. I came to realize that I was focused wrongly on the bottom layer, trying to “fill up” the pyramid from the bottom.
Get to the peak as quickly as possible.
Personal energy (or willpower, or motivation, whatever you want to call it) is a VERY limited resource early on. And I’m now convinced that this isn’t something you can change very much directly through sheer force of will. I’ve come to believe that the subconscious needs some proof
of success, or some kind of pleasure, before it will give you more energy. Hit the peak, and you unlock more energy to do more.
What is the peak? In writing, it’s publishing something and getting feedback from others, and changing your self-image in the process. You’re not a person who wants to write, you’re a person who has written. You’re a writer!
In cooking, it’s making a dish, eating it, smiling and realizing that you liked it. You want to get to that point as soon as you can. In fitness, it’s breaking a sweat, getting an elevated heart rate, going home and showering and feeling the endorphins. If you’re lifting weights, it actually means you shouldn’t lift too much too soon.
Counter-intuitively, this means you should do the minimum research possible.
Because more research means more inertia, more time-cost, more expectations. I don’t mean “throw yourself into difficult, dangerous tasks without any preparation whatsoever”. I mean that going for a walk is 100x more helpful than researching nuances of biomechanics. Do things that are safe, small, simple, easy.
How can you change your identity?
What’s the smallest, simplest, quickest thing you can do to change your identity? That’s real leverage. For me personally, “I’m a picky eater, I don’t know how to cook, have food issues” was a big part of my identity. On the 23rd of November 2014, I cooked eggs for myself for the first time. They were delicious. I’ve been much more comfortable with food ever since. And I’m also much more comfortable setting out to do almost anything.
Once you’ve experienced transformation in a couple of different domains, you start to see how it’s all the same thing. It’s all just project management. You start by managing your psychology, and then everything is logistics.
✱
What my ex-boss taught me
In the 5+ years I worked for my ex-boss Dinesh, he constantly, casually-yet-intensely would ask me about my goals & desired outcomes:
"What do you want to get out of this?" "How will you measure your progress?" "What's the next step?"
"What's the limiting factor?"
I've since internalized that stuff so thoroughly, and found it so useful, that I now almost struggle to remember what it was like before I installed Dinesh's instrumental thinking module into my mental suite. The wack thing is, once you internalize this, or a version of this, you look at the world in a completely different way than people who haven't internalized this. And you look around and you see that very few people really internalize this. You can get whiplash from the contrast.
Lots of people don’t know what they want
And they don't really try very hard to figure out what they want, don't really believe it's possible, if they try they aren't very systematic about it, or they try too hard and agonize about it unproductively, many ways to fail on this front
Lots of people don’t try to make things easier for themselves
Suppose you don't fail too hard on (1)- you have some sense of what you want, cool. Lots of people then aren't very persistent about translating this into manageable projects and actions. some might come up with a big grand plan that's insurmountable, like "write epic novel".
Lots of people don’t prioritize cultivating their own motivation
Suppose you did ok with (2)! people will always find ways to fail! they're like, okay, "become good writer, by writing a lot, write some tweets everyday, a blogpost every week" – pretty good... but then they struggle with managing their emotions and get jaded.
Managing your psychology is basically THE HARD PROBLEM in LIFE. Everything else is pressing buttons and pulling levers. A novel is one word after another. A marathon is one foot in front of the other. But how do you keep going when you don’t feel like it?
To keep going you have to know your motivations. you have to know your WHY. WHY are you doing this? What is it all FOR? Why am I writing this book? It’s for a younger version of myself who desperately needed this. It can help to examine your own life to see what things you've cared about in the past. Ask your friends & family what got you passionate and riled up the most.
Unlearn Catastrophizing, Learn Project Management:
We catastrophize when we feel powerless, like we have no control.
The challenge is to accept that, yes, we ultimately have no control in the grand scheme of things…
… but we have some power over some of our lives, and we can focus our time and energy on that.
We can narrow the frame of our attention to things that we have real influence over.
We can then devise projects to influence our little corner of reality for the better.
When we do that well, when we succeed, we increase our sense of power and control over our lives, and then we can expand our frames.
A project is anything that requires collaboration, even if “only” with yourself.
Project management is about enabling collaboration to take place. Start small. Ask lots of questions. Study and understand bottlenecks.
Learn to ask for help. Take baby steps. Do 100 things.
Cultivate a sense of humor. Embrace your mistakes. Celebrate your wins.
Slowly, surely, you will increase your project management ability.
You’ll start to get things done.
You’ll witness yourself becoming more powerful.
You’ll begin to feel the confidence of knowing that you got this.
Take baby steps
"I always love it when people say 'baby steps!' to imply they're being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown." – @OliveFSmith
It can be useful to compare and contrast different domains in your life, particularly ones where you are successful in contrast to ones where you are unsuccessful. I’m successful at writing. It comes easily to me, it feels abundant, I can write tremendous volumes of text. And a large part of this has to do with the fact that I’m always happy to “just start”. I write lots of tweets. I used to write lots of Facebook status updates, answer questions on Quora, post on forums.
(via ig:sighswoon)
In contrast, I think some of the areas of my life where I’m most embarrassed and ashamed of my [[failures]] are – my many failed attempts at trying to sustain a fitness habit, and my failures with scheduling. And when I think about it, in both of those cases, I get into a silly cycle where I feel really bad about not having done very much for a long time, and I feel compelled to try and “make up for lost time” by going as hard as I can. And this is always a bad idea, because I push myself too hard, and the experience is unpleasant. And while my conscious self might be
rah-rah about trying to do more, I’ve come to suspect that it’s my subconscious self that protests the torture, and flinches away from it. And in any drawn-out battle between the conscious and subconscious, the subconscious invariably wins, because the conscious eventually falters.
So I’ve come to believe that a big part of the power of baby steps is about teaching your subconscious that doing small little things is simple, pleasurable, fun.
✱
What people struggle with:
“Basically, you can't skip steps,
you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts,
but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.”
– Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin
The shame of doing something “too small”.
The funny thing about baby steps is that people very often feel that they’re “too small”. I’ve had many extremely roundabout conversations with people about this. They just feel in their hearts that they should be doing something “big”, even though they haven’t yet actually accomplished anything “small”.
This can be a very tedious conversation to have because people will insist for months and years that, no no, they don’t need to use the light weights, they’re not that weak, they’re not that pathetic, they’re not losers. Just give them the heavy weights and tell them how to lift it. It can’t be done! You can’t lift heavy weights before you first lift the “baby” weights. There is no shame whatsoever in lifting lighter weights.
If anything, if we had to use shame for some reason – and I don’t think it’s helpful, really – mayyybe we should be relatively less ashamed of lifting light weights, and more ashamed of being so arrogant and willful about the weight that we’re “supposed” to lift, that we prevent ourselves from making the progress that we want to see. But honestly, shame isn’t even necessary in this entire operation. We can do without it.
What you can do:
“Life is a series of baby steps along the way and if you add up these tiny little steps you take toward your goal, whatever it is, whether it's giving up something, a terrible addiction or trying to work your way through an illness. When you total up those baby steps you'd be amazed over the course of 10 years, the strides you've taken.”
– Hoda Kotb, NBC news anchor
Make a todo list.
[[Journal]]. Quickly put one together in a sketchy draft on a piece of paper or your favorite notes app. If you already have one, you can use that too, although I’m personally always a fan of starting fresh.
Investigate each item on the list.
[[Ask questions]]. How big of a task is it? Some people fall into the trap of listing entire projects as todo items. That’s like putting “slay dragon” on your todo list. You want to figure out what the sub-tasks are, which might be “acquire sword”, “practice slaying 10 smaller beasts”, “acquire armor”, and so on. Make the tasks as small and specific as you can. Get into the habit of persistently, repeatedly asking, “What’s the first step?” And then do it.
Do lots of little things and articulate what you’ve learned from them.
[[Do 100 things]]. People tend to underestimate how much they can learn from doing small things. If you think that you didn’t learn anything from doing something, try doing it again, a little bit differently. And then pay attention to what was different. That’s where the learning is.
[[Celebrate your wins]], however small.
This can seem counter-intuitive. The conventional assumption seems to be something like, celebrations are for big milestones – getting a promotion, getting married, winning a medal or trophy. And certainly, those are things worth celebrating. But small wins are worth celebrating too! In fact, I would argue that they are more important to celebrate, because things are more precious and fragile when they are small. They need encouragement and nurturance even more.
Take Baby Steps
Recognize that cathedrals are built one brick at a time. Every Olympic gymnast had to first learn how to walk.
They then kept learning.
It might not be realistic to expect yourself to become an Olympic gymnast.
But that’s not the point.
The point is to take the next baby step in front of you.
Release any shame or disdain you might have for the “small”.
Simple doesn’t mean easy.
You want to measure your progress against what you’ve done so far. Not against what you think you might someday be capable of doing.
Done is better than perfect.
It’s okay to make mistakes. You can learn from them.
The only thing that matters is that you take another step.
And then another one. What’s the next step?
Do 100 things
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
– Ira Glass, radio host
Doing 100 of something is an entire education in of itself.
Make 100 of a thing, show it to 100 people, solicit 100 instances of feedback. Along the way you pick up new ideas and curiosities for your next project. Repeat indefinitely: congratulations, you’re an autodidact! Write and record 100 songs. Take 100 photos. Do 100 drawings. Review them as you go. What do you see? What are the interesting patterns? What was fun, what was easy, hard, surprising? Paying attention to your feelings here is where all the learning is. Then ask yourself, is there anything you wanna dig deeper into? You could write 100 songs in 3/4 timing. You could take 100 photos of flowers. You could do 100 drawings of hands. Getting specific helps you get nuanced in your skills. The volume also helps you feel less anxious about any particular [[mistake]].
Being prolific makes you instantly interesting, too.
You end up with a body of work, a portfolio that you can share with others. Lots of people are typically curious to find out what you learned from doing 100 of something – this can be helpful in building relationships. You develop familiarity with a subject matter. People now have an excuse to talk to you about the thing.
Here’s a quote from my friend Cathy (@cathyreisenwitz): “Doing 100 things a la @visakanv has been surprisingly fun and interesting. I’m writing sketches. The trick for me is doing each needs to take 10-min max. The benefit happens the rest of the time. My brain is starting to think in sketches even when I’m not actively writing them. The great thing about it is there’s no pressure to be good. The entire point is that I’m not good yet. I might never be good. Doing it badly isn’t a
failure, it’s the point. This reframe is truly groundbreaking for me. The process is the point. The product is gravy.”
(via @seanwes)
Pay attention to what is going on.
You want to be at least moderately conscious and awake while you do it. Look out for surprises. If you do something that many times, you will almost definitely surprise yourself, even entirely by accident. You may find some elegant new way of doing things, some surprising efficiency. You will develop a sense of familiarity with the process, have some amount of “unconscious competence”, which will free you up to “go meta” and examine the process while you’re doing it. Or have a conversation with someone else, whatever, it’s up to you!
(via @billyisyoung)
Build a body of work. Write 100 tweets. Make 100 TikToks. Cook 100 omelettes. Talk to 100 people. Be intentional about it, but try not to be all burdened with expectations and perfectionistic standards either. The point is to have fun, mess around, see what happens.
✱
Drawing the rest of the fucking owl
Have you ever seen the drawing thing that’s like, “draw two circles, now draw the rest of the fucking owl?”
It’s usually presented as a joke, meant to point out how a lot of expert advice is poorly calibrated for beginners. But, I wondered to myself, what if that might actually work, actually? What if I actually tried to draw the rest of the fucking owl? So I set out to draw some owls. These are what my first 3 attempts looked like. (I still actually really like the 3rd one, I think it’s cute and has a rather evocative mood to it.)
There are children who can draw better than that. But I’m not mad about it, because it’s part of a process. I’m here to keep drawing more owls, and to observe the nuances in how things change each time. Up next is my fourth attempt. Kinda gnarly, but I’m not mad about it. I can see the shape. I can see what I was trying to do. “Spend more time getting the eyes right”, is a note I would’ve given myself. Because the eyes turn out to be the most expressive and important part of a drawing of anything with a face. Did you know that? I mean, it seems obvious once you hear it said, but I didn’t properly realize that until I drew a few owls myself. I also noticed, “Being sloppy with the shading in the middle is kinda cool, actually, and that means I don’t have to spend a lot of time drawing to be happy with the outcome.”
And this is my 9th attempt at drawing an owl.
Not bad, don’t you think? It’s far from perfect, but it’s such a tremendous improvement over the first few attempts. How good do you think my 100th owl would be? I don’t think I’m going to sit around drawing another 91 owls, though, at least not anytime soon. Because I have other things I want to do.
And here we arrive at another useful thing about the “Do 100 Thing” framework – sometimes you do a thing several times, witness yourself getting better at it, and then realize you don’t actually wanna invest the time and energy into getting better at it. And that’s fine. It’s satisfying to know that you could get good at something if you wanted to, but that you’d rather spend your effort on something else!
And it’s not “wasted” time, because it was time you enjoyed, witnessing yourself get better at something. That’s something you can carry with you to anything else that you do. For me, my experience as a writer has translated to me confidently making lots of youtube videos even though I knew nothing about videography when I started. I truly wish everyone could have that feeling of lightness, confidence, comfort with attempting things that they’re not familiar with, because it makes the world feel like a much more inviting place.
What people struggle with
“Lock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summers / That's a different world like three summers /
I deserve to do these numbers”
– Kanye West, Spaceship, 2004
I never particularly intended this, but “do 100 thing” is one of my talking points on Twitter that has really taken off and resonated with people. It’s spread far and wide enough that it’s also bumped up against people who find it tedious and discouraging. Oops.
I must say, if this frame doesn’t help you, you should disregard it! The point is, if life feels chaotic and overwhelming, doing something small 100 times is a simple and effective way to get a foothold on something new. It doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t need to be pretty. The point is to just have done something, and to do more of it than you would have if you were fucking around aimlessly. So “fuck around kinda-aimlessly but with some intent”.
Overwhelmed.
When some people hear “do 100 thing,” they feel overwhelmed. They do their first thing, and they feel like doing 99 more things seems just so daunting and discouraging. But actually, you can only ever do one thing at a time. So the thing to focus on is the next thing. Maybe start by thinking “Do 5 things”, and when you get to 5, expand that to “Do 10 things”, and so on. Adjust the framework to make it work for you.
Self-coercion.
Some people try to bully and force themselves into doing 100 of something that they don’t want to do. I think this is mistaken. If part of you wants to do the thing, and part of you doesn’t, this is an opportunity for dialogue, negotiation, compromise. Get to know yourself better. It could be that you learn that you don’t really want to do the thing all that badly. Or maybe your project management is too clunky.
What you can do:
“Let a person make a hundred or more drafts of short stories, none longer than two pages…”
– Frederich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878
Lower your expectations.
[[Embrace failures]]. Be willing to do things badly. Create “a sea of imperfect work”. The powerful thing that you might not expect is, if you have any taste at all (and I bet you do, because you are a human being), you will find yourself developing aesthetic judgements about the relative merits and demerits of each thing. Even if you make 100 crappy things, they won’t be uniformly crappy. Some things will be less crappy than others. Your task then is to notice the difference, and to examine it with curiosity, and reverse engineer it.
Start really, really small.
[[Baby Steps.]] Nothing is too small to start with. Suppose you want to be a writer. Try writing 100 words. It could be 100 words of stream-of-consciousness journaling, in sentences. Or you could try to simply make a list of a 100 words that come to your mind. It might sound trivial but just see what happens! If you feel truly bereft of thoughts, you could even literally write out “one… two… three…” and see how that feels. Get a sense of the feeling of what it’s like to make things, even if they’re just derivative copies.
Imitate others.
Miles Davis said, "Man, sometimes it takes a really long time to sound like yourself." Part of this is that all learning begins with imitation. Everything is a remix. We mimic, experiment, distort, modify, switch, invert. Don’t feel bad about this. The Beatles started out as a cover band. Sony started out as a radio repair shop. You have to tinker around with stuff before you figure out how to really make your own thing.
Embrace incompleteness.
It’s okay if you don’t finish. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish things that you don’t want to do – that will feel unpleasant, and I believe that you have to enjoy yourself in order to keep going.
Do 100 Things
“Do 100 Things” is a very powerful force. It’s conceptually simple, yet consequential.
Anybody who does 100 of anything has created a body of work. A body of work is something that you can study and learn from. You will notice patterns. You will see what is good, and what isn’t.
A body of work is something that’s relevant and interesting to other people.
It will open doors for you, and introduce you to opportunities. “Do 100 things” is a journey.
You will be a different person at the end of it.
You will learn things about your craft that you couldn’t even perceive when you started.
You will learn things about yourself, too.
Ask questions
"Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone's mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn't be who we are today. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder."
– Clara Ma, aged 12, winning the naming rights NASA’s Mars Rover
A 2021 selfie by the Curiosity Mars rover. It was by asking questions that we put a robot friend on another planet and sent a picture back to Earth.
I believe that curiosity is one of the most powerful drives on the planet.
It’s so powerful that it has to be culturally suppressed, because it’s power is dangerous. Think of all the negative words we have associated with a curious person: busybody, snoop, troublemaker, nosy parker. Even words like “inquisitive” tend to pick up negative connotations. I think part of this is because of complexity around privacy, which is understandable. Still, I think there is a tremendous opportunity for us to advance our species by encouraging curiosity at the most foundational layers, skillfully.
In the early stages, curiosity can seem frivolous.
That’s part of why it gets dismissed. It doesn’t obviously bear immediate fruit. It’s just some annoying kid asking irksome questions. But these meddlesome kids go on invent fertilizer and dynamite, atom bombs and iPhones.
My own curiosity has served me tremendously well throughout my life, even though it wasn’t always obvious in the moment. And I will admit it can also be a torment at times. It’s kept me going while writing this book, but it’s also refused to allow me to publish it until I feel that it’s really good. I’m just continually gripped by a desire to better understand the subject matter.
Encouraging curiosity has tremendous payoffs.
Many people will casually pay lip service to curiosity, without really thinking about what it entails. If you ask them, “is curiosity good?” They will say, of course, yes! But in practice, curiosity can be really inconvenient. Curiosity is the sort of thing that makes people pack up their lives and move to the Amazon rainforest to study obscure butterflies.
So some people might think it’s a little irresponsible of me to advocate for deliberately cultivating curiosity. But, oh well. There are worse things to advocate for. I believe that we need to encourage and support the curiosity of our species in order to truly flourish.
I believe that almost everybody has at least some curiosity in them. Children seem to be pretty naturally curious. They might not all be curious about the same things. If you’ve ever spent a few hours watching kids free-roaming at a birthday party, you get to see how they each end up self-directed in different ways. I remember being amused recently by a child that really enjoyed going up to adults and talking to them – something I would never have done as a child myself. It really made it clear to me that every person is different, and has unique strengths and weaknesses, and how silly it is that we broadly act as if a couple of standards should work well for everyone.
Anyway – the point of that is – don’t try to be curious about something you’re not curious about. This sounds a little silly but I do get DMs from people about this! They feel like they should be more curious about what their peers are into, or what is popular. That’s not how curiosity works. Curiosity is a cheeky mischief in your heart, a tingle in your fingers. If you pursue that feeling, genuinely, it will lead you on tremendous adventures, far beyond anything you can imagine.
What people struggle with:
"Questions are places in your mind where answers fit.
If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.
It hits your mind and bounces right off.
You have to ask the question – you have to want to know –
in order to open up space for the answer to fit."
– Clayton Christensen
There are two parts to this, the social aspect and the personal aspect.
People worry about embarrassing themselves.
Socially, some people worry that questions will be interpreted in bad-faith, or will make them look bad – look ignorant, uninformed. And this is a completely reasonable fear. Lots of people will pay lip service to curiosity, and say that it’s a good thing, but historically speaking, curiosity has not always been rewarded. It’s often perceived as a nuisance.
It takes time and practice to get good at asking the right questions.
Early on, some of your questions will be too broad, or too narrow. Too vague, or too specific. This can be frustrating to deal with. It’s somewhat like the pain of being inarticulate. Or like having poor aim, or being bad at tossing and catching a ball. But the only way to get better at it is to persist. Keep trying, and keep trying to be slightly less “off” than you were the last time.
Experiment with variations.
What you can do:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Rediscover and reinhabit your natural child-state curiosity.
Make lists of all the questions you can think of.
[[Journal]]. Practice asking lots of questions in a random way, whatever comes to your mind. (Psst: It’s never truly random.) What’s been on your mind lately? Make a list! Interrogate one of your journal entries questioning each of the sentences in them. Why did I think this? Why did I do that? What was I hoping to achieve or accomplish?
Ask questions, and then ask follow-up questions.
[[Baby steps.]] Well, this is recursive. I would recommend that you start with small curiosities. I particularly recommend examining your own life. I’ve had a lot of fun just looking at objects around my house and asking myself, “What’s up with that? Where did that come from?” – and it’s led me on fascinating Google and Wikipedia bunny-trails, looking up things like Korean battery factories. It’s never immediately obvious why this information would be useful, but you learn so much about the world just exploring.
Seek out curious people.
If you know curious people in real life, that’s great! But if you don’t, you can still be exposed to the spirit of curiosity through books and other media. I personally enjoy several nerdy YouTube channels like Overly Sarcastic Productions, Oversimplified and others. Simply witnessing their curiosity has a way of bringing out the curiosity in me.
When dealing with the social realm, start small.
[[Baby steps]]. Use tentative language. Express uncertainty. Use phrasing like “I wonder if…” and “part of me suspects…” that allow you to distance yourself from “bad takes” if necessary. It can be kind of annoying to have to do this – I find that the need for this increases the more status you have, the larger your audience is, and so on. I think it’s somewhat helpful to frame this as a kind and genuinely humble thing to do.
Ask questions, cultivate your curiosity
Curiosity is an extremely powerful force.
So powerful that, for a lot of human history, it was socially regulated.
Managed properly, curiosity can be uplifting, energizing.
Building a research project around a deep, persistent curiosity gives you a lens through which to process information from the world.
This makes the world more interesting, which makes life more exciting.
A research project is simply a set of questions that you persistently attempt to answer.
Questions are some of the most powerful assets we have.
Clay Christensen: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit.”
Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
What do you want to know?
Who do you want to be? Where do you want to go?
There’s a glorious quest waiting for you in every question, full of promise, adventure, riches.
The delight of discovery awaits.
Define problems and solve them
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
— Alan Watts
I suspect that almost all persistent problems persist because they are misframed.
Well-defined, well-scoped problems tend to get solved. We don’t even really think of them as Problems. We tend to think of them more as tasks. If you’re thirsty, you drink water, you quench your thirst, problem solved. It’s not typically a Problem that you have to agonize over. If you’re sleepy but you can’t seem to sleep, now that’s a Problem.
Since we tend to solve well-defined problems, the problems we’re left with are the ones that are poorly defined. And the meta-problem with poorly defined problems is that we tend to not realize that they are poorly defined. This rhymes with George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” People tend not to acknowledge this!
The problem is, we think we understand our problems.
If we could be more honest with ourselves about how little we understand about our problems, we would be much better positioned to solve them. The problems we struggle with the most are not actually the ones where we admit ignorance, but the ones that we misdiagnose. The ones that we think we understand, even as we continue to fail at solving them, or making progress at solving them, over and over again.
My friend Michael Story (@MWStory) has a great tweet that I want to quote in full: “Mistake I've made many times: seeing someone with a simple problem and thinking "not to worry, this just needs a quick fix and they'll be on their way!" instead of "what level of hidden dysfunction is keeping even this simple problem unsolved?"”
An important thing about this section is that I want to convey how people struggle with misframed, misdiagnosed problems. I’m not going to go super deep into each problem, what I want is to convey the general sense of what it’s like when people misframe problems.
Examples of misframed problems
“How do I figure out what I want?”
My friend Divia (@diviacaroline) pointed out that, if you tune in to it, the constant invalidation of children can be deafening. “You don’t want that!” (He does.) “You’re okay!” (She isn’t.) “That doesn’t matter.” (It does to the kid.) And my observation is – later in life, I get these kids in my DMs, and they ask me, “How do I know what I want? How do I know if I’m okay? How do I know what matters to me?” I actually started out writing this book trying to answer those questions directly, but only after agonizing over it for a couple of years did I begin to grasp that you don’t go looking for answers to those questions. The answers are already within you! You just need to reverse the invalidation. “Just”. Introspect is a book about trying to reverse self-invalidation.
“If I get famous I’ll stop feeling lonely.”
A depressing number of people pursue fame hoping that it’ll make them feel less lonely – and when they succeed, they often find that superstar fame is lonelier than anything else. People can pedestalize or demonize you, both of which are dehumanizing, and with potentially ruinous consequences. If you’re not careful, fame will crowd out the more intimate attention and understanding that you really want. Fame has its perks and upsides, but you want to be very careful when you’re courting it.
“Why can’t I sleep?”
This is a personal one for me. If there’s something you’ve been wanting to change about your life (eg: “fix my sleep”), and you’ve spent maybe 10+ years making failed attempts at it despite having done the reading, etc – the problem is probably upstream. It’s not actually the sleep, it’s something else. In my case, I’m coming around to realize that it’s not about whether I bring my phone to bed (I don’t) or sleep in a dark room (I do), but it’s about my conceptual relationship with rest altogether, which I will talk about in Act III.
“Why am I so stupid?”
I’ve recurringly encountered people describing themselves as stupid, when they’re not. “It’s so stupid how I haven’t yet done the thing I know I’m supposed to do.” This is a misdiagnosis! The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence, but of courage. You aren’t an idiot, you’re a coward! And if you’re a coward who’s misdiagnosing yourself as an idiot, you’ll be stuck there indefinitely, working on the wrong problem! (Which, you could say, at a meta-level, is what your fear wants. It wants to work on the wrong problem.) Once you acknowledge that the problem is fear, you can take baby steps towards addressing it.
“How do I become creative?”
If you think someone isn’t creative, you should look at their excuses. People are very, very good at coming up with all sorts of creative explanations for why they can’t do something. The
problem isn’t a lack of creativity. It’s typically a lack of courage, and sometimes a deficit of project management skills. You are already creative. The issue is likely that you’re clouding this from yourself.
“I don’t belong here.”
A lot of people seem to think that imposter syndrome – the experience of feeling like you don’t belong, don’t deserve to be somewhere – is either a sign of actual moral failure (you’re a bad person), or it’s a sign of some psychological defect. That you’re feeling the wrong feelings, and you need to change how you feel. That’s partially correct, but it cannot be intellectually, solved by thinking. No amount of introspection will help you with a lack of knowledge about the interiority of others.
You can only truly resolve your imposter syndrome by talking with other people, and getting to know about their experiences. The problem of feeling like a misfit is seeing for yourself firsthand how everyone else feels similarly. This requires getting out of your own head and giving a shit about other people’s experiences. The sense of belonging you seek is in your interactions with others.
What people struggle with:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself– and you are the easiest person to fool.
So you have to be very careful about that.”
– Richard Feynman, Nobel-winning physicist
Pretense of knowledge.
The big problem with problems, in my view, is that people think they understand the problems that they’re dealing with. If we openly began with the admission that we have no idea what we’re doing, no idea what we’re talking about, we will have a much easier time coming to good understandings of things. But unfortunately, we tend to have some expectations, some assumptions, some narrative, some idea about how things are “supposed” to be. And this can be a spanner in the works that grinds the whole enterprise to a halt. We can be stuck for years, decades, all our lives if we’re not careful – if we’re attached to a particular frame or point of view.
Complexity is difficult to wrangle.
Another problem is that problems can be wicked, meaning they have many different factors. Boredom and procrastination are two everyday problems that people struggle with, I think, significantly because they are multivariate problems. There are several different things going wrong at once, and it takes effort to be clinical and precise in your thinking, so that you can tease apart the factors.
What you can do:
“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them.”
― Steve Maraboli
Experiment with zooming out and zooming in to see the problem at different scales.
[[Framing]]. The big and important thing to do is to begin by opening up as wide as you can, accepting the possibility that any problem that you’ve been dealing with for a long time may be framed wrongly. This requires acknowledging the possibility of past failure. Don’t beat yourself up about that. [[Embrace your mistakes]]. You did more or less the best that you could have done given your knowledge at the time. Always be open and willing to start over again. No failed effort is ever wasted as long as you don’t quit.
If that doesn’t seem to be helping, the opposite can also work. Zoom in to look at the smallest possible facet of a problem. Instead of trying to solve “why am I unproductive”, which is a huge question that can take years to develop an understanding of, try solving “what would be a good use of 15 minutes of my time?” Now this isn’t to say that it isn’t worthwhile to ask the big question! I actually think it’s excellent to ask the big question. But pace yourself. Be careful that you aren’t hiding behind the big question to avoid facing simpler and more straightforward questions.
Exercise your imagination + seek novel inputs.
If you don’t have a lot of practice using your imagination, your imagination might be limited and progress might be slow. A good “trick” here is to rely less on generating ideas from inside your own head, and instead take advantage of the chaotic nature of reality. Look for ideas from completely different domains than the one you’re operating. Grab a magazine or search around online for some interest that isn’t relevant to you. Watch a documentary about something you know nothing about. Take a random bus in a random direction. Go somewhere different. Eat something different. Surprise yourself.
Write down precisely what you think the problem is, and what the factors are.
[[Journal]]. It’s very, very difficult to solve multi-factor problems in your head, or to identify errors in your thinking. Have you ever noticed how other people are so wrong about so many things? If you write stuff down, and revisit it, you can notice this about yourself, too. And the cool thing is, while you can't address other people's errors, you can address your own.
Literally make a list of all of the problems you can think of. I recommend focusing on the problems in your own life, but if you have bigger problems in mind, I recommend writing those down too.
Ask lots of questions and see what excites you.
Once you have a list of problems, interrogate them! My friend Malcolm Ocean (@malcolm_ocean) has a great riff where he points at something that’s less-than-great, and asks, “What if it were good, though?” How can we reframe this in a way that is useful, good, interesting, helpful? What would it look like if it were good?
You don’t need to answer every single question that you ask. Sometimes you make a list of a dozen questions, and one of them seizes your attention – it excites you, tantalizes you with the promise of an interesting journey. That’s the one I’d pick. Even if it isn’t necessarily the “most useful” – I think at a meta-level it’s good to get in the habit of enjoying your life. You’re much likelier to stick with something if you’re having fun. And the fun is the point, really.
✱
practice defining and solving problems
We are a problem-solving species.
We identify and solve problems all the time.
If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re thirsty, drink. If you’re tired, rest.
Simple enough.
But some problems are more complicated. They can involve multiple variables, and they might require a multi-step solution.
The most persistent problems tend to be the ones where we misdiagnose the problem.
As a consequence we end up perpetuating the problem. Sometimes we even worsen the problem.
The important thing is to cultivate a healthy, collaborative attitude towards problems.
I enjoy the idea of life’s problems as “worthy adversaries”.
They are there to challenge us to rise and grow.
In the peak state of clarity and bliss, it’s possible to experience the realization that there are no problems at all.
It’s not realistic to expect to live in that peak state all the time. When you come back down to earth, your problems are still there, waiting for you.
Greet them with open arms.
Investigate your desires
“The thing I really want to emphasize is, I didn’t have a choice. The dream is something you never knew was going to come into your life. Dreams always come from behind you, not right between your eyes. It sneaks up on you. But when you have a dream, it doesn’t often come at you screaming in your face, “This is who you are, this is what you must be for the rest of your life.” Sometimes a dream almost whispers. And I’ve always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to—your instincts, your human personal intuition—always whispers; it never shouts. Very hard to hear. So you have to every day of your lives be ready to hear what whispers in your ear; it very rarely shouts. And if you can listen to the whisper, and if it tickles your heart, and it’s something you think you want to do for the rest of your life, then that is going to be what you do for the rest of your life, and we will benefit from everything you do.”
– Steven Spielberg, speech at the Academy of Achievement
Practice articulating what you want.
When I was a teenager, I badly wanted to be a rockstar. This wasn’t a childhood dream, I didn’t really know about rockstars as a kid. My family wasn’t musical. Michael Jackson was the major star of the world of my childhood, but I didn’t really care for him. I do enjoy his songs, and respect his style and skill, but he didn’t set my heart alight. Looking back, I think it’s because I thought he was very “polite” and “safe”. Which already tells me something important about myself: I’m not very interested in “polite” and “safe”. (Re-reading this now, I also realize that a lot of this was about me crossing the threshold from childhood to adolescence – “rockstar” was the frame I was using to express my independence, my rebellion, my sexuality.)
I remember getting into Metallica and Guns N’ Roses as a teenager, and Radiohead, and Disturbed, and what I think I enjoyed about all of those bands is that they felt a little subversive, dangerous. And that’s what drew me in. I had a few peers who played musical instruments, and I thought they were really cool, and I wanted to hang out with them, and so I taught myself the guitar, and the bass – which I thought was the easiest instrument for a person with no musical background to pick up. I jammed with several bands, started a couple of my own, organized my own concerts, and all in all it was a fantastic part of my adolescence. I learned so much about life from those days, far more than anything I learned in school.
I still love music, though I do feel like I don’t love it as wholeheartedly as some “real” musicians I’ve met. I’ve met musicians who truly lived and breathed music, who woke up in the morning wanting to play music, and would practice their instrument until bed. I didn’t love music that much. That too taught me something important about myself. (What I do love that much is language. Words. I can nerd out about words indefinitely, all day everyday. Which is why I’m writing books instead of albums.)
Disassemble your desires
Anyway, the point of all of that is to lead up to this little diagram I once put together when trying to make sense of myself. Somebody on Twitter once asked, “what’s your biggest unfulfilled dream?” And the obvious response that arose for me was “touring rock musician” – I explicitly remember that I used to fantasize about running away from home and going on the road with nothing but a guitar.
I asked myself, “What are the things I hoped to get out of inhabiting that role?” And I wrote them down:
While I never did end up becoming one (and never say never! I’m still young!), I’ve found it very fulfilling to deconstruct all of the things I would've wanted to get out of it, and then restructure my life to get each of those bits from different sources. So at this point in my life, even though I’m not actually on the road, I do actually feel like a touring rock musician – or what I imagined it would be like to be a touring rock musician. I highly recommend doing this with your "unfulfilled" dreams. (Also, I feel like it’s important to note that reality is always muckier that we imagine it to be. Actually being a touring musician must be exhausting. Being on the road, sleeping in different places, eating different foods… exciting in some ways, but also exhausting for sure.)
Back to Disassembling: you can do this with everything. Maybe you think you want to get rich, but it turns out that... what you want is the $$ so you can buy really good food. If so, maybe you can become a home chef, or a food critic! Trying to solve problems with money is often the least intelligent solution. And the reason we go with the least intelligent solution, I think, is that we have gotten so numb to our own feelings, we dull our own sensitivity and our imagination.
There’s usually a better way, and that’s something to be excited and curious about. Reframe. Remix. Mess around.
Be sensitive to inherited wants
I think in a section about desires, it’ll also be useful to talk a bit about when I was wrong about what I wanted. The first example that comes to mind is: I used to have a bunch of books that I bought and kept, because I wanted to be the kind of person who read them. Books about philosophy and science that seemed like they were really smart and important. The Origin of Species! The Illiad! But I didn’t actually want to read them at the time. I mostly just wanted to be impressive, prestigious, cultured.
I don’t think it’s entirely bad to want to be impressive to others. After all, we are social creatures, so the impulse to impress is an entirely natural one. I think the important thing is to be honest with ourselves about it. Do not pretend to be interested in something, hoping that faking your interest in it will eventually lead to genuine interest. But this can be tricky. I’ll get into another example shortly.
Walk and then pave the desire paths
A concept that I encountered fairly late that really grew on me over the years is the idea of a desire path. A desire path is a path that’s created by people walking over it repeatedly. These paths tend to be really efficient, and have a beautiful elegance to them that’s quite a bit different than the sterile grids that we tend to come up with when we try to plan things in a top-down way.
It’s funny – part of what annoys me about the present state of the book you’re reading right now is that I didn’t have enough time to really write it the way I wanted it. It looks more like New York than Paris. The act of writing it has made it clearer to me what the next version of the book might look like, but I don’t have the time or energy to redo the whole thing from scratch all over again.
But anyway, the point of bringing up the concept is: you can pave the desire paths in your own life. Just do little things that you want. Do lots of little random things and pay attention to how you feel about it. And then work with that. A lightbulb moment I had recently while editing this book is that you don’t actually need to “Know” what you want, in order to do what you want.
Children certainly don’t! They just do what they want! The problem is that we get inside our own heads. We force ourselves to justify ourselves.
What people struggle with:
“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything?
What then?”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
The above quote is quite cynical and a little dissonant from the theme of the overarching optimism of this book, but I feel like including it anyway. The perspective here is the idea that nobody actually wants what they want, and that they enjoy the wanting. Do I agree with that? I think it’s sometimes true for some people, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. My instinct is that this is the perspective of an unintegrated person, someone who is internally haunted or tormented in some way. “Nobody does” is a minor “tell”. How can anybody assume what is true for everybody else? I can’t be sure that the character is projecting, but it does rhyme with what people who are projecting do. Like how dishonest people assume that everyone else is dishonest, too.
I believe it’s possible to get to a state where you want what you want, and you do enjoy getting what you want, and it does mean something to you, and after you get what you want, you move on to wanting new and different things, in a way that is additive, wholesome, nourishing rather than empty and tasteless like how the “hedonic treadmill” feels.
But I also do remember what it was like, in the depths of my depression, to feel like everything is bullshit, wants are all fake, just chemicals in your brain fucking with you, because we’re all a meaningless accident of evolution, yadda yadda. I do remember that. It was really bleak. What would I say to my younger self? I wouldn’t argue with him. Because he’s not wrong! His misery is in fact quite significantly a consequence of him being “not wrong”. The challenge is to invite him to experiment with different ways of being, for the heck of it.
“How do I tell the difference between what I actually want, and what I think I want?”
As I mentioned earlier when talking about sovereignty, people tend to be unsure of themselves, possibly because of all of the conditioning, all of the fog. So this is like saying, fogs be foggy!
The social aspect is really tough. For example, coming to terms with the fact that you mostly like something because you like someone. Sometimes this leads to a genuine thing, sometimes it doesn’t, and you’re the only person who can really know for sure. It can be smart to seek out a “networked answer”, where you try and talk with lots of different people to see how your feelings change when you’re in the presence of different people. You can also do this by journaling repeatedly over an extended period of time. We’ll get into this in greater detail in the next Act.
// There’s some stuff I’d like to get into here about Girardian or mimetic desire, but I don’t have time. I’ll save it for the next edition of the book. I do also kinda talk about it a little bit in [[social bloatware]]. Honestly upon re-read this whole section is murkier than I’d like, but I could say that about the entire book, so.
What you can do:
“For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Calvin and Hobbes was a huge influence on me as a kid. To this day I can’t tell if I modeled myself after Calvin, or if I was drawn to Calvin because he reminded me so much of myself.
Probably a bit of each.
Look for patterns.
This is where [[journaling]] over a lengthy period of time helps. I think it’s good to do monthly and annual recaps. If you have digital footprints – blogposts, Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram posts and so on, you can learn a lot by reviewing them. I definitely recommend setting aside time just to scroll through your old feeds while having a notebook or notes app open to jot down your own thoughts and observations about your old posts.
Talk to your old friends and family.
People who have known you for a long time tend to be able to perceive things about you that you might not even perceive in yourself.
Talk to strangers and ask them what their impression of you is.
This pairs perfectly with the previous thing – there are things that your longtime peers will miss, that will be notable to complete strangers. I do want to caution, though, that in both cases, you should never really take any one person’s word as gospel truth about who you are. Because they don’t necessarily see you “for who you are”, they see you through their own lens, which is colored by their own struggles, their own life experience. It’s best to “triangulate” a sense of how you are perceived, by talking to a wide range of people.
“Soften the ground.” – make your own desire paths!
Sometimes there’s something that you do want, and yet it’s not quite… right. An example that comes to mind for me: I vaguely knew that I wanted to know more about jazz, and Miles Davis. As a musician, this seemed normal and right for me. And yet I kept procrastinating. I think
sometime around 2015 I started listening to Kind of Blue on repeat on YouTube – and that softened the ground a little bit for me. Now I wanna know more about the guy who made the thing I like.
But that wasn’t enough yet to make me want to watch a 2 hour documentary. Until, at some point, I found myself asking the question, “What was the scene that Miles played in, anyway? What was that like?” – because I’ve had this ongoing curiosity about scenes. That led to me reading his Wikipedia page with some interest, and some of the details jumped out at me enough to get me interested in watching documentaries. Do you see what happened here? I had a vague intellectual interest, and I kept it around until I found an entry point that “softened the ground” for me – something which I think might be more in the realm of emotions. This is a skill you can develop!
Define your dream life in as much detail as you can manage.
Put together vision boards on Pinterest. Make collections of your favorite objects. Make lists of your favorite quotes. This stuff might seem frivolous but it’s very, very powerful. Yes, this is kind of in “Law of Attraction” or “The Secret” territory. I haven’t read that stuff too deeply – I think some of the criticisms of those ideas are that the language is very wooey, with claims like “The Universe will provide!”
Personally, I choose to read such statements as poetic, mythic ideas, rather than literal truths. That way I find a way to make the ideas useful to me, without necessarily buying into a broader ideology or worldview. There’s a quote I remember from an interview with Machine Gun Kelly, where he said something like (I paraphrase), “Suppose The Universe wanted to give a spaceship to someone. It could give it to some random kid, or it could give it to that weirdo who’s wearing a spacesuit to school every day. I was the kid wearing a spacesuit.” Again, I think there’s something to that, even if I don’t particularly think of “The Universe” as some sort of divine consciousness or agentic being. It can be a proxy for “social forces beyond your awareness”.
Optimize for the serendipity that you want.
Another way of thinking about all of this is that it’s about optimizing for serendipity that you want. Optimizing for luck. Making yourself receptive, being prepared for opportunities. Something like this happened for me not too long ago. I have a habit of doing Twitter threads about books I’m reading. I’ve also been making videos on my YouTube channel, chatting with friends and so on. One day, I did a book thread about David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity. Great book. Turns out I happened to have a mutual friend with David, and he was interested in doing a video chat with me about the book! I’ve had multiple opportunities like this over the years. Sure, it’s possible that I’m just very lucky. But I’ve found that I tend to get a lot luckier when I put myself in places where there are high rates of interaction.
Investigate your desires:
Children don’t seem to spend much time agonizing about their desires.
They know what they want. They know it in their hearts. They know it until we teach them to get in their own way.
So, “How do I figure out what I want?” is the wrong question.
And if you’re not careful, it can lead you on a remarkably fruitless chase. (Although, who’s to say, or know, what’s worthy, and what’s not?
The fruit of life is already within us.)
You already know what you want, in your heart.
The question is, how do you get out of your own way?
How do you quiet the mind enough to let your heart speak?
How do you stop suppressing yourself?
You have to face yourself with gentleness, patience, kindness.
Be a soothing presence to yourself, the way you would calm an anxious puppy.
Cultivate rituals of presence and peace.
Make it safe for yourself to feel.
Learn to ask for help
“From what I've seen, it isn't so much the act of asking that paralyzes us — it's what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one. It points, fundamentally, to our separation from one another.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art Of Asking
I will readily admit that I’m not great at asking for help. I do think I’ve gotten a lot better over the years. To be precise: once I acknowledge that I need help, I’m pretty good at asking for help.
But I’m very bad at acknowledging that I need help. It makes me feel weak, it makes me feel like a failure. What has helped me – which is kind of annoying, but it works – is to see that my aversion to asking for help prevents me from helping others in turn.
Which is to say, it’s actually selfish of me not to ask for help! Because my attempt to protect my own ego is the bottleneck limiting me from doing more good in the world! You do have to be careful with this line of thinking, because if you take it too seriously you can end up in the “excruciating meaning” trap (see meme in the next section), and then feel overwhelmed by it.
✱
Reviewing and editing this book, towards the end of my process, I’m now thinking that the meta-story of Introspect might be that it’s a book that I had to write in order to teach myself to ask my friends for help. Remember, a [[project]] is anything that requires collaboration, even if only with yourself. Collaboration is deeply humanizing, and the inability to collaborate is therefore dehumanizing. Asking for help is about seeking collaboration, you want someone to labor with you. Being unable to ask for help is dehumanizing. And I’ve felt this myself, very recently, in the process of writing this book, and feeling like I was doing it in a deep, dark pit all by my lonesome. [[jailbreak]].
And it was entirely self-imposed. Because I know that I have friends who love me, care about me, and would be delighted to have the opportunity to assist me with literally anything that I ask them for. So the interesting thing for me to introspect on is, why? Why did I refuse free help?
Not only would it have been free, it would have made my friends happy, and it would have saved me time, so it would have been a win-win! Don’t I claim to like win-wins? And the truth I have to come to terms with is: my ego was in the way. My inner [[authoritarian-tyrant]] was adamant that I had to work on this book all by myself or “it would be fake bullshit”, it “wouldn’t count”. Writing that down, saying it out loud, instantly reveals it to be utterly laughable as a claim. Why would anybody believe that nonsense? I did. Because I was scared. I couldn’t laugh about it until I wrote it down and saw its absurdity for myself. [[journalling]], [[humor]]. So, you see. I had to write this book to teach myself the thing I’m trying to help you with, too. We’re all in this together. We really are.
What people struggle with:
“The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking
I think Amanda covered this so well that I’m basically gonna just parrot her here. People are afraid of judgment and criticism. They’re afraid of being vulnerable, of being perceived as weak, and mocked for that weakness.
And they may have participated in the mockery of others for being weak. If you’ve done that, it can make it even harder to ask for help, because deep down you now know that it’s only “just and proper” that you be mocked in turn. Why do you deserve mercy if you didn’t show mercy to others? So if you want to seek help, I think it’s very important that you personally commit to never mocking anyone else for asking.
✱
Here’s a little anecdote of a behavior pattern I had back when I used to have a proper job, working in a team that had deadlines and so on. I can talk about it quite openly now, but at the time it was strange. And actually, when I think about it, there are versions of this pattern still playing out today. Anyway the thing is: I would be running late on a task, and then I would freeze up and “go dark”. My colleagues would message me, fairly casually asking, “Yo, Visa, what’s the latest on this? Any update?” I would see it, and my blood would run cold. I’m not exaggerating. I would freeze and panic and try to desperately finish whatever it was that I owed, even though realistically it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. And I would basically be in a state of alarm and anxiety the whole time. While being in denial about the whole thing, because of course I’m not an anxious guy, what are you talking about! =p
I did have conversations with my colleagues about this, bless them, they were really understanding and supportive. They would remind me that, dude, it’s way better for everyone if you just keep everyone posted on the progress at regular intervals, so people know what to expect, what to plan. When in doubt, overcommunicate. This made sense to me intellectually, but it felt utterly revulsive in my body. Even now, typing this, I can feel my mouth going dry, and my stomach is churning a little bit. I realize now that this goes back to childhood shit with family and school. That almost every single interaction I had in this kind of domain just led to me getting punished for it, and that the best way to avoid punishments was to try to hide. And so this is something that I have to actively repattern, process, confront. I have to take [[baby steps]]
and practice lots of little communication with people that I trust, so that I can feel for myself that it’s okay, that I’m okay.
✱
Brene Brown is another person who talks really well about shame, and I’m going to quote some notes directly from her TED talk:
“Shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection? [...] No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.”
“There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy.”
“Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.”
What you can do:
“Being able to receive gifts is a gift. When we receive gifts from others, we give them a gift of giving.”
― Miriam Hurdle, Songs of Heartstrings
There’s two parts to this. One is tactical: learning how to get better at asking. The other is fundamental: it’s about addressing your concept of “help” entirely.
Articulate, to yourself, what it is you need help with.
I recommend writing it down. Try to write in as much detail as possible. Ask yourself questions. “I need more money” – Why? For what? What is the outcome that you want?
// The following is extracted from a blogpost I’ve written. I don’t currently have the time to edit it to integrate better with the section, so here it is as-is.
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
This is the most important thing that tons of people seem to fail to do. Why should this person help you? What is it like to receive a message from you? Don’t be a creep. Don’t be a bore. If it’s an important text or email, and you’re not sure of yourself, run it by a trusted friend. Read it out loud and feel how it sounds. It shouldn’t sound like a demand, a threat or a hostage letter. It should sound, ideally, like a casual invite to a bit of fun.
Keep it short.
If you need help from someone, don’t make them read an essay just to understand what you’re asking. Put in the effort to edit down your request until it’s something that’s quick and easy to read. You might have 10 questions for them. Put 9 of them in your drafts, and ask the most important one. The more work you make them have to do to help you, the worse your odds of getting help get.
Give a sincere, specific compliment.
I’m not saying appeal to their ego to make them feel good, though that doesn’t hurt. The important thing is to demonstrate that you’ve done your homework. “I read your essay about X and I thought it was really insightful how you talked about Y.” Giving people specific, sincere compliments is a gift, and it will make them feel like repaying the kindness – if your request is a reasonable one. You’re no longer “random stranger”, you’re “person who appreciates my work”.
Make it easy for them to say yes.
Don’t give them the total responsibility of figuring out what kind of help you need. Make an effort to describe your issue in detail. Nobody wants additional responsibility for no clear reward or payoff. We all have enough responsibilities already.
Do your homework.
Do at least a cursory check to see if they’ve already answered the question that you’re asking. Google your question and see what the top results are, and read through the results. Piece together *your* tentative answer to the question you’re asking. Eg, instead of simply asking “should I do X or Y”, it’s worth adding a line that says, “I read a compelling argument for X, but…”. This lengthens your message slightly (don’t write a whole essay), but it’s worth it because it demonstrates that you’re serious and not just screwing around.
Don’t be needy and/or demanding.
Nobody owes you a response. It’s sad that this needs to be said, and yet it does. But also, a lighter version of this: don’t be tedious about how “you’re probably not going to see this…” and “I don’t expect a reply…” or any of that stuff. Just ask your question and go. The more overwrought you make things, the weirder you make it for them. Just ask the question, in a breezy and relaxed tone if you can.
[/blogpost stuff]
Appreciate the fact that there are many kinds of people in the world.
Not everybody will want to help, but not everybody will want to mock you either. There are those of us who will admire you for your courage in asking for help, and be eager to support you if we can.
Practice helping other people when you can.
You could think about this as learning to participate in the “gift economy”, and it’s also about adjusting your own perspective. It becomes a little easier to accept help from others when you become a person who helps others. Then it becomes easier to see it all as a great ecosystem, rather than something you as a solitary, self-centered individual are asking for.
✱
learn to ask for help, and practice it:
Nobody makes it on their own.
Everybody had to be raised as a child. Somebody had to feed you. Somebody had to wipe your butt.
We all rely on language, which is a communal enterprise.
We rely on roads, on money, on the rule of law, all sorts of communal enterprises.
“...a society which has defined him (Man) as separate cannot persuade him to behave as if he really belonged.” – Alan Watts
Some of us like to help other people, and you can even do us a favor by making it easy for us to help you.
When you ask for help, you demonstrate to other people that it’s okay to ask for help. This makes it easier for them to ask others for help, too.
So you can help others, by asking for help.
Remember, collaboration is humanizing, and the inability to collaborate is dehumanizing.
The more you isolate yourself, the less human you feel.
If you get mad at yourself for being stuck – or angry, guilty, ashamed – it gets worse.
Breathe. Articulate what it is that you need help with. Write it down. Make it specific. And then ask someone for help.
Cultivate a sense of humor
“Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious.
Solemnity, on the other hand, I honestly don’t know what it’s for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor and it freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. And the self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat.”
– John Cleese, actor and comedian
Nobody asks to be born – this is the central joke of life.
Our expectations are the setup, and reality is the punchline. We’re born crying, the challenge is to die laughing.
Not a resentful or mocking laugh, but laughter grounded in joy, surprise, love.
One of my private beliefs that doesn’t always translate very well is that true comedy is sacred. And not sacred as in solemn, but sacred as in profound. And even fart jokes can have a profundity to them if you get it right. But strangely few comedians seem to get it – many of them seem to be operating within a fixed [[frame]] of “I’m only supposed to be funny onstage”, but don’t see how real humor goes beyond the frame. Which is kind of sad, but also kind of funny from a certain angle.
I think it was Alan Watts who said that laughter and anxiety are both two sides of the same coin. The very serious job of the comedian, as I see it, is to transmute anxiety into laughter. There’s a similar quote by H. L. Mencken: “Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”
(I visited my dad in hospital after he had a heart attack (he’s fine now) & he told us he couldn’t sleep because one of the other guys kept farting all night. And right at the end of his story, the culprit farted again. We belly-laughed for ten minutes and it’s probably my happiest memory of him.)
I think for comedy to truly serve its exalted purpose, comedians have to, however briefly, put aside their ego, their neediness, their contempt and tap into a deep love for humanity, a deep joy, a deep sense of hilarity at the absurdity of all things. Easy for me to say, of course.
There’s a lot to be angry about in the world. There’s a lot of cruelty and injustice, and comedy can be a tool for addressing that. But I do privately believe that even there, there is a love in that pursuit. A desire for connection, shared understanding. Comedy is a way of grieving.
One must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing.
You were born crying, you should die laughing. When you meet God, laugh.
A lot of the tedium of everyday life builds up anxiety & stress, from the burden of maintaining a costly illusion of sanity. The comedian’s job is to remind us that it’s all hilarious. And not in a contemptuous or cruel way – laughing at ourselves should be wholesome, nourishing.
So anyway, y’know. I get pretty bummed out when I see comedians get all tangled up in stupid non-discussions about people being offended and whatnot. It’s like finding out that they’re not really comedians, only pretending to be, only playing the part of it. I was rooting for you!
But I can’t be too mad about it because that would be me missing the plot too, you see what I mean? It’s a little lonely inhabiting this space because very few people seem to really get it all
the way through. But the joke there is, “That’s my secret, Captain – I’m always lonely.” 😂 If I can laugh about my solitude, heartily, it ceases to have a vise-grip hold on me.
You can’t prescribe this as a method to anybody else, because it can be reductive and dismissive if it’s done without love. But for me privately, “what’s the joke here” gets me through almost everything. Laughter is not just medicine, it is a radical act in an anxious universe.
It’s been a while since I read Nassim Taleb, but one of my favorite bits from him is when he mentioned fantasizing about putting a mouse down the shirts of stiff corporate suit types. In a way that’s a great way to describe all of this. Put the mouse of joy down your own suit. I also just remembered that one of my favorite comics of all time uses a rodent as a cheeky way of breaking through solemnity. There is something profound here. Lots of people imprison their mischievous trickster rat, and in so doing imprison themselves. Humor is a critical part of breaking the rigid frame of joyless tyranny.
✱
A lot of paradoxes might be best resolved with a sense of humor.
For example, dicking around can be productive, but if you're anxious about being productive, that typically ruins the whole thing. The conflict creates a vortex that can be anxiety-inducing, until you see the humor in it. Once you can laugh about the ridiculousness of it all, you can steer your ship between the extremes.
This is the heart of philosophy, all else is commentary:
I have a pretty long list of such “ayy lmao” memes, where seeing the humor of the tension between two opposites helps to navigate it better.
reality — fantasy nobility — savagery
passive indolence — neurotic busyness absolutely Pointless — critically important immutable will of the divine — what I want, gosh everything is my fault — nothing is anybody’s fault everything is magick — nothing is magick cynicism imprisons — naivete burns
cloying, abject tenderness — brittle, rigid toughness
In every case, going too far in either extreme is potentially destructive – and yet it’s very challenging to have a “perfect balance” in between. The balance is less about striving for a 50/50 split in every moment, but rather, learning which frame is best for each context. And the humor here is, there’s no way we can ever become wise enough to know. So we’re always going to get our asses kicked, no matter how wise we are, and especially if we think we’re too wise to be “caught by surprise”. Life is fundamentally full of surprises. That’s the joke!
✱
Joke about the outcomes you want
This is a section about memeing things into existence. The stuff you joke about – even “ironically” – has a way of shaping your reality, so be careful and deliberate with that stuff. A lot of people fumble their own bags by joking about outcomes they don’t want. You might as well joke about the outcomes you do want.
I used to joke about being broke, and I started making more money when I decided that I wasn’t gonna do that anymore. I have a t-shirt business that I run on the side, and I literally made a
t-shirt that said “BO LUI”, which is Hokkien for “no money”.
When a person talks about what they want, I can take actions that might help them get what they want. And in a sense we are all doing this all the time. When we complain we are inviting others to complain with us and help us complain more.
When you spend your time and energy focusing on what you don’t want, you’ll likely end up getting more of it. For example, there’s a subreddit called /r/EnoughPetersonSpam where people post all day about how they can’t stand seeing anything about Jordan Peterson. And then they seem legitimately shocked when Reddit suggests to them that, maybe, if they’re in a subreddit that talks about Jordan Peterson, they might be interested in Jordan Peterson?
This is how the world works, friends! Whatever it is that you focus your time and attention of, whether jokingly or otherwise, that’s what will be directed your way. There doesn’t need to be any sort of mystical or metaphysical explanation for it. (Consider again Machine Gun Kelly’s Spaceship story from section 2.9 – that social reality will “conspire” to give you what it looks like you want).
// There are lots of amazing examples of people joking about outcomes they wanted. One of my favorites is Chloe Angyal, who wrote a blogpost titled “Marry Me, Zach Walls” in 2011, and then actually ended up marrying him in 2021. More on this next time.
What people struggle with:
“Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.”
― Eric Idle, Monty Python
Grave solemnity
Some people think, dude, life is not fucking funny. It’s full of struggle, pain, injustice, cruelty. And they’re right. There’s genuinely a lot to be miserable about. We shouldn’t hide away from this, or deny it. There is a truth to that, but it’s not the whole truth. The right thing to do is very
context-dependent. Trying to introduce humor when someone else is talking about their pain can be a tricky thing, and you probably shouldn’t attempt it unless you know the person well, have their trust, and so on.
Escapism: using humor to avoid reality
Some other people use humor excessively in an escapist way, as a way of avoiding reality. This can be useful to some degree as a coping mechanism, but I recommend that you be careful not to let this become too much of a habit. It’s tricky stuff! It can take many years to figure out what the balance is, and the act of finding this balance will likely involve making mistakes, sometimes painful mistakes that can be socially costly. That’s unfortunately part of the game. The good thing is that you can get better at it, and reduce your “error rate”. The frustrating thing is that, because of the bandwidth limitations of conversation, you can almost never completely prevent errors, except by refusing to communicate with anybody altogether.
✱
What you can do:
“Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood. The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unadroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparatively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence
– whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal – may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright.”
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Rather than see this as some sort of drastic reform, which can be intimidating and overwhelming, think of this as a sort of exercise in unserious comedic writing and exploration. [[Baby Steps!]] Imagine you’re going to clown school for a weekend. (By the way, clown school is real, I have a couple of friends who’ve gone, and it’s fascinating to hear about. Clowns are very serious about their craft! And they should be! Trickster energy is precious and important in our world.)
What are the most serious problems in your life?
Write them down. Can you find a frame in which they’re funny? Maybe you might not be able to make it funny yourself, but can you imagine, say, how you might use those problems as material in your favorite sitcom? Playing these ideas out through fictional characters can be very cathartic.
What are some of the funniest things that have happened to you?
What have been the best laughs in your memory? More specific prompts can make it easier to recollect. What are the funniest things that happened to you at school? At work? With each of your family members?
Watch a bunch of comedy, and analyze it.
There’s tons of material on YouTube, Netflix and so on. Set aside some time for laughter. I particularly recommend going on YouTube and listening to Alan Watts – who might not be an obvious comedian. He described himself I think as a “spiritual entertainer”, because he liked to talk about life and death and identity and the self and so on – but to me it’s really important that he had such a cheeky, mischievous trickster energy.
Ask, in the cheekiest voice you can muster, ”So what?”
(This is a tricky one because it depends on the context and delivery, so if you’re not feeling it, just ignore it. But if it hits you in the right way, it can be a tremendous relief.) A lot of the problem a lot of the time is that people have some implicit assumption that they’re not articulating. They think “God I’m so stupid, I’m such a failure”, and they feel bad about it, because implicitly they think “being stupid is bad, I cannot be loved or accepted or worthy if I’m stupid”. And the question to ask is, so what? So what if you’re stupid? What if being stupid is fine, actually? What next? Then what? And the thing here is not to be antagonistic, but genuine. Really, what now?
Suppose everything has crumbled to ash. Now what? What next? You may find that you have more freedom than you thought.
✱
Cultivate a sense of humor
True humor is divine.
Laughter and anxiety are two sides of the same coin.
Laughter: literally good vibrations.
The human condition is fundamentally absurd.
If you can laugh at yourself, you can endure anything.
There’s a reason authoritarians hate comedians.
You cannot tyrannize people who laugh.
Through your living, and at the end of your life, seek to laugh in the face of God.
An earnest, hearty laugh, shared between loved ones at the dinner table.
A laughter that reminds you that you are at home.
Embrace your mistakes
“If you make music with the wrong notes, they’re not wrong anymore.”
– Victor Wooten, virtuoso bass player and teacher
Victor Wooten changed my life. Very recently, too! This was in 2019. I can’t remember precisely why I was looking him up on YouTube – I must’ve been looking for inspiration to become a better musician, or just feeling like listening to good music. Anyway, I found a video of him giving a bass clinic in the Netherlands in 2010, where he demonstrated what it’s like to deliberately play the chromatic scale – every single note on the instrument – over a backing track. This simple thing altered my view of reality. Victor intentionally played notes that, theoretically speaking, are “off” and “wrong”. He was making “mistakes” on purpose. But because of that purposefulness, he was able to make it sound musical. Every note felt intentional and correct, even in its “wrongness”.
This completely shifted my understanding of music, and my understanding of mistakes as well. Jacob Collier made a similar point by demonstrating how notes that sound wrong in one instance, can be resolved in another. Something that seems like a mistake in one context can be “corrected” by changing the context to suit the “mistake”.
Mistakes are opportunities to be explored
So we beat ourselves up unnecessarily! We flinch at mistakes instead of seeing them as opportunities to be explored. I’ve since found in my music practice that “mistakes” actually add color and flavor to my playing, if instead of flinching at them, I “invite them in”, and welcome them, and make friends with them. And even more radically, I found that once I became more accepting of mistakes, my playing started to improve dramatically. I had been stuck in a musical rut for almost a decade because I was afraid of leaving my comfort zone, afraid of “wrong” sounds, afraid to allow my fingers to explore and learn. In the past, whenever my fingers did something they weren’t “supposed” to, I would internally flinch, lightly berate myself, “ugh”, “shit”, “ick”. But now I try to think “ooh!” and I look for ways to work around it, return to it, build off of it.
And the result has been tremendous for me – even a little bit of freedom from judgment has given me room to explore and learn. Once I stopped being some sort of authoritarian taskmaster over myself, insisting that the music had to be a certain way, I found that a whole new world of delicious interestingness opened up, and I found my hands and ears and body delighted to really explore and feel all kinds of sounds, good and bad, and understand them as well as possible. And I’ve even been making fewer “mistakes” since! Turns out that when you’re less subconsciously nervous about making mistakes, you make less of them! And I say less here, not “no longer”, because I’m still far from completely free here. Even marginal progress makes an observable difference.
✱
What people struggle with:
“Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The Flinch.
[[Body]]. The hard thing about the flinch response is that you can’t really think your way out of it, not directly. The flinch is something that happens before conscious awareness. If you haven’t yet come around to thinking about the body-mind as an intertwingled continuum, the idea that all of your “mental” problems might actually be in your body, can seem kinda wooey and out there. But actually, if you really dig into the history of it (and I might do this in subsequent editions of the book), the separation of mind and body seems to be a fairly recent idea.
Anxiety about becoming mistake-tolerant, ie lowering standards.
Some bring up “if I embrace my mistakes, won’t I just keep making them?” – it’s complicated, there’s a bit of a paradox here. I’d say that you want to accept mistakes, but not necessarily tolerate them. You want to try to flinch less at the mistakes, and instead study them with curiosity, so that you understand them thoroughly. A sufficiently intimate understanding of mistakes is indistinguishable from mastery. Become a master!
Feeling bad about feeling bad.
I think most people are brought up in a culture that’s rather hostile to mistakes. This can be easy to get mad about, especially if you’ve been burned for your own mistakes. I think the trick here is to see the humor in the situation, laugh, shake it off, and say “I’m learning!” [[Put The Gun Down]].
What you can do:
“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.”
– Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist
Make (safe) mistakes on purpose.
This is a very powerful one, because it gets you directly reprogramming how you feel about mistakes. You might say, well, is it really a mistake if you did it on purpose? I think that’s
over-intellectualizing it. The flinch is something that happens at a very primal level, in the gut, in the body. And you can reduce a significant amount of the flinch by doing flinch-inducing things on purpose in a safe way. Send out texts and tweets with typos in them. Draw some deliberately ugly drawings. Write pages of gibberish. Post a deliberately “ugly” selfie on Instagram. Make these mistakes, and really let them happen, and see how it feels. Savor it! Enjoy how bad it is!
Reflect on past mistakes.
[[Journalling]]. Make a list of your past mistakes. You could start with a very simple, “high level” list, that might be “school… ex-girlfriend… got fired…” and so on. List out as many things as you can. Then get more specific. Describe exactly what happened. Describe the pain and frustration you felt. Then… try to forgive yourself. Accept that you made a mistake, and decide that it’s okay that mistakes were made. If it was something really terrible that had consequences for other people, you don’t necessarily need to be “okay” with the mistake, but you can decide that you’re going to stop beating yourself up for it, and instead start making amends.
✱
Embrace your mistakes.
Mistakes are context-dependent.
If you make music with your mistakes, they’re not mistakes anymore.
A sufficiently intimate understanding of mistakes is indistinguishable from mastery.
Flinching is learned and can be unlearned.
Try making safe mistakes on purpose.
You can practice making lots of safe mistakes on purpose.
Once you get in the habit of that, you no longer have to freeze or flinch when you make a mistake.
Once you learn to love your fuckups, you become invincible.
Cultivate casual optimism
“My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I'm luckier than other mortals, and they sure don't come from visualizing victory. They're the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it. Like most astronauts, I'm pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I've thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That's the power of negative thinking.”
– Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
This is a section about the power and importance of optimism, and I feel like the right way to start is to talk about depression. There are two episodes of really bad depression that I’ve had that I sometimes talk about – once when I was about 17, and again when I was about 25. Those were the two times I remember seriously considering killing myself. The first time, at 17, I kept going out of literal rage. I refused to accept defeat. I had read widely enough to know that life is long and things can turn around and that what happens in school doesn’t have to define you in the slightest.
At 25, I felt much more empty and resigned. I felt less like I was trapped by social expectations from family, teachers, etc, and more like I was trapped by the drudgery of life itself. It’s hard to disentangle how much of this was, say, a consequence of bills, versus existential despair (I don’t think this was that big a deal, I had a lot of experience thinking through that stuff when I was
about 19 thru 22…). The bills were a big part of it, but the bigger part I think was the way I was thinking about it.
It’s interesting now to look back and try to make sense of what’s happening. I don’t actually have the time to fully get into it and give it the thorough treatment I want to in this version of the book
– that’ll require me to reread and reevaluate old journal entries to really get a sense of what I was thinking then. So I’ll go with my memory, which is likely distorted by hindsight. In the depths of my depression it felt like I didn’t have any optimism in the tank, moment-to-moment. I remember life feeling absolutely bleak. But… somehow I persisted through it, which suggests to me that there was something. And if I had to guess what that something was, I think it was the belief that things could get better in the future. Where did that belief come from?
As I’ve said earlier, I believe it came from music, and literature, and art. I knew that I wasn’t the first person to suffer what I was suffering. And I knew of people who had at least theoretically made it through depressive episodes. And I dared to believe that I could be one of them too.
✱
Alright, now I feel like I should talk about optimism proper. It might seem contradictory after talking about depression, but all my life, people have described me as optimistic, to the point of calling me naive. I personally wear naivete as a badge of honor. In my experience, naivete will burn you, but cynicism will imprison you. (see: ayy lmao meme in 2.11).
Q: Is optimism a matter of innate temperament, personality?
Maybe to some degree this is a matter of disposition. I don’t know if I really believe that. I do think that people who don’t believe in disposition are likelier to be able to subvert it. Or maybe that runs the other way around, maybe people who are able to subvert their dispositions are less likely to believe in them as static.
I do believe that personality is fundamentally fluid to a degree that most people don’t believe. Most people tend to seek out familiar contexts, and so they never even really get to find out who they are outside of those contexts, meaning they end up conflating their contexts and their “selves”. This stuff is very complex and I could write a whole novel about the nuance here. (I might do that, actually.) But for now let’s say this is beyond the scope of this book.
✱
What people struggle with:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
– Fred Rogers
Wariness of falsehood.
The obvious common challenge with optimism is the question, “aren’t you bullshitting yourself?” And I think to be fair to that challenge, there are quite a lot of people who take their optimism with a healthy serving of bullshit. I personally don’t think this is necessary. I think optimism can be grounded in the truth of what we know, and the truth of what we don’t know. I think it’s good and healthy to be skeptical of bullshit, and to try to see, find, identify the truth of matters.
Play-pretend optimism.
oglaf.com/delusionist
I’ve also often been amused to discover that some people are playacting their optimism for social reasons, meaning they don’t really, seriously believe that good things can happen, that change is possible and so on, but they mouth the platitudes because they think it’s socially
preferable to being a pessimistic, cynical killjoy. In a way, this makes them quite pessimistic about optimism – they don’t really believe that optimism is correct. It just feels good.
What you can do:
“What I call optimism is the proposition that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge, and that knowledge is attainable by the methods of reason and science. I think the arguments against that proposition are as untenable as ever.
I'm also “optimistic” in the sense that I expect progress to continue in the future.
I'm even a little more so now than I was, because I see that the idea of it is catching on.” – David Deutsch, author and physicist
Put together an accurate log of the things that you’ve succeeded at.
[[Journal]]. Even the little things. If you wanna be really intense about it you could start with things like “learned to walk”. Walking was a thing you couldn’t do until you did. Everyone around you simply assumed that you’d be able to do it, and encouraged you to do it. The same is true for speaking. Children who grow up in musical families, or even families of acrobats, often end up casually proficient at those things because they were encouraged in the same way.
Keep things small.
[[Framing]] [[Baby Steps]] You don’t have to be optimistic about the entire world. There’s certainly a lot of bad and ugly things in the world. Although, I must say, that stuff tends to be overrepresented in people’s minds, partially because of the way our minds work, and partially because of the way that media organizations are incentivized as a consequence of the way our minds work. Regardless, the point is that you can focus on little things, and be happy and optimistic about little things, and that totally counts. It’s relatively easy for us to allow one little bad thing to ruin our mood. Why not allow little good things to improve our moods, too? It’s totally possible, but you have to focus your attention on it.
Try to have things to look forward to.
It can help to have some kind of larger vision on a longer timescale. I’ve said before, very seriously, that one of the things that kept me going as a kid, was anticipating the art that I hadn’t seen yet. Movies and novels, sure, but also silly things like tomorrow’s memes! With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that I can also look forward to wonderful new friends in my life that I haven’t even met yet.
Cultivate your optimism:
Optimism is not a posture but a way of being.
Optimism doesn’t have to be boisterous, loud or preachy.
Optimism can be a quiet belief that it’s possible to learn, grow, and do things better.
You can cultivate your optimism in small ways.
You can start with baby steps. Do little things, and demonstrate to yourself that it’s possible to get better.
Learning is possible. Growth is possible.
Even as we hurtle towards the abyss, we can find purpose, meaning, joy, humor, pleasure.
Life can be bad, yes. Life can also be good. Life can be many things.
Yes, we may see the bad get worse in our times. But tough times also inspire some of the most sacred values of mankind. Courage. Loyalty. Sacrifice. Kinship.
As long as there is one good person left alive on the Earth, I’m on their team. And I’m optimistic that that would make a difference to them.
Because it would make a difference to me.
Celebrate your wins
“Years ago, I found that whenever something awesome happened in my career – maybe I got published, or promoted, or launched a project – I wouldn’t take the time to celebrate the achievement. I’m an achiever by nature, the kind who feels like every day starts at zero. Not deliberately marking these moments left me feeling like I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. “Oh cool, that A List Apart article went up,” I would think, then move on with my day.
Once I realized that this was happening, I decided to be deliberate about marking achievements by eating one donut. Well, sometimes more than one, if it’s a really big deal. The act of
donut-eating has actually helped me feel like I’m accomplishing my career goals. As I started to share this idea with more people, I found that it resonated with others, especially young
career-driven women who are routinely achieving goals and furthering their career but don't take the time to note their own success.
I decided to start celebrating in a public way so that more people may be inspired to find their own ways of marking their career achievements.” – Lara Hogan (larahogan.me/donuts/)
✱
I was never good at celebrating my wins.
For starters, my family hardly celebrated anything except holidays, and even then I’m not sure we were particularly good at it. They ran their own business, and they never really had any sort of work/life separation, which is something I inherited myself. We’re always “kinda working”, never fully switching off, never really taking time off, no sense of occasion.
When I had a job, I remember on multiple occasions feeling like shit at milestone events, because I was always hypersensitive to the fact that I still had work that was unfinished. In retrospect now I see how silly that is – because there will always be work that is unfinished! I was beating myself up internally in a way that served nobody. To be kinder to myself, I suppose I might say, I was beating myself up to serve a fearful part of me that was misguidedly trying to protect me. (The interesting thing about revisiting this now as I write this is realizing that it really does sort of mirror my parents, my siblings, many of my teachers, and really most of the adults in my life.)
What I think I really want to focus on is – how wild it is to look back and see that the anguish that I experienced in my 20s was truly a consequence of my own mismanagement of my psychological and emotional boundaries. I suspect that a good intervention from an observant, well-adjusted older person who really saw me and what I was going through, could have made a tremendous difference. That’s part of why I’m writing a book like this, to try and serve as a sort of proxy-intervention for the people who need it.
Celebration is not a frivolous indulgence, it is part of the rhythm of human life.
Let me dig into a specific example: I had great colleagues and a great working environment, and sometimes when we'd have a milestone, we would celebrate – and I remember at multiple of those milestone celebrations, I couldn't enjoy myself. I felt like shit because I was anxious about my overdue tasks. Now I look back and I'm like, what?! When it's time to celebrate, shut off and celebrate!! I feel sorrow at the realization that I was barely present for some important moments of my life. The work example is easy to talk about, but this extended to my personal life as well.
I felt so scared and alone, to be honest. My boss and wife were two wonderful shining lights in my life, but neither of them could have helped me navigate my relationships with each of them respectively. I'd have crawled through broken glass to have had the friends I have now. But actually even now it's so funny to think about because... it's not like I had NOBODY in my life. there were acquaintances who, I can see clearly now, if I had reached out for support, I would have received it. It just somehow didn't even occur to me to *ask*. I suppose the issue is that I
was afraid. I was afraid of being rejected, I was afraid of looking weak. And I didn’t feel like I had permission.
A thing I still feel shame about is that once my wife and I were alone at home on new year's eve and I was anxiously trying to meet a work deadline. which I could have surely renegotiated. Why didn't I? What was I doing? I feel like I really failed her that day, as a husband. Revisiting this with gentle curiosity... I think my relationship with work was something that I brought intense anxiety to. I had this narrative of myself as a weak, pathetic, incompetent sewer rat prior to work, and that my boss was this god-like figure who saved me by giving me a chance. I'm really lucky that my boss was actually an A+ guy, mature, well-adjusted, gracious, etc, genuinely concerned about me and my well-being, because he could totally have exploited the fuck out of me if he wanted to, and he didn't. He was great. I fucked myself up all by myself.
It's all so weird. We throw around the phrase "it's all in your head" a bunch here and there, and it comes across as dismissive, like you're hallucinating something fake. The situation is so much subtler than that. What’s in your head is your frame, but your frame influences what you see in the world. I wonder how I would get through to my younger self if I met him. Well– I do know, based on how I work with people in my DMs who are struggling like I did. I don't have any magic code-phrase. I just ask a lot of questions from a place of gentle yet persistent curiosity.
Everything unravels from that. You have to go on a walk around the frames, to not just see, but to see how you’re seeing.
✱
What people struggle with:
“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state – it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.”
– Abraham Joshua Herschel, rabbi
Being honest with yourself about your progress.
It’s far too easy to fall into a trap of being dismissive about what you’ve accomplished, especially when your mind is constantly focused on all the things you haven’t accomplished yet, all the things that are currently breaking, overdue, imperfect.
Seeing the bigger picture.
[[Framing]]. When you’re focused on the things that are going wrong, it can seem relentless. I remember once even writing in my journal, “every success is a stepping stone to another failure.” Today I can say, “And that’s good!” – because I now see failures and mistakes as learning opportunities, not things to beat myself up about. But it takes work to shift that perspective.
What you can do:
Make a list.
"The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate."
– Oprah Winfrey
[[Journalling]]. What have your past wins been? What have you accomplished? As a first cut, it’s worth erring on the side of including even trivial, silly, frivolous things. A lot of joy in life is “frivolous”. The aversion to frivolity is something that reliably leads to misery. Write down every little thing that makes you happy, every little thing that you’re proud of.
Talk to your friends.
[[Ask for help]]. Ask them what you’ve done that they’ve respected and admired. Return the favor. If you’re shy about this, you could start by first asking about other people. Remember, we’re all in this together. Everyone’s struggling in some way. Everyone loves to be part of a mutually supportive conversation. To collaborate is humanizing.
Celebrate your friends’ wins.
Practicing celebrating other people’s wins is a good stepping stone to practice celebrating your own. And as a bonus, people will enjoy having you around! My recommendation is, try to be honest and precise in your observations. I personally believe that being over-the-top and hyperbolic in praise actually does people a disservice, because they don’t really learn anything from it, and most of them probably won’t take you very seriously. (And the people who take you seriously maybe shouldn’t, because then their self-image might get inflated out of proportion.) Try to be specific and honest with your compliments. You’ll actually cultivate taste and sensitivity in the process, which will help you become more perceptive in identifying your own wins.
Reflect on the struggles of others.
At some point I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – it’s a book with pretty good life advice that’s contained within a fictional dialogue between two characters, one who was a hot-shot lawyer who was making lots of money, but was deeply unhappy and eventually had to experience some real crises – health issues, family issues, etc – before he was shocked out of his worldview and rebuilt a new one. We can learn from the failures and mistakes of others, even of fictional characters.
Reflect on the nature of celebration itself.
This might be the critical thing for some people. I suspect it was the case for me. “How can I celebrate when there are so many things going wrong?” To this I will point out like… people were celebrating birthdays and having weddings and having children during the most horrific of circumstances in human history. Life has to go on. You must prioritize managing your own psychology. If you’re still trapped in a utilitarian mindset, it might be helpful in the interim to think, “I can’t be productive if I’m not at least somewhat enjoying myself.” But my wish for you is that you eventually transcend the utilitarian mindset altogether.
✱
Celebrate your wins:
Celebrating your wins is an important part of managing your psychology.
It helps to have something to live for, something to be optimistic about, something to look forward to.
Some people overlook, diminish and underplay their wins. This is a recipe for a pessimistic outlook. Don’t do this.
If you get in the habit of celebrating wins, subconsciously, you’ll get in the habit of winning more, too.
It’s okay to enjoy your life.
If you can receive this in a light and humorous way: you could even say that it’s your duty to.
If you don’t enjoy all of your life, it’s okay to enjoy bits and pieces of your life. For starters. As a treat.
Simply enjoying your life – as long as you’re not being irresponsible, selfish and hurting other people in the process – can be a tremendous gift that you give others.
We all struggle in life. It helps so much to have something to struggle for.
Return to your stories. Return to your frames.
Be playful. Be silly. Be frivolous.
Enjoy yourself.
Rambling
(Dec 2, 2021)
God that was a long-ass Act. The longest in the book. Too long, it feels like. There should be a more elegant way of doing it. but I don’t think I can do it right now. But I desperately want to ship this book this year, this month… yesterday, really.
But well, here we are. We are where we are, it is what it is, and wishing otherwise isn’t going to change that. I have to make my peace with it. Okay. Here we are. Now what?
The most critical thing at this stage of the book remains the same: I have to finish it. What does “finish” mean? Nothing is ever finished. But in the context of this project,
finish means that everything has material.
Alright, I just took a few minutes to scan through the earlier sections. But I’m avoiding the later sections because I know that stuff is still not quite right. It’s still a bit of a mess.
I really need to dive into that even though it’s scary and uncomfortable. No – ESPECIALLY because it’s scary and uncomfortable. OK. Deep breath. Let’s do it.
✱
ACT III. Enter the Labyrinth
"At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are
and you know what you want."
– Lao Tzu
The classical 7-circuit labyrinth is a ~3500 year old motif. It can be a metaphor for pilgrimage, spiritual journeys, the pursuit of clarity through confusion. It’s about walking right into the depths of your psychic fog. The path through your personal labyrinth is a path through your most painful memories.
Consider the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, in the Labyrinth of Greek mythology.
Theseus and the Minotaur, by Edward Burne-Jones in 1861.
The Labyrinth was perhaps one of the earliest examples of hostile architecture, deliberately constructed to utterly confound anybody who enters it. But Theseus ultimately makes it in and out with the most simple of tools: a ball of thread.
All you need to get out of a maddening labyrinth is a ball of thread.
But without it, you’re lost and hopeless. The difference between despair and triumph can be as small as a bit of string. That’s what Act II was all about – getting familiar with your sword and thread, so that you have the confidence that you’ll be able to make it into and out of your labyrinth safely.
Carl Jung described the labyrinth as a “primordial image which one encounters in psychology mostly in the form of the fantasy of a descent to the underworld”. And in several senses, the hero’s journey of introspection is about “descending” to the “underworld” of the psyche. Joseph Campbell wrote, “beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”
This is what we are doing here. We are journeying into the unknown, unfamiliar, mystical, scary parts of yourself – going into the fog where there may be dangerous jinns and monsters, and to retrieve the Jewel of Life.
Okay so – in the previous Act, you’re supposed to learn all the skills you need to confront your demons, go into the labyrinth, face your problems. It can be hard, painful, uncomfortable, and distressing. You may find yourself overwhelmed, defeated, beaten. That’s okay. It’s all part of the struggle. If you need to take some time to work through it, do that.
When you’re ready, this Act is about facing the challenges you have ahead of you.
Overview of Act III
Here we begin to get into the murky depths of things. but we have faith and we hold the line because we know we are walking an ancient path that our predecessors walked before us. This is what we've been training for. we get into our fears, investigate our copes, confront our programming.
// Honestly, I want to rewrite this section to make it more breezy and light, but I don’t have the time or energy for it, so this is what you get for now in v1.0.
Investigate your boredom
I’m not talking about idleness, which can be sweet, but about a deeper, corrosive boredom, more akin to malaise or ennui. To address your boredom you have to address your desires, and to address your desires you have to investigate your self-concept, and to investigate your
self-concept is to annihilate yourself. At the end of self-annihilation is renewal and rebirth, and when you get there you forget what you were bored about in the first place.
Get in tune with your body
The Body Keeps The Score (van der Kolk). The drama of your life – the mental anguish, emotional distress – all plays out in your body. It’s hard to do anything productive or useful if your body is sick, injured, or exhausted. Listen to your body. Feel your feelings. Move!
Face your fears
Fear is possibly the oldest and most powerful emotion in the human body. it's meant to keep you safe, but it can go too far and trap you in a psychic prison. you must respect its power, and/but you can also negotiate with it, investigate it, get to know it better, and turn it into an ally. We talk about Ugh fields.
Declare trust bankruptcy (if you need to)
How do you build trust in yourself if you have a history of breaking promises, and you’re not a person of your word? I agonized over this as a teenager. Turns out the agony isn’t actually necessary. What you need to do is revert to very small baby steps. The hard part here typically is that the ego is in the way. Climbing out of a trust deficit with poor executive function requires doing things that are so small that they can feel insultingly trivial.
Uninstall social bloatware
We all inherit all sorts of bullshit expectations from the world around us, starting with our families, then our peers, and broader society. If we never take the time to step away from it all to reflect on what we want, it’s very easy to get nudged into a life that we did not choose for ourselves. Social neediness is also an issue here.
Investigate your cope
Many of us have coping mechanisms that aren't serving us well anymore. To dismantle them, the important thing is to really investigate them honestly and to see what needs they are meeting. Do a root-cause analysis and to seek upstream solutions. This can be a tiresome and iterative process, where you may repeatedly find that there's something else further upstream. Still, progress can be made, and should be celebrated. A critical thing will be to reconceptualize your relationship(s) with your coping mechanisms altogether (Easyway).
Face your anger
There is a wisdom in your anger. It is trying to protect you. It is a clue to the injustices and cruelties you have endured. It might be either suppressed or overblown. The challenge is to listen to it, and to express it appropriately, skillfully. Unfortunately, we live in a world that isn’t very good at dealing with anger, so it might be unwise to express it too openly, too publicly before you are skilled at it. But you can cultivate that skill.
Avoid exhaustion funnels
I've always struggled with this one myself: you can't skimp on rest. If you don't schedule time for rest and recovery, it will be scheduled for you, at the most inopportune of times. What's difficult is zooming out to see the bigger picture. You're not doing anybody any favors if you're exhausted, and once you're exhausted, it messes with your perception, and you make worse decisions. perpetual exhaustion is not very different than perpetual drunkenness. There are some tips and tactics, but the critical thing is to reconceptualize your relationship with rest entirely.
3.1 Investigate your boredom
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
– Dorothy Parker
Yes, it’s possible to be happily, blissfully bored. I’m not talking about sweet, luscious idleness. Enjoy that when you have it. I’m talking about a deeper, corrosive boredom, more akin to malaise (ill-ease) or ennui, the kind that’s heavy, haunting, foreboding. I’m increasingly convinced that deep, corrosive boredom is really a cloud cover – a fog – to hide darker feelings of guilt, shame, fear.
There’s a great anecdote from Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, where he talks about how physics used to delight him when he used to play with it, but then it started to disgust him when he got burdened by this idea that he was obliged to advance the future of science. That he was supposed to be doing “important” work. It’s quite poetic how, he only broke through his malaise when he decided to give up on the whole enterprise of “doing important work”, and simply started fooling around for the sake of it – and even more poetically, it was his fooling around with wobbly plates that led to the equations that he won the Nobel prize for!
Richard Feynman playing the bongo drums. Always be piddling.
Corrosive boredom can be a fog that’s meant to hide deeper issues from you.
Saying "I'm bored" is an easy way of avoiding deeper issues like "I'm exhausted", "I'm scared", "I'm overwhelmed", "I'm lost". Which, in my opinion, are usually the real underlying issues that people are avoiding. And as long as you're avoiding your issues you're not going to solve them.
And hey, we can flip this! We don't need to fixate on the losing frames, we can focus on the winning frames instead. And that is: I'm well-rested, I'm excited, I'm brave, I'm clear-headed, I know who I am, I know the way.
When I tweeted about this, someone sent me the following image, which is from Thomas Oden’s The Structure of Awareness [1969]. I love it. It’s kind of dramatic, and I wouldn’t say that I necessarily endorse it entirely, but I really love this sort of big-picture framework, how it contextualizes everything within a larger view:
“Demonic Boredom” is such a great phrase! And I really like the parallels to “future anxiety” and “past guilt” – all of these are things that I think we can take some time to consider, evaluate, process and integrate. I don’t really believe in trying to get rid of guilt, anxiety or boredom by avoiding them (although maybe if your system is broken, it might be helpful to have some coping mechanisms – more on that later). I believe that they are signals, they are trying to tell us that something isn’t right, and it’s up to us whether we want to undertake the project(s) of identifying and addressing the underlying issues.
Resolving boredom can require self-annihilation.
Fun fact: This entire book actually started out as “how do I not be (demonically) bored?” And the answer to that question ended up far more tremendous than I expected. I found that, to address your boredom you have to address your desires, and to address your desires you have to investigate your self-concept, and to investigate your self-concept is – not to be too dramatic about it – to annihilate yourself. Because the self is a story that we tell ourselves, and when we investigate that story we discover that it’s dynamic, not static, and once we do that we’re never the same again. At the end of self-annihilation is renewal and rebirth, and when you get there you kinda forget what you were bored about in the first place. Sometimes you pull a little thread because you're bored and you accidentally unravel the universe.
Coming back to Earth, I think boredom is experienced as the feeling of “Ugh, there’s nothing to do!” It might not be a literal truth. There’s obviously always things to do. But I think people say it because it’s the felt truth of their experience. It feels like there’s nothing to do. And really sitting with that feeling, really investigating it, it turns out, is not only the key to solving your boredom – it’s the key to everything.
✱
What people struggle with:
“When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily
with even the smallest decisions.”
– Pete Walker, psychotherapist
Energy levels too low.
[[Exhaustion funnels.]] If you’re really, truly exhausted and you can’t do anything, you should shut off and rest. That should be obvious, but some of us struggle with it regardless. Usually I find that people who are tired but not already resting, feel like we “don’t have time to rest”. This is a conceptualization problem (re: our relationship with rest), and buried in that is an emotional problem. It’s a question of “deserve”. Who deserves rest? Who deserves peace, and joy?
Poor [[project management]].
Where I’m at in my thinking right now is that a lot of poor project management is poor energy management, and a lot of poor energy management is poor emotional management. So this is kind of the same thing as above.
Fear of discomfort.
Or just fear in general! [[Face your fears.]] It might not be immediately obvious how boredom and fear are related, and in a way that’s by design, because fear is self-disguising. Cowardice disguises itself as confusion. It’s much easier to say “I’m bored” (which seems like it’s “not your fault”) than “I’m scared”, which can seem like a personal failing.
Sense of helplessness.
I think this is probably the hardest thing about demonic boredom. What do you do when you feel helpless? At some level, there is nothing you can do. That’s what helplessness is. I think the trick is to realize that helplessness is contextual, and it’s significantly a function of our expectations and assumptions about what we “must” do. In my many conversations with people about their struggles with helplessness, I’ve often found that people define overly large tasks and projects for themselves. We say “I can’t exercise” because we’re imagining a perfectionistic, fully-developed exercise routine. But can you do one pushup? A single pushup is worth doing, and worth celebrating for having done! [[Celebrate your wins.]]
What you can do:
“...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
– Susan Cain
Rest.
For some people, simply hearing this will make them go, “oh yeah, right” and then they go to bed and things get better. For some of us, though, this gets trickier. I’ll go into it in more detail in [[exhaustion funnels]].
Declutter.
This is slightly non-obvious, but part of the nature of boredom, or the experience of “there’s nothing to do”, comes from having too many things around you competing for your attention. It’s then actually quite a sensible strategy on the part of your subconscious to just go numb and be indifferent to everything. Decluttering can be easy for some people, but harder for others. Still, anything that you can feel comfortable throwing out or otherwise getting off your plate is a win. If you manage to get rid of 90% of your junk, congratulations! That’s amazing. If you only manage to do 5%, that’s still progress, that still counts. [[Baby Steps]]. I definitely recommend watching some Marie Kondo to see how she does it. Particularly pay attention to the cheerful, light energy she brings to everything.
Satisfice.
This is a [[project management]] skill, and it has to do with confronting perfectionism. As with resting and decluttering, some people might just need to hear the suggestion, and think “of course!” – but for others, it might be really difficult to do, because their perfectionism is really a symptom of something deeper. I’m struggling with this right now – there’s so much more that I want to say in the book, I keep coming up with new ideas for things to include in it. What’s helpful for me here is to put those ideas in a separate document.
Articulate what’s important to you.
[[Define your desires.]] This is the hardest thing to do, and the most important. I decided on the title “Introspect” after meditating on the idea of “defining one’s utility values” – which is a nerdy way of saying, articulate what’s important to you. And in an important sense, this is the thing that the other things hinge on. If you don’t know what’s important to you, how do you know what to get rid of? What’s the point of being well-rested? What are you satisficing in service of?
Investigate your past.
That’s what [[journalling]] is about! See again the section on writing your memoirs. When you articulate the story of your life – imagine introducing yourself again to someone new, that you respect and admire – it becomes clearer what you ought to be doing. Articulate for yourself what an exciting journey might be like, and then go on it. What would be a thrilling adventure?
Take action. Get out of your house.
[[Baby Steps]]. Do something! Something small, simple, easy. Get it done. Feel good about having done it. On to the next thing. I say “get out of your house” both literally and figuratively. One of the most annoying paradoxes in life is that low activity can very often lead to low energy. “I’m too tired to exercise” is something I’ve repeatedly felt over the years, and yet almost every time if I do some light exercise – take a walk, do some pushups, break a light sweat – I find myself mysteriously energized afterwards. This may have something to do with the body’s homeostatic impulse. (For some people of course this may have to do with chronic illnesses and so on.)
// There’s a lot more interesting stuff to say about boredom that I will have to save for the next edition, because I’m still working through what I think about it. In his book ‘Man’s Search For Himself’, Rollo May describes boredom as the occupational hazard of being human. It seems that boredom is a function of being able to perceive time. More on this next time.
Investigate your boredom:
Boredom can be pleasant idleness.
If that’s how it is for you, enjoy yourself, don’t worry about it!
But if your boredom is something more sinister, something pervasive and debilitating, then it’s worth examining it more closely.
What are you avoiding? What is important to you?
What is good in life?
When have you felt most satisfied? Most joyous?
When did you feel most in a sense of flow?
It’s possible to live a life where you are never bored.
But it’ll take work.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be staggeringly difficult work.
That’s a matter of project management. Define what excitement looks like to you.
Define an adventure for yourself.
Then take the first step.
Get in tune with your body
“Genuine feelings cannot be produced nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies.
The body sticks to the facts."
– Alice Miller
This is a section that I don’t feel qualified to talk about, but I think that makes it all the more necessary that I talk about it. Still, I must really emphasize that this is absolutely not my area of expertise. Sometimes I feel like I only just began to get in touch with my own body for the first time in my 30s.
Seek to be a native of your body, rather than an unwanted houseguest.
I think one of the wildest things about life is how things that you don't think of having any relation to your body, can affect your body.
I mean, everything ultimately affects your body, but – for example, my body has definitely been doused with cortisol and adrenaline the past 3-4 days or so because of family commitments and an approaching (self-imposed) deadline. I can feel it in my shoulders and stomach and I can also feel it in more subtle and nuanced ways these days – The body not only keeps the score, it’s effectively a sort of living memory palace once you start to learn how to read it. I mean it always was, but we’re kinda trained to disregard, disconnect, disembody…
Breathing can make you feel warm and fuzzy and welcome.
I feel like nobody ever sold meditation to me the way it I believe ought to have been pitched. The body is a sort of bustling metropolis, and to me meditation (which I approach as breathwork, really) is really about learning to make sense of it. As a native rather than as a tourist.
The body is full of inside jokes and private grievances that it hides from the cops, the feds, the adults, the squares (the consciousness). It’s actually pretty sad when you really get into it. It’s all connected. The tyrannical fascism of mind over body is pretty bleak. “The worst violence is that which we inflict upon ourselves”. If you don’t listen to yourself how do you really listen to anybody else?
Stretching can make you feel limber like a child again.
I similarly feel like nobody has ever sold me stretching the way it ought to have been pitched. I was under the impression that it’s something you kinda begrudgingly do so that you don’t get injured when working out. I now realize that it’s a way of becoming more limber, flexible, and
that physical flexibility is something that can make you feel like a child again. In some ways, I feel more child-like at 31 than I did throughout my stiff 20s.
The body has an intelligence of its own that seems to be “pre-conscious”.
When you touch a hot stove, for example, your body immediately pulls away before you even have time to think. When you’re staring into space thinking about something, and an attractive person walks past, there’s a good chance that you find yourself looking at them before you realize that you made that decision.
There are also ways we talk that reveal a broader understanding of the role of the body. We say things like “half-hearted”, or “my heart wasn’t in it”, or “I haven’t the heart to”. We talk about gut instinct, and a sinking feeling in the stomach.
I believe that the ancient Greeks believed that courage, or spirit, was something that resided in the chest. And even today our gestures seem to corroborate with this – notice how often athletes thump their chests in victory, and how often we put our hands to our hearts when we feel honored. I don’t know enough to speak confidently about this in detail, but I can say I’m pretty sure there’s something here. The body language of triumph is unmistakable:
And so too is the body language of disappointment, fear, defeat.
I share these examples to gesture at the fact that your body is always telling you (and everyone else around you) something about your inner state. This is a language, and it is a language you can learn to get better at. And since you’re going to be inhabiting your body for as long as you’re alive, it makes a lot of sense to get good at it.
In the next section we will talk about [[facing your fears]], and that’s a very “bodily” experience.
✱
“Trauma lives in the body. It is somatic. The body keeps the score. And so the only way to move past our stuff, past our trauma, is to have an experience of Inverse PTSD. An experience that is equally profound and equally impacting. But it is the inverse of the initial trauma. Instead of being horrific, it is beatific. It awakens and unleashes the free, brave, reckless god that lives inside us. An experience of such radiance, not just in the mind, but also in the heart and the body. It kind of leads to fear extinction and memory reconsolidation. All is refreshed, and renewed, and reborn.” – Jason Silva
Everybody is struggling with different things. Some people have stiffness and soreness in their muscles from carrying tension in them all the time. Stress and anxiety is manifest in the body.
The following is an illustration from The Body Keeps The Score:
“Trauma affects the entire human organism – body, mind and brain. In PTSD the body continues to defend against a threat that belongs to the past. Healing from PTSD means being able to terminate this continued stress mobilization and restore the entire organism to safety.”
This illustration stopped me in my tracks when I first encountered it. I found it to be a very sobering reminder that the body and mind are deeply interconnected. Stress isn’t something that just happens inside your skull. It wrenches your muscles, beats your heart, and it can give you the shits. Simply stopping to really appreciate this fact, I think, can be life-changing for some people. To realize that what you’re thinking in your head, and what’s happening in your body, are not two separate things. The aches and pains in your body are not random events like the weather – they are actually intertwined with whatever is going on in your mind.
What people struggle with:
“Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much.
And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.”
– Yann Martell, Life of Pi
Overthinking.
Some people are very cerebral, intellectual types. Sir Ken Robinson has a funny joke about this, how academics think of their bodies as vehicles for their heads. This can result in some funny “abstraction leaks”, an innocuous example being something like somebody who’s so focused on their work that they forget to eat and gets light-headed.
It can get quite a bit more sinister, like suppressing emotions without realizing that that’s what they’re doing, and then experiencing seemingly unrelated consequences – aches and pains, stomach ailments, fatigue, and so on. A very interesting thing to me is how people struggling with some persistent problem tend to have a self-shadowing blind spot about it. People who are struggling with their diet tend to underestimate how much they eat – often they have secret binge snacks. People who struggle with their spending tend to similarly underestimate how much they spend. People who struggle with sleep tend to say “I can’t sleep”, even though that’s objectively false.
Trauma.
This book isn’t specifically about trauma, because I don’t feel qualified to talk about that directly. But it’s a thing that crops up. “Trauma” can seem like a dramatic word, and I think sometimes people skim past it thinking “well, I wasn’t abused as a child or anything like that, so trauma has nothing to do with me”. I think that’s unfortunate, because there’s something in the literature for everybody. Everybody has some issues, because everybody is human. Everybody has some pain, some disappointment, some shit that they’re avoiding or averse to. It might not be as bad as how other people have it, but it can still be something that inhibits your emotions, freezes up your body, even in little, subtle ways.
Self-consciousness.
Different people have widely different relationships with their bodies. Some people have really bad body image issues, feel guilt and shame about eating, about being too skinny, too fat, and feel like their bodies are battlegrounds on which moral wars are waged, in which they’re typically on the losing side.
What you can do:
"In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical
self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past."
– Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps The Score
I will talk about my own experience, what’s worked for me.
Breathe – I particularly recommend learning “box breathing”
It’s the simplest thing in the world, and yet lots of people are very bad at it. I didn’t seriously start doing breathwork until my late 20s, and I feel really silly that it took me that long. I used to wake up in the morning feeling groggy and tired for a full hour or so. I’ve since managed to reduce that down to as little as five minutes when I do breathwork. I specifically do a casual version of “box breathing”, which is “Inhale for 4 seconds, Hold for 4 seconds, Exhale for 4 seconds, Hold for 4 seconds, Repeat”. I’m not too strict about the count. What I’ve found is that the holds between the breaths seem to make all the difference when it comes to developing mental clarity. You can look this up on YouTube for some examples – this was the one a friend sent me, that I used.
Stretch – particularly your hips, hamstrings and psoas
I always thought stretching was kind of silly and unnecessary, until I had some kind of spasm in my back one day which hurt for days and freaked me out. And stretching turned out to be the answer. If you’re someone who spends lots of time in chairs, you almost definitely have tight hips and hamstrings, and this will have consequences. I am not an expert, but I believe that a lot of chronic back pain that people have is actually tightness in hips and hamstrings that somehow “travels” to the back. There are a few good youtube videos about this. “Foundation 12 minutes” is something that really helps. I also like ATHLEAN-X, and I have a friend from Twitter, @movebetterproj, who’s a physical therapist who’s helped loads of my other friends with all sorts of physical aches and pains. You can check out his YouTube channel, The Move Better Project, which has playlists for every kind of pain you might have.
Move – take walks, play a sport, whatever you find fun
Go for long meandering walks, in nature if you can. Find something you enjoy doing. Personally I like the occasional run, and I like doing big compound weightlifting like squats, deadlifts, bench presses and overhead presses. At the time of writing, I’m currently doing Stronglifts 5x5, which is a simple weightlifting program that I’m finding enjoyable and effective. There’s even an app, which makes the whole thing a no-brainer.
Investigate your stress – do “body scans” to see how you’re feeling
“Stress” is a rather generalized idea that we could spend a whole separate book talking about. The core idea is that you want to practice listening to your body, being mindful of the tensions in your body. Are you clenching your jaw, tensing your shoulders? Acknowledge it, and let it go.
Look, I’m not an expert on this stuff, and there are loads of excellent resources from much more experienced people.
Record videos of yourself (and take lots of selfies!)
This is a fairly uncommon suggestion, because I think people haven’t yet adjusted to the reality that it’s now very easy and effectively free to record loads of video footage from the devices that we have with us all the time.
This can be entirely for you, you don’t have to show them to anybody else. You don’t even need to put your entire body or face in the frame – although if you’re uncomfortable about that, that too is something to be mindful of. (I have a friend who has an OnlyFans, and she said something like, “I get more nervous posting a smile than posting my tits!” – which I think is absolutely fascinating to consider.) The point of this is to get a sense of how you move, how you hold yourself. This is about studying your own body language.
I recommend setting aside to go through your old Facebook and Instagram photos and paying close attention to your body language. When I look at some of mine, I’m startled to see how much I was clearly trying to minimize the amount of space I took up. I would cross my arms and legs. It’s now clear to me how uncomfortable I was all the time.
Oh, and some selfie advice. This might seem super trivial, but I’ve heard from a lot of men who feel very uncomfortable taking selfies of themselves. I’ve advised friends to literally experiment with “take 100 selfies”, and the tremendous thing is how almost every single one of them reported feeling more confident, even sexy! Fiddle around with the lighting, the positioning, hold the camera further out from your face, make different expressions. All of this helps you to see yourself in new and different lights, and this expands your self-concept, changes your
self-image from a static one to a dynamic one. This is particularly relevant considering that we use photographs of ourselves to represent us in the world – on social media, on dating profiles, on LinkedIn and so on. Taking even a dozen extra selfies and finding one that you like more, that presents you in a better light than the previous one you were using, is something that can dramatically improve your quality of life. And it’s free!
✱
Inhabit your body:
Drop into the body. Put one hand gently on your throat and another on your stomach. Take a deep, slow breath. At the peak of your breath, hold it. Hold it to the edge of discomfort, and let it go. Feel your heart beating. You are alive.
Move! Get up. Go for a walk. Bend over. Feel the stretch in your hips and hamstrings. Feel the tension, feel the warmth, feel the burn. You are alive.
Go for a run. Just run as fast as you can, as far as you can. Feel your heart beating, feel your lungs burning. You are alive.
Take pictures and videos of yourself. You don’t have to show them to anybody else. The point is to get a sense of your own vibe. See how you are holding yourself. If you don’t like it, you can change it.
You. Are. Alive.
Face your fears: you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit
"He told me he woke with fear in the morning and went to bed with fear in the night. I didn't believe him. I asked him, "how can a man be brave if he's afraid?" "That is the only time a man can be brave," he told me."
– Robb Stark, talking about his father, Game of Thrones S2E08
It can be helpful to simplify everything down to “Love vs Fear”, or “Want vs Not-Want”
A useful oversimplification that I’ve been playing with for a couple of years now is the idea that you can reduce everything to Love and Fear. In this frame, “Good vs Evil” might itself be a fearful version of Love vs Fear.
What I like about this frame is, first of all, it feels more real. Good and Evil can be rather abstract concepts, but we know what love and fear feels like, in the broadest, vaguest sense. We might think of love as “allurement”, or “desire”, being drawn to something or someone, a wanting. We might think of fear as “aversion”, being repulsed, an unwanting, diswanting. The impulse to get away. Want and Not-Want are things that we can see in children, and in our pets.
Previously we talked about investigating your desires – getting a sense of what you want, what you’re drawn to. If you drew a blank then, there’s a good chance that it might be because you had gotten in your own way and blocked yourself off from your own desires.
In Frozen, Elsa was a cheerful, playful child who, in concert with her parents (who were really more responsible for this as the adults in the situation) locked herself up in a room – and in her heart – after accidentally hurting her sister Anna. She has reoriented her life around not causing anybody any hurt or pain, and effectively imprisoned herself. This is a common pattern for lots of people.
✱
Fear wants you to go scrutinize something else
An interesting thing about stainless steel – yes, the metal – is that it's "self-healing". When you scratch it, the exposed chromium immediately oxidizes to form a new protective layer. I’ve been reflecting lately that fear and/or ego work in roughly the same way.
I’ve noticed that people in my DMs often berate themselves for “being stupid” when really they were being afraid.
Fear is at the heart of so many things – almost everything, it's basically omnipresent – but we seldom consciously notice it, I think because its surface immediately reacts to deflect scrutiny. "I'm not scared, I'm stupid. I'm not scared, I'm a bad person. I'm not scared, I'm bored." In my experience, this is exactly what fear wants. The last thing fear wants is to be faced head on. Fear wants you to go scrutinize something else. Anything else. Argue with strangers. Rearrange your wardrobe. Question your sanity. Fear would rather you be mad than scared.
Procrastination is often a safety ritual
It can be “good”, too! In the final moments of editing this book, before publishing, my brain started flooding me with all sorts of excellent points and ideas that it has "withheld" from me for months. I'm just dumping them in a separate doc titled "for v1.1". This is an instance of good project management on my part.
(The dominant feeling I have when working on my book is that my project management is terrible. Because it’s so messy, chaotic, unstructured, disorganized. But that seems to be how my mind works most of the time. I’m not insisting that you should work like me, or work like how I’m suggesting work ought to be done. I’m just sharing my experience. Ultimately you have to decide for yourself how you want to work.)
✱
Where do I start with when telling this story? I should search myself for stories about fear in my own life. I think there are a few stories I can tell. My relationship with schedules, my relationship with food, and my relationship with writing this book. I’ll go in reverse order.
An obvious one is the process of writing this book. This book has been very difficult to write, partially because of the technical challenges, but honestly, mainly because I’m scared. I’m scared that it’ll be bad. I’m scared that it’ll be good. I’m scared that to make it good, I’ll have to dig into my own guts, my own life, my own feelings, my own story, and I’m scared that I’m not going to like what I find in the process. I can’t even really remember what I’ve shared so far, this book is so big.
✱
Optimize for survival
This is something I didn’t originally plan to include in Introspect, but it’s one of my recurring themes on Twitter, and I feel like it’s a fairly important “counter-melody” to a lot of what I’m saying here.
A lot of what I think people struggle with is that their fear, their defensive mechanisms, their cope, etc – they have this elaborate, pain-informed superstructure that’s meant to protect them, that costs them their peace of mind, happiness. You could say that technically people are overoptimized for survival, at the expense of joy.
To put the gun down, you must first convince yourself that you’re safe.
But so here’s the thing that I believe to be true: if you want to convince yourself to put the gun down, you have to convince yourself that you’re safe. And this goes beyond an intellectual, “ok I am safe now” sort of deal. It does help to do breathing exercises so your body feels calm and safe, I highly recommend that. But that’s just the start. It goes further and beyond that.
“During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor to the areas that showed the least damage. This contradicted the US military's conclusion that the most-hit areas of the plane needed additional armor. Wald noted that the military only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions – ignoring any bombers that had been shot down or otherwise lost, and thus also been rendered unavailable for assessment. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely
to base. Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost. His work is considered seminal in the then-nascent discipline of operational research.”
The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor.
Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Make a deliberate effort to analyze failures, understand them, and take action to avoid or mitigate them.
In my view, most businesses fail because most (more than half of) businesses are started by people who don't do any due diligence. A common story is someone using their life savings to start a restaurant without ever having worked in one, or even read about the specifics of the struggles involved. They simply thought that they had a good idea for a restaurant, and then discovered that it’s much harder than they thought it would be.
Failures are inevitable, but the trick is that you can fail early or fail late, you can fail catastrophically or you can fail safe. Seek to isolate your failures as early as possible.
Try to fail (intelligently) as much as possible, as cheaply as possible, as early as possible. You learn what's right by eliminating everything that's wrong. You can often do that a lot faster and a lot cheaper than people seem to assume. Then when you win, after decades of putting in the work, and more importantly, avoiding the big open pits in the ground that everyone around you keeps falling into, they'll say– well, it's survivor bias!
One of the best ways to understand something is to understand how it fails.
When it comes to your life, you are both the detective and the crime scene. But we don’t have to start there. Think about literally anything you’re interested in, or might be interested in. To understand how something works, it helps to understand how it falls apart.
If you want to understand how a car engine works, for example, a surprisingly effective way to get started is to look up “common engine problems”. I’ll look this up right now. Apparently the most common problem is poor lubrication, which causes unnecessary friction, which causes overheating. Looking at more of the problems – “inadequate fuel and air compression”, “oil deposits and debris”, and I start to develop a mental model of what a combustion engine is. It’s really a system of controlled explosions – igniting the fuel, and so on.
What people struggle with:
“... somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you're no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that! I'm always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You're my son and you're my blood. You're the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain't gonna have a life.” – Rocky Balboa [2006]
Identifying with your negative thoughts, accepting them as legitimate.
It’s startlingly easy to identify with your thoughts, to think that you are your thoughts, and that the voice in your head is you. It’s kind of like reading the news and thinking that that’s representative of what’s happening. But it’s not! The news is a stream of some of the worst things that happened. All sorts of lovely things happen every day that hardly anybody hears about. And similarly, just as the news is not an accurate representation of what is going on in the world, your most critical, cruel, hateful thoughts are not an accurate representation of what is going on with you!
Aversion to facing your weaknesses.
This might seem contradictory to the above – it is! And both things tend to be true at the same time, which is how people are internally conflicted, which is a source of pain and despair. A lot of people have a deep aversion to thinking of themselves as cowardly, fearful, and so on.
Ironically, this tends to make things worse. As Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
What you can do:
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
– Litany Against Fear, Dune
Get in tune with your body
I think this is the most important thing when it comes to dealing with fears. Fear tends to arise as something below the realm of conscious awareness, and it tends to try to manipulate us in ways that we may not consciously perceive. But The Body Keeps The Score. It reveals itself in muscular tension, aversion, appetite, sleep, all of those things. Everything is really connected.
Make lists of your fears
[[Journalling]] Quickly make a short list of things that you’re afraid of, things that you’re avoiding. There’s a good chance that the first list you make will leave out things that you’re most afraid of, but that’s fine for starters. You don’t have to fight the final boss in stage 1.
Doing some general purpose journaling where you write and ramble about your fears is also extremely valuable. I’ve noticed that sometimes I can feel myself physically relaxing when I’m writing about my fears. I’ve noticed this effect is even stronger when I make a video talking about it. I can witness my breathing changing in real time. The mere act of talking about a fear makes it seem less daunting. It’s when it’s unarticulated inside the mind where it can loom much larger than it really is.
Investigate your fears
[[Ask questions]]. Here, I’ll get meta and demonstrate a series of questions that I asked myself when I was afraid while working on this book:
“What are you afraid of? What’s stopping you from writing this book?”
I’m scared it won’t be good enough.
“What does good enough mean?”
It won’t be perfect.
“Duh. Every book is a failure. But what does good enough mean?” [[Unlearn catastrophizing!]]
Well, for starters, every chapter should be complete.
“How do you know when every chapter is complete?”
Well, the structure I have in mind is, each chapter should have 4 sections: the story, the struggle, what you can do, and a recap.
“How far are you from getting that done, precisely?” [[Learn project management!]]
Not that far, actually, but I suppose I’ve been distracting myself from finishing this level by worrying prematurely about what comes after.
“Can you finish this first, and THEN worry about what comes after?” [[Baby steps!]]
Yes. Yes I can do that.
“Good job!” [[Celebrate your wins!]]
Do little experiments that allow you to face your fears in tiny ways
[[Baby steps]]. Some people call this “exposure therapy”. And the important thing is to do it in tiny bits. Come up with little experiments that allow you to face your fears in tiny little ways, that don’t involve bad or painful consequences. If the fears are really bad – for example if you have a bad fear of spiders, even looking at pictures of spiders may freak you out. Astronaut Chris Hadfield had a great bit in his talk about deliberately walking into spider webs to see for yourself that it’s harmless.
Reward yourself for facing your fears
[[Celebrate your wins]]! Some people disagree about precisely how rewards should be used. I personally think, for example, that it can be worth rewarding yourself with donuts or other sugary treats when you’re trying to develop a fitness habit, if that’s something you find rewarding. This might seem counter-productive, but we’re playing a long game here! If you develop some kind of attachment to the sugary treats that’s a new problem to deal with, but you can deal with that problem with more confidence, because by that point you’ve built a new fitness habit and you can feel confident about your ability to get things done.
Face your fears
Your fear is the toughest opponent you will ever face.
You will never defeat your fear completely, and you shouldn’t want to.
Fear is an ally of yours.
Your fear is meant to keep you safe.
Your fear will actively evade your scrutiny.
Amusingly, you should try not to be mad about this.
This is a game of hide-and-seek, and hiding is part of the game.
Put the gun down.
Let’s talk it out instead.
Declare trust bankruptcy (if you need to)
Not everyone is “down bad” so much that they need to do this, but I was, and I’m writing it for people who need it as well. I think even if you’re not struggling so bad that you need to “declare bankruptcy”, it can still be useful to think about. You might maybe think of it as “refinancing” or “restructuring”. Revisiting this section again I realize it’s even more critical than I thought when I first started the book, because you could actually say that Introspect is about learning to trust yourself. If you don’t trust yourself, it becomes very difficult to collaborate with yourself, to make any sort of plan(s), do anything at all. And it’s very dehumanizing to be unable to collaborate with yourself.
How do you build trust in yourself if you have a history of breaking promises?
I agonized over this as a teenager. Turns out the agony isn’t actually necessary. What you need to do is revert to very small baby steps. Start making very small promises that can be kept immediately. “I promise myself that I will drink a glass of water.” And then do that. “I promise myself that I will do 5 pushups”. And then do that. Write it down. Slowly, slowly increase the challenge level of these promises. Rather than “I promise I will publish my book tomorrow”, I have to do “I promise I will work on my book for 2 sessions of 25 minutes each”. I’ve found that going to bed after a day of doing what I said I would do, vs not having done it, is a world of difference. I sleep much better, which has an impact on how my next day goes.
The hard part here typically (in my experience, and in conversations with others) is that the ego is in the way. Climbing out of a trust deficit with poor executive function requires doing things that are so small that they can feel insultingly trivial. And they can also seem like they’re not going to make any sort of difference whatsoever when everything feels like it’s going to hell around you. These are illusions. This isn’t to say that the feelings are “wrong” – they are real feelings.
✱
// The following section of the book is a lightly-edited transcript of a youtube video I made. It might seem a little disjointed from the vibe of most of the other sections of the book. So it is.
Backstory
I’ll start with my backstory. I was a very “ADHD” child, very scatterbrained, curiosity-directed. I never quite learned how to focus. I never quite learned how to set a schedule and follow it. I tried, but I failed over and over again, and it was very demoralizing and upsetting.
School
Before school, I could just do whatever I liked, whenever I wanted, and it seemed mostly fine. When I went to school, there were timetables and homework and all these structured ways of
being that you're supposed to be. I couldn't do it. Reflecting on this now… my parents ran their own business, so they operated on their own schedules as well. So I didn't really have much of an example to follow of what it's like to have a strict schedule of some kind. I also developed the terrible, terrible habit of lying – to say whatever words needed to be said to get people off my back. And I did this internally as well. The worst part – I’d tell myself, “I'll just play video games or watch tv for a while and then I'll do my homework later…” and I'll end up playing, having fun, whatever, for hours until it's too late. and then I get sleepy, and then I'm too tired to do my homework.
Bargaining with myself
I would bargain with myself. “Okay, I’m too tired to do my homework now. I’ll go to bed, then I’ll wake up at 5am and do my homework then.” But I’d wake up too tired, and very rarely would I ever actually get around to doing my homework. So I’d go to school, anxious as hell anticipating the inevitable scoldings and punishment I would get, and I’d try to get my homework done on the bus. Or, I’d try to do my science homework during math class, and so on. That was just a horrible experience and a horrible existence.
Even then the solution was obvious, right? Bro! Just do your homework! Right?! Do it ahead of time before you have fun! But I think the issue was that I had a scarcity mindset. I had no experience of things going well, so I felt like things were always going to go poorly, and so I think the part of me that wanted to have fun – the part of me that was curiosity-directed,
fun-loving and so on would hijack the rest of me in a panic and insist on binging the fun while it was still maybe-possible. It’s really grotesque and sad to look back on.
Competing interests
I now have the language and the frameworks for thinking about these things. There are competing interests in the mind, like there's a guy who doesn't speak up at the meeting and then after the meeting is over he finds some way to manipulate things to get the outcome that he wants. I can frame it in a bunch of different ways – when I frame it in terms of the meeting, it seems a bit sinister. But it's also like there's some desperate part of you that's afraid of the other part of you and doesn't feel like it has the right to speak up. doesn't feel… the longer I went not doing my homework and getting into trouble, the more I felt like, “Oh I can't have fun, I haven't earned the right to have fun.”
And there's a part of me that's like, “I have to have fun no matter what, because this is my life, and if i don't have fun now, then I'm just gonna die miserable. right? because i've always been miserable. because i've never fixed anything in my life and everything's just shitty.” I remember what that feels like. I even remember feeling that way at work 10 years later, when I
had a great boss, great colleagues and a great work environment.
And I could never fully properly enjoy our milestones and our celebrations and so on because I’d always be thinking, “Oh but you know this blog post is overdue or like this deadline, this task is undone and i always just felt anxious and guilty and ashamed in my life. all the time. wow. that
was really… it was so unpleasant and you know… nobody was gonna save me from that. right? everybody's got their own problems, everybody's dealing with their own shit.
Yelling at myself did not help
I remember I was journaling a lot the whole time, and I remember I would beat myself up– i would plead with myself sometimes. I remember very specifically when I was a teenager one day I was crying in the bathroom at home. I was pointing at myself in the mirror, and I said why won't you fucking study, why don't you do your homework, like you're getting into so much trouble, your parents are upset with you, your teachers are frustrated with you, like even your friends, your classmates think there's something wrong with you… like why do you continue with this destructive path? Why don't you just do the right thing? I was crying and miserable and sad…
…and it didn't help. I might maybe have done my homework that day, but like a couple of days later i was back to how I was before. I feel like I now understand the whole thing better. I have a bunch of riffs about that. One of it is: Negative reinforcement simply doesn’t work. I was trying to punish myself for things that were going badly and hoping that with sufficient
punishment for the bad eventually things would be good, and I now believe that that's a terrible way of approaching things. What I should have really been doing is positive reinforcement for what I wanted. And when things felt too big, I should have gone smaller. But you know, small always feels like not enough. like too little too too late, that kind of thing. But… any progress is progress, and it's precious. However long it takes and however small it is. Big things start as little things.
It doesn’t make sense to be absolutist
To answer the question– what do you do if you don't trust yourself? you have to unpack that. What does that mean, trust yourself? to do what? Because it doesn't make sense to talk about trust in this absolutist, essentialist kind of, “either i am a trustworthy person or i'm not” and then it becomes moralizing, right, it becomes like i'm an untrustworthy person because i am
sinful and shitty and bad. And you spiral. Whereas, you know it's not so much a moral problem, it’s actually more of a logistics problem and logistics are solvable.
And I know from my personal experience playing video games– I know that I learn logistics in video games and I can execute those things and I can learn skills and get better. But the thing about games is that it's not your life. You don't feel a sense of moral failure when you make a mistake in a video game, right. That's the complication. But the lesson is still to learn is to focus on tiny wins. You might say “I cannot trust myself whatsoever,” – that's way too broad, way too vague, way too general, and easy to disprove in tiny pockets.
The way to earn back your trust or to build trust where there was none, is to do what you say you're gonna do. So broadly trust is, I trust myself to do what I say I'm gonna do, and people tend to fixate on the “do” part, but actually half the problem, or even most of the problem, can be solved at the “say” part.
You gotta stop making promises that you can't keep.
You gotta stop lying to people right, and yourself. You gotta instead start practicing making very very small predictions about what you're gonna do immediately. That can feel silly. Write down, I am going to do five push-ups right. With a little checkbox. Immediately do the five push-ups and then tick the box. It might seem trivial and pointless, but now you can say “I trust myself to say that i'm gonna do five push-ups and do them.” You have just disproved the statement “I am completely untrustworthy”. That statement is now false. You can be trusted to do 5 pushups.
You have now earned a little, you know 10 cents of trust.
Then you repeat that. Look around your life – I'm looking at my desk now and I'm like, okay, I am going to tidy my desk a little bit, for five minutes. You have to design these tasks well. You don't want to say,”I'm going to study today.” That's too broad, it's too vague, it's open to interpretation. You want to break it down to, “I’m gonna spend half an hour working on the math problems from chapter three.” Let's do that, and then I'm gonna reward myself after that.
I know people say things like– there's this whole meme that I completely agree with, which is like, “you can just reward yourself right away though.” That's true. I did that for a long time. It did feel like I was getting away with something. The adults in my life would say something like, “You’re only cheating yourself,” and I thought to myself, “Haha, this rules, I can cheat myself and I can forgive myself and everything is fine!” But over a long enough timescale you begin to feel the lack of self-trust, the lack of self-respect, and that’s something that becomes oppressive and frustrating. if you can't respect yourself, you know, you don't enjoy yourself as a roommate in your head, then that tension and unpleasantness comes out in your face, it comes out in your utterances, in your body language… it just spirals out of control.
Building trust is an ongoing process.
The point is not to be “I'm the most trustworthy man alive” or like “I do every single thing I say I'm gonna do”. Even now I don't necessarily do every single thing I say I'm gonna do. But it's a process. I negotiate. Whenever I feel like I haven't been doing the things I've been saying, I try to suspend the project. I take a pause, I take a piece of paper from my notebook, and i'm like, what do i want to do today, that I can do today? Okay, I'm gonna spend half an hour updating the book that I'm working on. I'm gonna send out this one email. Each small task that you set for yourself, and then do, builds trust. And becoming someone that you can trust is one of the most valuable things you can do with your life.
And you can look around – it's night and day, the people who trust themselves and the people who don't. There are people who have blind faith in themselves, that's not who I’m talking about… I'm talking about this cool, calm, measured, almost sleepy casual confidence that comes from knowing that, if you say something, you're going to make it happen. These people have a gentleness to them that comes from a place of strength.
And it can become kind of subconscious, the way you know you might be able to type on a keyboard without thinking about where each letter is. You can start doing things without thinking
about what you're doing. That might seem very far away for some people, but I have been on that journey and I want to say that it's possible.
I don't necessarily think you need to believe in a grandiose promise of, “Oh everything's going to be great.” It's more… you reflect on what was a part of your life a long time ago, or what your state was a long time ago, and consider how your life now is different than it was then, and just consider that all of your experience – which is real, and yours, and true… is still not the whole picture. And there's a whole world beyond what you have seen so far. Just as you know there's a whole world– there's other countries that you haven't visited that you don't know what it's like, the cultures are different and so on. The world is big. There is a lot you haven’t seen, there is a lot you haven’t experienced. Consider being open to being surprised by it.
✱
// Heads up, the next section is a little sparse, I haven’t had the energy to populate it properly. But actually, you should be able to reread the previous section looking for clues and extract the todos from there.
What people struggle with:
Internal conflict / the ego is in the way
The first step to addressing a problem is to acknowledge that you have one, and this itself can be a difficult step for some. It’s interesting how paradoxical it can be – and it all makes more sense once you model yourself as having multiple different “parts” that have different concerns and interests. Some parts of you will be frustrated that you’re not better. But some parts of you will be offended at the suggestion that you’re not good enough. The solution, or the path towards the solution, is quite literally to bring all of these people to the negotiating table and articulate all of their respective concerns.
Absolutism / catastrophizing
This idea that just because you have failed at some things, or a bunch of things, that you can never be trusted with anything ever. That’s catastrophizing!
Self-flagellation
Beating yourself up about your past failures is typically counter-productive. In my experience, it tends to be something that people inherit from others – parents, teachers, authority figures and so on.
What you can do:
“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you’ll be happy to live with all your life.
Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” – Golda Meir
Accept failure and declare bankruptcy.
This might not be necessary for everyone. Baby steps. Regardless, I recommend having some sort of “ceremony” where you renegotiate your agreements with yourself. I recommend going to a fancy cafe that you might not usually go to, and bring a notebook. Then write down everything that you’re concerned about, everything that you’re worried about, everything that’s been weighing you down – missed deadlines, people you haven’t followed up with, and so on.
Baby steps / Project management
The most crucial thing when you’re in the process of renegotiating with yourself is not to make grandiose promises. You want to start really, really small. Almost insultingly, trivially small.
// Like I said earlier, reread the previous section and look for the directives. “Focus on the tiny wins”, etc. It’s the same thing throughout the book really. You get it.
Rebuild your trust in yourself
You can build trust in yourself.
It starts with baby steps. You can narrow your focus.
Trust yourself to have a glass of water. Trust yourself to clear your desk.
It’s okay to make mistakes. Embrace your mistakes.
Aim to make better and smaller mistakes.
Try to calmly evaluate precisely how and why you failed to deliver on your own promises.
Write it down. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t self-flagellate. Don’t perform contrition. None of that helps you make anything better.
In fact, works to keep you stuck exactly where you are.
If you want to break out of the prison of your “bad love”, as Nietzsche put it, you will have to practice “good love”.
Start small. You can do it.
Uninstall social bloatware
“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces.
They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
― Jim Morrison
When what you want is at odds with what your people (family, peers, tribe) want, that’s a perfect recipe for guilt. Our girl Moana sings, “I wish I could be the perfect daughter, but I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try…” and later in the song she literally asks, “What is wrong with me?”
What is wrong with her? Nothing! She is an individual who is trying her best. It’s not her fault that she has an independent spirit, a “quiet voice inside her”, that wants something different than what her social context is optimized for. That does not make her a bad person.
The coherent self is an interface, literally for inter-facing with others.
In 1994, 26-year-old Jason Lewis set off on a quest to pedal-boat 46,505-miles around the world
– no motors, no sails. He thought it would take about 2 years. It took him almost 14. Anyway, the really interesting thing about Jason’s story to me is how, when he was alone out at sea for months on end, he described his self unbundled into multiple personalities. "It seemed completely sane".
This is consistent with other things I've read about people in ultra-solitude. The coherent self is constructed for interfacing with others. Christopher Knight similarly-ish described how, in his
27-year hermit solitude, "I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant."
All problems are interpersonal problems.
One of the heavy-hitting lines in the book The Courage To Be Disliked is: All problems are interpersonal problems. Because if there were nobody else to comment on it, be annoyed by it, compare yourself to, then it wouldn’t be an issue. We think of ourselves as fast or slow, ugly or attractive, rich or poor, in relation to other people. I wouldn’t assert that this is absolutely true, but I think it’s a useful frame to peer through to consider our issues. What are our problems, really, and why do we struggle with them?
✱
// Some random bits I don’t have the energy to integrate.
Bloatware is the stuff that gets installed on your phone or computer without your consent, taking up space. I use this as a metaphor for talking about all the “apps” in your mind that you did not consciously choose, and might be better off uninstalling.
There’s family stuff, then there’s friends stuff. I once wrote a blogpost titled ‘Parents, peers, and other benevolent plagues”. I was really proud of the title because I felt like it very elegantly captured how it can be the good people in our life who hurt us, even without meaning to. And here I have two thoughts – one, that it makes no sense to get angry at them for it. And two, of course we should get angry about it, when we are treated with cruelty, even if that cruelty was borne of ignorance. This is one of those paradoxes that we have to somehow synthesize and find a way to laugh about.
The prestige trap
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
– Paul Graham, How To Do What You Love (2006)
In 2.9 [[Investigate Your Desires]], I talked about how I used to buy books that I didn’t actually want to read, but I wanted to want to read. That’s actually a minor example of a Prestige Trap! I must’ve spent hundreds of dollars on books I would never read. I got off lucky. That’s a very small price to pay. Some people spend years if not decades of their lives, tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to pursue an under-interrogated model of happiness, joy, success, fulfillment that they didn’t actually choose for themselves.
One of the most important things that I hope I can convey to you is this: I believe that you will save yourself a tremendous amount of grief by identifying the ways in which you have unquestioningly bought into your inherited ideas of prestige. You may have inherited them from your family, your friends, or wider society around you. The question I want you to ask yourself is, what did you want before other people got into your head about what you should want? What were you like? What were you drawn to, what did you like to do for fun?
For me, the first answer is obvious: books. I just always loved books, even if nobody else saw me reading them, even if nobody else cared.
Of course, there are some more complicated answers. I got into music significantly because some of my peers were into it. I now enjoy music for its own sake too, but I’m not sure I would have learned that about myself if not for my peers. We are social beings and I don’t think it’s realistic or desirable to seek to completely strip away all of social reality from ourselves. That strips away our very humanity.
Different people of course have different values and preferences in this domain, and I don’t particularly want to sell you on my values – although surely I have accidentally and unintentionally done so already in my writing. But what I really want is for you to consider your own values. How do you feel about the idea of being a monk in a monastery, cloistered off from the rest of the world? Some people find that idea deeply fulfilling. And if that’s what you feel in your heart, I say great, go for it! But the tricky thing is that lots of people are just plain unsure. And they change their minds along the way. And I’d say it’s okay to be unsure, and it’s okay to change your mind. You might even want to experience a change of heart, which I think is something deeper and more profound. I don’t know what the truth is here. I can only talk about my experience and my learnings but they are limited.
What people struggle with:
“Someone’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.”
– Les Brown
The cloying pressure of the Cult of Happiness
I use this phrase in a playful, silly way to point at something that I think is a real phenomenon. It can be a rather sinister one. There’s a song by Evanescence called Everybody’s Fool, and the music video does a pretty good job of conveying how people feel pressured to be happy.
Here’s a quote from Hayley Williams (whom I adore, I just thought I’d squeeze that in here): “We were about to play ‘Fake Happy’ for Good Morning America, and one of—I’m not gonna name names—but one of the anchors comes up and she goes, ‘Well this is a song I relate to!’ and I was like… it’s real. These people are miserable but they represent us every day and they have to look so happy. Really it just represents this idea that there’s so much pressure societally to show up and present yourself in a way that is pleasing to other people, that makes other people feel comfortable or makes other people feel like everything’s fine and perfect. “
(comic via @optipess)
✱
There’s a 2021 Atlantic article by Paul Bloom about parenting and happiness, where he writes, "A deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and marriages had they chosen not to have kids – yet they still describe parenthood as the 'best thing they've ever done.'"
I don’t see this as a puzzle at all! It only seems like a puzzle because the [[frame]] is wrong. “Happiness” is the wrong frame. The issue here is with people’s concept of happiness, and their relationship with it. This is one of those instances where it seems to me like people’s pain is actually downstream of bad philosophy. We really need a more comprehensive model of happiness, joy, fulfillment and so on. And people have figured this stuff out for centuries, if not millennia! It just somehow still hasn’t quite made its way to mainstream understanding.
// This stuff is truly wack! Much to get into! No time right now! Next version!
Fear of abandonment – social death
I think this is the big thing with social bloatware. We are social creatures. We don’t want to disappoint our family and friends. We don’t want to feel like we’re an unproductive, unvalued member of our communities, of society. Being socially ostracized can feel like annihilation.
Navigating this requires both courage and thoughtfulness.
Being excessively anti-social
I want to be clear that I’m not saying that you should be some kind of contrarian renegade, lashing out at everyone in your life. I’ve seen some people in my life do this, in a passionate outburst. It’s not sustainable. There’s a reason that society is the way it is, why we have polite fictions and so on. There’s no need to be a dick.
What you can do:
"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work."
– Adrienne Rich
Articulate for yourself who you are, and what you will stand for.
Sometimes you’ll see advice in the form of, “Stop caring about what other people think.” I think that’s a little oversimplistic and unrealistic. It might be something that someone needs to hear, if they’re really excessively obsessed with what other people think. But we are social beings. No man is an island. We have to live amongst other people.
Some people go too far in the opposite direction and are utterly indifferent to other people, in a selfish way. This rhymes with what people describe as being a sociopathic, narcissistic abuser.
Read The Courage To Be Disliked
I don’t entirely agree with all of it, but it presents a valuable perspective to consider. One of the arguments is that “trauma does not exist”, which I straight up disagree with – but it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider – what if trauma didn’t exist? What if we’re perpetuating whatever we’re perpetuating out of familiarity, a sense of identification with some set of events, and so on? (If this rubs you the wrong way, please disregard it completely!)
Here’s a tweet from my friend Rosalind (@wholebodyprayer), which I feel does a good job of summarizing the entire book: “If you want to be ungovernable, you have to be okay with people having hurt feelings & blaming you for them —because consciously or unconsciously we use feelings to govern each other”.
Thread Time!
What I’ve learned from people who DM me their problems
I’ve been learning a lot about people from the dozens of people who DM me every week. A recurring thing I’ve noticed about some anxious, frustrated people is that they haven’t really investigated their ideas about what is good, what they want. They talk about certain ideals (growing an audience, climbing a career ladder, making money) like they’re non-negotiable.
My perspective is: a lot of the pain comes from friction between how someone is and how they assume they’re supposed to be. They then beat themselves up about it, and they don’t realize they’re doing it. Psychological abuse appears benign when it comes from inside the house/.
One guy couldn’t understand why he was so frustrated with life. He was so kind to other people and so cruel to himself. My frame: his self-cruelty violated his own values (“be good to people”), and this violation was a source of dissonance. Self-loathing is a form of narcissism, which is isolating.
Another guy had been really struggling to let go of his jealousy of people that appeared more successful than him. He’s really bought into the idea that having more money etc makes you literally a better person. Our conversations are all just me getting him to say it out loud.
Zooming out, it’s interesting how people will come to me with “please help me” and then resist the most simple questions I ask them about what they want, what they’re trying to do, etc. I still laugh about the guy who asked for writing advice then disagreed with everything I said,
I once had a guy several years ago DM me some really vulnerable confessional stuff about feeling weak & ashamed etc, but then his timeline was full of him being mean to people. He seemed to be at a crossroads and making progress, but I eventually blocked him because he insulted people in my mentions, and I have zero tolerance for that. I still think about that one- could I have steered him off the path he was on? Will he redeem himself eventually? I don’t know, but I cannot allow him to use the people in my mentions as target practice. Was a rather unhappy block. Am never gleeful about doing this, but the alternative is worse.
People often get all apologetic in my DMs about being “pathetic” and talking about their unresolved feelings, but I find it so much easier to love them when they’re open and honest. It’s sad to contrast that with how abrasive and cruel those same people can be in the commons.
I think what’s coming together here for me is just how profound and powerful it can be to really listen. To yourself, to your conflicting feelings, to others. To be patient and to try to be kind. I’m not perfect at this and I’m not trying to be preachy either- It’s free power!!!
People feel powerless because nobody listens to them, not even themselves, and then they try to get a feeling of power by being cruel to others - but this is hollow, weak, fragile power created from fear. Real power comes from love. Cheesy-sounding, but I really think this is true. People trip up over this I think because the popular concept of love seems to be something frilly, superficial, trite. Real love is something deeper. It’s a deep acceptance of what is. It’s tolerance, patience, kindness, grace.
Uninstall social bloatware
Nobody asked to be born.
Nobody was put on this Earth to be someone else’s slave.
You should not have to live your life under the direction of somebody else.
You must find the quiet voice inside you that is yours.
This voice can take time to find, and hear.
You might be in a social environment that directly inhibits your self-expression.
In a sense, we all are, but some people do have it much worse than others.
Regardless, the thing is to cultivate a space within yourself where you can be free.
Even if that space is only in a journal, as a start.
Practice courage in small ways.
Then you can fan its flame, and slowly become more courageous in bigger ways.
Become who you are.
Investigate your copes
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to quit until you ARE ready. [...] You can keep smoking until you ‘get it’! In fact, we insist that you do. As long as you still see a cigarette as desirable, you’ll be a smoker.
[...]
You cannot force smokers to stop, and although all smokers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to smoke. This turns them into secret smokers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.”
— Allan Carr, Easyway to Quit Smoking
I gotta say, I really love the word “cope” because it’s so simple and evocative. It’s so easy to point at and talk about. And the interesting thing is, the phrase emerged in recent-ish times in a kind of derisory way – “cope and seethe”, “copium”, the implication being that the person who is trying to cope with something is somehow “less than”. This is a recurring thing in all sorts of domains. Somehow people have even found a way to say “Get help”, “you need therapy”, and so on as an act of dismissal and diminishment, with a little bit of plausible deniability woven into it. Truly amazing how we do this.
Anyway, being the eternally earnest optimist that I try to be, I want to reclaim “cope”, and investigate it with kindness and compassion. I once found myself tweeting, “Cope is when you’re bitter about not getting what you want. Flourishing is when you realize that you are so much more than getting or not getting what you want.” Thinking about it more, I wonder, can this apply to coping mechanisms as a whole? And the big word that I’m a little shy to using: Addiction? Is addiction not a form of cope? And could addiction be “when you’re bitter about what not getting what you want”? It’s surely not that simple, and yet I think there’s a strong enough ring of truth to it that it makes me actually reinvestigate my own compulsive, neurotic behaviors.
Your coping mechanisms exist to help you
This is a very important truth about coping mechanisms (copes) that we tend to brush off pretty easily, I think because we feel compelled to rush to the part about how they are bad for us, and how we are bad people for using them.
If I were to be a little dramatic about it, I think there’s something about that that makes the mechanism – or the part of you that’s associated with the mechanism – angry, resentful, mad. It retaliates. It considers you selfish, ungrateful.
Don’t be in a rush to get rid of your copes
Here’s my unconventional advice– but really, I’m borrowing directly from the Easyway playbook, and those folks have been very successful at helping people quit smoking: I don’t think you should be in a rush to get rid of your coping mechanisms.
Again, your coping mechanisms exist because they help you in some way. Feeling guilty or beating yourself up about them will actually make things worse. It sets up an internal conflict within yourself that is often doomed to fail.
To execute a jailbreak, you have to make attempts to evaluate things as clinically as possible. I don’t mean you have to become a clinical person, but I do think it helps a little bit. Commit to temporarily suspending guilt and shame about how you are, while you neutrally evaluate it. I saw a lady on YouTube who cheerfully helps to clean up depressed people’s messy houses, and it’s an absolute salve for the soul. I highly recommend it. (Search “depression cleaning”.)
The beautiful thing is seeing how she walks into a space that’s clearly something that most people would be ashamed of, but she brings to it this cheerful non-judgemental energy of “Oh wow! So much opportunity for me to help someone!”
I find it very humanizing to try and embody that spirit. For others, and for myself.
What people struggle with:
"I like the book ‘The Biology of Desire’ on addiction. It views addiction as an instance of the same kind of desire-driven habit-forming learning that’s the core of our motivational system. And so quitting an addiction is not exactly just quitting something bad. It’s more like a continuation of one’s general lifelong process of learning. This is a kinder framing and it’s thoroughly neuroscientific. And it reveals that addictions are actually very clever behaviors in some ways– so we can even learn from them as we try to develop healthier habits to replace the ones that harm us. It’s also a narrative perspective that respects the subject’s life story. The addiction was a part of my troubled human journey. And now my narrative needs to find a new charge, a new question, a new act. Maybe I was drawn into addiction in part because my life didn’t make sense, I felt disconnected from the past and scared of the future, etc. Addictions also form around the need for connection: it’s not just the beer, it’s the pub. So I have to find other social contexts that center around something that doesn’t harm me.”
– Mikael Brockman (@meekaale)
Bad frames keep people trapped
I’ve gotten increasingly clear that the main thing about persistent struggles is that they’re framed wrong. And the thing with coping mechanisms is that you’ll have to reframe your entire relationship with the cope in order to deal with it. Otherwise you have a “don’t think of an elephant” problem, where “trying to quit smoking” keeps you thinking about smoking. You want to instead reframe it to something like, “enjoying the breath”, “enjoying being healthy”, etc.
Shame and helplessness make it hard to move forward
Fear and worry, a sense that they will never unlearn the impulses. Impulses can take a long time to wither away, and it gets worse if you feel bad about it.
I’m going to quote Brene Brown again: “You cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin… You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions.
You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.”
“And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. "I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up." That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks. “
Negative reinforcement is very ineffective at behavior change
This is one of those statements that I wish I had encountered, considered, reconsidered, and really properly internalized earlier in life. I get the sense that my life could’ve turned out very differently if I hadn’t spent years and years of my life beating myself up trying to change my behavior, trying to bully myself into becoming a better person.
It’s a very ineffective tool, and it has all sorts of negative consequences that may not be immediately apparent – most terrible of all is that you despise yourself, your own company, your own authority over yourself – just as you would despise anybody else who seeks to bully or coerce you.
Merely talking about your problems without taking action can become a safety ritual.
The meta thing is, this sort of conversation itself will become a safety ritual if you don't then take some action that changes the game. I’ve seen people talk about how they do this in therapy – just show up every week or so and talk about the same problem they’ve been having for months, and years. That’s not bad – it can provide some relief – but we can definitely do better. I think a good way to make progress without bullshitting yourself is to take some new (small) action that you've not taken before (or recently).
But also, you can live your entire life as a sitcom rather than an adventure, that's perfectly fine. You can live a life full of safety rituals, and be safe, and warm, and take care of yourself and those around you, and that can be a decent-enough life. It’s really up to you to be honest with yourself about what you really want. You can seek out some external authority to tell you how you should live, but ultimately, submitting to that authority is also a choice on your part. The final responsibility for your life always lies within you.
I'm reflecting on how layered it is. The following is a little compressed summary of what so many people are struggling with:
There's some desire in your heart
You follow it, and you get burned. Pain!
You create a barrier around the desire, lock it up. No more pain.
But now, no more feeling, either. You now feel cold, desolate, numb.
The numbness makes it hard to do anything, and you feel bad about being unproductive.
You beat yourself up for feeling bad. Who are you to feel bad?
This internal conflict has you detaching from yourself, becoming apathetic to yourself.
“Ugh, why am I so bored & listless?”
And – if at stage 8 you then think the problem is that you don't have a good enough note-taking system, or some other triviality, you can then end up spending years avoiding yourself and your real issues. Fixating on the wrong part of the problem is also a kind of self-soothing safety ritual. Which isn't to say that notes can't help! literally the first thing I advocate for is extensive journalling. But the point – if you really want true relief – is to use the journalling to bring you closer to the root of your problems, and to help you take action to address them.
Or not! It is truly entirely up to you. You can bullshit yourself and lie to yourself if you want. That is a choice you can make. I’m not here to judge you. I used to be very bothered when I saw other people doing this but now I feel quite a bit more at ease with it. Each person is on their own journey, after all.
Why did it bother me? I was projecting my own shadow onto other people. At some point I had internalized self-loathing re: weakness and incompetence. I grew to believe that my weakness was the source of everything bad in my life. And seeing it in others distressed me. Surely, if I was punished for my incompetence, they will be punished for theirs too? And here part of me
tells myself that I want to protect them, but I think the deeper shadow part of me wants to punish them so that they suffer as I suffered. This is uncomfortable to say out loud, and I immediately want to defend myself and make excuses.
But increasingly I see, clearer than ever, that my aversion to weakness, my contempt of my own incompetence, these are the walls of my own psychic prison. only by embracing my own weakness was I able to begin to breathe again. and it made me stronger.
Also, "at some point I internalized self-loathing" is a euphemistic way to avoid saying "people treated me horribly". Facing the truth of having been mistreated can be emotionally overwhelming. Avoiding it is much easier. But of course, then life is cold, boring, and weirdly tense.
And you know, interestingly, once you get into that a couple of times, it's actually possible to then go way too deep into that, and turn the victim label into a suffocating safety blanket. it's tricky to talk about, because again, everyone is on their own journey…
But right now, as I'm looking at it all from this sort of unusually peak vantage point, I kind of have to laugh, because, oh gosh. Everyone has a point. Everybody has a reason to be scared. Even the people who bullshit and lie, they have a reason to do that. It all makes sense. And when people fight and argue with each other on the internet instead of working through their own issues, well, they have a reason to do that too! and I have a reason I'm doing this thread instead of finishing my 99.8% complete book. Haa...
What you can do:
“Before I could manage my emotions, I had to accept my emotions. Before acceptance, I had to identify my emotions. Before identifying, I had to acknowledge my emotions. Before acknowledgment, I had to be honest with myself. And this took work.”
– Rwenshaun Miller (@Rwenshaun)
Make a list of things that you do that you’re not proud of.
[[Journal]]. Insist on suspending judgment! If you’re usually mean or harsh to yourself about this, consider that it’s not helpful, and at least experiment, for this particular cycle, with the idea that you’re just not going to beat yourself up about it. [[Put the gun down]].
Be comprehensively honest with yourself.
Ask yourself why you started. It’s very important that you get to the truth of the situation, tell the true story to yourself about how and why you are the way you are. And you may not be able to get the whole truth out in a single sitting, you might have to write what feels correct to you in the moment, and then revisit it subsequently.
Do a root problem analysis.
[[Ask questions]]. You want to find out, and diagnose correctly, what it is that your coping mechanism is trying to protect you from. I remember being shocked when I realized that I was using cigarettes to self-medicate my volatile blood sugar levels, which was related to my bad diet, which was downstream of the constant anxiety and nausea I had because of issues at school. I had to begin to address all of that in order to begin to untangle my cigarette smoking habit.
Start building alternate solutions – even small, imperfect, incomplete ones.
Once you’ve figured out what your cope is trying to help you with. You might get this wrong for a while, that’s okay! It’s worth testing, trying and failing and learning. [[Baby steps!]]
Begin to reconceptualize your relationship with your copes.
[[Framing]]. In the case of smoking, you want to stop thinking of cigarettes as a crutch, as a treat, as an aid, as something that gets you through the day, but rather, as something gross, disgusting, expensive. You want to learn to fully inhabit the new identity of non-smoker, a person who loves breathing the fresh air, loves being free from a costly, nasty habit. Pick up a fitness habit that you can enjoy and be proud of.
Accept the possibility of failure, with grace.
You want to celebrate progress. Each failed attempt does genuinely get you closer to success, even if it doesn’t immediately seem that way.
Investigate your copes.
You do not have to hate yourself or feel guilt or shame about your coping mechanisms.
Try not to feel guilty about your coping mechanisms.
Understand and appreciate that your coping mechanisms are trying to help you, protect you.
Chances are you picked them up in a different context than the one you’re operating in now.
It may take some time and effort to articulate what it would mean to rearchitect your habits.
Your coping mechanism is almost definitely a “load-bearing pillar” that is propping up something else.
Respect that. Figure out what it is.
Only by facing the true reality of the situation, will we be able to make the adjustments we need.
Simply yelling at ourselves will not help. Shaming ourselves will not help.
Only a true understanding will help.
Face your anger
“Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy.”
– Aristotle, Ars Rhetorica, ~350BC
It took me a long time to realize that I have suppressed anger inside me.
There are several reasons for this. My father would sometimes be an angry man, and when he was angry he was frightening and dangerous. To his credit, he’s mellowed a lot as he’s gotten older, but even now I still feel a flinch of fear. Also, I grew up – and still live in!– a society which has a trope of “brown men are angry and dangerous”. From a young age, I felt like I could never express anger as a minority, because it would alienate me further. I felt compelled instead to suppress my anger, and to instead be maximally charming.
This does have a positive side to it – being able to turn on the charm is a very useful skillset! But the challenge for me was to unlearn the compulsive aspect to it. To learn to be okay, for example, when some random person dislikes me. Or even when a friend turns out to dislike me. I am not obliged to charm every single person in my life. It’s okay for people to dislike.
✱
Thinking on it more, I further realize that I grew up in a society where, if I said "bad things have happened to me and I am upset about it", the overwhelming response from everyone else was something like "no they haven't, fuck you, god you're pathetic.” Building on what Hayley said, there are people who get uncomfortable seeing any sort of expression that’s outside a very narrow range of what is “acceptable”, and they will express that discomfort by
and this sort of suppression and denial goes so deep, it's so much a part of the air we breathe – right now it's crystal clear to me that it's directly related to almost every other problem imaginable, yet nobody talks about it. Even now a part of me is like, "Oh no, are you really going to say that all of society is participating in a conspiracy". And you know what? Yes! Yes I am! It brings me no joy to say this. It's been ravaging me on the inside for years to even hold it. But it’s true! Families are conspiracies of silence. Society too is a conspiracy of silence. We brush away things that we don’t like to see, and don’t like to hear.
The world was cruel to me, and I denied this about myself.
Even now when I read the phrase “the world was very cruel to me”, my subconscious immediately offers negative responses. “The world was cruel to you? Like, you, personally? Fuck off, mate. So many people have it worse than you. You’re not that important.” And so on. And… I don’t think any of that is in conflict! Yes, I’m not that important! Yes, many people have it worse than me! AND, it’s also true that I endured cruelty growing up! That’s the truth, and I am okay saying the truth, and I am okay if there are people who do not feel comfortable hearing that truth.
The truth is also painful to admit. Expressing anger, feeling anger, means admitting that I have reasons to be angry, which means admitting that I experienced bad things, experienced injustice and cruelty. And I didn’t want to admit this. Part of this I think is because we live in a rather victim-blamey world. Even if someone doesn’t personally believe that victims deserve what happened to them, it still makes some sense for them to be averse to the victim label, or to even saying at all that they were victimized, because of the unpleasant assumptions that people will subsequently make. And… I can empathize with that, even, because I’ve seen how I do it myself.
I have a tendency to rage at cowardice and incompetence
Iff there's a sort of "shadow" that I hide underneath my friendly ambitious nerd persona – which by the way is a genuine, honest expression of myself – it might be that I have an intense rage at what I perceive to be cowardice and incompetence. I had a flash of it emerge for me earlier, which kind of shocked and surprised me, so I figure that's my cue to bring it out into the open and talk about it.
I think part of it is that some part of me is frustrated with myself for having taken so long with the book that I'm working on. Another compassionate part of me knows and understands that it takes what it takes, but the angry part doesn't give much of a fuck about that.
I don't like "bottled up" as a metaphor. I don't think my rage is "bottled". I think it's just... deep rooted? underground? It's like molten lava running through a cave. For the most part I don't find it necessary or useful to make a show of it. it exists, I express it sometimes I think part of what's uncomfortable to talk about – some of this stuff is internalized via external social cues. I didn't invent this harshness, I inherited it. I grew up in some harsh and cruel environments, which is how I learned to be harsh and cruel.
So like, it's... this double-edged thing, right. I'm reminded of Kratos's Blade of Chaos from God Of War (2016).
There's something quite cursed about this stuff. Dark, burning shit from a past life that you hope you never have to think about again, let alone use. Kratos really gives me a narrative to set this against. He associates the chained blades (and the resulting scars) with monstrosity, they remind him that he *was* a monster, of all the bad and terrible things he had done in his anger and hatred in his past life.
But at the end of his journey he realizes he truly isn't that any more. "I have nothing more to hide".
. 
I guess in some way I too have been bandaging up my own arms, being afraid - no... - ashamed? of my own power, my own anger and rage, because the last time(s) I got truly mad,
years and years ago, things turned out terribly. For myself, and for my friends. I think I can let this go now.
I've seen the tremendous damage rage and contempt can do. I must have like 20 Twitter threads about this stuff– never summon a demon to destroy your enemies, because it'll consume everything in the process. But also, legitimate righteous anger can give you a *clarity* like nothing else.
But how do you know if your anger is legitimate? For many years, I didn't know. There were a lot of things I didn't know, and I like to humor myself with the conceit that "I've resolved most of them" – but anger, rage, contempt is something that has always made me uneasy, something that I’ve never liked to face about myself.
I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as an angry person, and I don’t think anybody else would describe me as that, either. In fact, for a long time, I was a very conflict-averse,
conflict-avoidant person. (Although, funnily, I used to hate it when anybody said that about me, and it would trigger me into… an angry response. It’s truly humorous, once you’re able to step out of it.) But I have anger within me. As any person should. And I’m not ashamed of that any more.
What people struggle with:
“If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”
― Maya Angelou
I remember thinking “I have no right to be angry.”
“Other people have it worse.” But when I reflected on this, I feel like this was a cover story of sorts. I think the truth is that I believed that if I expressed anger, I would experience worse retaliation. “You’ll get in trouble if you seem angry.”
Confrontation can be scary, overwhelming and hard.
King T’challa, confronting his elders. (Black Panther, 2018 film)
It also often leads to temporarily worse outcomes. Things can get worse before they get better. This is usually what people are afraid of, and correctly so.
Some people are bad at confrontation, and come on too strong – which then results in retaliation or defensiveness, which then makes them feel like they were right to avoid confrontation altogether. The challenge, like Aristotle said, is to be angry the right amount, in the right context, in the right way. That’s hard. It takes mindfulness. You might have to go and scream in an open field to let it out. You might have to think through the roots of your problems, so that your responses become less compulsive.
But this is what we’ve been training for.
What you can do:
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, Twelve Steps to Happiness
Take baby steps.
You don’t have to confront the entirety of all of your grief, anguish, despair in a single moment. Think of it like cleaning a home. You can start with one room, and within that room you can start with one surface. Once you’ve cleared one surface, you can celebrate yourself for having accomplished that small task. Similarly, you don’t need to become a rage-monster when you decide to first start thinking about your issues.
Prepare for the mess.
Plan ahead! Think about what you’re going to have to deal with.
See the bigger picture.
Take the longer view.
Let your anger breathe.
But be not contemptuous or vengeful. Suffering is the enemy. Making people suffer is aiding the enemy. Do not perpetuate the cycle. Tk // seems useful to elaborate on this - what is anger?
How to let anger ‘breathe’? One of those fancy wine decanters comes to mind
Talk to someone who isn’t directly involved.
Anger isn’t always sensible, reasonable, measured and so on. That’s a part of why some of us tend to suppress it. We worry about the consequences. You might feel angry at your spouse but find it unwise to express that, because you’re not sure that you’ll be able to do it in a calm, measured way, and then there would be consequences. You probably don’t want to say anything overblown that you can’t take back.
Journaling can help here. Simply writing down everything about your anger, what you’re mad about, however unreasonable it is, can be helpful. I’m mad at my mom, I’m mad at the world, I’m mad at myself… get it all out. Once you’ve gotten it out, you’ll often feel better immediately, and then when you look at it later, you’ll find that the reality of things is more nuanced than you first thought.
Face your anger
You do not have to be ashamed of your old scars.
Your mistakes and failures are part of your story, but they do not have to define you.
You can be more than a victim, or a sinner, or a long-suffering miscreant.
If bad things happened to you, it’s not unreasonable for you to be angry about it.
Be careful of vindictive, righteous, hateful, venomous contempt – that’s something that leaks and corrodes your very being.
But anger can be justified. Anger can be clarifying. Anger can help you see the truth of your situation and rouse you to do the work of righting wrongs.
Give your anger a seat at the table.
They’re on your team. They’re looking out for you too.
Hear what they have to say.
Be aware of exhaustion funnels
“Somewhere along the way we've gotten the message that the more we struggle and the more we suffer, the more valuable we will become and the more successful we'll eventually be. And so we overwork ourselves, overschedule ourselves, and become "busier than thou" because we think there's some sort of prize on the other side of the pain we cause ourselves. And you know what?
There's no prize. All you get from suffering is more suffering.”
― Kate Northrup, Money, A Love Story
The following is a passage from ‘Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression’, by Segal, Williams and Teasdale:
“The narrowing of circles illustrates the narrowing of life…”
"...as we give up the things in life that we enjoy but seem 'optional'. The result is that we stop doing activities that would nourish us, leaving only work or other stressors that often deplete our resources. Professor Marie Åsberg suggests that those of us who continue downward are likely to be the most conscientious workers, those whose levels of self-confidence is closely dependent on their performance at work, that is, those who are often seen as the best workers, not the lazy ones. The diagram also shows the sequence of accumulating 'symptoms' experienced by Jim as the funnel narrowed and he became more and more exhausted."
Ouch. I don’t even think of myself as a conscientious worker, but somehow I find ways to get myself exhausted anyway.
Tiredness gets progressively worse.
To be honest, this is one of the hardest things in the world for me. I still struggle with this. I can have a wonderful abundance mindset when it comes to writing. I know that I have an effectively infinite capacity for writing. But when it comes to tiredness, sleep, exhaustion, I really struggle. My sleep just sucks, man. Writing this book made it worse. I’m confident that I will continually get better at this, but this is my weak point.
And what I know, after almost 20 years of struggling with it, is that it has very little to do with tactical things. Yes, I have blackout blinds. No, I don’t bring my phone to bed. I just don’t like going to bed, period. I’ve experimented with many different formulations… the problem is not that. I think the answer, as Rollo May said, is that "the battle for health must be won on the deeper level of the integration of the self". For me, my issues with sleep and tiredness are clearly an offshoot of some much deeper issue within myself. And maybe a part of me writes a book like this in the hope that writing it will help me to figure out what it is. Ironically, I am currently too tired to see clearly what it is. But I bet I’ll see it after I ship my book.
Almost everybody is struggling with something.
In a way, the silver lining of this for me is – my scarcity mindset relationship with rest gives me a window into appreciating how other people struggle with their own. It helps me get down in the trenches with them, instead of lecturing at them from some high-and-mighty podium. I don’t know if that’s a helpful idea for you, as you’re struggling. Sometimes I hear from people saying something like, “I wish I didn’t have to go through all that trauma, all that difficulty, it was such an unnecessary, wasteful, horrible thing.” And… yes, I won’t dispute that. I wish you didn’t have to go through it, either.
But having gone through some version of it, an interesting thing is that it gives you a window of connection with other people who have struggled. There is a deep kinship and communion in that. I don’t mean to romanticize it too much either. It’s tricky and nuanced. But your struggles may allow you to be of service to someone else, to help someone else feel alone. And when you do that, you can feel less alone, too.
What people struggle with:
“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves.
We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”
― Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Scarcity mindset
Sometimes I think the phrase “scarcity mindset” is woefully limited, because it isn’t really something that’s just limited to the mind. It’s also embodied. It’s a feeling in your gut. While the ideal end-goal is to change your thinking, that can be difficult to do because the resistance is “in your bones”.
Sense of obligation
I think the common mode here is that people inherit this socially, and they feel that they have something to prove to someone – maybe a parent, a teacher, a former lover. And somewhere along the way this can become internalized, and you then feel like you have something to prove to yourself, even after the original person might no longer be in the picture.
What you can do:
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Zoom out
The critical thing about exhaustion funnels is to see the bigger picture. I struggle with this myself. One thing I only just did while writing this book was to print out the diagram and paste it on my wall next to my computer, so that I look at it regularly. Zooming out is a matter of [[framing]].
Keep a log.
[[Journal]]. Specifically, write down how your behavior patterns go. Keep a log! How did you spend your day? What time did you wake up? What time did you go to bed? You might feel averse to doing this, because it might end up revealing things that you consider shameful or embarrassing. But remember, be accepting of your [[mistakes]].
When I look back on my past behavior over the years, there have been many times where I nodded along to the idea of keeping some kind of log, and oftentimes I wouldn’t do anything about it. Sometimes I’d start – and I’d often get really intense about it, try to be super-detailed and comprehensive, and then it starts to feel too much, I fall off the wagon, and then I repeat the cycle.
I won’t say that I’m an expert at keeping logs – except maybe with my tweets, because I tweet incessantly all the time – but I’ve gotten somewhat better at it over the years, and I’d say the main thing (especially if you’re ADHD like me) is to keep the data entry as simple as possible. Having experimented with a bunch of things, my favorite system has been to literally just type strings into my Notes app on my iPhone, and then maybe consolidate them weekly or monthly if necessary.
Talk to your friends
I have found in my experience that exhaustion is something that can spiral worse when I’m socially disconnected. There’s something about the rhythms of other people that has a positive “regulatory” effect. Unless it’s just you and your spouse and you both stay up really late together, then that can have a negative “coupled oscillator” effect. Getting out of the house in the morning, going for a walk, hanging out around a coffee shop or something, these are things that can really help with a sense of “bioregulation”. (I’m writing this in 2022, where lots of people are still working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic, but this was actually my lifestyle even before the dang virus hit. Sob.)
Investigate your history with rest
In my case, when I stop to think about it, I realize that I have all these ideas about how I cannot rest until I’ve accomplished something. And there’s also some childhood shit around school and homework that I haven’t fully processed yet.
// There’s a lot more I want to say with this section! A lot more to research, study, investigate! Too bad, I’m shipping it as it is!
Reconceptualize your relationship with rest
Rest is a necessary part of any process.
If you do not schedule rest, it will be scheduled for you in the form of injury or illness, when it’s most inconvenient.
You do not help yourself or anybody else by getting injured.
My wish for you (and for me) is that we eventually evolve to the point where our need for rest does not have to be “earned”.
Because we’re no longer thinking in a narrow, utilitarian mindset where you have to “earn” the right to rest.
And now for more unedited rambling
(Dec 1 2021)
The next section of the book is the most critical one, and honestly it stresses me the fuck out. Because I don’t feel like I’m qualified to write it. It was challenging enough to struggle through my own demons, and I’ve done a decent-ish job helping other people with theirs, in conversation. But to try and help people in text? That’s agonizing, because there’s no guarantee that I will be able to help people from text alone. And only now– ONLY NOW!!! – right as I’m trying to publish it – I’m realizing, oh gosh, I should have just written the section as a separate blogpost or essay and then solicited feedback from friends about it!! Why didn’t I do that? It didn’t even occur to me! And I’m writing a whole book about this stuff! A part of me is miffed, outraged, annoyed. But then a part of me is also laughing at how silly it all is. This is the problem. And at some level it’s good that I’m experiencing the problem while trying to address it, because it means that I’m for real. I’m not imagining this stuff. It’s a real issue. And if I can address it honestly, it should be helpful to someone. And that’s all that really matters to me.
(Dec 15 2021)
I think the core thing about introspect that has been driving me mad– and I’ve alluded to this in many places, circled around it, approached it obliquely– the core thing is – that there are some things one can “know” to be true more deeply than other things. Our words fall short. Words like “perceive”, “believe”, “feel”, “think”, are all loaded, they’re all clouded, they’re all approximations. There is a knowing that is beyond knowing and I’m so, so sorry that there is no way to convey it directly in words. I’m not saying this is spiritual or religious… those too are clouded, loaded words. As all words are.
the core thing about Introspect - also just a word, it’s really important not to get hung up on any particular word – is the pursuit of this truth. The unfolding of it. My job is to be a bit of a shaman, a bit of a threshold guardian, and I have had to relive my own terror.
And my terror is the realisation that there is just no way that I can promise to facilitate this magic for you. I can’t. I’ve written the same book 9 different times to try and “fix” it, and it’s a much better book for it, but the thing that finally breaks through is admission: you cannot explain the Tao, you can at best allow it to explain itself through you. And you have to be okay that it might just not work out. You cannot guarantee a good time, you cannot guarantee enlightenment, it will always elude you if you demand it.
I have been living with this anxious fear that someone will read my book and think “this is bullshit”. But I think I can own it now. It *is* bullshit. It’s an approximation of the
best bullshit I got, but it *is* bullshit. Everything is theatrics and shadow puppets… the point of which is to *get you to see what you already know*. what only you can “explain” to yourself using the language of your own heart, feeling the waves of your own body. “Explain”? also a loaded word. There is nothing to explain. You seek freedom from explanation. And yes, good explanations are tremendously better than bad ones, I have a whole section on this. A good explanation has more of the resonance of truth, truth is a harmony that passes through and beyond the doors of our perception.
What we seek *is that resonance*. It’s not the *words* of truth, because words are loaded. There is no magic phrase. there is only magic. we want to cultivate the courage to stand before the splendor of existence in our small naked silly cowardly selves and see that we too are Of It, we too are waves in its ocean. Every artist, every author, seeks their own path to conveying this same fundamental truth through the language of their own person. The story is retold a billion times in a billion ways, And That’s Good Actually.
Because it’s not the story that’s magic, *it’s the telling*.
We have played ourselves for absolute fools, lmfao. And we do this on purpose because we are scared. and we hide our fear, from each other and from ourselves, so that we may go on with the business of living. And to be fair, it’s pretty important business. The shaman respects the baker, both of their work is legitimate and important, one feeds the
body, the other feeds the spirit.
We will find ourselves caught up in a huge tangle of contradictions, some of this can be solved and that’s useful in the domain of logic and thought, but also, at a larger scale, contradictions are non-trivially consequence of tricks the mind plays on itself.
Existence, reality, is One Big Ongoing Thing, every person is a facet of an infinite diamond, separation is a hoax, life is a dream. None of these things are *literally* true
and if you get hung up on that you’ll have a bad time.
Fantasy is the thread that allows us to sync disjointed realities. if we do not do this thoughtfully and consciously, it will be done for us by our subconscious, and sometimes in vicious and ugly ways. Returning to the core glimmer of truth that had me shooting out of bed to write this in the first place: there are some things we know that are truer than others. some things are more fundamental. I can NOT tell you what your truths
are. your task is to awaken your own resonance.
In between you and your resonance is suppression, oppression, fear, uncertainty, doubt, blah blah all sorts of shit. Again, I don’t know what that shit is. I can make suggestions. Your job is to not take my suggestions too seriously. Don’t listen to me. Listen to you!! I am just a babbling fool. Sometimes a babbling fool can say things that might move you, help you connect certain things, feel more at peace in the world. Would be beautiful if it did. It’s totally fine if it doesn’t. Caveat emptor. Don’t expect too much from babbling
fools.
(2 Feb 2022) Just finished my latest edit of this Act before I’m going to ship it, lol. Feeling kind of… disoriented. I’m tired and I can’t think or see straight. I think I’m going to ship this as “introspect v0.9” and then update it maybe a week or a month later.
Famous last words, lol.
ACT IV. Confront the Minotaur
“The idea of a house built expressly so that people will become lost in it may be stranger than the idea of a man with the head of a bull, and yet the two ideas may reinforce one another. Indeed, the image of the Labyrinth and the image of the Minotaur seem to “go together”: it is fitting that at the center of a monstrous house there should live a monstrous inhabitant.”
— 'The Book of Imaginary Beings', Jorge Luis Borges
Queen Pasiphae of Crete nurses her son, the Minotaur (c340 - 320 BC.)
"The lower part a beast, a man above
/ The monument of their polluted love."
– Aeneid, Book VI (Dryden’s translation)
The Minotaur of mythology is a hideous, cursed creature, born of deception and lust.
As a symbol, the Minotaur can represent the fear of the unconscious, and the unknown. It can be a metaphor for death. It can represent the threat of non-being, of annihilation. It can also gesture at man’s complex nature, being all at once sacred, mundane and profane. It might represent an “unholy liaison” – between the masculine and feminine, monstrous and human, rational and irrational, spiritual and instinctual, deity and demon, good and evil.
The Minotaur represents the darkness within ourselves. It can represent tyranny. It can represent the dominance of animal instincts. It can represent raw Power, something dangerous and threatening that we feel must be suppressed, kept hidden, locked up, to protect ourselves and others from its destructiveness – ugly, hateful, angry, lusty, selfish, sinful.
We must cultivate sympathy for the “monster” within.
And yet. When choosing a picture to represent the Minotaur for this chapter, I found myself compelled to choose the above image: his mother nursing him as a child. How grumpy and frustrated she looks. Asterius – that’s his name – must have had such a miserable, unhappy childhood, being treated with harshness by his own family.
Sympathy for the Minotaur, I believe, is a necessary part of healing. The monster within us is the child that was neglected and shunned. We must learn to love the most unloved part of ourselves. Historically, the Minotaur story typically involves the Hero slaying the terrible beast with his sword. And we will always have that story, if and when we ever need it. But maybe we also need new ones. I can’t help but think of what Abraham Lincoln said when he was chastised for humanizing his enemies: "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"
I believe that we can heal our ancestral traumas.
We can make the world a more loving and kind place. We can start within ourselves.
Just look over your shoulder, by frostious (2021)
Overview of Act IV: Confront the Minotaur
Act IV is where we face the final boss: it's us. At the heart of the labyrinth is everything about ourselves that we find grotesque, hideous, cursed. Here is where we break down sobbing when we realize: he's not a monster, he's a child.
He's me. And here we learn what love is.
Confront the propaganda department of your mind
Propaganda is the insistence on a particular frame as truthful, and all other frames as untruth. Oftentimes the problem isn't just that we don't know what to do, or that we don't understand what is happening, but rather, that we have a false idea of things. We are, at any given point in time, pretty much certain to be perceiving things incorrectly. And yet it's challenging to appreciate this. It’s extremely natural to buy into our own bullshit. (Feynman: you are the easiest person to fool.) The challenge is to patiently, curiously identify this, without being needlessly aggressive or contemptuous about it.
Confront your inner authoritarian-tyrant
The inner tyrant is fearful and insecure, clinging desperately for safety, trying to control outcomes. Some of the worst violence is the violence we do to ourselves when we are afraid of being who we truly are. (Nomi, Sense8). Self-loathing can be a form of narcissism, an unproductive fixation on the self, which is alienating, which is dehumanizing, which is
despair-inducing. We have to listen to the pain, and let it go.
Put the gun down
You cannot bully someone into becoming a better person. Even if you somehow “succeed”, you’ve now taught them that bullying is how you get things done. This is true internally within yourself, too. You cannot install the new way with the old way. You have to put the gun down.
Violence begets violence. Mistrust begets mistrust. Learn rituals of peace.
The dark night of the soul
When you’ve made an effort to dismantle your coercive habits, to walk away from what you don’t want, you might not immediately be flooded with joy and peace. There’s a good chance that you will experience a cold emptiness instead. I believe this is why lots of people struggle to make the transition. Because it’s messy, painful, ugly, and, for a while, completely unrewarding. You have to create the rewards for yourself, and in the interim it may feel hollow, fake, empty, pointless, meaningless. It can be like a forest fire that scours the lands. But new life grows from the ashes.
// The following two essays were written after I struggled with the rest of the Act. I’ve put them right at the start because I think they capture the essence of what I want to say in this Act. An unfortunate consequence is that now the rest of the Act seems a little repetitive – it definitely needs a rewrite and/or merge with the essays – but I don’t have the energy to do it. Sorry! I’ll fix it in the next version.
Confront the Minotaur (Pt 1)
So Act IV of INTROSPECT is about confronting the Minotaur, and it’s kind of apt how it’s the Act that I’ve struggled with the most. So I figure I might as well do a wordvomit about it. I know that I’ve done youtube videos about narcissism and self-loathing, which is a subsection of it, but fuck it, I’ll just write a wordvomit first and see how it goes.
Alright, where do we start? I find myself thinking about the time when I was a teenager, living with my parents, struggling to keep up with my schoolwork, and I think I had a bad report card or something, and my parents were mad at me about it. I was mad at myself too, and I specifically remember angry-crying in the toilet, jabbing at the mirror and asking myself, “Why won’t you fucking study?” In retrospect, it seems both bleak and hilarious, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all, it was just miserable. I was in despair. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help myself, and nobody around me seemed to know how to help me, either. I felt like absolute shit, like a pathetic excuse for a human being. That was the sort of language I found myself using, and writing about it now I find myself curious to know where exactly I picked up that sort of language. It must have been from others. Maybe my family. Where did they pick it up? Why do we use it, when it’s so obviously ineffective?
It was only years later when I was working for my ex-boss that I really experienced a different mode of troubleshooting my problems. My ex-boss Dinesh was compassionate, kind, patient, and thoughtful. He was genuinely curious to understand the true source of my problems, to understand the mechanisms of it. Having inherited some of his style, I imagine I would now ask, gently and compassionately, “Actually, why aren’t you studying?” And I think the difference in these approaches is – when the question is asked from a place of anger, the implication seems to be that we aren’t really looking for answers. We’re looking for contrition. We’re looking for penitence, for remorse. We’re looking to hear, “I’m so sorry, I fucked up, it won’t happen again.” But what if you hear that repeatedly? What then? The impulse then is to think, well, here we have a moral failure, folks. A naughty boy. Irredeemable. A bad kid. Maybe if we punish him more, he will learn. Maybe he needs to experience more pain and suffering, then he will change his ways.
But how are ways changed, really? How does behavior change actually happen? These are important questions that don’t seem to get asked enough. What I’ve come to believe is that each person is a bundle of conflicting impulses, motivations, interests and so on, and can’t be reduced to a singular motive. For lasting behavior change to happen, there needs to be a sustainable consensus amongst the various different parts of the individual. And the individual
almost certainly is not entirely in charge of their own behavior. After all, if we were entirely in charge, why does anybody do anything less than optimal? Why does anybody smoke cigarettes, or eat junk food, or stay up too late playing video games? Why isn’t life a simple matter of, “here are the things I want to do, and I am going to do them”? Because the proclamations that we make – I’m going to lose 10 pounds, I’m going to learn a new language, and so on – are often like bold utterances made by the selfish, ignorant manager of an overworked team who doesn’t bother taking the time to get to know them.
To be clear, I’m not saying that having goals is intrinsically bad. I love having goals, and I encourage people to have goals. But the thing is that you have to “listen to your people”. You shouldn’t be making grandiose promises that you cannot keep. A lot of a person’s unproductive frustration with themselves becomes a lot clearer, more evocative and, yes – actionable – when you see it as an incompetent manager’s frustration with their overworked staff. Management makes promises that staff cannot deliver on, then yells at them for failing to live up to his unrealistic expectations.
So the question then becomes, how can you stop being such a shitty manager of yourself? Well, let’s pretend you just introduced new management. You can do that! Pretend that the old guy got fired, and you’re the new guy in charge, and you just inherited this tired, frustrated, overworked team. What’s the first thing you should do? I think the first thing is to listen. Really listen. You want to ask your team (that’s also you!), what was wrong about the old system? This feels a little abstract, so let me go back to my teenage self, and the question of “why aren’t you studying?”
Well, I know now with the benefit of hindsight that I had really bad project management skills, and nobody taught me to do it better. I also know, from observing how I actually spent my time, that I enjoyed playing video games, I enjoyed watching anime, and I enjoyed hanging out with my friends. Looking back, I regret none of those things, and in fact I wish I did them even more! But what was the mess exactly? The mess was… I wasn’t doing my homework, for starters, and that was getting me into trouble with my teachers, which was getting me into trouble with my parents, which was causing me great misery and despair. Alright. So… simply doing your homework would go a long way in making your life less miserable, right? Yes. So why aren’t you doing your homework? (And here it’s tempting to say, “You know, everyone else does their homework…” – but that wouldn’t actually help. It’s rarely helpful to compare kids to other kids.
It’s rarely helpful to compare yourself to other people as an adult, either.)
The first honest answer that I’d blurt out to me, which I don’t think I would have felt comfortable saying it to the adults in my life – and I think the truth can often feel like this – is “I don’t want to!” And the correct response from me, the Adult Visa reparenting Child Visa, is to smile, laugh, and say, “Hah, I totally relate. There’s all sorts of stuff I don’t want to do too. You should see me when it comes to dealing with health insurance.” And here I think my childself would actually be surprised, just to hear an adult validate the truth of that feeling. Yes, thank you. Thank you for admitting that homework sucks and isn’t worth doing. What an oppressive nightmare. And from here, I would actually take a massive detour, and ask my childself, what do you wanna do
instead? And he would talk about anime, and video games, and basketball, and music, and hanging out with his friends, and I would listen attentively to all of that, and ask questions from a place of genuine curiosity, and be encouraging, supportive, excited. This will take hours and hours of time, which none of the adults in my life were willing to spend on me. The impact of this is very difficult if not impossible to measure. But the result is that the child feels less anxious, less cornered, less oppressed by reality. When he feels safe to talk openly about his desires, and be taken seriously. When we wash away the guilt and the shame with the elixir of understanding, the child loosens his white-knuckle grip on what he perceives (quite correctly) to be the last precious little vestige of his selfhood, his sovereignty, his soul.
✱
Confront the minotaur (Pt 2)
So in Pt 1 I talked about how I tried to bully myself as a child, how ineffective that was, how miserable, how we are each internally conflicted, and how desperate I think I was, in retrospect, to hold on to my tiny sense of sovereignty in what felt like a cruel, oppressive world. How precious that was to me, and how little of a shit anybody else gave about that. Because, and here I can hear an authoritarian-self bellow, who are you to give a shit about something as pathetic as your soul? You can worry about your “soul” once you have a degree! Once you have money! Once you have prestige, accolades, status! Once you are a big man, then you can worry about your soul! (And I must say: this voice did not arise from within me. I inherited it from those around me.)
And I think even as a child I knew that this was a bullshit ploy. Because I had eyes. I could see. That while there were certainly big men around with degrees and money and prestige and accolades and status, they hardly had any soul. That’s why they bought expensive sports cars and cheated on their wives and had to have multiple heart-bypass operations. To try and fill the void where their soul would’ve been, which they had mortgaged away for mere trinkets.
I am eternally grateful to my childself for his stubborn protection of what he felt was sacred, even as he was clumsy about it, and even as he was utterly seized with fear and nausea. I wish I could’ve been there to protect him, to have his back. But the thing is, while I am lucky enough to have made it to adulthood intact, it wasn’t without scars. The mental image I have is – I tried to protect my light, but I was surrounded by darkness, and the darkness actively sought to snuff my light out. I know this mental image isn’t necessarily the entire truth of what was happening, but it is the truth of my experience, it’s the truth of what it felt like to me. Much like how being ostracized from one’s friend group as a teenager can feel legitimately apocalyptic, I felt like the world was actively trying to poison my heart. It really seemed that way, and felt that way. And I think it partially succeeded.
Despite my best efforts – and what could I have done, as a child? – some of the corruption of my environment seeped into my being. And I think that’s very difficult if not impossible to avoid, as a child, because part of what it means to be a child growing up is to absorb lessons from the environment around you. And one of the greatest struggles of growing up, transitioning into adulthood, is to realize that the environment that was supposed to nurture and protect you – and by this we might be talking first about parents, but also peers, and the wider culture we are immersed in – can be wrong. Sometimes terribly wrong. Despite trying their best not to be. We have so many coming-of-age movies about this, where the protagonist learns about the sins and wrongdoings of the father. (I might want to write a separate blogpost about this…)
The final page of The Hero With A Thousand Faces quotes Nietzsche saying “live, as though the day were here”. I interpret that to mean, don’t wait for the world to change before you do what you know you’re supposed to do. Live as though the day were here.
The final page of Man’s Search For Himself ends with a Socrates quote, and it’s identical in spirit to Nietzsche’s: When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on earth.” Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in heaven or ever will exist on earth, the wise man will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set his own house in order.”
Writing this book has been such a journey. I can point to a date when I decided that I was going to start writing the book – it dates back to around 2018 – but the contents of the book? I’ve been studying this material since I first learned to read, and I’ve been working on this since I first started to write. And I have been hemming and hawing about publishing it because it feels like I’m not ready. And I know I will never be ready, the book will never be good enough. But it is time. The day is here. I must live as though the day were here. It’s impossible to fully explain all of the thinking and reasoning and feeling that go into this realization, and I have to make my peace with that, too. There is a knowing that’s beyond explaining.
Okay but what else is there to say about confronting the minotaur, the authoritarian-tyrant of the self? I’ve talked about where I inherited it from, but ultimately there’s an expiration date on blaming other people for your problems. Yes, I was somewhat poisoned and corrupted by the world around me, but it’s since become my responsibility to take care of it, face it, deal with it. I have made pretty good progress with it overall, bit by bit, with the help of art, music, literature, and friends. And I have helped other people with their own, in bits and pieces, in ways that was meaningful to them. Which is why I’m writing this book.
But I have struggled tremendously in writing it, partially because of the technical challenges of writing a book (which are numerous and substantial, though also genuinely interesting), but I think mainly because of fear. It’s always fear. What’s the fear here? I’ve described a few over the course of writing this book. First I was afraid the book wouldn’t be good, in that it would make me look like a bad writer. I think I accepted that, dealt with that. Then I was afraid that the book might be damaging for some, maybe lead them to waste their time. Dealt with that. Then I think I found some deeper fears about the role that I’m stepping into. I’m afraid of becoming some kind of guru figure, I’m afraid of attracting responses from people who are struggling – and that I might not be able to help them.
And there was also this struggle where… I feel like, in writing about inner authoritarian-tyrants, my own rose up to resist me, resist being described, identified. Which is kind of funny and in retrospect exactly what I should have expected. It’s just so on the nose: Egos resist being attacked. I really have to put aside my ego to finish this book, and the act of doing that is a tricky and challenging one, and boy has it been a tedious, long-winded dance. And then it tries to protect itself by saying, “see, you took so long, it means you’re not qualified to write this”. That’s always how it is. That voice is never going away. I just have to smile, nod, and finish the book anyway.
Confront the propaganda department of the mind
“Don't surrender all your joy
for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.”
― Cheryl Strayed
// I know that this section repeats some of what came before. I’m at a stage in my editing process where I don’t really have the energy to streamline and eliminate repetition. If the repetition annoys you just skim and skip whatever. I’ll make it more elegant in future editions!
Simple narratives are convenient, reassuring, and wrong.
The propaganda department of your mind is the part of you that wants to have a simple, stable narrative. It can be tempting to describe it as something cruel. You could also see it as something rather small, selfish, cowardly. Or you could even see it as something almost innocuous in its plain neutrality. The Banality of Evil: it can turn out that one of the primary sources of pain and suffering in your life might be something almost insultingly mundane.
Bureaucratic.
When I think about my own propagandist, I think of it as kind of sad and pathetic. Outdated. Archaic. I’m now getting this mental image of this overgrown man-child who’s spent his entire life operating an old cinema – a tired, grumpy, forlorn man with no friends, no concept of joy, nothing to live for. Just his old movies, which he plays on repeat over and over. I start to feel sorry for him. The world has passed him by. Does he actually believe his own bullshit? Does he believe anything at all? It might seem interesting to try and suss out, but ultimately it really doesn’t really matter.
The propagandist is always fighting yesterday’s war. He doesn’t quite seem to understand the concept of change. He is haunted by fear, and a distorted view of reality. Somehow, we have to
forgive him for his failure – treating him with contempt and disdain achieves nothing – and we have to relieve him of his duties.
“People contain multitudes, coherence is fascism.”
I first said the above quote as a [[joke]], but the more I think about it, the more I find that there’s a truth to it. Not all coherence, of course – it’s possible to imagine a coherence that’s wholesome, varied, healthful, like a diverse group of friends. But I’m talking about a dry, sterile, Procrustean coherence, one that is cold, fearful, dominated by power.
Because we are each a bundle of competing motivations, competing interests, there's a whole Game of Thrones situation going on inside your head every day. You might want to enjoy loads of delicious food, but you may also wanna be fit and sexy. You may want the glory of stardom, and you want the peace of being left alone.
You are the manager of your own mind. Are you a good one?
And a lot of people are shitty managers of their own minds. I'm sorry! It’s true! It’s not even really their fault, they weren't taught better. This entire species is a fractal of shitty management all the way up and down. If you spend some time studying ancient creation myths, you will see the violence and cruelty in everything. And all the cliches of bad managers apply internally as well.
"My manager doesn't listen to me, keeps making promises of me he can't keep, drives me too hard, never gives me a break, doesn't praise me when I DO get things done, is infinitely critical, is somehow both paranoid and clueless, is no help at all, keeps increasing my workload..."
Does this apply to you? Think about it. Maybe take a moment to [[make a list]] of all of the complaints you have of your manager. Don’t hold back, but don’t beat yourself up about it either. The truth has to come out and you have to face it before you can really fix things.
The truth is often stranger and more complicated than we think it is.
It’s always kind of funny to me that one of my favorite lines about the subjective nature of truth is from a Marvel movie – in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Natasha “Black Widow” Romanoff says, "the truth is a matter of circumstance, it's not all things to all people all the time. And neither am I." She’s right! It follows, then, that being truly honest – even if only with yourself
– can be a very difficult thing to do. It can take years and years to even begin to understand the truth of something, because of all of the context and history that we are initially unaware of.
A dishonest narrative can be composed entirely of verified truths.
Consider how it’s possible to be dishonest – to present a dishonest picture – that’s made up entirely of verifiable facts. You just have to cherry-pick to create a particular impression, a particular narrative, a particular frame. And we almost can’t help but do this, as humans with limited bandwidths and pattern-matching impulses. We can’t help but create stories around
events. If two similar things happen to us within a short period of time, even if we know for a fact that they were entirely random events, it will almost definitely feel personal, and indicative of a pattern. This is very, very hard to resist.
This is a big part of why I insist that you study [[storytelling]] and [[framing]], because when you develop a familiarity with those domains, you instinctively find yourself playing around with them, asking “well what if it were the other way around?”, “what other ways are there of looking at this”, and so on.
✱
What is the propaganda department of the mind?
Why does it exist? Well, why does any propaganda department exist? The point of propaganda is to control the narrative. Why is there a need to control the narrative? To try and control outcomes. Who gets to control the narrative? Typically, whoever has the power to do so, and makes the effort. Why do they want to control the narrative?
Many people live in terror or apathy under an authoritarian regime, led by a vague, limited, selectively edited, imperfect image of themselves.
Authoritarianism happens at many scales, it’s about the hubris of thinking that X knows best. It’s about imposing and institutionalizing rigid frames to control outcomes. To reduce the variance in possible outcomes.
Being in denial is a strange thing, and I think it’s an important thing to reflect on. It’s like an optical illusion. It never quite feels like you’re in denial. That’s literally the whole thing about denial. You can’t see your own blind spot head on. You can only really infer it through secondary means.
This section ties up with [[journaling]]. A lot of how you do this confrontation is by reading your old journal entries.
✱
“I don’t deserve to have fun.”
Looking back, one of the major anxieties of my teens and most of my 20s was caused by this unhelpful, unhealthy belief that, if I had made mistakes, failed to meet my obligations, then I didn't deserve to have any fun or joy whatsoever until I sorted out all my shit.
This set up a terrible conflict within myself. While I was conscientiously trying to beat myself up to become a better person, there was another part of me that was utterly convinced that things would *never* get better, so "Fun Visa" would hide in the shadows, like a guerilla.
And whenever "Taskmaster Visa" got tired, and sloppy – which would inevitably happen, and I knew this from dealing with authorities (parents, teachers) – "Fun Visa" would then be ruthless about seizing control and unhealthily binging the fuck out of whatever fun he could get.
I see now that both of those guys were scared, anxious, weak. My poor babies. Nobody taught them any better. I had to bring both of them to the table, get them to hear each other out, realize we're all on the same team, and that we don't have to catastrophize.
It turns out that you don't have to work yourself to the bone to make amends, to get better – and that trying to do that is ineffective, anyway! There's diminishing returns!! So you might as well do your best for 3-4 hours, and then rest, relax, literally set aside time to have fun.
Once you have this realization, the whole thing can then go from being a grotesque internal civil war to becoming an interesting, even fun unlikely-buddies-on-a-road-trip sort of situation. And it turns out that both guys can help each other out, and be stronger and more powerful as a team.
Do you have grand theories about how society should be run? well guess what, you are also a society! you can test those theories yourself, right now! you can *demonstrate* what it means for a society to be well-governed, well-integrated. show us how to act. That's what the Crown motif is about, for me. it's not about power over others. nobody can have dominion over anything greater or lesser than oneself. it's about conducting oneself with grace and decency, about taking responsibility, refusing self-abandonment, self-abdication.
✱
The disconnect
The interesting thing to look out for when you’re having conversations with people – (and this is true with yourself too, but it’s harder to do in the moment by yourself, hence journaling) – is to pay attention to their language. Their vocabulary, their grammar, their tone of voice. There can sometimes be a “disconnect” between what they’re saying, and what they say they’re saying. In this moment you realize that they are unintegrated. And it can be tempting to want to point that out to them, but if you try it, you’ll often find that it gets met with hostility, denial, anger. And this too can be interesting the first couple of times, because they don’t even seem to realize that they’re doing it as they’re doing it. Now think about the last time you got mad at someone without quite realizing why. It’s very tricky business!
It comes up in marriages a lot, and I think it’s a big part of why so many marriages end in divorce. Isn’t that such an important thing to understand, societally? How is it that people marry their favorite person in the world, and then several years later, become each other’s worst enemies? I think it’s because when you put two people together like that, they invariably step on each other’s toes – or to be more accurate, they invariably poke each other in their unintegrated, traumatized fear-selves – and we are not taught how to navigate this gracefully.
// I have a lot more to say about this, but again, gotta ship the book. More next time.
What people struggle with:
"If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed."
– Anthony de Mello, Jesuit priest, psychotherapist
The tyranny of a static self-image.
A lot of people have a very narrow, fixed idea of themselves. They might have never consciously thought to develop this idea. It might be inherited from a surprisingly small set of experiences. Having a self-image is almost unavoidable, because We Live In A Society. But having a static self-image is very avoidable. It just takes a little bit of work.
I was looking through my 2021 notes – I have a Twitter thread where I do 1 tweet every month summarizing whatever I thought was notable and interesting that month. It only takes a few minutes each time, and it’s such a great resource to revisit. I noticed that in Jun 2021, I watched Bo Burnham’s Inside, and I was reminded that I really appreciated what he did with the cinematography in that special. And what surprised me, witnessing myself notice that about myself, is that I have an interest in cinematography! That’s not something that I would typically volunteer about myself, I barely even realize it to be true. It’s not a part of my cached self-image. But it is a part of who I am.
And discovering this little thing about myself feels me with delight – I realize that I am more colorful, more wonderful, more resplendent than I typically think of myself. What else about ourselves do we not realize? How much more are we than we think?
“How’s the water, boys?” – not even realizing that the image is an image.
Lots of people don’t even realize that there’s propaganda happening, they just take it at face value as the truth. Again, simply considering the fact that your life is a story that you tell yourself is something that, if you sit with for a bit, can naturally lead you down a healthier, happier path.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
– This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin
We inherit many of our flaws and anxieties.
It was only a few years ago – I was about 28 or 29 years old – when I traveled alone with my parents for the first time, to India for my grandfather’s funeral rites. And I learned some interesting things about myself by observing them, witnessing them. It became apparent that I inherited so much of their communication styles and their anxieties without realizing it.
How do I talk about this without coming across as angry, bitter, resentful, or like I’m trying to make my parents look bad? They’re only human, and I do believe that they did the best they could given their circumstances, given their own respective inheritances.
I’m not sure if I want to go into in-depth detail about my perception of my parents’ imperfections in a book that I’m releasing to the public… so I’ll be a bit oblique here. But basically, several of the things that I thought were my personal failings, turn out to be things that I actually picked up from my parents, and my family environment. And it’s tempting to blame my parents for them once I realize this, but it’s ultimately my responsibility to address and resolve.
So I’ve had to investigate my communication style, the way I think about time, blame, responsibility, punctuality, expressing desire – all of these are things that were deeply shaped by my parents and family. And this “complex” (core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions in the personal unconscious) would be a source of conflict for me with my friends, with authority in school, and even within myself. I’m 31 years old as I write this and I think I’ve only just begun to really grasp just how extensively this complex permeates through my entire being. It’s the water that I was raised in.
I think it’s worth saying that I now do feel genuinely optimistic about my progress. I believe that I am on a path of self-acceptance, self-transformation, self-transcendence. I was desperate for this as a teenager, but it seemed agonizingly out of reach – and I realize now that it rhymes with [[embrace mistakes]] – as long as I was disgusted with myself, cutting off a part of myself, contemptuous of myself, I was never going to be free. Freedom only began to blossom within me when I decided that it’s okay for me to be who I am, that it’s not okay for me to beat myself up. I could only be free when I [[put the gun down]].
✱
What you can do:
Journal to articulate your competing, conflicting interests.
For me, I’ve found journaling to be the single best way to approach this in “peacetime”. There are other approaches, surely, but this is what worked for me. The challenging thing is, while you can try to explicitly question yourself, and sometimes make some good progress on that front, the real good stuff is what comes up unintentionally. Here’s my recommendation: to do this well, you need to write at least a few dozen pages of stream-of-consciousness, from different states of mind, over a moderately long-ish period of time (say, 3 months).
Talk with people outside your social bubble and feel the difference.
I particularly love talking to kids, because they have a way of cutting through the bullshit with their elegant simplicity. But you can also get this talking with strangers, with older people, people who aren’t a part of your social scene
Go somewhere different to experience a different version of yourself.
This can be about literal travel, but it can also be about challenging yourself to do something in an unfamiliar domain. Try something that is completely unrelated to all the things you typically work on. For me, things like drawing and cooking fulfill this – I don’t expect to be a professional or even a serious hobbyist in those domains anytime soon, so I’m able to approach them as a casual player.
Playfully experiment with alternate narratives.
Humor is an important component here. Children are quite naturally able to experiment with playing-pretend, trying on ideas and roles that aren’t strictly “correct” or “true”. If you have a narrative where you’re a shy person, what if, for fun, you experimented for a month with living like you weren’t? It might be a bit of a leap to try and do an open mic set at a standup comedy venue (although honestly I do recommend this for everyone). I tend to describe myself as “bad with schedules and calendars”, but from time to time, when I’m in the mood, I find myself trying to experiment with them too, and there’s something liberating about it – even when the result is mostly failure.
Reflect on the chaotic, ever-changing nature of reality.
Consider how big the world is, and how small you are. Morgan Housel points out, “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” Reality is not obliged to conform to our expectations. Read about history and change. Nation-states are very recent things.
Multinational corporations are very recent things. Civilizations have risen and fallen, mythologies have changed.
Turns out that Nietzsche talked about this too – he describes this as having a “historical sense”
"Direct self observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves." (Human All Too Human).
✱
Confront the propaganda department of your mind
You are much more than you think you are.
You contain multitudes and potential that you may not have even begun to perceive.
Your self is dynamic, not static.
You can become more tomorrow than you are today.
You are capable of learning and growth. You can change the narrative of your life.
Change is uncomfortable, but it is liberating.
You can learn to enjoy change.
You might feel relatively powerless in the grand scheme of things,
but the power that you do have is extremely significant in the context of your life.
"Your fingers would remember their old strength better — if they grasped your sword."
Face your inner authoritarian-tyrant
“The worst violence is the violence we do to ourselves when we are afraid to be who we really are.”
– Nomi, Sense8
Self-contempt is a substitute for self-worth.
Tyranny begins with a declaration of contempt: “You are inadequate, you are impotent, you are ugly, disgusting. You are the reason why everything is terrible. You are a source of disappointment and shame. You are broken and you must be fixed, through whatever means necessary. Any amount of torment and humiliation, is absolutely justified to erase the malignant stain of your incompetence.”
A while ago I asked my Twitter audience, “If you’ve ever hated yourself… why?” I got over 200+ responses, and I would say that the dominant theme that ran across all of them was a sense of inadequacy. “I am not enough. I am broken. I am spoiled. I am a failure.” Reading response after response, I felt simultaneously relieved to know that I am not alone, and haunted to realize just how staggeringly widespread this. And these were the people who follow me on Twitter – people who I assume are quite well-adjusted, courageous enough to be able to express themselves, the truth of themselves. So many more people must be having it worse.
✱
How do people become authoritarian dictators over themselves?
The same way all dictators rise to power. They take advantage of the fear and insecurity in the air. They promise security, glory, greatness, power. They point at weakness and fan the flames of contempt. Insecurity. What do tyrants really want? Control, power. “To rule the world.” “Immortality.”
Why? Fear. Fear of being backstabbed. Fear of being betrayed. Fear of death. Fear of feeling powerless, tormented, taken advantage of, beaten, abused. You can cycle through all of the 7 sins – wrath, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, pride, sloth – and see the fear in each of them. If you’re familiar with Star Wars, Anakin’s story is a potent one to reflect on. His innocence, his torment, and how he really only turned to the Dark Side because he was grasping for the power to protect the ones he loved, but couldn’t. And how he ultimately redeemed himself.
"Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life, glorified as a political program.”
– Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child
Pedestalization and demonization are both forms of dehumanization.
It’s actually the same problem. We create a false image of someone to conveniently idolize or despise, ie dehumanize. It’s easier than having to face them as imperfect, nuanced, complex human beings. We also do this to themselves. It’s easier, and in the short run somehow less unpleasant, than facing the messy, “ugly” truth. But the truth is actually beautiful when you really, truly see it.
Introspection is about undoing self-dehumanization. And again I feel compelled to repeat – the most humane thing is to collaborate, with yourself, with others. To really do this, you have to really listen. You have to really pay attention. You have to be open to surprise. You have to release your needy fixation, pressing for some particular outcome.
✱
Self-loathing requires the delusional conceit that you know who you are.
This brings us back to the tyranny of a static self image. We are more than we know. Everything is more than we know. The world can always surprise us. We can always surprise ourselves.
Because we are more than we know. Unless we refuse to acknowledge this, refuse to allow it. Because we insist on controlling everything, and making sure things happen in predictable and known ways. That chokes the joy out of life, and then we wonder why we’re so bored, listless, depressed, lonely, empty. When we are in this mode of being, even the companionship of our dearest friends can feel hollow and false – because we know that we are not being ourselves around them.
Trickster Energy
Dismantling authoritarianism takes mischief, frivolity, joy, playfulness.
There’s a good quote about how opportunity gets ignored because it’s disguised as hard work. Less commonly appreciated is that opportunity is also disguised as unimportant frivolity. And between the two, I think frivolous things are overlooked more by would-be opportunists.
This thought wasn’t actually about economic opportunity— I’m editing my book and I’m finding that a lot of the solutions to a lot of people’s personal problems get dismissed because they seem small, silly, trivial, unimportant. Aversion to “wasting time” is the meta-problem.
But it does apply to economic opportunity too, Jobs and Wozniak would not have started Apple if they didn’t have experience phreaking telephone infrastructure to do prank calls. “If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”
The thing I get angry-passionate about is: Thinking you know in advance what’s a waste of time and what’s not? That’s hubris! There is an arrogance to this class of small-minded narrow utilitarianism, that refuses to see that great things come from small and sometimes silly beginnings.
Following your nose and screwing around with frivolous “unimportant” things is how you develop taste, and taste might possibly be the most precious force in the human domain. Everything good is made by people with taste. But we discourage its development because it “seems frivolous”.
And then we pedestalize and idolize people with taste, as though they possess some magical, ineffable quality that sets them apart. This just makes everything worse.
Our current state re: taste is like medicine before germ theory. We shrug at creative death, and falsely assume only few can do it.
When you take stock of how much of value in the world was created by fucking around (literally trillions of $), you have to ask why fucking around isn’t venerated globally.
I believe that the answer is that it offends, annoys, and upsets authority. It’s messy and chaotic and relatively opaque. Also cheeky trickster energy tends to leak, ie you can’t really get people to fuck around in one domain and be conformist in other domains. because tricksters play *with* boundaries, that’s where the trillion dollar value comes from. This makes authority very, very uncomfortable.
Because trickster energy is indifferent to authority. it does not respect it. Technically Jobs/Wozniak were committing a crime when they were phreaking phones. Feynman cracked safes for fun. Tricksters are hackers, they reveal security vulnerabilities, poke holes in authority. And they can’t give you a plan for how they’re going to use resources. so it looks incredibly inefficient and wasteful. Authority does not respect the creative process because it seems wasteful until it’s not. But then authority will retcon the narrative to make it palatable.
hacker-tricksters laugh at you when you tell them they can’t do something. this applies to both social status regulations – “you can’t insult the king!” and to assumptions about how the world works –“humans will never be capable of flight!”
Circling back – this entire dynamic plays out within you, too! You are already the monarch of your life. Many live in quiet despair under the authoritarian dictatorship of the static image of themselves.
Happiness is an inside job. You have to defy your internal feds and do whatever the fuck you want.
People do sometimes get all riled up to be mad at authority until you point out that they’re being authoritarian over themselves! It’s a fractal dynamic from within an individual to the entire species, and I think reflecting on how it plays out within us is a humbling and humanizing exercise. We’re really all in this together.
✱
Some notes on narcissism:
“The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is
self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”
– Pete Walker, cPTSD
I originally titled this section “face the narcissism of self-loathing”, and then I agonized over it for a very long time, because I felt that I wasn’t qualified to talk about “narcissism”, and I felt that people would misunderstand what I was trying to say. It took me a long time, lots of reading, research and conversations with others, to come around to finding a frame that I’m happy with. But I will reiterate here that I’m still thinking through this stuff.
Narcissism is a heavy and loaded word. There’s a medical-psychiatric context, and I make no claims about that terminology. When I talk about narcissism, I’m talking about it in the more colloquial, mainstream sense. Which itself is a kind of moving target, so I don’t know how this text will age in the future. I think in future editions of this book I might edit it out entirely, but it feels appropriate for now.
Narcissists do not love themselves
Tthe people who talk about their personal experiences openly – cheerfully inviting others to share their own stories & interpretations – can be the opposite of narcissistic. This is hard for some others to understand. especially those who are compelled to protect their self-image from scrutiny
Having talked with hundreds of people about their experiences, I’ve come to believe that narcissism is less about where one “points the camera”, and more about how obsessive, needy and fixated someone is on controlling the frame, controlling the narrative.
And you immediately see how tricky this is, because some amount of personal frame control is basic human sovereignty. Every person ought to have the right to choose how they want to present themselves. And who’s to say how someone else should present?
Ultimately I’ve found it’s not any particular set of utterances that makes the difference. It’s how people behave. Some of the loveliest people use the harshest-seeming words but with gentle kindness. Some of the cruelest people smile and use the language of freedom to oppress. I would say it boils down to, does this person respect the sovereignty of others? Do they leave when asked?
✱
I sometimes think of narcissism as a sort of parasitic disease. The ego, originally a helpful construct, swells uncontrollably, metastasizes and seizes control of its human host. The host will then act against its own interests, damaging relationships with others to serve the ego.
✱
Here’s a way I used to think about my self-development: “If I understand my badness well enough, if I develop a sharp enough picture of all the ways in which i’m fucked up, selfish, needy, angry, unfair… then I will be better”. That really didn’t work out. I made some progress but I was miserable the whole time. I was amused to discover that Martin Luther went through a similar version of this. Turns out this problem that I naively thought was unique to me, is something that humanity has struggled with forever.
Be honest with yourself, know what your limits are. Be aware of your failures and shortcomings but don’t let it fester. Seek out people who have the traits you want to have. Wanting to be worthy of their companionship, earning the respect and admiration of others. It’s very hard to do this shit entirely inside your own head, alone. Some people use religion for this, turn to the grace of Christ… if that works for you, go for it! For me, I tend to think about the love of artists and poets and authors musicians throughout history – as I said in the introduction, that’s God for me. There exists a possible ideal of grace and mercy, and we can try to live up to that, rather than try to squash our bad traits. Remember, again, negative reinforcement is very ineffective at behavior change. It’s like “don’t think of an elephant” – it ends up reinforcing the frame, the identity of a sinner, it sets you up for failure. Focus instead on the better version of yourself that you want to become, and forgive yourself as you stumble and falter towards it.
I highly recommend watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, particularly for Prince Zuko’s character development. The show really takes its time to make his journey honest and true, and it can be deeply enriching to watch.
Has blaming yourself ever helped?
One of the evergreen classic tactics of all abusers is to pretend that they aren’t responsible for anything bad that happens to you. They tell their victims “you brought this on yourself, you did this to yourself”. This can be tricky with other people, but it’s trickiest of all when it’s a voice inside your head. Because, after all, aren’t you to blame for your problems?
Blame is fucking tricky business! You are responsible for your domain, but the very concept of blame is hardly ever useful, and you can almost dispense with it entirely. Remember what Brene Brown said: "Blame is simply the discharge of discomfort and pain. It has an inverse relationship with accountability."
So the question to ask yourself, with kindness, is: looking back at your own life, thinking about all the times you’ve blamed yourself for your failures and mistakes, all the times you’ve beaten yourself up – has it ever helped? Has it ever led to you sustainably making better decisions?
Often, in my conversations with most people, the answer is no, not much. It might work for a short while, but it doesn’t get to the heart of whatever the problem was. It turns out that the blame truly is merely the discharge of discomfort and pain. It’s not helpful. Over time, it makes things worse. What helps, then?
You have to listen.
You have to face the part of yourself that you think is so monstrous… and you have to listen.
Hiko Seijuro, to Fuji (Rurouni Kenshin, 2x26: The Giant vs The Superman)
I return to this scene from time to time because it absolutely makes me cry. Fuji, the giant, was a gentle kid that was ostracized and attacked by society for looking like a monster. He was rescued from near-death by a villainous man who sought to manipulate him and use him for his own nefarious ends. All the classic abuser stuff. “You’re nothing without me, you owe me, you must do as I say.” And here is Hiko, a master swordsman who faces him in a duel. But instead of calling Fuji a monster like everyone else, he sees that Fuji has a sensitive soul, and is a true martial artist.
This act of compassion – Sympathy for the Minotaur – absolutely wrecks me. Because I see myself in Fuji, too. Part of it is that I’m really tall (lol), but don’t we all know what it’s like to feel misunderstood?
And isn’t it heartbreaking to realize that we might be subjecting ourselves to that too? That we might be misunderstanding ourselves?
What people struggle with:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
As I mentioned earlier – a while ago, I asked Twitter: If you ever hated yourself… why?
I got over 200 responses, and I would say that practically all of them are variations, riffs and motifs on the central idea, “I am deficient. I am inadequate. I am not enough.”
I noticed some distinct “buckets” or “groupings”. Here’s a short list of my summaries of the most common.
“I was abused or neglected as a child.”
“I have not lived up to my potential”.
“I’m socially awkward and I’ve never been able to fit in.”
“I feel unworthy compared to my peers.”
“What is wrong with me, why can’t I just work?”
“You’re smart enough to know better, why are you like this?”
“I hurt, disappointed, upset people that I love and care about”.
Body image issues. Dysmorphia, hating one’s appearance, feeling fat, ugly, not being thin and beautiful enough.
Some people had trauma from their religious upbringing, feeling guilt and shame about their innately sinful nature.
These are things that people have been led to believe that they ought to beat themselves up ove. It’s really sad. And in several of them, I see myself, too.
They don’t even realize.
The first major struggle that people have with their inner authoritarian-tyrant is that they don’t even realize that one exists. They just feel pain, self-loathing, frustration, anxiety, and they don’t quite have a sense of where it’s coming from. It’s the water that they’re in.
If they realize, they feel powerless.
“Oh no, I have a terrible voice inside my head that’s beating me up, insulting me, telling me I’m a horrible person. But what can I do? This voice has been here all along. I have no control over it.”
If they try half-heartedly, they might fail, and regress.
Some people, upon discovering that there’s a tyrant within them, decide to take some sort of dramatic action to get rid of him. This almost never works, for roughly the same reason that it doesn’t work “in real life”. If you assassinate a leader, for example, you might plunge the realm into chaos, or otherwise witness him quickly being replaced by a lieutenant who might be even worse. A bad attempt can be worse than no attempt at all, because it ends up justifying the status quo. So you really have to be sneaky and cunning, take your time. That’s what Act II was about. Build up your competence. Prepare.
// Much, much more to say here. Next time.
What you can do:
“Though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today, nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed, no poison of torture make me bitter,
if just one evening in prison can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.”
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s A Prison Evening
Focus on what you want, more than what you don’t want
The bulk of your time and energy should be focused on doing what you know you have to do. You don’t actually need to describe your problems in excruciating detail. Define it clearly, yes, using maybe about 10% of your time and attention, and then the rest of the time, focus on actually addressing the problems.
Take baby steps towards manifesting the vision that you have for yourself. This might be as “trivial” as drawing a bunch of sketches, practicing the guitar, whatever it is that gives you joy and excitement. It is not trivial. Doing what your heart desires is about rehabilitating your soul. No matter how busy you are, I believe you deserve to set aside at least 20 minutes a week for yourself. Even Presidents and major CEOs don’t work 24/7. Even God rested on the 7th day. And you are not God.
Experiment with affirmations
Try reading the following out loud. Slowly. Softly if you’re shy. See how it feels.
“I love me.”
“I look after me.” “I trust me.”
“I do not take up arms against myself.” “I root for me to succeed.”
“I listen to me.”
“I hold me to high standards.” “I challenge me to be better.” “I help me grow.”
If these seem too big and feel “fake”, I’d suggest writing your own versions of them that are small and more specific. If “I love me” feels too goopy, or otherwise just hollow and false, maybe for starters reduce it to “I like me” – and if that too seems straight up false, narrow it down to “I like it when I…”
Maybe you like it when you go for a walk. Say that. “I like it when I go for a walk.” Really feel it. That is self-love in action!
I don’t really believe in grandiose, oversimplistic, pushy affirmations that don’t feel honest. I don’t believe in “fake it till you make it”. I think it’s important to be honest. The thing is to find small little things that you can be honest about in a positive way, and then strive to expand that.
Step outside yourself and evaluate the relationship you have with yourself.
Specifically, consider it as if it were a relationship between strangers, or friends, or a parent and a child, or a manager and their employee. If you wanna have fun with it, you could even write out a journal entry, in the style of how people write to relationship advice columns about their partners.
Seeing yourself as your own partner is one of the most powerful ways I know to begin to rehabilitate your relationship with yourself into something healthy and nourishing.
“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself… the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. … And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.”
– Leonardo Da Vinci
Make a list of behaviors that you like and dislike.
[[Journalling]]. You could sit down and write out such a list right now, and I highly recommend doing this.
That said, it’s also quite likely that you will miss out on several important behaviors, because of the self-shadowing nature of [[Ugh Fields]]. So this is where journaling regularly helps. Journal especially after difficult, unpleasant, frustrating experiences, so that you’ll be able to review them afterwards and look for clues.
Once you have such a list, you want to analyze and investigate it from a place of genuine, gentle curiosity. It’s very important that you suspend judgment, at least for the context of this particular exercise. Remember, negative reinforcement is very ineffective at behavior change. It can even reinforce the behavior.
Study the archetype of the King; embody and honor your sovereign spirit.
One of my favorite examples of this is in Pericles Funeral Oration, which you can look up online and read in full. There are some stark similarities between Pericles Funeral Oration and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Cultivate abundance mindset.
There’s a 10 minute youtube video, “What Makes A Great King?” by Like Stories of Old, that I highly recommend watching. It borrows ideas from the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover to use as a framework for talking about kingsmanship, and it also does a great job of using scenes from popular media to demonstrate the challenges of leadership.
Art by Yannick Dubois, based on Moore and Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover
// This is probably the section that I’m most frustrated with in the book because there are so many disparate things that I want to say, and I haven’t yet figured out an elegant way to thread it all together, so it’s quite choppy and chaotic. As usual, hopefully I’ll do it better the next time
Face your inner authoritarian-tyrant:
Everybody has this guy inside them.
Fearful. Insecure. Anxious.
They’re trying to keep you safe.
Lack of trust.
Fearful of what consequences?
Death. Social annihilation.
Decide that tyranny will have no place in your heart.
Be gentle with yourself.
Listen.
Put the gun down
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
– Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
Learning to love yourself is not a cutesy, pretty or dainty process.
It is a head-on car-crash collision with everything you separate from yourself as terrifying, shameful and grotesque. It took me years to learn that one of the most heroic things you can do
both for yourself and the world – is to refuse to hate yourself. To put the gun down.
The question everyone asks, of course, is: how?
Are you holding yourself hostage?
I saw a TEDx talk by Ashley Stahl that was titled “how to figure out what you really want”. She opened with a story about how her parents were nearly scammed by fake kidnappers. Apart from telling a gripping story about a harrowing experience for her family, what really struck with me were the parts where she describes feeling empathy for her would-be kidnappers, who had chosen such a terrible way to try to make money – how bleak their lives must be, that they believed that they had to resort to causing such distress to others. And then she talked about how she had a flash of insight where she realized that she was her own kidnapper too, that she was holding herself hostage. Sympathy for the Minotaur.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
Carl Jung
And I think that’s something that resonated for me, and I suspect likely resonates for a lot of people. In the tv show Sense8, there’s a great bit where two friends, Nomi and Lito, are in a museum, and Nomi is sharing with Lito the terrible experiences she had growing up, and how she was attacked and bullied by others – and yet, she points out, the greatest violence is the violence that we do to ourselves, when we’re afraid to be who we really are. This mirrors what a lot of people have described as a deathbed regret: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
What people struggle with:
Desperation.
“I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack,
And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.”
— Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867)
What do you do when you’re desperate? When you feel like you have no options? When your awareness has collapsed to an agonizingly small point? And you can’t see any alternatives?
I’ve occasionally gotten DMs from people who are struggling so badly that there’s almost nothing meaningful I could say to them that is helpful. And yet, sometimes, I noticed that they got somewhat less distressed over time, from having a conversation maybe every other week or so, over a few months. Maybe it turns out that what they needed was that they needed to just talk to someone repeatedly over some period of time. I’m not going to claim to have
single-handedly changed their lives – ultimately each person is responsible for themselves, and
it’s what they did for themselves that likely made the real difference. And there have been people I haven’t really been able to help, either. But I think it’s worth trying.
Frivolity.
Sitting down to have this conversation with yourself can feel trivial, silly, frivolous. Or it can even feel kind of insane. I read a tweet by someone saying something like “indulging in a little mental illness to motivate myself by pretending that I’m a character in a video game”. I totally flipped out reading that. I mean, I’m completely supportive of this, but how terrible is it that people feel that it’s “mentally ill” to indulge in a little imagination? As long as you’re not hurting anybody, and you’re not outright deluding yourself that your imaginings are reality, imagination is such a critical part to how you have fun and enjoy life! Children understand this! It’s so, so sad that we lose the joy of childhood imaginings. There is no rule that this is how it has to be. Growing older does not mean we have to lose our sense of joy and cheer.
Paranoia associated with the perceived necessity of being capable of violence
Sometimes people feel that it’s important that they possess the capacity for violence – just in case. I’m quite sympathetic to this. I do personally think – and I don’t mean to impose my views on anyone else – that men, in particular, ought to aspire to strength and power, if they are capable of it. But the whole point of having strength is to be able to nourish, support and protect what you love. You can have a gun and still choose to put it down. Think of the classic martial artist riff: that you learn to fight with the intent of never having to fight.
✱
What you can do:
“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Seek healthy examples.
I think it helps to have exposure to examples of people doing better. If you can be exposed to therapeutic people, if you can have access to a good therapist, that’s great. For me the first real therapeutic person that I met in my life was my ex-boss. But before that I had musicians and artists. I highly recommend immersing yourself in art that inspires and nourishes you. Assemble an altar of your favorite work and treat it with genuine reverence.
Forgive yourself.
Here’s a thing that might seem frivolous, but absolutely works, and it’s much more powerful than you might think.
Make a list of all the things that you feel regret about, shame about, embarrassed about and so on. This can of course be painful and uncomfortable to do, and you might struggle to get it all out the first time. Still, try.
See if there’s anything that you can forgive yourself for. Do it. I recommend actually talking to yourself out loud, or writing out loud in your journal. “Dear Visa. When you were 16, you…. I’ll admit, I feel some shame and embarrassment about that. That was not cool. Can we do something about it? Can we make amends?”
Do it! Say that you are a different person now. Have a little ceremony. Rituals are powerful, even simple and “trivial” ones! If you have a trusted friend you can talk to about this, do that.
Create ritual spaces.
Reflect on memories of peace. Create rituals of peace. Create sacred spaces. Meditate. Cultivate routines where you can feel safe and comfortable, routines that remind you to see the bigger picture.
I highly recommend taking several minutes to look at this diagram. Really feel it, really understand it. It might take a while to internalize. Note the part about the negativity loop – “practicing interrupting the negativity loop may help you break similar loops in your daily life.” It’s absolutely true. Literally breathing is something that you can get more skillful at doing, and doing that can give you a sense of calm and confidence. Deep breathing can help you feel safe, less anxious, more confident, more awake, more aware. I recommend doing it first thing in the morning.
https://anengineersguide.com/ by PearShapedComic
Put the gun down:
You cannot bully yourself (or anybody else) into becoming a better person.
Even if you “succeed”, the underlying lesson you learn is that bullying is how you get things done.
Try to expand your awareness. Reflect on moments of peace.
Create sacred spaces.
The point of strength is to protect, support and nourish what you love.
Do not bring hostility into your home. Do not bring hostility into yourself.
Practice gentleness.
Read poetry.
Sit by the ocean. Embrace yourself.
You have a right to be here, just like anybody else.
I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad to share this existence with you.
Death and rebirth: The Dark Night Of The Soul
“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul,
a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”
— Vilayat Inayat Khan, Sufi teacher
Forest fires in Australia, 2020
I’ve been struggling with this chapter because I don’t really know how it fits and I don’t really know what I want to say but I do know that it should exist. I’m thinking now of the feeling I had when I was walking to work, sometime around 2014 or 2015, maybe, when I felt really vacant, empty.
Self-development can be self-alienation.
Around the same time – this was years before I had any sort of audience on Twitter – I made the excruciating decision to leave a group-chat of friends that I was very close to, and almost entirely reliant on for my social needs. I had gotten married, a job, and a mortgage, and I had different challenges in my life than all of my friends, most of whom were still in school. I still love all of the people in that chat, but there was something about the dynamics of that group-chat that made it no longer right for me. It was a lot of unproductive whining and complaining – we all knew it. I knew in my heart that I had to walk away from it. But it took me a long time to work up the courage to do it. I told them that I was quitting all groups to focus on my work, which was
true. Around the same time as this, I also made the decision to stop blogging about local news and politics, which was at the time a large source of meaning for me.
The right decision can still feel painful and empty at first.
And it really hurt when I left, even though I knew it was the right decision for me. It didn’t feel good at all. I felt empty. I felt withdrawal symptoms. I felt alone. I felt cold. I didn’t have any kind of support group of anybody who understood what I was going through. In retrospect, though, that experience made me strong. The process of becoming strong that way is really ugly, and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it. I don’t think it’s necessary. I did the best I could at the time, but I can see in retrospect that it was a harsher path than necessary. I think there are better ways to become strong. The main thing I would do, if I could go back and talk to my younger self while he was going through this process, would be to get him to reach out to other friends outside of work –
I was generally trying to make decisions that seemed like they were good for me, and the result was not a resplendent joy, but rather a cold emptiness.
✱
After the fires.
Years ago I read some tweets that my friend Arden (@itsmeardenleigh) wrote that lovingly slapped me across the brain and made me question how I was thinking about my life. She asked, “Is it fun? Did you forget you live here? [...] Did you forget you have a body?” It sharply pulled me out of my vague fog and brought me back into my body, into my home where I was. I
realized that, even as I was wandering listlessly in the psychological wilderness, I was still me. I I still had my history. I realized that a lot of what I thought I cared about was bullshit, but when I sifted through the rubble, I found that some of my oldest passions and loved remained intact. I still loved books. I still loved music. A good turn of phrase can still stir my soul.
What people struggle with:
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
— C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, vol 13 Collected Works, par. 335
It’s hard to end things.
It’s very difficult to walk away. Walking away requires having faith that you will be okay. This is especially scary when you’re young, when you haven’t had a lot of life experience. Walking away can feel like death.
It’s hard to start again.
It takes courage to dare to believe that this time might be different. Where does courage come from? One of my favorite tropes in stories – TV shows and so on – is when an older character who has been through a lot of pain and suffering makes the momentous decision to once again risk heartbreak and disappointment. It makes me cry, every time. For me it’s a reminder that it’s never too late. You can always start again.
“I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.”
– Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement speech
Cope, addiction and self-preservation
This is something that happens at the level of the subconscious, at the level of the body, you might say at very primitive and primal parts of our existence. So it’s very difficult to just think your way out of it. You will have to do a lot of self-reassurance. You will have to introduce new rituals of self-soothing, rituals of peace and comfort.
What you can do:
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
– T.S Elliot
Memento mori – remember that you are going to die.
Yeah this is kind of dramatic and it’s tricky advice to give, but I honestly do think it helps. If you instinctively flinch and think “No, I am not interested in doing that,” I would say, alright then, don’t worry about it for now. There is no rush to any of this, there is no point forcing yourself to any of this. But it is the final curtain. It is the thing that comes for us all in the end. And in a way, the pain of every transition is a kind of death. Being born is itself a death of the womb-state.
Entering adolescence is a death of the child-state. Entering adulthood is the death of adolescence. And yet, at each step of the way, we carry some of the past self with us. We carry our inner child with us always. And I like to think – even when we do die a physical death, our spirit carries on in the lives of those that we touched.
Steve Jobs: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Read about people who have struggled.
You are not the first person to go through the dark night of the soul, and you will not be the last. Many people have despaired. Despair is a part of the human condition.
Embrace the emptiness.
There can be a period of time where nothing feels sacred at all.This can be a necessary sort of transition process, a deep dark winter night of the soul. Sometimes I think it can be good, actually, to rip up the altar, cast away all the talismans, gnash your teeth at the futility of all meaning. Good! Good! Let it all out! Fuck it all up! This feels like risky advice, because I don’t know you personally, and I don’t know how far you will take it. You don’t want to do anything outright damaging to yourself or others. I want to assure you that the emptiness and despair will not last indefinitely. It ends eventually. You want to keep that in mind. You want to have a thread that you can hold on to, even as you scream and cry and yell in despair.
Reconstruct the sacred.
It will feel like you’re wandering miles in the desert, or jungle, choose your own preferred metaphor, and in the midst of despair you will realize that it’s truly the simplest, most fundamental things that matter. Being alive, for the sake of being alive. How even the breath is delicious. The feel of wind on your skin. This is hard to feel when you are clenching your muscles in tension and agony. You will eventually have to let go, whether by choice or by simply collapsing from exertion. Some people experience a renewal after some kind of “burning platform” moment, sometimes a major illness or injury, or some life crisis. In those moments, it becomes clear what’s really important to you. And if you’re lucky, you will get to rebuild your life around that. My wish for you is that you are able to do it without an ugly crisis.
Death and rebirth:
It is possible to “die many deaths” and “live many lifetimes” in the span of a single human life.
You can “restart the computer” without throwing out the whole device.
Sometimes the device will crash and you will have to reboot from scratch. This can be harrowing. And while it absolutely will not feel like it in the moment, this is ultimately a good thing.
It’s like a forest fire that clears out old brush so that fresh life can grow anew.
It’s like an earthquake that turns everything into rubble so you can rebuild again.
Be patient with yourself.
You can’t rush or force growth. That typically makes it worse.
Where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence.
Where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Rambling
9 Dec 2021 – look, my book seems like its slow when you think about how it's a bunch of text being edited, but it's actually going really fast when you think about how it's me revisiting and reprocessing every single traumatic moment in my life. going for a full 100% on this trauma speedrun too. oh, hm, wait. 100% is not quite actually possible because narratives are infinitely complex, fractal, nested. well that explains a lot. actually had a really unpleasant childhood-flavoured dream last night and I’m very certain it’s a direct consequence of the work I’ve been doing. Which again, explains a lot.
16 Dec 2021 – This was the hardest act to write. I struggled so hard with the authoritarian-tyrant section. Most of this struggle was inside of me. I didn’t know if I understood what narcissism was, and I didn’t know if this book is where I wanted to talk about it. But god, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. We are almost done.
The book won’t be anywhere close to perfect. But it is getting close to done.
17 Dec 2021 – strangely in the middle of making a thread and drinking coffee I suddenly feel like crying about the tiny gap between my life now and the life I want to live (reading and taking notes and being a huge nerd). It’s such a small gap– I’m practically there already – and yet. several things going on I think. one is that I’m thinking about people who misunderstand me and my motivations etc– but really the true tragedy is how that then leads to me partially misunderstanding myself, doubting and second-guessing myself. and the other thing I guess is the sheer weight of the burden of absolute responsibility for oneself, and how much of my life has been a story of neglect. all I ever wanted to do was to love the world and be loved in return, but apparently you can’t do this without also getting kicked in the face. [spits blood] I’m not
dead, and I’m not quitting.
19 Dec 2021 – Writing this while editing the book. Listening to “chillswitch engage”, a piano cover of killswitch engage. Music is really a source of courage, “bottled courage”,
it’s so powerful.
25 Dec 2021 – I’m so close to the end of the book and yet I’m feeling really lonely and isolated. It’s so interesting to observe. How it’s possible to feel lonely even though like, I have a wife who loves me, I have friends who love me… there is a loneliness that doesn't go away even when you're surrounded by people who truly love you, and that's when you are upset and disappointed with yourself, angry at yourself. And… hah, this is what this
book is about, this is what this Act is about…
…about an hour ago i was feeling sorry for myself because I was feeling lonely and alienated in the creative process, but i worked through it and now i'm feeling quite happy and proud of myself. i am not my book. my book is not final. i will ship it and then
work on the next thing. I am good at what I do. Introspect is just a 10-20 year book that I'm trying to ship in 3. of course it'll be a bit of a mess. I'm insistent on doing it alone, too. of course it is how it is. it's absolutely fine. I'm coming around to genuinely not caring if people hate it. What matters is that I like it, and I think it’s good. I don’t need it to be perfect. I want it to
have heart. I want it to be evocative.
Jan 2022 – Interesting to look at the previous couple of entries and see that I was so torn up. I’m almost at the end now, and I feel a sense of lightness at this stage. The book feels “basically done”, I’ve made a bunch of critical corrections that I felt I had to make. It’s not going to be as great as I want it to be, but that is always going to be the case for
everything I make.
Jan 2022 – Feeling pretty hype. Things are shaping up. Did some threads on twitter adjacent to these topics and I feel like I have a better sense of the big picture overview.
2 Feb 2022 – LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO. Ok I’ve taken almost 3 hours longer than I hoped, but I’m really close!!! IM REALLY CLOSE…. IM DONE. ITS NOT PERFECT BUT
FUCK IT IM SHIPPING
ACT V. Return with the Elixir
“Lift your heads, throw down your hands and weep no more.
The eye of creation looks upon you. Look back.
You are crystal reflecting fire.
In your own becoming there is light— enough to lead you home.”
– Becoming a Light in the Darkness, The Book of the Dead (~1550 BCE)
“With the Ace of Cups, Divine love and compassion are pouring through you. You are a vessel for deep, spiritual love from the Universe, and you can’t help but let that love flow through you and into the world. You receive love, you give love, you ARE love.
Your heart overflows.”
– biddytarot.com
Overview of Act V: Return with the Elixir
Act V is about rebirth and renewal, a rediscovery of the pure innocent joy of childhood. We have nothing more to hide. No longer do we need to suppress ourselves in fear or shame. We may now use our strong muscles to be tender, to support, nourish, encourage ourselves and each other.
Integrate your shadow
At the end of a journey is reconsolidation. What does that mean? It’s about identifying the parts of yourself that you’ve repressed, cut off, hid away as grotesque – and then facing them, embracing them, and welcoming them into yourself.
Focus on what you want to see more of
You are already the Monarch of your life. You get to decide what is good, beautiful. You get to cultivate what you want to see more of in the world. Even if you are relatively powerless in the world, this is a power you have within yourself, within the domain of your life. However small it might be, it is yours. Within it, you get to demonstrate how you want the world to be. And when you share it with others, it will grow.
Show up, Don’t Die, Don’t Quit
Persist. Survive. Continue. Remember, the drive and desire were there from the absolute beginning. I have found it helpful to return to my altars, return to my stories, return to what I know in my heart to be achingly beautiful and true. Embody all of that, and then take the next step. And then the next.
Pay it forward
When we give the world what we had needed most in our darkest hours – lovingly, openly, unflinchingly – then we will know true healing.
Integrate the shadow
“One doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
– Carl Jung
some old pot, idk.
You can get yourself together – rediscover your vitality and wholeness.
The opening paragraph of Moore and Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover is worth sharing in full: “We hear it said of some man that “he just can’t get himself together.” What this means, on a deep level, is that so-and-so is not experiencing, and cannot experience, his deep cohesive structures. He is fragmented: various parts of his personality are split off from each other and leading fairly independent and often chaotic lives. A man who “cannot get it together” is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo ritual initiation into the deep structures of manhood. He remains a boy – not because he wants to, but because no one has shown him the way to transform his boy energies into man energies. No one has led him into direct and healing experiences of the inner world of the masculine potentials.”
I don’t know if it’s realistic to expect anyone to suddenly “get themselves together” after reading a single book, but my hope is that if I’ve done my job well, I’ve provided you with some tools and perspectives to help you at least begin this process. It can take years. Parts of it will be painful, frustrating and tedious. But making progress will be deeply fulfilling. I believe that Moore and Gillette are right: we need to undergo deep transformations to get ourselves together. In the
absence of ritual initiations and ceremonies, we must come up with our own. Which is a lot to ask of anybody. But we can help each other with it.
So… what does a self-created initiation of deep transformation look like?
You get to decide! I’m obviously advocating for something like “A year of intense personal journaling” – but to be clear, that’s my personal preference, and it isn’t necessarily what will work best for you. I recommend digging into your childhood memories and past experiences to find what resonated for you. What’s something that you’ve always desired, always wanted, always loved? Take something from that, and turn it into a series of projects.
I’ve said earlier that projects are anything that requires collaboration, and that collaboration is humanizing. To collaborate with yourself over time requires, sooner or later, collaborating with every part of yourself. The bigger the project, the truer this becomes. So what I recommend – and this might be the thing that differentiates my take from more placid advice – is that you seek to accomplish progressively larger and more difficult projects. It could be deadlifting 3x your bodyweight. It could be running a marathon. It could be making a movie. It could be writing and recording an album. Whatever it is, you want to challenge yourself, and experience triumph.
Now here’s the tricky thing. Simply attempting large projects isn’t a guarantee that you will integrate all of yourself. Just like how going to church won’t necessarily make you a better person. The projects are merely vessels, contexts, situations in which you can challenge yourself. For me, writing this very book is one such challenge. It’s taken me 3 years to put it together. And honestly, I’m not totally satisfied with it. I feel like I could’ve done better, I feel like I could’ve done more. And that’s part of the process. I’ve had to confront my own perfectionism. I’ve had to celebrate my own wins, embrace my own mistakes. When I publish this book, I intend to get a tattoo to commemorate the accomplishment.
You don’t necessarily have to write a book! Writing books is what I wanted to do ever since I was a kid. The question is, what do you want to do? And how will you help yourself get to where you want to go? Clichés like “it’s the journey, not the destination” really do apply here. Define an exciting journey for yourself, and go.
✱
“For most of us, “enlightenment” isn’t a sudden awakening, but a slow process of shining the light of consciousness onto those rejected, forgotten and denied impulses within. Most extraordinarily in this work, we discover that the lion’s share of the shadow is pure gold. Hidden in the dark we find our creative endowments – those things which make us most uniquely beautiful – and little by little, our divine inheritance can be fully claimed.” – Toko-pa
✱
The shadow is amorphous, and almost never what you think it is.
In working on this book, I did a bunch of reading about shadow integration, shadow work, and so on, and I think I’ve begun to understand why so much of it is so convoluted. It's because the Shadow is 1. amorphous, and 2. almost never what you think it is. Literally the first move in the Shadow's playbook would be to misdirect you into thinking it's something else. That redirects the scrutiny and keeps it safe.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know myself well enough I think to know that if I were my shadow I would want me to be investigating very hard into something that is not the actual problem. Always Be Misleading The Authorities!
Which isn't to say that the shadow can't be identified, or interfaced with, or integrated. but you have to respect how tricky and sneaky it is. By definition, it is trickier than you. And by “you” I mean your conscious self, the flashlight of your conscious attention. Wherever you point the flashlight, the shadow likely isn’t.
What people struggle with
“There is no generally effective technique for assimilating the shadow. It is more like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter. First one has to accept and take seriously the existence of the shadow. Second, one has to become aware of its qualities and intentions. This happens through conscientious attention to moods, fantasies and impulses. Third, a long process of negotiation is unavoidable.”
– Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon
The shadow isn’t obvious – it’s like dark matter.
What we think our problem is, most likely isn’t actually the problem. It’s fundamentally slippery, evasive, avoidant. Are you familiar with the concept of “dark matter”? Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that makes up ~85% of the universe, yet can’t be observed directly. It’s existence is inferred. Similarly, I feel like psychological shadow entities can’t be observed directly, but we can infer that that they exist, because they leave evidence that can be observed
if we are patient and sensitive enough to discern it.
The shadow makes us uncomfortable.
It’s typically whatever we’ve separated from ourselves as “not us”. It doesn’t feel like who we are. We’ve typically been socialized, from infancy, even, to repress our shadows. And repression is something that takes effort. This effort becomes unconscious – we don’t even notice that we’re holding our breaths all the time, that we are tense.
The process of integration is painful.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s ugly. It can make us confront things that we’d rather not confront. It can make us rethink and re-evaluate our past in ways that we don’t like. It can force us to reexamine our identities, our self-concept. It can be exhilarating to find out that we are more than we are, but it’s also scary.
What you can do:
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung
The above image illustrates the shadow modes of the 4 main archetypes in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Each of the “shadow poles” represents two undesirable extremes. We all tend to lean closer to one or the other. The challenge as I see it is to seek balance.
Pay careful attention to what irritates you about other people.
Try to be non-judgemental about it. When someone annoys or upsets you, write it down quickly in your phone Notes app. Let some time pass, and then revisit it. Ask yourself what it is exactly that bothered you.
When I reflect on my own annoyances with other people, I notice the thing that troubles me most are the people who I describe as “half-free” – and definitely, definitely, I see myself in them and I despise it.
Thread time: The Half-Free
On the people who annoy me because they remind me of myself
You know how people can be harsher on their loved ones or their own crew, than with strangers? there's a range of reasons, from "I expect more from us", "your incompetence/failure makes me look bad", "this is a sore spot for me", etc?
One of mine is, I get annoyed by the "half-free". I believe that I truly mean it when I say that I'm honestly cool with people who don't think or care about being a Free Sovereign Autonomous Individual or whatever. call them NPCs, whatever, the label doesn't matter. They can be Happy and Good. I'm also cool with Real Gangstas, High-agency players, ambitious and striving.
But the people I somehow simultaneously have the most tenderness for – and get the most fucking annoyed by, ugh – I guess it's because they remind me of a part of myself – are the people who are stuck in the middle, a foot in both worlds, being indecisive, whining, etc.
You could of course switch up the frames and say that, is anybody truly free? Is anybody truly not-free? Aren't we all half-free? Well yeah, in that grand cosmic sense, sure. But I'm talking about people with a very specific energy. Flooring the gas and slamming the brakes simultaneously.
Decide!! Who! You! Are!!!! Omg!!!!!! Why do I get worked up about this, where are the exclamation marks coming from? Because somehow it's about me, and not the cool abundance mindset energy visa, but the scared, confused, isolated visa somewhere deep in there still. Oof man, oof. People were so mean and cruel to me when I was trying to figure myself out before I became who I am.
When I see someone else in that state I kind of freak out *for* them. I gotta sit with this. I’m super grateful to Contrapoints for talking about this in her video about Cringe. If she hadn’t articulated the phenomenon so well, I think I might’ve spent many more years kind of just shadow-freaking about this.
When I first began to observe these patterns in myself, I found myself laughing, and also angry, annoyed. It took me some repeated exposure and consideration to really see the humor in it, and how there’s a certain beauty to it, too.
✱
Thread time: Unintegrated Wannabes
The first step to cease being an unintegrated wannabe is to accept that you are one, and will always be one. and to see the beauty, humor, joy and humility in that. When you see the beauty in your imperfections. your stutter, your accent, your slouch, your squint, your posture, your gait
every aspect of you is a sacred manifestation of the story of your life, every dissonant horn and screeching string is crying out to tell the story of you.
I loved Alan Watts for many years (still do, tho I haven’t listened in a while) and the most challenging of his riffs that I struggled to understand was:
“The reason you want to be better, is the reason why you aren’t.”
It seemed bleak as fuck to me, and he said it with a laugh. I realize now that he was gesturing at the absolute comedic futility of self-improvement. It’s like trying to improve a cloud, or a tree. it can’t be done. if you really dig into it, there isn’t even a self to improve. It’s just an illusion. O god! O fuck! There’s nothing to stand on!
“But I have all these problems and all these imperfections and I make all these mistakes-“ Yes, yes! Glorious! But you see, every one of those things is a matter of context and framing. Chaos at one level is harmony at another. We get adorably attached to our limited point of view.
There is a lightness of being when you unshackle yourself from your point of view, and in that expanded awareness everything flows quite effortlessly, gracefully. This doesn’t mean the
*complete* absence of muscular tension, but the difference is enough to basically feel like it.
See the following pictures. The guy on the left is stressed that he is an unintegrated wannabe. The guy on the right has cheerfully accepted that he is one, and always will be.
In that narrow space in between, is all the “secret” energy that he was hoping to attain. hilariously, it truly is within you all along. There are of course still many areas of my life in which I experience stress and anxiety! I felt a ton of it while I was writing this book. This is because I am an unintegrated wannabe and always will be! I can laugh about that because I have experienced the magic of transmuting anxiety to laughter.
In my early-mid-20s I felt that my existence was an ordeal, a prison sentence with extra steps. I felt trapped in my body, in my mind, in my circumstances. I realize now that I *am* the universe, I am at home in the universe, the universe is just as much trapped within me.
I recurringly find it useful to look for the joke (our expectations are the setup and reality is the punchline). The idea of stress and anxiety being a kind of cosmic indigestion gets me laughing again. Who are you to hold in the universe?? LOL. Fart it out! Shake it off! Wew!
Your clinginess, neediness, etc are creations & manifestations of your fear, which is trying to keep you safe. Some yelling and screaming is understandable, but really they’ll start to leave you alone when you hug them and tell them thank you, I love you. Makes ‘em uncomfortable. :P
These be the unhinged ramblings of an imperfect wannabe. that’s it for today’s sermon, peace and love be with you.
Focus on what you want to see more of
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I used to get mad at people for sharing content that I thought was clearly bad. I would write lengthy criticisms of what I thought was ugly. The result? I would end up spending more of my time around what I thought was ugly, having tedious and frustrating conversations with people who didn’t see things that way I did, and it was always a losing battle. It took me a long time to realize what Nietzsche independently figured out over 140 years ago: it’s far more effective to focus your attention instead on what you want to see more of.
“Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of.”
I wrote this tweet sometime in November 2020, and it has since become my most critical talking point. I quote it and retweet it regularly and have made it a part of my Twitter bio. I honestly think that it might be the single most powerful force there is, and it’s also the thing that a startling number of people, including very smart people, fail to do. It’s just far too
Whatever you focus on has a way of looming larger.
This can sound really wooey, but I’m confident there are relatively simple explanations which have to do with how our minds work, how language works, how communication works, and so on.
We’re wired to recognize familiar faces. I was having dinner with my in-laws recently in a crowded restaurant, and I heard my sister’s voice through all the noise – even though I hadn’t seen or heard from her in months before! I believe that this is true privately within yourself, too and it’s also true communally amongst your peers, and beyond.
Share the good instead of the bad. It’s incredibly unfortunate that it’s so easy to share bad things.
What people struggle with:
"Don't let the negativity given to you by the world disempower you. Instead give to yourself that which empowers you." – Les Brown
Not knowing what they want.
Hopefully, having read this book, at this point you’d have some sense of what you want. Revisit your childhood desires, analyze your journals, old social media posts, look for clues. Ask your friends and family what they’ve noticed about you. Go somewhere different – I recommend going somewhere with a nice view, ideally in nature, but grand city views can also be excellent – turn off your phone, and just sit. Look into the distance and see what comes up. Who are you? What is your story? What do you love? What are you about?
Feeling drawn to things that they don’t want.
“What if I enjoy it?”
Part of it is fear, a sort of hate-watching. Haters are fans too. Contrapoints’ video on Cringe goes into this in great detail in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Many people are drawn to things that they cringe at, that disgust them, that they despise. This can be intoxicating and addictive – a form of cope. If this is something you do, I don’t judge you for it – it’s pretty widespread – but I will say that cutting this out will be a significant, important part of your journey towards accepting the darker parts of yourself. It’s very difficult to stop mocking yourself if you are simultaneously still mocking other people. [[Put the gun down]].
“What if I’ll be alone without it?”
Cringe isn’t the whole of it though. Part of it is social, and in there too is fear. There’s a fear that if you don’t keep up with all the awful things that your friends keep talking about, well, what else is there left to talk about? It can actually be lonely choosing to be a happy, well-adjusted person if your starting conditions were hostile, abrasive, and the norms around you dictate that you’re supposed to whine, complain, mock, taunt and so on. But the cool thing is that the world is a very big place, and there are always new friends waiting for you that you don’t know about yet.
There’s also actually something to be optimistic about here – I believe the nature of social norms means that a lot of people who are casually cruel to others, don’t particularly intend to be. They just haven’t learned a better way to relate to other people yet. And sure, maybe there are some people who will never unlearn their cruelty. But we don’t have to focus on them. We can focus on the people who can change, if given the right nudges.
“What if the problem gets worse when I wasn’t paying attention?”
Thirdly I think there’s another class of fear, which is that if you don’t point at problems and talk about problems, they will get worse. People often feel that it’s the morally responsible thing to do to keep up with the horrible things in the news, even if there isn’t anything they can particularly do about it in the moment. To this I would say, you really have no obligation to stay fixated on what is terrible.
And I’m not saying you have to delude yourself into pretending that there’s nothing bad happening in the world, either. But rather, the thing here is to be mindful of your information diet. I would say that I’m personally always concerned about the ugliness and cruelty in the world. I’m always angry. But I try (and I’m not perfect at this) to channel that anger into creating things that I want to see, that I believe will be a countermelody to cruelty. The point is to focus on building the world that we want.
What you can do:
“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer
Continually return to what you want.
It might seem like there’s a bit of a “broken clock” aspect to this – isn’t it tedious and mundane to repeat yourself over and over again? And I will say to that, no, actually. It really depends on how you do it. If you do it thoughtfully, attentively, paying attention to the nuances, then repetition is something that is enriching rather than numbing.
This rhymes quite a bit with how some people worry that marriage will be boring – because aren’t you seeing the same old person every day? Don’t you get bored? No! Because neither of you are the same person every day. We are always undergoing a process of becoming.
To a beginner, novelty is newness. To the master, novelty is nuance. Newness actually gets kind of predictable over time. If you go on dozens of first dates with strangers and then never go on a second date, even if you’re meeting different people each time, there is a numbing sameness to it – you never get to experience the nuances of developing a relationship with someone.
The same is true with any craft or skill that you want to develop. If you go to dozens of “Beginner 101” classes – and to be clear I do think this is better than nothing! – you will never experience the joy of getting better at something over time. It’s worth going to those classes to get a sense of how you feel about each thing, so that you can then figure out what resonates with you the most, but the next important thing is to pick something and stick to it for a while. At least a few months, enough to experience real progress, to do something that you couldn’t have done in a week or two!
Consider how to reframe what you don’t want, in terms of what you want.
This is a [[framing]] exercise, and an important one. Being able to articulate what you don’t want is better than nothing, but being able to articulate what you do want makes it much likelier that people will be able to actually give it to you.
A lot of people struggle to articulate what they want simply and clearly. There are a range of reasons for this. They’re afraid that if they ask, they will be rejected. Somehow it seems more painful to hear “no” than to hear nothing. But nothing is a kind of no, if you think about it. It just feels like less of a rejection. A big part of developing maturity and equanimity is learning to not take rejection personally. Very few things in the world are truly personal. Even your parents’ imperfect parenting is less about you than it might seem, and that’s probably the most personal-seeming thing in the world.
Commune with the ancestors.
“We are descended from voyagers.” – Moana (2016 film)
However alien you feel, you are not the first person in the world to be like you. The world is a big place that’s been around for a long time. Somebody, somewhere, has lived the life you are living, or want to be living, and they have written about their experience, as a gift for you to read and learn from.
When I say “the ancestors”, I don’t necessarily mean your literal biological ancestors. You can have “spiritual” ancestors too – people who cared about what you care about. I feel a kinship with bookish nerds throughout history: Marin Mersenne, who’s described as “the post-box of Europe” and “a clearing house for correspondence between eminent philosophers and scientists”. Desiderius Erasmus, an orphan who corresponded with hundreds of people over thousands of letters. The mere fact that these men existed gives me courage to do my own version of the same thing. I’m not just some weirdo bumbling in isolation. I’m a part of a greater tradition across space and time. This gives me courage and confidence to carry on the work of my predecessors.
Consecrate an altar of your ideals.
Remember: A talisman is any object that’s charged with meaning. An altar is a house of talismans. A ceremony is any process of meaning-creation. A temple is a ceremony hall, where meaning is reconstituted. You are the primary person responsible for managing the meaning of your life. And you can make your life more meaningful just by thinking about it. You can do this entirely inside your own head, but I recommend further externalizing that into your environment
the clothes and jewelry you wear, the books you read, the art you hang up on the walls.
Seek out good relationships that bring out the best in you.
When I talk about this with people, the interesting thing I find is that people almost always already have relationships with other people in their lives that they respect and admire, and yet they don’t spend a lot of time with them. They typically feel shy or nervous, there’s some sense of “that person is so well put-together, they’re doing so well, I would be a mere distraction to them if I tried to reach out.”
In my experience, this is usually false. well-integrated people are lonely, actually, because they're not common. and they are usually quite happy, excited even, to help someone else along the path to their own integration. The fact that someone has the "I'd just be a tedious distraction to them" feeling is a great sign, actually, because it means that they respect other people's time and attention. This makes it much less likely that they'll be the annoyance that they worry they'll be.
I do recommend taking a bit of time to think about what you want to say before you say it. A specific sincere compliment (always a welcome gift, if you're genuine) and a specific question usually goes a long way. Sharing a detail about your own journey also helps.
Thread Time!
On skillful indifference
An oversimplified way to think about life is that it's about learning the appropriate amounts of indifference to things. I don't see how you can truly learn this without first getting it wrong, and even then, because things are always changing, there's no guarantee you'll adapt correctly.
Obviously, each person's context is unique. A phrase I've been hearing lately is "they're still fighting the last war"– this rhymes with the general sentiment about the systematic mistake parents tend to make with kids, raising them with intuitions informed by their own experience.
The general process of working through trauma could be framed as, "teaching your body to stop anxiously, agonizingly, repeatedly fighting the last war". The opposite problem also exists – you could have the problem of extreme indifference, being so indifferent that you do the equivalent of mindlessly walk into oncoming traffic. Conveniently though I don't really have to talk about that because those people aren't reading my stuff.
A thing that I was tripping on while researching my book – investigating: what is fear really? – it's interesting how much of it involves the perception of safety, of control. While I’m not yet confident about yelling this from the rooftops, it seems to me not a huge exaggeration to say that you can absolutely meme yourself into becoming a more courageous person.
A thing I love to say when I get DMs from a clearly anxious kid (I'm old enough now that I can call 25 year olds kids, ha ha) is when they say "I'm so worried/anxious/etc!! omg!!!" and I get to respond, "That's good, it means you're smart!” This usually surprises and confuses them. Now, it's not that I can definitively know that they're smart just because they're freaking out. But because it deviates from their expectation of where the chat was going to go (I think they usually expect something like “don’t worry so much”), I get to confuse them out of their pattern.
I similarly like to making weird faces when I encounter a crying child in public. It confuses them, and when they’re confused they stop crying. Confusion is powerful. It’s powerful because when you realize you don't know wtf is going on, then you can actually start thinking, analyzing, questioning, figuring shit out.
Again, the problem with problems everywhere isn't that people don't know what is going on. It's that we think that we know what’s going on.
Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
Your attention is your most precious resource.
What you choose to attend to receives your support and encouragement,
whether you realize it or not.
Haters are fans too.
Talking about what you dislike
has a way of bringing more of it into your attention.
When you focus one what you want,
When you demonstrate through words and actions, you make it easier for others to give you what you want.
Even if the problem you want to address is massive, and your share of the solution is miniscule,
it is still wisest to focus on what you want.
Over time, if you play your cards right, what you desire will accumulate in your domain.
This then becomes an opportunity for you To give back to the world, what it is
That you want to see more of.
Show Up, Don’t Die, Don’t Quit
“Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up.
They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”
― Charles Jones, Life is Tremendous
Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live, ~2016.
Life will kick your ass. The challenge is to accept it with grace.
I feel like at this point in the book I’ve made my case, right? You get what I’m saying. So I just want to restate the big picture, which is that life will kick your ass. There’s no way around it. In The Lion King, Simba had to leave the kingdom in order to undergo the transformation he needed before he could return to take his rightful place as the true king. Steve Jobs similarly had to be fired from Apple before he could evolve into a better version of himself, return and
turn the company around. It really seems that this is inevitable. Failure, grief, heartbreak, disappointment, betrayal – all of these will happen sooner or later, because reality is not obliged to conform to our expectations. Life will kick your ass.
The important thing is not to quit. Challenge yourself to have a hearty, cheerful sense of humor about it. Take breaks if you have to. Walk away if you have to. Cry and scream if you have to. But remember that the sun will rise again tomorrow. It will be the dawn of a new day. And as long as you’re still breathing, you can always start over again.
✱
I have a couple of selfies that I took in some of my worst states of depression in my mid-20s. It might seem like a strange thing to do, but I love my past self for doing that. Past-Visa knew that he didn’t have the strength, resources, courage and so on to turn his entire life around, but he hoped that one day I would be able to honor that. He trusted in me, Future-Visa, even as he felt like he couldn’t really trust himself. And I am so grateful to him for that trust.
I just want to reiterate that this sort of evolution is possible.
When I reread my old blogposts that I wrote in the depths of my depression, I see that I was stating accurate facts. I think some part of me would sometimes issue challenges – to myself, to the universe – “Am I wrong? Am I wrong about how fucked up everything is?” And no, I wasn’t. There’s much in the world that’s fucked up. But I see now that that doesn’t mean I have to consider myself a fuckup. I don’t have to treat myself with cruelty. A friend observed that my old voice lacked self-compassion, and he was right. Introducing self-compassion has made all the difference.
What people struggle with:
“At the moment of victory, tighten the straps of your helmet.”
― Tokugawa Ieyasu
They quit – and worse, they beat themselves up for quitting.
They give up. Why? They lose heart. They lose faith. They feel good for a while, but then they get scared, overwhelmed, bored, and they revert to some previous stasis, some familiar holding pattern.
I’ve quit a lot of times in my life. I have probably hundreds of half-started, unfinished projects at this point, many of which feel like they’ve been lost entirely to the sands of time. The interesting thing, when I reflect on it now, is that I don’t regret trying and I don’t regret failing. If I regret something, it’s that I regret beating myself up about my failures, flinching from them, feeling ashamed about them. (And here I have to be very careful not to beat myself up for beating myself up! Instead, I look for the [[humor]] in it, laugh it off. [[Put the gun down.]])
Here’s what I wish I told myself: You do not have to feel bad about failing at something. [[Embrace your failures.]] It’s the flinch from the failure that keeps you from learning. If you want to do something – get fit, for example – there’s a reason you aren’t fit already. In fact there are probably multiple different reasons all acting in concert to keep you in homeostasis. You might have to try a dozen different times just to get a sense of what all those reasons are, and a dozen times more to address them. And you can approach this in a spirit of cheerfulness! It can be fun! It really can.
This is why I’ll never be an adult, by Hyperbole and a Half (2010)
There was a tremendous anecdote in The Body Keeps The Score that hit me really hard, about some study involving mice. I can’t find the exact passage so I’ll paraphrase from my notes…
The people conducting the study had two sets of mice, some that were raised in a warm nest with plenty of food, while others were raised in relatively hostile, noisy environments with little food. These mice were then allowed into “common areas,” some space that was different from their homes. Then, they were then subjected to loud, intrusive noises. All the mice scurried home immediately, even the ones raised in hostile environments, that were then in more pleasant environments afterwards.
“I guess home is home even if it's hell,” I wrote in my notes. There’s something quite depressing about this. It implies that maybe early childhood experience is destiny, and there’s no running away from our history. But… also, we are not mice. All this really tells us, I think, is that it’s possible that we might impulsively seek out familiar environments, familiar habits and routines, even if we know they’re bad for us. I think that corroborates with my experience, and with a lot of what I’ve seen, read, heard and learned about other people.
But also, I believe that it’s possible for us to heal from our childhood traumas. We are not mice. We can deliberately seek out nourishing environments, nourishing relationships.
There’s a great scene in the first episode of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, where our protagonist is in a state of shock after witnessing something terrible, which reminded her of her own past trauma, and she leaves the scene in a daze… and then she makes the resolute, heroic decision to turn around and head back to face the problem. People can do that. It’s hard, it’s terrifying.
But it can be done. I’ve done it. I believe you can do it too.
Of course, in practice, it’s not one single giant leap. It’s hundreds of little decisions. But you only need to make one little decision at a time.
In the depths of my depression, I remember once sarcastically, cynically saying “every success is a stepping stone to the next failure.” Today, I can smile and say, yes, that’s true! And there’s nothing wrong with failure. Failure is an opportunity for learning. For discovery. It’s where the magic is.
So dare greatly. Fail greatly. I’m rooting for you.
What you can do:
“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
— George Patton, one of the most successful combat generals in US history
Realize that giving up is never final.
As long as you’re still breathing, you can always regroup and start over again. But it’s painful, it’s hard, yes. I have fallen off many of my wagons many times, and I feel bad about quite a few of them. But when I am at my best, I realize that there’s actually no point feeling bad about failing. That doesn’t mean that I should suppress feeling bad. I should simply feel my feelings, and then seek to move on from there. Experience the disappointment and regret, and then resolve to learn from the experience. Embrace the mistake and do better the next time around.
Manage your psychology; return to your core motivations.
Remember, this is The Hard Thing. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s okay to make mistakes. Return to your stories. Remind yourself of what you care about, why you care about it. Take screenshots and photographs of things that inspire you, make you happy. Kind things about you that people have said. Put these in a folder on your desktop, and revisit it whenever you’re feeling low.
Practice [[project management]] – map out your next [[baby steps]].
It does crack me up how this motif seems slightly discordant with everything else in the book – so much of everything is about feelings, and then this is about… logistics. But logistics matters! You have to develop the capacity, the knowledge, the skill, to get things done, so that you can take care of yourself, so that you can take care of others. The important thing is not to moralize about this. Being bad at project management doesn’t make you a bad person. Thinking in those terms is largely self-defeating. The thing is to focus on making small, tiny improvements however you can.
Forgive yourself.
Accept your [[mistakes]]. Learn from them. No mistake has to be final. If you’re still breathing, you can still make amends. There are some things that you can’t take back, and sometimes if you’ve harmed someone, the best thing you can do for them is to give them space and leave them be. But you can still do better in other ways. You can serve someone else. It still matters.
Show up, Don’t Die, Don’t Quit
If you got any value out of reading this book…
The nicest thing you can do for me is to truly learn something from it, and embody that in your own life.
Treat yourself with kindness, patience, become a good friend to yourself, really listen, non-judgmentally.
All of this goodness is within you.
I’m just some guy rambling in the hope that it’ll help you see it.
Pick out the ideas that really resonated with you.
Write them down in your own journal, or otherwise find some way to integrate them into your life, wherever you’ll see it.
Do a little bit at a time. Go as slow as you have to. Take breaks if you have to.
But never give up on yourself.
You can do it. I believe in you.
Pay it forward
“When we give – in the world, what we want the most – we heal the broken part inside each of us. [...] Happiness exists in action, it exists in telling the truth and saying what the truth is, and it exists in giving away what you want the most.”
– Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues, TED 2004
Take care not to become a pompous jerk.
A tragic thing that recurringly happens when someone has some sort of great experience – meditation, psychedelics, crossfit, keto, vegan, whatever – is that they start to get all preachy about it with other people. I beg you, please don’t do that with this! Everybody is at a different stage of their journey, and nobody needs someone to condescend to them about what they have to do. That just never helps.
As always, the negative [[frame]] is typically counter-productive – so rather than think “don’t be a jerk”, think instead, “be a nourishing, accepting presence”.
Your friends typically need your presence more than your preaching.
There’s a great quote about someone going to a lumberjack to offer to teach him how to be more efficient, and the lumberjack responds with “Son, I don’t chop wood half as well as I know how to already.” People seldom need someone to give them solutions to their [[problems]].
Usually what they really need is someone to listen to them from a place of sensitivity, and to ask them [[questions]] from a place of genuine curiosity. They need to feel accepted and loved, so that they can let go of the tension that they’re carrying in their [[bodies]], and loosen the fixation they have on their [[mistakes]].
"The best advice is not to tell people what to do, but to ask them the right questions. Find out what's going on in their head, and help them frame that in a way that's useful." – David Allen
What people struggle with:
“Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell
Perceived burden of significance
Some people find it a little presumptuous or pretentious to think about Paying It Forward – like who do I think I am, I’m not that important. Well, who do you think you are not to pass it forward? The world has been going on for a long time, and people have always been paying their debts forward. That’s what society is!
Perceived burden of obligation
Some people take on in an overly burdensome, needy way, like it’s a heavy, weighty obligation. That’s a trap. Paying it forward is about giving gifts without any expectations. You cannot demand that people accept your help. It’s best to offer it, lightly, freely, without conditions. You are not entitled to perfect responses. And, almost paradoxically, the more light and free you are in the assistance that you render, the more cheerfully people will tend to accept it.
The shame of socializing
One of the most quietly cruel things I do to myself is: I allow too much of my mental bandwidth to be taken up by people who don't love me, which crowds out the people who do. I could even say, it's almost like I deliberately deny myself the love of my friends. It sounds so weird when you put it like that, but it’s true. I spent so many years trying to earn the trust and respect of people I admired. And I succeeded at it! And I hardly stop to let myself feel it.
I think I've gotten a little better at this with each passing year, but it does also feel like I'm on an incrementalist path when there's probably a more fundamental solution. There’s probably an important reconceptualization – [[reframing]] – that I could do that I haven’t yet quite gotten around to seeing. Still, I would tell my younger self, kid, you gotta make the time to enjoy your life. This is non-negotiable! And in doing that, I can feel my future 50yo, 70yo, 90yo elder selves all looking at me like, “well well well, hmmmm, wonder who else needs to hear that, hmmmmm?” It’s me, I need to hear it.
What you can do:
“A Spiritual Samaritan lives knowing that if we were to leave this world tomorrow, we were the best humans we could be and we touched the lives of as many souls as possible. We are not asked to be perfect.
We are asked to make a difference.”
― Molly Friedenfeld
Reach out to people! Make it a regular habit.
Talk to your old friends. Talk to new friends. Ask people how they’re doing, and really listen. The most important thing to pay forward is not some specific idea, but a nourishing presence. The gift of being truly present, attentive in a non-needy way.
I’ve written before about how my ex-boss gave me the gift of his sincere [[questions]] – he was genuinely curious to understand how I ticked, in a way that I had forgotten to care about myself. And I now spend quite a bit of time and energy passing that on to others. It doesn’t even feel like a sacrifice on my part – being genuinely curious about others in a gentle and supportive way has been incredibly rewarding for me. I learn so much. I make new friends. All sorts of good things happen for me. I believe they can happen for you too, and for loads of people who are blessed by your uniquely nourishing presence.
It’s really easy for me to be there for someone who reaches out to me. I will drop almost everything for a friend. What’s less easy, what’s less obvious, is when I need to reach out to someone else. The challenge is that I seem to have an [[Ugh Field]] around it – I don’t realize that I need to talk to someone, I just suffer quietly, hoping to resolve it by myself. And I know intellectually that I love being able to help friends, it makes me feel good to help them! So the advice I would give myself is, just always be reaching out to friends casually all the time. Do it with low stakes, so that it’s familiar.
(I have a similar bit of advice re: fashion and weirdness. Have something slightly weird going on all the time. Wear socks of different colors. Wear a strange ring or bracelet. Have a splash of color somewhere. Getting in the habit of doing this – being slightly deviant in trivial ways – makes it much easier to be substantially deviant when it matters.)
✱
– Raquel, ridinkskinned.com
Pay it forward:
It is good that you have an autonomous, sovereign spirit. And, you are also part of something greater than yourself.
You are a wave in a greater ocean.
It does nobody any good
if you hold on to all of the joy, all of the light,
all of the wealth.
Wealth is for sharing.
Pass it on, pay it forward,
share it with the people around you. Let your light give light to others. We’re only here for a little while.
Let’s make the most of it while we’re here. Let’s make a difference to somebody else.
Appendix
(22Jan2022) A wise guy once told me that the most important part of a book is its heart. What is the heart of Introspect? It’s about undoing
self-dehumanization. Why do people dehumanize themselves? Pain, fear, suffering. Somewhere along the way something bad happened and
self-dehumanization was a way of preventing the bad from happening again. But the problem with self-dehumanization is that it cuts you off from anything good happening, too. You end up feeling cold, isolated, alienated, desolate. And this can feel deserved, like the appropriate punishment for having caused pain and suffering. Like you don’t deserve to be human, because you’re a monster, and monsters should be locked up in labyrinths, away from humanity, where their neediness and ugliness can’t hurt anybody else. Right?
The funny thing about this book – and I talk about the importance of humor! – is that in writing a book about dismantling one’s inner authoritarian-tyrant, my own inner tyrant rose up within me to seize control of the project. He insisted that this book must be perfect, or I would be a failure, a disappointment, that I would have wasted the goodwill of my friends that I have painstakingly worked to earn. And I can’t proceed until I find the courage to laugh heartily in his face. “No one will respect you once they see how long and hard you’ve had to work to produce utter mediocrity,” he threatens. “No one will love you when they see what a failure you are. No one will ever forgive you for this.” And here – this is the power of stories – I borrow the strength of Tris from Divergent. “You’re
wrong,” I get to tell him. “Because I will.”
Recurring motifs throughout this book
This section is entirely made up of recaps! We will just revisit all of the things that we’ve talked about throughout the book. If anything jumps out at you, make a note of it, so that you can do something about it.
Be playful.
Be sketchy and sloppy and mess around. Give yourself space to make messes. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You could pretend that you’re role-playing as someone else. If you’re afraid to tweet with your name and face attached, you can create an account that’s anonymous. I recommend trying something that’s in a domain that doesn’t have any great emotional significance to you. If you’re a writer who’s very invested in the idea of writing well, I recommend being playful in the kitchen, where it doesn’t matter if you’re cooking something terrible. Cook (cheap) terrible things! Revel in the terribleness!
Be kind to yourself.
There is kindness in the world too, and you should seek it, but the most reliable way of encountering it is to create it yourself. There’s a lot of unkindness in the world and it tends to move fast.
Cultivate a sense of humor.
This is related to playfulness. It’s also something that I find lacking in a lot of severe, austere types. Being able to laugh at yourself, being able to laugh at your situation, is something that diffuses tension, alleviates anxiety. It gives you a broader perspective, and to introduce a lightness to your approach to things. Joke about the outcomes you want!
Take baby steps.
You don’t have to take drastic, dramatic action(s) before you’re ready. What’s the smallest version of the thing you’d like to do? Suppose you’d like to write a novel. Could you write a few tweets worth of micro-fiction? Maybe you don’t even need to be the author yourself – pretend that you’re a bad author, and then write bad fiction on behalf of that bad author. Have fun!
Take lots of baby steps.
There’s something magical that emerges from volume, as long as you’re paying attention. This is something that’s really counterintuitive to people. I’ve even found it counterintuitive myself, despite having experience doing it.
Embrace failures.
When I was depressed, I remember journalling something like, “every success is just a stepping stone to a greater failure.” What I would now say to that is “yes, and that’s not a bad thing!” See, embedded in that statement is the assumption that failure is bad. And sure, it’s rarely fun to fail at something, especially when you let other people down. But failure is always also a learning opportunity, if we’re able to lay our arms down long enough to pay attention to what actually happened, and to examine how and why it happened. So get out there and fail a lot. It’ll probably hurt, though you may find that when you have an expanded… tk
Celebrate small wins.
This is how you get to “spirals of success”.
Do little experiments.
This is kind of a repetition of the baby steps point, but it’s a little more advanced. Baby steps can meander in any direction. Experimentation is a little more deliberate. It’s taking steps in some deliberate-ish direction with the intent of finding things out. Some people find themselves getting bored with
Write things down.
Adam Savage of Mythbusters once said (quoting ballistics expert Alex Jason), "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." So write it down.
Be playful.
Lists are very simple and powerful tools for making sense of things. When you generate a list of thoughts “on the fly”, there’s usually something revealing implied by the list that isn’t immediately obvious while you’re writing it. Identifying, observing and analyzing these implications will lead you to a higher-level understanding of yourself.
Practice thinking out loud.
Thinking is more powerful than it seems. There’s this great bit in the book “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” where Richard Feynman describes how, in his youth, he used to fix radios by thinking about them. You spot flaws and errors in your thinking much more easily when you make your thinking explicit, ideally in a medium that allows you to revisit it.
Talk to people.
While introspection is an inward-directed process, it’s something that you don’t have to do alone. In fact, I highly recommend that you talk to as many people as you can. Read as many books as you can – that too can be a form of conversation.
Listen to your body.
The body does “keep the score”. If you disregard your body, it will find ways to protest your actions. Developing an antagonistic, adversarial relationship with your body will lead to a frustrating, unpleasant life. Seek instead to develop a symbiotic relationship with your body.
Practice gratitude.
You can be grateful to your own body, and mind, for having served you thus far. You can be grateful to specific people who have helped you on your journey. You can be grateful to your favorite books, movies, art, music, and even to more abstract things like language.
What I was hoping to do:
I have a lot of actual material from my journals (in visakanv.com/1000/, particularly) that I would love to weave into the entire book, but I haven’t had the energy to review and revisit it properly while simultaneously working on the book. I think it will be much easier to do after I ship the first version.
Talk more about attention. Attention is the most critical thing in a lot of things. I’m not sure how it didn’t come up more. Guess I wasn’t paying enough attention, lol. Introspection is about paying attention to yourself.
In the section about sovereignty, I was hoping to elaborate in more detail about how people struggle with family and friends.
In the journaling section, I was hoping to talk about some of the things I’ve learned re: indexing your notes, writing evocatively and so on. I may try to include this in updates to my blogpost about information architecture. I’m also writing a public ebook draft called Index.
I wish I talked more about interfacing with others. I will go into this in more detail in the next version of Friendly Ambitious Nerd (v1.1), which I will start work on shortly after this book (Introspect v1.0) is published.
Throughout the book, more specifics on what to do. Have a recentering routine. Build altars, checklists, guides. How your notes should serve you.
I’d like to research and write more about the body, the role of emotions, hormones, anxiety, trauma, cortisol, all of those things. I think it’s important to note that introspect isn’t just a cerebral thing, and that containing it to merely the intellectual domain limits what it can do for you.
Books I was hoping to read deeper and include more details from: Drama of the Gifted Child, Alan Watts (The Book, Wisdom of Insecurity), Body Keeps The Score, Complex PTSD. The Courage to Be Disliked. Focusing. Existential Kink.
Forte Labs blogpost on Body Keeps The Score
Want to dig into Carl Jung and weave his ideas through this book.
I’d like to dig deeper into the question of trust. What is trust, really? What is respect? How is it earned? What does it mean to believe something? What is assurance?
Similar questions about Love, Forgiveness, Acceptance, Equanimity, Grace, all of those words.
Storytelling. I could write a whole book about storytelling, and I think I might at some point. Though it would probably be good to first write my own stories so I can demonstrate the points rather than belabor them. I don’t know, we’ll see.
I’d like to have talked more about ceremonies, talismans, shamans, meaning, ritual spaces.
There’s a lot I want to talk about re: what musicians have taught me. I mention Victor Wooten… I also want to talk about Benjamin Zander, Bobby McFerrin, Kenny Werner, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Jacob Collier, Paul Gilbert, Guthrie Govan, Billy Sheehan… this is starting to sound like a series of blogposts or maybe youtube videos.
“You are a wave in a greater ocean” – read Alan Watts, listen to his lectures on YouTube, read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
In the section of desire I wanna talk about fucking and fuckability, and about Contrapoints’ articulation of desire in her video about Shame. Maybe next version.
I wish I talked more about specific feelings. Guilt. Shame. Anxiety. I will likely explore these in greater detail at visakanv.substack.com in 2022.
I wish I included more stories from people I’ve talked with. I was so anxious about trying to get the structure of the book right, I kind of neglected to give it the stories it deserves.
I wish I had been more aggressive about asking questions throughout the book. Tempted to rewrite the book as a set of questions, or maybe even as a dialogue, the way Courage to be Disliked does.
Thinking about radical self-acceptance and how so much pain and struggle is a consequence of feeling uncomfortable in the body, uncomfortable in the moment. Thinking also about Christopher Alexander’s point about comfort… I could talk about a quote from Chris Lakin: "When we truly feel comfortable, the desire to improve is natural— no antagonism required, no debt incurred."
I was thinking of including some stuff about creation myths and family, the father as the first tyrant. How the Gods of Olympus overthrew their parents, the Titans. This is a recurring thing in all sorts of creation myths from all sorts of cultures. The drama, the pain and suffering within the family unit. Reading about Greeks I learned that “tyrant” didn’t originally have negative connotations. Then and again, neither did “dictator”.
There’s a bunch of interesting things in Rollo May’s Man’s Search For Himself that I’d love to include in the next version of this book. First I’ll do a blogpost, I guess. Bunch of stuff about early childhood, and also about history.
Thank you
Thank you for reading this book. I hope you found something helpful within it.
Thank you to all my friends who have helped. Thank you to my wife Sharan for being my partner in life, and for enduring the worst of me. Thank you to my ex-boss Dinesh for being an excellent mentor. Thank you to all my Twitter mutuals, there are so many who have helped that I can’t possibly list everyone. Thank you to all the authors who have ever written anything from their hearts, thank you to all the musicians and artists who have done the same.
About the author
My name is Visakan Veerasamy, my friends call me Visa, you can find me all over the internet at @visakanv. I’d especially love it if you subscribed to my YouTube channel (youtube.com/visakanv), where I plan to make many more videos about the topics I’ve discussed in this book.
If you haven’t, you might be interested in reading my previous book, Friendly Ambitious Nerd.
It’s quite a bit shorter than this one.
Oh, and also! I’m putting together a Google document tentatively called “Introspect Notes”, where I will answer any questions you might have, and assembling a “further reading” list, and all that fun stuff. Don’t be a stranger!