The other day I replaced an old, cracked mirror in my bathroom. When I took the existing one down, suddenly the room seemed to lose half its size. Turns out it’s just a claustrophobic little room with a toilet, sink, and tub.

The sense that there’s open space in front of me while I brush my teeth is an illusion, but that illusion is much more familiar to me than the reality. In other words, my mirror-skewed impression of the room – the way it seems – feels more real and is more relevant to my life than the room’s actual properties.

The new mirror opened it up spatially again, and removed a bit of dinge and disorder from the view. This even made me seem better — I feel like a slightly more dignified person looking into an immaculate mirror than a damaged one.

The way things seem matters a lot, perhaps more than the way they actually are. You get a hint of this whenever you dress up in good clothes. Even if nobody else is around, you probably feel more capable and more formidable. Sharp attire can change, at least for the moment, who you seem to be, even though the being beneath the clothes shouldn’t be changed by draping new things on it.

Changing the way something seems, even when it doesn’t change the way it is, can have concrete downstream effects on all sorts of things. I already know I do better work when I’m better dressed, because it imparts a certain dignity to the writing process. A room made seemingly more spacious by mirrors affects the mind and mood, which affects behavior and quality of life, even how much someone would pay for the house. Plating a meal attractively makes it more enjoyable to eat, even though the tastebuds are encountering the same substances either way.

I had an interesting lesson in seemingness on my first trip to New York. Manhattan is one of my favorite places for many reasons, but one is that it was the first place I’d ever been where I felt almost no self-consciousness in public. Everybody is too busy and too world-weary to judge you. You could walk down the street in a clown costume and nobody will give you a second look. New Yorkers have seen it all, and your insignificance as an ordinary person is so much more obvious in a New York crowd than maybe anywhere else.

This felt very liberating, and it diminished my background self-consciousness permanently. It didn’t return when I got home, because a long-standing illusion had been dispelled. Most of my self-consciousness had stemmed from the subjective sense — the seemingness — that strangers are evaluating me constantly. In New York, it wasn’t possible to believe this. The indifference of the crowd was palpable. When I got home, I was able to feel that same indifference, that same basic tolerance, from the strangers here too. It no longer seemed so believable, here or anywhere, that my appearance or mannerisms were under constant scrutiny.

Persistent, unchallenged seemingness can dominate a person’s life, and make or break some of their prospects. If it seems to you that your creative work is no good, your life path will naturally veer away from creative work, reinforcing that impression. If it seems to you that you’re profoundly talented and worthy of praise, you’ll probably be more successful than you would otherwise, regardless of how talented you actually are.

How a thing is, and how it seems, are two layers of reality that can move independently, and we can take advantage of that. Psychologists sometimes talk about cognitively reframing an experience – consciously trying on different interpretations of the same event, because quite often it’s the interpretation that determines everything about the event’s impact. The body-buzz of anxiety can seem like the feeling of everything going wrong, of your complete ineptitude in the face of a challenge, or as excitement, energy, readiness for what’s about to happen. The difference consists entirely of what the anxious sensations seem to be about, because they’re the same bodily response.

This idea that seemingness often matters more than actuality, and can be managed artfully or ignored at your peril, is another example of ancient human wisdom people have mostly struggled to employ.

Famously, Hamlet acknowledged that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” before insisting to his friends that his home country of Denmark is, for him, a prison, because it seemed so given his state of despair.

Fourteen centuries earlier, Marcus Aurelius took a more rigorous approach to the same insight. In order to avoid getting caught up in reflexive impressions – unhelpful forms of seemingness — he practiced viewing all things as plain material realities, distinct from how those things seemed to the thinking mind:

“When meat or other dainties are before you, you reflect: this is a dead fish, fowl, or pig. This Falernian is some of the juice from a bunch of grapes. My purple robe is sheep’s wool stained with a little gore from a shellfish.”

Part of Aurelius’s struggle to keep perspective as most powerful man in the world revolved around reminding himself incessantly that he’s just a guy — an aging human body wrapped in a purple robe, wearing an Imperial diadem on its head, who other men happen to regard, for the moment, as important.

We’re not all emperors, but we are all easily caught in illusory worlds of seemingness, often for the worse. Ideally, you’d want to embrace empowering impressions where you can, and drop the disempowering ones. But seemingness overlays everything; it’s hard to even see where a thing and its impressions diverge. Which is the real bathroom? The claustrophobic, mirrorless one, or the one I actually experience 99% of the time?

The Stoic exercise described above – frequently returning to the obvious material facts of a thing, and letting impressions of meaning swirl about like the fickle breezes they are – does help to temper some of the needless reactivity.

I’m operating a fast-moving road machine, among other such machines.

I’m buying plant and animal parts at the current market price.

I’m having worried thoughts about a potential upcoming challenge.

I’m a human and I’m alive.

Raw, unsensational facts like these are more dependable than any of the abstract possibilities swirling around them.

Like all perennial human dilemmas, both Western and Eastern sages have suggestions. Mindfulness practice can serve as a more formalized version of the Stoic practice: you sit and notice a feeling, a sensation, an urge, or an impression, allowing it to be there just as it appears, dropping all interpretations without fuss, noticing how quickly thoughts about it arise and dissipate. Then another thing appears and changes and dissipates, and so on. The mind begins to see, a little more clearly at least, what actually makes up life and what is fabricated by the mind.

Seemingness is hugely powerful. We live at its mercy. We’ve all had the experience of over-interpreting the punctuation or word choice in an email or text, convinced that the other person is angry because they ended with a stark period instead of a lighthearted exclamation mark or emoji. More broadly, we live under powerful impressions about what we’re destined for, what’s out of reach, whether we’re capable of cooking or algebra or career change or genuine friendship — all just seemingness. The more you can tease the two layers apart a bit, the more paths forward become possible.

***

Photos by Lin Po-Tsen, Adam Watson, Enrique Alarcon, Suhyeon Choi

Humans aren’t good at predicting the future, but sometimes you can see a trend that promises something great — like “a genie is granting your wish” great. I think this might be happening right now with one of my genie wishes, maybe yours too.

For me it has to do with the piles of unread books I own. There’s almost nothing I want to do more than plow through stacks of 600-page history and philosophy books, but my efforts are mostly thwarted by the cognitive difficulty I have with processing line upon line of printed text. While I’m reading, my attention veers off at least once or twice per sentence (unless I read aloud, which is slower, hard on the throat, and not always appropriate).

It’s not a small impediment to learning. Not to sound dramatic, but those books represent something I want badly that feels locked away from me, like I’m stuck in the middle act of some frog prince fable. Imagine you loved swimming more than anything, but water happens to cause you horrendous itching.

Audiobooks allow me to spend more time reading (e.g. in the car, at the gym) but lapses of attention still occur frequently. I rewind a lot, but I still miss the context needed to understand the next point. Missed context accumulates until the content is mostly lost on me, then interest crashes completely and I stop.

This happens because books, in any form, are essentially long strings of interdependent sentences, which must be read and understood in order. They operate something like old strings of Christmas lights – miss an important “bulb” and the rest might not work for you at all.

There are other ways to learn, of course, but they too depend on one’s ability to comprehend long, uninterrupted strings of declarative statements (e.g. recorded lectures), or else they’re expensive and time-consuming (formal education, tutoring), or both.

Books are the traditional go-to for self-directed learning, and I would pay a million dollars for a way to reliably and comfortably get their contents into my head. I envy people for whom reading a book is a straightforward matter. There’s so much I want to learn and study, but processing 500 pages of interdependent sentences is about as easy for me as tying off five thousand balloons while wearing loose rubber dishgloves. Despite this handicap, I’ve certainly read hundreds of books to completion, but I’ve abandoned thousands. Too many missing bulbs.

Regardless of whether you suffer this particular bottleneck to self-directed learning, we’re starting to get some new tools that could multiply your current ability to learn.

Over the last few months, I’ve been using A.I. tools, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to learn in a different way. Mostly I get primers on things I’ve always wanted (or suddenly want) to know, such as how does jury duty work, what was Hegel actually talking about, or what do tariffs do and why do people disagree so strongly about them? I can then dig as deeply as I like into the topic, down any strand of inquiry.

The conventional method of intellectual inquiry, for most topics, is to find and read a long sequence of declarative sentences published by someone who apparently knows what you want to know. This means books if you want depth, encyclopedia entries if you want summaries, essays if you want opinions, and lectures if you want lectures.

All of these learning forms, however, depend on your ability to follow, sentence-by-sentence, the thin and winding line upon which the author wants to unspool their knowledge, creating a potential Christmas-lightbulb problem. Every lapse of attention during a given “unspooling” creates another gap in the context for everything to follow, creating a state of ever-disintegrating interest and comprehension. Many of us simply aren’t going to make it through the endeavor — some facts get through, but a working knowledge never crosses over to the new host.

This isn’t a huge problem for everyone, but I suspect it is for a massive, untold segment of the population. How many students completely disengage with learning material, at some point, in virtually every subject, because they can’t hold onto an interesting thread long enough? How many people check out of the practice of reading at all, early on in life, because it’s more frustrating than rewarding?

Talking to an A.I. like Claude or ChatGPT allows you to inquire into a topic from right where you are, circumventing the Christmas-bulb effect. You can begin with exactly the aspects of the subject you’re most curious or confused about. What even is jury duty? How do they teach jurors to interpret evidence? Or is that even a part of it? Was that thing I saw on Law & Order the way they really do it?

An A.I. can engage your right at your current level of understanding (or misunderstanding). If you need a definition, or more context, in order to proceed, just ask. If the explanation is too general, you can tell it to get specific. If you need a metaphor, it can provide one (or three or four) immediately. If its language is too technical, or too basic, you can adjust that.

You can tell an A.I. to answer your question in fifty words, or a thousand. You can ask as many follow-up questions as you need. If it mentions a jury-selection rule you find bizarre, you can ask it to fabricate a debate between two people for and against that rule. You can ask why they don’t just do it this way or that way. You can ask for ten different analogies until you get it. Unlike a human, an A.I. is infinitely patient with you and any trouble you’re having.

After a half hour of free-form inquiry you can come away with a much better understanding of almost any topic – certainly better than what you’d get from virtually any 30-minute lecture or period of assigned reading.

Far more learning could happen in this world if more people could remain interested and attentive to what’s being said. Imagine a world in which 10x, or 100x as much real learning is happening, and across a far greater proportion of the population. That’s a different world.

Learning via A.I. interaction is especially powerful for examining your existing beliefs, and understanding why people disagree with you. It’s very hard to do this in open conversation with another human being. Conversation about charged topics is easily distorted by partisan judgments, emotional reactions, and fear of misunderstanding. These factors are massive impediments to learning about and understanding world issues.

You can tell Claude your current opinion about how crime should be dealt with, for example, or when we should intervene in foreign wars, and ask what it thinks you’re overlooking. You can tell it what your take is on the Vietnam War and ask it what Gore Vidal, Jane Fonda, or Douglas MacArthur might have said about that. You can have it write a mini-essay disputing your view, or even have it grill you on your position. There’s nobody to be offended, nobody to accuse you of asking the wrong questions or sounding like one of “them.”

Of course, what an A.I. says to you can be biased, or totally wrong, both factually and morally, but that’s true about humans (and their books) too. All the more reason to seek multiple framings of each question.

[NOTE: Judging by some of the comments I should perhaps emphasize that I’m very aware that AI chatbots are somewhat clunky at doing some of things I’m talking about above, and you should not assume that they’re right about anything. What I’m most excited about is where this tech will be in five or ten years.]

My excitement about this technology is not an indictment of books, not at all. I love books. Books are lindy. I love to sit in a chair and follow someone’s printed, sequential thoughts about a topic, when I can stay on the same wavelength. Books are wonderful, but they don’t serve every attempt to learn.  

The future potential for A.I. assisted learning is incredible. We’re about to go from rubbing two sticks together to widespread access to lighters and matches. Say you’re studying for an exam in a dry topic like history or economics. Instead of force-reading a textbook, you can study with a small team of virtual tutors — subject matter experts who can explain to you the vital concepts using language you understand, and analogies related to your actual interests.

Imagine putting on some VR goggles and walking with a virtual Socrates on a shaded stoa, while he expertly leads you, question by question, evening by evening, to a genuine understanding of Hellenic philosophy (or for that matter, American history) at a level strong enough to ace a real professor’s exam.

I can understand being sketched out by this kind of technology. It seems inevitable that A.I. will change the world profoundly, and quickly. People are going to absorb themselves, sometimes too deeply, in virtual spaces. (Actually this has been happening for decades.) Propaganda will have many new avenues. But what’s better to combat it than a much more knowledgeable population?

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it’s a safe bet, though, that one of those profound, A.I.-induced changes will be a massive increase the human capacity for learning and understanding.

For many people, on a personal level, it will feel like the Berlin Wall coming down. We’re about to catch up on a lot of missed opportunities.

***

This is hardly a brilliant insight, but I’ve noticed that making small, “good” decisions early in the day makes the whole day work better. If I wake up and avoid screen time and loafing around, I get more and better work done, I make more sensible meal choices, I’m less needy and thought-addled, I don’t get as tired in the afternoon, and so on.

The exact causal paths here aren’t necessarily traceable. Maybe my procrastination neurons miss their usual early-morning workout, so I become less inclined to unlock my phone reflexively, which means I get more done and feel better about myself, so the future feels brighter and more within my control, so I don’t hit a wall of motivation loss at 2:30.

There countless variables involved, but the clear pattern is that good begets more good. This seems like a general principle that affects everyone.

It works the other way too, of course. Bad choices beget bad choices. In a moment of weakness you order cheesecake on DoorDash at 9:40 pm. You proceed to sleep poorly, and wake up distracted and screen-hungry. You start late, get annoyed at the first setback at work, compromise your afternoon plans, and feel bad about it, perhaps leading eventually to some evening ennui and more cake delivery.

Everything we do has echoes, in other words. Our choices affect our moods, attitude, and well-being, which in turn affect our choices.

This internal looping mechanism allows behavioral “snowballs” to form. Poor choices gather more poor choices as they barrel downhill. Midnight cake leads to cranky mornings leads to coffee abuse leads to irritability leads to workplace stress leads to more midnight cake, with many incidental collisions setting off new snowballs the whole way.

There are good snowballs too. Filling half your plate with vegetables for a week leads to more energy leads to more patient interactions leads to better work performance leads to a confidence boost leads to an actually viable exercise routine leads to yet more layers of ease and agency.

Because these two types of snowball counteract each other in many ways, either the good or bad type of snowballing tends to dominate at any given time. A strong meditation practice can’t abide depraved amounts of screen time, and vice-versa. You might flipflop between slumps and winning streaks, as opposing snowballing patterns cycle through your life. Sometimes it takes a while even to become aware of which way you’ve been snowballing.

Perhaps some people (normal people?) have a different sort of mechanism than I do, a counter-snowballing feature which prevents either type from getting too big. Maybe when some people start to feel too bad, the bad feeling inclines them towards healthier behaviors, rather than towards reinforcing the bad ones.

That’s hard for me to imagine. At any given time, I’m caught up some variation of one of these two currents. The difference is very distinct. It’s either the happy-side cascade, with its prudent dietary choices, reasonable bedtimes, and general productivity, or the self-sabotage-side cascade, with its outrageous procrastination, excessive screen time, and overconsumption.

The dark cascade can get pretty entrenched for me. Gravity is way stronger on that side. When I start to snowball that way, I stay up later, I eat worse food, and I say yes to alcohol more often. Procrastination becomes pathological. Meditation feels less intuitive, and I skip it or half-ass it. I become less focused, less organized, and dramatically less productive. I become more needy for stimulation, glued to screens, discombobulated, slow to begin and finish anything. I feel bad about myself, and seek comfort from more bad snowball stuff. This can last weeks or months.

As usual, I have no idea whether or how much my experience resonates with you, reader. I know I am an extreme case in many ways. But if this snowball phenomenon does sound familiar to you, I’ve identified two general approaches for getting back to the good side. One is more intuitive than the other, but I believe it’s the less effective one.

Two Philosophies for Righting the Ship

The natural temptation, once the bad snowball has become big and awful enough, is to try to steer it into a brick wall. You don’t want steady improvement; you want total and utter regime change. All the shenanigans will stop as of this Monday morning, you decree. App blockers on all my stupid apps! My alarm will go off at 6:00 sharp, from outside of the bedroom! A single boiled egg for breakfast! Two-cup daily coffee ration, then herbal tea only!

This can sort of work. Past self-destruction begets future self-destruction, and if you can disrupt even some of the bad momentum, and force some good momentum, many bad choices will no longer follow naturally. After two consecutive weeks of evening junk food, a one-day break can give you the best sleep you’ve had in a while, which might set you up for the best morning you’ve had in a while.

To make sure the change takes, you do this in every area of life at once – fitness, diet, relationships, hobbies, workflow — sending bold new habits rippling across your inner world, revolutionizing the status quo for good. Finally and forever there will be no snowballs but happy snowballs, which is your birthright and true nature.

Aside from the reckless idealism here, the main problem, as with all violent regime changes, is instability. Everything gets disrupted, because all the old systems have to break at once. Suddenly every office is manned by someone new, and they don’t know what they’re doing. Nothing that needs to happen has any momentum or tradition behind it. You’re trying to a create a new, functioning (inner) state with nothing but utopian slogans and a high-minded five-year plan. Opportunists slip into the abundant cracks, and start serving their own interests. Soon the transportation commission is controlled by railroad tycoons, the army has become a religious cult, and you’re eating Froot Loops because you ran out of eggs one morning. Soon you’re planning another revolution.

The better method, I think, is to avoid the regime-change approach and instead focus on controlling certain vital institutions. You identify one or two key elements of the bad snowball, and set a new, uncompromising standard around them. Your midnight cheesecake program, despite its popularity, is probably an ideal candidate for abrupt defunding. Same with the now customary after-work cocktail, which, studies say, correlates with imprudent DoorDash initiatives.

These two interventions alone could create lots of positive knock-on effects, if applied consistently. You can also pick one or two “good snowball” elements and commit to making them happen. Re-implementing the old lunch-hour walk policy, if that has worked for you before, might serve as a strong lynchpin for good days; it reliably yields better afternoons, which lead to better evenings, which lead to better sleep, and so on. It’s hard for any of those things to improve without seeing improvements elsewhere. The snowball effect can be a great ally, if its potency is respected.

The lynchpin approach also helps you avoid perhaps the greatest downside of the regime-change approach. Aside from the idealism and instability, there’s a tendency to wait for the right moment for your coup. So much has to happen for it to go right, so you can’t feasibly do it now — you’ll begin the revolution on Monday, or after this current project is over. The New Year would be the best time, really. You have every reason to put off your inflection moment, when you know it’s going to be painful, and when your consolation for waiting is another piece of cheesecake.

***

Snowball photo by Marty Harrington

I never threw a party until I was in my late 30s. I was always afraid people wouldn’t show up, or, even worse, that they would show up and quickly want to leave.

It felt like this particular fate could not be risked, which meant party-throwing was off the table. Other people could throw parties I guess, but I could not.

“No parties may be held in this lifetime” is quite a high cost to pay, just to protect yourself from a very occasional sort of pain. Yes it feels bad to have a lame party, but does it make sense to station yourself forever outside of the party-having population, solely to avoid having to feel that bad feeling two or three times in your life?

When I did start hosting parties, the usual outcome was that they were tremendously fun. Only one was genuinely disappointing. I had unwittingly scheduled it on the same day as another, more elaborately planned party. Several loyal attendees also got called into work or got sick and/or injured. Still, five or six excellent people showed up, including some who had gone to both parties. We sat around the kitchen table eating snacks and collaborating hilariously on a crossword.

Of course, now that I’ve actually “suffered” this long-avoided type of pain, it barely registers as a meaningful risk anymore. Why did I give up so much to protect against it?

I think this situation is common – to be giving up way too much in an effort to protect against certain kinds of pain. When protecting yourself from a certain unpleasant possibility becomes non-negotiable, you’re liable to suffer in other ways, often to a much greater degree.

For example, I used to dread small talk so much that I avoided meeting new people altogether. As we all know, small talk can be tedious or awkward, especially if you’re not good at it. It can create a kind of pain you might be tempted to avoid. But treating that as an unacceptable risk can result in far more pain, just in different forms.

I lived in fear of being introduced to any new person. My stomach sank when a friend would bring along someone I didn’t know. I especially feared the moment when that friend would excuse themselves to go the restroom, forcing me to make conversation with the stranger. Because I avoided these situations at all costs, I didn’t develop the skills to handle those situations. I declined most invitations to social events to pre-empt the possibility of experiencing this kind of pain.

Avoiding this one occasional type of pain created an entire hell-pattern of its own – the chronic pain of loneliness, alienation, self-esteem issues, and dependence on others. This is a ridiculous price to pay, in genuine suffering, for protection against the first kind. It’s like paying a billion dollars for an extended warranty on your laptop.

This is what happens when you avoid something “at any cost.” It ends up costing you a lot.

Most people wouldn’t get stuck in the same place I did, but there are many ways to fall into a massively lopsided pain-for-pain exchange. I’d guess each of us is caught up in at least a few of them.

Regular exercise is as close we have to a magic bullet for promoting overall health and disease prevention. If you exercise regularly, you feel better almost all the time, you look better, you gain confidence and energy, you sleep better, you live years longer, and those years are easier in many ways. But it requires a modest amount of vigorous manual labor each week, which is not always pleasant. Avoiding this modest amount of discomfort can literally take years off your life and lower its quality. But at least you avoided the displeasure of lifting a dumbbell.

In order to prevent the pain of feeling deprived occasionally, people spend money they don’t have and suffer constant financial stress.

In order not to risk the occasional unpleasant reaction, a person might get the same haircut for 20 years even though they feel stagnant and uncool every day.

In order to avoid the experience of making bad drawings for a few months, a person may never explore their interest in art, and always feel envious of people who do.

They get more subtle than this. The person who gets their friend to print things for them for years, rather than confronting the slightly intimidating task of buying a printer. The guy (me) who lives with a leaky faucet for years because he will not take an afternoon to figure out how to fix it. The person who never goes to the most interesting areas of town because they avoid parallel parking.

There’s also the person (and there are now millions of them) who avoids even a single minute of boredom or non-stimulation, and is utterly addicted to their phone.

Horrible deals abound.

As strong as these needlessly painful habits can be, they are choices, and we can at any moment switch the kind of pain we’re subjecting ourselves to.

It just takes a moment of adventurousness. I will risk embarrassment and do something new with my hair. I will get familiar with feeling of physical exertion, and become fit and strong for the first time in my adult life. I will learn the ins and outs of small talk, confronting its temporary pains, and free myself to socialize normally. Instead of getting annoyed by my sink six times daily, I will locate instructions on installing a faucet and carefully follow them.

Growth often takes exactly that form: choosing a different kind of pain. When you’ve had enough of the pain of loneliness and alienation, you can choose to risk the pain of rejection and awkwardness. And you might find that that’s a much better (and less painful) choice. When you’ve had enough of the pain of financial stress, you can choose the pain of budgeting and self-restraint, and you might discover just how much better it’s possible to feel.

Choosing a different kind of pain can end a long era of chronic suffering in your life, and sometimes the only cost is a few unpleasant minutes here or there. All you have to do is occasionally get curious about the kinds of pain you haven’t been choosing.  

***

Pool photo by Eric Nopanen

When I read Jane Eyre, I stalled for a full year between the opening part at the boarding school and the rest of the book.

I tend to dislike boarding-school openings in books, but the real problem was I found myself having to reread too many of Charlotte Brontë’s winding, multi-clausal, colon-encrusted sentences. Her writing is beautiful, but some sentences contained so many twists and detours that I would often lose the flow of them and have to take a second go. The book was clearly a special one, but whenever I looked at it I got tired at the thought of diving back in.

I finally regained traction by reading it aloud. I finished the whole book this way, which made it an unfettered joy. Because each of its complex Victorian sentences had to pass through my mouth, I found it easy to stay with their meaning and structure. The reading was slower, but much smoother, with very little doubling back. It felt like I was finally driving in the appropriate gear for the terrain.

The second time I read a whole novel aloud was Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, and it was for a different reason. All of Welsh’s books are written in heavy Scottish dialect — 350 pages of this:

“Ah found masel lyin tae her, tae justify Begbie’s behaviour. Fuckin horrible. Ah jist couldnae handle her outrage, n the hassle thit went wi it. It wis easy tae lie, as we all did wi Begbie in our circle.”

There was no way I’d get through this without reading it aloud, and of course it would be absurd to do it in my normal accent, so I read the whole thing in my best Scottish lilt, keeping my voice down so my downstairs neighbor wouldn’t think I’ve lost my mind.

As with Jane Eyre, reading this book aloud made it a delight and I finished it quickly. Once again, it felt like I’d found the right gear for traveling efficiently through the text.

It occurred to me only recently that I should use this gear more often. In fact, it might be the superior way to read most of the time, at least when there’s no need be silent or maximize speed. Reading aloud, I feel more immersed in the text, and rarely get distracted. Having to pass every word through your own voice imparts, or reveals, a new dimension to the book. It makes you give physical form, and a definite timing, to the contours of the words within their sentences, and sentences within their paragraphs. You’re no longer just decoding and absorbing the story, you’re now expressing it. You feel closer to what the author is saying, because now you’re saying it for them.

I love reading, but I am immensely distractible while I read. Soon after starting, something disconnects in my attention. One part of my mind continues following and subvocalizing the words, while another part has gone off to reconsider something I read earlier. Before I notice, I’m lost, and I have to backtrack a paragraph or two.

Unless the book is utterly gripping, my attention keeps sliding off the meaning of the words like this. If you can imagine riding a bicycle whose main gear has no proper teeth to grip the chain, just half-formed bumps, riding that bike is how it feels to read most of the time. Sometimes it catches and pulls me along for a good bit, but sometimes I can stay stuck on the same page for ten or fifteen minutes.

In my case this is mostly an ADHD thing, but it has certainly worsened in the smartphone era, and I’ve heard others make similar complaints. Once-avid readers say they can’t finish books anymore. There are countless threads in Reddit’s r/books subreddit about this. We’re losing our ability to focus, and with so many low-friction competitors for our attention, the relatively effortful pastime of pleasure reading is often one of the first things to go.

These days I’m reading aloud whenever I have a chance. For me, most of the time, it’s a just better and more reliable gear to be in. It’s slower than reading silently, but the ride is always a smooth and enjoyable one, with little backsliding. Obviously I’m not going to do it in a coffee shop, but even in places where I’m semi-audible (such as in a hammock at the park) I can still do it at a whisper.

Part of me feels ashamed reading aloud at all though, because I’d always been taught that reading aloud is for children and dum-dums. You read aloud only until you learn to read for real.

This idea is a very recent assertion, though. Historically, reading aloud has been much more common. Capable readers used to be rarer, so they frequently had audiences, so reading was commonly thought of as a social, or at least physical, activity. Even scholars often did their reading aloud when they were alone as late as the 19^th century.

Eventually, a social shift towards individualism and privacy, the advent of public education systems, and more reader-friendly typesetting practices pushed the trend toward silent reading as the norm.

But those were all pretty recent developments. Before the printing press, most reading was done aloud. Famously, St. Augustine once wrote about a fellow monk’s most unusual habit of reading silently:

“When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present—for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced—I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise.”

Augustine’s puzzlement here suggests that at one point, reading was expected to be an embodied, active process, not a passive way of absorbing information. Reading meant saying what the author has said, rather than just observing it.

Obviously silent reading is possible and worthwhile, but it isn’t a complete substitute for reading aloud. I suspect that in our transition to silent reading, the typical level of reader connection to the text has declined, and has never recovered.

Just try reading a good passage aloud, and notice how much more alive the text becomes, how much more impactful the words feel. The commas breathe. Parentheticals stand cleanly aside from their host sentences. Terminal words reverberate.

It’s great that Ambrose and other pioneers showed us we can read without speech, but I no longer believe that it’s simply a better, more sophisticated way of reading. I think it’s a more convenient, but generally worse way to take in the text.

There are studies demonstrating greater comprehension from reading aloud, which is unsurprising, but it offers something even better than that. When you don’t just comprehend, but pronounce the ideas in the text, you put yourself in a better position from which to connect with the author’s mind, which is arguably the whole point of reading. You’re not only receiving their thoughts, you’re running them through your own apparatus of expression. You’re trying them on to see how they feel in your body, how they sound in the air.

It’s good to have access to both gears. I’m just sorry I relied on only one of them for so long. Reading aloud may at first feel weirdly slow and exacting for a content-addled 21st-century person, but perhaps the ability to take in ideas in a slow and exacting way is just what we’re missing.

***

Let’s say you want to cross a river.

There’s no bridge, because it’s 3000 BC and you are a nomadic goat herder. You’ve never seen a bridge that wasn’t just a log over a creek. Crossing a big river is something you haven’t figured out. Maybe nobody has.

You could maybe make a raft, but it’s hard to find suitable wood for that, and you don’t know if it would be safe. Are there man-eating water-lizards lurking out there? Will the current dash you on some rocks before you get across?

You never cross the river.  

Say you want to learn accounting. You’d love to be able to track every penny that comes in and out of your life in a great big ledger. It would satisfy your desire for order and efficiency, and probably save you a lot of money. You could even provide accounting services for businesses in your village.

The problem is it’s 1590, and you are an illiterate tavern owner. There’s maybe one guy in a nearby town who might know about accounting, and the town is eight miles away and you don’t have a horse. Also, that guy is a monk and he has no reason to devote any time to teaching you accounting.

Basically it’s off the table. Maybe in the next life.  

Say you want to record your own music. It’s 1960, so you know it’s a thing that can be done.

You have some vinyl records and look at them. How do they encode music into those tiny grooves? You know they “cut” records using special machines of some kind, and your record player can read them and play the music. You know there are microphones and cords and tape-recorder things involved.

This is not enough information. You have no clue where to begin. Clearly somebody out there knows though. There are people who understand this esoteric art, and they are human too.

You go to the library, and the librarian does find you a book on recording music! You learn some terms, and write down some of the necessary equipment. You begin to diagram the process, but there’s so much you don’t get. This book was written for someone who already knows something about the process, and you don’t have anyone who can answer your questions. You don’t learn anywhere near enough to make a record.

You daydream about getting a bus to Nashville, befriending some musicians, and finally gaining access to this world of people who know how to record music. But you have a job and other obligations, so it is not at all practical to do that. You live and die without ever learning how to record music.

Until not long ago, humans ran into knowledge barriers all the time. It was hard to figure out how to do a thing you’ve never done before. You generally had to find someone who knew how to do the thing, and convince them to teach you. You probably had to travel to where they were, and live there for a while yourself.

Today, whatever it is you want to do, you can find out pretty quickly how people do that thing.

If you want to cook a turkey, build a shed, or become a lawyer, you can acquire a list of the basic steps, from someone who probably knows what they’re talking about, in about ten or fifteen minutes.

You can easily get follow-up questions answered. You can Google your question or ask an AI. You can go on Reddit and post your question to an entire group of economists, carpenters, musicians, accountants, or pastry chefs.

You can do all this while you sit in a bathroom stall on your break at work.

You don’t even have to look through any musty textbooks. People are constantly publishing content that spells out exactly how to do a thing, in the most user-friendly way possible. In fifteen minutes, you can find the exact steps to changing your car’s engine air filter (any model), getting certain weeds out of your garden, beating the original Donkey Kong, getting into the crime-scene-cleanup business, inventing your own language, or planning a renaissance-themed wedding.

Whatever it is you want to do, somebody has already figured it out for you.

This is an incredible state of affairs, and it’s so new I think we don’t quite appreciate it. Anyone with an internet connection has essentially limitless access to good quality how-to knowledge. We’ve had this technology for less than a generation.

Can you imagine what anybody from even the recent past would give up for this amenity alone? If you were an American who wanted to learn to meditate in 1947, you’d have to get on a boat to India, and roam the streets of Bombay trying to get someone to refer you to a trustworthy guru. You might die trying to find out.

It’s getting easier all the time, too. You can use an AI like Claude or ChatGPT to break down any task at all into any number of steps, and ask as many follow-up questions as you need. It will only get easier and easier and easier to learn to do whatever it is you want to do.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do the steps, but the know-how is available — if something’s stopping you, it isn’t cluelessness. In an afternoon, you can generate a real plan to do basically anything you would find worth doing, and get yourself in touch with people who have already done it. This is true even if the thing you want to do is extremely weird or specialized, like making a cake that looks exactly like a hamburger, or forging a bronze battleaxe with your family crest on it.

There are still many factors that can impede your endeavors — physical ability, opportunity cost, impatience, etc. — but not knowing how is unlikely to be one of them.

The how question has always been the first and one of the sturdiest barriers to human endeavor, and with few exceptions it’s basically gone.

How on earth do people braid their hair like that? How do people become highly-paid software developers? How do you safely rehabilitate a knee injury? How do you get grease stains out of cotton? How do you play Für Elise on piano? How do you type an umlaut? How do they make such amazing banana bread? How does a person avoid getting ripped off at a mechanic’s shop? What do you do when you encounter a bear? How do they make such amazing bread?

Imagine somebody had figured all of that out for you. They have!

***

South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth

If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back to so-and-so. Read that health and safety thing for work.

If you were to make a list of things you want to get done in the next two years, it would probably be more personal and more empowering. Learn to record my own music. Double my client base. Set up my dream office. Write my screenplay. The list would contain fewer things you must do –- since, by definition, those things will get done anyway — and more of what you actually want to do with your life.

We usually call these optional aspirations goals, but doing so immediately introduces a few problems that make them less likely to happen.  

The first problem is that goals are things you expect to do later, because they aren’t strictly necessary, and you’re currently busy with the to-do list stuff. You’ll do them, soon, but not quite yet. There must first be a lull in the noise and stress of normal life, in order to make goal-achieving feasible.

The other problem with goals is that, outside of sports, “goal” has become an uninspiring, institutional word. Goals are things your teachers and managers have for you. Goals are made of quotas and Key Performance Indicators. As soon as I write the word “goals” on a sheet of paper I get drowsy.

Yet the wiser part of you knows that to live a great life, you need to do goal-like things, and do them on your own initiative. You need to form your own aspirations, define their completion criteria, and work towards them systematically. And these efforts have to happen now, not in some hypothetical later-state; they must happen alongside regular, busy, workaday life, or they won’t happen. I’ve said all this before.

Still, the tendency is to wait for a better, less cluttered stretch of time to appear before you do that. You will execute your great plans as soon as life becomes a little easier and more spacious than it is now.

This is exactly backwards. Forming and achieving aspirations is how life gets easier and more spacious. It’s how people build skills, gain experience, invent things, declutter their homes and lives, start businesses, and enrich the mind with art, exploration, and creative work.

Last year I launched a pilot program for helping people do that – achieve a significant personal victory, over eight weeks, while you live your normal workaday life.

I called it One Big Win — the idea being that if you can pull off a personal win like this once, without waiting for better life conditions, you know you can do it again and again using the same method.

And the next time will be easier. Each win could add a new and empowering condition to your life: new skills, time-saving systems, organized spaces, a new income stream, more possibility in one way or another.

The Quest Mentality

The conventional term for this sort of personal campaign is a “short-term goal.” But I suggested to OBW participants that they drop the G-word in favor of something more fanciful: the quest.

If that sounds a bit whimsical, hear me out. Whereas “goal” has become a tired and bloodless descriptor for the (supposed) intention to do something great, the word quest instills the right mentality for achieving a real-life personal victory:

A quest is an adventure, and you expect it to be one. You expect a quest to take you into a new and unfamiliar landscape. You expect there to be puzzles, surprises, perils, and curious encounters. A bridge you counted on will be out. You’ll meet an interesting stranger on the path. You’ll hear wolves howling at night. This is all part of the fun. The goal mentality frames this stuff as setbacks, problems, pains – stuff in the way of the goal.

A quest changes you, not just your situation. Goals are practical attempts to change your circumstances. A quest is personally transformative – the endeavor itself shapes who you are, and what you’re capable of. It’s not only the reward that does this, it’s your inevitable encounters with the unfamiliar, and the new capabilities you gain as you handle these encounters. You don’t just get the novel started, you become a writer. You don’t just declutter the house, you get your house in order.

A quest has a dragon to slay (and it’s inside you). In all worthy quests, you (the hero) at some point will face a fearsome beast that seems at first like it will be your doom. Maybe there’s a tough conversation you have to have, or a tricky concept you have to learn. From a distance, the dragon always seems unconquerable, yet the hero finds a way. In epic fantasy tales, the dragon is always symbolic — the hero defeats it by overcoming some inner sense of limitation, which they had believed was a permanent flaw.

Also, the dragon always guards a hoard of treasure – your life-expanding reward for overcoming this particular inner limitation.

A quest can change the world. Everything great ever achieved required someone to overcome an internal obstacle. Society is built from realized human aspirations. Your project may be humble, but the way it transforms you is a big deal. It will bring more capability into the world as a whole.

This way of thinking about goals is what I call the quest mentality. In OBW, the Block method, which you may already know, is your trusty walking stick, your magic wand, the sword at your side. It also helps to have people questing alongside you (just ask Frodo).

In the first run of OBW, many people remarked that the quest mentality, and particularly the dragon, was the most powerful part of it. The goal mentality sees the dragon as bad, but in the quest mentality, it’s the key, or at least a clue, to becoming the version of you who actually achieves goals, and no longer waits for a better time.

The surprising thing about the dragon is that it doesn’t actually want to fight you. It wants to frighten you into going home, or not starting at all. Many participants chose a particular day to tackle their “dragon,” and found that it only took two or three 25-minute Blocks to properly slay the thing — it was scary to actually show up for the battle, but as long as they did, the dragon was no match for them.

The Quests People Did

Here are some of the quests people took on:

• Declutter the whole house
• Record an EP
• Prep six months’ worth of lessons for my students
• Set up an artist’s workspace
• Finish two short stories
• Gain a basic knowledge of classical music
• Fill every page in a sketchbook with drawings
• Complete a classical guitar program
• Make an “If I get hit by a bus” folder for my family
• Get rid of everything I don’t need
• Learn a new programming language
• Finalize retirement plans
• Create a mosaic wall surrounding a fireplace
• Compose two original pieces of music
• Get rid of hoarded possessions and invite people for coffee at the end
• Start a podcast and launch the first episode
• Set up a biodiverse garden on the balcony
• Build an app for a client
• Get up to speed on my financial position and make new budget
• Set up a home recording studio
• Write and submit a research proposal

You can perhaps imagine, for some of these, which part was the dragon – the crux moment, often close to the end, where you really want to delay, compromise, or wait for a better time. It was really cool to see people conquer their dragons.

Once you slay your first one, you know how the dragon operates. It still inspires fear, and the fear is real, but you know it can’t actually stop you. One person I spoke to today is on her fourth big win since last winter’s inaugural session.

*** Update (8/24) The group is full and registration is now CLOSED for this session. There will be another cohort in 2025. ***

I’m running the second One Big Win group session in just a few weeks, and registration is open as of right now.

The official group start date is August 26^th, but once you’re registered you can begin on any day you choose.

Selecting a personal quest is part of the course, so you don’t have to have one in mind already. The whole thing will be done in eight weeks, and you don’t have to wait for life to stop being busy first.

Sign up now | How does it work?

The program is still in beta so there is still a large (~$60) discount for participants this time.

The eight weeks will pass by anyway (and then another eight weeks, and so on). You can have something genuinely exciting to show for it, and a method for doing it again and again. New landscapes await.

***

An assassin is coming to kill you! At midnight tonight! Unless you do 100 pushups first, that is.

If this were true, you would do the pushups, no question, no problem. Any motivation issues would evaporate, thanks to your assassin. If the assassin did this every weekday, you’d have amazing pecs, even if you didn’t want them. Your fitness would become an inevitable result of circumstance.

The real question is how to get yourself to do 100 pushups, or some other rewarding feat, without an assassin coming to kill you. If your amygdala isn’t getting forcibly activated by an Anton Chigurh-like force, you have to rely on something else.

But why is that “something else” so much less dependable? Why is it so hard to just do the thing we think is best?

Someone emailed me a while ago and said, “Hey Dave, I notice what you mostly write about is self-control. Why all the talk about self-control?”

I do have my particular struggles with self-control, but I also regard the battle for self-control as the central theme of human history. Everything people argue about, all the news, all the political discourse, all the gossip and outrage, all the big religions, all the punditry and proselytizing — it all centers on what some person, or all people, should do or refrain from doing. All humans care about is good and bad, and the voluntary human actions that make good and bad happen.

Another word for this fixation on human self-control is morality. Everyone agrees that it matters what we do. A given person, at a given moment, might do a good thing or bad thing, and a lot hinges on that – much more than just that person’s own fate.

Other species don’t obsess over morality. I assume dogs and dolphins and other animals have consciences, emotions, and empathy, but they don’t agonize over hypothetical future states of their lives or their societies. Elephants don’t etch timeless elephant maxims into stone tablets, or publish elephant newspapers about the scandalous behavior of other elephants.

Humans underwent something unique in our development. We evolved, or were granted, the ability to imagine circumstances that don’t yet exist. This allowed us to understand ourselves as having multiple paths into the future, depending on our actions. Because some of these futures are way better than others, we really care about which actions are taken, whether it’s our own choice or someone else’s.

Not coincidentally, we’re also the only species to have cities, advanced tools, trade, literature, food production, laws, and a compounding technology tree that constantly gives us new abilities and possibilities.

After the Big Insight

This unique mental ability to contemplate a range of different fates separates us from the other animals, and puts the issue of self-control at the center of our lives.

For eons, mammals and other creatures basically operated on an approach/avoid axis. You move towards the things that make you feel good, and avoid the things that make you feel bad.

All that’s necessary to navigate this singular dimension is instinct. Instincts prod the being to move towards the Feels Good end, with its generally pro-survival outcomes, and away from the Feels Bad end and its potentially deadly outcomes. It’s a crude program, but it works well enough to keep a species going.

Note that there isn’t much for such a being to contemplate. At all times, you’re on a one-dimensional road and your feelings tell you which way to go.

Natural selection changes the form and shape of creatures over time — the specific things they approach and avoid, and how they do that, but the basic approach-avoid program remains at the core.

Our hominid ancestors, for example, were social creatures like us, so Feels Good for them partly meant getting in good with the tribe:

But then, at some point, something crazy happened. Abstract thought develops in humans, allowing them to consider hypothetical scenarios – events that aren’t happening, but could. They could now envision multiple different ways the future might go down.

This changes everything, because now they can see that there are times when it’s advantageous to approach a thing your instincts say to avoid, or avoid a thing your instincts say to approach.

For example, a human might reason that even though approaching a woolly mammoth fills the body with fear chemicals that tell you to run away screaming, successfully hunting it could result in the biggest score your tribe ever had, and your everlasting fame.

Similarly, refraining from doing a thing you want to do, such as hoarding all the gathered berries for yourself instead of sharing them, might result in a healthier tribe with less infighting.

Humans Eat the Fruit and Are Never the Same

What humans have discovered here is the possibility of making sacrifices. As hard as it is, you can give up things you covet, and you can move towards things you fear, even as your instincts beg you not to. And the rewards can be tremendous.

After this development, humans technically no longer need the assassin to force them to do the hundred pushups. They aren’t stuck on the approach-avoid axis anymore. Instead of operating by what feels good and feels bad, they can begin to discern what is good and is bad — independent of their feelings — with respect to their survival and well-being.

This is a whole new value system, and it blows things wide open. Humans can now travel along a second, perpendicular axis, which is much tougher to navigate, but is far more relevant to their ability to flourish.

The landscape becomes much more complex, and much more fraught. Approach-avoid is still strong as ever, but there’s now this perpendicular set of concerns, which has perhaps even higher stakes, and affords many more possibilities.

Some things Feel Good and are Good, but quite often doing an act of Good is difficult and counter-instinctual.

Privileging Good action over Feels Good action is hard, but can be deeply rewarding. It allows not only for voluntary pushups, but for new kinds of co-operation, generosity, endurance, meticulousness, trust between peers, and personal achievement. People can now deliberately confront their fears, save for a rainy day, and live by rules and codes.

Having people in your tribe who could wield this instinct-defying magic, and teach others to do it, would massively improve your chances of survival. It would utterly change what survival even looked like.

Seeing how much better this kind of wisdom could make society, people would naturally want to model the Good behaviors for their children, and warn them away from Bad ones. They would tell stories around the fire intended to highlight this difference. They would build shrines to honor this idea of Good-seeking, and invent symbols to remind people of it.

Some people would think about this powerful new axis all the time, and try to explain it to each other. What granted us this ability? What is this all-seeing force behind everything that seemingly rewards sacrifice and discipline, and punishes selfishness and cowardice? Clearly there’s something out there, maybe in the stars, that just knows when you’ve done something un-Good, even if nobody saw you do it. Something out there sees your industriousness and bravery, and rewards you and your people with good fortune.

Now in Book Form

Wise and trusted sages, in many societies, would eventually collate their best instructional stories and dictums into an authoritative collection of literature. Such a collection might be seen as so vital, so pertinent to the fate of humanity, that people just call it The Book.

There were probably many such Books, but only a few got so popular that people still read them.

The most famous of such books begins with exactly the scenario I described above, just without the Darwinian framing.

It tells of the very first people, who were once like the other animals — no sense of time, no worries, just instinctual living. Then their troublesome curiosity gained them a permanent new dimension of awareness. They could now see, for better or worse, an ever-branching tree of possible futures, a kind of knowledge once possessed only by the all-knowing, all-judging Force.

After that, they don’t get to live with the animals anymore. They get cast out of this timeless, abundant place, this straightforward way of being, into human history and its agonizing struggle with morality.

Their first children illustrate that struggle perfectly. They had two boys, who both understood the importance of what’s now called Good and Evil, but the younger brother really got it and the older one seemingly just got the basic idea. The great guiding Force, now officially called God, favored the younger brother, so the older one, perplexed at their differing outcomes, succumbed to his base impulses and murdered his brother with a stone.

The rest of The Book goes on to illustrate, using more stories, the tragedy of our species mostly not getting the big insight, mostly being like the well-meaning bad brother, but still having some awareness that there is a far better path than the default one. There’s a light you can see, or feel, and therefore navigate by, even through a driving sandstorm.

We struggle with it because it’s literally the hardest thing possible. Good is sometimes easy, but often tricky, counter-instinctual, unattractive, and uncomfortable. When the “storm” is bad we easily end up getting turned around and headed straight for Feel Good, because we always know where it is.

It’s especially easy to get sidetracked by Feels Good if you regard yourself as a zealous advocate of this or that Book, as a knower of moral rules. The Book is just literature, an extremely influential story collection pointing us to the immense potential of the Is Good axis, but some people take it literally, or self-identify as a Good Person among the not-goods, which can only lead to extremely confused expressions of approach-avoid.

Religion’s successor, political philosophy, often leads to the same mistake: becoming a self-identified Good Person against the not-goods. Doubt of one’s own “good” status is unusual in political discourse.

Good is a new capacity for humans, so our efforts usually get co-opted by Feels Good. Our various moral projects, religious and secular, have achieved some real Good, but most of them degrade into more Feels-Good-driven activity, devoid of self-reflection. Sloganeering feels good. Performative moralizing feels good. Being accepted by the in-group feels good. Smiting the out-group feels good. So it goes.

All of that is the broad view though. What we’re really concerned with is how to do a bunch of pushups without a hitman coming to kill you. This is the great spiritual question.

It remains a genuine mystery, mostly. Do you know how to always do the right thing, the Good thing? Sometimes we pull it off and sometimes we don’t. No wonder they write 700,000-word books about this question and study them for centuries.

What we do know for sure about Good is that it’s possible. The light is real, and we have some capacity to navigate by it. Each of us has seen it. We’ve been it. Civilization is built on this possibility, which might be the most important human discovery since we figured out how to stand up and walk on two legs.

Some say we shouldn’t have eaten the fruit. But we did. We have to learn to walk this new walk, and we’re just getting started.

***

Doing Things is Good

Getting more done can be hugely rewarding, but some of us aren’t natural go-getters. If productivity always feels like an uphill battle for you, I made a simple tool that can help.

How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged is currently on sale.

[What is How to Do Things?]

Images from Miramax, Pixabay, imgflip, Wikimedia commons. Illustrations by David Cain.

***

I know how to replace a kitchen faucet. If you have a janky old faucet that needs to be replaced with a smoothly operating new one, I can do that for you or show you how.

This wasn’t always true. It became true May 27, 2024, after pulling everything out of the under-sink cupboard, lying uncomfortably on my back inside it, and fiddling my way through several sets of internet-derived instructions.

The exact moment in which I became capable of faucet-replacing is hard to pin down precisely, but it was a real moment in time, sometime that afternoon, in that sweaty and contorted position under the sink.

Just before that, I had been dismayed to discover that the various hoses and hardware coming out of the fixture didn’t correspond to the ones in the instructional YouTube video. I could easily have abandoned the mission there, telling myself I’d “come back to it later” or “figure something else out.” Instead, I chose to lay uncomfortably a little longer, pondering the problem, testing my hunches. Within an hour I had a sparkling new tap that worked perfectly.

Now that I’ve done it once, the mechanics of faucet installation seem straightforward and self-evident, and I’m confident I could do it a hundred times over.  

This new skill is one of thousands I’ve picked up over the years, including making a stir-fry, calming down an upset person, calculating compound interest, hosting a dinner party, and polishing leather boots, to name only a few. Like each of these capabilities, the skill of faucet-replacing will reduce certain constraints on my life, add ease and/or pleasure, and save me some amount of time, money, and frustration, basically forever.

You may have different capabilities than those, but all of us have a lot of them. Each one you gain pays dividends for life. But you have to learn each one manually. They don’t appear in your life off-screen, while you’re sleeping. They appear as a result of your response to certain, consciously experienced moments — limit-testing, confounding moments like the one I had under the sink — when you just as easily could have backed off.

If instead of treating the difficulty as a hard boundary, you move consciously into the fence, into the awkward, groundless feeling of not-yet-knowing, you might just emerge with a new capability.

Gains of territory made here are gains for good. Because you pushed on this one part of the fence, until the fence moved, you now get to reside in a larger and more varied natural habitat. In this new territory, you’re able to ride a bike without training wheels, host a great party, complete a short story, or make small talk with a stranger. You’ve added a new colorful landscape to the area you get to live in. What was once without is now within.

A new bit of plumbing knowledge may sound like a small thing, and it is, but it’s turned a many-times-daily annoyance into a many-times-daily pleasure, and might save me a few thousand dollars in plumbing bills over the course of my life. And it’s only one capability among thousands, earned in one sweaty afternoon.

Life is riddled with problems and challenges, which means life is riddled with these sorts of crux moments, in which you have a chance to push on the fence, and maybe move it outward. You’ve been through so many already. Everything you know how to do – cook an omelet, mow the lawn, walk upright – you once didn’t. There were specific moments in which you pushed past your previous limit of capability, out of opportunity or necessity, and expanded into a new space. The fence used to be way behind you.

And so if expansions of capability are basically permanent, and they happen in moments when you act against the gravity of habit and familiarity, imagine the immense difference between two possible versions of yourself: one who recognizes and exploits such moments, and one who succumbs to gravity whenever possible.

There were certainly many moments when you didn’t push on the fence, but could have. The fence in these places might now seem like actual personal limits. I can’t do math. I can’t earn much more than this. I can’t be open and gregarious.

Ideally, you’d have a reliable way of cranking yourself through these crux moments and on to the other side – a hill-climbing gear to kick into, a nitro boost of some sort. We know that all-out, all-the-time effort isn’t feasible. Energy levels and mood fluctuate. However, being able to engage in an uncompromising 5, 15, or 30 minutes of hard fence-pushing, for those decisive crux moments, would result in many more of these victories, and a much freer and more capable You.

How to Push

In Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, he suggests a deceptively simple practice for strengthening your patience, regardless of what’s happening around you. Throughout your day, you perform short, intentional, timed periods of patience.

You can start with as little as five minutes and build up your capacity for patience, over time. Start by saying to yourself, “Okay, for the next five minutes I won’t allow myself to be bothered by anything. I’ll be patient.” What you’ll discover is truly amazing. Your intention to be patient, especially if you know it’s only for a short while, immediately strengthens your capacity for patience.

Try it, it works. Genuine intention is much easier to muster if you know it’s only for a short period. When you try to embody a good quality indefinitely, you know you’re going to fail or give up at some point, and in all likelihood that will be right at the crux, right when it hits peak toughness. With a short but definite “pushing” period, the start and finish time can bridge the crux moment, and let you into new territories.

This technique is analogous to my method for consistently getting work done despite having a very strong natural pull towards procrastination and compromise. You declare your “practice period,” set a timer, and spend those minutes moving directly towards the completion of your task. You do this uncompromisingly, setting aside the whole rest of the world, which you can do easily enough because it’s only for a short, predetermined stint.

I recommend actually setting a physical timer for these periods. The hard timeframe makes it clear that you will NOT consider succumbing to gravity before the buzzer goes. Until then, you push. If this pushing is uncomfortable, at least you know the discomfort is limited to this period. When the timer goes, you can stop and assess your next step.

By committing to a short, serious stretch of this pushing (25 minutes is a recognized sweet spot) you greatly de-complicate the inner battle of doing anything hard. You’re no longer constantly negotiating with yourself. You’re free of the internal threat of giving up, putting off, letting “later” handle it. You make a small and doable commitment, achieve it, and do it again if you want.

These chunks of intentional work, of pushing, are what I call “Blocks”, because you can build things out of them — permanent improvements to your life. You can knock down your to-do list one Block at a time, or you can rapidly stack them up in 20s, 50s, or 100s to achieve major personal goals.

Whatever you call them, having this sturdy little tool for spanning those fence-pushing moments can easily net you many more capabilities over time. You can almost guarantee the resolve required to finally master that tricky Excel function, get through the slow boarding school part of Jane Eyre, or do whatever else you think is worthwhile and enriching. You can systematically expand the territories you get to live your life in. And you get to keep them for good.

***

If you don’t yet use Blocks, you can learn my method in about an hour. The instructional book, How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged is currently on sale.

You can make your first Blocks today if you want. Knock off a nagging task. Take on a fun project. Fix your faucet!

Also, in August I’m going to reopen the One Big Win course for a second group. You’ll use the Block method to knock off a major personal goal, in your spare time, over eight weeks. Owners of How to Do Things will get a major discount. [More info on the course].

***

Photos by Martin Olsen, Steven Unger, Max Bohme, Ethan Olarte, Sunorwind, and Wikimedia Commons

The other day I closed a savings account at a tiny credit union branch. I expected it to take about five minutes, but the teller took so long that I started to experience time distortion.

I knew it had been at least fifteen minutes, but perhaps it was much longer. Twenty-five minutes? Forty? There was no visible clock, and I didn’t want to take out my phone. The young teller seemed to be Googling how to close an account while maintaining her professional bank teller countenance.

I waited patiently, occupying myself with an eyes-open meditation practice, and didn’t complain.

I did feel self-conscious though. There were only two tellers, and half of them were dealing with me while the other one, clearly more experienced, handled the rest of the line one at a time.

Another customer did complain, to the other teller.

She said, with an edge to her voice, “I would suggest that if a transaction is going to take more than ten minutes, it should be done by appointment,” and then went on to make a few more suggestions. The teller cited extenuating circumstances (scheduling problems, somebody is on lunch) and also said she was very sorry about that a few times.

Everyone in the tiny building heard this exchange, and it made for an uncomfortable few minutes for all of us.

I have no idea what transpired once I left, but I presume that this conspicuous instance of feedback made it a lot more likely that the young teller learned to close an account promptly that day.

After all, it’s so easy to ignore a problem and hope it fixes itself. The customer’s complaint forced an elephant into the room, which the two tellers probably couldn’t avoid addressing once the rush of customers was over.

Feedback is the only reason anything in our complicated human world actually works. Every device, business, or process begins in a rudimentary state with lots of problems. Whoever notices a problem -– a customer, user, or staff member — has to make the problem clear to the designer/operator of that thing in order for the problem to be fixed. This allows for a new version, with slightly fewer problems, and so on, until you have something much better.

The software you’re using to browse this website had to go through that process, as did every book on your bookshelf, every procedure at your workplace, every grocery item you buy, every machine you operate, basically everything you use that actually works. Civilization was built on feedback.

Feedback is even necessary for human morality. Having a conscience alone isn’t enough — most of our moral sense is formed by interacting with others. We learn, often during painful or embarrassing moments, the complex system of norms and values underpinning society: it’s not nice to insist on being first all the time; be aware of the people sitting in the row behind you when you stand up; refill the ice cube tray.

We need that kind of feedback because the reasons not to follow a given impulse (such as always steering the conversation to your favorite topic, or telling strangers about your gastrointestinal issues) aren’t always obvious, until someone makes a point of telling you.

In systems where honest feedback is stifled or forbidden, things get very ugly and dysfunctional. Authoritarian regimes are rife with inefficiencies and absurdities, because people can’t safely express their real feelings about the performance of their leaders or their systems.

Consider this anecdote about the internal atmosphere of Stalin’s USSR, from The Gulag Archipelago:

A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. […] And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes!.. Nine minutes! Ten!.. Then after eleven minutes, the director of a paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. To the last man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. […] That same night the factory director was arrested.

(For a more contemporary example of this kind of absurdity, watch this disturbing 2011 clip of North Korean citizens doing their civic duty of publicly expressing grief for Kim Jong-Il. There’s lots of wailing and pounding the ground, and no tears.)

A functional feedback cycle is necessary for things to get better, or even to begin working at all. Even in a free society, however, feedback can be so uncomfortable to give, receive, and witness, that it is sometimes never issued at all, even when it’s sorely needed. If your friend is a terrible singer who drives to every tryout for American Idol or and The Voice, someone could save them a lot of pain, effort, and money by convincing them that they have no chance of winning. But who wants to be the one to do it?

It takes courage, and tact. I know I’ve mostly abdicated this responsibility myself. Especially when I was younger, I didn’t want to embarrass anyone, or myself. Life was awkward enough.

It’s amazing how long a ridiculous state of affairs can go on simply because nobody says anything about it. I had a boss who habitually complained about his clients. He would repeat the same handful of stories about how some client had wronged him, even to other clients. I was 25 and didn’t want to tell my boss what to do, but a bolder and more responsible version of me might have saved him a lot of grief, and a lot of future problems with his clients.

Often, the more obvious and absurd a problem is, the harder it is to bring up. I had a computer programming instructor who ended seemingly every sentence of her lectures, maybe every sentence she ever spoke, with “…and that.”

“COBOL was developed in the 1950s but is still widely used in many businesses… and that.”

“This function uses a three-dimensional array… and that.”

“There’s no class next Tuesday.” [pause] “…aaand that.”

Otherwise she was completely professional and knowledgeable. She just trailed off every sentence like a teenager from a slacker movie.

It was so jarring. It was hard to even listen to what she was saying, knowing what’s coming. Of course I didn’t mention it, and neither did anybody else. We didn’t even mention it to each other. It was too embarrassing.

Giving feedback is as scary as getting it. After all, feedback isn’t always accurate or appropriate. It can be unhelpful, ill-informed, or just projection on the part of the giver. Even when it’s spot-on, the target isn’t always going to be receptive. All the more reason to leave it to someone else.

Yet — good, honest feedback can be a godsend to somebody, especially when something isn’t working and they don’t know why. Every complex system that works required a lot of feedback to get to that state, and much of it might not have happened if the giver had been more sheepish or afraid to offend.

Honest, well-intentioned feedback is potent stuff. It’s rare and precious, sometimes devastating, sometimes liberating, sometimes both. Someone pointing out a problem, with the right amount tact and humility, is often the only thing that can make a thing better. Bless those who are willing to offer feedback, even when (or especially when) we don’t want to hear it.

***

Photos by Febiyan, Wikimedia Commons

A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial independence.

I think it was an honest mistake on the part of the reporter. I told her I had quit my job to write full time, and I guess she thought that meant I must have millions of dollars.

To be clear, I was not then, and am not now financially independent. The 100 or so people that actually know me could discern that just by seeing my kitchen. Yet perhaps 20,000 people read somewhere that I am. That means potentially 200 times more people are wrong than right on this question, because of an inference made by a reporter.

This scenario, in which there’s much more wrongness going around than rightness, is probably the norm. People make bad inferences like that all day long. These wrong ideas replicate themselves whenever the person tells someone else what they know, which the internet makes easier than ever.

Consider the possibility that most of the information being passed around, on whatever topic, is bad information, even where there’s no intentional deception. As George Orwell said, “The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Technology may have made this state of affairs inevitable. Today, the vast majority of a person’s worldview is assembled from second-hand sources, not from their own experience. Second-hand knowledge, from “reliable” sources or not, usually functions as hearsay – if it seems true, it is immediately incorporated into one’s worldview, usually without any attempt to substantiate it. Most of what you “know” is just something you heard somewhere.

When people go on to share what they “know”, there’s usually no penalty for being wrong, but there are rewards for convincing people you’re right: attention, money, adoration, public rhetorical victories over others, and many other things humans enjoy.

The Two Kinds of Knowing

First-hand knowledge is a whole different thing from the second-hand kind. When you experience an event with your senses, you’re not just accepting a verbal claim, such as “There’s fighting in the streets of Kabul” — the truth is actually happening to you. The experienced sailor knows that looming cloud formation means trouble. The soldier knows the attack on his unit’s position was repelled. The dog owner knows exactly how long she can leave Rocco alone at home before he relieves himself on the floor. The friend sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch knows I’m not independently wealthy. Experience imprints reality right into your neurons; it doesn’t just add another thought to the abstract space in your brain where you keep your axioms and factoids.

Only a tiny percentage of what a given person “knows” is in this first-hand, embodied form. The rest is made of impressions gathered from anecdotes, newspapers, books, schoolteachers, blogs, and things our older siblings told us when we were little.

If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about.

It makes perfect sense, if you think about it, that reporting is so reliably unreliable. Why do we expect reporters to learn about a suddenly newsworthy situation, gather information about it under deadline, then confidently explain the subject to the rest of the nation after having known about it for all of a week? People form their entire worldviews out of this stuff.

What doesn’t make sense is that we immediately become credulous again as soon as the subject matter changes back to a topic on which we don’t have first-hand experience. You know they don’t know what they hell they’re talking about on Subject A, but hey what’s this about Subject B? In 2002, author Michael Crichton named this the “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In [Murray Gell-Mann’s] case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Crichton clarifies in the full speech that by “media” he’s not only talking about newspapers, but books, television, and internet too, and of course anybody’s recounting of what these sources say. Well, that accounts for just about 100% of our second-hand knowledge.

People do know things though. We have airplanes and phones and spaceships. Clearly somebody knows something. Human beings can be reliable sources of knowledge, but only about small slivers of the whole of what’s going on. They know things because they deal with their sliver every day, and they’re personally invested in how well they know their sliver, which gives them constant feedback on the quality of their beliefs.

Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong.

The mechanic has seen a thousand check-engine lights and knows how each of them was resolved. The English professor has seen a thousand essays and can tell you what’s wrong with yours. The night club bouncer has dealt with a thousand drunk patrons and knows which guests will be trouble even before they do.

There are ways to carefully gather, scrutinize, and compare high-quality second-hand sources, and maybe learn something reliable, but this is extremely difficult for the groupish, emotional creature we are. It is viscerally unpleasant (not to mention time-consuming) to honestly question beliefs you feel positively towards, or honestly entertain ones you don’t, and ultimately you’re just determining what “feels right” anyway.

Aside from our own respective slivers of reliable knowledge, we mostly carry a lot of untested beliefs — teetering piles of them, accumulated over years, from random people assuring us “this is how it is.” Most of these beliefs are bunk, but we don’t know which ones.   

Beliefs are Mostly Mind-Candy

Humans love beliefs, not because they’re reliable pointers to what’s true, but because they often feel good in some way, or have social rewards. Expressing and sharing beliefs can get us attention and social status, make us feel competent, sell our goods and services, and motivate people to do things for us, and they can just feel satisfying to say aloud. A convincing belief is simply one that feels good to the ears, or the mind.

Theory feels good. Pithiness and analogy feel good. A tight sentence feels good. Neat and snappy stories about what’s “true” are like candy to the sense-craving part of the human brain.

Notice how many smart people believe things like, “You can’t reason yourself out of a belief you didn’t reason yourself into.” This is a belief nobody would arrive at through reason. It doesn’t stand up to even a minute’s logical scrutiny. You certainly didn’t reason yourself into a belief that North-Pole-dwelling elves made your childhood toys, but you probably reasoned yourself out of it. Both beliefs are just mind-candy, only for different audiences.

In short, human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this — almost entirely by carefully combining and testing our respective reliable slivers — but as a species we remain supremely untalented at knowing what’s true outside the range of our senses.

Much of the problem is that we want so badly to be believed, to be seen as someone who knows stuff. In the rest of Crichton’s speech, he explains why he named the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect after Murray Gell-Mann: because he’s famous, and he’s a physicist. People believe things named after physicists because we know they’re smart. And Crichton is a medical doctor, so you should listen to the guy.

Also, none of you will be able to confirm this, but George Orwell did not say the line in the intro of this article. I just said that he did so you would take my own assertions more seriously. And it’s too late — you’ve already tasted the candy. I mean, Orwell could have said something like that. He might as well have said it. He probably did, basically! I will sleep soundly anyway. There are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards. Because nobody knows what’s going on.

***

Images by Artem Beliaikin, The Onion, Jamie Street, Rivage, Ryan Brooklyn, Gaurav Bagdi

Sometimes you really can trade lead for gold. You may have noticed, for example, how much of a time-saver it is to stay a little late to finish a task today that you could finish tomorrow instead. Somehow that last little bit, which would only take a half-hour now, will eat up most of tomorrow morning if you leave it till then. It’s the same work, but somehow its size and complexion change drastically depending on when it gets done.

There should be some metaphysical law that stops you from getting such a good deal, but there isn’t. So you should go for it, and also become a hunter for such deals.

A lot of variables come together to make this sort of transmutation happen. If you’ve been working on something for an hour or two, your system is warmed up in all the right places. You have the relevant information loaded up in your mental RAM, the body is tuned into the relevant actions (flipping between spreadsheets, folding clothes, whatever) and the mind has dropped most irrelevant thoughts. What would take thirty more minutes in this state might take two hours from a cold start tomorrow.

In this scenario, and many others, delay is extremely costly. You’re not simply pushing the same amount of effort to the next day; it will grow four-fold in the meantime.

There are times when delay is your friend, though, for exactly the same reason. Momentum, excitement, and other conditions make it much easier to do certain things at certain times — but sometimes you want a thing to be harder to do.

One of Mr Money Mustache’s tips for saving money, for example, is to consciously delay any purchase you are suddenly considering. This is because the moment in which it occurs to you to buy something, you are probably intoxicated with excitement. You’ve gotten it into your head that one of those sleep-tracking rings would change your life, or that having a bottle of XO-grade cognac on hand would make you a hero to your guests. The mind easily justifies such a purchase when it’s been “warmed up in all the right places” by whatever anecdote or advertisement brought the idea to mind in the first place.

At moments like these, bias towards “yes” is probably maximal – it can only dissipate. Instead of telling yourself “No, I can’t have that,” making the desire more persistent, you simply delay the decision. Chances are, the next time you think of that potential purchase, the initial heat-bomb of excitement and covetousness has faded. Even though you still want the thing, you don’t want it enough to spend hundreds of dollars on it. This time, reason prevails, because it doesn’t have to overcome nearly as much exuberance.

You may have heard similar advice about delaying dessert or second helpings. The time when you most want more food is when you’re still eating something delicious, or right after. At that time, the system is warmed up in all the right ways again, this time for eating more food, which may not be what your wiser self wants to do.

If you wait fifteen minutes before making the call about dessert, the mind’s fever cools, the body begins to report its distinct opposition to further eating, and the prospect of filling a bowl with ice cream might go from hyper-attractive to something more blah.

Making use of this principle isn’t just a matter of “delayed gratification.” Delayed gratification, made famous by the Stanford marshmallow experiment, is about the benefits of impulse control – you can often get better rewards in life by not taking the reward that’s right in front of you.

You might use some impulse control to push to the end your Friday-afternoon task, or to delay your prospective cognac purchase, but the more important idea, the real alchemical miracle, is about understanding and exploiting the huge swings in ease and salience that different activities have at different times. Just by doing something at a different time, under different conditions, you can make good things feel much easier and more natural to do, or make not-so-good things harder.

There is some cultural awareness of this principle (“Don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry”), but we talk much more about what to do than when. Often when I make some sort of personal breakthrough, it’s not because I’m doing a new thing, but because I’m changing when and under what conditions I’m doing an old thing.

I basically know already what’s worth doing – exercise, getting work done, sleeping enough, yada yada. But finding the best conditions for a given worthwhile thing – the best when – is usually what makes it finally work smoothly.

For example, I began exercising consistently only when I started doing it mid-day, rather than before or after work. At mid-day, I always have energy, the gym isn’t busy, traffic is light, evening plans never compete with my training, I don’t dread my workout, and it no longer feels cathartic to skip it. These are way better conditions. I actually want to lift heavy weights at noon; at 5pm I want to do the opposite of that. Doing it at 5pm is like adding a second kind of gravity to the barbell.

It’s like alchemy, this conditions-swapping game. You can often trade a bad situation, at a one-to-one ratio, for a good one. You really can pay twenty-five minutes of late afternoon work to spare yourself two hours of morning work. Lead-to-gold deals like that are out there.

If you tend to use your morning hours better than your evening hours, for example, by shifting your bedtime 30 minutes you’re essentially trading a low-quality half-hour of aimless screen time, which probably makes your sleep worse, for a high-quality half hour of morning reading on the porch. Good deal!

The best whens for a given person are an idiosyncratic matter. The deals you’re getting – and you’re getting a deal of some sort no matter what — depend on what your particular inner landscape is like in different situations, and inner landscapes vary tremendously between people, as you know if you’ve ever had a roommate.

Finding better whens takes some conscious experimentation. It’s unlikely that you’ve landed on them by dumb luck, because often we’re only doing a given thing at a given time because that’s when other people do it.

What to do is easier to figure out than when because we talk about what so much more. This makes me think that if something’s not working, it’s more likely the when, and not the what, that needs adjusting.

***

Photos by Rob Wicks, Anita Jankovic, FlyD, David Cain

Everybody used to be naked, all the time. Naked at birth, naked at death, naked while sitting around with people, naked while meeting strangers, naked while preparing and serving food.

This condition is hard to imagine, because everybody you’ve ever met has been in the habit of wrapping themselves in woven fibres. Coating our bodies with textiles is such a useful thing to do that everybody does it now. But the technology to do that had to be invented, and many people lived their whole lives before that happened.

In fact, many people lived and died before any material goods had been invented — at least anything more complex than sharpened sticks or stones. Biologically, those people were basically the same as us. They still had to stay warm, they had to keep their kids safe, and they had to eat. Just with no stuff.

Mother Nature gives all human beings the same raw deal: with a gun to your temple, she whispers, “Find 2000 calories today, for each member of your family, and you may live one more day. Don’t let your bodies get too hot or too cold, and don’t let anything puncture or break them. Good luck.” There is no negotiation, and no crying foul; you have to do this.

If a group of beings survives this arrangement for long enough, their children become old enough to do it themselves. We know some number of them succeeded, because we’re their descendants.

You could call that condition – naked, with no possessions – abject poverty. You really can’t have any less materially. This poorest state of human beings is our default state. It’s what we are, actually, before you add any accessories.

Wild animals all live in abject poverty, because they can’t invent any stuff to make it easier. Humans can improve their condition significantly by acquiring objects and knowledge. Anything useful we gain, on top of our basic no-stuff state, can be broadly called wealth. A bearskin is wealth. A sharp obsidian flake is wealth. A log placed across a stream is wealth. Knowing how to make twine is wealth.

Wealth For Sale – Cheap!

A few items of wealth can go a long way.

Imagine a group of pre-clothing, pre-stuff people, coming across a modern bag of kitchen garbage, left behind by careless time travelers. There are some food scraps in there, some balled-up cling wrap, some soiled rags and other useful materials, but the real prize is an empty jar of Kraft peanut butter. After eating the high-calorie remnants, they can use the screw-top container to carry a ration of water any distance without spilling it. Now they can go that much farther from the water source, to find more food and survey more terrain for other advantages.

That bag of garbage alone could elevate a small group of people to something slightly above the default no-stuff state, in terms of ease, maybe for a long time, if they can keep that peanut butter jar intact. The bag of garbage is wealth.

Imagine if instead of a bag of garbage, this group found the unsold stuff from a single American yard sale. Now we’re talking life-changing wealth. Enough clothing for six people. Containers galore. A stack of Danielle Steel novels, providing thousands of sheets of paper. A claw hammer and a hand saw. A screwdriver, and some screws. Forks and knives. Towels. A box of matchbooks. A bundle of ballpoint pens. Zoo animal figurines. A package of hair ties. A blue tarp and a four-man tent! Who could ever be so lucky? This group’s battle with the human condition is by no means solved, but it will be far easier than any of them thought was possible.

Now imagine they came across a modern landfill. What we might see as an embarrassing pit of refuse, they regard as a fertile mountain of food, tools, and inspiration. Just its ability to attract seagulls would be a boon they’d sing legends about. We may find it disgusting, but when compared to the absolute poverty that is our baseline condition, a landfill contains an unbelievable amount of wealth. Why do you think the seagulls and rats are always so excited about them?

Mountains Upon Mountains

We don’t regard landfills or unwanted yard sale stuff as wealth, because the life of even an ordinary modern human rests on far richer and more enormous piles of wealth – layers and layers and layers of wealth, which have elevated us so far beyond our base state that we’ve lost all perspective of what wealth even is, and how much of it we have.

Aside from all the cheap and free objects and tools that abound in the modern world, there’s such an abundance of food energy that even the least wealthy members of industrialized societies have to be careful not to consume dangerously excessive amounts of it.

Then there’s the wealth of countless institutions and systems that quietly deliver all sorts of ease, know-how, and services, directly or indirectly: libraries, maps, journalism, art, construction standards, computer networks, and ten thousand other layers of advantage.

Wealth levels vary greatly between individuals, which is inevitable when there’s so much wealth that has accumulated from so many sources. But even if you literally grew up in a garbage dump, you’ve probably always had access to an abundance of useful tools, helpful systems and infrastructure, accumulated human knowledge, and caloric energy galore — not everything you want, not everything others have, but much, much, more than zero.

Most of modernity’s wealth benefits us even when it’s owned or controlled by others. Living in a place where there are phones, even if you don’t have one, makes life far easier, and might even save your life. Simply existing within in a society with industries, courts, banks, hospitals, roads, electricity, professional expertise, and schools – even if you have no direct access to those things yourself — frees you from huge proportion of the survival burden Mother Nature still puts on every human being.

That stuff alone constitutes immense wealth, in the absolute sense. Virtually any random person from history would agree. The only person who wouldn’t is a contemporary person who’s measuring wealth not from zero but from how much some other person has.

Yet people somehow lived with none of this stuff. They had the same fragile bodies and the same propensity for suffering, and they presumably still experienced moments of connection, happiness, peace, and meaning in a zero-wealth condition.

True Value is Measured from Zero

Measuring wealth from zero is a different way to think about it than normal. What makes you wealthy, in the way the word is typically used, isn’t what you have, but what you have compared to the people near you in time, space, and culture.

It’s useful for politicians and pundits to describe wealth in this relative way — as a comparison to some arbitrary standard — because it allows them to exploit our capacity for envy and pity, and maybe convince us to blame society’s problems on their political enemies. Did you know you’re supposed to have a house and a car and an investment portfolio? If you don’t, guess who’s screwing you!

Humans are prone to seeing wealth in relative terms. Watch this 1-minute clip of a capuchin monkey getting caught up in the relative view. Mother Nature prods us to strive for more than we have, as a failsafe. A bit of burning covetousness now might help you survive a future drought or famine. But it can also make you miserable, even when you’re sitting on a centuries-deep mountain of advantages.

How to Measure from Zero

Getting new things feels exciting. Simply having the things you already have, even if those things are immensely valuable, doesn’t usually feel like anything. The relative view only allows new acquisitions to feel strongly rewarding for a brief time, before you fully assimilate your new identity as an iPad-haver or Blundstone-wearer.

Feeling the full wealth of what you’ve already got is possible only when you measure that wealth from zero. Then you can feel its absolute value, rather than its relative value.

The easiest way to feel the absolute value of something is to imagine, as vividly as possible, its disappearance.

Next time you go to bed, imagine the bed, the covers, the building and its contents, all disappearing from around you, dropping you naked onto the cold ground.

Pretend this is the new condition of your life. There you are, blowing in the wind. You’re still you, just with no stuff. You have to carry on with your life from here. Where do you go?

Your first impulse will probably be to rely on the abundant layers of wealth that still surround you – nearby structures to shelter in, available materials to wrap yourself in, phone systems, emergency services, friends and strangers and their piles of stuff.

Now — only if this surrounding stuff was gone would you actually have to contend with your real birthright: the base state of human beings.

But you don’t, and almost certainly never will. Now come back from this fantasy. Suddenly your ratty Wayfair duvet and noisy radiator feel like the riches they are.

Measuring from zero helps us keep perspective. I’ve often recommended a similar exercise, but in this version you make your friends disappear instead. You might know it already: when you’re with a loved one, imagine that they’re gone from your life and you’re not actually seeing them in the room with you, you’re just remembering what it was like when they were still here.

A moment later, when it clicks in your brain that they are still here, their true value – as measured against zero, not against some arbitrary status quo — becomes palpable. Who could ever be so lucky?

***

Photos by Sarah Brown, Matthew Moloney, Luca Bravo, James Wainscoat, Robinson Grieg, Chris Tweten, Alex Hudson, Element5Digital, Chandler Cruttenden

One thing humans do sometimes is attribute undesirable qualities to a person who’s doing something that seems overboard or unnecessary. It’s still common to hear that people who work out a lot are “obsessed with their bodies,” or that people who drive expensive cars are snooty or vain.

I’m sure I’ve thought and repeated these things myself, and a lot more. They’re flippant judgments to make, but they seemed true enough, from what I knew.

One inference I made a lot was that super-organized people who keep strict routines are “control freaks” or are otherwise anal-retentive. They must be afraid of to the tiniest amount of uncertainty or disorder. I always believed a more relaxed, free-form approach to work and household was healthier – not letting things fall completely to the floor, of course, but also not needing to have every little thing in its place all the time.

I didn’t see a connection at the time between my dismissive opinions on this subject, and the fact that I had always suffered immensely from my own inability to stay on top of my basic affairs of work and household.

Four years after an ADHD diagnosis, which helped me zero in on the nature of my problem, it is now exceedingly clear that my life works best when I am super-organized and keep strict routines. Things go well when I begin work at 8:30am and keep a rigid system of lists, hard rules, checklists, step-by-step plans, and procedures. When I work my system, I feel great and life unfolds happily. When I drift away from it, productivity drops to a fraction and so does my quality of life.

I wish I would have known this earlier, and I probably would have if I wasn’t so dismissive of the people who apparently did.

Two Paths Diverge in the Forest

When I first looked online for help, I found two diverging schools of thought about how to live with ADHD.

One advocated making systematic improvements to your habits and routines. You’re always in an uphill battle, so you need to identify the crucial behaviors that do the most to help (or undermine) your functionality. You need to exploit and expand the helpful ones, and manage or eliminate the unhelpful ones. This is a lot of work, which may be more difficult for you than it would be for others, but it is what will actually change the status quo.

The other school of thought focused on making you feel okay for having this affliction, and finding relief from the pressures you feel around not measuring up or being “normal.” The messaging emphasizes the fact that it’s not your fault — society is organized around people who don’t have this problem and aren’t even aware of it; few people will try to understand what it’s like for you, and even fewer will accommodate you; it’s important to be forgiving and compassionate towards yourself.

All of this is true, and hearing it helped me feel better sometimes. It allowed me to hate myself less, and accept that external constraints are real and consequential — the problem isn’t just me being bad again and again.

These reassurances did not particularly help me make my life better, though. They helped me tolerate the bad place I was in, which is a mixed blessing. Self-sympathy and coping strategies make it easier to stay where you are, but that’s not where you want to be.

I found that many online ADHD communities, especially the ones populated by people younger than me, emphasized the “feel okay with myself right now” strategy to the near-complete exclusion of the “try to get better at doing things” strategy.

A common type of thread in those forums was one in which the poster was exasperated that their employer had threatened to fire them for their chronic lateness. The poster couldn’t believe their boss wouldn’t make accommodations for their “time blindness.” Such posters interpreted the employer’s ultimatum as further evidence of their oppressed status in a society that didn’t recognize them as people.

That might sound like an extreme example, but it was really common. The replies were typically loaded with assurances that they were right. The minority of us who suggested that perhaps the boss has a point were voted down or lectured to about the unjust nature of society. I left these sorts of communities quickly, and I assume the other dissenters did too, which I guess explains how these forums became so self-affirming in the first place.

Recently I read an essay with a line in it I couldn’t stop thinking about. The author, Anuradha Pandey, in her effort to manage her mental health issues, had been caught up in the above philosophy herself for years, before discovering that it had been steering her away from what actually worked.

Reflecting on what’s been missing from her online support communities:

At some point, the concept of discipline entirely fell out of favor. […] A woman recently asked me how I got my mental health in order. When I shared with her that it was about discipline, I got a meandering response about how we all can do it however is best for us. I disagree. What is best for everyone is establishing some of the discipline that modern society has told us is somehow in contradiction to personal freedom. I spent a decade in therapy and psychiatry, and what solved depression, in the end, was establishing discipline and holding myself accountable more than others ever would.

I bristled at this initially. The repetition of the word “discipline” gave me images of pipe-smoking fathers sending their longhaired sons to military school, or mid-century schoolteachers brandishing “the strap” — a hard, less compassionate world in which misfits get trampled for our inability to conform to normal standards.

But maybe that bristling reaction is just what she’s talking about. At some point I adopted a caricatured idea of the concept of discipline, that it’s harsh and patriarchal, and that to suggest it as a viable route out of a bad place, to myself or anyone else, betrays a lack of compassion.

That topic sentence kept coming back to me though: “At some point discipline entirely fell out of favor.” It does seem unfashionable to appeal to discipline, as though it could only be mean or insensitive to suggest that a human being might retain some agency, and make good use of it, even when unfair things have happened to them.

I’ve wandered on both sides of the argument now, and so far discipline has been the most empowering quality I’ve tried to cultivate — more than belonging, more than righteous anger, more than self-love. I’m by no means fully recovered from my “problem,” but there has been a major upswing in my trajectory, and it occurred precisely when I began to impose a higher standard of discipline on myself: routines, explicit standards, accountability systems, and a keen suspicion of the part of me that just wants to drop everything and seek comfort.

Pandey goes on to connect discipline’s current unfashionableness to larger shifts in the political zeitgeist: a growing trend of identifying with victimhood, a suspicion of modernist ideas of progress and growth, and a taboo around ascribing agency to people who don’t belong to dominant classes.

Whatever the reasons for it, it’s hard to deny that discipline has indeed fallen out of favor. For some number of us, maybe millions of us, rediscovering it could be a godsend.

I’m sure there are many people who have had the inverse epiphany to mine: they always recognized the need for self-discipline, but thought self-forgiveness was inappropriate or unhelpful. May we all find the part of the puzzle we’re missing.

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Two Days Left for the Mindful Bundle!

If you want to learn some mindfulness skills, I’m offering all of my mindfulness resources — two courses and three ebooks — in a bundle for a mega-discount right now.

This ten-day sale is a one time thing I’m doing for Raptitude’s 15th anniversary, and it ends Saturday. [Details] | [Get it now]

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Images by Jeff Sheldon, Liz Joseph, Ocean Ng, Filip Andrejevic, David Cain, Wikimedia Commons

Last year I wrote a post asking readers to consider how much they’d pay for a hypothetical miracle medicine that lengthens your life, makes you happier, reduces anxiety, lowers risk of disease and injury, increases personal confidence, and literally makes you more attractive, along with dozens of other benefits.

The only catch is that you can’t pay money for it, not directly. You gain and maintain access to it by doing a few hours of manual labor per week.

The punchline was that this miracle medicine deal isn’t actually hypothetical; it exists in our world and is available on precisely the above basis. It’s called “regular physical exercise.”

Not everybody takes this deal –- a few hours of labor per week for incalculable benefits – which is crazy when you frame it this way. We pay a lot more for things that don’t provide anything approaching the same return. But humans are like that.

The Other Incredible Deal

Mindfulness ability is a similar deal: a hyper-beneficial medicine that can’t be bought directly, yet may be accessed by devoting regular periods to a certain kind of work.

Its benefits are subtler and harder to describe than those of exercise, which makes it even less popular. The usual claims are that meditation makes you less stressed out, generally wiser, and better able appreciate ordinary life. This is all true, but I don’t think these claims capture the depth and breadth of transformation it can make to a life.

I’ll explain why I think that, but in any case we can at least be happy that a regular mindfulness practice comes at a significantly lower time and labor cost than a regular exercise routine. To get this Other Incredible Deal, you don’t need to hoist barbells over your head or run until your lungs burn. Instead, you need to sit down for a bit, on a daily basis, to practice using your attention in a certain unusual way.

Basically, you sit there, and you notice what happens. You notice sounds. You notice body sensations, both pleasant and unpleasant ones. You notice the mind doing mind stuff: talking to itself, making pictures, rehashing bits of conversation, replaying bits of songs.

You don’t worry about any of this. You just allow it to happen, in a kind of “hands off” way. For once — just for this ten or twenty minutes — you’re not trying to fix anything, or “solve” what’s happening as though it’s a problem. You commit to simply observing and allowing it all instead.

This feels unusual at first, but you do your best.

A period of time set aside to practice mindfulness like this is called meditation. It is the work that gives you access to the Other Incredible Deal and its benefits. The minimum effective dose is perhaps ten minutes daily. More time is better, but the good deal starts about there.

Each time you practice, it strengthens a certain mental skillset, which frees you, gradually, from the usual neediness and fear with which adult humans tend to engage life.

In other words, meditation lowers trepidation in general. It makes you calmer and wiser over time, reducing your reliance on things being easy or agreeable.

How it does this is a good question that deserves an answer. The best way I can do that is with an analogy to skiing over bumpy terrain, which I expound on in this post.

Essentially, meditation trains your mental reflexes to meet the moment-to-moment emotional “bumps” in experience –- which life is riddled with — in a relaxed, supple, confident way, just as an experienced skier calmly adjusts to rises and dips in the slope.

From the post:

What if there was a way you could train your whole mind-body system to gracefully handle the bumpy terrain of everyday life, regardless of what form it took: disappointment, elation, uncertainty, temptation, overexcitement, shame, expectation, tension, and everything in between? Imagine this training allowed you to cruise smoothly over all these familiar contours in a way that felt good, at least more of the time.

To use a cliché, mindfulness ability expands your “comfort zone” in a fundamental way. You get used to letting feelings and sensations come and go naturally, without having to constantly manage them or brace yourself against them.

Whatever your life is like, reducing trepidation like this will always open new paths forward. Imagine turning a dial that lowers the self-imposed “walls” in your life a few notches — the ones between you and your desired habits, goals, social connections, and career possibilities.

Certain things that were impossible might become possible. Things that were merely possible might become doable. Things that were doable might become easy. Things that were easy might become trivial.

That’s the dry, bird’s-eye view anyway. The way wisdom manifests itself in your life is often more colorful, and specific to particular corners of it: while you practice piano, maybe you no longer tense up in anticipation of mistakes; you can more patiently work out an idea expressed in an old book; you aren’t annoyed to take out the garbage anymore. The bumps don’t knock you off balance so easily, or frighten you away altogether.

So that’s the Other Incredible Deal –- somewhat easier than physical exercise, but with its own incalculable, compounding benefits.

(Note that it can also dial down the psychological barriers to taking the original Incredible Deal; if I didn’t meditate, I don’t think I’d be able to get myself to exercise.)

A Thing I’m Doing

Raptitude’s main focus, for most of its existence, has been attempting to get as many people as possible benefiting from this profoundly good deal. Over the years I’ve built a small fleet of how-to books and courses on various mindfulness practices.

However, I’m not developing any new ones right now. My current focus is on helping my fellow productivity-challenged people (serious procrastinators, ADHDers, the highly distracted among us) to get unstuck. There’s a huge need for that kind of help, and I’m in a position to offer it, so that’s my focus right now.

Meanwhile, I’ve got all these mindfulness resources that I barely mention. My courses have been closed for some time, and I never talk about the books.

I had expected to relaunch it all with a major update and a new product, but now I know I’m not going to do that for a while.

Instead, I’m going to have a one-time sale for Raptitude’s 15^th anniversary. I’m offering all of my mindfulness resources, in a single bundle, for a huge discount.

That includes five things:

• Camp Calm: 30 Days of Mindfulness (course) Develop a simple, consistent meditation practice over a 30-day period.
• Camp Calm Relax: Mindfulness for Relaxation (course) Learn a meditation technique designed to promote physical and mental relaxation.
• You Are Here: A Modern Person’s Guide to Living in the Present (ebook) Explore ideas and techniques for practicing mindfulness in daily life.
• Making Things Clear: A Brief Guide for People Who Think Meditation is Hard (ebook) Learn to avoid the common ways people make meditation harder than it needs to be.
• Camp Calm Anxiety Kit (ebooklet) Three mindfulness techniques for managing anxiety.

All of these resources work as standalones. You can read the books and do the courses in any order, at any time.

Full price for the collection is over $200. As of right now you can get it all for $79 USD*. This is less than the price of Camp Calm by itself.

You’ll have lifetime access to all the material. Also, those buying the bundle will be invited to participate in future group sessions of Camp Calm, for free. There will be a group session later this year, but by then the course will be full price.

This sale will only be on for ten days, starting now, and then that’s it. After that I’m gone on a meditation retreat of my own, totally offline, so there can be no latecomers!

Get the Bundle Now

There are lots of ways to learn mindfulness skills – this is by no means your only chance to do that. But if you like my approach to things, this might be a good way in for you, and today might be as good a day as any to start.

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[More info on the Bundle]

*Some countries add VAT to this. I can’t do anything about it, sorry :)