Think Again

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

Perhaps you’re thinking, _Really? You were lucky enough to get a book contract, and now you’re not writing the book? Boo-hoo! Try working twelve hours a day in a factory, for God’s sake!_ I understand how this comes across. I mean, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of _Eat, Pray, Love_ when she’s crying on the bathroom floor as she thinks about leaving the husband who loves her? Gretchen Rubin in _The Happiness Project_ who has the loving, handsome husband, the healthy daughters and more money than most people will ever see but still has that niggling feeling of something missing?

***

As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same dam thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

***

If it seems strange that this clinic is letting me, a person who has performed exactly zero hours of therapy, take on somebody’s treatment, it’s simply the way therapists are trained — by doing. Medical school was also a trial by fire; in medicine, students learned procedures by the “see one, do one, teach one” method. In other words, you watched a physician, say, palpate an abdomen, you palpated the next abdomen yourself, and then you taught another student how to palpate an abdomen. _Presto!_ You’re deemed competent to palpate abdomens.

***

There was an unspoken irony to all of this. People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their moods had been riven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains expect kill it.” Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.

***

One day at me new practice, in the long lull between patients, I found a video online of MIT researcher Sherry Turkle talking about this loneliness. In the late 1990s, she said, she had gone to a nursing home and watch a robot comfort an elderly woman who had lost a child. The robot looked like a baby seal, with fur and large eyelashes, and it processed language well enough to respond appropriately. The woman was pouring her heart out to this robot, and it seemed to follow her eyes, to be listening to her.
Turkle went on to say that while her colleagues considered this seal robot to be great progress, a way to make people’s lives easier, she felt profoundly depressed.
I gasped in recognition. Just the day before, I’d joked to a colleague, “Why not have a therapist in your iPhone?” I didn’t know then that soon there _Would_ be therapists in smartphones — apps through which you could connect with a therapist “anytime, anywhere… within seconds” to “feel better now.” I felt about these options the way Turkle felt about the woman with the robotic seal.
“Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?” Turkle asked in the video. Her questions made me wonder: Was it that people couldn’t tolerate being alone or that they couldn’t tolerate being with other people? Across the country — at coffee with friends, in meetings at work, during lunch at school, in front of the cashier at Target, and at the family dinner table — people were texting and Tweeting and shopping, sometimes pretending to make eye contact and sometimes not even bothering.

Note: [this came up again in the context of the pandemic](Sherry Turkle).

***

I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles.

Atomic Habits

> Diderot’s behavior is not uncommon. In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
>
> You can spot this pattern everywhere. You buy a dress and have to get new shoes and earrings to match. You buy a couch and suddenly question the layout of your entire living room. You buy a toy for your child and soon find yourself purchasing all of the accessories that go with it. It’s a chain reaction of purchases.

> It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues. It can be difficult to go to bed early if you watch television in your bedroom each night. It can be hard to study in the living room without getting distracted if that’s where you always play video games. But when you step outside your normal

> When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use.”

> You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a mishmash of cues.

> It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

> If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

> In a sense, every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.

> Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy. For instance, my wife keeps a box of greeting cards that are presorted by occasion—birthday, sympathy, wedding, graduation, and more. Whenever necessary, she grabs an appropriate card and sends it off. She is incredibly good at remembering to send cards because she has reduced the friction of doing so. For years, I was the opposite. Someone would have a baby and I would think, “I should send a card.” But then weeks would pass and by the time I remembered to pick one up at the store, it was too late. The habit wasn’t easy.

> As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

> Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurement comes in many forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, the progress bar on a software download, even the page numbers in a book.

> This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you.

> In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration. In relationships, it’s called dating. In college, it’s called the liberal arts. In business, it’s called split testing. The goal is to try out many possibilities, research a broad range of ideas, and cast a wide net.
After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found—but keep experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you’re winning or losing. If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.

> The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.... As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”

> The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everything up in being the point guard or the partner at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you’re a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you’ll have an identity crisis on your hands. When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.

Springfield Confidential

> BURNS’S LAWYER, the nasty blue-haired guy in glasses, was inspired by Roy Cohn, the horrible man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and defended Donald Trump. (Why couldn’t it be the other way around?)

> I’d gone to visit Chernobyl, for Simpsons research—yes, it’s their hottest tourist attraction, in every sense of the word. Afterward, I went to a park in Kiev that was filled with statues of Scrat, the Ice Age squirrel who’s always pursuing an acorn but never quite getting it. I asked a Ukrainian woman why they loved Scrat so much. She said, “He teaches children that life is hopeless.”

Hollow Kingdom

> Even though I’ve alway been pretty plucky and motivated by my various passions, I’d never done anything like the Freedom Flies. Nothing that kept me so excited that my heart trilled like the songbirds that bolstered us on lunch breaks. They serenaded us with stories about bravery and  long-lost loves as we drilled into cans of finely aged SpaghettiOs and syrupy peaches with our beaks. The work was dangerous and made us so tired our bones hurt like old memories, but our hearts were overflowing as we dreamt about the dogs, goats, and all the other domestics we had offered life. I cannot recommend this to you enough: find something that you believe in, right down deep in the depths of your silvery plumage, and then throw your heart at it, blood and valves and veins and all. Because I did this, the world, though brambled and frothing at the mouth, looked more vibrant; blues were bluer, and even the fetid puddles that collected under rusted cars tasted as sweet as summer wine.

Recursion

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor


The sequel to [An Absolutely Remarkable Thing](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781524743468).

I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book. The evil entity felt a little too on the nose for 2020/2021, and there’s a lot of tell don’t show in the narration.


Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead


> We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes. Isn’t it scandalous that last time a doctor wanted to check what was happening in my stomach he made me have a gastroscopy? I had to swallow a thick tube, and it took a camera to reveal the inside of my stomach to us. The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain. The angles, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

> No, no, people in our country don’t have the ability to club together to form a community, not even under the banner of the penny bun. This is a land of neurotic egotists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticize, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.

> He also brings me newspapers, encouraging me to read them, but they prompt my disgust. Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think.

built with ☕

2021 Reading

Other years