The Addiction to Thinking

If you’ve followed me and read my newsletters over the past few years, then you know I’ve been going through some stuff. I just turned 51, so I’m at that age where there’s more behind me than ahead. Being what you might call a pensive guy, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ll be the first to say you can’t solve an emotional problem through a cognitive process, but damned if I haven’t tried. I journal a lot because writing things out is how I focus my thoughts. That’s private, of course, but sometimes I hit upon something that I bold, highlight, circle, and draw arrows to because I think it’s that important.

I want to be authentic with you guys. All I’m trying to do is distill some life lessons into something that’s fun to read even if you’ve already figured out The Thing, whatever it is in your case. If not, maybe it gets you thinking, too.

This month is about narratives.

Can “narratives” and “stories” be used interchangeably? Sure. We also call them by different names like “assumption” and “personal belief.”

What is a story, really?

Without looking at a dictionary definition, and having quite a bit of experience with stories, my own definition would be something like, “A series of related events described by an author or narrator that a) change the lives of a ‘character’ in some significant way, b) convey an idea or lesson, and/or c) create dramatic tension via a conflict which is usually resolved during the course of such events.” I put “character” in quotes because it may be multiple characters, society, or even the reader themselves.

I’m sure the real definition is much different, but this will serve my purpose.

Stories originated as a way for humans to make sense of the world. And, as has always been the case, the good ones have a way of surviving. One day, Og wondered aloud how water could come from the sky. Lak said, “Maybe moisture in the atmosphere condenses around bits of dust and falls back to Earth in a beautiful cycle.”

Bim waved his hairy hand dismissively. “No, no. An invisible man in the clouds is looking down upon us and crying. Probably because Lak’s story was so boring!”

If I’m Og, I’m probably gonna pass on the version with the guy in the clouds. If it gets a good reaction, I’ll tell it to the next caveman, but maybe I’ll embellish it with a tidbit about thunder being his angry roar. Fast-forward a few millennia, and you’ve got The Exorcist or mythology.

The point is that stories don’t really become stories unless they’re told to someone. Sometimes — and probably way more than you realize — that someone is the storyteller himself.

The stories we tell ourselves

Like our ancient ancestors, we, too need stories to help make sense of the world, including and especially the one each of us specifically inhabits. They’re often what comes after the word because. My boss hates me because I called him out in the team meeting. My wife is staying home because she doesn’t like my friends.

We all do this, all the time, to varying degrees. Telling ourselves a story is way easier than getting to the truth. It’s comfortable, and it settles the matter in our minds so we don’t have to think about it anymore.

Some people are wired to tell themselves a nice story. Carol really appreciates me because I always bring her coffee. The dishes didn’t get done because Larry’s been working so hard. I’m both jealous of, and annoyed by, people who tell themselves whatever story will make them feel good about themselves and the world.

Whether the stories you tell yourself are dark and cynical or upbeat and positive, they most likely aren’t based on what you know with certainty to be true. But a big part of you assumes it is because even acknowledging that it may not be puts you in a tough spot. If it’s not true, then you’ve made a lot of assumptions and acted accordingly. You may also have burned a lot of cycles on that story, and it would be hard to admit that any resulting emotional turmoil you experienced was completely unnecessary.

But admit it you must, because …

Stories can lead to blame and resentment

The because in our explanations about life always start with a why. Why did she snap at me? Why is he so into her? This is where the power of a story can become insidious. It basically becomes the lens through which we see related aspects of the world.

Our brains have something called the reticular activating system (RAS). Basically, it helps direct your attention based on your motivation. If your context for personal interactions, for example, is the story that people are untrustworthy, then your RAS will be hyper-aware of signs of untrustworthiness. It’s a bit like confirmation bias. You find what you expect to find, and what you expect to find is based on a story rather than being fully open to the present moment.

I’ve told myself a lot of stories about my partner over the years, and rarely did those stories give her the benefit of the doubt. Over time, they morphed into resentments. I held on to them for an embarrassingly long time, and when the time came, I had to own them. I’d imagine the same is true of someone who convinced themselves of a happy story when the truth was much harder to take.

The secret to overcoming narratives in your life is to ask yourself two questions, over and over.

What else could be true?

About 10 years ago, I had some significant health anxiety that you might call cyberchondria (it’s a thing). I had so much work-related and relationship stress that I started Googling “symptoms” like shaking hands and clumsiness. Before long, I was convinced I had MS.

That’s around the time I ran into this question: What else could be true? Well, it turned out a lot of things could. Things that were far more likely.

The more upsetting the narrative, the more useful this question becomes. I still slip into those bad stories, but at least I have a potential way out of the endless loop of story plus “evidence.”

What purpose does this story serve?

This can be a tough exercise. You basically keep asking why until you either a) remember how it started, or b) realize you no longer even know.

Here’s how I see it: A story you tell yourself in order to make sense of your world, especially a painful emotional experience, often just repackages the pain so you can’t see the experience objectively anymore. Let’s say you went to a restaurant that everybody recommended, and you have a terrible experience. Bad service, bad food, bad everything.

If you walk away from this experience believing it’s a bad restaurant, then you’ve told yourself a story. Same as something like, “I have bad luck with restaurants.”

You can only guess what was going on that night. Maybe the owner got rushed to the hospital, and everyone’s freaking out. Maybe their A team had the night off. Or maybe it was just a bad night. So, what else could be true? All sorts of stuff. What actually happened was that you had a bad experience at a restaurant. Full stop.

What purpose does it serve to think it’s a bad restaurant? So you can tell the people who recommended it? Prove them wrong? Tell them they’re crazy? Or is it so you won’t go down as the damned fool who gave a restaurant two chances?

In my case, most of my stories mainly served to cast myself or the people I care about in an unfavorable light. These days, I aim to keep stories on the page and make room for a little more truth, even when it hurts.

I don’t have any tattoos, but I’m thinking of getting one that says, “Today could be the last good day.”

I’ve referred to the experience of writing a dystopian series (the Cytocorp Saga) during the height of the pandemic. It wasn’t difficult to imagine all the ways that society could fall apart during that time because I perceived that it was beginning to do just that.

I wish I could tell you that my perspective has shifted.

If one were to plot the long arc of human civilization on a graph, with time on the X axis and something impossibly reductive like “condition” on the Y, you would see a general upward trend but not a straight line. As technology, medicine, and intelligence have progressed, so has our civilization. For example, the advent of antibiotics made it so a gash in your leg didn’t mean losing it. That would be a sharp little spike in the graph. War, famine, the Black Plague and such would be troughs.

There’s ample evidence to suggest we have already entered another trough. And, like other troughs in our illustrious history, it may last decades or even centuries.

Science, for example, evolved out of the ostensibly obvious need to establish unassailable truths when possible and well-supported theories when not. The freedom to take something as factual allows for the exploration of unknowns, which is how knowledge advances. It’s the base of the pyramid. Perhaps you’ve noticed that science isn’t exactly ascendant at the moment, especially among the ruling class. In fact, outside of the sciences and the lives of ordinary people, I would argue that objective truth no longer matters in our society. And when truth no longer matters, nothing does.

In his 2009 book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, Charles Pierce established what he called the Three Great Premises:

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.

The Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

The Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

You don’t have to look very far to see how accurate these statements have become. Truth is out, and attention is in. Rather than solve actual problems, our most brilliant minds have built highly efficient and profitable confirmation bias machines. Disinformation and fakery has never been easier to sell. In his book, Pierce refers to “cracks,” an old-timey word for those tinfoil hat types who used to stand on the street corner and fulminate about radio waves or microchips while nobody paid them any mind. Now, those same people have podcasts or offices in the Capitol.

Climate scientists, by contrast, have been screaming for decades that we are cruising toward an environmental catastrophe that will render vast swathes of our planet unlivable. Now, they’re the cracks nobody listens to, and they might as well stop screaming because it’s almost certainly too late. Does anyone see unprecedented global cooperation in our future?

As we speak, history is being rewritten. Before long, the messy parts of our history, like slavery or the Holocaust, won’t serve as examples of what not to do anymore. At best, they’ll be stories that only old people know like Hansel and Gretel or World War 2. For example, how many of the politicians and pundits who refer to so-and-so as a fascist have been made to publicly articulate what that word even means?

Empires fall. Systems collapse. Foundations crumble. So it has always been, so it always will be. When it gets bad, it will stay bad for a very long time. But even if the whole thing doesn’t go to shit in the near future, something will. It could be our health or that of a loved one. All the “virtual” money we have could vanish in a blink. The power could go out and never come back on.

The point is, cherish today. Notice it. Appreciate the people in your life, past and present. The many conveniences you currently enjoy. Grass. Rivers. The sound of birds. Live it up. Because any day could be the last good day, and that day will arrive before any of us are ready to meet it.

A number of affirmations hang on the wall of my office. I remember watching Al Franken play Stuart Smalley sketch on SNL and howling with laughter at the absurdity of a grown man looking into a mirror and saying, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

It’s still a funny sketch, but now I kinda get it. In fact, I embody it.

The past decade has been marked by a slow but steady process of disillusionment, or to put it less pejoratively, the deconstruction of beautiful lies. For me, that process began in my early 20s, when I began to realize that adult life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Eventually, that led me to the question almost all of us will ask ourselves at some point.

“Is this all there is?”

It’s an important question. Never asking it can only mean one of two things: Either you never had outsized expectations of life (or at least weren’t very attached to them), or you’re simply not wired to ponder such existential dilemmas. I’d wager most of us think it at some point, though, and I’m starting to believe that the best and most useful answer to internalize and accept as soon as possible is that yes, it is.

Young me thought chiefly about the future. I enjoyed the present, but I got more excited about what came next and how much better it would be. The next grade, for example, or the next family trip, or the next sleepover at my friend’s house. Growing up in a microscopic rural town, I felt so limited by my circumstances. I wanted to grow up, leave, and move on to something bigger and better.

But then you realize, to your dismay, that the world widens for you in some ways but narrows in others. For example, you can apply for thousands of jobs but only have a realistic shot at a couple. Social guardrails, processes, and bureaucratic dogma await you at every turn. Victories and achievements are harder won but less celebrated. Your expanded world takes you from being one in a few to one of many.

For me, this was all rather jarring. By age 21, I was in the grip of a deep depression. I didn’t realize it then, but I didn’t know myself at all. Everything that had propped me up as a kid was gone, and everything that could knock me down, did. I stared into the abyss and asked, “Is this all there is?”

But as anyone who struggles with depression knows, when you stare into the abyss, it only stares back. No matter. I already knew the answer. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

Looking back, what I felt was a form of grief. The First Big Illusion died in my arms. The next thing wasn’t always better. Sometimes there wasn’t a next thing at all. The future could, and often did, look an awful lot like the present.

I knew I’d someday travel and have exciting and novel experiences once again, but they would be fewer and farther between. And as a young assistant golf pro making $1,100 a month, even those weren’t in my reach.

I wish I could tell you that I processed my grief in healthy ways, adjusted my expectations, and moved on. Instead, I attended the funerals of countless dozens more illusions, and each one only added to my sense of hopelessness. Was nothing I believed about the world true? Why did I believe these things to begin with? Who were the architects of the beautiful lies behind my unrealistic expectations? How was I supposed to muster enthusiasm for life when nothing felt new anymore?

Thoughts of that ilk set up camp in my brain and stayed there, “rent-free” as my friend and stoicism author Andrew McConnell might say, for the next 25 years.

Lest you think I was miserable for that long, I wasn’t. I married a wonderful girl, had a nice career, befriended many incredible people, saw cool places and did cool shit. I experienced many disappointments but few real hardships and more than a few pleasant surprises. However, moments of joy become more and more elusive, because for me, joy had to come wrapped in novelty or I couldn’t see it as the gift it was.

One of the affirmations on my wall reads, “Joy hides in plain sight.” I don’t know if I invented that or saw it somewhere, but I’ve thought about it a lot lately. How do you find joy in the ordinary?

For me, it comes back to our question: Is this all there is?

Once you’re solidly in the second half of your life, I think it’s important to see that the answer to that question is basically yes. Most of what’s possible for YOU to see, feel, or experience, you’ve already seen, felt, or experienced. Maybe you haven’t been to some exotic foreign country, but you’ve been out of your element and had to adapt to new circumstances. Maybe you haven’t seen Mt. Chimborazo, but you’ve seen a majestic mountain of some sort. That’s what I’m saying.

Does novelty still await you no matter how old you are or what you’ve done in life? Probably, but not necessarily. Failing that, we must learn to see the world through a different lens. Ask yourself these two questions:

1. Do I want life to be as joyful as possible?
2. Have I already experienced most of what I am likely to experience, at least in some form?

#1 is easy enough. #2 requires some consideration. If you answer no, then you need to decide if accumulating new experiences truly is a priority, what you’ll sacrifice to get them, and what will happen if they don’t bring the joy you desire.

But if you answer yes, then you need to begin finding joy in the ordinary. I say “find” because joy doesn’t find you. It hides in plain sight. Just because your cynical, jaded eyes pass over it doesn’t mean it’s not there. This is the point of mindfulness. Don’t just drink your coffee; pause to consider its long journey to your cup. Don’t just shower; delight in its sensations while appreciating that the water is hot and clean.

When I realized that this is pretty much all there is, I wish someone could’ve told me that that’s okay. That I should stop being obsessed with what’s to come and take delight in what is. Inspirational speaker Kerwin Rae said, “Stress is resistance to what is.” I think that’s spot-on. If joy is elusive for you, then maybe it’s time to accept that this might be all there is. Because if you only look ahead, you never look around.