Check Engine Lights
Chapter 17: Stepping into the opaque
Dear Friend,
This week’s chapter of User Zero investigates road rage, the voice in our head that not everyone can hear, good stress, Teslian curiosity, the talent myth, and what to expect should you truly accomplish something original. BTW, I have a couple prints available of the illustration for this chapter. Just reply if you are interested in owning a piece of my art. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Ade
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.” —Buckminster Fuller
Imagine you are keeping up with traffic, zoning out to your favorite podcast, passing the time of your morning commute. A car cuts into your lane, forcing you to tap your brakes. You curse the driver for appearing unwelcomed into your consciousness. If you are restrained you let them go and return to the isolation of your podcasts. If the offense is extreme you punch the horn, hit the gas, and embrace the rage as the television in your brain switches channels to Death Race 2000.
Wouldn’t it be nice if our brains had a diagnostic mode that allowed us to observe and intervene before the blood-boiling events of life transform us into the worst versions of ourselves? Modern cars contain ten million lines of code and what feedback do you get when there’s a problem? Your new car can practically drive itself but all it can do is blink at you when it has a problem. Similarly, our mental diagnostic tools only give us crude feedback, the equivalent of check engine lights that only appear after the damage is already done.
So far user zero has been a polite passenger, an entity inside us that’s difficult to define. But what is it really? If it is simply the voice in your head then the road rage incident I just described paints user zero as a nasty, vengeful entity. It’s worth asking, what does the voice in your head sound like? For some people, simply asking this question can be enough to cause an existential crisis.
When Ryan Langdon read the following tweet, he didn’t believe it. A Twitter user known as @KylePlantEmoji posted:
“Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don’t. As in, some people’s thoughts are like sentences they ‘hear,’ and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them. And most people aren’t aware of the other type of person.”
Ryan clearly heard an inner monologue, a voice in his head narrating his every thought. Because he heard a voice, he assumed everyone had the same voice giving a play-by-play description of every moment of life. To validate the tweet, Ryan asked his friends if they heard a voice or something else. His blog post and accompanying video quickly went viral, showing that Ryan isn’t the only person fascinated by the various ways our thoughts present themselves to us.
Many people are so oblivious to their own mental modes that when they encounter people with different patterns, they simply can’t cope. It’s easy to assume that our mental patterns are normal, and other people are broken. For some people like Ryan, the realization is a painful awakening. Ryan said that his “life began to slowly spiral out of control” after he realized that his thoughts were uniquely his own.
One way to describe the act of observing our mental patterns is called mindfulness. Sam Harris describes it like this,
“We largely become what we pay attention to. We are building our minds in each moment. We are building habits, and desires, and worries, and expectations, and prejudices, and insights. And mindfulness is just the ability to notice this process with clarity and to then prioritize what you pay attention to.”
As strange as it may seem, it is easy to be oblivious of our own thoughts. It feels automatic, but when we let our thought patterns go their own direction, we forfeit our world-building capabilities. Some people never realize that we can choose whether our reality is shaped by us or if our reality shapes us.
Mindfulness seems attainable in the pristine chambers of a carefully curated environment, but the places we really need peace is within the ever-present chaos. Finding calm in moments of quite is easy, it’s the fury-inducing crucible of daily life where we need cool heads. Which brings us back to our imagined road rage exercise.
Is the moment when that jerk cut you off really as exceptional as it seems? The only thing remarkable is the fact that you noticed it at all. For some reason the programming in your brain created a trigger that fired when certain parameters exist. Morning commute + being passed on the right = oh no you didn't!
Nothing is ever our fault, we accept our dead-end jobs, we endure abusive relationships, we outsource our pleasure, we persevere fueled entirely by whatever stimulus trips our triggers. Boredom + vibration in our pocket = dopamine hit. We put our lives on autopilot and let the equations determine our responses. We fool ourselves into thinking we are in control, that our road rage is warranted, that our device addiction is normal.
Our cars are under constant stress and yet when that check engine light appears it always catches us by surprise. It’s the same with our minds. Unless we are in tune with the chaos happening under the hood, breakdowns are inevitable. Luckily, as long as the breakdown isn’t severe you heal. And unlike your car, your brain gets better with every cycle of stress/break/healing. With practice, stress can make you stronger.
Let’s say you decide to train for a marathon. On day one you are incapable of running 26 miles. This isn't a question of talent, nobody is born with the ability to run huge distances. It isn't a question of willpower, desire alone won't get you to the finish line. A marathon requires you to become something else. The stress of training is what makes this transformation possible. So you start running and mile by mile you change. Through repeated cycles of stress and recovery you improve. Stress is the only mechanism that can transform you from a person who can't do something into someone who can.
We’ve come to believe that stress is our enemy, something to eliminate from our lives. Stress avoidance started in school, we longed for the days when we could leave the homework and tests behind. After graduation we enter the job market where we optimize our days for maximum pay and minimum stress. We aspire to corner offices, executive retreats, meetings on golf courses, and golden parachutes. Retirement is the ultimate goal, an excuse to stop working entirely and live out our remaining years stress-free.
When our current jobs get too stressful we update our resumes and look for employment at better companies offering more "culture" and more entertaining projects. We avoid confrontation, reduce risk, and eliminate stress because we think that is how to get ahead. But many of us find ourselves at a plateau, our output falls short of our expectations, and our careers get stalled in mediocrity.
The math that got us here isn't hard. Too much stress causes meltdown. Too little stress and our muscles atrophy. We end up in stasis because we are never challenged enough to grow and we are never unfit enough to require additional training. Our routine involves just enough stress to maintain our current positions but never enough to advance to another level. And yet most of us feel a nagging desire to do the impossible, to be a part of something that changes the world. How do we get there from here?
Whether you are training for a race or trying to learn any new skill, you must foster a healthy familiarity with stress if you want to improve. You are seeking a routine that lets you function despite the pressure. The ideal state is comfortably uncomfortable, the threshold where discomfort is still painless. Get comfortable with a cycle where you deplete your reserves as soon as you are recharged. I propose that this state, functional depletion, is the key to break free of stasis. Find it and you will always be pushing your limits, never complacent, regularly failing but constantly on the verge of breakthrough. That is how stress transforms us into better versions of ourselves.
One problem. What I have just described is a great way to develop fitness and new skills, but it doesn’t guarantee creative breakthrough. For that we need more than the ability to tolerate discomfort. What about the big idea? Where will that come from?
Once again, let’s return to your morning commute, the same drive where you were rudely cut off. Instead of rush hour traffic, think of your surroundings through the eyes of user zero. Information is zooming past you in all directions. There is no way to process it all. Somewhere among the chaos is a kernel of information, an egg that could hatch into a world-changing idea. How would you go about finding it?
The Edisonian approach is to use our brains like computers. Through brute force and over-confident in our science-based software, we think the pentium processing power of our minds can find the egg by driving faster. We see the egg as a destination that we can steer our vehicle toward. We stick to well-trodden paths, striving to avoid anything risky. We step on the gas, trying to ingest as much data as we can find.
Driving this vehicle, your only hope of discovering that egg is for an insect carrying the precious cargo to accidentally flutter in front of you. Unlikely. Even if you are lucky enough to witness the splat, you are still going to try and look past it. Instead of focusing on the incredible treasure mingling among gooey guts inches in front of your face, you flip on the wipers and try to squirt off the priceless gunk. Your pattern recognition machine fails you.
What’s the alternative? Now that we are aware of our limitations, of the fact that our computer brains are incapable of processing more than a tiny fraction of the landscape, we understand that the solution isn’t the gas pedal. Whether we are traveling at the speed of sound or at a snail’s pace the inputs are overwhelming. Your only tool, your only hope of finding that egg is curiosity.
The Teslian approach grows out of curiosity about the negative space. In this mode you aren’t driving the vehicle, you are more like a bobblehead Buddha on the dashboard. Standing completely still, the flow of sensory data is infinite. You drift, open to anything. User zero.
You are waiting for dissonance, for something on the fringe of your awareness to trigger your attention. Here, at the dawn of consciousness is where the embryo of creativity can form. Perhaps it is the unfamiliar sound of an insect. As it flutters by, instead of swatting it away you allow it to land. You observe it, acknowledge that it has broken through the chaos and entered your reality. What can it teach you? Perhaps it will bless you with that egg. Perhaps not. Regardless, your world has just gotten a little richer than if you simply let the bug become a smear on your windshield.
When we realize that at any moment we are only absorbing a tiny slice of the world, an amazing things happens. We transform from preprogrammed machines into creative beings. Creativity is the ability to hold two ideas in your mind at the same time, simulate a collision, and sort through the debris for something new.
Some people might wrongly describe this skill as a talent. Do you believe in talent? Is there a fairy fluttering around blessing special folks with abilities and flying over the rest of us unlucky souls?
The danger of the talent myth is that it creates an excuse for us to segregate people into different buckets, often when we are very young. School divides us into groups, some pointed at scientific endeavors and others with artistic trajectories. Each student gets assigned to whatever bucket the talent fairies blessed them with. They would have us believe that creativity is optional, a talent that some people can theoretically live without. This is tragic because breakthrough is only possible in the negative space.
Further compounding the problem is that should you succeed, if you create something authentic, your masterpiece will most likely be ignored or attacked by people who have nothing to compare your creation to. The Dunning Kruger effect strikes again. The people who could benefit the most from your creative breakthrough lack the ability to recognize its transformational power.
When your work makes contact with the outer world, a truly original idea will ignite one of three responses. The first reaction is invisibility. If it can’t be put in their mental box, it just doesn’t exist for them. The second response is discomfort. When forced to interact with something they can’t define some people rebel. This is the “I just don’t get art/religion/math” response. The third response is change. If you are lucky, your work will trigger their check engine light. A question will appear in their mind, a blinking clue that what they had thought was true up until this moment requires recalibration.
Talent is a myth that is deeply connected to personal identity, it is a belief so fundamental to who we are that abandoning it feels like losing a limb. In the next chapter we will return to a time when our identities were still being formed. As we re-examine our youth we will evaluate one of the most deceptively simple user interfaces ever devised.