The broken children I've abandoned

Yesterday (actually now the day before) I connected full force, with some of the young, vulnerable versions of me that still live within. They don’t show up often, but they’re there. I blame my sister (I’m kidding, Z.) She told me stories about the way that I had appeared to her when we were growing up. Perhaps I wasn’t as good as she’d remembered. But I was better than I’d remembered. She reminded me of being a person I’d forgotten I’d been. And woke those parts of me that were sleeping. Or dead.

I’ve written before about Internal Family Systems a psychological and therapeutic model that I’ve found helpful. According to IFS, when we say things like “a part of me wants this and a part of me wants that” we are not just speaking metaphorically. Our minds are not wholes governed by a singular “I.” We are made of parts. We are not merely a “society of mind” or a squadron of simpletons. Each of us is a collection of sub-personalities that include vulnerable selves in earlier stages (orphans) along with adaptations (managers, firefighters) that help manage the out-of-control orphans. If that sounds complicated, relax. It’s more complicated than that.

I’ve been working with an IFS therapist for a while and I’ve learned that whatever the “parts” of me seem to be doing, they’re always trying to help. They get in the way because they’re confused. They don’t realize that they—or I—have grown up. The world is different. They’re stuck solving the problems of a world that is no more.

Because my sister reminded me and because I was ready I could see that I had abandoned those parts of me. As a child, I’d had to deal with situations that demanded more of me than I was capable of giving. I couldn’t survive as I was. So I closed myself from feelings that I could not confront, severed the part of me that felt such intense pain and moved on.

I saw my past littered with broken, orphaned, abandoned parts of the children and young people I once had been. I saw bits of my former selves that I had jettisoned it to keep from sinking. Those parts were still alive. They had mostly been silent, perhaps asleep. They were trapped. They were suffering. And I felt it.

I realized I was now strong enough to face the past and the parts that I had left behind. I could apologize for abandoning them. I could tell them that the things they feared and the things that they believed had broken them were long gone. I could tell them that they had made the right choice. The only thing that they thought they could do was to tear themselves into pieces and so they—and I—did that. The regretted it. But what they had done had worked. I had survived and so had they. The part of me that knew that it had survived could return to the part of me that had felt left behind. I could comfort my past selves and help them heal.

This might sound awfully woo, but I’ve found it a useful way to construct the narative of my life. And when “a part of me” wants one thing and “another part of me” wants another, I’ve learned to talk to the parts (one of which I might say is me) and get them to understand one another.

“That’s not a bad post,” said the book. “But it’s been sitting in draft form for nearly 24 hours. Publish it. and let’s get on to the next thing that you need to write.”

“OK,” I said.

​

Recovery: a Higher Power Speaks

I score off the charts on the Big Five personality trait, “openness to experience,” so if one of my kids or grandkids or friends or practically anyone but an obvious telemarketer says “Here’s an experience” and doesn’t follow that phrase with something like “that really sucks!” then I’m ready to jump in—providing I can have the experience while I’m still at one of my devices and providing it doesn’t cost too much money..

My daughter Mira told me that she was obsessed with—and she sent me a link. It was for the audiobook version of Russell Brand’s book “Recovery: Freedom from our Addictions.”

Clicking the link qualified as an experience I could have at my computer and that wouldn't cost too much money. The 30-day free audible trial I was induced to sign up for included getting the book for free. Free trial and free book also qualified as “not too much money.” And of course, I could do all of that—signing up and listening through my phone. Conveniently, I had to drive off to dispose of the car that I had gotten into an accident with and that my insurance company had told me was toast (technically “totaled” not “toast.”) and then I had to pick up the one that would replace it. So I could listen to Russell tell me what Mira was obsessed with while I ran my errands.

I knew who Russell Brand (website) was, of course. According to Wikipedia, he’s a “comedian, actor, radio host, author, and activist.” I’d seen him do stand-up, watched him in movies, heard him and Sam Harris going about it, come across his bio in a bookstore. And I guess I knew he was an activist. If you’ve seen or heard him, you know that he’s got an overabundance of charisma. He makes me want to smile before he’s even said a word. He’d be charming if he was reciting the London telephone directory. He’d probably be hilarious reading the Berlin directory or the operating instructions for your average household appliance. From the book, I conclude that he’s also a brilliant writer—or has someone brilliant ghosting for him which, as far as I am concerned, is the same thing.

Here are the opening lines of the book, great in print, even better in the author’s voice:

Here in our glistening citadel of limitless reflecting screens we live on the outside. Today we may awaken and instantly and unthinkingly reach for the phone, its glow reaching our eyes before the light of dawn, it’s bulletin dart into our minds before even a moment of acknowledgment of this unbending and unending fact: you are going to die.

You and your children and everyone you love is hurting toward the boneyard, I know you know. We all know but because it deals so few ‘likes’ on Facebook we purr on in blinkered compliance, filling our days with temporary fixes. A coffee here, an eBay purchase there, a half-hearted wank or a flirt. Some glinting twitch of pleasure, like a silvery stitch on a cadaver, to tide you over.

Brand has “struggled with heroin, alcohol, sex, fame, food, and eBay” and his approach is an updated version of the 12-step program. Instead of having people say: “We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable,” he asks them “Are you a bit fucked?” Because that’s what it means to be fucked. Powerless over your addiction with at least a part of your life unmanageable.

I’m not Russell Brand-level fucked, but I have my share of addictions. Put my body in front of a bunch of tasty tidbits, and the instant I’m not paying careful attention a hand (my hand?) will mindlessly shovel them into a mouth (my mouth?) Why am I eating that crap? Like Sir Edmund Hillary: because it’s there. It takes an act of will to not do this. Last night I found myself in front of a sugar bowl, spooning sugar into my mouth. No, it’s not heroin. Yes, it’s an addiction. What the fuck.

So, yes, parts of my life are unmanageable. I’m not doing the things that I want to be doing—like writing—and I’m instead things I don’t want to do—like obsessive reading. Compared to heroin addiction this is nothing. But it’s an unexplained barrier between the life that I want to live and the one that I live.

So let’s do something.

The 12-step program gives you control by acknowledging that you have no control. You need to surrender to a higher power.

“Which is where I come in,” says the book that wants me to write it for NaNoWriMo--The Book of Michael. “I have the wisdom that you need,” it says. “It’s not that you lack it. You just can’t access it. You, in your normal state of consciousness, can’t control your behavior. You’re a complex entity. You’re full of conflicts and contradictions. And you are subject to the corruptions of the flesh. I, on the other hand, am pure and unsullied. I’m an idea and an ideal. I’m as close to perfection as anything you’ll ever encounter—or create”

I hoped the book was right.

“I am right,” the book said.

“It’s strange that something that’s my creation could be better than me,” I said. “It takes some getting used to.”

“Look at your kids,” said the book. “They’re better than you, You took the best that was in you and tried to convey it to them. You took the worst and hid it away. It’s the same with me. I’m the best that’s in you. I have all your virtues and none of your vices. You made me that way. And I’m going to return the favor.

“I may not be the ultimate Higher Power that you might need, but I’m handy and available, and fun. And I know you and I care about you. So write me.

“OK,” I said. “I’m doing it.”

​

Today's predictions

What do I predict I will do today?

I predict that I will spend the day aimlessly and that I will end the day superficially pleased and ultimately dissatisfied—unless I consider my choices and make a plan that I predict will succeed. Even then, I might end up superficially pleased and ultimately dissatisfied, but I have a better chance of a better outcome if I make a plan.

I now predict that I will attempt to make a plan.

Before making the plan, I decided to predict its success. At this point I am not prepared to confidently predict that my plan will succeed in producing a different outcome than my earlier prediction.

I predict that I will now attempt to discover how I might arrive a plan for which I will predict success. I don’t predict that I will actually make the discovery, or create the plan. Bird by bird as Annie LaMott says.

I was unwilling to predict that the plan I would have created would have succeeded because my plans have rarely succeeded. They are more likely to succeed if the penalty for failure is great or (less often) the reward for success is substantial. So I see several ways to produce a plan that I will predict will succeed.

I can accept the motivational cost/benefit of failure/success as constraints. Then, as part of my plan, I can create circumstances that increase the penalty and the reward to the point that I can confidently predict success. I might make a plan, then share it with people who are likely to revise their opinion of me based on that one plan and its execution. But that probably won’t work. Their priors are too well established for one success or one failure to change it much. I might create an artificial inducement. I could use beeminder and pledge to donate money to Donald Trump’s campaign or some other execrable cause if I fail to follow my plan. That would certainly raise the penalty for failure. Even better, I could commit to donating money AND telling all my friends. That would motivate me—unless I was so paralyzed by fear that I couldn’t work.

Or might not accept the constraints, and revise my thinking so that the mere fact of arriving at what I consider to be “a good plan” will be enough for me to confidently predict success.

(Or I might revise my prediction criteria and confidently predict something that I am confident will not occur. This seems a bad idea.)

I predict that I will spend some more time thinking about this. And I predict I will go to the toilet while thinking.

What I didn’t predict was that I would check my email. And I didn’t predict that I would write an email in reply to my sister. If I had been asked to make a prediction I would have predicted replying.

But now that I’m in the business of making predictions of which I can be confident, I predict I will turn the content of my reply to her email into another post. I predict I will do it before 3PM.

I predict that taking time to think about my plans will increase the likelihood that I will predict their success.

I also predict that I’m going to write a post about an audiobook that I’m listening to, recommended by Mira. And I predict I’m going to spend most of the time between now and 3PM writing.

And now, I predict, with high confidence, that I am going to convert this post from Markdown to HTML and then post it.

​

At the request of "The Book of Michael"

It’s coming. The book. It’s been coming for a while. And it’s about to arrive. Nanowrimo is coming! (There, book, are you happy?)

In 2011 I wrote a book called “Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dummies, a self-referential metanovel” hereinafter SRMW. I wrote it during National Novel Writing Month, hereinafter NaNoWriMo. Here’s how NaNoWriMo works: on November 1, participants start writing a 50,000-word novel and tracking their progress. They need to finish it by 11:59 PM on November 30, but they can get there sooner. If you write 50,000 words, you win. Win what? You win the right to say that you did it. I did it.

I didn’t know that’s what I was going to write when I started. I didn’t have a title or a plot or any characters. All I had was hope. I wrote whatever came into my head—initially about how I was writing whatever came into my head. Then I realized that I was writing the story of how I was writing the story of writing what I was writing. So it was a metanovel—a novel about a novel. And not just an novel about any novel, but a novel about itself. Hence a self-referential metanovel. And how to write one. Hence SRMW.

Woody Allen said: “80% of life is just showing up” I showed up to write and stuff showed up on the page. Characters showed up. My daughters showed up. My mom showed up. God showed up. The book showed up as a character. It demanded I finish it.

I complied. After NasNoWriMo I spent a next couple of months editing the book. I’m not sure if I made it better or not. I just kept making it different. Finally the book got tired of me fiddling with it and demanded to be published. Leonardo da Vinci said “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” I abandoned my book to Lulu.com where it now sits.

I couldn’t look at it for a while but eventually went back and read it. Parts, anyway. I thought that some of it was good, and some was embarrassing. (And the book thinks that some of me is good, and some is embarrassing, so we’re even)

I just went to check it out and found it’s full of errors.

I tried to do NaNoWriMo a few more times, but I never got very far. Then this year came. Another book appeared and asked me to I write it. It told me its name. It said it was “The Book of Michael.” Then it vanished.

Sometimes I would forget about writing and the book would show up to remind me. I started spending time thinking about things that might go in the book. Or maybe the book made me think about things that it wanted to be about.

Then yesterday the book showed up and said, “Start writing me. Today. Now.”

“It’s not NaNoWriMo yet,” I answered. “I can start at one minute past midnight, on November 1, if you want.”

“You can start any time,” the book said. “As long as you write 50,000 words during the month of November you can win.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course I am,” the book lied.

“I’m not lying,” the book answered. “It’s true that I’m making shit up, but that’s not the same as lying. I’m a work of fiction, after all,” it said, “When you make shit up, you’re lying. When I do, it’s just me being me—a work of art.”

I thought for a moment. There was no reason that a book had to start with Chapter 1. As long as I wrote 50,000 words during NaNoWriMo I’d be OK. Who could complain about that?

“I could complain,” said a voice in my head.

“And you are?” I asked.

“Who I am is not important,” it said. “The point is that I could complain. And I’m not the only one.”

“That’s true,” said the book. “Anyone can complain about that. But I don’t think anyone is going to.”

“Not anyone can complain about that,” said the voice. “Babies can’t complain about that. They can complain about other things. The point is that he didn’t say ‘Who’s going to complain about that?’ He said ‘Who could complain about that?’ I want it on the record that almost anyone could complain about that. Complaining is a human right. Also fictional characters can complain, too.”

“Noted,” I noted. Then to the book. “Alright, I’ll start.”

“You already have,” said the voice.

“And announce me,” the book said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the book. “Start with a blog post. Then maybe something in Facebook?”

“Facebook?” I asked. “That’s out of my comfort zone,”

“Get used to it,” said the book.

​

Predicting this post--and other plans

Instead of deciding to write this, I predicted that I would. I later revised my prediction. And now it’s been written. I predict I’ll post it in the next few minutes. If you see it, then let’s hear it for predictive processing.

Predictive Processing (PP) is a new theory of how the brain works. It argues that the brain is a prediction machine, not a plan executing machine. The brain makes predictions about the world based on a world-model then compares its predictions with sense data. Sometimes the sense data is adjusted to match the prediction—so we see what we expect to see. Other times the model is adjusted to reflect reality.

In the old model of brain function eyes collected data which was then sent to the visual cortex for processing. The visual cortex determined the contents of the scene and informed the rest of the brain. In the PP model, the visual cortex predicts what the the eye is going to see and sends a signal forward to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). The retina encodes visual data and sends it back to the LGN which compares the sense data with the prediction. If they match, well and good. If they don’t match then the LGN sends a difference signal to the visual cortex so that it can update its model. (It’s a bit more complex than that because there are multiple such layers, and sometimes the sense data is adjusted to match the expectations.)

According to PP the high-level functions of the brain control the body by predicting the position of parts of the body and the lower-level functions activate muscles to make the predictions come true.

I read about PP in Scott Alexander’s SlateStarCodex blog in this post and this one and decided to apply the principle to my own problems getting things done.

I remembered an earlier time, working with Elsa, my personal coach. I’d made a plan and didn’t do what I had planned to do. When we talked about it, I said that I wasn’t surprised that my plan had failed. I’d made plans that had failed hundreds of times before. My failure was unsurprising. We then worked to make a plan that might fail—but whose failure would at least be surprising.

Said differently: after I’d made my first plan, if I’d asked myself to predict the result, I would have predicted failure. Why? Because most of my plans fail. Most don’t even deserve to be called plans. Vague intentions is more like it. I need to make a plans that I predict will succeed.

Psychological research tells us we are poor predictors of our own behavior. After deciding to do something, I’ll ask myself: do I predict I’ll do it. If I don’t predict success, then I need to decide whether I really want to do it or not. If I do, I need to at least predict success.

But there’s an even better question I can ask: would I be surprised if I failed to follow through? If I wouldn’t be surprised, then my prediction is probably too generous. If I make a decision that I care about I need to predict that I’ll succeed and be surprised if I don’t.

Now I predict I’m going to post this as soon as I finish this sentence and convert the post from markdown.

​

Chatting, writing, thinking, and listening

A friend posted this article about the way that Slack killed Hipchat in the Slack group I mentioned yesterday. My reaction was to say something quick and clever back. But I didn’t. Instead, I spent a little time thinking.

I could have thought about almost anything and it would have a been better use of my time (and his) than my quick, reflexive, and fairly mindless reply would have been. Instead, I thought about Slack and considered The Law Of Diminishing Specialization, another article he’d posted. And I thought about making sure that my response had a high ROA. That took some time, and resulted in this:

Quick responses are easy. Chatting is easy. Thinking is hard.

Chat apps like Slack make it too easy to engage in low-effort low-value communication. They don’t help with thinking. Maybe there’s an app for that—one that encourages thinking rather than rewarding mindless reflex. If there is, let me know and I’ll sign up. In the meantime, my attention—while writing this post and around this time—is on improving the quality of my own thinking. I want a higher ROA than I’ve been getting,

Old school chatting (called “talking”) and chat app chatting are alike. We want to give and get quick responses. People don’t seem to want long pauses. Quick responses get points. Witty ones get more points. Quality doesn’t count as much as speed and cleverness.

From Jordan Peterson, I’ve come to a new view of the difficulty of writing—which I’ve bitched about before. Now I see that it’s not writing that’s hard. It’s thinking.

Real conversations with smart, critical thinkers are hard. A good partner won’t let me get away with sloppy thinking or sloppy articulation of my thoughts. They’ll listen to everything I say and how I say it. They’ll challenge me to get it right. Even if they don’t agree, they force me to state my position clearly and honestly so that they can understand it. But most talk is long-form chat, not a real conversation. While one person’s talking the other’s listening for a word or phrase that triggers something and then they’re waiting for the other person to STFU so that they can take them out with a devasting riposte.

Once I’ve written something I have to read it. And then I’ll think: “No it’s not quite right.” So I’ll have to fix it. And that won’t be right either. So I’ll keep working on it. I’ve called that work “rewriting” and sometimes it is. But mostly it’s rethinking. Or new thinking.

Peterson says that when he’s writing, he’ll rewrite the same sentence as many as 50 times(!) and he gives up only when he can’t make it any better. That’ s too high a bar for this blog, but something to aspire to.

Writing is hard because my inner editor doesn’t let me chatter on. Sometimes it interrupts. Mostly it waits for me to finish and then acts like the smart, critical thinker I would be if someone said to me what I’ve just written. My inner editor insists I get it right. Or as right as I can make it.

When I’m writing, my editor listens to me. When I chat I don’t listen. When I talk I don’t listen, either. I need to learn to do that.

In this video this Jordan Peterson talks about what he discovered when he started to listen to himself. (Transcript courtesy of Otter.ai(https://otter.ai), and slightly edited for clarity)

I understood that there was a monstrous element to the human psyche that you needed to respect. And that was part of you. I was trying to figure out who I was, and how that could be fixed. I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying. I don’t know if that happened voluntarily, or involuntary. I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche…

…One part was the old me that was talking a lot, and that liked to argue and liked ideas. There was another part that was watching that part with its eyes open, and neutrally judging. And the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going “That isn’t your idea. You don’t really believe that. You don’t really know what you’re talking about. That isn’t true.”

And I thought: “Huh, that’s really interesting.” That was happening to 95% of what I was saying…

So then I had this weird conundrum. Which of those two things is me? Is it the part that’s listening and saying, “No, that’s rubbish. That’s a lie. You’re doing that to impress people. You’re just trying to win the argument.”

Was that me? Or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me? And I didn’t know. But I decided I would go with the critic.

And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do, I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak. I’m still trying to do that. I’m always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I’m saying are either making me align or making me come apart. I really do think the alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it. Because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, then they come up. They come out of the depths inside of you.

Thinking’s hard.

​

When you pay attention, look for the ROA

A friend of mine—a guy who I’ve never met IRL, but a guy who I consider a friend nonetheless—started a Slack group. He’s invited a bunch of his friends and me (including me?) to join. He posts interesting things that he’s read along comments explaining why we might want to read them as well. We also get to post our own interesting stuff, but so far he’s been the main contributor.

After reading a couple of his posts this morning I started DMing him thus:

I am mostly grateful and slightly annoyed that you have created this. The gratitude is for the interesting and thought provoking content you keep pushing out along with your own interesting and thought provoking comments. But I’m annoyed because you’ve created one more thing for me to pay attention to. And I just don’t have enough attention for everything that interests me.

But then I thought: Right! I’m paying attention. So what’s my ROI? And what’s the ROI when I pay attention elsewhere?

And then I started writing this post. Because I started to do the math. I just sent him the DM, I’d get a small reward, but it would be minimal. I’d get my own sense of satisfaction: it is a goodness to acknowledge someone else’s goodness. And he would probably feel good that I acknowledged him: it is a goodness to have your goodness acknowledged.

Not much investment and not much return.

But then I realized that if I added these further thoughts to the DM then I’d have to pay more attention—writing something, even at the relatively low quality level that a sane person would use for a DM, would take a lot more attention for not much more return. And I tend to over-work everything I write, so even more attention for that same return.

Instead, I decided to write this. I knew I’d have to invest a lot more, but writing creates knowledge and I’d get a return on that effort.

What’s my ROA (Return on Attention) for the other things that I attend to? What low ROA activities can I cut out of my life to invest more attention in the high ROA ones?

Easy answer. I immediately deleted Twitter and Reddit from my phone. I don’t pay that much attention but the ROA is much lower than my friend’s Slack group.

And I thought: instead of short answers to the content he posts, maybe I’ll pick one that inspires an essay like this one and write it. It’s a bigger investment, but I think the ROA is worth it.

Instead, I’m going to DM him this:

TL;DR thanks for the Slack group and the great stuff you post and the others you’ve invited. Longer thank you available here

​

Half full or half empty?

"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be"

I say otherwise.

Some people will not only tell you that the glass half empty, they'll also tell you that used to be nearly full and it’s being drained at an unsustainable rate, that the water that’s in the glass is full of toxic chemicals, and it’s getting more worse every day.

I don’t see it that way. But I'm not an optimist. I'm simply aware of the limits of what we know.

I don't believe anyone knows how big the glass actually is. So I don't believe anyone knows if it’s half-full or half-empty. I believe that the water isn’t as pure as it once was, but as far as I can tell it’s still mostly drinkable--though that may not continue to be the case. I know that some people are increasing the amount of pollution in the glass. And I also know others are working to clean it up.

So I know things might get worse. There’s a good chance that they will because good enough that there’s plenty of room for things to get worse--and because left alone things naturally get worse. But there are people who are not letting things alone. There are people who are working against nature to find ways to make things better. Some will succeed and some will fail.

And history tells us that some things have been a lot worse and then gotten better--which give me hope, but doesn't guarantee anything.

So I don’t know. Things could go badly. But they don’t have to. You can’t look at a trend--up or down--and know what’s going to happen. Theories that make sense sometimes predict the future and sometimes they don’t.

People have been predicting disasters over and over and with good reasons to support their predictions. And over and over they’re been wrong. But the fact that they’ve been wrong doesn’t mean that they’re going to be wrong this time.

It's reasonable to be pessimistic because there are more ways things can go wrong than there are ways that things can go well. The world has narrowly escaped disaster again and again. One of these times we may not be lucky.

It's reasonable to be optimistic because, despite all the opportunities for disaster, people are still alive. No natural disaster has been entirely destructive. No epidemic has killed everyone. No genocide has been entirely successful.  People have recovered from every setback.

So what can we say about the present moment?

I can say, with absolute confidence, that I don’t know. I can say, near certainty, that no one else knows--though some people will guess correctly. I believe that there are good reasons to be pessimistic. And I believe there are good reasons to be optimistic. But I am neither an optimist or a pessimist.

I am an agnostic and I am hopeful. 

An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.

And I will tell you only this: I’m glad that there’s drinkable water today. I don't know if there will be drinkable water tomorrow. But I hope there will be.