Tough Pills to Swallow
I have three tough pills for you, I hope they find you well.
I promise that each one of these, when fully understood, will drastically improve your life.
#1 – Everything is Your Fault
There is nothing in your life that falls outside the domain of your responsibility.
It does not matter if someone else is the catalyst of an outcome in your life, tolerating the outcome makes you culpable.
the litmus test for whether or not you have swallowed this pill is in the form of measuring how often you blame others, and excuse your own role in your life.
Here's an imperfect analogy:
You are driving down the road, and someone is just ahead of you cruising 10mph under the speed limit. You're late for an important appointment or you're desperately holding in your urine... whatever the case: you need to get where you're going.
You and your captor are approaching a stoplight, and it turns yellow. despite going slower than you'd like, you truly are going faster than makes sense to come to a full stop before the intersection. Yet despite all logic, driving handbook guidance, and human ingenuity, your less intelligent counterpart panics and slams their breaks and screeches to a halt in the second quarter of the intersection; you however, in your infinite wisdom, continue driving directly into their tailgate.
from one perspective, the car in front of you is driven by an absolute idiot. mental deficiency of this kind should lead to the death penalty. You were not speeding, you were 3 car lengths behind them, and you're late for a meeting (with your boss or toilet, take your pick). How can someone be this inconsiderate?
You have all of my sympathy for feeling this way, and yet... the wreck is your fault.
You could have gone even slower, you could have paid more attention, and more importantly: you were not living in reality. you were living under a delusion in which everyone on earth follows the same trail of logic and rationality as you. A world where cell phones and lack of sleep don't exist, a world where judges don't condemn defendants to worse sentences when they are hungry.
You tried your best at being clairvoyant, and I'm sorry to inform you: you failed.
It's your fault. With a regard to improving your life, and having less car accidents (though hopefully we can all see this isn't really about cars), it is vital that you accept this truth. You not the other guy/gal should have prevented the accident by being a better driver. Failing to account for the potential (and probable) stupidity of others is a worse form of stupidity. it's a form which blinds you to your own biases while making you feel superior. take a step back and look at the damage: the front of your car, and the rear of the other. You hit them, there are no heroes walking away from a car accident.
This may seem a flippant example.
"Okay sure, I could drive better but I was seriously hurt as a child... how is that my fault?"
there are two types of problems in your life: Catalysts and Consequences.
A catalyst is the inciting incident, it's the car wreck. and some car wrecks truly are not your fault. Sometimes you are at a complete stop, and someone slams into the back of you.
Being hurt as a child in any form, is the latter type of car wreck. it's the kind that is not your fault. However, the consequences of that event are your responsibility to deal with.
No one is coming to save you, other than yourself. You have to reach down and pick yourself up. There are worse lives to live than mine, by a magnitude that is incomprehensible quite frankly. But I have lived through more than my fair share of dark days. some very unique circumstances. I can tell you first hand: you can reach a hand down to the child inside of you and lead them into adulthood, if only you can learn to be the adult first.
Not accepting the challenge of re-parenting your inner child is feigning your responsibility. does it suck? yes. is it necessary? no... not unless you want to live a full life. There is a wild fire burning behind you and every year it moves up to the present day, scorching the earth inside your soul. No one is going to put that fire out on your behalf, it is up to you to take care of it.
If that fire burns your life down with self sabotage, with poor decision making, with fear locking you away from what you truly desire (or the kinds of relationships you truly desire), it's your fault. The catalyst may not be, but the continuation makes you culpable.
To be clear, I am also talking about sales, career development, your relationship with your children and significant other, finances, health, etc. All of it is your responsibility. None of it is someone else's fault. No matter the hand that life dealt you, there is nothing for you to do except climb upward.
A quick note: I do not mean here, that you cannot ask others for help. I do not mean you must be entirely reliant on yourself. The people we are lucky enough to have around us for support should not be shoved away. I simply mean that blaming the catalyst for your outcomes in life is a path which leads to the bottom of the barrel.
The path to hell is paved with excuses.
You cannot just say "oh my trauma" and move on. You cannot say "oh it was her/his fault" and call it a day. Your life is yours, not the proverbial theirs.
It's all your fault. There are paths to solving it, I found one of them and plan to stay on it until the day I die. It's a journey with no end, but it gets better all the time.
This path starts by accepting that which no one wants to accept: It's all your fault. it's all your responsibility.
To shoehorn in some probably unneeded theology: Jesus died on the cross, but this vicarious forgiveness does not relieve you of the responsibility to mimmic Christ. Pick up your cross and walk.
#2 – Critical Thinking is about you, not others
Thinking critically is very simple, the goal is to think about thought itself.
"Why did I do that?"
"Where is this feeling coming from?"
"Why did I say those words and not other ones?"
Or as the talking heads once asked:
"How did I get here? [...] How do I work this?"
When we think critically, we are trying to understand ourselves first. The process is much easier–and much more fun–to project onto others, but without first looking at ourselves, how do we know if our assessments of others are correct?
For example, it may not be clear to you here unless you're from outside the US, but my frequent use of driving metaphors is uniquely American. This is not to say that driving doesn't exist out in the rest of the world, but our reliance on the highway system (largely due to big oil lobbying... but I digress) is unique to us. I'm not sure I have ever been on a train in the US.
All of your behavior is a product of your environment, which means you likely suffer from the same brand of myopia as your cultural peers. We cannot escape cognitive biases, but being aware of them is the first step toward mitigating them. Can I account for why I use driving analogies so often? not entirely. that should worry me (and it does, but more on that later).
It's easy to pick apart the thinking of others (like the imbecile who MADE US WRECK INTO THEM BY STOPPING WHEN THEY SHOULD HAVE GONE), it's much harder to take that responsibility onto yourself and realize that you have gaps in your thinking too. Some humility would work nicely here.
A brief aside: it's clear to me that some subset of readers here may think that I actually got into the kind of car accident I am referencing here. it's important to my ego that you all know I have never been in an accident. I am fallible, but I do pay attention on the road.
The first step to being critical of the thinking of others, is to turn the attention of your critical gaze upon itself.
You must remember that every single person makes decisions that are rational and logically consistent with their internal systems, yourself included.
these systems may not be thought out, they may not touch base with reality, but they are systematic. a failure to understand this is a failure to understand human nature.
Right and wrong
There are no right or wrong ways to think or feel in a global sense.
There are wrong ways with regard to your goal orientation (but that is an essay for another time). Life makes a lot more sense in prescriptive terms.
If you want X, then do that which will bring you more X. if you want X so you do Z, which brings about less X... then you have made a wrong move.
When you think critically about other people's thoughts, you are failing to account for their goal orientation.
The person slamming their breaks at the intersection wants to obey the law, you want to get home as soon as possible. neither is right or wrong, and they are both logically consistent with the thinkers internal system. you are both doing that which gets you more X (obedience or miles closer to home, in this case).
This failure to account for an alignment error is critical. I can literally kill people (car accidents do that, but so do many other alignment errors).
Failing to account for orientations leads to miserable outcomes. You thinking myopically–not critically–when you have this kind of error. But again, this is it's own (very long) essay.
#3 – You do not have free will
At least, not in the sense you think you do.
I will give you one disclaimer: this subject can cause people a lot of emotional distress. the feeling that we are free is quite difficult to shake, and may lead to a sudden existential crisis if you're not ready for it. Feel free to skip this part, though its arguably the red pill you might need (I mean no reference to the alt-right red pill movement here, just the matrix).
Without this becoming it's own very lengthy essay, lets unpack some hidden values.
When most people say they have free will, what they mean is that they have autonomy to do whatever they want to do. I do, in fact, think we have autonomy.
If you present me with chocolate and vanilla ice cream, I will choose chocolate every time. This is freedom, is it not?
Well, not in the Schopenhauer sense of the phrase "A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills". That is to say: I can choose chocolate, but I cannot account for why I prefer it and therefor why I chose it.
Inside you there is a scale (the lady justice kind, not the bathroom kind) which is weighing decisions. Our upbringing, environment, genetics, friends, parents, financial status, access to education, physical health, etc. all play a role in what the outcome is of the scale.
You can choose vanilla out of spite of this example, but can you account for why you would rather eat your less preferable flavor just to prove a point?
Think of the most disgusting meal you can fathom. Maybe it's cold and rubbery octopus tentacles dipped in frog blood. Maybe it's pancakes made with cricket flour. whatever the case, make sure it sounds truly abhorrent.
Would you take a bite?
Maybe you would, to prove your freedom of will. but can you make yourself like it?
No, you certainly cannot. and once again, you cannot account for why you would choose to eat the worst food imaginable rather than refuse it. you want to preserve your feeling of freedom, at the cost of your taste buds. but you cannot account for why.
If you cannot make yourself like that which disgusts you, how can you be free?
jikishi-ninshin
In Zen Buddhism there is a principle know as jikishi-ninshin, or "Direct pointing to the human mind". I am going to do a little of that here, there may be some momentary discomfort.
What are you going to think next?
Really think about this for a minute. What is the next thought that will enter your brain? will it be about lobsters? politics? your health? will it be "I'm just about to think of X" while you are blind to the fact that you already are thinking X by thinking it?
If you seriously consider this question, you have no clue what your next thought will be.
It's a complete mystery.
In order to know what you're about to think, you must think it before you think it. this is impossible. By the time you think it, you are already thinking it.
So ask yourself this: If I do not know what my next thought will be, and I never can, then how can I be the direct author of my thoughts?
The thoughts which appear inside your mind are just as random and unexpected as construction noise, and you have just as much control over whether you hear them as you do a jackhammer or table saw.
This voice inside your head, which is sometimes at odds with itself, can be wrangled and understood through meditation. But if you have never realized this truth, then have you really been in the drivers seat? (and can I account for why i used yet another driving metaphor?)
Chicken noodle soup for the soul
Assuming this section undid some dearly held belief's about yourself (which it may not have, it took me a while to grasp it), I want to console you briefly.
Not having ultimate freedom over your will does not mean you are a robot. nor does it mean that determinism is true in the colloquial understanding of the phrase. There is no puppet master here. there is a computer program running in your brain, and you did not write the operating system. Your life did. But you can make changes to this code. Re-parenting your inner child, therapy, meditation, journaling, and making environmental changes will change the course of your thoughts, and the outcomes in your life.
This is a truth that every self help guru on the planet understands. Tony Robbins repackaged this insight into 23 books and $10k courses and mastermind groups. but ultimately it's all much more simple than that:
Your life is controlled by your past and your environment. if you want to change your life, you must change both. Re-contextualize your past, and change your environment. Choose better friends. find new leaders. Read books that open your mind rather than consume media that narrows it.
Nassim Taleb said it best: “The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad."
You cannot will yourself into something you do not will to happen (oddly), you must come at it indirectly. If you think you are "free", you will never try the indirect (but successful) route.
Conclusion – Why any of this matters
Taken together we have three tough pills which will drastically change your life once understood and followed.
- You are responsible for every outcome in your life.
- You must have humility and understanding of yourself, you must understand the context from which your thoughts arise.
- You must understand that neither you or anyone else is free to change what they want through sheer power of will.
This means you need to:
- Take radical accountability for your life and the outcomes you suffer or thrive under.
- Develop an understanding of self, and humility in its wake.
- Develop radical compassion for those who are less fortunate than you. You are not special, you are just very fortunate for reasons you are not the ultimate cause of.
I hope these pills find you well, as I said.