Life is an unending struggle against my own brain. Perhaps I'm equipped
with a more defective and/or adversarial model than the ones encased in
y'all's crania, but it's only come to brighter, clearer, harsher light
in recent years — realistically, more like months — that the true foe
really does lie within. I have met my enemy, and he is a glob of
neurons, gray stuff, blood vessels and electricity.
Actually, that's overdramatic. My brain is, to whip out a hideous neologism, a frenemy. No other organic entity has been at once so helpful and such a hindrance. Without a brain, I couldn't do anything of note: no reading, no writing, no conversing, no making anything. I'd have to spend all day on 4chan. Ironic, then, that the very thing jamming itself between me and reading, writing, conversing and making happens to be — drum roll — my brain.
Should I read that book? "No!" interjects my brain. "What if you don't understand it or it takes a long time or it keeps you from doing something more important?" Maybe I'll write an essay. "Hold it!" my brain shouts. "You don't know every word you're going to type. What if you get absolutely stuck and all the time you spend on the thing goes wasted?" Well, that person over there seems interesting; I think I'll talk to them. But my brain ain't hearin' that: "Oh no you won't! What if they turn out to be dull or just dislike you? Then you'll have forever wasted a part of your invaluable life on unproductive chitchat." Fine, then. I'll go make a video. "Woah, woah, woah! Are you ever delusional today! That'll never work, for the following set of extremely plausible-sounding reasons..."
Unreasonably negative predictions, ranging from the everyday "That might suck!" to catastrophic doomsday scenarios. Playing the ace courtroom-drama defense ("Now, I may be just a simple country lawyer, but...") for my inner weenie. Darting off toward the nearest shiny thing. It's this sort of crap that makes me have to routinely scare my brain straight by threatening to kill it with Nickelback albums and Michael Bay movies. Because that, obviously, does not constitute a viable long-term strategy — if my brain calls my bluff, we're both goin' down — I try to fake out my brain more often than I issue it ultimata.
I've found a few semi-effective maneuvers with which to accomplish these fakings-out, some of which work some of the time, but all of which most definitely don't work all of the time. I can break and sub-break tasks into bits of such tininess that even as crafty a de-motivator as my brain can't convince me I'm incapable of handling them. It might argue that an actual essay about a subject lies well beyond my feeble grasp, but it's got to get up pretty early in the morning to convince me of my inability to construct a single sentence. Similarly, I can slow down what I'm doing until my endeavor of the moment becomes too simple for my brain to credibly bitch about. Or I can go all Alan Watts and simply avoid thinking in the first place, circumventing that lousy organ as completely as possible.
Starving my brain of loose clods of data out of which to build mountainous molehills seems promising, but it might be easier to offload the task from my internal processor to my environment. I think of this process as cultivating — if you'll forgive the flaky-sounding term — "thoughtspace." That is to say, making the physical space that allows the freedom to think actual thoughts, as opposed to, say, dwell on my brain's edicts, delivered with deceptively donnish authority, about what is (everything worthwhile and hard) and is not (everything stupid and easy) a dead end.
The organizing principle is to present my brain with as little as possible to grab and run with, given that the old grab-'n-run appears to be its stock in trade. I want to minimize the noisy input, in other words, and maximize the signal-y input. This means a minimum of sticky notes, a minimum of tchotchkes, a minimum of doodles, a minimum of discrete objects. A minimum of vibrating cellphones, interrupting passers-by or other mobile nuisances that make bids for your attention completely orthogonal to your tasks. A minimum, too, of windows, of browser tabs, or any sort of parallel process sucking the sweet, sweet energy away from what's supposedly the main event, the theoretical point of focus. That this aligns neatly with my existing spare aesthetic preferences does indeed fill me with delight.
I'd submit that this all comes down to clarity, the condition that keeps the junk outside the brain's purview and the meaningful stuff inside. Clarity demands the absence of sonic, visual, informational or personal noise. This is not to suggest that you must become some sort of environment weenie thrown into paroxysms of discontent by so much a stray staple-pull or SMS message, but that the exterior physical world and its tangible furniture has as much say in whether you can accomplish what you want to accomplish as the metaphorical "furniture" of your "ineffable inner life."
Now that I'm in the mindset, when I get into an unsuitable thoughtspace, I can't deny it. The ultra-embarrassing part: the effects of a junky environment don't manifest themselves in substandard work. They manifest themselves in my not being able to extract myself from my own navel. A staggering percentage of the time, I'll have a bunch of jobs to do and spin my wheels for what feels like half a day simply deciding which one to approach first, playing a mug's prioritization game in which there are no winners. Hell, I'd do better to just random-select. But when I have everything laid out as clearly as possible, in the crispest terms and arrangements, with as much detritus cleared from the periphery as I can manage... then, it's a different story.
Actually, that's overdramatic. My brain is, to whip out a hideous neologism, a frenemy. No other organic entity has been at once so helpful and such a hindrance. Without a brain, I couldn't do anything of note: no reading, no writing, no conversing, no making anything. I'd have to spend all day on 4chan. Ironic, then, that the very thing jamming itself between me and reading, writing, conversing and making happens to be — drum roll — my brain.
Should I read that book? "No!" interjects my brain. "What if you don't understand it or it takes a long time or it keeps you from doing something more important?" Maybe I'll write an essay. "Hold it!" my brain shouts. "You don't know every word you're going to type. What if you get absolutely stuck and all the time you spend on the thing goes wasted?" Well, that person over there seems interesting; I think I'll talk to them. But my brain ain't hearin' that: "Oh no you won't! What if they turn out to be dull or just dislike you? Then you'll have forever wasted a part of your invaluable life on unproductive chitchat." Fine, then. I'll go make a video. "Woah, woah, woah! Are you ever delusional today! That'll never work, for the following set of extremely plausible-sounding reasons..."
Unreasonably negative predictions, ranging from the everyday "That might suck!" to catastrophic doomsday scenarios. Playing the ace courtroom-drama defense ("Now, I may be just a simple country lawyer, but...") for my inner weenie. Darting off toward the nearest shiny thing. It's this sort of crap that makes me have to routinely scare my brain straight by threatening to kill it with Nickelback albums and Michael Bay movies. Because that, obviously, does not constitute a viable long-term strategy — if my brain calls my bluff, we're both goin' down — I try to fake out my brain more often than I issue it ultimata.
I've found a few semi-effective maneuvers with which to accomplish these fakings-out, some of which work some of the time, but all of which most definitely don't work all of the time. I can break and sub-break tasks into bits of such tininess that even as crafty a de-motivator as my brain can't convince me I'm incapable of handling them. It might argue that an actual essay about a subject lies well beyond my feeble grasp, but it's got to get up pretty early in the morning to convince me of my inability to construct a single sentence. Similarly, I can slow down what I'm doing until my endeavor of the moment becomes too simple for my brain to credibly bitch about. Or I can go all Alan Watts and simply avoid thinking in the first place, circumventing that lousy organ as completely as possible.
Starving my brain of loose clods of data out of which to build mountainous molehills seems promising, but it might be easier to offload the task from my internal processor to my environment. I think of this process as cultivating — if you'll forgive the flaky-sounding term — "thoughtspace." That is to say, making the physical space that allows the freedom to think actual thoughts, as opposed to, say, dwell on my brain's edicts, delivered with deceptively donnish authority, about what is (everything worthwhile and hard) and is not (everything stupid and easy) a dead end.
The organizing principle is to present my brain with as little as possible to grab and run with, given that the old grab-'n-run appears to be its stock in trade. I want to minimize the noisy input, in other words, and maximize the signal-y input. This means a minimum of sticky notes, a minimum of tchotchkes, a minimum of doodles, a minimum of discrete objects. A minimum of vibrating cellphones, interrupting passers-by or other mobile nuisances that make bids for your attention completely orthogonal to your tasks. A minimum, too, of windows, of browser tabs, or any sort of parallel process sucking the sweet, sweet energy away from what's supposedly the main event, the theoretical point of focus. That this aligns neatly with my existing spare aesthetic preferences does indeed fill me with delight.
I'd submit that this all comes down to clarity, the condition that keeps the junk outside the brain's purview and the meaningful stuff inside. Clarity demands the absence of sonic, visual, informational or personal noise. This is not to suggest that you must become some sort of environment weenie thrown into paroxysms of discontent by so much a stray staple-pull or SMS message, but that the exterior physical world and its tangible furniture has as much say in whether you can accomplish what you want to accomplish as the metaphorical "furniture" of your "ineffable inner life."
Now that I'm in the mindset, when I get into an unsuitable thoughtspace, I can't deny it. The ultra-embarrassing part: the effects of a junky environment don't manifest themselves in substandard work. They manifest themselves in my not being able to extract myself from my own navel. A staggering percentage of the time, I'll have a bunch of jobs to do and spin my wheels for what feels like half a day simply deciding which one to approach first, playing a mug's prioritization game in which there are no winners. Hell, I'd do better to just random-select. But when I have everything laid out as clearly as possible, in the crispest terms and arrangements, with as much detritus cleared from the periphery as I can manage... then, it's a different story.
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