Colin Marshall

The purge

Given this journal's increasing role as a forum for me to preach to myself, what a futility it would be if I neglected to practice said preachings. (Hypocrisy has its uses, but not in a population of one.) In my argument for less, I quoted from Paul Graham's essay "Stuff", in which he makes kind-of-but-not-really the same point I do: the less stuff you've got, up to a point, the better. His distaste for miscellaneous objects is well laid-out — as, I hope, is my raw hatred for same — but he does utter a caveat:

I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books — but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity.

At first, I clung to this point, perhaps assuming it excused my ludicrous overspill of bound volumes from their shelves. But now, having come to the less-is-more conclusion on my terms as well as on Graham's, my grip has loosened. While I'm all for the maintenance of a well-stocked home library — who could live without the knowledge that, no matter what, there will be an interesting book nearby? — I'm growing increasingly dubious about the necessity of my own's size and composition. Books take up physical, visual and mental space, they're a pain to pack and move, and each one added to the total diffuses attention that should be focused only on the best of them. As I must constantly justify my own existence, it seems that each of my books should face no less a test.

Really, in our modern world of libraries — I have access to at least two separate systems — and free-flowing information on the net, what books do I need to own? Some essentials are obvious. Art and architecture tomes, which are more like design objects in and of themselves, and are the closest thing to useful "reference books" surviving today. Anything Tom Stoppard, Kobo Abe, David Sedaris, Edward Tufte, Brian Eno or David Foster Wallace-related stays, because I've already demonstrated that I pick those guys up again and again. (Generally speaking, anything I repeatedly look to specifically as an example of what to achieve should, I think, remain in my possession.) Certain works, like Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, George Pólya's How to Solve It or Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, exert some sort of mystical undecaying draw, so those stay.

Similarly, some nonessentials are obvious. Old galleys? Gone. Duplicates? Gone. Research books for completed projects? Gone. Anything a syllabus instructed me to buy? Gone. But, as ever, it's the border points that pose the greatest challenges, and in this case those would be the volumes I can't quite determine whether or not I'm likely to return to. Especially nice or rare editions have some protection — I'm not much of a Sherlock Holmes buff, but that 1930s collection I picked up in antique store isn't going anywhere soon — but Penguin classics? Flimsy, pamphlet-like Dovers? Mass-market paperback sci-fi? When, exactly, am I going to pick those things up a second time? (Why, for that matter, did I pick them up the first time?) What absolutely doesn't matter here is (a) how much I paid for the book in the first place, since it's a sunk cost and I'm paying mental bandwidth for just having the thing around and (b) how "good" I think the book is. If I dispose of it and one day yearn for it, I can simply buy it again. If I don't think a repurchase is worth it, then how much could I have liked the book in the first place?

And what of the books still unread, purchased up to a decade ago with the vague intention of one day probably maybe reading them? While I firmly advocate a well-stocked Strategic Literature Reserve, how valuable is one comprised of a bunch of books acquired on hunches? I've got seven or eight Robertson Davies novels sitting around, all recommended by respected friends and thus almost certainly excellent, that I've spent years and years not reading. At this point they've blended into the background, become part of the furniture. My brain has tuned out their presence, all but erasing them from my perception like it erases an object that's stationary within one's field of vision. Wouldn't having borrowed a library's copies of these books, with their attendant due-date deadlines and attention-drawing foreign-object-ness, been more effective? The action of purchasing a book seems to defer the reading, since it feels as if you've already done it.

Which may actually be the point, come to think of it. My newly zealous book-purging mood is driven in part by the fear of becoming one of those pathetic book fetishists who roams from sale to sale, snowballing acquisition after impulsive acquisition into a gigantic Katamari of dusty, obscure ink and paper. (These, in case you're wondering, are the people who rail against the Kindle by launching into incoherent raptures about the smell of dust jackets and taking books into the tub and whatnot.) I find myself more irritated than ever when someone goes on and on about the books they've recently bought, because buying and owning books means nothing; books are for reading, period. This sounds like a simple point, but it's one that I've failed to understand before, to my detriment. All forms of culture are simply tools to program your brain, and filling the shed accomplishes nothing by itself. Failing to keep the trivial you-bookstore transaction absolutely separate from the vital brain-book transaction brings about an ugly slippage between altering your mind and — shudder — signaling your bookishness.

There are at least two positive consequences to the mindset that treats books as objects more or less like any other. First — and this generalizes widely — constant weeding is an aid to the iterative process. Outing the old and inning the new washes away the clinging junk that obscures your view of who, exactly, your current iteration of yourself is; it's like not having to look past your lingering racecar bed and Linkin Park posters to get a clear view of the adult you. Second, the need to clear space and minimize clutter, when applied to books, provides a pretty damn forceful incentive to read the things, because when you finish them, you can get rid of them! While I don't desire a book-free existence, I do desire to possess far fewer books that I do, and those of a much higher standard of quality. Getting comfortable with mercilessly tossing them and prioritizing the reading far above the owning should, given sufficient iterative cycles, lead right to it.

This isn't that

Quoth Mark Twain,

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

One lesson I've learned in the last couple of years is that epiphanies are nice (and damn useful) to have, and, additionally, that one can actively pursue them instead of kicking back and (vainly) awaiting them. (Though I suppose it's less about pursuit than about putting yourself in places where epiphanies are likely to occur.) The obvious epiphanic high comes in the form of that "Hey, from now on, I'm probably going to do better" feeling, but there's a downside, too, because every change for the better reveals that, for the entire time preceding the epiphany, you've been DOING IT WRONG.

I recently had to admit over twenty straight years of doing it wrong. Like, really wrong. So wrong that it quashed most of my potentially notable accomplishments before I could take a full step toward realizing them. Aborted, much-fantasized-about projects litter my childhood and adolescence. I'd admire a comic — a Tintin adventure, a Calvin & Hobbes Sunday strip — and, unable to replicate it, would abandon my own drawing. I'd admire a game — any of the PC graphic adventures I'd burn through on a weekly basis, or maybe one of the more elaborate Phantasy Star installments, — and, unable to replicate it, would distract myself with a different, equally ill-thought-out project. I'd admire a piece of music — something from Steely Dan, to name a particularly advanced range of examples, or even tracks by far more pedestrian artists — and, unable to replicate it, put the instrument down and call it a day. "This isn't that," I'd think, and then throw in the towel.

However different these pursuits, my approach never varied:

1. Enjoy something, envision self creating something very similar
2. ?
3. Profit

I was, in other words, locked into what I've previously called a "director" as opposed to "conceiver" mindset. Instead of asking myself, "What's cool about that, and how can I implement that kind of coolness in my own context?", I asked myself, "How can I make that?" I pictured what I wanted to make and then attempted to make it exactly. Such an aim is destined for defeat, since (a) to replicate something, I'd need exactly the same resources, tools and thoughts as the original creator had and (b) even if I could replicate it, my version would be redundant and unnecessary by its very nature. There is much wisdom in, as Paul Graham puts it, copying what you like, but I took it to a paralyzing extreme, trying and failing not just to copy what I liked about what I liked but the things themselves that I liked.

My realization that that the relevant ability of creation is not to faithfully replicate but to harness accident is certainly welcome, but I wish it'd come a tad earlier. Who knows where I'd be now if I'd figured it out before? And I guarantee that I wasn't the only one afflicted by the inability to do the small and kind of lame — or at least to do it with commitment — because I hadn't realized that I could iterate it toward something bigger and better; hundreds of aspiring writers are no doubt staring at a Word document even now, comparing it to The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby or Sweet Valley High: Wrong Kind of Girl, thinking, "This isn't that," and twitching toward the old upper-right X.

The solution seems to require no less than a teardown/rebuild of one's own view of stuff-doing: the goals, the expectations, the metaphors, all that nonsense. There are worse starting points than Twain's premise. Making profitable use of accident — which I mean more in the sense of unpredicted input and restriction than of, say, auto pileups — won't get you the very same work that spurred on to create something yourself, but, used well, it can put you on your way to quality equivalence. Perhaps the core of the issue is that it's easier on our weak human brains to think in terms of how best to react to developments rather than to go nuts focusing on the countless points at which our projects, in their incomplete states, fail to mirror their idealized inspirations. If this is true, I suppose it's another vindication of the Organic, Iterative Creative Processes^TM of which I've been so enamored lately.

Three wise men

Three wise men's words have come together in my mind. In his now-valorized Kenyon commencement speech, David Foster Wallace said:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

In a Musician magazine interview, Brian Eno said:

I don't see or hear that much, so I guess I do edit a lot. That sounds like an ostrich activity but concomitant with that is the fact that I really value what I do see and hear. My main input at the moment is not from music but from paintings and films and I spend a lot of time looking at both of those. The way I look at paintings is perhaps a screening process. I go into a gallery and walk through it very quickly. I don't try to look at everything but if something catches me I stay with it and just look at that. I take a little folding chair with me to the galleries. My idea right now is rather than trying to absorb everything, which is an impossible, tiring and rewardless task, to concentrate on fewer and fewer things. For the past few months I've been playing the same three records: gospel music and a record of an Arabic man singing the Koran.

In a recent New York magazine article, Merlin Mann was quoted as saying:

Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement. It's an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it's gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.

Despite the common theme's obviousness, it's tricky to name. Controlled attention? Selective focus? Perceptual choosiness? Whatever its title, the idea has to do with the importance of actively directing your attention rather than letting the wind blow it to and fro. It's a simple concept that I think everyone has considered from time to time, but attention's controllability seems to be a notion that rarely reaches the level of their everyday actions. Think of how people talk about how their attention's spent: "That show grabbed my attention." "He walked up, trying to get my attention." "Facebook drained my attention all afternoon." It reveals a model of attention that's primarily acted upon — poked, twisted, stolen — by outside entities rather than judiciously channeled by the person who owns the stuff in the first place. I would argue that, as easily as passing detritus seems to be able to manhandle our attention, we're not totally and completely enslaved to distractions. It just feels that way.

The problem — and I doubt the above quotes would have been written or spoken in the first place if it wasn't a problem — is that directing our attention wisely isn't impossible — just really hard. And not only that, performing that direction isn't simply an important thing; it might be The Important Thing. When I read that my use of attention is the "indisputable receipt" for my existence, and that if I do it wrong I'll be "totally hosed", stuck grinding through "impossible, tiring and rewardless" tasks", it jibes with my own experience. How someone allocates their attention tells you everything you need to know about them, especially since we only get so much to allocate.

So I've been thinking quite a bit about this family of issues lately: attention, focus, selectivity, filtering, all that. Expect to see more about it posted here. For the moment, though, I will say that it's prompted me to ponder hard the fact of what a person is. Even since high school, I've been pretty hardcore about my you-are-what-you-do stance, regarding people as the sum of their actions. Never have I bought the rationale that someone "isn't a bad guy; he just does bad things". Though I find that belief unchallenged today, "actions" seem to have broken into subcategories: interactions, habits, uses of attention, that sort of thing. It all counts, and the clock's ticking.

Things I am slightly less stupid about than I was six months ago

I do believe it's about time for a roundup:

• Focus and effort are more profitably spent on the present, the concrete and the execution than the future, the abstract and the idea. This is the big one. I was halfway down the track when nyuanshin pointed me toward Robin Hanson's "A Tale of Two Tradeoffs" which covers similar ground quite intelligently, as is Hanson's way:

  The human mind seems to have different "near" and "far" mental systems, apparently implemented in distinct brain regions, for detail versus abstract reasoning. Activating one of these systems on a topic for any reason makes other activations of that system on that topic more likely; all near thinking tends to evoke other near thinking, while all far thinking tends to evoke other far thinking.

  These different human mental systems tend to be inconsistent in giving systematically different estimates to the same questions, and these inconsistencies seem too strong and patterned to be all accidental. Our concrete day-to-day decisions rely more on near thinking, while our professed basic values and social opinions, especially regarding fiction, rely more on far thinking. Near thinking better helps us work out complex details of how to actually get things done, while far thinking better presents our identity and values to others.

  Much of my progress in this direction springs from pondering a quote by, of all luminaries, Tom Leykis: "Thinking about doing something is useless." Almost offputtingly simple, yes, but oh so right. (The same might be said about a great many lessons the man puts on offer.) I fear getting engangled in thoughts about hypotheticals, in thoughts about the predicted future, in thoughts about potential disasters — in "head-land" — because of how badly detrimental such a habit is to my reality-based endeavors. Where things, y'know, matter.
  
  This position has a few useful consequences. One is that acting as much as possible in the realm of the concrete necessitates working only with very small pieces of it at any one time. Taking micro-steps and performing micro-actions, though, actually makes for an effective "thin end of the wedge" strategy: raise momentum for a task by completing the tiniest possible increment of it. Another is that the way you want to be should manifest itself in your current position in spacetime, no matter where you are or what you happen to be doing. (I banner this, some what flakily, as living life "fractally": each part's representative of the whole, etc., etc.) Yet another comes as something of a consequence of the previous: telling yourself that "things will be fine when x" is dangerously delusional.
  
• You will die. And there ain't no two ways about it. The natural response to this inevitabily — that is, ignoring it — has the unpleasant side effect of encouraging the listlessness of one who believes his time is infinite, sitting in front of the telly, as Philip Adams put it, and treating life as if it goes on forever. But something like motivation results from making death axiomatic: once you know that the clock's ticking, priorities come a lot closer to clicking into place. (Heart attack and cancer sufferers often describe a similar clarity attending the onset of their conditions, but surely I won't be blamed for wanting that clarity in advance of a grievous bodily malfunction.) Given the grains running through the hourglass and whatnot, it seems that actions should be chosen for their potential to catalyze, multiply or enhance the experiences you can get, while you can get 'em.
  
  The icy hands of the reaper also, when acknowledged, drive B.S. like "fallbacks" from your life, which is just too short to squander twisting yourself in knots of braided dishonesty about your own goals, intentions and desires.
  
• Work and art can generate impressive non-monetary benefits. As Werner Herzog said in Herzog on Herzog, he creates art because it "makes life BETTER." (And, in another section, that it's in real ways superior to that of a rich man.) He specified that "better" be printed all in caps, and I'm starting to see why. Tao Lin wrote, in characteristically quotation-marked style, that "'making money' is 'inextricably tied' with 'just doing something so that there can be things to do instead of feeling bad,' 'trying to have more people know about you so that you can meet new people for various purposes,' 'doing things to feel excited,' and 'doing really 'retarded' things in order to relieve boredom.'" adamcadre wrote that art "changes the equation," enriching the creator's existence in a variety of delightfully unpredictable ways. (Or, to quote nyuanshin, "What makes a good life is a flow of excellent experiences, and making something people appreciate is the most powerful way to generate that, both for yourself and everyone else.")
  
  I would actually go almost so far as to say that much of this benefit comes in the areas where the money isn't, where a bunch of investors aren't tempering everything with demands for safety. Adam Carolla spoke of his desire to get into radio in order to "connect with people". I'd say that motivation holds for most other forms as well, and the connections look to be a bit richer and more easily made in forms that are lower on the totem pole, financially speaking.
  
• Ideology doesn't really matter. 99% of the time, whether someone is a "Republican", a "Democrat", a "liberal", a "conservative", a "libertarian", a "socialist", an "anarcho-syndicalist" or a "minarchist" signifies nothing. That is to say, the ideological label someone applies to himself typically has no bearing on what he actually does in reality. Beliefs at this level of abstraction are, except in rare cases, best ignored; practically nobody acts on them in any meaningful way. (And this level of abstraction includes beliefs about much more than the political.)
  
• The "rules" don't apply to you. Per Paul Graham, rules are just crowd control hacks. Live by them, and you'll remain one in a crowd. This doesn't mean you should go around breaking the rules at every opportunity, but simply that you should recognize them for what they are — what they are not is a pathway to success — and know when they must be subordinated to achievement of your goals.
  
• Personal identity hinders development. This comes even straighter from Graham. The more defined your identity becomes, the more restricted you are. Maximize your freedom by defining yourself minimally.
  
• Everything big starts small and grows almost biologically from its inceptive form. I've grown enamored with biological metaphors for how things develop. (See? The word "grown", right there in the first sentence!) It's not simply that I consider the comparison neato, though it is; the more I talk to various stuff-doers about how the stuff they do came to be done and the more I study the twisted routes ideas take toward realization, the more I find that things grow and are guided rather than are envisioned and just made. There is, of course, an idea, but that idea reacts with and is changed by the outside world; the altered idea then continues to work with and be worked on by what's external to it in a different new way. The major role of context is undeniable. This phenomenon is, I'm provisionally convinced, better accepted and used than vainly (and hopelessly) bludgeoned to fit one's imaginings.
  
  The notion that everything big started small, er, sprouts from this. Practically speaking, any big-time endeavor you'd want to be doing in the future will, of necessity, begin its life as something small-time. Good reason for doing stuff, even if it seems small, lame and crappy. The only stepping stone to large, cool and non-crappy is, alas, the small, the lame and the crappy. Which brings me to the fact that...
  
• Suckage is unavoidable, so embrace it, engage in it strategically, and gradually iterate away from it. Suckage is as inevitable as death, so you'd better own it as soon as possible. Unlike death, though, there is actually a way to skirt suckage: never attempt anything. The safe bet, as Ze Frank said, is to think up your ideas and "not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack!" Ideas are exclusively head-land phenomena, and thus not worth a damn without real-land execution. Real-land execution, by its very nature, is imperfect, and so ideas will often fall short of the vision when instantiated. Merlin Mann (about whom much more soon) wrote what I would call the definitive post on this:

  Nobody likes feeling like a noob, especially when you’re getting constant pressure on all sides to never stick out in an unflattering way. And, in this godforsaken just-add-Wikipedia era of make-believe insight and instant expertise, it’s natural to start believing you must never suck at anything or admit to knowing less than everything — even when you’re just starting out. Clarinets should never squawk, sketch lines should never be visible, and dictionaries are just big, dumb books of words for cheaters and fancy people. Right?

  I think finding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here — being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

  At bottom, never underestimate the the ability to get things done, nor the advantage in a project's being there, as opposed to being in someone's imagination.
  
• Escapism is a drug. Never robust, my taste for escapist narrative has bottomed out in recent years. Updike, to name a creator of some note, knew escapism wasn't where it's at, and the recent wave of astonishing "neo-neorealist" film makes me wonder why I'd want anything else. Interviewing Ramin Bahrani, a filmmaker often named as standing on the vanguard of neo-neorealism, I asked him about his avowed distaste for escapism, to which he responsed, "What, the real world isn't interesting enough?" (Or wise words to that effect.)
  
  I've come to believe, though, that escapism has a much more pernicious effect than creating distraction from a more interesting reality. Compulsive viewing and reading of escapist narratives doesn't, at least to my mind, seem far from "escaping" one's life with the aid of hard drugs. You're getting high and listening to Pet Sounds once a week out of an otherwise productive life? Fine. You need a veritable pharmacy to get through each day? Less so. Escapism as a momentary shot of pleasure is, in itself, harmless, but make a habit of it and you'll never address the underlying problems that prompted the need to escape in the first place. And, to whip out the growth metaphor again, problems left unattended sprout nasty problem-vines. They're covered in highly pokey thorns. And how to get away from the thorns? More escapism.
  
• Art is best conceived of as a human-object interaction, rather than as a thing. This is lifted almost wholly from its many mentions in enoweb's 1973-2002 interview archive, through which I've been combing. A work of art alone is a bit one-hand-clappy; what's truly fascinating is how particular humans engage with particular works of art. Certainly it's best when you've got a gallery packed with eccentrics and pieces from a high-reputation artist to observe.
  
• You can't eliminate; you can only displace. This comes more from nyuanshin's explorations than mine, but it's still incredibly useful. Simply deciding not to act or think in a certain way doesn't seem to work. [Insert, by way of explanation, a reference to the old "don't think of an elephant" saw here.] The lousy habit must be displaced with the good one, or at least the not-quite-so-lousy one. To boil it as far down as possible: you can actively do, but you can't actively not do.

(NOTE: All of the above is subject to change.)

If only

I try hard to identify my most dangerous patterns of thought, but since the most dangerous ones are by definition those difficult to detect or apt to masquerade as beneficial, progress is slow. By "dangerous", I generally mean the ones that excuse mediocrity. Procrastination's thousand guises provide ready, accessible examples: "I'll work on the project first thing in the morning." "I'll start the diet next week." "I'll get to that novel someday." But the literature on procrastination forms mountains; I'll refrain from adding my own crag today.

The dangerous thought I recently caught in one of its unguarded moments gets much less press than the p-word, but it's similar in form and quite possibly even more poisonous. I call it the "Things will be fine when x" mindset, where x is any future condition or set of conditions. Examples:

• "I'm bored and lonely, but things will be fine when I land a significant other."
• "I'm sick of work, but things will be fine when it's the lunch hour."
• "I'm still sort of bored and lonely, but things will be fine when I get married."
• "I'm really unsatisfied with my life, but things will be fine when I start painting."
• "I remain bored and lonely, but things will be fine when I have kids."

The trouble is that (a) states, once reached, don't seem to make things "fine", much less in perpetuity (as old Hobbes so wisely wrote, "here can be no contentment but in proceeding") and (b) this practice can easily cascade into a perpetual displacement of one overweighted hope with another. "If only I could just drop these extra pounds" begets "if only I could just get that sweet car" begets "if only I could stage that work of interpretive dance", etc. The dreamed-of satisfaction doesn't come, but the anticipation of that satisfaction puts out just barely enough of a fume to keep the motor running.

So whenever I notice them floating across my mindscape, I displace "Things will be fine when x" thoughts with ones about the concrete, present moment. The shift is from a question of "What will it take for things to be fine?" to "What can I do to make now reasonably good?" This applies especially to issues of self-improvement. Pondering how much better life will be when you master x behavior or habit of mind is all well and good, but its importance is dwarfed by the matter of what you could be doing more excellently right this moment, in these conditions. This may be another solution that boils to getting the hell out of head-land and replacing far-thinking with near-thinking, but all angles are worth exploring.

It's all in your head-land

From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen... He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

I've come to draw, or at to emphasize, a distinction separating two realms between which I divide my time: real-land and head-land. Real-land is the physical world, occupied by myself and billions of equally real others, in which my fingers strike a series of keys and a monitor displays strings of text corresponding to these keystrokes. Head-land is the world in which I construct an image of what this sentence will look like when complete, what this paragraph will look like when complete and what this entire post will look like when complete. And it doesn't stop there: in head-land, the finished post is already being read, readers are reacting, readers are (or aren't) responding and the resulting conversations are, for better or for worse, playing themselves out. In head-land, the thoughts I've translated into words and thus defined and developed in this post are already shaping the thoughts to be explored in future posts, the composition of which is going on there even now.

Head-land is the setting of our predictions. When deciding what actions to take in real-land, we don't base our choices on the possible actions' end results in real-land — by definition, we don't know what will happen in real-land until it already has — but on their end results in head-land. The obvious problem: while real-land is built out of all the information that exists everywhere, head-land is built not even out of all the information in a single brain — and that isn't much — but of whichever subset of that brain's information happens to be currently employed. Hence the brutally rough, sometimes barely perceptible correspondence between head-land and real-land in the short term and the nearly nonexistent correspondence between them in the long.

One might grant that while responding that running models in head-land is nevertheless the best predictor of real-land events that any individual has. And that's true, but it doesn't change our apparent tendency to place far more trust in our head-land models than their dismal accuracy could ever warrant. To take but one example: we really seem to believe our own failures in head-land, head-land being the place we do the vast majority — and in some cases, all — of our failing. How many times has someone entertained the dream of, say, painting, but then failed in head-land — couldn't get a head-land show, say, or couldn't even mix head-land's colors right — and abandoned the enterprise before beginning it? How many times has someone started painting in real-land, gotten less-than-perfect results, and then extrapolated that scrap of real-land data into a similarly crushing head-land failure? Even established creators are vulnerable to this; could the novelist suffering from a bout of "writer's block" simply be the unwitting mark of a head-land vision of himself unable to write? The danger of head-land catastrophes that poison real-land endeavors looms over every step of the path. The possibility of being metaphorically laughed out of the classroom, though probably only illusory to begin with, never quite leaves one's mind. The same, to a lesser extent, goes for experiencing rather than creating; someone who refuses to listen to a new album, sample a new cuisine, watch a new film or visit a new art exhibition on the excuse that they already "know what [they] like" appear to have seen, and believed, their head-land selves listening, eating or viewing with irritation, repulsion or boredom.

That most of what we get worked up about exists in our imaginations and our imaginations only is less a fresh observation than the stuff of a thousand tired aphorisms. No battle plan survives the first shot fired. You die a thousand deaths awaiting the guillotine. Nothing's as good or as bad as you anticipate. You never know until you try. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear is the mind-killer. It's all in your mind. Don't look down. Quoth John Milton, "The mind is its own place, and in it self, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." The more time I spend in head-land, the less time I feel like I should spend in head-land, because its awful, discouraging predictions are practically never borne out in real-land. (Even when one comes close, head-land seems to fail to capture the subjective experience of failure, which I find is either never failure qua failure or always somehow psychologically palliated or attenuated.) Experiencing a disaster in real-land is one thing, and its negative effects are unavoidable, but experiencing hypothetical head-land disasters as negative mental effects in real-land — which I suspect, we all do, and often — would seem to be optional.

Consider global economic woes. While you more than likely know a few who've had to take cuts in their incomes or find new ones, it's even likelier that you're experiencing all the degradations of destitution in head-land even as your real-land income has not and will not substantially shrink. You're living out the agonies of fumbling with food stamps in a long, angry grocery line despite the fact that you'll never come close. When one is starved for real-land information, one's head-land self gets hit with the worst possible fate. I hear of someone dying in a gruesome real-land freak accident, and I die a dozen times over in more gruesome, freakier head-land accidents. I visit a remote, unpopulated real-land location and my head-land map contracts, desolately and suffocatingly, to encompass only my lonely immediate surroundings. (Then my glasses fall off and break. But there was time! There was time!) I dream up an idea for implementation in real-land, but even before I've fully articulated it my head-land self is already busy enduring various ruinous executions of it. In head-land, worst-case scenarios tend to become the scenarios, presenting huge, faultily-calculated sums of net present real-land misery.

Fear of the ordeals that play out in head-land is a hindrance, but the paralysis induced by the sheer weight of countless accumulated hypothetical propositions is crippling. Even riding high on the hog in real-land is no bulwark against the infinite (and infinitely bad) vicissitudes of head-land. Say you're earning a pretty sweet living playing the guitar in real-land. But what if you'd been born without arms? Or in a time before the invention of the guitar? Or in a time when you would've died of an infection before reaching age twelve? Then you sure wouldn't be enjoying yourself as much. And what if you lose your arms in a horrific fishing accident ten years down the line? Or if you suddenly forget what a guitar is? Or if you die of an infection anyway? Despite the fact that none of these dire possibilities have occurred — or are even likely to occur — they're nonetheless inflicting real-land pain from across the border.

I call this phenomenon a blooming what if plant, beginning as the innocuous seed of a question — "What if I hadn't done or encountered such and such earlier thing that proved to be a necessary condition to something from which I enjoy and profit now?" — and sprouting rapidly into a staggeringly complex organism, its branches splitting into countless smaller branches which split into yet more branches themselves. More perniciously, this also happens in a situation-specific manner; namely, in situations whose sub-events are particularly unpredictable. The classic example would be approaching the girl one likes in middle school; the possible outcomes are so many and varied, at least in the approacher's mind, that the what-ifs multiply dizzyingly and collectively become unmanageable, especially if his strategy is to prepare responses to all of them. It's no accident that those never-get-the-girl mopes in movies spend so much time vainly rehearsing conversations in advance, and that doing the same in life never, ever works. There's a line to be drawn between the guys in junior high who could talk the girls up effortlessly and the ones who seized up merely contemplating it. I suspect the difference has to do with the ratio of one's relative presence in head-land versus that in real-land.

I would submit that, whatever their results, the dudes who could walk right up to those girls and try their luck habitually spent a lot more time in real-land than in head-land. They probably weren't sitting around, eyes fixed on their own navels, building elaborate fictions of inadequacy, embarrassment and ridicule; if they were, wouldn't they have been just as paralyzed? They appeared to operate on a mental model that either didn't conjure such dire possibilities or, if it did, didn't allow them any decisionmaking weight. "So the chick could turn me down? So what? What if space aliens invade and destroy the Earth? I don't know what'll happen until I try."

This brings up something else Wallace wrote and thought about — equivalent verbs for him, I think — though not, as I dimly recall, in Infinite Jest. In his sports journalism, of which he wrote some truly stunning pieces, he kept looping back to the issue of the correlation and possible causal connection between great athletes' brilliant physical performance and their astonishing unreflectiveness in conversation and prose. I'm thinking of Wallace's profile of Michael Joyce, a not-quite-star tennis player who has no knowledge or interests outside the game and couldn't even grasp the thundering sexual innuendo on a billboard ad. I'm thinking of his review of Tracy Austin's autobiography, a cardboard accretion of blithe assertions, unreached-yet-strongly-stated conclusions and poster-grade sports clichés. What must it be like, Wallace asked, to speak or hear prases like "step it up" or "gotta concentrate now" and have them actually mean something? Is the sports star's nonexistent inner life not the price they pay for their astonishing athletic gift, but rather its very essence?

One can say many things about bigtime athletes, but that they live in their heads is not one of them. I'd wager that you can't find a group that spends less time in head-land than dedicated athletes; they are, near-purely, creatures of real-land. The dudes who could go right up to the ladies in seventh grade seemed to be, in kind if not in magnitude, equally real-land's inhabitants. It comes as no surprise that so many of them played sports and weren't often seen with books. And not only were they undaunted by the danger (possibly because unperceived) of crushing humiliation, I'd imagine they were inherently less vulnerable to crushing humiliation in the first place, because crushing humiliation, like theoretical arm loss and imagined endeavor failure, is a head-land phenomenon. Humiliation is what makes a million other-people-are-thinking-horrible-thoughts-about-me flowers bloom — but only in head-land. The impact can only hit so hard if one doesn't spend much time there, because in real-land, direct access to another's thoughts is impossible. In head-land, one can't, as their creator, help but have direct access to everyone else's thoughts, and thus if a head-land resident believes everyone's disparaging him, everyone is disparaging him. "So what if they're thinking ill of me?" a full-time real-land occupant might ask. "I can't know that for sure, and besides, they're probably not; how often do you think, in a way that actually affects them, about someone who's been recently embarrassed?"

But there's a problem: saying someone "lives in their head" is more or less synonymous with calling them intelligent. "Hey, look at that brainy scientist go by, lost in thought; the fellow lives in his head!" As for professional athletes, well... let's just acknowledge the obvious, that professional athleticism is not a byword for advanced intellectual capacity. (Wallace once lamented the archetypal "basketball genius who cannot read".) So there's clearly a return to time spent in head-land, and arguing for the benefits of head-land occupancy even to nonintellectuals is a trivial task. How, for instance, would we motivate ourselves without reference to head-land? How could we envision possibilities and thus choose which ones we'd like to realize without seeing them in head-land? Surely even the most narrowly-focused, football-obsessed football player has watched himself polish a Super Bowl ring in head-land. Why else would he strive for that outcome? Head-land is where our fantasies happen, where our goals are formulated, and is that a function we can do without?

Hokey as it sounds, I do consider myself a somewhat "goal-oriented" person, in that I burn a lot of time and mental bandwidth attempting to realize certain head-land states. But, as the above paragraphs reveal, I often experience head-land backfire in the form of discouraging negative imaginings rather than encouraging positive ones. Here I could simply pronounce that I will henceforth only use head-land for envisioning the positive, but it's not quite that easy; I can think of quite a few badly-ending head-land scenarios that I'm happy to experience there — and only there — and take into account when making real-land decisions. The head-land prediction that I'll get splattered if I walk blindly into traffic comes to mind.

And I'm one of the less head-land-bound people I know! I wouldn't be writing this post if I didn't struggle with the damned place, but traits like my near-inability to write fiction suggest that I don't gravitate toward it as strongly as some. Still, I feel the need to minimize the problems that spring forth from head-land without converting myself into an impulsive dumb beast. The best compromise I have at the moment is not necessarily to stem the flow of predictions out of head-land, but simply to ignore the bulk of their content, to crank down their resolution by 90% or so. Since the accuracy of our predictions drops so precipitously as they extend forward in time and grow dense with specifics, they'd mostly lose noise. Noise simply misleads, and attenuating what misleads is the point of this exercise.

There are countless practical ways to implement this. One quick-and-dirty hack to dial down head-land's effect on your real-land calculations is to only pay attention to head-land's shadow plays to the extent that they're near your position in time. If they have to do with the distant future, only consider their broadest outlines: the general nature of the position you envision yourself occupying in twenty years, for instance, rather than the specific event of your buxom assistant bringing you just the right roast of coffee. If they have to do with the past, near or distant, just chuck 'em; head-land models tend to run wild with totally irrelevant oh-if-only-things-had-been-different retrodictions, which are supremely tempting but ultimately counterproductive. (As one incisive BEK cartoon had a therapist say, "Woulda, shoulda, coulda — next!") If they have to do with the near future, they're more valuable, and the nearer the future they deal with, the better you would seem to do to pay attention to them.

The concept behind this is one to which I've been devoting thought and practice lately: small units of focus. Alas, this brings us to another set of bromides, athletic and otherwise. One step at a time. Just you and the goal. Break it down. Don't bite off more than you can chew. The disturbing thing is how well operating on such a short horizon seems to work, at least in certain contexts. I find I actually do run better when I think only of the next yard, write better when I think only of the next sentence and talk better when I think only of the subject at hand. When my mind tries instead to load the entire run, the entire essay or the entire conversation, head-land crashes. (This applies to stuff traditionally thought of as more passive as well: I read more effectively when I focus on the sentence, watch films more effectively when I focus on the shot, listen to music more effectively when I focus on the measure.) When Wallace writes about "the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news" and "[hunkering] down in the space between each heartbeat and [making] each heartbeat a wall and [living] in there", I think this is what he means.

Ignoring all head-land details past a certain threshold, de-weighting head-land predictions with their distance in the future and focusing primarily on small, discrete-seeming, temporally proximate units aren't just techniques to evade internal discouragement, either; they also guard against the perhaps even more sinister (and certainly sneakier) forces of complacency. While failure in head-land can cause one to pack it in in real-land, success in head-land, which is merely a daydream away, can prevent one from even trying in real-land. I can't put it better than Paul Graham does: "If you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate."

This is why I'm starting to believe that coming up with great ideas in head-land and then executing them in real-land may be a misconceived process, or at least suboptimally conceived one. How many projects have been forever delayed because the creator decided to wait until the "idea" was just a little bit better, or, in other words, until the head-land simulation came out a little more favorably? It's plausible that this type of stalling lies at the heart of procrastination: one puts the job off until tomorrow because the head-land model doesn't show it as turning out perfect today, never mind the facts that (a) it'll never be perfect, no matter when it's started and (b) it's unlikely to turn out better with less time available for the work, especially given the unforeseen troubles and opportunities. I provisionally believe that this a priori, head-land idea stuff can be profitably be replaced with small-scale real-land exploratory actions that demand little in the way of time or resource investment. Rather than executing steps one through one hundred in head-land, execute step one in real-land; if nothing else, the data you get in response will be infinitely more reliable and more useful in determining what step two should involve. Those dudes in middle school knew this on some basic level: you just gotta go up to the girl and say something. It's the only gauge you have of whether you should say something more, and of what that something should be. It's all about hammering in the thin end of the wedge.

For what it's worth, I've found this borne out in what little creation I've done thus far. I've reached the point of accepting that I don't know — can't know — how a project's going to turn out, since each step depends on the accumulated effects of the steps that preceded it. All I can do is get clear on my vague, broad goal and put my best foot forward, keeping my mind open to accept all relevant information as it develops. When I started my first radio show, I had a bunch of head-land projections about how the show would be, but in practice it evolved away from them in real-land rather sharply — and, I think, for the better. When I started another one a year later, I knew to factor in this unforeseeable real-land evolution from the get-go and thus kept my ideas about what it was supposed to me broad, flexible and small in number, letting the events of real-land fill in the details as they might. With a TV project only just started, I've tried my hardest to stay out of head-land as much as possible; the bajillion variables involved would send whatever old, buggy software my head-land modeler uses straight to the Blue Screen of Death. (Yes, our brains are Windows-based.) Even if it didn't crash, it's not as if I'd be getting sterling predictions out of it. I have, more grandly speaking, come to accept much more of the future's unknowability than once I did; that goes double for the future of my own works. Modeling a successful work in head-land now seems a badly flawed strategy, to be replaced by taking small steps in real-land and working with its response.

I could frame this as another rung in thet climb from a thought-heavier life to an action-heavier life. of approaching and affecting the world as it exists in real-land rather than as it is imagined in head-land. I've nevery been what one would call an idealist and I suppose I'm drawing no closer to that label. Some regard flight from idealism as flight toward cynicism, but it's cynicism I'm been fleeing as well, perhaps even primarily; what is cynicism, after all, but a mistaken reliance on pessimistic head-land conclusions?