Category: Life Lessons

Categories
Life Lessons Uncategorized

The Dizziness of Freedom

I played weekend soccer in elementary school. Though I was far from the best player on the team, I was the fastest kid on the field. That meant I’d sometimes end up on a breakaway, with the ball at my feet and no defenders ahead of me. When that happened, I’d fall down. I’d literally laugh and fall down, and I wouldn’t even try to kick.

Now, decades later, I realized what I was doing. My body was sabotaging itself. The laugh came first, then the legs going soft, then the grass.

This was a reflex. If I had thought about it, I would have had plenty of options. I could have practiced it, until my body knew what to do when the moment came in a real game. But I wasn’t thinking. Underneath the not-thinking was a fear I couldn’t have named at the time. It was a fear of making a decision, and possibly failing.

I thought I didn’t deserve to score. That was the fear underneath, and the usual advice only made it worse. “Fake it till you make it” sounded selfish, a way of saying “I don’t know what I’m doing, so please bear with me while I figure things out.” But the real selfish act is sitting with your own insecurity so long that you forget there’s a job in front of you that needs doing.

Alfred Adler, the great psychologist from the early 20th century, had a word for how to think about this: Gemeinschaftsgefühl. It’s a German word that loosely translates to “community feeling.” The idea is that we’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves. We are here for the benefit of others, not ourselves.

I have one friend who’s genuinely curious and warm, and asks people good questions. But when a conversation gets into really interesting territory, where something ambiguous or tender is sitting on the table, she laughs. She’s laughing because it’s funny and interesting to her, and also a little uncomfortable. The laugh shuts the conversation down right when it’s getting good. She doesn’t mean it that way, but the laugh does the work of closing a door.

I recognize this because I do versions of it myself. My adult version of the soccer fall is gratitude, both giving and receiving. If someone thanks me for something that actually mattered, I feel the reflex start up. I’ll crack a joke or shift the credit to someone else before the moment can land. Giving it is almost as hard. When I want to tell someone what they’ve meant to me, I can feel my body trying to find a lighter, safer version that won’t require me to sit in the fullness of what I actually mean.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had a name for this reflex. Writing in the 1840s, he was one of the first people to treat anxiety as a philosophical problem. He’s sometimes called the father of existentialism, and what he named was existential anxiety, the dizziness of freedom. It’s the intense uncertainty that hits you when you realize the next move is yours, and so is whatever comes of it. That dizziness is terrifying enough that we spend most of our lives trying to avoid this responsibility.

This matters more as I get more senior at work, where people look up to me. Authenticity matters when you’re a leader, because other people are depending on you. The temptation is to talk about the problems rather than trust the company strategy. But that’s its own kind of falling down in the grass. Part of the job is putting on a brave face even when you’re not confident. Your job isn’t to feel brave. It’s to give other people the steadiness they need.

One of my mentors, a former CEO of several companies, told me once, “You don’t have enough time to be an expert in everything. You do it a couple of times and then move on to something new.” It wasn’t advice so much as access. He was showing me that even at his level, he hadn’t figured everything out. Nobody does. There’s no moment when someone tells you that you’re allowed to take the next step. You grab it anyway.

Now I have the chance to do that for other people, and it’s become one of the best parts of my job. Someone I worked with, I’ll call her Nancy, was very competent but had spent a decade without a real chance to grow. She didn’t feel worthy of the space she was taking up. We worked on small things together, starting with how she introduced herself in a meeting. It was a tiny thing, but it was the same kind of muscle memory I needed on the soccer field. I could stand with her as a coach while she did the work.

Immanuel Kant, one of the great moral philosophers of the Enlightenment, wrote that we stay children, and not because we lack reason. We have the reason. What we lack is the resolution and courage to use it without someone else directing us.

Being an adult doesn’t mean the dizziness goes away. It means you learn to manage it. You stop waiting to feel ready and start. I came across a phrase from the Disordered podcast that sums up this whole essay. The hosts were talking about clinical anxiety, but it applies to existential anxiety too. They call it shortening the time between “oh my god” and “oh well.”

Categories
Life Lessons

The Navy SEAL in Seat 14B

SEAL Team 5 Challenge Coin

On the value of trading things you can’t buy.

I was flying out to California last week for the Collaborative Gain conference and ended up next to a guy who was actually reading. He wasn’t scrolling or multitasking. He was on a Kindle, deep in his book, and stayed that way for a long time. He looked about thirty. That kind of focus is rare enough to make me take notice, like a the way a startup CEO might be wearing a hoodie and a Rolex.

So I did what I usually do when something interesting is sitting three inches to my right. I waited for a natural break and asked him about the book. It was a novel, and he seemed a little embarrassed to be reading fiction. I figured out why when I asked him what he did. He’s a Navy SEAL.

Turning thirty, eight years in, Team 5, based in Coronado just south of San Diego, which turns out to be one of the two main bases for SEALs in the country. The way he talked about it was very matter-of-fact, the way a plumber might tell you he does mostly commercial work these days. He loved his job and he loved his teammates, though he couldn’t tell me anything about what he actually did.

He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and met his wife there. She’s still a Merchant Marine. He did ROTC and was on track to be a commissioned officer, then realized that if he actually wanted to be a SEAL, he had to give up the officer track and enlist. He also liked the idea of picking up specific skills, or quals as the SEALs call them. One of his favorite quals was as a SEAL medic, battlefield doctor.

Now he’s applying to Navy med school. The Navy has a program where they run you through a two-year pre-med, then send you through med school, then you do your residency as a Navy doctor. Add that to the eight years he’s already done and the time on the other side, and he hits a twenty-year pension right around the time he finishes residency. He’ll walk out as a doctor with a pension.

I asked him what kind of medicine. He said, “Anesthesiology would be the smart move, but I kind of want to be a trauma surgeon.” I said something about trauma surgery being brutal, long hours, not the money of the quieter specialties. He shrugged, and said, “Yeah, but I’ve got an ego. I’m a SEAL.” He knew it was just his ego talking, and was probably going to go with anesthesiology.

Trauma surgery and anesthesiology seemed like such different things, but to him they were pretty similar. Trauma surgery was easier than you’d think because it’s like battlefield surgery with no one shooting at you. He was impressed with battlefield anesthesiology, because those guys have to intubate someone who’s just been blown up. I asked about the residency part, the famous thirty-six-hour shifts. When was the last time he’d been up for twenty-four hours straight? He said, “Friday. I was up until four to finish a qual and then took a flight at seven.” That thing med students find crushing and horrible, he does it for fun on a weekend.

At some point I realized that he might have a challenge coin. My son Blake and I collect challenge coins. We pick them up during Fleet Week at the Intrepid, and it’s become a small family thing we do together. I even have one from a space launch. So I told him about our family project. He rifled through his bag for a minute with a half smile on his face, and pulled out a SEAL Team 5 coin. The actual handoff was awkward on my end. He tried to pass the coin to me, and I blanked on how this is supposed to work, which is palm-to-palm during a handshake, the coin pressed discreetly into the other person’s hand. He handled it gracefully and gave it to me again, this time with the handshake, the way it’s meant to go. There’s something I love about that tradition, the idea that a coin carries a unit’s history and you hand it to someone as a kind of keepsake for the experience behind it.

I had a few copies of my book in my carry-on to sell. I gave him one. He tried to wave it off and told me I should keep it if I needed it, that he was happy to give me the coin anyway. I told him no, this was the fun part. We’d both just handed over something we were proud of, something we’d earned. His coin took eight years of service. My book took five years of evenings and weekends. Neither one was the kind of thing you could buy.

I’d spent the whole flight being amazed by this guy. The focus, the career, the quals, the staying up until four on a Friday because that’s just how the week went. Everything about his life was something I couldn’t comprehend doing. And then I was standing there holding his coin, and he was standing there holding my book, and it hit me that the admiration ran both ways.

He reads fiction because he just can’t get into non-fiction. He told me his living room has a giant bookcase, and he only puts books on it that he actually loves. If he reads something on his Kindle and it matters to him, he buys the physical copy to put on the shelf. He took a non-fiction book from a stranger on a plane and was genuinely glad to have it. I can’t be a SEAL. He can’t write a book. We’d each spent years making something the other person couldn’t make, and for a couple of hours over the middle of the country, we happened to be sitting close enough to trade.

We took a picture after we got off the flight. Me holding the coin, him holding the book. I’ll keep that one to myself, because posting a photo of an active SEAL online seems like exactly the kind of thing a SEAL would prefer I not do. I’ll admit I also took a surreptitious shot earlier in the flight, which in retrospect was an extremely stupid move. The man is a trained operator whose professional skill set includes noticing things, and if he’d caught me and cared… well let’s be thankful he’s such a nice guy.

If you want to learn more about challenge coins and the traditions behind them, 99% Invisible did a great episode on the subject.

Categories
Life Lessons

Mind Like Water

David Allen wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and became a kind of secular priest for ambitious, overwhelmed professionals. His central claim was almost absurdly simple. Get things out of your head and write them down. He wasn’t just pitching better organization. He was promising you’d feel calmer, think more clearly, and be more present with the people around you. He called the result “a mind like water.”

When I first heard this, I was drowning in work. I tried it, and it made me more relaxed. But I kept wondering why making lists made me feel better. The answer is a simple principle called the Zeigarnik Effect.

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist. In the 1920s, she was sitting in a Berlin café when she noticed something odd about the waiters. They could hold an absurdly complicated order in their heads while it was still open (twelve people, substitutions, dietary restrictions) and then forget it almost instantly once the bill was paid. She went back to her lab and confirmed what she suspected. We remember unfinished tasks far better than finished ones. The brain treats incomplete work like an open file on your desktop, staying active and demanding attention until it gets saved or closed.

Maria Ovsiankina noticed something similar. Open loops don’t just stay active in memory. We also feel a strong pull to return to them. The Ovsiankina Effect is why it’s so hard to stop in the middle of something once you’re engaged, and why interruptions feel so grating even when they’re minor. We remember the open loop and feel compelled to close it.

And that’s what I notice in myself. Whenever I start a new project, pick up a new book, or start a new text conversation, that’s a new open loop. Often these unfinished things would scream, “Hey! Look at me!” By the end of a busy day, the tiredness I feel isn’t just physical. Every loop I opened and didn’t close is still there, demanding to be dealt with until I do something about them.

That’s why I could get a mind like water just by writing things down. Writing something down closes the loop for a while. My mind can stop circling. The list holds my open loops so my attention doesn’t have to.

The most obvious thing I learned is that the number of open loops matters. Right now I’m reading a book I actually want to finish, and every instinct says to start the other one on my shelf. But if I do, I’ve just added another loop pulling at me from somewhere I can’t quite see. If I really want to finish the first book, the answer is to wait. I’ve made a commitment to the first one, and splitting the loop makes both harder. In the end, the answer is to close some loops before opening new ones.1

When I’m in the middle of something I love, the open loop isn’t a burden. Everything is in alignment, like a brigade of tiny soldiers who were all wandering in different directions suddenly snapping into formation and marching together. My mind is going to be obsessed with this thing anyway. It becomes the single most important thing in the world, and if I do anything else, it’ll just be a distraction. It’s what keeps me thinking about it in the shower, wanting to talk to everyone about it, working on it the moment I have ten free minutes. I’m in a flow state, and the incompleteness is what keeps it going. Then, when the loop finally closes, everything settles into a beautiful harmony—at least for a little while. When I finish a book, it becomes a memory, which is why I try to write about books while I’m still in the middle of them.

The thing I keep coming back to is how much better everything feels when I’m actually inside one thing. Not managing ten things, not half-finishing six of them, just present with one open loop that I care about. I’m trying to keep the loops few and stay inside the good ones. That’s as close to a mind like water as I’ve managed to get.

Footnotes

  1. Software engineering calls this keeping your Work in Progress (WIP) low so one project doesn’t distract from the others. ↩︎
Categories
Life Lessons

The Art of Getting Out of the Way

There’s this thing that happens on crowded sidewalks in New York. Two people are walking toward each other in a rush, both trying to navigate around the other. One steps left, the other steps left. One corrects right, the other corrects right. And suddenly you’re doing this little dance with a stranger, each of you making it worse by trying to fix it.

I heard something recently that reframed the whole thing for me. The problem isn’t that people are clumsy or oblivious. The problem is that two people are both trying to control the same thing at the same time. Both are trying to help. And it creates a gridlock where they both end up blocking each other. One of them has to let go.

So instead of trying to solve the problem and evading the other person, I tried something different. I started doing nothing. I slow down slightly and let the other person choose. They make a move, I follow, and we’re past each other in a second. The hard part is that slowing down feels wrong. Every instinct says to move, to fix it, to be the one who figures it out. Standing there, barely moving, while someone walks toward you feels almost rude. But that discomfort is the whole point. The moment I stop trying to solve it, it solves itself.

And the failure mode, the case where both people let the other choose, seems like it would be horrible—no one would move. But actually it’s fine. We drift past each other slowly, a little awkwardly, and nothing bad happens. No collision, no real delay. The worst outcome of doing less turns out to be pretty manageable.

But it’s not just about sidewalks. I was talking to a friend recently who said, half-joking, that he needed to do less. He meant it as a complaint about being overloaded. I took it as a goal.

Oliver Burkeman makes a version of this argument in Meditations for Mortals. He pushes back on the idea that importance and difficulty are the same thing, that if something matters it should feel hard, and that easy means you’re not really trying. He offers a different question: what if this were easy? Not as a feel-good slogan, but as a way of living. What if you built your life so that the default was things that felt natural and really wanted, and the hard stuff was something you looked at deliberately and decided was worth doing.

I’ve been trying to live this way. I’m doing less and holding things more loosely. I’m noticing when I’m doing that sidewalk dance inside my own head, overcorrecting, making things harder than they need to be. The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop treating caring and straining as if they’re the same thing. When I’m doing something because I want to, I’m better at it. Not because I’m more focused or disciplined, but because I’m not fighting myself the whole time.

Getting out of the way is a skill. Whether it’s on the sidewalk or in my own head, I’m still learning it.

Categories
Life Lessons

Life Is Unfair: A Guide to Existential Meaning

This really is unfair.

I spent last year working on myself—figuring out how to relax, how to unhook from things that were bothering me. I read The Happiness Trap and Feeling Great, and I was well on my way to cleaning up the issues in my life.

But now that things are cleaned up, I have a big problem—one that everyone has to deal with at some level—the existential question of, “What should I be doing with my life?”

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to freedom.” It’s a quote that seems a bit glib—the kind of thing an aloof Frenchman in post-WWII Paris would use to pick up women in a cafe. But it’s an incredibly powerful idea.

We normally think of freedom as a blessing. We live in the USA. Freedom is our birthright—as American as mom and apple pie. But we tend to view freedom as pushing back the things that we don’t want to do. However, freedom also means we have to decide and be responsible for the life that we lead.

And that’s terrifying.

As I tried to answer this question, I’ve discovered that there are three levels of the answer, each one more abstract and fundamental.

Level One: Big E Existential—The Goals That Give Life Direction

This is what we normally think of when we think of existential questions. Am I accomplishing the things I want to accomplish? Am I doing things that really matter in the long term?

I like to use the model from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In ACT, the answer is simple: figure out what you want to do and then spend your time doing it.

I use a Bullet Journal for this.

It gives me a simple way to plan for the future and make sure I stay on track, making sure that I’m spending my time on things that matter.

It also helps me understand that I’ve used my time well and done things that are aligned with my values. You see, I have an awful memory. Without my Bullet Journal, when I look back and think about last week, I often can’t remember what I did. I’ll feel this existential void like I hadn’t done anything at all. And when I feel like I haven’t done anything that matters, I panic and overcorrect. I hyperfocus on some new project or goal. I feel like I need to fill this huge emptiness with something bigger, something important. But this whipsawing between projects means that I accomplish even less—leading to a vicious circle where I actually am getting less done. With my Bullet Journal I have an accurate accounting of what I’ve done and see if I’m living my goals. If not, I can just slowly adjust and point back at my goals.

But here’s what I discovered: even when my Bullet Journal showed me I was accomplishing my goals, something still felt missing. That’s when I started to understand the second level.

Level Two: small e existential—The Moments That Make Us Real

There’s another type of existential meaning that’s just as important but harder to pin down. It’s about being seen. It’s about the small moments each and every day where someone recognizes who you really are. It’s about existential validation—that feeling of truly being seen because someone recognizes the authentic you.

I learned this from someone on my team—actually a combination of people on my team over the years. Let’s call them Jamie. Jamie was very competent but since graduating from college a decade ago, they’d never been given a chance to grow, leaving them with a feeling that they weren’t good enough. They even told me they wanted to work on their self-confidence.

At our first team meeting they introduced themselves. “Hi, I’m Jamie,” they said, in a monotone voice. “I’ve been at the company for 5 years. And well, that’s about it.” They finished quickly because they didn’t want to waste other people’s time—because they’d been trained that they weren’t important.

So I worked with them—starting with that introduction they made. It’s a short little speech but it sets the tone of how other people will think of you. I had them practice it at the beginning of each 1:1 meeting we had. I did my own intro as an example.

They quickly started to get it. They started to own their story, be proud of themselves, and the work they did. They stopped looking like a shrinking violet and blossomed into a beautiful flower.

After a few months, they wrote, “Thank you so much for working with me on my self-confidence. Your support, not just one time but over many meetings, made a significant difference for me, both professionally and personally. You really listen to me and tailor your guidance to what I really need. You don’t understand how rare that is in a manager—at least in my experience. I’m so privileged that I can share my problems with you, knowing that you’ll come back with solutions that will really help me out.”

Watching Jamie transform taught me something about myself. All my carefully tracked goals couldn’t compare with that moment of genuine connection. When Jamie looked up from the practiced introduction with such pride—I’d made a ding in the universe.

But even this wasn’t the full picture. Because to truly be present in those moments—to really see Jamie and be seen in return—required something deeper.

Level Three: The Self Underneath It All

All of this comes back to an idea that’s part of many traditions—that there’s a true transcendental existence underneath everything else. Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about this as transcendentalism, this idea of touching something deeper in yourself. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls it “The Creator.” Religions call it a soul.

The point is, there’s something inside people that’s bigger than us. It’s really hard to explain cognitively, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the difference between going through the motions of life and actually living life.

ACT therapy calls it “the self” or “self-as-context.” It’s the underlying you that’s really there. So in ACT, you’re not anxious, you’re noticing the feeling of anxiety. You don’t feel like a failure, you’re noticing the feeling of shame and sadness that you didn’t accomplish something. That true you is always underneath, always there noticing the things that happen in your life and making decisions about it.

Here’s what I’ve learned: this deeper awareness—the ability to step back and notice what’s happening—creates the space where I can make the right decisions. Without it, my Bullet Journal becomes list of To Do’s and mentoring others becomes a task I should do for my annual review. But when I’m grounded in that self that notices, I have room to choose. I can decide to do things that align with my values as opposed to just respond to my anxiety. I can genuinely connect with the true self of other people. That space—that pause between noticing and reacting—is what makes the other two levels of meaning possible.

But when I’m grounded in that deeper self—the one that’s just noticing—everything changes. I can look at my journal without judgment. I can be with Jamie without trying to fix anything. I can just be present with what is.

You can try this for yourself, if you know how to meditate. Try meditating and noticing some things. Then ask yourself “Who is doing the noticing?” It’s quite an experience if you can get it right.

This may seem clinical and exhausting, but it’s actually the opposite. It allows you to be truly present in the moment. This is the only way to not be buffeted by the outside world and do things that you think are important to you.

So here’s what I’ve learned: existential meaning isn’t one thing. My Bullet Journal gives my life direction. Those moments with Jamie remind me I’m not alone. And that deeper awareness—the self that notices—makes both of those work without turning goals into obsessions or connections into performances. The easy thing is to avoid the question entirely, to let other people’s goals fill the void. The harder thing—the thing I’m still learning—is to live on all three levels at once.

Sartre said we are “condemned to freedom.” We are condemned to responsibility and making choices. Albert Camus had a different take on existential suffering—that it’s all futile. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote about the Greek king condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity—only to watch it roll back down each time he reached the top. But Camus concluded, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Even though Sisyphus was condemned to never achieving his goal, he didn’t have to be unhappy. He could find meaning in the struggle itself. That’s what these three levels give us—ways to create our own meaning through the goals we pursue, the moments we’re seen, and the self that does the noticing. It’s still unfair that I had to figure this out. But at least now I have a map.hat I had to figure this out. But at least now I have a map.

Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

An Open Letter to Atheists

I’m writing this for one particular friend, but thought the rest of you might enjoy it.

As an atheist, you probably think of religion like Richard Dawkins. He talks about religion this way. Imagine someone tells you there’s something incredibly important hidden in your backyard. You start digging. When you don’t find anything, they say you’re not digging deep enough. You keep digging. Still nothing appears. Eventually, the hole gets so big and destructive that you’ve ruined the entire yard. Yet you’ve convinced yourself that digging is virtuous.

The problem is that Dawkins views religion in a particular way. He sees it as an end in goal—a claim about what’s literally true about the universe. And a lot of people think of religion that way. But that’s not what religion is, at least not for me.

Here’s my short answer: Religion is a means to an end. What end? The end of being a better person. It’s a framework for asking the right questions about how to live, a way of making the ordinary sacred, and a path toward holiness that neither science nor art alone can provide.

Let me explain.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Atheists”
Categories
Life Lessons

Getting Over Hidden Addictions

We all know addiction is bad for us. But when we hear the word, we think of drugs, alcohol—maybe gambling if we’re feeling expansive. Few of us think about being addicted to food, or YouTube, or productivity itself. Those don’t sound dangerous—just human. But there’s a quieter kind of addiction too, the kind that hides behind good intentions, entertainment, or routines. Spotting those is hard. Getting rid of them is harder. But if you can, life opens up in surprising ways.

However, in his book Feeling Great, David Burns discusses four hidden addictions that are worth overcoming.1

1. The Addiction to Being Special

This one hides behind ambition and self-improvement. It starts as the drive to do something meaningful, to be good at what you do, to make a mark. Nothing wrong with that—until it starts eating you alive.

You begin to measure everything: your success, your relationships, even your joy. You compare. You optimize. You chase that fleeting hit of validation that says, “You’re not just good—you’re better.” And then you need another hit, and another.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “special self.” It’s the moment you realize you don’t need to be extraordinary to have value. That maybe the most radical thing you can do in a world obsessed with attention is to stop performing and just be.

If you’ve ever burned out on trying to “live up to your potential,” you’ve felt this. The relief comes when you finally drop the act. When you stop chasing applause and rediscover what it feels like to just enjoy something for its own sake.

Try this: Do something purely for the joy of it—and tell no one. Don’t post it, don’t share it, don’t even mention it. Just live it.

2. The Addiction to Safety and Control

This one feels virtuous. It’s disguised as responsibility, as “being organized.” You make lists, double-check, plan ahead, rehearse conversations in your head. It feels like you’re managing life—but really, you’re managing your anxiety.

Control gives the illusion of safety, but it’s a treadmill. The more you control, the more fragile you feel. Because underneath it all is the fear that if you stop trying, everything will fall apart.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “fearful self.” The breakthrough isn’t when you finally feel safe—it’s when you realize you don’t need to. That you can live with uncertainty, and even thrive in it.

The monster you’ve been running from—the unknown—isn’t trying to hurt you. It’s trying to invite you.

Try this: Leave one small thing unplanned today. Let the email sit. Don’t overexplain. See what happens when you let the world unfold without micromanaging it.

3. The Addiction to Being Right

This one hides in plain sight. It’s in every argument where you “just want to be understood.” Every moment you feel that if only they’d listen, things would be fine.

We all tell ourselves we’re reasonable people surrounded by idiots. But if every disagreement you have feels like déjà vu, the common denominator might be you.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “angry, blaming self.” He has patients keep a “relationship journal,” writing down exactly what was said in a conflict and how their own response might have made things worse. It’s humbling work. You start seeing how often your attempts to “fix” or “clarify” are really attempts to control.

When you stop trying to win, you realize how many arguments are just two people asking, “Do you see me?”

Try this: In your next disagreement, aim to understand, not persuade. Ask one genuine question and listen to the answer without planning your rebuttal. You might be shocked by how fast things soften.

4. The Addiction to Comfort and Escape

This one’s sneaky because the world encourages it. Comfort is the new religion. We “treat ourselves,” “unwind,” and “disconnect”—usually by connecting to something else. We fill every empty moment with noise.

The pleasure-seeking self isn’t evil; it’s just scared. It’s the part of you that can’t stand stillness because stillness might mean facing something real. That’s why the scroll never ends, the fridge door keeps opening, the show auto-plays.

Burns calls this getting rid of the “entitled, pleasure-seeking self.” He found that addiction isn’t mostly about pain—it’s about narcissism. The belief that we shouldn’t have to feel bad. That discomfort is an error in the system.

But the truth is that meaning often lives right underneath discomfort. When you stop numbing, you start noticing. You realize that boredom isn’t emptiness—it’s space.

Try this: The next time you feel the urge to distract yourself, don’t. Wait sixty seconds. Name what you’re feeling instead. It might surprise you how quickly the urge passes.

The Hard Part

These addictions don’t look like addictions because they feel like virtues. Striving, planning, arguing, relaxing—what could be more normal? But beneath them is a single impulse: to protect the idea of who we think we are.

The real addiction is to the self itself. Without it, you give up the scaffolding that’s been holding you up—your ambitions, your opinions, your comforts—and you think, What’s left? But what’s left is the part of you that doesn’t need scaffolding. The part that simply is.

It doesn’t feel good at first. It feels like loss. But it’s the kind of loss that clears the space for everything that matters: peace, love, connection, joy.

In other words: You don’t need to so more or do it better. You just need to stop running.

Other Books with Hidden Addictions

Footnotes

  1. In the book, Burns doesn’t describe them as addictions but the four great deaths. ↩︎
Categories
Human Behavior Life Lessons

When Science Fails

You may have heard of the marshmallow test. Back in the late 1960s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel sat preschoolers down with a marshmallow and made them an offer—eat it now, or wait fifteen minutes and get two. Then he left them alone and watched what happened.

The kids who waited, the story goes, went on to have better life outcomes. Higher SAT scores. Lower BMI. Better jobs. The ability to delay gratification, it seemed, was the secret ingredient to success.

When I became a parent, I thought here’s something I can use. I could become a better parent through science. I tried it on one of my sons, running my own informal experiment. I told him the rules. Here’s a marshmallow. If you can wait 15 minutes, I’ll give you two. I set a marshmallow down in front of him and waited to see what would happen.

He looked at the marshmallow. Acknowledged its existence. Then went back to whatever he was doing.

Fifteen minutes passed. The marshmallow sat there. An hour. He liked this game. He asked, “How many marshmallows do I get now?” It wasn’t that he didn’t like marshmallows—he did. He just happened to be weirdly good at ignoring them. I could probably have left that marshmallow there for days.

I thought this is it! This kid is destined for great things.

And look, I still think he is destined for great things. But here’s what I learned pretty quickly. His supernatural ability to resist marshmallows didn’t translate to resisting video games. Or ice cream. Or the urge to hit his brother when his brother was being annoying.

Turns out self-control isn’t one thing. It’s not a trait you either have or don’t have, like eye color or left-handedness. And that famous marshmallow experiment? It’s a great story. But like so many great stories in psychology, it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as we’d like to think.

When Stories Become Science

Here’s the thing about the marshmallow test. When researchers tried to replicate it with larger, more diverse samples, the whole thing kind of fell apart. The correlation between childhood marshmallow-waiting and adult success basically disappears once you control for family income and education. The original study had a small sample, mostly kids from Stanford’s campus community. What looked like a profound insight into human nature was actually just a story about privilege.

But we love these stories. We love them because they’re clean. Simple. Scientific-sounding. They give us the illusion that human behavior can be reduced to a single variable we can measure and optimize.

This is the world we live in now. Science gave us cars and houses and antibiotics and smartphones, and we’re grateful for that. We should be. But somewhere along the way, we decided that everything should be scientific. That everything should be able to be measured, studied, and reproduced in a lab.

Science has become our religion. It’s where we turn for answers, for certainty, for legitimacy. We have faith that science works, and we apply it to everything, whether it belongs there or not.

In the physical sciences, this works great. Chemistry, physics, biology—we see the results immediately and they’re consistent. But when we get into fields like psychology, things get messier. This is what led to what psychologists called their reproducibility crisis.

Basically, a lot of the famous experiments that had been taught for decades, that had shaped how we understand human behavior, turned out to be flukes. They were interesting one-offs with compelling narratives. These stories seemed too good to be true. And they were.

When Sensational Stories Become Scientific Truth

Consider Kitty Genovese. In 1964, she was murdered outside her Queens apartment while, according to the New York Times, 38 witnesses watched and did nothing. The story became the foundation for understanding the “bystander effect”—the more people present, the less likely anyone is to help.

It’s a hell of a story. It shaped decades of psychology research. It became the go-to example in every intro psych textbook.

There’s just one problem. It wasn’t true.

Later investigations revealed that far fewer people witnessed the attack. Several did call the police. At least one person held Genovese as she died. The Times story was sensationalized—probably to sell papers—and then that sensationalized version became the basis for scientific conclusions about human nature.

The documentary The Witness follows Kitty’s brother as he reexamines the murder and the famous “38 witnesses” story, uncovering a much more complicated—and ultimately more human—account of what actually happened.

Then there’s the Stanford Prison Experiment, where Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned students to play prisoners and guards, then watched as the “guards” became sadistic and the “prisoners” broke down. The experiment seemed to prove that situations, not character, drive behavior. That any of us could become monsters given the right circumstances.

The documentary The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth presents a very different perspective. It suggests that Zimbardo coached the guards to be harsh, that many participants were acting out what they thought was expected of them, and that the experiment’s most dramatic moments involved only a few individuals—not a universal dark side of human nature.

These experiments became famous because they’re stories. They have protagonists, conflicts, dramatic reveals. They’re the kind of thing you remember from Psych 101 twenty years later. They’re too good not to be true.

Which is exactly why we should have been more skeptical.

The Tyranny of Analysis

This impulse to make everything scientific extends way beyond psychology. Look at how we teach poetry.

The whole point of a poem is that it can mean different things to different people. You can hold it up to the light and see something I don’t see. You can turn it around, look at it from another angle, feel something unexpected. That’s not a bug—it’s the entire point. Poetry is about feeling, about creation, about letting something resonate in ways the creator might not have even intended.

But we don’t teach it that way. We teach students to analyze creative works—to dissect metaphors, identify literary techniques, interpret symbolism. And more than that, we teach them that there’s a right answer. That the goal is to figure out what the poem “really means.”

This might help you get an A in English class. It might help you win at school. But it doesn’t teach you anything about poetry, or creation, or appreciation. It doesn’t help you notice something beautiful in your actual life. It doesn’t help you capture a moment or let art move you. How often will you need to write a formal analysis of a poem’s structure after graduation? Compare that to how often you might want to experience something beautiful and let it sit with you.

That’s why I was excited when we went to an open house at the Heschel School and the English teacher shared the following poem for discussion.

That’s why I was excited when we went to an open house at the Heschel School and the English teacher shared the following poem—not with the students, but with us, the parents.

Think about that for a second. He wasn’t teaching the kids how to interpret Billy Collins. She was teaching us, the parents, how not to ask our kids what their poems “really mean.” In a room full of achievement-oriented parents who probably wanted to know about grade distributions and college acceptance rates, he was quietly suggesting that maybe we were asking the wrong questions entirely.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry from The Apple that Astonished Paris.

That last bit—students beating a poem with a hose to extract its meaning—that’s what we always do. We’ve turned everything—even poetry—into a puzzle with a correct solution. But real poetry isn’t a science. It’s an art. Art doesn’t have one correct interpretation.

So What Do We Do Now?

The marshmallow test isn’t about marshmallows. It’s about self-control. And self-control matters. The ability to separate impulse from action is genuinely important—it shows up in the Bible, Buddhist texts, every wisdom tradition we have.

These experiments are tools, not destinations. The problem is we keep treating the measurement as if it were the phenomenon.

The scientific method is powerful because it’s humble—it demands replication, welcomes skepticism, updates with new evidence. But when we need every question to have a scientific answer, we get pseudo-science instead—the aesthetic of science without its rigor.

Some things can’t be boiled down to a single experimental variable. A poem means different things to different people. That’s not a failure, that’s the point.

My son is destined for great things not because of a marshmallow test, but because he’s curious and kind and stubborn in productive ways. Not everything worth knowing fits neatly into an experimental design. The hard truth is that science doesn’t know everything, and it never will. You can’t reduce a person to a test score or a poem to its “real meaning.” And that’s not a failure—that’s what makes life more than a bunch of equations.

Categories
Life Lessons Technology

Can Something Be Too Convenient?

Can something be too convenient? That’s a question I’ve been grappling with for years.

You see, I’m a product manager. My entire job is built on making things more convenient for customers. In tech speak, we call it “removing friction.”

That’s the Silicon Valley playbook: find pain, remove friction, scale up, cash out. Mobile payments eliminate the pain of carrying cash. Delivery apps eliminate the pain of calling for takeout—no more language barriers, no more phone tag, no more getting your address wrong. Dating apps eliminate the pain of rejection. And in each case, you make the system smoother, faster, cheaper. The user wins. The investor wins. Everyone wins.

Until something breaks.

Friction and Resilience

A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services’ main data center in Northern Virginia—US-EAST-1—went down. For hours, the internet itself seemed to wobble. Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out that this wasn’t just a glitch; it was a parable.

In theory, the internet was built to be resilient—decentralized, redundant, and nearly indestructible. But over time, everyone put their data in the same place: the cheapest, easiest region. The system that was supposed to be distributed became dangerously centralized.

As Thompson wrote, “the true price being paid for global efficiency is [lower] resiliency.”

The smoother we make things, the more brittle they become. And the more dependent we are on a single, frictionless path, the more catastrophic it is when that path fails.

That’s not just an engineering story—it’s a human one too.

What Convenience Does to Us

I’ve watched this pattern play out in my own life. The more convenient things become, the less I can tolerate even the smallest frustration. Waiting in line feels intolerable. A phone call that requires me to deal with another person—especially when I’m frustrated and want to just get something done—feels like a huge imposition.

People are inherently inconvenient. They misunderstand me. They have different goals than I do. They make mistakes. That’s what makes them people rather than machines.

What we call inconvenience is often just engagement with the world. Dealing with the tiny annoyances of everyday life—lines, neighbors, phone calls, mistakes—builds the muscles of empathy and flexibility. These little failures and frustrations are what keep us human.

If you smooth out every human interaction, you risk smoothing out what makes life worth living.

You can see it in dating.

Faith Hill’s piece in The Atlantic describes how fewer teenagers are getting into relationships. Many say love feels “too risky” or “too much work.” They prefer “situationships”—connections without commitment, emotions without vulnerability. It’s the frictionless version of romance.

But that friction—the awkward silences, the heartbreak, the vulnerability—is what makes connection real.

We’ve come to see friction as failure. Waiting, misunderstanding, uncertainty—all feel like bugs to be fixed. But these “bugs” are what teach us how to adapt.

The beauty of life is that everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context. Every interaction forces you to adjust your own. It’s inconvenient, but this is what living is all about.

Addiction to Convenience

In his audio series Inconvenient Truth, Oliver Burkeman makes an observation that stuck with me:

“It’s like we’re constantly trying to outrun any difficulties in our lives. Yet, the smoother we make things, the worse the remaining difficulties feel. No matter how quick and easy things get, you never stop being inconvenienced. It’s just that your standard of inconvenience shifts along with technology and the new reality. The goalposts keep moving, and maybe there’s a societal delusion that we can outrun our instinct for inconvenience.”

Oliver Burkeman, Inconvenient Truth

That’s the heart of it. We’re addicted to convenience—not because it makes us happier, but because it feeds the illusion that we can finally escape frustration.

And companies know this. Amazon has built an entire business model around the fact that customers always want more. As Jeff Bezos puts it, customers are “beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied” even when they’re happy—which means there’s always another pain point to solve, another bit of friction to remove.

Addiction always starts as a solution. It works at first—it makes life easier, smoother, more efficient. But over time, it hollows us out. The less friction we experience, the less resilient we become. Waiting in line, calling a restaurant, talking to a stranger—these once-normal parts of life now feel intolerable. We’ve built a world that promises we’ll never have to feel discomfort again.

We don’t call this addiction because it looks like progress. We call it “innovation.” But the underlying pattern is the same: every shortcut erodes a bit of our tolerance for reality.

It’s tricky because that’s what I’ve been trained to do at work. But I’ve realized that just because I have access to all of these tools of convenience, that doesn’t mean I need to use them all.

The Magic Dial

If convenience is an addiction, how do we break ourselves of it? The best answer, of course, is to consult a psychologist. But I’ve been reading psychologist David Burns a lot over the last few months, and he offers a framework that’s helped me think about this differently.

Burns is one of the founders of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and one of his most important tools is what he calls “the magic button.”

Here’s how it works: Burns asks patients to imagine he has a magic button. If they press it, their problem disappears completely. A person with social anxiety would never feel anxious around people again. Someone with perfectionism would stop caring about mistakes entirely.

At first, almost everyone wants to press the button.

Then he asks them to think about it more carefully. If you press the button and your social anxiety disappears, you might also stop caring about how you come across to others. You could become insensitive, oblivious to social cues. Your anxiety, while painful, is also trying to protect you—it’s what makes you considerate, what helps you read the room.

The very thing that causes pain also carries something valuable inside it: care, conscience, awareness.

What people really want, Burns says, isn’t a magic button. It’s a magic dial. They want to turn their anxiety down from an 80% to a 10%—not eliminate it entirely.

At work and in life, we’re thinking too much about magic buttons, when what we really need are magic dials.

I don’t want to eliminate all inconvenience from my relationships. I want enough friction to stay engaged, to stay flexible, to keep building those muscles of empathy. I want to be inconvenienced by my kids when they interrupt my work, because that interruption reminds me they’re real and present and need me.

The beauty of being alive is this constant reworking of context, this endless recombination of perspectives. It’s messy and inefficient and sometimes exhausting. But it’s also what makes connection possible. It’s what makes love possible. It’s what makes us more than just nodes in a perfectly optimized network.

Life is inconvenient because people are inherently inconvenient. Everyone you meet lives in a slightly different context—different assumptions, different experiences, different ways of seeing the world. Every interaction requires me to adjust, to translate, to meet someone where they are.

That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.

Categories
Life Lessons Uncategorized

I’m Not Who I Thought I Was

For most of my life, I carried around a fixed idea of who I was: Smart. Impulsive. A little weird. “This is just who I am,” I’d tell myself, as if it was literally set in my genes. But this year, after reading some great books on psychology and working with a life coach, I’ve learned to start letting go of that story of a fixed me.

Nothing made me realize how unstable the concept of “I” really is quite like breaking my ankle. There’s nothing that represents “me” more than my body, and I had this revelation lying on an operating table watching a doctor prepare to cut open my leg and screw a metal plate into my ankle. This wasn’t a doctor wrapping my arm in a cast—this was hardcore carpentry on my body.

When I woke up in my cast and started moving through the city, I realized how interconnected the world was and how reliant I was on it. I’d always thought of myself as independent, self-contained. Now I saw how much I depended on everything around me.

I thought people would be annoyed by me. But it was actually the opposite. People went out of their way to help—holding doors, offering to carry things, scanning for ways to make my life easier.

Then there were the products. I was delighted to find that companies made devices exactly for my condition. If I needed to get to work on the subway, I could use a Knee Rover, scooting along by pushing with my good leg. If I needed to do the dishes, I could strap on the iWALK and feel like a modern-day peg-legged pirate.

But each of these devices made me far more aware of the world around me. I started noticing things differently: where the stairs were, where the scooter couldn’t go. On the Knee Rover, I learned about sidewalk slopes—not just forward and backward, but left and right. Suddenly, the infrastructure of the world—the parts we usually ignore—became visible.

What I’ve come to realize is that the world isn’t made up of individual people so much as the interconnections between them. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls it “interbeing”—the idea that we don’t just exist, we “inter-are.” Remove the surgeon, the Knee Rover, the helpful strangers, the sloped sidewalks, and there’s no “me” to speak of.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote something similar: that we become real, become someone, not in isolation but in genuine encounter with others. Every person who held a door, every designer who thought about accessibility, every stranger who made eye contact and asked if I needed help—they weren’t just helping me navigate the world. They were part of what made me me in that moment.