I’ve been whining in my own head for a while now (mostly in the shower) about how I have no traction in this world. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks and sometimes I’m shocked at the things the authors and podcasters are ignoring, things I think are completely obvious. Now, sometimes they’re doing it for effect and they’re wrapping their podcast around to it at some point later in the piece (there is a journalism term for this, but I can’t find it right now). But sometimes they’re just ignoring it or ignorant of it. How is this possible when humble old me knows it? How are they getting paid for spreading information/entertainment while they’re clearly lacking all the informative/entertaining material?

Well, one reason may be that I’m delusional to think this at all. My first stop on that train is always to second-guess myself because, well, I’m me and I’m usually wrong about stuff. But, when you have the attitude that you’re usually wrong about everything, you also tend to self-correct much faster than average. This results in being less wrong over time. That adds up, an accumulative advantage relative to the competition.

This leads to my next thought, which is that they’re missing information. Given the level of professionalism in podcasting these days it’s very hard to believe that they don’t have fact-checkers and writers in on the production. Which means that the entire team missed some crucial piece of information that could completely reframe their viewpoint. This is the point at which I’m questioning all of reality. How is it I don’t have a seat at the table with these people?

Well, the answer to that is that I’ve been quite content to live my quiet life up to this point. I haven’t been trying to be heard. I’ve been focused on becoming competent at everything I do, on learning as much as possible, on refining my skills, on turning up any possible viewpoint that could expand my understanding of how the world works, and on pruning out the things in life that aren’t important to me. I’ve been on a decades-long struggle to make some sense of the world and shape myself into my best possible version. I have failed at both of these things, but the struggle has made some things very clear to me.

The first thing I’ve realized is that it’s impossible for a human to truly make sense of reality. This takes a lot of explaining, so I’ll put that off for many later discussions. Suffice it to say that reality so massive that it is beyond the capacity for a mere human to comprehend ever, let alone quickly enough in a human lifespan to do any good with the information. Following that statement, I will say that I have figured it out just about as good as a human can. Then, following that statement, I’ve also figured out that any time you think you have it figured out that much, you are wrong. After that it’s turtles all the way down.

The second thing that’s completely clear to me is that I am not capable of seeing myself clearly. I am delusional about practically every aspect of my own self, and this is the most clear and true comprehension one can possibly have of one’s self. If you think you know who “you” are, then you are being completely fooled by yourself. People don’t like to hear this, and they will usually (instinctively) bristle at the idea, get defensive (“of course I know who I am, it’s taken me years to accept myself”), and then mentally shut themselves off to further discussion of the topic (known as “cognitive dissonance”). This is your mind’s defensive mechanisms working to protect your identity from attack. But I’m not trying to attack you (specifically), I’m attacking the idea that there is a “you” that you can know.

I’m not alone in this, by the way; it’s a pretty well-trod road at this point. But I’ll get into it a little. Let’s look at a few things your mind is capable of doing without you being involved. It regulates your temperature based on your preferences, but it also decides what those preferences are (seemingly without your input). It dictates what foods and drinks you desire and then persuades you to eat and drink things that are literally poison for your body and (ironically) mind, meanwhile shit-talking about you to yourself for having made that “decision”. This can’t be in your best interests, so it will remind you of that, too, and make you feel even worse about yourself. It will send you random thoughts about the bodies of people you may not even personally like and make you want to do genuinely nasty things with them which would make you need to vomit if you were forced to watch any other two people perform together, and then it will make you regret having the thoughts or (even worse) acting on those thoughts. It will tell you that you should want to do a thing, but then also tell you that you don’t really want to do that thing, and when you don’t do it it will make you regret not having done the thing you were told you should have wanted to do. Seriously, if someone else treated you like your own mind treats you, you would tell them you’re in an abusive relationship.

Ok, so lets look at how your mind isolates you from reality. You have many sensory inputs that feed you information about the world around you, and you rely on these inputs to make decisions about your safety, security, and how you should allocate your effort to best set yourself up for success in the future. We talk about the five senses, but you have many more than that. You can also sense gravity, air pressure, directional travel, internal organ conditions, the passage of time, all kinds of things. But lets ignore the things your body knows that you don’t and just focus on the really obvious ones that you can’t argue about. Let’s take sight. Your eyes take in light in the visible spectrum, convert it into a representation of the world around you, and you use this to guide yourself through your life. Safe enough. But your eyes can only focus on one thing at a time, literally, yet you have the illusion of everything in your field of view as what you can see. Your eyes move rapidly around that field of view in a jerky pattern and then conspire with your mind to create the illusion that you “see” everything as a field (in three dimensions, no less). Not only that, but there are blind spots in your field of vision (where the optical nerves connect) that you don’t realize are there because your brain fills these spots in with surrounding information, blurring it together. Furthermore, your brain actively ignores things “you” aren’t focused on. Like when someone is proof-reading their own material and just can’t see misspelled words, often even when someone specifically points them out. Now, here’s the thing, though. Your subconscious mind is always filtering your environment for threats to your survival. If it picks up on something that could be life-threatening, it will instantly shock your attention onto that threat, essentially scaring the shit out of you, and refocusing all your efforts into reacting to that threat. You are normally inundated by external inputs that have to be filtered out since you can only focus on one thing at a time. We like to believe that “we” are the ones doing that selecting. But there are things in our environment that “get” our attention. That is, your mind discovered information in your environment that it considered more important than what “you” were focused on, and it inserted the new information into your feed. There is a subconscious part of your mind that is filtering information for you, and that subconscious part of your mind is making decisions about importance. You have no control over this process. Something inside your mind has more control of your mind than you do, at least about some things, some of the time. Now, I find it disturbing to consider that anything has more control over my own mind than I do for even the briefest of moments. The idea that I’m just a passenger in this meat sack, along for the ride yet still subject to all the consequences of decisions makes me terribly uncomfortable. And yet that seems to be the case.