Raptitude.com

When I read Jane Eyre, I stalled for a full year between the opening part at the boarding school and the rest of the book.

I tend to dislike boarding-school openings in books, but the real problem was I found myself having to reread too many of Charlotte Brontë’s winding, multi-clausal, colon-encrusted sentences. Her writing is beautiful, but some sentences contained so many twists and detours that I would often lose the flow of them and have to take a second go. The book was clearly a special one, but whenever I looked at it I got tired at the thought of diving back in.

I finally regained traction by reading it aloud. I finished the whole book this way, which made it an unfettered joy. Because each of its complex Victorian sentences had to pass through my mouth, I found it easy to stay with their meaning and structure. The reading was slower, but much smoother, with very little doubling back. It felt like I was finally driving in the appropriate gear for the terrain.

Let’s say you want to cross a river.

There’s no bridge, because it’s 3000 BC and you are a nomadic goat herder. You’ve never seen a bridge that wasn’t just a log over a creek. Crossing a big river is something you haven’t figured out. Maybe nobody has.

You could maybe make a raft, but it’s hard to find suitable wood for that, and you don’t know if it would be safe. Are there man-eating water-lizards lurking out there? Will the current dash you on some rocks before you get across?

You never cross the river.  

Say you want to learn accounting. You’d love to be able to track every penny that comes in and out of your life in a great big ledger. It would satisfy your desire for order and efficiency, and probably save you a lot of money. You could even provide accounting services for businesses in your village.

The problem is it’s 1590, and you are an illiterate tavern owner. There’s maybe one guy in a nearby town who might know about accounting, and the town is eight miles away and you don’t have a horse. Also, that guy is a monk and he has no reason to devote any time to teaching you accounting.

South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth

If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back to so-and-so. Read that health and safety thing for work.

If you were to make a list of things you want to get done in the next two years, it would probably be more personal and more empowering. Learn to record my own music. Double my client base. Set up my dream office. Write my screenplay. The list would contain fewer things you must do –- since, by definition, those things will get done anyway — and more of what you actually want to do with your life.

We usually call these optional aspirations goals, but doing so immediately introduces a few problems that make them less likely to happen.  

An assassin is coming to kill you! At midnight tonight! Unless you do 100 pushups first, that is.

If this were true, you would do the pushups, no question, no problem. Any motivation issues would evaporate, thanks to your assassin. If the assassin did this every weekday, you’d have amazing pecs, even if you didn’t want them. Your fitness would become an inevitable result of circumstance.

The real question is how to get yourself to do 100 pushups, or some other rewarding feat, without an assassin coming to kill you. If your amygdala isn’t getting forcibly activated by an Anton Chigurh-like force, you have to rely on something else.

But why is that “something else” so much less dependable? Why is it so hard to just do the thing we think is best?

Someone emailed me a while ago and said, “Hey Dave, I notice what you mostly write about is self-control. Why all the talk about self-control?”

I do have my particular struggles with self-control, but I also regard the battle for self-control as the central theme of human history. Everything people argue about, all the news, all the political discourse, all the gossip and outrage, all the big religions, all the punditry and proselytizing — it all centers on what some person, or all people, should do or refrain from doing. All humans care about is good and bad, and the voluntary human actions that make good and bad happen.

Another word for this fixation on human self-control is morality. Everyone agrees that it matters what we do. A given person, at a given moment, might do a good thing or bad thing, and a lot hinges on that – much more than just that person’s own fate.

I know how to replace a kitchen faucet. If you have a janky old faucet that needs to be replaced with a smoothly operating new one, I can do that for you or show you how.

This wasn’t always true. It became true May 27, 2024, after pulling everything out of the under-sink cupboard, lying uncomfortably on my back inside it, and fiddling my way through several sets of internet-derived instructions.

The exact moment in which I became capable of faucet-replacing is hard to pin down precisely, but it was a real moment in time, sometime that afternoon, in that sweaty and contorted position under the sink.

Just before that, I had been dismayed to discover that the various hoses and hardware coming out of the fixture didn’t correspond to the ones in the instructional YouTube video. I could easily have abandoned the mission there, telling myself I’d “come back to it later” or “figure something else out.” Instead, I chose to lay uncomfortably a little longer, pondering the problem, testing my hunches. Within an hour I had a sparkling new tap that worked perfectly.

Now that I’ve done it once, the mechanics of faucet installation seem straightforward and self-evident, and I’m confident I could do it a hundred times over.  

The other day I closed a savings account at a tiny credit union branch. I expected it to take about five minutes, but the teller took so long that I started to experience time distortion.

I knew it had been at least fifteen minutes, but perhaps it was much longer. Twenty-five minutes? Forty? There was no visible clock, and I didn’t want to take out my phone. The young teller seemed to be Googling how to close an account while maintaining her professional bank teller countenance.

I waited patiently, occupying myself with an eyes-open meditation practice, and didn’t complain.

I did feel self-conscious though. There were only two tellers, and half of them were dealing with me while the other one, clearly more experienced, handled the rest of the line one at a time.

Another customer did complain, to the other teller.

She said, with an edge to her voice, “I would suggest that if a transaction is going to take more than ten minutes, it should be done by appointment,” and then went on to make a few more suggestions. The teller cited extenuating circumstances (scheduling problems, somebody is on lunch) and also said she was very sorry about that a few times.

Everyone in the tiny building heard this exchange, and it made for an uncomfortable few minutes for all of us.

A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial independence.

I think it was an honest mistake on the part of the reporter. I told her I had quit my job to write full time, and I guess she thought that meant I must have millions of dollars.

To be clear, I was not then, and am not now financially independent. The 100 or so people that actually know me could discern that just by seeing my kitchen. Yet perhaps 20,000 people read somewhere that I am. That means potentially 200 times more people are wrong than right on this question, because of an inference made by a reporter.

This scenario, in which there’s much more wrongness going around than rightness, is probably the norm. People make bad inferences like that all day long. These wrong ideas replicate themselves whenever the person tells someone else what they know, which the internet makes easier than ever.

Consider the possibility that most of the information being passed around, on whatever topic, is bad information, even where there’s no intentional deception. As George Orwell said, “The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Sometimes you really can trade lead for gold. You may have noticed, for example, how much of a time-saver it is to stay a little late to finish a task today that you could finish tomorrow instead. Somehow that last little bit, which would only take a half-hour now, will eat up most of tomorrow morning if you leave it till then. It’s the same work, but somehow its size and complexion change drastically depending on when it gets done.

There should be some metaphysical law that stops you from getting such a good deal, but there isn’t. So you should go for it, and also become a hunter for such deals.

A lot of variables come together to make this sort of transmutation happen. If you’ve been working on something for an hour or two, your system is warmed up in all the right places. You have the relevant information loaded up in your mental RAM, the body is tuned into the relevant actions (flipping between spreadsheets, folding clothes, whatever) and the mind has dropped most irrelevant thoughts. What would take thirty more minutes in this state might take two hours from a cold start tomorrow.

Everybody used to be naked, all the time. Naked at birth, naked at death, naked while sitting around with people, naked while meeting strangers, naked while preparing and serving food.

This condition is hard to imagine, because everybody you’ve ever met has been in the habit of wrapping themselves in woven fibres. Coating our bodies with textiles is such a useful thing to do that everybody does it now. But the technology to do that had to be invented, and many people lived their whole lives before that happened.

In fact, many people lived and died before any material goods had been invented — at least anything more complex than sharpened sticks or stones. Biologically, those people were basically the same as us. They still had to stay warm, they had to keep their kids safe, and they had to eat. Just with no stuff.