Say you’re walking through Death Valley, trying to find your way back to the highway. Luckily you’ve got a good paper map.

As you walk, you scan the territory around you for landmarks. You see some large-scale details: hills, rock formations, and gullies. Also some minute ones: pebbles, gangly plants, trails through the dust where snakes have been.

These smaller details would never appear on a map, because they’re not conducive to navigation, yet they are certainly part of the territory, as are lizards, birds, forgotten stone arrowheads, the bleached bones of cattle, and the fossils of Mesozoic squid.

At least right now, you too are a part of the territory, along with your clothing and boots, canteen, Tilley hat, and California highways department map of Death Valley.

When you look at a map, it appears at a glance that the territory is inside the map. This map contains the whole of Death Valley National Park — every stretch of its highways, every point of interest, both gas stations, and a handful of residential hamlets. You hold the whole expanse in your hands. You’re in there somewhere, presumably south of the line that says Highway 190.  

The other day I replaced an old, cracked mirror in my bathroom. When I took the existing one down, suddenly the room seemed to lose half its size. Turns out it’s just a claustrophobic little room with a toilet, sink, and tub.

The sense that there’s open space in front of me while I brush my teeth is an illusion, but that illusion is much more familiar to me than the reality. In other words, my mirror-skewed impression of the room – the way it seems – feels more real and is more relevant to my life than the room’s actual properties.

The new mirror opened it up spatially again, and removed a bit of dinge and disorder from the view. This even made me seem better — I feel like a slightly more dignified person looking into an immaculate mirror than a damaged one.

The way things seem matters a lot, perhaps more than the way they actually are. You get a hint of this whenever you dress up in good clothes. Even if nobody else is around, you probably feel more capable and more formidable. Sharp attire can change, at least for the moment, who you seem to be, even though the being beneath the clothes shouldn’t be changed by draping new things on it.

Humans aren’t good at predicting the future, but sometimes you can see a trend that promises something great — like “a genie is granting your wish” great. I think this might be happening right now with one of my genie wishes, maybe yours too.

For me it has to do with the piles of unread books I own. There’s almost nothing I want to do more than plow through stacks of 600-page history and philosophy books, but my efforts are mostly thwarted by the cognitive difficulty I have with processing line upon line of printed text. While I’m reading, my attention veers off at least once or twice per sentence (unless I read aloud, which is slower, hard on the throat, and not always appropriate).

It’s not a small impediment to learning. Not to sound dramatic, but those books represent something I want badly that feels locked away from me, like I’m stuck in the middle act of some frog prince fable. Imagine you loved swimming more than anything, but water happens to cause you horrendous itching.

Audiobooks allow me to spend more time reading (e.g. in the car, at the gym) but lapses of attention still occur frequently. I rewind a lot, but I still miss the context needed to understand the next point. Missed context accumulates until the content is mostly lost on me, then interest crashes completely and I stop.

This happens because books, in any form, are essentially long strings of interdependent sentences, which must be read and understood in order. They operate something like old strings of Christmas lights – miss an important “bulb” and the rest might not work for you at all.

This is hardly a brilliant insight, but I’ve noticed that making small, “good” decisions early in the day makes the whole day work better. If I wake up and avoid screen time and loafing around, I get more and better work done, I make more sensible meal choices, I’m less needy and thought-addled, I don’t get as tired in the afternoon, and so on.

The exact causal paths here aren’t necessarily traceable. Maybe my procrastination neurons miss their usual early-morning workout, so I become less inclined to unlock my phone reflexively, which means I get more done and feel better about myself, so the future feels brighter and more within my control, so I don’t hit a wall of motivation loss at 2:30.

There countless variables involved, but the clear pattern is that good begets more good. This seems like a general principle that affects everyone.

It works the other way too, of course. Bad choices beget bad choices. In a moment of weakness you order cheesecake on DoorDash at 9:40 pm. You proceed to sleep poorly, and wake up distracted and screen-hungry. You start late, get annoyed at the first setback at work, compromise your afternoon plans, and feel bad about it, perhaps leading eventually to some evening ennui and more cake delivery.

I never threw a party until I was in my late 30s. I was always afraid people wouldn’t show up, or, even worse, that they would show up and quickly want to leave.

It felt like this particular fate could not be risked, which meant party-throwing was off the table. Other people could throw parties I guess, but I could not.

“No parties may be held in this lifetime” is quite a high cost to pay, just to protect yourself from a very occasional sort of pain. Yes it feels bad to have a lame party, but does it make sense to station yourself forever outside of the party-having population, solely to avoid having to feel that bad feeling two or three times in your life?

When I did start hosting parties, the usual outcome was that they were tremendously fun. Only one was genuinely disappointing. I had unwittingly scheduled it on the same day as another, more elaborately planned party. Several loyal attendees also got called into work or got sick and/or injured. Still, five or six excellent people showed up, including some who had gone to both parties. We sat around the kitchen table eating snacks and collaborating hilariously on a crossword.

Of course, now that I’ve actually “suffered” this long-avoided type of pain, it barely registers as a meaningful risk anymore. Why did I give up so much to protect against it?

I think this situation is common – to be giving up way too much in an effort to protect against certain kinds of pain. When protecting yourself from a certain unpleasant possibility becomes non-negotiable, you’re liable to suffer in other ways, often to a much greater degree.

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.