WE HAVE VERY FEW REAL PROBLEMS I know that sounds crazy. But bear with me... I write fiction: stories people do not believe. Sometimes I think this newsletter is the mirror to that: deconstructing the stories people automatically believe. The idea for this week came from the news story about the water problem in the Western states of the US and the incredible droughts in Europe. Namely, that there isn't any water. (I mean, I love the TV show Drain the Ocean, but it's not supposed to be literal!) LIFE IN CONSTANT DROUGHT I grew up in Colorado, and it's difficult to describe to someone who hasn't grown up rationing water what it is like. Residents for decades filled fountains with lights instead of water and transformed our yards into rocks and took military showers. But more than any one action, this mindset infects you until it's almost instinct. The craving for water as you watch the world turn beige and light on fire every year. As your skin desiccates and your … [Read more...] about A Fiction Author on How to Fall in Love with Reality
Make Life Suck Less
How Bottlenecks and Slushies Help You Get Better Ideas
How do you make the best guess and get better ideas? I talked about last week how we're terrible at the first step in the scientific method: making a hypothesis. We never learn to do it. Here's a few ways to do it better. TELL YOURSELF THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED We all have stories about why things happen in the world and in our lives. They can be really awesome stories. Whizbang beginnings, tense conflict, explosive endings. Elaborate backstories. Fifteen sequels. Do they have anything to do with reality? Until we had the scientific method, we had no way to know. But now we do! The fancy word for this is a root cause analysis, digging through the story to try and find the story that most closely matches the reality of what happened. It is shocking how many big decisions people make their lives without the smallest bit of due diligence. They apply for graduate programs without ever talking to someone who's gotten that degree or has the job they think they want. Or … [Read more...] about How Bottlenecks and Slushies Help You Get Better Ideas
4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing
DOGS AND BONES AND HUMAN MOTIVATION There's an apocryphal story about racing Grayhounds and how when they catch the dog or the bunny, they cease to race. Though there is no confirmation of this story anywhere in actual racing circles. I am a little suspicious of it because, though I'm allergic to anything with fur, when normal dogs catch anything, they seem to be quite happy to repeat the experience all day. But it's a useful metaphor about human behavior, so let's pretend it's true, which is also very common human behavior. Either the dog is completely satisfied by that one bone and never tries to run again, or he's so pissed off that the bone or the bunny is made of cardboard, he also never runs again. This past week, I caught the bunny. Twice. One day this week, I checked off everything on my to do list. Not just the explicit list that has a prayer of occasionally looking realistic, but also the unspoken expectations I hold myself to, that if I ate … [Read more...] about 4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing
Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering What is the function of a tree? At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed. I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they're meant to do. Of course, trees don't need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is. THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it's in every single culture. It has reached the level of … [Read more...] about Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong
Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
I have a wee bit of vertigo, which means I have my phone read me emails and texts. This can lead to some assertions I don't think the authors are intending. Enjoy! The idea for this newsletter started when I got an author's newsletter that my (marvelous) app Speaking Email read to me as “Out Now: New romance non-binary vampire non-binary vampire” Excited, because that would be an awesome romance, but confused because it wasn’t exactly this author’s wheelhouse, I clicked over to my regular email and saw “Out Now New Romance 🧛🧛” This has happened to me before, though never to such hilarious results. Audio descriptions of emojis often don’t mean what we think they mean. Here are my favorites. (Try to imagine hearing these without the image for reference) 😂 Face with tears of joy 🐥 Standing chick 😒 Unamused face 😞Disappointed face 😔 Sad and pensive face 😟 Worried face 😕 Confused face 😣 Persevering face. (This is exactly how I look when persevering. I … [Read more...] about Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value. But we just can't help ourselves. BRAINS LOVE STORIES That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn't. We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin. Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos). Sometimes we know we're doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn't get the job because of the tie we wore, but it's better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a … [Read more...] about How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions
Photo Behzad No We decide this together: what is healthy or not, stressful or not? I owe a lot to Elizabeth Stanley and her book Widen the Window for her discussion of the connection between stress and trauma and how we think of them as worlds apart when they really are a spectrum. Though I've extrapolated into the healthy side of things for my work. Yes, we have to live in reality, but we shape reality with a lot of story. What doesn't kill you... The fact that some things are good for us and some kill us is not a controversial statement. I think everybody knows that some things make us happy and some things make us miserable, and some things traumatize us and blight the rest of our lives so we end up eating a pint of ice cream made of avocado because that would be healthier at 3 am when we’re convinced we’re going to be fired, our chosen political party will never win again, and humanity will be extinct in a century... No? Just me? One note: trauma is a … [Read more...] about Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions
Could You Be Addicted to Outrage??
I'm Kyler and I'm an outrage addict. It's been fifteen minutes since my last hit of cortisol. This is the story of how I thought I had a totally normal, healthy relationship with the internet, but learned I was actually completely screwed. It took a sixty-day migraine with vertigo to get me offline. Did you know vertigo was a symptom of migraine? Or that one of the primary triggers is screens? One day last year, I started to feel like a cork bobbing on the ocean while someone hammered on the back of my head. Fun times. And then it went on for months. Even after I figured out what was going on and that screens were my primary trigger, I just kept looking at them. All the time. As spikes were driven into eyeballs. I was that addicted to terror and outrage, and I was a pretty casual user. You know this. This is not news. But do you truly, madly, deeply know this? Because I was completely fooled. I thought I understood. I did not get into flame wars. I had the … [Read more...] about Could You Be Addicted to Outrage??