(That should be the new tagline of this newsletter! Hopefully, this is interesting if not helpful…)

1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PROCRASTINATION

Don’t get me wrong, I am a master procrastinator. Witness eight novels. It took active work to not publish after a while.

But the more I work, the more I realize delaying work, writer’s block, fear, and all of these tactics are rooted in good instincts in my brain. It usually means something is wrong with the work itself and if I resist writing something, it shouldn’t get written. Sometimes it means I’m terrified of the marketing side of things and I need to shrink those tasks. Sometimes it means I’m just exhausted and I can get things done later if I just take a nap.

So now, if my brain is telling me no, I figure it has a good reason, and I just have to figure out what it is.

2. HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE WORK DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO THE QUALITY OF THE WORK

This is another thing that I believed for a long time. There are a lot of days I’m very lucky, and when I sit down, I’m inspired and things go quickly.

Then there are some days where every word is like pulling teeth. I’m not inspired. I don’t like what I’m doing. I don’t have faith in what I’m writing but I can’t think of anything better to write. And so I’m just slogging through a scene that I’m sure will be terrible and deleted.

Looking back over what I’ve done, that isn’t the case. 

In fact, sometimes the slog is better, because I’ve had to go slower and be more careful and it reads better than the inspirational word vomit. And sometimes it does happen and I have to delete some dreck that took me way too long to write.

But this is my point, whether I hate every minute of it or whether I love every minute of it does not correspond to whether I’m going to like it or keep it later.

This is really important in being able to keep going.

3. SITTING DOWN TO WORK AND ACTUALLY DOING THE WORK ARE TWO DIFFERENT SKILLS

Writing is a skill. Making sandwiches is a skill.

Showing up to work is a different skill!

Managing your time and energy and distractions and pain to be able to sit down and be productive is just as hard to learn as where to put a beautiful adjective.

It’s helped immensely with the pants-in-chair struggle to separate out the skill of sitting down to work and the skill of actually working. On any given day, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which was more challenging, but it gets easier when I treat both like the truly challenging skills they are.

4. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PRODUCTIVE, BUT IT CAN BE FUN

I feel like there are two kinds of articles in the productivity space. First are those that say buck capitalism! You’re just here to beeee. Versus those that say: how to get forty-five things done before 5 AM!

Both of them miss the fact that, yes, modern productivity culture can kill you if you let it. (Ask me how I know.) But at the same time, most of us like producing things. We’re a generally industrious species. Work is a huge source of pride for most of us, even if and perhaps because it’s so bloody hard.

5. CREATING A SCHEDULE IS NOT THE SAME THING AS PERFORMING THAT SCHEDULE.

Just like sitting down to write and writing are a different skills, sitting down to write (and exercise and eat and relax and socialize) every day is another different skill.

I am a champion schedule maker. I used to be a project manager, so you better believe I can make a schedule like nobody’s business.

Am I capable of performing that schedule every single day? No!

And that’s okay. Work is hard. Sitting down to work is hard. Sitting down to work consistently is the absolute bloody worst!

I used to make the big mistake of thinking if I planned, it was real. There’s some evidence that this is how your brain works. If you think about something, your brain reacts as if you did it. That’s really cool in the imagination department, but really hard when you’re trying to build a life you like.

Now I know that if I make a change in my routine, it’s going to take time for me to practice and get good at that routine, even if individually it’s made up of things like making lunch or writing a scene that I have done 1000 times. Putting them together on a regular basis is hard and I’m not going to do it every day starting tomorrow.

But I can eventually get there if I keep trying.

6. IT’S IMPOSSIBLEISM, NOT PERFECTIONISM

This deserves its own note,  but it’s worth touching on briefly that the expectations in your head are fantasies. They’re not perfect – they’re impossible and naming it perfectionism still makes it a little bit attractive.

The inputs that went into your vision aren’t real. Whether they were from the culture at large or your family of origin or the really inspiring entrepreneur who is probably gonna be dead by 40 given his schedule, just because you dreamed them does not mean they’re possible.

Real life is always chaotic and much messier than that, and if you have not lived up to your expectations, step number one is to examine your expectations not upbraid your imperfect human squishy toy of a body for failing.

I mean, yes, it’s possible your expectations were reasonable and you didn’t live up to them, but in my experience, 99 times out of 100, it’s my expectations, not my performance that was the problem.

7. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WASTING TIME

When I was younger, books were all I really cared about. And everyone said there’s more to life. But I really didn’t think so. And if I didn’t do this, I felt like I would have wasted my life.

There’s no such thing as a waste of life.

Having spent a great deal of the last year unproductive, dealing with vertigo, that lesson was hammered home. Whether you spent the day binging the latest TV show or writing a novel or working your dead-end job or playing with your kids or just waiting for the world to stop spinning, there’s no jury out judging your day.

8. FINISHING SOMETHING, EVEN IF IT’S BAD IS REALLY SATISFYING

There are lessons to be had in completing something, even if you don’t end up putting it out, even if it’s not good, and even if it is a novel-shaped object rather than a novel.

Finishing it is delicious.

And with that, I’m done

The post 8 Sanity-Saving Hacks I Learned Writing 8 Novels first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

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 vegetables, exercised twice, got to bed on time, called my friends and actually talked to them, and smelled all the flowers – life would be… perfect?

Yes, I had a perfect day, according to some past version of myself that put down a list of tasks that when completed would mean this day was not wasted.

And then a couple nights later, I slept through the night! I put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and opened them 8 hours later when the sun was coming up. I have nuclear levels of insomnia and can count on my fingers the number of nights I’ve gone to bed and woken with the sun. In my entire life.

It was the perfect day and the perfect night. In the same week!

It was terrible!

ASPIRATIONS ARE THE EPIC FANTASY VERSION OF YOUR LIFE

The day after the perfect night’s sleep, I was actually kind of groggy. It was hard to get started in the morning. I wasn’t calmer, more clearheaded, or more articulate. Or any happier. In fact, I was just still me. And then I slept like absolute crap the next night.

The day of perfect productivity, I felt kind of frenetic. Too busy. Too rushed. I wasn’t more accomplished, peaceful, connected. Or any happier. I was also still just me.

I’ll leave the sociopolitical antecedents of productivity from the Protestant reformation to modern hustle culture for another newsletter. We definitely have a really screwed up relationship with work and leisure, but I think the heart of our difficulty with getting things done is more fundamental than our present stopwatch age.

My favorite book on this subject is the Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan, though there are many that cover reality vs aspiration, the real vs expected self, and many other synonyms for the fact that human brains can imagine the future.

One scientist calls that improvisational intelligence, or more prosaically, creativity. We can picture something that hasn’t happened yet.

That little jump in intelligence means we are forever living two lives:

• Today: the exhausting, smelly,  inconvenient, delicious, disgusting, crying, silly, distracted experience of reality.
• Tomorrow: the productive, calm, impulse-free, benevolent, successful perpetual future.

Sometimes imagination sucks.

Sullivan says that handling the gap is a key skill to life satisfaction. Note, I didn’t say closing the gap and finally living up to tomorrow, getting everything done, and fulfilling all your dreams.

Today and on the day of your death, there will still be a gap between what you want to happen and what happens.

We will always have to manage that gap. It’s a skill I deeply suck at, by the way, so this is not sage advice on how to do this. This is that I am here in the trenches next to you, and I peaked out for a second.

This week was proof positive that closing the gap does not make life better, because for twenty four hours, I lived as close to tomorrow as I think I’m ever going to get.

I lived exactly how I wanted to, perfectly, and felt like the exact same as all the days I fail miserably.

HERE ARE A FEW TIPS FOR HANDLING THE GAP

Photo: NikoReto

REMIND YOURSELF IT’S NEVER GOING AWAY

When we fall short of what we aspire to do, we hardly ever look at the aspiration. We always blame ourselves. A huge leap forward is just remembering that we have made up what we want to do and so when we fall short, you need to examine the expectation as closely as reality.

Even as I write this, I hear the voice in my head that says: you’re going to be a lazy failure sitting on the couch forever. But I promise you, as someone who did nothing but sit on the couch for several months, it’s really hard to do.

Even when I was so sick that I couldn’t do anything but sit on the couch, it was still extremely hard to do. The version of yourself that plays on a loop when you don’t drink enough water or watch one more episode isn’t going to happen.

CHAOS HAPPENS AND SUCCESS IS ONLY A PROBABILITY

We think accomplishing everything we want to protect us against failure. We can keep the chaos at bay if we are perfect.

The perfect version wouldn’t have been taken in by charlatans. And would have picked the right job. And the right partner. And wouldn’t have said that boneheaded thing to your sister-in-law.

We don’t live in a deterministic universe; we live in a probabilistic one governed by chaos. Things just randomly go wrong, and the things we plan have only a chance of coming true. That means we waste a lot of time, take a lot of chances that don’t pay off, and even the things we are successful at are often random too.

TRY FOR THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

Often when we make changes, we want to do all of the things. I’m a big fan of the geographic cure, when you quit your job, break your lease, and move across the country and start in a completely new industry. But that’s just me.

The minimum effective dose is a medical term, but it can be applied to just about anything. It means making small changes that add up overtime. It’s prosaic and not at all sexy, but it makes for a smaller gap which is what we’re going for.

MEASURE YOURSELF AGAINST THE PAST, NOT YOUR FUTURE

This is Sullivan‘s main advice for handling the fact that we are always aspirational beings. The answer is not to let go of anything that you want and just sit like a slug. The answer is to want things and to attempt to improve, but to measure not against an imagined perfect future, but against your very imperfect and probably less skilled past self.

That way you are always looking at realistic progress that you have made, which is motivating, and you’re measuring accurately instead of always feeling like a failure.

And if this sounds like a cop-out, in his research, the people who do this get much farther in life because they are more motivated and more realistic and they just have a much better time than people who always move the goal posts.

TASTE YOUR FOOD; SMELL SOME FLOWERS

Oh yes, mindfulness, that old chestnut. And yet it makes every list for a reason.

I am absolutely not telling you to sit down and meditate every day. In my 20s, I went on a month-long retreat where I meditated for 16 hours a day on top of years long daily practice. And I am back to tell you it also did not help. You are still you.

Only you get really hypersensitized so that every twitch of fabric feels like sandpaper, and every rustle of noise sounds like gunfire. And then you have to go back to your life and everything is loud and bright and busy and crazy and it takes a while for all your senses to shut back down. And for you to stop asking: what was the point of that?

I went from that to a long period of time where I did not want anything to do with any kind of mindfulness. But all of the folk wisdom about missing your life isn’t wrong. If you don’t spend at least sometime in the present moment smelling the flowers, you will go for years without truly enjoying anything.

My favorite resource on mindfulness now is a book called Positive Intelligence, which is extremely misnamed because it has nothing to do with positivity or intelligence.

It preaches popcorn moments of mindfulness.

Rather trying to beat yourself up maintaining your focused attention on anything, you just try and notice your senses in brief moments. Taste a few bites of every meal; stop and look at something beautiful; smell your shampoo, actually hear the music you’re listening to. If you pay attention to the best moments of your day you’ll enjoy more of it.

ALL THESE MAKE YOU A LITTLE MORE SATISFIED AND A LITTLE LESS MEAN TO YOURSELF

Maybe examine the picture in your head as carefully as you examine your actual performance. Maybe cut yourself slack when you run up against chaos  or you run up against the probability of success and you didn’t get the thing you want. Maybe when you do try something, measure against what you’ve already tried.

Life is not a string of perfect productivity.  It’s a mess. Even when it goes perfectly, it still doesn’t really change that.

Enjoy the strawberries. Drink enough water.

The post 4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

MY FIRST BRUSH WITH SKYWALKERS

I was 7 years old and wandered into the living room to see what my parents were watching…

And froze. 

The scene playing out onscreen was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life. It was Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi, and the only thought in my head was that they had discovered Sesame Street for grown-ups. (Which, given Yoda’s antecedents, was truer than I realized.)

I was transfixed. 

It was dynamic, tense, and shocking for a girl whose main media diet was Disney and PBS. 

I was hooked. 

ONCE A FAN GIRL

I watched all of the films, over and over again, which at that point numbered three. (And have never gotten over the fact that I watched them out of order and never got the shock of Luke’s Father.) 

I ditched school for the first and only time with friends from marching band to see the first prequel when it came out in theaters. I avoided the internet for a whole month before I could get to The Force Awakens.

And have just had a delightful night watching the new Obi-Wan series. I’ve only seen one episode because vertigo and screens don’t mix and it’s going to take me MONTHS to see it all, but I’ve noticed something odd.

ONE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH

The exultation at the end of Return of the Jedi has turned out to be the only success the Skywalkers have ever achieved.

Since they want to keep making new stories, every one has to end the same way: the plucky rebels win one battle (and usually destroy a death star) and continue to lose the war so we can keep getting new Star Wars movies.

It’s what happens when you try to serialize an epic.

What if in Lord of the Rings, destroying the ring didn’t also destroy Sauron? You could have endless books where the wizards say: “JK, there’s another ring! What’s that? Destroy the guy who keeps making rings? No, no, no… way too hard. We just got to get this ring!”

It’s had an interesting side effect on the message of the films. They’ve become meditations on failure.

PHILOSOPHICAL, DEPRESSED OLD MEN

This is one reason I’m writing this newsletter. Fiction is the most powerful way to move people, but it’s also super finicky. Story is more important than theme, if you do it right, which means that in pursuit of story, you could end up with a message you really didn’t intend.

Like a property aimed at preteen boys that now cranks out story after story about philosophical, depressed old men reflecting on everything they did wrong.

IF YOU WANT TO KEEP BLOWING UP DEATH STARS…

Did anyone plan it like that? I doubt it, but since they started with the biggest threat and the biggest weapon in the first movie they put out, they were kind of stuck. Shrinking the threat would be an anti-climax, and you can’t really grow the threat more than a planet destroyer.

It’s just death stars all the way down, now. 

The heroes who knock them out get to jump up and down and maybe get a medal, but then also get to spend the rest of their lives reflecting on their failure to actually conquer evil before it builds yet another death star.

I’M NOT UPSET ABOUT IT?

I enjoyed watching Kenobi working his dead-end job cutting meat with his dead-eyed stare. I felt that.

Particularly because I spent the first half of the pandemic managing a grocery store and spent an appreciable amount of time behind the meat counter. 

(Side note: my only beef with the episode was how they clocked out at the end of the night and just left everything sitting around. It takes almost two hours to clean your average meat department with many varied disinfectants. No one in food service worked on this script!) 

I felt confident writing this now without seeing the end, partly because it’s going to take me a couple of months, and partly because even if he gets his confidence back and rescues the princess… Literally…

We know how this ends.

Kenobi spends the rest of his life in that desert. Then on one last adventure to rescue the same princess, (Do they have another plot?), his erstwhile student cuts him down. 

IT’S UNEXPECTEDLY PRESCIENT

I think a lot of people could enjoy this, but I don’t think kids will get it. It takes a few years to work up a good dead-eyed stare, and a few massive failures to feel any interest in philosophy. 

I don’t think when Lucas was writing the original stories (mostly in the 70s and the 90s), he had any idea how much failure was coming our way as the world burns and evil rises. Watching Obi-Wan fail so spectacularly and then live the rest of his life regretting it is unexpectedly validating these days. 

AN UNINTENDED DARK SIDE?

Dark side…. get it? 

There are also reports of the actress, a black woman Moses Ingram who plays the main villain and was amazing in the first episode, getting a lot of hate. Unfortunately, this is a familiar story for so many actors of color and women starring in Star Wars properties, and this inadvertent focus on failure may contribute to normalizing that.

Again, I don’t think anybody is doing this on purpose. But the empire is not just. It destroys planets. It enslaves lots of innocent aliens. 

And none of that is really discussed or fixed in these films. It allows a bunch of people who have much more in common with the empire than the rebels to continue their fantasies of persecution and taking out the man, when they are in fact, the man.

The unintended message of this constant failure is that the status quo, no matter how terrible, is better. That truly changing the empire is an unreachable goal. That the unacceptable is acceptable and just blow up the next death star already…

HOPE

Regardless of the perverse lessons Star Wars now broadcasts, I think the message Lucas did intend to send was one of hope. I know that by the name of the very first movie he filmed, A New Hope. (Literary criticism is hard!) Before we got stuck in an endless loop of mega weapons, it was a revolutionary movie about impossible odds and saving princesses, and changing the world.

And I hope one day, they actually, truly, madly, deeply succeed, not just at destroying the last Death Star, but at making a better universe. It’s a low bar, but I have hope. 

The post Lesson from Star Wars: How to Fail Spectacularly first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

BEWARE THE AUTHOR PHILOSOPHERS 

(Though you can learn other things from authors like how to stay sane while doing a really weird job…)

The primary purpose of entertainment is to entertain, but sometimes, especially in science fiction and fantasy, an author can’t resist waxing philosophically.

It’s a dangerous condition filled with aphorisms and sagely nodding heads.

Fortunately, there’s only one science-fiction author who has worked their way into a full-blown religion: L. Ron Hubbard with his Scientology, so we all know how good of an idea THAT is.

But even those authors who know they’re writing fiction can’t resist the perfect saying to be excerpted and printed on Etsy in a beautiful decorative frame.

ADVICE I ONCE LOVED

Here is some of the advice I have taken from various famous fictional accounts of life that have not stood the test of time. 

First, a caveat: I love these properties. They are great works of art and deeply meaningful to me. Why else would I take the words of their creators as gospel? My ringtone is still R2-D2. This is not me trying to tear down another’s work, just trying to take it the slightest bit less seriously.

DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY FROM STAR WARS.

In this secular world, Stars Wars is already a myth and the Jedi are almost a religion. As a philosophy for living, it leaves a little something to be desired. Watching Yoda train Luke is one of the most amazing moments of cinema. But his advice at that moment? Do or do not; there is no try.

What perfectionistic gobbledygook!

All there is is try!

This is a probabilistic universe! Anything we attempt has only a probability of success. We have to do it a bunch of times to increase that probability. That’s a fancy way of saying we have to try things over and over again and mostly fail at them.

If you are not mostly failing, you probably aren’t trying that much and aren’t very far out of your comfort zone.

Nobody can just do or do not unless it’s something they’ve done 1000 times. You do or do not brush your teeth. You cannot do or do not anything that matters; all you can do is try. 

FORGET REGRETS OR LIFE IS YOURS TO MISS FROM RENT.

This isn’t speculative fiction, but for me personally, this was probably the second most important piece of advice I ever took that is deeply, deeply wrong.

The characters are coping with AIDS, which in the 90s usually meant a decreased life expectancy in the best-case scenario.

It’s a deeply moving song, but the longer I’ve lived and screwed things up, the less sense these words have made. 

Sometimes, there is an experience so bad that the only thing you’re left with is regret.

All you can say at the end of it is that, hopefully, you won’t do that knuckleheaded thing again. There is absolutely no other upside.

Staying in dead relationships, taking the wrong job over and over again, letting people treat you poorly, and trusting healthcare workers who are incompetent or downright malicious. All of these are examples of what happens when you beat yourself up for regretting things.

FEAR IS THE MINDKILLER FROM DUNE

The litany against fear was created by Dune author Frank Herbert for a religious/secret society/warrior concubines in his epic Dune series. (It was the 70s.) It is an awesome and amazing book, and this litany against fear has become a real-life mantra for many people. And it can be really amazing to try and control your fear and do things anyway.

The problem, and this is true in the book itself as well as in real life, is that some of those situations are actually life-threatening and obeying your fear is the best thing you can do. One of my favorite non-fiction books by Gavin De Becker is the Gift of Fear.

Fear is adaptive.

Acting out of fear can save your life. If you successfully squash your instincts like this, you can get into really dangerous situations and then stay because fear is the mind-killer, when sometimes what you fear is an actual killer.

BECAUSE I CHOOSE TO FROM THE MATRIX

This was another very inspiring moment that does not bear up in the face of catastrophe. Anyone with a chronic illness or disability can tell you there is a lot about life you cannot choose, and it just doesn’t help to pretend you can.

In fact, it can get really ugly when you think you have to choose what you are experiencing (instead of getting angry or resentful or grieving). Then you’re trying to change your attitude while coping with disaster while trying to convince yourself you somehow chose this.

Like all of these, there is a time and a place. There was a time when I was absolutely debilitated and making a small choice felt really good. 

But it can so easily turn into blaming yourself.

OUR BEAUTIFUL ASPIRATIONAL CULTURE

All of these in some way or another reflect our need to wish for things. We strive to do better, most of us, most of the time. And that is an amazing thing and has been responsible for a lot of our accomplishments.

But there is a shadow to that: if you only attempt the things you know you can do, you won’t attempt very much. If you don’t regret the mistakes you make, you might be more likely to make them again. If you don’t fear things, you’ll take poor risks. If you don’t acknowledge that not everything in life is a choice, you can be absolutely cruel when you’re dealt a bad hand.

So here’s to our strange mix of art, entertainment, philosophy, religion, and folk wisdom.

May we always find what we were looking for in the pages of a good book. And at the right moment, may we remember it’s only a book.

The post The Perils of Advice from Fiction Characters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

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 complex, deeply personal illness that requires a ton of support. This note is not about how to heal from trauma. This note is about how we as a society think and talk about it, and how that can make everything better. Or worse.

This is a spectrum of human experience I’ve created for writing fiction but now use it for so much more. Importantly, this spectrum is both how we actually experience events and how we judge we should feel about those events. Those two don’t match sometimes.

Peak experiences: When we get all the happy neurochemicals and hormones and remember these moments for the rest of our lives. For me, hugging my family after a year of working in a grocery store through the pandemic and never coming anywhere near anyone unless they were stressed out of their gourd and complaining about how their chicken was cut. I forgot other humans are warm. No joke. My sister put her hand on my shoulder and I gasped at how hot her skin is. I will remember that moment forever.

Healthy/Positive: We get happy neurochemicals and hormones, but probably not in a dose that is memorable in twenty years. Still, the aggregate usually adds up to whether we look back with any satisfaction on our life. They are deeply personal experiences like a good meal, a good movie, a smile, a joke, or a clear dark sky with beautiful stars. They are also practical things we need from each other: childcare that doesn’t cost as much as a mortgage, work that doesn’t take twelve hours a day, and water and air that doesn’t kill us. A lot of life sucks, but there are rewards.

Neutral/Boring: You’re not being harmed. You’re not being helped. Maybe you’re a little under-stimulated, but life is…fine.

Annoying: I’ve included a special negative category for when you’re peeved, but it wouldn’t rise to the level of actual stress. Lines. Busted zippers. The crazy packaging scissors come in, which would be no big deal if you had scissors. The dude at the front of the turning lane who leisurely pulls into the intersection and takes the slowest, widest arc and.nobody.else.has.timetoturn…  So you sit at the light again and wish death on his family to the twelfth generation. You know, not actual problems.

Stressful: You get an unhappy chemical soup and slow degradation of systems not necessary for long-term survival. This state was prehistorically reserved for life-threatening situations, but our brains have creatively co-opted it for anything we think could possibly be threatening: Bad bosses. Bad jobs. Bad paychecks. Bad children. Bad spouses. Bad news. Bad test results. Plus those things we need but aren’t getting from each other, like a city free of pollution, a way to get around the country that doesn’t cost as much as a paycheck, a living wage. Something has gone wrong, and the accumulated cortisol degrades our system over the decades.

Warning: here and going forward, under trauma and unspeakable trauma I name some specifics.

Traumatic: According to our current understanding, which is evolving constantly, two main things turn stress into trauma: the length/seriousness of the bad event and your perceived ability to control it. Remember: this is not objective; it is still all about your own perception. This is where we switch from slow degradation to acute bodily harm. This is where what doesn’t kill you may blight the rest of your life.

Unspeakable/unimaginable trauma: As I’ve spoken to people about this spectrum, I’ve had some people push back on the distinction between a bad car accident (which can absolutely be traumatizing) and child trafficking (which is so far beyond that trauma, it’s hard to fathom). So I’ve expanded to a further category of unspeakable trauma for those things that surpass anyone’s understanding of pain. We don’t generally argue about these. (Or when you do, you tend to lose your career. Or get elected to congress.)

Conflict comes because we define each of these as a culture, but our biology doesn’t care.

One of the biggest things I realized while creating imaginary cultures, is that every culture on earth has collectively decided what experiences fall on the left and right of the spectrum and for whom. This affects how we talk to ourselves, how we talk to each other, who breaks the law, and what laws there are to break.

In the US, here are a few examples of our collective agreement on where different ideas fall in this spectrum. This is far, far from an exhaustive list; plug in your own ideas!

Unbelievably, ridiculously important caveat: this is where the dominant culture collectively THINKS these should go, not where the actual impact of many of them go.

Peak: Religious services (usually involving saxophones and lilies), missionary position especially with a ring on your finger, travel, concerts, sports games, winning contracts, selling a business, winning anything on television, having a kid, having more money than you can spend in your entire life. Any kind of winning, really.

Healthy/Positive: working, working overtime, working on a deadline, working salaried without set hours, working freelance, working minimum wage, working below minimum wage for tips, meetings, productivity, quarterly goals, making money, exercise AND overeating, all sports, all guns, housework, ketchup, kale.

Neutral/Boring: Education, movies in other languages, boiled food, having a disability, being a victim of prejudice (remember – this is according to dominant culture).

Annoying: Car salespeople, spam (literal and metaphorical), construction, traffic, children in public places, subscription software, standing behind someone with a disability doing something 5% slower.

Stressful: Performance reviews, feedback of any kind, honest conversations, owning a business, getting married, computer call centers.

Traumatic: Sugar, fast food, war, natural disasters, assault (unless it’s your spouse), child abuse (unless it’s by siblings), getting called out for assaulting someone.

Unspeakable: torture, child trafficking (unless you marry the child), slavery (unless you’re running for congress), murder (unless the victim murdered someone and the state’s killing them).

This isn’t just subtext and social media. This is text. This is law. Sex with a child is a crime unless you marry, and then it’s totally legal in 44 US states. Hitting an adult is an illegal assault, but hitting a child is acceptable discipline, and hitting a child to drive athletic training is a peak experience. Overdosing on opioids is a disease, but overdosing on heroin is a crime. Who is traumatized and who is not? What is stressful and what is healthy?

A fight in our own minds.

This doesn’t end in the public sphere. We do it to ourselves—all the time.

You go on a diet and immediately half your calorie intake. Your neocortex feels strong, in control, and believes you are finally going to find a spouse, get a raise, and not disappoint your mom.

Meanwhile, your subconscious brain, the part dedicated to your survival, is screaming FAMINE, slowing down your metabolism and hanging on to every ounce of fat, eventually eating your own muscles to survive.

Then you eat enough to feel satiated, and your subconscious says: we’re saved! We have food! Meanwhile, your neocortex freaks out that you will be alone forever, underpaid, and will have to hear your mother talk up your younger brother for three hours at the next holiday gathering while she asks you what happened and to please warn her when you’re eating meat or not because Uncle Hal will be traumatized if you don’t eat his turkey.

I don’t have an Uncle Hal or a younger brother. No family members were harmed in the writing of this newsletter.

That’s a deliberately silly example but it can be much more damaging: A worker takes on sixty-hour weeks and tells themselves that this is healthy, safe, even a peak experience, while their body slowly rots. (Ask me how I know.)

An assault victim chastises themselves for not bouncing back because they asked for it, right? They went out and wore a skirt and had a beer, after all, and it’s not that bad, right?

Members of marginalized groups can discount the prejudice they experience, pushing it towards annoying or neutral, not acknowledging to themselves it’s a very common source of trauma. After a decade of worrying about being pulled over or flying, of whether their marriage will be valid next year, of confronting the assumptions of decreased intelligence and increased threat every day and every night for YEARS, their bodies revolt even if their minds say it’s fine or at least, not as bad as a hurricane.

What do you do with this?

In public, for one thing, I promise you can’t unsee it. For me, this has put context around almost every television or social media fight I’ve not been able to look away from. It is in every confessional. Every political speech. Every law passed. Every jail sentence handed down to a perpetrator.  What is healthy? What is not healthy? What is traumatizing? For whom? We seem to have a deep need, especially these days, to correct people on how upsetting something should be to them.

Getting this wrong can be the most invalidating, enraging conversation in which one human tells another: you haven’t suffered. It really sucks to hear this, but it also sucks to realize you’ve accidentally said it to somebody else.

This doesn’t mean we can’t ever have a conversation where we try to adjust the box someone has put someone else’s or their own experience in, but this is a good reminder of how fraught and hard that conversation is and how much trust it requires. “I can’t help thinking, based on my own history, that not getting the table that you wanted at a restaurant should fall a little closer to neutral than unspeakably traumatizing.”

And if there is no trust, remembering this is a way to walk away from the drama without feeling both mute and pissed. I worked retail for a decade; you cannot believe the problems I’ve had to sincerely empathize with: me wearing my name tag the wrong way, a steak being too red, and my tone. Oh my god, tone. People go absolutely nuclear if they don’t think you’ve pitched the correct amount of deference when speaking to them. The most mature people in our society work at customer service counters.

And as for inside my own head, I’m more tentative about where I stick my own experiences, realizing that my neocortex is not the one deciding. I can come out of a fight or a disappointment thinking I should be annoyed, but find myself waking in the night with my heart pounding and realizing I’m much more close to trauma than I wanted to acknowledge. So then I can actually deal with that and not go around pissed at myself for…being human? Or I can plan my perfect day and realize that my fantasies of the perfect day will actually eventually destroy me if I really did all of that every day.

A utopia of respect? Someday?

Even if we were the most mature band of humans in history, we would still have to design our society and laws around where experiences fall. If we have laws against hurting people; we must decide together what constitutes an injury. And we would still not agree. But hopefully, we will get better at matching our expectations of how we should feel after an event with actual reality. And that our laws and policies and unspoken rules also eventually match that reality.

I have found myself on both sides of this conundrum, screaming into the void that my lived experience is stressful and biting my tongue wanting to school someone that theirs can’t really be that bad. And I’ve been right and wrong on both counts, but ideally, understanding the gap helps me get this more right over time and less upset when others get it wrong.

The post Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

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 little screen time limits on that I only ignored two or three times in a day. I haven’t posted on my personal Facebook since 2016. I did not read the comments. I stopped when I wanted to. I was different.

But I was wrong.  So very wrong.

April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year when people critically evaluate news articles before accepting them as true. – Kellen Brent, Reddit Shower Thoughts

Here’s the weirdest/funniest part of this story, when I finally bowed to reality and moved back to the 90s without a single screen, I missed the outrage! I would catch a glimpse of a headline and feel a rush of all the emotions and feel more alive for a second. I was living in a world of books, puzzles, and board games to try and stay busy, and I found myself seriously jonesing for a bit of controversy.

A soupçon of brain science to understand why.

The only way we know anything about the world is through what our senses tell us. It comes into the brain and before we even know what it is consciously, we judge whether it’s safe or not.

And we judge safety by whether something is familiar or not. Seen it before and didn’t die? Safe. Haven’t seen it before? Threat. Seen it before and almost died? MAJOR THREAT!

Memory is a survival mechanism.

It’s not for phone numbers; it’s for keeping you alive, and that’s why it has such a major negativity bias. Yes, it needs to remember good things like: this bush had berries that didn’t kill me the last time I walked by. But more often it needs to remember: this bush had a lion behind it that almost did kill me.

I think of mine as a little green man in my brain saying, “That did not go well. Write it down. Keep it forever.” He doesn’t stir when I’ve had a perfectly fine day. That just passes away unremembered.

Your brain: You haven’t survived anything recently? Meh.

But here’s the absolutely horrible part – then your brain rewards you for surviving a threat! It actually feels better to be outraged than it does to be bored and just okay. All those stress chemicals feel good, because, success, you’re alive!

This is the business model of the internet.

It’s basically become the prehistoric equivalent of, “There’s a lion behind every single bush you encounter at all times!” This comes from an amazing book, Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari.

Unfortunately, the business model of making everything free in exchange for ad dollars and being able to tailor that free content exactly to us the more we use it, means we get our own increasingly perfect horror movie. The main character heads for the basement and instead of the rubbery monster head everybody sees – each person gets their own perfectly calibrated nightmare. It’s the most brilliant idea since sliced bread.

Fun fact that has nothing to do with the topic at hand: automatic sliced bread was invented in 1928 in Missouri by an engineer/jeweler named Otto, who promised a thrill of pleasure for housewives everywhere, proving that it’s not just outrage that sells. At least in the realm of breakfast foods.

I’m not just talking about social media, although it is the worst example. Every news article. Every op-ed.  A large percentage of the internet is speculation designed to provoke outrage designed to keep you on the site looking at ads.

The joy of boredom.

After I bowed to reality and stopped looking at the internet, it took weeks to down-regulate and stop jonesing for controversy.

Photo of one of my hobbies circa May 2021. “Drawing”

And then something even weirder happened. I was arguably in the worst position of my life. (If you missed working in that list of hobbies, you’re right. You can’t really hold down a job full of fluorescent lights, screens, and stress when you turn your head wrong and have to vomit.) So I was unemployed without unemployment, moving back home, unable to work, unable to look at a screen, and unable to drive for more than a few minutes without wanting to puke.

And I was happier.

I was calmer, slept better, and enjoyed life more.

I could not believe it. Which pointed me to my second delusion: that I was handling all of this outrage. That this was a net positive for me. Sure they were making money, but I was well-informed. What I read didn’t bleed into my life. I could evaluate things rationally. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, I am really, really not suggesting debilitating illness is the answer to anyone’s problem. I would not wish this on my worst enemy if I had one of those. I’m not even suggesting the artificial version of this where you go on a retreat and someone locks up your phone for you.

To my mind, learning how to exist in your life in this world and not go crazy is one of the key skills of life.

So how do you cultivate this (without a year of vestibular migraine)?

Ask what’s the angle. Every time. Every time your heart accelerates, who is profiting?

It’s important to me to be educated and well-informed about the world, but that’s not what’s happening 90% of the time.

Who is paying for the thing you’re reading and how lurid are they making this to keep your eyes on it? 

Another good question: is this news?

Did something actually happen or is this something that could happen, might happen, will happen in the future, maybe? Who knows what the probability is?

Some groups have even staged boycotts of their own work to get people angry and boost the signal, mostly young right-wing pundits trying to cancel themselves and attributing it to feminists to get actual feminists to anger-type all about it and massively boost their signal.

I really try to stay away from speculation and especially speculation dressed in fear or anger, because the downside is higher than I’ve ever realized with very little upside.

If I do want to indulge, I treat it as entertainment, no different than a Bond film, because it’s no different from a Bond film. It’s kind of like eating a bucket of popcorn while watching said Bond film. You know this is just coating your arteries, but once in a while can’t be bad. I’m still on social media, but I know what it’s doing to my arteries.

And if you’re worried that you will be uninformed if you turn off the juice, I actually have much more energy to act in the smallest, imperfect way that I can to the small amount of actual news that happens every day, because I’m not living in the land of terror. It’s amazing how little actual news there is every day; the world still moves pretty slow.

Ask, where is the lie?

I’m not anti-lying. One of the most influential books of my life was The Giver, by Lois Lowry, an old-school dystopian reality where everybody lies and pretends not to. Everybody is performing; everybody has an angle.

He could, conceivably (though it was unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: “Do you lie?” But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

-Lois Lowry, The Giver

My little 8-year-old self was horrified by that, but my grown-up self who has both managed and been managed by human beings is much more sanguine about the necessity of that.

“That’s a great idea!” – Said as a boss and to my boss, and boss’s boss, etc…

But there is a particular form of lying that creators online do: that they are doing this for our own good. They are not in the business of entertainment. They are not trying to stoke outrage or terror to make money. They are objective. They are telling you the truth.  They are serving the greater good. This whole exercise is necessary.  Lie. Lie. Lie. Don’t fall for it.

You don’t have to stop watching!!! I revisited the 90s and I’m back to tell you, it’s boring there. But going into a piece of content asking what their angle is and how much they’re lying about it will at least help with the whole blood pressure problem.

Sometimes, occasionally, for short periods, get offline.

I’m not saying all the time, even most of the time. But sometimes get outside, taste your food, hug somebody. Absolutely prosaic advice, I know, I know. But take it from someone who thought I knew this and then suddenly it was all I had and realized I hadn’t actually tried it in years. We are on this planet for the blink of a blink of an eye.  Don’t miss it.

Just know, while you do it, that it’s not going to feel as good. This is a paradox that keeps people away from their lives; they’re soooo boring compared to the algorithm. You’ll not feel all present and good; you’ll miss the rush. But if you can live through the first wave of boredom, strawberries taste absurdly good.

And don’t announce to the world you’re doing it. You will sound like this.

Pick up some fiction. It makes reality less boring.

ALERT: HUGE ANGLE. I’m an author of books, so of course, I want you to read more of them. See book one of my urban fantasy series about a goblin and an FBI agent saving Washington DC. Do you see what I did there?

But, seriously, my enforced break taught me how important fiction is. Not to be repetitive, but plain reality is mostly borrrring. So boring. Drawing 1000 circles level of boring.

Real threat deeply upsets your amygdala; fantasy thrills it. I know I JUST said be more present in your life and now I’m saying fantasize. It’s both. Our brains are storytelling machines, and saving the world or getting the perfect guy or girl or whoever — that’s delicious. So is apple cobbler. You get both.

I know I’m really selling this: read my book, make reality slightly less boring. (:

But not if you’re glued to the news cycle or the endless scrolling convinced you’re on the verge of losing your life every second of the day – then you get neither.

Enjoy your day!

When I end these things with, “enjoy your day,” this is what I mean.

I thought this stuff wasn’t affecting me. I thought I had control over it. I thought I was wise to the persuasion techniques I was seeing and didn’t get sucked into the outrage. I was wrong. So wrong.

This newsletter is meant to be an antidote. Let’s look more deeply at the world and how not unique this time in history is and how typical humans are and what we can do about it.  That’s my angle.

P.S. I’m doing much better now. The world only rocks a few days a week and my phone reads me everything now, and I can even look at a screen for a few hours a day. Enough to keep writing. (:

The post Could You Be Addicted to Outrage?? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Here are some tricks to help see the existing world in new ways and hopefully shine a different light on the water we’re swimming in and come up with new solutions in the existing world. Or just make you giggle.

Fundamental #1:  Life is dirt and sunshine, full of ocean.

Every bit of energy, movement, heat, light, thought, and life in the world comes from our sun (with very few nuclear exceptions). It shines down on the world; the plants take dirt and marry it with that sunshine and fill it up with water; we eat the plants and break down those bonds to make ourselves. Complex life is just dirt and sunshine full of ocean.

And it’s not just that we do this once; we run out of ocean every few minutes and sunshine and dirt every few hours.

We are constantly remaking ourselves and trying to maintain our own complexity.

And we will eventually, inevitably fail, decaying back into just the dirt without any ocean or sunshine, and we know it. It changes everything about what we do.

Fundamental #2:  The purpose of life: Homeostasis

(I didn’t say the meaning of life.)

What do we do with this energy that takes so much of our lives gathering? Staying the same.

Yes, we spend the majority of our lives, even in the vaunted first world where we are so good at everything [saracasm], trying to stay at the right temperature, the right arousal (the sexy kind and the safety kind), and the right amount of water and food, and other unsexy things like salt balance. We are not self-improvement machines, we are self-maintaining machines, who, yes, have to improve when circumstances grow more inhospitable.

I’ve been wrestling with migraine recently and feel this deeply. Migraine triggers are basically anything a little bit outside of perfect homeostasis, so I essentially wear a shock collar that zaps all the blood vessels in my head the moment I get thirsty, cold, sleep-deprived, or anything else. (Though we all suck at this one… Put this down and go get some water!)

Special Human Wrinkle to this Fundamental fact #1: We are herd animals.

Our main project after ensuring our blood has the best salinity is maintaining membership in the herd. We are a social species, which means we mostly get all of these needs met through our group membership, not directly.

Arguably these days, we don’t have to worry about thirst or hunger directly if we maintain our place in our group. (Short of actually picking up a water bottle. Did you get some water? Go get some water.)

This means we spend almost all of the rest of our energy cooperating or building dominance and are constantly balancing between what we need, what our group needs, what the other groups have, and who is in our group.

Special Human Wrinkle #2: We don’t mature for a quarter-century.

The current accepted thought is that our brain is done cooking by the time we’re 25 years old. That is crazy when you think about all the threats to it.

It’s a huge drain on our collective energy stores, those with and without kids. Though obviously, it’s the hardest on parents to launch the next generation, especially because in the vaunted first world we treat it as an individual project.

It informs so much of what we do, takes so much of our energy, and informs so much of our policy and our world.

Special Human Wrinkle #3: We have way more than we need.

The most special part of being human: we have leftovers!

I’m not even kidding. In the animal kingdom, scavengers and dung beetles take care of the excess, but the rest of the ecosystem lives really close to the edge, finding extra energy just in time. We are the only ones who have figured out how to store vast amounts of dirt and sunshine and water for our use whenever we want it.

Don’t get me wrong, it still takes most of our lives to maintain complexity and homeostasis, our spot in our group, and spend a quarter of our lives launching the next generation…

But what do we do with the extra?

That’s the biggest existential question.

I write these postcards. (This is not a newsletter. If I ever break any news…. you’ll have your signal that a great deal of our civic institutions is in serious trouble.)

Or we write symphonies. Run the fastest. Swing a bat at a ball. None of our hobbies violate the first two rules, but one of the miracles of humanity is that we manage to grab hold of extra energy beyond what we need for right now and we do genuinely spectacular things with it.

And it’s also I’d say the Achilles heel of humanity as we eat everything in sight.

What isn’t in one of these boxes?

I’m not going to try to sum up all of civilization in one postcard, usually, but this is a big place to start. Our laws, entertainment, technology, communication, schools, military, law enforcement, marriages, water treatment plants, religion, and spa retreats with little circles of cucumbers – everything can fit into these boxes like Russian nesting dolls of reality.

Okay, maybe not the cucumber water. That is totally irrational and has no function on earth, contributes nothing to our survival, does not help us raise our young, maintain our group, or have any redeemable value.  I am not biased. That is an objective fact.

The post Life is just dirt and sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Text version, in case you don’t do images:

The Manifesto of Manifestos

One: Categorize everything with price per pound and country of origin …. Sorry, wrong manifest.

Two: Synergize outside the box but in your wheelhouse to grab all low-hanging fruit and stretch your goals.

Three: Use variable fonts so the big words stick out.

Four: Don’t believe every stupid thought in your head and believe in your dreams and in people and in fairies.

Five: Manifestos should be short and sweet with under 5 points.

Six: Live like you are going to die, but probably not tomorrow, because you are likely one standard deviation away from 72.4 years old.

Seven: That does not prevent you from getting hit by a bus tomorrow.

Eight: The same statistic applies to success, financial security, marriage lengths, and nose lengths. You are often dead center but can’t know if you’re on the lip of the bell about to fall off.

Nine: Worry about what will probably kill you: cars, the sun, excess salt, sugar, saturated fat, viruses, bacteria, accident, injury, cell mutation, not moving, not sleeping, and not washing your hands.

Ten… Maybe, I’ve lost count: Don’t worry about the things that rarely kill anyone: planes, sunscreen, fiber, preventative medicine, criticism, dating, public speaking, performance reviews, HOAs, quitting, joining, starting, finishing, and the comment section.

Eleven… Probably: The stress of getting those two wrong will probably be what actually kills you.

Twelve? Don’t miss the stars, the strawberries, the hugs, or the leaves, but keep your nose on the prize and your eye on the grindstone. Don’t touch it, because ow, but keep your eye on it.

Definitely Thirteen: We are all the same and we are all different. Other people are not your business and the world is your neighbor.

14: But since you don’t speak to your actual neighbors… never mind.

Fifteen: You are perfect, imperfect, and perfectly imperfect, and imperfectly perfect. Is that a word?

Sixteen: Oh, dear.

Seventeen: End on an odd bullet to make things feel incomplete.

The End I mean Eighteen: Life is short and endless. Enjoy the shit out of it.

The post The Manifesto to End Manifestos first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.