There are two conflicting pieces of advice that drive me crazy on a regular basis.

1. The “trust your intuition,” “go with your gut” crowd that says you should always heed your instincts as if we have magic intestines.
2. The “feel the fear and do it anyway,” “push harder than you want,” and “don’t let your fear limit you” crowd.

Of course, the answer is both. As with all pieces of advice, context really matters.

The problem?

IF WE PICK WRONG, IT CAN GO SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In both directions. Of course, those are the people who consistently take no risks or consistently take all of the risks, but the rest of us are just a messy combination of playing it way too safe and then practically killing ourselves.

Sometimes you do exactly right and still get hurt. To quote Jean Luc Picard, or at least an anonymous Star Trek screenwriter: “It’s possible to make no mistakes and still love.”

You listen to your gut and your gut is just plain wrong. You play it safe and miss the perfect opportunity. You take a huge risk and reap the consequence. So it’s not like the tips in the rest of this newsletter or foolproof and if you just do this you’re not gonna get hurt and you’re not gonna miss out. Both of those things will still happen, but maybe a LITTLE less often

OTHER PEOPLE SEVERELY SCREW UP YOUR RADAR IF YOU LET THEM.

We are herd animals. Many of our instincts are about getting along with the herd, which means we are much more likely to disregard our own gut when we’re trying to fit into the group.

You are most likely to disregard your gut for other people.

If you’re risking everything for somebody else, even though that feels really noble, pay real close attention. Part of our instincts includes overriding our own instincts in order to follow the herd, particularly the most powerful members of the herd.

You’re most likely to play it safe for fear of other people.

The corollary is you could be avoiding risk because you’re afraid of people who aren’t in your group. Be wary of that, because again we are built to be afraid of them. Whoever your particular them is.

“Us” are never so noble as we think and “them” are never so scary.

ABSENT INFORMATION, EVEN YOUR GUT IS GUESSING.

One of my favorite books on earth is The Gift of Fear by Gabin de Becker who talks about how our brains can make super-fast judgments about situations that keep us safe.

But what often gets left out of most conversations is that you have to feed your brain data in order to make a call.

It isn’t intuition, so much as lightning-fast evaluation. If you don’t have all the facts. It’s not gonna work.

How many people make moves or take jobs without ever speaking to someone at the company or in that role or living in that town? If you’re having a strong gut feeling about something, ask yourself how much you know about your decision. The less you know, the less you can trust that gut feeling.

AT THE SAME TIME, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING.

While you can’t fly completely blind, you will also never have enough data. The analysis paralysis of researching until you know when you’re never going to work. It can help to make a time limit: either a certain amount of days or sources, or whatever, and after you’ve learned them, you call it.

Will any of these protect you from disaster? Nothing protects you from disaster. But hopefully, it will protect you a little bit from regret, both for taking a risk or passing up an opportunity.

At least you can tell yourself you have decided how to make a decision.

The post How to Go With Your Gut and Push Your Limits. Magically at the Same Time. 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.