Introspect

It's very difficult to summarize this book, so in the author's own words:

INTROSPECT is an ebook by @visakanv about becoming who you are. Remixing Nietzsche, Emerson, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell and more.

I'd describe it as the most flawed book that's almost certain to change your life. It did for me. It's messy, and the author is painstakingly aware of his own shortcomings as a writer. But his honesty is inspiring, and there are a TON of amazing nuggets in here about coming to terms with yourself, dismantling your inner "authoritarian-tyrant", and growing into someone who can love themselves and others. I admire Visakan a lot and would highly recommend all of his writing.

Scattered, highly unstructured highlights.

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think"

That’s the petty, insecure tyrant in each of us that chokes the joy out of life with their cowardly pursuit of control and certainty. This requires cultivating courage, kindness, and, perhaps most importantly, a genuine sense of humor. As Alan Watts said, “humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive”.

Introspect is about cultivating a nourishing relationship with yourself. This involves earning your own trust and respect, which in turn requires learning project management, and, in parallel, learning to manage your own psychology, to get in touch with your own emotions.

I definitely need to get in touch with my emotions better

Why surprising? Well, that brings us to “ ugh fields ”. Here’s the LessWrong summary: “Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field". The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.”

Which is to say, the body-mind generates a protective fog to keep you from facing things that make you uncomfortable .

I get a lot of DMs from people who describe feeling “spiritually homeless”. This too can be described as a kind of fog. Let’s call it a “spiritual fog” . And I wonder, maybe this is what Nietzsche was talking about all the way back in 1882, when he wrote “God is dead… and we have killed him” ? Society (particularly Western society, and globalization means we are all Westerners now to some degree) broadly dethroned the idea of a central illuminating figure – He who said “Let There Be Light” – and some might argue that the result has been that large swathes of humanity have plunged into a great fog.

I highly, highly recommend that you assemble all of your favorite art – anything that has ever moved you – and keep it close to your heart, as talismans, on a personal altar of devotion to the human spirit. This will keep your spirit alive. Your spirit is precious and valuable and deserving of nourishment.

I should do this with my favorite articles! Keep them close and have a way of easily accessing them. > if you don’t consciously acknowledge your desire for sovereignty, and be proactive about it, it will express itself in ugly or dysfunctional ways. Binge-eating, excessive drinking, substance abuse, being caustic and hurtful towards other people – all of these can be ways that the repressed parts of you “act out” to express their sovereignty, in defiance of your authoritarianism.

Sit with the question, “what do I want?” Ask Questions. And if you’re comfortable thinking of yourself as a plurality of selves – for every person is a bundle of conflicting drives, motivations, interests, and so on – you might ask, “what do we want?” And here I recommend making a “silly” list of every stray thought that comes to your mind. You could start with your body – would you like to cut or color your hair? Any thoughts about tattoos or piercings? You could think about the environment you live in. Would you like some posters on the walls? Do you like your clothes? What are the books you’re reading? Is there some kind of music you’d like to get into? You don’t need to arrive at dramatic, powerful answers immediately – the inquiry is the point. Take your time to get to know yourself and your interests. Do little experiments.

My answer to the vaguely defeatist "well who's to say what's right and wrong" is something like: I decide what is right and wrong within the domain of my life; I take responsibility and ownership of that, and if it turns out I was mistaken, I make amends and revise my views.

Outside the domain of my personal life, when I share contexts with other people, I am mindful about trying to discern what the history is, what the norms are, what other people believe. When I conduct myself in this space artfully, effectively, other people respect my decisions.

Confront your self-flagellation, and gently say, “let’s not do that.” Put the gun down. When I review my own journals, I find that I often used to beat myself up too hard. It’s tacky, cruel, and worst of all, it’s not even effective! Your media diet may have been different than mine, but I find that bravado is often overblown, particularly for men – there’s often this play-acted tough guy vibe that goes too far. You can aspire to bravado, and work towards it, but beating yourself up for failing is tricky business that you should be careful with. Honestly, life is hard enough without you taking up arms against yourself. What you actually want to do is to be genuinely curious about why you failed, and truly understand what happened, so that you can take steps to prevent it from happening again. Ask questions.

Because the question is, how do you keep showing up for the training, day in, day out? How do you persist? How do you stay motivated? That’s a matter of managing your psychology! It’s about the story you tell yourself.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an example of someone who I think everyone can agree is indefatigably motivated and focused on his goals. How does he do it? He made a TikTok answering this question, and I think it’s worth sharing his answer in full:

“What is it that I do to power myself through being tired and fatigued, and sometimes train late at night? Like so many of you guys out there, we are busy, we are on this treadmill of life, there’s no stop button… we are going and going, we’re fatigued, we’re tired, we have babies, bills to pay, school to go to, jobs, relationships, a lot of the stuff that just makes us tired throughout the day. It happens: I’m tying my shoes, and I think shit, I should just call it a night. No one’s ever gonna know… I try to remember what it was like when I didn’t have much at all, those “7 bucks” days, usually that gets my ass in gear. When I think back to the days, and what it took to get into the position that I’m in now. If that doesn’t motivate me, I’ll ask myself, how bad a motherfucker do you think you are? How bad do you think you are? I have this conversation with myself. “Alright it’s up to you. Go prove it. No one’s watching, no one will know.” Usually by then, I’m like, “fuck you, I’m ready to go.” That is the kind of stuff I tell myself, which is ultimately why I need therapy.”

What you need to do is figure out your own style. What works for you, your personality.

What does work for me? So far, it's been motivating myself through habit checklists, structured procrastination, and "doing what I know is right" while not pushing myself too hard. But I think I could be pushing myself harder.

What you need to do is figure out your own style. What works for you, your personality.

Again, I’m not saying that you should try to become The Rock, or even necessarily be Rock-like in your own domain. I’m trying to help you see that there’s a slider here that you can experiment with. And that it’s very unlikely that you inherited a position on your slider that’s perfectly calibrated for you. So experiment with it! Try lots of little things. Fiddle around, try to surprise yourself.

Another thing that works for me -- picking days when I'm feeling motivated and taking things all the way. (Reading three books in a single weekend like I'm doing now, for example.)

Practice stream-of-consciousness journaling Journaling is the "ball of thread" that will allow you to trace your path into the abyssal labyrinth of your subconscious, and back out again. You want to create a space where you can practice outrunning the censors of your conscious mind. What’s exhilarating is, beyond their reach, you will discover a richer, more complex, more beautiful, more powerful version of yourself, waiting to come to life.

Learn storytelling to encourage yourself We are all living in stories. Do you like yours? If you don’t, you can change it! We are the directors and producers of the movie of our lives. We can study the stories that move us, and reverse-engineer them to move ourselves, to live stories that we're proud of. What makes us root for characters? How can we live our lives in a way that makes us root for our success? Embedded in our favorite stories – the ones that make us feel – are the clues to our inner motivations.

Act II of INTROSPECT is about learning the skills you will need in order to do the difficult work you have ahead of you (which we will get into in Act III and IV). The skills themselves are fairly simple, you could teach them to children. The challenge is to learn them in parallel, which is why I’ve written a section summary.

Experiment with your frames It is sometimes possible to experience a genuine increase in a sense of felt freedom just by changing how you frame your reality.

Practice articulating your problems as precisely as you can, and it will begin to become clearer what you should focus on. That’s where projects come in. A project is anything that requires collaboration, even if it's “only” between you-today and you-tomorrow. Collaboration is deeply humanizing! It’ll make you feel more powerful, confident, expand your sense of self, and the world feels like it opens up to you.

Ask questions You can actually navigate your life by framing everything as a set of questions. The point is not to arrive at final answers (though you may find some good ones!), the point is to live out the questions. Having interesting questions on-hand makes life interesting as well. There is a quest in every query. And having compelling quests makes life enjoyable.

What Are My Questions?

Big problems are often made up of smaller problems. And just as with questions, you can think of your life as an infinite set of interesting problems to solve. (Dark side: some people find this overwhelming. But that’s actually a project management problem. Which can be solved!)

But the effort is worthwhile. Developing clarity about your innermost desires makes everything else easier to manage and navigate.

What do I desire? Probably one of my questions What Are My Questions?

A lot of effective introspection is about learning to ask yourself for help, and giving it. It also helps (ha) to practice this with other people. You can get good at asking and framing your requests in a way that makes it likelier that you will receive help. This is one of the most powerful skills you can learn in life: it will feel like the world magically becomes a more welcoming, supportive place.

Sometimes, as Marianne Williamson put it, our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Why would anybody be afraid of being powerful? Because with great power comes great responsibility, and being responsible for things can be overwhelming. Every action you take (or not take) becomes drenched with meaning and consequence, and this can be a lot to bear.

I feel this at times. If I become really good at working out, I need to keep going to the gym to maintain it, which is more responsibility that I might not want.

Outrun your critic.

In a journaling context. I think this is one of my favorite #quotes .

(By the way: dismissing creative work as frivolous – silly, trivial, pointless, unimportant – is part of how tyrants stay in power. This includes the tyrant within you.)

If you do barely anything with your life but take little notes every day – snapshots of your opinions, impressions, perspectives, predictions – and then you thread these notes over time, say, 10 years…

...by the end of it, if you reflect, review, corroborate, verify and discuss them with others, you will develop a robust, dynamic worldview. You will deeply appreciate the nature of human reality in a way that you cannot get from any single book or person or experience.

In this frame, journaling for yourself is a radical act. It’s an act of self-ownership, self-education. It’s about setting your own curriculum, defining your own worldview, deciding for yourself what is important. I personally think that this shouldn’t be outsourced to others. Your life is yours. You should be the one to decide what is meaningful to you.

There’s something fascinating and beautiful to learn about yourself through exposure to these “frivolous” characters. At least one of the guys in my head was this very stern, solemn taskmaster sort of dude. Another was lazy and indifferent to authority, a sort of jester-clown figure. Getting to know these people within me helped me develop a lightness and casual confidence about myself. I know who I’m speaking on behalf of, I know their interests, I know their concerns. People ask me about this all the time: how do you exude such casual confidence? Well, I know myself. I know the material. It’s like I’ve watched all the episodes of the TV show of Me, and I can confidently quote from it at will.

I definitely don’t want you to feel like you’re forcing yourself to do something that you’re not enjoying, not getting any value out of. That just worsens the larger problem of not being able to trust yourself. I would say… try and keep it small, simple, low-effort… but also try to dig a little deeper. Ask yourself questions that you wish someone would ask you. Try to get a sense of what’s really bothering you at any point in time.

Once it’s outside of your head, you can investigate it. You don’t have to get it “perfect” right away, or ever. You mostly just want to build up an increasing volume of notes about yourself.

Sometimes people think they need inspiration or motivation from something external to them – that they need to find the right role model, the right guru, the right hobby, the right productivity app and so on. And… I’m not going to dismiss that entirely, but rather I want to focus on the fact that – when you find something that resonates with you, you are resonating with it. So the trick is to first find out what moves you, and then look for those elements in your own story, and focus your attention on those elements.

Rather, the idea here is to try to be more sensitive to what you already feel. And investigating your favorite stories for clues is a great place to start!

What Are My Favorite Stories?

Knowing what you really feel, tuning in to that, is an important precursor for figuring out what you really want, for investigating your desires. You can’t know what you want if you don’t know what you feel.

A good way to do this seems to be keeping a ranking of the things I like. That way, even if I don't know exactly what I feel, the algorithms might. Make lists of things you like

There’s a great quote from author Maurice Sendak where he said, "Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do." So a lot of the challenge for people here is to put away the pretenses of Proper Adulthood – which is really just another stage act, another type of play-pretend. People might ask “how do I be child-like again”, but I think that’s the wrong frame. Your child-self is still within you. You just have to recognize that you’re playing the Role of a Proper Adult, and to drop the act for a minute.

This is beautifully written.

Stories in fiction tend to be conveniently tidy, which is part of what makes them pleasurable to inhabit. There is a clarity in fiction, whereas reality tends to be complex, complicated, and often not make narrative sense. It’s always tempting to try and condense the infinite complexity of reality into a singular, simplistic narrative. It’s satisfying, but it’s also dangerous.

See also: legibility Avoid the desire for legibility

Learn storytelling to encourage yourself

Make a story of your life.

Assemble lists of your favorite movies, books, video games, tv shows, songs, artists – all your favorite media. The more the better. Don’t think too hard about this, there are no correct answers. Frivolous and silly examples are totally fine.

Hehe, this is what I was just talking about. Make lists of things you like

Every single time a friend says something like “I have some time to kill and I don’t know what to do,” I almost always say “write your memoirs”. Because writing down your own story gives you power over it. You can investigate it, examine it, question it, pay attention to how it makes you feel. You can choose what you want to focus on, emphasize. As a helpful constraint, maybe keep it to about one page for starters – but if you feel compelled to keep going, keep going. Let it flow. Do it chronologically if that feels natural. “I was born in…”

#takeaway

A lot of us tend to default to whatever existing story we’ve inherited – maybe people experiment a little bit as teenagers, but then we tend to settle into something stable, familiar – and not necessarily what is best for us. I can’t know what is best for you. And I would guess that you don’t consciously know what is best for you, either. But you can feel it when you get it right. So trial-and-error is very instructive here.

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.

Here’s an example of modern-day shamanic work: “One of my favorite stories I saw on Reddit was a parent who taught her child that the secret of Santa is that YOU get to be Santa. YOU get to join the secret group of people who make the world a better place for other people. I find that very compelling and heartwarming.”

It’s about finding a way to reframe a story in a way that is rich, meaningful, compelling. It requires a sensitivity to people, and also a playful disregard for existing frames. It’s trickier than it might look! it can go very wrong.

The whole blogpost is worth reading because it goes into lots and lots of specific examples of all the different kinds of shots. Reflecting on this always makes me question and rethink how I’m framing things in my own life. I typically find that the first, obvious, intuitive choice is rarely the best one. If you experiment with your frames – zoom in, zoom out, change the angle, you’ll likely find a better one that achieves a better effect.

You get to choose what you want to focus on! This isn’t obvious to everyone, because people are conditioned to “pay attention” and focus on what they’re told to focus on. Sovereignty is about exercising the freedom to focus on what YOU want to focus on. And, inversely, tyranny is the use of coercion to enforce frames, controlling what people can see, think, feel, believe, experience.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

nice #quotes

“The LSD phenomenon [...] is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.” – Joseph Campbell

cool #quote

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

Richard Feyman

I think this is one of my values Some of my values in life as well. Uncertainty is okay! There's always more to know in life, otherwise the idea of wonder would not exist.

Do you have grand theories about how society should be run? well guess what, you are also a society! you can test those theories yourself, right now! you can demonstrate what it means for a society to be well-governed, well-integrated. Show us how to act!

I think the real power move with kids is to be as precisely truthful and honest about reality as you can. This means trusting them, which I think many adults typically hesitate to do because they’re fearful themselves, that they will be blamed if the kid doesn’t do well.

I can’t speak for all kids, but I can speak for my kid-self, who I swore to represent well into my adulthood. I sincerely believe that I would have worked really hard if I was given proper structure and guidance. I wasn’t. I was just terrorized into an unproductive panic.

Build a body of work. Write 100 tweets. Make 100 TikToks. Cook 100 omelettes. Talk to 100 people. Be intentional about it, but try not to be all burdened with expectations and perfectionistic standards either. The point is to have fun, mess around, see what happens.

“Do 100 Things” is a very powerful force. It’s conceptually simple, yet consequential. Anybody who does 100 of anything has created a body of work. A body of work is something that you can study and learn from. You will notice patterns. You will see what is good, and what isn’t. A body of work is something that’s relevant and interesting to other people.

It will open doors for you, and introduce you to opportunities. “Do 100 things” is a journey. You will be a different person at the end of it.

You will learn things about your craft that you couldn’t even perceive when you started.

"Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up space for the answer to fit." – Clayton Christensen

to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

If you know curious people in real life, that’s great! But if you don’t, you can still be exposed to the spirit of curiosity through books and other media. I personally enjoy several nerdy YouTube channels like Overly Sarcastic Productions, Oversimplified and others. Simply witnessing their curiosity has a way of bringing out the curiosity in me.

Since we tend to solve well-defined problems, the problems we’re left with are the ones that are poorly defined. And the meta-problem with poorly defined problems is that we tend to not realize that they are poorly defined. This rhymes with George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” People tend not to acknowledge this!

My friend Michael Story (@MWStory) has a great tweet that I want to quote in full: “Mistake I've made many times: seeing someone with a simple problem and thinking "not to worry, this just needs a quick fix and they'll be on their way!" instead of "what level of hidden dysfunction is keeping even this simple problem unsolved?"”

202307030351 Avoid the desire for legibility

“Why can’t I sleep?” This is a personal one for me. If there’s something you’ve been wanting to change about your life (eg: “fix my sleep”), and you’ve spent maybe 10+ years making failed attempts at it despite having done the reading, etc – the problem is probably upstream. It’s not actually the sleep, it’s something else. In my case, I’m coming around to realize that it’s not about whether I bring my phone to bed (I don’t) or sleep in a dark room (I do), but it’s about my conceptual relationship with rest altogether, which I will talk about in Act III.

it.

“How do I become creative?” If you think someone isn’t creative, you should look at their excuses. People are very, very good at coming up with all sorts of creative explanations for why they can’t do something. The problem isn’t a lack of creativity. It’s typically a lack of courage, and sometimes a deficit of project management skills. You are already creative. The issue is likely that you’re clouding this from yourself.

You can only truly resolve your imposter syndrome by talking with other people, and getting to know about their experiences. The problem of feeling like a misfit is seeing for yourself firsthand how everyone else feels similarly. This requires getting out of your own head and giving a shit about other people’s experiences. The sense of belonging you seek is in your interactions with others.

Complexity is difficult to wrangle. Another problem is that problems can be wicked, meaning they have many different factors. Boredom and procrastination are two everyday problems that people struggle with, I think, significantly because they are multivariate problems. There are several different things going wrong at once, and it takes effort to be clinical and precise in your thinking, so that you can tease apart the factors.

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them.” — Steve Maraboli

If you don’t have a lot of practice using your imagination, your imagination might be limited and progress might be slow. A good “trick” here is to rely less on generating ideas from inside your own head, and instead take advantage of the chaotic nature of reality. Look for ideas from completely different domains than the one you’re operating. Grab a magazine or search around online for some interest that isn’t relevant to you. Watch a documentary about something you know nothing about. Take a random bus in a random direction. Go somewhere different. Eat something different. Surprise yourself.

“The thing I really want to emphasize is, I didn’t have a choice. The dream is something you never knew was going to come into your life. Dreams always come from behind you, not right between your eyes. It sneaks up on you. But when you have a dream, it doesn’t often come at you screaming in your face, “This is who you are, this is what you must be for the rest of your life.” Sometimes a dream almost whispers. And I’ve always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to—your instincts, your human personal intuition—always whispers; it never shouts. Very hard to hear. So you have to every day of your lives be ready to hear what whispers in your ear; it very rarely shouts. And if you can listen to the whisper, and if it tickles your heart, and it’s something you think you want to do for the rest of your life, then that is going to be what you do for the rest of your life, and we will benefit from everything you do.” – Steven Spielberg, speech at the Academy of Achievement

I asked myself, “What are the things I hoped to get out of inhabiting that role?” And I wrote them down:

While I never did end up becoming one (and never say never! I’m still young!), I’ve found it very fulfilling to deconstruct all of the things I would've wanted to get out of it, and then restructure my life to get each of those bits from different sources.

But anyway, the point of bringing up the concept is: you can pave the desire paths in your own life. Just do little things that you want. Do lots of little random things and pay attention to how you feel about it. And then work with that. A lightbulb moment I had recently while editing this book is that you don’t actually need to “Know” what you want, in order to do what you want.

This is where journaling over a lengthy period of time helps. I think it’s good to do monthly and annual recaps. If you have digital footprints – blogposts, Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram posts and so on, you can learn a lot by reviewing them. I definitely recommend setting aside time just to scroll through your old feeds while having a notebook or notes app open to jot down your own thoughts and observations about your old posts.

“Soften the ground.” – make your own desire paths! Sometimes there’s something that you do want, and yet it’s not quite… right. An example that comes to mind for me: I vaguely knew that I wanted to know more about jazz, and Miles Davis. As a musician, this seemed normal and right for me. And yet I kept procrastinating. I think sometime around 2015 I started listening to Kind of Blue on repeat on YouTube – and that softened the ground a little bit for me. Now I wanna know more about the guy who made the thing I like.

But that wasn’t enough yet to make me want to watch a 2 hour documentary. Until, at some point, I found myself asking the question, “What was the scene that Miles played in, anyway? What was that like?” – because I’ve had this ongoing curiosity about scenes. That led to me reading his Wikipedia page with some interest, and some of the details jumped out at me enough to get me interested in watching documentaries. Do you see what happened here? I had a vague intellectual interest, and I kept it around until I found an entry point that “softened the ground” for me – something which I think might be more in the realm of emotions. This is a skill you can develop!

Optimize for the serendipity that you want. Another way of thinking about all of this is that it’s about optimizing for serendipity that you want. Optimizing for luck. Making yourself receptive, being prepared for opportunities. Something like this happened for me not too long ago. I have a habit of doing Twitter threads about books I’m reading. I’ve also been making videos on my YouTube channel, chatting with friends and so on. One day, I did a book thread about David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity. Great book. Turns out I happened to have a mutual friend with David, and he was interested in doing a video chat with me about the book! I’ve had multiple opportunities like this over the years. Sure, it’s possible that I’m just very lucky. But I’ve found that I tend to get a lot luckier when I put myself in places where there are high rates of interaction.

But I’m very bad at acknowledging that I need help. It makes me feel weak, it makes me feel like a failure. What has helped me – which is kind of annoying, but it works – is to see that my aversion to asking for help prevents me from helping others in turn.

Which is to say, it’s actually selfish of me not to ask for help! Because my attempt to protect my own ego is the bottleneck limiting me from doing more good in the world! You do have to be careful with this line of thinking, because if you take it too seriously you can end up in the “excruciating meaning” trap (see meme in the next section), and then feel overwhelmed by it.

Remember, a project is anything that requires collaboration, even if only with yourself. Collaboration is deeply humanizing, and the inability to collaborate is therefore dehumanizing. Asking for help is about seeking collaboration, you want someone to labor with you. Being unable to ask for help is dehumanizing. And I’ve felt this myself, very recently, in the process of writing this book, and feeling like I was doing it in a deep, dark pit all by my lonesome. jailbreak.

My inner authoritarian-tyrant was adamant that I had to work on this book all by myself or “it would be fake bullshit”, it “wouldn’t count”. Writing that down, saying it out loud, instantly reveals it to be utterly laughable as a claim. Why would anybody believe that nonsense? I did. Because I was scared. I couldn’t laugh about it until I wrote it down and saw its absurdity for myself. journalling, humor. So, you see. I had to write this book to teach myself the thing I’m trying to help you with, too. We’re all in this together. We really are.

“The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.” — Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

There’s two parts to this. One is tactical: learning how to get better at asking. The other is fundamental: it’s about addressing your concept of “help” entirely.

Articulate, to yourself, what it is you need help with. I recommend writing it down. Try to write in as much detail as possible. Ask yourself questions. “I need more money” – Why? For what? What is the outcome that you want?

Keep it short.

If you need help from someone, don’t make them read an essay just to understand what you’re asking. Put in the effort to edit down your request until it’s something that’s quick and easy to read. You might have 10 questions for them. Put 9 of them in your drafts, and ask the most important one. The more work you make them have to do to help you, the worse your odds of getting help get.

Give a sincere, specific compliment.

I’m not saying appeal to their ego to make them feel good, though that doesn’t hurt. The important thing is to demonstrate that you’ve done your homework. “I read your essay about X and I thought it was really insightful how you talked about Y.” Giving people specific, sincere compliments is a gift, and it will make them feel like repaying the kindness – if your request is a reasonable one. You’re no longer “random stranger”, you’re “person who appreciates my work”.

Make it easy for them to say yes.

Don’t give them the total responsibility of figuring out what kind of help you need. Make an effort to describe your issue in detail. Nobody wants additional responsibility for no clear reward or payoff. We all have enough responsibilities already.

Do your homework.

Do at least a cursory check to see if they’ve already answered the question that you’re asking. Google your question and see what the top results are, and read through the results. Piece together your tentative answer to the question you’re asking. Eg, instead of simply asking “should I do X or Y”, it’s worth adding a line that says, “I read a compelling argument for X, but…”. This lengthens your message slightly (don’t write a whole essay), but it’s worth it because it demonstrates that you’re serious and not just screwing around.

Don’t be needy and/or demanding.

Nobody owes you a response. It’s sad that this needs to be said, and yet it does. But also, a lighter version of this: don’t be tedious about how “you’re probably not going to see this…” and “I don’t expect a reply…” or any of that stuff. Just ask your question and go. The more overwrought you make things, the weirder you make it for them. Just ask the question, in a breezy and relaxed tone if you can.

think it was Alan Watts who said that laughter and anxiety are both two sides of the same coin. The very serious job of the comedian, as I see it, is to transmute anxiety into laughter. There’s a similar quote by H. L. Mencken: “Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”

What are the most serious problems in your life? Write them down. Can you find a frame in which they’re funny? Maybe you might not be able to make it funny yourself, but can you imagine, say, how you might use those problems as material in your favorite sitcom? Playing these ideas out through fictional characters can be very cathartic.

There’s tons of material on YouTube, Netflix and so on. Set aside some time for laughter. I particularly recommend going on YouTube and listening to Alan Watts – who might not be an obvious comedian. He described himself I think as a “spiritual entertainer”, because he liked to talk about life and death and identity and the self and so on – but to me it’s really important that he had such a cheeky, mischievous trickster energy.

had been stuck in a musical rut for almost a decade because I was afraid of leaving my comfort zone, afraid of “wrong” sounds, afraid to allow my fingers to explore and learn. In the past, whenever my fingers did something they weren’t “supposed” to, I would internally flinch, lightly berate myself, “ugh”, “shit”, “ick”. But now I try to think “ooh!” and I look for ways to work around it, return to it, build off of it.

do:

“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.” – Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist

Make (safe) mistakes on purpose. This is a very powerful one, because it gets you directly reprogramming how you feel about mistakes. You might say, well, is it really a mistake if you did it on purpose? I think that’s over-intellectualizing it. The flinch is something that happens at a very primal level, in the gut, in the body. And you can reduce a significant amount of the flinch by doing flinch-inducing things on purpose in a safe way. Send out texts and tweets with typos in them. Draw some deliberately ugly drawings. Write pages of gibberish. Post a deliberately “ugly” selfie on Instagram. Make these mistakes, and really let them happen, and see how it feels. Savor it! Enjoy how bad it is!

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think

That’s the petty, insecure tyrant in each of us that chokes the joy out of life with their cowardly pursuit of control and certainty. This requires cultivating courage, kindness, and, perhaps most importantly, a genuine sense of humor. As Alan Watts said, “humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive”.

ntrospect is about cultivating a nourishing relationship with yourself. This involves earning your own trust and respect, which in turn requires learning project management, and, in parallel, learning to manage your own psychology, to get in touch with your own emotions.

I def need to get in touch with my emotions better

Why surprising? Well, that brings us to “ ugh fields ”. Here’s the LessWrong summary: “Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field". The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.”

Which is to say, the body-mind generates a protective fog to keep you from facing things that make you uncomfortable .

I get a lot of DMs from people who describe feeling “spiritually homeless”. This too can be described as a kind of fog. Let’s call it a “spiritual fog” . And I wonder, maybe this is what Nietzsche was talking about all the way back in 1882, when he wrote “God is dead… and we have killed him” ? Society (particularly Western society, and globalization means we are all Westerners now to some degree) broadly dethroned the idea of a central illuminating figure – He who said “Let There Be Light” – and some might argue that the result has been that large swathes of humanity have plunged into a great fog.

I highly, highly recommend that you assemble all of your favorite art – anything that has ever moved you – and keep it close to your heart, as talismans, on a personal altar of devotion to the human spirit. This will keep your spirit alive. Your spirit is precious and valuable and deserving of nourishment.