Category: Conscious Experience Described

A few years ago I found myself suffering from vertigo for a few weeks. It past, and since then it has returned a couple of times for a day or two. That first bout was intense and it complicated my life considerably. Fortunately it was just benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) which can be helped with some very specific head movements that help to reposition the otolith (crystal-like substances) to their normal position in the utricle (a part of the inner ear). Basically, to help with balance, spacial awareness and proper body orientation, the vestibular system in the ear contains crystals that move freely in the fluid. Given that the crystals have a higher density than the fluid, they sink causing them to stimulate hair cells. When the head moves, the crystals move, being pulled downward by gravity, resulting in them stimulating different hair cells. This way the brain always knows what way is down and it always knows what way the head is orientated relative to the pull of gravity.

With BPPV, the crystals become dislodged and move into one of the semicircular canals. As a consequence to this, the brain has extreme difficultly interpreting the information that is coming from the vestibular system because it is scrambled / ambiguous – whereas the crystals would normally stimulate a lot of hair cells in one area that corresponds to down, the absence of the crystal means there is less stimulation in a specific direction, and more stimulation in general. The brain assumes it is orientated in many directions at once, which isn’t possible, and this causes the symptoms of vertigo. While not exactly the same thing, about one third of people who experience weightlessness will suffer from a type of motion sickness that is believed to be caused by the elimination of down. The crystals float which isn’t necessarily a problem. However, when the person changes direction, the crystals impact the hair cells in a different way than normal – the force vectors are direct (straight) and not impacted by the pull of gravity (forward or back with a downward angle). The brain adapts to the change very quickly and the motion sickness disappears after a day or so.

Fortunately for me, the resetting movements seem to help. The nausea, which had been very strong the first week faded and just went away. What remained was an intense dizziness when I move my head suddenly, or when I would lie down or stand-up. I went to the doctor and he said that it would normally pass after a few weeks. If there was a virus going around that was causing it, my body would take care of it, and if it was BPPV the movements would take care of it. He didn’t know, but since there was no obvious pathology in terms of my ears being injured or infected, there wasn’t much anyone could do. Welcome to middle age was about all his smile said.

His answer was par for the course and about what I had expected. So as unsatisfying as I found it, I didn’t have any choice but to accept it, get back to life and wait for natural healing to occur. And of course this meant that I would be hyper aware of whatever was going on and whatever changes occurred until I was back to normal.

This was for me the most interesting part of it. Step one was to learn about what was causing the vertigo (the explanation outlined above). Step two was to learn about other ways the system might break down even when it was working fine (the zero G motion sickness stuff). The final step was to be curious how my brain would adapt to deal with what was going on. If the brain of an astronaut took a few days to adjust to the changes in sensory input coming from their vestibular system when “down” was eliminated, what was my brain going to do in response to the scrambled input it was getting? No matter how bad I felt or whatever interpretation I was giving to my experience, my brain was going to try and make sense of the input it was getting, simply because that is what brains do.

Since I wasn’t feeling nauseous any more, life was just more difficult. It would have been nice and of course I would have liked to not be dizzy anymore, but that wasn’t going to happen simply by wishing it away. There was a tiny chance that I would never return to normal, a thought that I didn’t like but had to entertain if I was going to be pragmatic about things. IF this was going to be the rest of my life, WHAT did I need to do to reduce the dizziness? Doing something about it was important for reasons other than the feeling it created, the bouts of dizziness were mentally draining. It takes a lot of effort to remain standing when it feels like you are tumbling through the air. The sensation doesn’t match reality and the amount of work that is required to reconcile the conflict and make the accurate determination that I was standing upright was exhausting. The exhaustion was a symptom of the work being done, and when all is said and done, it’s exactly what I needed my brain to do. It was now on me to help it out as much as I could.

A long time ago I watched a BBC program about the functional plasticity of the brain. It covered the Innsbruck Goggle Experiments of Theodor Erismann (1883–1961) and Ivo Kohler (1915–1985). In their studies, they gave the subjects glasses that flipped all of the visual information and made it upside down. The subjects were then asked to wear the glasses during all of their waking hours for the next few weeks as they went about their lives. As you would expect, that first few days were very challenging for the subjects. They had a lot of difficulty interacting with the world. While they were able to pick things up, they had a lot of problems moving their hands into the right position to grab the objects. Moving objects were nearly impossible to track at the beginning and were impossible for them to touch. Walking was extremely difficult and no one was allowed to drive.

But very quickly the subjects began to get the hang of it. After a few days writing became easier, they figured out how to locate and manipulate objects, and moving around stopped being a trial and error type experience. After 10 days, one of the participants was able to ride a bike without falling and without fear of running someone over or riding somewhere they didn’t want to go. It was remarkable to watch their progress and notice the daily improvement in acquiring functionality and then automating it after some period of time.

When the study was over and they were allowed to remove the goggles, they did not immediately return to normal. They found it difficult to interact with the world again, not nearly as tough as they had found it when they put on the goggles, but it wasn’t automatic and unconscious. But after about half an hour, things just seemed to pop into place and their pre-experiment proficiency was restored and everything seemed to return to normal.

In my own life I have experienced a similar type of thing, just a lot less intense or overwhelming. Any time I buy a new bike, my brain is forced to adjust to the new geometry and riding position. For the first few rides I am a little shaky and need to take it easy to make sure I don’t fall, but after a week or so it doesn’t feel odd and I have no difficulty maneuvering the bike on rough terrain and over logs. When I get back onto my old bike, it feels strange for a few minutes but I adjust to it very quickly.

There was no reason to believe that I would not be able to adjust to the miss signals that my ears were sending to my brain. All I would need to do was interact with the world for a period of time and my brain would do the rest. But I was in a hurry because I needed to get back to working at full speed and the vertigo had reduced my output significantly. I felt certain that there were a few ways to speed the process up and have a suspicion that my brain had already figured some of them out and was changing my behavior to take advantage of them.

The dizziness wasn’t there all of the time, and it was much less intense at night when I was in bed than during the day. Frankly, I don’t have any idea what dizziness is other than a physical sensation, but the fact that darkness seemed to reduce it is significant. Also significant is the fact that I have never felt dizzy when I have been dreaming. Even the weirdest floating and spinning dreams I have ever had did not have any impact on my sense of orientation. Dizziness then is caused when information from two separate sensory systems doesn’t reveal the same thing. When it’s dark, there is no visual information to conflict with the vestibular information and when I am dreaming, there is no vestibular information to conflict with the visual information. Putting it all together, I started closing my eyes when I felt dizzy and then began to close them before I moved my head too much. This took care of a lot of it. While it felt like I was moving a lot more than I was, I was able to make enough sense out of things to know where I was and where down most likely was.

The next piece of it came automatically, and it was unrelated to my present situation. I do the dishes at home and for some reason, when I’m moving about the sink, I keep one foot on the ground and kind of hook the other foot on the underside of the cupboard. I do this mainly when I need to reach away from the sink and don’t want to take a step. No idea why I do it but it’s a thing that I do, and carried over into other areas of my life. In the case of my vertigo, I found myself doing it even when I wasn’t reaching away. It seemed that I was it doing to to ground myself or to provide more sensory information to my brain to give it something else to work with since it could no longer rely on what was coming from the ear. Once I noticed that the foot information seemed to help, I started to use my hands and elbow to provide more clues. Normally I wouldn’t touch the work table when making panels, but I found that when I placed a free hand on it I instantly felt more certain about the position of my body. If I started to get dizzy when I was walking down a hallway, I would just need to reach out and touch the wall to stabilize things.

There was a certain level of deliberateness to all of these adjustmenta I was making, but it didn’t take very long before I automated doing them. I don’t like being dizzy or the sensation of tumbling when I’m not, so making these feelings evaporate very quickly acts as a strong incentive to reward the actions that eliminate the feeling. In a way, I was powerless to NOT do these things once I discovered that they did something that was positive or eliminated something that was negative.

These work-arounds are very effective, and they made the process of healing from whatever caused the vertigo a lot less challenging or dramatic. Close my eyes or touch something became my reactions to the feeling that I was about to get dizzy.

In a larger way, this whole thing tells a very interesting and important story about how we make sense of the world, deal with ambiguity, and go about adjusting to changes in how we received sensory information or adjust to changes in the quality / accuracy of that information.

First off, it’s just electrical impulses triggered by the stimulation of a sensory cell. The location of that cell, along with the part of the brain that initially receives the signal will determine a lot about the nature of the stimulation, but the brain is not dependent upon the specific signal coming from a specific location in order to make sense of the world. Particularly when it comes to body position. Sure, the first place it will get info from is the vestibular system in the ears. If these sense organs are there and functioning correctly, the information streaming in is very useful and rich. It tells us where down is, and therefore any direction. It tells us that we are moving, accelerating or decelerating, and it gives us an idea of where our head is in relation to any other part of our body that is sending in tactile information. It does this regardless of light condition.

But a lot of this information is available through different modalities. Just because the brain is used to getting it from the ear does not mean that it cannot process visual data to extract the same information. This won’t work in the dark, but when it is bright enough to see something that we are able to place spatially, the brain can take some time to reprocess the information to figure out where we are, what position we are in, and if we are moving. It isn’t perfect – recall any time you were on a stationary train and the train beside you begins to move, or a time when you were on a spinning ride, and everything else is spinning at different speeds – but it works very well under most circumstances. In fact, the brain relies on a combination of the two in order to get a more exact idea of where the body is and what it is doing.

The same applies to the tactile information that the brain is working with. While it isn’t nearly as effective at determining movement or direction, a guess can be made that we are moving when the skin that is facing the same direction begins to send in a signal that corresponds to there being a slight breeze. Orientation can be guessed by two simultaneous touches of something that is stationary because the brain knows where the tactile information is coming from and can compare it to an internal map of where those locations are. Orientation can also be predicted because gravity pulls the skin down, along with all of the tissue and fluids, so the brain is aware of a change in shape and will be able to predict down based on this.

Under normal circumstances, the brain takes it all in and ignores whatever it doesn’t need. Under challenging circumstances, it will do the best with what it has. When one modality is down, it will rely on the information provided by other modalities. And we are free to give it more information any time we like. So long as it is congruent with the interpretation the brain is making, it will be largely ignored. But when there isn’t sufficient information naturally, we can provide more by looking, touching, or hearing.

The opposite it also true. When there is an in-congruence or ambiguity with the sensory information that is flowing in from the senses, we can eliminate it by stopping the data flow from one of the sources. When my ear was telling my brain that I was spinning but my eyes were saying that I was stationary, closing my eyes eliminated the conflict. It went with spinning, which wasn’t a problem because the sensation wasn’t very long lived. There were no crystals to be pulled down and trigger a massive stimulation of the hair cells, so the movement of the fluid that was the result of me turning my head stimulated all of them a little bit. The thickness of the fluid meant that the movement does not continue for very long. As soon as it stopped, my opening eyes would reveal information that was aligned with what the vestibular system was sending.

The worst of the vertigo faded away and hasn’t returned with the exception of a few moments when I haven’t been getting enough sleep or get a little run down. There moments are tough when compared to the day before when I didn’t have vertigo, but they are nothing in comparison to my first experiences with it. In fairness though, I’m not certain that I have ever returned to a vertigo free state. It seems likely that I have, but it is entirely possible that my brain just figured out how to process the sensory information my body generates in a way that allows it to make enough sense of the world to get by. Regardless, I’m grateful for having had the experience because of what adjusting to it forced to learn and figure-out. The human brain is fantastic at adjusting to whatever the world throws at it and adapts automatically and quickly in order to get the needed information from what source can provide it.

For reasons of survival, human beings cannot think logically when they are experiencing an emotional response; the prefrontal cortex is mostly deactivated and we are moved to action vs. thought. This is fantastic when immediate action is required but it creates a vulnerability when thought would serve you better. And let’s face it, there are not a lot of times in modern life that require immediate mindless action.

But that doesn’t mean that we can over-write or undo millions of years of evolution. When we perceive a threat – consciously or unconsciously – we are initially going to be motivated to run or fight.

And this is how we end up buying a lot of stuff that we don’t actually want. It’s rather remarkable actually. We go looking for something, a car for example, and the sales person shows up, friendly, happy and effectively building rapport. We’re guarded at first, we’ve bought a car before and we know the racket, but parts of our brain that function without our awareness are taking in and processing all the information. After some period of time we open-up simply because there is no actual threat. No one is going to harm us and our life is definitely not in jeopardy.

The sales person will find out what kind of car you are looking for, what your specific needs are and how much money you have to spend; they may not be so bold about finding out this information but you’ll give it to them because normal conversation flows in such a way that we tell people stuff. Effective sales people are going to uncover what they need to know in order to begin to trigger emotional reactions within us. And we give them the tools they need because the sales process is set-up like that.

I am one skeptical human being. Some would consider me to be paranoid and I agree, I am very aware of just how easily an emotional reaction can be triggered. I am not the mark I used to be, but I have had to work like hell to not become a part in this click wirr process. When I bought a car a few years ago the entire process was extremely unpleasant for me. I ended-up with a brutal headache and feeling very sick towards the end of it. I bought the exact car I went in to buy and actually paid a little less for it than I had planned. To an outsider it would have looked like a pleasant experience, a win:win for me and the sales person, and he was an extremely nice and good natured person. But I never let my guard down because I didn’t want to get taken.

When the gas water heater people make their rounds I try to get out of the conversation quickly. I don’t really want to waste their time because there is no way they are going to come into my house and I’ve found that when I do talk to them, the conversation degrades very quickly as I call them on the manipulative things they say. They try to use fear that the water heater that is in our house isn’t up to code; they can’t possibly know because they’ve never seen it. They try to tell me it will save money; modern water heaters are extremely efficient. They say that we are entitled to government grands; they don’t even know if we have a gas heater so they cannot know if we are entitled to anything. They say that they are with the gas company and are just in the neighborhood and would like to give our heater a free check-up; no successful company sends out its technicians unannounced and without a reason.

I can say this, they have been well trained to push the buttons that trigger emotional reactions, which will then lower resistance to what they are selling. Listening to them, it is easy to understand how people get sucked into long term contracts with the gas resellers they represent. This makes me angry because I don’t think it’s fair that people knock on your door and try to make you feel things just so you can buy stuff you don’t want. I suppose I could simply just close the door, but even though I have no respect for what they are doing, they are still human beings and deserve some respect.

And I think that’s the problem with emotional selling, it takes so much energy to combat that it ends up changing how we interact with other human beings and this makes the world a little worse of a place for everyone. These automatic reactions are the result of intensity, recency and an averaging of experiences.

Each one of us has a mental storage capacity that is enormous. We are capable of remembering hundreds of thousands of experiences, possibly millions, and when given enough time, we will be able to access most of them. A few of them will come to mind instantly, these will be the most recent and the ones that are the most intense for some reason, but almost all of the remainder will require a certain amount of deliberate mental. A system being set-up like this is very practical. When we need to make a decision very quickly, it limits the amount of information that comes to mind allowing us to filter through with ease and make a decision. We don’t get bogged down reviewing volumes of information, parsing out context, checking for relevance and reprocessing this for patterns and a relationship to other things that might be useful. The brain is capable of performing these tasks, it just doesn’t do it initially and it doesn’t do it very quickly. But when faced with a life or death situation, or when we need to determine IF something is a life or death situation, bringing to mind the most useful and revealing information that is relevant is the fastest and most effective way to do it.

Initially, three things will come to mind, one right after the other:

The first thing that comes to mind will be the contextually similar things that were accompanied by an extreme emotional reaction. There is a favoring of negative emotions over positive emotions here – things that scared us or made us angry – and the corresponding emotion will be triggered to some extent. Our consciousness will be filled with the memory and our body will be hit with some of the emotion. We will be, in a way, transported back that moment in time and this will ready us to respond to that specific stimuli in the event the present situation is a reasonable copy.

The second thing will be the most recent thing that was contextually similar – the context being determined by the last time we crossed the threshold into the physical / geographical space or a location – entering a room, getting into our car – or that is defined by a metaphoric meaning – going to work, talking to a spouse or sales person. Things that happened longer ago have less salience than the things that happened more recently, and the things that happened moments ago will take on a much greater portion of our awareness.

The final thing that comes to mind will be a sort of average of all of the situations that were close enough to the present situation in terms of context, language, emotional state, and a match on any other information that the brain deems as relevant. These will be thrown into a pot, mixed together and formed into a prototypical or representative case that called into mind in response to the sensory data that the present situation provides.

These three things impact the brain in slightly different ways and have different response curves. The emotional one will be first and if there is no negative component it will fade away very quickly. If there is a negative component, it will linger for longer, and if fear is the primary component, it will begin to shut down higher level cognitive processes as a fight or flight response takes over. There is a small window here in which the other two responses can mitigate the response and allow the emotional hijack to fade away. If recent experiences have shown the situation to be safe or if the average experience has been deemed to be safe, the hijack will be reduced.

This is why cognitive behavioral therapy or systematic desensitization is so effective at helping people gain a higher degree of control over their thoughts and reactions. Through repeated exposures that have a positive or neutral outcome, the brain begins to factor them into the average which will begin to lessen the severity of the response.

Assuming that there is no emotional hijack, the recency wave will peak next and fade away, quickly followed by a slow peaking average wave, which will remain for a lot longer before trailing off slowly. What ends up being perceived as reality will most often be a combination of the average and the sensory information. So long as a response is taken quickly, the process for this moment ends and there will be very little deeper searching of long term memories.

The average wave is interesting because it will be comprised of the things that happened more often and things that happened once or twice may not be included. If these single or infrequent happenings are critical for decision making, the person will need to hold off action for a while to give their brain the opportunity to activate these memories and bring them to mind.

This is the process that my brain goes through when there is a knock at the door and I see someone who is trying to sell me something when I open the door. They are not threatening, but I am on a heightened state of awareness because of what has happened before and fairly recently – someone just like them, in a context identical to this, tried to make me feel scared that there was something in my house that was no longer at up to code and could kill me. So without so much as a moments conscious thought, I’m already a little bit angry. When the average of all of the experiences like this fills my mind, I’m only slightly less annoyed and ready to tell them “no thank you” and “good bye.”

In general, these interactions are never as bad as the worst one was, they are fairly transactional once they say their bit and I reply to them based on how they are treating me. The only ones that are in anyway bad are the hot water tank people or the energy resellers, the telecom people are selling a service that they cannot match our present provider on, the political candidates and real estate brokers know that they won’t ever get my vote or my business if they are pushy or rude. And the religious people get thanked for their time and efforts as I politely say “I don’t feel like talking about it.”

At this point, the only door to door sales people that are able to trigger me into an emotional buy are the kids who are selling cookies or raising money for something, or who knock on the door asking to wash my car or shovel the snow from the driveway. They will get money almost every time and I have even paid them to not touch my car as an attempt to reinforce their entrepreneurial efforts.

What is most interesting to me is how Heather doesn’t have any problem listening to people try to sell her things or with their attempts to trigger an emotional response in order to get her commitment to buy. She actually enjoys it because she’s very aware of her internal state and feels it immediately when someone is trying to manipulate her. I’ve heard her complement sales people on their tactics, point out what they did and tell them “no thanks, I’m not buying anything from you.” All without any rage or obvious level of agitation, and even with some enthusiasm for having learned something new.

Heather and I are very different emotional operators. Historically I have been a much more empathetic person, with a tendency to feel emotions to a larger extent and for a much longer duration. She has as wide an emotional spectrum as me but is much more compassionate in terms of how she feels in response to the actions of other people and her perception of their immediate experience. I have only seen her angry once and I have never seen her behave in a way that would be viewed as inappropriate or out of place. The episode of anger was directed towards someone who was completely out of line and in desperate need of some social correction. The consequence of our differing ways of processing emotions is that, while I am more inclined to have a larger first response in terms of emotionality based on my previous experience before it fades to a more objective assessment of the immediate situation, her first response is very low or non existent in terms of emotion because her interpretations are well calibrated with reality. Someone trying to manipulate your emotion is only a threat IF they are successful and trigger a response. They have no power over you when you maintain control of your emotional state. Someone who is actually dangerous will not rely on slow methods to gain control, they will use force right from the very beginning.

The key to emotional selling or to combating emotional buying is logical thought because rationality helps people rank the importance of whatever is occurring. Sellers using these tactics are trying to gain the upper hand by creating a state that favors impulsive or rash decision making. An emotional hijack is the most effective way to do this, and it helps to complete a sale when the person is selling the solution to the proxy cause of the emotional response. Note, the cause of the response is the words / communication of the sales person and the proxy cause is the thing that they are talking about.

For example, the water heater guy is trying to get me to buy a new water heater by making me afraid that my present heater is no longer up to code and is therefore dangerous. He’s presenting the problem and the cure to something that is not a problem in need of a cure. The code change he was making reference to was an update to how gas pipes are labelled. There is nothing unsafe about anything. The ministry just made the determination that better labeling of gas lines would be more helpful. Of course I didn’t know this when he knocked on the door, but since our utility supplier hadn’t told us anything, I was confident there was no actual safety concern. When the sales guy told me my life was in danger I just replied with “good, if something happens you get to be right and I won’t ever have to talk to you again. Now get off my property and stop trying to scare people into buying crap from you.” This isn’t as good a response as what Heather would have had, but she asks me to answer the door because she gets a kick out of hearing what I say when someone’s efforts to make me afraid instead trigger anger.

The best approach is to take your time to allow your brain to surface as much information as it can and to allow whatever emotional response might be triggered to run its course and for your body and brain to return to baseline. This might mean not buying something at that moment in time and missing out on any first visit incentives. It might mean having to buy the product / service elsewhere. But doing it is going to mean that you will buy only the things that you want to buy and that these things will be YOUR choice. Your past will be used to shape your decision making – all of your past, not just the recent past or the experiences that were highly emotional – which will lead to better choices based on reality and actual need.

The 1990 movie “Jacobs Ladder” is about an American soldier who has returned from Vietnam under some sketchy circumstances. As he tries to get his life in order and move forward he starts to experience a growing number of odd and unsettling things. These leave him shaken, and since some of them seem to be related to his time in the war, he grows more curious about what happened. As the movie progresses he starts to realize that his memory has some huge gaps in it and the continuity problems began on a specific day while his platoon was stationed somewhere in the Vietnam jungle. SKIP AHEAD three paragraphs if you have not seen the movie and want to avoid finding out why his life became so bizarre.

The climax of the film centers around what happened on that day. In an attempt to turn human beings into the ultimate fighting machines the Army scientist manufacture an LSD-like drug they call the ladder – the main effect of it is to trigger primal fear within the user. The rational is that fear is the source of all anger and if a soldier is angry, they will fight with more aggression – think about how a cornered wild animal seems to throw a switch that redirects their flight energy into fight energy that causes them to do a 180 and to violently attack whatever has cornered it. Something is going to die in the next few seconds and the cornered animal is going to do everything it can to make sure it isn’t it.

During the day in question, the soldier are hanging out, talking, eating, smoking, playing cards, etc…. You hear some helicopters flying over that one of the soldiers comments are not expected. Over the next few minutes everyone begins to start acting differently. A few of them run off screaming, one of them begins to look terrified, the rest of them just seem to go to pieces. There’s a fast forward and the main character is seen in the jungle holding his gun clearly looking for the enemy. Suddenly there is some action and he is stabbed. At the end of the film it is revealed that he was mortally wounded by another member of his platoon because the ladder worked so well that the soldiers were unable to perceive anything other than threat and viewed any other person as the enemy. There is no such thing as logic when you are completely overcome by a fight or flight response, so there was no way they were going to be able to discern their platoon mates from their actual enemy and everyone began to attack the first person they saw.

This is the problem with empathy and it is why our species is much better served by compassion.

Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” while compassion is defined as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” In a metaphoric way, empathy allows us to become another person by taking on their feelings, or our interpretation of what their feelings are. This is very different from compassion which has us remain as ourselves and experience our version of concern for someone else. There is no blurring of the boundaries between us and them, allowing us to remain in control and more rational about what we are experiencing or our interpretation of it. The risk of an amygdala or emotional hijack is much lower when compared to the risk level when an act of empathy triggers fear or anger.

The maintenance of boundaries is critical when dealing with challenges because detachment or separation from a situation is very important for objective problem solving. There is a tendency for the number of solution choices to drop dramatically the closer one gets to the events. A normally very pragmatic person can be left incapable of anything other than a “hulk smash” reaction to something when they are part of it while those on the outside will see many alternatives that do not involve the destruction or elimination of a “threat.” The passage of time will also have the same effect. The massive reaction today will probably seem over the top in a few hours or a day later when the person can see that they could have just said “thank you, I’m not interested” and closed the door.

Having too much empathy causes us to relate too much with one of the two parties in a conflict. This comes at the cost of being able to maintain the idea that the other party is an equal and therefore entitled to the same respect and rights that we are bestowing upon the person we are connecting with. This makes sense, we are actually feeling what we believe the person is feeling, which will trigger us to respond to the other person as though they are actually acting towards us. But there are two sides to everything so our hyper vigilant quest of complete understanding for one party causes their experience to take on a disproportionately large role in our understanding of the situation or conflict as a whole.

Of course, we are wrong with whatever it is we are feeling in terms of empathy because we are NOT the other person and we have very little understanding of the context that led to things being what they are. While it might be true that IF we found ourselves in that situation we WOULD feel a specific way, this should beg the question, would we ever find ourselves in the situation? There is a very good chance that somewhere along the way, before things got were they are now, we would have done something different that would have change the course and eliminated what is presently occurring from the list of future possibilities. The context piece of it is very important because it is rarely visible and therefore very hard to bring to mind, particularly when the amygdala has hijacked our brain.

Not all people who are suffering are victims; or at least not all people who are suffering are being victimized. This is a very important fact to consider, one that empathy doesn’t really allow for. Emotions are a strange thing in that it is a lot easier to be angry at someone else than it is to be angry at ourselves and the anger towards others will last a lot longer. The context provides important information about how each person arrived at this moment and it will clearly show the level of responsibility each person has for what is going on. Very often, the person who is suffering has made a series of bad decisions, one after the other, leaving them with the choice of this bad thing or that bad thing. When they had the opportunity to create a future that didn’t have this situation as one of the possible outcomes, they made a bad choice.

This can be a tough pill to swallow because it does land like victim blaming and dogmatically adhering to it does kind of remove compassion from the equation. It also seems like a very “right wing” view of the world, and it might be. And none of these things, even if they are all true, make this perspective incorrect. I’d argue that the moment someone sees themselves as the cause of their situation marks the beginning of their situation improving. There is no power in being a victim. Life is DONE to victims and their only choice is to put-up with it while feeling worse and worse. But the growing negative feelings only serve to hijack their logical thinking to an even greater degree, leading to fewer solutions and more “victimization.”

There are some real victims, people who have found themselves in bad situations with no good options through no fault of their own. People who would have done something else if they knew what as actually going on. These people need assistance, which is best fueled by compassion. Feeling pity or concern will allow you to remain helpful because you will not become overwhelmed with whatever feelings being empathetic causes to come to the surface.

This is the same approach that should be employed with dealing with people who are suffering as a result of their own poor or lazy decision making. In fact, empathy will only be counter productive with these people because it will cause you to miss critical clues about context that are needed to restore their sense of control and autonomy. Consider the case when someones computer crashes causing them to lose a lot of work. There are two ways to look at this situation. The first is to see the person as a victim of bad luck, and to empathize with them. You’ll feel disappointment and anger, and this will lead to a strong sense of bitterness. The second way is to see the person as having played a role in the situation through one or more of their actions. You can be compassionate towards them, it really sucks to see the screen go blue and know that the last few hours of your work has just disappeared. But you don’t need to live their negative feelings and cultivate a sense of bitterness that you’ll bring with you into the rest of the day. This isn’t helpful and will only do harm.

When you allow yourself to be compassionate, you will very quickly start to solve the problem and empower them with the responsibility of implementing the solution. In this case, a computer crash shouldn’t mean the loss of hours of work because everyone KNOWS that computers crash and should be taking the steps to preempt the consequences of this happening. Those who have not backed up or saved their work are completely responsible for whatever work is not available to them once the computer reboots. It isn’t Microsoft or Apples fault, nor is it the fault of the company that makes your computer. Operating systems are complex, powerful, and fallible. An individual transistor is simple, a collection of a billion of them isn’t. Complex things throw errors and you need to know this when working with something that is complex. There is a non zero chance that any complex thing will stop working in the next second so given enough seconds it IS going to break down. Save your work often, back-up you work often and back-up your back-ups often. If you choose not to do this, when the complex thing breaks down and you lose the last few hours of your work, it is gone because YOU made the choice to make the most of your bad luck.

This doesn’t mean that you laugh at the person who didn’t look after their work, but you shouldn’t ever empathize with them UNLESS you are willing to really feel what it is they should be feeling. Saying “stupid piece of crab” or “useless bloody operating systems” as you cultivate an anger that is directed towards a computer is entirely the wrong thing to feel when someone loses their work as a result of a computer crash. While that might be a pure expression of empathy, it isn’t an accurate reflection of reality. In this case, empathy should be having the rage sent inwards for NOT saving their work and backing things up. The expression of emotion onto something that is external is an effective way of not feeling the consequences of the truth, but it is a lousy way of making the future any better than the present.

And this is one of the main problems with empathy, it doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation and is based only superficially on the context and the history leading-up to the moment in question. It cannot be said that your feelings are wrong because they are what you are feeling, but it is fair to say that they are not appropriate when they are not based on all of the events that contribute to the situation. When someone doesn’t take responsibility for backing-up their work and the computer crashes, being compassionate towards them, by acknowledging their disappointment and maybe offering to help them look for any auto recovery versions of the work because you have a more clear head about things, is the only course of action that makes sense, and the only one that might possibly help them find the lost work.

The other area in which empathy is exceptionally problematic is in the realm of conflict. Specifically when it comes to taking sides, because it is impossible to take both sides of an argument at once. Human beings cannot be objective processors the moment they start to feel what they believe one of the sides in the conflict is feeling. In fact, the longer they stay in an empathetic state, the more subjective their interpretation and perceptions will be. If they spend long enough there, they will be able to manufacture hatred, rage, and complete contempt for those on the other side of the conflict; all while having very little access to the context and the history of the events that lead up to the escalation.

This does not mean that every conflict is justified, nor does it mean that no conflicts are justified. The second world war was absolutely needed to happen to stop the actions of those who started it. Hitler was awful, his ideas were wrong, and his solution to things wasn’t grounded in a version of reality that was shared by anyone. However, and I’m not making excuses here, when you take a look at what happened after the first world war, the second world war seems almost inevitable. How Germany was treated throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s was both the result of too much empathy for those who were effected by WW1 and a complete lack of compassion for the German people who didn’t have anything to do with starting the war. They were simply people who were trying to carve out lives for themselves in exactly the same way as the people from any other country that found itself involved in the war. When the ruling class starts a conflict and the entire country is made to pay for it afterwards, there is almost no way to avoid future conflicts because the population is eventually going to grow tired of the punitive measures they are forced to endure for something they had no hand in starting. This is why the end of most of the wars since WW1 have had the winning side provide finance and participate in the recovery efforts.

On a much smaller scale, empathizing too much with either side of a conflict is going to dramatically reduce your ability to actually be of service in terms of offering solutions or helping to broker peace. The other side will be bad, evil or untrustworthy, and this will fuel suspicion and animosity, which will trigger a greater emotional reaction and keep the cycle going.

As unappealing as it seems to the other side, having compassion for both groups is critical for cooling things off and putting an end to strife. It is a lot easier for outside parties to approach the issue with compassion vs. empathy BUT not impossible for those who are involved in it. When it happens, a strong characteristic of compassion alters the dynamic in a powerful way. Compassion, like empathy, humanizes the person we are relating to. But unlike empathy, compassion for the other is possible (thus ensuring the ongoing objectivity) and once it is triggered, it is nearly impossible to not approach the situation from a more objective and balanced point of view. When this occurs, the vilification of others becomes much more difficult and the notions of right and wrong evaporate to be replaced by differences in opinion based on different perspectives or access to different information. This will allow both sides to track into the specific challenges and the key players in the conflict. Hitler was accurately determined to be evil, along with a number of his supporting players, but the German people were not lumped into this bucket because of the objective assessment compassion allows.

The ladder in Jacobs Ladder was a fear creating drug. It eliminated the possibility for compassion or an objective assessment of what is going on because when fear is involved there is only “me,” “them,” and the rest. The rest is everyone and everything that presents no threat and is ignored into non existence. The only thing that comes to mind is the threat – them – and the only thing to do is to take massive action to run away or to destroy the threat.

Under normal circumstances we have the ability to expand this binary reaction dynamic by avoiding an empathic reaction and preventing ourselves from getting lost in the experience of feeling our perception of other peoples feelings. This will give us the clarity to see things for what they are and to consider the role each person played in creating the present situation. We will be able to care and relate to the people involved, but we’ll not get lost in blaming other people for things that they didn’t have very much to do with. This is much more helpful to the person who is suffering because we give them understanding but do not give them permission to remain locked in a less than ideal situation. In the end, showing compassion for others is an act of caring that can help to move them through something they do not like by reestablishing the link between their actions and the outcomes they are experiencing. It reveals to them that they have the power to change their circumstances simply because it prevents you from getting wrapped up in the emotions that crush objectivity and reduce clarity and options.

There is no drug called the ladder, but too much empathy might be a fairly good behavioral proxy. We all have the power to choose between compassion and empathy when faced with someone who is suffering. If we really want to help them, we will choose compassion and take whatever steps we need to in order to show that we care for them. They’ll know that they are not alone while being certain that we are committed to helping them move past whatever the miserable experiences is they have found themselves in because we will be standing beside them and not, metaphorically, INSIDE of them.

Watching episode 3 of the final season of Game Of Thrones was a mixed experience. The battle has seemed inevitable for the last few season and the series has built the tension up dramatically over the last six or so episodes. I’m not going to spoil it other than to say that the battle happened at night and during a snow storm of sorts. Who won? It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this article.

The show in general is a visual masterpiece. It is filmed in a number of different locations and doesn’t rely too heavily on CGI to generate spectacular scenes. Green screen is used a lot and there are some CGI / post production components but the producers make use of reality as much as possible in terms of make-up, costumes, and real buildings. When I think back on some of the episodes and what they brought to the screen it really is breathtaking. Top marks needed to be given for the quality of what appeared on the TV screen week after week.

That was not the case on Sunday and I noticed my mind drifting off onto the experience of watching as opposed to being lost in what I was seeing. This was annoying to me, given the build-up of the battle that was being depicted on screen. The show took a full year off to film, edit, produce, and do whatever was required to make sure it was exceptional. This was evident in the first two episodes of the season and for portions of this one, but once the call to arms was sounded, the waiting to ensure the high quality seemed to have been pointless.

From a story-line perspective, it was decent, and held-up. The action was fantastic, the tension arc was outstanding and even though it is a show that has dragons and the ability for dead people to be reanimated like zombies, there wasn’t anything about the story that was too over the top that broke the spell or forced the viewer to suspend reality past the boundaries of what I was willing to do.

The problem I had with it was just how difficult it was to see. It was really dark. It was as though it was a battle that was occurring at night – which it was – during a snow storm – which it was – before they had invented electrical light – which it was – and the only source of illumination was fire – which it was. It was very authentic, and that is what is what made it really hard to watch.

When I say hard to watch, I don’t mean hard in an emotional way – like it was making me sad or angry. I mean hard in an energetic way. It was draining to watch because the normally super crisp details and HD clarity wasn’t there. While it was clear that people were fighting, it wasn’t clear who those people were or what the outcome was. The exceptions to this were when key characters got killed or did some killing. As I write that, I suppose that I should have used that as a tell that something important was about to happen. Oh well, maybe I’ll rely on that the next time I watch something that is only marginally brighter than dark.

The experience was not uninteresting. Even though the show was missing a lot of what makes it great and very easy to watch, the difficulty I was having in seeing what was happening on the screen served as a strong contrast to the normal viewing experience. I found that I began to care less about what was going on and started to become critical of the premise of the show. It wasn’t that I wanted any or all of the key characters to die, it was closer to not caring about the outcome one way or the other. One side is going to have to win and the sooner they did the sooner this visual black hole would end. The premise that I have always been willing to accept as just a part of the show started to receive the brunt of my critical internal dialogue. Dragons do not exist so their abilities are not constrained to any historical or factual set of rules or guidelines. But my skepticism was building about them and their imaginary powers. They breathe fire when they exhale but somehow they are able to exhale for a long time, even when they had been flying all over the places and should be breathing really hard? Their fire wasn’t just flame, it was like spraying napalm that continued to burn for a long time afterwards. How can they have an unlimited supply of that?

I didn’t get critical all at once, it was a slow build. Initially I just wished that thing were brighter, then I wanted to see things better, and then the frustration arrived and grew. On the screen was the unfolding of an epic battle that had been festering for 7 seasons and in my head was an annoyance that was growing with each passing minute of almost invisible action.

At around 30 minutes in, the amount of energy I was spending trying to see and figure out what was going on hit the “too much to bother” level and I disengaged.

What’s interesting about it, is the finding that people have better recall of text that is harder to read than they do text that is visually highly contrasted and very crisp on the page. Ease is a problem when it comes to short term memory and the tougher things get, the better our recall tends to be. I would imagine that there is a level of difficulty that represents the upper threshold of what people are willing to tolerate when it comes to working their way through difficult text, and that this level is related to the incentive the person has for putting in the work. I have no doubt that if I was going to be tested on what happened during the episode and that there was something on the line, if knowing would actually matter, that I would have been able to keep at it for longer. But there wasn’t any incentive for me to keep doing the work. In fact, the effort that was required actually served as a disincentive to keep manufacturing whatever meaning I had created that allowed me to remain interested. It is entirely possible that watching it was so draining that there was no energy left over to do the mental work that is needed for the suspension of disbelief.

This is a common enough occurrence. People who are highly engaged are willing and able to continue to work hard towards an impossible goal but only as long as they are able to maintain their belief that it is possible. The moment reality breaks through, they view their efforts for what they are and they check out. The process is very much like the experience I had. The amount of effort that is required to sustain the belief increases in a relative sense – either because it requires more units or because fewer units are available to do it because they are being siphoned off and directed onto something else. Once the relative effort hits a certain level the foundation begins to fall apart and the weight of the belief causes it to collapse leaving reality to stand uncontested.

Human beings are programmed to understand what they are experiencing, and are more than willing to take some very big steps to construct a coherent narrative interpretation of what is going on. Entertainment relies on this quality. Without it watching a play or reading anything other than nonfiction would be a waste of time because we would only be capable of perceiving what was going on as being fake. The context in which we are viewing the make-believe stuff serves to prime our brain with the information that makes watching or reading possible. There is a piece of us that is completely aware that it is a play or a work of fiction, but the volume of that part is dialed down allowing us to get lost in what we are experiencing. It isn’t that we do not know that it is fantasy, it is that the part of us that cares is being actively suppressed.

Being aware of reality is a natural operation while ignoring it is not; this is almost a paradoxical situation in that it costs more energy to suppress reality than it does to accept it. The consequence to this fact is that we will only suppress reality when there is an incentive to do so. In this case, the incentive is reward chemicals that are released in response to the thoughts or the type of thinking that only flow when reality is suspended. It only works when we get something out of it and when what we get out of it is much greater than the cost of what we have to put into it.

Imagine that it takes 20 mental units of energy to suspend reality. However, the chemical reward that this can lead to is worth the equivalent of 50 units of energy. This is a positive experience and is therefore something that the brain will be more inclined to perform in the future. After enough of these experiences, the brain will have learned that suspending reality is always worth the initial cost because of the magnitude of the reward. This is why consuming fantasy literature or entertainment is a learned experience; it is available to everyone who has a brain that releases reward chemicals in response to the changes in thinking that suspension of reality facilitates AND who have enough experiences of the pairing of the stimulus and the response. If anything is missing the person will remain fixated on reality and will never have a reason to transcend into the realm of fantasy entertainment.

However, for those who have learned to find the experience rewarding, it is not without its limits. There is a cost associated with generating the reward, and the cost must be paid before the reward is released. Human beings have a propensity to be more loss adverse than they are reward seeking, and this creates an interesting phenomena in terms of sensation and perception. The ratio of loss to gain is one : two meaning that a loss of one unit is equal to a gain of two units. This is the general break-even point marking the boundary between when someone will do something that takes effort because the gain is worth it and when they will not take an action because the gain is not worth it. For example, we’ll put in 50 units of effort to get 110 units of reward, but we will not put in 50 units of effort to get 90 units of reward. The math is fairly straightforward although the timing of the rewards does not necessarily need to be immediate once the learning has taken place. If we were to get 50 reward units now and get another 100 units later, so long as we believed that the 100 units later were the result of spending 50 units now, we would have no difficulty perceiving this situation as a win and making the effort. This delaying of gratification is also a learned skill so the notion of investing effort for future reward is something that tends to come into play a little later in life.

The 2:1 ration is a perceptual thing in that it is the threshold that separates costs from losses. It is of big narrative significance because it alters the meaning we give to work / effort / actions. As long as the reward at least 2 times greater than the amount of energy we have to put in, we view the effort as a cost. Since things of value have a cost, we are accustomed to paying a price for things. The lower that price is relative to the value we get out of them the better; and it is not uncommon for something that is priced too low to be viewed as less valuable than it is. This means that we do not necessarily want the things that are handed to us and that we are actually more inclined to want something more when its price is slightly inflated. There is a sweet spot or range within which we are willing to work at varying degrees to get the value of something. Above it we perceive it as worthless and below it we view the effort we need to put in as a loss.

The lower threshold is about 1:2 in terms of effort to reward. There is some variability at the exact point, but narratively it can be defined as the point at which the cost of something is experienced as a loss. It’s an entirely relative thing but that does not change the dynamics at all. All things being equal, if the reward increases the cost can increase by a factor of 0.5. If the reward decreases, the cost will need to drop by a factor of 2. If the cost increases, the reward will need to increase by a factor of 2 and if it decreases, the reward can drop by a factor of 0.5. When one of these things does not occur AND when the ratio of cost to reward drops below 1:2, the costs become losses and the transaction will no longer be viewed as favorable. There is a small margin in terms of the time it will take before the brain makes the decision to abandon the transaction but the window is very small and dependent upon the size of the ratio – 1.1:2 will be tolerated for longer than 1.2:2 and a 3:1 ration might result in an immediate end to their participation in the behavioral transaction.

Past experience will pay a role in someone’s interpretation of reward and in their willingness to delay gratification. Those who have a longer track record of positive transactional ratios or who have a number of experiences that support the notion of delayed gratification will remain engaged for longer than someone who has little or no experience with either one of these elements; both generally, but more specifically with reference to the context of the current situation. However, most people will reach a breaking point eventually and once it has been crossed, the transaction ends and will only be reactivated when the ratio improves again to move the outcome from loss to cost.

This is what was at play for me while I watched this episode of Game Of Thrones. I have been more than willing to put the energy into suspending reality given how I have learned that doing so can lead to immediate and future rewards – consuming fiction has been rewarding and I have gotten a lot out of watching this series. Up until about 9:20 pm the ratio had been favorable and I had not minded putting in whatever effort was needed to keep me watching because the reward had been predictable and large enough to consider this effort a cost. However, the ratio dropped below the critical threshold which threw the costs / losses switch in my head. I very quickly burned through whatever good will that had been built-up and my brain was no longer willing to waste the effort that was needed to suspend reality or figure out what was happening on the screen. And that was it, the spell was broken and I instantly became aware that I was watching a TV show about make believe stuff that cannot and will not ever happen. The laws of physics flowed in and altered my perception of what I was able to see on the screen so I stopped. It suddenly became kind of silly, far-fetched, and unimportant.

The episodes director, Fabian Wagner, doesn’t believe that there was a problem. He suggested that the lighting was by design and used as a way to aid in the story telling. Everything that was important was visible, even if it was a little tougher to see than normal. He made some other comments about it that aren’t helpful. Suffice it to say, what was broadcast WAS what we were supposed to see. A collection of people took a look at the final product and approved it for distribution. I’m not a film maker and am only a fly by night fan of the show and not likely the person they were targeting with this episode. I am a lot less engaged than a diehard fan and may lack the specific commitment to put in the effort that was required to manufacture the information low picture quality failed to supply. True fans probably did the work and remain lost in the battle of until it was won.

Since I am a human being, I have a long track record of saying and doing some very stupid things. The trend line, however, slopes upwards so if I maintain this trajectory, I’m on course to have a few very good years in a couple of decades. Most of the dangerous and very dumb things are behind me, because I learned from doing them.

Probably the mistake that it has taken me the longest to learn from has to do with the truth and when to tell it vs. keeping it to myself. As a rule, I think knowing and telling the truth are some of the most important things for people to do. Each of us has a good brain that is capable of making sense of the world, and will do this much sooner when dealing with reality as opposed to some sort of nonsense. When we believe that something is true when it isn’t our life becomes more complicated and we make the life of other people more complicated when we choose to tell them a lie or misrepresent something as being true when we believe it might not be. I want life to be as easy as possible for everyone and there is no place for dishonesty in this.

Except when there might be.

It isn’t that there is a time and a place for not telling the truth but there is a time and a place for not saying anything. And this is where life experience comes into play. When making the decision on whether or not to say something, speak only when the statement is true AND helpful. Most things that are true are irrelevant and therefore not helpful.

Take a moment to consider your area of expertise and bring to mind a fact that relates to it. Now imagine stating this fact during every conversation you have with any one. Going in to get replacement registration for your car, ordering dinner, shopping for clothes or groceries, volunteering at the animal shelter, etc…. Okay, that’s all kind of silly, but so is talking about almost everything when it isn’t helpful. The Buddhists have a term for these types of things called “useless speak” and when you get right down to it, almost everything a person says out loud is useless speak. Almost everything we say to ourselves is useless speak and almost every spontaneous thought we have would fall under the catchall of useless speak.

For the last 10 years or so I have been a believer that I’m a little to a lot messed up. I’m not dangerous or stupid. Nor am I antisocial in a psychological way. I’m fine. I have some good qualities, some bad qualities and many that don’t really make much difference. What I am is more or less the same thing as everyone else. A human being who is doing their best to make life easier and a little better each day. Sometimes I’m successful at doing this, but most of the time my actions don’t make any demonstrable difference. It’s good that I got out of bed that morning and took whatever actions I did, but none of them will be written to the big book of life as things that mattered. And this is basically how it is for everyone and everything. Important but irrelevant. Well intentioned, a little screwy and lacking universal appeal.

So when I met Heather in 2012 and found myself completely enamored by her, I just did what I always did – thinking it, feel it, say it. But she wasn’t expecting my slightly over-the-top way of engaging the world; which might be better described as a pathological impulsive honesty. I told her what I was seeing, what it made me think and how that made me feel. It lacked any of the coy aloofness that is very common during the beginning of a relationship. It isn’t what she was used to and it can be a little hard to take.

The main reason I think I did this has to do with knowing what my brain does when it pays attention to something. I had learned from experience that whatever it was I thought about would expand in terms of what my brain did with it – if someone cut me off in traffic and I continued to pay attention to the car, I would begin to notice all of their driving errors, if someone let me merge without drama or tension, I would begin to notice more random acts of kindness or courtesy, it didn’t matter what it was, as soon as I saw it, I would see more of it. I was deliberately paying attention to the things I liked meaning that I was not noticing anything else. And since I talked about what I was thinking, all that was coming out was a growing list of the things that I thought were great. This approach makes it a lot easier for me to remain grateful and happy.

After a few weeks of dating she said to me “I don’t know who you think you are dating, but no one is as good as the person you are talking about.”

It took a moment for me to register what she was saying and when it landed I replied with “I know everyone sucks a little, that goes with out saying, but maybe I should have said it. You are going to do things that annoy me, that disappoint me, that remind me that you can be selfish and mean. I know this and I still adore you because you are….” and I returned to my observational honesty. This was what she needed to hear because it eliminated any pressure that had been building. She knew herself well enough to know she is a collection of traits and qualities and that some of them are not necessarily admirable. Sooner or later there would be a fall from grace and God only knows what would happen if this blind-sided me.

A few days ago one of my friends sent me a video titled Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton and I was reminded of the early part of my relationship with Heather. It’s a great video, both funny and a little thought provoking. He seems to have drawn the same conclusion that I have – that people are all kind of screwed-up but are, in general, fine. There are a few lines that seem a little harsh until they sink in and which point they resonate like wisdom.

He is making the point that Heather thought I had missed – that we’re good and bad, but mostly a lot of neither. There probably isn’t anyone who is perfect for us and if there is, we’ll probably never find them because we don’t know enough about ourselves to actually know that our paths have crossed. You are free to look for them if you like, but then you’ll end-up dying alone. The best we can hope for, at least statistically speaking, is that we find someone who is good enough and that we have the good sense to accept that good enough is good enough.

That is what Heather knew she had when we met. I was charming enough to spend time with, intelligent enough to be interesting, self-aware enough to know that I was a work in progress and that bigger and better things were in my future, and conscientious enough to put the work in to make them a reality. Could she have held out for more? Maybe, but there was a very good chance that all she would have been waiting for was different.

The two of us are clear that there is a huge complement in our traits and qualities, that I’m some of the things she isn’t and she’s some of the things that I’m not and that we are human beings and as such are prone to moments of being insufferable and kind of unlikable. And we’re fine with this. These moments suck, but they are worse for the person who is being the jerk than for the one observing it.

Heather was simply trying to figure out if I had the good sense to not say anything about the shortcomings or the bad sense to believe that I had found perfection in a person.

And maybe that’s the key to relationships. Realizing that you’ll partner up with someone who isn’t perfect, each partner accepting that good enough is good enough. Establishing a connection with someone who can put up with us, overlooking the ways in which we fall short and adoring the ways in which we excel. Knowing the truth and when to voice it, and maybe, most importantly, knowing what to not say out loud.

David Foster Wallace was an American author who also taught English and creative writing at university. He won many awards including a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Like many people, he suffered from mental illness – depression – and took his own life on September 12, 2008.

Three years before his death, Wallace accepted an invitation to give the commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech was a very good one, regarded as the best commencement speech ever given by Time Magazine. It was recorded, transcribed and was used as the foundation for a book titled “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.”

When you listen to the speech, his tone is flat and the delivery is very “matter of fact.” This is a bonus because it forces the listener to pay attention. When you spend any amount of time viewing and listening to these types of speeches you quickly develop a sort of immunity to the flowery platitude rich messages, presented in such well rehearsed oratory fashion that it’s easy to forget the venue and who the actual audience is. This Is Water isn’t like that, and that’s why it is so easy to hear what he is saying.

Life is hard, boring, and every day is almost exactly the same. There are so many people that we cannot help but constantly be in each others way. While we all have the same basic needs, each one of us has a unique struggle to meet them. We need food, so that means we need money, so there are jobs. These jobs are, for the most part, pointless experiences of repetitive nonsense performed for its own sake. Few of us do something that has any higher meaning or that contributes anything to the future history of humanity. The experience of life is awful for most people. Endured for too many decades and ending with no fanfare. It peaks too soon, and from around the mid twenties, we physically decline. Vitality is replaced with aches and pains as our lust for life fades, substituted with a growing sense that maybe the entire thing has no point.

Whatever sense of meaning we had at the beginning of the journey is revealed to be a mistake or a lie, as the only thing that ends up being real is the growing amount of work we have to do.

And this is true. Life is not easy. Staying alive requires constant effort to find food, shelter, security, connection and purpose. And it is this final one that we innately get wrong. Maybe we were raised to believe that we would change the world, that our birth would mark a new end and beginning point in human history. And while that is true, it isn’t very true. We matter, just not very much. There are too many people for any one person to matter. Our species has effectively reproduced itself into the position of devaluing any and every single individual. Your value is one seven and half billionth of the collective worth of the human race.

No, purpose is not something we are born with, it is not an innate trait. When we mistakenly assume that by meeting our needs for food, shelter, security and connection that we will be living a purpose filled life we are setting ourselves up for disappointment, at best, or a life of struggle, torment and confusion as the more likely.

That is what I take out of “This Is Water” and I believe that is the essence of Wallace’s message. Life is meaningless. Being alive is not, in and of itself, sufficient enough to make living worthwhile. But we need meaning and purpose as much as we need food, and shelter, and safety, and connection. It is too easy, almost automatic, to become nihilistic a few years after we leave school and have begun our careers. Being an adult is a daily reminder of the utterly pointless nature of being alive.

Except that is only the truth when we choose to not put the work in to see it any other way. Meaning is a completely abstract thing while also being very real at the same time. Like water to a fish, it is necessary for survival, but rarely do human beings take the time to see meaning and purpose as so essential to our survival that we spontaneously and unconsciously manufacture them out of absolutely nothing just to make sure it is there.

Being alive is not a purpose, getting your survival needs met is not a purpose. These things are essential for living a life of purpose, but are insufficient at creating and sustaining the will to continue to work hard, day in and day out, to make life a little bit better each day. When we lean completely on them to give our life meaning, we park our progress in the bad part of town only to wonder months or years later why everything of value has been stripped away and sold as scrap.

Living a life of meaning will only happen on purpose. It requires conscious effort that is focused and sustained over time. It is mindful and deliberate. It is the consequence of looking at the world, your life and LIFE in general and then making the decision to see that you have the choice on what body of water you are going to live in, and then doing EVERYTHING you are capable of doing in order to get there. Even if you never make it, your life will have had meaning simply because you did the things that give it meaning.

Meaning cannot and will not happen by accident as the only automatic is the unhappiness associated with ONLY meeting your survival needs. You will get by, and that is all you will get.

Living a life of purpose and meaning is not easy. It requires clarity and constant effort. It is work. But so too is living a meaningless life. The only difference might be the moment to moment experience. A life thoughtlessly lived on autopilot is the soul crushing existence described in Wallace’s speech. A life lived with care and deliberateness is, if nothing else, a life filled with distraction from the day to day tedium.

Life is going to be hard. It will be work regardless of what you do. Find out what you want, and direct that effort towards the things that make it a little bit better each day.