So Act IV of INTROSPECT is about confronting the minotaur, and it’s kind of apt how it’s the Act that I’ve struggled with the most. So I figure I might as well do a word vomit about it. I know that I’ve done youtube videos about narcissism and self-loathing, which is a subsection of it, but fuck it, I’ll just write a wordvomit first and see how it goes.
Alright, where do we start? I find myself thinking about the time when I was a teenager, living with my parents, struggling to keep up with my schoolwork, and I think I had a bad report card or something, and my parents were mad at me about it. I was mad at myself too, and I specifically remember angry-crying in the toilet, jabbing at the mirror and asking myself, “Why won’t you fucking study?” In retrospect, it seems both bleak and hilarious, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all, it was just miserable. I was in despair. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help myself, and nobody around me seemed to know how to help me, either. I felt like absolute shit, like a pathetic excuse for a human being. That was the sort of language I found myself using, and writing about it now I find myself curious to know where exactly I picked up that sort of language. It must have been from others. Maybe my family. Where did they pick it up? Why do we use it, when it’s so obviously ineffective?
It was only years later when I was working for my ex-boss that I really experienced a different mode of troubleshooting my problems. My ex-boss Dinesh was compassionate, kind, patient, and thoughtful. He was genuinely curious to understand the true source of my problems, to understand the mechanisms of it. Having inherited some of his style, I imagine I would now ask, gently and compassionately, “Actually, why aren’t you studying?” And I think the difference in these approaches is – when the question is asked from a place of anger, the implication seems to be that we aren’t really looking for answers. We’re looking for contrition. We’re looking for penitance, for remorse. We’re looking to hear, “I’m so sorry, I fucked up, it won’t happen again.” But what if you hear that repeatedly? What then? The impulse then is to think, well, here we have a moral failure, folks. A naughty boy. Irredeemable. A bad kid. Maybe if we punish him more, he will learn. Maybe he needs to experience more pain and suffering, then he will change his ways.
But how are ways changed, really? How does behavior change actually happen? These are important questions that don’t seem to get asked enough. What I’ve come to believe is that each person is a bundle of conflicting impulses, motivations, interests and so on, and can’t be reduced to a singular motive. For lasting behavior change to happen, there needs to be a sustainable consensus amongst the various different parts of the individual. And the individual almost certainly is not entirely in charge of their own behavior. After all, if we were entirely in charge, why does anybody do anything less than optimal? Why does anybody smoke cigarettes, or eat junk food, or stay up too late playing video games? Why isn’t life a simple matter of, “here are the things I want to do, and I am going to do them”? Because the proclamations that we make – I’m going to lose 10 pounds, I’m going to learn a new language, and so on – are often like bold utterances made by the selfish, ignorant manager of an overworked team who doesn’t bother taking the time to get to know them.
To be clear, I’m not saying that having goals is intrinsically bad. I love having goals, and I encourage people to have goals. But the thing is that you have to “listen to your people”. You shouldn’t be making grandiose promises and proclamations that you cannot deliver. A lot of a person’s unproductive frustration with themselves becomes a lot clearer, more evocative and, yes – actionable – when you see it as an incompetent manager’s frustration with their overworked staff. Management makes promises that staff cannot deliver on, then yells at them for failing to live up to his unrealistic expectations.
So the question then becomes, how can you stop being such a shitty manager of yourself? Well, let’s pretend you just introduced new management. You can do that! Pretend that the old guy got fired, and you’re the new guy in charge, and you just inherited this tired, frustrated, overworked team. What’s the first thing you should do? I think the first thing is to listen. Really listen. You want to ask your team (that’s also you!), what was wrong about the old system? This feels a little abstract, so let me go back to my teenage self, and the question of, why aren’t you studying. Well, I know now with the benefit of hindsight that I had really bad project management skills, and nobody taught me to do it better. I also know, from observing how I actually spent my time, that I enjoyed playing video games, I enjoyed watching anime, and I enjoyed hanging out with my friends. Looking back, I regret none of those things, and in fact I wish I did them even more! But what was the mess exactly? The mess was… I wasn’t doing my homework, for starters, and that was getting me into trouble with my teachers, which was getting me into trouble with my parents, which was causing me great misery and despair. Alright. So… simply doing your homework would go a long way in making your life less miserable, right? Yes. So why aren’t you doing your homework? (And here it’s tempting to say, “You know, everyone else does their homework…” – but that wouldn’t actually help. It’s rarely helpful to compare kids to other kids. It’s rarely helpful to compare yourself to other people as an adult, either.)
The first honest answer that I’d blurt out to me, which I don’t think I would have felt comfortable saying it to the adults in my life – and I think the truth can often feel like this – is “I don’t want to!” And the correct response from me, the Adult Visa reparenting Child Visa, is to smile, laugh, and say, “Hah, I totally relate. There’s all sorts of stuff I don’t want to do too. You should see me when it comes to dealing with health insurance.” And here I think my childself would actually be surprised, just to hear an adult validate the truth of that feeling. Yes, thank you. Thank you for admitting that homework sucks and isn’t worth doing. What an oppressive nightmare. And from here, I would actually take a massive detour, and ask my childself, what do you wanna do instead? And he would talk about anime, and video games, and basketball, and music, and hanging out with his friends, and I would listen attentively to all of that, and ask questions from a place of genuine curiosity, and be encouraging, supportive, excited. This will take hours and hours of time, which none of the adults in my life were willing to spend on me. The impact of this is very difficult if not impossible to measure. But the result is that the child feels less anxious, less cornered, less oppressed by reality. When he feels safe to talk openly about his desires, and be taken seriously. When we wash away the guilt and the shame with the elixir of understanding, the child loosens his white-knuckle grip on what he perceives (quite correctly) to be the precious little vestige of his his selfhood, his sovereignty, his soul.