Why Procrastinators

Procrastinate
By Tim Urban

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pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-|
noun
the action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination.
Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the
dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution.

Avoid procrastination. So elegant in its simplicity.

While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people
avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being
out of the ocean.

No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those

people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m
such a procrastinator!” The same people that will say to a real procrastinator
something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.”

The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a
real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how
to not do.

In college, the sudden unbridled personal freedom was a disaster for me—I did
nothing, ever, for any reason. The one exception was that I had to hand in papers
from time to time. I would do those the night before, until I realized I could just do
them through the night, and I did that until I realized I could actually start them in the
early morning on the day they were due. This behavior reached caricature levels
when I was unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it
was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctor’s office learning
that lack of blood sugar was the reason my hands had gone numb and curled up
against my will. (I did get the thesis in—no, it was not good.)

Even this post took much longer than it should have, because I spent a bunch of
hours doing things like seeing this picture sitting on my desktop from a previous post,
opening it, looking at it for a long time thinking about how easily he could beat me in
a fight, then wondering if he could beat a tiger in a fight, then wondering who would
win between a lion and a tiger, and then googling that and reading about it for a
while (the tiger would win). I have problems.
To understand why procrastinators procrastinate so much, let’s start by
understanding a non-procrastinator’s brain:
Pretty normal, right? Now, let’s look at a procrastinator’s brain:

Notice anything different?

It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator’s brain is coexisting with a
pet—the Instant Gratification Monkey.

This would be fine—cute, even—if the Rational Decision-Maker knew the first thing
about how to own a monkey. But unfortunately, it wasn’t a part of his training and
he’s left completely helpless as the monkey makes it impossible for him to do his job.
The fact is, the Instant Gratification Monkey is the last creature who should be in
charge of decisions—he thinks only about the present, ignoring lessons from the
past and disregarding the future altogether, and he concerns himself entirely with
maximizing the ease and pleasure of the current moment. He doesn’t understand the
Rational Decision-Maker any better than the Rational Decision-Maker understands
him—why would we continue doing this jog, he thinks, when we could stop, which
would feel better. Why would we practice that instrument when it’s not fun? Why
would we ever use a computer for work when the internet is sitting right there waiting
to be played with? He thinks humans are insane.
In the monkey world, he’s got it all figured out—if you eat when you’re hungry, sleep
when you’re tired, and don’t do anything difficult, you’re a pretty successful monkey.
The problem for the procrastinator is that he happens to live in the human world,
making the Instant Gratification Monkey a highly unqualified navigator. Meanwhile,
the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal
with competition over the controls, doesn’t know how to put up an effective fight—he
just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the
suffering procrastinator whose head he’s in berates him.

It’s a mess. And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending
a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground.1
The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where
leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be
happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s
completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread.
Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you
waste time doing normal leisure things, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey
sure as hell isn’t gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird
activities where everyone loses.2
And the poor Rational Decision-Maker just mopes, trying to figure out how he let the
human he’s supposed to be in charge of end up here again.
Given this predicament, how does the procrastinator ever manage to accomplish
anything?

As it turns out, there’s one thing that scares the shit out of the Instant Gratification
Monkey:
The Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up when a
deadline gets too close or when there’s danger of public embarrassment, a career
disaster, or some other scary consequence.
The Instant Gratification Monkey, normally unshakable, is terrified of the Panic
Monster. How else could you explain the same person who can’t write a paper’s
introductory sentence over a two-week span suddenly having the ability to stay up all
night, fighting exhaustion, and write eight pages? Why else would an extraordinarily
lazy person begin a rigorous workout routine other than a Panic Monster freakout
about becoming less attractive?

And these are the lucky procrastinators—there are some who don’t even respond to
the Panic Monster, and in the most desperate moments they end up running up the
tree with the monkey, entering a state of self-annihilating shutdown.

Quite a crowd we are.

Of course, this is no way to live. Even for the procrastinator who does manage to
eventually get things done and remain a competent member of society, something
has to change. Here are the main reasons why:

1) It’s unpleasant. Far too much of the procrastinator’s precious time is spent toiling
in the Dark Playground, time that could have been spent enjoying satisfying, well-
earned leisure if things had been done on a more logical schedule. And panic isn’t
fun for anyone.
2) The procrastinator ultimately sells himself short. He ends up underachieving and
fails to reach his potential, which eats away at him over time and fills him with regret
and self-loathing.
3) The Have-To-Dos may happen, but not the Want-To-Dos. Even if the procrastinator
is in the type of career where the Panic Monster is regularly present and he’s able to
be fulfilled at work, the other things in life that are important to him—getting in shape,
cooking elaborate meals, learning to play the guitar, writing a book, reading, or even
making a bold career switch—never happen because the Panic Monster doesn’t
usually get involved with those things. Undertakings like those expand our
experiences, make our lives richer, and bring us a lot of happiness—and for most
procrastinators, they get left in the dust.
So how can a procrastinator improve and become happier? See Part 2, How To
Beat Procrastination.

How to Beat Procrastination

By Tim Urban

This is Part 2. You won’t get Part 2 if you haven’t read Part 1 yet.  Here’s Part 1.
___________

PDF:  We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or
see a preview.)
___________

pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-|
noun
the action of ruining your own life for no apparent reason

Let me start by saying that I’ve had just about enough of the irony of battling through
crippling procrastination while trying to write posts on procrastination and how to beat it.
I’ve spent the last two weeks being this guy, who shoots himself in the foot while talking
about gun safety, and I look forward to getting back to irony-free procrastination following
this post.
A couple notes before we begin:

 I’m not a professional at any of this, just a lifelong procrastinator who thinks about
this topic all the time. I’m still in a total battle with my own habits, but I have made
some progress in the last few years, and I’m drawing my thoughts from what’s worked
for me.
 This post was posted late, not only because it took me 2,000 years to do, but also
because I decided that Monday night was an urgent time to open Google Earth, hover a
few hundred feet above the southern tip of India, and scroll all the way up India to the
top of the country, to “get a better feel for India.” I have problems.
Alright, so last week we dove into the everyday inner struggle of the procrastinator to
examine the underlying psychology going on. But this week, when we’re actually trying to do
something about it, we need to dig even deeper. Let’s begin by trying to unwrap the
procrastinator’s psychology and see what’s really at the core of things:
We know about the Instant Gratification Monkey (the part of your brain that makes you
procrastinate) and his dominion over the Rational Decision Maker, but what’s really
happening there?

The procrastinator is in the bad habit, bordering on addiction, of letting the monkey win. He
continues to have the intention to control the monkey, but he puts forth a hapless effort, using
the same proven-not-to-work methods he’s used for years, and deep down, he knows the
monkey will win. He vows to change, but the patterns just stay the same. So why would an
otherwise capable person put forth such a lame and futile effort again and again?

The answer is that he has incredibly low confidence when it comes to this part of his life,
allowing himself to become enslaved by a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s
call this self-fulfilling prophecy his Storyline. The procrastinator’s Storyline goes something
like this:
For the Have-To-Dos in my life, I’ll end up waiting until the last minute, panicking, and then
either doing less than my best work or shutting down and not doing anything at all. For the
Want-To-Dos in my life, let’s be honest—I’ll either start one and quit or more likely, I just
won’t ever get around to it.
The procrastinator’s problems run deep, and it takes something more than “being more self-
disciplined” or “changing his bad habits” for him to change his ways—the root of the
problem is embedded in his Storyline, and his Storyline is what must change.
___________

Before we talk about how Storylines change, let’s examine, concretely, what the
procrastinator even wants to change into. What do the right habits even look like, and where
exactly will the procrastinator run into trouble?
There are two components of being able to achieve things in a healthy and effective manner
—planning and doing. Let’s start with the easy one:

Planning
Procrastinators love planning, quite simply because planning does not involve doing, and
doing is the procrastinator’s Kryptonite.
But when procrastinators plan, they like to do it in a vague way that doesn’t consider details
or reality too closely, and their planning leaves them perfectly set up to not actually
accomplish anything. A procrastinator’s planning session leaves him with a doer’s nightmare:

A big list of icky, daunting tasks and undertakings.

A big list of vague and daunting things makes the Instant Gratification Monkey laugh. When
you make a list like that, the monkey says, “Oh perfect, this is easy.” Even if your gullible
conscious mind believes it intends to accomplish the items on that list in an efficient manner,
the monkey knows that in your subconscious, you have no intention of doing so.
Effective planning, on the other hand, sets you up for success. Its purpose is to do the exact
opposite of everything in that sentence:
Effective planning takes a big list and selects a winner:
A big list is perhaps an early phase of planning, but planning must end with rigorous
prioritizing and one item that emerges as the winner—the item you’re going to make your
first priority. And the item that wins should be the one that means the most to you—the item
that’s most important for your happiness. If urgent items are involved, those will have to
come first and should be knocked out as quickly as possible in order to make way for the
important items (procrastinators love to use unimportant but urgent items as an excuse to
forever put off the important ones).
Effective planning makes an icky item un-icky:
We all know what an icky item is. An icky item is vague and murky, and you’re not really
sure where you’d start, how you’d go about doing it, or where you’d get answers to your
questions about it.

So let’s say your dream is to make your own app, and you know that if you build a successful
app you could quit your job and become a full-time developer. You also think that
programming ability is the literacy of the 21st century, and you don’t have money to spend
outsourcing development anyway, so you decide to anoint “Learn how to code” the winning
item on your list—the number one priority. Exciting, right?
Well, no, because “Learn how to code” is an intensely icky item—and every time you decide
it’s time to get started, you will coincidentally also decide your inbox needs to be cleaned out
and your kitchen floor needs to be mopped, ASAP. It’ll never end up happening.

To un-icky the item, you need to read, research, and ask questions to find out exactly how
one learns how to code, the specific means necessary for each step along the way, and how
long each one should take. Un-ickying a list item turns it from this:

Into this:

Effective planning turns a daunting item into a series of small, clear, manageable

tasks:
Icky combines with Daunting into an Instant Gratification Monkey steroid potion. And just
because you un-icky an item, it doesn’t mean it’s still not horribly big and daunting. The key
to de-dauntifying an item is to absorb this fact:

A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious

tasks looks like from far away.
No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a
house. Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful
mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction
workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up,
until a house is built.

Nearly every big undertaking can be boiled down to a core unit of progress—its brick. A 45-
minute gym visit is the brick of getting in great shape. A 30-minute practice session is the
brick of becoming a great guitarist.

The average day in a wannabe author’s week and a real author’s week looks almost the same.
The real author writes a couple pages, laying a brick, and the wannabe author writes nothing.
98% of their day is otherwise identical. But a year later, the real author has a completed first
draft of a book and the wannabe author has…nothing.

It’s all about the bricks.

And the good news is, laying one brick isn’t daunting. But bricks do require scheduling. So
the final step in planning is to make a Brick Timeline, which slots bricks into the calendar.
The slots are non-negotiable and non-cancellable—after all, it’s your first priority and the
thing that matters most to you, isn’t it? The most important date is the first one. You can’t
start learning to code “in November.” But you can  start learning to code on November 21st
from 6:00 – 7:00pm.
Now you’re effectively planned—just follow the schedule and you’ll be a programmer. Only
thing left is to do…

Doing
It’s not that procrastinators don’t like the concept of doing. They look at the bricks on their
calendar and they think, “Great, this will be fun.” And that’s because when they picture the
moment in the future when they sit down and knock out a work session, they picture things
without the presence of the Instant Gratification Monkey. Procrastinators’ visions of future
scenarios never seem to include the monkey.
But when the actual moment arrives to begin that scheduled brick-laying, the procrastinator
does what the procrastinator does best—he lets the monkey take over and ruin everything.

And since we just stressed above that all achievement boils down to the ability to lay that one
brick during that slot when it’s on your schedule, we seem to have isolated the core struggle
here. Let’s examine this specific challenge of laying a single brick:
So this diagram represents the challenge at hand anytime you take on a task, whether it’s
making a PowerPoint for work, going on a jog, working on a script, or anything else you do
in your life. The Critical Entrance is where you go to officially start work on the task, the
Dark Woods are the process of actually doing the work, and once you finish, you’re rewarded
by ending up in The Happy Playground—a place where you feel satisfaction and where
leisure time is pleasant and rewarding because you got something hard done. You
occasionally even end up super-engaged with what you’re working on and enter a state
of Flow, where you’re so blissfully immersed in the task that you lose track of time.
Those paths look something like this:
Sounds pretty simple, right?

Well unfortunately for procrastinators, they tend to miss out on both The Happy Playground
and Flow.

For example, here’s a procrastinator that never even gets started on the task he’s supposed to
do, because he never makes it through the Critical Entrance. Instead, he spends hours
wallowing in The Dark Playground, hating himself:
Here’s a procrastinator who gets started on the task, but she can’t stay focused, and she keeps
taking long breaks to play on the internet and make food. She doesn’t end up finishing the
task:
Here’s a procrastinator who couldn’t bring himself to get started, even though a work
deadline was approaching, and he spent hours in The Dark Playground, knowing the looming
deadline was drawing near and he was only making his life harder by not starting. Eventually,
the deadline got so close, the Panic Monster suddenly came roaring into the room, freaking
him out and causing him to fly through the task to hit the deadline.
After he finishes, he feels decent because he accomplished something, but he’s also not that
pleased because he knows he did an underwhelming job on the project because he had to rush
so much, and he feels like he wasted most of his day procrastinating for no reason. This lands
him in Mixed Feelings Park.

So if you’re a procrastinator, let’s look at what you need to do to get on the right path, one
that will leave you much happier.

The first thing you must do is make it through the Critical Entrance. This means stopping
whatever you’re doing when it’s time to begin the task, putting away all distractions, and
getting started. It sounds simple, but this is the hardest part. This is where the Instant
Gratification Monkey puts up his fiercest resistance:
The monkey absolutely hates  stopping something fun to start something hard, and this is
where you need to be the strongest. If you can get started and force the monkey into the Dark
Woods, you’ve broken a bit of his will.
Of course, he’s not going to give up anytime soon.

The Dark Woods is where you are when you’re working. It’s not a fun place to be, and the
Instant Gratification Monkey wants nothing to do with it. To make things harder, the Dark
Woods is surrounded by the Dark Playground, one of the monkey’s favorite places, and since
he can see how close it is, he’ll try as hard as he can to leave the Dark Woods.
There will also be times when you bump into a tree—maybe the jog is taking you on an
uphill street, maybe you need to use an Excel formula you don’t know, maybe that song
you’re writing just isn’t coming together the way you thought it would—and this is when the
monkey will make his boldest attempt at an escape.
It makes no sense to leave the Dark Woods in favor of the Dark Playground—they’re both
dark. They both suck to be in, but the big difference is the Dark Woods leads to happiness
and the Dark Playground leads only to more misery. But the Instant Gratification Monkey
isn’t logical and to him, the Dark Playground seems like much more fun.

The good news is, if you can power through a bit of the Dark Woods, something funny
happens. Making progress on a task produces positive feelings of accomplishment and raises
your self-esteem. The monkey gains his strength off of low self-esteem, and when you feel a
jolt of self-satisfaction, the monkey finds a High Self-Esteem Banana in his path. It doesn’t
quell his resistance entirely, but it goes a long way to distracting him for a while, and you’ll
find that the urge to procrastinate has diminished.
Then, if you continue along, something magical happens. Once you get 2/3 or 3/4 of the way
through a task, especially if it’s going well, you start to feel great about things and suddenly,
the end is in sight. This is a key tipping point—
The Tipping Point is important because it’s not just you who can smell the Happy Playground
up ahead—the monkey can smell it too. The monkey doesn’t care if his instant gratification
comes alongside you or at your expense, he just loves things that are easy and fun. Once you
hit the Tipping Point, the monkey becomes more interested in getting to the Happy
Playground than the Dark Playground. When this happens, you lose all impulse to
procrastinate and now both you and the monkey are speeding toward the finish.
Before you know it, you’re done, and you’re in the Happy Playground. Now, for the first time
in a while, you and the monkey are a team. You both want to have fun, and it feels great
because it’s earned. When you and the monkey are on a team, you’re almost always happy.
The other thing that might happen when you pass the Tipping Point, depending on the type of
task and how well it’s going, is that you might start feeling fantastic about what you’re
working on, so fantastic that continuing to work sounds like much more fun than stopping to
do leisure activities. You’ve become obsessed with the task and you lose interest in basically
everything else, including food and time—this is called Flow. Flow is not only a blissful
feeling, it’s usually when you do great things.
The monkey is just as addicted to the bliss as you are, and you two are again a team.
Fighting through to the Tipping Point is hard, but what makes procrastination so hard to beat
is that the Instant Gratification Monkey has a terribly short-term memory—even if you wildly
succeed on Monday, when you begin a task on Tuesday, the monkey has forgotten everything
and will again resist entering the Dark Woods or working through them.
And that’s why persistence is such a critical component of success. Laying each brick yields
an inner struggle—and in the end, your ability to win this very specific struggle and lay brick
after brick, day after day, is what lies at the core of a procrastinator’s struggle to gain control
over his world.

So that’s what needs to happen—but if procrastination could be solved by reading a blog

entry, it wouldn’t be such a large problem in so many people’s lives. There’s only one way to
truly beat procrastination:

You need to prove to yourself that you can do it.

You need to show yourself you can do it, not tell yourself. Things will change when you
show yourself that they can. Until then, you won’t believe it, and nothing will change. Think
of yourself like a basketball player on a cold streak. For basketball players, it’s all about
confidence, and an ice cold shooter can tell himself 1000 times, “I’m a great shooter, I’m
going to hit this next one,” but it’s not until he physically hits a shot that his confidence goes
up and his touch comes back.

So how do you start hitting shots?

1) Try to internalize the fact that everything you do is a choice.

Start by thinking about the terms we’ve used in these posts, and if they resonated with you,
write them down. Part of the reason I assigned terms to so many of these feelings or
phenomena—the Instant Gratification Monkey, the Rational Decision-Maker, the Panic
Monster, the Dark Playground, Ickiness, Bricks, the Critical Entrance, the Dark Woods, the
Tipping Point, the Happy Playground, Flow, your Storyline—is that terms help you clarify
the reality of the choices you’re making. It helps expose bad choices and highlights when it’s
most critical to make good ones.

2) Create methods to help you defeat the monkey.

Some possible methods:

 Solicit external support by telling one or more friends or family members about a goal
you’re trying to accomplish and asking them to hold you to it. If that’s hard for
whatever reason, email it to me—I’m a stranger (contact@waitbutwhy.com)—and just
typing out a goal and sending it to a real person can help make it more real. (Some
experts argue that telling people in your life about a goal can be counterproductive, so
this depends on your particular situation.)
 Create a Panic Monster if there’s not already one in place—if you’re trying to finish
an album, schedule a performance for a few months from now, book a space, and send
out an invitation to a group of people.
 If you really want to start a business, quitting your job makes the Panic Monster your
new roommate.
 If you’re trying to write a consistent blog, put “new post every Tuesday” at the top of
the page…
 Leave post-it notes for yourself, reminding you to make good choices.
 Set an alarm to remind yourself to start a task, or to remind you of the stakes.
 Minimize distractions by all means necessary. If TV’s a huge problem, sell your TV.
If the internet’s a huge problem, get a second computer for work that has Wifi disabled,
and turn your phone on Airplane Mode during work sessions.
 Lock yourself into something—put down a non-refundable deposit for lessons or a
membership.
And if the methods you set up aren’t working, change them. Set a reminder for a month from
now that says, “Have things improved? If not, change my methods.”

3) Aim for slow, steady progress—Storylines are rewritten one page at a time.
In the same way a great achievement happens unglorious brick by unglorious brick, a deeply-
engrained habit like procrastination doesn’t change all at once, it changes one modest
improvement at a time. Remember, this is all about showing yourself you can do it, so the
key isn’t to be perfect, but to simply improve. The author who writes one page a day has
written a book after a year. The procrastinator who gets slightly better every week is a totally
changed person a year later.
So don’t think about going from A to Z—just start with A to B. Change the Storyline from “I
procrastinate on every hard task I do” to “Once a week, I do a hard task without
procrastinating.” If you can do that, you’ve started a trend. I’m still a wretched procrastinator,
but I’m definitely better than I was last year, so I feel hopeful about the future.
Why do I think about this topic so much, and why did I just write a 3,500-word blog post on
it?

Because defeating procrastination is the same thing as gaining control over your own life. So
much of what makes people happy or unhappy—their level of fulfillment and satisfaction,
their self-esteem, the regrets they carry with them, the amount of free time they have to
dedicate to their relationships—is severely affected by procrastination. So it’s worthy of
being taken dead seriously, and the time to start improving is now.

____________
The follow-up to these two posts: The Procrastination Matrix

The Procrastination Matrix

By Tim Urban

Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why’s previous
post  on procrastination.
___________

PDF:  We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or
see a preview.)
___________

Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a procrastinator, I would have said yes.
High school students are given all these lectures about “pacing yourself” on longer projects,
and I proudly paced myself less than almost anyone I knew. I never missed a deadline, but I
only did anything the night before it was due. I was a procrastinator.
Except I wasn’t. High school is full of regular deadlines and short-term projects, and even
longterm projects had sub-deadlines that force pacing upon you. There were a few dire
moments, but for the most part, I was just doing everything at the last minute because I knew
I could probably still do well that way—so why not.
There was definitely an Instant Gratification Monkey1 in my head, but he was cute more than
anything. With deadlines looming constantly, my Panic Monster2 was never fully asleep, and
the monkey knew that while he could have some time at the wheel each day, he wasn’t the
one in charge.
One day, high school ended, and so did my life as a somewhat normal-acting person. College
is not like high school. The assignments are big, with a lot of time between deadlines, and
since you’re not a child anymore, classes don’t treat you like one—no one forces you to pace
anything. As a Government major, most of my classes involved a couple papers, a midterm,
and a final exam over a four-month stretch, which means most of the time, there were no hard
deadlines anywhere on the horizon.

Without deadlines to occupy him, my Panic Monster, who can’t think too far ahead, began to
spend a lot of time in hibernation. My Rational Decision-Maker, who never realized how
much he had relied on the Panic Monster, began to have difficulties carrying out his plans.
The more the Panic Monster slept, the more confidence the monkey gained. The Rational
Decision-Maker, the only member of the brain who sees the world clearly, was concerned—
he knew that college assignments were a lot bigger than high school assignments, and that
pacing was no longer something to scoff at, but a critical thing to do. He’d put his foot down
about social commitments when a deadline began to draw closer, but that wouldn’t solve the
problem.
The RDM would slip further into despair, and only the times when things reached their most
dire would anything change.
 
It didn’t matter how obvious a decision seemed to the RDM, it was becoming clear that he
was totally unable to control the monkey without the Panic Monster’s help.
While college was often a disheartening experience for my RDM, it was a full renaissance for
my Instant Gratification Monkey, who explored a wide range of activities in an effort to find
himself. With a Yamaha electric keyboard right next to my desk, the monkey became
increasingly passionate about playing the piano. It almost seemed like the times my RDM
was stomping his foot the hardest about getting to work were the exact moments the monkey
would feel the most spirited about putting on the headphones and becoming lost for hours in
the piano.

When college ended, thrilled to be done forever with formal education, which was clearly not
my thing, I burst out into the world with 1,000 ambitions to do 1,000 things. Just wait till the
world saw me. I had everything imaginable to offer except knowledge, skills, and work ethic.

My RDM had done a lot of thinking about this, and he understood that the monkey had spent
college trying to tell him something important—I wanted to be a composer. That was clearly
the thing I was most drawn to, and finally, it would become the thing I was supposed to do
each day. No more fighting the monkey—he was going to get exactly what he wanted. I had
figured out life, and I moved to LA to write movie scores.
In order to pay my bills, I began tutoring kids after school on their homework or for the SAT,
a side job I chose because it wouldn’t distract me from becoming the next John Williams. It
was the perfect setup, I was brimming with excitement about music, and things were starting
to move—when the weirdest thing happened. Just when I was sure I had found myself, the
monkey began soul searching. When the RDM and I would sit down at the piano to write
something—the exact activity the monkey spent college obsessed with—the monkey would
throw a fit and refuse to join us. The RDM began to feel helpless, the same way he did in
college.
Meanwhile, the monkey had found a new interest—he had become fixated with my side job.
Tutoring was going well, referrals were increasing, and while the RDM would insist that we
were already working with too many students, the monkey would accept every new job that
came our way. Soon, the monkey started thinking bigger, and without running it by the rest of
us, he began hiring my friends to tutor for me. The RDM would wake up eager to dive into
composing, but the whole day would end up being spent on phone calls and buried in
spreadsheets. The monkey had started a business.
My brain and I ended up in an unpleasant no-man’s land. The monkey refused to let us pour
ourselves into our music career, and the RDM refused to embrace the monkey’s new business
career. I was doing a lot of things and not giving my all to any of them.

It was around then that my best friend Andrew moved to LA. Andrew isn’t like me. He lives
and breathes business, with no interest in pursuing anything in the arts, and ever since I met
him when we were five, his monkey has been a tame little bitch who does what he’s told.
After he moved, we started talking about maybe going into business together somehow. My
RDM had refused to entertain taking business seriously until then, but the prospect of starting
a company with Andrew and actually putting a full effort into it was enticing—and the
monkey was clearly into it, so maybe this was the thing I was supposed to be doing all along.
I decided to dive in, and building off of what I had started, we founded a new tutoring
company together.
The RDM still wrestled with the decision to put a pause on the music side of things, but the
company was growing quickly, being in business with Andrew was a great time—like
playing a complex strategy game with your friend—and the RDM finally started to feel okay
about becoming totally wrapped up in business.

Which was the monkey’s cue to become an avid blogger.

I had been casually blogging for a few years at that point, but business taking off was just
what the monkey needed to kick his new writing hobby into full gear, and over the next few
years, I wrote hundreds of blog posts in my off hours. I went into work every day, and I’d be
engaged while I was there—but instead of doing what an entrepreneur is supposed to do
outside of work and keep the wheels turning, mulling over the strategy and allowing the
subconscious to drop key epiphanies on you from time to time, I’d be thinking about what to
blog about next.

In 2013, when Andrew and I decided to start something new, we looked at my monkey, saw
how absorbed he always was with his blog, and thought maybe that was the thing I was
supposed to be doing this whole time—so we started Wait But Why. Andrew would continue
to grow our company while I’d fully immerse myself in this new project, giving the monkey
exactly what he so badly wanted.
___________

What was classic procrastination in college morphed into a bizarre form of insanity once I
entered the real world. On a day-to-day, micro level, there was still always an element of the
normal “RDM tries to do something, monkey makes it difficult” thing, but in a broader,
macro sense, it was almost as if I were chasing  the monkey. After he defeated me so soundly
in college, I wondered if fighting against him in the first place was my mistake. He’s born
from some inner, primal part of me, so wouldn’t it make sense to pay attention to his
inclinations and use them as my guide?
So that’s what I tried to do—when he’d be continually drawn to something, I’d eventually
take his lead and build my life around that. But the problem was, he was almost like a mirage
—once I’d get to where he was, he wouldn’t be there anymore. He’d be somewhere else. This
was confusing—was he there before because he actually wanted to be, or was he just there
because it was where the RDM was not? Did he actually have passions of his own, or was he
just some elusive evil contrarian inside of me with a mission to hold me back from ever doing
anything great with my talents and energies?
Last year, I came across a little diagram that I think holds the key to these questions. It’s
called the Eisenhower Matrix:

The Eisenhower Matrix places anything you could spend your time doing on two spectrums:
one going from the most urgent possible task to the least urgent, the other going from
critically important to totally inconsequential—and using these as axes, divides your world
into four quadrants.

The matrix was popularized in Stephen Covey’s famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People and is named after President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was well-
known for being tremendously productive, which Covey credits to his “first things first”
attitude on how to spend your time. And to Eisenhower, the “first things” were always
the important  ones. He believed you should spend nearly all of your time in Quadrants 1 and
2, and he accomplished this with a simple D-word for each quadrant:
And that’s fantastic for Dwight fucking Eisenhower. But you know what Dwight clearly
didn’t have in his bald head? An all-powerful Instant Gratification Monkey. If he had, he’d
know that a procrastinator’s matrix looks like this:
If you ever want any information on Quadrant 4—directions, places to eat, etc.—just ask a
procrastinator. They live there. For a non-procrastinator, Q4 is a happy place to spend time.
After a productive day working on important tasks, it feels great to kick back in Q4—and
under those circumstances, there’s a name for Q4: The Happy Playground. But
procrastinators don’t tend to hang out in Q4 after an efficient day of high-level work—they’re
there far more often than that, against their will, because the monkey has dragged them there,
all while the Rational Decision-Maker is begging them to leave. And they have a different
name for Q4: The Dark Playground.
As for Quadrants 1 and 3—the urgent quadrants—most procrastinators will end up there
from time to time, usually in a full sweat, with the Panic Monster next to their face
screaming. Q1 and Q3 keep the procrastinator off the streets.
And then there’s Quadrant 2. To a procrastinator, Quadrant 2 is a strange and foreign land,
far, far away. Kind of like Atlantis, or Narnia. He knows it’s an important place, and he’s
tried many times to go there, but there’s a big problem—the monkey is repulsed by it, and the
Panic Monster isn’t concerned with it. And that’s the deadly combo that defeats the
procrastinator every time.

The reason this is disastrous is that the road to the procrastinator’s dreams—the road to
expanding his horizons, exploring his true potential, and achieving work he’s truly proud of
—runs directly through Quadrant 2. Q1 and Q3 may be where people survive, but Q2 is
where people thrive, grow, and blossom.

But if you’re a procrastinator, you’re in luck. You have an ace up your sleeve—someone
daring and fearless, with bountiful energy and dynamic talent, and someone who can defeat
the monkey like stepping on an ant: Future You.
Future You is a procrastinator’s most important ally—someone who’s always there and
always has your back, no matter what. I know all about this firsthand. Future Tim is an
amazing guy.

When my alarm goes off and I don’t want to wake up, I just press the snooze button, which
doles out the job of getting out of bed to Future Tim instead. My to-do list has two parts—a
short, easy one for me, and a long one, full of all the things I can’t imagine ever doing,
because they’re so icky-seeming. Future Tim always handles that one, without a complaint.
Future Tim also has no problem with even the vilest of social obligations. I was recently
invited to attend a feedback-giving session for a three-hour-long play written by someone I
barely know—I certainly had no intention of ever doing that, but I would also have felt guilty
just saying no, so I explained that I have a busy couple months, but that I’d be more than
happy to join when it happens again this summer, a time when it’ll be Future Tim’s problem,
not mine.

Future Tim also has a discipline and balance to his lifestyle I could only ever dream of. I’ve
never been much of an exerciser—but Future Tim belongs to a gym and does all the jogging
for both of us, and I love how into cooking healthy meals Future Tim is, because I personally
don’t have the time. Future Tim is the kind of guy we all want to be like—I suggest getting to
know him yourself, which you can do by buying his books, since he’s a prolific author.

But the most important role Future Tim plays in my life brings us back to the Eisenhower
Matrix. In a convenient stroke of fate, Future Tim happens to spend almost all of his time in
the one place I can never seem to get to myself: the all-important Quadrant 2. Future Tim is
Quadrant 2’s warden, and when I make a list of important to-do items and notice that most of
them seem to land in Q2, I don’t have to despair, because I know Future Tim is on top of
them. Which is good, considering how dire a situation Past Tim, that useless fuck, has often
left me in:
But for all of Future Tim’s virtues, he has one fatal flaw that kind of ruins everything: he
doesn’t exist.

It turns out that Future You is as much of a mirage as the monkey’s passion for a hobby. I
banked on Future Tim’s real-world existence for my most important plans, but every time I’d
finally arrive at a time when I thought I would find Future Tim, he was nowhere to be found
—the only person there would be stupid Present Tim. That’s the thing that really sucks about
Future You—whenever time finally gets to him, he’s not Future You anymore, he’s Present
You, and Present You can’t do the tasks you assigned to Future You because those tasks can
only be done by someone without a monkey. You assigned them to Future You in the first
place because he doesn’t have a monkey—that was the whole point. So you do what you
always do—you re-delegate them to Future You, hoping that next time time catches up with
Future You, he actually exists.
This is what left me unable, for years, to give life my full effort. The important work to be
done usually lives in Q2, a place I had a hard time going to, so I’d direct the extra energy to a
passionate hobby instead. The monkey would get super into these hobbies, because hobbies
are, by definition, in Q4—a place the monkey loves to be.

So here’s what went on when I was supposed to be pursuing a composing career:

And when I decided to “follow the monkey’s lead” and take on business, I was missing the
key point: “taking on” business meant making business the thing I was supposed to do, which
turned it from a not important task into an important one—moving “business” from Q4, the
monkey’s favorite place, to Q2, his least favorite place.
The fact that I expected the monkey to remain obsessed with business after the switch to Q2
shows how little I understood the monkey. The monkey’s passion never was music, or
business, or blogging—the monkey’s passion was always Q4.

And the thing the monkey really likes about Q4 isn’t anything about Q4 in particular—it’s
that Quadrant 4 isn’t Quadrant 1 or 2. The monkey, whose core drive is to do
whatever’s easiest, can’t stand the “important” quadrants, because the important quadrants
are where the pressure’s on—it’s where there’s something to prove, where your actions have
consequences, where the stakes are high, and where you’re shooting for the stars, which
means you might fail to reach them. No fucking thanks, says the monkey. Writing 300 blog
posts while I was supposed to be dreaming up brilliant business growth strategies wasn’t
“easy” in the sense that I didn’t have to work hard to write them—it was easy in that there
was nothing at stake. Stakes are really what’s hard for a human.
___________

When I started writing posts for Wait But Why, I knew I wanted to write about
procrastination. I needed to try to articulate the madness that went on in my head. After
assigning that daunting mission to Future Tim for a while, I finally bit the bullet and did it.
The reaction was overwhelming. In addition to the over 1,300 comments on the two posts,
here’s the breakdown of emails I’ve received from readers:
There have been thousands of emails. Apparently this whole thing isn’t just me.
And the emails aren’t quick, “Hey I liked the procrastination posts bye” notes—
they’re thorough. And heartfelt. A good number of them mention that the posts made them
cry. And they’re not crying because they were moved by my shitty stick drawings—they’re
crying because they were reading aboutone of the biggest problems in their lives.
The profiles of those who have emailed range wildly, covering all ages, all kinds of
professions, and hailing from almost every country in the world. I’ve heard from a 13-year-
old in Pakistan, a middle-aged professor in Argentina, an 80-year-old retired nurse in
Mississippi; a German graphic designer, an Australian author, a Ghanaian filmmaker, a
Korean entrepreneur. And the PhD students—the hordes of PhD students—doing the ultimate
Q2 task.

In one way, these people all have the same exact problem, and the same problem I have—an
Instant Gratification Monkey they can’t control. But I’ve noticed, after reading every one of
their stories, that the extent to which this problem is ruining their lives varies drastically,
depending on a few key facts about their particular circumstances. This distinction places the
readers who have emailed into three categories:

1) The Disastinators
Of all procrastinators out there, the Disastinators are in the worst shape. A Disastinator is
permanently camped out in Quadrant 4, and procrastination is completely destroying their
life. A procrastinator usually becomes a Disastinator for one of two reasons:

A) Their monkey has stopped being scared of the Panic Monster and has become all-
powerful
B) They’re a normal procrastinator but they’re in a life situation with no external
deadlines or pressure
Situation A is super-dark, and as I’ve learned from reader emails, not that uncommon. These
people have lost the ability to do almost anything that matters to them and are either in a
downward spiral or have given up entirely.

In Situation B, the Disastinator isn’t a worse procrastinator than any other, it’s just that their
circumstances are a catastrophic match for their personality. The nature of their life and work
gives the Panic Monster no reason to wake up at all, and unfortunately, the monkey isn’t
scared of the Self-Loathing Monster.
The outcome is that the Disastinator gets nothing done, ever. Many of the PhD candidates
who emailed me fall into this category.

2) The Impostinators
We haven’t talked much about Quadrant 3, but it might be the most dangerous quadrant of
all, and it’s where the Impostinator reigns king. The Impostinator’s life looks like this:

The Impostinator seems productive, but she’s really an imposter—a procrastinator wearing a

productive person mask. By spending all of her work time in Q3, she seems busy—
she is  busy—but she never seems to make much progress on her real goals.
Impostinators have clever monkeys, and Q3 is the monkey’s most clever trick. The monkey
knows that the RDM, who can be gullible, can be appeased if he spends ample time out of the
Q4 Dark Playground. So the Impostinator’s monkey creates a battle that goes back and forth
between Q4 and Q3, and that works because Q3 feels productive to the Impostinator. It relies
on one major delusion of the Impostinator—that busy = productive.
So an Impostinator will spend the whole day answering emails, running errands, making
phone calls, organizing lists and schedules, participating in meetings, etc. and if she’s judging
herself by time spent out of the Dark Playground, she’s a smashing success. But at the end of
the day, the satisfaction she feels has a hint of emptiness to it, and the Happy Playground is
never quite fully happy. She may have deluded herself into thinking she’s living a productive
life, but in her subconscious, she knows she’s not doing what she’s supposed to be doing. Her
feelings of accomplishment come along with an undercurrent of despair.

In reality, she’s living in a grand, overarching procrastination, brilliantly crafted by her

monkey. Rather than try to win the tug-of-war between doing what matters—the stuff up in
Q2—and the Dark Playground, the Impostinator’s monkey tricks the RDM into fighting on
the wrong battlefield, and he lets the RDM “beat” him on this battlefield, which leads her to
believe she’s doing a good job.

The other difficulty the Impostinator faces is that sometimes Q3 disguises itself as Q1. A
busy Impostinator often believes that the urgent work she’s consumed with is important, but
the problem with that is what Eisenhower himself said best:
What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.
In other words, Quadrant 1 often does not exist. This isn’t always the case, but it’s especially
likely to be true for people who have yet to get their career rolling, because usually when
your truly important work is also urgent, it means you have something good going on. This
creates a catch-22, where the people who most need urgency in order to do things—
procrastinators early in their career—are often those with a totally vacant Quadrant 1.
The more time goes on, the more I think that being super busy tends to mean having a packed
Q3 (usually mixed in with too much Q4 time). I know that when I’m in one of those zones
where I’m telling everyone how busy I am and how little time I have for them, it’s almost
always because I’m overloaded with Q3 bullshit. People who are really on top of their life—
really in control—tend to have plenty of space in their schedules. But society smiles upon
busy people, the phrase “I think you have too much time on your hands” is an insult, and that
leaves Impostinators looking—and often feeling—like they’re doing it right. And while the
Impostinator will always feel superior to the Disastinator, the truth is that in terms of real
productivity on things that matter, they’re equal.
The major lesson here is to beware of Quadrant 3. Q3 grabs you by the collar and thrusts you
onto a treadmill of reacting  to things. It’s not a place of self control. And if you’re not
careful, Q3 will suck your life away. I know, because I’ve spent a lot of my life as an
Impostinator.
Of the many Impostinators who emailed me, the most common professions were artists of
some kind or entrepreneurs. In both of those situations, you’re the boss of your own life, and
the important work to do—improving your skills, deepening your network, executing a
creative vision—is rarely urgent.

3) The Successtinators
After spending most of my life feeling unable to maximize myself, since starting Wait But
Why a year and a half ago, I’ve written over 250,000 words—the equivalent of 1,000 book
pages—and what I’m doing really matters to me. For the first time, the satisfaction of
accomplishment doesn’t come along with a twinge of guilt or emptiness or despair. I’ve done
it! I’m a doer.
Not quite.
The reality is, I haven’t overcome my monkey problems one ounce more than the
Impostinators and Disastinaters who emailed me—the big difference is, I’ve gotten myself
into a situation where I have a big, fat Quadrant 1 in my life. Not a fake Q1 that’s really Q3
in disguise—but a genuine Q1, and it’s packed. The intimate relationship a blog has with real,
living people—and the pressure that generates—turns a blogger’s important work into urgent
work, as soon as there are enough readers that the Panic Monster takes interest in things.

For a procrastinator, this is the opposite of the PhD-type situation, which I described as a
catastrophic match for a procrastinator. Writing regularly with an immediate audience is an
example of a terrific match for a procrastinator’s personality, because it puts his Panic
Monster in the optimal location—it aligns the Panic Monster with his most important
endeavor.

Of course, my monkey is still wreaking havoc over my whole life in any way he can—I
pulled a lifespan-reducing all-nighter to finish this post. But there’s a key distinction between
what he’s doing now and what he was doing during my previous projects. With those other
projects, he spent his Q4 time pursuing real, ambitious projects—and he was allowed to do
that because the RDM wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted, and he would question whether
the monkey was actually on to something with his distractions. But at least so far, working on
Wait But Why is hitting the nail on the head for the RDM, because he’s actually spending a
lot of time above the important line, so he has a conviction about the undertaking he didn’t
previously. Because of this, he’ll let the monkey tap dance around Q4 and Q3, mainly
because he has no power not to, but he won’t allow the monkey to take on
anything serious with his time.
I have not conquered procrastination, but for the time being, at least, I’m in the least bad type
of procrastinator situation—I’m a Successtinator.
A Successtinator has found a solution-ish to his problems, but it’s not pretty, often not
healthy, and usually not sustainable. It’s a clever duct-taping of a troubled machine to hold it
over temporarily.

I received a lot of emails from Successtinators, and the patterns were consistent and resonate
with my own current situation. A Successtinator can be happy with his life, but isn’t usually
that happy in his life. And that’s because being a Successtinator does not make you a success.
Someone who does something well professionally at the expense of balance, relationships,
and health is not a success. Real success means having both professional life and lifestyle
working well and in harmony—and Successtinators are too stressed, too unavailable, and are
often completely deprived of Happy Playground time, which is a critical component of a
happy life. A Successtinator is also usually limited in his professional possibilities—great
work can be done in Q1, but it’s often more on the maintaining side of things. Q2 is still
where most of the professional growth and out-of-the-box thinking takes place, and like all
procrastinators, Successtinators rarely set foot in Q2.
___________

There are bigger problems in the world than procrastination. Things like poverty, disease,
mental illness, and drug addiction all make procrastination seem glaringly like a problem of
the privileged—something to suffer over for those whose lives have no real suffering.

But if a skeptic spent a few hours reading through the mound of procrastination-related
emails I’ve received, I think they’d agree that this is a dire problem in many, many lives. And
it doesn’t just harm the procrastinator—it hurts the people close to the procrastinator,
spreading the effect.
It’s also the world’s loss. For every Steve Jobs or John Lennon or J.K. Rowling or anyone
else whose talents have enhanced our lives, there are thousands of people with just as much
potential who never achieve much for the world because they waste away their time in the
wrong quadrants.

One way to look at this is that each human life has a certain number of “time points,” and it’s
up to you how you “spend” them. Consider the difference between someone who spends 30
hours a week in Q2 and someone else who only manages two hours of Q2 time a week. Since
Q2 is, for many, where real advancement happens, over the course of their lives, the 30 hour
person will accomplish 15 times as much in her life as the two hour person. And in reality,
the multiplier is probably even larger than 15, since progress builds upon progress and the
rate can accelerate (i.e. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have accomplished 1/15th of what he
accomplished if he had put in 1/15th the productive hours—he probably would have
accomplished none of it.) The distinction between an ordinary person and an extraordinary
person might simply come down to the differences in how they allot their time points.
Clearing away delusion
If we want to improve our time point spending, the first step is learning to see the world
through a crystal clear Eisenhower Matrix—which means shaking off all delusion. We need
to develop well-thought-out definitions of urgent and important, which will be different for
everyone and requires a deep dig into the highly personal question, “What matters most to
me?”
Brett McKay defines “important tasks” as things that contribute to our long-term mission,
values, and goals. This is broad and straightforward and a good core sentence to come back
to when assessing importance down the road.
The thought process about what is and isn’t urgent should revolve around the self-discussion
of what’s most important. Ideally, urgent would not  mean, “The thing grabbing me hardest
by the collar”—it would be defined by what, of the important tasks on your
list, would benefit most from happening sooner rather than later. Using this definition,
spending time with your kids would certainly qualify as urgent, while under the typical
deadline-related definition of urgent, it would qualify as “not urgent.” In other words, the
order of your priorities is much better off being set by your RDM than your Panic Monster.
Wisdom resides in the RDM, and when the mindless Panic Monster calls the shots on what’s
urgent and what’s not, you take the RDM’s wisdom out of the game.
You may also want to gather some hard data on how you’re currently spending your time
points, by logging your hours for the next week and seeing just how many of them fall into
each of the four quadrants (you’ll probably be unpleasantly surprised by the results).

Becoming the boss of your brain

Once you feel clear on your Eisenhower Matrix and where its various boundaries lie, you’ll
need to do the hard part and gain control over how you spend your time points within it.
Which, for a procrastinator, is life’s greatest challenge.

The rewards of gaining control are obvious. It’s incredible how much a person can get done
—while also maintaining a balanced lifestyle—if they’re in control of their time point
spending. And those not in control will lose most of their time points to Q3 and Q4 and feel
like they don’t have time for either their work or their lifestyle, all while accomplishing very
little. Time point allotment is everything.
A procrastinator in desperate straits can take a half step in the right direction through the
brute force method of rearranging his life in a way that makes him a Successtinator. That’s
where I am now, and it’s a hell of a lot better than where I was before.

But that’s like hiring a bodyguard instead of learning how to fight. The real goal of a
procrastinator must be to figure out how to become the boss of his brain. A procrastinator’s
reality is that his inner self—his Rational Decision-Maker—is the grandmaster of his life in
theory, but in practice, only a spectator. The procrastinator’s RDM goes, helplessly, where
the waves take him, shuffled from activity to activity by the primal forces of the monkey and
the Panic Monster. Until a procrastinator’s RDM can walk, on his own, from Q4 to Q2,
whenever he wants to, he’s not fixed.

___________

If you Google “how to stop procrastinating,” you’ll find about 1,000 articles, all offering
terrific advice on how to do it. The problem is that the articles are always written for sane
people, and procrastinators aren’t sane people. Being insane, procrastinators are always under
the delusion that they’re sane, so they read an advice article and think they’ll be able to apply
it to their life. But then it doesn’t work out that way.
Before a procrastinator can act on good advice, he needs to have control. A race car driver
can get all the coaching in the world, but if, when the race starts, someone else is controlling
the steering wheel and the pedals, all the coaching is useless.

That’s why the only way a procrastinator can take the wheel in his hands is if his self-
fulfilling prophecy—his storyline— says that he can. And storylines only change with real-
world action. Quite the chicken and egg issue.
At its deepest level, it comes down to a battle of confidence. The RDM and monkey each
have their own idea of how to spend your time points, and whichever of them is more
confident—whoever has a stronger belief that they’re the alpha dog in the relationship—ends
up prevailing. The difference between a procrastinator and a non-procrastinator is simply that
the procrastinator’s monkey and RDM both believe that the monkey is the alpha dog, and the
non-procrastinator’s pair both believe that the RDM is the boss.
But as firmly entrenched as these confidence levels may feel, the monkey and the RDM share
a single pool of confidence with a fixed sum—when one’s confidence goes up, the other’s
goes down—and the balance can begin to be tipped by the smallest changes, taking your
storyline with it.

Figuring out the starting point of this chicken and egg paradox is each procrastinator’s
personal quest. But a universal starting point is to try to remain aware as much as possible.
Aware of what’s important, aware of what’s urgent, and most importantly—aware of the
monkey. The monkey is not your friend, and he never will be. But he’s also part of your head
and impossible to get rid of, so get in the habit of noticing him. When you wake up in the
morning, he’ll be there. When you sit down to work, he’ll be there. Whenever you most badly
need all the guts and grit you can muster, he’ll be there to take your guts and grit away.
But he thrives off of unconsciousness. Simply by noticing him and saying to yourself, “Yup,
there’s the monkey, right on cue,” you can start to tip the balance out of its default state. Then
maybe one day, you’ll find yourself nonchalantly shoving the monkey off of the wheel with
the simplest, “No monkey, not now.” And your life will be forever changed.

___________
I love the emails I’ve received about procrastination, and I hope they continue. But I always
wish the people who have emailed me could hear each other’s stories. I encourage anyone
who feels like sharing their story to do so in the comments.
Life is a Picture, But You Live
in a Pixel
 November 20, 2013 By Tim Urban

This is Jack:

 
And this is Today:

 
Jack and Today are dating.
The relationship is going all right and Jack’s reasonably happy, but for a while now, Jack has
known that the Today he’s with is not the one. Sure, he and Today have fun sometimes, but
all too often, Jack feels like he’s dating a mundane Wednesday, and that’s certainly not the
kind of Today he plans to be with in the long run.
Because he knows the relationship is just temporary, Jack doesn’t invest that much of himself
in it, spending more of his energy thinking about someone else—Tomorrow.
Now Tomorrow is the kind of day he’d love to date—fulfilling, passionate, meaningful and
exhilarating. He knows it’s only a matter of time before he finds a Today just like that, the
kind of Today he’ll be with when he’s found love, when his career has taken off, and when he
lives in his dream city. He can just picture her now:
 
That time will come, but Jack has another plan in the meantime—he’s getting a raise next
week, and he’s going to break up with his current Today as soon as that happens and start
dating someone new—Today Once I Get My Raise. Of course, she’s not the kind of Today
worthy of marriage for a guy like Jack, but she’s much more fun and exciting than his current
very ordinary Today.

The morning after he gets his raise, Jack wakes up with an extra bounce in his step. He’s a
new man with a new Today, and he likes her already:
 
That night, he goes out to a restaurant he couldn’t afford just a day earlier, and the second
day, he buys a new set of golf clubs.

 
Two weeks later, Jack goes back to that fancy restaurant, but something feels a little different.
The food is still great, but it’s just not quite as exciting this time.
And a month after that, when he heads out golfing for the fourth time with the new clubs, his
mood isn’t affected at all by them—it just kind of feels like a normal golf day again.
Until one day, the walls look exactly how they did before his raise.

 
Jack is confused. He left his ex-Today in the dust, so why does it kind of seem like he’s
dating her again? He’s supposed to be done with that part of his life.
It’s disappointing, but Jack shrugs it off—this raise was small potatoes anyway, and the real
future’s all still to come, so it’s not a big deal if he’s not that happy.
A few years later, Jack has a big month. First, after years of being single, he meets this
amazing girl and they hit it off right away. She’s exactly who he’s been waiting for, and after
a few dates, she’s his girlfriend. Right around the same time, the new restaurant-rating
business Jack started a year earlier is written up in a big newspaper and suddenly, business
starts raining in. He knew the business was a good idea, and now this is proof. For Jack, it’s
all finally happening.
And his new Today, Today Once My Business Takes Off And I Find A Girlfriend, is
everything he spent his last few years dreaming about.

 
This is the life Jack always knew he’d be living soon enough—he’s just that kind of guy. And
his Wednesdays will never be mundane again.
But then something starts to happen. After a few months, even though things are going well
with his girlfriend and his business’s growth has only accelerated, Jack finds himself
appreciating all of the excitement around his Today a bit less than he used to, which makes
things feel a little less vibrant. He’s busier than he’s ever been before, working almost
constantly, and while he’s still pleased with his new Today, his general mood doesn’t feel all
that high anymore.
 
And a year after that, even though Jack’s life is richer and more meaningful than it used to be,
he’s gotten completely used to the way things are. He also has watched a friend’s career take
off even more than his own and wonders what that must feel like, and his other friend seems
to have a little more fun with his girlfriend than Jack has with his—must be nice, he thinks.
And one day, Jack wakes up to find himself here:

He can’t believe it. What the hell is she doing here?

He considers placing a restraining order on this ex who won’t leave him alone, but ultimately
decides to let it go—after all, it’s not like he was gonna marry Today Once My Business
Takes Off And I Find A Girlfriend anyway. The real Today he’s holding out for is Today
Once I Sell My Business and Marry My Girlfriend, and that’s the Today he’ll truly be happy
with.
***
Jack’s struggle isn’t unusual—it’s something most of us are going through in one way or
another. In his amazing TED Talk, Harvard professor Dan Gilbert describes what he calls
The Impact Bias—our “tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events.”
Humans have the ability to simulate future situations in our heads to predict what it’ll be like
to experience them, but that simulator doesn’t always work so well and tends “to make you
believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.”
Gilbert says that “from field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an
election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or
not passing a college test, and on and on, have far less impact, less intensity, and much less
duration than people expect them to have.” It even applies to terrible events in our lives.
According to Gilbert, “a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests
that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact
whatsoever on your happiness.” Jack is clearly a victim of The Impact Bias.

Jack’s difficulties also relate to The Pixel Theory, a phrase coined by Tim Urban during his
famous “alone in his apartment in front of the mirror” TED Talk.

Jack sees his life as a rich picture depicting an epic story and assumes that the key to his
happiness lies in the broad components of the image.
But this is a mistake, because Jack doesn’t live in the picture’s broad strokes, he lives at all
times in a single pixel of the image—a single Today.
 
So while thousands of Jack’s Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a
complete picture, Jack spends each moment of his actual reality in one unremarkable Today
pixel or another. Jack’s error is brushing off his mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely
on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of his actual life.
And his assumption that his future Todays would be as vibrant and rich as the broad picture
of his life is misunderstanding the unremarkable nature of a pixel, no matter what one’s life
looks like in broad strokes. This assumption leads Jack to feel like his uneventful Today must
be an unsatisfactory temporary relationship, when in reality it’s an inevitable and permanent
marriage that he must accept and embrace in order to be happy.
As far as what will actually make Jack happier as he lives in his mundane Wednesday, there
are a number of scientifically proven things, including spending time with people you like,
sleeping well and exercising, doing things you’re good at, and doing kind things for others.
But perhaps the first thing Jack needs to do is learn to feel more gratitude,
another scientifically provenroute to happiness and the area in which he falls the most
woefully short. Jack spends so much of his time looking up at the great things that will come
his way and planning his future happiness and not nearly enough time looking down and
thinking about how badly he used to want so many of the things he currently has.
Your Life in Weeks
 May 7, 2014 By Tim Urban

Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.

This is a long human life in years:

And here’s a human life in months:

But today, we’re going to look at a human life in weeks:
Each row of weeks makes up one year. That’s how many weeks it takes to turn a newborn
into a 90-year-old.

It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are
—fully countable—staring you in the face.

Before we discuss things further, let’s look at how a typical American spends their weeks:
Sources: [1][2][3][4][5]
There are some other interesting ways to use the weeks chart:
But how about your weeks?
 

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart
helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve
got.

Given that fact, the only appropriate word to describe your weeks is precious. There are
trillions upon trillions of weeks in eternity, and those are your tiny handful. Going with the
“precious” theme, let’s imagine that each of your weeks is a small gem, like a 2mm, .05 carat
diamond. Here’s one:

If you multiply the volume of a .05 carat diamond by the number of weeks in 90 years
(4,680), it adds up to just under a tablespoon.

Looking at this spoon of diamonds, there’s one very clear question to ask: “Are you making
the most of your weeks?”
In thinking about my own weeks and how I tend to use them, I decided that there are two
good ways to use a diamond:

1) Enjoying the diamond

2) Building something to make your future diamonds or the diamonds of others more
enjoyable

In other words, you have this small spoonful of diamonds and you really want to create a life
in which they’re making you happy. And if a diamond is not making you happy, it should
only be because you’re using it to make other diamonds go down better—either your own in
the future or those of others. In the ideal situation, you’re well balanced between #1 and #2
and you’re often able to accomplish both simultaneously (like those times when you love
your job).
Of course, if a diamond is enjoyable but by enjoying it you’re screwing your future diamonds
(an Instant Gratification Monkey specialty), that’s not so good. Likewise, if you’re using
diamond after diamond to build something for your future, but it’s not making you happy and
seems like a long-term thing with no end in sight, that’s not great either.
But the worst possible way to use a diamond is by accomplishing neither #1 nor #2 above.
Sometimes “neither” happens when you’re in either the wrong career or the wrong
relationship, and it’s often a symptom of either a shortage of courage, self-discipline, or
creativity. Sometimes “neither” happens because of a debilitating problem.

We’ve all had Neither Weeks and they don’t feel good. And when a long string of Neither
Weeks happens, you become depressed, frustrated, hopeless, and a bunch of other upsetting
adjectives. It’s inevitable to have Neither Weeks, and sometimes they’re important—it’s
often a really bad Neither Week that leads you to a life-changing epiphany—but trying to
minimize your Neither Weeks is a worthy goal.

It can all be summed up like this:

 

The Life Calendar

One of the ways we end up in NeitherLand is by not thinking about things hard enough—so
one of the most critical skills is continual reflection and self-awareness. Otherwise, you can
fall into an unconscious rut and waste a bunch of precious diamonds.

To help both you and ourselves stay conscious and avoid NeitherLand, we’ve created a Life
Calendar that lays out every week of your life on one sheet of paper. We don’t typically bring
products into posts, but in this case, they go hand-in-hand.

The calendar is a 24″ by 36″ poster on high-quality poster paper, made to be written on and
last for decades. It costs $20 and you can buy it here.
Besides the purpose of encouraging regular reflection, we hope the calendar can help you feel
more oriented in your life, help you set goals and hold yourself to them, and remind you to be
proud of yourself for what you’ve accomplished and grateful for the diamonds in your spoon.

How you use the calendar is totally open for creativity. Some possibilities:

 Highlight the weeks in the past in different colors to segment them into “life
chapters”—i.e. High School, College, Job 1, Job 2, New City, Engagement, Marriage,
etc., or maybe a whole other conception of what a life chapter means to you. You can
also mark special boxes where key turning points happened.
  Write something in each week’s box as it goes by—the boxes are large enough to
write a few words in with a sharp pencil.
 Plot out goals for the future by making a mark on a future box and visually seeing
exactly how many weeks you have to get there.
 If you’re a new parent, it might be fun to make one for your child so they can look at
it later and have some info on what happened in the first few years of their life.
 Or maybe you’d rather leave it totally untouched.
Both the week chart above and the life calendar are a reminder to me that this grid of empty
boxes staring me in the face is mine. We tend to feel locked into whatever life we’re living,
but this pallet of empty boxes can be absolutely whatever we want it to be. Everyone you
know, everyone you admire, every hero in history—they did it all with that same grid of
empty boxes.
The boxes can also be a reminder that life is forgiving. No matter what happens each week,
you get a new fresh box to work with the next week. It makes me want to skip the New
Year’s Resolutions—they never work anyway—and focus on making
New Week’s Resolutions every Sunday night. Each blank box is an opportunity to crush the
week—a good thing to remember.
The Calendar:

______
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posting schedule isn’t exactly…regular…this is the best way to stay up-to-date with WBW
posts.
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Taming the Mammoth: Why
You Should Stop Caring What
Other People Think
 June 13, 2014 By Tim Urban

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here.

Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth

The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very
pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name
was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.

When you’re seven, there aren’t really any actionable steps you can take when you’re in love
with someone. You’re not even sure what you want from the situation. There’s just this
amorphous yearning that’s a part of your life, and that’s that.

But for me, it became suddenly relevant a few months later, when during recess one day, one
of the girls in the class started asking each of the boys, “Who do youuu want to marry?”
When she asked me, it was a no-brainer. “Alana.”
Disaster.

I was still new to being a human and didn’t realize that the only socially acceptable answer
was, “No one.”
The second I answered, the heinous girl ran toward other students, telling each one, “Tim said
he wants to marry Alana!” Each person she told covered their mouth with uncontrollable
laughter. I was finished. Life was over.
The news quickly got back to Alana herself, who stayed as far away from me as possible for
days after. If she knew what a restraining order was, she’d have taken one out.

This horrifying experience taught me a critical life lesson—it can be mortally dangerous to be
yourself, and you should exercise extreme social caution at all times.

Now this sounds like something only a traumatized second grader would think, but the weird
thing, and the topic of this post, is that this lesson isn’t just limited to me and my debacle of a
childhood—it’s a defining paranoia of the human species. We share a collective insanity that
pervades human cultures throughout the world:
An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think
of us.
Evolution does everything for a reason, and to understand the origin of this particular
insanity, let’s back up for a minute to 50,000BC in Ethiopia, where
your Great  Grandfather lived as part of a small tribe.
2,000

Back then, being part of a tribe was critical to survival. A tribe meant food and protection in a
time when neither was easy to come by. So for your Great  Grandfather, almost nothing in
2,000

the world was more important than being accepted by his fellow tribe members, especially
those in positions of authority. Fitting in with those around him and pleasing those above him
meant he could stay in the tribe, and about the worst nightmare he could imagine would be
people in the tribe starting to whisper about how annoying or unproductive or weird he was—
because if enough people disapproved of him, his ranking within the tribe would drop, and if
it got really bad, he’d be kicked out altogether and left for dead. He also knew that if he ever
embarrassed himself by pursuing a girl in the tribe and being rejected, she’d tell the other
girls about it—not only would he have blown his chance with that girl, but he might never
have a mate at all now because every girl that would ever be in his life knew about his lame,
failed attempt. Being socially accepted was everything.
Because of this, humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them
—a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. Let’s
call that obsession a human’s Social Survival Mammoth. It looks something like this:

Your Great  Grandfather’s Social Survival Mammoth was central to his ability to endure
2,000

and thrive. It was simple—keep the mammoth well fed with social approval and pay close
attention to its overwhelming fears of nonacceptance, and you’ll be fine.
And that was all well and fine in 50,000BC. And 30,000BC. And 10,000BC. But something
funny has happened for humans in the last 10,000 years—their civilization
has dramatically changed. Sudden, quick change is something civilization has the ability to
do, and the reason that can be awkward is that our evolutionary biology can’t move nearly as
fast. So while for most of history, both our social structure and our biology evolved and
adjusted at a snail’s pace together, civilization has recently developed the speed capabilities
of a hare while our biology has continued snailing along.
Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans
with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival
in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. We’re all here in 2014,
accompanied by a large, hungry, and easily freaked-out woolly mammoth who still thinks it’s
50,000BC.

Why else would you try on four outfits and still not be sure what to wear before going out?
The mammoth’s nightmares about romantic rejection made your ancestors cautious and
savvy, but in today’s world, it just makes you a coward:
And don’t even get the mammoth started on the terror of artistic risks:
The mammoth’s hurricane of fear of social disapproval plays a factor in most parts of most
people’s lives. It’s what makes you feel weird about going to a restaurant or a movie alone;
it’s what makes parents care a little too much about where their child goes to college; it’s
what makes you pass up a career you’d love in favor of a more lucrative career you’re
lukewarm about; it’s what makes you get married before you’re ready to a person you’re not
in love with.
And while keeping your highly insecure Social Survival Mammoth feeling calm and safe
takes a lot of work, that’s only one half of your responsibilities. The mammoth also needs to
be fed regularly and robustly—with praise, approval, and the feeling of being on the right
side of any social or moral dichotomy.

Why else would you be such an image-crafting douchebag on Facebook?

Or brag when you’re out with friends even though you always regret it later?
Society has evolved to accommodate this mammoth-feeding frenzy, inventing things like
accolades and titles and the concept of prestige in order to keep our mammoths satisfied—
and often to incentivize people to do meaningless jobs and live unfulfilling lives they
wouldn’t otherwise consider taking part in.

Above all, mammoths want to fit in—that’s what tribespeople had always needed to do so
that’s how they’re programmed. Mammoths look around at society to figure out what they’re
supposed to do, and when it becomes clear, they jump right in. Just look at any two college
fraternity pictures taken ten years apart:
Or all those subcultures where every single person has one of the same three socially-
acceptable advanced degrees:

Sometimes, a mammoth’s focus isn’t on wider society as much as it’s on winning the
approval of a Puppet Master in your life. A Puppet Master is a person or group of people
whose opinion matters so much to you that they’re essentially running your life. A Puppet
Master is often a parent, or maybe your significant other, or sometimes an alpha member of
your group of friends. A Puppet Master can be a person you look up to who you don’t know
very well—maybe even a celebrity you’ve never met—or a group of people you hold in
especially high regard.
We crave the Puppet Master’s approval more than anyone’s, and we’re so horrified at the
thought of upsetting the Puppet Master or feeling their nonacceptance or ridicule that we’ll do
anything to avoid it. When we get to this toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master,
that person’s presence hangs over our entire decision-making process and pulls the strings of
our opinions and our moral voice.
With so much thought and energy dedicated to the mammoth’s needs, you often end up
neglecting someone else in your brain, someone all the way at the center—your Authentic
Voice.

Your Authentic Voice, somewhere in there, knows all about you. In contrast to the black-and-
white simplicity of the Social Survival Mammoth, your Authentic Voice is complex,
sometimes hazy, constantly evolving, and unafraid. Your AV has its own, nuanced moral
code, formed by experience, reflection, and its own personal take on compassion and
integrity. It knows how you feel deep down about things like money and family and
marriage, and it knows which kinds of people, topics of interest, and types of activities you
truly enjoy, and which you don’t. Your AV knows that it doesn’t know how your life will or
should play out, but it tends to have a strong hunch about the right step to take next.
And while the mammoth looks only to the outside world in its decision-making process, your
Authentic Voice uses the outside world to learn and gather information, but when it’s time for
a decision, it has all the tools it needs right there in the core of your brain.

Your AV is also someone the mammoth tends to ignore entirely. A strong opinion from a
confident person in the outside world? The mammoth is all ears. But a passionate plea from
your AV is largely dismissed until someone else validates it.

And since our 50,000-year-old brains are wired to give the mammoth a whole lot of sway in
things, your Authentic Voice starts to feel like it’s irrelevant. Which makes it shrink and fade
and lose motivation.

Eventually, a mammoth-run person can lose touch with their AV entirely.

In tribal times, AVs often spent their lives in quiet obscurity, and this was largely okay. Life
was simple, and conformity was the goal—and the mammoth had conformity covered just
fine.

But in today’s large, complex world of varying cultures and personalities and opportunities
and options, losing touch with your AV is dangerous. When you don’t know who you are, the
only decision-making mechanism you’re left with is the crude and outdated needs and
emotions of your mammoth. When it comes to the most personal questions, instead of
digging deep into the foggy center of what you really believe in to find clarity, you’ll look to
others for the answers. Who you are becomes some blend of the strongest opinions around
you.

Losing touch with your AV also makes you fragile, because when your identity is built on the
approval of others, being criticized or rejected by others really hurts. A bad break-up is
painful for everyone, but it stings in a much deeper place for a mammoth-run person than for
a person with a strong AV. A strong AV makes a stable core, and after a break-up, that core
is still holding firm—but since the acceptance of others is all a mammoth-run person has,
being dumped by a person who knows you well is a far more shattering experience.
Likewise, you know those people who react to being criticized by coming back with a nasty
low-blow? Those tend to be severely mammoth-run people, and criticism makes them so mad
because mammoths cannot handle criticism.
At this point, the mission should be clear—we need to figure out a way to override the wiring
of our brain and tame the mammoth. That’s the only way to take our lives back.

Part 2: Taming the Mammoth

Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps
keep the mammoth in check. Others die without ever reining their mammoth in at all,
spending their whole lives at its whim. Most of us are somewhere in the middle—we’ve got
control of our mammoth in certain areas of our lives while it wreaks havoc in others. Being
run by your mammoth doesn’t make you a bad or weak person—it just means you haven’t yet
figured out how to get a grip on it. You might not even be aware that you have a mammoth at
all or of the extent to which your Authentic Voice has been silenced.

Whatever your situation, there are three steps to getting your mammoth under your control:

Step 1: Examine Yourself

The first step to improving things is a clear and honest assessment of what’s going on in your
head, and there are three parts of this:

1) Get to know your Authentic Voice

This doesn’t sound that hard, but it is. It takes some serious reflection to sift through the webs
of other people’s thoughts and opinions and figure out who the real you actually is. You
spend time with a lot of people—which of them do you actually like the most? How do you
spend your leisure time, and do you truly enjoy all parts of it? Is there anything you regularly
spend money on that you don’t feel that comfortable with? How does your gut really feel
about your job and relationship status? What’s your true political opinion? Do you even care?
Do you pretend to care about things you don’t just to have an opinion? Do you secretly have
an opinion on a political or moral issue you don’t ever voice because people you know will
be outraged?

There are cliché phrases for this process—”soul-searching” or “finding yourself”—but that’s
exactly what needs to happen. Maybe you can reflect on this from whatever chair you’re
sitting in right now or from some other part of your normal life—or maybe you need to go
somewhere far away, by yourself, and step out of your life in order to effectively examine it.
Either way, you’ve got to figure out what actually matters to you and start being proud of
whoever your Authentic Voice is.
2) Figure out where the mammoth is hiding
Most of the time a mammoth is in control of a person, the person’s not really aware of it. But
you can’t make progress if you’re not crystal clear about where the biggest problem areas are.

The most obvious way to find the mammoth is to figure out where your fear is—where
are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? What parts of your life do you think
about and a dreadful, sinking feeling washes over you? Where does the prospect of failure
seem like a nightmare? What are you too timid to publicly try even though you know you’re
good at it? If you were giving advice to yourself, which parts of your life would clearly need
a change that you’re avoiding acting on right now?
The second place a mammoth hides is in the way-too-good feelings you get from feeling
accepted or on a pedestal over other people. Are you a serious pleaser at work or in your
relationship? Are you terrified of disappointing your parents and do you choose making them
proud over aiming to gratify yourself? Do you get too excited about being associated with
prestigious things or care too much about status? Do you brag more than you should?
A third area the mammoth is present is anywhere you don’t feel comfortable making a
decision without “permission” or approval from others. Do you have opinions you’re
regurgitating from someone else’s mouth, which you’re comfortable having now that you
know that person has them? When you introduce your new girlfriend or boyfriend to your
friends or family for the first time, can those people’s reaction to your new person
fundamentally change your feelings for him/her? Is there a Puppet Master in your life? If so,
who, and why?
3) Decide where the mammoth needs to be ousted
It’s not realistic to kick the mammoth entirely out of your head—you’re a human and humans
have mammoths in their head, period. The thing we all need to do is carve out certain sacred
areas of our lives that must be in the hands of the AV and free of mammoth influence. There
are obvious areas that need to be made part of the AV’s domain like your choice of life
partner, your career path, and the way you raise your kids. Others are personal—it comes
down to the question, “In which parts of your life must you be entirely true to yourself?”
 

Step 2: Gather Courage by Internalizing That the

Mammoth Has a Low IQ
Real Woolly Mammoths were unimpressive enough to go extinct, and Social Survival
Mammoths aren’t any better. Despite the fact that they haunt us so, our mammoths are dumb,
primitive creatures who have no understanding of the modern world. Deeply understanding
this—and internalizing it—is a key step to taming yours. There are two major reasons not to
take your mammoth seriously:
1) The mammoth’s fears are totally irrational.
5 things the Mammoth is incorrect about:
→ Everyone is talking about me and my life and just think how much
everyone will be talking about it if I do this risky or weird thing.
Here’s how the mammoth thinks things are:

Here’s how things actually are:

No one really cares that much about what you’re doing. People are highly self-absorbed.

→ If I try really hard, I can please everyone.

Yes, maybe in a 40-person tribe with a unified culture. But in today’s world, no matter who
you are, a bunch of people will like you and a bunch of other people won’t. Being approved
of by one type of person means turning another off. So obsessing over fitting in with any one
group is illogical, especially if that group isn’t really who you are. You’ll do all that work,
and meanwhile, your actual favorite people are off being friends with each other somewhere
else.

→ Being disapproved of or looked down upon or shit-talked about has real

consequences in my life.
Anyone who disapproves of who you’re being or what you’re doing isn’t even in the same
room with you 99.7% of the time. It’s a classic mammoth mistake to fabricate a vision of
future social consequences that is way worse than what actually ends up happening—which
is usually nothing at all.
→ Really judgy people matter.
Here’s how judgy people function: They’re highly mammoth-controlled and become good
friends with and date other judgy people who are also highly mammoth-controlled. One of
the primary activities they do together is talk shit about whoever’s not with them—maybe
they feel some jealousy, and eye-rolling disapproval helps them flip the script and feel less
jealous, or maybe they’re not jealous and use someone as a vehicle for bathing
in schadenfreude—but whatever the underlying feeling, the judging serves to feed their
hungry mammoth.
When people shit-talk, they set up a category division of which they’re always on the right
side. They do this to prop themselves up on a pedestal that their mammoth can chomp away
on.

Being the material a judgy person uses to feel good about themselves is a fairly infuriating
thought—but it has no actual consequences and it’s clearly all much more about the judgy
person and their mammoth problem than it is about you. If you find yourself making
decisions partially based on not being talked badly about by a judgy person, think hard about
what’s actually going on and stop.

→ I’m a bad person if I disappoint or offend the person/people who love me

and have invested so much in me.
No. You’re not a bad person for being whoever your Authentic Voice is in your one life. This
is one of those simple things—if they truly selflessly love you, they will for sure come
around and accept everything once they see that you’re happy. If you’re happy and they still
don’t come around, here’s what’s happening: their strong feelings about who you should be
or what you should do are their mammoth talking, and their main motivation is worrying
about how it’ll “look” to other people who know them. They’re allowing their mammoth to
override their love for you, and they should be adamantly ignored.
Two other reasons why the mammoth’s fearful obsession with social approval makes no
sense:

A) You live here:

So who gives a fuck about anything?

B) You and everyone you know are going to die. Kind of soon.

So like…yeah.

The mammoth’s fears being irrational is one reason the mammoth has a low IQ. Here’s the
second:

2) The mammoth’s efforts are counterproductive.

The irony of the whole thing is that the obsessive lumbering mammoth isn’t even good at his
job. His methods of winning approval may have been effective in simpler times, but today,
they’re transparent and off-putting. The modern world is an AV’s world, and if the mammoth
wants to thrive socially, he should do the thing that scares him most—let the AV take over.
Here’s why:

AVs are interesting. Mammoths are boring. Every AV is unique and complex, which is
inherently interesting. Mammoths are all the same—they copy and conform, and their
motives aren’t based on anything authentic or real, just on doing what they think they’re
supposed to do. That’s supremely boring.
AVs lead. Mammoths follow. Leadership is natural for most AVs, because they draw their
thoughts and opinions from an original place, which gives them an original angle. And if
they’re smart and innovative enough, they can change things in the world and invent things
that disrupt the status quo. If you give someone a paintbrush and an empty canvas, they might
not paint something good—but they’ll change the canvas in one way or another.
Mammoths, on the other hand, follow—by definition. That’s what they were built to do—
blend in and follow the leader. The last thing a mammoth is going to do is change the status
quo because it’s trying so hard to be the status quo. When you give someone a paintbrush and
canvas, but the paint is the same exact color as the canvas, they can paint all they want, but
they won’t change anything.
People gravitate toward AVs, not mammoths. The only time a mammoth-crazed person is
appealing on a first date is when they’re on the date with another mammoth-crazed person.
People with a strong AV see through mammoth-controlled people and aren’t attracted to
them. A friend of mine was dating a great on-paper guy awhile back but broke things off
because she couldn’t quite fall for him. She tried to articulate why, saying he wasn’t weird or
special enough—he seemed like “just one of the guys.” In other words, he was being run too
much by a mammoth.
This also holds among friends or colleagues, where AV-run people are more respected and
more magnetic—not because there’s necessarily anything extraordinary about them, but
because people respect someone with the strength of character to have tamed their
mammoth.
Step 3: Start Being Yourself
This post was all fun and games until “start being yourself” came into the picture. Up to now,
this has been an interesting reflection into why humans care so much what other people think,
why that’s bad, how it’s a problem in your life, and why there’s no good reason it should
continue to plague you. But actually doing  something after you finish reading this article is a
whole different thing. That takes more than reflection—it takes some courage.
But courage against what, exactly? As we’ve discussed, there’s no actual danger involved in
being yourself—more than anything, it just takes an Emperor Has No Clothes epiphany,
which is as simple as this:
Almost nothing you’re socially scared of is
actually scary.
Absorbing this thought will diminish the fear that you feel, and without fear, the mammoth
loses some power.
With a weakened mammoth, it becomes possible to begin standing up for who you are and
even making some bold changes—and when you watch those changes turn out well for you
with few negative consequences and no regrets, it reinforces the epiphany and an empowered
AV becomes a habit. Your mammoth has now lost its ability to pull the strings, and it’s
tamed.

The mammoth is still with you—it’ll always be with you—but you’ll have an easier time
ignoring or overruling it when it speaks up or acts out, because the AV is the alpha dog now.
You can start to relish the feeling of being viewed as weird or inappropriate or confusing to
people, and society becomes your playground and blank canvas, not something to grovel
before and hope for acceptance from.

Making this shift isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s worth obsessing over. Your Authentic Voice
has been given one life—and it’s your job to make sure it gets the opportunity to live it.

_________

If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the
new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.
How to Pick Your Life Partner –
Part 1
 February 12, 2014 By Tim Urban

To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:

And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on
average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.  But a closer
1

analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on
marriage quality, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less
happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more
happy than the literature reports”. In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:
2 
Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful
position, compared to what their situation could be. A single person who would like to find a
great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great
relationship.” People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are three leaps away, with
a to-do list of “1) Go through a soul-crushing break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a
great relationship.” Not as bad when you look at it that way, right?
All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages
makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your life partner.
Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like
thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too
intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in
slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.

But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life partner is fully in your control, so it’s
critical to make yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is and to
thoroughly analyze the most important factors in making it.
So how big a deal is it?

Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that’s about the number of
years you’re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few.

I’m pretty sure no one over 80 reads Wait But Why, so no matter who you are, that’s a lot of
time—and almost the entirety of the rest of your one existence.
(Sure, people get divorced, but you don’t think you will. A recent study shows that 86% of
young people assume their current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older
people feel much differently. So we’ll proceed under that assumption.)
And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting
partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for
about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure
time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about
18,000 times.

Intense shit.

So given that this is by far  the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible
that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that
leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?
Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us:

People tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship

Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out
to be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned
about their relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with
what they show to prefer in the actual event. 4

This shouldn’t be a surprise—in life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve
done it a bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a
few, if any, serious relationships before they make their big decision. There’s just not enough
time. And given that a person’s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite
different from the way they are as a single person, it’s hard as a single person to really know
what you want or need from a relationship.

Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice

→ Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide.
If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective
business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and
analyze your business’s performance diligently. This is logical, because that’s the way you
proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.

But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a
healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept
their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational
robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.

No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting
for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. If a business
owner took society’s dating advice for her business, she’d probably fail, and if she succeeded,
it would be partially due to good luck—and that’s how society wants us to approach dating.

→ Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners.
In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current
opportunities, opportunities wins hands down—our dating choices are “98% a response…to
market conditions and just 2% immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin,
professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by
what’s on offer that night.”5

In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter
how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here
is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot
of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an
intelligent way.

But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their
spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by
bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool.
Fortunately, this stigma is diminishing with time, but that it’s there at all is a reflection of
how illogical the socially accepted dating rulebook is.

→ Society rushes us.

In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies
from 25 – 35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t
marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person
than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the
former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for
permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person
is.

Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors

→ Human biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of
having a deep connection with a life partner for 50 years.
When we start seeing someone and feel the slightest twinge of excitement, our biology gets
into “okay let’s do this” mode and bombards us with chemicals designed to get us to mate
(lust), fall in love (the Honeymoon Phase), and then commit for the long run (attachment).
Our brains can usually override this process if we’re just not that into someone, but for all
those middle ground cases where the right move is probably to move on and find something
better, we often succumb to the chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged.
→ Biological clocks are a bitch.
For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very real
limitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is
just a shitty fact and makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. Still, if it were
me, I’d rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the
wrong one.

___________________

So when you take a bunch of people who aren’t that good at knowing what they want in a
relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but
that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that
drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long,
what do you get?
A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important
decision of their life. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall
victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships:

Overly Romantic Ronald

Overly Romantic Ronald’s downfall is believing that love is enough reason on its own to
marry someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in
a happy marriage, but without a bunch of other important things, it’s simply not enough.

The overly romantic person repeatedly ignores the little voice that tries to speak up when he
and his girlfriend are fighting constantly or when he seems to feel much worse about himself
these days than he used to before the relationship, shutting the voice down with thoughts like
“Everything happens for a reason and the way we met couldn’t have just been coincidence”
and “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”—once an overly romantic person
believes he’s found his soul mate, he stops questioning things, and he’ll hang onto that belief
all the way through his 50 years of unhappy marriage.

Fear-Driven Frida
Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the right life
partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all kinds of otherwise-
rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The types of fear our society (and
parents, and friends) inflict upon us—fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an
older parent, sometimes just fear of being judged or talked about—are the types that lead us
to settle for a not-so-great partnership. The irony is that the only rational fear we should feel
is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the
exact fate the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.
Externally-Influenced Ed

Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision.
The choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for
everyone, and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you
know someone. As such, other people’s opinions and preferences really have no place getting
involved, other than an extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse.
The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the
right life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn’t actually care
about (religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family
insistence or expectations.

It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is thrilled with his
relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it’s not actually that
great from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.
Shallow Sharon

Shallow Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the
inner personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked—
things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item
like being foreign or having a specific talent.

Everyone has certain on-paper boxes they’d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person
prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her
potential life partner when weighing things.

If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because
of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-tron boyfriend” or
a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly fill out all the bubbles. I’ve gotten some
good mileage out of that one.

Selfish Stanley
The selfish come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:

1) The “My Way or the Highway” Type

This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and
opinions are simply more important than her partner’s, and she needs to get her way in almost
any big decision. In the end, she doesn’t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her
single life and have someone there to keep her company.

This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a
pushover with a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals,
almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.

2) The Main Character

The Main Character’s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner
who serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning
either favor. Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion
centers around his day—after all, he’s the main character of the relationship. The issue for
him is that by being incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up
with a sidekick as his life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.

3) The Needs-Driven
Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the
meeting of needs—she cooks for me, he’ll be a great father, she’ll make a great wife, he’s
rich, she keeps me organized, he’s great in bed—becomes the main grounds for choosing
someone as a life partner. Those listed things are all great perks, but that’s all they are—
perks. And after a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed
to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of
the relationship she’s chosen or she’s in for a dull ride.
___________________
The main reason most of the above types end up in unhappy relationships is that they’re
consumed by a motivating force that doesn’t take into account the reality of what a life
partnership is and what makes it a happy thing.

So what makes a happy life partnership? We’ll explore in Part 2 of this post.

[Sources at the bottom of Part 2]

How to Pick Your Life Partner –

Part 2
 February 13, 2014 By Tim Urban

This is Part 2. Part 1 is here.

Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on
how to succeed at just one piece.

When we examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a

long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In the pixel post, we looked at a
human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and
again—and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine
weekday.

I think the same idea applies to marriage.

From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie.
And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.

But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad
summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where
our happiness is determined.

So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage
up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane
Wednesdays.
Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take
together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having
dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.

Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.

So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll
work that part out I’m sure—and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make
Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.

To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key
ingredients necessary:

1) An Epic Friendship
I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my friends. But with
certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so interesting, and so fun that they pass the Traffic
Test.

The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is
driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s
how much I’m enjoying the time with them.
Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it, and
that I’m the complete opposite of bored.

To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who
passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test, what
a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone who
doesn’t.

A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:

 A great sense of humor click. No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.
 Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport delays, long
drives, errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the amount of fun a couple has is
a strong predictor for their future.6

 A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner doubles as a
career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going
to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting
that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to
say about it.
 A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-
preferences. Otherwise a lot of what makes you ‘you’ will inevitably become a much
smaller part of your life, and you and your life partner will struggle to find enjoyable
ways to spend a free Saturday together.
A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets better and better with time, and it has endless
room to deepen and grow ever-richer.

2) A Feeling of Home
If someone told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving, aside from
wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your first thought would be, “I better
get in the most comfortable possible position”—because you’d know that even
the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to
do something for a long, long  time, it’s best if it’s supremely comfortable.
When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort” between you and your partner can be a
permanent source of unhappiness, especially as it magnifies over time, much like your
torturous situation in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and
utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in
place:

 Trust and security. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an

invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world
—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something?
And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes
with the concept of home. This is why having an affair during an otherwise good
marriage is one of the most self-defeating and short-sighted things someone could ever
do.
 Natural chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in
the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength” in general. When I’m
with someone on a very different wavelength than I am, it doesn’t take long before the
interaction becomes exhausting.
 Acceptance of human flaws. You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your
current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human.
And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your
flaws and reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t
work on self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude
is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner’s, and they’re part of
the package I knowingly chose to spend my life with.”
 A generally positive vibe. Remember, this is the  vibe you’re a part of now, forever.
It’s not really acceptable for it to be a negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship
scientist John Gottman has found that “couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive
interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce.” 7

3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage

Relationships are hard.  Expecting a strong relationship without treating it like a rigorous
part-time job is like expecting to have a great career without putting in any effort. In a time
when humans in most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in life, it
usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of something and compromise on a
bunch of things you grew up being selfish about.
So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?

 Communication. Communication being on this list is as silly as “oxygen” being on a

list of items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is the downfall of
a huge number of couples—in fact, in a study on divorcees, communication style was
the top thing they said they’d change for their next relationship. Communication is
8 

hard to do well consistently—successful couples often need to create pre-planned

systems or even partake in couples’ therapy to make sure it happens.
 Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty
quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one
person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail over the other’s, when one person can
treat the other in a way they’d never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a
problem.
  Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When
a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and
genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive.
They also fight less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a
typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved
—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls
again and again. 9

In searching for your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s important to
remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably won’t end up in something that
gets an A in every one of the above items and bullet points—but you should hope to do pretty
well on most of them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.
And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t
want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other
checkboxes—most of which will not have a large effect on your happiness during dinner
#4,386 of your marriage. It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list of
must-haves.
I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year, whatever you did for it. Just remember
that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.
10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single
Guys
 October 9, 2013 By Tim Urban

30-year-old guys are a curious bunch.

Find me a group of 30-year-old men and I’ll pick out one overgrown frat dude living with
roommates, another guy who just dropped his two kids off at school, a few who are well into
their careers and a couple soul-searchers looking for work. Some will tell you that they’ve
finally figured it all out and some more will say they feel hopeless for the first time in their
lives. It’s a motley crew.

But perhaps the motliest part of this crowd is the ever-growing group of 30-year-old single
guys. If you want a case study in humanity, 30-year-old single guys have pretty much all the
bases covered. Let’s examine some of the common types:

1) The Total Package

The Total Package is smart—he went to a top college. The Total Package is an athlete, a
musician, and an avid traveler. The Total Package is handsome—and you better believe he’s
well-groomed.
The Total Package has a hell of a career going, but don’t you for a second suggest that The
Total Package would be a workaholic—The Total Package is a family man.

There’s just one thing The Total Package seems to be having a hard time finding—a girl
worthy of his greatness.

Yes, the woman fit for The Total Package will be the ultimate icing on his cake of perfection.
He imagines her often—gorgeous as they come, she turns heads; bursting with charm and
charisma, she lights up every room she enters; she’s a brilliant rising star in her career and
beloved by her many friends. And that’s just her public persona—at home, she’s fantastic in
bed, a spectacular cook, loving, selfless, and devoted. Oh and she also speaks French, plays
tennis, sings beautifully, reads voraciously and she’s a history buff. His Juliet.

Unsurprisingly, The Total Package is single. He’s immersed in a fierce battle between his
superhuman standards and his terror of being 40 and single—because 40 and single is not
supposed to be part of The Total Package’s story.

2) The New Lease On Life Guy

As long as anyone can remember, The New Lease On Life Guy had been dating his longterm
girlfriend. He never seemed that happy in the relationship, but everyone just assumed they
would eventually get married. Now, after a long and difficult breakup, The New Lease On
Life Guy has reemerged with a bang and is suddenly acting like he just got called down on
The Price Is Right. He’s not really sure how to be single but he’s goddamn happy he is, and
he’s sure as hell going out tonight.

He’s also the arch-nemesis of The Resigned Fiance, who’s in an equally unhappy relationship
but just kind of kept going with it, unable to resist the sweet, sweet inertia, and who most
certainly does not want to hear about The New Lease On Life Guy’s latest exploits.

3) The Guy Who Has To Marry Someone

Of The Same Ethnicity Or His Parents Will
Never Speak To Him Again

It’s hard enough finding someone to be your life partner, and this guy’s parents are really not
making things any easier. He tried to rebel briefly, but after his last girlfriend was not allowed
in his parents’ house, causing her to cry, he gave up on that.

He’d also really appreciate it if his mother would stop setting him up on dates.

4) The Misogynist

The Misogynist hates women, and women hate The Misogynist. The Misogynist doesn’t
know a whole lot about the other gender, but he can tell you the exact number of them he’s
slept with—214.
He did quite well with girls back in his earlier days when many were in their attracted to
assholes phase, but lately, only those with the lowest self-esteem seem to gravitate towards
him.

The Misogynist’s close cousin is The Perpetual Cheater. They’re different but they
understand each other.

5) The Guy Who Peaked Too Early

Back in the day, The Guy Who Peaked Too Early had everything a 17-year-old girl could
ever dream of. His sky-high confidence carried him smoothly through college, and no one
was surprised when he landed a smart, sweet, beautiful girlfriend in his early 20s. But The
Guy Who Peaked Too Early was just getting started. There was a field that needed to be
played, and he broke up with his girlfriend when he was 24.

Now it’s seven years later, his hair got bored and left, and his high school lacrosse glory isn’t
part of the conversation that much these days. And he’s noticing that girls like his ex-
girlfriend don’t seem to be all that into him anymore. Realizing this about five years after
everyone else, he takes a deep sigh and cranks his standards down a few big notches.

6) The Guy Who’s Finally a Good Catch

On the other side of the coin, after losing some weight, getting decent clothes, and having
early career success, The Guy Who’s Finally a Good Catch is getting more attention each
week than he got in his first 25 years combined. Girls find it endearing that such an appealing
guy has managed to maintain his humility, when it’s actually just that he’s assuming every
girl is out of his league at all times.

Once his new situation starts to sink in, he enters an unfortunate new phase, stressing his
male friends out by doing things like winking at them over the shoulder of a girl he’s dancing
with and offering them a fist pound when an attractive girl walks by on the street.

7) The Normal Guy Who Just Hasn’t Met

The Right Girl Yet And He Really Wishes
People Would Stop Looking At Him With
Those Pitying Eyes
Ah, The NGWJHMTRGYAHRWPWSLAHWTPE. The
NGWJHMTRGYAHRWPWSLAHWTPE is enjoying his life. He likes his job, he likes his
friends, and he likes being single just fine. He’s in no rush to be in a relationship and feels
totally confident that at some point, he’ll meet the right girl and get married.

He’s also not quite sure why everyone who knows him is trying to figure out “what the
problem is.” His parents are worried, never wasting an opportunity to ask him if he’s been
dating anyone. His friends want to help, setting him up on dates every chance they get. He
appreciates all the unsolicited support, but he also thinks it would be pretty great if everyone
stopped thinking there was something wrong with him.

8) The Aggressively Online Dating Guy

Who Can’t Believe He’s Not Married Yet
The opposite of the previous guy, The Aggressively Online Dating Guy Who Can’t Believe
He’s Not Married Yet can’t believe he’s not married yet. Through high school, college and
his twenties, he was always The Guy With A Girlfriend. He spent years enjoying pitying his
single friends, and somehow, he’s now 30 and single.

He has four online dating profiles, and when people ask him if he’s dating anyone, he
explains that he’s just too busy with his career right now for a relationship.

9) The In-The-Closet Guy

The In-The-Closet Guy is so close to being the perfect catch—he’s handsome, he’s well-
dressed, and he has a great job. He’s funny, articulate, and charming. The only tiny little
inconvenience is that he’s not attracted to females whatsoever.
His antithesis is The NGWJHMTRGYAHRWPWSLAHWTPE, who’s had just enough of the
theories about him being gay, since he’s completely straight and, for the hundredth time, just
hasn’t met the right girl yet and is really very okay with being single right now.

10) The Guy Who Has Just Fully Quit At

This Point
The Guy Who Has Just Fully Quit At This Point never tried that hard in the first place, but at
least there used to be a semblance of effort. He doesn’t like going to bars, refuses to try
online dating, and both the bong and the X-Box are back in the living room following their
brief stint in the closet after his friend gave him a pep talk one day four months ago.

Deep down, The Guy Who Has Just Fully Quit At This Point is pretty frightened about a lot
of things, but his fear manifests itself in indifferent denial, and passivity usually prevails.
There is only one way that things change for The Guy Who Has Just Fully Quit At This
Point, and that’s to find himself squarely in the sights of The Girl Who Relentlessly Pursues.
Until then, the whole thing isn’t really his issue.
Religion for the Nonreligious
 October 19, 2014 By Tim Urban

Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.

The mind…can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ― John Milton

The mind is certainly its own cosmos. — Alan Lightman
You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you’re pleased with yourself. But are you
wiser?

You get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better
company, gain even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a
parking spot, stop doing your own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the
stuff settles down to the bottom. But are you happier?

You do all kinds of life things—you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things,
take out the trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt
on things, have sex with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the
dog, buy a couch, close the curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set
your alarm, fix your hair, order lunch, act friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple
juice, and put a new paper towel roll on the thing.

But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in
a meaningful way?

In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist—but how in my
satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active
approach to internal improvement—hindering my own evolution in the process.
This wasn’t just my own naiveté at work. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it
doesn’t stress the need to take real growth seriously. The major institutions in the spiritual
arena—religions—tend to focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal
instead of self-improvement. The industries that do often focus on the human condition—
philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self-help, etc.—lie more on the periphery, with their
work often fragmented from each other. All of this sets up a world that makes it hard to treat
internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra-curricular, icing on the life cake.

Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our
reality, working on what’s going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority.
In the same way a growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought-out strategy
and measurable metrics, a growing human needs a plan—if we want to meaningfully
improve, we need to define a goal, understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in
the way, and have a strategy to get past them.
When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving.
The efforts were there—apparent in many of this blog’s post topics—but I had no growth
model, no real plan, no clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self-improvement in
one area or another, whenever I happened to feel like it. So I’ve attempted to consolidate my
scattered efforts, philosophies, and strategies into a single framework—something solid I can
hold onto in the future—and I’m gonna use this post to do a deep dive into it.
So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you—
you’ll want to have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is.

____________

The Goal
Wisdom. More on that later.

How Do We Get to the Goal?

By being aware of the truth. When I say “the truth,” I’m not being one of those annoying
people who says the word truth to mean some amorphous, mystical thing—I’m just referring
to the actual facts of reality. The truth is a combination of what we know and what we don’t
know—and gaining and maintaining awareness of both sides of this reality is the key to being
wise.

Easy, right? We don’t have to know more than we know, we only have to be aware of what
we know and what we don’t know. Truth is in plain sight, written on the whiteboard—we just
have to look at the board and reflect upon it. There’s just this one thing—

What’s in Our Way?

The fog.

To understand the fog, let’s first be clear that we’re not here:

We’re here:

And this isn’t the situation:

This is:

This is a really hard concept for humans to absorb, but it’s the starting place for growth.
Declaring ourselves “conscious” allows us to call it a day and stop thinking about it. I like to
think of it as a consciousness staircase:
An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than
a chicken, and a human more than a monkey. But what’s above us?

A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can
understand our world and how we think.

There’s no reason to think the staircase doesn’t extend upwards forever. The red alien a few
steps above us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of
an orangutan—they might think we’re pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we
don’t actually begin to understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched
by one of their toddlers.

To the green alien up there higher on the staircase, the red alien might seem as intelligent and
conscious as a chicken seems to us. And when the green alien looks at us, it sees the simplest
little pre-programmed ants.
We can’t conceive of what life higher on the staircase would be like, but absorbing the fact
that higher stairs exist and trying to view ourselves from the perspective of one of those steps
is the key mindset we need to be in for this exercise.
For now, let’s ignore those much higher steps and just focus on the step right above us—that
light green step. A species on that step might think of us like we think of a three-year-old
child—emerging into consciousness through a blur of simplicity and naiveté. Let’s imagine
that a representative from that species was sent to observe humans and report back to his
home planet about them—what would he think of the way we thought and behaved? What
about us would impress him? What would make him cringe?
I think he’d very quickly see a conflict going on in the human mind. On one hand, all of those
steps on the staircase below the human are where we grew from. Hundreds of millions of
years of evolutionary adaptations geared toward animal survival in a rough world are very
much rooted in our DNA, and the primitive impulses in us have birthed a bunch of low-grade
qualities—fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant-gratification, etc. Those qualities are the
remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part of our brains, creating a zoo of small-
minded emotions and motivations in our heads:

But over the past six million years, our evolutionary line has experienced a rapid growth in
consciousness and the incredible ability to reason in a way no other species on Earth can.
We’ve taken a big step up the consciousness staircase, very quickly—let’s call this
burgeoning element of higher consciousness our Higher Being.
The Higher Being is brilliant, big-thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale,
he’s a very new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their
coexistence in the human mind makes it a strange place:
So it’s not that a human is the Higher Being and the Higher Being is three years old—it’s that
a human is the combination of the Higher Being and the low-level animals, and they blend
into the three-year-old that we are. The Higher Being alone would be a more advanced
species, and the animals alone would be one far more primitive, and it’s their particular
coexistence that makes us distinctly human.
As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and
found himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn’t
understand who or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high-level thought,
but with animals tramping around his work environment, it wasn’t an easy job. And things
were about to get much worse. Human evolution continued to make the Higher Being more
and more sentient, until one day, he realized something shocking:

WE’RE GOING TO DIE

It marked the first time any species on planet Earth was conscious enough to understand that
fact, and it threw all of those animals in the brain—who were not built to handle that kind of
information—into a complete frenzy, sending the whole ecosystem into chaos:
The animals had never experienced this kind of fear before, and their freakout about this—
one that continues today—was the last thing the Higher Being needed as he was trying to
grow and learn and make decisions for us.

The adrenaline-charged animals romping around our brain can take over our mind, clouding
our thoughts, judgment, sense of self, and understanding of the world. The collective force of
the animals is what I call “the fog.” The more the animals are running the show and making
us deaf and blind to the thoughts and insights of the Higher Being, the thicker the fog is
around our head, often so thick we can only see a few inches in front of our face:
Let’s think back to our goal above and our path to it—being aware of the truth. The Higher
Being can see the truth just fine in almost any situation. But when the fog is thick around us,
blocking our eyes and ears and coating our brain, we have no access to the Higher Being or
his insight. This is why being continually aware of the truth is so hard—we’re too lost in the
fog to see it or think about it.

And when the alien representative is finished observing us and heads back to his home planet,
I think this would be his sum-up of our problems:

The battle of the Higher Being against the animals—of trying

to see through the fog to clarity—is the core internal human
struggle.
This struggle in our heads takes place on many fronts. We’ve examined a few of them here:
the Higher Being (in his role as the Rational Decision Maker) fighting the Instant
Gratification Monkey; the Higher Being (in the role of the Authentic Voice) battling against
the overwhelmingly scared Social Survival Mammoth; the Higher Being’s message that life
is just a bunch of Todays getting lost in the blinding light of fog-based yearning for better
tomorrows. Those are all part of the same core conflict between our primal past and our
enlightened future.
The shittiest thing about the fog is that when you’re in the fog, it blocks your vision so you
can’t see that you’re in the fog. It’s when the fog is thickest that you’re the least aware that
it’s there at all—it makes you unconscious. Being aware that the fog exists and learning how
to recognize it is the key first step to rising up in consciousness and becoming a wiser person.
So we’ve established that our goal is wisdom, that to get there we need to become as aware as
possible of the truth, and that the main thing standing in our way is the fog. Let’s zoom in on
the battlefield to look at why “being aware of the truth” is so important and how we can
overcome the fog to get there:
The Battlefield
No matter how hard we tried, it would be impossible for humans to access that light green
step one above us on the consciousness staircase. Our advanced capability—the Higher Being
—just isn’t there yet. Maybe in a million years or two. For now, the only place this battle can
happen is on the one step where we live, so that’s where we’re going to zoom in. We need to
focus on the mini spectrum of consciousness within our step, which we can do by breaking
our step down into four substeps:

Climbing this mini consciousness staircase is the road to truth, the way to wisdom, my
personal mission for growth, and a bunch of other cliché statements I never thought I’d hear
myself say. We just have to understand the game and work hard to get good at it.

Let’s look at each step to try to understand the challenges we’re dealing with and how we can
make progress:

Step 1: Our Lives in the Fog

Step 1 is the lowest step, the foggiest step, and unfortunately, for most of us it’s our default
level of existence. On Step 1, the fog is all up in our shit, thick and close and clogging our
senses, leaving us going through life unconscious. Down here, the thoughts, values, and
priorities of the Higher Being are completely lost in the blinding fog and the deafening
roaring, tweeting, honking, howling, and squawking of the animals in our heads. This makes
us 1) small-minded, 2) short-sighted, and 3) stupid. Let’s discuss each of these:

1) On Step 1, you’re terribly small-minded because the animals are

running the show.
When I look at the wide range of motivating emotions that humans experience, I don’t see
them as a scattered range, but rather falling into two distinct bins: the high-minded, love-
based, advanced emotions of the Higher Being, and the small-minded, fear-based, primitive
emotions of our brain animals.

And on Step 1, we’re completely intoxicated by the animal emotions as they roar at us
through the dense fog.

This is what makes us petty and jealous and what makes us so thoroughly enjoy the
misfortune of others. It’s what makes us scared, anxious, and insecure. It’s why we’re self-
absorbed and narcissistic; vain and greedy; narrow-minded and judgmental; cold, callous, and
even cruel. And only on Step 1 do we feel that primitive “us versus them” tribalism that
makes us hate people different than us.

You can find most of these same emotions in a clan of capuchin monkeys—and that makes
sense, because at their core, these emotions can be boiled down to the two keys of animal
survival: self-preservation and the need to reproduce.

Step 1 emotions are brutish and powerful and grab you by the collar, and when they’re upon
you, the Higher Being and his high-minded, love-based emotions are shoved into the sewer.
2) On Step 1, you’re short-sighted, because the fog is six inches in front of
your face, preventing you from seeing the big picture.
The fog explains all kinds of totally illogical and embarrassingly short-sighted human
behavior.

Why else would anyone ever take a grandparent or parent for granted while they’re around,
seeing them only occasionally, opening up to them only rarely, and asking them barely any
questions—even though after they die, you can only think about how amazing they were and
how you can’t believe you didn’t relish the opportunity to enjoy your relationship with them
and get to know them better when they were around?

Why else would people brag so much, even though if they could see the big picture, it would
be obvious that everyone finds out about the good things in your life eventually either way—
and that you always serve yourself way more by being modest?
Why else would someone do the bare minimum at work, cut corners on work projects, and be
dishonest about their efforts—when anyone looking at the big picture would know that in a
work environment, the truth about someone’s work habits eventually becomes completely
apparent to both bosses and colleagues, and you’re never really fooling anyone? Why would
someone insist on making sureeveryone knows when they did something valuable for the
company—when it should be obvious that acting that way is transparent and makes it seem
like you’re working hard just for the credit, while just doing things well and having one of
those things happen  to be noticed does much more for your long term reputation and level of
respect at the company?
If not for thick fog, why would anyone ever pinch pennies over a restaurant bill or keep an
unpleasantly-rigid scorecard of who paid for what on a trip, when everyone reading this could
right now give each of their friends a quick and accurate 1-10 rating on the cheap-to-generous
(or selfish-to-considerate) scale, and the few hundred bucks you save over time by being on
the cheap end of the scale is hardly worth it considering how much more likable and
respectable it is to be generous?
What other explanation is there for the utterly inexplicable decision by so many famous men
in positions of power to bring down the career and marriage they spent their lives building by
having an affair?
And why would anyone bend and loosen their integrity for tiny insignificant gains when
integrity affects your long-term self-esteem and tiny insignificant gains affect nothing in the
long term?
How else could you explain the decision by so many people to let the fear of what others
might thinkdictate the way they live, when if they could see clearly they’d realize that A)
that’s a terrible reason to do or not do something, and B) no one’s really thinking about you
anyway—they’re buried in their own lives.
And then there are all the times when someone’s opaque blinders keep them in the
wrong relationship, job, city, apartment, friendship, etc. for years, sometimes decades, only
for them to finally make a change and say “I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier,” or “I can’t
believe I couldn’t see how wrong that was for me.” They should absolutely believe it,
because that’s the power of the fog.
3) On Step 1, you’re very, very stupid.
One way this stupidity shows up is in us making the same obvious mistakes over and over
and over again.1
The most glaring example is the way the fog convinces us, time after time after time, that
certain things will make us happy that in reality absolutely don’t. The fog lines up a row of
carrots, tells us that they’re the key to happiness, and tells us to forget today’s happiness in
favor of directing all of our hope to all the happiness the future will hold because we’re
gonna get those carrots.
And even though the fog has proven again and again that it has no idea how human happiness
works—even though we’ve had so many experiences finally getting a carrot and feeling a ton
of temporary happiness, only to watch that happiness fade right back down to our default
level a few days later—we continue to fall for the trick.

It’s like hiring a nutritionist to help you with your exhaustion, and they tell you that the key is
to drink an espresso shot anytime you’re tired. So you’d try it and think the nutritionist was a
genius until an hour later when it dropped you like an anvil back into exhaustion. You go
back to the nutritionist, who gives you the same advice, so you try it again and the same thing
happens. That would probably be it right? You’d fire the nutritionist. Right? So why are we
so gullible when it comes to the fog’s advice on happiness and fulfillment?

The fog is also much more harmful than the nutritionist because not only does it give us
terrible advice—but the fog itself is the source of unhappiness. The only real solution to
exhaustion is to sleep, and the only real way to improve happiness in a lasting way is to make
progress in the battle against the fog.
There’s a concept in psychology called The Hedonic Treadmill, which suggests that humans
have a stagnant default happiness level and when something good or bad happens, after an
initial change in happiness, we always return to that default level. And on Step 1, this is
completely true of course, given that trying to become permanently happier while in the fog
is like trying to dry your body off while standing under the shower with the water running.

But I refuse to believe the same species that builds skyscrapers, writes symphonies, flies to
the moon, and understands what a Higgs boson is is incapable of getting off the treadmill and
actually improving in a meaningful way.

I think the way to do it is by learning to climb this consciousness staircase to spend more of
our time on Steps 2, 3, and 4, and less of it mired unconsciously in the fog.

Step 2: Thinning the Fog to Reveal Context

Humans can do something amazing that no other creature on Earth can do—they
can imagine. If you show an animal a tree, they see a tree. Only a human can imagine the
acorn that sunk into the ground 40 years earlier, the small flimsy stalk it was at three years
old, how stark the tree must look when it’s winter, and the eventual dead tree lying
horizontally in that same place.
This is the magic of the Higher Being in our heads.

On the other hand, the animals in your head, like their real world relatives, can only see a
tree, and when they see one, they react instantly to it based on their primitive needs. When
you’re on Step 1, your unconscious animal-run state doesn’t even remember that the Higher
Being exists, and his genius abilities go to waste.

Step 2 is all about thinning out the fog enough to bring the Higher Being’s thoughts and
abilities into your consciousness, allowing you to see behind and around the things that
happen in life. Step 2 is about bringing context  into your awareness, which reveals a far
deeper and more nuanced version of the truth.
There are plenty of activities or undertakings that can help thin out your fog. To name three:
1) Learning more about the world through education, travel, and life experience—as your
perspective broadens, you can see a clearer and more accurate version of the truth.

2) Active reflection. This is what a journal can help with, or therapy, which is basically
examining your own brain with the help of a fog expert. Sometimes a hypothetical question
can be used as “fog goggles,” allowing you to see something clearly through the fog—
questions like, “What would I do if money were no object?” or “How would I advise
someone else on this?” or “Will I regret not having done this when I’m 80?” These questions
are a way to ask your Higher Being’s opinion on something without the animals realizing
what’s going on, so they’ll stay calm and the Higher Being can actually talk—like when
parents spell out a word in front of their four-year-old when they don’t want him to know
what they’re saying.2
3) Meditation, exercise, yoga, etc.—activities that help quiet the brain’s unconscious chatter,
i.e. allowing the fog to settle.

But the easiest and most effective way to thin out the fog is simply to be aware of it. By
knowing that fog exists, understanding what it is and the different forms it takes, and learning
to recognize when you’re in it, you hinder its ability to run your life. You can’t get to Step 2
if you don’t know when you’re on Step 1.
The way to move onto Step 2 is by remembering to stay aware of the context behind and
around what you see, what you come across, and the decisions you make. That’s it—
remaining cognizant of the fog and remembering to look at the whole context keeps you
conscious, aware of reality, and as you’ll see, makes you a much better version of yourself
than you are on Step 1. Some examples—

Here’s what a rude cashier looks like on Step 1 vs. Step 2:

Here’s what gratitude looks like:

Something good happening:

Something bad happening:

That phenomenon where everything suddenly seems horrible late at night in bed:

A flat tire:
Long-term consequences:

Looking at context makes us aware how much we actually know about most situations (as
well as what we don’t know, like what the cashier’s day was like so far), and it reminds us of
the complexity and nuance of people, life, and situations. When we’re on Step 2, this broader
scope and increased clarity makes us feel calmer and less fearful of things that aren’t actually
scary, and the animals—who gain their strength from fear and thrive off of unconsciousness
—suddenly just look kind of ridiculous:
When the small-minded animal emotions are less in our face, the more advanced emotions of
the Higher Being—love, compassion, humility, empathy, etc.—begin to light up.

The good news is there’s no learning required to be on Step 2—your Higher Being already
knows the context around all of these life situations. It doesn’t take hard work, and no
additional information or expertise is needed—you only have to consciously think about
being on Step 2 instead of Step 1 and you’re there. You’re probably there right now just by
reading this.

The bad news is that it’s extremely hard to stay on Step 2 for long. The Catch-22 here is that
it’s not easy to stay conscious of the fog because the fog makes you unconscious.
That’s the first challenge at hand. You can’t get rid of the fog, and you can’t always keep it
thin, but you can get better at noticing when it’s thick and develop effective strategies for
thinning it out whenever you consciously focus on it. If you’re evolving successfully, as you
get older, you should be spending more and more time on Step 2 and less and less on Step 1.

Step 3: Shocking Reality

I . . . a universe of atoms . . . an atom in the universe. —Richard Feynman
_________

Step 3 is when things start to get weird. Even on the more enlightened Step 2, we kind of
think we’re here:
As delightful as that is, it’s a complete delusion. We live our days as if we’re just here on this
green and brown land with our blue sky and our chipmunks and our caterpillars. But this is
actually what’s happening:
But even more actually, this is happening:
We also tend to kind of think this is the situation:

When really, it’s this:

You might even think you’re a thing. Do you?

No you’re a ton of these:

This is the next iteration of truth on our little staircase, and our brains can’t really handle it.
Asking a human to internalize the vastness of space or the eternity of time or the tininess of
atoms is like asking a dog to stand up on its hind legs—you can do it if you focus, but it’s a
strain and you can’t hold it for very long.3
You can think about the facts anytime—The Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago, which is
about 130,000 times longer than humans have existed; if the sun were a ping pong ball in
New York, the closest star to us would be a ping pong ball in Atlanta; the Milky Way is so
big that if you made a scale model of it that was the size of the US, you would still need a
microscope to see the sun; atoms are so small that there are about as many atoms in one grain
of salt as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. But once in a while, when you
deeply reflect on one of these facts, or when you’re in the right late night conversation with
the right person, or when you’re staring at the stars, or when you think too hard about what
death actually means—you have a Whoa moment.
A true Whoa moment is hard to come by and even harder to maintain for very long, like our
dog’s standing difficulties. Thinking about this level of reality is like looking at an amazing
photo of the Grand Canyon; a Whoa moment is like being at the Grand Canyon—the two
experiences are similar but somehow vastly different. Facts can be fascinating, but only in a
Whoa moment does your brain actually wrap itself around true reality. In a Whoa moment,
your brain for a second transcends what it’s been built to do and offers you a brief glimpse
into the astonishing truth of our existence. And a Whoa moment is how you get to Step 3.
I love Whoa moments. They make me feel some intense combination of awe, elation,
sadness, and wonder. More than anything, they make me feel ridiculously, profoundly
humble—and that level of humility does weird things to a person. In those moments, all those
words religious people use—awe, worship, miracle, eternal connection—make perfect sense.
I want to get on my knees and surrender.This is when I feel spiritual.
And in those fleeting moments, there is no fog—my Higher Being is in full flow and can see
everything in perfect clarity. The normally-complicated world of morality is suddenly crystal
clear, because the only fathomable emotions on Step 3 are the most high-level. Any form of
pettiness or hatred is a laughable concept up on Step 3—with no fog to obscure things, the
animals are completely naked, exposed for the sad little creatures that they are.
On Step 1, I snap back at the rude cashier, who had the nerve to be a dick to me. On Step 2,
the rudeness doesn’t faze me because I know it’s about him, not me, and that I have no idea
what his day or life has been like. On Step 3, I see myself as a miraculous arrangement of
atoms in vast space that for a split second in endless eternity has come together to form a
moment of consciousness that is my life…and I see that cashier as another moment of
consciousness that happens to exist on the same speck of time and space that I do. And the
only possible emotion I could have for him on Step 3 is love.
In a Whoa moment’s transcendent level of consciousness, I see every interaction, every
motivation, every news headline in unusual clarity—and difficult life decisions are much
more obvious. I feel wise.
Of course, if this were my normal state, I’d be teaching monks somewhere on a mountain in
Myanmar, and I’m not teaching any monks anywhere because it’s not my normal state. Whoa
moments are rare and very soon after one, I’m back down here being a human again. But the
emotions and the clarity of Step 3 are so powerful, that even after you topple off the step,
some of it sticks around. Each time you humiliate the animals, a little bit of their future power
over you is diminished. And that’s why Step 3 is so important—even though no one that I
know can live permanently on Step 3, regular visits help you dramatically in the ongoing Step
1 vs Step 2 battle, which makes you a better and happier person.

Step 3 is also the answer to anyone who accuses atheists of being amoral or cynical or
nihilistic, or wonders how atheists find any meaning in life without the hope and incentive of
an afterlife. That’s a Step 1 way to view an atheist, where life on Earth is taken for granted
and it’s assumed that any positive impulse or emotion must be due to circumstances outside
of life. On Step 3, I feel immensely lucky to be alive and can’t believe how cool it is that I’m
a group of atoms that can think about atoms—on Step 3, life itself is more than enough to
make me excited, hopeful, loving, and kind. But Step 3 is only possible because science has
cleared the way there, which is why Carl Sagan said that “science is not only compatible with
spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” In this way, science is the “prophet” of
this framework—the one who reveals new truth to us and gives us an opportunity to alter
ourselves by accessing it.
So to recap so far—on Step 1, you’re in a delusional bubble that Step 2 pops. On Step 2,
there’s much more clarity about life, but it’s within a much bigger delusional bubble, one that
Step 3 pops. But Step 3 is supposed to be total, fog-free clarity on truth—so how could there
be another step?

Step 4: The Great Unknown

If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where
we came from, we will have failed. —Carl Sagan
_________

The game so far has for the most part been clearing out fog to become as conscious as
possible of what we as people and as a species know about truth:

On Step 4, we’re reminded of the complete truth—which is this:

The fact is, any discussion of our full reality—of the truth of the universe or our existence—
is a complete delusion without acknowledging that big purple blob that makes up almost all
of that reality.

But you know humans—they don’t like that purple blob one bit. Never have. The blob
frightens and humiliates humans, and we have a rich history of denying its existence entirely,
which is like living on the beach and pretending the ocean isn’t there. Instead, we just stamp
our foot and claim that now we’ve finally figured it all out. On the religious side, we invent
myths and proclaim them as truth—and even a devout religious believer reading this who
stands by the truth of their particular book would agree with me about the fabrication of the
other few thousand books out there. On the science front, we’ve managed to be consistently
gullible in believing that “realizing you’ve been horribly wrong about reality” is a
phenomenon only of the past.
Having our understanding of reality overturned by a new groundbreaking discovery is like a
shocking twist in this epic mystery novel humanity is reading, and scientific progress is
regularly dotted with these twists—the Earth being round, the solar system being heliocentric,
not geocentric, the discovery of subatomic particles or galaxies other than our own, and
evolutionary theory, to name a few. So how is it possible, with the knowledge of all those
breakthroughs, that Lord Kelvin, one of history’s greatest scientists, said in the year 1900,
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more
precise measurement”4—i.e. this time, all the twists actually are finished.
Of course, Kelvin was as wrong as every other arrogant scientist in history—the theory of
general relativity and then the theory of quantum mechanics would both topple science on its
face over the next century.
Even if we acknowledge today that there will be more twists in the future, we’re
probably kind of inclined to think we’ve figured out most of the major things and have a far
closer-to-complete picture of reality than the people who thought the Earth was flat. Which,
to me, sounds like this:

The fact is, let’s remember that we don’t know what the universe is. Is it everything? Is it one
tiny bubble in a multiverse frothing with bubbles? Is it not a bubble at all but an optical
illusion hologram? And we know about the Big Bang, but was that the beginning of
everything? Did something  arise from nothing, or was it just the latest in a long series of
expansion/collapse cycles?5 We have no clue what dark matter is, only that there’s a shit-ton
of it in the universe, and when we discussed The Fermi Paradox, it became entirely clear that
science has no idea about whether there’s other life out there or how advanced it might be.
How about String Theory, which claims to be the secret to unifying the two grand but
seemingly-unrelated theories of the physical world, general relativity and quantum
mechanics? It’s either the grandest theory we’ve ever come up with or totally false, and there
are great scientists on both sides of this debate. And as laypeople, all we need to do is take a
look at those two well-accepted theories to realize how vastly different reality can be from
how it seems: like general relativity telling us that if you flew to a black hole and circled
around it a few times in intense gravity and then returned to Earth a few hours after you
left, decades would have passed on Earth while you were gone. And that’s like an ice cream
cone compared to the insane shit quantum mechanics tells us—like two particles across the
universe from one another being mysteriously linked to each other’s behavior, or a cat
that’s both alive and dead at the same time, until you look at it.
And the thing is, everything I just mentioned is still within the realm of our understanding. As
we established earlier, compared to a more evolved level of consciousness, we might be like
a three-year-old, a monkey, or an ant—so why would we assume that we’re even capable of
understanding everything in that purple blob? A monkey can’t understand that the Earth is a
round planet, let alone that the solar system, galaxy, or universe exists. You could try to
explain it to a monkey for years and it wouldn’t be possible. So what are we completely
incapable of grasping even if a more intelligent species tried its hardest to explain it to
us? Probably almost everything.
There are really two options when thinking about the big, big picture: be humble or be
absurd.

The nonsensical thing about humans feigning certainty because we’re scared is that in the old
days, when it seemed on the surface that we were the center of all creation, uncertainty was
frightening because it made our reality seem so much bleaker than we had thought—but now,
with so much more uncovered, things look highly bleak for us as people and as a species, so
our fear should welcome uncertainty. Given my default outlook that I have a small handful of
decades left and then an eternity of nonexistence, the fact that we might be totally wrong
sounds tremendously hopeful to me.
Ironically, when my thinking reaches the top of this rooted-in-atheism staircase, the notion
that something that seems divine to us might exist doesn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. I’m
still totally atheist when it comes to all human-created conceptions of a divine higher force—
which all, in my opinion, proclaim far too much certainty. But could a super-advanced force
exist? It seems more than likely. Could we have been created by something/someone bigger
than us or be living as part of a simulation without realizing it? Sure—I’m a three-year-old,
remember, so who am I to say no?

To me, complete rational logic tells me to be atheist about all of the Earth’s religions and
utterly agnostic about the nature of our existence or the possible existence of a higher being. I
don’t arrive there via any form of faith, just by logic.

I find Step 4 mentally mind-blowing but I’m not sure I’m ever quite able to access it in a
spiritual way like I sometimes can with Step 3—Step 4 Whoa moments might be reserved for
Einstein-level thinkers—but even if I can’t get my feet up on Step 4, I can know it’s there,
what it means, and I can remind myself of its existence. So what does that do for me as a
human?

Well remember that powerful humility I mentioned in Step 3? It multiplies that by 100. For
reasons I just discussed, it makes me feel more hopeful. And it leaves me feeling pleasantly
resigned to the fact that I will never understand what’s going on, which makes me feel like I
can take my hand off the wheel, sit back, relax, and just enjoy the ride. In this way, I think
Step 4 can make us live more in the present—if I’m just a molecule floating around an ocean
I can’t understand, I might as well just enjoy it.

The way Step 4 can serve humanity is by helping to crush the notion of certainty. Certainty is
primitive, leads to “us versus them” tribalism, and starts wars. We should be united in our
uncertainty, not divided over fabricated certainty. And the more humans turn around and look
at that big purple blob, the better off we’ll be.

Why Wisdom is the Goal

Nothing clears fog like a deathbed, which is why it’s then that people can always see with
more clarity what they should have done differently—I wish I had spent less time working; I
wish I had communicated with my wife more; I wish I had traveled more; etc. The goal of
personal growth should be to gain that deathbed clarity while your life is still happening so
you can actually do something about it.

The way you do that is by developing as much wisdom as possible, as early as possible. To
me, wisdom is the most important thing to work towards as a human. It’s the big objective—
the umbrella goal under which all other goals fall into place. I believe I have one and only
one chance to live, and I want to do it in the most fulfilled and meaningful way possible—
that’s the best outcome for me, and I do a lot more good for the world that way. Wisdom
gives people the insight to know what “fulfilled and meaningful” actually means and the
courage to make the choices that will get them there.

And while life experience can contribute to wisdom, I think wisdom is mostly already in all
of our heads—it’s everything the Higher Being knows. When we’re not wise, it’s because we
don’t have access to the Higher Being’s wisdom because it’s buried in fog. The fog is anti-
wisdom, and when you move up the staircase into a clearer place, wisdom is simply a by-
product of that increased consciousness.

One thing I learned at some point is that growing old or growing tall is not the same as
growing up. Being a grownup is about your level of wisdom and the size of your mind’s
scope—and it turns out that it doesn’t especially correlate with age. After a certain age,
growing up is about overcoming your fog, and that’s about the person, not the age. I know
some supremely wise older people, but there are also a lot of people my age who seem much
wiser than their parents about a lot of things. Someone on a growth path whose fog thins as
they age will become wiser with age, but I find the reverse happens with people who don’t
actively grow—the fog hardens around them and they actually become even less conscious,
and even more certain about everything, with age.
When I think about people I know, I realize that my level of respect and admiration for a
person is almost entirely in line with how wise and conscious a person I think they are. The
people I hold in the highest regard are the grownups in my life—and their ages completely
vary.

Another Look at Religion in Light of this Framework:

This discussion helps clarify my issues with traditional organized religion. There are plenty
of good people, good ideas, good values, and good wisdom in the religious world, but to me
that seems like something happening in spite of religion and not because of it. Using religion
for growth requires an innovative take on things, since at a fundamental level, most religions
seem to treat people like children instead of pushing them to grow. Many of today’s religions
play to people’s fog with “believe in this or else…” fear-mongering and books that are often
a rallying cry for ‘us vs. them’ divisiveness. They tell people to look to ancient scripture for
answers instead of the depths of the mind, and their stubborn certainty when it comes to right
and wrong often leaves them at the back of the pack when it comes to the evolution of social
issues. Their certainty when it comes to history ends up actively pushing their followers away
from truth—as evidenced by the 42% of Americans who have been deprived of knowing the
truth about evolution. (An even worse staircase criminal is the loathsome world of American
politics, with a culture that lives on Step 1 and where politicians appeal directly to people’s
animals, deliberately avoiding anything on Steps 2-4.)

So What Am I?
Yes, I’m an atheist, but atheism isn’t a growth model any more than “I don’t like
rollerblading” is a workout strategy.
So I’m making up a term for what I am—I’m a Truthist. In my framework, truth is what I’m
always looking for, truth is what I worship, and learning to see truth more easily and more
often is what leads to growth.

In Truthism, the goal is to grow wiser over time, and wisdom falls into your lap whenever
you’re conscious enough to see the truth about people, situations, the world, or the universe.
The fog is what stands in your way, making you unconscious, delusional, and small-minded,
so the key day-to-day growth strategy is staying cognizant of the fog and training your mind
to try to see the full truth in any situation.

Over time, you want your [Time on Step 2] / [Time on Step 1] ratio to go up a little bit each
year, and you want to get better and better at inducing Step 3 Whoa moments and reminding
yourself of the Step 4 purple blob. If you do those things, I think you’re evolving in the best
possible way, and it will have profound effects on all aspects of your life.

That’s it. That’s Truthism.

Am I a good Truthist? I’m okay. Better than I used to be with a long way to go. But defining
this framework will help—I’ll know where to put my focus, what to be wary of, and how to
evaluate my progress, which will help me make sure I’m actually improving and lead to
quicker growth.

To help keep me on mission, I made a Truthism logo:

That’s my symbol, my mantra, my WWJD—it’s the thing I can look at when something good
or bad happens, when a big decision is at hand, or on a normal day as a reminder to stay
aware of the fog and keep my eye on the big picture.

And What Are You?

My challenge to you is to decide on a term for yourself that accurately sums up your growth
framework.
If Christianity is your thing and it’s genuinely helping you grow, that word can be Christian.
Maybe you already have your own clear, well-defined advancement strategy and you just
need a name for it. Maybe Truthism hit home for you, resembles the way you already think,
and you want to try being a Truthist with me.

Or maybe you have no idea what your growth framework is, or what you’re using isn’t
working. If either A) you don’t feel like you’ve evolved in a meaningful way in the past
couple years, or B) you aren’t able to corroborate your values and philosophies with actual
reasoning that matters to you, then you need to find a new framework.

To do this, just ask yourself the same questions I asked myself: What’s the goal that you want
to evolve towards (and why is that the goal), what does the path look like that gets you there,
what’s in your way, and how do you overcome those obstacles? What are your practices on a
day-to-day level, and what should your progress look like year-to-year? Most importantly,
how do you stay strong and maintain the practice for years and years, not four days? After
you’ve thought that through, name the framework and make a symbol or mantra. (Then share
your strategy in the comments or email me about it, because articulating it helps clarify it in
your head, and because it’s useful and interesting for others to hear about your framework.)
I hope I’ve convinced you how important this is. Don’t wait until your deathbed to figure out
what life is all about.
10 Types of Odd Friendships
You’re Probably Part Of
 December 8, 2014 By Tim Urban

A note about listicles: So we know a lot of people hate listicles and associate them with
cheap, low-quality, traffic-driving, link-bait articles. But here’s the thing—a list is a great
format for an article, and a format I was using on my old blog almost 10 years ago. In fact,
my first listicle, 19 Things I Don’t Understand, was published in August of 2005, a year
before Buzzfeed was even founded. Then, over the last few years, I watched in horror as one
of my favorite formats decided to prostitute itself all over the internet as the default format
for lazy articles. Anyway the point is, A) I was doing listicles before they were cool, and B) A
list headline doesn’t mean it can’t be a high-quality article, so C) Wait But Why will make a
listicle when it’s the best format for that post, and don’t be mad at us cause it’s not what it
looks like.
__________

When you’re a kid, or in high school, or in college, you don’t really work too hard on your
friend situation. Friends just kind of happen.

For a bunch of years, you’re in a certain life your parents chose for you, and so are other
people, and none of you have that much on your plates, so friendships inevitably form. Then
in college, you’re in the perfect friend-making environment, one that hits all three
ingredients sociologists consider necessaryfor close friendships to develop: “proximity;
repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down
and confide in each other.” More friendships happen.
Maybe they’re the right friends, maybe they’re not really, but you don’t put that much
thought into any of it—you’re more of a passive observer.

Once student life ends, the people in your life start to shake themselves into more distinct
tiers. Something like this:
At the top of your life mountain, in the green zone, you have your Tier 1 friends—those who
feel like brothers and sisters. These are the people closest to you, those you call first when
something important happens, those you love even when they suck, who make speeches at
your wedding, whose best and worst sides you know through and through, and whose
relationship with you is eternal—even if you go months or years without hanging out,
nothing has changed when you find yourself together again. Unfortunately, depending on
how things went down in your youth, Tier 1 can also contain your worst enemies, the people
who can ruin your day with one subtle jab that only they could word so brilliantly hurtfully,
the people you feel a burning resentment for, or jealousy of, or competition with. Tier 1 is
high stakes.
Below, in the yellow zone, are your Tier 2 friends—your Pretty Good friends. Pretty Good
friends are a much calmer situation than your brothers and sisters on Tier 1. You might be
invited to their wedding, but you won’t have any responsibilities once you’re there. If you
live in the same city, you might see them every month or two for dinner and have a great time
when you do, but if one of you moves, you might not speak for the next year or two. And if
something huge happens in their life, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it first from someone
else.
Towards the bottom of the mountain in the orange zone, you have your Tier 3 friends—your
Not Really friends. You might grab a one-on-one drink with one of them when you move to
their city, but then it surprises neither of you when five years pass and drink #2 is still yet to
happen. Your relationship tends to exist mostly as part of a bigger group or through the
occasional Facebook like, and it doesn’t even really stress you out when you hear that one of
them made $5 million last year. You may also try to sleep with one of these people at any
given time.
The lowest part of Tier 3 begins to blend indistinguishably into your large group
of acquaintances (the pink zone)—those people you’d stop and talk to if you saw them on
the street or would maybe email for professional purposes, but whom you’d never hang out
with one-on-one. When you hear that something bad happens to one of these people, you
pretend to be sad but you don’t actually care.
Finally, acquaintances gradually blend into the endless world of strangers.

And depending on who you are and how things shook out in those first 25 years, the way
your particular mountain looks will vary.

For example, there’s Walled-Off Wally:

And Phony Phoebe, who tries to be everyone’s best friend and ends up with a lot of people
mad at her:
 

Even Unabomber Ulysses has a mountain:

Whatever your particular mountain looks like, eventually the blur of your youth is behind
you, the dust has settled, and there you are living your life—when one day, usually around
your mid or late 20s, it hits you:

It’s not that easy to make friends anymore.

Sure, you’ll make new friends in the future—at work, through your spouse, through your kids
—but you won’t get to that Tier 1 brothers level, or even to Tier 2, with very many of them,
because people who meet as adults don’t tend to get through the 100+ long, lazy hangouts
needed to reach a bond of that strength. As time goes on, you start to realize that the 20-year
frenzy of not-especially-thought-through haphazard friend-making you just did was the
critical process of you making most of your lifelong friends.
And since you matched up with most of them A) by circumstance, and B) before you really
knew yourself yet, the result is that your Tier 1 and Tier 2 friends—those closest to you—fall
in a very scattered way on what I’ll call the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph:
So who are all those close friends in the three non-ideal quadrants?

As time goes on, most of us tend to have fewer friends in Quadrants 2-4, because A) people
mature, and B) people have more self-respect and higher standards for what they’ll deal with
as they get older. But the fact is, friendships made in the formative years often stick, whether
they’re ideal or not, leaving most of us with a portion of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships that
just don’t make that much sense. We’ll get to the great, Quadrant 1 friendships later in the
post, but in order to treat those relationships properly, we need to take a thorough look at the
odd ones first. Here are 10 common ones—

1) The Non-Question-Asking Friend

You’ll be having a good day. You’ll be having a bad day. You’ll be happy at work. You’ll
quit your job. You’ll fall in love. You’ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder
them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn’t matter, because none of it will be
discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything
about your life. This friend can be explained in one of three ways:

1) He’s extremely self-absorbed and only wants to talk about himself

2) He avoids getting close to people and doesn’t want to talk about either you or himself or
anything personal, just third-party topics

3) He thinks you’re insufferably self-absorbed and knows if he asks you about your life,
you’ll talk his ear off about it

Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, we’re left with two possibilities. Possibility #1 isn’t
fun at all and this person should not be allowed space on Tier 1. The green part of the
mountain is sacred territory, and super self-absorbed people shouldn’t be permitted to set foot
up there. Put him on Tier 2 and just be happy you’re not dating him.

Possibility #2 is a pretty dark situation for your friend, but it can actually be fun for you. I
have a friend who I’ve hung out with one-on-one about four times in the last year, and he has
no idea Wait But Why exists. I’ve known him for 14 years and I’m not sure he knows if I
have siblings or not. But I actually enjoy the shit out of this friend—sure, there’s a limit on
how close we’ll ever be, but without ever spending time talking about our lives, we actually
end up in a lot of fun, interesting conversations.
2) The Friend in the Group You Can’t Be
Alone With Under Any Circumstances

In almost every group of friends, there’s one pair who can’t ever be alone together. It’s not
that they dislike each other—they might get along great—it’s just that they have no
individual friendship with each other whatsoever. This leaves both of them petrified of the
lumbering elephant that appears in the room anytime they’re alone together. They’re way too
on top of shit to ever end up in the car alone together if a group is going somewhere in
multiple cars, but there are smaller dangers afoot—like being the first two to arrive at a
restaurant or being in a group of three when the third member goes to the bathroom.

The thing is, sometimes it’s not even that these people couldn’t have an individual friendship
—it’s just that they don’t, and neither one has the guts to try to make that leap when things
have gone on for so long as is.

3) The Non-Character-Breaking Friend

You Have to be “On” With
This is a friend who’s terrified of having an earnest interaction, and as such, your friendship
with him is always in some kind of skit—you always have to be on  when you’re interacting.
Sometimes the skit is that you both burst out laughing at everything constantly. He can only
exist with you in “This is so fucking hilarious it’s too much!” mode, so you have to be in
some kind of joke-telling or sarcastic mode yourself at all times or he’ll become socially
horrified.
Another version of this is the “always and only ironic” friend, who you really bum out if you
ever break that social shell and say something earnest. This type of person hates earnest
people because someone being earnest dares him to come out from under his ironic safety
blanket and let the sun touch his face, and no fucking thanks.
A third example is the “You’re great, I’m great, ugh why is everyone else so terrible and not
great like us” friend. Of course, she doesn’t really think you’re perfectly great at all—if she
were with someone else, you’d be one of the voodoo dolls on the table to be dissected and
scoffed at. The key here is that the two of you must be on a team at all times while
interacting. The only comfortable mode for this person is bonding with you by building a
little pedestal for you both to stand on while you criticize everyone else. You can either play
along and everything will go smoothly, even though you’ll both despise yourselves and each
other the whole time, or you can commit the ultimate sin and have the integrity to disagree
with the friend or defend a non-present party the friend criticizes. Doing this will shatter the
fragile team vibe and make the friend recoil and say something quietly like, “Hm…yeah…I
guess.” The friend now respects you for the first time and will also criticize you extra hard
next time she’s playing her pedestal game with a different friend.
What these all have in common is the friend has tall walls up, at least toward you, and so she
builds a little skit for you two to hang out in to make sure any authentic connection can be
avoided. Sometimes that person only does this out of her own social anxiety and can become
a great, authentic friend if you can just stomp through the ice. Other times, the person is just
hopelessly scared and closed off and there’s no hope and you have to get out.
In any case, I can’t stand these interactions and am in a full panic the entire time they’re
happening.
4) The Double-Obligated Friendship

Think of a friend you get together with from time to time, which usually happens after a long
and lackluster email or text exchange during which you just can’t find a time that works for
both of you—and you’re never really happy when these plans are being made and not really
psyched when you wake up and it’s finally on your schedule for that day.
Maybe you’re aware that you don’t want to be friends with that person, or maybe you’re
delusional about it—but what you’re most likely not aware of is that they probably don’t
want to see you either.
There are lopsided situations where one person is far more interested in hanging out than the
other (we’ll get to those later), but in the case we’re talking about here, both parties
often think it’s a lopsided situation without realizing that the other person actually feels the
same way—that’s why it takes so long to schedule a time. When someone’s excited about
something, they figure out how to get it into their schedule—when they’re not, they figure
out ways to push it farther into the future.
Sometimes you don’t think hard enough about it to even realize you don’t like being friends
with the person, and other times you really like the idea or the aesthetic of being friends with
that particular person—being friends with them is part of your Story. But even in cases where
you’re perfectly lucid about your feelings—since neither of you knows the other feels the
same way and neither has the guts to just cut things off or move it down a tier, this friendship
usually just continues along for eternity.

5) The Half Marriage

Somewhere in your life, you’re probably part of a friendship that would be a marriage if
only the other person weren’t very, very, extremely not interested in that happening. 1 for 2
on yes votes—just one vote away—so close.
You might be on either side of this—and either way it’s one of the least healthy parts of your
life. Fun!

If you’re on the if only side of things, probably the right move is to get your fucking shit
together? Ya know? This friendship is one long, continuous rejection of you as a human
being, and you’re just wallowing there in your yearning like a sobbing little seal. Plus, duh, if
you gather your self-respect and move on with your life, it’ll raise their perception of your
value and they might actually become interested in you.
If you’re on the oh yeah definitely not side of the situation, here’s what’s happening—there’s
this suffering human in the world, and you know they’re suffering, and you fucking love it,
because it gives your little ego a succulent sponge bath every time you hang out with them.
You enjoy it so much you probably even lead them on intentionally, don’t you—you make
sure to keep just enough ambiguity in the situation that their bleeding heart continues to
lather your ego from head to toe at your whim.
Both of you—go do something else.

6) The Historical Friend

A Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met
when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though you’re a very weird
match. Most old friends fall somewhat into this category, but a true Historical Friend is
someone you absolutely would not be friends with if you met them today.
You’re not especially pleased with who they are, and they feel the same way about you.
You’re not each other’s type one bit. Unfortunately, you’re also extremely close friends from
when you were four, and you’re both just a part of each other’s situation forever, sorry.

7) The Non-Parallel Life Paths Friendship

Throughout childhood and much of young adulthood, most people your age are in the same
life stage as you are. But when it comes to advancing into full adulthood, people do so at
widely varying paces, which leads to certain friends suddenly having totally different
existences from one another.

Anyone within three years of 30 has a bunch of these going on. It’s just a weird time for
everyone. Some people have become Future 52-year-olds, while others are super into being
Previous 21-year-olds. At some point, things will start to meld together again, but being 30-
ish is the friendship equivalent of a kid going through an awkward pubescent stage.
There are darker, more permanent Non-Parallel Life Path situations. Like when Person A
starts to become a person who rejects material wealth, partially because she genuinely feels
that pursuing an artistic path matters more and partially because she needs a defense
mechanism against feeling envious of richer people, and Person B’s path makes her scoff at
people who pursue creative paths, partially because she genuinely thinks expressing yourself
is an inherently narcissistic venture and partially because she needs a defense mechanism
against feeling regretful that she never pursued her creative dreams—these two will have
problems. They may still like each other, but they can’t be as close as they used to be—each
of their lives is a bit of a middle finger at the other’s choices, and that’s just awkward for
everyone. It’s not always that bad—but to survive an Off-Line Life Situation, friends need to
be really different people who don’t at all want the same things out of life.
This friendship is a distant cousin of The Morally Off-Line Friendship—
 

8) The Frenemy

The Frenemy roots very hard against you. And I’m not talking about the friends that will feel
a little twinge of pleasure when they hear your big break didn’t pan out after all or that your
relationship is in bad shape. I’m not even talking about someone who secretly roots against
you when they’re not doing so well at some area of life and it hurts them to see you do better.
Those are bad emotions, but they can exist in people who are still good friends.
I’m talking about a real Frenemy—someone who really wants bad things for you. Because
you’re you.
You and the Frenemy usually go way back, have a very deep friendship, and the trouble
probably started a long time ago.

There’s a lot of complex psychology going on in these situations that I don’t fully understand,
but my hunch is that a Frenemy’s resentment is rooted in his own pain, or his own
shortcomings, or his own regret—and for some reason, your existence stings them in these
places hard.

A little less dark but no less harmful is a bully situation where a friend sees some weakness or
vulnerability in you and she enjoys prodding you there either for sadistic reasons or to prop
herself up.

A Frenemy knows how to hurt you better than anyone because you’re deeply similar in some
way and she knows how you’re wired, and she’ll do whatever she can to bring you down any
chance she gets, often in such a subtle way it’s hard to see that it’s happening.

Whatever the reason, if you have a Frenemy in your life, kick her toxic ass off your
mountain, or at leastkick her down the mountain—just get her off of Tier 1. A Frenemy has
about a tenth of the power to hurt you from Tier 2 as she does from Tier 1.

9) The Facebook Celebrity Friend

This person isn’t a celebrity to anyone other than you, you creep. You know exactly who I’m
talking about—there are a small handful of people whose Facebook page you’re
uncomfortably well-acquainted with, and those people have no idea that this is happening.
On the plus side, there are people out there you haven’t spoken to in seven years who know
all about the new thing you’re trying with your hair, since it goes both ways.
This is a rare Tier 3 friend, or even an acquaintance, who qualifies as an odd friendship,
because you found a way to make it unhealthy even though you’re not actually friends. Well
done.

10) The Lopsided Friendship

There are a lot of ways a friendship can be lopsided.

Someone can be higher on their friend’s mountain than vice versa.

Someone can want to spend more time with a friend than vice versa.

One member can consistently do 90% of the listening and only 10% of the talking, and in
situations where most of the talking is about life problems, what’s happening is a one-sided
therapy situation, with a badly off-balance give-and-take ratio, and that’s not much of a
friendship—it’s someone using someone else.

And then there’s the lopsided power friendship. Of course, this is a hideous quality in many
not-great couples, but it’s also a prominent feature of plenty of friendships.

A near 50/50 friendship is ideal, but anything out to 65/35 is fine and can often be attributed
to two different styles of personality. It’s when the number gap gets even wider that
something less healthy is going on—something that doesn’t reflect very well on either party.

There are some obvious ways to assess the nature of a friendship’s power dynamic—does one
person cut in and interrupt the other person while they’re talking far more than the other way
around? Is one person’s opinion or preference just kind of understood to carry more weight
than the other’s? Is one person allowed to be more of a dick to the other than vice versa?
Another interesting litmus test is what I call the “mood determiner test.” This comes into play
when two friends get together but they’re in very different moods—the idea is, whose mood
“wins” and determines the mood of the hangout. If Person A is in a bad mood, Person B is in
a good mood, and Person B reacts by being timid and respectful of Person A’s mood, leaving
the vibe down there until Person A snaps out of it on her own—but when the moods are
reversed, Person B quickly disregards her own bad mood and acts more cheerful to match
Person A’s happy mood—and this is how it always goes—then Person A is in a serious
power position.
Not All Friendships Are Grim…
In the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph above, the friendships we just discussed are
all in Quandrants 2, 3, or 4—i.e. they’re all a bit unenjoyable, unhealthy, or both. That’s why
this has been depressing. On the bright side, there’s also Quadrant 1—all the friendships
that do  make sense.
No friendship is perfect, but those in Quadrant 1 are doing what friendships are supposed to
do—they’re making the lives of both parties better. And when a friendship is both in
Quadrant 1 of the graph and on Tier 1 of your mountain—that friendship is a rock in your
life.
Rock friendships don’t just make us happy—they’re the thing (along with rock family and
romantic relationships) that makes us happy. Investing serious time and energy into those is a
no-brainer long term life strategy.
But in the case of most people over 25—at least in New York—I think A) not enough time is
carved out as dedicated friend time, and B) the time that is carved out is spread too thin, and
too evenly, among the Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships in all four quadrants. I’m definitely guilty
of this myself.

There’s something I call the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap. When you haven’t seen a good friend
in a long time, the first order of business is a big catch-up—you want to know what’s going
on in their career, with their girlfriend, with their family, etc., and they want to catch up on
your life. In theory, once this happens, you can go back to just hanging out, shooting the shit,
and actually being in the friendship. The problem is, when you don’t make enough time for
good friends, seeing them only for a meal and not that often—you end up spending each get-
together catching up, and you never actually get to just enjoy the friendship or get far past the
surface. That’s the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap, and I find myself falling into it with way too
many of the rocks in my life.
So I think there are two orders of business:

1) Think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren’t in Quadrant 1, and
demote them down the mountain. I’m not suggesting you stop being friends with those
people—you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto—
but if the friendships aren’t that healthy or enjoyable, they don’t really deserve to be in your
Tier 1, and you probably shouldn’t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time
to…
2) Dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you’re in your
mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you’ll ever have. Your rock
friendships don’t warrant 2x the time you give to your other friends—they warrant 5 or 10x.
And keep in mind that seeing one of them for an hour-long meal isn’t really enough—your
rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them.
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are
Unhappy
 September 9, 2013 By Tim Urban

Say hi to Lucy.

Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s.
She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special
Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the
main character of a very special story.

So Lucy’s enjoying her GYPSY life, and she’s very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one
thing:

Lucy’s kind of unhappy.

To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the
first place. It comes down to a simple formula:

It’s pretty straightforward—when the reality of someone’s life is better than they had
expected, they’re happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they’re
unhappy.
To provide some context, let’s start by bringing Lucy’s parents into the discussion:

Lucy’s parents were born in the 50s—they’re Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy’s
grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or “the Greatest Generation,” who grew up
during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not
GYPSYs.

Lucy’s Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her
parents to build practical, secure careers. They wanted her parents’ careers to have greener
grass than their own, and Lucy’s parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable
career for themselves. Something like this:
They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn
of a career, but that they’d need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy’s parents embarked on their careers.
As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic
prosperity. Lucy’s parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling
gratified and optimistic.
With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy’s parents
raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren’t alone.
Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be
whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their
psyches.

This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their
parents’ goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn’t really do it for them. A GYPSY-
worthy lawn has flowers.

This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Wildly Ambitious

The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security.
The fact is, a green lawn isn’t quite exceptional or unique enough for a GYPSY. Where the
Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own
Personal Dream.
Cal Newport points out that “follow your passion” is a catchphrase that has only gotten going
in the last 20 years, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently
a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time. The same Ngram viewer
shows that the phrase “a secure career” has gone out of style, just as the phrase “a fulfilling
career” has gotten hot.
To be clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did—they
just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn’t think about as much.
But something else is happening too. While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have
become much more particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message
throughout her childhood as well:

This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Delusional

“Sure,” Lucy has been taught, “everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career,
but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the
crowd.” So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career
lawn, each individual GYPSY  thinks that he or she is destined for something even better—
A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition
of special:

spe-cial| ‘speSHel |
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.
According to this definition, most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean
anything.

Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, “Good point…but I actually am one
of the few special ones”—and this is the problem.
A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job market. While
Lucy’s parents’ expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a
great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as
she, and for her it’s just a matter of time and choosing which way to go. Her pre-workforce
expectations look something like this:
Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a
place, and the weird thing about careers is that they’re actually quite hard. Great careers take
years of blood, sweat and tears to build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them
—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or
mid-20s.

But GYPSYs aren’t about to just accept that.

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched
this, finding that Gen Y has “unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting
negative feedback,” and “an inflated view of oneself.” He says that “a great source of
frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often
feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and
effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting.”
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, “Do you
feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?” He says
that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be
an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded
sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through
overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but
often lack any real justification for this belief.”
And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few years out of college
Lucy finds herself here:

Lucy’s extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit
deluded about one’s own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early
years out of college. And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her
“reality – expectations” happy score coming out at a negative.

And it gets even worse. On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem that applies to
their whole generation:

GYPSYs Are Taunted

Sure, some people from Lucy’s parents’ high school or college classes ended up more
successful than her parents did. And while they may have heard about some of it from time to
time through the grapevine, for the most part they didn’t really know what was going on in
too many other peoples’ careers.

Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern

phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.
Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the
open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people
who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships)
are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves
Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:

So that’s why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate. In fact,
she’s probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing.

Here’s my advice for Lucy:

1) Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious
person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it’ll work
itself out—just dive in somewhere.
2) Stop thinking that you’re special. The fact is, right now, you’re not special. You’re
another completely inexperienced young person who doesn’t have all that much to offer yet.
You can become special by working really hard for a long time.
3) Ignore everyone else. Other people’s grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in
today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is
that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you
just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.
7 Ways to Be Insufferable on
Facebook
 July 8, 2013 By Tim Urban

The memory is vivid.

New Year’s Day, 2013. I’m going about my afternoon pleasantly, when I open my email and
a friend has forwarded me what she calls a particularly heinous Facebook status from her
news feed, written by someone we’ll call Daniel. It read:

2012 was a biggg year for me. I left my amazing job at NBC to move back to Chicago. I
started dating my angel, Jaime Holland. I started yoga (thanks Jake Fisher & Jonah
Perlstein!). I wrote an album with Matthew Johannson. Wrote another album I’m proud of. I
got to hang with Owen Wilson, and worked with Will Ferrell on an amazing project. Had a
conversation about Barack Obama with David Gregory. Danced. Joined a kickball team. Won
a couple awards. Helped my sister plan her summer trip. Swam a lot. Golfed a little. Cried
more than you would think. Read The World According to Garp. Saw Apocolypse Now.
Went to Miami for the NBA Finals. Drank the best orange juice I’ve ever had with Davey
Welch. Tweeted. Went to amazing weddings in Upstate New York. Drank a ridiculous
amount of milk. Learned how to make sand art. Saw a great light show. Saw the Angels and
Lakers. Fell in love with Jawbone Up. Cooked with Jaime. Gardened with Jaime. Watched
Homeland with Jaime. Wrestled with Jaime. Laughed for hours with Jaime. Fell in love with
Jaime’s family. Worked on a play. Played World of Warcraft. Did some improv. Played a ton
of the guitar. Really just had a wild, amazing year. What a world.
By the time I finished reading, I realized that my non-phone hand was clutching tightly to my
forehead, forcefully scrunching my forehead skin together. I had the same facial expression
I’d have on if someone made me watch a live event where people had their skin slowly
peeled off.

It was everything bad about everything, all at once.

But instead of distancing myself from the horror, I soaked in it. I read it again and again,
fascinated by how something could be so aggressively unappealing.

It made me think about what makes terrible Facebook behavior terrible, and why other
Facebook behavior isn’t annoying at all. It comes down to a pretty simple rule:

A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing
positive for anyone reading it.

To examine this a bit, let’s start by discussing the defining characteristics of statuses that
are not  annoying.
To be unannoying, a Facebook status typically has to be one of two things:
1) Interesting/Informative
2) Funny/Amusing/Entertaining
You know why these are unannoying? Because things in those two categories do something
for me, the reader. They make my day a little better.
Ideally, interesting statuses would be fascinating and original (or a link to something that is),
and funny ones would be hilarious. But I’ll happily take mildly amusing—at least we’re still
dealing with the good guys.
On the other hand, annoying statuses typically reek of one or more of these five
motivations:
1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.
2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and
the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.

3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.

4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.
5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better. This is the
least heinous of the five—but seeing a lonely person acting lonely on Facebook makes me
and everyone else sad. So the person is essentially spreading their sadness, and that’s a shitty
thing to do, so it’s on the list.
Facebook is infested with these five motivations—other than a few really saintly people, most
people I know, myself certainly included, are guilty of at least some of this nonsense here and
there. It’s an epidemic.

To lay out the most common types of offenses:

7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook

 

1) The Brag
Bragging is such a staple of unfortunate Facebook behavior, it needs to be broken into three
subsections:

1a) The “I’m Living Quite the Life” Brag

Description: A post making your life sound great, either in a macro sense (got your dream
job, got your degree, love your new apartment) or a micro sense (taking off on an amazing
trip, huge weekend coming up, heading out on a fun night with friends, just had an amazing
day)
Examples:
 Guess who just got her TFA acceptance letter!!!
 Hawaii!
 Tailgating, Giants game, night out with Dave, Matt, Paul, and Andy. I love you,
Saturday.
Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting (I’m successful; I’m happy; I have a great social
life), Jealousy Inducing
So at best, you’re just really excited about your life and you need to tell everyone, and at
worst you’re specifically hoping to make people feel worse about their lives and jealous of
yours. Somewhere in the middle would be you calculatingly crafting your words as part of an
unendearing and transparent campaign to make people see you in a certain way.

Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re just excited and need to brag to
someone. Even if that’s the case, the only people it’s okay to brag to in life are your close
friends, significant other, and family members—and that’s what email, texting, phone calls,
and live talking are for. Your moment of self-satisfaction is profoundly annoying to people
you’re not that close with, and they make up the vast majority of people who will be
subjected to the status.

1b) The Undercover Brag

Description: Like the blatant brags above except behind a frail disguise. This includes
all humblebrags, indirect brags, brags disguised as a rant, etc.
Examples:
 Apparently they now give PhDs to frauds and drunks. What a time to be alive!
 I’ll be traveling for the summer if anyone knows someone looking to sublease a Soho
apartment in July and August.
 On my walk home from work, I was whistled at twice, honked at twice, and one car
almost caused an accident slowing down to stare at me. Sometimes I really hate men.
Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting, Jealousy Inducing
On one hand, these people are at least self-aware enough to cloak their brag in something. On
the other hand, they have the same exact core motivations as the blatant braggers and looking
at these examples actually makes the first group seem almost lovable in comparison.
1c) The “I’m in a Great Relationship” Brag
Description: A public expression of your extremely positive feelings for your significant
other or an anecdote signifying the perfection of your relationship.
Examples:
 A surprise trip to Vermont for two nights in a cabin. All I can say is Wow, what a
boyfriend.
 Thanks, Rachel, for the best year of my life.
 Excited for a rainy Sunday of pizza, games, and movies with the wife.
Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting (FYI, I have a boyfriend; I’m in a wonderful
relationship), Jealousy Inducing
The image crafting and jealousy inducing motives here are transparent. The only less-
appalling possibility could be that it’s an attempt to strengthen the relationship itself by
showing how you feel in a more substantial way than just saying it in private. But really?
You’re gonna drag 800 of us into this shit because you couldn’t find a more creative way to
go over the top in expressing yourself?

The one very funny possibility when it’s a guy posting is that either he’s in trouble for
something or that his girlfriend’s friend’s boyfriend pulled some shit like this at some point
and his girlfriend has now been 10% mad at him ever since it happened, so he finally has to
just bite the bullet.

The fact is, there’s no excuse for it, because if you feel the need to plaster your relationship
all over Facebook, there are plenty of socially acceptable ways to do so—go nuts with couple
profile photos, and enjoy three separate moments of like button and comment applause when
you change your status to “in a relationship,” “engaged,” and “married.”

2) The Cryptic Cliffhanger

Description: A post that makes it clear that something good or bad is happening in your life
without disclosing any details.

Examples:
 That’s IT. I am DONE dating.
 This could be a biggggg day…
 Moments like these make all of the struggle and all of the pain worth it.
 Ughhhhhhhhh
Core reasons for posting: Attention Craving
The fun part of these is watching the inevitable comments and then watching how the author
responds to them, if at all. This process slots the author into one of four sub-categories:

 The celebrity: The author stays silent, treating the commenters like gawking fans.
 800 people’s collective high-maintenance girlfriend: The author explains
everything in the comments, which means he wanted to talk publicly about it, but he
didn’t want to just tell the public, he wanted the public to ask him about it.
 The tortured protagonist: It’s something bad. The author responds but maintains the
mystery—she’s unhappy about it and she “doesn’t feel like getting into it.”
 Everybody’s special princess: It’s something exciting. The author responds but
maintains the mystery—it’s really good and he “can’t say yet but you’ll find out soon!”
Now you’ll have an extra hop in your step as you wait for the big news with bated
breath! This is a special one because it also brings Narcissism, Jealousy Inducing, and
Image Crafting in. What a fun person to have in your life!

3) The Literal Status Update

Description: An actual status update on someone’s mundane day.
Examples:
 Off to the gym, then class reading
 Dumplings!
 Finally finished my paper!
Core reasons for posting: Loneliness; Narcissism; Thinking a status update is supposed to
be an actual status update
Allow me to present a visual—

“Finally finished my paper!” Okay…and? What are you looking for here? A fake

congratulation from a bunch of people who aren’t emotionally invested in your struggle?
Finishing your paper is green territory on the above chart, or if you had been working on it
for a couple months, it might scrape the outer edges of the orange. For 90+% of the people
who will read the status, it doesn’t come near the red territory, which is all they care about.
Off to the gym, then class reading. Oh is that what’s on tap for tonight? Who exactly are
you telling this to? I really want to get to the bottom of this. At some point between leaving
work and arriving at the gym, you had an impulse to take out your phone and type this status.
Then you put your phone away. Tell me what was accomplished.
We’re talking about serious blue territory here, which means that even your mom doesn’t
give a shit. A lot of annoying statuses fall far from red territory, but they all serve the author
in some way, which is why they’re posted.

But info about your schedule doesn’t do anything to craft your image or induce jealousy in
anyone—so it just seems a lot like Attention Craving’s sad cousin, Loneliness. I suppose it’s
nice that Facebook gives a lonely person someone to tell their day to, and if these statuses
didn’t come with the byproduct of reminding everyone else that life is meaningless and
they’re gonna die someday, they wouldn’t have to be on this list.

The other possible explanation is severe narcissism, as if somehow, because you’re you, even
the smallest details of your life are interesting to others. A weird part of the life of a major
celebrity is that people are obsessed with everything about them, even their blue territory. If
you’re not a major celebrity, this is not a problem you have, I promise.

4) The Inexplicably-Public Private

Message

Description: A public posting from one person to another that has no good reason to be
public.
Examples:
  I miss you! When are we hanging out?
 What a weekend with Julie Epstein and Emily Rothchild. I love my girls!
 All private jokes.
Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting; Jealousy Inducing; Narcissism; You’re over 80
and don’t realize there’s a difference between a public post and a private message.
My grandmother aside, there is no good reason to ever do this. Good is the key word. There
are lots of very annoying reasons to do this. Let’s list them:
 To make yourself seem cool and social and make your social life seem vibrant and
fun
 To show everyone what good friends you and the recipient are
 To make people jealous or feel worse about their own lives
 Because you’re acting like you’re in high school and you’re one of the popular kids
whose social situation is actually an important thing for people
The one possibility I enjoy is that the message is written to be jealousy-
inducing specifically for one individual who will likely be seeing it, whether it be an ex or a
friend they hate. That kind of malice is so extreme it crosses over the far line and becomes
awesome.

5) The Out-Of-Nowhere Oscar Acceptance Speech

Description: An outpouring of love for no clear reason and aimed at no one in particular
Example: I just want to say how thankful I am for all of you who have touched my life. Your
support means everything and I couldn’t have gotten through a lot of things in the last year
without you!
Core reasons for posting: Attention Craving
I refuse to believe you feel a genuine outpouring of love for your 800 Facebook friends. And
if you felt suddenly emotional about your best friends and family, is a public status really the
way you’d express it? Wouldn’t contacting a few people by email or text be a lot more
personal and genuine? Not relevant, because that’s not what’s happening here.

What’s happening here can really be boiled down to, “Hey everyone! I’m here! Hug me!”
You know the inevitable response to one of these statuses, no matter who you are, will be
dozens of like button hugs and comment arm squeezes. And isn’t that a little needy of you?
You’re not feeling loving when you write this post—you’re feeling the need to feel loved.
The one time this is somewhat acceptable is when it’s part of a huge collective group hug,
like on Thanksgiving or Christmas. If you open Facebook on Thanksgiving, you’ll be treated
to hundreds of Out-Of-Nowhere Oscar Acceptance Speeches. (These I could also do without,
if you’re wondering.)

6) The Incredibly Obvious Opinion

 

Description: When a big event happens, a post chiming in with the opinion we’ve heard
1,000 times.
Examples:
 I feel so deeply for the Egyptian people fighting for their right to freedom. Everyone
has a right to freedom and I pray that they prevail.
 My thoughts and prayers are with the families in Newtown after this unspeakable
tragedy. I have no words to express my sorrow for those who lost a child.
 I’m disappointed about some things about Obama’s first term, but I’m happy he was
reelected and hopeful about what his second term can bring.
Core reasons for posting: Narcissism; Image Crafting (I’m the kind of person that has this
particular opinion or reaction; I’m smart and I can say adult things)
These are annoying because A) you’re not saying anything remotely original or interesting on
an event the media is already flooding our airways about, covering every possible angle, and
B) you’re now making a huge, and often tragic event, partially about you. The sadness you’re
feeling about the massacre of children isn’t really a key piece of the puzzle here, and you
need not describe to us what the event looks like through your personal lens, especially when
the lens is just transparent glass—if I want a side dish of narcissism along with my tragedy,
I’ll just read celebrity tweets about the event.

7) The Step Toward Enlightenment

Description: An unsolicited nugget of wisdom.
Examples:
 “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” ~Buddha
 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all
your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. ~Proverbs 3:5-6
 I don’t see what the big deal is about new years and people claiming how different
they are going to be next year. If you want to better yourself it shouldn’t matter what
day of the year it is…. Me? Im going to be the same person I am today tomorrow.
Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting; Narcissism
Oh, where to begin.

First of all, let’s be entirely clear that there is no humility involved in a Step Toward
Enlightenment post simply because you might be quoting someone else—the clear
patronizing message is, “Ahh hello Facebook Friends. I am one who knows the secrets of life
—allow me to teach you so that you too can one day find enlightenment.”

Secondly—you know what inspires people? You achieving something incredible and letting

it be an example and inspiration to others. For your words alone to be inspirational, you need
to be a gifted speaker or writer who really has something original to say—and we both know
that’s not you. So for you to consider yourself an inspirational character by simply posting
trite quotes is, well, flagrantly narcissistic. You’re assuming that you, just by being you, are
inspirational.
Thirdly, let’s get to your real motive with these statuses—Image Crafting. You want people
to see how enlightened you are and admire the spiritual journey you’re on.

***
Our friend Daniel’s post was quite a feat—in one simple paragraph, he sliced through my
soul, accomplishing nearly every terrible status type and motivation discussed above. The
thing is, though, that if you looked right below his post, all you saw were likes and a couple
friendly comments.

And that’s why insufferable Facebook behavior will never go away—there’s no dislike
button or eye-roll button or middle finger button on Facebook, and it’s bad form to be too
much of a dick in the comments below a status. So annoying statuses are just positively
reinforced, and people remain un-self-aware that they regularly bring down the quality of
everyone else’s life.

The bigger point here is that the qualities of annoying statuses are normal human qualities—
everyone needs to brag to someone here and there, everyone has moments of weakness when
they need attention or feel lonely, and everyone has some downright ugly qualities that are
gonna come out at one time or another.

And that’s why you have people who love you.

The thing that Daniel and most others haven’t internalized is the fact that if they have 800
Facebook friends, only about 10 or 15 love them. For an especially lovable person, maybe it’s
as high as 30. Between 1 and 4%. That means that between 96 and 99% of your Facebook
friends DO NOT LOVE YOU.
People who don’t love you don’t care about you or your day or your life that much, they’re
probably not especially rooting for you, and they certainly want nothing to do with your
worst qualities. And you doing something purely to serve your emotional or egotistical needs
really should not show up on their computer screen—it just shouldn’t.

Okay, gotta go. Off to the gym, then dinner, then home, then bed.
The Great Perils of Social
Interaction
 January 21, 2014 By Tim Urban

If an alien ever immigrated to Earth, he’d be a social disaster.

He’d try his hardest to learn by observing how humans behave, but it wouldn’t be easy—he’d
see someone ask a stranger for a cigarette and he’d go ask for a sip of someone’s latte. He’d
see a couple kissing on the street and he’d go try to kiss the policeman on the corner. He’d
stare. He’d get food all over his alien face. And when he got tired, he’d lie down on the
sidewalk.

Our alien immigrant wouldn’t last a day before being arrested. He wouldn’t be behaving
correctly, and he’d quickly be forcefully removed from society.

That’s the way things are—there is an intricate set of thousands of social rules, and we’re all
sharply attuned to them. If we weren’t, we’d be sent away somewhere. Even being nearly
perfect will get you into trouble—you can have 98% of the rules down cold, but that last 2%
will leave you with a reputation of “rude” or “weird” or “creepy.”

But the hardest part of trying to abide by the Social Rulebook is that it’s far from a perfect
book. It’s a lot like the Constitution:

 It takes you to a certain point but then leaves much up to interpretation

 There are parts that are outdated or badly thought-out and terribly in need of an
Amendment
 And to further complicate things, every nation, ethnicity, culture, and subculture has
its own unique version of the Rulebook
Unfortunately, in the world of social interaction, there’s no Supreme Court to interpret tricky
situations, no legislature to amend bad rules, and no international law to help standardize
things across cultures.

It’s the wild fucking west out there.

So you’re welcome to head out into public, but before you do, I’ll sprinkle you with just a
sampling of the perils you’ll face, as a final warning—

Perils of Interacting With Friends and

Family
You’d think that friend and family interactions would be on the safer side, since those people
are likely to be using mostly the same version of the Rulebook as you. The problem is, with
those closest to you, an expectation of intimacy and comfort puts pressure on each interaction
going well, your history together often leaves things highly charged, and since this is the
arena where gossip and long-term memory live, the stakes are at their highest. Also, you’re
probably kind of an awkward person and awkward people are never safe, no matter whom
you’re with.

When meeting up with a friend or family member, things can get tricky before they even
start, with a potential 30-Second Hello:

And just when you’re relieved that that’s over, you’ll find yourself trying to pick a door in
one of the great social struggles of our time, The Handshake/Hug Decision of Doom:
 
I’ll be 90 and I still won’t have figured this out. There are different rules for everyone and
nothing’s clear—Do I shake my grandfather’s hand or go for the hug? How about my friend’s
father? Old friend? New friend? Opposite-sex acquaintance? Longtime work colleague?
Sibling’s good friend who I’m meeting for the second time? It’s unbelievably complicated.

And there aren’t just two options you’re choosing from—there’s the high school bro
handshake/backslap douche possibility, there’s the vertical, loose-hand high-five that morphs
into a weird springy-finger tension thing as you snap away, there’s even the easy but taking-
yourself-really-seriously non-ironic fist pound. And even if you both go for the hug, there’s a
question of duration and firmness and who’s in charge of those decisions.

(Hugs are a weird concept, by the way. There are a large handful of people in my life I hug
tightly every time I say hi or goodbye to them who I would never in any other circumstances
touch that intimately. It kind of makes no sense. Whoever wrote the Social Rulebook didn’t
really think that hard about it.)

Anyway, just when this couldn’t get any harder, somewhere along the line, society decided it
was a good idea to bring kisses into the mix. Kisses were doing just fine in the romantic and
parent-child arenas, and it’s unclear why kisses have any part in any other situation. Unless
it’s specifically part of your culture, no one under the age of 18 kisses people when they greet
them, and as you move into the adult world, you’re just expected to figure out when to kiss
people during a greeting. And there are multiple versions of kiss too—the light cheek kiss,
the near-cheek air kiss, the absurdly drawn-out one-kiss-on-each-cheek-as-if-we’re-an-
Arabian-prince skit—all further complicating the situation and putting us in deep peril of the
dreaded Accidental Mouth Kiss:
After surviving the greeting, some close friends continue to show affection, which leads to
more trouble, such as The “Wait How Do We Stop Doing This” Physical Contact
Situation. I often end up resorting to making up a drastic thing I need to do with my arms.
 

And all of this is nothing compared to The Money-Related Song and Dance. There’s the
obvious:
 
But friends can break into a Money-Related Song and Dance almost anytime, anywhere:
And it’s not just limited to transactions. At some point between the ages of 22 and 40, it goes
from being totally okay to discuss your income, price of rent, and general financial situation
with friends to not really okay at all. And we all have to figure out how to make that
transition.

Perils of Interacting With

Acquaintances
An acquaintance is someone you know, but you don’t hang out with them socially, and if you
ever did, it would only be as part of a large group of people. It could be someone you went to
high school with but were never friends with, someone who lived down the hall from you in
college for a year, a friend of someone you know, or someone you work with or used to work
with but you don’t know very well.

Most of the time you’re with friends, things are fine—the awkward parts are the exception to
the rule. But with acquaintances, awkwardness is the rule. My theory is that the word
“acquaintances” is derived from the word “awkward” to mean “people you’re awkward with”
and was originally spelled “awkwaintances,” but then they changed the spelling to try to
make things less awkward.
Here’s the issue—there are three ways to converse with someone:

1) Pre-Written Social Skits—You do this when you’re not trying to get to know someone
better but you’re also scared to just act normally around them.
2) Climbing the Hill—Trying to get to know someone better or to catch up on their life.
3) Being Normal—Accepting the state of a relationship and just enjoying whatever you can
from each other’s company.
In general, the main thing that makes interactions awkward is inauthenticity. Authentic is the
enemy of awkwardness, and with acquaintances, the only two authentic options are #3 or, if
you really do want to advance the relationship into friendship territory, #2. Since usually,
neither party actually wants or plans to become better friends, we’re left with “Being
Normal” as the key to acquaintance interaction. But here’s where we run into trouble. This is
how most people see these three above types of interaction:

But that assumes that you can only  be normal around someone you know well, which is not
true. I started using a new barber last year, and I was pleasantly surprised when instead of
making small talk or asking me questions about my life, he just started talking to me like I
was his friend or involving me in his conversations with the other barber. By doing so, he
spared both of us the massive inauthenticity of a typical barber-customer relationship and I
actually enjoy going there now. He doesn’t go by the above graph, but rather, sees things
more like three doors that you can choose from:
You’re not required to either smalltalk or pretend to want to get to know someone—it’s a
choice to do either and you can choose “Be Normal” instead. Unfortunately, the Social
Rulebook doesn’t talk about being normal with acquaintances, only a bunch of chapters about
how to survive the terror of an acquaintance interaction, authentic or not. We badly need to
make a Rulebook amendment here—until we do, my barber relationship will be a rare one.
For now, we’re stuck with things like The Work Acquaintance Trap, which happens when
two people who are acquaintances by circumstance and have to see each other every day
make the short-sighted mistake of sacrificing what had been the peace of an authentic non-
relationship for the hell of a permanently-stuck-in-#1 bullshit cycle:
 

 
Because conversation type #1 involves a large number of pre-written-by-society, canned
Robot Phrases, The Work Acquaintance Trap also leaves you at great risk of a Robot Phrase
Mismatch:
Even worse is running into an acquaintance in public. Both people are typically so petrified
by the awkward-potential that they end up acting insane. And it can go on for a hideously
long time if anyone makes the grave error of asking about the other’s life, leading to The
Everlasting Acquaintance Run-In:
Perils of Interacting With Strangers
Interacting with strangers is another way of saying “interacting with the rest of your species,”
and it’s often uncomfortable. Even though unlike the former two categories, nothing real is at
stake (other than your dignity), stranger interactions can provide some of the most awkward
moments in life.

Introductions are awkward by nature, and they’re severely complicated if you’re not entirely
sure of whether the person you’re introducing yourself to is actually a stranger. The main way
to get yourself into trouble is having a bad memory for whom you’ve met before, which can
lead to a Nice to Meet You / Nice to See You Disaster:
Then, of course, there’s The Sidewalk Direction-Mirroring Quagmire:
One of the most asinine and outdated clauses in the Social Rulebook states that despite
having zero relationship with me whatsoever, a nearby stranger must vocally command God
to save me if I inhale some pollen. The Inexplicable Sneeze Standoff is possibly the single
most awkward part of my life, especially since I’m a Multiple Sneezer.
Men also deal with a whole pile of stranger awkwardness in the urinal arena. This might just
be a weird issue I have, but at some point, I become incapable of peeing if there’s some
pressure to pee and I start to think too hard about it. Being next to one other person at the
urinal in an otherwise-silent bathroom usually does the trick:
In the rare circumstances that the other person next to me is a weird neurotic person too, we
run the horrifying risk of a Silent Urinal Standoff Nightmare:
Considering all of the hazards out there in the world, you’d think at least an interaction with a
not-yet-sentient blob would be safe. Think again. Interacting with stranger babies in public is
a high-stakes endeavor—if they respond well to you, you’re the most charming person in the
room and everyone is suddenly smiling at you and wants to marry you. It goes like this:
The baby acted like a reasonable person and everything went well. But the problem is, a large
percentage of babies are dicks, and you never know who’s who. Nothing will make you look
and feel like a big fucking weirdo quicker than a baby reacting badly to you.
Beware The Dick Baby:
It’s a tough world out there. And just when you’ve had enough and you’re heading home to
safety, you’ll likely say goodbye to whomever you’re with before realizing you’re about to
embark together on a Same Walking Direction Post-Goodbye Walk:
___________
Why I’m Always Late
 July 7, 2015 By Tim Urban

I woke up this morning to a text from Andrew. It was a link:

http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-
late/1097735/
“optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late”

Intriguing. Nothing’s better than the headline, “The reason people are [bad quality that
describes you] is actually because they’re [good quality].”

I got reading. And as it turns out, late people are actually the best people ever. They’re
optimistic and hopeful:
“People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic. They believe they can fit
more tasks into a limited amount of time more than other people and thrive when they’re
multitasking. Simply put, they’re fundamentally hopeful.”
They’re big-thinking:

“People who are habitually late don’t sweat over the small stuff, they concentrate on the big
picture and see the future as full of infinite possibilities.”
Late people just get it:
“People with a tendency for tardiness like to stop and smell the roses…life was never meant
to be planned down to the last detail. Remaining excessively attached to timetables signifies
an inability to enjoy the moment.”
By the end of the article, I had never felt prouder to be a chronically late person.

But also, what the hell is going on? Late people are the worst. It’s the quality I like least in
myself. And I’m not late because I like to smell the roses, or because I can see the big picture,
or because the future is full of infinite possibilities.
I’m late because I’m insane.

So I thought about this for a minute, and I think I figured out what’s going on. The issue is
that there are two kinds of lateness:

1) Okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does not negatively impact anyone
else—like being late to a group hangout or a party. Things can start on time and proceed as
normal with or without the late person being there yet.
2) Not okay lateness. This is when the late person being late does negatively impact others—
like being late to a two-person dinner or meeting or anything else that simply can’t start until
the late party arrives.
Haltiwanger’s article is (I hope) talking mostly about okay lateness. In which case sure,
maybe those people are the best, who knows.
But if you read the comment section under Haltiwanger’s article, people are furious with him
for portraying lateness in a positive light. And that’s because they’re thinking about the far
less excusable not okay lateness.
All of this has kind of left me with no choice but to take a quick nine-hour break from
working on the gargantuan SpaceX post to discuss not okay late people.
When it comes to people who are chronically not okay late, I think there are two subgroups:

Group 1) Those who don’t feel bad or wrong about it. These people are assholes.
Group 2) Those who feel terrible and self-loathing about it. These people have problems.
Group 1 is simple. They think they’re a little more special than everyone else, like the zero-
remorse narcissist at the top of Haltiwanger’s article. They’re unappealing. Not much else to
discuss here.
Punctual people think all not okay late people are in Group 1 (as the comments on this post
will show)—because they’re assuming all late people are sane people.
When a sane person thinks a certain kind of behavior is fine, they do it. When they think it’s
wrong, they don’t do it. So to a punctual person—one who shows up on time because they
believe showing up late is the wrong thing to do—someone who’s chronically late must be an
asshole who thinks being late is okay.

But that’s misunderstanding the entire second group, who, despite being consistently late,
usually detest the concept of making other people wait. Let call them CLIPs (Chronically
Late Insane Person).

While both groups of not okay late people end up regularly frustrating others, a reliable way
to identify a Group 2 CLIP is a bizarre compulsion to defeat themselves—some deep inner
drive to inexplicably miss the beginning of movies, endure psychotic stress running to catch
the train, crush their own reputation at work, etc. etc. As much as they may hurt others, they
usually hurt themselves even more.

I come from a long line of CLIPs. I spent around 15% of my youth standing on some
sidewalk alone, angrily kicking rocks, because yet again, all the other kids had gotten picked
up and I was still waiting for my mom. When she finally arrived, instead of being able to
have a pleasant conversation with her, I’d get into the car seething. She always felt terrible.
She has problems.
My sister once missed an early morning flight, so they rescheduled her for the following
morning. She managed to miss that one too, so they put her on a flight five hours later.
Killing time during the long layover, she got distracted on a long phone call and missed that
flight too. She has problems.
I’ve been a CLIP my whole life. I’ve made a bunch of friends mad at me, I’ve embarrassed
myself again and again in professional situations, and I’ve run a cumulative marathon
through airport terminals. It’s often the same story, something like this:

I’ll be meeting someone, maybe a professional contact, at, say, a coffee place at 3:00. When I
lay out my schedule for the day, I’ll have the perfect plan. I’ll leave early, arrive early, and
get there around 2:45. That takes all the stress out of the situation, and that’s ideal because
non-stressful commutes are one of my favorite things. It’ll be great—I’ll stroll out, put on a
podcast, and head to the subway. Once I’m off the subway, with time to spare, I’ll take a few
minutes to peruse storefronts, grab a lemonade from a street vendor, and enjoy New York. It’ll
be such a joy to look up at the architecture, listen to the sounds, and feel the swell of people
rushing by—oh magnificent city!
All I have to do is be off the subway by 2:45. To do that, I need to be on the subway by 2:25,
so let’s be safe and get to the subway by 2:15. So I have to leave my apartment by 2:07 or
earlier, and I’m set. What a plan. Here’s how it’ll play out (if you’re new to WBW, you’re
advised to check this out before proceeding):
 

 
 

 
 
CLIPs are strange people. I’m sure each CLIP is insane in their own special way, and to
understand how they work, you’ll usually have to get to some dark inner psychology. For me,
it’s some mix of these three odd traits:

I’m late because I’m in denial about how time works. The propensity of CLIPs
to underestimate how long things take comes out of some habitual delusional optimism.
Usually what happens is, of all the times the CLIP has done a certain activity or commute,
what they remember is that one time things went the quickest. And that amount of time is
what sticks in their head as how long that thing takes. I don’t think there’s anything that will
get me to internalize that packing for a week-long trip takes 20 minutes. In my head, it’s
eternally a five-minute task. You just take out the bag, throw some clothes in it, throw your
toiletries in, zip it up and done. Five minutes. The empirical data that shows that there are
actually a lot of little things to think about when you pack and that it takes 20 minutes every
time is irrelevant. Packing is clearly a five-minute task. As I type this, that’s what I believe.
I’m late because I have a weird aversion to changing circumstances. Not sure
what the deal is with this, but something in me is strangely appalled by the idea of
transitioning from what I’m currently doing to doing something else. When I’m at home
working, I hate when there’s something on my schedule that I have to stop everything for to
go outside and do. It’s not that I hate the activity—once I’m there I’m often pleased to be
there—it’s an irrational resistance to the transition. The positive side of this is it usually
means I’m highly present when I finally do haul my ass somewhere, and I’m often among the
last to leave.
Finally, I’m late because I’m mad at myself. There’s a pretty strong correlation
here—the worse I feel about my productivity so far that day, the more likely I am to be late.
When I’m pleased with how I’ve lived the day so far, the Rational Decision-Maker has a
much easier time taking control of the wheel. I feel like an adult, so it’s easy to act like an
adult. But times when the monkey had his way with me all day, when the time rolls around
that I need to stop working and head out somewhere, I can’t believe that this is all I’ve gotten
done. So my brain throws a little tantrum, refusing to accept the regrettable circumstances,
and stages a self-flagellating protest, saying, “NO. This cannot be the situation. Nope. You
didn’t do what you were supposed to do, and now you’ll sit here and get more done, even if it
makes you late.”
So yeah, that’s why I’m late—because I’m insane. Don’t excuse the CLIPs in your life—it’s
not okay and they need to fix it—but remember, it’s not about you. They have problems.

___________
Putting Time In Perspective –
UPDATED
 August 22, 2013 By Tim Urban

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them. It’s not
our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast
compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle
on it. If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours
later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history
itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since
Christ.

To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing
timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which
timelines are which). All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re
expressing.

A note on dates: When it comes to the far-back past, most of the dates we know are the
subject of ongoing debate. For these timelines, it’s cumbersome to put a ~ sign before every
ancient date or an asterisk explaining that the date is still being debated, so I just used the
most widely accepted dates and left it at that.

For teachers and parents and people who hate cursing: here’s a clean, Rated G version.
 
Posters
You can get the poster of this graphic here. It comes in both normal poster size and long
skinny vertical size. And a prettier, less offensive version.
___________

And two other big graphics I made that also took me 900 years:

Horizontal History
 January 13, 2016 By Tim Urban

Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with
large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about
usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to
come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of
history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit
hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on
the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.

The reason history is so hard is that it’s so soft. To truly, fully understand a time period, an
event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times
over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re
saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and
conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost
thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete
truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the
way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics
between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an
equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out
of.
That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the
key people involved at the time can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective
tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters,
and many, many narrators.
And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes
to simplify things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us
is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too
complicated and mysterious for us to understand.
Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are
bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—
the us guys—and they detest the bad guys—the them guys—and everyone’s happy. Stories
written for adults aren’t that different—you loved Shawshank and Braveheart and Star Wars,
right?
So when it comes to the story we’re all a part of, we most certainly want to feel the same
way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to
make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong
to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.
The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. Someone has to be Jafar, right?
Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything
close to the full, real, complete  story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one
even knows the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy
tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we
pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there
are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.
This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper
Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.

The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story
of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the
same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but
deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad
guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking
conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the
US while Aladdinizing the other side.)

This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine.
Hordes of people on both sides of what is an insanely complicated story are red in the face
with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that
anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity
of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.
Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly
story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and
accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the
definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of
the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or
bad.

So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s
that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical
event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that
that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my
head.

Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story
or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe
the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray
something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who
believe both of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like
history. I’ve learned this from experience.
This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to
research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of
varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and
don’t know.
So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of
what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history
that’s indisputably black-and-white—who happened when.
Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars,
we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.

But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.

Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of
the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or
the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate
to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time,
studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while
ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense.
And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an
especially complete picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all
about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession
that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars
for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So
while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern
times are all about.
Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work On the Revolutions
of the Celestial Spheres in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that
same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better
picture of the times. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening
that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take
on a distinct personality. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-
dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s horizontally, like cutting out
a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.
A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two
separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view
of different times. Both involve a lot of names.

Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about who I chose to include. I tried to remove
my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like Time. I
searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important
people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most
powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m
familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by
publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards
people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places
like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t
entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I
intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In
other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed
a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an
exhaustive list.
Horizontal History—First Crack:
For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—
kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people
lived, especially in relation to each other.
Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living
people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is
about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On
the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if
I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:

If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the
70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and
40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:

But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less
clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this
group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And
that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get
oriented:
Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a
name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes,
and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age.
So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man
fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen
Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.

Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were
not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each
others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-
grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.

Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who
was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t
alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows
of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take
a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their
great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t
come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.
Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.

Horizontal History—Second Crack:

For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of
Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I
Think It Might Be Fun.

This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth
year and the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above
chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal
path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.
As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down
L with way  more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household
names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those
recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out
about half of the recent names. But, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016
names into two groups by category and here they are below:
Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016
names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what
was going on during that particular time.
[Note: A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. Here it is.]
Some overall thoughts:

 Lifespans are unfair. Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when
two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years
before the other.
 Murder is dickish. Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut
someone else’s bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when
this other guy just took a scissors and snipped his bar.
 On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this
diagram. This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit
a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh
nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a
young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut
from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not
2.5 inches of diagram cool.
 Some people aren’t easily categorized. I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin
into a category.
 Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder”
thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks. I know. But it
was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?
Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:

I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US
forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship
with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.

I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all
happened right around the year 1610.
And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo
was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.

But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a
bigger story:
While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age
of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to
the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation
brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue
exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism
(today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the
other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.

Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s
one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we
overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years
between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing On the Origin of
Species  (1859), Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities  (1859) and Great
Expectations  (1861), Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), Dostoyevsky
published Crime and Punishment (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with War and
Peace (1869). These guys were all in their primes at the same time. So was Lincoln, before
some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.
So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the
next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.

___________