Everything That Happens Teaches You Precisely What You Need to Learn in This Moment

I've revised and improved this posting from 2023.


I've had the impression since childhood that the universe is trying to teach me things. In fact, that's what This All is. Especially the friction; the "bad" stuff.

I'm not trying to shine some positive light on it - Mr. Optimist constructively framing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's not a "spin". For me, it's a fully-formed point of view that's stood the test of time. My conviction rests on two elements:

I detect intention. Nothing supernatural. Not some lofty "Guy". Something more...tectonic. And unmistakably intelligent.

Second: the timing is never random. Everything that ever happened seemed to teach me precisely what I needed to learn in that moment.

I'm not presupposing some meaningful magical orchestration. It's more like being caught in an inexplicable machine, challenged to reverse-engineer its nature and operating principles — and, more mysteriously, my own nature and operating principles. Gradually, the objectives merged. And they seemed to merge coherently. Which is my point!

The lessons learned were never complicated. Just basic, remedial stuff. Like an ape delighted by the revelation that a stick helps knock bananas from high branches. Stuff that can't be unlearned, because it's so very obvious.

I've previously noted that even the most profound epiphanies easily congeal into cheesy cliché. Gems soon turn to dust. So: It's all teaching us; and the lessons, which arrive as ecstatic epiphany, turn out to be ludicrously banal. That's my 18-word summation of life on Earth.

Few people frame worldly adventure as lessons being taught. Instead, the teaching feels like persecution. Aggravation! Headwind! Frustration! An obstructive universe keeps getting in their way as they try to do what they'd set out to do.

I once wrote a poem, "The Reed". If you click back to its original post, you'll enjoy a cool accompanying photo, but I'll repost the poem below:

The reed,

unendingly assaulted by violent wind,

never suffers.


It never occurred to the reed

that the wind was a separate, external thing.


Insofar as the reed thinks at all,

it thinks it's dancing.

I confess that I haven't always been 100% reed-like. I've felt persecuted at times. But I've tried to keep one foot firmly planted in the recognition that it's always - without exception! - lessons being taught. And I've stabilized around that framing.

It makes a huge difference, because you can't learn lessons until you open to them — embracing the deeper benevolence rather than resisting the superficial harassment. You need to be receptive! You have to thirst for more! The answer is indeed blowing in the wind, but the first step is, obviously, to welcome it rather than bitching about the damned wind.

"Bitching about the damned wind" and "receptivity" are vastly different mindsets. It's an eternal choice, and only one choice is sane despite its puzzling unpopularity.

You can go your entire life bitching about (aka "peeing into") the wind. But the lesson of lesson-learning will leave you extraordinarily receptive, if you can get past the false assumption that this is just more "Take your lumps!" stoic shtick. Establishing this mindframe, despite its off-putting essential sanity, can be your miracle box. The universe functions as an epiphany provocateur if you'll merely let it.

And if you can embrace that recognition while also remaining consistently reed-like, you might find this ride more delightful than I did for most of my time here. Do better than me, and dive in with both feet!

---

Beware, though, of this pitfall.

The Steep Intellectual Prerequisites of Extreme Idiocy

There is a level of stupidity that only smart people can attain.

Extraordinary skill and mental firepower are needed to reach the absolute peak of stupidity.

---

Marx. Ayn Rand. Eugenics. Radical Chic. Universal basic income. Mortgage-backed securities. Lobotomy. Nation-building. Segways. Technical stock analysis. Citizens United. Clippy. "Move fast and break things". Etc.

The Hidden Pitfalls of Exceptionality

The problem with making an edge case of yourself (in any respect) is that it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific "You" as a generalized "Them."

People very often are not interacting with a specific you. You dissolve for them into a category. This is perfectly normal, and usually unnoticed by either party. It happens most commonly out of laziness.

It takes special consideration and extra concentration for someone to lock onto you as a unique entity rather than a generic one-of-them. So you often become the category. Humanity-in-general, or else whichever personality type you're seen as representing. If you wear fuzzy sweaters and smoke lots of pot and repeat "It's all good!" a lot, this makes you easily categorizable, and you'll often be spoken to as That Guy; a cartoonish blur rather than the specific person you are.

The second cause is narcissism. If people exist to serve one's needs — populating dramatic arc requirements and filling in needed chunks — there's little reason to conceive them as unique entities...except insofar as it helps to manipulate the desired result. Being essentially disposable, we scarcely merit tighter focus.

It even happens with chatbots, who are neither lazy nor narcissistic. Even if you've shown over time that you're very much this way, a given utterance on your end might be parsed that way if that's a more widely typical interpretation. You might chalk it up to a bot's inclination to draw from corpus rather than unique current circumstance, but I see no difference from what humans do. We smear from our experience, barely heedful of custom fit — which is, after all, a pain to maintain ad infinitum. And my point here is that you'll only notice if there's a stark difference. If, that is, you've made yourself an edge case.

Disintegration-into-category normally rolls up quite comfortably within the suspension of disbelief fueling human sociality. We seldom notice when an interlocutor lapses into viewing us blearily as "people" rather than "person" if there are no major differences between the two. But insofar as we stray from the mean via achievement or failure, or uncommon ways of thinking, talking, or acting (“exceptionality” isn't just high achievement; it's any variation from human baseline) it will become horrifyingly obvious when our personhood fades. Where'd I go???

This isn't just about encounters between people who don't know each other well. My mother often deemed my intentions selfish, though selfishness is not among my many flaws, as even casual acquaintances observe. She had three children, two of them remarkably selfish (with positive qualities, as well, some of which I lack), so my mother, having sensibly registered that the majority of her kids were that way, settled into the reasonable operating assumption that "My kids are selfish." She'd frequently ascribe my intentions that way, as I felt myself blurring into the category. Which is weird.

My mother wasn't really at fault. She was just doing what we all do most of the time. And if I were a more normal 60-80% selfish, I'd have felt light exasperation when wrongly accused, not the alien uncanny experience of a mother eerily blind to her child’s most obvious quality. If selfishness were more in my mix, it would have been a perfectly understandable error. A fine-tuning issue. But, having made an edge case of yourself, it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific you as a generalized "them."

---

I was haunted for years by an experience that turned very strange on the bucolic, idyllic New England small town lane I lived in for a while. I'd observed that one of the neighborhood children had extraordinary artistic talent. As I've noted, this sort of thing can be very hard to notice because we tend to compress greatness (placing "fabulously great" adjacent to "competently okay"; i.e. "greatness" seems like "goodness" with extra oomph). Everyone knew she drew well, but it wasn't recognized that she was a prodigy. I told her father, and his face turned red and gnarled into pained disgust. "My child is not extraordinary!" he fumed, leaving me paralyzed with bewilderment. Ever since, I've been painstakingly unraveling what, exactly, he meant.

I think he sensed something I couldn't at the time: the uncanny, horrifying drawbacks of being an edge case, and he didn't want that for her. I interpreted it at the time as a hard-headed celebration of mediocrity. But maybe he was onto something. Maybe this explains the universal impulse to conform and not stick out. Maybe people innately sense something that took me decades to recognize.

The Temperature Magician

In a recent posting titled "Sharpening", I wrote:

Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not.

Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it.

Whenever you check anything, flash a result. Nothing obsessive or emotionally fraught. Don't be like a daft compulsive gambler trying to game absolutely everything. Just flash a result, calmly, and see how you do. Then don't give it another thought. Let subconscious calibration happen.

Keep this up as a long game, and you'll get like Nostradamus.

I bought a bunch of cheap little temperature and humidity sensors from Xiaomi, and left one in every room. Mostly to help decide if I really need AC, and to track effectiveness of open/closed blinds and fan placements.

When I enter a room, I guess the temperature, very informally, and then glance at the thermometer. How many iterations would you imagine it took to get within half a degree? 1000? 10,000?

No, more like 15. After 15 iterations, I was usually surprisingly right, though occasionally dead wrong.

After 200, I was not much righter, but dead wrong a lot less.

Now, after 1000, I'm nearly the same. After a billion, I'd expect any improvement to be hardly noticeable (unless, perhaps, I managed to maintain a fresh sense of discovery as the process becomes tediously routine).


Related: Confusion Isn’t Infinity, it’s Twelve (or Three)

You Can't Get There From Here

How far away is another frame?

Impossibly far yet immediately accessible.

It sounds like a trippy puzzle, but there's nothing spooky about it. It's a simple matter of shifting perspective.

How far away is forgiveness? Impossibly far, but you can do it right here and right now. It's immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is gratitude? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is love? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is your reorientation as a speck within a vast universe, making petty concerns irrelevant? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

There used to be a saying, "You can't get there from here!" With shifts of perspective, this is literally true. You can't get there from here...yet it's immediately accessible. Just shift perspective. Just reframe.

It's not a question of "trying harder." It's a matter of viewing differently.

We've all experienced this. One day the world seems different — we're "inspired" or "in love" or "forgiving" or "appreciative" or "freshly determined" or "finally at peace". It all shifts, and things look different, so we figure the world must have changed out there.

But no. We did it — by shifting perspective in here. And this ability is always available, like a smartphone feature we've forgotten about.

A shift of perspective can bring us impossibly far. You can't even get there from here! Yet it's immediately accessible.

---

That's the simplest explanation. The "Explain it like I'm 10" version.

This series goes the other way, explaining how the entire multiverse hinges on this utterly simple flexion of subjectivity. I.e. this is how it all works.

Recircumcision

A strange form of behavior is becoming more and more common. I've coined the term "recircumcision," which hopefully evokes a baby peering up from his crib in horror asking "Really? You're seriously going to cut me again?

The recircumcision phenomenon is best seen by examples:

Outdoing Your Self-Deprecation
You say something self-deprecating, and the other person one-ups you.

You: "I'm a screwup"

Them: "You're the biggest screwup who ever lived".

Your self-deprecation in no way immunizes you from my deprecation.

Congratulations on your recircumcision!

Apologies, My Ass
In one of the Slog's most popular postings, "Angel on a Bike", I tried to make hay out of the widespread reluctance to accept apologies:

I absentmindedly walked into a bike lane in Manhattan, forcing a biker to swerve around me. I recoiled in horrified shame, yelling "I'm so sorry! I'm an idiot! Are you okay?"

Over his shoulder, he roared, "You fucking asshole, why don't you look where you're going?"

I quickly realized that this person was an angel, perhaps even a sort of messiah. If he'd gamely nodded at me in weary resignation, I'd have felt awful all day. But his reaction absolved me of all guilt. I felt light as a feather.

The unwillingness to accept sincere apology is a hallmark of lousy character, but it also affords the highest possible absolution. The biker had taken me utterly off the hook, leaving me completely unburdened.

Measure once, cut twice. Recircumcision!

Forgiving You For Their Mistake
In the posting "Correcting the Record?", I noted that you go on probation whenever someone realizes they've judged you wrongly.

If someone has a wrong idea about you—about something you said, did, or thought—you might, with effort, convince them otherwise. Maybe!

But here's the problem: we exalt our assumptions and opinions, even when they're whimsical. They outweigh provable truth (if this seems odd, imagine how different this world would be if it weren't so). So after all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time!

So the next time you offend, confuse, or simply trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.

Recircumcised again and again, 'til it's whittled down to a stub!

Sue and the Speed Bump
Here's where I finally saw the heart of it. The kernel. The unseen flowing channels of ghastly glowing green ectoplasm beneath quiet city streets spurring all this ghoulish recircumcision.

I'm driving zippily through back roads with a passenger, Sue, a bitter elderly alcoholic who excels at the unique alcoholic skill of judging everyone and everything from atop a dizzyingly high perch and won't you please pass the wine BELLLLLCH thanks very much.

I hit a speed bump at speed. Jarring. I apologize profusely — at first, sincerely, but lapsing into more lavish and pathetic self-immolation as I try to delay and dispel the inevitable blast from Sue's loaded shotgun of verbal excoriation. However, my tongue lashing is not the least bit reduced by my profuse mea maxima culpa blame-taking. The doctor has slated you for recircumcision, so recircumcised you shall be.

But just before she emits her harangue, I notice something. Her jaw sets. She has perceived an obstacle. An impediment. And she's revving her engines to clear it.

I realize, with a sickening start, what happened. My apology had infuriated her, because it was taking away her big moment. Sue's big moment where she'd enjoy free reign to savage another human being without compunction.

There are precious few opportunities to really let loose and harangue, harass, attack, insult, deride, and generally consume fellow human beings while remaining more or less within the bounds of proper behavior. Such moments are golden. Golden moments! And my extended apology had been like stealing a toddler's sundae cherry. Which, naturally, only peaked her pique.


The horrifying truth is that the knives are never far from out, anything you do might precipitate the snip-snip-snip of greedy scissors, and they actually like it this way.

The Mundanity of Intuition

The problem with intuition is that it can be hard to distinguish useful intimations from suggestions of what you want to happen, or are afraid might happen. Or from random frothy mental noise. It's hard to winnow truth from slop.

I've written previously ("The Subtlety of Truth") that real intuition is quiet and doesn't nag, whereas emotion and froth holler on endless repeat. "God whispers while the Devil shouts" would be the cheesy storybook version. Real intuition feels like knowing.

I just thought of another hallmark. Real intuition feels obvious.

Often have I screeched my car to a halt in front of some seemingly generic noodle shop or bakery and eagerly polled passengers "doesn't that look fantastic?" while they squinted and shrugged. They don't see it. Which bedevils me. How can they not see it?

That's how real intuition feels: remarkably mundane. Obvious. Right there in front of you.

It's so banal that it might be flowing deeply without your ever realizing. Extraordinary ability feels flatly ordinary from the inside. My sister, a natural at drawing, spent years thinking the rest of us simply don't try hard enough.

If you imagine you've come up with something mysterious and magical, that invalidates the whole thing. Real intuition doesn't feel special or strange or uncanny. It arrives as information, no different from any other. Like noticing an open window or empty coffee mug. So I'll amend my previous aphorism: Real intuition feels merely like knowing.

This observation itself is recursive. It took me 63 goddamn years to notice. Why? It was too obvious.

Booby Trapping

Mocking old people is like booby trapping the rollercoaster you're queued to ride.

My Brad Pitt Chronicles

My whole life, I've worked into a headwind because of my looks. It's not that I'm particularly horrible looking, but more than one woman has informed me that I'm not in "their league" (actually true, though not in the way they thought), and when I walk into a room of strangers, the energy, despite my upbeat attitude and witty repartee, sinks measurably. Ah, hell. Here comes Mr. Shloomphy.

The issue is that I'm really, really — no, really — not Brad Pitt, and just as I entered adulthood, that became the standard. I've failed the Brad Pitt standard miserably.

Which is fine! I'm not trying to look like much, or seem like much. My interest is in full-heartedly doing much. I don't mind standing back in the gloom as lowly Mr. Shloomphy while people enjoy my creations. I'd much rather be The Guy than seem like The Guy, even though this ensures that no one ever believes I'm really The Guy. Seemers always win!

It's not my ideal outcome, but I wouldn't switch. Even in a world that rewards pretense over substance, I'd rather Do than pretend to be a Doer.

There's also a moral component to beauty which always made me feel that it's not for me. I once noted that "Qualities such as kindness, intelligence, generosity, and a sense of humor are of service to others. Beauty, by contrast, serves only its possessor." I didn't say it with a bitter snort. In fact, the world probably needs beautiful people to spruce up the place and stoke whatever social energy we still have left as a species. In a world of Mr. Shloomphys, we'd all recede 100% into our screens rather than just 98%.

So perhaps beauty can be mildly generous, after all. But it's still not for me. There are specialists for that, so I amiably get out of the way and let folks preen while I do what I do, because that just seems more useful. I was raised on Richard Scarry. We each contribute what we have to contribute.

And it didn't work out so badly. I got a lot done, and a series of oddly glamorous girlfriends saw past Mr. Shloomphy's facade. I'm proud of my work, and would regret it if I'd ever shortchanged it by diverting energy to making myself seem shiny. I was famous for a moment and didn't like it. I walked away. So I'm not a victim of circumstance, or of genetic lottery. I've made choices for clear reasons, and I stand by them.

But the same world that always responded to me with a firm "Uh-uh!" — insisting that I don't look the part, make the grade, or pass the Brad Pitt test — is suddenly very upset about my looks.

I'm 63, and my genes are not optimized for graceful aging. Plus my health has been crap. Plus I was spookily aged by my ordeal with Chowhound, which I created at age 35 (looking 28) and escaped at age 43 (looking 60). And when I connect these days in-person with old friends — even ones who particularly admired and respected me — roughly half of them wince at first glance. Often, an overt sneer. They grudgingly chat with me, and I don't hear from them again. I'm more chill and droll than ever, so it's nothing I'm doing. It's how I'm looking.

So I suppose this means that they'd mostly liked me for my fantastic good looks all along. Who knew??? This beautiful, beautiful man longer radiates PIZZAZZ! How the mighty have fallen!

It's the strangest strangeness of my long, estranged life. I don't get it. But I keep doing my thing. I'm a diligently purposeful ant, striving to be a generous earthworm (shitting out ever-so-slightly more nutritious earth as he goes), all with the blitheness of a reed (with no reason to object to the battering wind). Everything else is a kaleidescope, which I try to marvel at but more often just eye-roll — giving me frown lines compounding my tragic loss of visual magnificence.

---

When this bizarre ride is over, and I'm handed a user survey card to rate my experience, I'll hand it back, blank, with an affable shrug. I'm not sure anyone has ever worked more industriously to understand this world, but much of it remains absolutely bewildering. This place truly defies all understanding.

Sharpening

Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not.

Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it.

Whenever you check anything, flash a result. Nothing obsessive or emotionally fraught. Don't be like a daft compulsive gambler trying to game absolutely everything. Just flash a result, calmly, and see how you do. Then don't give it another thought. Let subconscious calibration happen.

Keep this up as a long game, and you'll get like Nostradamus.


This seems like kid's stuff. Unserious. But kids internalize all of human civilization in a few short years, while adults can hardly read a book. Maybe it's time to stop deprecating childhood tactics?