Last week I wrote about a method of inquiry that’s helped me be less difficult about some things. A few people have told me that it seemed useful, so I thought it might also be useful to share an example of the process from my life. I pulled a passage from my journal of a few weeks ago and edited it a bit for legibility and I’m about to share that with you now.
This dialogue is unsatisfying in dramatic and philosophical terms and also perhaps annoyingly meta, given that most of what I was working through in the inquiry was my felt resistance to working on this very newsletter. Still I think it conveys a flavor of the process, one messy instance of one version of the process, that would be hard to get across by other means. Maybe you’ll also find something relatable in it. The excerpt starts in medias res because just before where it starts I was journaling about some specific people in my life.
Some caveats: Because this was initially just my internal processing, it communicates very little of the felt sense of the inquiry, and could easily conceal the fact that all of the “answers” are only my best attempts to interpret, say, a heavy feeling in my chest or a swirling of butterflies in my abdomen. Imagine pauses between lines in which I actually check in on this stuff and let words burble up from the murk. Or better, imagine a third character, not transcribed, who communicates via burps of complex static. In an ideal sense “B” is working as a translator between the inquirer, “A,” and this third entity, though sometimes he neglects this role and just says what he thinks about stuff. None of these entities are reductively “me.”
Whenever B says “something shifted there” or “that freed something up,” that’s a sort of jargon. This is my way of noting that some sort of weird physical thing just happened.1 It’s often but not always (in this way of reading) a sign that a belief has loosened or an insight has clicked into place. Every shift is distinct, but there's a somewhat recognizable pattern where a dammed-up reservoir of feeling in my head opens up and the feeling moves down through my chest and into my hands and feet. Often it’s good to check after a shift whether the belief I was working with still feels active.
I would hazard that this particular inquiry lost me three, maybe four beliefs—pretty good for one sitting! In response to the obvious question, those changes have felt stable so far—this is of course nowhere near scientific—in the sense that I haven’t found myself inclining toward those precise worry-patterns anymore. Others, yes. This particular rope is long and full of tangles.2
(At this point I’m very wary of becoming some kind of Option Method hype man, so next week’s post will be about something completely different.)
—
A: Let’s ask this question again. Why would it be bad, why would you have to feel bad, if you made a newsletter and no one liked it, no one commented on it, no one said anything, you never got any evidence about how anyone felt or reacted?
B: That would suggest that I had embarrassed myself in some way.
A: And why would you have to feel bad about having embarrassed yourself?
B: I would have to feel bad because I would have to figure out what I had done wrong, in other people’s eyes. And because it would suggest that there was something wrong with me, that other people were seeing and I wasn’t.
A: Would it actually suggest that there was something wrong with you, if people didn’t like or respond to your blog?
B: “Rationally” no. Feels like, yes. It might mean I was stupid for instance.
A: Why would it mean that?
B: Because I had failed to anticipate how people would react. If I were smart, I would be able to anticipate the effect things would have on people.
A: Is that true?
B: Hmm. Not quite. I’ll probably never really be able to granularly predict the effects things will have on people. I’ll never be that smart, however smart I might be in relative terms.
A: So, it isn’t a reason to feel bad if something I say or write has an effect I hadn’t predicted?
B: It still feels like it would be sort of bad, if the effect were negative, or if people didn’t care.
A: Why would it be bad if people didn’t care? Or, why would you need to feel bad about it?
B: Because I want people to care what I have to say.
A: Okay, you want people to care what you have to say. Do you feel like you’d have to feel bad if you got evidence that people really don’t care what you have to say?
B: Yep. That feels dangerous and scary.
A: Why? What would happen if you didn’t feel bad about that?
B: If I didn’t feel bad about it, I guess I could just take it as an invitation to adjust my approach. Or, maybe I’d have to admit that I don’t really know why no one cared about what I said. I could ask them, but even then I might not get the full truth, and probably won’t.
A: Is it frightening that you can never really know what other people think of you?
B: God, yes.
A: What would it mean to not feel bad about the fact that you can’t ever know what other people think of you?
B: Well… it would be freeing. But it feels like it would mean not caring what they think of me. And then it would be harder to check, or to look for evidence. Like I might forget to pay attention to what other people are thinking of me.
A: Is that true?
B: And then I might do something really bad.
A: If you didn’t feel bad when it turned out that people were ignoring you or maybe thinking negative thoughts about you, then you might do something bad, which is to say, you might do something that would make people continue to ignore you or think negative thoughts about you, something that would increase that.
B: Yeah. That seems to be the belief.
A: Why would you need to feel bad, then, if you did something to cause people to ignore you or think negative thoughts about you? Or to increase that?
B: Because a lot of really important things come from people paying attention to me. There’s a huge amount of pleasure in it, and it seems necessary for me to survive in pretty basic ways. If no one ever paid attention to me again, I’d probably starve.
A: Is that true?
B: Well… I guess I could steal what I needed or grow it on an unused plot of land or something. But I might die of loneliness.
A: Is that true?
B: I’d definitely feel lonely… and I would die eventually. But I guess I could never say with any real certainty that I’d died of loneliness. And I think in general, life would probably be worth living, even if no one ever paid attention to me again. It would be extremely different, it’s hard to imagine. Actually a funny thing is occurring to me, which is that even if somehow magically people couldn’t pay any attention to “me”—to my body, my voice, face, etc.—still there would have to be some way that I could construct some representation, a robot or figurehead or puppet or something, that people could pay attention to, and this would allow me to negotiate my basic needs. I would construct a self somehow, a performance. The only way I couldn’t create any kind of social self at all would be if I had almost no ability to manipulate my environment. Or if everyone else had vanished for some reason. Even then… wouldn’t I just start relating to my environment itself more socially? Become more of an animist?
A: So you’re saying it isn’t true that your happiness is really dependent on people paying attention to you.
B: Right… I just really like it, I guess. I get a lot of pleasure from it.
A: Even if no one ever looked at you again, you wouldn’t have to feel “bad” about that.
B: It’d be an adjustment, but no.
So, I was just thinking, even if I had no effect at all, on anyone, or on anything, I don’t think I would actually have to feel bad about that. And then I thought, And maybe I don’t, and something really shifted. What if the only "point” of consciousness were to be happy? What if that was literally the only thing it did? Like an epiphenomenon that sometimes pretends it’s more?
[Long pause here, not much thinking going on.]
A: So it seems like you’ve popped into a somewhat more spacious state there, but if you did want to continue…
Do you still feel like you would need to feel bad if you, say, published a series of blog posts, and no one had any reaction to them? They just got completely ignored, or almost completely?
B: See that’s interesting, that “almost,” the fact that you had to add that. Because it’s genuinely hard to imagine something being absolutely ignored. That would have to mean that no one even saw it. And if no one even saw it, then no, why should that matter? It would just mean they hadn’t read the thing. If they read the thing and I never got any responses… I’d probably just think people didn’t have anything to say, or didn’t feel that there was any need to make a comment. How many of the things I’ve read have I ever commented on? Less than a tenth of a percentage point.
A: So… there’s actually not a situation there where you’d have to feel bad? Meaning, there’s no situation where you’d really know that people were deciding to ignore it because of some weird or embarrassing thing you’d said?
B: I guess I would never really have any way of knowing that, no. So, I wouldn’t have to feel bad about it.
A: Okay, now what if people demonstrate that they actively dislike it? They think you’re “odious” for what you said. They think it’s really dumb. They think you’re basic. Let’s make it acute. Let’s say that someone who you think is really smart and interesting and cool and a good person writes a searing takedown saying why the thing you wrote is totally dumb and uninteresting and uninspiring.
B: Seems sort of contradictory. They might say it was dumb, but if it wasn’t interesting to them they wouldn’t be talking about it at all. So actually that could be kind of a desirable experience, right? And I might learn something from it, because maybe they’re right and I’m wrong.
A: Would you feel bad if you knew someone smarter than you thought you were stupid?
B: Well, if they’re smarter than me, then I guess they’re partially right. But if they’re going out of their way to convince me that they’re smarter than me, then they may be smarter in some technical sense but they probably wouldn’t be wise… I mean, I would discount their opinion significantly on the basis of their acting that way, and would probably assume there was something else going on for them, like they were grandstanding or attaching some meaning to the exchange that didn’t have much to do with me. So no.
A: Would you feel bad if someone you respect thought you were a bad person or had ill intentions?
B: I guess I don’t really believe in fundamentally ill intentions… so I’d think they were either talking in a kind of shorthand, or that they were confused. It might make me want to talk to them or explain myself I guess, but I don’t think I’d feel bad about it. I mean I wouldn’t have to believe I was a worse person just because I learned that someone else was saying that.
A: But what if you were really indoctrinated—like, a lot of people started saying you were a terrible person all at once, and giving convincing arguments for it?
B: Yeah, I mean, I won’t say I’m impervious to that. But from where I’m standing now it seems like to be convinced I was really bad in that way would be a belief taken on under duress. And the better response would be to learn from that and use the information to change my behavior if appropriate, not to conclude that I’d been behaving with deliberate evil, which is a belief that would only make it harder to change.
A: Okay but there must be something you’re afraid of here.
B: I agree.
A: Maybe you’re afraid that even if you’re not explicitly afraid of any of the consequences of writing publicly, you still won’t do it for some reason.
B: Oh, yes. I am definitely afraid of that.
A: Okay so, why would you need to feel bad if you never actually wrote this blog?
B: Because it would feel like evidence that I don’t finish things, and it would tank my self-concept about that, which would make it harder to finish things.
A: Why would writing the blog demonstrate anything on the level of finishing things? Or, what does it mean to “finish” the blog?
B: I guess I just mean writing posts. If I didn’t write a certain number of posts, it feels like I’d have to conclude that I didn’t have the discipline to write, really. Or to follow through on anything difficult.
A: Is that true? That not writing a certain number of posts would mean that you lacked the discipline to do anything difficult?
B: No, not literally true. But it does feel like it’d be indicative.
A: How many posts would you have to write, to be able to quit the project and not have it indicate that you lack discipline?
B: I don’t know… twenty? If I actually posted once a week and I wrote twenty posts in a row, I think that would probably prove reasonably well that I was, uh… capable of… writing twenty blog posts… or… I guess it would feel good, and would interact favorably with my self-concept, but I’m not sure I could explain that in more specific terms.
A: You just think it would feel good to demonstrate that you’re capable of writing twenty blog posts in a row. Or more.
B: Yeah, I guess so. Wait no, definitely. I think it would feel good.
A: Would you need to feel bad if you set out to write twenty blog posts and failed? Say you miss a week, or two weeks.
B: I would probably make some excuse for it and make a superficial show of forgiving myself, but deep down yeah, I think I’d feel bad. I’d feel like I failed and like it meant something.
A: What would it mean?
B: It would mean that I wasn’t serious enough about writing.
A: And why would you need to feel bad about not being serious about writing?
B: I don’t know…
Wow okay, that was a big shift.
I really don’t know! That feels big to acknowledge. I haven’t looked at that before, didn’t quite know that was there. I guess I just feel like writing is important? Or like it’s something I really want to do. And also like it’s something I’m expected to do.
A: So, after this shift, do you still feel like it would be bad not to be serious about writing?
B: I… don’t think I feel that anymore, no. But that seems too easy.
A: Do you feel like it would be bad to set out to write twenty blog posts and then fail? That it would make you feel bad, I mean.
B: Maybe, yeah. I think it would suggest something about follow-through. It would suggest that I wasn’t able to keep commitments to myself. This is something I worry about.
A: Why would you need to feel bad about not being able to keep a promise to yourself?
B: It seems like it would suggest some kind of inadequacy or limitation that I don’t want to have. It would limit my ability to carry out projects and make progress on things, if I couldn’t make trustworthy commitments to myself.
But as I say this I’m realizing that setting out to write twenty blog posts wouldn’t exactly be a commitment just to myself. It would be a commitment to the readers. And to the project itself. The trouble is neither of those things exist yet, so it’s hard to feel like that’s binding. It does feel like right now it’s up to me.
A: If you set out to write twenty blog posts… first of all, how would you know that you were setting out to do that?
B: I would know because I would tell someone… I guess I would know because I would tell [a friend], first of all.
A: And then, let’s say you didn’t succeed, for whatever reason. Let’s say you only wrote ten posts.
B: Well, if I only wrote ten, then I must have just given up. Because that’s different from failing the other way, where I write twenty but I don’t post one a week.
A: Would you need to feel bad about having given up?
B: It sort of feels like it, yes. If I had actually decided to do it. To undertake a longish prosocial project. And then didn’t. That would feel like a failure.
A: Why would you need to feel bad about having given up, about failing the project in that way?
B: Huh, yeah… again, I don’t know. I don’t know. And realizing that is definitely freeing something up.
Because I don’t really have any clear sense of what that would mean, to have given up, without knowing the circumstances or why I had decided to give up. There could be a million reasons for giving up.
A: Can you think of any good reasons?
B: Um, maybe if I really found myself hating it… but no, I could do twenty posts even if I was hating it a little. Maybe if some incredible opportunity came along, somehow completely different from what I’m doing now but definitely worth taking, and I was suddenly too busy with that. Even then it’s hard to imagine not having time to squeeze out a hundred words once a week. But then… okay, this raises what is actually the most likely reason I think, which is that I would give up on the project because I would have a sense that what I was producing wasn’t good enough. I would want to spend more time editing things or I would want to adjust the process for better results, in some way that would throw me off of actually following through on the commitment.
A: So you have a sense that your desire to do a good job, to write good essays, might interfere with the commitment—which actually doesn’t explicitly say anything about the essays being good.
B: Right, like that would be this outside concern that would sort of come in… I’d want them to be good, because again, I’d start caring what other people thought, or at least I think I would, I guess I’m sort of modeling that I would care.
A: And would you really have to care what other people thought about the essays? Or, to make that more specific, would it be necessary to care about what they thought to the point that you’d want to give up on the commitment? Let’s say people weren’t responding to it in a way you liked—
B: No, that isn’t the issue, I think we’ve covered that. I’m seeing that the real issue is that I wouldn’t like what I was writing. That I would find it lacking.
A: Okay, interesting. So you feel like you might make this commitment, and you’d be doing it at first, but then you might start disliking your own work, and this would… demotivate you, maybe, to continue. You might start feeling like it wasn’t worth doing.
B: Yes. That’s what I’m afraid of. That at some point I’ll start to feel that it isn’t worth doing.
A: And why would you need to feel bad, if you did decide that it wasn’t worth doing?
B: Because I don’t feel like I would have really decided it, in some meaningful sense. I feel like I would have just failed, or gotten weak at a pivotal moment. It would be like relapsing into an addiction. It would feel like not deciding, like just going with the impulse not to do the thing that’s harder. It would be like when I reach for a Q-tip after deciding not to.3 It would be this habitual lapse.
A: So, maybe to put that differently, even if in some sense you did decide that it wasn’t worthwhile anymore, despite having committed earlier, then you’re predicting that you would distrust that decision and question it, and think that really you had just been acting out a negative pattern.
B: Yep.
A: Is it actually possible to drop a commitment without deciding to?
B: I guess there are different levels of that. I could, for instance, forget.
A: So if you forgot about the commitment, then that would not be a decision.
B: It would still be a decision in the sense that I have some control over what I represent to myself and what I remember. And maybe in the sense that what I remember is always expressive of my desires. So yes, it would still be a decision, or at least I would still be able to strongly suspect that it had been a decision. It wouldn’t be a valid “excuse,” just to have forgotten.
A: So, maybe what you’re arriving at here is that you might not be able to know, for any given case, whether you had fully decided to break the commitment—but either way you might still suspect that you had decided to give up, and that would create some… difficulty.
B: Right. In general it does seem useful to take the stance that I have the ability to follow through on my commitments. And I don’t think that—I realize I’m contradicting something I said earlier—but I actually don’t think that not writing twenty essays would be proof of some hard environmental or inner constraint that had kept me from doing it. In some meaningful sense, short of an act of God, I would have decided not to do it.
A: Maybe what’s worrying you is the idea that you might decide not to follow through on the commitment, but that you’d be making this decision against or in some way constrained by a belief about yourself that is not accurate. Almost like you’d cause yourself to fail by making it too big.
B: Yes, wow, you really understand me!
A: So what is this belief you have about yourself that might not be accurate?
B: … I don’t know now. This seems to be getting overcomplicated.
A: You’re right. We can table that piece for now. Maybe let’s look again at the idea that you would break the commitment because you would care too much about the quality of the work. How does it play out in practice?
B: It’d be like, I’d be writing, I’d have written some amount, and then I would do what I did recently—so see, there’s precedent for this—and decide I wanted to pull some of the previous writing, because it was no longer the thing I was trying to do, or because I didn’t really want people to see it.
A: Okay, this is something. What do you think you’re afraid of when it comes to people seeing something of yours that “isn’t good” in your view?
B: I guess that they’ll then get some wrong sense of my capacities… because I feel I can do better… even though I technically and sort of tautologically haven’t, yet…
A: Do you feel like doing “better” work later on almost invalidates the earlier work? Like it means you were actually capable of doing better all along?
B: Yes… something like that… it seems like.
A: Would you need to feel bad if you knew you were doing and displaying work that was not your best? That was significantly far from what you are capable of?
B: I’m actually having a hard time seeing how I would ever know that.
A: So what if you just suspected it?
B: Yeah, that feels like something that happens. And it does make me feel bad. I’m sort of feeling that way right now actually, because I’m doing this self-talk exercise instead of editing the essay I was planning to post today. So the essay isn’t going to be as good as it could be.
A: So the suspicion that you aren’t doing the work you’re really capable of, this feels like a reason to feel bad. What would happen if you didn’t feel bad about that possibility, if you didn’t feel bad about doing work that was pretty mediocre compared with what you’re capable of in some ideal sense?
B: My first impulse is that that would be liberating. And the sense of freedom that would give me would be good for the work. And I would almost certainly do more of it. But I’m wanting not to rush this, to really check. If I didn’t feel bad… this is just getting back to the idea that I must feel at some level that there is this standard, this semi-objective standard, that other people possess knowledge of, that I possess some knowledge of too, but my knowledge is imperfect—and the fear seems to be that other people will apply this objective standard to the work, and find it wanting, and this will be bad for some reason.
A: Does it actually feel like it would be bad? Are you feeling that right now, or are you just speculating?
B: I’m not really feeling it. Which is sort of weird. I mean I can think of some relative ways that I might not like this. Maybe if people thought my work was bad, there would be fewer career opportunities or something, that would manifest, than if people thought it was really good. But there’s an unquestioned premise there.
A: Which we’ve already talked about. The premise that you can effectively model other people’s tastes and standards.
B: Yeah. And I’ve thought about this question a lot in my life, it seems to come up again and again. And the answer I seem to keep coming back to is that the much easier alternative to approximating other people’s tastes is just to develop my own taste and make sure I’m making stuff that satisfies it. And trust that I’m usually not as unique as I think I am, so if I like something, someone else will too. Or won’t, but at least I will.
A: What would the alternative be?
B: Either to really complexly map other people’s desires, which seems both tedious and manipulative and I wouldn’t know where to start, or… well, just to be more spontaneously attuned to how other people respond. But this is hard with writing, because you never have the audience in the room with you.
So I just come back to the idea that I can’t do all that much modeling. And moreover don’t even want to. That I’ll have to rely on something else, and probably always have.
In some ways I haven’t carefully tracked, a lot of my methodology and terminology (“felt shift,” “felt sense”) and probably some of my implicit assumptions about this kind of work have trickled down to me from Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing” paradigm—which is on my list to read more about. His book Focusing seems to be the main recommended source.
Luckily, there’s no particular necessity to untangle it.
I am addicted to Q-tips. Yes. My ears they just itch all the time, because I use Q-tips to scratch them, which keeps the skin dry and flaky. I think there’s a metaphor in this for samsara.
Damn