To Externalize

 Revisiting this for the first time in a long time. Despite my original goal of writing more, I think I've done no more writing in the last 8 months or so than any other time. Recently when listening to a podcast, I was reminded of the value of externalizing your thoughts, as a way perhaps of being mindful or understanding them better. 

I can't remember where, but a while ago I heard a podcast or something talking about some potential applications of virtual reality for psychology and therapy. They explained that they had setup a virtual little world which had some animated version of Sigmund Freud in it, and the patient would don the VR helmet and talk to freud about their issues, just as they would a therapist usually. Once they had voiced their thoughts, they would switch places virtually with freud and hear and watch a recording of themselves voicing their own worries. They found evidently that individuals had a much easier time empathizing with themselves, and they found it easier to be forgiving with themselves, when they had a chance. to perceive their problems as someones elses. While the concept itself could be a little clunky, the fundamental idea that we are more empathetic and forgiving to others than we are to ourselves really shines through. It makes me think about how when I imagine or hear about a friend going through a hard time, by default I believe that they will be able to overcome it, or that they are well intentioned, or on the right path even if meandering.  It's easier to give your loved ones or even strangers the benefit of the doubt than it is to give yourself, for whatever reason. I think it partially has something to do with the concept of the metacognitive narrative that contributes to your life. The Hidden Brain episodes which got me thinking about this in the past week were about the ideas of stories, and explanations, and how we use each in our lives to alter the way we view reality even if those different narratives and explanations have little or nothing to do with reality. The explanation for why events play out in a certain way could reveal a great deal about how we perceive the world and our place in it. The idea that our perception is shaped largely by. the explanations we give to things is related somehow to the idea of the left brain/right brain split. Evidently,  one hemisphere of the brain is more attuned to things which require immediate, binary. decisions. The ability to grasp an object, or perform a task, or react quickly, often is mediated by this side.  In. contrast, another part of the brain deals with the "big picture", awareness of. your surroundings, justifying causality, and in some ways, generative a narrative for how you the past has lead to the future and why.  All these things taken together make me think of not only the duality of the mind, but. also the abstract way we are able to conceptualize things in general. Really what it amounted to. for me is the reminder, or realization, that there is a non trivial and very psychological basis to the idea of externalizing. your thoughts in order to better understand them. 

I often approach metacognition from a standpoint of just thinking. I assume most of the time when I'm thinking about thinking, I'm just doing that and only that: thinking. It stand to reason then that any distortions. or biases that come into play when. you are just sitting there thinking will also impact your metacognition, and then your memories of doing that. metacognition. Instead, there is tremendous value in taking those same thoughts and externalizing them to paper, or even aloud, and then either disposing of them or reading them back as if someone else had thought those thoughts. Suddently,  the intimate feedback loop of a thought about a thhought within a thought is broken, and your brain treats that new thought with the care and indifference it would any other narrative you consume. It. no longer becomes so viscerally "you", I mean it is. and that's sort of the point, but by externalizing your thoughts it adds one degree of separation enough to trick the narrative forming parts of your brain into analyzing this thought with a whole new set of tools. It's like resampling your thoughts with new effects on it, same source material, but a whole new way to play it back. This,  ultimately, is what I think the goal (at least one of mine anyway) of mindfulness is, or maybe a method to achieve it? Usually when I'm trying to be mindful I'm either thinking of mentally narrating my sensory experiences, like saying. aloud in. my mind what I'm seeing,  feeling, or touching. One step beyond that is hearing your thoughts, whatever they may be, and treating them not as the semiwordless ideas that pass through. your mind, but actually verbalizing them in your mind, or whatever the commensurate verb to "speaking aloud" is in your head. These are still always in your minds eye though, and while I believe this type of mindfulness is a huge aspect to to the idea and practice, its not the only tool or even the best method in every case. Especially for big complicated webs of ideas, or networks of thoughts that you explore so often you forget what they are,  I imagine my mind starts to compress these thoughts, gloss over them,  and it resorts to running quick and cursory scripts to try and parse new details without reexamining the old. It makes sense, trying to render a new abstract thought every time it comes up is time consuming and too. lengthy , instead your mind must have a way of reducing an abstract concept,  especially one that is not verbalized or given a name, to a pixelated thumbnail which doesn't come close to the entire explanation, but allows you to refer to that web of thought quickly and easily,  saving brain power for other new or important tasks.  

It's hard to think of an example of this directly. This is part of the confusion and difficulty. It's the over familiarity which buries overthought thoughts among others and which resists your ability to extract and examine them. What comes to mind first is what I imagine is a tangled but interconnected web of thoughts which has to do with my sense of sense, or ego, at its basic level. This already is way too big of an idea to even begin parsing. out. Ego can refer to everything from your self esteem to your desire to be praised to the simple drive to live and exist and probably assume even our own consciousness. To try and. narrow this thought web. further,  I look instead to. one network of thoughts about myself that I visit often. in my mind,   which I'll group together based on "thought proximity" or my perception of their relation to. eachother? In this group there are a large set of self deprecating and negative thoughts about myself. which range wildly in. origin and how they manifest.  Sometimes they are irrational anxieties which arise not from an internal sense of self. loathing, but just because the anxiety drive happens to be acting up that moment and it manifests as thoughts which have to do with my self worth.  Othertimes,  its the replaying of a memory which I think is "cringe", which again has mysterious origins of why that thought comes up then, but when it does, my brain sets up a reactionary mechanism which is itself a part of this web of thoughts. The cringe memories and the set of reactions to them are each their own small web of thoughts which I know happen, I can recognise in the moment, and to some extent I can even control, but for whatever reason I don't remove these thoughts one degree further to acknowledge what they are and what's going on. Suddenly I will be triggered to remember a date I went on, specifically something I said that I have since deemed to be cringeworthy. I think of this moment, and immediately it triggers a set of other thoughts I have assigned to this trigger which are also cringeworthy, and a cascade occurs. These other thoughts in turn trigger the reaction of me wincing, sometimes making an audible remark like "fuck me" or "oooof", sometimes to the point where I feel physical discomfort until I direct my mind away. Lately what I've been doing to. conciously alter this reaction is to instead of cringing, or right after saying "yikes" aloud, I will. stop and say "not yikes, this cringe thing is not so cringe, and it is okay. You've acknowledged this and moved past it" or something like that. I think though that while trying to reinforce a positive reaction to a negative thought web like that is a good thing and a step in the right direction, the real root of the problem, or at least one layer deeper, is that a random though will trigger a web of other thoughts which, while being based in real facts and memories, manifest only as part of a narrative I've created for them.

To be more concrete, this date I went on was probably pretty okay. Awkward maybe,  I don't know I remember. feeling pretty good about it at the time. In the following days I asked the girl if she wanted to get coffee, she said yes, and after a week of not hearing back with plans, she said she was busy,  and I. said let me know if. you change your mind. When she first said yes let's get coffee, all the facts of that date that now bother me became contributing evidence to a narrative that the date went well,  and I started to build them into a host of other thought webs. When I say "X things", they are well received, I am a fun person to be around, I can be charming, part of my identity is someone who is a good first date, etc etc. As time went on and it became clear this girl was uninterested in going out again either because she really was busy or because she didn't feel a spark or have a good time,  the same facts of the date became a part of a completely different and competing narrative.  I am awkward on first dates, I overshared when I shouldn't have, you must have looked so stupid when eating that ice cream cone, etc etc. The facts remain the same, but I'm using them to project a different story into my life and identity.  Habits of bad thoughts about yourself get reinforced by our brains desire to make sense of the many assorted details of memory which often lack details or vital information.  I have a limited number of memories from those two hours last fall. on this date with a stranger, but I've given them great implications somewhat unduly for the purpose of building a story about myself, and building a story about my place in the world. Why, though, do I tend to focus on and reinforce a negative self image, when it seems I could just as easily construct a positive one? I don't know.  I'm tempted to point to some anecdote I find reassuring that says its simply human nature to highlight and concentrate on the bad memories,  for some psychological reason. Beyond that I tell myself it doesn't really matter why, because I and many others do simply dwell on the bad in the face of the good. This tendency however is only predominant in the absence of awareness, even if it is the default,  it seems that you can override that impulse if you pause and consider which narrative this recollection in. contributing to, what story about the past are you writing for yourself?

This is where being able to be mindful or using a tool like. externalizing. your thoughts becomes incredibly powerful.  Honestly, even writing this out as I have has sort of helped me explain to myself something I must. have been aware of already.  The process of cringing at a memory is something I'm quite. aware of, but I haven't ever really verbalizing what it is I'm doing and why that matters. It allows me to pause and consider my reaction rather than. be engulfed by it. It's hard to track down. the origin of these invasive thoughts though, and. so it's hard to writing about in the moment when they're not necessarily occurring.  

Sometimes my webs of unnamed thoughts,  while summarized and condensed,  are still ideas which I understand the content and origin of when I think about them, but which still have bearing on. my. thinking and. life. when I'm not thinking. about. them.  For instance,  one knot of negativity which I'm quite aware of is the shame and frustration of not having had sex in a year and a half. Even typing it still makes me cringe somehow. Many of the thoughts I have are quite explainable and even normal. to some degree if irrational. The first layers are shame, I feel like I'm not fulfilling my idea of what a young man should be,  and that I am somehow impotent for not being more. sexually active.  I feel ashamed that my peers expect this of me, and I'm ashamed that while I expect this of myself I don't seem to fulfill this expectation. These. thoughts of. shame and impotence feed into my sense. of self,  my identity.  I tell myself that,  based on the fact that I haven't. had sex in a long time,  that I'm not the. type of person who can,  or wants to. I tell myself that because of this true fact that I'm not having sex, the reason must be that I am undesirable.  Or that I'm just not putting myself out there enough,  which means I'm not the type of person who is capable of doing that. Or worse, that I once was able to be outgoing and attractive and sex-having and that now, for some inexplicable reason,  I'm not, that I somehow lost this intangible quality that I can't get back. It also feeds into a narrative of my life which. is related to but separate from my identity. I tell myself this is a phase  of life, or maybe the new normal, I'll often phrase it in a third person memoire sort of way, that "he didn't have relations with. a women for the entirety of his 24th year", which besides being some cathartic insult to myself becomes a part of how I'm telling the story of my life in real time and so far.  Usually the process for constructing this narrative is "I haven't been intimate in a long time", and then I ask: Why? And so I invent a plethora of. reasons to explain it. While the deep scary parts of my brain will offer rude and insulting reasons that seem only to detract from my self image, other parts of my mind offer. more neutral reasons, and these are the most forgiving ones I give and what I aloud if ever.  "It's a pandemic,  what can I do?" Or how can you. meet people in the upper. valley,  living with. your parents? not like I can bring them back home! It's not safe to go outside, etc, you can't meet people. when. everything is. closed. These are real reasons and however sad, they are probably much. closer to the actual explanation of my life than the mean ones I offer myself such as that I'm not capable, or worthy, etc. 

What I should probably try to do is acknowledge, verbally, by writing, somehow, any thought when it crosses my mind which is either triggering a thought cascade, or which is contributing to a false or negative narrative of my. life. In many ways, I do believe that happiness is a choice. I can view a year spent indoors without sex as a failure, some systemic letdown of my and others expectations of my life and a reason to regret, or I can view it as a year spent learning and creating and experiencing ease and pleasure. The truth is, the closer you get to the facts of life, that is some kind of completely objective accounting of events as they happened, the less subjective quality they have, the less they are either good or bad regardless of who is ascribing that meaning. I have a default set of values which I've used so far in life to rate events and memories on value, goodness, and rank in a narrative of my life, but they are flawed, they change, these values are different from anyone else's on earth. They can be changed, swapped or rearranged in most cases based solely on my discretion. I think when people say that they eventually stop caring what other people think, what they mean is they stop basing their value scale for life events on their perception of what other peoples assessment of value for the same event would be. Like, spending 8 hours watching TV has some object consequences and outcomes, but how positive the memory, how enjoyable the experience, and what narrative that contributes to in someone's life is virtually completely independent of the event itself. Some people have a set of values that say that is "wasted time" and they deem it unhappy, those 8 hours are a memory of failure or weakness, or proof that you fundamentally are someway or another.  But another person may use the same experience to justify a completely different self image, one of positivity, relaxation, or interest. I do understand and act on this sometimes, but still have a hard time calibrating my value scale, and I'm not quite sure why. A lot of it boils down to my trying to act in accordance with maximum objective value, trying to do the things which are factually the most beneficial to my self image. I do this because is subjective value is a more. useful or prevalent way to rating life experience,  then suddenly all rules and paths forward become equally viable and good, and in my mind there is a paralysis of choice. If you can decide which experience is more valuable, and which will contribute more to a positive narrative in your life, then there is no right answer, no best choice, and life becomes somehow devoid of meaning and a moral compass. For me it, takes away my sense of power and control over my life, it prevents me from minimizing my suffering and removes the guidance of what I've been told will lead to happiness. If staying in and going out are both net 0 objective value, then both outcomes are based only on what I decide is valuable to me, which you'd think would be a nice! But I don't trust my ability to value things correctly over the long term. Regret exists. I could make a choice that is pleasurable now which is not in the future, and there's sort of no way to reconcile that. It's an inevitable source of suffering, which the whole ascribing value to events thing is supposed to minimize in the first place. I'm not sure why I'm so adverse to this, and maybe it will change. I think it already has in many ways. I do practice ascribing positive meaning to memories, and even try to repurpose bricks from a negative narrative to use in a positive one, sometimes because new information tells. me there is an objective reason to reassess, and sometimes because I understand and exercise my ability to invent and ascribe positive meanings to things without a good reason, just because I want to feel it was nice. 
    The problem of course is that inventing meaning is very near straying from reality, and sometimes the lines between subjective and objective outcomes become very blurred. I'm sure I'm the last person to do this though because of my near obsessive desire to view the world as close to its objective reality as possible. A life which is made up of concrete events whose meaning is utterly unrelated to their impact is a life of delusion, surely.  You could simply decide that eating ice cream and watching TV all day is what you value and what you will remember most fondly on your deathbed and what contributes the most to the image of yourself you desire, and then you've accomplished a perfectly valid way of being happy. 
    The problem with assessing objective goodness and subjective goodness is that after a certain age, everything that is objectively good has sort of been figured out. I mean, not that value is linear, but I believe that all events are first given a value rating based on the objective feeling you get, and that most early experiences in life do have an objective value rating. Pain: objectively bad, not a lot of room for debate. Ice cream, objectively good, your brain says yum and it tastes good and yep that's it. Even more abstract ideas do have some pretty clear cut answers right away. While adversity is bad, overcoming it is objectively good. So struggling and achieving is, most would agree, objectively a good thing. Eventually though once you have ranked most of life's experience for yourself and developed a scale for value, you're presented with the unanswerable subjective outcomes of things. What is the ratio of adversity to achievement that is still objectively good? Well, that's no longer objective, there's no correct answer to how much suffering is good suffering.  You have to decide, and you may borrow sample ratios from the people around you to practice and refine your value assessment for this more nebulous event in life. But invariably you'll find, at least at first or for a while, you are unsure of your value system for subjective experiences. How far can I run before the pain and discomfort outweighs my perception of the pay off? Your track coach may have a very different suffering to pay off ratio than you, and may even back it up with objectively evidence about fitness, but if you're out of shape, you may subjectively set the ratio lower, quit sooner, and run less, suffer less, and possibly experience less objective benefit. The strange thing is, you can decide that your subjective assessment of value is more importance than the objective value, even if you are aware of it. You can be aware, as many people are, that running is good for their health, and objectively prevent possibly tremendous suffering from disease in their future, but their subjective assessment that not running is more enjoyable, beneficial, and valuable to them will totally outweigh it, and that is a completely valid way to become more happy. 

Maybe exercise is a bad example, because I really do believe in the objective benefits of running and don't override them with my subjective desires for pleasure. What's more troubling for me is maybe a social scenario. I believe objectively, spending time with friends laughing and having fun is valuable, and probably will be more valuable in the moment, as a memory, and to your sense of self than staying home and watching a documentary would be. The problem is, the objectivity ends as soon as I compare being with friends to staying home. Yes, being with friends is objectively good. But also, watching a documentary, relaxing and learning is an objectively good thing to do. The difference in value between. these two is up to the user, subjective, and unanswerable. This is the crux of the first world problem, the indecision paralysis, it's the fact that I am in my life presented with choices which are all objectively good ways to spend my time, things which will at face value always add value to my life objectively. This makes my pursuit of MOV (maximum objective value) easy at first, I can do anything! It's all good. But When given a bar to pass, a sum total of value to achieve every day and in a life time, suddenly you have to start balancing and parsing out which experiences give more subjective value, and there's no reliable way to do this. You get to make it up! Everyday you write a new point system and set the scoreboard limit differently, as low or as high as you like. Eventually, though, all the confusing subjective value points get ingrained in your system, and you treat them like objective values again, even if they aren't actually. You do this to rationalize and make sense of the world, so that you don't have to constantly evaluate the shifting possibilities of living. Fewer and fewer things become of unknown value, and you begin to feel self assured and confident in your ability to give you life meaning, providing you are liviing up to your minimum value requirements. 

But, I don't know. This explanation seems to lead to the outcome that you turn 30 and everything mostly makes sense, and you know how to spend your time, and what you like and how to treat memories to make you happy, but I know that's not how I feel, or how a lot of people feel. I'm asking myself, do I think my life, or the sum of experiences which makes it up, is actually lacking value? Like is there not enough, regardless of how I allocate it, to go around, not enough value to meet whatever bar I've set? Obviously not! I think. My life is teeming with value. I think that's partly why gratitude works so well, it gives tangibility and volume to appointed value which you've long since set. Like if you get X value points from a delicious meal or sense of belonging in your community, you get used to that level of satisfaction as a baseline. Gratitude is the practice of reminding yourself what 0 value points from that experience would be, and contrasting it with the experience you're having, like displacing water to measure the volume of an amorphous shape, you don't know how much volume it has until you make a metal metaphor, a proxy in your mind with how much water it moves. I also think, despite all that I've just written about it, reducing life to a series of experiences which you rank in value and benefit is limiting and somewhat flawed. Value is real, but obviously not linear, numeric, or translatable. You can't compare your life and its sum total value to someone else's life because even if one of you were predisposed to dole out a lot more value for every experience in life, and would be presumably more satisfied on their deathbed, the other one who died full of regret had a completely different set of experiences which could be more or less deserving of value. It's just not directly comparable. I suppose in this way, the inequitable distribution of objective value in life is balanced out by your subjective allocation of value, and the opposite is true, that happier people who give more meaning to their lives more easily contrast with people who are more naturally depressive, and this discrepancy is similarly mediated by the objective goodness in the world.  
    More likely, this is a silly thought experiment and most people alive will be subject to an indiscriminate amount of pleasure happiness and suffering without cause or systematicity.