Everything Is F*cked(20)
No wonder Newton was such a cranky loner.34
And the worst thing is, the longer we’ve held onto these narratives, the less aware we are that we have them. They become the background noise of our thoughts, the interior decoration of our minds. Despite being arbitrary and completely made up, they seem not only natural but inevitable.35
The values we pick up throughout our lives crystallize and form a sediment on top of our personality.36 The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from those values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with pain and discomfort.37 This is why there is no such thing as change without pain, no growth without discomfort. It’s why it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.
Because when we lose our values, we grieve the death of those defining narratives as though we’ve lost a part of ourselves—because we have lost a part of ourselves. We grieve the same way we would grieve the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a house, a community, a spiritual belief, or a friendship. These are all defining, fundamental parts of you. And when they are torn away from you, the hope they offered your life is also torn away, leaving you exposed, once again, to the Uncomfortable Truth.
There are two ways to heal yourself—that is, to replace old, faulty values with better, healthier values. The first is to reexamine the experiences of your past and rewrite the narratives around them. Wait, did he punch me because I’m an awful person; or is he the awful person?
Reexamining the narratives of our lives allows us to have a do-over, to decide: you know, maybe I wasn’t such a great boat captain after all, and that’s fine. Often, with time, we realize that what we used to believe was important about the world actually isn’t. Other times, we extend the story to get a clearer view of our self-worth—oh, she left me because some asshole left her and she felt ashamed and unworthy around intimacy—and suddenly, that breakup is easier to swallow.
The other way to change your values is to begin writing the narratives of your future self, to envision what life would be like if you had certain values or possessed a certain identity. By visualizing the future we want for ourselves, we allow our Feeling Brain to try on those values for size, to see what they feel like before we make the final purchase. Eventually, once we’ve done this enough, the Feeling Brain becomes accustomed to the new values and starts to believe them.
This sort of “future projection” is usually taught in the worst of ways. “Imagine you’re fucking rich and own a fleet of yachts! Then it will come true!”38
Sadly, that kind of visualization is not replacing a current un healthy value (materialism) with a better one. It’s just masturbating to your current value. Real change would entail fantasizing what not wanting yachts in the first place would feel like.
Fruitful visualization should be a little bit uncomfortable. It should challenge you and be difficult to fathom. If it’s not, then it means that nothing is changing.
The Feeling Brain doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and future; that’s the Thinking Brain’s domain.39 And one of the strategies our Thinking Brain uses to nudge the Feeling Brain into the correct lane of life is asking “what if” questions: What if you hated boats and instead spent your time helping disabled kids? What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you? What if people’s unavailability has more to do with them than it does with you?
Other times, you can just tell your Feeling Brain stories that might or might not be true but that feel true. Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL and author, writes in his book Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual that he wakes up at four thirty every morning because he imagines his enemy is somewhere out there in the world.40 He doesn’t know where, but he assumes that his enemy wants to kill him. And he realizes that if he’s awake before his enemy, that gives him an advantage. Willink developed this narrative for himself while serving in the Iraq War, where there were actual enemies who did want to kill him. But he has maintained that narrative since returning to civilian life.
Objectively, the narrative Willink creates for himself makes no fucking sense. Enemy? Where? But figuratively, emotionally, it is incredibly powerful. Willink’s Feeling Brain still buys into it, and it still gets Willink up every damn morning before some of us are done drinking from the night before. That is the illusion of self-control.
Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain. The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.
Emotional Gravity
Emo Newton sat alone in his childhood bedroom. It was dark outside. He didn’t know how long he had been awake, what time it was, or what day it was. He had been alone and working for weeks now. Food that his family had left for him sat uneaten by the door, rotting.
He took out a blank piece of paper and drew a large circle on it. He then marked points along the edges of the circle and, with dotted lines, indicated the pull of each dot toward the center. Beneath this, he wrote, “There is an emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our orbit who value the same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those whose values are contrary to our own.41 These attractions form large orbits of like-minded people around the same principle. Each falls along the same path, circling and revolving around the same cherished thing.”