Mental Floss

Part of my rehabilitation, during this hiatus from work, is to work on my memory. I'd like to strengthen my mental skills all around, in fact, but mostly I need to focus on recollection. I have sharp short term recall, but have been cursed with one of the worst long term memories of anyone I know. I'd almost prefer it was the other way around. While it's great to be able to distinctly remember everything that's happened or was said over the past several months, sadly there are huge parts of my personal life that I simply can't recall. So I have to rely on friends to retell stories as if I wasn't there.

Part of strengthening the mind is understanding how it works. While scientists on a whole are still in the early stages of identifying and mapping brain function and linking it to what we perceive as our mind, we actually have a unique opportunity, each of us, to explore how the mind works ourselves, having access to a fully operational one at all times as we do. The trick, of course, is to get past the concept that you are using a tool to analyze itself, which some say is why we will never be able to fully understand how our mind works. I wholeheartedly disagree with this - our mind is capable of visualizing such unimaginable things such as invisible protons or vast solar systems - so why not think that one day we will be able to use it to understand how we think?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. My perception of the mind (based solely on the exercise of being aware of my own thoughts and where / how I become aware of them) is that it is made up of two distinctly separate pieces: the conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious mind operates exactly like the mind of an alligator or a dog or a cat; it is what allows us to function, to eat, to sleep, even to experience emotions. The conscious mind is a completely different animal, and seems to be capable of logical thought (based on pattern recognition and the ability to predict outcomes and make decisions accordingly).

This is pretty close to scientifically proven, and it doesn't contradict Dr. Freud - he was talking psychology and we're talking pure thought here. In fact, there are literally two different physical areas in the human brain that when measured for activity during different mental challenges each fire at different times. Scientifically, this seems to support the theory of dual conscious and subconscious minds by indicating that these distinct thought patterns take place in completely physically separate places in the brain.

Separate they may be, however these two pieces of our mental fiber are in constant communication with each other.They don't act as one, but they work together in near-perfect harmony.

Ever try your hardest to remember something only to fail and then have it pop up later when you are thinking about something completely different? That's your subconscious working in the background, executing a search, and then passing the results back to your conscious mind in the mental equivalent of a browser popup window. Ever have deja vu? That's your subconscious mind constantly comparing current sensory input with previously-recorded memories and sending an alert to your conscious when it finds a match that is worth noting.

I tend to think that we dream in our subconscious mind, and in a rested state with no sensory input, our conscious mind wanders over and watches from time to time, like some residential voyeur peeking over the fence at a suntanning neighbor's wife. This gives us a glimpse into the strange and jumbled world of our subconscious, a peek into how we actually think and process input.

Like dreams, this process is is illogical, intuitive, nonsensical, and completely meaningful.

It's also stubborn. While our conscious mind can be reasoned with, our subconscious cannot. It learns from repetition, and unlearns the same way. Have a cigarette with your coffee every morning for a year, and the first day you have a coffee and skip the cigarette, your subconscious (albeit fueled by chemical dependencies) will scream out for a smoke, desperately sending images of your favorite brand pack of smokes to its conscious cousin. Wake up every Monday dreading your work day for long enough, and even after you quit your job, Monday morning will arrive along with that same feeling of dread - now out of place and illogical, when viewed in the perspective of the rational conscious mind.

This is how I started my day today. Saturday and Sunday I rose full of hope and rested (despite not sleeping well), but this morning I woke up with the same nagging feelings of dread I used to get knowing that checking my e-mail would open a Pandora's box of misery to kick off my work week.

This is interesting insight, to say the least, into how complicated - and yet simplistic - the subconscious mind is. It tracked the day of the week in order to prepare me for my Monday, but couldn't track current events enough to know that work was no longer a factor.

Or, more to the point, it couldn't reason and predict that quitting my job meant that Mondays would no longer be depressing to me.

That's a task for the conscious.

And so the conscious and subconscious work together quite well, but then again are completely independent creatures and that's where we fall short of our true potential. The duality of man, so to speak, in that we literally have two minds operating for us (and against us) at any given time. How frustrating that I can be conscious of the difference of this Monday and last Monday, but still be a slave to my subconscious defenses that kicked in despite being no longer relevant.

Just like deciding to quit smoking isn't the same as quitting smoking.
(For those keeping track, by the way, it's day 4 and I'm not looking back. My subconscious mind can eat it.)

It seems to me that the key to life then, the key to enlightenment, and perhaps even the key to happiness is to tune our independent minds to work as one. Imagine how powerful a man would be if he could harness the strength of both halves of his mental capacity; the whole undoubtedly being greater than the sum of its parts.

Forward Looking

There is a term: "forward looking", that in business describes a method of decision-making with the implication that it is strategic rather than short-sighted; planned instead of reactionary. This applies to all aspects of life, not just business. All too often people react rather than plan, deny rather than fix, flee rather than fight.

Since the start of the year I've been honestly and abrasively looking forward in my own life, comparing the path I've put myself on to the future I wanted for myself, and realizing that there were no roads that connected the two. What I saw was that I had been in deep denial about the future of the company I was working for, that I couldn't see a particularly fruitful or fulfilling future there for myself or my team, and more importantly, that I couldn't imagine leaving that job for a carbon copy of it, starting the cycle over again, not bettering my situation, instead simply moving it somewhere else, like I had done in the past, over and over again.

For 3 months, this realization, as well as my father's words echoing in my head (something about not leaving a job without having an offer from someplace else, or maybe it was about hatching chickens) kept me mostly undecided about what to do to fix this. I was flat out miserable, this I knew. I woke up every day dreading going to work, even though I worked from home and all I had to do was turn on my laptop or dial into a meeting. I spent time and energy looking for other work and talking with a few other companies, but nothing seemed like a step forward, instead everything seemed like a step to one side or the other. Like dancing.

Dancing around the issue, perhaps.

Rather than continue to tango with inevitability, then, I finally and simply handed in my resignation. I realized that as scary as it was, I had to terminate the abusive and unhealthy relationship I have had with my career. I needed to do this swiftly and unequivocally, leaving no room for greyness or misinterpretation. I decided to jump out of the airplane, and check for my parachute on the way down rather than dick around in the door and risk losing my nerve.

I realized that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. But I'm damn sure that it's not what I've been doing. I'm not cut out for the corporate bullshit, I want off this stupid ladder.

The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

So the first step, now that I'm in free fall, is to clear my head. Reboot my mind. In order to do that, I need to restore my emotional and physical health. I have quit smoking, quit eating junk food, and quit drinking (at least for the foreseeable future). I will be exercising daily in an effort to get back into the physical health I was in just two years ago. I'm going to focus on the things that, while working, I never made enough time for.

Writing. Reading. Making music. Drawing. Crossword puzzles. Long motorcycle rides to nowhere. Hobby programming.

Like leaving an abusive relationship with a woman, I need to find myself, my own identity, and most importantly, my own values before I can move on to a new partnership. Nothing short of that would be right for me, or whoever I re-engage my career path forward with. It's terrifyingly exciting.

I won't be working for the Man ever again, because now I AM The Man.

But for now...

Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.  

- Office Space

Charlie Sheen is from Mars, Women are from Venus

I recently had an e-mail conversation (a "convo" is what I think the kids call it these days) with a female friend of mine about how guys approach picking up women. She was fascinated with some of the insight I was giving her about it (trying, as she was, to apply it to her own experiences with men), and once I resigned myself to the fact that I was being a traitor to my gender, I started thinking more about how we, as guys, interact with women in general. I'm going to break that down for you now. Consider this a gift to womankind, and I expect to be rewarded for my efforts with backrubs and other favors that start with the letter "b" (like "burgers").

First and foremost, if you smile at us, are nice to us, or otherwise treat us with anything less than disdain, our immediate reaction is that you are trying to tell us that you would like to have sex with us. We're going to promptly put you into the revered "possibility" bucket in our head, and there you will stay until you flat out reject us. Sadly, this means that waitresses, baristas, strippers, stewardesses, and other women in the service industry who rely on social grace for tips are going to go through the day unwittingly "signaling" men in their wake that they are hot to trot.

Many women realize this, and resort to being bitches to every man they meet who isn't Ryan Reynolds. I can't hardly blame them.

The reason for this is that most men are not very good at reading body language (this is a scientific fact) and so we will not know, in fact, with any amount of certainty whether a woman is interested in us sexually until our penis is actually moving in and out of her vagina. As a result, if we always erred on the side of caution, women and men would cease to have sex and the human race would die out in a generation or two. Therefore, we must assume that you all want us. All the time.

Of course, guys that are good at hooking up with women have found a way around their genetic gender deficiencies and have learned to bully through and succeed. My experience is that this has less to do with realizing the subtle nuances of courtship, and more to do with large egos and the assumption that every woman does, in fact, want to sleep with you, whether or not they are aware of it yet. Hence, the "nice guys finish last" stereotype, which is by and large true. Not to say that women are attracted to douchbags, it's just that douchbags don't second-guess themselves and that comes across as confidence.

It's a numbers game, really. Hit on enough women, and one of them will sleep with you. Repeat.

Women are far better than men at social interaction. Period. We are genetically designed to build things, hunt things, and burn things. Women are genetically designed to orchestrate all of the other daily workings of complex social groups, and as such are inherently more in tune to other people's needs, feelings, and status hints.

Before I get buried with hate mail from angry women, please let me clarify this for one hot minute by saying that of course women can also build things, hunt things, and burn things. What I'm saying is that men suck at social grace.

Or at least we men have to work at it. Our idea of courtship is grinding on your booty in a dark nightclub with a bottle of beer in our hand while we grin at our buddies. Women design complex mating rituals around subtle cues, sharing of thoughts and ideas, and a complicated game of give and take designed to feel out a potential partner's ability to provide, care for, and support.

Quite simply, this confuses us.

We have simply not evolved socially like women have. We are base and crude. And to further complicate and confuse things for us, women actually naturally do want this simple ruggedness in their man, but along the way, social evolution has required us to be what we are plus what we are not, in a way that is flat out contradictory to itself. We are expected to be all things at once. Ask any woman what she wants in a man, and you will hear things like "rugged" and "strong" and "dirt under his fingernails", but she will also say "understands me" and "likes to shop at the container store" and "sensitive".

To fully understand this, put your way-back-thinking-cap on and consider cavemen. And cavewomen. Our genetics do not evolve at the rapid pace that our brains do, rather they evolve slowly, across generations. Our minds evolve much more rapidly, even more so in the age of technology. Society at large is many times removed from the primitive society that lived in caves and revolved around a nightly campfire, but our genetics have not nearly begun to catch up.

Genetically we are more similar to cavemen than we are mentally. Mentally we are leaps and bounds ahead of them, but our genetics are still programmed around the camp fire. This is why it's so hard to understand human behavior, especially when it comes to the differences between the sexes. Because we're trying to frame it in the 21st century, when it really only makes sense in the pre-dawn era.

Primitive societies were intra-supportive. Families were less polar and individual than they are now. When a baby was born, all of the women of the village would care for it. When a sabre-tooth tiger was dragged home from the hunt, everyone would eat from it. Women got their social and emotional support from other women, and ran the village while the men were out procuring food for the table. Men merely had to bring home the sabre-tooth bacon and impregnate women. Those were our sole responsibilities.

Ah, those were the days.

Now, however, families are polarized even under one roof, and generations are generally physically separated. Even 50 years ago, 2 or 3 generations would live together, but now, each generation has it's own house, oftentimes in different localities. Women no longer have the always-present female support system they once had, and they don't think they need it any more, being the pants-wearing, no bra having, educated and earning types that they have become.

But they do need this female support system. And without the village, they now they expect men to provide that for them.

Gone are the days when men would see a woman they found attractive, beat other men into the ground who also felt that way, and then drag her off to a dark cave to lay seed in her belly. I say "Good riddance dark days, we have since evolved". And we have, but not quite enough yet.

The truth is that we are still genetically designed for something similar to this type of behavior, and anything else is difficult for us to process.

Which brings us to today. Today's social groups are much smaller than they were before. A couple without kids is akin to an entire village in caveman times. A man can bring home dozens of frozen sabre-tooth tiger patties from his job each day, and a woman (through the miracles of modern medicine) can conceive babies even without medical trauma. In vitro fertilization, adoption, welfare, unemployment, home alarm systems, 911; all replace the need for a tight-knit social strata by allowing us to survive on our own when we should not be able to.

But these technological advances have not replaced a woman's need to orchestrate social engineering within her social group, or a man's need to bond with fellow men on the hunt. So we turn to our spouses to fill those gaps, and they always fall short. Why? Because they're not programmed for it, as much as they might want to be.

How many men have you heard say "She's awesome, she loves sports"? How many women have you heard say "He's great, he listens to me"? Women are not programmed to love sports, and men are not programmed to listen - at least not to women's stories. Yet these become desired attributes in a mate. Why? Because we are genetically still cavemen, but no longer have the social makeup of caveman times, so we look to our spouse to fill the void.

I've digressed. But the point of my digression was to point out that men simply do not have the genetic abillity to process social cues like women do. We didn't need it. Sabre-tooth tiger had one social cue: hungry.

I'm not making this up, it's scientifically proven. SCIENCE says this. We're simply not built to be the specific pattern in the fabric of modern relationships that is expected of us; we're being asked to play a role that other women once played. Initially, we were designed (by God or science, take your pick, I'm not smart enough to get into that debate) to be involved in courtship rituals that involved hair-pulling and chest-beating. Genetically, women were designed to respond to exactly that as well, and back then, things were much more simple.

Nowadays, however, complication rules, and that is where women reign supreme.