Naming things is the hardest part

I’m going to try to tie a bunch of loosely related strands of thought together here. It is more that I am trying to consolidate the ideas for posts that I’ve had over the last month but not a chance to compose them. One of the things that clicked this past week was the return of the NPR podcast Invisiblia and their episode centered around pain science. A lot of this post is about the various forms of, experiences of, and effects of pain and how I’ve arrived at a place where - not pain free by any stretch - but I’m able to manage my pain in such a way that it interferes less and less with the life I want to live and the person I want to be.

In the episode “The Fifth Vital Sign”, the point that stood out most to me was that the language we use to describe our experience helps to define the experience and the expectation of similar experiences going forward in our lives. The episode centers around a teenage girl with a version of rheumatoid arthritis. She is placed in a experimental group that performs hours of intense physical therapy and training every day for months. The therapists are instructed to help the patients both ignore the sensation of pain and to also describe how they feel; “was that easy, medium, or hard?” “What did that feel like?”

As the show says - the point is not emotional repression, some 1950’s era psychology getting a rebrand; but rather to provide the patients with the tools needed to think about and defuse the stress causing the experience of pain.

At my job, which has many different aspects to it, but in particular writing CSS that defines how a web app looks and feels and is experienced by a user, we like to say that naming things is the hardest part. Turns out, we’re right - naming things is the hardest part of experience, and needs to be done with care and attention in order to prevent it from becoming an automatic loop of toxic behaviors.

POPULAR STOICISM

You may remember last year I did a 30 day challenge from Daily Stoic. It was enjoyable, and fun, but one thing I bet really bothers the site’s creator and the person most responsible for the renewed interest in Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, is how the ideas of stoicism are popularly portrayed and recalled.

Even looking at a dictionary definition, stoicism is thought of as a philosophical form of denial or an extreme form of psychological endurance. The idea being a stoic is someone who endures life’s misfortunes without obvious disturbance.

You can see how this is appropriated by every wannabe tough guy macho chauvinist. Stoicism = toughness.

Holiday would rightly contend that there’s a whole lot more nuance to it. That the “toughness” idea about it is really misguided and a gross exaggeration of the philosophy, and he’s right, but nuance doesn’t market well.

So - that’s one input.

NOCEBO

I’ve talked about nocebo before, but let me take a step back and talk about where I heard the idea of nocebo first. I heard it from Dr. Austin Baraki in the context of strength training. The scenario was that if you’ve been told that there is one perfect model for performing a lift and you deviate from that model at your own peril, you’re setting yourself up for catastrophe.

At the same time you are internalizing that you are the problem. And you can see how this errodes notions of you as capable and worthy and lovable over time and that it can also create a learned helplessness and dependency on certain authority figures.

THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE

I finished the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, last month. It was my first time ever reading the book, and also, I can’t say enough good things about reading this series as an adult, and how good it is as a work of fiction. There were so many things about this book that as a middle aged man resonated with me deeper than I want to admit.

In the chapter “Horcruxes”, Dumbledore really lays in to how much Harry does not understand. I would retype it, but the section I’m writing about here is several pages long. Here’s the TL:DR; Harry is setting too much importance on what the prophecy says, but not what the prophecy has meant.

The prophecy being that “ and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives” (Trelwaney in Order of the Phoenix). Understandably, 16 year old Harry is kind of obsessed with this question. It is literally his life and death, right?

Dumbledore explains that Harry is missing the point: In acting on the words of the prophecy, Voldemort has created his worst enemy. It’s not dissimilar to Oedipus and Macbeth - what the words say and what the words mean are two different things, each leading those characters down to their inevitable dramatic demise.

More than that, the centrality of the ability to love as our secret weapon is explicated: “In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your hearts desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches.”

Harry is still skeptical - even if it that’s the case, I still have to kill him in single combat, right?

“Of course you’ve got to! but not because of the prophecy! Because you, yourself, will never rest until you’ve tried!”

and to finish:

“The difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I , thought Harry with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.”

THROWING FECES IN THE GOOD PLACE

There’s three basic philosophical approaches to morality:

1. Virtue Ethics - I do good because I am good
2. Deontology - I do good because some acts are good and some acts are bad, in and of themselves.
3. Consequentialism - I do good because the outcome of this act is good, irrespective of what the act itself is.

Most of the last 400 years has been various ways of looking at the last two, for good reason: you can actually measure those. The first one is a tautology, and it also can open up its own pandora’s box of biased outcomes including but not limited to eugenics and genocide.

But, what I want to point out is this: There’s a study by Greene and Paxton. Subjects in a scanner would predict the outcome of coin tosses, earning money for correct guesses. During periods of forced honesty, subjects predicted correctly around 50% of the time - exactly what you’d expect for a random event.

However, this test was framed as studying paranormal abilities, and rather than state their prediction before the toss like in a bet, they just had to say afterward if they were right. It’s about who cheats, how often and why.

About a third of subjects cheated like crazy. Another 6th were almost big cheaters - that’s half of the people studied. When they cheat, the area of the brain responsible for decision making lit up, but not the area of the brain around moral conflict. When they didn’t cheat and instead resisted? That part - the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) lit up like crazy too. In other words, cheaters gone cheat and if they don’t, it’s really costly on a neurobiological level.

But here’s another side to this study: There were people who never cheated. A good amount, too. And was it “willpower”? No. Not really. The same brain regions the cheaters needed to use were turned off. The truthful subjects might as well have been walking down the street or washing dishes - their brains were running as they normally would. In other words: they weren’t struggling with the choice. The choice to not cheat had become automatic to them.

Honesty isn’t only the result of implicit automaticity but it sure helps if it’s practiced so often it’s become reflexive. The way to make someone an honest person is to be honest over and over and over again.

Which is another way of saying “I do good because I am good.”

THE WRONG ANSWERS FOR THE WRONG QUESTIONS

The science of addiction is equally fascinating - and equally disturbing when you consider treatment and long term treatment outcomes. There’s a growing body of literature that shows for young people who problem use, age is the best intervention. Rates of problem drinking and drug use drop and decline steadily after age 30. The explanatory logic is yuppieism. So and so gets a demanding job and meets their future spouse and they have children and other things in their life, and just kindof stops. Some of those people end up using recreationally and some abstain on virtual permanent basis. But either way the data show that for a plurality of problem users, doing nothing is more effective than rehab, therapy, boot camps, religious conversion, etc.

That’s terrifying to think about. It means a lot of people are charlatans, preying on vulnerable people who want help, and it means some people are going to die who didn’t need to and some people are going to live who shouldn’t have.

In other words, we are where empirical science, philosophy, and real life tee bone each other and break your vertabrae.

But the non-intervention literature is asking the wrong question. The question isn’t “How do you get someone to stop using,” the answer is “How do you get someone to change themselves.”

12 step programs - by the data - are almost as ineffective as random chance. On a long enough timeline, around 50% of 12 steppers return to use, often with terrible consequences.

But if the cheater study logic can be applied here; the 12 steppers who do stay clean and sober for decades - their actions and decisions have become automatic too. Quite literally, given enough time, crappy coffee, and annoying aphorisms, your brain can internalize sobriety as identity, and there’s no struggle to stay sober for these people.

12 step programs plainly do not work for everyone. But if you find yourself at a meeting, don’t leave until that happens.

YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS

Did you see what I did with the last section? I started with quantitative data to make a point, when in reality the qualitative data was more important?

This happens ALL of the time. And as someone in technology, studying accounting, and moving to a data analytics management role, the inherent bias we have to ascribe authority to quantitative data is enormous.

And it blinds us to the obvious point of quantitative science and math in the first place: they help explain what it is we’re seeing, but don’t actually answer any questions.

At their best, they can point us to asking better questions.

Consider how absurd it is that fictional work can describe accurate truths using entirely imaginary people, places, and things. Why? Because there is an experience that can be described, be named, be felt, and can point to greater truths than what is measurable (or often, more damningly that what is measured is only what can easily by measured).

Which leads us back to:

WHY POETRY IS BOTH THE BEST PROGRAMMING TUTORIAL AND THERAPY

Poetry is the right words in the right order. Which is exactly what programming is. What I didn’t understand until like, last week, looking up at the stars alone on a beach, is that the right words in the right order is how we actually become better people.

Think about how many times you’ve heard exercise advice. Think about how many times you’ve heard financial or relationship advice. Think about what would happen if you did a meta analysis on a topic - you read every thing you can find on a topic. Ever notice how the reasonable recommendations always end up being not sexy and not controversial in their field?

Those are the right words. Asking the right questions the right way, we can measure just about anything. If we’re responsible about the measure and reporting of that, and acknowledge our biases, we can approximate how to do something and get the result you want.

But what we can’t do is compel anyone to do it that way.

THE LADY ON THE PLANE AND THE NOVEL I NEED TO WRITE

I am preferentially, an introvert. I’d rather be in small groups, or one on one, or alone, than in a crowded place. But one thing I am not is shy. And thankfully, neither was this lady on my flight back to DC. She had this bad ass tote bag, and we got to talking about so many topics on which we both had a lot to say. I’m pretty sure everyone around us was annoyed with us by the end of the flight, cause we just didn’t shut up.

One of the things that we went on an extended tangent on was family history. And the more idiosyncratic the conversation appeared to get, the more relatable the stories became. It reminded me that I wanted to write this big, sprawling fictional history of some families I know, and hearing the stories this woman had to share affirmed that I just need to start drafting it, 200 crappy words at a time.

Not only was the connection important but the leap that the connection helped me to I make in my head; that organizing these words into some order would help me name, describe, and feel the experience I’ve had; that I’d be better for doing for it.

TOMORROW, TOMORROW

The patients in the pain study I talked about above - at the very end of the study, were asked to rate their pain again on the standard 1-10 scale. Most patients rated their pain about the same as they had on entry to the program.

Pain wasn’t reduced.

But importantly, that’s not the right metric. And its not the right question. The real question was, were they able to live a life without being impeded by the prescence of pain. Were they able to, even while tolerating the constant white noise of pain in the background of their lives, be open and present to all of the joy of life?

They were.

I studied martial arts for most of my child hood. I remember fighting, a lot. I remember not being bothered by fighting, or even injuries sustained during sparring and tournaments. There was a meaning and freedom to that pain, but I never understood until now about how I constructed that meaning; the stories I told myself about the experience of the pain.

And I also never extended that lesson to my life until now; that regardless of the measure or the diagnoses or the emotions themselves, that what I had failed to, to my own peril, was to do the hard thing and name them, describe them, feel them, and construct some kind of story.

We do a version of this whether we want to or not. That part is automatic, and with automaticity comes faster and more rigid behaviors. If we haven’t examined them, we’re internalizing all of the things everyone else has told us about ourselves. We’ve also seen that our minds are plastic and we can shape what those automatic behviors are.

Yes, princess, life is pain and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. But life is so much more than that, too. And you have to be the one to name it, describe it, turn it over and over and over again until its something like automatic.

On one of my flights last week, I put my carryons at my seat and went to the plane’s bathroom. When I returned, a small child had taken my seat. I gently informed the mother and even offered to move my things. They decided to move and I sat back down in my original seat. A lady across the aisle saw the whole thing and tapped me on the shoulder after I sat. She said “You’re a very polite young man.” And I was actually speechless.

It was a superficial act of politeness in a contrived circumstance, but this woman felt comfortable enough to describe me like that. I was speechless because I didn’t have a particularly thought as to why I handled it the way I did. I kindof gave an “Aww schucks” shrug, like anyone would have done the same, even when, earlier that day I witnessed multiple people choose differently.

It just happened.

It just happened turns out to be another way of saying “that’s just the person I am now.” I’m not saying that to brag, just that in this case, for a good thing for once, it turned out that’s the kind of person I am now, and that’s a relief. Because I know that wasn’t always the case. Or I know that I was acting a kindof way to make you think that about me, but it wasn’t who I actually was.

I did good in this case because, in some way I am good. Thinking of myself that way is new for me.

Sitting on that beach the other night, watching the stars and listening to the waves lap, with complete indifference to me, lap as they had for millions of years before and will for millions to come, it occurred to me that the change will happen slowly. Barely noticeable for what feels like forever, and then in the blink of an eye, the truth you failed to notice before would be plain as day.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow will come, and the pain which I’ve lived with will not impede either the march of time nor my enjoyment nor zeal for life nor love for my people in it.

In the Bardo

Life ends for all us. In his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders explores the realm of near-life post mortem; a state the Tibetans call the Bardo. Ghosts. And one of the lines that is sticking with me is this:

men, quietly content, who, in our first youth, had come to grasp our own unremarkableness and had, cheerfully (as if bemusedly accepting a heavy burden), shifted our life’s focus; if we would not be great, we would be useful.

that sentiment has stuck with me since it stuck me reading it. The other book I finished recently was Roseanne Cash’s memoir Composed, which is haunting and beautiful too. She has a chapter dedicated to the deaths of her parents and step mother June, and there’s a passage here that stuck me too:

Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.

Death, pain, loss, narrative, and belonging, all tied together; and despite our best efforts to make sense of it, always indifferent and present.

Every love story is a ghost story, I suppose; the unfinished business, the thing left unsaid.

There’s only this

My wife just accepted her field placement for her seminary formation. The rector at her new site has a podcast and I listened to her episode about, of all things, the theology of the Lion King.

Now that I think about it, it’s a version of the second most famous ghost story (Hamlet, which is absolultely a ghost story, and the first most famous is Jesus’ resurection).

One of the points she made was when the ghost of Mufasa says to Simba “Remember who you are,” its not about shaming Simba. We know this because the very next line “You are my son;” and the subtext there is “and you are loved. You are not your worst act.”

It’s worth noting several things. Simba at this point believes that his worst act was inadvertendly killing his father (when he was merely coincidental to his father’s death); he’s been taken in and cared for by self described outcasts (who run their life through a silly aphorism of “No Worries”) for years, and is believed dead by everyone. The only character he thinks knows the “truth” about him is Scar (his uncle and the usurper king) who told Simba to run away and never return.

If James Earl Jones’ voice isn’t the voice of God I don’t know what would be (don’t come at me with that Morgan Freeman ish); and when he says return, you go.

What I hadn’t appreciated is that Timon and Pumba go too. They have no skin in the game; who rules the Pridelands doesn’t materially affect them. But they go anyway because that’s the kind of friends they are (and what a good lesson right there, right?).

But Scar still has the trump card; he can reveal the “truth” about Simba to the pride. Which he tries to do to avert the challenge from Simba (it doesn’t work - Simba is now strong enough to know he has to do the right thing, even if that’s true)

In other words - it’s only after years of love and support and a sufficiently motivating experience that you return to confront the worst parts of yourself.

It Goes On.

God bless my wife. She is a seminarian and is taking a course on the Hebrew Bible. She thought the course needed an actual Hebrew’s perspective on an issue and asked me to write about it. Email me if you want that piece. But in writing that one I had to look up the covenant that the Israelites actually agreed to.

You know the funny part about it?

It’s not actually a list of wonderful things you get. It’s not prosperity or health, freedom from torment or persecution. Anything listed are obligations they have to do. The only promise made is that they get to continue. They get to go on.

My son’s name is Felix Bernard. He’s named after 2 of his great grandfathers; two men remembered as thoroughly decent people. For his part my son is kind, sweet, verbal, musical, artistic, and sensitive.

Memory is more than what we recall. It’s the way in which pain or joy are transmitted from people we never met to people we’ll never know.

It just goes on. Dayenu.