Your brain is full of mush and garbage. It’s a total dumpster fire in there. Whole parts of it are complete mysteries to you; other parts are actively working against you. Most of it is trying to keep you alive, at least, but often in ways that are completely counter-productive to living a healthy and fulfilling life in the modern world.
It’s an autopilot designed by an endless series of serial barbarians going back hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, it’s picked up a museum of bad wiring.
Most of your brain is reactionary. Without outside stimuli, a lot of that programming is dormant. If nothing scares, threatens, or tempts you, then mostly your brain’s biggest vice is sloth.
Why am I trash-talking your brain so much? As a reminder that you have a reasonable amount of control over what stimuli get through the mental drawbridge into the little castle on top of the trash heap. Above all that other junk is one small oasis of conscious thought, and it’s just enough to be a gatehouse between the outside world and the roiling chemical soup that steers 95% of your actions.
Have you ever mixed baking soda and vinegar? It causes quite a reaction. Once you drop one into the other, you can’t stop the reaction – you probably can’t even contain it. It’s going to make quite a mess unless you’re well-prepared, and maybe even regardless. Trying to contain the reaction once the elements are mixed is a fool’s errand. But that’s what many people try to do – they try to use what little conscious faculty they have to control their reactions to things.
What you should be doing is using that gatehouse to make sure that the baking soda never gets dropped into the boiling vinegar of your brain to begin with. Don’t lower the drawbridge for things with little to no value, expecting that you’ll be able to maintain your values, honor, and nobility even as the chemical reaction has started. You won’t.
The Opportunity Machine 