So today, I went to a small local cafe for a business meetup. The waiter asked me what I’d like to drink, and I asked for an iced tea. One of my colleagues was then asking about flavors of tea, and the waiter mentioned that they had peppermint tea, which I like.

“Ooh,” I said. “Could I change my order to a peppermint iced tea, please?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “We don’t have peppermint iced tea.”

…

I looked at him for a moment, just in case he was joking. He wasn’t. He seemed genuinely ignorant of the relationship between tea and iced tea. I didn’t want to burden him, so instead I asked if I could just have a hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, then.

He asked: “So, you want that AND the iced tea?”

…

I clarified that I just wanted the hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, thank you.

A few moments later, he returned. What he brought with him to serve to me was the following, and ONLY the following:

– A glass of (normal, non-peppermint) iced tea, with a lemon slice, and
– A sealed peppermint tea bag.

And when he set these two items down in front of me, he said:

“I hope this is what you wanted.”

People describe me as very optimistic. I don’t really like that term, because I don’t really like the whole “optimism/pessimism” axis of thought. Both of those mindsets yield a lot of agency to the universe, and that’s not the way I like to operate. I seem optimistic because I think things will work out well, but I don’t think that because I’m trusting in good fortune. I think things will work out generally well because that’s the way I’ve engineered them to work out.

Sure, some things are out of my control. Lots of things, in fact! But I don’t waste any time even thinking about whether those things will work out well or poorly. Instead, I think about ranges of outcomes, and my potential reactions.

An optimist thinks a coin flip will end up in his favor. A pessimist thinks it won’t. I don’t think either of those things – instead, I think about the bets I can make, what I stand to gain or lose, and whether I can choose to bet or not. I make my bets accordingly and then I’m satisfied that no matter how the coin lands, I’ll be fine. I’m not sure what kind of ‘ist’ that is, but that’s the kind I am.

You are not a passive observer of your own life. Roll your sleeves up and start working – minimize your need for hope or your vulnerability to fear. Be an empowerist.

Count backward from ten. Breathe. Keep your mouth shut. Listen, but listen to the patterns of information more than the information itself – most of which is nonsense.

The fire will burn out, the dust will settle, and there will be time to sift through the ashes. You’ll find truth in a book a decade or a century later, not in a screaming crowd while the flames still rage.

Just a reminder that humanity is most tested when it’s most needed.

“We can’t help what we like.”

Sure we can.

Deciding to like or not like something is way easier than trying to force yourself to act opposite of your desires. When I was a teenager and living on my own, money was extremely tight. I needed to make cost-efficient choices when it came to necessities like food. Until that point in my life, I hated peanut butter. But it’s cheap, calorically dense, fairly nutritious, and doesn’t require any particular kind of storage – perfect for a kid living in shaky circumstances. The only problem was that I couldn’t stand the stuff.

But it was the right choice, so I decided to like it. Not “I decided to eat it even though I didn’t like it,” because that sounded like torture. I just decided to like it.

Now I love the stuff. People hear that story and think I’m weird, but I think most people just haven’t tried reprogramming their desires. All it ever took for me was thinking about the act or object, skipping the middle part where I thought about how it felt, and then thinking hard about the other side – how it felt when it was over.

So for peanut butter, I’d look at the jar, and not think about the taste – which is fleeting and inconsequential anyway – and instead think about the end result, and how much I like having a cheap, easy, portable, nutritious way to feed myself. Boom, I like this stuff! I could think about that even while shoveling spoonfuls into my craw, and the deed was done. My brain was now wired to like the stuff. How it tasted was just a manifestation of that.

It’s the same with soda. Soda is absolutely terrible. It’s pure poison, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. All I had to do was think about how vile it was, and it suddenly made me sick to my stomach instead of tasting good.

The point is, it’s not a question of willpower, or of forcing yourself to do stuff. It’s just a question of deciding why you like things in the first place. You’re not an animal, led around entirely by your short-term sensory input. You can take the little wire in your brain that connects “what you like” to “why you like it,” and unplug the “why you like it” end from your sensory organs and plug it into your reason instead.

Give it a try. It might not be as hard as you think.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating for yourself. If you make music or art or anything like that, you can – and should! – make what makes you happy. Make music you want to listen to. Make art you want to look at. Write what you want to read.

But fundamentally, that’s a different skill set than being able to do those things professionally.

See, doing anything professionally is pretty much defined as “trading a thing I can do to other people for stuff they have that I want,” i.e. usually money. You can’t always have it both ways. Sure, you can create things that appeal to you and then look for the incredibly narrow audience of people whose tastes align exactly with your own, but that mentality is why there are a lot of “starving artists.”

Selling to other people isn’t selling out. If you’re a brilliant musician and you really like jazz, but someone is willing to pay you to produce a country album, then produce the country album! The money you make lets you pursue other passions and do what you like. Artistic integrity is a real thing, but it’s diminished by doing harmful things, not by doing perfectly fine things that just don’t align with your own preferred tastes.

Helping others is a wonderful virtue, and doing so with creative gifts that give you more freedom to play in that playground is a huge win/win. Don’t avoid it.

I think we often categorize people based on their station, rather than their behavior. And I think maybe we should lean a little bit more the other way.

You owe loyalty to people who deserve loyalty. If someone who should be on your side is constantly causing you to have to fight for basic respect and decent treatment, then you shouldn’t necessarily try to win those fights. You should just recategorize that person as not your ally and move on.

I don’t want to say, “You’re supposed to be my friend, why are you always treating me badly?” That’s a painful fight, and it never ends. Instead, I’d rather say – just once – “Oh, this person always treats me badly. I should stop considering them to be my friend and remove them from circumstances where they can do so.”

I don’t like to fight. Nine times out of ten, someone forcing you to fight immediately means they aren’t worth fighting for.

A weird incidence of status quo bias: Let’s say you step outside and it feels hot. You look at a digital thermometer you have outside and it says 95. The next day it feels hot again, and again the thermometer says 95. The third day you step outside and it still feels hot, but the thermometer says 88. You immediately think “Oh, that can’t be right, it must be on the fritz.”

I’ll bet it never even occurred to you that it might have been incorrect the first two days. That hypothesis never crossed your mind, even though you have no idea how accurate it was. You stepped outside that first day, felt the heat, and looked at the number “95.” Immediately your brain connected the amount of heat you were feeling with that number, and the next day solidified it. On the third day, therefore, you said “Oh, it can’t be 88, because it feels like it’s 95.” But you have no idea what 95 feels like!

With a sample size of only three events and zero actual testing, you don’t have enough information to decide which temperature reading is the accurate one. But almost universally we’ll go with the first one.

In other words, we don’t question the first piece of information we get nearly as much as we question subsequent information that disagrees with the first piece, even though we have zero reason to trust one over the other.

Just a quirk to be aware of – don’t default to believing something today just because you believed it yesterday. Unless there’s something deeper under that first belief, then it’s skepticism all the way down!

If you see a train chugging along at a good speed and one or more of its wheels are off the track, you would probably be very frightened. I know I would, especially if I was near – or even on! – the train. That’s a lot of power and potentially destructive force just barreling along without anything keeping it from suddenly lurching off the track and into a suburban neighborhood or adjacent highway.

Some people remind me of that. There are some people who just make absolutely wild decisions, while simultaneously wielding quite a lot of power over the lives of others. If they were trains, they’d be doing 90 MPH with eight wheels out of twelve off the track. Choo choo.

Once, a long time ago, I worked in the service industry. On a break one day, a handful of my coworkers and I were standing around telling each other jokes. If you’ve ever worked with young people in the service industry, you can guess that some of these jokes were pretty rough. Nothing terrible, but definitely not jokes you’d tell to grandma. One of the guys in the group spoke up, like it was his turn to tell a joke. Instead, he went on a ten-minute rant about his extremely racist views on the problems of society and the sickening “solutions” that he would implement. Our eyes were wide with horror the entire time. He didn’t work there much longer, obviously.

But here’s what rattled me. It wasn’t that he held those views. I’ve read, you know, books. I know that there are people in the world with horrifying views, some even worse than his. What rattled me was that this guy had such an incredibly frightening lack of self-awareness that he thought it was appropriate to share them. Like, he looked around at a group of coworkers, at his job, that he didn’t know very well and that notably were not all of the same race, standing around telling jokes, and his brain went “Yup, this is the time and place for this screed I’ve had in my back pocket. This is going to go great!“

Of course, I know he didn’t think that. That’s what’s frightening – the only way he could have said that stuff at that moment is if the part of his brain that should make those decisions just didn’t work at all. In other words, wheels off the track. The part of his brain that controls his body wasn’t being held back by the part of his brain that’s supposed to control the other parts of his brain.

People have dark thoughts. I have dark thoughts sometimes! What makes that not worrying is that most people have a dark thought and go “Ugh, that was dark. Better stick that one in the vault and not act on it or say it out loud, and maybe go take a shower.” That’s an important safety feature of the human brain. Let’s call it the “Nope Impulse.” I like people whose Nope Impulses are in good working order. Those people are capable of looking at actions they’re about to take and say “Nope!” to the ones that shouldn’t be done.

There’s a concept in psychiatry called an “intrusive thought.” It’s just the term for the random thoughts that pop into your head that absolutely do not reflect any of your real views, opinions, or intentions. If you’ve ever leaned over a high ledge and some part of your brain said “jump,” that’s an intrusive thought. You don’t want to jump, you never would jump, but your brain is doing all sorts of A/B testing with thoughts and neurons all the time, so sometimes you see a Lego and your brain just suggests that maybe you should eat it.

If you have a good Nope Impulse, intrusive thoughts aren’t really a problem. They pop up, you go “nope,” and they vanish. That racist co-worker did not have a Nope Impulse. And that’s frightening, because if he didn’t say “nope” to that, what other things might his brain suggest to do that he has no defense against?

Choo choo.

Sometimes the examples are more mundane, but they still draw attention to the same mental defect. One of my clients, who had worked for his boss for fifteen years, asked for a week off for the birth of his son. The boss responded with: “A whole week?”

Think about that. This guy, who manages an entire factory and 200 employees with huge spinning machines and trucks and thousands of tons of cargo – this guy’s Nope Impulse wasn’t sharp enough to tell him not to say possibly the stupidest sentence he could have uttered at that moment. (The client quit, enjoyed 3 months off with severance with his wife and son, and then started his new job at double the salary, while the boss sent him numerous texts asking him to come back, in case you wanted the dopamine hit of the extremely happy ending to that story.)

But that boss still manages that factory. What if one day his brain says “Push that guy into that machine,” and he just doesn’t have the mental defenses to not give in to that idea? I know that sounds like an extreme example, and it probably is. But my point is that every time you see some inexplicably stupid action done by a human, I think they mostly trace back to that choke point.

Sometimes people do bad things for sensible reasons, at least in their context. A premeditated murder is a bad thing, but the person who did it at least planned to get away with it, whether they succeeded or not. But the person who just rams his car into a bunch of people because one of them flipped him off? There was a moment, however narrow, where his brain said “Oooh, step on the gas and turn right,” and most other people would have just gone “Nope.”

So that’s a frightening thing to me. More frightening to me than actual malice, which is at least held somewhat in check by the realities of a society that punishes those who try to harm it. More frightening than just stupidity, which is at least usually somewhat predictable and the places where stupidity can do the most damage have the most insulation against it – they don’t let absolute morons fly planes or build bridges.

But missing the Nope Impulse? You don’t have to be evil or stupid to have intrusive thoughts. And if you’re generally good and reasonably intelligent, you may have made your way to a position in society that gives you a lot of power over a lot of people. And if you’re the kind of not dumb, not evil person who nonetheless sends an email to a female co-worker telling her that she should wear heels in the office because you like watching her walk around in them, then I’m really afraid of letting you get near any big red buttons.

Choo choo.

Maybe this isn’t true of everyone, but for me, one of the highest compliments I can receive is: “Hey, can you help me with this thing?”

A sentence like that does everything for me. First, it’s a compliment about my competency; especially if the task is somewhat specialized, then I’m flattered that the person thought of me as the right person among those they knew to do it. Secondly, being able to help someone I care about makes me feel wonderful. I derive a lot of personal satisfaction from the thought that I’m a net positive in other people’s lives, and being able to help with something directly brings that thought into the light.

Plus, there’s always the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing a specific, narrow task. As far as that sense goes, you just can’t beat “the cabinet door was broken and now it isn’t, because of me.”

My overall point is this: doing things in service to others is remarkably good for your mental health. If you’re asked, that means you’re seen as one of your community’s Helpers, one of the people who holds it together. That’s worthy of respect. And even if you aren’t asked – volunteer. Do a few things in service to others and watch all your other woes begin to melt away. The inconsequential ones will evaporate from your worry, and the few truly meaningful ones will be easier to tackle with the help of the friends you make.

My son, at five years old, already prides himself on this behavior. He rushes to every door to make sure he gets a chance to open it for people. He won’t let anyone else carry anything that he can lift. Yesterday my mother needed the old swingset disassembled from her yard, and she asked me to do it. (So we’re already off to a great start, as the request immediately put me in a good mood.) Since my son was with me, I said: “Hey, I could use the strongest boy in the world to help me, do you know who that is?” He rushed to my side and together we took the thing down, me showing him how to use the tools and him helping me carry the old metal away.

We both beamed with pride, the chain of service continued. You just can’t beat it.

Many people seem to have a big blind spot when it comes to reading people. Not just that they can’t do it, but they don’t believe it can be done.

Let’s say two people sit down to play some Texas Hold’em. They decide in advance to play 10,000 hands, because they’re both immortal and don’t need to eat or sleep. The law of large numbers says that over 10,000 hands, pretty much exactly 50% of them will give the better cards to Player A, and the other 50% will give the better cards to Player B. So if “who has the better cards” determines who wins, then the players should come very close to breaking even at the end of the game.

In reality, if one of those people is a professional poker player and the other is not, the pro will absolutely wipe the floor with the amateur.

Why? Does being a professional poker player give you the ability to get dealt better cards from a shuffled deck? Of course not. But the pro will know when his opponent’s hand is better and when his own is, and he’ll bet accordingly. He’ll bait his opponent into bad moves and he’ll maneuver around unbeatable hands. He’ll completely rob the other guy.

And in my experience, at the end of the night, the other guy will say his opponent “got lucky.”

People just absolutely do not like to admit they got tricked, manipulated, or bluffed. They hate the idea of ever losing a battle of wits (probably because we equate being smart with moral worth), to the point where they won’t admit that’s what happened. And as a result, they force themselves to ignore the fact that this is a skill that can be developed.

So the cycle continues. That same person will never be able to read people – or bluff – because they don’t want to acknowledge that other people might already have that skill and be better at it than them.

And I get it. Being tricked, especially outside of a game, feels very bad! And if we acknowledge that we got tricked because of a lack of our own ability to detect the trick in the first place, it’s like taking on the blame, and calling someone else smarter than you. Most people’s egos can’t handle it. Some people won’t even report scams to the police because it hurts their pride too much. If you get robbed at gunpoint, that doesn’t feel as shameful as getting taken in a confidence scheme.

But the only defense against this game is to play it. If you don’t recognize it as real, it’s a huge weak spot. You aren’t immune to it – and if you think you are, you’re even more susceptible. Watch a few poker games, then play a few. It might be frustrating, but it’s a skill worth learning.