I spent the end of 2022 with my parents (after not seeing them for 3 years) and my partner. This experience, while cherished, left me acutely aware of how context-sensitive my entire personality is1. I had some sense of this during the trip but then I came back home, resumed my routine, caught up with friends and the contrast was stark. My immediate social connections and physical location blend together and seemingly create the background tone of my entire conscious experience. Normally, while immersed in routine, I tend to identify myself as being a certain “type of guy” but spending time with my parents in a different country made me feel like a daydreaming, introverted teenager again2.
Whenever I think I've made permanent psychological “progress” it later turns out that the underlying neurosis is still there, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be activated again.
Generally, people tend to see personality as either soft or hard. The “soft” perspective is the post-modern view that we can consciously decide who we are, where-as the “hard” view is that we are doomed to repeat the same patterns forever. I, as usual, fall somewhere in between. I think personality is firm3. Our brains have a kind of “personality inertia” which resists changes to our fundamental perspectives and assumptions. Perhaps we can never alter our deepest personality traits, only alter our relationship to them or our interpretation of them?
Let’s make this concrete. For most people there are just some things that offend their sense of sanctity and, in turn, seem disgusting. I am skeptical that humans can ever completely overcome the xenophobic tendencies that stem from these disgust4 reactions. No matter how much self-work we do, the experience of disgust remains a part of our lives. However the framing of "disgust" can be altered considerably. Perhaps you don't actually dislike an entire demographic, you merely dislike witnessing behaviour you cannot understand? Investigations along these lines can loosen our grip on ingrained emotional responses and can result in a reduction in the intensity of the emotion - but rarely lead to total alleviation.
Knowing this malleability exists, I've burned countless brain cycles obsessing over the “right” kind of person to be. For much of this time I believed in the “soft” interpretation of personality. I thought I could change anything and everything about myself, with sufficient effort. Now, I think the “soft” view is merely a useful fiction to bootstrap self-improvement. We cannot change everything, far from it, but believing we can alter ourselves is a prerequisite for making any meaningful change.
I know by now that obsession with identity only causes problems yet I've spent immense effort trying to compress my personality to a legible identity.
I have a natural tendency to define myself as a monolith:
"Okay so I'm a game developer. No, a programmer. No, a researcher. No, an artist. No, a hippie. No, a Buddhist. I give up."
It seems the human body is roughly 70% water and 30% contradictions. It’s simultaneously possible to geek out over optimal fitness and nutrition and also believe that whole foods and good sleep are all you need. It’s possible to voraciously review productivity tools and techniques and also to know that it’s mostly a distraction. It’s possible to worry deeply about the impact of technology on the world and also believe it’s our main hope for the future.
So, who should I be? What's the right project to work on? What's my authentic nature? These are funny questions because, as Zen has taught me, they're immediately answered if we can get out of our own way. Frustratingly, the idea of striving for authenticity blocks the experience of it5.
I am coming to accept that my overcritical, overthinking, disagreeable and rather obsessive defaults will always be there. In fact, it actually feels better to indulge these traits than to suppress them in the pursuit of being the “right” kind of person. Of course, being excessively disagreeable makes it hard to actually, uh, enjoy things but maybe I'm just not a happy go lucky person?6
There is a relief that comes from accepting our limitations. We can overlay the project of self-improvement with the kindness of self-acceptance. We can approach self-development pragmatically, instead of forcefully reinventing ourselves. We can build new pathways of association downstream from our psychological triggers, through repeated practice (this is basically CBT as I understand it).
For me, this means constantly finding myself back in familiar territory.
"Huh, I've been stuck in this thought loop before, and had this realisation before... I’m doing the thing again."
The process of “self knowing” is one long ongoing conversation with yourself. You’ll inevitably bump into the same behaviour patterns again and again. In fact it's a mark of progress that you're noticing the patterns at all! So long as you're patient and attentive, your patterns of thought and behaviour will automatically adjust over time. It's not as simple as "knowing the answer", we have to ingrain it deep in our synapses.
Patterns learned early in life have an unfair first-mover advantage. They wormed their way into our brains early and established themselves as load-bearing pillars of our entire personal ontology. We can’t just remove them, we've been practicing the status quo for our whole lives. It shouldn’t be surprising to keep coming back to it!
So, am I saying we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever until we die? Well, to some extent, yes. However we can build layers of abstraction over our primordial thought patterns and capture more upside with less downside. Our ingrained behaviours became ingrained for a reason. Anxiety has a use. Fear, anger, disgust, jealousy too. They can be difficult to handle and channel into meaningful outputs but that is the project of personal development. To see things as they are (not through the lens of expectation, comparison or projection) and act accordingly.
When I see bad design in the wild I immediately feel the invitation to anger: “How could anyone think this was an acceptable solution!?” Luckily my mindfulness experience lets me catch this in the moment and decide, is it really worth following that thread?7
Somehow, in each moment, you have to decide who you are and know that there is no-one to try to be in the first place.
The paradox of progress is that even as you're going around in circles, you still move forward. I see Buddhist enlightenment as a was of teaching this same lesson. We will never arrive at our destination but, weirdly enough, that was never the goal in the first place. The goal is to be happy where we are.
Until next time,
✌️ Ben
Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About
📄 The Lost Art of Poetic Immersion
📄 Game Theory Applied: The Flow Channel
📄 We’re all living on the frontier now
📄 The Language Model Vocabulary Gap
🎙️ Charting the Future with Sarah Northway (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist)
🎥 Finding and Fixing Slow Code // Raytracing Series
🎶 All Waves to Nothing - Greg Puciato
I’ll take “what is psychological regression?” for $200
As opposed to an imaginative, curious, ambivert adult
Yes, I am thinking of software, firmware and hardware.
Except for Buddha, obviously
This is the veil of maya, which is also a great band
Anyone who has known me for a while can see that I tend towards Yin rather than Yang
Often the answer is yes, but for my friends’ sake I’ve learned to let go… sometimes