You've Never Met The Man In Your Head

Hi friend,

For most of his life, a psychologist named Timothy Wilson has been building a case against you.

Not against you personally. Against a belief you hold without ever having checked it, which is that you have some reliable access to your own mind. His doctoral thesis, finished in 1977, was called Awareness and Self-Perception, and in the four decades since, working out of the University of Virginia, he has shown again and again that when a man explains why he did something he is usually guessing, and that when he predicts how happy a thing will make him he is usually wrong. In 2002 he gathered it into a book. The title says everything he had found. Strangers to Ourselves.

So here is a man who has spent his career proving there is someone living inside your head whom you have never properly met.

Sooner or later he was going to ask the obvious question. Can you sit in a room with him?

The experiment he designed was almost childish. Put a person alone for fifteen minutes, tell them to think, and leave a button on the table that delivers an electric shock to the ankle.

His co-authors thought it was a waste of everyone's time. Nobody presses the button, they said. You cannot publish nothing.

He ran it anyway, and before the fifteen minutes began each participant felt the shock once, so they knew exactly what was on offer. Then the researchers handed them a hypothetical five dollars and asked how much of it they would spend to never feel that again.

Forty-two people said they would pay.

Those forty-two were the ones locked in the room with the button, and two thirds of the men pressed it.

One of them pressed it one hundred and ninety times.

The researchers removed him from the results as an outlier, which is standard practice and probably correct, though I have thought about that man more than any other detail in this study. Nobody was hurting him. He could have stopped at any moment and nothing would have happened to him. He had a chair, a quarter of an hour, and the contents of his own head, and what he chose, roughly once every five seconds until the door opened, was voltage.

Wilson published the whole thing in Science under a title that gives nothing away. Just Think.

He had expected people to manage it easily, and you can see why. We each walk around carrying an organ of extraordinary power, stuffed with memories and arguments and places we have been and futures we can build out of nothing at all. Fifteen minutes alone with that should feel like a small holiday.

It did not.

Now let me give you the argument against Wilson, because it is a real one and I would rather you heard it from me.

Later that same year, other researchers went back through his numbers and noticed something he had glossed over. When participants rated how much they had enjoyed the thinking period, the average came out slightly above the middle of the scale. Not torture. Mildly pleasant, mildly dull. Wilson, they argued, had oversold his own data.

I think they are right, and I think it makes the finding worse rather than better.

Hold the two facts next to each other. Sitting alone with your thoughts scores about a five out of nine, and most of the men in that room still reached for a shock they had offered money to avoid. The problem was never that thinking hurts. The problem is the tiny distance between mildly dull and unbearable, and how quickly a man will cross it.

Three hundred and fifty years earlier, a sick Frenchman had already worked out why.

Blaise Pascal built a working calculating machine at nineteen and helped lay the foundations of probability theory before he turned thirty. He spent his last years in serious pain, scribbling fragments toward a book he did not live to finish, and he died at thirty-nine. Those fragments became the Pensées, and inside them sits the line everybody quotes: that all of man's troubles come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

People repeat it as gentle advice about slowing down. Pascal meant it as an accusation.

His word for what we do instead was divertissement, and his claim was not that we get distracted, because distraction would make it an accident. His claim was that we hire it. Nobody drifts away from stillness. We run from it on purpose, continuously, for a lifetime, and most of what we call a life is the shape of the running.

He proved it with a hunter.

A man rides out before dawn and spends the whole day chasing a hare across cold ground, and comes home exhausted and content. Stop that same man at the gate the next morning, though, and offer him the hare as a gift. No chase, no cold, no effort, just the animal in his hands. He will refuse it, and he will be insulted that you asked.

He never wanted the hare. He wanted the hours it took to catch it.

Which brings this to your Tuesday.

Your phone is not stealing your attention. I know that is the fashionable way to say it and I know it feels true, but it makes you the victim of a rectangle, and Pascal would tell you that you are not the victim, you are the employer, and the rectangle is performing its duties with real dedication.

You generated the evidence yourself this week. The reach at a red light that lasted forty seconds. Something playing to nobody while you cooked. Nine minutes to the shop with a podcast in your ears, as though nine minutes of your own company were a hole in the day.

None of it feels like fleeing while you do it. It feels like sensible use of a spare moment. That is the whole trick. Diversion never arrives dressed as diversion. It arrives dressed as convenience.

So the real question, the one under Pascal's famous line, is not whether you can stay off your phone.

It is this. What is in the room?

Something has to be. Men do not shock themselves to escape an empty space; they shock themselves to escape a full one. Whatever waits in fifteen unfilled minutes was enough to make ordinary adults, handed a button, choose the current.

You already know part of what is in yours. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The number you have not looked at. Your own life in plain sight, which only becomes visible when there is nothing on the screen.

It does not leave while you are out chasing the hare. It just gets better at waiting.

Fifteen minutes. Nothing to reach for.

Go and meet the stranger.

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill