The Terrible Master

In retrospect, it’s funny that I linked to the David Foster Wallace “This is Water” speech the other day because I was absolutely certain, at the time, about which parts of it were immediately applicable to my own life and which parts weren’t. I’d independently and very recently come to terms with the discipline involved in not letting the banal, petty frustrations of day-to-day existence become a fixation, but I completely glossed over the part that explains 95% of my (admittedly first world) problems: I have a tendency to completely over-intellectualize (and, in doing so, sabotage) everything I care deeply about. Conversely, I tend to succeed with flying colors when doing things I care very little about but do anyway out of obligation.

Let me be clear: this is a shitty, frustrating mindset, one that is both unconscious and automatic, and one that cannot continue if I’d like to feel neither shitty nor frustrated. It prevents me from making art that I care about, contributing to discourse (both public and private), and feeling completely fulfilled when I go to sleep at night. It has ruined relationships, stopped other relationships from blossoming, and invited endless amounts of undue (first world) stress into what has otherwise been a privileged (relatively speaking) and drama-free existence.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls this mindset “The Resistance.” He wasn’t the first to articulate this idea, but he was arguably the best, and Internet thought leaders like Merlin Mann and Seth Godin have since run with the baton, discussing at length the ways The Resistance serves to keep us alive but prevents us from ever feeling alive.

The Resistance is frequently referred to as the Lizard Brain, which itself is a reference to an actual physical part of the brain near the brain stem that we share in common with all other animals, one that is chiefly concerned with survival. Godin puts it best when describing the Lizard Brain’s tertiary concerns: “I’m hungry. I’m horny. Get me out of here.” In other words, it doesn’t give two shits about the speech you have to give or that article you have to write; If anything, it turns these otherwise mundane tasks into frightening exercises of life and death importance. Anything The Lizard Brain sees as a threat to your ability to have sex and make copies of yourself sets off Drudge Report sirens. Unfortunately enough for you, that’s most things that don’t involve lying under a table in fetal position.

That, and not attention to detail, is the real reason I spent a half hour on the first paragraph on this post and nearly gave up instead of getting on with it and coming back later; It’s why I shut down a marginally successful music website back in 2006 despite the fact that it had only brought me good things; It’s why the archives of this site (from 2009) were taken offline. The Lizard Brain wants me to believe that the stakes of making things for 37 other people to read are too high, when in reality, there are no stakes.

There’s a Ludwig Mies van der Roh quote that made the Internet rounds a while back that goes, “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” To that end, the Lizard Brain responds, “Bullshit, van der Roh. You’d better be both original and good if you ever want to see your family again. Everyone’s going to laugh at you, and you are going to die.” It’s a voice as real and as vivid as the heart beating in my chest.

The Lizard Brain is indeed a Terrible Master, but there’s good news: It can be defeated, just like the one described in Wallace’s speech. To do so, you must first start at the very beginning and recognize that it exists.