Raise Anchor
Two summers ago as Michael Phelps was busy cleaning up at the Beijing Olympics, much was being made of his diet, which, you may recall, consisted of the kind of fare that lands ordinary humans on The Biggest Loser: an entire pizza, a pound of pasta, two ham and cheese sandwiches… and that was just lunch. And yet despite his 12,000 calorie a day intake, Phelps publicly lamented his inability to weigh more than 194 pounds—an annoyance for someone trying to generate more power in the pool, but something to aspire to for many folks watching at home.
The thing that struck me about The Michael Phelps Diet was not his superfluous mayonnaise consumption just to make weight, it was the fact that with nearly every mention of fried eggs and chocolate chip pancakes came a disclaimer from a healthcare practitioner essentially saying to the general public, “Please don’t try this.” At the time, I didn’t see why this was even necessary. I mean, surely nobody thinks it’s a good idea to eat 12,000 calories in a day, right?
I was missing the point.
Clearly, everybody knows that eating a week’s worth of food for lunch is a poor decision unless you’re an elite athlete. That’s not what this was about. The warnings were necessary because when people read that Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day while he’s training, what they really read is “chiseled aquatic multi-millionaire eats without consequence, bangs hot model,” perhaps overlooking the part where he spends six hours a day in the pool. This is an example of anchoring, a natural tendency to assign importance or attention to something based on inherent desires while ignoring other information that might otherwise inform our decision making. It’s the same reason we’re likely to overeat when we’re hanging out with skinny friends who can “eat whatever they want”: it’s not so much a matter of assuming that the same rules that apply to others also apply to us; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what those rules are to begin with, driven largely by the innate human compulsion to believe in magic bullets. When the outcome is delicious comfort food, it’s perfectly natural for us to infer advice from the example of others.
But unlike Michael Phelps’s meal plan, most things in life don’t come with a disclaimer, and that can be a problem for the ever-increasing number of people who can’t easily silence the part of their brain that wants to kill them with food. Take, for instance, the Travel Channel show Man v. Food. Though admittedly a little husky, host Adam Richman never gains a considerable amount of weight from one show to the next, taking on one insane food challenge after another. Instead, the only thing he appears to gain from finishing a human infant-sized burrito in the time allotted is a rare guitar, his picture on a wall, and a kiss from an attractive lady. And that’s all the information we have when we watch Man v. Food; the producers leave it up to us to be an adult about things and treat the show as entertainment, not a grocery list. You wouldn’t know, then, that Richman fasts for a day leading up to his biggest food challenges and works out with a trainer twice daily while he’s on the road, or that he eats just enough to get enough footage for the shot and eats like a saint when cameras aren’t rolling, or that he regularly has his cholesterol, liver enzymes, and blood lipids checked. You’d have to Google that.
I know. Not bloody likely, right?
Merlin Mann made a 40-minute video the other day about the fallacy of shallow internet advice (the explicit kind), and how it necessarily keeps people from being anything more than Advanced Beginners. It is a natural human tendency, he argues, to seek out advice on things we have a passing interest in when we’re not sure who we want to be when we wake up in the morning. The problem, again, is not the availability of said information, it’s that we are seldom mindful enough to stop and question a) if the person giving it is even remotely qualified, and b) whether or not they have a disincentive to really help us get to the point where we no longer require their advice.
The real danger in giving our attention to advice on which we have no intention of acting lies not in the lack of any sort of real progression or the double motives of shady internet publishers, it’s the mental rabbit hole that invariably follows. It leads to us creating preconditions for beginning things that we weren’t motivated enough to just do, and wondering later where time went when we realize what it was we really wanted to be doing all along. “I can’t start running until I have the right shoes,” you find yourself saying. “What am I looking for in a midsole? Maybe I should find an article about lacing methods. Do I need that Runner’s World book about eating?” Dude, just run. It’s like the one thing your body already knows how to (sort of) do. Pretty soon you find yourself not so much anchoring, but doing whatever the masturbatory opposite of anchoring is that makes you focus on everything except the one thing you ostensibly wanted to do.
I had enough to write about for the first few months after I started The Elements of Lifestyle, but sometime in mid-August posting dropped off considerably. (Read: Entirely.) It wasn’t because I ran out of things to say, either—I had simply become lost in a rabbit hole. I had read a piece Kurt Vonnegut had written with advice to students about writing, and got stuck on one particular point.
7. Pity the readers
They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—twelve long years.
So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.
This was, on the surface, a point about the importance of the economical use of language, but I read it as, “Nobody cares and nobody wants to read your bullshit.” And so I found myself second-guessing everything I wanted to write until I was too crippled to write anything at all. I’m hesitant to call it writer’s block; I had plenty to say, after all, I just chose to otherwise spend that time coming up with perfectly good reasons not to say it.
Figuratively speaking, I wanted to drill a hole in my brain like the guy at the end of Darren Aronofsky’s movie Pi until I received a nice message from someone I went to high school with and with whom I’d since fallen out of contact. Not only had he read everything I’d written up to that point, but he seemed to genuinely enjoy having read it. I realized then that I had read Vonnegut’s Point Seven all wrong. Clearly, the only person I pitied was myself.
It’s funny how we make terrible decisions when we stop thinking for ourselves, if only for a second, or start to look outward for meaning where there’s no meaning to be found. Indeed, nothing is more poisonous to idle minds than the example of others. Having at least some idea of what it is that you value, then, becomes essential to making it through the day.
Being an adult is hard work.
