This book gained some traction with a few publishers, then turned into TREES.app
Original image credit: DALL·E 2023-04-05 13.39.45
(Prompt: "A surrealist painting of a brain being inundated with images, podcasts, articles, videos, and ideas. But the brain is staying healthy.")
Summary
We all like to think we make free choices, but ads and apps work on the assumption that we don’t. And holy crap do they work. There’s big money in controlling people.
That ad that tried to sell you insurance worked, at least a little. Maybe you didn’t buy Fidelity Insurance on the spot, but you do feel just a tad uneasy about what your family (present or future) will do if you get hurt. You hadn’t considered it much before, but now your mental map has changed and you’re a little more afraid of the unknown, and a little more likely to buy insurance in the future. Companies spend $500 billion globally on ads each year; A spaceship costs $2B, as a point of reference, and there’s more research on advertising than on spaceships. Ads work. Advertising’s younger and smarter brother, User Experience (UX) also works. Apps use UX to hijack our motivational systems by provoking dopamine hits to make us dangerously obsessed. If you need convincing, peek at a few drivers next time you’re on the road and see if any of them are endangering themselves and others so they can get that dopamine hit.
You probably believe me that these manipulations work on others, but you probably don’t believe me that these manipulations affect you to the point where you should be worried. You’re intelligent. You’re careful what apps you use. The apps are just fun. You know the media’s tactics. Yup. We all perceive others as automatons, but we experience ourselves as unique. Every time I give a talk on this subject I ask the audience who thinks they’re above the room’s average in their ability to outsmart manipulative media. Everyone puts up a hand. In one such talk (at an ad agency, as it happened) I explained that not everyone in the room can be above the room’s average in their ability to outsmart manipulative media. Nonetheless, the bastards all refused to put down their hands. I sat down and waited to see how it would play out. The room relented when coffee came out a giggling statistician’s nose.
So we’re surrounded by tech and media that control us, and we think we’re above them, and the hijackers don’t care about us. Hell, these hijackings make money off innocent adolescent love. Right now, an awkward teenager named Carl is on his burger-flipping shift. He’s saving up to buy a pair of Nikes that match beautiful Becky’s favorite Nikes. He’s so smitten that he’ll sacrifice his teenage hours for her. And what really closes the loop on this hijacking is that Becky will notice those shoes. Those Nikes will get Carl a date, because brands have become identities, not only in Carl’s head, but also in Becky’s.
So how on earth are you supposed to keep yourself from becoming someone else’s farm animal? How will you stop yourself from going through what you think is a normal life while you’re actually in a pen, being milked for profit, just like conscientious Carl and beautiful Becky? How will you make your whole existence about something other than putting your nice, tender side cut on some fatcat’s plate?
The answer is this: You use their weapons to benefit yourself instead of letting the fatcats use them on you. You use their media and their tech to make yourself smarter and more free.
Think of the growing mental health problems that result from us being swamped by media and tech in the same way as you think of our obesity epidemic. The obesity epidemic is an odd thing, really. The best athletes are breaking old records—getting faster and stronger—due to advances in nutrition and exercise. But despite these advances, for the first time in human history the average person will die younger, due to poorer average health than the generation before. First time in human history. Unprecedented since before we were homo sapiens. That’s a deadly ominous statistic. Why are people dying younger on average?
Human lifespans have been elongating since we started cooking food and developing larger brains; Now they’re shortening because of a glut of garbage food choices and an economy that encourages gluttony. So while the best—the rockstar athletes—get healthier, forever breaking records, most of humanity is getting worse. The average person is getting worse because the average person is nudged by their environment to make shitty choices about what to put into their bodies and what to do with their bodies.
This is cataclysmic. But the solutions to the physical health problem—for the motivated individual—are already shouted at you from the front pages of many other books: Eat green! Do yoga! Deal with your emotional baggage! Get your health together in baby steps! Hopefully you—being diligent enough to buy this book and read it—are already in the physical health elite, because physical health is not the topic of this book.
Mental health is the topic of this book, and the same cataclysmic tipping point is taking place for mental health. The elite are sending friends to Mars and building electric cars (using power from stars). Meanwhile, the average person is getting dumber. Why? Because the average person is making shitty choices about what information to put into their brains and what to do with their brains.
Bravo to you for being part of the physical elite, or on your way. You should be proud. It’s not easy. Now let’s move on to your information choices. Let’s move on to how to become part of the brain-elite, who are more free, more effective, and more contributing.
If you feel selfish trying to become elite, think of it as taking care of yourself before you can take care of others. There are few fat fitness coaches. I want to appeal to your self-interest and your desire to be smarter and more free, not because I care about you personally (sorry, friend) but because I think that if you get better and more free, the world gets better and more free.
You must use the glut of information, entertainment, and apps that would enslave you to advantage yourself instead. If you’re concerned about the state of the world rather than the state of your self, you still must do this as an individual. We all must make ourselves healthier in order to make the world better. We’re in it, after all. We make the world better by taking in good mental models.
Ready?
Preface
I wrote this book because things are more complex than we like to think, and because freedom depends on complexity. We like simple explanations (“I wrote this book because…”). But most situations are more complex than one explanation can cover, and problems often ensue as we attempt to explain complex situations with simple explanations: He’s a republican. I use my phone to relax. It’s global warming. Embracing complexity is less comfortable in the short run, but it unveils beauty and harmony not present in simplicity.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s ask a company of engineers to design a machine that removes pollution. The engineers get out their pencils and protractors, fuss away, then present you with a prototype with vents and chips and gears inside it, that will filter pollution from the air. It’s a box. Their marketing team wanted an aesthetically-pleasing shape, but the engineers turned down because aesthetically-pleasing shapes don’t stack and boxes do. So the engineers make you a box-machine that pulls pollution from the air, and the box-machine whirrs away using minimal electricity and only three filter replacements per year. Once the box-machine is running well, the engineers’ business-development team pitches you more box machines (“You can stack them!”), and an upgrade that draws some power from wind turbines. Fine. Grand. I wish they existed.
Now consider how nature does it. Some variety of photosynthesizing plant or tree exists in almost every place on earth, from mountaintop to ocean floor. They snake toward sunlight, they flower, they let the wind spread their seeds. Redwoods thrive in forest fires that burn off choking climbers and create fertile ash. Mangroves collect sediment from water around their roots to generate new land so they can root further into the water. The box machines need to be protected from the rain. Trees drink it. No trees are boxes. There are no simple explanations when it comes to trees. They’re beautiful because they’re complex, in reaction to a complex world.
The simplicity that we humans—and our team of engineers—favor is always functional according to one way of thinking about the issue—one mental model—but often shortsighted when considered across multiple mental models. There is often a slightly more complex option at the end our our reach that is better, more farsighted, and more beautiful.
Why bring beauty into this discussion? What does beauty have to do with the functionality of box-machines and trees in removing pollution? What is beauty? We have a hard time describing it. Terms like symmetry or negative space don’t come close. My theory is that we find a tree beautiful because it reveals a lot of facts about the nature of the world. Branches stretch toward sunlight while bending with wind and evading shade for tens of thousands of days. That’s a lot of physics—a lot of information about the nature of reality—captured in wood. Such complex patterns fill us with awe elsewhere in the natural world: Waves crashing over rocks show us the density, tension, power, and weight of water. Fire burns wood with mesmerizing chemical transformations. In the natural world, the interplays of reality dance in front of us. It’s no wonder a calm person can stare into an ocean or a fire at length. Both are so complex that they max out our cognitive processing capacity. It’s no wonder a busy person ignores both in favor of refreshing their email.
The jokingly-used idiom that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is literally true in this case. A tree is pleasing to a human because it contains physical truth for anyone willing to ponder it. It’s a symphony explaining reality.
We’re glad this beauty and complexity exists in nature, but compare forests, trees, fires, and oceans to your neighbor’s lawn. That lawn is square, homogeneous, and pleasing when it’s all cut to the same height. Humans can’t abide by too much complexity. It makes them feel too small.
What does any of this have to do with this freedom? A chance for awe exists in almost everything we do. More than that, to enjoy complexity is to embrace a more complete model of reality. This means not getting hijacked or lost in simple explanations, or at least doing so less often. Those who love controlling us for their own ends mostly do so with simple explanations: This deodorant will make you popular. This app will make you happy. This war is about freedom. My stance is that things get better—for us and for others—when we aspire to inhabit a reality that is more complex than that. This book is about feeling small but embracing complexity anyway.
The benefits of moving into a more complex reality are plainly visible, both in the research and in daily experience. Research shows that when we get more educated (gaining mental models), we increase our sense of control over our lives (a university education is one of very few things that moves measured locus of control inward). That increased sense of control correlates with self-esteem, mental health, socioeconomic status, and just about everything else that predicts wellbeing. And we feel that we have more control, because as we get more educated we understand more about the world and that actually gives us more control over what happens to us in the world. If we instead drink in simple models of how reality works, we never feel quaffed. Instead, we feel ever-more confused and anxious.
But being narrow-minded remains tempting because it’s easier. For most of human history—which was spent as monkeys and cavepersons—if things got complex your best bet was to choose a side and listen to a leader. Then you’d know what to do. Then you wouldn’t have to think through as many options. Then you wouldn’t be worn down trying to consider all the mental models you can, let alone all the mental models you know you’re not considering. I get it. It’s no wonder that we want simple, dichotomous, and polarizing choices—the world has gotten really damned complex. We’d love to have someone tell us what to do (Buy insurance! Buy all the insurance!). Our evolved instincts are telling us just to choose a side (democrat versus republican, socialist versus capitalist, Nike versus Adidas, religious versus atheist, Coke versus Pepsi, academic versus profiteer, pro-guns versus no-guns) and fight for it until things settle down a bit. But we keep tripping over our dearly-held illusion that the world is simple. We wish it all were made up of simple choices based on simple mental models, but it isn’t.
Perhaps you thought this writing was going to tell you the three buttons you can push to make yourself happier and more free. Sorry friend, it’s kind of the opposite (and I hope you got this far before making the purchase). Instead of false simplicity, this book offers better mental models that better explain the complexity of the world.
We can only make intelligent choices that take us where we want to go to the extent that our models of reality are complete. They never can be complete, of course, and most of us have to take some action rather than staring at the ocean all day. But the information landscape—that we use to fill in our mental models of reality—is so overflowing and ever-present that by changing our information and entertainment choices and thinking a bit more about mental models, we can make a lot of progress toward happiness, effectiveness, and freedom. In fact, good changes that we make to our mental models in the present pay compound dividends in the future, as those adaptive mental models improve our future choices and mental models, and those improved future choices do the same. There is no final resting point—no retirement from working through mental models. There never was. But as our mental models improve, we better understand the world around ourselves, and by better understanding it we can better shape it. Complexity isn’t going away, so we might as well appreciate its beauty and use it make ourselves more free, and more beautiful.
Why psychology?
Why this book?
Why you?