TomsTimer5.exe
(v5, Windows, installer)

Here’s what it already did:

• Click Work or Break to start tracking time
• App’s name in the taskbar shows how long you’ve been at it

These days I mainly use it to track how long I worked each day, partly to keep an eye on productivity but mostly cos logging that work in my spreadsheet triggers a little dopamine hit of accomplishment I don’t get otherwise.

But I hit two issues I wanted to fix: firstly, I’d sometimes need to rush off while the work timer is going. I don’t have time to note down how long I’ve worked, so I don’t click the break button cos that’ll wipe the data. But if I’m away a while, now the data is wrong.

Secondly, sometimes I just forget to officially stop a work session, and the timer is ticking away while I’m not at my desk. Obviously I realise this has happened, but how long was I away?

Just generally, the timer wasn’t great if you ever failed to use it perfectly, and I saw a few ways it could be more helpful with that. So I added:

• Keeps a running total of all work sessions: means you can end a session without losing any data, and you can just log total time at the end of the day.
• Detects when you’re idle: if the mouse and keyboard haven’t done anything in more than 5 minutes, when they next move, the log notes how long you were idle. It doesn’t subtract this time or do anything with it, since it could be wrong, but it’s just useful info for you to have if you know you were away.
• Keeps a timestamped log of each time you start a session: useful for back-solving if you lose track of something, and generally good for clarity / not losing info.
• Optional stretch reminder pings every hour: I ought to be doing this, I don’t. There are other apps for this, but since I already have one that now has a sense of whether I’m at my computer, fits nicely here. It won’t ping if you’ve been idle for 30+ minutes, assumes you’re out of the room.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it’s made a certain sense of my timer, my spreadsheet, and various other coping mechanisms I’ve developed. It puts in a bracket with folks who have much more serious struggles than I do, and many symptoms I have no trace of. I tend to think diagnosis buckets like this aren’t worth bickering about, they’re just a means to finding treatment and strategies that work. I was having some memory and attention lapses, and I got some meds that help with that.

The timer helps too, as does the spreadsheet, and researching ADHD has helped me understand how to lean into that with other tools. It’s a wide family of symptoms, but a lot of it stems from the brain failing to provide enough of a reward for just doing the shit you need to do. A year ago I would have told you these tools were just about tracking my time and keeping an eye on productivity. Now I realise they’re also about helping to turn ‘I did what I was supposed to’ into ‘I feel good’.

I’ve since made myself a Trello-based to-do list that is obsessively focused on the aesthetics of hiding any daunting backlogs, making what’s on my plate look manageable, and keeping my accomplished tasks everpresent and cumulative. The aforementioned spreadsheet now turns daily chores into satifying box-checks, keeps running tallies of how I’m doing on many different metrics, and has a two-tiered system of weekly achievements to aim for. Nothing more I can share yet, but I’ll keep tinkering and report back if anything postable serves me as well as this timer has.

Here’s the original Timer post.

And I just noticed my tweets about each version aaalmost work as a version history, except the very first one isn’t in the thread. So for posterity: version 1, then versions 2 onwards.

Programming is about 40% of my job. Another 40% is design, and the other 20% is every other job on a game that isn’t art or music. The design part is hard to track though: I find most productive design thinking comes from a big engine in the back while you’re doing other things, as it randomly matches disparate ideas and sprinkles them with what you’re currently experiencing and asks: “Is that anything?”

Programming, though, I can measure: I start a timer and then focus on work for anywhere from 8 minutes to 80. If I get the urge to check Twitter, I can but I have to stop the timer to do it, and only log the work time. I only get to log the time if it really was focused work – all breaks and interruptions and meals and everything else is excluded. Back when I notionally worked an 8 hour-a-day job, I had an hour for lunch, lots of Twitter breaks and interruptions. I’d be surprised if I averaged as many as 6 productive hours a day.

Anyway, here’s my first full week’s programming time tracked:

The faint numbers below the days are individual work sessions, that’s where I log them. I know there are apps to automate this but my actual focus doesn’t always correlate to which app I’m switched to, I prefer to do it manually so the data is meaningful. It’s also a satisfying moment to type the number in and see the bar go up.

This comes to about 30 hours, which struck me as alarmingly low at first. It felt like a very full week! But I was forgetting a few factors:

• I do other work on Mondays, which I didn’t track at all – more on that below.
• Programming is only 40% of my job. Design’s 40% mostly overlaps with other stuff, so I’d expect programming to be more than 40% of my work time, but less than 80%.
• This is productive time only, which is very different to ‘office time’ – per above, I estimate worked less than 30 productive hours at a 40 office-hour job.

So, actually, pretty good! The graph we’ll never see is how much more I started working because I knew it was being tracked – that’s one of the reasons I started. Since I’m hovering around 4-5 hours on a normal work day, I’ll aim to get that to a solid 5.

I did not log the time I spent tweaking the layout and colours of this graph.

Some features of my week:

Business Mondays

I set aside Mondays for dealing with all the company, tax, phonecalls, organisational bullshit I hate, and e-mails which I don’t hate but did not respond to at the time. When this piles up during the week, unless it’s urgent, this system lets me shelve it guilt-free, knowing exactly when I’ll get to it. I also do a lot better with tasks I dislike when I know they’re coming – I kinda dread Mondays (I picked Monday so I’d dread the same day as folks with office jobs), but that makes dealing with them easier. I wake up knowing the day will be all bullshit, no hope of doing any interesting work. And if I can plow through the bullshit quickly, I get the rest of the day off. I also relax any diet/booze restrictions on Business Mondays, a policy offices should adopt also.

I’ve been doing Business Mondays for about 5 years now and it’s one of the most successful habits I’ve made for myself since going independent – it stops the bullshit getting you down or derailing the productive stuff. As you can see I actually did end up doing a couple of hours of real work last Monday – this was on a side-project, as a reward for getting all my boring stuff done.

Side-Project Saturdays

This is new, not sure if I’ll stick to it, but I was remembering Google’s 20% time and wondering if that could work for my back-burner projects. My main project is Tactical Breach Wizards, and it’s progressing in ways I’m optimistic about, but it hasn’t been fast. I sometimes get anxious about it because our artist John Roberts made it look so good so fast, and people reacted so well to it, that it basically has to be made. That’s two massive lucky things I’m grateful for, but I’m used to having literally a year to fuck around with ugly prototypes of random shit I make up before having to decide which one is my real project. Feeling ‘locked-in’ so early makes me anxious, and having side-projects relieves some of that.

So, I thought, maybe Saturdays are for side-projects? No hour quota, work as much or as little as I fancy. And you will see from the hour count that I fancied quite a lot. The two games I play most these days are Slay the Spire and Race for the Galaxy, and my fascination with digital, single-player card games has got to the point that I wanted to try making one. I’m also interested in trying something mechanics-heavy but completely non-violent, which means it’ll probably end up being about destroying suns. I’m making it in Unity to make sure I’m learning new things about the tools that’ll help the main project.

Evening Chillwork

Towards the end of Heat Signature, when I really needed to put in the hours, I’d sometimes give up on a bug at 6pm, have dinner, then watch TV with my laptop open and just tinker absently with it as I’m watching. It was amazing how often this solved it. When focus fails, taking the pressure off and putting your brain in the open mode is really effective. I’d also sometimes do it if the next day’s work was a big, daunting new task – just scope it out while relaxing, no pressure to get anywhere with it, and I often made surprising progress.

So now I do this occasionally, if I’m stuck on something or just didn’t find the hours in the daytime. I log this as half-time for the graph – an hour of chillwork is 30 minutes of productive time. No idea how accurate that is.

Actually Take Sunday Off

Well, the graph don’t lie, I didn’t do this. But that was evening chillwork, while watching movies. It was work I was excited to do, and sitting there forcing myself to fritter the time away instead wasn’t appealing. I won’t do this kind of thing when the side-project hits a tough part or just needs grunt work, that’s when it gets draining.

When I was making Gunpoint, towards the end, I was doing 5 days at PC Gamer and 2 days on Gunpoint. The idea here is just: don’t do that.

Daily Routine

I work from home in the morning, work out, have lunch, then go to a cafe for the afternoon’s work. I settled on this order of things because:

• Lazy mornings are the primary perk of working for yourself.
• I used to work out in the morning but if I was having a low-energy day, I’d procrastinate and it’d derail everything.
• Being around people for part of my day levels me out.

Working entirely from home is more efficient, but if I do it for too long my mood starts to suffer. I lose perspective, small problems seem maddening or utterly insurmountable. In a cafe, when a problem is driving me nuts, I feel the initial frustration but then catch myself and get perspective.

Obviously I’m amazingly lucky to have this kind of freedom over my working life. That much freedom can be dangerous: if you don’t consciously get on top of it, create systems and measure the results, you can end up throwing away a huge gift and being miserable despite it.

It’s been fantastic. GDC has been the highlight of my year in each of the three years I’ve been. This was my first Rezzed, but it was much like the brilliant EGX with better food, more people I knew, and no queues for the bathroom.

For most of the year I like my peaceful, productive life at home, but for these few weeks I love switching into the opposite mode, and getting all the benefits of that in rapid succession. That’s why I’ve been chaining these events together: preparing and organising is the only part I don’t like, so any time I can do two for the price of one is great.

That introvert/extrovert flip is also a big jolt to the system, combined with a massive influx of fresh perspectives from a diverse crowd of smart people, combined with a deluge of raw feedback and reactions to the current state of my game, combined with a big break from my usual working schedule, combined with lots of new sights and sounds and games and experiences and inspiration.

I might do a separate post about what I learned about Heat Signature from the reaction it got, but in this one I’ll just boil down two things this trip clarified about life and people and events like these.

This was in my room at the hostel.

Acceptance is like armour

The way confidence and success feed off each other is deeply unfair. “Have confidence!” “Believe in yourself!” and “Fake it till you make it!” are all bits of advice that can work for some people in some situations. But a lot of the time, you might as well be saying “Have gills!” “Believe you have gills!” “Fake having gills until you have gills!”

People say those things because confidence, unlike gills, can quickly lead to the kind of success or approval that gives you more. That’s the part I became familiar with on this trip: the more people heap disproportionate praise on Gunpoint, the easier it gets to talk to people – even the ones who aren’t praising it and have no idea what it is. That acceptance gives you one point of armour, and you can take that armour into any situation you like.

Once you get one point of acceptance-armour, it’s not that scary to talk to someone who might hit you with rejection. You know it doesn’t mean you’re worthless, because you have this piece of acceptance that says you’re not. And of course, most of the people you were scared of talking to actually have no intention of doing that, so they usually give you another point of acceptance-armour and then you can talk to basically anyone. But when you have zero, that fear is so much harder to shake.

I don’t have One Weird Trick for breaking out of that state, because I stumbled out of it largely by luck, and my brain is so self-defeating that it sometimes tries to crawl back in there if I go too long without even more of that luck. But I can tell you what I did try to maximise my chances of getting off the confidence floor.

Your brain is great at remembering criticism and great and forgetting praise, so I tried to reverse that bias. I wrote down anything nice anyone said about my work in a sort of Praise File, to refer back to when I was losing faith. I didn’t keep a file of criticisms, and as hard as it tries, the brain can’t remember those forever.

So was this.

Praise feels different in real life

Getting ten positive internet comments about your thing is radically different to having ten different people come up to you and say they loved it. The first feels good, but the second is extraordinary – it’s the moment the most childish part of your brain is dreaming of while you’re fretting over all the little dilemmas and struggles you had making it.

“Maybe if I just get through this and do it right, there’ll be… like… some kind of party? And everyone will tell me how great I am? And there’s cake?” That’s dumb, that brain-part is an idiot. But if you’re lucky enough that your thing catches on, and you go to these events, that can actually happen.

I was going to say “except for the cake”, but then I remembered that on the last day of Rezzed someone actually did produce a giant box of cupcakes and gave me one. This is ridiculous.

Bear this in mind if you ever get a nice comment on the internet. Try to imagine someone coming up to you and saying it in real life, how nice that is, and how many more people must be feeling the same thing without explicitly saying it.

That’s it, thanks so much to everyone who made this a fantastic trip. Here are some more pics from it:

From the plane, on approach to SFO.

Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco.

Bananas Foster is/are a hell of a thing.

Old Fashioneds (Olds Fashioned?) at the Hog & Rocks, a discovery of my friends at Asymmetric.

Introversion improvise a way to adjust the projector in our room at Rezzed.

Gunpoint/Heat Signature artist John Roberts supervises our booth while I nip out for lunch.

Your faults are not ‘your fault’ if you’re born with them, if they’re forced on you, if you didn’t know about them, or a whole variety of other conditions. Language forms organically and messily, and it only makes sense to talk about it in generalisations. But the most prevalent trend I can see in the types of faults that are not ‘your fault’ is this: they’re the ones you can’t reasonably change.

Back to the coffee: if I knew you had shaky hands, I might go one step further and say “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have given you one so full!” I could have prevented this problem, whereas you can’t really do anything about your shaky hands, at least not right now. If we really care about this coffee getting spilled, I’m the one who should change: I should remind myself to be more mindful of other people’s physical quirks. Or I should put less coffee in cups. Either way, the reason I give myself the blame is that there’s something I can do about it.

So far, the way we naturally behave is pretty logical. It makes sense that we have this urge to assign blame, because our feelings about where it should lie match up with who should take action to prevent the same problem from happening again. Not only is it not nice to yell at someone for being born with shaky hands, it also doesn’t get you anywhere: the problem won’t get solved.

So this is an effective way for social creatures to work: when a problem occurs, figure out who can do something to prevent it in future. Blame is an inbuilt tool to direct our energies towards the most effective course of correcting action.

The Self-Conscious Killer

But the question of who ‘can’ do something about a problem gets tricky, particularly as we start to understand more about the brain. This article starts with the story of a man who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 more, but left a suicide note requesting that his brain be autopsied after his death, because he felt something in him had changed and that was affecting his behaviour. The autopsy showed a tumour compressing his amygdala, which regulates fear and aggression. He’d even seen doctor for help, and while the note is vague, he evidently didn’t get it.

His fault? Could he have done something about it? Now that we know there was a physical cause for his urges, should we say he wasn’t to blame?

Irresistible Urges

You could claim that urges and emotions are just one input into the decision making process, and one always has the choice of whether to give in to them. I experience the hunger urge as the result of a biological cause, but I can choose to resist it. But what if I was at the point of starvation? I don’t know.

My one experience of an urge that feels completely beyond decision-making is vomiting. In mild illnesses sometimes you can repress it for a moment, but when you’re really ill, sometimes vomiting just happens. It’s an action, I’m still conscious, my body still moves as if under conscious control (I don’t collapse, for example), but I wouldn’t call it a choice, I wouldn’t say I could do anything about it, and I don’t really think it’s my fault.

Whether or not something feels like a choice gets us caught up in questions of free will, but my criteria for saying that vomiting was not a choice is that my intention not to do it had no effect on whether I did. I got to study this in great detail when I had 24-hour food poisoning once, and it happened exactly the same way whether I was in the most convenient and hygienic place to vomit, or in the middle of a full aeroplane. If someone had told me, “Throw up one more time and I’ll shoot your family,” I’d still have thrown up one more time. Nothing could affect the ‘choice’ to vomit, because it happened even when my intention not to do it was absolute. That’s my definition of not-a-choice.

A Blameless Society

In the case of the tumor sufferer, I think we have to say we don’t know what it was like to be him, or whether the urges were resistible or not. His note specifically refers to ‘deciding’ to commit these crimes ahead of time, but there’s good reason to believe a medical problem influenced those decisions.

As we start to understand more of the brain, maybe every instance of criminal behaviour will be traceable to physical trait of the brain that causes it. Is everything that we can explain that way ‘not your fault’? Could we get to a point where nothing is anyone’s fault? Would that even be a bad thing?

The reason we get in a tangle here is that we’re still focusing on where to put the blame. But as we’ve hopefully established, blame is just an emotional tool for guiding us towards who can take action to prevent future problems. In the tumor case, we don’t actually need to answer the question “Was he to blame?” because we already know what action should have been taken, and what action can be taken in future. (Also he’s dead.)

Pointless Punishment

So what about someone with a history of violence? Someone who’s repeatedly offended, even when they knew there’d be harsh punishment? Once we understand the brain well enough to point to a medical cause of this, are they still to blame? I don’t know. But the question of what to do about it is easier: it’s purely about preventing them from hurting more people.

‘Punishment’ as retribution no longer makes any sense: our urge for vengeance is an emotion that comes from a blame system too simple to apply coherently to our more nuanced understanding of human behaviour. Both in the justice system at large, and in our personal lives.

When you’re angry with someone for something they did, it’s worth remembering that the anger is just a tool to direct your attention to what needs to change. And it’s a crude one. It’s still worth rationally checking: what’s the best way to prevent this from being a problem again? It might be lashing out, but it usually isn’t.

The only thing that matters is prevention. And our greater understanding of the mind might influence how we do that.

Unsettling Cures

That will be our next ethical tangle. Once we know the medical causes of more types of criminal behaviour, we might also know the medical ‘cures’. Maybe that violent re-offender just has too much of one hormone, and we can give him an operation to produce less of it. Once we see behaviour as having a medical cause, when do our ‘cures’ become brainwashing?

It seems scary to start modifying people’s personalities to fit our norms, yet it would seem natural to cut out that shooter’s tumor if we’d found it before he died. In that case, he actually wanted to be cured. But what if his tumor-induced urges included the urge to stay the way he was? Clearly we can’t let him kill again, but can we still cut out the tumor? Can we modify someone’s desires when they don’t want us to?

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that we already do this in some cases. But it’s going to get stranger, and stickier, and harder to agree on as more and more undesirable behaviour maps to physical things we can intentionally change.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a way to contribute to a discussion without derailing it. Whether there’s some way of knowing, in advance, that what you’re about to say will make you look like an asshole, start a fight, or be outright wrong.

I think there is.

The problem

There’s a common thread in a lot of the unhelpful and offensive things we say. I only started to spot it after I realised a few things:

1. We don’t know anything.

Most of the things we think and talk about are things we have no certain knowledge about. It’s scary and stupid how fiercely I’ll defend claims I have never verified for myself – I just heard them from sources I trust.

I trust my dad. I trust the consensus of the scientific community. I trust my gut, which is filled with 31 years of passively absorbed half-truths from television, the internet, and hearsay.

But all those things have been wrong, and worse, I’m often unaware that I’m even trusting them. I just think I know things. But beyond my own thoughts and immediate, specific experiences, I don’t.

2. People are different.

I don’t know how different yet, but every time I think I know how different, I meet someone even more different.

So almost anything I say about a group of people will be wrong. And even if it’s only about one person, my picture of them is 1% observed behaviour and 99% conjecture from my own experience. Anything based on the latter is liable to be offensively inaccurate.

3. We like to simplify.

I did it right there. We don’t all like to simplify, and we don’t like to simplify all the time. But I cut those qualifiers out because shorter and snappier sounds better in my head. Maybe it does in yours too. I don’t know, because I don’t know anything, people are different, and I shouldn’t simplify.

The instinct to simplify before you speak can convert a specific and true experience into something harmful, wrong, or both.

The process

Too often, we do something like this:

I’ve seen X be false, and people I trust say it’s false.
Becomes:
I don’t believe X, no-one in their right mind does.
Becomes:
If you think X, you’re a moron.

This process of assholification generally isn’t conscious, but too many of us have come out with that third line. We take specific experiences we can be reasonably sure of (1), conclude more than we could possibly know from them (2), extend that to presume things about other people (2), then simplify it into a neatly prickish generalisation (3).

Simple statements deal collateral damage. You insult people you didn’t mean to. You sound more hostile than you intended. And you seem to be claiming things you don’t actually believe. That’s often how an argument turns into a fight, and any chance of progress dies.

The solution

“Don’t do that” seems like a good solution. But it’s hard to just change the way your brain decides how to say something.

Luckily, most of the fights we waste our time and energy on happen in text, which we can check before we send. Do I know this first hand? Am I claiming something about someone else? Am I generalising for the sake of simplicity?

The way I’ve started to think of it is this:

Share your experiences, not your opinions

You’ll always form opinions, but they need to be flexible. They need to reflect the data, and the data available to us is always changing.

Experiences are the data. What you’ve seen, what you’ve felt. By sharing the data itself, rather than your conclusions from it, you give other people more data on which to base their opinions.

It seems meek. But experiences can be incredibly powerful in changing people’s minds. I’ve never had an “Oh shit, I was wrong” revelation from someone calling me an idiot – every one I can remember came from hearing a different perspective.

• I didn’t realise this thing affected you that much.
• I didn’t realise there were people in that situation.
• I’d never imagined how it would feel for someone who’d been through that.

And stating your opinion also makes you less receptive to that data. When I used to do it, I felt a neurotic urge to defend my position when new information seemed to threaten it. Saying it locked it in place. But an opinion you’ve never stated can be changed without damaging your pride.

In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:

Johannes: Great article!

For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.

The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy.

It’s an hour long, which I know isn’t cool on the internet, but I promise you won’t regret watching it. If you don’t have time, I’ll summarise the most mind-blowing things in it below.
 

Concentrating makes it hard to have ideas

Our brains store a crazy amount of information. If you’ve had that nostalgic flood of memories on seeing a toy you had at 5 years old, you have some idea of just how much is kept in there. But logical thought, the kind we use when we’re focusing on a problem and trying to solve it intelligently, is all handled by the prefrontal cortex.

That’s a tiny area of the brain with an even tinier capacity for information – it can only hold a small amount at once. So we load the info about a problem into it, then crunch that information in a logical way.

When we do that, the rest of the brain isn’t doing much. All our activity is focused on logically processing that chunk of data we decided was relevant. Which is good if that really is everything relevant to the problem and the solution. For a problem like 8+12, it probably is.

But for more real-world problems, we can’t cram the vast amount of data that might be tangentially relevant into that tiny prefrontal cortex. We have to pick a small set of information and process just that. And while we do, all that other information goes unexamined, because the rest of the brain is being neglected.

This dog is trying to distract you from the fact that I have no relevant images for this post. Is it working?

When we stop concentrating on the problem, the rest of our brain wakes up, all that information is available to us, and we stop thinking in such a focused, rigorous way. So we’re not being totally logical, but we do suddenly have the capacity to notice weak connections between pieces of information stored in that vast databank in the rest of our brain – a capacity we didn’t have thirty seconds ago.

With what we’ve already figured out logically, often new bits of information light up in the rest of our brain as being relevant. And that, briefly, is why you have your best ideas in the bathroom.

It’s when you stop concentrating that non-obvious ideas can strike, and in complex problems these are often the really game-changing ones.

Even small worries and threats destroy your ability to think clearly or well

The big, powerful, illogical subconscious can’t do much when your prefrontal cortex is busy focusing on something. But both are completely crippled any time there is even the slightest possibility of harm coming to us. We have evolved to be ridiculously skittish, and at the smallest danger our limbic system completely takes over. Instinct, basically.

In modern life, it’s often useless or inappropriate. And while it’s engaged, we lose the ability to think rationally, we lose the ability to have inspired ideas, and we even lose basic functions like short term memory. We instantly and massively suck, and it lasts for ages.

Social threats have the same effect as physical threats

The traditional model of psychology says that survival concerns are ‘primary’ – deeper, stronger and more instinctive – and others, including social concerns, are secondary. Nice if we can get them.

The behaviour of the brain doesn’t correlate to that. Our reaction to social threats, like insults, is not only as strong as our reaction to physical threats, it’s the same.

If you can’t focus on your work because your leg hurts, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again. If you can’t focus on your work because someone called you incompetent yesterday, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again.

Our five main social concerns spell out SCARF

So we’re incredibly affected by social threats, but what’s a social threat? What do we need, socially, that we’re scared of losing?

Status: What other people think of us, and how they treat us. If people will think less of us for something, we are terrified of it.

Certainty: How sure are we that our current status will continue? If we hear some redundancies are coming, we haven’t lost any status yet, but suddenly Certainty takes a huge hit, and we feel a massive, instinctive threat.

Autonomy: Is my fate in my own hands? If you propose putting me in a position where I’m heavily dependent on someone else, I feel threatened.

Relatedness: Do I care about this person or thing? Friends and blood relatives have high ‘relatedness’, and we feel empathy for them and listen to what they say. Everyone else is perceived as an enemy by default: we don’t instinctively feel their pain, and we don’t even picture what they’re saying unless we consciously try to. The only exceptions are attractive people, babies, and everyone – when we’re drunk.

Fairness: Pretty self-explanatory. If you give a raise to the new guy, I get a Fairness threat even though my status hasn’t gone up or down.

Understanding threats makes them cripple your brain less

This panic effect, the way a threat consumes your brain and cripples your ability to think clearly, is partially avoidable.

I’ve often had a feeling of dread, or panic, or anger, without quite being able to articulate what my problem is. So that’s what my brain does, for the next hour. I don’t listen to anyone or get anything done, I just re-run the narrative of what’s going on in my head until I can sort of cobble together a whiny complaint about it that I could conceivable say out loud if I decide to speak up.

In an hour.

I write for a living, and I studied putting words to abstract things for three years at uni. What the hell is wrong with me?

What was wrong with me was I didn’t have names for the kinds of threats I feel when something potentially unpleasant happens socially. I didn’t understand why they occurred or what they wanted from me. That meant not only did they affect me more, the way they affected me also hindered my ability to give them names or start understanding them.

When you do have a quick, rough guide to the basic types, your brain is dramatically better at compartmentalising them and retaining the rest of its normal functions. All you need to think is “Eek – OK, that’s my certainty being threatened,” and you won’t revert to an angry, idiot animal state controlled by your limbic system. You have a sec to think “OK, I know why that is, let’s deal with it.” And that, too, dramatically reduces the brain-shrinking panic of the thing.

That’s why this talk went beyond interesting and all the way to life-improving, for me. Thanks, Johannes!

The reason we want things isn’t that they’ll make us happy.

Often, getting what you want does give you a little rush of happiness. We can be fooled into thinking this is the sensation of having that thing. In fact, of course, it’s the sensation of getting it. We are feeling the change in our status, not its new level. Which is why it fades.

We expect this relationship:

But we get something more like this:

As a long-term strategy for pursuing happiness, you can see chasing success clearly isn’t going to work. You’d have to be consistently improving your lot to stay happy, and if you ever hit your potential, you’d flatline. This type of happiness – you could call it Gain Happiness – is fleeting.

One consolation is that the reverse is true: if a major loss doesn’t have recurring consequences, you only feel it temporarily. Before long, you’re back to your previous level of happiness even if you’re worse off. A study in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (PDF) explored the subjective well-being of 118 people over two years, and found that neither positive nor negative events had a lasting effect on their reported happiness beyond three to six months.

So Gain Happiness is hard to gain, but Loss Misery is easy to lose. We’re surprisingly stable. Within that, how do we get happier? Here’s what I have so far:

1. Be ruthless about getting away from sources of misery.

I can’t help you with this, but it’s worth acknowledging its importance. I’ve only talked about what happens in the positive bit of the happiness chart – if you’re actively unhappy and there’s an external cause, obviously getting permanently away from it is your only priority.

For me, the only times I’ve been truly unhappy have been when I was living with people I didn’t like. Once I managed to get away, every type of happiness got a hell of a lot easier.

Disclaimer: try not to kill anyone.
 

2. Do something because you enjoy the process, not the result.

Ideally for a living. There are two particularly great things about my job: writing, and feedback. If feedback was the only one I enjoyed, I’d be miserable.

It’s the result, and if you’re anything like me, getting a great result makes a good one disappointing. It’s Gain Happiness with ever-increasing expectations, which leads to a constant war of neuroses. You can’t let your happiness be dependent on something like that.

Luckily, I love writing. Before we launched the site in June last year, I didn’t get that much feedback on what I wrote – people don’t write to a magazine as readily as they comment on a blog. But I already loved my job, because I love the process.
 

3. Do what you want to be in the mood to do.

Often you’re not angry or sad because of the thing you’re angry or sad about. You’re just in a bad mood. I’ve found if I pay attention to what mood I’m in, it’s amazingly easy to snap out of it.

In my case, I can just watch something funny – I’ve never been angry while Flight of the Conchords is on. And like everyone, I have mood amnesia: the moment I’m out of a bad mood, it’s forgotten.

But it’s even more powerful than this. You can also get stuff done that you don’t feel like doing, just by starting to do it. Your brain only resists up until the point you actually start the job, at which point it starts to focus on doing it. You do what you want to be in the mood to do, and soon you’re in the mood to do it.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the single most useful piece of information I’ve discovered about the way my brain works in 29 years of having one.

I spend my downtime in life analysing things, trying to identify comprehensible systems and figure out ways to beat them. Then I forget again. So this is a notebook of that stuff.

It’s what got me interested in philosophy, but since uni, my interest has shifted to the more practical consequences of it. It’s not hard to figure out the meaning of life, it’s harder to figure out how to pursue it. Hence, Advice.

The meaning of life is there isn’t one, which is to say there isn’t one other than the obvious one, which is to say be happy.

It gets clearer if you think about what you’d want for your kids: you might want them to have kids themselves, but that really only gets you back to the drawing board a few decades closer to the destruction of the planet. What you probably want, overall, is for them to be happy. Apart from anything, it’d make you happy.

This hedgehog agrees with me.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that some people have written a bit about how to pursue happiness, but a lot of it trips over a pretty basic hurdle at the starting line. We’ve noticed we are happy when we get things we wanted – love, money, sex, kids, shoes – and concluded this stuff is related. Or we’ve noticed we are unhappy when we can’t get things we want, and concluded we should stop wanting things.

At the heart of it there’s an assumption that we want what’ll make us happy, with a certain margin of error for when things aren’t what we expected. We think we’re almost rational that way, wanting things because of the happiness they’ll bring, or our estimation thereof. We are way, way off.

This won’t sound terribly profound, but we just want shit. It just happens. It’s not a decision, it’s a set of drives built into us by evolution to ensure we survive and reproduce whether it’ll make us happy or not. The desire to have kids has nothing to do with any felicific calculus about the happiness and sadness they’d bring, in the same way that hunger isn’t a judgment about how enjoyable food would be. Other desires that are less primal stem from these, usually via power, safety and status.

The upshot is: your brain, gut, heart, genitalia, and whatever other organs you want to assign desires to, are not trying to make you happy. When they say they want something – whether it’s true love or a breakfast burrito – it doesn’t mean they’ll thank you for it. And the question of how to make yourself happy has really very little to do with getting what you want. These posts will be about what it does relate to, and sometimes how.