TED Talk for Authors · 9:49pm Nov 13th, 2021
A talented self-deprecating author asked me if he had the talent to do the hard thing. This “speech” is what bled out of me. It applies to all authors and artists. It tackles writer’s block and everything that gets in the way of our art.
Civilization, society, and inculturation create a censor in... our... head.
Some people call it “a conscience.” The enlightened call it “the monkey mind.” It insists that we be normal. It insists that we fit in, that we keep our head down, that we must not be noticed lest the lion eat us. It is how society controls us, how society convinces us that we are happy with our lot when clearly we are not. It is how society molds us into a low wage worker instead of a star.
Society creates the monkey mind in our head to incessantly chatter away at us. It tells us “Don’t do that!”, “I’m wasting my time,” “It’s going to fail; don’t even try!”, “It’s too hard,” and “I can’t do this.”
Become aware of the evil implanted inside of you. Recognize it. Find it. Collar the beast. Wrap a choke chain around its neck and leash it. Force the beast to serve you.
Creative people are neurotic by definition... this a good thing. Fight that governor inside your head that dismisses things as stupid or unworthy, that keeps you from creating, that prevents you from evaluating without judgement “your crap” so that you can apply the intense pressure necessary to fashion your malodorous carbon into a diamond.
I am not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying you can do it. This... takes... courage.
My best advice for self-introspection is: Stop kicking your self to the curb! Failure is nothing more than feedback. Take your blows, stand back up, find a solution, then try again.
I expect this to be controversial. I expect some of you to take this like a sermon and feel upset. The last thing I want to be is condescending. Let this open a conversation on mastering writing. Please. Go ahead and comment.
Makes perfect sense to me. Good talk!
I just wish I knew how to truly take it to heart.
KorenCZ11 on this thread pokes a few important holes in my argument. I think it’s largely because of the format and the some lack of clarity in the declarative format of the speech. Yes, I dual posted to share with a wider audience.
I am quoting my reply (you can use the link to find post) so you can see my clarifications.
Riiight.
I'm confused: is it lions or other people?
Citation needed?
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<Rubs his chin, thinking.>
I apologize for references that aren’t as current as maybe they ought be. Your confusion and my stumble is an example of inculturation, yours vs mine. I have lived during eight decades*, and I remember seeing the JFK funeral on a B&W TV. I wrote in my reply to KorenCZ11 about women’s roles because I witnessed them change.
*Get a gold star if you can guess what year I was born in.
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You get a gold star. 🌟 I can’t guarantee this answer will wipe out your writer’s block as it did mine as I detailed to KorenCZ11 in that reply.
The advice I can give is when you block: Examine your emotions. Is there fear there? If so, what do you fear? Is it embarrassment? Why are you embarrassed? Are your emotions telling you should be doing something else? What is that activity? Why is that more important than you expressing whatever ideas you want to express? Ask the questions out loud, or write them so you can see them. Ask a friend to ask you the questions. Activate your brain in as many ways as you can. An answer may come immediately, in a dream, or when you’re soaping up in the shower. Keep asking yourself. Stay credulous.
My revelation a year after my mother’s death that I had told myself (in not so many words) that I had to concentrate on making money to support her and that doing anything else was worthless changed my life. Duty trumps happiness, right? Basic inculturation. I had blocked badly, twice, for months, writing The Runaway Bodyguard, and was struggling as I started working toward restarting my SF writing career. Then, suddenly, I understood the programming inside my head. It felt like chains had snapped. My world changed.
Now, I just sit down prepared with an idea, characters, or scenes and just write until I’m done. Weird, right? Shouldn’t writing always be that way?
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Honestly, that it invokes both neuroscience and evolutionary biology (i.e. sounds 20% more scientific) seems more likely theory. That's modern spin on something at least 2000 years older than that movie --- through all stuff about free will, religious philosophy ("flesh is weak") to Plato with his chad philosopher vs common people limited to their basic passions.
It's not in our head* and is not that complicated: people do most (interesting) stuff they do for social approval. If you're consistently not getting approval for what you're doing then you are to A. change what you're doing B. change the social group you're seeking approval from (both are very non-elementary actions) or C. sulk. Postulating malevolent magical entities which are messing with you is just a distraction.
I though you're talking about one of scales in "big 5 personality traits" (I remember seeing a few papers that failed to find relation between people's "big 5" traits and profession, although it was, like, decade ago and maybe changed since)
* well, ok, one may have generalized anxiety disorder, or something, but it still isn't treated by cool stories
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I blame using “brain” instead of “mind” associated with “monkey” because of the (for me, traumatic) monkey brain scene in the movie. Monkey mind is the proper term, and it is intended to highlight destructive self-talk.
No magic. Psychology. Most people aren’t aware of how their experiences and inculturation allow them to act reflexively. Not necessarily a bad thing! It’s when those reflexes force us to act against our own self-interest or desires that conflict occurs. When that happens, self-talk often tells us we can’t do it, that it’s wrong, we are bad people, we’ll fail, only girls (or boys) do that, etc. Becoming aware of the self-talk is a key to fighting it and mastering it to achieve your goals in life.
Social approval derives from inculturation. We are taught how to behave. Through learning, culture becomes behavior. It is in our head. Cultural norms don’t derive from a vacuum. Culture is not innate. When we behave “right”, following cultural norms, we receive social approval.
When I was young, when a woman sought marriage instead of a career, her upbringing, her “female culture,” provided her a sense of approval. If she went for the career, however, her parents became critical, strangers might consider her “loose”, her male co-workers often objectified her, her male employer would assert she’s taking a male head-of-household’s salary away (an example of “male culture”). Worse, her defiance of cultural norms would make her feel bad, often through destructive self-talk where she told herself that not conforming makes her unfeminine.
We have a somewhat different cultural norm today because some people recognized the cultural programming that benefited males, refused to conform, and made other people aware of what they were fighting in their heads.
Social approval? Social disapproval? The need to conform is innate; the definitions we conform to are learned. Ask yourself where those ideas of conformance came from, whom they benefit, and whether you agree with them. This ultimately gives you the freedom to choose non-conformance and to ignore self-talk that makes you feel bad because you seek happiness instead of social approval.
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Not that different from monkey soul.
That is suspiciously precisely like 2.5k years old magic. Hmm...
If you mean they cant speak about it, then yes.
Challenging self-talk is what "C" in CBT is about. It isn't irrelevant, sure, but some research shows that it can be completely thrown out without noticeable decrease in treatment efficiency for anxiety and depression. Results aren't completely clear (leaving it in and throwing other components out works as well, and medication too), but it decisively counters "is a key" part.
Yes. By facing consequences of concrete instances of our behavior. Social approval, for example.
Platonism is wrong. Culture doesn't "become" behavior. Culture IS behavior of many people --- no magical spirits attached.
No, we just receive social approval (or not). All that stuff about norms is our way of talking about existing approval patterns --- no platonic forms attached.
Cultural evolution is a very complicated thing and I wish I could say why exactly that happened, but people becoming richer (= less dependent on other people + more free time = more free to flip them the bird) and more densely packed in cities (= easier to find alternative people) may have something to do with that.
We doesn't conform to definitions, we conform to people.
Probably from the fact that ancient guys who couldn't make allies were banished from tribe and failed to reproduce, or something like that. Or, more recently, from the fact that life or people who piss everyone off tend to kinda suck.
You can not seek happiness instead of social approval. I have a strong suspicion that you may be retelling another old cultural story about great heroes who, unlike common folk, are free to act completely independently from dirty earthly desires and can directly manifest platonic form of Good.
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The wording of our philosophies are fighting one another. Having read your reply, I feel they agree on the gist of the argument. Except:
<grins>Wanna bet? Happiness is self-approval.
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Self-approval is a social behavior: you demonstrate others how you approve yourself so they'd be impressed with how cool you are.
(paywall, but there's sci-hub)
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Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this with you and others.
Self-approval is asocial. Tell somebody. They'll slap you or tell you you're a narcissist. Self-approval being asocial is why most cultures suppress it in deference to demanding you act like everyone else, i.e., in an approved way. Now I'm going to be hyperbolic:
Maybe not entirely hyperbolic, but then I'm an author. I peddle dangerous ideas.
You understand CBT. Here is how it is applied:
Take my previous example in my reply to TheAncientPolitzanian of my writer's block clearing when I realized the distortion in my thinking caused by me buying into social norms (that I had to take care of my mother) illustrates self-application of CBT principles. I (my monkey mind) kept telling myself it was worthless to write when there were more important things to do. I stopped one day while staring at a blank page. I asked myself, why do I tell myself this? My subconscious helpfully (finally!) explained—and I experienced an epiphany. The distortions were dual: (1) I could write and make money to support her. (2) She had passed over a year prior.
Being able to hear your self-talk is a step any person can take.
Please don't assert I am anti-psychology or new-agey or a religious fanatic. I'm agnostic, but I have studied non-western societies from all over the world, as well as their religions and mythologies. (My degree was exceptionally useful for writing SF with alien cultures, and for being a curator, but it also let me see our own culture from an alien perspective.) I've had plenty of therapy, from traditional and nontraditional sources.
I ceased being chronically depressed* when I heard (really heard) on a Wayne Dyer tape (before he became a lune) essentially, "Depression is the emotion you feel when you perceive you lack control over your life." I went from being depressed most days of the week to 0. Happened on a winter evening, driving home, listening to a cassette tape. I couldn't even find a way to wallow in self-pity—which feels exceptionally good (a depressed person's equivalent to an angry person's love of outrage)—because I realized I had deluded myself that I had control. I didn't. Plenty of else to control in my life, plenty to be happy about, so I shrugged and moved on. I can't say the voice in my head was happy about my revelation, but I ignored the incessant chatter of how bad things were. Eventually it stopped.
I shan't tell you how I stopped being suicidal as a teen when I was introduced to the concept of the monkey mind.
Can you see why I want to introduce the concept?
It is undoubtedly true. I agree it "isn't key." Psychology is hard. But why discard or minimize a tool that if an individual can grasp the concept can be very effective, and self-applicable? It changed my life. I know it changed the life of many others, too.
To be clear, if I am talking to a psychologist or psychologist, not just a fellow philosopher, I am not advocating this for everybody, or anybody, in place of necessary medication, treatment, or therapy. It's a concept. It worked exceptionally well for me.
*Functional not organic depression