Agentic or insane?

Learning doesn't have to hurt

You’re going to have this song stuck in your head for a week.

Welcome to Learning To Human, a potential new series in which I’m writing from inside my current experience of… well... learning to human, which I hope will resonate with other people who are vibing on the far right tail of the “hoping-to-reach-enlightenment-by-death” end of the spiritual distribution.

This one’s for the folks who learned resilience the hard way. Something (or more accurately several Bad Somethings) happened, so your nervous system did what nervous systems do when environmental inputs exceed your default capacity and updated your firmware to run a faint but unkillable loop of I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down underneath every waking moment like a fucked-up Chumbawumba single you’re contractually obligated to play in perpetuity.

The things that instigated this system update probably happened at you / to you (unless you subscribe to the Platonic thing where souls pick their next life before being born, in which case bold choice, past self). Either way, you were afforded the grand opportunity to build internal psychological infrastructure around “survival” before you encountered any of the softer “emotional safety” frameworks of the help-self cinematic universe. And you’re probably no longer particularly interested in rehashing most of the Things That Happened in detail; the stories are boring, the outcomes are what they are, etc.

The more important underlying thing is the resilience itself, forged in a world that’s demonstrably Not Safe (TM) and calcified into a baseline assumption that nothing is guaranteed to turn out how you’d prefer it to (a foundational truth many people spend thousands of hours meditating to integrate. Congrats on the shortcut!). Much ink has been spilled on the two basic ways of meeting a truth like that: shrinking away from it or grasping at it. The shrinking is often a fear-driven avoidant thing that makes people flee or freeze. The grasping is the fighty one and when out of balance it becomes semi-deranged: if nothing is safe, then everything is equally safe, so might as well Fuck Around and Find Out.

That’s my adaptation, and many of the most-exceptional people I’ve met in the last 10 years have a similarly-shaped one. It’s the kind that likes the taste of blood but also optimistically books the last-minute Burning Man trip because someone in the groupchat has a spare spot in their van and the alternative is, what, not going? Or moves to NYC sight-unseen because some weird robotics guys from Twitter seemed kinda interesting. Or looks at an entire profession like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, thinks what if I became a venture capitalist and then just… does it. It’s an excellent operating system in many respects and is the reason I have a life with my own fingerprints on it rather than the one I was issued at the factory.

This codes in Silicon Valley-adjacent circles as “high agency” and in others as “vaguely insane”, and like many life strategies it’s actually both of those things at once and doesn’t always pay off in a positive way. Like, I don’t plan my life very far in advance because I can roll with the punches and therefore exist at a level of continuous chaos that makes it nigh impossible to be consistent at anything. I don’t protect myself adequately from myriad sources of relational harm because I’m unambiguously elite at in-the-moment crisis management and keep getting myself hurt in predictable and stupid ways. I outsource the decision to pull the ripcord on many a far-less-than-ideal situation to a future version of me even though she’s certain to be compromised on account of being actively on fire at the time of consultation.

KC Green, “This is Fine”

It’s pretty weird that I keep doing this in spite of being so very self-aware about it. My perception is 20/20, my predictive ability is clairvoyant, my capacity to take damage without collapsing is borderline OSHA-violating, but my discernment about which damage is worth taking is still way off because my default threshold for danger is still set to “Will this kill me? If no, proceed without caution.” Anything that won’t literally end me is auto-approved even though survivable and worth it are totally separate categories of thing. My therapist recently suggested that the question I need to ask, rather than “will I survive this?” (because duh), is “will this danger actually net the upside it's dangling in front of me right now?”. And then, whether the answer is clear or not, I need to find a way to protect myself before I'm in the emergency.

One version of this mechanism is a Ulysses pact: Homer’s guy wanted to hear the sirens but understood that future-present-him would absolutely steer his ship directly onto the rocks in response and therefore took some advice from a witch and arranged in advance to be lashed to the mast, with strict orders that the crew ignore everything he screamed at them. Venture requires you to make this pact with every deal; you go out, seek outlier reward, accept it rides on outlier risk, and use pro rata rights and liquidation prefs and a handful of other legally-binding terms to make sure you're still standing whichever way the wind breaks. I became pretty good at this in my professional life, but in my personal life there’s an unreasonably high likelihood I’d just chew through the rope. Maybe I need to use chains instead? Regardless, it seems the point is that rather than wanting the upside less (where’s the fun in that?) I can probably figure out a way to make sure that the moment of wanting is not the place where the decision ultimately gets to live. It may be easier to let the wanting-ness pass without yeeting oneself into an impossible situation that way. This feels laughably basic but, well, here we are.

It may also help to stop assuming that all lessons have to be painful. Pain was the medium of instruction in the OG curriculum so it still reads as subconscious proof that learning is underway, in which case an experience that doesn’t cost you much can register as an experience that doesn’t teach you much. This is the con the system runs in a loop, conflating intensity with information while insisting with great confidence that the blood is the data. But it’s not; the data is the data and the blood is the result of a probably-avoidable injury and you can in fact learn things that don’t hurt. I’m currently taking a meaningful fraction of that on faith, but it's evident that the premise I absorbed so early I mistook it for a law of physics, that possibly-damaging automatically qualifies as high-stakes/high-reward, can become a harmful frame to operate a life from within.

Developing a healthy level of discernment and desire for some amount of self-protection can, inversely, help you build a life in which your baseline FAFO vibes get aimed at things that return positively. I haven’t fully developed this muscle given as recently as last week I found myself, at an hour at which no good decision has ever once been made, composing a message to a person I have already surveyed for a lifetime and confirmed as likely to cause me pain who I nonetheless keep sprinting towards with the outsized confidence of someone who knows this cannot end me, I’ll be fine, I’m always fine, which is the entire problem in a single sentence. But this time I caught myself in the loop and didn’t actually send the message and that’s how the protective filter gets built in real-time. I’m roughly halfway to installing it and halfway to doing something inadvisable on any given Tuesday, but I’m trying even though the structure may never be perfect and I’m highly likely to embarrass myself at least a few more times before it fully holds.

You’re welcome to try alongside me and we can compare notes in six months, assuming neither of us has managed to die in the interim. But as always, no guarantees. :) ¹

1. Thanks to my therapist, James Kettle, Sasha Chapin, and José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente for feedback on this draft (of me and/or my writing). For more (and arguably better) content on the human condition, read Sasha’s “Newsletter”.