Image credit: DALL-E and Norman’s Woe
I stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do? But my business hurried me. I concluded to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my future leisure.
— Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Imagine that you’ve established a routine, with the following steps (setting aside trivial details):
- Step one: Head downstairs.
- Step two: Turn on the electric kettle.
- Step three: Go out to the back deck for a cigarette to aid in shocking into full wakefulness. (This may require additional attire, depending on weather conditions.)
- Step four: Make a cup of coffee for yourself and a cup of tea for your partner, taking care to add just the right amount of milk or cream to each.
- Step five: Note the time.
- Step six: Deliver the cup of tea to your partner, who is by this time attending to their phone in bed upstairs. Avoid sloshing tea on stairs.
Steps two, four and six are repeated a second time after a twenty-five minute interval,1 provided you have remembered to follow step five. Failing that, use the best estimate of time available. Perhaps how much of your coffee you have drunk.
Just why you’ve established this routine is another matter altogether. It may be that you’re a genuinely nice person who has affection for your partner and wants to make a kind gesture. On a routine basis. It may be that you want to be taken for a genuinely nice person, knowing secretly that you’re no such thing. Or it may be that something has to happen in the morning and this is as good a routine as any other. But this is impertinent to the topic at hand.
What is pertinent is that you have established a routine, which means that, most mornings anyway, you don’t have to think about it. Which is helpful, as you have many other things to be thinking about. Maybe parsing reality from a dream you’re remembering. Maybe becoming growingly aware of what the day holds and evaluating whether that is to be dreaded, welcomed, or simply accepted for what it is. Or maybe picking up an issue from the previous day that has not been resolved and requires (or demands) further consideration.
The point is that you’ve established a routine and remember it sufficiently well to be able execute it without thought. Which, now that you think of it (maybe at Step three), is strange. But of course you do that all the time. You don’t think to breathe or swallow (usually). Thinking is no assistance in your heart beating–but of course, that’s all below decks.2 Nothing new in that.
What about climbing stairs? That’s a bit more complicated, as it’s a learned behavior and, once learned, generally needs no thought. Except perhaps after injury, passing of time or attempting not to slosh tea on the stairs, which might again require firing up the expensive upper deck.3 Pertinent to topic, but a rabbit hole.
And then this happens: On one particular day, while working mindlessly through your morning routine, mechanically following the steps while being pestered with some thought or another. Perhaps you have a slight headache and are busy reflecting that you may have had just a wee bit more bourbon the evening before than is good for following mornings. You’re on Step 6 when you realize you have not added the milk and cream, respectively. I almost forgot, you think to yourself, and proceed to consciously interrupt the routine to amend the error; reversing course, setting the hot mugs on the counter, and shuffling toward the fridge.
You almost forgot?
You weren’t doing the remembering in the first place. You as it happens, are confined entirely to your brain’s upper deck, which is, on a good day, only about half of your brain’s mass. The hard work of remembering and informing you of what you remember (or almost forgot) is largely outside of your control–except, perhaps, when you deliberately burn a lot of fuel by memorizing, or work to habituate a routine so as to save the burning of fuel in the future (posting a sticky note to the fridge labeled “ICE”, for instance), or attempting to take command of the lower decks by reminding yourself to remember (tying a string around your finger).
Worse still for you, most of what you think of yourself as doing is beyond your awareness entirely. And even if, by some accident of learning, you become aware of all the machinery below decks that do all the things that keep you rattling around busily–consuming useful energy and returning it to the ungrateful universe as useless infrared energy4—you still can’t exercise much control. Try holding your breath. Try not to blink. Better still, try to think your heart into stopping.
You, as it turns out, think way too much of yourself. Very likely way too often about yourself. And to a near certainty entirely wrongly about yourself. It remains an open question as to whether you exist in any meaningful way. And even if you do, your existence is so contingent as to be laughable. You might be better termed Woe. Perhaps your name is Norman.
To be fair, you’re stuck with you. Very difficult to shake, though various methods have been developed over time by other yous, most involving you-altering chemicals. You would do well to employ them, early and often. Or simply swallow the blue pill and burn no more fuel on the topic at all. It’s a large pill and may take some conscious effort in the swallowing.
- A third round may have been added over time, involving an additional step: empty the ice from the ice maker in the fridge into the ice bucket in the freezer in support of evening cocktails. Routinizing this may have required some effort, such as posting a sticky note to the fridge with the notation “ICE” for some period of time, until the practice became habitual. ↩︎
- You will be spared, dear reader, of formal designations for brain regions. Below decks or the downstairs brain suits well enough for the brain stem and other subterranean caverns. If, as a fussy sort, you must know what structure keeps your heart beating without further attention, it is the medulla oblongata, the bottom part of the brainstem that helps regulate your miserable breathing, heart rhythms, blood pressure and swallowing. ↩︎
- Why expensive, and what’s the upper deck? Really Fussy? Go get a PhD in neuroscience. If you’re reading this, you might consider an online PhD program from Panama or something. ↩︎
- Whether you realize it or not, your main job is to assist the universe in returning to its low entropy origin by consuming useful energy. And lest you be tempted to think, Aha, at last I know my purpose in life, your contribution is so vanishingly small that it wouldn’t matter at all if you had never existed. ↩︎