Lying to yourself to get what you don't want

Let's talk about the battle against second-order biochemical puppetry.

It’s girl scout cookie season, and I’ve been fighting a war on two fronts lately:

1. Don’t buy more cookies.

2. Don’t convince yourself to buy more cookies.

The first battle is against a crude, first-order biochemical impulse — the dopamine-soaked, animal desire to ravage some Samoas. I can often hold steady on this front. But the second — oh, the second! — is far more insidious. It’s impulse masquerading as logic. It spurs me to look at the label on the box, look at the nutrition facts, come up with a rhetoric that is somehow consistent with any logical tripwires that I’ve set up, then proceed to purchase 5 boxes.

“I just want to eat some cookies” sits within other trojan horses:

• “I’m going to exercise in an hour — I need energy”.

• “I just finished exercising — I need to replenish my muscles’ glycogen stores.”

• “Maybe I should carb load so I can exercise really hard later.”

And this is the battle that has been silently undermining me my whole life (not the cookie/exercise battle specifically, but, more generally, self-delusion). It’s the fight against an impulse to want what I know I don’t really want.

I know what I want in life: I want to be a great Dad, to be a great husband, to build something valuable for the world, to better understand what life is, to give my family financial stability, and to take care of myself well enough that I can have time to do all these things. But if I really believe that, why do I argue with my mom over who left the side door open? Why am I training my biceps at the gym? Why am I starting Twitter fights?

Unfortunately, there are all these other ambitions playing marionette with my actions. These are things I don’t really want, but my animal brain craves anyway: I want to be wealthy, I want to be attractive, I want to impress people. It’s a world of status, perception, power, social currency — backwards currencies, etched into my brain by our dopamine culture. Given any amount of thought, I don’t really want any of these things. But there are always plausible reasons for pursuing them.

The problem, of course, is that these mindless animal ambitions are sneaky. In the absence of active thought, these default desires consume me. I’m at the gym, trying to figure out what to do. If I don’t actively think about longevity, I’ll just start doing bicep curls — they’ll make my biceps look bigger, right? I’m arguing with a coworker, and I start to try to win, rather than to find truth.

I thought for a long time that I needed to just fight my dopamine-drenched urges. But with all this, I had a sobering realization that there’s a battle I’ve lost by not even realizing it’s there to fight — I’ve just been a quiet slave to this second layer of animal ambitions. Yeah, sure, there are a few things I do each day that are aligned with what I want. But then there are hundreds of things I’m doing for God-knows-what reason. In the absence of thought, my lizard brain seems to summon some arbitrary biochemical compulsion alongside some plausible justification to do a lizard thing.

What to do

I don’t really have a cure here — I’m just writing to lament the fact that I got myself late-night Chipotle again under the pretense that I’m bulking. But I suppose I’ve found some things that have helped:

• I find that mindfulness helps with two things:

  1. to at least notice that your brain is performing these mental gymnastics

  2. to give yourself enough cognitive control to pause before continuing down the path of self-delusion

• After that, I find that I just need to stem the root compulsions. In particular, I’ll remove the circumstances that trigger these things to avoid having to exercise willpower on a continual basis — it’s much easier to say no once than to say no all day. I’ll avoid eating at my desk, for instance, to avoid Netflix or Youtube; as a rule, I’ll avoid looking at my phone before bedtime to avoid mindlessly scrolling; I don’t keep sweets in the house to avoid binge eating late at night.

What I find interesting to note here is that these compulsions and their remedies parallel patterns of addiction (the first principle of alcoholics anonymous appears to be honesty, for instance, which certainly helps here). In general, I think there’s something to say here about how most of our actions really are addictive behaviors. We’ve conditioned ourselves to behave in a certain way, and it’s quite difficult to break free from this conditioning.

Of course, sometimes I feel that unraveling this thread has only revealed that I have little control over anything I think or do whatsoever, but I’ll save that for another day.