My Weekly ‘Therapy’ Session

I was having a conversation with a very good friend the other day. We were talking about the circle of topics that we always talk about, e.g. life, work, relationships, status, and emotion. I deeply enjoy the conversations and they happen almost weekly. It is my own surrogate for therapy, and we pay each other by giving that listening and suggestion to each other in response.

At any rate, it was his turn on the couch, so to speak, and he was telling me that he had no outlooks, no drive, very little to show for his effort, and little to look forward to. He said that he was waiting for things to happen, and did not care much when they did. This is atypical for my friend, usually a bastion of insight and support for when I feel this way.

The Invisible Hand Theory

In discussing possible solutions, we talked about the Invisible Hand theory, often applied in financial theory, in which some people believe that we are acted upon by an unseen influence, like fate, or God. At the opposite extreme, there is a free-will mentality, in which we put ourselves on paths that lead to a greater or lesser likelihood of intended outcomes. I am in the self-driven free-will camp.

For instance, let’s say that we are talking about an accident. It happens. Was it fate that caused the accident, in which we had no choice in the matter, and it was going to happen no matter what? Or was it you taking the risk of that accident by getting into the car or driving recklessly? All other possibilities and contingencies aside, you likely feel stronger about one, or the other.

Some might say that we are born into the understanding capability that we have. That we are more likely or less likely to have the ability to be smart about some particular topic, because of fate or destiny. This is often attributed to me in regards to technology. Some say I ‘just get it’ because it was meant to be that way. My point of view is that I understand technology because I have a passion for it, and want to learn about it, I want to have it in my hand, and I want very much to understand it. To this end, I surround myself with people, media, practices, and work that moves me towards that end. It is not an effort, per se, because I have a passion for it, but it is not by fate, in my opinion. I choose that particular path.

Nutrition, Emotion, and Schedule

We also talked about it in regards to nutrition. I lost over 100 pounds in about a year after being obese most of my life. This happened because I read books, got tools, and practiced, to that end. I did not know what I was eating, what I was burning, or how any of it worked. I spent time with people who thought nothing of eating footlong sandwiches and chips or fries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I did not put the right foods in my refrigerator, did not visit the right restaurants, and did not understand the hidden natures of food, such as how food’s size or type or connotation (e.g. ‘healthy’) is completely unrelated to satiation, calories. or flavor.

In regards to emotion, the same is true. Without meditation to understand the nature of your mood, or by spending time with negative or poisonous influences, you might be asking for a bad mood. You might not see patterns and relationships between food, visits, actions, tone, and mood, but they exist. Unless it’s just fate, but I do not believe that it is.

Finally, there is schedule. I, myself, live by my calendar. I use tools like IFTTT to place an event on my calendar automatically when I get or make a phone call, and record all of the details that I can in the fields of meetings, such as an address in the location field, so that later, I can review and understand the nature of the way that I spent my time, which may very well affect how I spend my time better.

Insights on Tools and Quantification

Towards the end of the conversation, I had a very good insight. For me personally, it is the tools that allow me to review and annotate the quantification of events related to food, schedule, safety, and communication. Like almost anything else I believe and understand the truth of something when I can sense (sight, hearing, taste…) it. I realized that it is because of my awareness of incoming calories in MyFitnessPal combined with output of calories in FitBit that I am able to easily maintain, increase, or decrease my weight. I realized that it is because of the manual and automated manipulation of my schedule that I can see very clearly what took place yesterday, tomorrow, last week, next week, last year or next year.

It is because of the automated download of on-demand media such as technology podcasts about topics I find important in my work that I am able to stay abreast of what is going on in those arenas. By making good choices in the grocery store, I am forced to some degree to make good choices about eating.

I figure that if I can find the right tool for the other concerns in my life, such as money or customer relations, I might be able to apply the same kinds of logic to those in order to make those ecosystems better as well. My emotion, for example, is now being recorded every three hours by MoodiModo, an emotion tracking app that asks me about 16 likert style questions (are you more or less…) about my moods like how angry, scared, or anxious I am. I can look at the charted responses in conjunction with my food diary, exercise charts, or calendar in order to see trends between, let’s say, food or meetings and my level of anger or joy and maybe begin to sense causal relationships.

His response? “But that takes willpower and commitment in order to do that, you have that.”

My response? “if you leave the right tools and choices in your path, working passively and automatically, you need neither. “