Where To Begin

When I entered the video game industry in 1999, one of the greatest barriers to creating immersive worlds was the NPC (Non-Player Character). How do you make a machine talk like a human? Back then, the state of the art was the dialogue tree. The player selected from a limited menu of options, and the computer delivered a pre-generated response. If you played games like Baldur’s Gate, World of Warcraft, or Fallout, you’ve encountered these.

Major studios hired voice actors to record the lines, and animators spent sleepless nights bringing the characters to life. The biggest games, like Mass Effect, featured tens of thousands of recorded lines. As a kid, I’d try to navigate every possible dialogue combination in a game. But with Mass Effect, that felt impossible. You could play it a hundred times and never exhaust every story permutation.

Then, in April 1999, I attended the Global Leadership Conference in Macau—the former Portuguese colony that China was transforming into its own Las Vegas. There, the noted futurist Pascal Fénice spoke about a new breed of AI poised to change the world. While old systems, like those in video games, relied on humans coding thousands of “rule sets,” a new model was on the horizon: learning machines. Machines that could learn from experience, just like us.

Fénice gave examples of AI systems that, when set up to compete, could play games better than any human. AlphaGo was the first to beat a human grandmaster at Go. Soon after, computers could understand human speech more consistently than we could, and algorithms were generating photorealistic images of people who never existed.

The world was about to change. “Where automation ‘ate’ manual labor,” he warned, “AI will eat software.”

Jump forward to 2022. After a morning of snowmobiling, some friends and I sat down in a restaurant in Reno, NV, to talk about AI. At that time, OpenAI had released several “large language models” that could do some interesting things. I remember thinking it was like autocomplete on steroids. You’d type a few words, and the AI would build on your prompt.

I got shivers. For the first time, I was conversing with an NPC that had no script. The AI was communicating with me—imperfectly, but also unpredictably. This quirky little startup was teasing a new model on the horizon: ChatGPT.

As of this writing, over 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly. The question is, how? What are they doing with it? What are you doing with it? (Seriously, please tell me!)

But you are probably here because you want to know what I am doing with it.

The Answer

Well, not as much as I hoped, and more than I ever thought possible. Before I dive into my current workflow and the problems I use AI to solve, let me share a few principles that shape how I think about work.

I am a Knowledge Worker

I know that’s a popular buzzword, but what does it really mean? For me, being a knowledge worker meant using my mind to solve hard problems and create innovative solutions. Unlike a manufacturing job or the trades, my work was cerebral. I sat at a desk and used computers to shape the future. Put simply, I made a living with my mind, not my muscles.

I did this by assembling data into information and turning that information into knowledge that informed decisions. The old saw “work smarter, not harder” really meant one thing to me: always be learning. In a world of accelerating change, acquiring new knowledge was the only way to stay ahead.

Pop culture reflected this shift. In the ’70s and ’80s, action heroes were Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger. By the late ’90s and 2000s, we saw more “smart” espionage heroes who won by out-thinking their opponents, not just out-muscling them.

Being smart mattered.

But how do you get smarter? Go back to school? That’s when I discovered Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I still recall three big takeaways from that book:

  1. Stop consuming the news. It’s a waste of time and energy, mostly designed to upset you.
  2. Start learning. Every single day.
  3. Study Stoicism. It’s like an operating system for life.

I didn’t have time for college, so I stopped listening to the news and started listening to TED Talks and audio programs in my car. One book almost always led to another. I became a lifelong learner, eventually listening to a book a week. The combination of Kindle and Audible was magic.

I consumed a lot of content. Some of it changed my life, my business, and my family. However, a staggering amount went in one ear and out the other. What began as a well-intentioned effort to improve myself had turned into a form of intellectual doom-scrolling. I’d finish one book, highlight some passages, and immediately jump to the next. I was addicted to learning as entertainment.

But what was I really learning?

Not much.

I decided I needed a better way to learn. I knew there were valuable tools in the books I was reading but couldn’t figure out how to make them stick. This led me to a core principle for all my tools: they either need to make me smarter, or they need to make my life easier.

This is really important. There is a huge difference between knowing the answer and knowing there is an answer. If you only know an answer exists somewhere, you have to waste time finding it. In that time, you’ll lose to the person who already has the answer. The corollary is, when you do have to find an answer, can you get the right answer, fast? Speed is everything, and knowledge is a force multiplier.

Let me put it this way:

The more you know, the more you are capable of knowing.

This is one of the biggest mistakes people make with AI. Just because a tool somewhere knows something doesn’t mean you know it. AI is incredible at bringing answers to you faster, but if you don’t have the foundational knowledge to use those answers, you’re only slightly better off. In a hyper-competitive world, the person who truly knows has an outsized advantage in speed and capability.

As a result, I am not interested in AI learning for me. I am interested in AI amplifying my ability to learn.

Barbara Oakley’s wonderful book, A Mind for Numbers, explains why simply highlighting a text doesn’t build deep knowledge. Highlighting creates familiarity—you can recognize concepts—but true learning is about production. If you really know something, you can recall and reconstruct it from scratch, unprompted. As Brené Brown says, it’s “in your bones.” It’s part of you. Real learning involves recall, which is our ability to reconstruct an idea.

A cognitive bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth gets in our way here. It goes something like this: Because someone else knows it, I assume I know it too. I believe many people are now falling for the “Illusion of AI Depth”—the belief that because the AI knows it, I know it.

One of the most important skills in working with AI is to always have a solid grasp on what you know versus what you don’t. This is critical because the Dunning-Kruger effect is always in play, reminding us that the more confident we feel, the less we might actually know.

A Tool To Make YOU Smarter

My goal in sharing all this is to explain my mindset. When I engage with AI, I use a specific set of strategies to track what I know versus what I think I know.

I’m trying to enhance my personal effectiveness. Therefore, I use AI to automate mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing me up to use its power to enhance my creative ideas and communication.

I am still working with knowledge, but now I need new strategies. Like the video game with the infinite dialogue tree, I could never explore all the possibilities this technology presents. I have to choose what to focus on, where to apply my limited attention, and work to get the best outcome possible.

How I use AI Every Day

(Tip: I’m not in marketing)

I don’t know about you, but I am settling into this feeling that AI, while powerful, is also kind of looping over the same territory. I find myself turning to AI to answer questions instead of Google search.

I think most people who use AI either use it as a search replacement or they ask it to write a document for them that they themselves have low confidence in being able to generate themselves.

It seems to me the primary use of AI for the vast majority is:

  1. Replaced Google with better, more relevant answers.
  2. Writing well is hard, so do it for me.
  3. Make a pretty/cool/interesting picture for me.

Okay, that’s not fair, is it? There are a few more.

  1. Note takers: Transcribing meetings and capturing what everyone is saying.
  2. Video creation tools are powerful.

I have seen some cutting-edge applications, like Eleven Labs and Go High Level voice agents. And that brings me to the next giant category of AI use: marketing. Since marketing seems to be about persuasion with words and pictures, it makes a ton of sense for AI to thrive in that arena. Makes sense, right?

But what if… you are not in marketing? What if you are running a company? What if you want to use AI to be more personally productive? What are some ways you can use AI to increase your own effectiveness?

That is what I want to write about. I want to share, a little at a time, how I have been implementing AI for my own personal workflow. And yes, this will definitely include some content about how I use my digital second brain.

At present, I am thinking about covering:

  1. What I use and why (my three tools: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini)
  2. The environments (mobile, desktop, command line)
  3. The types of problems I solve and how I solve them.
  4. Tips and tricks for being more productive.
  5. Model Context Protocol techniques.
  6. Vibe Coding
  7. Power Tools:
    1. GitHub - managing personal projects, backups, and revisions.
    2. Visual Studio Code
    3. Marta (or other dual-pane file managers)
    4. Markdown
    5. Obsidian
    6. Calibre
    7. Anna’s Archive
    8. Automator
    9. AppleScript
    10. Python
    11. Node.js

Kinds of Problems

What kinds of problems am I solving with this “stack” or workflow?

Here are a few examples:

  • Take a rambling description of a topic and turn it into a well-organized presentation, with thematic images I can use for a keynote.
  • Convert 99 screenshots of recipes into 73 linked text recipes formatted for my Obsidian database and published so I can share with my mom. (Including stitching together recipes that span more than one screenshot.)
  • Performing a financial analysis on my operating business locations, as well as helping me build a forecast model for a cash-based business (non-trivial problem).
  • Working with complex concepts and ideas across multiple knowledge domains (psychology and neuroscience) to find interesting insights and connections which have a practical application.
  • Story coaching. How to take my highly conceptual presentations and bring them alive with real stories for greater stickiness and impact.
  • Using multiple models to cross-check work and minimize sycophancy.
  • Using multiple models to fractionate large projects into more manageable pieces so quality can be checked before running off the rails.
  • Techniques for both 1. Preserving context across large project runs and multiple sessions and 2. Isolating projects so as not to cross-contaminate work.

If any of these sound interesting to you, then. You might enjoy this series. If this is not interesting to you, then just have your favorite LLM reduce this to a few trivial bullet points, scan that, and then move on with your life, or ignore it altogether (which amounts to pretty much the same thing).

Note: You can also find this article on medium.com: scottnovis.medium.com/how-i-use…

An Idea At Play For Today - Aim High Keynote Intro

Yesterday I was blessed enough to speak to the Boys Team Charity, a youth association to help young men find purpose in giving back.

My talk focused on three areas: Direction, Values, and Attitude. I approached the presentation from two overlapping points of view.

Number one, as a member of the Servant Leaders for Christ, I am looking for opportunities to help lift up and guide younger men. The idea of the mutual aid society in the United States all but dried up years ago as government agencies absorbed those responsibilities. If you wanted government funds, you had to follow government regulations. Those regulations all but eliminated the concept of mutual aid.

However, the need for “elders” to mentor the next generation had not abated. Therefore, I presented myself not as a wise elder there to spew wisdom from the stage (what they call the safe on the stage), but to imagine me as a time traveler. I am coming to them from their future. You see, I have walked the paths many of them are looking at now, and I arrived to share with them my scouting report. I wanted to share what I had learned and seen along the way, so that they could make better decisions.

After making the presentation, I was left with two overwhelming impressions.

First, it went very well. I felt like I held the audience and engaged them for the entire time. Second, I left too many stories out and cut the talk shorter than it needed to be. The lack of stories makes the content less relatable and less memorable. Well, the one good thing is that I can use my keyboard and my blog to fill in the gaps and share my ideas and my stories.

You see, I did not only share experience, I shared the tools I used to find my way. I mean, I managed to have a career in making video games, I managed to raise a family, and start a successful business (an entire industry really) that entertained millions of kids. I should have shared more of that. I am confident in retrospect that I had absolutely no idea the scope and scale of GameTruck, or the reach of the mobile video game theater had on the United States, and even the world. (There are game theaters in countries outside the United States.)

So in a lot of ways, husband, father, coach, entrepreneur, game developer, innovator, I have been down many of the paths that appeal to most young men. And I have stories and lessons to share from the journey.

So it is with that in mind, and the one caveat from my all-time favorite book title, I will share my presentation.

What is the book title?

It Worked for Me by Colin Powell. As they say, your mileage may vary. However, the key here is to take what works for you and leave the rest. This is after all a scouting report, not THE answer, but some useful information, insights, and tools that may aid you (or a young man you care about) on your way.

20250829 - An Idea At Play

For a while, I have been playing with this idea that balance is different than I learned it was. Balance is a verb. What most people think of as balance is actually equilibrium:

Equilibrium refers to a state of balance where opposing forces, influences, or processes are in a stable condition with no net change over time.

And specifically, when they say balance, they really mean static equilibrium, like sitting in a chair. You are at rest, and you still stay that way until something or someone comes along and causes you to move.

While this might sound ideal and restful, there is a feature of equilibrium that is often overlooked. It is vulnerable. If you’re sitting in a chair, someone can sneak up behind you and tip you over with little effort.

Balance, or dynamic equilibrium, however, is effortful. It is an active process and more closely mirrors how our bodies and our brain actually function. Standing on one foot is an act of balance. The two hemispheres of our brain, the rods and cones in our eyes, even our two feet are constantly in a dance of competitive cooperation. They push on each other and test each other to create better answers and better results.

My theory is that by becoming aware of this dynamic dance of life, I can live a more satisfying life instead of lamenting or resenting that my life is not effortlessly “balanced.”

Not only do I not get static equilibrium for free, I am beginning to believe I don’t want it. I am beginning to see life as a dance, where my goal is to find the sweet spot between leading and being led.

For my part, one of those domains is how to balance my beliefs in faith and my beliefs in engineering. Now I am not talking about atheism vs. Jesus, but more, where do I find useful, practical information on how to best live?

Faith, for example, is the belief in the absence of proof. In some absolutely sense, that sounds like a recipe for willful stupidity. However, I have found in raising children that having faith is extremely valuable. Why should you not believe they can learn to do something before they have proven they can do it? Or that they can become someone awesome before they have proven it? Waiting for proof can be a life-sapping, cynical, and frankly miserable way to live.

However, and here’s the balance, it is also unwise to just take everything on faith and never look for proof. This is what makes it a balance, or “balancing act”, literally an act of balance.

And I find this function is the kind of problem that our body and our brain— which together make a mind— are extremely adept at solving for. We literally are walking disambiguation engines. The senses flow information into the brain while the body also transmits its current status, and together, those signals are blended together to determine best outcomes and courses of action.

The real magic comes from the third source, our lived experience, which can help guide what we are seeing and feeling, shaping what we see, hear, and feel while also being shaped by those same signals.

I have come to understand that certainty is a feeling, not a fact, and we crave it so desperately because it is highly correlated with the moments when all three of our core mental processing systems align— the feeling that accompanies our “moment of recognition,” we label certainty. And it feels good!

It feels so good, in fact, we can often use that feeling as our objective instead of the outcome. We chase certainty, revising our memories and beliefs trying to make reality fit the model that makes us feel “most certain.” We have names for these cognitive artifacts; we call them biases, and the big two are:

  • Confirmation Bias (I see what I believe)
  • Desirability Bias (I only look for what I believe)

The third amigo that often accompanies these two, especially in our modern knowledge economy, is my personal favorite, the “I’m not Biased Bias.” The “smarter” you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to this cognitive artifact. It basically makes it harder for you to believe that you could make a mistake.

In psychological experiments, the people with the highest IQ’s performed the worst in cognitive tests where they were presented with disconfirming evidence which contractures a cherished core belief. In other words, they were more stubborn, and more resistant to change, and less likely to accept proof that their belief needed revision, than people who had a lower IQ.

Uncertainty, like being off balance, is uncomfortable, largely because it requires effort. However, there are gifts that come from dynamic equilibrium or active balance.

Visualize the athlete who stands on their balls of their feet. With their knees bent, feet shoulder-width apart, head up, hands out just above the waist in that classic “athletic” or “gunfighter stance." They are extremely stable. Imagine a basketball player on defense, or a gunfighter, or a softball player on the infield the moment before the ball is hit. Ponytails and ribbons aside, that girl is ready for what is about to happen next.

This is a moment of optimal “balance,” opposing forces in tension to keep a dynamic system in a state of preparation to make a move.

And to me, that feels like a dance, specifically the tango. Sometimes I move, sometimes, live moves.

And here is where I see the pattern repeat.

Oliver Burkeman in his book 4,000 Weeks, and Meditations for Mortals talks about slowing down, focusing on fewer projects, and recognizing the moments when you will lose control over your day and to welcome those with open arms.

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh, or Pema Chödrön. They talk about being extremely present to life, and receiving whatever happens. You move, but you also pay attention. You give, and you receive life.

Reading Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, she is inspired to write, “Spend time with me before you begin your day, worrying about nothing.”

Michael A. Singer’s Surrender experiment. You listen to where life wants to lead you, then you have to go.

And my own father’s lovely, “Dumb Luck Theory”. You set an intention, get in motion, then pay attention.

All of these touch on a similar theme, the balance between living out into the world through intention and action, but also receiving from the world what arises and some level of trust and faith that it will work out.

For me, they all embody three principles, or they combine to create one animating “spirit”, the spirit of adventure and generativity. They embody humility (I am paying attention, listening, watching, and I’m not in control), faith (but I believe that good can come from this), and courage (I will act in accordance with my faith).

My faith directs my actions, my courage empowers my efforts, and my humility informs my faith and beliefs. This cycle creates a kind of dynamic balance, an athletic position of heart, mind, and soul, if you will.

Who am I writing this to? Myself, I suppose. I am looking for patterns and clarifying my own thoughts and beliefs. I am constantly seeking and revising the answer to my question, how to best live in this life.

20250826 - Todays Idea At Play

I have this burning desire to write something, but I don’t know what. It’s weird. I sat down and wrote 15 blog posts in a row, day after day, and it felt so powerful, but when that tiny experiment ended, I did not continue the next one.

And then life happened. I got caught up in work, travel, fun, friendship, and faith. And my writing projects fell by the wayside.

Here’s the weird part: I “feel” lazy, but I know that I’m constantly working on something. Perhaps it is the ADHD in me that draws me to new projects every single day, it seems like. My list of interests feels nearly infinite. However, it also feels “doable”, like with just enough focused time, I could finish it.

But that is not true. Especially because I keep adding things to the list. My sense of curiosity is what is limitless. My time and focus, on the other hand, appear to be scarce commodities. What is weird is that there is a gap between learning something and sharing it with others in a way that helps them.

I now know a lot about kids, video game addiction, and tech. But turning that into a speaking business? Well, it is like starting a business. And social media might be the answer, but that is just as hyper-competitive as any other kind of business, and in many ways, it is more competitive because it is easily accessible to the whole world at a very low cost.

Plus, social media does not necessarily surface what is most useful to us but what we are most likely to click on. Yeah, that old bugaboo. Our novelty sensor is not necessarily tuned for maximum self-benefit, but it seems rather it is tuned for what is most threatening (though not necessarily dangerous) or titillating.

But those are just excuses. When you help someone solve a problem, they tell their friends about it. That is how GameTruck grew. I just need to lean into being as useful as possible and as helpful as possible.

And I need to get out of my own way when it comes to sharing.

So this is a start, likely one of many, where I sit down, put words to… it’s not paper? What am I doing? Moving electrons around. I am trying to transmit representations from my mind to yours using a medium that only exists as charged electron states in silicon wafers encased in plastic. What a weird way to communicate. It is meant to replicate print on paper. These groups of electron charges can be used to direct the rendering of lines on a white background to simulate print. Your eyes see them and translate them to familiar sounds and qualia (that’s a fancy word for a quality that is made up of sensory details, it’s like the attributes we attach to a memory or sensory experience). Hopefully, these groups of squiggles trigger representations in your mind, which lead to thoughts.

And thus we communicate over time and space, distance collapses, and two minds have shared an “idea.” Yeah, what a crazy world we live in. And you might even imagine you hear my voice as you read these words.

It is rather incredible that sight and sound can fulfill the same function, transmitting the thoughts from one mind to another across time and space. But the real magic happens when those thought threads, or word strings, are integrated into our own thinking, combined like spices added to a delicious (or malodorous) stew.

We change each other, mostly in small ways, but sometimes in large ones. So, I suppose it boils down to this. I need to have faith to put my ingredients into the stew that is our society, I commit to adding to the stone soup that makes up our communal existence.

20250624 - IdeasAtPlay

Cultivate Curiosity, Don’t Communicate Conclusions

As I have been studying what I will call The Constructed Emotion Theory, or CET, I realize that I need to change the way I communicate in presentations and workshops.

While I have known for a long time that you can’t send people information like computers do, I can’t take the already finished spreadsheet and send it to them for them to use. We don’t work like that. I need to take a different approach.

Basically, I want to leverage the way our brains already work. We are not stimulus-response machines, we are prediction engines. We are constantly trying to anticipate what will happen so we can be prepared for it.

Lecturing, teaching in a traditional sense, does not seem to work well with adults, at least the way I have been doing it. So I want to try a different approach. And I am going to experiment with that today. Instead of getting up and giving a twenty-minute explanation about what a Forum Health Check is (if you want to know, leave me a message, I can tell you) , I will start very simply with, “I am here to help you discover how to create a better forum experience.” And then launch into an exercise of discovery with the group called, Alone/Together or Paired Sharing. I will ask them to look in and share their best (and worst) forum experiences. First alone, then in pairs, then they will select the “best” or most representative of each and go around the room. I will assign roles, Seasoned Viewpoints and Fresh Perspectives. I want them as a group to discover how they all see this “thing” they call a forum.

Instead of lecturing, I want to lead them on a journey of discovery and curiosity. I know that we are lazy reasoners. That when you argue with yourself, you always win. However, we are amazing in small groups getting to the truth of things. Our true powers of rational thought are focused outward, toward what is coming into us. And even this system is built upon our predictive abilities. When we dream up our reasoning, we are free to think what we want, largely unconstrained. However, when information comes to us, it must be matched against what we expected, and that matching produces discrepancies, conflicts, and before we treat someone else’s ideas as “prediction error” that must be corrected, we push back. We argue. We ask for clarification, or we present our prediction as an “alternative” that must be considered. And thus begins a process of negotiated mutual understanding. Our information, plus new information, and discussion or debate to get the “right” information. Also, don’t forget, this process must factor in what is acceptable to the group, the cultural milieu, or situation. Words are not simply sounds which hang in the air, but streams of energetic mental representations which can animate another person. (I found this interesting: when ordinary, everyday, spoken words are removed from their context and played back in isolation, adults can identify the word less than 40% of the time.) Communication is an act of mutual transmission; it is musical, contextual, and highly dependent upon many factors.

And what are words anyway? But the transmission of one mental construct, or representation, from one mind to another? Firing networks of neurons stimulate the complex muscles necessary to pulsate air in particular patterns. The three-dimensional sound waves then collide with the inner ear of another person (and this collecting of sound waves is so important we have two large flaps of skin on the sides of our head to collect and direct these oscillations to the necessary sensors). These sound wave sensors then generate electrical stimulations which are converted by the brain from temporal signals (sound happens in a rapid sequence) into something spatial, a representation which can be held and manipulated, worked with and combined, compared, and considered as representations in the other person’s head.

What started as patterns of electrical activity ended as patterns of electrical activity.

Thoughts do not only fill a mind like water filling a bucket, they are the fuel for future predictions the brain will use to interpret the world.

As such, because literally everything is compared against expectation (another word for prediction), crafting communication to be receivable is far more challenging than I realized. Well, communication I want to be received well.

If I do not give people the opportunity to compare, contrast, and contemplate their “prediction errors,” if they cannot “contribute” to the conversation, they will in all likelihood tune out, shut down, or resist much of what I say.

But What If…

What if I am speaking to an audience and I can’t give them an exercise or activity? What if it is too many people? I can tell a story. I can lead them on the journey of how I discovered what I learned. I can share my questions, and my exploration. I can engage our predictive prediction by making a mystery of it. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his master course. A surprise is when the unexpected happens, but a mystery is like a puzzle missing a piece. We know that we are missing a key piece of information, we even know what we are missing. The who done it, the core mystery is “who?” In other genres it could be a how? The caper genre relies heavily on our understanding that best laid plans go awry, the question is “How?” We know what to look for, what missing piece will make this puzzle complete? There is a gap in our information.

We also want surprise. The brain is constantly in search of novelty, but there needs to be a balance of what we expect interrupted with the unexpected.

But this means sharing my own journey, in as entertaining a way as possible, without jumping directly to my conclusions. I need to focus on the question of essence. In the case of the Forum Check, that question could be as simple as, “What is a great forum experience to you?” But for my work on video games, the question could be, “Why are young kids acting like they are addicted to video games?” The true depth of this question is better understood when you ask the question, “What is addiction?” The mystery of the iPads and kids becomes more profound when you realize that these kids have none of the preconditions for classical addictive response. In theory, it should be nearly impossible for them to become “addicted” in the classical sense of the word. And yet… That is probably the place to start: what is addiction anyway? If engineering school taught me anything, it was this: you have your best chance of solving a problem when you understand it. Or as they would say at Intel, “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” Despite George Lucas’s assertion that slapstick physical comedy can solve hard problems (Anakin Skywalker ends the war with the Trade Federation by flailing around in the cockpit of his purloined space fighter - Oh gee, let me smash a bunch of buttons, oh wow, look what happened!) In what most of us would call real life, we have to understand a problem before we can solve it.

There is a similar saying: “If you find out why the fence is there before you go tearing it down, you will meet a lot fewer angry dogs.” Uninformed problem-solving can create new, unanticipated problems.

I know, I know, lecturing again. This is going to take some time. I suppose what I’m leaning into is uncovering and sharing my own motivations. I have my question: why are these kids addicted? What is addiction anyway? Why do I care about understanding addiction? Because a well-defined problem is a problem half solved. If you don’t understand what is causing the problem, or even the problem that is being caused, it is hard to know what changes need to be made to solve it.

So I can make it personal: do I even know what addiction really is? I mean, I am not a doctor, and I don’t play one on TV. But people, just like me, are being blamed for causing a problem, for harming kids. And that is not cool. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

What we can say for certainty is these kids are suffering and so are their families. What started out as a (largely innocent) desire by adults to entertain and engage the children they love is this turned into a nightmare for many of them. But why? What is going on?

And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Parents thought they were giving their child a toy, and their kids act like their parents got them hooked on crack cocaine. What the hell is happening here?

Summary

To bring this to a close, I want to rework all my stories, teachings, and shares to leverage the way our brains engage with reality. My conclusions are so far removed from people’s predictions they are very, very hard to digest. So we need to go on a journey together. And I need to build, Tools for the Traveller. How do we navigate this idea space together?

I do love that idea, Tools For the Traveller. If you are going to go on a journey, you should take what you need to get you where you want to go. And as a guide, I need to plan better to make sure I have what my guests need, so I can take them where they want to go.

And this is their journey. They want to have this experience. I cannot, nor should I, try to experience it for them. Maybe this is why Matthew Dicks says, “your vacation story is not a story.” Any time you (well, I’m talking to me) try to share a conclusion, you are telling a vacation story.

20250622 - Your Brain - And Amazing Prediction Engine

How Your Brain Uses Predictions To Construct Your Perceptions and Emotions

There are some astounding discoveries coming out of neuroscience that I project will have far-reaching implications in the world of psychology, but also just every-day human interaction. One of the most interesting is the way our brain produces our experience of reality is actually the opposite of the way we experience reality. Put another way, we feel like “things happen to us” and we “react.” But if that is not how our brains work, what is actually happening?

It turns out, the neurocircuitry of the brain is too slow to successfully execute a stimulus response model. It would not work. Instead, the brain runs a kind of continuous “prediction loop” where it is constantly trying to anticipate what is about to happen and then make continuous, micro adjustments as sensory information becomes available. These “adjustments” are really about responding to prediction error.

Think of it this way. When I was a coach, I taught our players to be “moving on the pitch.” As the pitcher would rear back to throw the ball, we told the players to try and anticipate where the batter might hit it. We wanted them to already be in motion when the batter swung. It is much easier to change direction once you are moving, than to start moving from a dead stop in the direction you need to go. We called this, “getting a jump on it.” The brain does something very similar. It is constantly trying to anticipate what is next, preparing to make the right move, and like a ball player, if the information comes in that tells the brain to do something different, it is more energetically efficient (i.e. easier) to change course, than to start from a dead stop.

What does this mean in practical terms? In practice, this means the brain is continuously constructing our experience of reality from two massive streams of chaotic, confusing, and incomplete data. One set is our senses. Our eyes, ears, skin, smell, and so on. But it also includes the interoceptive network, the giant bundle of signals coming from inside our body. In practical terms, your brain is continuously trying to make sense of what is going on. It spends a lot of its computational bandwidth trying to anticipate what will come next.

Now, this feels completely counterintuitive. The world definitely feels like something happens to us, and we respond. I know that is how it feels to me. However, it turns out there is a gap between what happens to us and what we perceive. This is different from Stephen Covey’s Gap between stimulus and response. This is a gap between sensory data and what I will call, “sense making.” This gap happens at a level outside conscious awareness. I don’t want to call it subconscious because “the subconscious” is a suitcase word. It can hold lots of different meanings, and different people pack different meanings into that word. So let’s use the word preconscious. Your brain is trying to raise the information to the level of conscious awareness as quickly as possible, but it takes time for it to run through all the layers it has to before you can “become aware” of what is happening.

Putting it this way, your brain has information to work on: what just happened. It makes an “educated guess” as to what is most likely to happen next, then it compares its predication against input from the external senses and the interoceptive network. Basically, it compares what is actually happening to what it predicted would happen. The deviations are called “prediction errors,” and the brain uses prediction errors to adjust its next cycle of predictions.

Going back to our baseball analogy, the outfielder starts moving on the pitch, anticipating a line drive in front of him when the batter hits the ball deep to his left. The player anticipated the ball moving in one direction, but the sensory information from his eyes, transmitted through his visual cortex, tells him that the ball is going to be over his head to his right, so he immediately adjusts to the new information. He predicted one thing, but the facts indicated something else (prediction error), so he adjusted.

Here, however, is the catch. The exact same mechanism is used to determine how we feel. The reason that feelings seem to “trigger” us is that we only become consciously aware of them very late in the processing game. Basically, feelings, far from being this built-in, predetermined biological response to stimulus, are the result of how our brain tries to interpret the interoceptive signals coming to it from inside our body. In practice, the model of " we think than we feel" is very likely wrong. It feels this way because we become aware of the story much faster than the emotion, but the process is the same. What this means, and it is really mind-bending, is that our brain constructs our experiences from the dynamic interaction of predicting what will happen and adjusting to what really happens. Both perception and emotion are processed at the same time, but typically, we become aware of our thoughts before we become aware of the feelings giving rise to our belief that our thinking or what happens to us causes our feelings.

We experience our emotions as something that happens to us, but the science says our feelings are the brain’s way of making sense from the interoceptive signals from inside the body.

Okay, I know this is deep, but let’s go back to the ball player. He moves in anticipation of what he believes is mostly likely to happen next, then while he is in motion, his senses give him new information which is different from what he expected, but he adjusts. But how does he feel? Well, in order to execute, his body has to respond to his predictions. Muscles need to move, which means breathing has to provide enough oxygen, the heart has to pump that oxyinated blood, and other things as well need to prepare the body to perform. It was his anticipation of what would happen, and his intention to execute that kicked all of this off, but the channels of communication between the body and the brain are not one way, they are bidirectional, so the body can report back to the brain, “hey this is how we are executing.” This is what it feels like, and the brain then tries to interpret those sensory inputs within the context of its predictions. It is asking what does this mean? Those “feelings” or “emotions” get integrated into, or put another way, they color our perceptions. Our thoughts and intentions are imbued with the signal information from inside the body, which we experience as emotion.

The surprising result of the ball going over the head signals a large prediction error, so the brain kicks more energy so the player can turn faster, and run harder to close the gap and catch the ball. All of that physical action inside the body generates signals back to the brain - the interoceptive networks in the brain interpret these signals as emotion. But what emotion?

And that is the surprising key to this whole thing. Remember when I said the brain makes “educated guesses” about what will happen next? What education? The education of experience. Our mental models, our predictive engine, are shaped by our life experience. Not only cognitively, but emotionally. In essence, we learn what those signals in our body mean, and we assign concept words to those feelings. Those concept words are emotion words.

In short, we all, everyone one of us, are constructing our experience of reality, continuously, dynamically, all the time. And how we interpret the signals that make it to us is a combination of what has happened to us before, as well as what options we believe are afforded to us in the present moment. (These are called affordances.)

So what you might ask?

What good is knowing this? Well, once you begin to understand the way the brain, experience, and emotion really work, you can begin to use that information to work with your brain, (and others) to get better outcomes. This is a new model for understanding the human condition, and one reason I believe it is so powerful is that it has consistently demonstrated not only an explanatory capacity (it explains observed phenomena), it is the first time that I am aware of we have a predictive model for human behavior.

In a rather obscure experiment conducted by Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University, he demonstrated that our “priors” (prior experience) absolutely affect our perceptions below the level of conscious awareness.1 He was trying to understand the phenomenon behind the controversial internet meme “The Dress.” (Google it.) His experiment was groundbreaking because he used the model of constructed perception (as opposed to stimulus-response) to construct an experiment to test whether or not people’s past experience shaped how they literally saw “reality.” The answer: that is exactly what happens. Our brain uses what we think can happen, informed by what has happened to us in the past, to construct predictions that we use to perceive the world. Another term for perception in this context could be “disambiguation.” The world is noisy and chaotic, yet our brain finds ways to make sense of it, in real time, and move forward with tremendous confidence. Daniel Kahneman wrote about this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We have to sift through an extraordinary number of sensory data points and make sense of it all. Our brain does this not by merely reacting, but by anticipating (projecting) and adjusting (predictive error correction). The really astounding discovery is that we process emotions the same way.

Your brain doesn’t generate emotions, it constructs them, at the exact same time, in pretty much the same way, that is, makes sense of what is happening in the world around us, it tries to make sense of the world inside us. Only we become aware of one before the other. Most of the work of constructing emotions happens preconsciously, which gives rise to the sensation that emotions “just hit us.” We rarely, if ever, see them as they form. However, there are times we can sense the ambiguity. There are times when the emotions are not clear. And that realization opens the door to a new way to think about emotion regulation, and how perhaps we might be able to manage ourselves, and our relationships with others a little more effectively.

  1. A Pair of Crocs to Match the Socks, Scientific American, 2019. www.scientificamerican.com/article/a… ↩︎

The Weird Science of How We Make Emotions

What if Everything You Knew About Emotion was Wrong?

Over the past week, I have been reading the book, How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. And when I say, “read,” I mean “listen to.” However, the reality is that I do a bit of both. I listen, then pause and go to the Kindle version of the book and highlight or mark key concepts.

While listening to Dr. Barrett’s book, I was struck by the amazing similarity between her work and that of Stephen Grossberg. You probably have never heard of Stephen Grossberg because he works tirelessly in a very obscure niche between psychology, neuroscience, and physics.

Grossberg’s goal was to understand how the observed behavior of neurons (neuroscience) can explain the observed behaviors of humans (the discipline of psychology). Very few psychologists are trained in neuroscience, and very few neuroscientists are trained in psychology. Neither of those groups is trained in physics.

What does physics have to do with the brain? One of Isaac Newton’s great contributions (similar to Einstein’s) was not only a theory of how physical reality is structured but the mathematics to model it. We have amazing equations like Force = Mass * Velocity^2. I used to tell my baseball players that a lighter bat moving faster can hit with more force than a heavy bat moving slowly.

This, it turns out, is counterintuitive. Early baseball players played with very large, heavy bats. They believed a big thing (the big bat) hitting a little thing (the ball) would produce the best results. However, controversial home run king Barry Bonds swung the lightest bat he was allowed to swing. Modern professional players focus on swing speed and exit velocity. Newton’s laws of physics shape how they play. Early players’ intuitions were wrong. And this, sadly, turns out to be a case for many of our “intuitive” senses about reality.

A great model can unlock better understanding of the way the world works. Of course, there are limits. Newton’s classic mechanics gave way to quantum mechanics, which challenges our understanding of a great many things.

Einstein’s great discovery of relativity is known by its equation, e = mc^2 . But you typically do not see equations like that in medicine, neuroscience, or psychology. The most common type of mathematics used in the “people” sciences is Bayesian statistics, a formal set of disciplines designed to help scientists make sense of data gathered from experiments. This means most psychologists and neuroscientists tend to form a hypothesis and test it for validity. Physicists build models which have valid predictive capabilities.

Grossberg is perhaps the only person working in the “soft science” fields I know of building such models. He wanted to understand how a group of neurons, wired together, can produce many of the psychological effects researchers gather from their studies.

In essence, using cross-disciplinary skills, he is trying to connect the dots. How do bundles of neurons collected into a three-pound (1.5-kilogram) ball make a human mind?

Grossberg is not well known to most people; however, he was the first to educate other scientists and engineers on his discoveries about how neural networks work. Because he also focused on creating mathematical models to explain how these networks work, engineers could build software simulations of his networks. Thus, Grossberg seeded a generation of work which has led, more or less in a straight line, to our modern artificial intelligence systems, the “large language models” or LLMs behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

But Grossberg was not trying to build artificial intelligence; he was trying to understand human intelligence.

I have been reading his textbook for the last year a little at a time, and it is dense. What’s more, Grossberg suffers from a lot of self-reference. He mostly refers to his own papers, and he is very rarely cited in other people’s papers. This has the unfortunate side effect of making him look like a bit of a crank, or at the very least an oddball.

Sadly, even science seems to be subject to the laws of human prestige. If we can’t know for certain the truth (because every claim is hard to verify), we resort to good old-fashioned popularity contests. If enough people not only build on your work but say they build on your work and give you credit for doing so, then you must be right.

From my point of view, since Grossberg toils away in the gaps between disciplines, effectively belonging to multiple camps, he belongs to no camps. However, recently, the work of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett on understanding human emotion seems to me at least to lend tremendous credence to Grossberg’s work. While she never directly cites him or mentions him, her work is consistent with Grossberg’s assertions and other recent neuroscience discoveries that the brain does not work the way we believe it does.

Just as the early baseball players managed to play the game despite the mistaken belief that a heavier bat was more effective than a lighter one, many scientists and clinicians have been able to work with people using incorrect understandings of the human brain’s wiring.

The first major myth of the brain, one that is near and dear to any determinist’s heart, is the idea that the brain is a stimulus and response engine. B.F. Skinner built his entire career around this idea, that the brain is stimulated and responds. End of story.

Only… the evidence - for quite a while has been mounting that this is not actually how the brain works. It is not fast enough to be only a stimulus and response engine. So it does something even more incredible.

The human brain is a proactive prediction engine. Now, that won’t mean very much to you at this point in time, but the difference is profoundly important. And it is this understanding that is of particular interest to me, because I think it directly relates to why kids are having so much trouble with video games, especially free games designed to “hook” the user.

250617 - Knowledge Disruption

Everything you Know About Emotions is Wrong

One of the most interesting books I have read in the past few years was Journey of the Mind by Ogi Ogas. This book gave a very simplified explanation of the work of Stephen Grossberg. Grossberg’s work, admittedly, is really dense, and he cites his own research quite a bit. However, the concepts he puts forward are amazing, especially because much of his early work inspired other engineers and scientists to create the kinds of neural networks and learning systems that created generative AI— the software that is changing our world.

The reason I am enjoying the book How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett is that her work to a large degree supports some of the key concepts put forward by Grossberg and Ogas. Namely, our brains operate differently than we think.

You have no doubt heard that the amygdala (that little walnut-sized part of your brain buried deep inside your “lizard brain” at the top of the spinal column) is responsible for “fear.”

Feldman’s meticulous research has revealed that this just isn’t so. In particular, I love her work because she has undertaken the daunting task of trying to reverse almost a hundred years of scientific misconception. And if there’s one thing science, academia, and most humans love to do is latch onto an idea and hold it for dear life.

Adam Grant pointed this out beautifully in his book Think Again. Instead of actually rethinking or reconsidering flawed ideas, nearly all humans have a playbook we run instead. In various orders, in various ways, we run through three “personas” in rapid succession. We will take on the role of:

  • Preacher— extolling the virtues of our threatened belief.
  • Prosecutor— pointing out the flaws of the new belief.
  • Politician— we will pander to other believers and try to rally their support against the new idea.

It appears to be part of the human condition of achievement and leadership, that when you climb to the pinnacle of any area that holds influence over others, you want to establish a “realm” and defend it. Not all realms are political or physical. Some are ideological. And according to Dave McRaney, these are non-trivial. We find safety in groups. In his book How Minds Change, he could not find a single instance of a high-profile “change of mind,” where someone who was a card-carrying member of a controversial community changed their mind then left the group. In fact, the opposite happened. They had to leave the group first. And only after they felt safe and supported were they able to reconsider the beliefs, thoughts, and opinions they held for so long.

We love disruption in industry, but not so much in ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. We crave certainty. We want to know. So for me, the most impressive part of Feldman Barrett’s work is the uphill battle she is facing trying to reveal the misconceptions we have held for decades, and in some cases millennia, about what emotions are, how they are formed, and how we perceive them.

That is no small task. And what’s the punchline? The amygdala is not responsible for fear. It is a part of a very complex system that is responsible for generating all of our emotions. The idea that there are parts of the brain dedicated to certain emotions is, what I would call an “organistic” view of the brain, that certain “circuits” are dedicated to do certain things, like the organs of the body are organized to perform certain clearly identifiable functions such as lungs for breathing, stomach for digestion, heart for circulating the blood. But the brain is different. To say some dedicated part of the brain is responsible for creating emotion is like saying some part of the silicon on the computer chip inside your phone is responsible for running your texting application, and only that part. That’s all it does. Clearly, the central processing unit (CPU) in your phone runs ALL the software on your phone, every app, in addition to running an operating system that is always active.

The human brain is not so different. I love Feldman Barrett’s analogy that the brain is like a sports team. The roster is bigger than the number of players on the field, and depending upon the situation in the game, different players may be on the field, some go in, some leave, a few stay most of the time, but when the game was over we say “the team won.” Well, who actually did the winning? Nearly everyone contributed to the win, some more than others, but on a different day it could change yet again. The brain works like this, with different systems contributing in different amounts, often to produce the same or similar outcomes.

Her big finding is that emotions are constructed much like thoughts or memories. How we experience emotions, as to thoughts might be another thing, but there is no one “fear circuit” in the brain centered on the amygdala or elsewhere. The amygdala plays a part in lots of emotions, and seems to have more to do with novelty and cue detection than only fear processing.

Monday Minute - June 16 2025

Monday Minute

I miss writing my daily blog. It was interesting. As a tiny experiment, I really enjoyed and committed myself to writing a blog. I captured information throughout the day. But as soon as it was over, my grand plan, my intention to “just slow down” a bit, fell to pieces. I just didn’t do it.

I am not entirely sure why. I have a few habits that I have been committed to with some degree of rigor. Four in particular.

  1. I check in with my emotions.
  2. I read a daily “devotional."
  3. I review 5 highlights on Readwise.
  4. I read an inspirational / spiritual entry from Our Daily Bread.

So I try to track my emotions, read a little, review what I have learned, and connect with my faith.

I have a list of other habits I would like to follow, like exercise, writing, meditation, or even yoga for stretching (this becomes more important the longer you live); however, none are as consistent as those four. Probably because those four have some kind of streak counter in them.

But they are all also, largely consumption and intellectual activities. None of them are what I would call production activities. Where I need to produce something. Lately, it has been easy to defer producing. Despite all my “knowledge”, I find myself still to be human and subject to tides of emotion and motivation.

There is one thing that I do not do daily, but I have been committed to for some time, and that is drawing cartoons. I don’t know why I like it or do it, except it makes me happy. But those tend to be created in bursts, batches of 3-5 at a time, which I can schedule to post on social media and Comic Fury.

The year feels half over already. Now I find myself in the dreary, long tunnel of development, trying to build a business? Trying to establish some kind of positive impact with kids and video games. The time of the exciting ideas now gives way to, you have to do the “grindy” work of actually getting good at what you want to do.

This, of course, is a challenge for me. I suppose it is a challenge for anyone, but some part of me wants to say, “Yeah, but it is more of a challenge for me!" Sure, it is. I heard this cynical throwaway line from a trailer for a movie I never watched and can’t remember the name. It goes: It is the most ordinary thing in the world to want to believe you’re special.

When I get into this kind of funk, I feel like I need to go back to basics, which for me goes back to a core tenet of faith. Try to live with:

  • Humility
  • Faith
  • Courage

I find it fascinating that when someone loses motivation, they are discouraged. It seems strange that courage, which sounds like a special case of facing danger or difficulty, is nevertheless linked with the motivation to charge out and do what you want to do. The gap between a good idea and executing it always feels… lonely.

Hello, Monday. '

To List Or Not To List

To List Or Not To List

Today’s question is about the validity of the humble to-do list. Or perhaps you think of it as the vaunted to-do list. It feels like a thousand years ago I heard a story about Charles M. Schwab, the President of Bethlehem Steel (not to be confused with Charles R. Schwab, the founder of the eponymous investing stock brokerage and financial services company).

Steel-Schwab, let’s call him, was obsessed with efficiency, and in 1918, he hired Ivy Lee, an efficiency expert, to advise him on how he could get more done. Lee’s advice, which later became known as the Ivy Lee Method, was the following:

  • At the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks to accomplish the next day—no more than six.
  • Rank these six tasks in order of their true importance.
  • The next day, start with the first task and work on it until it is finished before moving on to the second task.
  • Continue down the list in order. Any unfinished tasks move to the next day’s list.
  • Repeat this process daily.

I read in the book The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes the “secret” method of billionaires. It was the same. Major a list with no more than six items. Later, Jay Papasan would write a book called The ONE Thing, and he would advise cutting the list to a single most important thing.

I can’t recall where I read it, but another method was to take a piece of paper (8.5x11 for Americans and Canadians, A4 if you are from the rest of the world), and fold it three times. You will end up with a sheet of paper that is about the size of a standard American Index Card (three inches by five inches, or A7 cards for all-yall in the rest of the world - ROW).

It is hard to fit more than six times on a piece of paper this size - but if you have really tiny print and you turn it portrait, you can pack a lot of information onto such a card.

But the real point is to focus. There are a couple of items here with Ivy Lee’s and Chet Holmes methods.

  1. At the end of the day, make your list.
  2. Decide what is most important.
  3. Focus on one item at a time and work it to completion.

I saw Mr. Papasan speak at an EO Arizona event in Scottsdale. What I recall from the talk is that they limited the list to one thing because it takes mental energy and self-discipline to force yourself to focus on a prioritized list, and it turns out humans do not have these in an unlimited supply.

Therefore, his advice was to pick one thing and focus on that. The one most important thing. After that, have at it, but make sure you apply your precious, limited self-discipline doing what is most important.

So in that regard, Lee and Papasan were in alignment. Choose the night before - which is a form of Hemingway Bridge, then decide what matters most, focus on that first thing.

Note: What is a Hemingway Bridge? According to Tiago Forte, Ernest Hemingway wrapped up each writing session by writing a few sentences about what he intended to do next as he ended his writing session.

Making your list at the end of the day has the following advantage: your head is already filled with the context of working all day. If you will, your working memory is loaded with context. You know what you wanted to get done when you ran out of time. You will lose this felt sense of what is important once your brain moves onto other tasks, like dinner, socializing, and resting for the evening. So capturing the intent while you have it all fresh in your memory is most effective.

But Does It Work?

Look, lists of things to do have been around forever. Human brains are great at storing narratives, stories, but not facts and arbitrary lists of things. Every home has some kind of recipe book, but I have never been in a home that had one book, let alone a shelf or cupboard full of story summaries. We remember stories. But steps, procedures, ingredients, we need mnemonic aids.

But the prioritized list? Well, there are two problems I have run into.

  1. Everything is important to someone. Very few people put things on a to-do list that does not need to get done (but it does happen).
  2. We don’t always control our lists. Priorities (and plans) can change in an instant.

In my next post, I will share the task management and list tips that have been most useful to me.

Which Requires More Discipline?

Which is harder? Doing something you don’t want to do, or resisting a temptation to do something you know you shouldn’t do.

Day 15 - Looking Forward

The end of an experiment

Well, this is it. I have reached day 15 of my tiny experiment in micro blogging. I would say there is not much micro about my blogging. The shorter entries are at least 500 words, and the longer ones over 3,000. Now that is very different from writing a book, or even a journal article; however, I do believe I have shared a lot of good ideas that are grounded in some pretty solid research.

Some topics are debatable. For example, I think Meta and Roblox are doing everything they can to refute the harm they cause. They might even believe it. When you study self-rationalization, you start to realize there is almost no behavior humans cannot rationalize.

As a matter of point, I really try to do my best to not ever consider myself a victim. Why? Because I have seen people use resentment and feelings of victimization to rationalize some really awful behavior. I am not saying there are not victims, and bad things don’t happen to good people. What I mean is that personally, the mindset of seeing myself as a “victim” usually leads to some undesirable behavior and generates more suffering than it cures. The book TED - The Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald expands on this idea at great length.

For me, the rule goes something like this:

  • Treat others with compassion
  • For myself, live with humility, faith, and courage.

Now, Kristin Neff, a prominent researcher at the University of Texas and expert in self-compassion, wrote that your ability to show compassion to others will be gated by your ability to show compassion to yourself. Brené Brown wrote about her in one of her books, and whose website I have visited (https://self-compassion.org) and read content from convinced me that being excessively harsh to myself created conditions where I believed it was “okay” to be “less” harsh to others. I was doing them a kindness by not holding other people to the same impossible standards of perfection I was holding myself to.

Wow, talk about a load of self-rationalizing garbage. I had no business being so negative to myself, and definitely no right to treat other people even a fraction of the way I was treating them. If you struggle with perfectionism, negative self-talk, and in general treating yourself like hot garbage, I recommend the book Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine. However, in truth, the book that changed my life the most was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. One day I stopped projecting myself into imaginary future fights and I stopped relieving my worst memories. I was able to calm down and get centered in the present moment. Morning pages (see The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, or better, just Google it, or Google Tim Ferriss’s and Morning Pages) gave me ways to get calm, grounded, and centered.

From the space of being grounded, I rediscovered my faith, not as a source of guilt and judgement. I am a fan of Rob Bell. (Love Wins). I personally believe the Bible was written by real men and women, for a real audience, at a real moment in time. They were all figuring it out (the humility to recognize they did not have the answers), with prayer (faith), and imperfect living (courage).

That is the most effective move of living I have found so far.

But nothing about that says, “I am a victim.” Nor does it say, “Do not take care of victims.” And nowhere in there does it say judge. In fact, the Bible is pretty explicit on that point. We are not supposed to judge. That is someone else’s job. I believe in discernment, evaluating, and sorting, but I believe the Buddhists and the Bible (Judeo-Christian) are in alignment with the ideas behind three Buddhist principles.

  1. Non-attachment.
  2. Non-permanence.
  3. Non-judgement.

If I recall correctly, the first parable that captures this actually comes from the ancient Sufi tradition. I will start this story, like all good fables start, with four famous words…

The King

Once upon a time, there was a king given to wild emotional swings. From the heights of joy to the depths of despair, daily he flew from rail to rail, wearing himself, his family, and his court out both physically and emotionally. He offered a reward to anyone who could help him with his exasperating life. A Sufi brought him a small box and explained that he had the resolution to the King’s problems. The king asked the mystic what price he wanted for the medicine. The man replied that it was worth more than his entire kingdom, but he would present it as a gift if the King promised to keep it with him always and follow his instructions without fail.

The king agreed. The man handed the king the box, then said, like a doctor prescribing a treatment plan for a patient, “First, you must wear this ring at all times. Second, whenever anything happens, before you declare it good or evil, you must pause for a moment. Then you must read the inscription upon the ring.”

The mystic then turned and left the king with his box and his ring. The king opened the box and saw the simple gold band tucked in velvet cushions. He lifted the ring and slipped it onto his finger, where it fit perfectly. He then read the inscription. It said simply, “This too shall pass.”

From that moment on, the kingdom knew peace.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story, as I took it away, was that it is a very human condition to assume that whatever is happening to us will continue to go that way forever. In fact, as a species, we do a really great job of trying to convince ourselves that whatever we do is permanent. We love certainty. We love predictability. Until they confine us, strangle us, and bleed all joy out of our lives. We love adventure, change, and variability until the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, and the unknown leave us exhausted and emotionally drained. The story is the reminder to take the larger view that nothing is really permanent and moments will change.

I noticed over the decade that I walked my dog, Cookie, every morning to the school track and back, about a mile and a half, sometimes two, **no two days were ever the same. I think it was healthy for me to spend that amount of time every morning in nature. I saw trees broken apart from storms, then heal, then grow again. Some days there were other dogs, some days it was just me on the Log Beast. But every single situation passed, and something similar, but new, took its place.

The Baby

Once upon a time, in ancient China, a wise and respected Zen monk lived in a small fishing village. He made his home in a comfortable cottage alone on top of a low hill. One day, a farmer and his wife knocked on the monk’s door early in the morning. The monk opened the door to greet the man and his wife and saw that they also had their daughter with a newborn infant in tow.

The farmer explained that his daughter had become pregnant and named the wise monk as the father. The monk simply replied, “Is that so?” The farmer insisted it was so, and then told the monk that he must raise the child. The monk said again, “Is that so?” The farmer insisted it was since the father must take responsibility for his child. So the monk took the baby from the miserable girl, and then proceeded to raise the child as his own.

He fed the baby, cared for the baby, and loved the baby as a true father would. His reputation in the village was ruined, but it seemed to make little difference to the monk as far as anyone could tell.

Then, one day, some months later, the farmer returned with his daughter (still miserable). The monk greeted him and asked how he could help. The farmer, now somewhat sheepish, but still very angry with his daughter, explained that the true father of the child was, in fact, a boy from the fish market. The child’s father was the son of the fishmonger. “Is that so?” was what the monk said. “Yes!" said the miserable girl, speaking for the first time. “So you must give us her baby back,” the farmer said roughly.

“Is that so?” The monk asked.

“Yes!” The farmer and his daughter insisted together. So the monk returned the healthy, happy baby boy to his mother and grandfather.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story, as I can remember it, goes something like this: the monk was never attached to his reputation, his solitary way of life, or even later the child. That last part seems rather cold to me personally, but he accepted what life offered him in the moment with love and dedication, and when life returned to demand back what it had given him, he released it without grief, moaning, or objection. The story does not ever actually say how the monk felt or what his thoughts were, but the reader (or listener) is left to ponder his words. “Is that so?” Maybe not all things are as they appear. And sometimes, when a situation (or a person) is brought into our life, they will not be with us as long as we hope or fear. In fact, and this is the moral of the story, like the King who knew that “this too shall change”, the monk knew the only certainty was change. Therefore, the best way to handle any situation in life is to make the most of it while you are in it, appreciate it for what it is, but be ready to let it go when its time has passed.

Now for the final story.

The Farmer

This is the most famous story as near as I can tell. I heard it in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, it was in the book The Power of Now, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff included it in her book Tiny Experiments. This story is quoted more than any other fable I have read, and I’m certain it is in many more books in my collection than I have mentioned. (I should probably start linking each book I find it in to my digital second brain to get a feel for how often this story comes up.) I feel confident you have heard of it. It goes like this…

Once upon a time, a farmer discovered a beautiful black stallion in the woods and was able to lead the wild horse back to his farm. His neighbors saw the horse and immediately commented, “Oh, this is a sign of good luck!"

The farmer replied, “We shall see.”

A week later, the farmer’s son was trying to tame the horse by riding it. The horse was strong and wild, and it threw the son from the saddle. He fell awkwardly and broke his leg. The next day, upon learning of the boy’s injury from the doctor who set and plastered the leg, the neighbors agreed, “You are right, the horse is an ill omen. Look at the misfortune you have suffered.”

The farmer simply replied, “We shall see.”

Later that week, the king’s army marched into town looking for conscripts. The farmer’s son was overlooked because of his broken leg. The townsfolk, many of whom had lost their sons to the forced recruitment, looked upon the farmer with envy. “You are right,” they said, “The horse was a blessing. You still have your son!”

As ever, the farmer replied, “We shall see.”

The Moral of the Story

This story, like the others, contains hints and flavors of the others, but the core message is that it is in human nature to rush to judgement. We always want to determine if something is good or bad, and then assign it that value forever. The farmer’s refrain, “We shall see,” is a reminder to be patient, not to rush to judgement, and to be open to possibility. The farmer advocates for curiosity. We don’t know what things mean as much as we want to.

I read once that the reason we love stories so much is that stories combine three things and make them happen in sync that we get:

  • Events
  • Feelings
  • Meaning

All at the same time. Like, they happen simultaneously. We can see what happens, we know how the characters (and in a great story ourselves) feel, and most importantly we know why it matters, we know what it means. Life lived in real time is rarely so clean and clear. Often we’re not sure what the hell is going on while we’re right in the middle of things. We don’t have all the information, the context can be jumbled, and it is coming at us in real time so we are sorting it out as we live through it. What’s more, our emotions can be a mess too. As Pixar made so brilliantly clear in the movie Inside Out, emotions are complex combinations of often conflicting feelings. And as for meaning? How can we possibly know what something means when we don’t know what is really happening or how we really feel about it? Yeah, life is good, but it is also challenging and more often than not confusing. Or we have done such a good job getting our life under control that it feels completely predictable and boring and we begin to worry about its significance or the fear that it will never be different overwhelms us.

The bottom line is that we often have to reflect upon what has happened to us to sort out the events, the emotions, and the effect of it all. We just don’t know while we’re going through it. But later, with the advantage and perspective of time, we can piece it all together.

These three stories bring to life the principles that can help us overcome some cognitive biases that affect all of us.

  1. The tendency to project whatever happens to us in the present moment as a permanent condition. It isn’t. It will most certainly change.
  2. The tendency to attach to life’s conditions and resist unexpected (and unwanted) change.
  3. The tendency to rush to judgement.

In summary, the antipodes are:

  • Recognize that things will change and use that knowledge to appreciate fleeting joy, or endure temporary hardships.
  • Be open to what life brings you.
  • Live with curiosity and not judgement.

Life Advice

Wow, that’s a lot of life advice for a micro blog. I think these thoughts are sparked by my daughter’s graduation. Last night, thousands of kids and their families packed into the basketball stadium on Boise State’s campus and watched the graduation ceremony.

This marks the final of three journeys from infant to adult for my wife and me. Hopefully, there will be grandchildren to carry on the tradition, but for Stacy and me, our kids have completed a long and worthy journey to independence. And as I sit here, I realize that each of them is now engaged in their own version of the same journey I am on, and the one you are on. Figuring it all out. The prescribed answers are over. The clear path ahead is complete, and we are left in the wonderful, wild, woolly world where choices have consequences, we just can’t know what most of those will be at the times we have to make the best decisions we can.

College may have prepared us for a career (maybe), but what has prepared us for life? Each other, I hope. It is on that journey, I find that doing my best to keep faith, live with humility, and act with courage is surprisingly effective.

It does not prevent me from being afraid, frustrated, angry, or hurt, but neither does it leave me stuck, anxious, or bitter.

Compassionate, courageous, and curious to me feel like better ways to approach the world. Or as my dad put it,

  1. Set an intention.
  2. Get in motion.
  3. Pay attention.

Compassion orients me toward doing what I can to recognize the suffering of others, and if I can do that, I can do something about it. Courage gives me the motivation to take action. And curiosity keeps me in the present moment so I am aware that maybe, just maybe, life is offering me something better than I imagined.

Conclusion

I have found this experiment in sharing my thinking and my thoughts wonderfully liberating. It has also given me a… a space? A venue? A medium in which to explore my own thoughts and questions. After today, I will take a short break, about a week, then take the best of what worked and drop the rest.

My initial reaction is to slow down the posting schedule. And I haven’t decided yet, but I feel like I should take the best of this blog and migrate it to my speaking blog, but keep this one running, sort of as a kind of daily journal. Or rather, a daily journal.

I feel good about the commitment and the sprint. I honestly had zero expectations for what would happen here; I simply committed to doing it. I followed Le Cunff’s suggestion: Set a purpose, an action, a cadence, and make it trackable. Fifteen days. Fifteen posts. Done. One a day. The purpose? To learn and think very publicly. And then see what happens. And for now, what I have learned is:

  • I enjoy it.
  • I am having more interesting conversations with people.
  • Questions are more inclusive than conclusions.
  • When people feel like they can contribute, they are more likely to participate.
  • Focusing on only one thing and being known only for one thing may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
  • I have a lot more to say than I thought.
  • People value what I am sharing more than I expected.
  • I still have a lot of questions.
  • I created enough content to write a book.
  • I am going to write a book for parents and educators about kids and video games.

Day 14 - Reflections

Reflections

It is Saturday as I sit here and type this. My final posts will be written and published on the road. I still have not answered some of my biggest questions, but I do have some actions I can take next. First, I think I will start a blog series on my main blog, that will be more open-ended and authentic. I will try to be a little less polished and authoritative. The conversation to me is more interesting than the answer. Don’t get me wrong, I love having the answers to why things work the way they do. However, I appreciate engaging with people more.

Also, it frees me up to share more often because it nerfs my perfectionism.

Note: Someone asked me recently about the expression to nerf something. As far as I am aware, it comes from the video game world where a weapon in a game would be overpowered (OP), and the developers realizing it would change the game device (weapon, spell, charm, tool, character class, etc…) to be less effective. Like a nerf version of a sword. I might look cool, but it was no longer so dangerous or effective.

Therefore, my first reflection is that I want to write more often, probably 2-3 times per week, but be more open. Perhaps I will focus on the weekly question.

The second thing is that I am going to share more of me. There’s an idea that you must focus on one topic and be known for one thing. The truth is all my interests are part of who I am and they are interconnected. Also, Keith Roberts, the creator of the Oak Journal, who I am lucky enough to call a friend, told me to have four to five core messages. Well, he might not have said messages, but interests. I think most of us have more than a single interest, although we might have a single career.

And in the spirit of Tiny Experiments, focusing on only one thing is just another form of rigid linear thinking.

Lessons Learned

I would say that along the way, creating this blog has had an impact on some of my other habits. For one, my morning pages routine did get decimated. I have many blank pages in my journal. I just can’t do all the kinds of writing I want to do in the amount of time I allocate in the morning.

However, I have also learned, or at least I have had my own learning process confirmed. Being patient and persistent makes knowledge and methods available to me that I feel should have been available from the moment I started, but for whatever reason, they did not become apparent or available until I spent some time working with the tool, material, or domain. For example, I now know that I can publish micro.blog content directly from inside of Obsidian. So my new writing process has taken that into account. I learned how to upload images from my phone to Micro.blog using the iOS app, and then I can paste the links directly into the Obsidian draft of the blog post and they work. There are a few more steps, but my overall frustration with the process has dropped dramatically. It is still easier to use this system with MarsEdit on my MacBook, but only needing a portable keyboard and my phone opens the universe to me for publishing blog posts easily.

That strikes me as very cool.

I have not decided if I will continue to use this platform, but I feel like there could be room for something here. Matthew Dicks blogs his personal life constantly and has for years. However, there is some risk as his entire life was turned upside down by people who edited his blog posts with malicious intent and then blackmailed him and his employer with it. There are reasons people are not always open and vulnerable. Sometimes, vulnerability means exactly what we fear it means, and not what Brené Brown tells us it means in its best use. When you are vulnerable, you are in fact open to being hurt.

Shopping

As part of my one-bag travel, I am always on the hunt for products or clothes that make the experience better or more effective. One thing I have struggled to find (until today) is sandals. I had some Xero sandals, but I did not like the way they fit, and they are extraordinarily flat. Now, the whole point of the Xero shoes is to have a shoe that feels barefoot, but there’s sort of a point where it’s a little too flat and I just never felt good about wearing those sandals. Teva’s, sort of the granddaddy of the sports sandal, are surprisingly thick. In general, they have very thick curves souled and thick straps making them heavy and surprisingly bulky.

Aside: Arch Supports Are Stupid Until you hear someone point out how dumb something is, it can be hard to realize when a piece of marketing hype is just stupid. One of my favorites is “Arch Support”. Or perhaps it is one of my favorites to ridicule. You see, arches provide support, they don’t need support. Think of the arch de Triumph in Paris, or the famous arch in St. Louis. Arches do not need support. They are support structures. I am not a doctor, but I am an engineer, and the arch is a marvel of engineering the way it distributes force from a top to the sides. That is what arches do. Now, according to the shoe makers - who may or may not have doctors advising them - weak arches are likely the cause of having arch support and not conditioning your foot to do its job. In other words, walking barefoot causes your arches to flex, which stretches the ligaments and builds up the muscles that hold the structure together. But, part of the key is to switch from heel striking to landing on the ball or pad, or side of your foot. Most shoes with heels, or thick padded soles encourage heel striking (letting your heel hit the ground first). A more natural way of walking is for the ball, pad, or side of your foot to touch down first. I was surprised how much this changes the way I walk, from body position to the entire motion of my leg, yet despite that, I have been a fan of zero drop style shoes for years now.

So back to my sandal adventure, my son’s partner, Shelby, recommended Bedrock sandals. This particular brand has a Vibram sole, the same kind they use on hiking boots, but they are relatively thin, with a decent “lug” which gives them good “grip." They are zero drop (flat) and they are light. These are the best compromise I have found for a travel sandal that can earn a permanent spot in my one-bag travel kit.

There are two styles of Bedrocks, a thicker model and a thinner. I purchased the thinner variety, and my initial impressions are extremely positive.

I also had one of those strangely serendipitous shopping experiences where REI had a shirt I liked, but never in my size, and as I was walking out of the store, I literally said, “I wish they had this in my size,” and the shirt on the top of the pile - that was not there the day before - was in my size. So I grabbed it and I bought it before I changed my mind.

So it was a good start to the day, and I got back to the house before anyone else besides my wife was awake. Stealth mission complete.

More Reflections

So, getting back to video games and addiction. One of the problems I have with the word addiction is that people use the word both casually and seriously. One example is the new game Balatro. And by new, I mean this is not a classic game that has been around for decades. Balatro is a roguelike deck building game that uses poker-like elements for gameplay.

But first, some definitions:

  • Roguelike: A “roguelike” game is characterized by procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. These games often emphasize strategic decision-making and replayability.
  • Deck Building: A deck-building game is a card game where players start with a small set of weak cards and gradually acquire more powerful cards to build a stronger deck as the game progresses. The goal is to strategically improve your deck to achieve victory.
  • Poker: Seriously? I don’t need to describe this, do I? But just in case, ChatGPT generated this: Poker is a card game where players bet on the strength of their hands, aiming to win chips or money. It involves skill, strategy, and luck, with players trying to form the best hand or bluff opponents into folding. The most common variant is Texas Hold’em.

Okay, a number of people describe Balatro as addictive. But is it really? First, it passes my two critical criteria.

  1. You can buy it.
  2. You do not have to be online to play it.

But then why is it addictive? And is it really? Well, one thing about the game is that it is definitely compelling. But is it something you can set down when you want to?

In my experience, yes; however, I hear (and read) from a lot of people that the game is “addictive.”

In my experience, what makes the game so compelling is its well-balanced play and replayability. It does not appear to have any of the devices or mechanisms that are common in addictive games.

Basically, in an addictive game, the core mechanic is luck. A boss. Of mine once explained the difference between gambling and risk-taking.

In gambling, there is nothing you can do to change the outcome in your favor. When you are taking a risk, you can influence the odds of a good outcome in your favor through research, hard work, and discipline.

In a gamble, you are along for the ride. Pull the slot machine lever, throw the dice, hope you get the right cards. But with a risk, you get to make choices in how you deploy your resources, or trading one object for another.

When games lean toward manipulative, in my experience, they tend to hide information. If you think of Tetris, it showed you the next piece, but also their primary mode of difficulty was speed. As you advanced, the game got faster. However, with gem matching games, they drop batches of gems, and the boards themselves “appear” to be randomly generated. You really have no idea what is coming next.

Roguelike games, with their random generation, seem similar; however, usually, the random elements are largely cosmetic or aesthetic. The layout of the map, but the types of enemies you fight are largely consistent, and getting past them requires skill. But in manipulative games, the difficulties err on the side of never quite being something you can master because, like in a gamble, they don’t want you to experience the consistency of developed skill; they want to keep your brain in a mode of experiencing experimentation. They are designed to produce a variable reward, not a consistent reward based upon skill.

Interesting, Balatro will show you the entire deck of cards remaining to be played in a hand. This single piece of information, allowing you to calculate odds by showing the deck (something they would never do in Las Vegas), is a pretty compelling argument to me that the designers of Balatro are trying to help you improve your decision-making.

Taking calculated risks to achieve rewards is a valid form of decision-making. And decision-making that balances available information, resources, outcomes, and probabilities, is a skill. In fact, it is one of the most important skills in being an entrepreneur.

Also, once you recognize certain hands can produce certain point yields, your decision-making can become faster and more consistent.

Consequently, I am inclined to believe that Balatro is what I would call a good game. That is a game where:

  1. The developer is trying to entertain the player.
  2. The developer is not trying to steal attention and sell it to someone else.
  3. The game builds skills that can produce reliable or consistent results.
  4. You can voluntarily put the game down when you need to or want to.

There may be other attributes that I’m not considering, but so far, I feel like this analysis works well.

Day 13 - Connection

Day 13 - Connection

Only a few more days to go, and this little experiment will be finished. And interestingly, I feel like I have learned a lot during this period. On the topic of keeping kids safe online, some of the conversations I’ve been having offline include:

  • Kids as young as 10 years old (4th and 5th) graders, mostly the boys, are “hacking” school computers so they can access pornhub and bring up disturbing images and videos on school campus. Teachers are not trained as IT professionals, nor do they want to be.
  • Kids in elementary school are experiencing sleep deprivation and are having behavior issues in class as a result of having devices (phones and tablets) in their rooms at night. The parents think their kids are sleeping, but the teachers see evidence to the contrary. What behaviors? Fragmented attention, falling asleep in class, the kids are tired and grouchy, like cranky babies.
  • Parents of girls who have gotten onto social media (almost all of them below the minimum age of 13 - how can we take age protections seriously from Meta when they still do nothing to stop underage kids from getting online?), report that their daughters are stressed, depressed, and anxious all the time. When they pry the phone away from their kids and force them to take a break, they return to “normal”.
  • Family therapists are getting pounded with requests from families about child behavior issues around devices.
  • Boys especially become violent when parents try to take their devices away. Fortnite is one of the biggest offenders.
  • New York City just passed a ban on phones in schools.
  • Every single person I talk to is fascinated by the brain development of children and the way video games are designed.
  • Parents are looking for solutions, like could video games help their autistic and ADHD children adapt?
  • Nongaming parents (and some gaming parents) have a hard time knowing what kind of games to pick for their kids.
  • Young adult men are just as fascinated by this topic as many parents. They have friends who have gotten lost and have lost motivation, and it frustrates them. They don’t know why they can’t just “fix themselves”. What is more, they know which games are awful and cheat. They are not happy about what is being done to them. They see the social pressure to play and conform, but they also know that what is happening in the games is not healthy or right.

All in all, people are frustrated at feeling powerless. These big tech companies seem to be able to do what they want to do without consequences, and the parents are left to pick up the pieces of their broken children’s lives. Young adults are frustrated because they see their friends suffering and even they themselves experience the broken offerings of these companies, and they know on some level it is not right, but what can they do about it?

I always go back to the core idea of engineering. First, understand the problem you are trying to solve. Also, you need a vision for what outcome you are trying to achieve? What does good, or final, or fixed look like?

Twenty or thirty years ago, we used to fret about kids sitting in front of TV’s and getting fat. Now, no one turns on the TV. True story. I travel with a little travel router and a Fire Stick— mostly because I think it’s cool to have all of my devices “pre-connected” to the router, and the router is capable of logging into captured networks like at hotels, conferences, or Airbnb. It also saves me from having to try and log things like my Remarkable or gaming device into a hotel internet connection, which they cannot do. The Fire Stick lets me watch my programming.

And yet… no one turns on the TV. Not at home. Not on the road. I know a lot of people my age who watch TV and love the portability of a Fire Stick. But none of my kids use it. They turn to their phones. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, (never Facebook or LinkedIn). Sometimes Snapchat. But the TV has collapsed as a form of entertainment in our house, and in the lives of my kids.

Truth be told, my wife spends most of her time watching videos on her iPad while cooking, and sometimes at night with her fancy noise-cancelling headphones. (Apple’s software is just magic; that you can move AirPods from device to device automagically is brilliant.)

But rarely is the TV on. At all.

As I said, my kids grew up with dumb phones. Phones that could call. Phones that could text. Phones with crappy cameras. But no internet. No apps. No social media. No games (beyond Snake. I swear Snake gets ported to every device imaginable).

Aside: If you think you don’t know Snake, I bet you do. It’s that game where you use arrow keys to move a line around the screen, avoiding other lines, and the longer you move, the longer the body of your “snake” becomes until you trap yourself and bump into your own body, ending the game.

The course of this experiment has also taught me some personal things.

  • Sharing questions is more compelling than sharing answers. Answers end conversations. Questions open conversations.
  • I did not do as much storytelling as I planned. I still gravitate toward translating ideas into simple systems that are easier to understand.
  • Shockingly, people see value in my “why it works like that” shares. They may not be as impactful as a story, but they are interesting nonetheless. I think most people do want to understand the way the world works.
  • This problem is real, it is massive, and it is affecting an enormous segment of our population.
  • Despite the chaos and instability in the economy right now, the culture wars, and the bitter bipartisan disputes of our political landscape, there is near-universal agreement that children should not be anxious, depressed, afraid, strung out, and sleep-deprived. None of this is good for the kids, the families that are raising them, or the teachers trying to educate these kids. We are not imagining this. The struggle is real.

The Systematic Destruction of Norms

That reminds me, there is an important aspect of how the social media platforms harm girls, and it is related to anomie, or normlessness. The algorithms promote novelty relentlessly, which leads to elevating the prestige of more extreme behaviors. Kids attempting to discover their own identity often emulate these behaviors, which creates two problems. 1. The behaviors are extreme, which is often dysfunctional, and 2. Because they are novel, they don’t last when they become popular and they rotate back out to the fringe, being replaced by whatever is novel next. What I describe as decent behaviors, ways, and modes of living that have been proven over time, rarely get elevated, prioritized, or promoted, so instead of learning what works and is sustainable, kids get trained more or less in failed, maladaptive coping strategies that are doomed to fail because their only redeeming quality is that they are “novel”.

Think of it this way. In business, we put a lot of value on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), also known as Best Practices. It just makes sense that if you figure out the best way to do something, you want everyone to do that and to get as good at that as possible.

Now imagine, your company had a new way of selecting its practices. Not on effectiveness or success but on novelty. What is the weirdest practice? And, your roll-out and adoption strategy is that as soon as enough (arbitrary number decided by a hidden algorithm) people start to implement that strategy, it is no longer considered novel and a new strategy is elevated as The One To Emulate, leading to a consistently and persistently fractured set of behaviors within your organism as some people who experience success during the last cycle, cling to their modes of operating while new people who missed out on the old way, fly to the new way in hopes of elevating their status.

On second thought, maybe companies have their own way of doing this with the rapid rate of change of executives. However, usually (but not always) the financial discipline of tracking what works brings some kind of balance.

But, by and large the most respected companies, the brands we admire, and definitely the ones that control the algorithms adhere to the concept of best practices. It is the users and the community who suffer because this process by design generates instability. There are no norms, nothing to measure yourself against. Everything becomes relative and our intrinsic systems for understanding the value of things like human behavior are consistently, and persistently undermined. Being different enough to be novel and therefore command attention becomes the law of the land, which is exhausting, ineffective, and largely unsustainable. Why are we doing this to our kids?

Idaho

I am sitting at an Airbnb in Idaho, with other family members who have come into town for Rebecca’s graduation. I heard recently that you get to spend 20 years with your kids. 18 as they go through school, then another 2 years spread over the rest of their lives in small chunks, a day here, a holiday there. The longer I love, the more I admire the families that found a way to live close to each other and stay in near-constant contact.

I have learned to see these days as precious. Our adult kids are now moving fully into discovering their own lives, making their own decisions. For my part, I am trying to learn how to be a father to such self-reliant, wonderful people. They are raised. What is the best, most effective relationship I can imagine?

I will say this. First, they are my favorite people to hang around. They know me and love me for myself. Second, I compete with my wife in a friendly way to be their biggest fans. I still worry about them (I suppose I always will), but through experience and my own maturity, I can now recognize that their struggles are their own. They are meant for them. They learn by growing through these cycles. I cannot, nor should I, try to take them away. At the boundary of our ability and comfort, we grow. And they inspire me to do the same. This blog post started out as something deeply uncomfortable for me because I was not sharing my answers and thus proving my intelligence (I am still waaaay too wrapped up in valuing my intelligence as a core value of my worth as a person). Sharing my ignorance was not easy for me. But ignorance is not a bad thing. Ignorance, the state of not knowing, is fine, in my mind, as long as it leads to questioning and thus learning. And the more I learn, well, I have heard it said knowledge is like an island in the sea of ignorance. The more you know, the larger the island, the more coastline touches the sea of ignorance. Put simply, the more you know, the more you don’t know. Stupidity, however, is an inability or an unwillingness to learn. When we are stupid, we are being arrogant, stubborn, or unwilling. I am not stupid, and I try not to behave in stupid ways.

However, I will add this. The current most widely accepted definition of intelligence (used by nearly all AI companies, by the way) I learned from Stuart Russell in his book Human Compatible.

Intelligence is the ability for actions to achieve intended outcomes.

That, believe it or not, is a shockingly narrow definition of intelligence. But, let’s accept it for a second as true. If we do accept it, then it means when our actions do not produce the intended outcome, we are by definition stupid. This problem has been haunting students and learners for far longer than social media and smartphones. In the era of the highly educated adult, mistakes are not seen as opportunities to learn, no matter what the memes may say. The way most of us were raised and educated, mistakes are proofs of stupidity.

This is not just some abstract problem that only engineers face, although we may get a heavier dose of it than most. I learned from my father that being intelligent as an engineer was gold, it was the currency of successful engineering. The smartest engineers were their intellect. And really, that’s the twin pairing - smart vs stupid. We all want to be smart. We all fear being stupid.

Sharing this blog the way I am, reveals that there are a lot of things I don’t know. And the more questions I answer, the more questions I get. It feels endless.

This is one reason why I do like being an engineer. I don’t have to answer all the questions, just the one in front of me in a way that solves the problem I am trying to solve.

So if I can find answers, best practices, and techniques to solve the problem, then I can move forward. I am not required to answer all the questions that may come up, or prove everything that I know. Just leave the situation better than I found it.

Aside: Are we more open to listening to AI than other people? I have a friend who uses AI to help him round out his thinking. He had a partner who he couldn’t get along with and they went their separate ways. It seems from the outside he is more open to listening to the computer than to his partner. I wonder what the difference is or was?

The Greenbelt

Boise, Idaho, has this amazing green belt that runs for some 40 miles (I guestimate), about 20 miles in each direction from Boise State’s main campus. We headed north on Lime Scooters and explored. We eventually ended up at a wine tasting room and kicked back to enjoy a bottle of rosé. It was such a beautiful day. I could have spent all day there drinking wine and hanging out, but more family is coming in, and we still needed to pick up a cake for graduation.

But it is days like these that are a total blessing. Blue sky, light, fluffy Toy Story clouds, cool breeze, river flowing behind green trees nearby, and cold wine with loved ones. Man, life is good. I am so blessed.

I will sign off for today as I focus my attention on the rest of the family as they arrive from Phoenix.

Day 12 - Travel

Day 12 - Travel

I am getting close to my 15 days of micro blogging right now. I am concerned about the next few days because… I will be traveling. 🧳

One Bag Travel

I have become a huge fan of one bag travel. I really do not like to check bags and I am likewise concerned about not being able to get my bag onboard in an overhead bin.

That was when I came across James Clear’s post on one bag travel.

Ultralight Packing List: How to Pack Light & Travel With 1 Bag (jamesclear.com)

I spent a lot of time revamping my wardrobe and getting super efficient. For example, I have a hairbrush that is about the size of half a Pop-Tart. It lays flat and slips over my ring finger and works great.

I also got into wrinkle-free athletic dress clothes. shop.bluffworks.com is my favorite. But last year I needed to upgrade from a 20L pack to something that would hold my mobile office (all my devices) and my clothes.

I did a ton of research and discovered that since I first discovered ultra-light travel in 2019 (hard to believe that was 6 years ago), there has been an explosion of discount bags on Amazon (or AliExpress) from China. Most of these are done in set runs and then sold online until they run out, so links from articles often don’t work.

However, if you search, you can find really functional bags in the $30 to $80 range.

However, I noticed that four out of five reviewers had personally bought the same bag. What bag? The Cotopaxi Allpa 35L. Once I discovered this bag was available at REI and I could go check it out in person, I boogied down to the REI in Denver to check it out. I was hooked right away.

This saggy-looking thing is shockingly functional, and it is now the only bag I travel with and I have taken it all over the world. It is the first bag to bump my Tumi backpack and roll on.

Aside: Ever since Samsonite bought Tumi, I have been underwhelmed with their products. They are basically taking the same designs and respinning them with cheaper fabrics and colors. The lifetime warranty is gone, and the quality with it. Thanks, Milton Freeman. Who would have thought that making the only purpose of a company to generate profits for shareholders would lead to companies destroying long-term value to create short-term profits? It’s like the hedge funds bleed the value out of a business, then discard the empty husk of a company and move onto the next prey when their current victim, err, investment runs out of blood. But maybe I’m being overly cynical, and this just creates new opportunities for new ideas. It worked for Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club. Meanwhile, back to your regularly scheduled program.

So what makes the Cotopaxi so special? A few things:

  1. Space-wise, it is about the same as a 20-inch roll-on.
  2. The interior has zippered pockets, so it’s like it has its own built-in packing cubes.
  3. It has some cool features, like zippers that tuck up behind loops, making them theft “resistant“. Someone cannot “casually” unzip the laptop pocket, for instance.
  4. And it has a laptop pocket.
  5. But my favorites are the two front pockets, one small, one HUGE.
  6. It has an elastic water bottle holder on the side.
  7. It has heavy-duty shoulder straps AND a hip belt, all of which can be stuffed into pockets and hidden away.
  8. It has handles on the top, bottom, side, and back - so you can pretty much grab it from anywhere and get a good grip, and the back handle lets you slide it over a roller bag handle and stay put.
  9. It has loops on all four corners, which are perfect for carabiners. Yeah, sometimes I strap things to the outside of the bag.
  10. The build construction is two shelves. The zippers are heavy-duty, and the stitching is robust.

If you don’t pack it full, allegedly it will fit under a seat, but I have never tried it. I find that the two front pockets and the laptop pocket perfectly hold all my “gadgets.” Notebook, pens, battery bank, charging cables (this keyboard), power adapters, pens, Remarkable, it all fits. And I can pack a week’s worth of clothes in the thing.

It can be heavy to carry because I overload it, but I love it. And then I have one bag to worry about. They come in a variety of colors. Cotopaxi is famous for reusing high-quality fabrics and remnants. I chose black because… well, I wimped out. I wish I had picked out one more colorful. I had this goofy idea that a black back would be more suitable in a business environment, but I have yet to meet anyone who cares what your backpack color is.

But, one of the things I read over and over again is that the reviewers bought this bag because they could “live out of it,” and I have done the same. When I get somewhere, I rarely unload it; I just take what I need and go.

There are a few small additions that I made to the bag:

  1. Highly optimized toiletry kit. (It’s about as big as my battery bank.)
  2. A super tiny REI daypack that fits into its own pocket.
  3. A super tiny “Laundry bag” to keep dirty clothes separate from the clean ones.

And over the years, I have built up a selection of travel gear, things I put in my closet that are meant to go in this bag so when it’s time to go, it doesn’t take long to pack, and I don’t have to think much about it.

If you decide to get into the one-bag travel world, I welcome you and wish you luck. The rabbit hole is deep but not dark. It seems to be populated with other souls who love to travel and want to do it efficiently and without needing to track multiple bags.

10:55 a.m.

New experiment: Using Instagram stories to track my trip with pictures. Haven’t done that before.

Oh, I left my DJI microphone behind. Rats, that thing takes such good audio! But, it’s fine. I can still film if I want.

Dailyish - A Day of Family.

There’s this great story in the book The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. He interviewed Jerry Seinfeld about his advice for writing jokes. The world-famous and beloved comedian famously told a newcomer, (I paraphrase) “Write a joke every day and then mark it on the calendar. Then don’t break the chain.” What is surprising is that Seinfeld says he thinks the advice was stupid. To paraphrase the interview, the advice was dumb to him because it just seemed obvious that if you wanted to become a comedian, you should write jokes every day. It would be like training for a marathon. How do you get better by not running? The advice was dumb because it should have been obvious. You practice a lot.

However, the way the “internet” (the new them and they) took it so literally, you have apps, and websites, and people advocating don’t break that chain. And what all of these well-intentioned, but likely misguided efforts have in common is this.

  1. You can be creative by being mechanistic. In other words, forcing yourself to be creative, and
  2. You absolutely must maintain the chain at all costs. As if the ritual holds the creativity, not you.

When stated this way, both of these things end up being patently false. What’s more, they both point to the idea that force of will and self-discipline are the only ways to overcome resistance, procrastination, and our limitations of being human.

I like Burkeman’s idea that while we do want to practice, just as Seinfeld observed, being a slave to a routine is just another form of trying to force control on an unpredictable world. Burkeman suggests that instead of forcing ourselves to do something with slavish, (dare I say mindless) discipline, we are better off doing things Daily-ish. Mostly Daily. We make the effort. We plan to do it, but we give ourselves the grace to allow that circumstance or life itself may have other plans for us.

If you are Christian like me, or adhere to some other religion, you could say that God has other plans, and they might be worth listening to.

However, the most effective model I have found is what I call The Tango. Last year when I was at the Global Leadership Conference for the Entrepreneurs Organization in Singapore, I attended a wonderful breakout session by a Russian immigrant who had moved to Paris. She taught a room full of business owners how to dance the tango. Well, not really. But she taught us a model of communication based upon not only trying to share your truth, but to be completely present as other people tried to do the same.

And in the Tango, there is this beautiful play where, sometimes you lead, and sometimes the other person leads, and this is done by feel.

After reading Burkeman’s book, and learning about his concept of approaching tasks that are daily-ish, I decided I would try to treat each day as a Tango with life. I have some plans, moves I want to make, but I need to be open and pay attention when life wants to lead.

And one thing I have learned in this 15-day experiment in writing is that posting every single day is not likely sustainable for me in the long run. However, I could see to posting on a much more frequent schedule, and what’s more I can see the value in not focusing so much on posting answers, but posting questions. When I only share answers, there is little room for conversation. When I share questions, areas I am researching, there is more room for conversation. And in truth, since I have started this blog - I have had more interesting conversations with people about kids and video games in the last five days, than I have had in the last five months.

Day 11 - Uneasy

I am a little uneasy about yesterdays post. I feel like I should know a lot more about girls and social media. However, the truth is I would be taking a lot of information from predominantly two sources: The Anxious Generation and The Facebook Papers. There is a third source worth considering, Alison Armstrong’s material, but that is actually about adult women, and adults, whether men or women, are materially different from children whose brains are still developing. To do that segment justice, and not simply regurgitate what I’ve already read, I would need (and want to), go to Professor Haidt’s sources. That’s one thing I love about great academic writers, they cite their source material, and typically I find in those books a wealth of useful and interesting information.

Now that I am on day 11 of 15, two things pop up for me.

  1. I am traveling for my daughters graduation, so I am not sure I will be able to sustain the content production I have been pushing for the last 10 days.
  2. I want to do some more research on:
    1. What are the “bad” games?
    2. What are the “good” games?
    3. What else are people doing to help neurodivergent kids with video games?
    4. What exactly is social media doing to girls?
    5. What is the state of the art for age verification? (Meta invests according to SEC filings $1B a month in VR and metaverse technology. Why can’t they solve the age and account verification problem? - my take: because they don’t want to. Well, Bars don’t to check ID’s either but they have. We do we let Tech companies make their own laws.)

Super Cool

My interview on the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast with Hillary Wilkinson. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here. I really love the work Hillary and her organization are doing to educate parents on screen safety. She and her cofounders were on this topic long before it became cool. If you take a look at healthyscreenhabits.org, their content is fantastic and they start with five healthy screen habits:

  1. Give you phone a bedtime.
  2. Ask what’s my purpose
  3. The grandma rule
  4. Phones away or silent.
  5. No phones in bedrooms.

And I really love their Family Technology Plan. If you want to see something happen, having a plan is one of the best ways to do it. They also have a book called: Healthy Screen Habits for Tweens & Teens which retails for $14.99 on Amazon. What I really like about these resources is that they are chock full of tips and techniques to help keep your kids not just safe, but in a space where they can thrive.

5:11PM

I spent the better part of the day at the dentist office having the hardest to reach tooth in my mouth worked on. The dentist kept telling me I had a “tiny” mouth. I kept telling her, no one who knows me will believe that. I plan to call her as a character witness in the future. Consequently, this shall be a short blog post day.

They all can’t be monster writing days I guess. As Oliver Burkeman said, “try to be Dailyish.”

Day 10 - Communion

7:30 a.m. Breakfast Meeting

This morning I had an awesome meeting with Isaac and Arthur, two enterprising young men who are starting out on a new business adventure. Meeting with other entrepreneurs is one of my favorite things to do. The focus, commitment, and enthusiasm for building a business that has an impact always inspires me.

While waiting for the meeting, I experimented with uploading my blog from my phone. For the most part, it works really well; however, one of the challenges is dealing with images. MarsEdit on macOS is my preferred way to post to micro.blog; however, on the phone, micro.blog does have an iOS app; however, whenever I upload images, they automatically get pasted to the bottom of the post. I wish they would stay inline or past the link at the cursor when they upload images. But they don’t. Or at least, I can’t figure out how to make it work.

So what I learned is that I have to upload the image, scroll to the bottom of the post to get the URL for the image— typically a <img /> tag— and then move it to where it belongs in the post. And by move it, I mean copy, paste, then go back and delete it. All things considered, it worked. So my revised phone flow looks like:

  1. Edit markdown in Obsidian
  2. Copy Obsidian page note and paste into Drafts app.
  3. Inside of Drafts app, run macro to remove WikiLinks syntax(things in double brackets ``).
  4. Make sure any images are saved in my Photos app (so Micro.blog app can upload them).
  5. Run Apple AI Writing Tools Proofread (it doesn’t run in Obsidian for some reason).
  6. Copy cleaned-up article.
  7. Paste it into Micro.blog new post.
  8. Upload the images.
  9. Move the images to where they belong in the post.
  10. Post the image to the blog.

It’s more tedious than it needs to be; however, it does work, and that is good enough. It means I can post on the road and keep up my commitment to this little experiment.

9:30 a.m.

This morning, I had another meeting with Rizwan from Pakistan. For the past few weeks, we have been talking about morning routines and productivity. Rizwan is a very kind and supportive entrepreneur who has shown a lot of interest in my second brain learning system as well as how I manage notes. However, today, we talked about kids and video games. In particular, Rizwan has been reading these blog posts, and the information about kids and video games interested him. He speculated that video games might be useful for helping neurodivergent kids adapt and adjust in social situations.

The call was fascinating, and it recalled some of my own experience working with kids on the spectrum. The last post, I spent a lot of time talking about the experiences boys need. I suppose it’s not a terrible point to stop and share some information and experiences that I have learned about working with kids on “the spectrum.”

Neurodivergent Thinking

One parent in particular raised the question, “Can’t we use video games to help our kids connect?” And the answer is, in my experience, absolutely, but like with all things, it is about being intentional. Being in the video game events industry, I have worked with a lot of kids on the spectrum. Here are some of the best practices that I have seen.

I love working with the Boys and Girls Clubs because most clubs have a policy of “normalizing” kids. When we would run programming, they would make sure to include autistic kids and kids with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Note: For a long time, Asperger’s and Autism were considered separate conditions; however, in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), they do not differentiate between the two. Both now fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Historically, Asperger’s was generally used to describe individuals with milder symptoms than autism. They typically had strong verbal skills and intellectual ability, but experienced difficulty with social interaction and repetitive behaviors. The main difference between Asperger’s and autism was the lack of cognitive or language delays in the Asperger’s patients.

The key idea was that the Club staff wanted both groups to become normalized to each other. However, they recognized that some kids could become quickly overwhelmed in a high-stimulation environment, so they created exit plans for the children on the spectrum to be able to go to a quieter space when they became overstimulated.

A friend of mine runs a clinic that specializes in providing services for neurodivergent children, and she gave me some excellent tips which we used to train our staff.

  1. Be clear. Use simple, direct language.
  2. Structure and predictability are important.
  3. Plan for sensory considerations.
  4. Focus face to face to hold their attention.
  5. Be patient.
  6. Be kind.
  7. Be present.

As Will Guidara wrote in his book Unreasonable Hospitality, everyone wants to be seen, valued, and cared for. Autistic kids are no different. But the behaviors that will make them feel seen, valued, and cared for can be different from most other kids.

How Video Games Can Help

One reason video games are so appealing to this group of kids (both boys and girls) is that they are inherently structured. The consistency is appealing. Back in the days when computer hardware was not that powerful, games could only render what mattered. They did not have the capacity to throw a bunch of random things at you. This made it much simpler and easier for all gamers to process, but especially appealing to kids with autism.

Also, what inhibits social emotional development for most kids (staring at glass instead of a screen) can be a relief for many autistic kids. The social environment is radically simplified so they are more or less protected from making the kinds of awkward mistakes that frustrate them in large group settings.

But perhaps the most empowering part of video games is that many children experience a kind of status inversion. They are not just good, they are very good at the games. Thus video games are a domain where they can experience mastery and respect of their peers.

The Video Game Party

One set of parents that I met did one of the best jobs I have seen working with their autistic son. They invested a lot of time and energy with their son to see his condition as a gift and a challenge he would have to learn to manage. They often used video games to help him socialize and normalize working with other kids. When GameTruck showed up for his party, his parents had invited a few of his closest friends over to play. It was a small party, but the boy had his own noise-cancelling headphones, and impressively he self-regulated. When he felt he was becoming overstimulated, he told the Game Coach (the party host managing the event) and went into the house or the backyard to let the energy dissipate. When he re-regulated, he returned to the party. His parents watched, but never interfered.

This even was as much about giving their son opportunities to practice emotional and self-regulation as it was about celebrating a birthday. I watched the entire situation and was deeply impressed by the compassion and commitment of the parents. Even more impressively, none of the guests and not even the Game Coach really realized what was happening. From the outside, he was just another gamer who was taking a break every now and then. Which is not an unusual behavior.

I share that story because it gives me hope that we can use tools like well-made video games to help kids experience dignity and acceptance that can be hard to experience in other areas of their lives.

And What About…

Okay, I will confess I am not an expert in girls and social media, but I am a father of a daughter, and the impact of attention-stealing platforms appears to be as harsh (or more harsh) for girls as “bad” video games are for boys.

For the best information I have found, I highly recommend reading The Anxious Generation. But for the sake of being fair, here’s what I know.

Girls also want to have experiences of agency, mastery, and relatedness. However, they tend to prioritize community first. They are more attracted to visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

The first big problem with all of these platforms, for both girls and boys, is that none of these platforms do age verification. None. They can do age verification for gambling websites, but the most valuable companies on the planet can’t (or won’t) do it. What’s more, they do not do account verification. It is easy to open multiple anonymous accounts. Have you ever tried to do that with a driver’s license? If you think that’s not a fair comparison, then try to buy liquor without one. We use government-issued identification all the time to regulate business behavior in the real world.

Why can’t we do that online?

This level of anonymity creates multiple problems for girls. First, is the tremendous pressure to “look pretty” - all the Instagram and TikTok filters that dramatically increase the girls' sex appeal, which leads to creepy old guys reaching out and soliciting them. Or worse, stalkers and predators seeking them out and grooming them.

There is a serious move to fence in the elementary school a block from my house. It has been an open campus for sixty years. I understand the school board’s motivation, but if they are going to do that, why can’t they also make the schools' phones free? Because the predators are not lurking outside the school anymore, they are in the kids' pockets, in their apps, and they have perfected methods to get the kids to come to them.

The other problem with the complete lack of regulation of account authenticity or age control is that for girls, relationships are much more important than they are for boys at the same age. So to hurt a teen girl, you hit her in the relationships. Social media platforms are all about judgement, from the like button to the comments, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to savage someone’s reputation and once one kid gets taken down, the mob mentality sets in almost as a mode of survival. As long as the angry mob isn’t after me, I’m safe.

Never before, in the history of humanity, have so many people been able to weigh in so angrily, viciously, and ruthlessly on one person without fear of reprisals or accountability. Matthew Dicks, winner of the Moth Grand Slam and story coach, shares his own experience with having his content edited, modified, and then used to assemble a smear campaign against him. As a successful grown man, he goes into great detail about this in his book Storyworthy. And no one was trying to blackmail Dicks into sending nude pictures of himself.

Your average teenage girl is at risk of cyberbullying and attempts to solicit compromising images from her constantly. While boys are experiencing fake agency in video games, girls are experiencing fake community in social media. They are both being cheated out of the real experiences they need to develop healthy social-emotional skills.

Meta’s Response: Instagram Teen Accounts.

As I was writing this, I happened to see an advertisement on TV from Meta announcing a “new” teen mode for Instagram. There is a lot of chatter online that this is not about helping kids, but more about averting regulation.

So what are Instagram Teen Accounts? So here’s the short version: Supposedly it’s their big move to keep kids safer online. These accounts come with a preloaded list of safety features: the accounts default to private, there are tighter restrictions on who can message them, content filters are stronger, and there are built-in nudges like time limits and sleep reminders. They’ve even beefed up age checks and added tech to spot underage users trying to sneak through. Parents now get a dashboard with some actual levers to pull—especially for kids under 16 who can’t change the defaults without a parent’s OK.

That all sounds great, and I’ll give them credit—those are good moves. But let’s not kid ourselves. Plenty of experts and child advocates are still giving Meta the side-eye. The core concern? Instagram is still Instagram. The same algorithms, the same infinite scroll, the same comparison traps and dopamine spikes. And while Meta’s tools help, they also put a lot of the burden on parents—again—to monitor and manage a system built to be addictive. The timing of all this also feels… strategic. Convenient, even. A new rollout that just happens to line up with mounting regulatory pressure?

What do you think?

For me personally, “reminding” a kid to go to bed is about as effective as PornHub’s “Are you 18?” banner. The kid dismisses it. They are not missing sleep because they forgot it’s bedtime. They are missing sleep because the platform is addictive. Every cigarette pack sold in the USA has a warning label. And people still buy them. You know what stopped people from buying cigarettes? Taking them out of CVS. When CVS dropped cigarettes, people assumed the sales would spike at other retailers. It didn’t. The market literally shrank. Taking the product AWAY reduced smoking. Warnings stop new people from smoking. But Meta isn’t warning kids to not use Instagram, just not to use it so much with an easily dismissible notification.

The other thing about Meta’s announcement is that they never address the issue with kids under 13 getting on the platform. It is almost as if they intentionally mention the under 16 to create the impression that only high school juniors and above are on the platform. They completely avoid the issue that most middle schoolers and a good chunk of elementary school kids in the fifth grade are getting on the platform.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Kids deserve to have the same protections online that they have in the physical world. An 11-year-old can’t walk into a bar, a strip club, or a dispensary and purchase products. If they do it, it is the business that is held accountable. Our government helps us protect our kids. Massive tech companies claim they are different because… they want to be held to a different standard. That is patently absurd.

Day 9 - Informed

06:19 a.m.

While it is interesting to understand how things work, I find it far more valuable to answer the question, “Yeah, but what can you do about it?" Or perhaps even, “What can you do with it?”

Perhaps the best way to handle this next part is for me to share the framework of what is happening for both boys and girls.

Note: If you are not offended that I focus on only two genders, you can skip ahead. If you happen to be either offended or upset that I focus on only two genders, then I offer you this path for your consideration. I do this not to be political or oppressive but rather because it creates contrast. It is much easier to see choices when they are put in contrast to each other. You can think of it this way. It is human nature to take a spread of almost anything and reduce it to binary poles. Rich and poor. Tall and short. East and West. In fact, one of the most common cognitive biases (mental shortcomings) Homo sapiens like you and me suffer from is called the “False Dichotomy”, creating a division where there is none. Personally, I do believe we are predominantly of two genders, but I also believe (and the data shows) that human behavior manifests on a spectrum, and men and women have a lot more overlap than they do difference. There are ample mannish women and effeminate men. So you are free to think of the needs I put below as options, and by watching your own child or the children you care for, my hope is that you are more able to rapidly identify what they need and help them fulfill that developmental requirement. You see, there is one thing I do not accept. I do not accept sameness. Equality, yes. Sameness, no. Our individuality may be our greatest gift. Even genetically identical twins are not “the same” person. If they are not, why should anyone else be? Extraordinarily similar, perhaps, but not identical. Forcing everyone to be the same is the gist of an Ancient Greek tragedy about the Procrustean Bed. I’ll share it when I get the chance.

What Do They Need?

To figure out what to do, it would first be helpful to know what kids need.

While philosophers may argue that much of our gender roles are created by society, the odds of anyone of us changing society in time to help our kids is so vanishingly small, I think it’s better to just sort out why the rules are to the best of our understanding and go from there. These, of course, are changing, but not in a way that any of us seem to understand or can predict.

So I will try to break it down by what kids need, in general, then what girls need, then what boys need. I am most personally familiar with boys because of my coaching background, and well, my own experience growing up as a modern man.

It seems most women are familiar with what girls need for the same reasons: time, exposure, and personal experience.

There, all the caveats out of the way, let’s take a look at my current best understanding of what kinds of experiences kids are looking for.

What Kids (both boys and girls) Need

During that magic window when children develop their cultural identity, there are a few other things happening as well.

With each increase in movement, I saw that my children also took another massive leap in personal development. When a baby went from being held to crawling, more of their personality presented itself. They could move away from Mom or Dad. When they went from crawling to walking, they became even more of an individualized person. They could move about the house and could be trusted to walk themselves, albeit in close orbit to Mom and Dad. Then, when they got a bike, they could rove, moving about the neighborhood and street. Sadly, still in range of Mom or Dad, but that was about the time that they started to go to school and spend time away from Mom and Dad and spend it with other kids their age and with other adults who would look after them.

During the elementary school years, our children learned how to be a part of our family, and then slowly how to make friends. They were becoming well socialized. As they approached the third, fourth, and fifth grades, their development expanded from being part of the family to being part of a “friend group” at school. And this correlated with that window from 5-14. The elementary school and middle school years.

During this time, they also started to expand their identity beyond the family group and started to try and find their place within their new tribe, their same age cohort, their class, their team, their neighbors. What we loosely call their “friend group.”

It is such a natural and timeless process that I think it would have stayed invisible and ordinary to us all if it had not been distrusted by technology.

So what is happening in this friend group? Or, what should be happening?

12:45PM

Monday’s are usually chock-full of meetings, so it is hard to engage in a full thought thread. One thing that popped up for me today: I was able to rattle off a bunch of new cartoons. I will sometimes use a smaller sketch pad with a pen or pencil and block out body language and the “jokes."

sketch 1

sketch 2

These rough sketches let me make mistakes and iterate quickly. I can also do them in batches or a few days in advance, and then when I have time to draw (and my brain is fried), I can convert them into line art, which I later color. So far, I’m up to 96. I’m almost halfway to my first goal of creating 200. Well, not really a goal. A tiny experiment, let’s say. Already, I have learned:

  1. What markers work best.
  2. I’ve established some conventions for conveying interactions.
  3. I learned how to create a comic series (see: atplaygang.thecomicseries.com)
  4. I even have a few people that follow me and comment on my comics. That’s fun.
  5. I’ve learned about different kinds of markers.

Here’s an attempt to create Sonny in Excalidraw:

Sonny Excalidraw

In principle, I can make it work, but I personally like the imperfections of the hand-drawn art. At present, it is less fun making vector art look like hand-drawn art.

What Kids Need

What kids need has a shocking resemblance to Self-Determination Theory. Basically, both boys and girls are looking for experiences of:

  • Agency (Autonomy)
  • Mastery (skill development)
  • Relatedness (Community)

What is different between boys and girls is that boys traditionally have sought more experiences of agency. Acting in the world, risk-taking. Risk taking. The explosion of “safetyism” has greatly hindered (some would say harmed) boys’ ability to have these experiences. Video games provide a simulated world of agency and, therefore, instead of channeling a boy’s desire for exploration into fake and unreal ends.

It is hard to say which is worse: video games or safetyism. What is safetyism? It is the unchecked belief that kids are not safe in our neighborhoods or the world in general and must be watched and guarded by adults at all times.

I often share the story that I grew up in the era when I was told to “go outside and play.” I was not allowed back in the house until the street lights came on. I remember one time coming home, and my dad asked, “Are you in for the night?” I said, “No, I’m just getting a flashlight.” He was fine with that. And so was I. I. I ran outside to join my friends as we prowled around Holly Hill Farms, the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in Michigan.

Today, however, when I talk to my friends with kids, the few who want to send their kids out to play discover there is no one to play with. My wife and I moved to our present neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona, because there were so many kids visible. We moved two miles from our old neighborhood, but it felt like we had moved a world away. In our old neighborhood of Pecan Grove Village III (apparently the builders really liked the name Pecan Grove Village), we did not meet a neighbor boy who lived just four houses down the street from us until both boys entered kindergarten. For five years, the two boys lived a few hundred feet apart, but neither boy nor their parents knew anything about the other.

That would have been impossible in Holly Hilly Farms.

I first noticed this strange isolation effect when I started GameTruck. In 2009, as the brand was taking off and becoming popular, I drove to a neighborhood in Gilbert where the family was bragging (well, proud) of the fact that they were the first people on their block to have a GameTruck Party. The very next weekend, we went to the exact same neighborhood and the exact same street, only we were across the street from the other family. This family also bragged that they were the first to have a GameTruck Party in their neighborhood. I thought they were joking, but they were serious. A week later, we showed up five houses down near the end of the block, and that family gleefully claimed that they were the first. That was when I realized that none of them knew each other.

We live next to each other, but rarely, if ever, interact anymore. Each of these families believed that they were part of their community, but the reality is that today’s professional work environment, school choice, and keeping kids indoors all the time has radically changed and limited how boys experience agency.

I remember about ten years ago, Nintendo hired us to do a birthday party event for one of its executives. What made the party special was that leaders from Nintendo Japan were coming specifically to check out GameTruck and our mobile video game theater experience. I made sure to show up to answer any questions they might have about the business.

They were very impressed with the concept, and as I stood there on a beautiful sunny Saturday in Northern California, I pointed out the neighborhood to the group and their translators. “All these families are home. See the cars?” they all nodded. “But what is missing?” I asked.

They shook their heads. It is hard to see what is not present. Or, to be more accurate, it is hard to notice what you can’t see.

“There are no kids. This neighborhood should be buzzing with children, like packs of busy bees floating from one house to the next. But you don’t see any of that. The kids are either at sporting events, or they are cooped up safe inside.”

Safetyism is the overreach of trying to keep kids safe by basically locking them up all the time. Now, this is another one of those gender differences that hides in plain sight. Safetyism is also the outcrop of rising divorce and single-parent rates, coupled with the fact that most of the time it is the mother who ends up with the majority of the custody (if not all) time.

Alison Armstrong, who leads a series of couples retreats in Northern California and has an excellent series of recordings available on Audible under titles like, Making Sense of Men, and The Queen’s Code, asks a room full of men and women, “Men, when was the last time you were concerned for your physical safety?” Most of the men turned and looked at each other. They had to try and remember. When I heard that, I recalled the time I felt 30 feet down a cliff while mountain biking. I remember thinking, “this is going to hurt.” It did, but fortunately I got no serious injuries from the tumble, just a lot of scrapes and bruises, and I lost a really nice bench-made pocket knife. That incident was months (now years ago, as I write this).

However, when she asked the women that question. All of the women in the room raised their hands when Alison asked, “Has it been within the last 24 hours?” To women it was patently obvious the world is a dangerous and hazardous place. The men were taken completely by surprise. You can run this test yourself. When I asked my sons the question, they really had to think about a time and they struggled. When I asked my wife and daughter, they both said it happens every day and they each could describe situations which to me sounded innocuous but to them represented risk, such as walking the dog in the neighborhood, or riding a bike to the grocery store.

Men and women perceive the world of risk very differently. Or at least, we used to.

With more single women raising young boys, more boys are being indoctrinated into the world of Safetyism. With the collapse of male teachers (according to Haidt, the percentage of male teachers is down from over 30% to just above 15% as of the time of this writing), boys are getting exposed to fewer, and fewer men.

In fact, in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover points out that for most of human history, women did not raise boys. When the global economies were mostly agrarian, boys were kicked out of the house and spent the days with their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, great uncles, and cousins. Men raised boys. If you read the autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (benefactor of Carnegie-Mellon University), he did not start school until he was 10 years old! Benjamin Franklin also did not start education until a similar age. Today that would be like waiting until the fourth or fifth grade to start formal education!

But the Industrial Revolution removed men from the household, calling them away to the factory. As a double whammy, the only careers available to women were largely childcare jobs, including teaching.

So Glover points out that I am now part of the third or fourth generation of men to be raised by women. I will leave it to you to do your own research about what this means, but I can tell you as a man who grew up in a loving home that was nevertheless split up by divorce, I never really had a great idea about what a mature masculine man looked like. I am not trying to bag on my father, but it was not until I was an adult that I realized I would have to take charge of “the rest of my upbringing.”

And that was before safetyism. I am sharing these things with you because it was part of my own journey in understanding what it would look like to become a “good man,” a mature and capable masculine man. It was largely assumed I would just “get it” but from where? From TV? Dear Lord no. And I grew up before social media, before the frenzy of elevating the fringe, novel, and extreme behaviors that dominate the algorithm.

What I’m saying is that, like the observation about morality, finding out what is “good” is actually nontrivial and not obvious. At least, it wasn’t for me. I had to go looking for it.

Now imagine the life of a young boy lost in video games and more or less locked up at home, or in the classroom so they can be “safe.” What are they learning?

Opportunities for physical risk taking, like climbing trees, or crossing creeks, or riding your bike “a little too far"from home have become non-existent. It is no wonder for the first time since we started tracking the data we are seeing boy behavior switch from externally focused to match that of young girls, internally focused.

Traditionally, boys acted out. They were aggressive, or they expressed themselves physically to process their emotions. When I wanted to talk to my boys I would grab a basketball, football, or baseball and we would get moving first. We talked later.

According to Haidt, however, more and more boys are starting to experience their stress and emotion in a manner more traditionally experienced by women. They are turning inward, staying at home, inside, safe, but stressed.

This change appears to be correlated with the rise of Defend Mode in boys.

But what about the girls?

I will have to approach that… in my next post.

Day 8 - Discover and Defend

Discover and Defend

8:36AM

Sunday. This should be a relatively laid-back day. Yesterday was crazy. I woke up early, wrote my blog post, then got my gear ready for a Harley ride to Yarnell. The weather was perfect for it, and the Foothills HOG group turned out 10 bikes for the ride. Not big by some group standards; however, for an impromptu Saturday ride, it was very cool. Then I had to race back, take a shower, and get dressed for my EO Board Appreciation dinner at Puttshack. I am all about games and play. We had fun, then I had to race back to Tempe and join my wife and neighbors for game night. I felt like I was home for an hour, but it was all social, all fun, and all some of my favorite things to do with some of my favorite people. How can I complain? (Because I’m talented at complaining, that’s how! You will never hear me say, “I can’t complain”, because that would be a lie. I do not have things worth complaining about. This is true. However, my capacity to complain is excellent. I have a lot of skill there.)

So… Kids. Video games. Smartphones. As I recall yesterday, I left off with the hint that I was going to cover Discover and Defend mode. Well, that sounds like a good topic to bite into. As per usual, I will add my own thoughts and research I have done about kids and mindset to Dr. Haidt’s terms (I first heard these labels in his book The Anxious Generation). So… let’s get after it.

Slight distraction

As I have said before, my day job is CEO of GameTruck, the franchisee of the GameTruck Party concept. People often assume the job is fun, and mostly it is. Occasionally things go wrong and we mess up some kids' party. That is the worst, but then there are days like today when I wake up to a review like this:

New review for PDX on Google: “What an amazing time was had by ALL! This was a birthday part for my now 9 year old autistic son who was over the moon about the Game Truck! The employee was kind, professional and efficient, providing the kids with all the minutes we paid for by arriving early for set up and guiding kids into the experience into a unique experience they enjoyed thoroughly! One unexpected blessing I had not anticipated was a QUIET house during the party so I could continue to prepare for the food and cake portion of the birthday party! It was worth the cost, I would totally do this again and have already recommended to others!”

One of the things I tell our staff - we call them game coaches - is that they are very important in the lives of the kids. Why? Because they are an adult who is not a parent, teacher, or coach, and they play video games! This makes them someone the kids naturally look up to. They have an opportunity to have an enormous impact on these kids by role modeling what it looks like to be a good gamer, not just good at games, but good at being a human being. They are there, helping the kids play together, and the actions they take to make sure everyone is included give the kids a chance to see what that looks like, in person, up close and personal. For me, that is the best part of this job, inspiring kids even in the smallest ways to think that a good gamer is also someone who takes responsibility and looks out for others. You can be skilled and considerate. You can be capable and compassionate. Video games are not always about competition; they can also be all about connection.

Discover and Defend

Or… what are we doing to our kids?

On Raising “Good” Kids… What does that mean?

Well, hopefully what we are doing to our kids is raising them to be good people. There’s a lot of debate on what that means. One of my favorite authors is the neuroscientist Sam Harris (who also happens to be famous for being an atheist). I read Dr. Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, and I found many of his arguments compelling. However, as much as Dr. Harris would like science to lead the charge into better living, he sees two deeply entrenched obstacles which he identifies in his book. According to Harris, the scientific and academic communities have by and large dropped the ball on establishing anything remotely like a moral framework (much to his chagrin), because of two entrenched beliefs:

  1. Science is restricted to pointing out what is, not what ought.1
  2. Moral relativism disempowers academia from making any attempt at defining how people “should live."2

Facts and Values

The first limitation was created when the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued:

that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality).

Hume was quickly followed by more philosophers building upon his conclusions; the likes of G.E. Moore and Karl Popper supported the idea, basically cutting off morality from all our forms of knowledge outside religion.

Consequently, science, the domain of “facts,” does not have to try to answer the question of how we should best live or even coming up with a working definition of good for that matter.

Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition.

Anthropological Relativism

So if science can help us, what about academia? Again, Harris is frustrated in his attempt to create a non-religious moral framework because of the concept of moral relativism.

Harris believes that moral relativism is a reaction against colonialism and ethnocentrism. The philosophy gained traction as it led to the belief that all cultural practices and moral systems are equally valid. He suggests that this perspective has been perpetuated by certain academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, which often emphasize the importance of understanding cultural differences without making moral judgments.

Harris points to influential thinkers such as anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Harris’s frustration is that instead of using the best intellectual toolkit ever created for problem-solving; namely, the scientific method, we have declared analysis off-limits. Harris believes we have been cut off from determining if one mode of living is in fact better than another and left to our own devices. Therefore, instead of investigating and optimizing how we can improve human well-being, we must turn to matters of faith.

From my perspective, if science can’t (or won’t) tell us anything, and all moral systems are relative, then defining “good” becomes highly subjective. Conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson raise the concern that this kind of thinking quickly leads to nihilism; the belief that nothing matters. Personally, I see nihilism as another form of learned helplessness.

I, for one, am not ready to make that leap, and I do believe there are better ways of behaving. Not all systems are equally effective, and while I agree we should not judge, I do believe we absolutely have an obligation to discern.

Human suffering is not an abstraction. Just ask any parent how abstract it all feels when they see their kids suffer.

I think about these things a lot. It started because as a Caucasian, conservative, Christian, heterosexual male business owner, I am the man. I don’t want to be part of the problem. I want to be part of the solution. And so far as I can tell, the advice given to “people like me” is, “don’t be a Nazi.” Well, lots of people are not Nazi’s. That’s a very broad and not terribly useful orientation. I wanted to seek something that oriented me toward maximizing the well-being of the people I care about and the people around me. As Simon Sinek wrote in his book The Infinite Game, you want to be for something. The old saying says, “what you resist persists.” So, I started my own research project to help raise my sons and challenge myself to be a good role model for them.

So, I’m going to go with the definition I have used in my own life. My goal as a parent was to raise decent, competent, capable, compassionate adults.

Aside: A Note about Decency. A behavior is decent when you can pretty much do it forever. Kindness, contribution. These behaviors are sustainable. Indecent behavior, on the other hand, tends to have a short life span. Drinking and partying will destroy your health if not your relationships. So, at a minimum, behaviors which lead to greater well-being tend to be decent. Those that lead to suffering tend toward indecent.

I say this because, in the short term, what kids are experiencing from the phone-based childhood does not look all that harmful, but over the course of their young lives, the distortions to their mental and emotional development can lead to long-term suffering.

A Model for Human Behavior

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Professor Jonathan Haidt talks about discovery mode and defend mode. He points out that animals have two default modes that a person can develop. They are like filters, or belief systems that regulate how we process the world.

We can use animals as images or metaphors for these two psychological states. Discovery mode is like a Labrador puppy, full of joy, energy, and a desire to explore the world. They believe they are fundamentally safe and they engage with the world through a lens of curiosity and wonder.

Defend mode, on the other hand, is characterized by a state of worry and fear. You can think of defend mode by imaging mice. Timid, shy, and overly cautious. They interpret everything as a threat.

This view of the unknown, however, extends beyond physical safety; it also affects how we process new information and new ideas. And this perhaps is the most concerning.

Discovery mode

When it comes to new information and new ideas, discovery mode is a state of openness and curiosity. When in discovery mode, individuals are more receptive to new ideas and willing to explore different perspectives. They are motivated by a desire to learn and understand, which allows them to engage in constructive dialogue and consider evidence objectively.

Defend Mode

In contrast, when a person is entrenched in defend mode, their approach to new information and uncertainty is characterized by a defensive and protective mindset. When in this mode, individuals are more focused on defending their existing beliefs and viewpoints. They are less open to new information and more likely to interpret evidence in a way that supports their pre-existing opinions. This mode is often triggered by perceived threats to one’s identity or beliefs.

It should be relatively simple to see that people who are more open, curious, and seeking to understand are more likely to engage positively with new viewpoints and new people. People primed in defend mode, on the other hand, are going to resist change and are likely to see new ideas (and people) as threats.

I also find it interesting that the book which kicked off this entire blog post series, Tiny Experiments, advocates for curiosity. From my perspective, Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s entire effort is to get us to treat our own personal experiences as one giant discovery mode. Be curious, be flexible, be open, explore, and learn. If we are priming kids to be defensive, closed-minded, and rigid out of fear, that runs counter to what we are learning about human flourishing.

Experiences Shape Kids' Default Mode

What does all of this have to do with kids? When children are encouraged to play freely and explore their world, when they have those:

  • Face-to-face
  • Synchronous
  • High-commitment relationships

They are more likely to be primed to approach the world in discover mode. However, when they “come of age” in an environment defined by:

  • Anonymity
  • Asynchrony
  • Abandonment from low-commitment communities

They are much more likely to be primed to act in defend mode. The technology-mediated experiences which are dominating their waking lives are cultivating them to act in defend mode.

In short, 24/7 access to the internet, whether it is games, online porn, or social media, is having a serious negative impact on kids. And with half of all kids having a phone or a tablet, they are growing up in a way that is making them more defensive, more rigid, more closed-minded, and more likely to view new information and new people as a threat.

Put another way, the phone-based childhood is training our children to fail the public goods game.

Healthy and Happy

One area of research that is skirting the line when it comes to understanding, if not morality, at least, how to improve human well-being is the area of Positive Psychology. Pioneer Martin Seligman about twenty years ago made an observation, followed by a question. His observation: “All we seem to do is study mental illness in psychology.” His question: “Why don’t we study human flourishing?” As president of the American Psychiatric Association, he was in a particularly influential position to both make the observation and ask the question. His inquiry sparked a decades-long foray into what is now known as “Positive Psychology.” It goes along the lines that the absence of illness is not the same as robustness of health. Dr. Seligman was a particularly well-qualified psychologist to ask this question, since his own research in the 1960s and 1970s established the concept of learned helplessness, which shows how exposure to uncontrollable stress can lead to depression-like behavior.

He might not be establishing a moral framework, but he is a huge proponent of using evidence-based approaches and practical tools for improving mental health. His methods are valued by both practitioners and researchers. I have often joked that I like being an engineer because I do not have to prove something is true, only that it works. That is my snarky way of admitting I am a practitioner, not a researcher. If a model works, I will apply it. However, Seligman is a bit of both. A researcher who cares about the applicability and utility of his findings.

And his model for humans is The PERMA Model. The five letters stand for:

  • Positive Emotion
  • Engagement
  • Relationships
  • Meaning
  • Achievement

I want to point out two interesting but similar points in this model. First, positive emotion, what we call happiness or feeling good, only accounts for 1/5th of what we need to flourish. As Seligman himself said on Dr. Laurie Santo’s Happiness Lab Podcast, (I paraphrase)

Pursuing happiness alone is stupid because you are missing 80% of what you need to flourish.

I believe he meant that pursuing happiness, and only happiness, is a failing strategy. You need more to truly flourish. In a similar vein, Achievement also fails to produce flourishing for the same reason. As a member of the entrepreneurs organization, I have met many high-achieving financially successful founders and business owners who are miserable. When you pursue achievement at all costs, the costs are very high.

This leaves the three in the middle. What is Engagement? Seligman defines it as “Flow”, that state of timeless wonder when we are working at the edge of our ability. First described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say his name five times fast, I dare you) - the famous Check psychologist who studied and then described the phenomenon in his book Flow. Flow is a state of optimal engagement. Yes, I realize that is a circular reference, but Flow is highly related to Self-Determination Theory, which is why so many video games focus on creating it. When you have established a baseline of competency, and you are working on a challenge you find interesting, you can drop into a flow state. Add in a dollop of relatedness, like this challenge will help or benefit people you care about (such as your teammates, or clan members) and you have the key ingredients for a flow state.

That leaves the other two. Relationships. Seems pretty self-evident, but the final word, meaning is an interesting one. Viktor E. Frankl is the famous Austrian psychoanalyst who was imprisoned during World War II in the Nazi concentration camps. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning is often quoted for Frankl’s proposition that humans can determine the meaning of their lives. It is a choice.

But last year, I heard in a podcast that Seligman was updating his PERMA model to switch from Meaning to Mattering. It is not abstract meaning that helps us flourish, but the kind of meaning that is both personal and relational. We want to know that our efforts (the achievements that came as a result of our engagement), were noticed and appreciated - they mattered to people we related to.

If we want to raise healthy, happy children, then we also want to help them experience the PERMA model, which means yes, they should have positive emotions, but they also need to:

  1. Learn challenging skills that align with their interests.
  2. Learn how to relate to other people.
  3. Focus on achieving work that
  4. Matters to the people they care about.

This chain of challenging work which produces positive outcomes for people we care about is about the most concise way I can state the ideal.

Seligman’s implication, although not clearly stated, is that a person in a PERMA mindset is also a person in a Discovery Mode. They are curious, exploring, and fully engaged. This also happens to be highly correlated with Carol S. Dweck’s “Growth Mindset.” Children (and adults) with a “Fixed” Mindset more closely resemble Haidt’s defend mode mentality. You cannot work at the edge of your ability without embracing a certain degree of uncertainty. Fixed Mindset and Defend Mode are all about staying away from risks.

In other words, raising kids with smartphones primes them to do nearly the exact opposite of flourishing.

But What Can We Do About It?

This is the next part of the challenge. Removing smartphones from a kid’s life, or telling them to go outside and play with their friends, are not very effective strategies if everyone else they know has a smartphone and no one else is outside to play with.

And this is where I can come into the heart of my research. What can we do about it? I think I understand what is happening and why, but really digging into what we can do, especially as individuals, parents, and educators. This is going to be tricky and challenging.

So, I think the paths seem to fall along three lines. I see these as, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our country.

  1. Making informed decisions.
  2. Working for change in our schools.
  3. Advocating for change nationally.

Armed with better information, we can start to make the kinds of choices that give our kids a better chance for living a rewarding, fulfilling, flourishing life. When we know what is going on, we can try to support others in our community who are asking for change, like phone-free schools, and more intentional social interaction with other like-minded parents. Finally, together, we need to start advocating for the kinds of protections online that we get in the physical world.

Notes

  1. The Moral Landscape, Page 10. ↩︎

  2. The Moral Landscape, Page 19. ↩︎