Back Roads — Built, Not Born | Post 3 of 3
For someone who craves autonomy and freedom, I don’t like being trapped in the jail cell of tradition or guided by convention. I don’t respect because I said so, or that’s just what people do, or that’s the way it’s always been.
Richard Feynman has a quote I love. It comes from Leonard Mlodinow’s Feynman’s Rainbow, a back-and-forth between the two of them about a long-standing theory. Mlodinow mentions the paper has been around for fifteen years. Feynman doesn’t miss a beat: “So not only is it bullshit, it is old bullshit.”
I built my house on land I share with my mother. The context matters to what comes next.
One random Tuesday morning — running late for work, my wife running late for work, the whole house in that chaos that only exists when everyone has somewhere to be and not enough time to get there. My phone dings. I ignore it. I’m loading tools into my truck. It dings again. Whatever it is can wait. Me and my ego have shit to do today. It rings.
My mother.
WHAT DOES SHE WANT NOW?
“Yes?” — me “What’s wrong?” — mom “What do you mean what’s wrong?” — me “You all are home?” — mom “No shit mom, we live here.” — me
Those without context are missing a history. Unannounced visits. Unwelcome ones. One time my wife came out of the shower and my mother was just standing in the living room. No knock. No warning. Just there.
I never used to lock doors. My truck. My house. When I lived in the city, my roommates hated it — I’d leave for work and not even think about the deadbolt. But this relationship, impervious to clear and direct communication, eventually made me install locks on every door in my own home. A daily reminder. That woman across the field cannot mind her own business.
“I’m sorry for being concerned, just making sure everyone was okay.” — mom “Thanks. Bye.” — me
I sent her a not-so-polite text about how when her surveillance of our day-to-day life turns up inconsistencies, she should keep it to herself. Then I spent the entire day angry. And the entire next day angry. Two weeks later I signed up for BetterHelp — and found myself arguing with a therapist who, worth noting, was arguing angrily back at me — who was not buying it when I told her I could be sitting alone in a dark room with zero stimulation and find something to be angry about.
She held up and pointed to an anger iceberg worksheet.
I wanted to slam the top of my computer closed.
“It’s not on the anger iceberg.”
It’s in my head. My blood. My bones.
The Science
In Principles, Ray Dalio talks about the amygdala — that damned almond-shaped residence of the ego. In high-stress situations, the brain interprets stimulation as a threat. It hijacks you. Fight or flight. Evolutionary. A survival instinct older than rational thought.
Arthur Brooks puts it plainly. On the Daily Stoic podcast he described the limbic system as “an ancient console of tissue that’s up to 40 million years old” — it predates homo sapiens. These forces at work inside you are older than your species. How’s that for fighting the establishment?
I found my way to Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman — a Dalio recommendation. And in it I learned something that stopped me cold. The chemical reaction that emotions consist of lasts 90 seconds. That original burst — the response to the stimulation — is a minute and a half. Those two days that had me seeking therapy, a reprieve from my own misery, were the longest ninety seconds of my life.
I remember sharing about it at an AA meeting. The open discussion topic was anger. During my share I had a moment — hey, wait a second. After 90 seconds, I should be able to use something to break the pattern. There’s a saying in the rooms: have a thought, move a muscle. It’s more about craving management, but all the same. When the thoughts had me, I could move a muscle. Get up. Do the dishes. Write a quick gratitude list. Some breathwork. Take myself out of the anger and create something new to do with it.
When the tape starts playing, that’s my cue to get up and do something else.
Tony Robbins — Late to the Party, Right on Time
I was already doing it intuitively. Then Tony Robbins gave me a formalized version.
I found him through the Tim Ferriss Show. He came on and talked about state change — how he could cure phobias like snakes in a single session, something that could go unsuccessful after years of Freudian therapy. I was intrigued. Skeptical. But I figured, what did I have to lose? I worked through a couple of his audiobooks. Tried the Time to Rise Summit. And that’s where he touched on it — when you have a thought, you allow yourself to feel it for 90 seconds. You observe it like a Vipassana meditation technique, watch it pass through a thought bubble, and then you change your state. Train yourself like a muscle to get out of it.
He was the first person I found who gave a practical guide on how to get out of the stories you tell yourself and the patterns you’ve fallen into. UPW was the next step — and the Dickens Process alone was worth every penny I spent on that weekend. We trained and conditioned ourselves to break up those old patterns, those old useless stories we’d been telling ourselves, and put newer, empowering beliefs in their place.
The first day after UPW, I didn’t have a single angry thought. That voice in my head was gone. It simply wasn’t there anymore. That took what I was doing to a whole new level. The immediate effects fade — life is still life, and those patterns were conditioned for so long they weren’t ready to go without a fight. But now I have a system to manage them. I can rarely remember what bothered me anymore.
The 91st Second
Naval Ravikant says that “enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.” It’s a concept shared with the Stoic and Buddhist traditions — the more you grow that gap, the more present and free you become.
I believe that space is the 91st second.
I protect it. I try not to react to things immediately. I don’t make decisions when my heart is racing or my anxiety is flaring. For me, specifically, the main problem was anger. Looking back on who I was just recently — the power of UPW makes the version of me at the beginning of this year feel like a completely different identity. I would slip into uncontrollable spats of angry rumination. Rehearsing arguments in my head, some that had never even happened. Things from years ago, done by people who don’t draw breath anymore. Things that didn’t work out the way someone wanted when they were trying to help. Things other people didn’t even know they did bothered me. Like a skipping record. I couldn’t free myself from the thoughts.
It was miserable being me. And I let everybody know it by making it miserable to be around me. How my wife put up with me, I still have no idea.
Seneca wrote, in De Ira:
“Anger is a short madness: for it is equally devoid of self-control, regardless of decorum, forgetful of kinship, obstinately engrossed in whatever it begins.”
He wrote that two thousand years ago. He didn’t have the neuroscience. He just paid attention.
Learning what literally happens in the body — and understanding what my part in the process actually is — makes this passage from Marcus Aurelius land differently than it used to:
“The anger or grief caused by another is something that happens inside you — it is not caused by the other person.” — Meditations 6:26
I was letting things outside of me dictate how I felt. How I acted. How well I slept. How much energy and focus I had. Running my life. I was being jerked back and forth by thoughts. Hallucinations. Things I was creating that weren’t real.
For someone who doesn’t like the confines of rules, traditions, and convention — I was living in an angry, lonely prison of my own making.
I don’t have to live that way anymore.
The funny thing about all that autonomy I was fighting for — I didn’t have any. I was the most controlled person in every room I walked into. Not by my mother, not by convention, not by anyone else’s rules or actions. By a chemical reaction. Ninety seconds of biology I couldn’t name, running on a loop I didn’t know I could break.
I wonder what Feynman would have to say about that.
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