I look back at my life and see an abundance of mistakes. Decisions I made that are regrettable (and repeatedly so). In a clear headspace, I can see so clearly that I wasn’t making wise decisions. I was caught in my impulses.

“How should I be living my life right now?” is the essence of a lot of my thinking. I find my mind reflects on my actions, intentions, impulses, and analyzes the long-term consequences of my lifestyle.

To avoid paralysis, and to ever make a decision, this thinking must end. Thus I self-justify: I find alignment between my impulses and my higher-order, conscious, logical self. The two voices cannot keep arguing. This is where self control ends.

Self control is the capacity to monitor internal conflict. Once conflict ends, self control ceases. Stated another way: there is nothing more to self control than the model of a self expressing control (the voices in your head!). Metaphysically satisfying.

The interesting thing is: I believe I am rational. Throughout the day, as I tally up mistakes, I carry this deep belief that I am thinking clearly. Right now, as I write this, I believe I am rational.¹ It is quite dazzling to realize this.

With hindsight, irrationality is everywhere. But in the moment it is no where to be found. I must be more intimate with my irrationality. I must integrate irrationality into my self-model.

Awareness of irrationality gives rise to skepticism, and hopefully enough of it. We begin to test our conclusions against protocols, frameworks, and other minds. We become thorough in analysis, strive for structure, whilst never being fully certain.

“How do I know I’m right?” is the essence of it. You’re looking for good models of reality—and a good model is predictive. You must simulate a model to reality-test it, so do this in your mind. We are not clear thinkers. Just ask Kahneman.

Footnotes

1. I understand there is some weird recursion here. How do you ever know this is the objective lens? How can you know you aren’t being impulsive right now? How do you ground any thinking in truth, and know you are being clear-headed? This can take us to epistemology: can we build reliable systems of logic that produce consistently truthful statements? Can we design a master algorithm to “feed” our thoughts to—and filter reason from illusion? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. But I have a few guesses. ↩