Tag: stories

Why Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet

~ cafebedouin

You know that David Foster Wallace speech about fish? Two young fish swimming along, older fish passes and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The young fish swim on, then one turns to the other: “What the hell is water?”

That’s the point. We don’t notice what we’re swimming in.

The Furniture We Sit In

Think about chairs. If you grew up sitting in chairs, you probably can’t comfortably squat all the way down with your feet flat on the ground. Try it right now. Most Americans can’t do it—our hips and ankles don’t have that range anymore.

But people in many Asian countries can squat like that easily. They didn’t sit in chairs as much growing up, so their bodies kept that mobility.

The chair didn’t reveal “the natural way to sit.” It created a way to sit, and then our bodies adapted to it. We lost other ways of sitting without noticing.

Stories and language work the same way. They’re like furniture for our minds.

Mental Furniture

The stories you grow up hearing shape what thoughts seem natural and what thoughts seem strange or even impossible.

If you grow up hearing stories where the hero goes on a journey, faces challenges, and comes back changed—you’ll expect your own life to work that way. When something bad happens, you might think “this is my challenge, I’ll grow from this.” That’s not wrong, but it’s not the only way to think.

Other cultures tell different stories:

  • Some stories teach “be clever and survive” instead of “face your fears and grow”
  • Some teach “keep the group happy” instead of “discover who you really are”
  • Some teach “things go in cycles” instead of “you’re on a journey forward”

None of these is more true than the others. They’re just different furniture. They each let you sit in some positions comfortably while making other positions hard or impossible.

Reality Tunnels

Writer Robert Anton Wilson called this your “reality tunnel”—the lens made of your beliefs, language, and experiences that shapes what you can see. He was right that we’re all looking through tunnels, not at raw reality.

Wilson believed you could learn to switch between different reality tunnels—adopt a completely different way of seeing for a while, then switch to another one. Try thinking like a conspiracy theorist for a week, then like a scientist, then like a mystic.

He wasn’t completely wrong. But switching tunnels isn’t as easy as Wilson sometimes made it sound. It’s more like switching languages—you need immersion, practice, and maintenance, or you just end up back in your native tunnel when things get difficult.

Why This Matters

When you only have one kind of mental furniture, you think that’s just how thinking works. Like those fish who don’t know they’re in water.

But when you realize stories and language are furniture—not reality—you get some important abilities:

First: You notice when your furniture isn’t working. Sometimes you face a problem where thinking “I need to grow from this challenge” actually makes things worse. Maybe you just need to be clever and get through it. Or maybe you need to stop focusing on yourself and think about the group. Your usual way of thinking might be the wrong tool for this specific situation.

Second: You can learn to use different tools. Not perfectly—that takes years of practice, like learning a new language. But you can borrow techniques.

Want to think more tactically? Read trickster stories—the wise fool who outsmarts powerful people through wit rather than strength.

Want to notice how groups work? Pay attention to stories that focus on harmony and relationships instead of individual heroes.

Want to see patterns instead of progress? Look at stories where things cycle and repeat instead of moving forward to an ending.

Third: No framework gets to be the boss. This is where it gets interesting. Once you see that all frameworks are furniture, none of them can claim to be “reality itself.” They’re all tools.

Think about how cleanliness norms work in Japan. There’s no cleanliness police enforcing the rules. People maintain incredibly high standards because they value the outcome. The structure is real and binding, but not coercive.

Your mental frameworks can work the same way. You choose which ones to use based on what you value and what works, not because any of them is “the truth.” That’s a kind of mental anarchism—no imposed authority telling you how you must think, but still having structure because you value what it enables.

The Hard Part

Here’s what most people don’t want to hear: different frameworks sometimes genuinely conflict. There’s no way to make them all fit together nicely.

An anthropologist once read Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a tribe. The tribesmen thought Hamlet’s uncle marrying his mother was perfectly reasonable, and Hamlet’s reaction seemed childish. They weren’t offering “an alternative interpretation.” From their framework, the Western reading was simply wrong.

This creates real tension. You can’t be “in” two incompatible frameworks at once. You have to actually pick, at least for that moment. And when you’re stressed or in crisis, you’ll probably default back to your native framework—the one you grew up with.

The question is whether you can recover perspective afterward: “That framework felt like reality in the moment, but it doesn’t own reality.”

The Practical Part

You probably can’t completely change your mental furniture. That would be like growing up again in a different culture. It would take years of immersion in situations where a different framework actually matters—where there are real consequences for not using it.

But you can do three things:

Stay aware that you’re sitting in furniture, not on the ground. Notice when your usual way of thinking is just one option, not the truth.

Borrow strategically from other frameworks for specific situations. Use a different mental model, tell yourself a different kind of story about what’s happening, ask different questions. Not because the new furniture is better, but because sometimes it gives you a view you couldn’t see from your regular chair.

Accept the tension when frameworks conflict. Don’t try to force them into a neat synthesis. Real anarchism isn’t chaos—it’s having structure without letting any structure claim ultimate authority. You maintain your primary way of thinking because you value what it enables, not because it’s “true.” And you accept that other frameworks might be genuinely incompatible with yours, with no neutral way to resolve it.

The Bottom Line

We all swim in water—language, stories, ways of thinking that feel natural but are actually learned. The point isn’t to get out of the water. You can’t.

The point is to notice it’s there. To see that your framework is a way, not the way. To choose which furniture to sit in based on what you value and what the situation demands, not because someone told you that’s reality.

That’s harder than it sounds. When things get tough, your native framework will reassert itself and feel like the only truth. But if you can recover perspective afterward—if you can remember that you were sitting in furniture, not touching the ground—you’ve gained something real.

It’s a kind of freedom. Not the easy freedom of “believe whatever you want.” The harder freedom of “no framework owns you, but you still need frameworks to function.”

That’s not much. But it’s something. And it beats being the fish who never even knew there was water.

Lludd and Llefelys

~ cafebedouin

“Lludd and Llefelys, one of the medieval Welsh tales collected in the Mabinogion, is a vision of the internet. In fact, it describes the internet twice. Here, a terrible plague has settled on Britain: the arrival of the Coraniaid, an invincible supernatural enemy. What makes the Coraniaid so dangerous is their incredibly sharp hearing. They can hear everything that’s said, everywhere on the island, even a whisper hundreds of miles away. They already know the details of every plot against them. People have stopped talking; it’s the only way to stay safe. To defeat them, the brothers Lludd and Llefelys start speaking to each other through a brass horn, which protects their words. Today, we’d call it encryption. But this horn contains a demon; whatever you speak into it, the words that come out are always cruel and hostile. This medium turns the brothers against each other; it’s a communications device that makes them more alone. In the story, the brothers get rid of the demon by washing out the horn with wine. I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.”

Sam Kriss, “The Internet is Made of Demons.” Damage Magazine. April 21, 2022.

Interesting metaphor.

The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth

~ cafebedouin

“Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. That shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to change or improve society’s values. Good guys stand up for what they believe in, and are willing to die for a cause. This trope is so omnipresent in our modern stories, movies, books, even our political metaphors, that it is sometimes difficult to see how new it is, or how bizarre it looks, considered in light of either ethics or storytelling…

When I talked with Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017), about the rise of the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, she told me: ‘Three inventions collided to make concentration camps possible: barbed wire, automatic weapons, and the belief that whole categories of people should be locked up.’ When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals. It is the Grimms’ and von Herder’s vision taken to its logical nationalist conclusion that implies that ‘categories of people should be locked up’.”

-Marina Benjamin, “The good guy/bad guy myth.” Aeon. January 29, 2018

Criticism as Other People’s Stories

~ cafebedouin

Stories are explanations of the world we tell ourselves. They are filled with unnecessary detail, and by extension, falsehoods. Getting involved with stories is how we give meaning to our lives, reenforce our ego, and project that ego – our brand if you will – out in the wider world.

If the above is true, then it also means that when someone makes a criticism of you – if they say: you are X, then they are trying to hire you as an extra in their movie. In some cases, you may even be cast in a main role – as the villain, the victim, the obstacle to be overcome, colleague, etc.

But, we are not extras or actors in someone else’s movie. We are not even stars of our own production. The stories we tell ourselves are narrative fiction, a reduction of our experience to an easily understandable illusion. It’s a filter, designed to create a certain look that doesn’t reflect reality. It’s our ego taking control.

If we want to get to lived experience, we have to break free of the plots created in our head. The easiest first place to do that is to break free from the plots in other people’s heads.

When someone says something to you, the most likely thing they are doing is projecting their own story. They are telling you how you fit in to their story. You may be a personification of some trait they don’t like about themselves, or the opposite. You may be an important piece in making their fiction work, or a bit player. But, no matter what role you are assigned by someone else, you always have the choice about whether to play the part.

Some parts have useful lessons to teach us, and we are obligated to play them by our circumstances. But, even then, you have the choice in whether to believe in the part. It’s one thing to know you are an actor in a fiction. It’s something else to think the role we play is our life.

Most of us think the stories we tell ourselves or the parts we play in other people’s stories are our lives. We need to pause these productions, see them for what they are, and if necessary, play our roles. But, play it knowing it’s a role. It makes all the difference.

Sadhu’s Sugar

~ cafebedouin

“A woman in India was upset that her son was eating too much sugar. No matter how much she chided him, he continued to satisfy his sweet tooth. Totally frustrated, she decided to take her son to see the local sahdu (holy man).

She approached the sadhu respectfully and said, “Sir, my son eats too much sugar. It is not good for his health. Would you please advise him to stop eating it?”

The sadhu listened to the woman carefully, turned, and spoke to her son, “Go home and come back in two weeks.”

The woman was perplexed. She took the boy by the hand and went home.

Two weeks later, she returned, boy in hand. The sadhu motioned for them to come forward. He looked directly at the boy and said, “Boy, you should stop eating sugar. It is not good for your health.”

The boy nodded and promised he would not continue this habit any longer.

The boy’s mother turned to the sadhu and asked, “Why didn’t you tell him that two weeks ago when I brought him here to see you?”

The sadhu smiled and said, “Mother, two weeks ago, I was still eating sugar myself.”

Moral: If you are going to give advice, take it yourself first.

—Adapted from preilly, “Gandhi Story.”

h/t Tim Ferris. I changed it from Gandhi to a sadhu because it makes better sense to me. There are village elders, sadhus, etc. all over India that are respected in their communities enough to be a stand-in for Gandhi.

Charisma

~ cafebedouin ~ 3 Comments

“The truth is that charisma is a learned behavior, a skill to be developed in much the same way that we learned to walk or practice vocabulary when studying a new language.”

-Bryan Clark, “What Makes People Charismatic, and How You Can Be, Too” The New York Times. August 15, 2019.

Argues that charisma is presence, power and warmth. When we focus on other people, they tend to notice our attention and the fact that we find them worth noticing. People like to be noticed, and they tend to like people that notice them.

Power seems to be used in the sense of confidence. There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. But, most people don’t have too much confidence. They have too little. As a result, the end up doing a lot of complaining: about their lack of agency, about the unsatisfactory things in their lives, etc. No one wants to hear about other people’s problems. Everyone has plenty of their own.

Warmth. In a cold, cruel world, be someone else’s sunshine. Be everyone’s sunshine, if you can. Some people seem like they are born that way. Even if you weren’t, who doesn’t appreciate the effort?

Suggestions for improving your charisma? Learn to tell stories. Our stories make us relatable and telling them to others requires focus, confidence and the vulnerability of sharing ourselves with others, which if it isn’t warmth, it’s in the neighborhood.