Matte Therapy

My grandpa, Doug, is a walking paradox. On the one hand, he’s a romantic who loves to pontificate on the beauty of maple trees. On the other, he’s a pragmatic lumberjack – always assessing the industrial value of an ecosystem. 

It only takes him a moment to switch from one perspective to the other. This pivot is done without hesitation. There’s no walking back previous statements, no remark about the irony, no analysis. Whenever I witnessed him do this, it struck me as odd, almost jarring, but I didn’t know why.

Prelogical

Now I think I figured it out. Doug is not the most self-reflective person. In fact, he’s basically a blackbox of a machine. He wakes up, does yoga, eats a bowl of Shredded Wheat, then grows or cuts trees – depending on the day. There’s not much room in his schedule for journaling or introspection. 

As a result, he’s able to hold about a hundred different, contradictory viewpoints in his head. Like: Climate change is unpredictable. Washington State is going to get less and less rain as time goes on. It’s important to live in harmony with nature. Those good-for-nothing, devilspawn opossums have got to go.

Is it just intellectual inconsistency, or is there more to it?

Life is messy and Doug has done a great job living it. Luck was a factor, as always. But I think his ability to contain paradoxes also helped him seize opportunities. Doug could just latch on to the nearest available, most helpful piece of information in his brain without wondering if it made sense in the broader scheme of things.

Consistently good microdecisions → no coherent mesostructure → good macro outcomes.

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Chaotic storage

I’ve got a bit of a kneejerk response to therapy, psychoanalysis, counseling, shrinks, coaches, spiritual guides, breathwork gurus, etc. I meditate a bit, but thus far, this category of care has not been my cup of tea. I’m not really in a position to weigh the costs and benefits of these things. They might work, or not, no clue. 

My hypothesis here is simply about one effect of striving for psychological feng shui. Namely, that it erodes our tolerance for contradictions. And that tolerance is a key faculty for emotional regulation.

Feng shui as a practice aims to harmonize people with their environments by realigning furniture and getting rid of things that don’t fit. Psychological feng shui is an attempt to achieve internal harmony.

I think most people equate this with consistency. Namely, taking action in a way that is consistent with how they perceive their personality. Once someone has formed a sense of self, they attempt to avoid breaking the mold. For example, when shopping for a new shirt, it feels nice to hear, “That is sooo you.”

After a while, this personal system turns into a set of hard protocols. Any action can be assessed against the set and be measured as kosher or a breach. Less breaches = good. Being introspective means having a high assessment rate – i.e. regularly self-auditing for consistency and purging contradictions when they’re discovered, even if they would have been helpful in real life.

I imagine this same type of person would be absolutely shell-shocked upon walking into an Amazon warehouse, where packages are basically stored at random. It looks chaotic, but this lack of mesostructure makes robots and people more efficient. Instead of neatly collecting toothbrushes in the corner, you spread them out. This increases the probability that a worker can find one quickly.

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Matte Therapy

Therein lies Doug’s advantage: a low assessment rate. He just goes along, doing stuff, and not worrying too much if it aligns with previous behavior. His operating system is a black box. He doesn’t look into it. He just does. 

It might even be worth considering this its own unique kind of therapy. Where you spend time reducing your assessment rate and just operating based on intuition and environmental feedback. 

If traditional mental care is about increasing visibility into how you think, matte therapy is about ignoring it. It’s about being indifferent towards paradoxes. This doesn’t mean ignoring your feelings, but rather accepting them at face value. Instead of spending time trying to construct an unassailable belief system, you could just focus on doing stuff. 

Sort of like how investor’s profitabilities are inversely correlated with how often they check their portfolios, or how much time a company spends on developing mission statements vs. listening to customers. 

One would think that looking inwards is the way to unlocking your “third eye”. That it’s the path to a greater, more profound understanding of the world and enhanced agency. But I think there’s a strong possibility that the opposite is true. Maybe life just isn’t that deep..