On Saber-Tooths, Joshua, and your Bitch-ass Brain.

I keep telling myself that I’m not a writer.

I do it as I’m editing content, drafting a press release, writing copy for a website, or working on an essay to publish on Medium.

Why? because that’s the easiest way to stay right where I am. Not fail, not succeed. Just stay. See, it’s our brain’s job to protect us from danger. Based on the knowledge of the past and the uncertainty of the future, our minds lead us to the decision in which the likelihood of us being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger is the lowest.

Yep, that’s right. It doesn’t matter what the issue is that your dealing with, the mind is always going to treat it like life or death. That poorly evolved but highly effective part of us is as old as time. Time, by the way, that was created by the mind in the first place.

Knot yourself up pondering on that one, my friend. But later. Right now you and I talking.

But all of this thinking isn’t the mind locked in a civil war with you – or rather, THE You – the real consciousness that is actually in power. It isn’t that it knows the saber-tooth is evil … it’s just that it doesn’t want you to get eaten. So instead of picking up a stick and killing that big ass tabby, you sweat and hide in the cave (and maybe do some painting … but we can talk about that later in a pro-fear post, because that’s gonna be a thing).

So let’s say that your saber-tooth tiger is that chance for a big promotion or an audition. For some of us, it’s not that we are programmed to not succeed, we are just avoiding failure. And as Joshua the Computer told us in WarGames, “The only winning move is not to play.”

And what is this big sponge on our neck? A fucking computer, shitting out cold logic that is only warmed by our actual consciousness; the warm light of Being. A gross but accurate metaphor that I may edit later.

What do computers know about tigers? Only what we tell them. It’s all in the programming, isn’t it?