In the Sci-Fi comedy The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a wife argues with her husband and tells him to get a sense of perspective. Just to spite her, the husband goes ahead and creates the Total Perspective Vortex—an unbearable room that shows visitors their incredible smallness in relation to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe—to prove that the one thing we simply cannot live with is a sense of perspective. The room ends up frying his wife’s mind, which saddens the husband, but also satisfies him that he’s at least proven his point.
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I was reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—and had just gotten to the part about the Total Perspective Vortex—when I started Flow, so I laughed when I saw how Csikszentmihalyi kicked off his book by framing human dissatisfaction from a universal perspective. In a section called “The Roots of Discontent,” he writes:
The motions of stars, the transformations of energy that occur in it might be predicted and explained well enough. But natural processes do not take human desires into account. They are deaf and blind to our needs, and thus they are random in contrast with the order we attempt to establish through our goals. A meteorite on a collision course with New York City might be obeying all the laws of the universe, but it would still be a damn nuisance. The virus that attacks the cells of a Mozart is only doing what comes naturally, even though it inflicts a grave loss on humankind. ‘The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,’ in the words of J.H. Holmes. ‘It is simply indifferent.’
The universe is big, chaotic, and for all practical purposes, does not care about our happiness. In fact, much of the enjoyment we experience in life, is the result of our ability to create order in the midst of the chaos. Csikszentmihalyi argues that culture, religion, work, and any personal goals we might have for how we use our time on this earth are all attempts to bring psychological order to our sense of self and prevent chaos from unraveling it—what he calls “psychic entropy.” He goes on to write:
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.
And that’s just it—it comes down to what we have the ability to control. Csikszentmihalyi concludes the section by describing the kinds of people who are able to improve their quality of life through the flow experiences that result from an appropriate focus on what they can control:
Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives.
The one thing we can truly control is ourselves. That’s a perspective we can maybe all agree on, both husband and wife.
Then again, when it comes to having a universal perspective, recent research suggests that maybe the husband was wrong after all. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin, or any other part of the world destined for slippery streets in winter, knows that sometimes you have to turn right to go left.
It follows, then, that anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin wasn’t surprised by what Doc Hudson said to Lightening McQueen in the Pixar movie Cars: “I’ll put it simple. If you’re going hard enough left, you’ll find yourself turning right.”
But Lightening McQueen didn’t grow up in Wisconsin and he doesn’t get it. He’s too focused on turning left that he can’t do it. A prideful McQueen fails to see that to reach his desired goal, he has to change his way of doing things. Ultimately, he has to look outside of himself and adapt to his environment.
Sometimes, to reach our desired goal, we have to take action that is unexpected, even counterintuitive to what our initial game plan might’ve been. Focusing too hard on the goal, it turns out, can actually blind us to the steps we need to take and prevent us from getting to where we want to go.
In the wake of Gene Hackman’s death, I read an article that quoted him as having once said:
I don’t like to look real deep at what I do with my characters. It is that strange fear that if you look at something too closely, it goes away.
Hackman was an outstanding actor who I imagine worked very hard at his craft, so what did he mean? Maybe great actors bring their characters to life by focusing on something other than the end result. His words started me thinking about certain areas of expertise or states of being that can only be achieved indirectly. If you shoot for them directly, you’re bound to miss the mark.
For example, considering knowledge of the soul, Virginia Woolf (via The Marginalian) writes:
One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.
There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.
[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to.
These examples remind me of how important it is to focus on something other than the destination. My wife recently pointed out that the hardest part of running a half marathon is the last half mile, because you’re so preoccupied with being finished. By contrast, if you’re running a full marathon, mile 13 feels just like the others because you’re still focused on the journey.
This past week, I was “playing” a game of cribbage with my friend Matt. After two hours, we had only progressed through one hand. The journey of conversation, it would seem, was more important than the game’s destination.
Cribs progress after 2 hours – “It’s the journey, not the destination.”
Matt and I were happy to be engaged in good conversation, without any preoccupation of it leading to any grand accomplishment or revelation.
Many people struggle with figuring out how to be happy. It’s another one of those elusive states of being that can really only be achieved indirectly. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:
Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ said J.S. Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
He goes on to quote Viktor Frankl, who links success with happiness as two things that cannot be pursued directly:
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: ‘Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.’
According to Csikszentmihalyi, happiness is the byproduct of living an active and cognitively engaged life. By focusing on key elements of the journey, happiness—or better yet, deep enjoyment in life—is a destination that can be reached.
Csikszentmihalyi calls the journey “flow,” or the ability to experience so much enjoyment in doing something that you have the positive feeling of losing yourself in the process. If you’re in flow, you’re fully in the moment, without worry or concern for how you’ll obtain happiness. Happiness becomes an afterthought because you’re literally living a journey of self-induced fulfillment.
Another way of understanding flow is as the space between anxiety and boredom. For any activity, we can either further develop our skills or adjust the challenge level to stay in flow. But the important thing to realize is that we’re in control.
Csikszentmihalyi describes the difficult emotions and mental states we experience in life as psychic entropy, or the disorder of consciousness. Without structure, the mind can be a chaotic place, leading to all sorts of woes and ruminations. It needs a sense of order for us to feel secure and satisfied. Flow is what restores that sense of order.
So instead of focusing on the vague end goal of enjoying life, we might look closer at how to bring more flow activities into it. According to Csikszentmihalyi, these are activities that provide us with a sense of control over how we perform and that we have a chance of actually completing. They have clear goals that require concentration to reach, and provide us with feedback on how we’re doing.
In the end, it’s quite simple: flow activities require us to work. Most things worthwhile in life do. The work is the journey to focus on. In the case of flow, it’s involving yourself in activities that increase the complexity of your mind, thereby reducing psychic entropy, and allowing you to experience growth of the self and a deeper enjoyment of life as a result.
Look away from happiness, and instead toward creating quality experiences in life, making the most of what you already have. You might be surprised at how much happier you start to feel.
Argentinian cartoonist Liniers – Image via his website
I first learned about Argentinian cartoonist Liniers from his book Lo que hay antes de que haya algo (What there is before there’s something), a terrifying children’s story that—in a style reminiscent of Where the Wild Things Are—addresses the inescapable fear born in moments of anticipation. You can experience a reading of the story in Spanish here. And the beauty of pictures books is that you don’t have to know the language to follow along. The drawings of Liniers are wonderfully eerie and detailed.
I tend to align more with Austin Kleon’s perspective on Star Wars, but Liniers appears to be a bigger fan. He uses Star Wars characters regularly in his comic strips.
Here’s a small sampling of some of my favorites:
Reduce, reuse, recycle (via Comics Kingdom)Darth Vader and his friend, Darkness (via Liniers)Darth Vader, doing it again (via Liniers)Going extreme commando (via Reddit)Foiled by allergies (via Comics Kingdom)Luke’s other family members (via Pinterest)
And on this May the 4th, 2025, let’s all remember to be wary of the dark side.
Liniers’s comic strip is called Macanudo and it’s a real treasure that holds the forces of darkness at bay.
Who doesn’t face difficulty in life? Difficult decisions, for starters, are part of being human. Each day presents us with countless choices—some big, some small.
But what about difficult internal experiences? At some point, we all have experienced things like negative emotions, unwanted thoughts, or intrusive memories. We may even be engaged in an ongoing battle with depression or anxiety, or avoid situations that would lead to a more fulfilling life because of an unspoken fear holding us back.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced like the word “act”) is an evidence-based tool that can help you accept your difficult internal experiences and commit to taking action that brings you fulfillment in life. In other words, it’s a way of choosing to act according to your values rather than allowing your difficult internal experiences to dictate how you live.
One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
ACT takes a similarly empowering view of choice in response to human suffering. In Reclaim Your Life: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in 7 Weeks, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes how the mindfulness components of ACT help you make the choice to live out your values despite the difficult experiences you may face. She writes:
They allow you to pay attention to difficult experiences like thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, and urges without immediately reacting to them. Instead, you make a conscious decision as to how you want to respond to any given situation based on your values.
Many of our internal struggles are the result of the storytelling mind, something that makes us uniquely human. While our ability to tell stories allows us to do many wonderful things, it can also lead us to believe things about ourselves and our world that are untrue or unhelpful. In fact, oftentimes the stories we tell ourselves make our internal suffering worse. ACT helps us overcome this trouble through gaining psychological flexibility. Just like performing exercises to increase our body’s flexibility, we can also use strategies to increase our mind’s flexibility.
Essentially, the “acceptance” part of ACT entails welcoming any experience, whether positive or negative, into your life without judgement. In his poem “The Guest House,” 13th-century Persian poet Rumi encourages us to welcome every kind of guest into our home. “Entertain them all!” he says.
The act of living is based on rhythm—on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are content with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life,” metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy.
It’s through acceptance that we give up the fight to control the uncontrollable, and can begin to take action toward what we value.
2. Cognitive defusion
You are not your thoughts. This idea is central to the process of cognitive defusion. We sometimes get “fused,” or attached to a negative thought, which can end up clouding our view of reality and dictating how we experience life. But if we can get some distance from the thought, or separate ourselves from it, then we gain the clarity needed to understand that it’s just a thought, and our thoughts don’t define us. It’s our choices and our actions that define us.
In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes the act of noticing the culture without feeling obligated to be a part of it:
It’s helpful to view currents in the culture without feeling obligated to follow the direction of their flow. Instead, notice them in the same connected, detached way you might notice a warm wind. Let yourself move within it, yet not be of it.
The same could be said for noticing thoughts or emotions. If we imagine them floating by us like the currents of a river, we can more easily see that they are fleeting and they are not really part of who we are. This is the power of cognitive defusion.
3. Being present
The present moment is all we have. ACT incorporates many mindfulness strategies, but perhaps none as direct as those focused on being present in the moment. In “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:
Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.
It’s in this intermediate space that we have the power to act. Or, take Jamie xx’s song “Breather,” which features audio of a yoga teacher speaking calming words over the DJ’s backing rhythms:
Breathe Be grateful for this present moment The only moment that truly exists ‘Cause the past is gone And the future is uncertain But what we know right now is this moment
Making contact with your present-moment experience—whether it’s your external environment or your internal condition—rather than resisting it, is an essential component of ACT. Again, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes it like this:
The point is not simply to be present, but to help increase your ability to attend to your present-moment experience so that you can respond rather than react reflexively through old habits that may not be serving you.
The only place that change can happen, after all, is in the present.
4. Self as context
This process is also referred to as the “observer self.” When our storytelling mind is in high gear we are locked into the “thinking self.” Similar to cognitive defusion, shifting into the observer self helps us gain some distance from our thoughts, or our thinking self. It’s basically the ability to view what you’re experiencing from an outside perspective instead of an inside one. We can do this through the simple act of noticing our own experience. If we can direct our attention to what we’re experiencing and name it, then we become aware of it, and it’s through that awareness that we’re able to confront it in service of living out our values.
5. Values
Once we unhinge ourselves from all the things holding us back, we become empowered to move in the direction of our values. But in order to do that, we need to know what we value. In ACT’s terms, values differ from goals, which are things that can be accomplished. Values, on the other hand, are more ongoing and provide us with direction in life.
6. Commitment
This process is also known as committed ACTion. Clever, huh? Once we’ve identified our values, the logical next step is to commit to living them out. Taken together with the other processes of ACT, we are freed to live according to our values instead of our unwanted thoughts and fears. Living like this may very well mean entering uncomfortable situations, but we do so willingly, knowing that they represent something we value. Isn’t that a much better and fulfilling way to live?
So, if you ever find yourself struggling internally with difficult thoughts or unwanted emotions, remember ACT’s hexaflex. Go ahead and flex that thought muscle! Get out of your head and move toward living out your values.
Acceptance frees us to fly – I made this animation from a paper bag I got at the
Jade Rivera gallery
in Lima
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about finishing Oliver Burkeman’s book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I loved its central message of accepting our limitations—not the least of which is the limited time we all have in this place—as a way of living more freely and more meaningfully. In particular, I loved the sentiment with which Burkeman ended his book:
And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
It has me reflecting on what “magnificent task or weird little thing” I came here for and goes well with Austin Kleon’s “Be the weird you wish to see.”
It also has me wondering about how limitations can counterintuitively liberate us in other areas of life. On this topic, Kleon too, has something to say. In the final chapter of his book Steal Like an Artist—titled “Creativity Is Subtraction”—he writes:
Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of unlimited possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.
The way to get over creative blocks is to simply put some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.
I’ve recently started following Erik Winkowski’s newsletter Paper Films, which I find to be wildly creative. When I think about using constraints as a way of unleashing creativity in your work, Winkowski’s short films immediately come to mind. For example, a few weeks ago he posted a video showing how he uses a typewriter to draw.
It’s hard to imagine a more constrained way of drawing than doing so on a typewriter.
Kleon also employs the humble typewriter as a limiting tool for his own creative work. He conducts his excellent typewriter interviews via the U.S. Postal Service, a constraint in its own right. In today’s hyperconnected world, the time it takes to type up interview questions, mail them out, wait for a response, and post the results serves as a limiter that brings Kleon’s creative work and collaborations into focus. It’s the good friction.
He also popularized blackout poetry—a form of found poetry in which you remove, or “black out,” words of a newspaper or other text to create your own unique composition.
One of Kleon’s predecessors in this type of work was the visual artist Tom Phillips. In 1966, Phillips decided to take W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document and modify every page through his beautiful paintings and collages with the goal of creating an entirely new work of art—blackout poetry taken to the extreme. Phillips’s commitment to the project would produce his magnum opus: A Humument. Over the course of 50 years, A Humument saw various publications and modifications, the latest version coming out in 2016, just six years before Phillips passed away. Every page of this beautifully unique and impressive book is graciously available for viewing on Thomas Phillips’s website.
Page 93 of Tom Phillips’s A Humument (2nd version 1986)
In the end, Winkowski, Kleon, and Phillips have all used limitations as a way of freeing themselves to pursue and define their life’s work. In doing so, they’ve carved out their own creative niche—their own unique voice, their own version of weird.
I think we need limitations in life. There’s definitely a time for pushing yourself beyond your limits, but when life seems complicated, I always find it helpful to simplify. If I ever feel stressed out, this mantra always helps to ground me: “Keep it simple.” This could just as well be, “Find a limitation.” It’s a way of focusing yourself in on what you can actually do now with the tools you currently have.
Setting such limitations ends up teaching you something important—it might even reveal the wings of your real self opening, or the weird little thing you came here for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
