The Terrible Master

The mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

This was David Foster Wallace’s message to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College in his now famous speech, “This is Water.” He continued, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.”

Taming this terrible master requires being aware of the ongoing dialogue in our heads. The dialogue that’s focused on the future and the past, but rarely on the present.

Naval Ravikant describes the voice in our head as a crazy roommate that never stops talking:

“Those conversations you’re having in your head all the time. That is your world. That is the world you live in. That’s the worldview you have. That’s a lens you see through, and that’s going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else.

Back to that crazy roommate analogy… you would eventually tell your roommate to shut up, or you would tell them to start justifying their claims, or you would at least at some level, you start dismissing them for just kind of rambling all the time.”

The brain is terrible master and a crazy roommate because it hasn’t caught up to our current times. It evolved to keep us on the alert for predators. It wasn’t that long ago that we had to be aware of a stalking tiger or a pack of wolves. Our high alertness and anxiety kept us alive. Our brains even explain why the world is facing an obesity epidemic. Yuval Harari explains in Sapiens:  

“In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes.”

Now we have these foods in abundance, but our brain is wired to eat as much of it as possible because it doesn’t know when it might get it again. Processed foods are designed in a lab to exploit this natural wiring of our brains.

This brain that causes us to overeat is the same one that causes us to overthink and worry incessantly about the future.

That’s what we’re up against. Thousands of years of outdated instincts hard-wired into our brains. Sometimes we mistake peace or calmness for boredom. We’re not particularly anxious, so we start scrolling. We check email, Instagram, Twitter or the Drudge Report. We’re in search of something to worry about.

It’s like the crazy roommate went to their room for a bit, so we wake them up and ask them to talk about conspiracy theories.

Our brains are running on an outdated software and working against us. To find peace is to upgrade this software or at least defragment it.

The path to calmness is cultivating a practice that helps us realize we aren’t our every passing thought. And just because we feel a certain way or can imagine something, it doesn’t make it real. It can be through meditation, running, journaling or working out, but finding a way to quiet or observe this internal conversation as an outsider is key.

Separating the never-ending chatter in our heads from reality is the path to a calm mind. It’s the way to turn the terrible master into an excellent servant.