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In the Beginning, there was Blame
July 3, 2024 at 11:13am – Dillon Beach, CA The man answered, “The woman you put here with me gave me the fruit, and I ate it.”- Genesis 3:12
Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you might look stupid, wrong, flawed or generally bad, you always have the option to blame.
Blame is like a big red button that’s always available to press. When you press this button, it shoots out a red lightning bolt at somebody or something to blame.
It feels a bit like dumping rubbish into a bin. It’s mostly habitual and automatic. When we open the lid, it stinks, but once it’s closed, we wipe our hands clean. The trash is going somewhere else and isn’t our problem anymore.
Man has been blaming things since Adam threw Eve under the bus. No one person, institution or ideology can escape a pointed finger or resist pointing too.
And although it doesn’t feel nice to be blamed, there’s always a good, noble, righteous reason why someone ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be blamed for something.
The Nuts and Bolts of Blame
Neuroscientist Jill-Bolte Taylor links blame to the left hemisphere, where she suffered a massive stroke, described in A Stroke of Insight and Whole Brain Living.
“As my left brain became stronger, it seemed natural for me to want to “blame” other people or external events for my feelings or circumstances.”
Recovered from her stroke, she gained a rare objectivity, and wrote clearly about how it feels when anxiety, shame, guilt, anger or blame overwhelm and possess her consciousness.
“highly focused as my head feels like it is in a deep cloud …heavy, burdened, or desperate, just as though doomsday has perilously arrived… prickly in my body and tense in my throat… like a pressure cooker that is ready to explode with vehement hostility and blame.”
These “old pattered responses” become habitual over time and “perfected in …attempts to fend off threats”, but may also get triggered if we have a strong need to hide something, like shame.
This is the focus of the book Healing the Shame That Binds You, where author John Bradshaw admits that shame “ruled me like an addiction. I acted it out; I covered it up in subtle and not so subtle ways; I transferred it to my family, my clients and the people I taught.”
Blame can also be used to strike out against anything we find strange or unpleasant in our environment.
This dynamic is called projection, described by analyst Joseph Lee as a sort of “magnetic attraction between you and (certain unacknowledged) qualities(s) out in your environment.” Rather than accept these disowned parts of ourselves, we defend against them with criticism and blame.
Beyond Blame
This is one of the paradoxes of our life, that familiarity is stronger than comfort – Virginia Satir
Post-stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor sounded like Marcus Aurelius when she writes “nothing external to me had the power to take away my peace of heart and mind.” Not easy for us mere mortals, but this is the promise of blaming less.
Without blame, we could go easier on ourselves and others. We could accept responsibility, and stay comfortable with uncertainty and not-knowing. We could learn to speak the truth and say what we want to say, without holding our tongue or venting and complaining. And we could reel in our projections, admit our mistakes and become a more realistic, imperfect human being, warts and all.
A world without blame is deeply uncomfortable and painful. But it’s possible, and gives us the chance to see life clearly, as it truly is.
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Police in plain clothes
August 7, 2025 @ 11:13am – Dart Island, NSW A desire to understand is wisdom;
desiring a result is greed.Sayadaw U Tejaniya
It’s June 20, 2022. As usual, I’d arrived at my therapist’s office in a rush. We talk about feelings. Feelings I’ve had for as long as I could remember. Feeling different. Disconnected. Feeling like a fraud. A deep, disorienting sadness.
These were sensitive topics for me, but I was trying too hard to do therapy correctly. Asking clever questions. Speaking carefully. Thinking a bit too much. That doesn’t get you very far. It’s not really talk therapy. It’s not even proper talking. The performance prevents anything real to percolate. You’d be literally better off talking to a tree.
My therapist changed tack. She asked the part of me that was blocking her questions to sit (imaginarily) on a (real) empty chair and tell her why it was acting like that. Why was it so defensive? And what in particular was it protecting?
When I spoke as that part, which we named The Controller, I repeated the same evasive, critical stance I had taken before. The crucial distinction was that it was now a separate part of me. Before the exercise, I was identified with it. I was it. By naming, placing and conversing with it, it was now a separate part. It had its own form. It had moved from subject, to object.
Unofficially, this was parts work, usually associated with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. In No Bad Parts, Richard C. Schwartz rejects a “mono mind paradigm”, dividing up our interior world into many parts or “little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe.” There’s different types of parts, like Protectors, “the parts of us usually running our lives” and Exiles which “we have tried to bury”, burdened with difficult “emotions, beliefs and memories”. There’s also the Self, which is like our mature and ‘spontaneously compassionate’ side, that we all access once other less healthy parts move aside.
When we talk to, listen to, and gain the trust of these different parts, we can restore peace and order inside us. Exiled parts can emerge from the shadows when we no longer find them disgusting or dangerous. Harsh, defensive parts like an inner critic can relax. By talking to The Controller, I learned a little about what it cares about (identifying threats), but also that it’s tired of this job. This attitude, this protective stance started to sound like an extremely expensive insurance policy, written for imaginary risks.
Outside a police academy, plainclothes officers whoop and horse around like new graduates. Two run straight at each other and collide, bouncing off unhurt like stuntmen. A policeman tells me they’re practicing to be criminals.
Dream – August 5, 2025No Bad Parts, written by IFS founder Richard C. Schwartz, is a decent, slightly bland introduction to the theory. But like a book about basketball, it’s probably better to start practicing. Schwartz recommends finding an IFS trained therapist, which is a good start, although any mental health practitioner would be able to walk through a similar exercise to mine that I shared.
Since most people probably don’t have access to a therapist, or the concentration required to sit quietly and listen to themselves, it’s worth experimenting with other approaches. For example, if you have a practice of recording your dreams, you might consider thinking of dream characters as parts. Dreams have no need for conscious visualization or monk-like concentration. All you need is a bit of memory.
Dreams are naturally vivid and emotive, effortlessly delivery images and potent symbols for you to review each morning. A dream of a meeting with a confused, miserable teenager might be showing you an Exile that you banished years ago for being too embarrassing. A dream of policeman, horsing around in plain clothes might signal the relaxing of a habitually judgmental attitude.
Parts work uses different language than Jung, but the thought is the same. It doesn’t matter if you recognize a part in a dream or in an empty chair. What matters is getting free of the habitual identification, with the confidence and assurance that “you will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”1
- Johnson, Robert A. 1989. Inner Work ↩︎
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Light pollution
July 18, 2025 @ 12:54pm – Melbourne, Australia “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell
“We have to acknowledge that we hate those things and only those things in the world that we first hate in ourselves.” – Ken Wilber
If you look up at the night sky in a city, you’ll see a couple of stars. There’s the constellations you’re familiar with, and a few others here and there. You may have seen the sky full of stars, but that’s probably not the sky that you experience most of the time. It’s limited, but it’s your sky. In a similar way, we are habitually identified with a certain type of consciousness, our ego. This is the attitude, thoughts, beliefs, that we have grown up with and grown used to.
It’s been developed for good reasons, because an ego helps us to relate with others and get things done in society. But because of how the ego is developed, unconsciously, and in response to stuff that happens in childhood, it is naturally going to be a little bit narrow. As we’ve grown up, we’ve made all these little choices about what is good, what is bad, and so on. It’s been in our interest to try our best, but we’re always operating off limited information. So our personalities end up a bit limited too.
The ego is missing some stuff. It’s probably over-indexed on certain things, under-cooked in other areas. It’s a house designed with very little oversight. Some of us spent most of the time designing a sleek infinity swimming pool. Others spent a lot of time getting the kitchen right, but forgot to plumb the bathroom. Some rooms are lit up with seductive mood lighting, others have no electricity.
In this imperfect process, as we double down on the things we believe to be important, we’re also doing a lot of shoving away of the things that are deemed dangerous or difficult, or that don’t particularly help us to navigate the world.
This stuff becomes what Jung called the Shadow, the “dumping ground for all those characteristics of our personality that we disown”1. Deborah Stewart, of This Jungian Life podcast, describes it as “the underbelly of the ego…that’s hard to look at… hard to feel really connected to…loaded with feelings of disgust, profound discomfort, and a feeling of wanting to push it away.”2
Although the ego and the shadow have such differing relationships with the conscious mind, they both constrain us. We are constrained by identification with some things and rejection of other things.
The Constraint of the Ego
I was collaging with some friends. I hadn’t made a collage in a long time. I thought it would be easy, but I found it very difficult to create a composition that I liked. I was selecting and cutting out images from magazines. I thought I was being clever. I thought I had a good eye and aesthetic. I’m a designer. I should be good at this.
But I was stuck. I was jiggling around pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing was fitting together. My friend D saw this and asked what I was doing. I said “I’m trying to move it around so it looks right.” She replied, “What’s right? It’s a collage.” She had a point. What did right mean? And why was that important? Why not just have fun? Why not make something silly, or shocking, or bright turquoise? No, for me, I need to get it right.
A few pieces of ripped paper shone a bright light on what’s habitual for me, what I identify with. The need to be careful, considerate, aesthetic, minimal. I pick pleasing things. I take care and attention and time. That’s my ego.
There’s no right way to do a collage, of course. That’s like saying there’s a right way to make a song. And I got more interesting results when I used colors that I don’t normally use, or if I used my left hand, or closed my eyes, or if I ripped things really quickly, or if I ripped instead of using scissors.
The Constraint of the Shadow
When I buy something at the supermarket, I don’t make small talk. I place my things down on the counter, my phone bristling ready to pay. I move on as quickly as I can. I want to be efficient. I don’t want unnecessary attention on me. I don’t want to slow down people behind me.
Now, sometimes, when I need coins for the laundry in my apartment building, I need to ask for change. It’s not possible to move by quietly like usual. I have to stop and say “Hey…” I have to ask someone to do something for me. In a way, I have to admit that I need help, or that I don’t have my life completely organized and together. Those are things that I would rather not look at directly. Things that my habitual side really can’t stand and pretends don’t exist. That’s my shadow.
And there’s a lot of defense mechanisms when I’m pushed into those shadow areas, even with something simple like asking for change. For some people it’s “hatred, disgust, avoidance, criticism, accusations, attacking.”3 In this case, I’ll get irritated. I’ll try and avoid it. I’ll roll my eyes. I’ll think about finding a machine to do this so I don’t have to think about it again. I’ll feel bad about holding up the line and apologize a lot.
Just like the ego constrained my collaging attempts, my shadow also prevents me from spontaneously asking for things.
There’s no need to blow up the ego, or to live out your shadow all at once. That would be reckless and dangerous. These functions have been carefully created for practical reasons. But we need to watch them closely. Watch how they shape our behaviour and most importantly how they constrain us into tight spaces.
We can try to stop squeezing ourselves between our (self-created) likes and dislikes. It’s not comfortable there and never will be. We need room to move. Like Viktor Frankl famously said, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
We can look up at the sky and we can say “hey, I kind of know this isn’t the full sky, right? I kind of know that light pollution is blocking some stuff. I know there might be more out there.”
- Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche ↩︎
- Episode 55 – Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow,” This Jungian Life ↩︎
- Episode 55 – Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow,” This Jungian Life ↩︎
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Breaking the habit
February 18, 2022 @ 1:31pm – San Francisco, CA We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”
Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
When you have a bad habit, it becomes very easy to do things you don’t want to do, like staying up late watching YouTube.
But when consciously created, a habit can make it easy to do something you want to do, like eat healthier or go to bed a bit earlier.
Habits rewire your brain and eventually even change your identity. James Clear writes about this in his popular self-help book Atomic Habits (2018). You don’t just go to the gym every Monday, you become the type of person who does so.
A habit helps you to show up even when you have temporarily lost interest, motivation or willpower. On a particularly cold night, my swim coach admitted that ‘some nights all that’s left is the habit.’ That could sound a bit sad, but sometimes that’s the difference between sticking at something and giving up entirely.
Habits seem to work so well because humans are habitual by nature. When certain brain circuits are triggered, we react the same way again and again. Most of our movements are habitual and automatic. The way we breathe, stand, talk, scratch, itch, whistle. Our preferences repeat too, like which clothes we select to wear or which yoga mat we like to sit on. When so much of who we are, and what we do is a habit, the harder it is to notice.
And so, the danger of introducing new habits, is that although life may get easier and more efficient, we may also become even more stilted, predictable and mechanical than we already tend to be.
A man decides to run three times a week. Over the course of year his physical and mental health improve. He finds that he has more energy and a brighter outlook on life. But even this healthy habit can become unhealthy. His unconscious desire for perfection means he becomes irritated and frustrated when the weather is bad or his stats aren’t improving. He denies spontaneous impulses to try out different, more interesting routes. He turns down social invites to keep his streak going. And eventually gets injured after ignoring obvious signals from his body to mix things up or to rest.
We want to hammer our lives like a nail, tag it, stereotype it or cram it into a category.
But life isn’t mechanical.
Iain McGilchrist writes that “The only things in the universe that are machine-like are the few lumps of metal we have created in the last 300 years.”
This might be why mechanical things often fail or break in dreams.
So before you install a new habit, see how it feels to eat your dinner in a different place, at a different time or to skip it entirely. Maybe it’s worth removing a something habitual, before adding more.
When we gain the ability to hold our habits lightly, we find freedom, maybe the most important thing in life, or at least much more important than a healthy meal or some saved time.
This is the 100th post on Buddha.Bike
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Claws and teeth
June 5 @ 12:08pm – Hawthorn, Australia Heating up
We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions – Marcus Aurelius
Why does anger exist? “Fear tells us what to avoid; anger tells us what to resist. Both of these emotions exist to keep us from dying, from getting hurt, from losing energy.”1 When “anger is roused…it tries to push away and eliminate whatever it is that’s unpleasant.”2
When you have anger, passion, fear, breath can never remain normal. A little harder, faster. Also heat, palpitation at the biochemical level. – S.N. Goenka
Minor irritations can lead to anger. I know that when I’m late for something and I’m rushing around, it’s easy for lots of irritations to stack on top of each other, and I’m more likely to get angry. When I’m swimming laps, leaking goggles, missing instructions or losing track of my time all start as minor irritations but can quickly build up into anger too.
In order for a fight to happen, at least one person needs to take it personally. Just like pain needs to be personal, so does anger.
Everyone expresses anger differently. Some will express it immediately and then get on with their day. Others don’t acknowledge their anger, but will take it out on their kids, or an untidy house.
Anger, like any strong emotion, literally distorts your perception. Anger can easily spill out into the environment. This is what people mean when they say ‘projecting’. You are sending out your anger, and suddenly all the cars around you are angry, everything is angry but you. Your unclaimed anger might appear as a monster in a nightmare.
I seem to care a lot about fairness (in a subjective, relative sense). For me, the thought ‘that’s not fair!’ is very often associated with a feeling of anger. Perhaps the more righteous you are as a person, the more angry you’ll tend to be.
A person who is never angry will not be able to love either. – Osho
Anger is hot. Resentment is cold. Resentment is pickled anger. Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, believed “the key to resolving resentment…was expressing one’s anger.”3
Another grotesque side product of suppressing anger is passive aggression. Those little snarky comments we can make sometimes are like steam leaking out of clamped down pot.
You can hold a grudge for decades, but the actual emotion of anger leaves your body very quickly. “It takes less than 90 seconds for me to think a negative thought, have a negative emotion, run the physiological response, have it flood through me and flush out of me.”4
Cooling down
It is very difficult to observe anger as anger – abstract anger – S.N. Goenka
In the Tibetan Buddhist system, anger is the same substance as clarity and intelligence, which is an interesting comparison. When you think of anger as a form of energy, it’s easier to see that it is “free of any problems, except the problems we create out of fear of that energy.”5
There’s lots of ways to express your anger in a safe way. Turn it into aggression in the gym. Do some primal screams. Anything but act on it blindly.
Exercise seems to help, since we can’t really exercise angrily, but we can exercise aggressively.
You can write it down. What was the thing that made you angry? Or what is the angry thought you’re having? I’ll write down “I have no time” or “This is a waste of time” and an angry face 😡 next to it.
The better you can deal with anger, the more responsibility you have to do so.
Anger is given to us like claws and teeth, to defend ourselves and is vitally important. We need rage and anger. But Jung taught us to first learn to control it and then to use it in a controlled way. Let it out, but let it out so that you could stop any minute if you wanted to. – Marie Von Franz
- Ego – Peter Baumann ↩︎
- The Practice of Not Thinking – Ryunosuke Koike ↩︎
- https://www.anilthomasgestalt.com/about-fritz ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxLhPBmIvO28k9YC8Z81UMLP_ayXZGV8kT ↩︎
- https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/articles/mindfulness-anger-management.htm ↩︎
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Sliding doors
February 19, 2022 @ 11:53 am – Petaluma, CA I have found life to be too short to be preoccupied with pain from the past. – Jill Bolte Taylor
On a recent meditation retreat, I spent the first few days living in the past. I finished each day in a fog, feeling like I had recounted every single missed opportunity and disappointment I’d ever experienced.
No matter what technique I used to calm down, my mind would find a new thing to feel sorry about. Eventually, it relaxed a bit and I could enjoy the last few days without too much rumination.
When we clutch hold of missed opportunities or ‘what ifs’, we can’t help but feel miserable. It’s almost like the closer things were to playing out differently, the more pain and regret we feel.
Yet, our future is always changing based on the choices that we are making in the present.
One place to see these probabilities play out is in our dreams.
There are many different beliefs and theories about what the images in our dreams mean. A Jungian analyst might see a car crash as a metaphor or a symbol representing an inner dynamic. A Theosophist might see a premonition, a warning to drive more carefully. Or for the majority of us, it’s random, meaningless and already half forgotten.
But what if these images reflect real possibilities? I’m not talking about the dream with the spaceship or the fire-breathing dragon. I mean the dream where you are living in a nicer house, or a different country. Banal stuff. Things that could have, or might still happen to us, depending on chance or the decisions we make.
For example, in a recent dream, I was:
- Camping with an old friend from High School
- Struggling to ride a bike
- Living somewhere in Colorado
- In a very senior, chaotic role at my company
Choosing one job over another, a promotion swinging my way, a lower level of motivation, never leaving a place I used to live. These are all probable, plausible alternatives to my life. In a metaphorical sense, they are forked code, glimpses of parallel universes.
A sliding door dream doesn’t neccasarily paint a picture of a better life, just of a slightly different one. This can open us to new opportunities and perspectives.
And still, even if you choose to remain fixated on the past, consider that other versions of yourselves are living different, perhaps happier lifetimes, in your dreams.
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A study in Frustration
Screenshot from The Simpsons episode ‘Homer’s Enemy’ © 1997 Fox Broadcasting Company “Suffering is the rejection of reality” – Yuval Noah Harari
Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let the fruit of action be not thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction.” – Bhagavad Gita
Why are some people more easily frustrated than others?
It could be that they have especially dodgy wi-fi connections or bad traffic on their way to work.
It could be their disposition, conditioning or upbringing.
But maybe it’s because of their internal rules about the world. Beliefs about how things ought to be.
When these assumptions clash with reality, they get frustrated.
To see how these sorts of beliefs can backfire, let’s look at Frank Grimes, a hapless character from The Simpsons, the episode ‘Homer’s Enemy’.
Frank is this really square, serious, buttoned up guy “who’s earned everything the hard way.” He’s a ‘real life, normal person’ who’s just working hard and struggling through life.
The joke of this episode is to have Frank start working at the power plant alongside Homer. Obviously opposite of Frank, Homer is a slacker, constantly failing to do his job properly, yet managing to coast through life. Homer can’t help but irritate Frank, who eventually becomes his sworn enemy.
As Frank settles into his new job, you can tell he’s a model worker who doesn’t have time for messing about. After perfunctory introductions he dismisses Lenny and Karl, saying “I’m sure you all have a lot of work to do.” Homer irritates him immediately, by knocking over his perfectly ordered pencils. Frank believes a good worker has a nice clean desk and doesn’t waste time with chit-chat. This sort of belief might help him feel like he’s had a productive day at the office, but it doesn’t leave much time for personal connections.
Frank is appalled at Homer’s indifference and sloppy shortcuts. When alarms are ringing in Homer’s control room, Frank has to point it out. He starts to gossip, “I saw him asleep in a radiation suit” and “I’ve never seen him do any work”. Homer doesn’t fit into what Frank believes a Safety inspector should look like, and the result is resentment: “That’s the man who’s in charge of our safety?”
When Homer nearly drinks from a beaker of acid, Frank’s beliefs compel him to intervene. Thinking fast and doing the right thing saved Homer’s life. But along with those good morals is a big dose of righteousness. He can’t help but give him a lecture. “Don’t you realise how close you came to killing yourself?” In Frank’s world, people ought to be cautious and careful. He feels that he needs to step up, because no one else seems to care.
Frank’s resentment goes into top gear when he visits Homer’s home. He’s stunned to discover that Homer has been living in a ‘mansion’. Homer has everything that Frank wants, but doesn’t have. Deep down Frank believes that only those who ‘work hard every day’ deserve a ‘dream house, two cars’ and ‘beautiful wife’. The result is the unpleasant taste of bitterness and more resentment.
Frank only lasts an episode. He winds up electrocuting himself, yep, you guessed it, to prove a point. He couldn’t survive that particular clash with reality. Josh Weinstein, Simpsons producer, expressed regret for killing him off so early but admitted that “we took a certain sadistic glee in his downfall. He was such a righteous person, and that somehow made his demise more satisfying.”
Frank also inspired an interesting mix of reactions amongst fans too. Many related to his realistic struggle while others just wanted him gone. Everyone seemed to take away a slightly different lesson from the episode. Here are some comments from a YouTube clip:
- “The less you care about life the more you gain.”
- “Found it funny as a kid. Now it’s realistically painful. Like I totally understand Frank’s frustration now that I’m adulting”
- “Frank no doubt deserved a better life, but he blew his chance to try and make at least one friend.”
- “our modern day Job(from the Bible)”
- “Dumb lazy people = succeed Hard workers = failures”
- “people will always prefer the fun-loving over the miserable man.”
- “Life isn’t fair, Frank.”
I feel bad for Frank. He had a point, but his downfall came from clinging too tightly to it. His rigid beliefs about what a good person should look like, and what a good person deserves, only fueled his misery and suffering. He couldn’t find a balance between his particular internal code of perfection and the real dysfunction around him.
But someone like Frank needn’t abandon their integrity or work ethic. They shouldn’t have to switch off their brain like Homer or melt down into caustic cynicism. What would help is patience (the best remedy for anger) and abiding by your inner rules a little more lightly. Neither squeezing life with a death grip, or giving up on it, but simply allowing it to happen.
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Abstractified
November 19, 2024 @ 6:31pm – Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia What I like about Temple Grandin is she gets to the point.
In “Animals in Translation”, she doesn’t spend long digging into the science, research studies or history behind a fact. She’ll just say something like “in my experience dogs do not like Halloween costumes.”
And she’s probably right.
She likes to use heuristics like “the more Wolfie a dog looks, the more Wolfie it acts” and she’s not afraid of wading into un-researched areas either, “I expect we’ll find that dogs make humans into nicer people and better parents.”
As I read on, I was surprised not only how willing I was to give her the benefit of doubt, but also how refreshing her writing felt. Why was that?
I mean, I don’t even own a dog.
One reason her writing stands out might be because she’s autistic. Temple is highly functioning, but clearly looks at the world differently. One example of this is how she sees things most people don’t. In her work with livestock, she created a checklist of 18 ‘tiny details that scare farm animals’. For her, and to a 1200lb Angus, a ‘sparkling reflection on a puddle’ is really distracting, something even seasoned farmers weren’t noticing.
Secondly, she doesn’t signal. Usually in a popular science book like this, the author is subtly signalling all sorts of things like that they’re smart, woke, a New Yorker, a creative or that they’ve read a ton of books. Everyone does this to some degree. Publishing a book itself is usually about establishing some degree of credibility and authority. It’s actually so prevalent that it’s hard to notice, until you read a book like Animals that is completely devoid of it. It’s not that she doesn’t have an ego, or a point of view, she just doesn’t seem to care how she comes across. She is simply trying to communicate important things to know about animals. Yes, really. Even when she is considering something controversial like whether humans should eat meat or not, she’ll talk about the idea purely on its merits, something pretty much no one does.
Lastly, Grandin avoids the usual frameworks and buzzwords that are so common in pop science books. In fact, she views abstract thinking as a big blind spot for us ‘normal’ people.
“Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with animals, all normal human beings are too absractified, even the people who are hands on. That’s because people aren’t just abstract in their thinking, they’re abstract in their seeing and hearing. Normal human beings are abstractified in their sensory perceptions as well as their thoughts. That’s why the workers at the facility where the cattle wouldn’t go inside a dark building couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They weren’t seeing the setup as it actually existed; they were seeing the abstract, generalized concept of the setup they had inside their heads. In their minds their facility was identical to every other facility in the industry, and on paper it was identical. But in real life it was different, and they couldn’t see it. I’m not just talking about management. The guys in the yard, who were there working with the animals, trying to get them to walk inside the building, couldn’t see it, either.”
Abstraction is hard to avoid, especially in knowledge work that involves complex, messy problems that span code, relationships, digital systems and physical environments.
Even so, I’d like to think of Temple barging into a meeting, covered in mud, sweeping all the post-its aside, clearing the diagrams off the whiteboard and saying ‘what the hell are you guys doing here?’
In 2023, I wrote Keeping in Touch, inspired by Temple’s first book, Thinking in Pictures
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The best course of action
December 24, 2023 @ 11:05am – Puyan, Taiwan “The aim of the painting is that the eye should find out what it likes.“
– Marion Milner
A recommendation is defined as ‘a suggestion or proposal as to the best course of action’. Whether it’s a stock-tip from a broker or more likely, online content served to you by an algorithm, recommendations help save you the time and energy that decisions often require.
Since time and energy to think is not something that most people have in abundance, recommendations are usually welcome. A point of view on what film to watch next or the quickest route home can come as a relief.
There’s no obligation to action a recommendation if you don’t want to. No one is forcing you to buy a book ‘selected for you’ or to cook the ‘recipe of the day.’ But by definition, they infer an action to take. For example, after a well known author recommends a novel, you might decide to sample or buy the book. You might decide to watch a Western film after Netflix recommends the genre to you. And after a spirited recommendation by a sommelier, you might drink the wine. These actions, whether online or offline, big or small, subtle or obvious, reveal the other side to a recommendation.
A few decades ago, a friend might of suggested a recipe to cook simply because they liked it, or because they thought you might like it too. Now, a featured recipe considers dozens of additional factors and data points like global trends, your cooking history or context like day of the week.
It’s simple. If a recommendation understands and meets your needs, you’re likely to choose it again. If you like every song Spotify thinks that you’ll like, you’ll keep listening, right? If you’re going to see ads on your YouTube videos, wouldn’t you rather see “ads about the things you care about?” The better they get, the more you rely on them.
With the help of AI, Mark Zuckerberg says that soon Meta will be so good at ad recommendations that “any business… can just come to us, not have to produce any content, not have to know anything about their customers… and pay (us) for as many business outcomes as (they) can achieve.”1
The serendipity of a new song or the salivating promise of hyper effective ad targeting are non-trivial benefits. But one could also benefit from spending equal or more time exploring alternatives, like figuring out what you actually want.
It’s an important, but difficult question to answer. What makes you happy? What do you dream about? What do you obsess over, and why? For a week last winter, for reasons unknown, I got interested in the history of Samurais. Ironically, by the time I was getting served film recommendations, I couldn’t have cared less about them.
Threads of interest, curiosity and delight are unlikely to be directly leveraged by algorithms and but are frustratingly difficult to notice for yourself. In the 1930’s, British writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote about her efforts on this problem, which sent her to almost Carl Jung depths of the unconscious. But the journey was worth it.
I had also learnt how to know what I wanted; to know that this is not a simple matter of momentary decision, but that it needs a rigorous watching and fierce discipline, if the clamouring conflict of likes is to be welded into a single desire. It had taught me that my day-to-day personal “wants” were really the expression of deep underlying needs, though often the distorted expression because of the confusions of blind thinking. I had learnt that if I kept my thoughts still enough and looked beneath them, then I might sometimes know what was the real need, feel it like a child leaping in the womb, though so remotely that I might easily miss it when over-busy with purposes. Really, then, I had found that there was an intuitive sense of how to live. For I had been forced to the conclusion that there was more in the mind than just reason and blind thinking, if only you knew how to look for it; the unconscious part of my mind seemed to be definitely something more than a storehouse for the confusions and shames I dared not face.2
The sort of introspection Marion conducted is absolutely not for everyone. It’s certainly easier to follow recommendations from other people. But a recommendation will always be what someone else thinks is best. What do you think?
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Designing with concepts
March 20, 2025 @ 7.32pm – Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia In his book The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design, author Daniel Jackson says that all apps are made up of collections of “concepts” each a “self-contained unit of functionality.”
A concept isn’t exactly a design pattern, feature or job to be done. So, what is it?
“You’re already familiar with many concepts, and know how to interact with them. You know how to place a phone call or make a restaurant reservation, how to upvote a comment in a social media forum and how to organize files in a folder.”
So when you write an email in Gmail, or message a friend on WhatsApp, you’re not just scrolling screens and tapping buttons, you’re relying on these invisible “concepts” like Inbox and Conversations.
Concepts are everywhere, characterizing every piece of software.
Another concept you’re probably familiar with is a comment. You might find comments on a NYT Cooking recipe, a line in a Google Doc or a video on Meta. A comment lets users to respond to something specific. Like a comment, but a bit more specific, an upvote on Reddit lets users to show they support a post, making it more visible to other members.
If you’re responsible for designing software, you’re likely already dealing with lots of concepts that were “invented by someone at some time, for some purpose… (and have) undergone extensive development and refinement over time.”
Well designed concepts means better usability
‘So what?’ you’re thinking. I’m a designer, I’m focused on real problems like usability, not abstract concepts.
Well, what makes software difficult to use? Sometimes it’s because features are missing or hard to find but usually (it only takes one user testing session to learn this), it’s because “the user has a mental model that is incorrect—that is, incompatible with the mental model of the designer and implementer of the software.”
Or in other words, the user experiences bad design.
We can design better software when we understand how our users think about the software – their mental models. And likewise, “An app whose concepts are familiar and well designed is likely to be easy to use, so long as its concepts are represented faithfully in the user interface and programmed correctly. In contrast, an app whose concepts are complex or clunky is unlikely to work well, no matter how fancy the presentation or clever the algorithms.
‘Style’ – A closer look at a word processing concept
I first learned about concepts from Daniel Jackson years ago. The thinking resonated with me, but as a product designer I struggled to put it to use. Since concepts ‘have no visible form, they’re rather abstract’, it’s easy to overlook and dismiss them.
One simple way to work with concepts is to compare how they’ve been expressed in similar apps. Take word processing for example. It turns out Microsoft Word & Apple Notes share lots of the same concepts like paragraph, format and style.
In Notes, an app created by Apple to help “jot down quick thoughts”, clicking a button in the toolbar opens a menu with 9 preset styles.
Notes: Click anywhere in the text you want to format, click “Aa”, then choose a style. In Word, there’s also a similar Style menu in the Toolbar, but instead of 9, there’s 16 preset styles. When you resize the window, more styles become accessible in a visual ‘Style Gallery’. Fancy. There’s also a side panel so you can see all the styles while you type as well as heavy duty style management in settings.
Word: Select the text you want to format, and then click the style you want in the Styles gallery.Style is a foundational concept, which is why it appears in both apps and works in pretty similar ways. But small differences point to different product decisions, target users, and even company values.
Designing with concepts
Aside from discovering concepts in apps you use, here are a few ways to bring concepts into the actual design process.
- The less the better: Aim to use the smallest set of concepts users need to get the job done. Simple doesn’t necessarily mean less functionality or more white space. It’s true that some of the best designed apps are simple, but they are simple because they use a small number of elegant concepts – or paraphrasing Gall’s law, “evolved from a simple system that worked.”
- Don’t overload: If you’re thinking of introducing a new concept into your product, always make sure it has a clear “purpose”. Don’t overload a concept to make it try and solve lots of different problems at once. In Word, buttons for formatting text appear near to the Style panel (because that’s where one might expect them to be) but they aren’t all mixed up in same menu.
- Where are concepts failing? When you test a design with a user, consider if they are having trouble with a particular interface element or bit of content, or if there might be a broader issue with how concepts have been designed and implemented.
UI widgets don’t determine the success of a successful product, well designed concepts do. When we work with them directly, we can design systems that are more enjoyable, learnable and effective for the user.
Want to learn more? Daniel Jackson has created a lot of content on this subject:
- Short read: Software = Concepts (6 min read)
- Watch: What makes software innovations succeed? Maybe not what you think. (13:30)
- Long read: The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design (336 pages)
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