I love the brain. It’s beautiful in its complexity, but, down at its depths, it’s the same bits you’d find in a lizard or chicken or chupacabra. Our cerebral cortex, with its billions of neurons and trillions of connections, sits atop a bare-bones, eons-old structure, like a mansion built atop an old workshed. This situation, my friends, is why we tend to suck so much.

You see, these old structures are built solely to keep us alive, whether that means breathing, pooping, or making you eat three plates at a buffet.  I’m kind of lumping a lot of brain structures together, but it’s to emphasize a point: The parts of our brain that have dreams and hopes, that have standards for what we eat or who we date, the ones where romance and love and symbolism arise; these all have to contend with a big subcortical jerk. ... continue reading.

Perfectionism is a curse. It can be loosely defined as “the compulsion to create only the very best, and thus to create nothing at all.”

Look back at your own perfectionist tendencies and tell me it’s not true. You start with a good idea, but you defer implementing it until “just the right time,” “when inspiration strikes,” or “when everything is ready.” Think of how much has been left undone because of this poisonous idea, how much creativity and productivity has been stolen from the world.

The very fact that I’m writing this blog is amazing to me, because I had to pass through a number of thick, gelatinous membranes of perfectionist compulsion to get here. Enjoy that imagery for a moment. Indeed, this is probably the third or fourth incarnation of my blog, with a graveyard of other blogs with even sillier names left in its wake. I had this strange idea that I needed everything to be right before I started in earnest, so I did a lot of faffing about (which is British for “fucking around”) for a few years. In the end, I was only faffing myself. ... continue reading.