Here are a few stories about holes.
Something you hear people say after a friend gets divorced, or after the death of a loved one, is “just stay busy.”
Or if you’ve ever been alone for a long, long time, someone might tell you “just find lots of things to do, to keep your mind off of it. Find a hobby you really enjoy.”
This advice is reasonable. I mean, it can work. But telling someone to “stay busy” is more like offering that person a coping mechanism than offering them something productive. Coping mechanisms, psychologically speaking, are short-term crutches, not long-term healing strategies. They are to be used only when they’re needed just to get by. (And hey, sometimes just getting by is what you have to do.)
But I’ve been alone for a long, long time too. And I have found that the best thing is not simply “staying busy,” but completely redefining what my life is and should be right now.
I’ve had sex one time in 9 years. One time. And through most of that time, I haven’t had a woman in my life to spend time with at all. No companion, no physical touch, nobody to take walks with. Despite what plans I had for my twenties and thirties. Because life has a great sense of humor.
So I can sit around thinking about how womanless my life is, and how many unfulfilled needs I have. That’s the easy thing to do. Or, I can overload myself with tasks and hobbies and books and stimulation — to keep my mind off of what I wish I had.
But that doesn’t really solve the problem. Because that’s the same as admitting that the absence of that thing is what’s really driving my life. That my life revolves around something in parentheses. And the time I currently find myself with is just something to “get through” by stimulating myself with distractions.
That’s not really any different than trying to drink grief away. The bottle does absolutely nothing to help me “deal with” anything. It just pushes those feelings further into the future. No matter which way you slice it, I’m diagnosing and treating a hole.
The only option I have had these last several years is to re-frame my perspective on reality. From expectation to open curiosity. Maybe this chapter of my life is supposed to be a vacation where I’m extremely productive, and have very few distractions. My long solitude where I feel flexible and relaxed almost every day. Maybe this period of my life is supposed to be what ultimately makes me into the man I’m supposed to be, in ways I’m not aware of yet.
Who knows. All I know is, this is time that can be useful. So I might as well make it useful. Not for the sake of getting by, but for the sake of revolving around my own goals instead of something in parentheses.
Don’t get me wrong, I still sit on the couch and feel that absence sometimes. But most days I’m in good shape. I’m writing a blog, and reading a bunch of books — and it’s not to distract myself, but because these are the activities that I’d want to do if I had a wife and kids anyway.
David Deutsch said, “there is no difference between having an X-shaped hole in your scheme of things, and believing in X.” Here’s another story.
Galileo’s heliocentric theory (the theory that the solar system revolves around the sun, not the earth) was at first rejected — which shouldn’t be surprising. The Inquisition demanded that he renounce his theory. And they produced a theory of their own. Their theory, more or less, said: “the planets and stars in the sky are moved by angels in a way that would be consistent with the heliocentric theory… for reasons we can’t understand or explain.”
So, they denied the science and math behind his theory, and then referenced that very same science and math, in their own theory that would be consistent with their own religious beliefs. They denied heliocentrism… all the while touting a theory that had a perfectly heliocentrism-shaped hole in it.
No, this is not a joke. This actually happened.
It would be like if someone came into your driveway and said “this is not a car. It’s actually a magical item that looks and behaves like a car, but works through processes we cannot explain. It’s actually not a car.”
This person is trying to sell you logic that has a how-cars-work-shaped hole in it. In other words, they refuse to believe in a reality where we know how cars work, while diagonally admitting that they do in fact live in that reality.
Or if you tried to bake a loaf of bread, and included all of the ingredients given to you by a professional baker, but you didn’t believe in yeast.
What you're left with is a standard, everyday loaf of bread that you can’t explain.
Denying the hole is there does not stop the bread from being baked, nor does it discredit the baker or his insights. It just creates a need for you to do mental gymnastics. Holes in people’s thinking make them do funny things. Occam’s Razor says the simplest and most direct explanation is the one you should go with. And that’s a fantastic rule, because it can free you from outsmarting yourself.
I’ve heard of people who lose their faith after a serious life event, and others might say they “have a God-shaped hole” in their heart. A person who has a "God-shaped hole" in his heart is not simply lacking a god. He's lacking a god while still believing that he needs one. Because that’s what the hole means. It’s the absence of one very particular sort of thing.
Another way to think about it: the person does still believe in God — he’s just not happy with the way the relationship is going. He has expectations about reality that are not being fulfilled. After all, expectations are resentments waiting to happen. They are holes someone is waiting to see filled, all the while holding a gun to their own head and telling the world it better go ahead and fill them.
When an alcoholic gets sober, he does not embark upon a journey of abstinence. That's missing the entire point. We call them dry drunks: people who still genuinely wish they could drink, and think about drinking, but know that they shouldn't. And therefore (often barely) abstain from doing so. This was me for a while.
To be an alcoholic in recovery and to stop drinking are two entirely different things.
An alcoholic who truly enters recovery has to completely redefine his concept of reality. He has to redefine his experience of life.
He does not just say "I can't drink because I'm afraid that consequences will follow.” What he says instead is "I surrender to the fact that alcohol is stronger than me. I cannot beat it. No matter what I do, alcohol will always emerge victorious over me." And he actually believes this, down to the very core of his being. This is Step One, and unfortunately some people never take it.
Being an alcoholic is like having a severe shellfish allergy. He can sit around all day thinking about lobster, and resenting people who can eat it, but why would he? Or it’s like if he was from Canada but wished he was Italian. No matter what he does, no matter how much he thinks about it, he will never be Italian.
It's not about "I live in a world where I can drink alcohol but I must choose not to." It's "I live in a world where some people can drink and some can’t. I can’t.”
Without this complete redefinition, he exists with a consciously-created alcohol-shaped hole in his psyche. As long as he still lives in a world where he "could" drink but shouldn't, he'll always be running from ghosts. From what could or should be.
I don’t know how many people I’ve seen fail at white-knuckle sobriety. Hundreds. And I’ve seen some of them die.
Recently I’ve been watching the Sopranos. I have no idea why I didn’t watch this show earlier — it’s one of the best series I’ve ever watched.
One of the themes of the Sopranos is the slow decay of the Mafia. With the passage of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act in 1970, it became incredibly difficult to sustain a crime family in the confines of American cities.
(There are no major spoilers here, in case you want to watch the series yourself.)
Over the course of the show, things get harder and harder for Tony Soprano’s New Jersey crime family. They’re losing members to murder, criminal convictions, and cooperation with the feds. As the state of the family trends downward, Tony keeps filling the ranks with worse and worse people.
Why would he do that?
Because the Mafia, just like any Silicon Valley tech outfit, is a dividend-paying entity. It’s a business. And the owners categorically refuse to allow it to slow down. Even when all possible signs are pointing to a slowdown and a lack of good candidates for membership, Tony won’t budge. Even when his Capos are not even remotely trustworthy and in fact are actively undermining him, he refuses to let his crime family slow down.
Knowing what I do about the New York Mafia throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, I’d argue that this is one of the biggest reasons for its downfall. When faced with holes in their ranks, and in their profitability, the bosses of the 5 families continued to throw lower and lower quality dirt into them — in a futile attempt to keep momentum.
When faced with a definite and obvious quality problem, they tried to make up for it with quantity. They used bad things to fill holes left by good things. A lot of businesses fail this way.
I’d argue that a business, or a crime family, should be treated like a work of art: built on the magic of personalities and shared vision. Maybe if you can’t find the right people, it’s not time to grow. You can’t force a square man through a round hole.
But there’s no hard-and-fast rule about holes, just like there isn’t with much of anything in life. Holes can be good things. They can be useful. When they keep you from being complacent. When they push you to grow your business or work toward your desires. When they scream at you to make progress in your emotional development or your hobby or your career.
You have to be extremely careful with desires. You have to constantly take inventory of yourself, to find out what your current desires are. It's too easy to have 10 or 11 different desires at once. That can be a miserable way to live. Because then your entire life feels like a big pile of absences. Your life feels like a bunch of holes that have connected into one big vacuous pit of dissatisfaction.
And only once you take serious inventory of these might you realize how insignificant most of them are. Life is much easier and better when you only have one or two big desires at once.
Holes can be very dangerous, or they can be paralyzing, or they can be incredibly motivating. Observe them, but don’t bow to them. Every hole doesn’t need to be filled. Some of them are meant to be there.
Drink some water and watch out for holes.
JDR
"A lot of people don't believe in curses. A lot of people don't believe in yellow-spotted lizards either, but if one bites you, it doesn't make a difference whether you believe in it or not.” - Louis Sachar