Stop Looking for Yourself. You Are Not Under the Couch 🛋️

On a Sunday morning in April 2011, I made a promise. I vowed to explore my own thoughts, accept them as if they were scientific fact, and follow each truth they revealed. Being someone who likes to see whether a promise stands strong, I kept making it, and posted ten entries in thirty-six minutes. Philosophy, as you may know, has a tragic tonality, and Schopenhauer was not keen on hope. "I think possibly Schopenhauer didn't have a dog." By the ninth entry I had decided that what I enjoyed most was laughter, so I followed that thread instead. The promise I made to myself had thus produced its first truth, and it turned out to be mildly funny.

Fifteen years later, I have a notebook to show for it. The archive had roughly 330 posts in 2011 and about 550 in 2012, then a slow taper. Across 2019 to 2025 it only has about eighteen, and so far this year it has passed seventy-seven. That comes to something near fifteen hundred entries, with a quiet stretch in the middle. This does not count the more than five thousand jokes and humorous quotes I posted elsewhere. But by any measure, HTTF is a full notebook.

A full notebook invites the question that a person with a full notebook eventually asks: did it answer my promise? The one I asked it early. On the blog's fourth anniversary I wrote that the blog had explored countless thoughts while "ever so statically-moving toward staying in the same place." I also noted that my most popular post at the time had nothing whatsoever to do with humor, a result I found rather hilarious. Experiments do that (surprise us). The blog also carries a badge (or warning) that reads "This Blog is for Entertainment Purposes Only," which is a peculiar companion to a vow to treat my thoughts as scientific fact. I regard that bit as my professional risk management brain kicking in.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor at London Business School, would recognize the blog if she were to read it. She spent years studying people trying to reinvent themselves and found that they could say what they wanted to escape but not what they wanted instead. The familiar advice to work it out first and then act had the order backward. The people who moved forward experimented to discover what they wanted while equipping themselves to do it. In her account, knowing is the result of doing. Hamlet took five acts to ask whether he should exist. "The rest of us have meetings," and the question has been largely settled for us, or so I claimed. 

Nothing waits at the center to be found, either. A working identity is not a hidden treasure, and we are made of many selves. I can vouch for that. I once traced my own path as a series of turnings that ended "before turning to quantum theory" and arrived at a point where the answers to the big mysteries wouldn't change my sense of self. Ibarra calls the route a crooked journey along which we try on possible selves. I call it Tuesday or Wednesday, I’m undecided. 

By that standard, my notebook is a laboratory that never quite stopped running. It has entries as varied as "Legalize Catnip" and "The Repair and Maintenance of Skepticism." In one 2012 post I even assigned myself the role of a laissez-faire regulator named "Nacho Daddy." A notebook that only asks: what do I want? is a diary. And a dusty one at that. But a notebook that tries something new every day, publicly, for more or less fifteen years, is closer to a very long pilot program. The quiet years fit the pattern too. Every laboratory closes for renovations, and the interesting fact is that this one reopened. I needed a place to keep my thoughts, especially since I wrote this before LLMs dropped and have since used it as a repository to examine the history or evolution of my own thoughts. It’s quite handy that way and I highly recommend blogging if only for that reason. 

Yet, I am the first to raise the obvious objection. The sidebar says that we find what we seek (a proposition I first wrote when I was a teenager), so my promise to follow the truth, kept by writing jokes, may only prove that I found the jokes I was looking for. It is a fair point when you think about it. At the same time, it also matters less than it seems, if only because the answer was never going to arrive as a conclusion. It just arrives as more entries.

In a disclaimer I once drafted for a hypothetical legal department, I warned the consumer that he or she "may be the only entity in the universe," and that any defects in the product were therefore the consumer's own fault. It remains my most concise summary of the search for the self. If you are the only entity in the universe, you cannot be under the couch. You are the one holding the flashlight. 🔦 

So the keys were never under the couch. The notebook, however, is on it, and it turned out to be the better find.

PS: For those who are curious 🧐 the lines came from these places:

- The Schopenhauer line is from my home page.

- "The rest of us have meetings" is from an August 2026 post.

- The entertainment-only badge is from my sidebar.

- The disclaimer is from "Philosophical Disclaimers."

- "Before turning to quantum theory" is from "Self-Effacing Humor."

- "Nacho Daddy" is from "Heuristic Humor."

- The five thousand jokes are from my Case Study on Humor, which also puts the blog at 824,416 page views by mid-2015 (nearly two million today, though at one point HTTF had 44M pageviews before Google reset its algorithm). 

You Are Not Who I Think You Are (And Neither Am I)

Or: Why the Guy Who Cut You Off Isn’t Necessarily a Sociopath

Someone cuts you off in traffic and your brain delivers an instant verdict: what a reckless, entitled jerk. Meanwhile, when you cut someone off last week, you weren’t a jerk. You were late for a job interview, your GPS glitched, and honestly the other lane was clearly moving faster. 😅 

This is not a coincidence. This is a bug in the human operating system, and psychologists call it: the fundamental attribution error. It’s our tendency to explain other people’s behavior with sweeping character judgments (“she’s rude,” “he’s lazy,” “they’re arrogant”) while explaining our own behavior with a generous list of circumstances (“I was tired,” “the traffic was insane,” “nobody told me the deadline moved”).

Same behavior. Wildly different verdicts, depending entirely on who’s in the driver’s seat.

The Courtroom in Your Skull

Picture your brain as a tiny, overworked judge who has exactly three seconds to rule on every human interaction and no time to hear evidence. A barista forgets your order. GUILTY of general incompetence. A coworker doesn’t reply to your email. GUILTY of not respecting your time. Your friend cancels plans. GUILTY of secretly not liking you anymore.

The judge never asks: Did the barista just get yelled at by the customer before you? Is the coworker buried under four deadlines? Did your friend’s puppy just throw up on the carpet?

We’re stingy with context for others and endlessly generous with it for ourselves. Psychologists call this the actor-observer asymmetry, which is a fancy way of saying: when I mess up, it’s the weather. When you mess up, it’s your whole deal.

Why We Do This

Partly it’s laziness, in the best sense. Judging character is fast; investigating circumstances is slow, and your brain is trying to process a thousand micro-decisions a day. “That person is careless” is a one-step conclusion. “That person is normally careful but is currently distracted because their mother is in the hospital, something I have no way of knowing” is a twelve-step investigation nobody has time for between the espresso machine and the register.

Partly it’s self-protection. If other people’s failures are about them, fixed, stable, personality-level failures, then the world feels predictable and safe. The alternative, that good people have bad days for reasons entirely invisible to us, is scarier, because it means the same could happen to anyone, including us, without warning.

And partly, deliciously, it’s ego. If their mistake is a character flaw and my identical mistake is a circumstance, I get to keep being the protagonist. Nobody wants to be a background extra in their own bad-driving story.

The Five-Minute Verdict

Here’s where it gets tricky, and a little embarrassing: we don’t just do this to strangers who cut us off. We do it in five-minute job interviews, first dates, group chats, and that one Slack message someone sent without a smiley face and we’ve been quietly building a case against them ever since.

One clipped email and suddenly they’re “cold.” One awkward silence at dinner and suddenly they’re “not that into you.” One missed holiday text and suddenly they’ve “changed.” We build entire personality profiles, complete with backstory and predicted future behavior, out of a sample size of one interaction, usually a bad one, usually five minutes long.

It would be funny if it weren’t the exact mechanism behind most workplace grudges, half of dating app ghosting spirals, and approximately 100% of family group chats during the holidays.

The Fix Isn’t Complicated (Just Inconvenient)

The antidote isn’t to become a saint who assumes everyone is secretly wonderful. It’s smaller and more useful than that: just leave a little room. Before the internal verdict locks in, ask the question your brain skipped: what don’t I know here?

Not as therapy. As basic epistemics. You are working with a tiny, biased sample of someone’s life, usually their worst five minutes, and building a permanent record out of it. The barista, the Slack message, the guy in traffic, none of them auditioned for the role of Protagonist’s Nemesis. They’re just people having a Tuesday, the same as you, minus the benefit of the doubt you’d instantly grant yourself.

So next time someone cuts you off: maybe they’re a jerk. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re late for the same kind of Tuesday you had last week, the one where you, too, were absolutely not yourself.

How to be Creative

I have been thinking about creativity and what we actually mean when we tell someone to “be creative,” because it is one of those instructions that sounds perfectly sensible until you try to follow it. Be creative. Okay. Should I stare harder at the wall? Buy a beret? Rearrange my desk? Wait for inspiration to arrive by registered mail?

Creativity seems less like a special talent and more like the ability to move deliberately between two very different states of mind: open and closed. We need an open mind when we do not yet have a clearly defined purpose, because uncertainty gives us room to contemplate, wander, associate, notice, play, and entertain ideas that have absolutely no obligation to become useful. Then, once we know what we want to accomplish, we need to become considerably more closed-minded. We narrow the field, ignore competing possibilities, make choices, impose structure, and get the work done.

Neither mode is more creative than the other. Creativity happens somewhere in the movement between them.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

An idea.

An idea who?

I don’t know yet. That’s why I knocked.

That is roughly how open thinking works. Something appears and, instead of immediately demanding credentials, references, projected revenue, and a detailed explanation of why it deserves to occupy valuable cerebral real estate, we let it in for a minute.

Suppose I suddenly think, I should write a blog post about creativity. That thought does not yet need an outline. It certainly does not need twelve SEO headings and a graphic of a human brain with lightbulbs shooting out of it. At this point, I may not even know what I think about creativity. The idea simply interests me.

So I contemplate it.

Maybe creativity is curiosity. Maybe it is pattern recognition. Maybe creative people merely tolerate uncertainty for longer than other people. Maybe it depends on having enough unrelated information floating around in your head that occasionally two pieces collide. Maybe boredom is involved. Maybe walking helps. Maybe the whole thing is just the brain entertaining itself while pretending to work.

What do you call a brilliant idea with no practical application?

Tuesday.

The point is that during this stage, I do not have to decide. I can think about children making up games, mathematicians playing with impossible problems, scientists following anomalies, artists trying materials they have never used, somebody inventing a ridiculous sandwich at midnight, or why humans apparently looked at milk and eventually thought, You know what this needs? Mold.

Open thinking permits the useless thought.

That word, useless, deserves more respect. We live in a culture that is remarkably eager to ask what everything is for. What is this book for? What is this idea for? What is this conversation leading to? Can we monetize it? Can we measure it? Can we put it into a spreadsheet and make someone responsible for Q3?

Sometimes the answer should simply be: nothing yet.

How many creative people does it take to change a lightbulb?

Twenty-three.

One to change it and twenty-two to ask whether darkness might actually be an underexplored medium.

Open-mindedness is valuable precisely because we have not yet decided what counts as relevant. If we define the destination too early, we begin filtering information according to a conclusion we have already reached. We see what serves the plan and ignore everything else.

Sometimes that is exactly what we should do.

Just not yet.

When we are exploring an idea, wandering is productive because there is no penalty for taking the scenic route. I can begin thinking about creativity, somehow end up reading about octopus cognition, remember a conversation I had in Mexico fifteen years ago, wonder whether jokes themselves are small acts of creativity, go make coffee, notice something odd about the spoon, and return to the original question with a completely different idea.

This is not necessarily procrastination.

Sometimes it absolutely is.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Procrastination.

Procrastination who?

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Eventually, however, I have to write the blog post.

At that moment the entire mental operation changes.

I now know what I want to say: creativity requires the ability to move between open and closed states of attention. Wonderful. Now stop wandering.

I do not need another theory of creativity. I do not need to investigate whether dolphins understand jazz. I do not need seventeen possible titles. I certainly do not need to reorganize the bookshelf because I suddenly believe the books will communicate more efficiently if arranged according to philosophical temperament.

Now I need to write.

This is where closed-mindedness earns its place in the hall of fame.

Once we have selected an outcome, creativity needs boundaries. We decide what belongs, what does not, which thought we are following, which thought we are abandoning, and what “finished” means. We reduce possibility intentionally because unlimited possibility is incompatible with completion.

How many writers does it take to finish a blog post?

Apparently nobody knows.

They’re still revising the opening paragraph or letting ai write it for them. 

Closure is not the enemy of creativity. Closure is how creativity becomes something other people can actually encounter.

Think about the difference between walking into a bookstore because you have forty minutes to kill and walking into a bookstore because you need a particular book. In the first case, there is absolutely no reason to proceed efficiently. You pick something up because the title is clever or the pages are beautifully painted (a trend I’m loving 🥰). That sends you somewhere else. You discover a subject you did not know existed. You read three pages standing in an aisle. You forget what time it is.

That is open mode.

Now imagine you are late for a meeting and somebody has asked you to bring a specific book.

You walk in, find it, pay, leave.

You do not need to develop a sudden scholarly interest in nineteenth-century mushroom illustration.

That is closed mode.

What do you call someone browsing a bookstore with no intention of buying anything?

Research.

What do you call someone browsing a bookstore when they have a deadline?

Dangerous.

The same distinction appears when we solve problems. If we are still figuring out what the problem actually is, opening the field is tremendously valuable. Ask strange questions. Reverse assumptions. Consider explanations that initially seem implausible. Follow the weird observation. Ask what would happen if some apparently fixed condition were changed.

“What if?” is one of the great opening devices of human thought.

What if buildings generated their own power?

What if waste were treated as feedstock?

What if computers could converse with us?

What if we put wheels on luggage?

The last one is particularly instructive because humans dragged suitcases around for an astonishingly long time before someone apparently noticed that civilization had already invented the wheel.

How many humans does it take to put wheels on a suitcase?

Millions.

But first we need several thousand years to think about it.

Once the problem becomes concrete, however, the questions change. If you are actually building the thing, “what if?” eventually has to give way to “how?”

How much does it cost? Does it work? What materials do we need? What happens when it fails? Who will use it? Can we manufacture it? Can we permit it? Does anyone actually want it, or have we simply become emotionally attached to a very expensive bad idea?

This is where closed thinking performs quality control.

Open thinking says, Suppose we could.

Closed thinking says, Show me.

Both are necessary.

One without the other produces very different kinds of failure. A person who remains permanently closed can become extremely competent at repeating established solutions. Give that person a well-defined problem and they may solve it beautifully, but they can have difficulty noticing that the problem itself has changed.

A person who remains permanently open has the opposite difficulty. Everything is fascinating. Everything connects to everything else. Every project produces six additional projects. Three notebooks become twelve notebooks. A blog post about creativity somehow becomes a theory of civilization, a proposed documentary, two patent applications, and a strong opinion about cephalopods.

What do you call a creative person with no deadlines?

Missing.

We therefore need both states, and we need to recognize which one we are in.

When I have a random idea for a blog post, I should stay open for a while. I should turn it around, contemplate it, follow whatever odd associations it produces, make jokes, contradict myself, and see whether the thought has enough substance to become something.

Then I should close.

Sit down.

Write the thing.

Open again when I reach a problem. Close when I find the solution. Open when something unexpected appears. Close when I have enough. Open while generating alternatives. Close while choosing among them.

Creativity is not endless freedom. It is a rhythm between possibility and constraint.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Another idea.

Another idea who?

No.

I’m finishing this one.

Love Yourself as a Basic Principle

Across social media platforms you’ll see “be kind to yourself” memes that pop up daily. I suggest that we take this a step further and “Try being in love with yourself as a matter of basic principle.”

That changes the question, doesn’t it? Here, love becomes less a mood, vibe, or connection than a standing policy. 

You do not have to wake up every morning dazzled by yourself, tho that would be amazing. 

No, you simply stop treating your own person as an exception to the ordinary courtesies, loyalties, forgiveness, humor, patience, and protection you readily extend to someone you love.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Humor, Edited by Lydia Amir, with forward by John Morreall, gives us a much more interesting route into that idea than contemporary self-care language. 

Amir traces a long philosophical tradition of self-referential laughter, including Democritus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Santayana, Dennett, Morreall and others. The important distinction is that laughing at yourself need not mean joining the prosecution. Properly understood, it creates enough distance to see yourself clearly while remaining on your own side.

It’s an insightful volume and I highly recommend it if you want to delve deeper into Montaigne and others who remind us that we can catch ourselves doing something completely idiotic, and still love ourselves. 

I think the what we should be looking for is to: fall in love with yourself properly. Not narcissistically. Not ceremonially. Not through candles, manifestation journals, bath salts, or declaring yourself a goddess before coffee ☕️ . The key is to treat yourself the way you behave when you genuinely adore another human being.

When you love somebody, you learn their peculiarities. You know they lose their glasses while wearing them. You know which story they tell badly. You know they become irrational when hungry. You have seen their worst haircut. But none of these discoveries causes you to convene a tribunal about whether they remain worthy of affection. 

Imagine loving someone and reviewing the relationship every evening according to their productivity.

“Darling, I remain fond of you, but you accomplished only four of the seven things on your list today. Unfortunately, affection has been suspended pending tomorrow’s performance.” 

Love does not require thinking everything you do is wonderful. That would be useless. If I love myself, I can say, “Soph, that was an astonishingly bad idea,” with approximately the same affection one uses while watching a beloved dog walk confidently into a glass door. 

This idea seems reasonable to me. I have, after all, been in a relationship with myself for quite some time. We share finances, memories, passwords, several regrettable haircuts, and absolutely every argument I have ever had in the shower. At this stage, leaving would be administratively complicated.

And yet “love yourself” has always struck me as rather vague advice. Love myself how? Are flowers involved? Must I gaze appreciatively into mirrors? Should I start leaving little notes in my lunch?

Then I realized that I already know how to love people. Most of us do.

When I love someone, I don’t require perfection before breakfast. I do not withdraw affection because they misplaced something, said something foolish, gained five pounds, forgot an appointment, failed magnificently at a new idea, or spent twenty minutes looking for a telephone that was in their hand. I generally think: there they go again.

And somehow the affection survives.

Perhaps that is the basic principle.

First: loving yourself means dropping the strange employment-review model of self-worth.

Second: affection and accurate judgment are perfectly compatible. You can love yourself and know you behaved badly. In fact, love may make correction easier because every mistake is no longer an existential referendum.

Third: learn to find yourself funny. This is where Montaigne and the Palgrave offer more insight . Being able to see yourself as a ridiculous little human creature doing your best is psychologically very different from contempt. The Handbook repeatedly distinguishes the value of this self-referential humor from simply directing ridicule outward. 

Fourth: stop making self-love comparative. “I love myself because I am smarter/prettier/more successful/more interesting than X” is an unstable financing structure. Someone eventually walks into the room who is smarter, prettier, richer, younger, funnier, or capable of doing Pilates without making noises. Amir’s chapter specifically links the liberation of self-acceptance with escaping comparative emotions such as envy and jealousy. Easier said than done for most of us but heck, it’s an aspiration worthy of intentional pursuit. Anything to move the needle. 

Finally: basic principle means you remain yours.

You have been present for every embarrassing incarnation of yourself. You know what happened. You know what you misunderstood. You know what you survived, what you ruined, what you repaired, what you still cannot explain, and what seemed terribly important in 2007 but mercifully no longer does. You are the only person who has accompanied you through the entire thing.

It seems a little rude, after all that, not to become friends. So yes, I am willing to try being in love with myself as a basic principle. Nothing excessive. I am not planning a destination wedding.

But I might at least stop threatening to break up with myself every time I make a mistake.

We have history.