How to Turn Off Autopilot and Create Your Identity
Even the most self-aware person lives most of their life on autopilot. We decide to take vacations because we see ourselves as the type of person who would take that trip instead of asking how a vacation will benefit our personal goals. We post things to social media sites because we see these things as the sort of content someone like us would post—instead of asking how it benefits us to post that thing.
Some individuals don’t ever leave autopilot. Many even decide what they believe about the world while on autopilot instead of thinking through what they actually believe is true (e.g., “I am a good, deep, spiritual person—what do people like that believe?”).
Below, we will discuss both how to turn off your autopilot and how to create an autopilot that generates impulses you don’t have to inhibit because they represent the way you would want to act were you not on autopilot.
Leveraging Moments of Lucidity
Almost everyone will see value in learning to occasionally break through the haze of autopilot and create brief moments of lucidity, during which one is capable of thinking: “Is this really what I believe is the right thing to do?” and “Does this really serve my goals?”
While it is easy to create moments of lucidity in which your autopilot is off, it is trivial in the same way getting out of bed on a day when you have nothing to do is trivial. You might lie in bed thinking, “You know, I should really get out of bed,” but there is another part of your brain that pleads, “But why? This is working for us right now; just go with it”—and that other part of your brain often wins.
It becomes easier to silence those parts of our brain if we have moments of lucidity built into our weekly schedule. These “periods of audit,” in which we have time set aside to evaluate all of the major decisions we have made that week, can ensure our actions aligned with our goals and beliefs about right/wrong. Just as with exercise, these periods of audit are easier when we build them into our daily routine and easier still if we manufacture social pressures that encourage us to stick to those routines. For example, you may schedule a morning walk and talk with your significant other during which you discuss your goals for that day and that week, how you plan to further those goals through concrete action, and what major decisions you have coming up in your life.
While it may become easy to create moments of lucidity with practice, creating a mental state in which we can rewrite our internal models—the personal blueprints that determine our autopilot—is extremely difficult. While in a moment of lucidity you may think: “It is not helpful for me to react angrily in a situation like the one I encountered yesterday. I should really not do that in the future,” merely having that realization will do little to change your behavior or your internal model of self. Instead, to be able to rewrite your internal model, you will need to put forward a considerable, sustained effort during a period of flux.
Leveraging Flux Periods
Flux periods are times in our lives during which we can rewrite and adjust our core mental models. Periods of flux are not states that we can consciously create, they are turns of events that happen to us. That said, we can trick our brains into entering them.
As long as your life is static, you will be extremely limited in your ability to rewrite the personal mental model that governs your unconscious behavior. However, when our lives are not static, it is as if the code that makes up our personalities becomes malleable. During these periods, our internal models of self will almost certainly change, whether we choose to change them, they serendipitously change, or our environment/social group influences them.
These periods of flux—moments in which your internal model can be edited—can occur during:
- Major life transitions: Many people experience a personality reinvention between high school and college, when moving to a new city for a new job, when getting out of prison, etc.
- Major social transitions: If you are transitioning social groups (especially if your schedule also significantly changes), it is possible to enter a period of flux—even if you are not in a novel environment.
- Moments experiencing abnormally high levels of oxytocin release: This happens when one is falling in love, dating a new person, etc.
- Hitting rock bottom: This may involve entering prison, nearing the end of an addiction spiral, nearly dying, losing everything in a divorce, etc.
- Getting high: Altered states of consciousness achieved through meditation or drugs, particularly certain hallucinogens, can lead an individual into a state in which one can rewrite their self-model. Unfortunately, while these altered states of consciousness allow us to rewrite who we are and what we believe, they enable us to make these changes during a time in which our cognition is impaired. New beliefs and personalities born from such states may be inherently defective when contrasted with those born of sound minds. (Do you really want to make one of the most important decisions in your life in a cognitively impaired state?)
It is easy to read the above list and through reflecting on your own life realize that your personality did change some during periods like those described, and you had no idea just how susceptible your personality was to being rewritten during such periods.
To drive home how malleable your core internal programing becomes during periods of flux like those described above, consider that when heroin addicted soldiers returned from Vietnam, the massive shift in social and environmental conditions allowed 95% of them to shake their addictions. It is unlikely that you have any personality trait more deeply written into your unconscious than an addiction to heroin.
Obviously, we won’t always have the luxury of being in the midst of a major life transition. Because of this, we should mark these flux periods as they appear on the horizons of our lives and specifically take note of what we want to change about ourselves during these brief windows of time. If, however, you see no potential flux periods on the horizon and you wish to update yourself in the near future, you can attempt to create a period of flux artificially.
Artificial flux periods can be created through one of two methods: the sabbatical and the localized reboot.
In the sabbatical method, an individual creates a short-term major change in their life, schedule, and environment. This may involve living in another country for a couple months while focusing on updating your internal model. However, this method is unrealistic for most due to limited finances, limited vacation days, and regionally locked jobs. Changes made during these sabbaticals might also fail to stick if you return to a completely unchanged home, schedule, job, and social set after the sabbatical finishes.
The localized reboot involves moving to a new neighborhood and building completely new routines, surroundings, and social networks. Obviously, this is not easy to do either, but so long as your life remains static, rewriting who you are as a person will be incredibly difficult.
Revelations
A revelation is a phenomenon that occurs when an individual changes a significant part of their ideological tree during a flux period. Revelations make changing your internal model nearly effortless and allow for vast changes in character. The downside of revelations is that the new ideologies which prompt them will become defining characteristics of your identity (and internal model) going forward.
Examples of people changing their internal models through revelations include a person experiencing a “finding Jesus” moment after hitting rock-bottom, a freshman in college deciding that communism is the best form of government, or a teenager discovering “The Red Pill” after being dumped by his first long-term girlfriend.
Unless you have a hard religious objective function, we recommend that you avoid allowing revelations to “write your new identity,” as they can lead to dogmatic beliefs in whatever aspect of your ideological tree you changed. However, revelations are fantastic tools for those following a hard religious path, as dogmatic obedience towards specific ideologies can beneficially augment the execution of their objective functions.
To illicit a hard religious revelation, use a period of flux to focus a significant portion of your free time on the exercise discussed in the “hard religious” objective function section of this book, which is designed to help you clarify your religious beliefs. Once you gain access to some new way of seeing your faith, you should focus on what that says about the type of person you should be.