Trauma, Mental Models, And How To Fix your Brian - Social Media, Gen Z, And Saving The Kids

Garbage in, garbage out.

How brains work

I remember everything

Not every moment—though if you jogged my memory, I probably could—but everything I was paying attention to.

I remember the first time I tried bagel bites in preschool—where I was, what I was thinking at the time, how I felt—pure ecstasy of course.

I remember the teachers pushing me on the swing. I remember learning about dolphins. I remember the shape of the playground, and my mom buying me a green bagel for this weird thing called St Patrick’s Day.

I remember my mom buying my best friend a pack of gum and the earth shattering unfairness I experienced when they showed up to grab me from school and I didn’t have a pack waiting for me.

I remember Ocarina of Time (only the first level because that’s all I knew how to play). I remember running around the courtyard of Mario 64. I remember deleting my brother’s files on the two games because I couldn’t read and I just wanted to play.

I remember being happy, and smiley, and having parents who cared about me.

Every single important thing. Every core memory that went into who I am today. Many of them are sad, or happy, or unfair, or incredible. I don’t feel like I’ve changed at all. I’m still exactly who I was at 3 years old when this brain of mine turned on and started making sense of things. What has changed is my mental model.

Mental models

I experience something, I chew on it, I update my thinking. As I get more information, I throw out old stuff, or if I determine the new information is nonsense, I throw out the new stuff.

I certainly have biases, but to me it’s always been clear why I think the way I do. I do, of course, eventually throw away the “why” because you can’t first principles your way to everything, so you turn knowledge (data) into wisdom (hardcoded values).

In kindergarten, these two girls used to be obsessed with my hair and play with it all the time. A third one kissed me one day. First off, um assault anyone?, but secondly, and actually, this was information about what I looked like. It was information that something about my hair was different and that I was a total hottie.

I had this very dark, very thick, curly, but not Jewish curly, hair. I remember hating it my whole life, well up until I quickly lost it to alopecia, because it wasn’t like anyone else’s. Similarly, as early as 3rd grade I hated what I looked like.

I had chubby cheeks and confessed while riding circles around my cul de sac to the neighbor kid that I thought I was ugly and worried about it. He agreed.

I’m writing this today because things have changed and I have not.

I’m certainly older and have quite a bit of wisdom, but the old thing wasn’t my fault, and the wise thing wasn’t either.

I remember getting depressed for the first time at 10. I remember why I was depressed, how I thought about it, and the first time I decided that giving up life wouldn’t be so bad.

I remember how I developed my first obsession with OCD.

The first moment was seeing a friend’s feet and not liking them. Eventually that information took hold of my obsessive hardware and I became “afraid” of feet.

I remember the first compulsion. I was getting ready for Cub Scouts, and I kept filling up an empty red Gatorade bottle at the sink, drinking a bit, then doing it again until I eventually threw up. We stayed home that night because I was “sick”.

I remember choking on a Carmel apple and nearly dying at 6. I worried about choking to death for months after that, so I mentally tested different foods incessantly to determine how choke-able they were.

I remember watching Daylight, a movie where an underwater freeway collapses and Vigo Mortensen has to escape the flooding tunnel. I remember people saying he was great (little did I know he was the rightful king of Gondor!), and me worrying about drowning in a tunnel.

One of the tricky things about this process of intaking information and updating the model is it becomes very difficult to unlearn things until the mental model can be sufficiently updated with new, contradictory information.

The reason I was scared of underwater tunnels is because I’d never thought about them failing, I rode in cars all the time, and at the time I was afraid of dying. Now I had it in my head that these were incredibly dangerous.

It wouldn’t be until I got hundreds of hours more in a car, dozens more trips through tunnels, and more confidence in the infrastructure of the world as a whole that I’d stop worrying about dying in an underwater tunnel accident.

This is how the brains work.

Now this isn’t to say we should go about over-protecting kids from the world. This is the process of maturing—ingesting information and updating the mental model to have the appropriate response to a stimulus.

The world is dangerous, and life is very very difficult, but it is the reason that we must treat kids differently than adults.

The kids aren’t alright

Kids can have their whole world rocked by information that would be trivial to someone in their 30s.

Kids have no conception of consequences.

Kids have never experienced long-term gratification or the consequences of always choosing short term gratification. Adults suck at this too, but at least they know better.

Kids don’t know how the world works, how life works, or really anything.

This is why we protect them and we introduce new information—sex, drugs, rock n roll, geopolitics, hardship, death—slowly and carefully.

This is why we don’t let kids get tattoos, or do drugs, or have sex, or make any decision of consequence.

This is why kids don’t listen.

Kids have very fragile, very useless mental models. Until they get enough information on cause and effect, we can only expect them to respond at random. They also learn very quickly because almost nothing gets thrown out since they have no way to filter for what’s useful.

It’s why I was afraid of food after choking. Food can be dangerous. So can tunnels. In my head, something happened where feet got added to that list.

This is why when tragedy happens to a kid—maybe a loved one dies—it’s especially sad.

It’s not sad because of the thing happening, it’s sad because their mental model inevitably gets turned upside down and they will have to grapple with a compromised mental model, a broken response mechanism to the world, for probably decades.

It’s sad because they don’t know what to keep vs throw away.

It’s why people, even adults, report being “lost” when something horrific happens. Their mental model, their map and compass, is now defunct.

A kid who is used to having two parents now only has one. How does that reshape their mental model?

They never get the unreasonable love of a mother, or the important lessons and approval only an old man can bestow.

They end up with trust issues, or with lives full of misguided hedonism and regret.

When you have a bad mother or father, you end up with those for the same reasons. The job of a parent is to foster good mental models, mostly by controlling the information ingested, so the next generation can lead productive, happy lives.

This is where depression comes from too—mental models.

Depression

Depression is a problem of optimism about tomorrow.

Whether something awful happens to you that disempowers you, or you collect enough data that you can reasonably predict tomorrow is going to be awful, if you internalize that tomorrow is going to be awful and/or that you don’t matter to it, you will be depressed.

That’s why moving, getting a new job, finding friends—any change in circumstance—can cure depression overnight. Tomorrow shows promise of being different.

It’s amazing how this maturing process unfolds appropriately in most people, and how we mostly end up being adults with robust mental models that can deal with the vicissitudes of every day life. But this process is predictably corruptible.

If the data that goes in is overwhelmingly bad. Or you don’t have enough data in the system that you’re still afraid of driving in tunnels, that’s going to manifest in the model outputs.

What about me?

As a child I didn’t know much.

The only data I had is that I had a few friends, I was weird, teachers mostly really liked me and I liked them, I was gifted (but not as gifted as my brother), I fought with my brother, I liked my sister, I hated my hair, I was ugly, sometimes things weren’t fair, and I had these obsessive thought loops that would rob me of hours each day.

As I got into my late teens, most of that fell away, but I was stuck with my OCD, my feeling that I was falling behind, an attraction to women that eventually turned to fear during the early days of #MeToo, and a contradictory guilt around being a middle class white guy in a town dominated by women and minorities.

After enough time marinating in thoughts that I was ugly and weird, I didn’t like myself. I still deal with this.

After years of horrible compulsions, wiping myself off 50+ times a day, turning off the lights over and over until it felt just right, restarting test problems because somebody coughed, I abhorred the idea of waking up in the morning. My brain still goes here sometimes.

After years of being told I am a problem, I am dangerous, I began to question what “good” is and if my opinions mattered. I still walk on eggshells around anyone who isn’t also a white guy or married to one.

And it’s amazing, because as you can see, that information, often called “trauma”, is still in my model today. I was exposed to a few things too early and it has effected every aspect of my life since.

This concept is extensible and more pervasive than ever.

Kids exposed to the problems of the world too early, especially very often as is common these days, end up with models full of awful data that yield awful outputs. It’s real data, I don’t deny that, but a kid doesn’t have a robust enough mental model that they can withstand that much new information.

They will be paralyzed with whatever emotion is their response to a chaotic, out of control, unjust world. Is it anger, empathy, apathy, HEDONISM, NIHILISM? You’ve seen these recently. These are familiar because these are the natural responses to an apocalyptic world full of tragedy.

Just to really drive the point home, we’ve all seen a textbook example of this over the last 5 years, but first, we need to talk about Hardware.

Hardware vs Software

We all are born with different hardware: some of us funnier than others, smarter than others, more risk-averse than others. Maybe you’re predisposed to being a bit happier, or insecure, or neurotic. Maybe you’re a bit more open-minded, or a bit more cautious about new things.

Most traits are heritable, it’s why people become their parents—they literally are their parents.

We don’t get to change that. We don’t get to change our hardware.

This is the free will argument.

Your hardware + your software = you today.

To simplify for the people bad at math: your brain + your mental model & the information you ingest from your environment = the person you are today.

It’s why we often don’t know who we are until we encounter things and see how we react.

Our hardware is just a meat blob in our skull.

But the software and data we upload help us figure out what our meat blob, our hardware, is suited to, and the combination of the two is who we are. It’s our self.

A mediocre example

If you found an unlabeled laptop, a mostly useless way of figuring out who it belongs to would be to take it apart and see what the components inside are. Maybe you could determine it’s age, but not much else.

A slightly better way would be to turn it on and see which software is installed. This would give you a high level idea of what the person thinks about. Maybe a video editor is installed. Or Spotify. There’s information there.

The best way would be to open the software and see what information is inside. You’d know who it belongs to immediately.

My laptop is a random Macbook. Taking it apart yields very little information.

Looking at the software, you can see I have Chrome, email, Logic (for music), Final Cut Pro (for videos), Slack. Pretty telling.

If you open up Logic you can see it’s a bunch of Rock N Roll. Final Cut a bunch of mountain biking. Notes a bunch of sad songs and partly finished blog posts. Slack a bunch of AI jargon. Very telling.

The hardware is not that interesting. The software and what’s done with it is where all the magic is.

Hardware matters tremendously at determining what can be done on the computer, but the software tells the story of what is done.

It can feel a bit fatalistic to say “I’m stuck being the way I am because of my hardware”, but the better interpretation is “I’m stuck being the way I am because I’m running the same programs over and over on my hardware.”

We can change our mental models, our software, with better information and our mental models tell the majority of the story of who we are.

So what happens when we exclusively install bad software onto a piece of hardware?

Hardware Is Easily Corruptible

Imagine you get a new laptop. You can do anything with it.

Run a business. Write the first draft of this blog post. Create videos. Ingest brainrot (TikTok, The News, Reddit, Twitter).

Initially this might be okay. You go to work, have hobbies, and when you do use the computer, you spend 2 hrs a day on it.

The first hour is for wrapping up work.

The second hour is for fun. You talk to a friend for 30 min, read the news, maybe watch a little TikTok before bed.

Then one day you break your foot. No hobbies, no going out with friends.

Without the IRL part of your life, you now have an additional 3 hrs of sitting in your room on the computer.

You still have 1 hr of wrap-up work to do each day, and you still catch up with your friends 30 min a day, but now you have 3.5 hrs to kill!

There are two realities here.

1. You were looking for a few extra hours a day to build something. This new time is a blessing.

2. You are tired at the end of the day and spend that time bouncing between TikTok, Reddit, and the news.

In option 1, you are spending 4x as much time on productive work! You’re writing software, or business plans, or scripts for videos. You don’t even think of TikTok even though you still use it 30 min a day. Your hardware is full of productive software. You still have a bit of brainrot, but it’s fun having a silly side.

In option 2, you are consuming 8x more brainrot! Your hardware is full of garbage software. You don’t even think about work anymore. You think about the world ending, gender wars, race wars, global wars, the climate, government spending.

Now imagine you’re a 16 year old kid.

Cohort 1 becomes entrepreneurial, creative, industrious, and cohort 2 dysfunctional.

The 1s are loving life and optimistic about the future. These are those kids you meet who are way ahead of even most adults.

The 2s are nihilists because social media + the news told them they were all gonna die and the only way to save the people they care about is to lock themselves inside and avoid people.

This is exactly what happened to the Covid kids.

This generation spent 2 years being to told how to think by adults and they believed us because how couldn’t they? That’s the mental model we gave them, and that’s why people argued we shouldn’t close schools—not because it would or wouldn’t stop the spread of a virus, but because we were sacrificing an entire generation’s mental models for something that ended up being more a political issue than a public safety one.

The 1s weren’t paying attention, but the 2s, well that’s all they could think about.

This is why adults don’t like social media for kids. Adults have trouble with that much information. Imagine kids.

But the same thing did happen to adults, the outcomes just look different.

You are not a progressive or a trad-Christian Nationalist.

You are just ingesting awful information and your mental model is responding in kind.

If you’re always feeding negativity, injustice, fear into your response mechanism, you will always respond that way.

Every time you log into social media you see violence, oppression, sexism, racism, war, death, immorality. Depending on the zeitgeist and your hardware, you end up with a mental model full of partisan garbage.

This is why people worry about China controlling TikTok—they control the software of the American mind.

This is also why moralists worry about social media. It’s a public forum where people are rewarded for sharing their favorite software viruses for short term gratification.

This is why ghosting, and hooking up, and drug abuse, and hate, and labeling oneself as a victim are all fashionable, and why racism is back on the menu. These are all dopamine hits that make us feel good today yet corrode us tomorrow.

Bad ideas used to be limited to your friend group, now they have global reach and get algorithmically amplified to millions.

People do grow out of vices, prejudices, trust issues, mental issues, fear, insecurity, but it’s taking longer these days.

We used to become more similar over time because we learned enough about the world that our mental models all converged, but that only happened because we were ingesting the same information.

With so many cultures, sources of information, echo chambers, we no longer have a consensus on what to even aspire to grow toward.

We all end up with different north stars, and without adequate introspection, we can end up with a compass someone else controls.

The data has become so divisive, and the marketplace for ideas so crowded, that the only way to stand out is to make the most noise from the most extreme position.

It’s a temper tantrum on the scale of 100 million people. People can’t contend with nuance because their mental models have not been trained on it.

This modern age is one of competing, combative mental models that are influenced by bad information at massive scale.

But again, the hardware hasn’t changed.

You are your parents. And they theirs.

It’s all bad software to blame. You are a piece of hardware running a mental model trained on a decade of garbage.

I know plenty of boomers who started as hippies. I know many red-blooded patriots who have softened up over the years, but that doesn’t happen as much anymore.

I’m writing this now because I feel like I’m standing on two continents.

I remember when I was compassionate and kind, and then conservative and mean, and then woke and spiteful, and then conservative and spiteful, and now whatever I am today, and all those changes were heralded in by new data, and shown the door by new data.

During the summers of that 14-24 era of life, I’d get glimpses that the smiley kid with the curls who had that green bagel all those years ago was still in there.

School, life, family, and especially the early internet—had filled my brain with a lot of clutter, much of it poison, and as that clutter goes unprocessed, a curious, introspective kid can become avoidant and reactive.

I’d watch YouTube, workout, play video games, start little projects because left idle my brain would begin to process things and I was too fragile for that.

It feels bad to face all that negativity. It feels scary to sort through it. It feels impossible to change.

But I did face it, and sort through it, and after a lot of introspection and curating of my information diet, eventually even change.

How I fixed my mental model

One day, starting in my mid 20s, catalyzed by the pandemic, I hit one of my many rock bottoms.

Usually when I hit a rock bottom I mope, distract myself from ruminating, and let my routine carry me forward while trying to do better next time.

This one was different because there was no way out.

I was out of content to consume, I wasn’t allowed to go outside or see friends. I had sustained a huge injury to my arm so I couldn’t even exercise or play video games.

I was alone and it was finally time to face the music.

I tried putting my reading glasses and start going through the decade of unorganized filing cabinets. At first I felt 100% lost.

What was my software even trained on? Who was I?

I began randomly apologizing to people. Apologies were good right? Taking accountability would ensure I could open even the ugliest files.

I reworked my personality. I had gone bald from alopecia very quickly, so sarcastic douche was out. Was I nice, was I cold and mean, stoic? I tried different things on. How did people respond to different masks? Which ones felt good to me?

I thought back to a time in college when I put the facade down and showed someone pure kindness. That felt good.

I thought about times I tried to be an alpha. That didn’t feel good.

I also reflected that I usually got further with kindness.

Ok, kindness is good.

I felt courageous for going through this, but if I was throwing way all this stuff and reworking it, how would I know I was going in the right direction?

I decided I needed help. If I was throwing away my old compass, I needed to have some idea of where I was going.

I got a therapist to help me through the process. I thought I wanted a woke one to reaffirm me, but instead I got a middle aged man who did the opposite. He asked me who I wanted to be and equipped me with the tools to become it.

He gave me difficult books, called me out for being a pushover, and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself, stop being nice to awful women, stop being emotional at work and just do the work.

He helped me find the control panel that had been left on autopilot a decade earlier, and then he promptly fired me from his tutelage and told me it was up to me now that I was back on the joystick.

This process, like a breakup or a loss, took an axe to my mental model. The reason things are life changing is because they change your mental model. Pruning is often useful—asking yourself why you think a certain way—but in this case it seemed many trees had died from neglect and I needed to figure out which ones to replant.

You are kind of an asshole. You are entitled. You are a pushover. You are not enough. Life isn’t good.

These were things I didn’t want in my mental model. This information had made it into my software and made operating system changes I didn’t want. I needed to stop watering these.

You aren’t that important. Life is a good thing. People care about you. You matter. It’s gonna be okay. You are enough.

These were all in there, but they were under layers of garbage. Some of them I had replant, but that would be hard until I cleared away all the crap.

Fix your mental model

I used to think about dying all the time because I had no tree that said life is good, and I had plenty of data to support the contrary. That makes me want to cry because that is such an awful way to operate and I did it for 10 years.

How many ideas like that are in your head? Are there things you keep coming back to because of some information you ingested 10 years ago?

You need to be careful what information you let in, especially when you’re young and unhappy, as most young people are, and that’s exactly why.

As you age, you will gain experience and update your model. You will change, you will think differently, you might even become the thing you said you hated.

It can feel awful—like betrayal even. If you’re carrying regret, pain, or vitriol, introspection can feel dangerous, even treasonous. What if you don’t hate the thing you spent the last 10 years committing your life to hating? What if you were wrong about the decisions you’ve made? What if you end up regretting everything?

That’s scary, but that’s progress.

You weren’t always going to be this way. It was information that turned you into this, and it’s information that can be used to change it.

Check your biases, re-examine your mental model. If you’re unhappy, taking the 10 steps back might feel like a regression, but it’s the only way to move forward—on your terms.