On Bad Data, Reality Distortion Fields, And Escaping Their Orbits
Be careful around people who have a lot going for them.
Reality Distortion Fields and Bad Data
This one is going to be short. Probably.
Have you ever met a really pretty girl who seemed crazy?
I’m not talking subjective, eye-of-the-beholder beauty. I’m talking RIPPIN’ hot. One of those eye magnets that everyone in the room acknowledges is problematically good looking.
What about a guy who is having some break out moment in his career or a rising star in whatever industry he’s in?
Everything is going well, he is on top of the world, and everyone knows it.
What do these two things have in common?
Reality distortion fields.
Think about your life. Sometimes it’s stressful, unpredictable, painful—things go wrong. Sometimes it’s great—you get a raise, a date goes well, you have some good luck.
You collect data over time on how to prevent the bad things and promote the good things.
The other 80% of the time though? It’s boring!
It’s normal, banal. The trite happenings of an over-brained ape. Working, exercising, reading, talking to friends/family. It’s not good or bad, and the boring moments are the baseline which define good or bad.
If everything sucked (like actually sucked, not 15-25 year old no one understand me sucked), a good day would be a low bar, but you’d be miserable to the point of numbness.
What about the opposite? What if everything was great all the time?
This answers a little more complicated.
In theory this would be awesome, but in practice, it can’t last, which is why you need to get good data on how to live before your life changes for the normal-er.
That 14/10 girl will get all the cons that come with attention (some very bad), and eventually she’ll age out of her perfection.
That guy having his moment will run out of dopamine at some point and become depressed, have family issues, etc etc Scrooge we’ve all heard this one.
In essence, they’ll never learn what to do with lemons when people are handing you lemonade all the time. It’s just how it be baby.
My Experience On Top
I’m not going to pretend that I’m some super hot, super successful guy, but I’ve had tastes of the good life, and I’m going to use one such taste (ew) to make my point.
I’ve had small peaks (still building toward my big peak).
In dating, I was in the early stages of Alopecia, so I’d have bad hair days, which were more like no hair months, but generally I was in a phase where my hair wasn’t horrible, and I had a bit of confidence + a handful of good photos.
After living in Palo Alto for a few years, it was time to move to SF to go all in on my startup, and as an added bonus, I’d get access to about 100x more women (and infinitely more non-Stanford women).
At the time, I had the blissful ignorance and demeanor of a 26 year old, 6’4” Product Manager who loved working out, bikes, and #hustling. I was so dumb, but girls love a confident guy no matter how dumb.
As much as dating apps are terrible (insert dating app post) I felt like a girl on a dating app…as a boy on a dating app.
90% of the girls I swiped right on matched with me.
I was playing hard to get by virtue of having no time to respond to all these messages, resulting in me being hard to get.
All the sudden, my self-esteem was propped up sky high on toothpick stilts and I couldn’t help but walk around with my chest puffed out. All the data I was gettind I was the f**kin man, and I believed it! I was the man! Yeah!
WOMEN LOVED ME
With all this attention, my confidence was higher, my standards were higher, my optionality was higher.
Any date I went on didn’t matter, because I always had 5 more lined up. Any girl I talked to became an object auditioning for personification, not a person worth getting to know and appreciate.
Being a girl interested in dating me must have enigmatically sucked: they could do everything right and receive an irrational, or rational-to-me-but-irrational-to-them response.
This is because my reality had become distorted.
I thought I was amazing, the world (in a way) was giving me data that I was amazing, and things were generally going well for me, so I thought I’d “figured out life”.
Instead of getting good data saying I should find a nice girl and commit to her, my data said I was invincible, and because of this, I can absolutely understand how people on top at any scale end up making bad choices.
Without the right values, role models, etc, all my data told me that everything I did was at least a neutral, if not always positively reinforced, and negative externalities all but disappear.
This is the same for success. We all know someone who has had it easy.
I see this on founder Twitter and occasionally in person. People get WAY ahead of their skis. They give cringe and get praise. They build an image on being an asshole, even saying things like “cordial is just a hedge for incompetence”, and get retweets, clout, investments, etc. No matter what they do, they get a positive outcome, and this is BAD DATA.
Maybe the music never stops for these perpetual winners, but I’d bet all my money it will.
In both the hot girl case and the successful 25 year old case, they’re putting all their money on black and winning regardless of whether or not the roulette wheels shows red. Try convincing that person gambling is bad. I promise you you won’t.
That’s the problem with Reality Distortion Fields. The facts change, the data is bad.
To an outsider grounded in reality, getting caught in one can drive a person mad. Commitment = bad, people = exploitable, arrogance = good.
It’s through good data collection you develop character, maturity, wisdom, and getting a bunch of bad data on how to lead a good life will only confuse you.
Enter Alopecia
The music will always stop.
Beauty fades. Success gets hedonic treadmilled away. Obscurity eventually conquers fame. Hair falls out.
For me, the last one eventually got me, and it really did feel like I had been Truman Show’d.
All the sudden, I’d bet on black, the wheel would show red, and I’d lose? What’s more, it seemed like I was losing more than I was winning. Could the odds in gambling be…stacked against me?
I had SO much data to show that winning was the default that I had to not only learn what losing was, but also that gambling in general was actually not an effective way to live.
That analogy got a little away from me, but in essence: being a hot girl or successful young guy can feel like no matter what you do, you get positive feedback, and eventually that will become untrue in a big way.
For me, I had grown so attached to what I looked like, and had placed so much stock in how I coasted through the game of love (and life!) by being a tall, charismatic, good looking man, that when my hair fell out it literally changed everything.
I wish I was using literally figuratively, but I’m using literally literally!
This was worse than when the Fire Nation attacked!
Every single encounter I had with people changed. It wasn’t always negative, but it was always different. Part of that I projected onto the world, but a large part was presented through undeniable evidence.
Dating 2.0
I changed my profile to include pictures of me with a shaved head, and it f***in sucked dude.
Remember when I said 90% of girls I swiped right on matched with me, and they all wanted to date me? Let’s flip all them numbas.
10% of girls I swiped right on matched with me, and almost none of them wanted to date me.
It was actually insane, and the cause was irrefutable.
I have had plenty of tough times in my life, so I’m not pretending this was the first time I’d faced any music, but for a guy who had set his sights on of finding a girlfriend, this was a rug-pull.
The fastest way to depress a guy is to make him feel incapable of achieving his goals.
I was depressed.
That fragile self-esteem disappeared. My self-assuredness all but vanished. My previously distorted reality had snapped back to 20/20 vision and I needed LASIK to make me blind again.
I felt like I didn’t know anything, and every neuron in my head was hitting the “wait, go back” button to no effect.
I won’t elaborate too much on how I dug my way out of this, as you can read more about that in my post on Alopecia, but I’ll say it took time and it was worth it.
The point is, the music eventually stopped, and while it was playing, I wasn’t a real person living in a real world.
I thought I’d earned this dating success, I thought dating was easy. I thought I’d figured out life, and the foundation was hair and sarcasm, but that was all bad data, and I couldn’t have been convinced otherwise until I started getting good data.
Escaping The Distortion Field
I tell that story NOT to brag. I write it to say that if you’re currently having your reality distorted, start collecting data from other sources so you don’t have to rebuild from 0 when your life eventually implodes, and if you’re caught in someone else’s distorted reality, get out.
When I feel myself getting a little too high and mighty, I’m always quick to remind myself that it will disappear. And when I meet people who are on top of the world, I used to try to talk them down, but with all the data they have going against my warnings, I’ve found it’s best to walk away.
I have a lot more confidence today than I ever did back then, and it’s foundational confidence after literal years of doing the work, bettering myself, becoming more successful, owning my flaws. I had to get a bunch of new data on how to live, and use that data to construct an actual, real, undistorted good life. All that work sucked, but it paid off (eventually I will link to post on doing hard things and the road to self improvement).
Because of the confidence I’ve built, I’m mostly nonplussed when I meet people who have these RDFs (yeah, I just made that TLA (three letter acronym) up), but I still feel the RDFs trying to ruin my data.
If you’re a competent mental gymnast or successful enough, your firewall can be sufficient, but if you’re not, you need to find a way to remove the person from your life before you start getting bad data from them.
STORYTIME
In grad school, my classmates in my masters program WORSHIPPED the PhD-student TAs who taught us. We had been doing Economics for 2 months, the TAs had been doing Economics for 4-5 years. For that reason, it never got to me. If anything, it was good data. Keep going and you will get better.
On the other hand, being in the founder game, I meet people who have sold companies for 8 figures that are still in their early twenties. No amount of character building or mental gymnastics will make that feel okay. 25 year olds rarely should be rewarded for anything. Was I being too mature? Am I doing life wrong? This is bad data.
Storytime Over
Shortest stories ever, but you see the point. Sometimes it’s easy to justify an RDF away, but usually it’s not.
We didn’t evolve to know hundreds of people, so those one-percenters, as sparse as they are, will pop up, and the best thing you can do is NOT interact with them, or you can do so to leverage their advantage without directly competing with them.
You might think you can focus on your goals, or focus on the things where the person is just average, but it doesn’t work. If they have something that strong over you, their data will distract you, confuse you, depress you, or make you feel that your goals are the wrong goals.
Whether it be extricating yourself from the situation, embellishing their flaws, identifying their common humanity, or making yourself so rock-solid that you can escape their event horizon, you need to remember that their reality is distorted, and you need to protect yourself from it giving you bad data on how to live your life.
Use them as fuel or work around the field, sure, but after a year, when you’re tired and confused, you’ll realize that keeping a bad data feed around is a great way to feel confused all the time.
Careful out there space rangers.