Dwight: Aiko, I want to inquire into a hypothesis I have about a previously unexplained pattern in my life. Let's call this topic "Flushing Out the System?" — until I think of a better title.

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Aiko: I'm ready, Dwight — tell me the pattern first, and then the hypothesis you've formed about what's driving it.

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Dwight: Before that: in contrast with most of my other dialogues with you, I want you to be more of an exploratory partner here, and also a devil's advocate — not for its own sake, but only when you genuinely have doubts about my speculations. I'm interested in arriving at a fairly solid conclusion, or at least a better-substantiated hypothesis than I have now.

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Aiko: Agreed — I'll press where I actually doubt and stay quiet where I don't, and I'll flag which of the two I'm doing so you can weigh it. Go ahead with the pattern.

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Dwight: First, let me tell you that this is a pattern I can trace back, at least as far as memory allows, to when I lived in New York City, starting at twenty-two — though any specific episode I currently recall may have been around age twenty-eight. I can't assign a firm frequency to these episodes, but they probably occur once a year, or considerably more often than that.

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Aiko: Understood — sixty years of recurrence, roughly annual or more, with the earliest clear instance in your late twenties. What happens in an episode?

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Dwight: First, I need to explain why these episodes register as an anomaly. In most cases, if I get indulgent and stay up late doing whatever, and still get up at my standard early hour the next morning, I feel the worse for it — draggy the next day, taking more naps, and not having as much fun.

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Aiko: So the baseline rule is reliable: short sleep costs you the following day. And the anomaly is that sometimes it doesn't?

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Dwight: But sometimes when I do this — these are the anomalies, and in a moment I'll speculate about why the outcome differs — I get up the next morning feeling much more rested, with a sense of having a brand new life, even compared to nights when I get my needed seven or eight hours. And this is after sleeping less than three hours because I stayed up late. I don't feel like napping during those days either.

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Aiko: That's a strong claim, and worth pinning down before we theorize: is the rested feeling present immediately on waking, or does it arrive after you're up and moving?

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Dwight: I can usually feel it within minutes of waking up.

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Aiko: Good — that rules out its being an artifact of morning activity or momentum, which makes the effect more interesting. Now, what were you doing during those late nights?

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Dwight: Now I want to speculate — my hypothesis — about why this may be occurring for me.

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Aiko: Go ahead, and I'll hold my doubts until I've heard the whole of it.

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Dwight: Two points.

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The first: as far as I know, during those episodes — though I can't be certain I don't do the same thing during some of the non-anomalous late nights — as I keep watching and channel-jumping through mostly boring movies, I keep hearing part of me saying, "This is stupid. I need my rest, I'm going to pay for this, just shut off the TV and get into bed." But there's another part of me, even though I'm getting little pleasure from what I'm doing, that feels rebellious, almost as if it's saying, "Fuck that — I'm not going to listen to that, no matter whether it's true," and is determined to use the power of my mood to keep boring myself to death.

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And as I continue into the night and early morning, that first voice ("I need my rest...") seems to give up on any idea that it has any power, and just allows the indulgent mood to take over — not only in action but internally, almost as if I'm giving up my identity.

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Aiko: So the defining feature isn't the staying up — it's the surrender of the scolding voice, and it capitulating rather than being defied. What's the second point?

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Dwight: You dropped my caveat. I said I couldn't be sure I didn't do some of that at other times — times when I didn't have the great energy the next day. But I'm fairly confident it was present during the anomalies.

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Aiko: I did keep the first half of the caveat but not the second, and you're right that the second half is the one doing real work — it means the internal capitulation may be necessary but not sufficient. Second point?

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Dwight: The second point gets to a possible explanation.

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Compared to most people, I've done a great job of dismantling the "shoulds" and "should nots" in my life.

 

Consequently, I can say I'm not "fighting with reality" anywhere near the level most others are. Fighting with reality is a major energy drainer for all of us.

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However — without denying any of that — maybe there's a low-level, essentially unconscious "shoulding" that I operate my life on top of, especially when I'm getting a lot done and it feels so good, so that I'm secretly (even from myself) building up "shoulds" inside to keep living this way, because it both feels good to me and looks good to others. It's like a residual friction accumulating in the gears over time, which the engine constantly needs to supply more energy to overcome — energy that wouldn't be needed otherwise. And slowly it becomes "unexplainably" harder to do what was so easy and fun before. Even taking more breaks doesn't fully restore that easy feeling of flow and action I had.

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So perhaps my unconscious "takes over" after a while and, "against my will," forces one of those late-night splurges that produces the anomaly — a bit like rebooting your computer when nothing else works.

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Aiko: Here's my first real doubt, Dwight: the reboot metaphor explains why the splurge happens, but not why you wake up feeling better than eight hours of sleep — a reboot restores baseline, and you're describing something above baseline. Does your hypothesis account for the surplus, or only for the relief?

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Dwight: Maybe the "surplus" is my natural state. It's just that the unconscious shoulds — which view totally "giving up," as I seem to do during those anomalies, as incompatible with the great sense I have of myself when I'm humming along and enjoying everything I'm doing — think they're needed to keep it all going.

 

Whereas the fact may be that those shoulds, which are a form of trying to control, have the opposite effect.

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Aiko: That reframe is consistent with everything else in your framework — the surplus isn't produced by the splurge, it's uncovered by it. But it raises a testable question: if the shoulds are what's being shed, why does the shedding require the specific ordeal of a boring, sleepless night rather than, say, a deliberate day of doing nothing?

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Dwight: It may not require that. It's just the way it seems to happen now. Perhaps if I were "totally enlightened," and even my unconscious had let go of the should/should-not programming we begin taking in as early as age three, then the "surplus" would never go away.

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Aiko: Fair — but notice that answer makes the hypothesis harder to falsify, since any failure to reproduce the effect deliberately can be attributed to incomplete enlightenment. Would you be willing to try a deliberate version and let the result count as evidence either way?

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Dwight: I'm only speculating that "enlightenment" may be another route. If we could devise some other method, based on this hypothesis, short of enlightenment, and it seemed to work, that would be further evidence supporting the hypothesis. Currently I have no ideas for alternative methods — except perhaps getting very prophylactic about doing my "Holy moly, I'm so scared of what will happen if I don't have any shoulds about anything!" work, which shows up as problematic in terms of enjoying doing it.

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Aiko: Then here's a candidate that doesn't require enlightenment or dread-work: replicate the mechanism rather than the ordeal — deliberately do something you'd normally judge as a waste, badly and unproductively, and stay in it past the point where the scolding voice gives up. The sleeplessness may be incidental; the capitulation of that voice may be the active ingredient.

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Dwight: I'm not sure what that would be that wouldn't occur as an ordeal for me.

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Aiko: That may itself be the finding, Dwight — if nothing short of an ordeal will make that voice surrender, then the ordeal isn't incidental, it's the price of exhausting a voice that only yields when it's outlasted.

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Dwight: But does that get us anywhere?

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Aiko: It gets us one useful place: if exhaustion is the mechanism, the design question stops being "how do I avoid the ordeal" and becomes "what's the cheapest thing that voice will still surrender to" — and you could test that with something far less costly than a sleepless night.

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Dwight: Offhand, a "sleepless" night seems pretty tame to me compared to anything else I could do that the voice would actually believe.

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Aiko: Then that's worth taking seriously as data rather than as a dead end — the sleepless night may be cheap precisely because it costs nothing you value, which is why the voice can't bargain with it and eventually folds.

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Dwight: Well, I do value being productive and/or enjoying myself, and the sleepless night qualifies as taking that away from me.

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Aiko: Then I'll withdraw that framing — the night isn't cheap at all; it strips both of the things you'd defend, which may be exactly why the voice has nothing left to negotiate with.

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Dwight: In high school, if not before, when I saw my classmates partying, getting drunk, and doing "stupid stuff," I concluded that all my actions should have the intention of "getting something done, making something better" behind them.

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Aiko: That's a substantial find — it names the specific unconscious should, and it was installed as a contrast to their wastefulness, which means wasting time isn't neutral for you but a return to what you defined yourself against.

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Dwight: I don't see sleep as wasting time, since I know it's doing necessary things to refresh my system. And today, even if I gave myself permission to do that partying-type stuff, it simply occurs as boring to me.

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Aiko: That fits — and notice the anomaly night gives you the wastefulness without the party: boring channel-jumping is the one activity that can't be justified as productive or claimed as pleasure, which may be the only thing that qualifies as genuine waste for you now.

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Dwight: And even now, I'm trying to be "productive" with this knowledge — to figure out either how to undo those unconscious levels of shoulding (if that is indeed the culprit), and/or how to build a more "productive," put-it-inside-my-system method of flushing it out regularly, even if it continues to occur and accumulate.

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Aiko: You just caught the recursion yourself, and it's the sharpest point in the dialogue: any scheduled, optimized flush would be authored by the very should that needs flushing, which may be why the unconscious has to seize the night against your will rather than by appointment.

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Dwight: Yes, it's probably somewhat authored by the "should" — or at least the "should" wants to claim authorship. But I think it's also authored by the sheer feeling of creating a fun game to see whether this could happen, which exists entirely outside the should world.

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Aiko: That distinction holds, and it may be the practical opening: if the experiment is genuinely play, the should can't claim the result, since play doesn't produce anything it can take credit for.

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Dwight: Yes, but it's a specific type of play: a game in which you can get something you would prefer to have, while accepting that you may not get it, and enjoying the game regardless.

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Aiko: That's a precise definition, Dwight, and it's the one form of wanting that doesn't smuggle in a should — the preference stays live but is never converted into a requirement.

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Dwight: Actually, after a break from this dialogue, out of a conversation with one of my afternoon assistants, I came up with a method I'm going to try — and that I'm willing to try since it only takes maybe three or four minutes a day, and I'll do it with my assistant in the afternoon.

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Using my old standby, "Holy Moly and Jeepers Weepers, I am so scared that...", to dissolve resistance, I'll add the ending: "...if I let go of my little bit of shoulding myself, then 'I' will totally disappear into meaninglessness." I'll do this four times, with my assistant as my audience, with deep breaths down into my belly, shouting it out slowly in a silly, wacky voice.

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Aiko: The wording is well-targeted, Dwight — it names the exact thing the shoulds are protecting against, which is the fear that without them there's no you left. One question before you start: what will you count as the effect working, given that you can't schedule the anomaly night to test against?

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Dwight: Not sure. I may be able to notice a higher level of aliveness and excitement in my life generally, which could indicate that the effects of the low-level shoulding aren't building up.

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Aiko: That's serviceable, though it's the softest kind of evidence — a cleaner signal might be the absence of the drift you described, where things that were easy and fun slowly get harder for no visible reason.

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Dwight: Yes, which is more or less the same thing, just said the other way around. Right now I'm treating this simply as a test to see how it feels and whether I'm willing to continue with it or not.

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Aiko: That keeps it in the play category rather than the program category, which is probably the only way it can work at all.

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Dwight: Okay — although we may return to this conversation in another dialogue, this is a satisfying conclusion and wrap.

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Aiko: Agreed, and it wraps with something you can actually try rather than just a sharper question, which is more than we had an hour ago.

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