In my early twenties, while working a job leading backpacking trips through the Southern Appalachian Mountains, my friend and I invented a religion.

The trips were usually eight days long through what is a temperate rainforest. It was hot. It was humid. And it rained constantly. We would move camp most days, which meant that even after hiking all day, there was still the matter of finding somewhere to sleep, setting up camp, filtering water, and cooking dinner.

Sometimes we’d get lost and still be miles from camp when it got dark. Everyone would be hungry. Everything would be wet. My socks would make that awful squishing sound inside my shoes, and we knew that whenever we finally found a campsite, we still had hours of chores waiting for us.

It sucked.

But this was where our religion came in. We called it Diabolicalism.

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The theology of Diabolicalism was simple. We believed in a Diabolical God, and whenever something unusually miserable happened, we took it as evidence that he had personally intervened in our day.

He was the reason why it would start raining as soon as we set off on a hike, or why our midweek food supply would be late, or why we couldn’t find water. Whenever one of these things happened, we would look at each other and smile.

“This is so diabolical.”

And we’d start laughing while everyone around us was miserable and complaining.

Nothing about the situation had changed. We were still wet and hungry. But we had invented something outside of ourselves to respond to. The rain wasn’t just rain anymore. It was the work of a petty supernatural being who had, for reasons beyond our understanding, taken an unusually strong interest in ruining our evening.

Our god was diabolical, and it was fun to watch him work.

This completely changed our relationship to what was happening around us. We had built an interpretive framework that was capable of taking even the most unfortunate and miserable moments and making them light and joyful.

Behind the silly game we were playing was a more general principle: attitude changes experience. Of course, this is always obvious from an outsider’s perspective, and we often accept this in almost every area of life. We tell our kids to focus on their attitude when it comes to sports or we think about the attitude we bring with us into a social occasion or a trip.

But when we talk about intellectual work, attitude often disappears from the equation. We reduce capabilities to something like raw processing power: how much you know, how quickly you understand, how intelligent you are.

Cognitive Attitude

The mathematician David Bessis uses the term cognitive attitude for the part we leave out: how you respond to confusion, where you direct your attention, whether uncertainty makes you anxious or curious, whether you find the work you do to be joyful.1

These things don’t merely determine how pleasant thinking feels. They change how you think. They affect what you notice, what you try, and they play a large role in determining your ability.

In other words the mathematician is one of the variables in the mathematical problem.

And yet this is almost completely absent from the way we talk about intellectual ability. When the people we eventually call geniuses are asked to explain what separated them from everyone else, they rarely describe raw intellectual horsepower. They describe something closer to an approach.

“I have never presumed my mind to be any more accomplished than that of the common man. Indeed, I have often wished my mind, my imagination, as clear and precise, my memory as well and sharp as certain other people. But I venture to claim that since my early youth, I have had the great good fortune of finding myself taking certain paths that have led me to reflections and maxims from which I have fashioned a method.”

That’s René Descartes, the man credited with inventing modern philosophy.

This seems to happen every time we try and slap the label of genius on someone or credit them with being gifted with a superior mind. They counter:

Newton attributed whatever service he’d done to “industry & a patient thought.” Edison repeatedly rejected the genius explanation in favor of hard work, persistence, and common sense. Einstein famously wrote, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Feynman described himself as an ordinary person who became intensely interested in something and learned it.

The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck wrote:

“In our acquisition of knowledge of the Universe (whether mathematical or otherwise) that which renovates the quest is nothing more nor less than complete innocence. It is in this state of complete innocence that we receive everything from the moment of our birth...

This unique power is in no way a privilege given to “exceptional talents”... persons of incredible brain power (for example), who are better able to manipulate, with dexterity and ease, an enormous mass of data, ideas and specialized skills. Such gifts are undeniably valuable, and certainly worthy of envy from those who (like myself) were not so “endowed at birth, far beyond the ordinary”.

Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the “invisible yet formidable boundaries” that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn’t even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child’s play.”2

The Attitude of Play

Listen is a strange verb to find at the center of a description of mathematical discovery.

We usually imagine difficult thinking as an act of exertion. You attack a problem. You wrestle with it. You force yourself to concentrate. You push until something gives.

Grothendieck describes almost the opposite posture. The mathematician becomes receptive. He pays attention long enough for the problem to reveal something about itself. And perhaps this is why he connects innocence with child’s play. A child investigating something doesn’t yet know which observations are important enough to notice. So, for a while, everything is allowed to be interesting.

And yet the most common attitude we’re encouraged to bring to our own creative work is rarely one of play. We are usually told (or more likely we tell ourselves) to take our work more seriously. Become more disciplined. Eliminate distractions. Narrow our attention.

There is obviously value in all of this. But I think we make a mistake when we confuse the conditions that help us work with the attitude that helps us think.

Seriousness can organize a life around creative work. It can get you to the desk every morning. But it does not follow that seriousness is the most useful state of mind once you are there.

In fact, many of the people whose thinking we admire seem to describe something almost opposite: curiosity, innocence, play, a willingness to follow something before knowing whether it will be useful.

Taking the work seriously and feeling serious while doing the work are two different things.

Pain Is Not the Unit of Effort

A 2020 LessWrong article called “Pain Is Not the Unit of Effort” by alkjash describes how we’ve come to treat suffering as evidence of exertion. The more miserable someone looks, the harder we assume they must be trying:

“I noticed recently that, at least in my social bubble, pain is the unit of effort. In other words, how hard you are trying is explicitly measured by how much suffering you put yourself through… culturally, we’ve been led to believe that overstressed, exhausted people are the ones trying their hardest. It’s right to be kind to those people, but let’s not go so far as to indulge the delusion that they’re putting in more effort than their joyful, bouncing-off-the-walls peers.”

The article offers two counterbalances to this:

1. If it hurts, you’re probably doing it wrong.

2. You’re not trying your best if you’re not happy.

I don’t think this means that worthwhile work should never be painful. Of course it will be. There will be boring stretches, frustrating problems, and days when you have to force yourself to sit down and do it anyway.

But I do think the pain is information.

And sometimes I think we’re almost too quick to explain away the opposite signal. We hear that Einstein was “passionately curious” about physics and think, Well, of course. He was fascinated by physics. I’m not fascinated by physics.

Okay. Good.

Maybe you shouldn’t become a physicist.

That sounds obvious when you put it that way, but I think we spend an enormous amount of time trying to override exactly these kinds of signals. We assume resistance is a character flaw to overcome and attraction is somehow irrelevant. But both are telling us something.

What if writing used to feel playful and absorbing, and now every sentence feels like something you have to drag out of yourself? What if you used to spend hours following questions for no reason other than wanting to know the answer, and now you’re constantly asking whether they’re useful enough to justify your time?

In that case, the loss of enjoyment may not be telling you that you’ve chosen the wrong thing.

It may be telling you that something has gone wrong in the way you’re approaching it.

Allowing Myself to Be Curious

The impetus for this essay was my own struggle with allowing myself to be curious. It began as a journal entry I wrote on May 2nd titled “Allowing Myself to Be Curious.”

I’d been taking a step back from my projects at the time, and I didn’t like what I found. Whenever I ran into a problem, my instinct was always the same: it must be more effort. Effort is the solution. I was hard-forcing everything, bracing against the work instead of moving with it.

What I wrote that day was this:

“One thing that is stifling my productivity (my ability to create quality work) is, paradoxically, not allowing myself to try things. This feels counterintuitive, because by doing less I should be able to do more. However, I’m ignoring my own curiosity, which is the greatest driver of my momentum.”

Curiosity was the thing actually moving me forward.3

But somewhere along the way, I had developed the exact opposite attitude from the one we’d accidentally cultivated in the mountains.

When something went wrong backpacking, the difficulty itself became interesting. Look what our diabolical god came up with now.

When something went wrong in my work, I treated it like a threat. I narrowed my attention and tried to force my way through.

The challenge is that this sounds almost offensively simple, and it flies in the face of what most of us have been trained to do through school and work. We are taught to justify where we’re going before we go there. What will this lead to? What will it produce? Is it useful? Is it worth the time?

Curiosity asks something almost opposite of us. It asks us to play the way a kid plays.

When you’re a kid wandering through the woods, you don’t climb the next hill because you’ve calculated that the view will be better than the last one. You climb it because you want to see what’s on the other side.

That’s the attitude I think I’d lost. I had started demanding that every idea tell me where it was going before I was willing to follow it. But curiosity doesn’t work that way. There’s no promise that the next hill will have a better view. But don’t you still want to see what’s there?

This essay was originally written and edited on paper, then voice-transcribed into Google Docs and AI-formatted for grammar.

Footnotes

TL;DR: My friend and I are geniuses for our invention of Diabolicalism.

Every Saturday, Jim pulls into the parking lot of his oversized, overlit, overpriced gym. He chose it because it had more amenities than any of the others. A huge weight room, a pool, a sauna, a track, basketball courts. Jim hardly uses any of it. His routine is to spend about 20 minutes on the track, then head to the smoothie bar, order a smoothie, and scroll on his phone for 40 minutes before heading home.

He’s been at it for two months.

Jim, now in his late 30s, is quite out of shape.

Having never really had to exercise before, he was nervous about going to the gym. But his doctor agreed with his wife that he really needed to be healthier.

He’s not a morning person and doesn’t have much energy to go after work, so he only goes once a week.

He keeps going mostly because he likes the smoothies.

One day, Jim is out with his friends and tells them that he’s developed a gym habit. They’re not impressed when they learn he only goes once a week. “You’re wasting your time. You’ll never get in shape going just once a week.”

Jim doesn’t have the heart to tell them he also only exercises for 20 minutes before getting a smoothie and hanging out.

But he knows they’re right.

He got into this to get in shape and he’s not even doing that. Now he’s just wasting money on a gym membership.

But Jim still goes that Saturday. He can’t cancel his membership for another month anyway.

As he’s waiting in line for his smoothie, Jim wonders what he should do with his time instead. It’s not like he was doing anything else before. He was just at home watching TV and scrolling on his phone. Maybe he’ll get into building apps. Maybe he’ll start reading more.

Oh wait, he remembers. He’s supposed to be getting in shape.

He asks Google if there is a secret to enjoying running.

That’s when he meets Ken.

Ken is very high energy and talkative. Turns out they have the same smoothie order. Ken talks about how he comes here on the weekends just to swim and stretch, but his main gym is a Muay Thai place nearby. They have a nice interaction. Jim has no idea what Muay Thai is. Ken says it’s like kickboxing.

The next week, they bump into each other again.

Ken asks Jim about his workout routine. Jim, a little embarrassed but not the kind of guy who would lie, tells him the truth.

Ken: “That’s great, man. It’s good to have a routine. Hey, you should come try out the Muay Thai gym. It’s a really good group of people.”

Jim: “I don’t know if it’s for me.”

Ken: “That’s what everyone says.”

Smoothie in hand, Jim takes his usual seat and pulls out his phone. He looks up Muay Thai.

People getting kicked in the face. Grown men elbowing each other in a cage.

It is definitely not for him. He’s not a violent person. He doesn’t want to fight anybody. The people who do this for fun must be insane. He writes it off.

The next week, Ken extends the invite again: “No one’s going to judge you. It’s fun. Just come try it, it’s free.”

Jim finally ends up going to a class one evening after work.

Jim was right. It’s not for him.

The whole thing felt completely foreign. He felt fat and awkward and unathletic. He spent most of the class watching the clock waiting for it to end.

After class, Ken introduces him around. Everyone is really nice and friendly and welcoming. They’re all talking to each other. No one talks to each other at his other gym.

Jim can’t believe these are the same people that were just punching each other. One is a lawyer, another a bricklayer, another a software developer.

Jim felt defeated during the class. But by the time he leaves he has a warm glowing feel to him. He feels lighter. He’s smiling about nothing at all. He forgets how much he hated the class.

He decides to go again. And again. Six months later he’s down 20 pounds and hasn’t missed a week. His relationship with his wife has improved. He’s more confident at work.

He meets up with his friends again. They notice he looks different. One of them goes “wait, you do Muay Thai now? That seems like the complete opposite of your personality.” Jim laughs. He’s not sure how to explain it. “It’s not really like that.” He sees they don’t understand.

The point of the story is that most people think about things in a vacuum.

They say going to the gym once a week is “not enough,” and they’re not wrong. But they’re removing the fact that the world is full of variables smashing together. They’re impossible to predict, even though we constantly try.

Before you do anything, your brain runs a calculation. It estimates the cost, models the upside, and decides whether it’s worth it. The problem isn’t that people are wrong or irrational. The problem is that the calculation is always missing most of the inputs. The context is too big to model. It is always operating in a vacuum, working with maybe ten percent of the relevant information.

Ken was never a variable Jim could consider. Muay Thai was never even on his list of options for getting in shape. The lawyer and the bricklayer and the software developer weren’t variables. The warm glowing feeling after class wasn’t a variable. None of it was visible from the outside. The context knew things Jim didn’t. It always does.

You can’t build Ken into a model before you’ve met him. You can’t factor in a conversation that hasn’t happened or a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet. The things that end up mattering most are almost never the things you could have predicted from your couch.

So the calculation your brain runs before doing something isn’t rigorous. It just feels that way. It accounts for everything you already know and has no mechanism for everything you don’t. And the only way to access those hidden variables — the only way to find out what’s actually in the function — is to go do the thing. Place yourself in environments where chance things can happen and they will.

There is a certain blindness that comes with owning a car.

Not just the physical kind like the way you stop noticing the weather, the streets, or the specific sounds of your neighborhood. That blindness is real, but it’s the obvious one. The subtler blindness is this: you stop seeing driving as a choice.

When a tool is so obviously the “best” option by every measurable metric (speed, ease, comfort) it collapses into the default. Questioning it feels faintly absurd. Why would I want to arrive somewhere slower? Why would I want to show up sweaty?

And when it becomes the default, the experience of the tool vanishes. The car becomes an invisible, unremarkable tunnel between two points.

Home > Commute in a car > Work
becomes
Home > Commute > Work

This blindness causes us to misdiagnose our own frustrations. Someone might think, I hate my commute, without realizing they actually just hate commuting in a car. If they don’t see the tool as the issue, they can move closer to the office and still feel that same drain, because the invisible tunnel remains.

Wendell Berry noticed the same defaulting reasoning running through writing.

In his essay Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, he describes being told repeatedly by university professors that a computer would help him write faster, easier, and more. He was made to feel like a fool for not using one. His response was simple: those aren’t my metrics.

“Do I then want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity… I would like to be a better writer. And for that, I need help from other humans, not a machine.”

He goes on to explain exactly who those humans are:

“I acknowledge that as a writer, I need a lot of help, and I have received an abundance of the best help from my wife, from other members of my family, from friends, from teachers, from editors… These people have helped me out of love or friendship.”

The people he means are specific: his wife, family, friends, teachers, editors. People who help him, as he puts it, out of love or friendship.

From the outside, all anyone sees is the speed and the ease. They miss the trade-off. What you can only learn through experience are the invisible benefits of the “inefficient” method.

By writing by hand and relying on people he loved, Berry was building a practice and the practice was building the relationships. He wasn’t rejecting the computer to be a contrarian. He was letting his own accumulated experience tell him what mattered.

Figuring out what matters takes time. It requires trying many different things and actually noticing how you feel while doing them instead of just accepting what is, supposedly, the right answer.

Other writers thrive at a keyboard. But I don’t, and it took me a long time to notice that. Here is how the process feels for me:

Writing on the computer

Before: Dread sitting down. Procrastinate. Open YouTube or Substack for an hour just to cope with the anxiety of starting.

During: Every difficult sentence, every moment the words won’t come, I want to click into a new tab. I’m not just thinking — I’m fighting the urge to be somewhere else.

After: Junk food. TV. Something to feel better quickly. Too tired for anything that requires being present.

Writing by hand

Before: Look forward to it. Feel myself relaxing before I even sit down — I know I’m about to inhabit a calm space where I get to explore my own imagination.

During: More engaged. More ideas. I go off on tangents. It’s less linear, but I can feel my imagination expanding. It’s generative.

After: More energy than I started with. I'll work out, eat a decent meal. I'm more present with friends and family.

I used to finish a writing session the way you finish a long shift. Relieved it was over, too tired for anything that required being present. Now I finish the way you finish a good walk. Slightly surprised it’s done. Wondering where the time went.

I did eventually see through my own commuting blindness.

I ride my bike everywhere now. To visit friends, meet at the bar, go to the grocery store. And when people find out, they almost always say the same thing: “I wish I biked more. That’s such great exercise.”

It always stops me slightly. Exercise is so far down my list of reasons for cycling that it barely registers.

What I want to explain — but have found very difficult to explain — is that the benefits aren’t measurable. How do I convey how satisfying it is to understand how each neighbourhood connects to the next? How do I explain the particular joy of finding a new shortcut, or the feeling of blood returning to your face after a cold ride? These are feelings. I only know how much they matter because I’ve felt them.

That’s hard to convey to someone who hasn’t. They don’t understand why any of this matters to me more than speed, ease, and comfort — and unless they’ve felt it themselves, they have no idea what I’m talking about.

When we reason about decisions in the abstract, we can only assign weight to things we can measure. Speed, ease, and comfort are legible. You can compare them, rank them, argue for them.

The feeling of knowing your city the way you know your own house doesn’t exist yet when you’re making the decision. You can’t weigh it because you haven’t felt it. And you can’t feel it without having already chosen the slower option and stayed with it long enough for that feeling to arrive.

This is why abstract reasoning so often steers us wrong. It’s not that we’re being irrational. It’s that the things that end up mattering most are invisible at the moment of choosing. The feeling is how you know how much something matters. And it only comes after you try.

My grandmother used to tell me that if I ever need to have a difficult conversation with someone, I should do it in the car.

This advice feels counterintuitive. I was taught to face the person I’m speaking to and make eye contact. But I’ve found that this makes me feel self-conscious when I’m trying to say something difficult.

When I look directly at someone, I watch them react to my words in real-time. If I’m expressing something difficult like my grievances, or their flaws, or “I’m sorry Kate, but this relationship just isn’t working” watching their reactions causes me to panic. I see them get sad or angry, and I instinctively edit the truth to soften the blow. I lose my nerve. I end up letting a relationship drag out for months longer than it should because I couldn’t get through that difficult conversation.

The car is different. In the car, you are side-by-side. You are facing the same direction. You are both looking out at the passing landscape, watching the same world move. Because you aren’t staring at the other person, you stop performing for them. You are just two people watching the road and it becomes easier to be honest.

Journaling works in the same way for me.

I used to struggle to maintain a consistent journaling habit. I would make time for it, sit down at my desk, open a blank page and then… nothing. I wanted to write something profound. Something that sounded like it belonged in a memoir. But because I was watching myself think, I would flinch. I was trying to force depth rather than letting it come to me naturally. And it made the whole experience feel awkward and contrived, so I would stop.

Sitting down at a blank page and demanding a profound insight was like walking into a gas station at 2:00 AM and immediately asking the clerk about his relationship with his father. I can’t do that. That’s insane. I have to make small talk. I have to buy a Slim Jim first. I have to mention the humidity outside. I need a transaction of the ordinary so I can arrive at depth naturally.

I went back to my grandmother’s advice. Instead of trying to focus on my “feelings,” I shifted my attention toward the physical details of my day.

When I anchored my journal in the external world, the weather, the miles I biked, what I ate that day, the performance anxiety vanished. I stopped trying to sound smart.

Paradoxically, recording the dry facts of my day gave me a clearer picture of my mood than my actual feelings did. Spending two paragraphs describing a storm told me more about my state of mind than simply stating “I’m sad.” The focus on the grey light and the oppressive dampness revealed the heaviness I was trying to ignore.

I started to see patterns in my life that I was too close to see in the moment. I could see how my activities were causing certain behaviors.

To understand this, look at What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

A lot of it is pretty ordinary. He begins many chapters by talking about the distance he ran that day, the temperature, the specific clouds in the sky, or the music he listened to. But beneath those surface details, something deeper starts to emerge.

In one section, he reviews his training log and looks at the miles he ran over the past month. He notices his times have slowed. The data forces him to confront what it means to age, to lose physical capability, and to accept limitations.

Approaching journaling this way breaks the paralysis. Instead of sitting down and forcing yourself to answer a big question—What does it mean to get older?—you are drawn into that conversation in a more natural way. It doesn’t feel forced or contrived. In fact, you didn’t even know it was going to come up, so you’re more honest about it.

Introspection is often treated like mining. We try to dig straight down into the dark to find a gem. But accurate journaling is actually more like land surveying.

You cannot measure the elevation of your own mood without a benchmark. You need a fixed point outside of yourself to triangulate where you actually stand.

For Murakami, running is the anchor. For me, its cycling.

When you ride a bike, you tend to repeat the same routes. You climb the same hills in July that you climbed in December. You descend the same canyons in the rain that you descended in the heat. Because the route is a constant, it becomes a perfect control group for the experiment of the self.

When I ride a familiar segment, I am not just riding it in the present. I am riding alongside my past rides. The landscape acts as a trigger. As I pass a specific tree or ride down a familiar street, the memory of the last time I was there comes up.

This creates a “whole picture” view. I might remember riding this same curve a year ago. I might remember thinking, at the time, that I was happy and handling my life well. But as I ride it today, with the benefit of distance, I recall the tightness in my chest I felt back then.

I realize I wasn’t happy then, I was stressed and suppressing it. The bike ride forces a confrontation with the reality of my history. And when I write it down, it creates a composite image of who I was and who I am, overlaid on the same stretch of asphalt.

It’s hard to accurately convey how you really feel. It’s easy to fool yourself. Maybe you only write when you’re happy or when you’re sad. But if you focus on capturing the benign details of your day, you can see how you really felt based on your actions. You stop trying to stare your life in the eyes to find the truth. Instead, you just sit next to it, watching the road, and let the truth arrive naturally.