Dealing with Default Settings

This won't be one of my usual business/clarity focused posts. Occasionally, I need to just ramble about more personal stuff that's banging around in my overthinking mind.

Like default settings. What's that all about?

It's the stuff under the surface that causes us to act, feel, think, and react in certain ways - almost (or entirely) automatically.

I'm convinced that we humans each end up with a rather unique constellation of attributes, perspectives, and emotional/mental states. Our defaults. I'm thinking more of a constitutional operating system as opposed to more conceptual perspectives that we choose to adopt to explain the world.

These "settings" become part of us in our early years, and there's an endless multi-millennium debate over how much of this is attributable to nature versus nurture. I am nowhere near smart enough to settle that debate, especially since it's always going to be a dynamic combination of the two for every individual.

It's the internal wiring stuff we're all stuck with, for better or for worse. And I would venture to guess that many default settings (though not all) have both a "better" and a "worse" aspect to them.

For instance, one of my defaults is an unceasingly analytical approach to...well, everything. Analyzing is as natural as breathing to me, and about as constant.

But I quite literally cannot shut it off - and I have always been this way, from my earliest childhood memories. My brain seizes ideas like a dog does a bone, and won't let go. How does that fit? What does it mean? Why this and not that? What are the big-picture implications?

Being analytical makes me an effective consultant, writer, teacher, and creator. I'm pretty sure the baristas at the coffee shops I go to enjoy some secret chuckles together when they see me staring off into space in front of my laptop, the faint whiff of burning brain-rubber ascending as I tackle that day's set of ideas and words.

So this trait is wonderful in certain settings when I'm helping others figure stuff out, but it's also a curse when I'm spending too much time inside my own head, which is often.

And so I have to deal with that default. First, I had to recognize it as one of my DNA-level attributes; now I have a lifelong responsibility to own it, manage it, and try to make it productive instead of self-destructive. It's not going away - like most of our constitutional defaults, it's a matter of employing work-arounds and coping mechanisms (one of which, alcohol, I have to be very careful about. Because, at least in the moment, it does work somewhat to slow the mental gears down and provide a temporary reprieve).

I will admit that this particular trait is immensely wearying, and I envy people who can just take life as it comes and not overthink everything. Maybe you relate?

Another one of my default settings, which I don't believe has a "better" aspect to it (only worse), is that I grew up with a very negative self-image. Hypercritical, insecure, and loads of inferiority feelings. Not really any one person's fault - just a wiring/DNA default setting. An irrational and very powerful one.

Perfectionistic self-hatred: not the nicest setting among the internal dials.

This is a particularly unhealthy attribute when combined with the analytical streak just described. It led to decades of clinical depression (a prescribed anti-depressant started lifting some of the worst clouds starting in my mid-40's, but an overly dark frame of mind remains my lot in life).

And so I've had to cope. Work around it. Manage it. Keep adjusting the dials. Many people now see only the version of Steve that comes across as confident, driven, humorous, and personable. And that's not fake - I consider it a miracle-in-process. But what no-one sees is that each day is also an uphill battle - a very lonely one - against all those internal waves of negativity.

I'm arm-wrestling myself and my defaults pretty much 24/7.

I do find it fascinating (I did major in Psychology, after all) to observe and even figure out what drives other people, and what gifts and strengths are in their makeup. But we often feel we have to hide our less lovely defaults. And that cuts us off from the most helpful coping strategy of all - people who love us and who can speak kindness and reason into our irrational fears and stubborn defaults.

My wife and I have been married for over 42 years. And we're each continuing to work through deep default settings that trip us up as individuals and as a couple. But we're coping together - when I allow it (still struggle with vulnerability issues, which maybe is one reason I'm writing this essay. Tired of hiding.)

I've known people who suffer from migraines or fibromyalgia. Sometimes I've told myself, "I cannot imagine living with that pain every day." But actually, we all do, right? Some kind of secret and persistent pain, some scars or raw nerves, even if we've learned to cope, and even if we're otherwise thriving.

We didn't ask for these defaults. We didn't choose our DNA and our childhood, and (some of) our later experiences. But we are who we are, a mixed-bag of both crazy and good stuff.

I realize that to succeed in life and society we often have to project a more "together" front than perhaps we actually possess. But there's always a lot more below the surface, and some of those traits are really hard to manage. Especially alone.

Well, you're not alone.