The Magnetized Man

1. Flash fiction: The Ghost is stuck at work
2. The Physics of Focus: What are the points on your personal field? 
3. The Physiology of Focus: How much glucose does it take to feed your false identity? 
4. Distractions are Just Attempts to Relieve Psychosocial Stress 
5. Focusing means programming a better “controlled hallucination” into your brain
6. Connection to Omar’s Journey in The Magnetized Man
7. Building Your New Mental Model One Pixel at a Time 

Flash fiction: The Ghost is stuck at work

You are obsessed with doing a good job, but you’re terrified that everyone can see through you, and you don’t want to let anyone down. In the morning, you get up and you make sure you look presentable for the office. Polished, but not like you’re trying too hard.

At work, you use all of your energy to be non-threatening to some and look decisive and domineering to others. You spend hours building relationships with people you don’t particularly like. 

Like Marcus who is adored by your bosses, always makes time for his family, and never worries about a thing. 

You do this so they’ll have your back when your plate is full or if you make a mistake, but you have yet to cash in on any of this stored up goodwill. 

You spend hours outside of work studying up on an obscure thing a senior leader said during a presentation, because maybe it’s something you’re expected to know. 

You remind yourself to be collegial when co-workers – who don’t work as hard and who have time for hobbies and family and friends – get recognition. 

Like Marcus who is adored by your bosses, always makes time for his family, and never worries about a thing. 

You tell yourself that if you just work hard enough, you can leave on good terms and then start your own business. 

And then one day, you’re rushing to work so you can get there two hours before anyone else does. All so you can double and triple check your presentation. You fail to notice that the light’s not yours and walk straight into oncoming traffic. 

You’re killed instantly, but for some reason you’re still here, so you do what you know: you continue on your way to the office where you remain for the next 6 months.  

You were never expecting your employer to be devastated that you’re dead. You’ve heard a million times not to take work too seriously, because workplaces are corporations and you’ll be replaced immediately after you’re dead and yada yada yada. 

Probably a guy like Marcus who is adored by your bosses, always makes time for his family, and never worries about a thing.  

But still…you’re curious. What about all of those things that were so urgent? So important? 

You’re touched by some of the people who are devastated by your death; there were a few that surprised you. But you’re mostly baffled by some of the things that you thought were objectively important. Your ghostly nature prevents you from manipulating matter, but you can move through it, and this gives you access to all kinds of locked rooms and exclusive meetings. 

You learn that a deadline – that you were told was do or die – gets pushed back with less than a minute spent on the topic. Your part of the work is done, so you know it has nothing to do with your death. In fact, your death isn’t even mentioned. Dead or alive, that project didn’t really matter all that much in the grand scheme of this company let alone the grand scheme of things. 

The new guy they hire to do your work does it so sloppily that you almost want to help him, but his work is accepted without protest by your manager and you realize your manager doesn’t even know what they’re looking at! It goes up to the director and you see that they quickly skim it, jot down a couple of lines, and then toss it aside. In fact, you notice that the director gets something similar from a bunch of other managers and tosses those aside after taking bits and pieces. Then the director goes to the VP who listens carefully and asks for the original reports to be forwarded to him along with the director’s high-level thoughts. Then the VP asks his Chief of Staff to print all the original reports out, because he knows the VP hates dealing with Outlook and the VP’s worried that asking the director to do admin work would be sexist. Even though it’s all admin work. 

You watch and wonder if you could have just handed in the first iteration of your report and had an easy two weeks. But you had taken such pains to game out every single scenario of your work so that you could justify every single possible question that could be asked, not realizing that there were already 10 other people on the case. 

And then, when your ghostlike figure drifts into the CEO’s office and starts reading the reports laid out neatly on the desk, you find – to your horror – that all the possible scenarios you gamed out and discarded are there as the individual final submissions of everyone else. 

You can’t figure out what would piss you off more: finding out that no one went through the same process as you or finding out that everyone went through the exact same process as you. There are no annotations on any of the papers, so you don’t know which ones the exec team values. 

You feel something build up inside of you that you haven’t felt in a few days – rage and shame and humiliation and regret – and the papers drift off the desk onto the floor, just as the door opens. The CEO enters, picks up that piece of paper and as he reads it, you read it over his shoulder. You hadn’t had a chance to read this one. Maybe it was underneath one of the others; your ghost hands prevent you from interacting with matter. It’s a concise report. A page and a half. There are no caveats and, “all things considered” and “there’s the possibility that…” and “of course, there’s the possible alternative of…” There’s not a methodology section or explanation of the recommendation. Just a recommendation. 

Just then the phone rings and someone asks the CEO whether he’s made a decision. He rattles off what’s written on the paper. You go to see who it was written by, and discover that it was written by Marcus. 

Marcus, who is adored by your bosses, always makes time for his family, and never worries about a thing. 

The Physics of Focus: What are the points on your personal field? 

The Ghost and Marcus have completely different fields, and as a result, their energy produces completely different experiences of the material world. 

The scientific definition of a field is a region of space where each point is associated with a specific physical quantity. Let’s break that down to make it more visual and intuitive. Imagine that there is a massive piece of invisible graph paper cutting through the centre of The Ghost’s torso, pre- and post-mortem. This division happens horizontally, so the piece of paper creates a division between the top half of the body and the bottom half of the body. This piece of graph paper extends out into the world, cutting through buildings and the earth’s core and into the rest of the universe. On this piece of paper is a Cartesian graph, and your belly button forms the 0,0 point. 

Parts of The Ghost’s life are plotted along this graph: 

• His parents are at the 1,1 point. 
• His friends are at the 2,2 point. 
• His job is at the 1,-1 point. 
• His ex-girlfriend is at the -1,-1 point. 
• His parents’ (perceived) failed hopes for him are at the -2,-2 point. 
• The woman he’s interested in is at the -1, 1 point. 

Every person, place, thing, or idea that occupied The Ghost’s mind sits on this graph, and their sense of security, social acceptance, and safety rely on these points. 

Because The Ghost is at the centre, The Ghost believes that he exerts ultimate control or responsibility over those people, places, things, or ideas. 

Even though The Ghost’s parents would simply be happy with a phone call that updates them on his life, he’s become so convinced of his energy’s importance that he’s worried that not being strong or upbeat or successful or a reflection of their good parenting every time he interacts with them will make them fall apart. 

Even though The Ghost’s friends would be happy to support his goals, he doesn’t want to spotlight their inaction by taking too much action, so he keeps his ideas small until they’re big enough that he can pull everyone up along with him.  

Even though The Ghost’s job doesn’t require every ounce of his soul, he feels guilty that he got the job in the first place, so he feels like he has to always be “on.” 

Even though The Ghost’s ex-girlfriend has shown him through her words and her actions that she does not like him or want to be around him, he’s still convinced there’s a misunderstanding. 

While an onlooker might say The Ghost had no self-respect, that’s not an accurate assessment. The Ghost is respecting himself. He’s respecting the false identity that he’s created for himself.  In the same way that an accountant will track a company’s financial health and a programmer will build apps, a performative try hard will treat being a performative try hard like a job. But because this offers no value to the rest of the world – except the momentary burst of energy that performing and trying gives – the only way society will reward this is by giving the bare minimum detailed within the social contract. 

Why did The Ghost refuse to make moves? Since he’s convinced himself that he’s the centre of the universe – that Cartesian graph – he feels like a shift in any direction, even if it doesn’t have the intent to cause harm, will shift all of the other points. And here’s the thing: things will shift. 

The problem comes when we only think about the shift in one dimension. We think that everyone will move away from us. In reality, they will wind up ascending with us. As we rise, so do they, and while the dynamic of the relationship has changed, everyone is still individually better — more elevated — than they were before. 

As they say, the only way to first change the world (in this case, your world) is to change yourself. 

The Physiology of Focus: How much glucose does it take to feed your false identity? 

So, what does your false identity feed on? Metaphorically speaking, it’s the stories you tell yourself, but literally, your false identity – really any identity – feeds on glucose. 

To understand this, you need to understand glucose’s role in the body. Glucose is the body’s main source of energy and your brain’s main source of fuel. The brain takes up a disproportionate amount of our body’s fuel. 

Studies suggest that when you switch tasks, there is increased glucose metabolic activity in your brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, which helps you with higher level thinking. Every time you move to a different task, your brain needs more glucose. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. If you’re working towards a goal, it’s good for the strategic, creative part of your brain to have the energy it needs to make connections and come up with ideas. But when you’ve constructed a false self based on lies, your prefrontal cortex is focused on being strategic and creative and spotting connections all in the service of feeding the lies, images, and performances necessary to maintain that false self. 

And then what happens? Your brain – and your false identity – runs out of glucose and you need more food. But because you intuitively sense that effort is supposed to come with some kind of a reward – an objective outcome – you wonder why you don’t feel that great. So you grab things that make you feel good in a cheap and temporary way: junk food, drugs, alcohol. If you’d been working on something you care about, you’d have the reward right in front of you: the physical manifestation of your efforts. As a result, you wouldn’t need as much external help getting to that feel-good state. Instead, you are getting unwanted byproducts when you’re getting the outcome of your false self surviving. These byproducts are credit card bills, regrettable texts sent in a moment of fear and loneliness, hangovers, and whatever else. And because you’ve made yourself the centre of the universe, you intuitively know that you deserve all of these outcomes, so you’re constantly in a cycle of either blaming others, taking erratic action and burning yourself out, or numbing the pain. But the thing that wanted all of this energy – your brain and your ego and your false self – remains intact. 

And what are the brain and the false self’s greatest source of fear? Psychosocial stress. Our brains are meaning making machines and if your life is self-focused (consumed by the story you tell you about you), you’re stuck in a cycle, since studies show that psychosocial stress leads to a higher glucose metabolism in the prefrontal cortex as well as activation of the HPA axis. Your body is constantly receiving signals from the environment (your five senses) and your body’s internal organs (your interoception aka “your sixth sense”), but it has no clue what these signals mean. It has to rely on your past experiences and thoughts and feelings to assess this information and predict what to do next. 

Distractions are Just Attempts to Relieve Psychosocial Stress 

When you’re in the wrong field, there are still points in the field, but these points become “psychosocial stress.” Psychosocial stress is the stress that comes from experiencing things in your mind, social network, or environment that you’re not equipped to deal with. When you create a false identity, every person or thing or idea in your mind, social network, and environment is a potential threat, because you know you’re not who you think you are. And so you keep tending to these potential threats by projecting an image or projecting energy and these attempts feel so fruitless and exhausting and empty that you need to find a way to escape that feeling. Enter: distractions. These distractions become the new data your brain uses in your predictions in the constant seesaw between interoception and cognition and the average of this seesawing creates your model of reality or what some cognitive scientists call, “your controlled hallucination.” 

Focusing means programming a better “controlled hallucination” into your brain

This brings us to the controlled hallucination theory of perception in cognitive science. Cognitive science has the idea of predictive processing. This means that instead of actively using the information that your body is given on a moment to moment basis, your brain is running a model of reality that helps you make sense of the world. New information and strong emotional experiences help update this model. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, who talks about “the power of prediction in your everyday life” explains, “From a metabolic standpoint, it’s always better to predict and correct than it is to react.” In other words, it’s BIOLOGICALLY AND PHYSICALLY easier to do what you’ve always done based on what you’ve already experienced and based on what you already believe. But that doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually and emotionally easier. 

Connection to Omar’s Journey in The Magnetized Man

In Chapter 4, Omar is keeping the wrong field warm: a field built on niceness instead of kindness where he’s desperate for someone to take care of him and provide the conditions for his success instead of taking ownership of his own skills and abilities.

Meanwhile, both Omar and Ryan are operating within their own controlled hallucinations. And they are both getting the reality they predict. Omar’s deep programming from societal norms and his own shame tell him that he’s been exposed as a liar or a whiner or that he’s misunderstood and so he flees the bus. Ryan’s programming — and his missionary training — reminds him to stay pleasant and open and to assume positive intent. Omar thinks he’s taken the most rational step based on his field, his physiology, and his controlled hallucination: politely excusing himself from a man that wants to convert him. Ryan’s field, physiology, and controlled hallucination tell him that this is just part of his work and he has to serve for however many years before he can return home.

And what happens when Omar gets off the bus. He finds himself angry and bitter. He needs to find someone to blame. He thinks of what his efforts at being “nice” have done for him. And he craves junk food to relieve him from the discomfort of being himself. 

Building Your New Mental Model One Pixel at a Time 

When completing the exercise below, do not do it to prove to someone that you did or to share it on social media. Don’t do it thinking “this better work.” There are many examples of people who have put all of their faith in books or gurus or programs or coaches to get a result and then blame those entities. Instead, use it to build a new model for your brain in a safe, healthy way. 

Pick one thing you want to accomplish — getting closer to God, achieving financial freedom, starting a family — and ask yourself: “What’s one skill that I have to make this possible? What small step can I take right now?”

It’s important to be honest about your actual skills, not what you think you could do or create if you had the time, the money, the emotional support, the connections, etc. Try that, and I’ll see you in the next blog post. 

Read an excerpt of Chapter 4 here.

Purchase The Magnetized Man here.

Read Chapter 4 for free here.