obvious subtle effect

Moontower Munchies #113

Jun 11, 2025

Friends,

A silver lining to the past few weeks have been nice in that I’ve been around a lot of friends and family. Loved ones with a lot of history with. There’s also been lots of little gaps. Long drives a few flights, time is less structured. Working on stuff at odd hours.

3 disconnected thoughts that follow me around lately:

A Rorschach tweet

Courage looks like stupidity to an audience of maximizers

The solution to that is to give courage more status but when there is no universal form of status (there's no good or bad these days just friends/enemies*) the incentives leave courage to be for suckers

*there's some obvious exceptions. Pedo is still bad.

“Lost in humility”

I was catching up with one of my most OG friends recently. The person is world-class in their field. But at a crossroads. One that seems out of step with the accomplishments. A lesser person would feel salty, my friend sees the bright sides. Still you try to be objective about how you undershoot.

My friend used a phrase I can’t shake:

I was lost in humility.

Those words either grab you right away in which case they need no explanation. The pleasers understand it. I got it right away. You trust in the universe. It’s a strength to be able to do that — the universe does vibrate back — but if you go overboard on the trust you’re a doormat.

If that sounds abstract, don’t worry about it — you’re probably doing great.

I wrote this is almost exactly a year ago. I had good people in mind when I wrote it. That’s why I wrote it…to help.

From late bloomer:

Maturity allows you to reframe the duties you’d rather shirk as opportunities, gifts even, to give another joy. You can see how this works. Personal responsibility lets us pass the joy pipe around. And the fundamental unit for personal responsibility is not taking time for granted. To be reliable, you need to actually be awake when you’re supposed to be. Simple idea. Not easy to do. It’s not easy to be ready.
It’s not easy to keep everything together but still maintain the ease to drop into the moment. Alternatively, the free spirit who only lives in the moment is eventually an adult who needs you to put their oxygen mask on for them in an emergency. I have one of each kind of parent. I was born into this tension.
Preserving waves of joy in a sea of self-governance. Respecting time while occasionally denying its existence. Maturity is playful because it maintains perspective. But it stiffens when it needs to. It’s both the conscious and somatic wisdom to alternate between modes as needed.

obvious subtle effects

Some forces in the world are simultaneously subtle but obvious.

Like coffee assuming you’re caffeine-responsive.

You get an obvious uptick in focus and motivation but it’s still subtle. I can’t see the caffeine in your eyes and you’re not going to corner someone at a party to talk their ear off.

One I’ve been thinking more about is the cliched “shower thought”.

If I told you how many posts I’ve written that have mostly come together under the hypnotic rush of hot water you wouldn’t believe me.

It has taken me so long to accept that this is a reliable way to conjure because on its face it seems like the effect is just some availability bias thing. But instead of intellectualizing it, I just go take a shower when I need to sort an idea. It reliably works.

Is the white noise some embryotic trigger to free-associate with the locked parts of your brain? Flying is the closest focus drug to a shower. Well, there is a hum at 30,000 feet*. But I don’t get the same generative surge if I turn on a sound machine. Maybe it’s the lack of alternatives? I like running water so I take long showers but there’s nothing to do but think (I don’t sing). There are no distractions. Even the airplane has some distractions. It’s hard to find places with no distractions in your daily routine (unless you walk without headphones).

Paraphrasing ChatGPT:

Shower thoughts are the product of your brain’s default mode network (DMN).

A neural state associated with:

Mind-wandering
Self-reflection
Memory consolidation
Connecting disparate ideas

The DMN is crucial for creative insight because it allows your brain to make unexpected associations.

It’s triggered by relaxation, low cognitive load repetition (like washing dishes), and a lack of interruption.

This tracks with what I learned when I wrote about Cormac McCarthy’s Kekule Problem piece.

[Fun fact about the article — Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia once tweeted that he’d pay $1,000 to whoever had the best explanation for where intrusive thoughts come from. I replied with that post. When he contacted me to tell me I won, I said instead of the money I’d like to Zoom. He agreed. It was fun — better than a thousand bucks since we ended up rapping for 2 hours.]

Anyway, shower thoughts are my favorite “obvious subtle effects”.

Although after admitting all this you might wonder how I can call it “subtle”?

If the connection between DMN and creativity hit everyone over the head then we’d be making more space in our lives for DMN. But when was the last time you heard this exchange:

“Where’s Frank?”

“He’s brainstorming how to price a best-of call on the 2027 Pokemon vintage”

Find your DMN. Identify your obvious subtle effects and crank ‘em.

*NBA commentator Kenny Smith has noticed this airplane thing too after a psychologist told him not to watch movies while flying:

@changethegametv.com Kenny Smith explains why a psychologist told him not to sleep during an airplane flight. #kennysmith #psycologyfacts #psycology #psycologist #psycologytricks #airplane

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From My Actual Life

I spent the last week in NYC with my family, seeing friends, getting my Ezra Full-body MRI and calcium chest CT scan.

Recall the Warriors PSA in 2024. The CT scans are cheap. Please don’t die out of the blue. Get one.

During the weekend we were in Ithaca for my 25-year Cornell Reunion with about 15 friends. I haven’t been back since 2009 when my sis and bro-in-law got married at Sage. It is a special place.

I don’t remember anything I learned in school but my college crew manages to see each other multiple times a year wherever we can make it happen. Most of them were in my dorm freshman year. Almost 30 years of friendship to celebrate so I dropped the ball on the Sunday Moontower. I was too busy eating a DP Dough calzone after having a few cocktails Saturday night (drinking is a rarity for me the last few years).

Some love from Ithaca:

Stay groovy

☮️

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