The mud-rock spectrum

The following is a metaphor that someone else invented, but which I haven’t seen put forth in public and think is a pretty useful way to talk about minds and mental states.

Imagine a dirt trail, baked hard by the sun.

It’s basically “rock,” at this point—you could chip away at it with something sharp, but the footprints and tire tracks and other depressions are approximately immutable …

… until it rains.

As the rain softens up the dirt, the trail changes from “rock” to “mud.” Suddenly, old imprints and depressions can be melted and smoothed over, and new tracks left in their place.

Once the rain stops, the trail will bake hard again, and those new impressions will remain until things get muddy again.

You can think of human minds as undergoing similar periods of rigidity and flexibility. Large, foundational beliefs (such as one’s religion or one’s attachment style or one’s overall life goals) are approximately unchanging for most of the hours of one’s life, but can shift relatively easily and relatively rapidly under certain circumstances.

There’s no clear-cut set of things-which-qualify-as-“rain” in this analogy, just as there’s no clear-cut set of things-which-qualify-as-“sun.”

But in general, there are certain things which tend, for most people, to slide them toward muddiness, or toward rockiness.

Things which tend to make people muddier:

• “Intense” experiences (e.g. powerful religious ceremonies, breakups of long-term relationships, brushes with death)
• Close quarters (e.g. spending large amounts of waking time with small numbers of people in a relatively small space, without leaving it)
• “Deep” work (e.g. spending four days straight on curious introspection and open-ended life planning)
• Lack of sleep, especially persistent lack of sleep
• Physical exhaustion and fatigue
• Hallucinogenic drugs
• Strong social pressure, especially that which undermines one’s sense of reality or threatens to rewrite one’s recollection of past events

Things which tend to make people rockier:

• Light physical exertion
• Returns to prior contexts (e.g. conversations with parents or old friends, literal visits to one’s previous homes or childhood school)
• Sleep
• Unfocused time (e.g. playing games, going on walks, vegging out with TV or movies)
• Simple foods
• Rehearsal (e.g. repeatedly reminding oneself of one’s narrative about past events, or repeatedly thinking through one’s future plans)
• Tightening scope (e.g. instead of thinking “what should I do with my life?” zeroing in on something like “but how do I actually build a table out of these available pieces of wood?”)
• In some cases, medication (e.g. mood stabilizers)

We have a word to describe items in the latter category: they’re often referred to as grounding. We don’t really have a word for the former category? Or, to the extent that we do, it has a pretty strong negative connotation: destabilizing.

But of course, things that are grounding are not always good, and things that are destabilizing are not always bad. This is why I like the mud-rock distinction a lot—it reminds me to focus on changeability as its own concept, separate from the question of whether or not certain changes will be good or bad or should be embraced or resisted.

People in a muddy state are vulnerable in general—they’re more likely to be susceptible to false beliefs and erratic behavior and wild mistakes, but they’re also more likely to be able to reorient in crucially positive ways (such as recognizing that a given relationship has been toxic and abusive, and finally escaping a narrative of excuses and justifications). Cults will systematically exploit muddiness for nefarious purposes, but life-changing workshop experiences like those of Circling Europe or the Center For Applied Rationality also depend on muddiness for much of their positive effect.

(Note that there is something of a sweet spot of “just a little muddier than usual” that is very different from “torrential rain sweeping away the entire trail.” Mania and hypomania are dangerous things, and there’s almost never a good reason to push yourself into them. Orgs in the reference class of CE and CFAR often specifically train their facilitators to recognize the warning signs of people who are at risk of getting too muddy, and to take concrete steps to reground them.)

On the flip side, people in a rocky state are less vulnerable by definition, for better and for worse—they’re more likely to shrug off attempts to perturb their beliefs and influence their current plans, period. Strongly normative institutions like churches or large companies will systematically exploit rockiness, rewarding and reinforcing a kind of set-in-one’s-ways, “this is how it is” mentality regardless of whether it’s true in fact, or healthy for a given individual. But rockiness also tends to go hand-in-hand with dependability, and can be a crucial ingredient to things like long-term partnerships of all kinds.

Thus, the goal is to develop discernment and agency—to be able to tell where you and the people around you currently are, on the spectrum running from mud to rock, and whether that’s a good thing, and to know which way to move at any given moment, and how to accomplish that shift.

One of my favorite wrong-but-useful frameworks is the Magic: the Gathering color wheel. I’ve often given talks about a dichotomy that I think of as being between red and white, in that system:

If we mix the metaphors, it’s clear that “white” would be generally in favor of rockiness, while “red” would be pretty cognizant of the benefits of muddiness. Not only would red prefer a muddier set point in general, compared to white, but red is more likely to view any movement toward mud as positive, and the reverse is true for white.

Which opens up a sort of meta-question: how should one move back and forth from rock to mud and back again?

If you’re e.g. a sort of MTG white-aligned personality overall, then any project of stretching out to acquire some of the superpowers of red is likely to be hamstrung by a general bias toward rockiness—being too wary and too skeptical of mud, even as you experiment with it. Correspondingly, any red-aligned personality trying to dip into white is going to be biased against exactly the kind of locking-in that they’re seeking to understand.

(Interestingly, the MTG system itself suggests another dichotomy in the answer to this very question: the “green” perspective would say that you should basically just not worry about it, and trust that the sun and the rain will come at the right times and you’ll deal with them both just fine, and the “blue” perspective would argue that you should seize control of the whole process, carefully and deliberately tuning it to match your ultimate goals.)

I don’t actually have a clear answer, myself. My main point is something like “it’s probably worth thinking about, and knowing this metaphor allows me, at least, to think more clearly about it, understanding the tradeoffs that I was already instinctively making so that I can tinker with them explicitly.”

I’ve found benefits in getting a little muddy—especially in times of persistent, systematic distress, when something structural about me or the environment or the interaction between them is going wrong, and I need to shake up my assumptions and see things afresh.

And I’ve found benefits in drying things out—especially in times of acute, disorienting distress, when the weight I’m shouldering is threatening to crush me or knock me off the trail entirely, when I’m lost or confused and really just need to make the problem small enough and simple enough that I can handle it, even if that means letting other stuff go un-dealt-with in the meantime, or continuing to act as though [beliefs which I’m pretty sure contain falsehoods] are true, until I’m ready to deal with them.

And it’s nice to have an easy checklist of items which move me one way or the other, and to realize that this cluster of very different actions all tend to move me back and forth along one single line.

The biggest takeaway, though, is this: be careful what tracks you leave in the trail while it’s muddy, because once they dry, those tracks might be there for a long, long time before it rains again.