You, Your Executive Brain, and Everything Else

When you think of you, you think of yourself as a small, medium-sized, or large discrete individual human that you cannot get away from no matter how much you try. You seem to be there when you wake up in the morning and you seem to be there as you are having trouble falling asleep at night. You are housed in a body that seems to go with you almost everywhere you do, you have memories, a personality, a vague sense of identity, an imagination, an appearance, wishes, hopes, dreams, thoughts, plans, goals, and a number of bad habits that cling to you no matter how much you try to diassociate yourself from them.

You have a soul, that you seem to occasionally misplace, a history, a set of circumstances, and a number of features and quirks that you didn't ask for and have no idea where they came from. You have hobbies, preferences, likes and dislikes, emotions, the ability to engage in actions both surprising and mundane, reactions, a recurring desire for food, sleep, and sex, not necessarily in that order, sensations, a television set, a head, a heart, and a whole bunch of other shit you don't understand. Add it all up and it's an integrated bundle of You-ness, that try as you might never becomes Someone Much Better Than You-ness, although that doesn't stop you from buying lottery tickets.

This is a pretty damn good explanation of You and I applaud you for coming up with it. It's not what I am talking about when I talk about You though. When I talk about You I am talking about your Conscious Brain or your Executive Brain (except when I'm not talking about those things at all, but just you. I do that sometimes for no apparent reason.)

Your Conscious Brain or Executive Brain is the part of you designed to trick you into thinking you have an identity - a handy thing to have whether it's real or not. Your Executive Brain is so proud of its ability to pretend you have an identity that it spends a great deal of time trying to convince you that it is really You and that nothing else matters - that you are your conscious identity, your executive will, your intangible You-ness, some organizing consciousness that supercedes all the random tangible events of your life and creates something uniquely You out of what would otherwise be a completely disorganized mess of sensation and event. It's the thing that feels like You.

It's your Executive Brain that makes you think you are an integrated bundle of You-ness when in fact you are a sprawling, brawling, infighting, backbiting muddle of individual parts grudgingly, faithfully, and determinedly doing their best to further the common enterprise of keeping your ass alive even though it's frequently a difficult and unrewarding endeavor. And even though your Executive Brain is a congenital liar and like every other part of you will do anything to help you survive, fair or not, we are very impressed by its abilities here at prettyfedup.com and so when we refer to You that's what we are talking about. We call everything else something else - like your Social Brain, your Sex Brain, Your Insecurity Module, and so on.

To recap: You = your Executive Brain, your conscious identity. you = your Executive Brain, plus all the other sprawling, brawling individual parts your Executive Brain doesn't like to give any credit.

Your Executive Brain isn't really you - it's actually just the CEO of a very large corporation. At birth, You were unexpectedly thrust into the role of CEO of a very large corporation You were not only completely unfamiliar with but immediately expected to make function and even profitable. No wonder you spent much of your infancy crying. Fingers, toes, digestive organs, eyes, ears, brain, face, somehow or another You were expected to figure out how to work all of these things and steer them toward the common enterprise of not getting your ass dead. Eating, breathing, burping, seeing, moving - You were expected to make sense of all of these things and figure out how to make them useful. The task was so overwhelming, You immediately wanted to go to sleep. In fact, You did your best for several months to spend as little time as possible awake.

You are still the CEO of that same large corporation and although you have considerably improved in Your ability to get the hang of it, You are still just the CEO. Just like a CEO, You oversee a large number of departments whose functioning You don't understand at all. Think about it - CEOs, they make strategic decisions, engage in long-range planning, yell at people, spout bullshit for the press and public, soothe the shareholders, yell at people some more, provide a vision, make lots of money, get big bonuses, skim corporation profits, have heart attacks, manage vast operations, try to turn things around, get fired, and so on - but they don't actually know jack shit about making the office coffee, working the copier, shipping the product, understanding the filing system, balancing the books, calling the customers or anything else that makes the business go. They don't actually know how to do anything and are utterly dependent on the people they yell at. This is You.

You don't actually know how Your kidneys work. If Your kidneys went on strike and announced they were sick and fucking tired of filtering waste products, would You be able to do their job for them? Hah! You know jack shit about being a kidney. Your eyes. Do You know how to see? If they were short-handed and needed some extra cones and rods would You be able to fill in? Hah! You know jack shit about being photo-sensitive. Emotions. If Your emotional system went down, would You know what neurotransmitters and chemicals needed to shipped into the system to bring it back up? Hah! You only know what an emotion feels like not how it works. Your spleen. If Your spleen started goofing off on the job, would You even know what a spleen is? I wouldn't - and neither would You.

No, You would do what every other CEO would do - You'd bring in high-priced consultants to explain to You how Your business works and how it can be improved. You'd pay big bucks to bring in the doctors, because You know jack shit. You're just a CEO. All the rest of you does the real work - day in, day out. You're not a worker, You're an executive. You can yell at people but You can't do their jobs.

This is why You can yell at yourself and still you won't do what You tell you to. This is why You can experience inner conflict wherein You are of one opinion and yet major parts of you seem to be of an entirely different opinion. This is why you frequently don't make any sense to You. This is why You have to get to know yourself by trial and error. You are not the whole kit and caboodle, you are not even hot shit because You're the CEO - You're just the CEO.

As the CEO, You can give yourself direction, and You should, but the rest of you will be the ones to carry it out. You can supervise things, and get reports, and make strategic decisions, and provide vision and guidance and support and motivation and encouragement and incentives and play politics and do all the other fun things CEOs get to do. It's fairly exciting being the CEO of a major corporation made up of billions and billions of individual worker cells, some of whom are unionized while some aren't.

Just like a regular CEO, you oversee a vast worker army of slackers and eager beavers, backstabbers, and loyalists, ambitious climbers, and conscientious stalwarts. There are the cheerleaders and morale builders, and the grumpy clock-watchers and office weirdoes. There is politicking and office liaisons, and bitter infighting, disagreements, memos, lots of middle management, as well as line workers, and workers nobody is sure what they really do.

While You are busy being CEO and presenting a public face, all your workers are busy talking behind your back, supporting You, rooting for You, anxiously watching Your effect on their stock price, second-guessing You, manipulating You, lying to You, being intimidated by You, cozying up to You, snitching on each other to You, presenting reports to You, making pitches to You, trying to impress You, angling for raises from You, bitching about their direct supervisors to You, arguing with each other, worrying about their job security, jostling for position, wishing they could quit, working their butts off for You, considering alternatives, making millions and millions of day-in, day-out decisions for You, fucking things up for You, saving Your ass, and generally doing everything You would expect workers in a large corporation to do. They are doing Your filing, and Your cleaning, and Your shipping, and Your transport, and Your accounting, and gathering information for You.

Once You understand all the rest of the you that is not your Executive Brain, you will start to make a lot more sense to You. You will become aware and informed management, gaining the respect and adulation of Your employees as they work feverishly on Your behalf. You will manipulate and motivate yourself, guide and inspire yourself, work with yourself for maximum value, impress your stockholders, and gain the loyalty and respect of yourself even when the chips are down and you would otherwise be calling for Your own ouster. It's worth getting yourself on Your side, because you never know when your Executive Brain may sorely need some assistance from the grunt workers.

To summarize - goddamn it's a lot more fun and handy to think of yourself as a sprawling, loosely organized mass of individual parts with differing personalities and agendas than it is to think of yourself as just an integrated bundle concocted by your boring old Executive Brain. In reality, goddamn you are complicated!

You are exciting, you are dramatic, you are multi-faceted, you are mysterious, you have hidden talents, furious rivalries, amazing capacities, special abilities, mood-swinging chemicals, desperate battles, life-or-death conflicts, high-stakes dilemmas, miracles of cooperation, unexpected successes, heart-wrenching defeats, gut-twisting encounters with danger, narrow escapes, high-level strategy, massive battles, touching moments of bonding, inspiring loyalty, admirable fortitude, corrosive worries, sheer courage, jaw-dropping ingenuity and much more. Give yourself some credit! You are way more than an Executive Brain, and all the rest of you is often much more interesting. If You knew half the work that goes into maintaining you, You'd stop bitching at yourself all the time and indulge in some serious worker gratitude and maybe even a bonus or two. Think of yourself as consisting of lots of different little parts, give the parts some interest and attention, and Your enjoyment of life will go way the fuck up. Your Executive Brain is an executive! What does it know about having fun? Send your Executive Brain out to spend some time with the workers and learn how life is really lived.

Next! Meet your Management Team!

oh goody! My Management Team....

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