Still Just a Geek, page 35
[TRANSITION]*
Okay, we have talked about some geeky things, as promised. I am now going to talk to you about something that I think is the geekiest thing of all, a thing that most of us have in common, regardless of which particular part of geek culture we hold closest to our hearts: anxiety.*
I have this thing called impostor syndrome, and I guess it’s fairly common among creative people. The way it works is this part of my brain that’s supposed to be on my side but is really a dick about everything goes, “You know, you suck at everything and you don’t deserve to be here and nobody likes you because you suck. Boy do you suck. You are the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.”
This voice is relentless, and even though I’m supposed to be successful enough to ignore it and show it physical evidence of its bullshit in the form of awards and a happy marriage and two awesome kids, it never, ever, ever shuts up. But while I was preparing for tonight, it overplayed its hand. It filled me with so much anxiety, it reminded me of an article I read about a study, which indicated that highly intelligent people tend to have generalized anxiety and other mental health issues at a rate that is significantly greater than a control group.*
And when I read that, I knew that I wanted to talk about it, because it doesn’t matter if I’m just a writer or just an actor or just a geek or just any of the things my stupid brain tells me I “just” am. All of us here, at one time or another in our lives, have had a hard time relating to people who just don’t get us. We are constantly surrounded by people who just see a loaf of bread, or don’t care how things work, as long as they work. They don’t stay up at night, unable to sleep, because they can’t stop thinking about how thin our atmosphere is, relative to the size of our planet, and how terrifying it is that we’re basically these tiny little things on a giant hunk of rock speeding through space at like thirty kilometers per second and what the hell is space, anyway? And if we really are in a computer simulation, what’s the computer running it in?* And can I somehow break out of the program to find out? But wait. If I can think that, it’s just part of my programming, so does that mean that free will is oh hey the sun is coming up and I haven’t slept at all.
And it’s not that we want to do this, right? It’s that we can’t help it. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer, an artist, an athlete, or a blacksmith. Look around you—everyone here has their own internal monologue. It’s what separates us from animals, that constant conversation going on in all our heads.* And when we feel nervous about something—that voice is what helps us rise above the fight-or-flight instinct of animals—it can soothe us, talk us down, talk us up or, in some cases, blather on and make things worse. When you’re smart, and faced with a problem, this voice starts to break things down, so you can solve it. “Here is the problem. Here are its individual pieces. Now, how do we solve this rationally and logically?” It is not unreasonable to expect that by breaking down a problem into pieces, we should be able to make those pieces follow rules. And rules are comfortable and comforting and make us feel safe.
But anyone who has ever tried to reason with an unreasonable person knows that more frequently than we’d like, the pieces just will NOT follow the rules, even though they should follow the rules, because that’s the simplest and most efficient and most logical way to get things done.* And here comes that voice again, only this time it’s telling us that everything is terrible and nothing will ever follow the rules and we’re all going to die and the frogurt is also cursed.*
That voice speaks to me almost every day, and if I could just make it stop, I would, but I have mental illness. I have anxiety and depression, and I want you to know that if you do, too, you are not alone. If you’re like me, you get frustrated that the thing that makes you special, your big beautiful brain that is so smart and capable of so much more than some muggle’s brain is,* actively fucks with you every day.
And it makes you wonder: If I’m so smart, why is my brain so dumb? Why can’t my brain just get with the program, and stop worrying about everything all the time? My life is great! I love my job. I love my family. I love my home and my pets. I love everything I get to do in this amazing world, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what there is to explore on this planet! I make art that matters and I inspire people to do cool stuff . . . so why do I feel so terrible about myself all the time?
Oh, right. Because my brain is broken. There’s all sorts of interesting medical and neurochemical reasons for it, and I’ve learned everything I can about them,* but knowing all of that isn’t enough to make my brain magically start processing serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine in a balanced way, so that I won’t feel like my career is over when I’m not cast in The Dark Tower* or Ready Player One, and feel like nothing is worth doing for days at a time, even though I know how irrational that is.
This is where being really smart is kind of the worst. All the skills that we’ve learned over the course of our lives, the things that set us apart from average people, they really don’t help. In fact, the frustration that we feel when those skills don’t work can actually make it all worse, because it’s not only unfair, it’s irrational! It isn’t following the rules, and this isn’t Vietnam, dude.*
And it makes you feel really, really alone. Like, you are the only person who has ever felt this way, and the only person who ever will feel this way, and if you just tried a little harder, you wouldn’t feel this way. But you do feel this way, because you’re alone. Yep, you’re alone and nobody can help you. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the only one with this infernal internal monologue. Look around you—nobody else seems to have this problem. It’s just you.
But that’s not true. Even when it feels like it’s the most truthful thing in the history of human existence, it’s a lie. I know this, because I have depression, and I know that depression lies. It lied to me for months while I was trying to put this talk together, tag teaming with its best friend, anxiety,* so I reached out to some of my friends, and asked them for help.* And it took a little while, but they helped me find my way out of that terrifying darkness and back into the sunshine, where I was able to put this whole thing together.
And I know that this doesn’t apply to all of you in this room, but statistics and personal experience tell me that it applies to enough of you that it’s worth saying: you’re the only one with your point of view, and the voice in your head is unique to you—so when that voice starts being negative or irrational, it can feel super weird to reach out and ask for help—how can anyone else understand what’s going on, or what you’re feeling if they cannot get in your head?
But you must. And I’m not using the second person plural as a generality—I am really talking to YOU. ALL OF YOU sitting out there. YOU must ask for help when anxiety makes you feel out of control. Because we need you. We need you to be well and whole and taking care of yourselves. I know that the prevailing rise of anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our world right now can be unbelievably depressing. I know that it’s hard not to go to bed forever when you read about people Googling “what happens if the UK leaves the EU” AFTER they’ve voted to, you know, leave the EU.* Or hear that people are “sick of experts.”* But, and I have to believe this or I may just be the one who goes to bed forever—eventually the pendulum will swing back. The world needs smart people, because smart people are the ones who figure shit out. Smart people are the ones that don’t throw away the petri dishes because some mold got on them. Smart people don’t cut down apple trees in anger because the damn apples keep falling on their heads. Smart people—look, YOU guys are the SMART people, I don’t need to keep giving you examples.*
Here’s what I need you guys to do. I need this entire room of people to make a pact. It’s just us, so what happens here in beautiful downtown San Diego stays in beautiful downtown San Diego. So here it goes. You are the superheroes we need. But the world doesn’t know it yet. But they will. And something cataclysmic will occur, and the world will cry out, “who will save us?” And I need you to be ready to burst out of the crowd, rip open your shirt to expose your true identity and say proudly, “I’m ready! I am the SUPERHERO YOU NEED!”*
But you won’t be ready for the day we need you if you don’t take care of yourself. I’m not saying go all Dark Knight on us and build an industrial bunker underneath your house or physically train like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, which I know seems like a reference out of left field, but that’s my go-to movie montage of someone working hard at being physically fit, because of reasons.
What I mean is, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by your internal monologue, and the voice delivering it is no longer a friendly one—please—don’t be afraid to ask for help. One of the most insidious lies mental illness tells us is that asking for help, or taking medication to get better, means that we are weak. It means that we are a failure, and we somehow deserve to suffer.
This. Is. Bullshit.
You don’t deserve to suffer. You are not weak. You are not a failure. Your brain, like mine, needs help to keep its profoundly complicated machinery working. Depression lies, and when it tells you these lies, you can look right back into its stupid face and say, “Shut up. Wil Wheaton told me that it’s okay to get help, and he pretended to live in outer space, so he outranks you.”
I love being a nerd, and I love having the tremendous privilege to occasionally stand up in front of other nerds, and talk about what it’s like when you’re us, and if you’ve heard something useful or even inspirational tonight, I hope that you will be me to someone else. Because we’re all we’ve got, and in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about how rapidly our species is destroying our planet, and how many stupid and dangerous people have the ability to wipe us out in the blink of an eye, it helps to know that there are smart, compassionate, empathetic nerds in the world to stop them.
We need you. So please take care of yourselves.*
And play more games.
Thank you for listening to me.
My Speech to the 2016 USA Science and Engineering Festival
On April 17, I was given the great honor and privilege to speak before the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C.
These are my prepared remarks. I mostly stuck to them, and didn’t improvise as much as I usually do, because I was more nervous than usual at this conference. I knew that I had to speak to children, their parents, and their teachers. I hoped that I would inspire them all to keep doing awesome things, and to do more awesome things. I also hoped that some of my remarks would be heard beyond the walls of the conference, because I’m doing my best to make a positive difference in the world.
Please keep in mind that these remarks are written to be read and performed by me, so they are probably not as strong when read as I hope they are when they are heard.*
Hello. I’m Wil.
I’m going to speak directly to the kids in the room for a minute. Parents, if you don’t understand what I’m about to say, ask your child later, and I’m sure she’ll clear everything up for you.*
On Friday afternoon, I was putting the final touches on this talk, when my friend sent me an article in the New York Times, about a boy named Jordan. Jordan is eleven years old, and he loves Minecraft.
Not that it matters, but I’m forty-three and I also love Minecraft. I terraformed an entire island made of sand into a giant bunch of grassland with a castle on it, and I did it in survival with no cheats.
But, like I said, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jordan loves Minecraft, and he especially loves building mazes and puzzles to challenge his friends. One of the things he wanted to do was build some traps that would go off randomly when his friends were exploring one of his mazes. In a computer program, we’d use a random number generator function to decide which tile on the floor of a room releases a flood of lava, or causes the walls to start closing in, but in Minecraft, we don’t have that kind of control over things.
Or do we? Jordan thought about it, and realized that if he built a different room with some pressure plates in it, and put a mooshroom in it, it would wander around, occasionally stepping on a pressure plate that activated a redstone circuit, to make randomly different tiles trigger his traps.*
Jordan, like the computer hackers of my generation, looked at the tools available to him, saw that they didn’t explicitly do what he wanted them to do, and hacked them so that they did.
Jordan is kind of my hero, you guys, because Jordan used his ingenuity and creativity to solve a problem, when a lot of other people—including me, probably—would have given up. And did I mention that he did this in a game? Because that’s a really important part of why I think Jordan is so awesome: he was having fun, playing a game, and he chose to do something that was kind of like homework to solve a problem.
So the next time you’re frustrated because your math or science homework is challenging, or a test is really hard, think of Jordan, who looked at a problem like it was a puzzle, and solved it . . . because that’s what scientists and engineers do.
And I know that some of you here today are young scientists and engineers, and I know that you’re going to build the world that I will be an old man in, and I think it would be cool if you made it kind of like Minecraft.
Maybe with fewer spiders.*
Okay, parents, you can tune back in.
When I was a kid, I was weird and shy, uncoordinated and super awkward.* As a result, I spent a lot of time alone with my imagination. I would go to the library, check out as many books as I was allowed to, read them all, and when I was done, let them inspire my imagination to create my own things. And whether I was writing my own story, or drawing something I’d only seen in my imagination, it was science fiction that inspired me the most. In science fiction, anything was possible! A kid my age didn’t have to struggle with math or sports like I did; he’d just have his personal robot do his homework for him, or use his cybernetic implants to predict where the ball was going to be, and let his mechanical legs put him there to catch it. And it was those books—that art, created in many cases decades before I was born—that inspired me to examine and understand the science that powered the fiction. Those stories put me in rocket ships, they gave me command of supercomputers, and made me the last kid on Earth, and without being explicitly educational—which to a kid is code for BORING—they sort of tricked me into learning about everything from basic classical physics to principles of organic chemistry, to the engineering feats required to build a Dyson sphere.*
I never did anything professionally with those interests, and eventually chose a career path that took me into the arts, but I got interested in STEM subjects, and I am passionate about STEM education today, because my interest in ART turned STEM into STEAM.* To this day I struggle with advanced math,* and I understand calculus as much as I understand hieroglyphics (this is embarrassing, considering how fluent I am in emoji), but there are young people in America and around the world right now who are watching Doctor Who or Star Trek or Mr. Robot, and discovering that they have an interest in STEM education, because they, too, are inspired by ART.
And it isn’t limited to science fiction! Remember Jordan, from a minute ago? He wanted to build his traps and mazes because he was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies. What’s Jordan going to build when he’s inspired by Apollo 13? Or Moon?* Or even Futurama?* Something wonderful.
And this is why I believe that ART is an important part of a well-rounded education, not as an alternative to STEM education, but as a fundamental part of it. I want us to start putting ART into STEM, to make STEAM.*
You don’t need to be an art historian to know that we fundamentally cannot understand what is really going on in a civilization until we’ve taken a good hard look at the art that it produces. One walk through the Met or the Smithsonian can tell us just about everything we need to know about where our ancestors were at just about any moment in our history. It is through the art of their time that we can know what their hopes and fears were, and we can look to their speculative fiction to learn how they were trying to understand the world around them. Their artistic creations, and the artists of their time, are just as fundamental to their society and its scientific advances as the scientists who discovered them.*
And I believe that we need to remind ourselves and our children that ART and artists are an important part of the machine of discovery and invention.
In the last century, we had television like Star Trek to inspire us to reach out to the stars, and shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits to warn us about what to do when we got there. ART took its place next to the science and engineering of the atomic age and challenged our parents and grandparents to use the destructive power of the atom carefully, and maybe to even reconsider using it at all.
Right now, a series I love called Black Mirror is holding a smartphone up to our faces to catch our reflection. One episode tells us a story about a woman who misses her fiancé so much, she buys a clone of him, powered by an AI that makes it look and sound like he’s still alive . . . but she soon discovers that there is much more to a person than how they look and sound and feel . . . and spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well, because the intangible but incredibly important things that made him who he was couldn’t be re-created. He looked like the person she loved, but he wasn’t human. I watched that episode, and while it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for AI and cloning, it reminded me there is much more to it than the science that will make it possible. And I really want the people who will be clones of me in the future to think about that, too. I want them to pay attention to Black Mirror, movies like Ex Machina and artists like Banksy. These works caution as well as inspire, and they encourage all of us to discuss the moral and philosophical issues that accompany technological advancement.*
Of course, ART doesn’t have to be heavy and intense, and playing a few hours of Warcraft, losing ourselves in a novel like Hyperion, or spending an afternoon with a coloring book is also good brain break that can lead to scientific breakthroughs. My friend Danica McKellar is best known for playing Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years,* but she’s also the coauthor of a mathematical proof named the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem. She tells stories of her and her classmates being so knee-deep in the language of mathematics that sometimes they would walk into walls.* When you’re trying to figure out a complex engineering or programming problem, sometimes just by switching to a different hemisphere in your brain, you allow yourself room to have a eureka moment.* Like Archimedes, taking a bath, playing with his little boats and realizing that’s what displacement was.
