I often get asked by people things like "how did you think of that?" - and the honest answer is - I didn't.

I "think" by largely shutting off higher rational thought, and just let a problem freewheel through my mind. Either an answer comes pretty much instantaneously, or it doesn't at all.

I don't logically think things through - I find the answer, then it justifies itself.

This was always infuriating for my teachers, as I'd look at a problem in Maths or Physics, write down the answer, and then, if I felt like it, figure out what the "working" was.

I think we've largely forgotten how to think. Language oriented symbol linking and logic is slow - it's a whole abstraction layer that you can just sidestep, if you trust your mind.

I have gone out of my way to find ways to 'step out of the way' of my subconscious for many years. For me, big, non-trivial answers don't come quickly or in full. As ideas, thoughts and proto-answers surface, I let them 'float' for a minute, and then let them sink back below the surface for a while longer.

In the end, I have 'in hand' a nice tidy pile of possible answers/directions, which I can then apply rational thought to in order to select one or more as the concrete course/courses of action.

It's really hard to explain, but it makes for easy and rapid evaluation of possibilities, as you can just "see" what fits, and what doesn't.

I remember completely scrapping a 1500 word piece, rewriting the whole piece and resubmitting it to my editor. He was amazed I did it so quickly, I was quite disturbed I'd written the whole thing with barely an iota of conscious thought going into it.

I don't think I'm riding shotgun for my consciousness, I think I'm a kid in the back of the wagon.

I spend 7-8 hours at my desk every day. I get about the same amount of work done each day, but I don't consciously control how I'm spending those hours. I might be reading / posting on HN, thinking about personal stuff, or even coding. When doing the latter, sessions start when I feel motivated to code and stop the very instant I'm not feeling it anymore.

After I stop, my subconscious goes to work. While I'm 'screwing around', insights will bubble up concerning the broader architecture of the platform I'm building and where the thing I'm coding now fits into it. At some point I'll realize why I stopped coding and what I need to do to continue. It's inevitably some deeper consideration that I never would have thought of had I not taken a break. I've also stopped making mistakes more than once. The second I make one, I lose motivation to work until my subconscious has worked out why I made it and how not to make it in the future.

I had to 'give myself permission' to operate in this way. Conscious mind just doesn't want to give up control, you need to exercise will in order to give up will. It was a little scary at first. As I built up confidence, I started trusting myself to do it more and more.

I prefer to think of it as simply "to be"

Dancing with.

i spent a long time struggling with mental illness, and it was only when i began to understand the need to work _with_ my subconscious instead of fighting it that things went better for me.

Jordan Peterson - in his personality series - talks often about depression, and how tending to the subconscious can result in positive outcomes. Importantly - I think - he suggests that people should stop deceiving the subconscious, and instead listen to it, and work with it. Unfortunately, he fails to mention any meaningful ways to accomplish this.

Some days it was not possible to do anything. Eventually I learned that it can be OK to not be able to do anything too (instead of trying to focus on forcing myself to do things, which never worked anyway).

These things come down to hearing "I'm too tired to do all of that" and instead of saying "No, I can do all of this" (deception), saying "Maybe I'll try for something smaller". You repeat that process until you arrive at a point where everything doesn't seem impossible anymore. I think that is what is meant by working with your subconscious.

The process can take many years. There's still joy in the world, but I find I have more conscious awareness of it.

I'd be really interested to see studies of people who "recovered" from depression. Maybe there are two cohorts; those who get their rose-coloured glasses back, and those who have to learn to cope with what they feel. [That sounds worse than I intend it to, but I can't think of a better way to express it].

Indeed. I'd be interested in reading case after case of people that recovered from depression. But for all the industry has put out (drugs, therapy) they do not seem interested in interviewing those people that they say got better in their abstracts. I guess the academia is not interested in that.

Belief requires free will, making "driven by" contradictory. There may be a mixture or a degree removed, but the idea that free will doesn't exist is always self-contradictory.

Why?

Well now we're just talking about words though.