Someone else was driving

Part one of two — the audit: looking at the conditions of your life clearly, before you change a single thing.

I pull into the grocery store parking lot, get out and walk into the store. It’s about noon on an otherwise nondescript weekday. Instinctively I enter the turnstiles and hang a left, about 8 aisles down, then right.

The beer aisle is big glass-doored refrigerators on each side. It’s heavily favored towards 12 packs and cases of the standard light American fare. The micro brews are tucked in the middle; non-prime real estate away from both ends. I grab my every day six (balancing taste and cost to come up with something I can live with) and proceed to self pay, and the inevitable waiting for a clerk to come by and check my ID.

It’s a beautiful day outside as I climb back into the car. But wait. Something’s wrong, I pause while trying to put my finger on it.

Then it hits me. I had come to the store explicitly for food, that was my intention when I left the house. I know this because the shopping list is in my pocket. It seems that the store has transformed itself from being a place primarily for food, to a place primarily for alcohol. What’s going on here?

The passage above does not look like an audit. It looks like a man standing in a parking lot on a nondescript weekday, unable to say what is bothering him. But the moment he is describing — the store has transformed itself from being a place primarily for food, to a place primarily for alcohol — is the first move of one, and it is worth naming the move before we watch him complete it.

An audit, in the sense we mean here, is not the financial-spreadsheet kind, or the corporate-process kind, or the personal-development-worksheet kind with eight life areas scored on a ten-point scale and a colorful chart at the end. The closer analogue is what a careful doctor does at a first appointment, before any diagnosis — taking the history, observing the patient, noting what is there before reaching for an intervention. Or what an engineer does at a first site visit, before any redesign — looking at the existing structure, understanding how it actually works and why it is the way it is, before touching anything.

The audit is a posture rather than a procedure. The posture is this: I am going to look at my current life carefully, and I am not going to fix anything yet. The not-fixing-yet is the entire discipline. The man in the parking lot has not resolved to quit, or to cut down, or to change his route. He has only noticed something. That is correct. The noticing comes first; the intervention waits its turn.

I’m in my house as the work day is winding down. I work remotely from home, and most all of my time is spent online in meetings. I’m occupied from a time just after I get up to a time in the noon to 2 PM range.

I’m in the kitchen as the work day has completed and I’m setting up my afternoon. I look through the cabinets and the frig and start a list for the store. When I complete my rounds, I look at the list. Instinctively I know that I don’t need to do this shopping today — I have more than enough supplies. However, I notice I’m being drawn to do the shopping anyway. How curious I thought.

I began to wonder, as I got in the car to head to the store, about how and why I actually decide to go to the store on a given day. Obviously, when I need an item I’m out of the choice is clear. But that wasn’t the case today. Yet my intuition was that I should do the shopping now. Maybe I had read about inclement weather? Nope, that wasn’t it. Was it that I had noticed a holiday whose traffic I wanted to avoid? Again, not it. I didn’t see the thread.

Into the store, I get a cart and am immediately drawn 8 aisles down, then to the right. Alcohol aisle. Light bulb.

The second passage shows the posture deepening into a question, and the question is more important than it looks. The man is not asking himself why do I drink? — and the absence of that question is the thing to notice, even though he has not yet noticed it himself.

Why do I drink is the question the culture hands you. It invites the childhood, the authority figures, the retrospective narrative, the species of self-analysis that is satisfying to perform and almost never produces a next action. The man asks something different. He asks, in effect, what is making this trip happen today, when I do not need anything? He runs the candidates — weather, a holiday, a genuine shortage — and rejects each, because none is the thread. The question he is circling, without naming it, is the only one the audit actually requires: what in my current life is making the drinking the path of least resistance, right now?

The difference between the two questions is the difference between speculation and engineering. The why-question points backward, into a past that cannot be revised. The what-makes-it-rational question points at present conditions, which can be observed today and altered tomorrow. It produces present-tense answers, and present-tense answers are the only kind a person can build against.

The conditions it asks about live in five rough layers, and the man is walking into them whether he has the names or not. There is the environmental layer — the house, the route, what is reachable in minutes versus what takes real effort. The body — sleep, food, movement, the hour of the day when hunger peaks. The mind — the quality of attention, and the noise the drinking has quietly been covering. The intellectual — what he actually understands about the substance, and the rationalizations he has not examined because examining them would cost him something. And the social — the people, the obligations, or, as we are about to see, their absence. The audit does not ask him to fix any of these. It asks only that he look at each and describe what is actually there.

I began to see that the regular trip to the store demanded my attention. It was an event that I repeated almost daily, and, as the previous incident reveals, it was an event that had been relegated to me being a passenger; clearly someone else was driving.

I noted the following attributes of the event: - This event happened many/most day - This event occurred just after lunch as my work day was ending - I had fallen into a routine of eating once a day, late in the afternoon, so this meant that this event occurred when I was the most hungry - The event was very efficient, time-wise; I was out and back in under a half an hour - My days, after work ended, were free; there was no standing events or obligations - My life, at the moment, was single; there was no other person to be accountable to - The alcohol I bought was not so expensive as to create immediate financial issues; it quietly lived in the noise of discretionary food purchases

And when I say I noted these conditions, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote them down. I put the list on my living room side table. Over coffee the next morning I stared at the list. The spooky thing was that each attribute of the event (that consisted of me going to buy alcohol) actually made the event easy to accomplish.

The attributes created a system. The system in place was the enabler.

The passage above is what an audit looks like when it is done well, and it is worth slowing down over, because nearly everything we have been describing is operating in it at once.

Notice first that the man is being descriptive, not prescriptive. Not one item on his list is a resolution. He does not write I should eat earlier, or I should find something to do in the evenings. He writes here is how it currently is: the event happens most days; it lands just after work; it coincides with the hour he is hungriest; it takes under thirty minutes, out and back; his evenings are unclaimed; he is accountable to no one; the cost hides in the noise of the grocery bill. The is-state is what the audit produces. The should-state belongs to the work that comes later, and he has correctly declined to start it.

Notice next that his list, assembled by simply looking, sorts itself across the five layers without his having reached for them. Just after work, the hour I am hungriest is the body and the daily sequence. Out and back in under a half an hour is the environment, reporting near-zero friction. Evenings free, accountable to no one is the social layer, describing an absence rather than a presence. Hidden in the discretionary noise is the environment again, this time reporting that the cost — which could have been a source of friction — has been arranged so that it is not. He consulted no framework. He looked at his actual Tuesday, and the layers showed up on their own. That is what the five layers are for: not to be filled in like a form, but to make sure the looking is complete. His particular list happens to run light on the mind and the intellectual layers — another person doing the same exercise might find that is exactly where most of theirs lives. The conditions belong to the life, not to the template.

And notice the line that turns description into recognition. The attributes created a system. The system in place was the enabler. This is the sentence the audit exists to produce. The man arrived at the parking lot a passenger — someone else was driving — and he leaves the kitchen table a person who has seen the machinery and can name it. Nothing in his life has changed. The store is the same distance away, the evenings are still empty, the hunger still peaks at the same hour. What has changed is his relationship to those conditions: they have moved from the situation I am in to the situation I am studying, with the intent to redesign it. The shift is small, and it is the precondition for everything that follows.

The output of an audit is not a document. The man happened to write his on the back of a list and leave it on the side table, and that is one good way to do it; a long walk that arrives at the same clarity is another. The output is the clearer interior picture — the conditions of your life, seen plainly enough that you can finally tell which of them have been doing the driving.

He has done the looking. He has even named what he found: an enabling system, assembled by accident, running most days without his consent. What he has not done is build anything in its place. That is the next move, and it is a discipline of its own — because seeing the system is not the same as dismantling it, and resolving to dismantle it, as we will see, accomplishes almost nothing at all.

That is the subject of part two.

— Ben Walker