If You Told Me Then
How a so-called “warrior” gene quietly talks you out of leaving the house
Do not let me work the suicide hotline. I’d do terribly. After listening intently, I’d get pulled into the caller’s frame, thinking the way they think. As I offered up possible ways out, they’d raise more obstacles and setbacks that prove they really are facing insurmountable odds. A few minutes in and I’d agree; your life is as bad as you think. If I were in that situation, I’d try to call it quits, too. I don’t see a great way out.
Maybe the hotline script is a sympathetic voice. Your tribe hasn’t abandoned you. If you want the rational counterargument, I only have one. You cannot anticipate the good things that will happen in the future. There is some cognitive distortion that allows you to enumerate bad things that could happen, but not good things. From the inside, it doesn’t feel like a bias or bug in your model. It feels like the structure of reality.
If I leave the house to buy clothes, I can easily list everything that might go wrong. The store is out of my size; I step in a puddle and ruin my shoes; I get stuck in traffic, maybe even die in a car accident. All that can go right, in my default frame, is they have exactly what I want at the price I expect and I make it home without incident. Everything going as planned is the best-case scenario. With uncapped downside and breakeven upside, I’m unlikely to make the effort. Loss aversion is a perfectly reasonable bias for an organism that wants to continue existing in the future. If I’m doing fine now and want to be doing fine tomorrow, the safest move is often to hold still.
If I really strain, I can invent possible upsides, but they feel like fiction. Maybe I bump elbows with my future wife…in menswear? Maybe I run into an old coworker who suddenly remembers I’m perfect for his startup. Maybe I try on something ridiculous, get a compliment from a stranger, and pivot to a more flattering style that slightly rewrites my social life. Even my made-up upsides sound implausible compared to the crisp detail of the ways things can go wrong. That’s the asymmetry. Doing an inner join on the finite, enumerable downsides is a lot easier mentally than doing an outer join on the entire world of potential upsides.
There’s a gene that tries to correct this mentality. It’s misnamed warrior/worrier in popular science reporting and framed in terms of stress handling or clearing a hormone. It’s better understood as a slider that asks: do you expect new things to have more upside or downside? When something goes wrong, is your first thought, “This never would have happened if I stayed home.” You already know what variant you and everyone in your life has. Would you rather try a new restaurant or get your favorite meal from a place you know? If you have Val/GG like me, you’ll have that thought every time something goes wrong, and you’ll pick the old favorite restaurant every time. Oddly, that one is called “warrior.” Go ahead, check your results on 23andMe.
The gene is a knob to bias your calculations toward or against novelty. It made more sense in a peasant world where few chance opportunities existed. The best life strategy really was to farm bread for your lord, keep your head down, and avoid random misfortune. Now, taking chances is far more valuable than holding still in a world with secure food and dense social networks and a firehose of weak ties. There is a newer mutation that tries to adjust the tuning for you, whispering, “Try the new thing. It might be better.” This is consistent with Val being the ancestral type and Met appearing only in humans thousands of years ago.
As a Val, how can I resist this stay-home mentality? What counter-distortion would make me a better suicide hotline attendant, for others and for myself? If suicide is, in part, what happens when you can no longer imagine any good thing ever happening again, its foil is very specific. It is the good things that happened that you did not anticipate, especially times when you took a chance when you would’ve rather stayed home.
This is the information you’d most want to send back to depressed, stagnant you. You can simulate sending it by imagining your past self receiving that message at the exact moment they’re convinced nothing will ever change. How would you explain the joy of learning that life has this kind of plot twist? Probably exactly like the cliché bride in her wedding toast—now so common it’s parodied. “If you told me five years ago I’d be standing here today, I would’ve never believed you.” She’s not wrong.
Build a personal catalog of pre-hindsight—the surprises you only see after stepping into uncertainty. Make a habit of quietly writing down the best thing you realistically expect to happen before you go somewhere you’re tempted to skip. Then, when you are shocked by an unexpected twist, you can compare it to the timid little scenario you’d sketched and feel, on your skin, how badly your model underpriced upside. Prediction-registering you would be delighted to know how wrong you were.
Think about the doctor or dentist you finally visit after a decade of procrastination and dread. For years you’re certain they’ll find something catastrophic, so you keep not making the appointment. When you finally go, it’s boring. A quick cleaning, a small fix, a mild lecture about flossing, and you walk out fine. You would love to mail that piece of relief back to every past version of you who lay awake inventing worst-case scenarios.
Or the boring birthday party you say yes to out of obligation, fully expecting to smile politely, eat bad cake, and slip out early. Instead, you get seated next to someone you talk to for three hours straight, and a year later they’re your cofounder or the person you call first when something breaks. How many DMs have you almost not sent—the late-night “hey, I loved this” or the clumsy reply to a stranger’s thread—that quietly grew into a friendship or a job or a move? Those are all branches of reality you were one fidgety moment away from pruning.
Keep the wristband from the concert, the email that started “no worries if not,” the calendar invite you were one click from deleting. Take photos of disarray so you can look back on how many small projects you completed through attrition and how many seasons of your life quietly turned over. Notice when a gambled-on meal at a new restaurant becomes your default order, even though you were sure the best case was “edible.”
I regularly run my library of photos dating back decades through face recognition. When I get a selfie with a new friend, I check whether we’ve crossed paths before, and very often we have. It’s an incredible source of serendipity. There are photos I took of a group playing football. I was there to document, but years later, one of those strangers turned into my weekly hospital volunteer partner. What a fun piece of trivia it would be to beam back to me, squinting through the viewfinder, convinced I was just killing an afternoon.
I met one of my oldest friends because I needed batteries for my calculator and forced myself to speak up to ask a stranger for help. At the time it was an awkward, forgettable exchange in dingy classroom. Twenty‑five years later, we still talk daily, and his custom‑built air filter is humming in the corner while I write this in another state. All of it was one trivial question away from never existing.
Maybe before departure you search for the name of the monthlong writing residency you’re attending and, somewhere down the results, find a coffee cart’s offhand post about working the event. You tap like and move on with your day, assuming the best that could happen is they serve affogato and can spell your name. The best could be significantly better. Maybe the barista joins you on your deck to watch the sunset, and you talk for hours about life’s winding paths. That’s the bit I’d send back. The first line of a scene you didn’t even know had started.
If you’re a fellow “warrior,” you don’t have to discount the bad. Just admit your model is lopsided. It’s clinically precise about what might hurt you, almost illiterate about what might help. The only lever you get is attention. Start watching what actually enters your life on the days you almost stayed home and went anyway. Those are the scenes you’d beg a time traveler to show you in advance. And be ready to give that speech at your wedding. You already know the opening line.
Tomorrow, how to know when to pick your head up and look for branches at all.