Instinctive Wiseman Luck
Evolution knows when to pull your head up from the grind better than you ever will
Richard Wiseman did an experiment where he handed people a newspaper and asked them to count how many photos were inside. Some dutiful souls started flipping pages and tallying. Others stopped almost immediately. On page two, in huge type, he’d printed, “Stop. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”
His definition of “luck” wasn’t rabbit’s feet or crystals. Lucky people were the ones who noticed the headline and took the out. They kept one eye on better branches and were willing to switch, even in the middle of a task they’d agreed to complete. The unlucky plowed through, diligently reaching the final page and delivering the same real answer, having ignored the hint from above.
I couldn’t find any robust correlation between “feeling lucky” and life outcomes. Still, Wiseman’s definition of the word is too useful to drop. Luck as branch prediction. How often do you pick your head up from the grind to scan for stop signs? How much of your life should be execution over search? “Never give up” is survivorship bias dressed as grit. It only works if you picked the right quest on day one. Luckily, something already solved this scheduling problem and shipped it in our firmware.
Imagine Interstate 40 secretly dead‑ends into the Atlantic. Everyone who takes the eastbound extension just…disappears. No survivors, no warning, no news story. You’d think evolution is helpless there. No information comes back. How could any future human know to avoid that stretch of road?
It can still learn. If, by random mutation, some line of people develops a superstitious fear of “40” or highways generally, they’ll be slightly less likely to vanish into the ocean. Over enough generations, genes that produce “irrational” aversions win. Evolution can send information back from the grave by killing every branch that took I‑40 and overweighting the ones who stayed home with a bad feeling. It’s an absurd example, but this may be happening everywhere all the time. We just can’t see it.
We already know evolution does clever combinatorics for the immune system. Your MHC genes sniff out mates whose histocompatibility patterns are unlike yours, so your kids cover more pathogen space. It would be bizarre if it didn’t reuse that move for risk coverage in behavior, not just histocompatibility.
Absurd phobias start to look less staged. Those weirdos on daytime TV unable to touch cotton balls or step on manhole covers? You can treat that as noise, or as a population‑level hedge. Evolution doesn’t know whether the new hazard is plastic, microwaves, nickel, or something in shampoo, so it sprinkles out random, heritable nopes over the whole environment. I envy the kid who grew up “irrationally” terrified of eating or drinking out of plastic.
The same holds for interests. There is no model train gene. There’s a toy model that looks more like obsess over controllable, rule‑bound miniatures. In one person that shows up as HO scale railroads, in another as Kubernetes clusters, in another as city zoning. Evolution doesn’t care which local expression you pick. It cares that the tribe’s collective micro‑obsessions cover a wide landscape of possible future niches. The same combinatorics show up in traits we don’t like as much.
We make the same mistake with the schizophrenia gene. There isn’t one, but there is a polygenic cluster where high expression gives you psychosis and low expression gives you loose associations, pattern‑hunger, and creativity. At volume 3, it’s a branch‑finder. At volume 10, you’re following too many branches at once and never reassembling them into reality. Evolution is quite willing to buy a long tail of hallucinating uncles to get a few generations of inventive weirdos.
Even male pattern baldness starts to look like a scheduling heuristic. On its face, it’s brutally fitness‑negative. If hair is a status signal and you lose it early, you’d expect your genes to vanish. Unless baldness is being used for something else. It suspiciously kicks in around the age the 37% rule from the secretary problem suggests settling down. “Corners are receding. You know where this ends and how undesirable it makes you. Commit ASAP or lose your chance forever.” It’s a forced stop‑sampling alarm. Pick a mate while your graph is peaking instead of gambling on future trade up forever. And that’s only at the trait level. When evolution really cares about a phase, it can overhaul the whole system.
We talk like “becoming a mom” is a cultural thing. Under the hood it’s a metamorphosis. Many new mothers’ brains go through a prune‑and‑rewire that is extreme, consistent, and uncorrelated with postpartum depression. Gray matter shrinks in some places and densifies in others, especially in circuits for tracking social threat, baby faces, and home. The personality change is obvious to everyone—hyper‑vigilant, boundary enforcing, self‑centered around the nest. We politely launder it as “she’s just like that.”
Adult children experience it as narcissism and head to r/RaisedByNarcissists, which now boasts a million subscribers. Science quietly publishes fMRI plots and calls it “maternal brain remodeling.” No one dares say Mom Brain is a real thing and it never fully reverts. The obvious read is that evolution has a standard brain upgrade optimized for keeping toddlers alive and in line with no equivalent uninstall when they age out.
It’s not just moms. Evidence is emerging that everyone goes through remodeling at specific ages: about 9, 32, 66, and 83 years old. Whatever the exact breakpoints, “phases of life” look less like moods and more like scheduled full renovations to suit changing abilities and roles in the family and community.
There are suspiciously recurring patterns for other life stages. Kids love Lego and forts and Minecraft bases. We treat that as a toy fad. It’s a shelter‑building script. Follow it across the lifespan and it has a weird blackout window. The “Lego dark ages”—a known thing in the community—hits roughly 14–30. Boys drop the bricks and hyper‑fixate on mates and status. In mid-life it reactivates; we dig our old sets out of the attic and rebuild them just as HGTV starts looking interesting. Evolution yanks building offline exactly when mating and roaming matter most, then brings it back when it wants you to settle and fortify.
Girls get a complementary daemon: the little overseer man in your head who monitors clothing, posture, reputation, and hotness 24/7. Our culture correctly notices he’s annoying and blames “the male gaze.” I don’t think he’s purely cultural. A continuous evolution-installed overseer is a valuable way to keep yourself ever-ready for mating. We hand‑wave it as capitalism and Instagram and then wonder why we hide the toothpaste in a drawer in our own private bathroom. Evolution calls it the main quest from 14–30.
Later, a similar pair shows up again. Old men suddenly obsessed with birds and squirrels and telephoto lenses? That’s “big‑game multi‑day hunt” rewritten for aging joints. Evolution doesn’t want 70‑year‑olds dying three valleys away. It gives them an itch to map nearby small fauna with a camera‑gun. Meanwhile, older women and grandmothers double down on home gravity and family management, often feeling a nearly physical tether to grandkids.
Zoom out spatially and you see another strong script. Don’t stray too far from Mom. The average American lives about 18 miles from their mother. Only a minority live more than a couple hours’ drive away. That is not a coincidence. Grandparental help is a 30–40% childcare discount and evolution wants you cashing it. That shudder of fear when a job offer in another state pops up? Your ancestral spreadsheet screaming at you about future childcare, whether or not you want kids today.
Even the story that would make me want kids feels pre‑written. The tempting arc is that I almost discovered something important, but I’m missing a trait—grit, extroversion, follow‑through. My wife has it. We reroll the genome, boot my stalled quest into our kid, and they get over the line I missed. Historically that “reroll with bootstrapping” was one of the only ways to jump to a new branch if your own stats felt capped.
Maybe this perceived cap has always been the script that triggered fertility. Modern life is now so boundless, fluid, global, and with such wide horizons, endgame doesn’t hit until old age. Seventy years ago you were resigned to a single track by age 25—good or bad. Part of low birthrates might just be reroll drive re‑routed into self‑improvement. If you don’t believe parents are trying to reroll through their children, search profiles for “account run by parent,” but not if you’re of sensitive disposition.
Day to day, you don’t feel these life stage patches. You feel a swarm of little interrupts: boredom, procrastination, renewal, an urge to perform, a sudden inability to fantasize about certain futures. They look like noise until you treat them as branch‑timers.
Boredom is your clue that this branch is solved and a dead end. Procrastination says this branch can be ignored. I’m routinely shocked by how many things I was sure I’d have to do that quietly resolve themselves when ignored. I couldn’t imagine how they’d get resolved, but apparently evolution could. The ones that matter bubble back up. The to‑do list is an abomination because it overrides that priority queue with an external one. You’re pinning every tiny wobble in your awareness as if the scheduler doesn’t already know which ones you’ll actually care about in two weeks.
The feeling of “renewal” deserves a first‑class name. That clean new page turned urge after a move or breakup or job change. The itch to buy a fresh notebook and start over. It’s your firmware saying you’ve exhausted the local maxima here. Try a different neighborhood. We don’t teach people to notice it, so they treat it as self‑sabotage and run back to the old branch.
The desire to be performative is another one. The itch to post, present, publish, do a public debrief. We frame it as cringe, but to evolution, it’s “stop grinding alone.” A project nobody sees is a dead end. No downstream opportunities, no new coalitions, no mates, no status. If months go by and you haven’t shipped anything visible, that part of the scheduler will start pestering you. Show your work.
Fantasy and imagination are the query API into this whole system. You can ask, “Here’s a situation. Can I have a preview of how it would feel if this happened so I can decide whether to aim at it?” The response isn’t a logical argument but a feeling—the only way scripts can communicate with you. Walk through buying the house, taking the job, moving cities. Your internal model runs a quick simulation and returns a sensation at a lower preview intensity.
Crucially, that API is gated. You cannot meaningfully fantasize about an 8/10 outcome from a 3/10 life. The simulation returns static. Only after you’ve stably lived a 6 can you get an emotional rendering of a 7. Overshoot the happiness window and the system withholds feedback so you don’t chase delusional branches. Most “visualization” advice is just people trying to brute‑force fantasizing about levels they haven’t unlocked yet, at their own peril.
On the other side, there’s a watchdog script for meta‑thinking itself. I suspect evolution pre‑booby‑trapped extended introspection. If some poor hominid sat there thinking about thinking for more than half an hour, the scheduler would have a rule. “This one is lost between branches. Flood them with weird neurotransmitters and patterny insights and see if they’ll take the hint and pivot.” That’s why spiritual epiphanies after three‑day meditation retreats feel like a firmware‑level reroute, not contact with the true structure of reality.
None of these are bugs. They’re nicely tuned heuristics about when to look up. Boredom, renewal, performative itch, blocked fantasy, even the sudden urge to stare at walls and “process your life” are the STOP headlines in your own newspaper.
This is why I’m skeptical of “inner work” as the primary way to change your life. You’re not writing a fresh program onto blank silicon. You’re vibe‑coding edits into a codebase that has been debugged with corpses since the Pleistocene. Though if you want to be master rather than apprentice, it is a good way to trap others in a system with a baked-in status hierarchy and you at the top. You can cast a wide net. Are your emotions perfectly calibrated to maximally achieve all your goals? If not, why not enroll in my gimmick?
A lot of the mental-health framing starts from the premise that every unpleasant sensation is pathology to be soothed away. Shame? Trauma. Restlessness? ADHD. Low‑grade dread about avoiding some task? Anxiety disorder. If feelings are dashboard lights from tuned scripts, turning them all off because blinking lights are “stressful” is snapping the wires off your branch predictor. If you want to see how good that predictor really is when you don’t touch it, you have to look at something uglier than procrastination.
The scariest example of firmware competence isn’t even any of these. It’s Stockholm syndrome. For most of our history, tribal raids were a fact of life. Sometimes your people captured others. Sometimes you got captured. Once you’re in the enemy camp, there are only two long‑run possibilities: you’re killed, or you’re integrated. There is some probability curve over time for “my people will successfully raid back and rescue me.” Early on, it might be high. Months in, it’s basically zero.
How long do you hold out hope? You can’t refuse to bond forever. You’ll be seen as dangerous, disloyal, and probably killed. You also can’t instantly flip allegiance. That destroys the credibility of bonding as a signal. If you’d happily imprint on any captor in 24 hours, that trait would blow up your original tribe’s pair‑bonding and childrearing, too.
Somewhere in your family tree, every possible capture duration and rescue scenario played out. Evolution saw those curves and baked the solution into the firmware. Multiply the violence of the abduction by the duration of captivity and you get a number. Land in a certain zone and, over a span of days to weeks, you start feeling an involuntary attachment to your captor. The pop “trauma bond” story treats this as an irrational, pointless bug. It’s a tuned time‑probability graph for when to abandon the old tribe and accept the new. Once you appreciate that level of calibration, the idea that your homemade journaling protocol is going to outsmart these scripts starts to look comical.
You see the same invisible strings in gentler form everywhere. Sorority girls who “just like walking in the nice neighborhood” after putting on perfume and a sundress. Of all possible streets, they pick the one with concentrated wealth and age‑appropriate men. Ask and you’ll get “I do it for me.” Of course you do. The part of you that writes sentences is never the one pulling the strings.
Watch people at conferences. The Wiseman‑luck believers float, talk to everyone, and treat each conversation as a possible opportunity chain. The ROI guys scan badges, decide “you aren’t someone who’ll directly make me money,” and bail. They’re still counting photos in the newspaper. They’ll never see the headline.
So when should you pick your head up? Not on a timer. Not because a coach told you to do more inner work. All you can do is listen for interrupts. If boredom turns global instead of local, if renewal shows up clean, if you get a strong, uninvited urge to show your work, if your fantasies suddenly block at a certain level, if you find yourself thinking about thinking for entire afternoons—those are the times to stop counting and look for the big STOP in that area of life.
Everything else, you can mostly leave to the firmware. It’s not perfect, but it has seen more branches than you will in a thousand lifetimes. The worst person to put in charge of your luck is the narrator who wants to feel in control of it.