Your Brain Is Lying About Probabilities
Issue 012 | On Distorted Perception and Rebuilt Agency
“I’m the one experiencing life, not acting as a puppet for life to experience pain through.” - Creator Captain Isaac Lester
I. Situation Report
Yesterday you performed the audit.
You mapped your circles. You identified who belongs in the Circle of Trust, who lingers in the Triangle of Suspicion, who gets maintained distance in the Rhombus of Doubt, and who falls outside all shapes entirely.
Some of you discovered your Circle of Trust is smaller than you thought. Some of you realized people you’d placed at the center had never actually earned that proximity. Some of you are now staring at a suddenly empty room, wondering if you made a mistake.
You didn’t.
But your brain is about to lie to you about what that emptiness means.
My friends, it is Tuesday, December 16th, in the year of our shared crisis before the comeback, 2025. Good day to you. I bring you Morning Thunder. Are you with me?
Think of this week like a classroom. Monday, I provided instruction and set you to work independently. You began running the people in your life through the filters. Now you’ve approached the inevitable wall.
Here is the sacred moment where the work gets heavy and the doubt creeps in.
This is where the teacher provides a statement or two of monumental insight.
Here it is:
The net may have been rotten, but it was still holding. Now there is none. And that terrifies you.
I understand. But the terror is a distortion. Your brain is lying about probabilities. Recent pain feels permanent. Recent emptiness feels like prophecy. It isn’t.
You are between chapters. And between chapters, there is always darkness. Always silence. Always the compressed moment of time where the old story has ended and the new one hasn’t begun.
This is not abandonment. This is the exam.
The instructor is always silent during the test.
II. Framework for Chaos | Awareness/Reconstruction
Framework 4: The Availability Heuristic
Core Principle: Recent and vivid events feel more probable than they actually are.
Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine optimized for survival, not accuracy. When something painful happens, your brain flags it as HIGH PRIORITY and begins scanning for similar threats everywhere. When something wonderful happens, your brain assumes the good times will continue indefinitely.
Take care and great caution, my friends, do not be deceived!
Both are lies.
The Distortions:
One bad relationship → “All relationships are toxic.” One good month → “I’ve figured everything out.” One failure → “I always fail.” One success → “Success is easy now.”
The Truth:
“This hell will last forever” I claim Falsehood. “This paradise is the final level” I say again, Falsehood.
A season of challenge may extend if you don’t learn the lesson. It may intensify, repeat in other forms, iterate across your life until you finally adapt. But it will not last forever. Seasons turn.
And surely, you are not of the kind to repeat the same actions hoping for changed results. You’re smarter than that.
A season of success may be cut short if you’re unwilling to do the maintenance work. You cannot buy your way into a new lifestyle without equipping yourself for its challenges. But success doesn’t evaporate because you had one bad week.
Recognition prevents catastrophic decisions.
After Monday’s audit, your brain wants to tell you stories:
”You’ve pushed everyone away.” ”You’ll always be alone.” ”The emptiness proves you’re broken.”
These are not insights. They are distortions. Recent events such as The Audit, The Culling, the sudden quiet of entering into The Chrysalis, can feel like permanent prophecy because they’re vivid and immediate.
They are not your future. They are your present. And the present is not a prison. It is a passage. It is an opportunity.
For all the scares they gave me, were it not for my struggles, my best estimate is that I’d be fat, working a 9-5, and living somewhere in Wisconsin with a partner and a child I likely would not be able to afford.
See the present and all challenges you currently wrestle with as they are. They are universe sent gifts.
The Space Between Chapters: Potential
Can you imagine a life vastly different from the one you’re currently living?
Think about it for a moment. I’ve found with most people I speak to that they are only truly a few decisions removed from realizing that life.
A single conversation. A single business move. Leaving solitude to find a partner. Rekindling passion with the partner you have. Removing a negative influence. Deciding to stop negatively influencing yourself.
I could write a book about how dramatically different my life is now that I drink water over whiskey.
In the heat of the moment, I felt empowered by past accomplishments to make a radical decision: leave everything behind and start over from a sailboat. Long-term goal within reach, several decades early, under wildly unforeseen and unfavorable circumstances... but within reach.
I saved, slaved, sold, and collected a few grand, devised a general strategy, and made the before unthinkable happen with shocking ease. I was so high…
…on adrenaline and passion that I could see the curvature of the Earth. I felt I would never experience the weight of the world again.
When I arrived and moved onboard, I was so consumed by peace and disbelief… that I never bothered to make sure the vessel was even in working order.
When it all fell apart, when I was forced to travel across the country again, to crash with someone else again, to start over again, I was precious millimeters from total mental collapse. I felt wholly abandoned by God.
The creeping darkness inched in to claim my soft and weak body again for the cold and endless void.
More setbacks. More struggles. Then, after yet another disaster, I decided:
I am no longer going to allow life to have its way with me.
I’m the one experiencing life. Not acting as a puppet for life to experience pain through.
Now I’ve re-established myself on solid, floating fiberglass. I pick up where I left off, with a new MINDSET Operating System.
And I understand something I didn’t before:
The instructor is always silent during the test.
I was not abandoned. I was being given an opportunity to show up and show out on the stage of life. I stumbled, as we all do. I recovered, as we all must.
Remember that no one cares about what you want, and the only way to make something happen is to make is a top priority in life.
You will find a way to be present when the universe aligns to give you what you MUST have, yes?
Challenges come in seasons. And it is a blessing to have new problems as the new day is shocked to meet us already well underway on our paths to personal excellence.
As we Campaign against the chaos of the modern day. As we Crusade across our very minds, routing out the pity and disgust and anguish of apathy. As we RISE with The Morning Thunder, And install a new MINDSET Operating System.
This is progress. This is The Way Forward.
Framework 15: The Agency Reconstruction System
Core Principle: You can’t execute when you don’t believe you CAN execute.
If you’ve found yourself isolated, lonely, or in a season of challenge after Monday’s audit, I would have you remember: there exists a compressed moment of time between every chapter of any story.
The loneliness, the self-doubt, the sparring sessions against the SpicySadness, they exist in different degrees for different people based on their personal paths. But they exist for everyone who dares to change.
When has greatness ever been achieved without a season of challenge? How could anyone expect lasting change without undergoing total mental reconditioning and a complete rebuild of their worldview?
You were made for such a time as this.
Your DNA holds the fabric to weather all storms, deconstruct all obstacles, and literally run down all goals. The challenges you face today do not have the power to break you.
Whether you stand at the remains of a shattered life, drift in the void praying for a way out, or sit so deep in a hole you dug that warmth itself has left you, these failures will fuel your future. These setbacks will become stepping stones. These trials will become triumphs.
But first, you must rebuild belief in your own agency.
After collapse, your confidence in your own capability is shattered. Motivation doesn’t fix this. Inspiration doesn’t fix this. Only evidence fixes this.
The Protocol:
1. Set embarrassingly small targets. Make your bed. Walk for ten minutes. Drink water before coffee.
2. Complete them with precision. Not “mostly done.” _Done._
3. Document the completion. Write it down. Timestamp it.
4. Stack slightly larger targets. Yesterday’s ceiling becomes today’s floor.
5. Reference past wins when setting new targets. Your brain needs receipts.
The MINDSET Magic Explained:
Your brain needs NEW evidence that you’re capable. Past-you has lost favor and now stands discredited at court. That version that failed, collapsed, and landed you in the void. New-you needs fresh proof. Micro-wins rebuild the belief engine one receipt at a time.
I embarrassed myself greatly with poor work on a public stage once. I bled on the crowd and desperately cried for help through the guise of lyrical lines. A biohazard of emotion. An outpour of trauma. A FeverDream of the original definition.
But I practice my comeback strategy piously, and much time was spent studying speech. I learned there were basics, and from there an entire world opened itself to me, intimately. Hours of podcasts breaking down cadence. Books on flowing from topic to topic like a dancer.
I was trained in the dark arts and took to the streets in the garb of the Recruiter. When the lockdowns descended, I descended upon the phones, where Marines were first contacted and inspired to enlist in our most beloved and Illustrious Corps of Colored Pencil Chewers.
In the off chance there happens to be a Schenectady Spartan among you here today, know that I have loved you more than my own flesh and blood, I have prayed for your safety, I have thought about you constantly, and despite the hell I have traveled through to speak to you today, I can proudly state that I still have our flag.
Semper Fidelis Sprint through the mf Finish, Hats tipped low & cups up high to the most resilient, Forever.
Contrary to popular belief, the modern Devil Dog is quite the nuanced and opinionated creature, preferring only the finest pigment sticks, specifically those of the Crayola brand, which initiate both mating cycles and mayhem sprees. - Gunnery Sergeant Google
I learned how to speak more betterer. Convincingly too, apparently. Check my lyrical lexicon of verbal voodoo and be amazed. Oh I say vexed, even.
The point: I accepted radical and only marginally realistic delusion as a baseline personality trait long ago. I have no problems connecting my success in overcoming the challenge of articulation with becoming a skilled sailor, content creator, and master of all things I claim within my defined but vague limits of rogue studies.
If I can imagine it in my mind, there is a path to travel me there. I just have to find it and work backwards.
Speak that out loud. Again, now. Mean it.
III. Campaign Orders
For the next 72 hours, you are not allowed to evaluate your future.
No grand assessments. No sweeping conclusions about where this is all going. No extrapolating from present emptiness to permanent isolation.
Your brain is lying about probabilities. We’re going to starve the lie and feed the truth.
The Assignment:
One: Write down the last three events distorting your sense of probability. What recent pain feels permanent? What recent win feels like you’ve “figured it out”? Name the distortions.
Two: Identify one micro-action that proves agency today. Not a life-changing decision. A small, completable task that demonstrates YOU STILL MOVE.
Three: Complete it before the change of the guard at nightfall. Document it. Timestamp. Receipt. Bring it tomorrow and share with the class, your effortless success and monumental deeds and we will congratulate you with warmth.
Delusion feeds delusion, better the positive sort than the garbage currently running laps around our feeds, yes?
Four: Do not extrapolate meaning beyond that completion. The task is not a metaphor. It’s not a sign. It’s proof. That’s all.
Your job is not to decide where this chapter goes.
Your job is to prove you still move.
IV. Bear Witness/Practice Piously
Remember the successes you’ve gained as an independent and conscious human being endowed with free will.
You have overcome before. You have adapted before. You have emerged before.
The version of you reading this has a 100% survival rate for worst days. Every single one of them. You’re still here.
That’s everything you need!
Reconnect with your agency. One micro-win at a time. One receipt at a time. One proof of movement at a time.
The space between chapters is dark. But it’s not endless.
The next chapter is coming. And I would have you face it eager and prepared.
V. Transmission End..
Recognize the cognitive distortion.
Your brain is lying about probabilities. Recent pain feels permanent. Recent emptiness feels prophetic. Neither is true.
Make decisions from data, not emotion. Stack evidence of your own capability. Prove you still move.
The instructor is silent during the test. That doesn’t mean you’ve been abandoned.
It means you’re being given the opportunity to show what you’re made of. So show up and by God, show out.
Progress wears many disguises. Sometimes it looks like an empty room. Sometimes it looks like making your bed.
Both count.
Patience with your persistence. Progress will come. Lux Ex Tenebris | Light From Darkness Per Aspera Ad Astra Through Hardships to The Gorydamn Stars - Isaac & Bobert via Matila, on Campaign
