“Maybe this is a good time to take some time off and figure out how to move your life forward.”

It sounds supportive, even compassionate. But…

The Anxiety Carried by Language

In 2023, a study found that 36% of senior tech leaders surveyed were taking antidepressants. In an environment of high pressure, constant comparison, and structural instability, some of the psychological toll reaches us through a medium we rarely stop to examine: language.

When you hear the phrase “take time off,” do you notice the logic built into that word, “off”? It quietly assumes that work is the default state, and everything else is a deviation from it. You are only “off” when the machine is powered down for maintenance, or when you have drifted away from the track you were supposed to stay on.

This points to a core problem in Refactoring Experience:

When Narrative Takes Over

In my book, I define suffering as a collapse of possibility. The trouble starts when a narrative hardens into fact and life begins to narrow around it.

Below are a few common workplace phrases worth pausing over. What makes them powerful is not just that other people say them frequently, but how easily they begin speaking inside your own head without being questioned (a sign of low awareness).

“Take time off.”

What are you taking time off from? From life? The phrase quietly treats work as the default state and everything outside work as the interruption. But that gets the hierarchy backwards: work is only one activity within life.

“Move life forward.”

It suggests that if your life is not moving toward recognizable milestones, then it is not moving at all. But the road is always beneath your feet; every step you take is, by definition, forward.

The deeper problem is that someone has usually already decided what counts as “forward” before you ever get to answer the question for yourself.

“Gap year.”

You leave a job, and within hours the language is already there to explain what this period is supposed to mean. The word “gap” implies that life should unfold as one seamless sequence, and that any pause is a hole that needs to be filled. But life is not inherently linear.

“The real world.”

This is not a neutral phrase. It is a way of claiming authority over the meaning of reality itself.

It suggests that idealism, artistic inquiry, or contemplative practice belong to a protected illusion, while market logic, strategic compromise, and utilitarian grind are cast as the only things serious adults should trust.

“Ownership.”

This is a remarkably effective form of psychological conditioning. It demands that you adopt the mindset of an owner, often without granting you the rights of one. It blurs contractual boundaries, inducing you to carry anxious responsibility for assets that do not belong to you.

“Wasting time.”

Ah, this phrase. This commodifies time as something that must be spent well, invested properly, or justified through output. It makes you feel that any second without visible productivity is somehow a debt to existence.

The reality? Every second of being alive, regardless of what you do, is literally a wasting of time.

Ask Yourself

To loosen the grip of this suffering, we have to let awareness rise and put narrative back in its place. When you encounter these high-frequency workplace phrases, ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Is this describing a fact, or is it already installing a narrative?

Is it a neutral observation of what is happening, or is it already telling you what this situation is supposed to mean?

2. What is this narrative doing now that it’s in my head?

Is it helping me solve a real problem, or is it shrinking my space of experience by making me feel behind, deficient, or somehow substandard?

Most of these terms are forms of instrumental language. When you are acting as a social function—an employee, an entrepreneur, a trader—this language is efficient. But when you are trying to live as a human being (not just a role), these same words can become shackles if taken as fact.

I’ve watched this happen in my own mind too. The phrase arrives before the feeling has even had time to clarify. We must draw a line in the sand: we may operate within this language, but we must never let it become the language we use on ourselves.

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Workplace language is one way narrative takes hold. Another may be even more powerful:

the absurdities that become normal simply because they are repeated often enough and left unexamined for long enough.

That is what I want to write about next.

If this resonates, I explore the larger framework behind it in my book, Refactoring Experience.

Read the first chapter:

This post is the complete first chapter of my book, Refactoring Experience: The Anatomy of Suffering and the Illusion of Self. I’m sharing it here as a self-contained introduction to the experiments and the framework.

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Daily life comes with a set of stubborn intuitions:

“My lived experience is continuous and flowing. My feelings are certain and real. Every second, I am directly experiencing what is happening now. And through all of this, I am directing my thoughts and actions.”

It sounds airtight, doesn’t it?

Earlier, I promised that this book would attempt to take apart the structure of experience by hand—that was not a metaphor. In this chapter, we will run a few small experiments to test what feels “self-evident.”

Up close, that smooth surface may turn out to be cracked.

1.1 The Non-Flowing River

Experience is continuous… Is it?

Experiment A

Form a simple thought, such as “I want to drink water.”

Try to hold it. Repeat it quickly in your mind if you’d like to.

Eventually, it snaps. It drops out, often so abruptly that you only notice its absence after something else has already arrived.

In the instant it disappears, does it fade the way a sunset fades? Or is there simply no “in-between” to point to?

(If you catch yourself thinking about this when you’re half-asleep and the mind is messy, that’s an even better moment to watch how thoughts shift.)

Experiment B

If you clench your fist tightly, then release it, you can feel the faint tingling where fingers meet the palm. Now, rub your heel against the floor. Attend closely to the pressure and temperature at the point of contact.

Switch back and forth: Palm. Heel. Palm. Heel.

Don’t rush. Do it slowly.

Now, watch the switch itself. From palm to heel, do you notice any transition at all? Or is it simply: one moment is palm, the next moment is heel—nothing in between?

What this suggests

In memory, life experience seems continuous and flowing. But under close inspection in the present, the switch leaves no trace. Foreground content seems to update more like a slide deck than a river:

Snapshot A → [gap you can’t point to] → Snapshot B

This isn’t just a curious observation. The sense of continuity may be something stitched together afterward.

1.2 The Flattened Particles

When we say, “I am annoyed,” the feeling often presents as an indivisible chunk. But is it?

Experiment C

Bring to mind a mildly unpleasant event from recent days, perhaps a friction with a person or a situation. (There is no need to touch deep trauma; a small discomfort is sufficient for this purpose.)

Move slightly closer to the raw texture of the unpleasantness. Before naming it, step back and ask: What is the first thing that can be discerned?

• A sudden tightening in the chest?

• A constriction in the throat?

• A faint stab at the temple?

• A face or scene flashing in the mind?

• An urge to stand up and leave?

• Or a half-formed sentence: “He really is…?”

If you repeat this observation, you may notice something striking: what appeared to be a single feeling actually comes in very different textures—bodily signals, visual imagery, verbal thoughts, impulses. Sometimes, you can even detect a sequence: this first, then that.

These distinct bits fuse into a single lump, producing a subjective impression of a single coherent whole.

Language compresses it even further. Like a diner who gives the meal a one-star verdict without naming what went wrong, the mind often collapses the complexity of experience into a crude one-line remark:

“Anyway, I just feel bad.”

1.3 The Second-Hand Now

A moment ago, we glimpsed a fracture in the timeline: the “present” is not a pure tense.

Experiment D

Consider a common scenario: You send a message to someone you care about. Your phone remains silent.

Now, observe the reaction in slow motion as it rises.

Perhaps a memory flashes—a previous time you were brushed off. A thought appears: “Not again.” You might feel a faint shame, or a sudden contraction in the chest.

Notice that in this brief sequence, not everything is coming from the present.

The silence is a present fact. But the scene of being ignored is a past experience resurfacing on its own. The thought “Not again” points to history. And the shame is likely a groove worn smooth by repetition—triggered by the silence, but not strictly bound to it.

When these pieces are laid out, you may find that a substantial part of “what is happening” is actually arriving from earlier.

One might object: This is an imagined scenario, so of course it uses memory.

Then look at something physical—the cup beside you. You recognize it as a cup only because past experience participates in present vision. Without any contribution from memory, there would be no recognition of “cup”—only colors, edges, and shapes.

This applies to almost every moment of perception. The “now” is rarely a clean, isolated region. It is a superimposition: current input layered with historical input.

We believe we are living fully in the present, but much of the time, we are simply re-steeping the past in today’s water.

1.4 The Late Commentator

So far, we have exposed three cracks in the smooth surface of experience:

1. The sense of continuity breaks down (1.1).

2. The “wholeness” of feeling splits open (1.2).

3. The “present” is a superimposition of past and present (1.3).

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Now, if experience is not inherently continuous, not inherently unified, and not strictly confined to the present—where does the unshakeable sense of unity come from? Why do we feel, so powerfully, that it is me who is living through all of this?

From birth, the body changes and memory keeps changing, yet we rarely doubt the certainty of “me.” On closer inspection, however, what we call “I” is not a solid object. It is a feeling: the sense that “there is a subject here, experiencing everything.”

Experiment E

In the next few seconds, you will naturally blink. Watch closely:

Before the blink happens, do you actually experience a command that announces “the blink is about to begin”? Can you notice that the action occurs first, and the confirmation—“I just blinked”—arrives afterward?

Of course, you can decide deliberately to blink. But even then, what appears first is not a clean internal order. It is a tendency taking shape—a subtle tension forming in the eyelids. The action is already unfolding. Only afterward does the mind add its running commentary: “I did that.”

This is hard to verify because it happens fast. So let’s stretch the timeline:

Have you ever been absorbed in a movie, or deep in conversation, or caught in the moment of reading—so absorbed that you “forgot yourself”?

In those moments, there is no running voice in the mind saying “I am watching” or “I am reading.” Even the feeling that “there is an I here” may be indiscernible for minutes at a time. The sense of subjectivity simply does not arise.

It looks as if a unified “I” is undergoing everything. But the sense of subjectivity is not a commander that is always present.

It is easy to understand why “I” disappears in deep sleep. But even while awake, the sense of subjectivity is not the origin of experience, nor the one directing it from the beginning. It is often a late commentator, arriving (only sometimes) after the fact, and tagging what already happened as “I did that.”

And that immediately opens a more basic question:

If the sense of subjectivity is not the starting point, then what is experience like before any ownership or commentary appears?

This might feel like a moment of vertigo, as if the frame rate just shifted. But we aren’t losing contact with reality. We are gaining resolution.

Clarity changes the physics of suffering.

Where to go next

The rest of the framework and experiments are in the full book.

I’ll also publish new teardowns and drills here as supplemental material as I build them (no fixed schedule).

Select a feeling you would like to experience right now—sadness, joy, fear, irritation, or any state you assume you can summon.

There is one constraint: do not use memory, do not imagine a scenario, and do not deliberately adjust your breath or posture. Without relying on external or internal aids, see if this feeling can appear on its own within ten seconds.

You’ll find this difficult. Even if you drop the rules entirely, you cannot guarantee that a specific emotion will arrive on demand. Harder still: when an unwanted emotion arrives uninvited, can you simply command it to vanish?

If not, the statement “I control my own experience” starts to look less like a fact. On closer inspection, every key term in that sentence deserves to be re-examined.

Experience is where we start.

Welcome to Refactoring Experience.

Refactoring Experience means learning to see what a moment in life is made of—before it turns into a story about “me.”

It’s a way to separate what’s happening from what you’re saying about what’s happening.

Why care?

Human suffering is a collapse of possibility in life.

It tends to happen when awareness is low and structural clarity collapses. Signals, conditions, and stories fuse into a single verdict.

Refactoring experience is about rebuilding that structural clarity. This project offers a testable framework and practical teardowns to help you do that.

I use a lens called ASNA to take these loops apart:

• Appearance: Raw material of the moment. Sights, stings, and itches before they are named.

• System: The internal terrain. Your fatigue, your habits, and your physiological rhythms.

• Narrative: The mental script that tries to stitch everything together into a logical story.

• Awareness: The degree to which experience is visible in detail, across the whole field, and as distinguishable layers.

Who am I & The Approach

I’m a contemplative practitioner living in the Bay Area. My cultural background is Buddhist and Daoist.

I sometimes draw from those traditions because they offer unusually systematic ways to examine the illusion of self, the mechanics of suffering, and practices that increase structural clarity in lived experience.

I’m not trying to be a doctrine translator. What I’m trying to express is how the “self” gets assembled and how suffering can be reduced in real life, written in modern language that is precise, verifiable, and practically meaningful.

Everything I share here comes from what I’ve actually done: meditation, standing practice, reading, and repeated observation in ordinary life. If a claim can’t be tested in direct experience, I treat it as provisional.

What you’ll find here

Most newsletters are content. This one is tools.

If you subscribe, you’ll get:

• (Free) the first chapter of

  Refactoring Experience — The Anatomy of Suffering and the Illusion of Self

• Field notes that summarize the core claim, the mechanism, and the refactor

• Diagrams, checklists, and small drills for stuck days and looping nights

• An Awareness track: clarity practices drawn from Buddhism and Daoism, explained in operational, non-mystical terms

No fixed schedule. No hype.

— E. Lumen