Addressing

Addressing is a technique I use to make certain things more enjoyable. I started experimenting with it when my favorite song was Whatcha Say, by Jason Derülo, and I wanted to relate better to the lyrics.

The song's narrator is asking a girl to forgive him for cheating. There are more details on the song's page, but it's enough to say that he's not very convincing. It seems like the rhymes got decided first and any emotions were fit in after the fact.

I hadn't been cheating on anyone when I was playing the song up to two times a day, so the lyrics didn't mean much to me. I only paid attention to the sample and the auto-tune tricks. But I could never really justify feeling good about a song like that; to someone else, someone who knew a lot about infidelity, things would've been different. It seemed like I was having the wrong emotions, and that if I could just hear the song the way Derülo had intended I might like it better. And when I played it on my iPod, as a soundtrack that was composed and synchronized with my walking, I might take the short, begrudging steps of a guy feeling guilty. Maybe I'd walk with my hands in my pockets, so nobody could grab my phone to look through the text messages.

So I toyed with various solutions to make the song seem realer. They sounded great on paper, like "I could get a girlfriend and cheat on her and apologize and play this song on the way home from her apartment and see how I felt." It would probably have worked, actually, but I have a feeling it would have caused more problems than it solved.

Then I realized I should just play down the specifics. Maybe I'd imagine a song about betrayal in general instead of just cheating, and make believe I'm singing the song to someone I'd recently betrayed. I'd feel the right emotion then. Jason Derülo wouldn't mind if I added some meaning to his song like his managers added that umlaut to his name. He deserves to get repurposed. He's already done it to someone else. He'd sing "I was caught up in her lust when I don't really want no one else," and suddenly they wouldn't be bad lyrics; now they'd be about me and my own impulsive affairs. He'd be me, and maybe I'd be singing to my younger self, apologizing for ever thinking I'd be better off taking Ritalin. And suddenly the song would be beautiful.

It was settled. I'd generalize the lyrics and then pretend I was singing them to whoever made sense. Over time it mutated into what I now call "addressing."

How It Works

You can do it to just about any experience. You just have to be willing to admit that your brain doesn't always know what's good for it. And you have to OK with ordering it around sometimes.

Technically, what's going on is an awareness and manipulation of your own confirmation bias. Normally, you're unconscious of the way your brain forms opinions and categorizes the world, and a lot of the conclusions you make that way would seem illogical if you thought about them in someone else. You can toy with this on a basic level; people who call themselves optimists do it when they "look on the bright side"; pessimists do it when they try to "be realistic." But the minute you admit that some opinions might be better for you than others, and that you can decide which ones to pick out, something different happens.

Addressing is just a