Daniel Goleman, on page eight of Emotional Intelligence, a book my wife gave me as a gift, makes a quiet claim that he then spends three hundred more pages documenting.
"In a very real sense, we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels."
Civil. Accurate. Beautifully framed. The thing Goleman is too professional to put on page eight, the thing the book documents without ever quite naming, is that those two minds are not equal partners and society has a preference between them so violent it makes the preference look like nature. One mind pays the bills. The other one cries in the shower. Guess which one gets the corner office.
I want to name something the book made visible to me, sitting now (with a coffee, with the survivors of my own family, with a roof that belongs to me on paper) on the other side of a long period during which I was, functionally, an organism with one and a half brains. I want to call this period the maintenance years. I want to call the mind that ran them the maintenance mind. Not because Goleman uses the term, he does not, but because the polite phrase "rational mind" undersells what is actually happening when the rational mind is asked to run the shop alone. It is not rational, in those years. It is operational. It is middle management. It is the part of you that signs the contracts on behalf of the part of you that was not invited to the meeting.
The script you are handed (the one your parents recite to you, the one your country recites to your parents, the one capital recites to your country) is not a complicated script. Build a family. Buy a house. Get a career. Three sentences. A whole life. The script does not ask whether you have two minds or one or seven; the script needs a delivery date and a signature. The signature is procured by the maintenance mind, because the other mind has handwriting like a teenager in a notebook and tends to put commas where the bank wants stamps. So you do the sensible thing, which is what I did, which is what most of us do, which is sit the feeling mind down in a cardboard box, put the box in a storage facility somewhere in the inferior parietal lobe of the soul, label it do not open until further notice and get on with delivering the goods.
I wish I had the bravery to say no to the script. I did not.
I wrote, a lot, before the maintenance years began. Then I stopped. I did not stop because I decided to stop, which is the part of this that took me twenty years to understand. I stopped because writing was the only language the feeling mind had ever been allowed to speak in my life, and the moment I put that mind in storage the language went with it. There was no announcement. There was no ceremony. There was just a long quiet during which I assumed I had outgrown something, because the maintenance mind is excellent at building flattering explanations for the absences it engineers. You grew up. You got serious. You stopped being self-indulgent. Bloody hell. I had not grown up. I had outsourced the half of myself that knew how to grow, and the other half had filed a report saying the work was complete. Fucking Goleman, he just devastated me.
The maintenance mind is not a villain. It is not cruel. It is not even unkind. It is the part of you that loved your parents and wanted to please them. If you think about it, just like a dog. I have been a dog. But I digress with my feelings here... so back... It is the part that understood the mortgage application. It is the part that showed up at the hospital with the right paperwork on the right day. The feeling mind would have showed up too, but it would have been weeping in the lobby and the bank would have called security. So you send the maintenance mind. You always send the maintenance mind. After a while you forget that you ever had a choice about who to send.
Goleman's other line, the one I have been circling:
"These two minds, the emotional and the rational, operate in tight harmony for the most part, intertwining their very different ways of knowing to guide us through the world."
The full version is that the harmony is real only when both minds are on the floor. The maintenance years are the years when one of them is in storage and the other is grateful for the solitude, because partnership is hard work and tyranny is efficient. The intertwining stops the moment the mortgage application opens. The intertwining resumes, if it resumes, only after the deliverables are delivered, and not always then. Some people never reopen the box. They die with the storage receipt still in their wallet.
I am not writing this to recommend my way. There is no way. There is what happens, and then there is what you do with what happened. I delivered the script. House, family, career, the three nouns of the contract. I am not sorry I delivered them; I am also not proud of having delivered them, because pride and shame are both feeling-mind operations and during the maintenance years they were unavailable for comment. I just delivered. The maintenance mind drove the car. The feeling mind sat in the box. The body did the work. Twenty years passed in what felt, internally, like a long Tuesday afternoon.
Then something opens. In my case it was reading Goleman, on a sofa, with the deliverables visibly delivered around me. The book did not change my life, the book named my life. It said the word "two" out loud at a moment when I had been running on one. The maintenance mind, hearing the count, glanced at its watch and admitted the contract had quietly expired some time ago and nobody had thought to tell it to stop. The feeling mind, hearing the count, started moving in the box. You could hear it the way you hear something move in the attic at three in the morning and you tell yourself it is a pipe and you know it is not a pipe.
What does a feeling mind do when it comes out of storage. It writes. It rages. It mourns the years it missed. It looks at the family you built and notices, for the first time, that you love them; it looks at the house you bought and notices it is not just a balance sheet, it is rooms; it looks at the career you ran and notices that some of it was joy. The feeling mind does the work the maintenance mind could not do, which is to feel what the maintenance mind was building. The deliverables become real. The contract becomes a life. It is not romantic. It is not transcendent. It is the simple fact that one half of you finally meets the other half on the floor of the same room, twenty years after it was supposed to.
(I started to digress again, truly sorry, do not give up on me yet.)
The part of this I want to be careful about, because the voice I write in does not allow softness without earning it, is the part where I say I made peace with myself. I did. The peace is real. It is also not a thing I am selling. Peace, in this context, is not the wellness-influencer peace; it is not the meditation-app peace; it is not the peace your therapist signs off on at the end of the engagement. It is the much smaller, much more boring fact that the two minds are both back on the floor, neither of them is in charge any more and the management vacancy is no longer being filled. The maintenance mind has been decommissioned. The feeling mind has been let out of the box. They are wary of each other. They are learning to share an office. That is not a triumph. That is just Tuesday.
If there is anything in this for you, the reader, it is not a method. There is no method. You will deliver your version of the script on your version of the schedule and you will lose your version of the feeling mind to your version of the cardboard box and you will read your version of Emotional Intelligence on your version of the sofa with your version of the deliverables visibly delivered around you. Or you will not. Some people read the book at twenty and skip the maintenance years entirely. Some people never read the book and live their whole lives running on one mind. Most of us do what I did, which is the long way around, which is to abandon a part of ourselves so completely that we have to be told by a paperback that the part existed.
Goleman could not write what I am about to write because his book was published in 1995 and the year matters. The maintenance mind, the one that signs the contracts and delivers the script and does not weep in the lobby, is the part of a human being a machine can already do. Much of what I did in the maintenance years (the schedule-running, the paperwork, the optimisation of household logistics, the parts of careers and mortgages that consist of forms) is now done faster and cheaper by software, by spreadsheets, by the polite chatbots my employer pays a subscription for. More of it will be by next quarter. The maintenance mind is the part of us the machines have already eaten. What they cannot eat, until somebody installs an emotional chip in Commander Data (and even in the fiction Data spends three films learning to integrate the thing; integration is not optional and it is not free), is the feeling mind. The machines can simulate it, fluently, at scale, in any tone you ask for. The simulation is excellent and getting better. The simulation is also, and this is the part that matters, not the thing. A chatbot does not feel what it tells you it feels. A spreadsheet does not regret. The feeling mind is the only part of you that is uncopyable, because copying it would require having one.
So when you put your feeling mind in storage to deliver the script, you have not become more efficient. You have become more replaceable. The maintenance years are not just years you lose to yourself. They are the years during which you voluntarily impersonated the machine that will, in due course, do your old job better than you did it.
Goleman is correct. We have two minds. He is being polite about the maintenance years because his book is for everyone and a book for everyone cannot afford to say what I am saying. I have no such constraint. So I will say it. The two minds are not partners during the contract years; they are accomplices, with one of them in a stress position. The harmony Goleman describes is the post-contract harmony, the harmony of people who have served their time and been released on parole. It is real. It is also expensive. The price is the years.
I do not recommend the maintenance years. I do not warn against them. I am only telling you that they happened, that the box was not empty when I opened it and that the thing inside, against the odds and against the trend of the century, is the only part of me a machine cannot make.
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