Everyday Systems: Podcast : Episode 100

Mantrafication Clip Show

Welcome to the 100th episode of the Everyday Systems podcast! The jubilee. The episode of episodes.

Whenever any series reaches a milestone like this, there’s gotta be some kind of retrospective. A lot of times these are really lame and tedious, and lazy, just recycling a lot of old material instead of doing anything new. “Clip show” is the industry term for this. But there’s no way around it. It’s a cultural requirement—the gravitational pull of the nice round number.

So here’s what I thought I’d do: I’ll do a clip show, sure, I will honor the conventions of the genre. But rather than just a greatest hits, I’ll do it in a potentially useful way, not just for nostalgia. And in the process I will do another one of my re-presentations of an older system, and finally fulfill a vague promise I made 50 episodes ago, all at the same time.

What I’m going to do is to revisit Mantrafication, the system that rebooted the Everyday Systems podcast in 2020, after an almost four year hiatus, and present clips from my actual recorded mantras, as I murmured then that I might someday do.

Why mantrafication? Well, for one thing, if I’m going to do a clip show, there are clips involved. But also because, as I’ll explain, it provides a compressed representation of all of the Everyday Systems I am practicing. So it’s part tour, so you can see how these systems fit together and maybe become aware of some you didn’t even know existed, and part tool, a mechanism you too can use to tie your various habit systems together.

I don’t get the sense that mantrafication has had anywhere near the same resonance as systems like No S or Shovelglove, or even personal punch cards, but it’s definitely had as much impact on my life and creative efforts as any of these, and I feel a special affection for it because it marked this turnaround both for me personally, and for this podcast. So I want to give it another chance to register with people because I think it really could be genuinely useful. I was little out of practice podcasting that first time I presented it, and I’ve now had five additional years to refine the system itself, which has gotten a lot simpler, and I think more approachable. The basic idea is the same, but the process is a lot less fussy.

OK, so what is a mantra, in the context of this system? It’s very simple. It’s a sort of self-pep talk that I record for myself and listen to every day. I use the term “mantra” both to describe each individual exhortation in this pep talk, and sometimes also a recorded set of them, a bunch of mantras in a single recording. My mantras are often about Everyday Systems I’m practicing, but not always. And they're not a giant exhaustive list. They’re just the hard parts. Just the most important parts, that I am struggling with most, and know I need to get better at.

Why do this? Why is it helpful?

This part I think I expressed pretty well the first time around, Clip number one:

In other words (this is 2025 Reinhard speaking again): Your mantras are not so much a reminder as a ritualized recommitment.

Why speak them into the recorder, vs. just writing them down?

Again, I think I got that part pretty well last time:

What I did NOT do so well in that original episode was give good general advice for how to put together the scripts for your mantras. I gave a lot of very precise, overcomplicated instructions about viewing each element as a contract you are making with yourself, and using a specific kind of index card to write them out. I don’t want to knock it completely, it was helpful for the specific problem I was most focused on then, glass ceiling, but having gone through several generations of mantras now, for a wide variety of problems, I no longer think such an involved process is necessary and is probably even distracting.

Here’s what you do instead, this is the simplified process: just ask yourself: what do I need to be reminded of every morning? What commitments? To myself and to other people? What are the positive habits that I keep neglecting? And on the other hand, what are the dangerous habits, and habits of thought that I need to be careful not to keep falling into? What situations do I need to be particularly mindful of?

Then come up with a bunch of imperative statements: do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that. But also: remember this, remember that. Keep this in mind when that happens. Write out these statements into a little script, however you like, yes, even in a google doc. You don’t have to use an index card. I use a google doc because it’s easier to revise.

You can write these statements out as one undifferentiated list, or break them up into categories. For the last few years, I’ve been using my usual categories of body, soul and spirits, so three categories.

I used to break up my mantras even further than this, by the particular problem they were addressing. And I would make a separate recording per problem. The idea was then that if I had to change something I would just have to re-record the one problem-specific mini mantra rather than the whole thing. But this modularization actually made it more complex. The truth is, if you have to make a change to one of your mantras, it’s not that hard to re-record a few minute thing just for yourself vs. managing all these files. Maybe save up till you’ve got a few changes, but still, it’s not that hard. The modularization was premature optimization. It wasn’t worth it. So for the last few years I just have one, active combined mantras script and file. This is the one file I listen to every day—until I revise it and rerecord and replace it, every few months, or more recently, just once a year.

So: when you feel like you’ve got your one combined script about right, and this can take a few weeks, stick the date at the top, because at some point in the future you’re going to want to revise or totally replace you mantra and it can be interesting to see how they’ve evolved without having to do digital forensics looking at timestamps and whatnot. The date is enough. You don’t have to give version numbers like I suggested in the original script. Then bust out the recorder or voice memo app and hit record. If you fumble too much or totally hate it, like, some line sounds very different than it looks and you feel like an asshole saying it, make some minor tweaks to the script, and rerecord. But don’t fuss too much. Little mistakes and “what was I thinkings?” that make it into the recording can actually be helpful as a device to jolt you into attention when you are listening to them. A little irritant that keeps you from zoning out completely as you become all too familiar with it. It also painfully, repeatedly but very effectively clarifies how you should do it better next time.

There is something inherently ridiculous about mantrafication, like, Stuart Smalley meets Krapp's Last Tape. But that’s good. The ridiculousness is good. But you have to savor it properly. You can laugh at it while you’re recording just to show that you get the joke. You have to play it deadpan. Like those little mistakes I just mentioned, the deadpan absurdity gives you another jolt when you listen to it, to make you pay attention—and it does more than that.

“Hey, wait a minute, what if someone thinks I don’t get it?” you might feel yourself reacting. And then, hopefully, you’ll feel silly for feeling this pang of absurd vanity, for thinking that anyone would care at all what you are saying to yourself in your recorder—for even wanting someone to care. And then you will have the opportunity to benignly accept your own silliness, which is a good, spiritually important thing to practice. An exercise in productive humility.

I used the term “pep talk” earlier. That is not quite right and unfortunately there is no term that is quite right, which is partly why I had to invent this thing. Pep talk calls to mind self affirmations. That’s not what this is. This is not, “I’m great, I’m fine, yay me.” This is not about BSing yourself. This is about accepting yourself when necessary, and pushing yourself, when possible.

You can think of it like a personalized, secular serenity prayer. It’s like a todo list template in the spirit of the serenity prayer. Now, I don’t say “secular” to knock prayer—I pray too. J.S. Bach wrote hundreds of religious cantatas, but he also wrote the coffee cantata, and it wasn’t because he was having a crisis of faith. There is a time for prayer, there is a time for coffee, and there is a time for whatever this is.

Eventually, probably quite quickly when you are new to mantrafication, the content of your mantra will diverge somewhat from what is most pressing and important in your life. Then it’s time to rescript, and re-record — and then you can address some of those irritating errors that have been driving you crazy. When I was starting out with mantrafication, this happened every few months, sometimes every few weeks. For the last three years, I’ve gone down to just once a year, both because I’ve stabilized, partly because of the good effects of my mantras, some of the problems they were addressing got solved, and partly because I’ve gotten better at writing them, better at seeing what is of enduring importance for me and coming up with “keeper” mantras that stay valid longer.

When should you listen to your mantras? Ideally, early in the day, as part of your morning self-reboot routine, if you have one, so you are firmly recommitted for the day before you can possibly run into any challenges to these commitments. I do it while I’m walking my cat, around 6am. But sometimes I have to do it at other times, and when I do, instead of feeling bad about not having done it at the proper time, I try to look at it as an opportunity: I try to let the unfamiliar time and surroundings revive the tired old routine of listening to these words, breathe fresh life into them. Maybe I’ll hear them now in a new way. I try to lean into it.

Even if you have a day when you do the opposite. If you play your mantra recording as usual and it’s become so routine that you barely even hear it, the knowledge that you have played it, that you have enacted this ritualized recommitment has some value. It’s a kind of an oath, and oaths are valid, and psychologically compelling, even if you spaced out while taking it. Not that you should space out every day during your mantras, but it will happen, and you shouldn’t get too freaked out when it occasionally does. If it starts happening all the time, that is a sign that maybe it’s time for a new set of mantras, something fresher that hits you harder. But keep listening to your old ones until you have a replacement.

If you speak or aspire to speak more than one language, one thing you can do to both practice your other language and give a jolt of freshness to your mantra is to translate it into that language and record it. AI makes this super easy even if you aren’t 100% confident in your translation abilities and the process is actually a lot of fun and interesting. I’ve done this for my mantras in German and French and am experimenting with Spanish. I listen to these at least on the days of the week I’ve associated with the study of these languages: Dienstag and Donnerstag for Deutsch, Friday for francais, etc.

OK, now you have the up-to-date theory, let me give you that clip of my actual, current mantra that I promised you, and which, given the length of this wind-up, I must be pretty desperately trying to avoid. It’s one thing, I guess, to do humility exercises for yourself, another for the internet. So lest I feel the temptation to give even more wind up to put it off even further, to maybe never, let me get this thing over with already. If there are bits you don’t immediately understand, don’t stress, I’ll explain and excuse as necessary afterwards.

Ready? See how many individual Everyday Systems you can pick out. Here goes:

OK. That was it. Three months old at this point, and if I played you the previous mantra, which lasted a full year (don’t worry I won’t!) you’d hear that there are very few differences. My Mantra text has been pretty stable these last few years.

How many systems did you pick out? I get 9 or 10, depending on what qualifies as a system. As many as 11 if you count systems I haven’t described yet.

I lead with a non-system, although maybe it should be one: remembering other people. Both because it’s most important, and something I am most likely to neglect. I mean, there’s something inherently pretty self absorbed about talking to yourself into a tape recorder, and in general about self-help. So I’ve got to try to correct for that right up front.

Because I have a bit of a paranoid streak, and sometimes feel like an alien or some other species among humans, a demihuman, I like to remind myself of this lovely German term that the psychologist Alfred Adler liked to use, “Mitmenschen.” It means literally, “with people,” or “fellow humans” or “co-humans.” But I also hear the Yiddish word mensch here, as in, “he’s a real Mensch,” which gives it an additional warmth. It helps me remember that probably everyone sometimes feels like a demihuman, trapped in ourselves and isolated from the real humans, and that far from separating us, we’ve all got that in common, that feeling, and that in some important way we’re all on the same side, or at least in the same situation.

I sometimes pause the recorder after the “take a moment to think about them” part to actually think about someone in particular, and what they might need from me. Sometimes something concrete and actionable occurs to me that I might not have thought of otherwise.

Spider Hunter, my CBT game for anxiety, appears in all three sections, which may seem surprising, but because it’s been so successful for me in its original, anxiety-focused version, I’ve branched out with expansion packs for other problems that are less directly anxiety related, like sleep and getting to work on time. With me, everything is at least a little anxiety related, so none of this is such a huge stretch.

TLAYS – todo lists are your salvation, and TLAYD, todo lists are your damnation, are two equal but opposite truths I have to keep in mind at all times.Goal vs. No Goal. Taken together, they’re an important special case of Allocation Mind– which hopefully does make sense in the recording, and has become increasingly important to me as I strive to come to terms with my limitations.

Glass ceiling writ large (my system for regulating alcoholic beverages and other psychotropic substances) remains a disproportionately large issue. As you may remember, I spent a lot of time wrestling with this in overcomplicated ways in my original mantras. The difference is I’ve made a huge amount of progress in the meantime. I drink a lot less. I take a lot less ativan. I never mix the two. I’ve chased the enemy back to the gates of Mordor. But the enemy still exists, and is still dangerous, and I have to spend a fair amount of time talking to myself about him.

I don’t mention the No S Diet or anything about diet at all explicitly. Because at this point I’m not really struggling with it. It’s not that I never have to think about it, that I never feel challenged, say, by what to do about a bunch of potential S days coming up for holidays or vacation, but it doesn’t rise to the chronic, persistent level of my other challenges, and I know, from decades of experience now, that I can handle them.

Zeno’s Paradox Exercise Progress plan is probably the most important element of my body mantra section, and I imagine as I get older, that will be only more so. The real challenge of exercise for me these days, and I suspect most middle-aged and older people, is “injury management,” dealing with actual, potential, and lingering injuries: How to avoid them, how to bounce back from them, how to do something at least but not too much while you are recovering from them. I sometimes joke that I’m grateful when I only have one injury at a time. People who are 10 years older than me don’t even get the joke because their litany of injuries is too long. So hubris—doing too much and then injuring yourself—and despair, flopping out and doing nothing at all when you are injured, these are the Scylla and Charybdis we have to sail between. Zeno’s paradox is my compass for that.

Greenishness also makes multiple appearances: Looking for ever so slightly more, sustainably more green in the color scale conditionally formatted fields of my lifelog spreadsheet. It’s not unrelated to Zeno’s Paradox, to making the smallest possible and not getting unsustainably far ahead of myself and then bouncing back from the inevitable reversals. It’s the visualization of Zeno’s paradox. You don’t want to make too much progress all at once, because how are you going to get green again next month, if you’re raised the bar too high? You want to set yourself up for continuous, sustainable slow progress, and all the psychological benefits that brings.

Last comment about my current mantra: Misha is my cat, the heir to Gingi and Zippy, the Shovelglove cats. I take him on a walk every morning, on a leash. It makes me look a little crazy, like, there goes the crazy cat man, so another good humility exercise. And it has other soulful benefits as well, as I’ll discuss in more detail in a future episode.

My current recording, the one I just played you, is four minutes and 53 seconds. A little longer than I would like, almost a minute longer than the year before. It was hard to cut and there were a few new lines I wanted to squeeze in. I try to ask myself: What is necessary for me, now? I don’t want to keep something in just because it is a good line, “a darling,” or because I needed it last year. It has to be something I still need, this year, right now. August, on my longer vacation, is when I tend to reflect on and review and rewrite these, with a little helpful distance and perspective, and this August I’m hoping to be able to bring myself to do more culling than adding.

But for today, I think I’ve said enough. I hope you can now see how Mantrafication might be helpful for you too. I might stick some older, interim recordings on the transcript for download if you are curious to see how they’ve evolved, or maybe inspire you in your approach to a problem that was a live issue for me for a while, but no longer. And please feel free to share anything you’ve come up with with me, scripts or actual recordings. I promise you I will not find them boring, no matter how mundane, cryptic and awkward. I’ll read them with love and interest, as one demihuman Mitmensch sharing his struggles with another.

Thanks for listening.

By Reinhard Engels

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