Or: why a forty-six-year-old man recoils from an unwashed plate — an investigative report in the case of János
If your childhood surroundings kept signalling that everything that exists is a problem to be dealt with, then as an adult your plate will look like a problem too — and that will make you not just tired but, sooner or later, depressed. The good news is that vectors can move.
Ha ezt a bekezdést gond nélkül elolvassa, Önnek nem ez a kiadás kell: az eredeti, lábjegyzetek nélküli mese a tanul.io/lusta címen várja. Ha viszont egy szót sem ért belőle, kérjük, ne aggódjon, és főleg ne tekintse elintézendőnek: pontosan Önnek írtuk, ami ezután következik.
P.S. If the paragraph above means nothing to you, do not worry about it. In the spirit of this essay: it is not a task. Keep scrolling.
Once upon a time there was a man — let us call him János — who, one Wednesday afternoon, caught sight of yesterday's dinner plate in the sink. On the plate slumbered a small memorial to a tomato sauce, decorated with a few stuck grains of rice, like the little stone statues on a mausoleum. János was forty-six years old, paid his taxes honestly, and maintained a startlingly functional, mutually agreed arrangement with a colleague named Krisztina. And yet — as he looked at that plate, something dark and ancient growled awake inside him.
Pronounced YAH-nosh. The Hungarian John. Statistically, every third Hungarian man of a certain age is a János; most of the rest are called László, and both have learned not to expect the barista to spell it right. The Guide notes that in Hungarian literature, when an author wants an everyman, he reaches for a János the way English reaches for a John Doe — except János also has to wash up.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't tired. And yet he felt that instead of washing the plate he would much rather walk down to the Danube and watch a grass snake practise its figure-eights for an hour. He did, for the record, eventually wash the plate — eight minutes later, after a single existential bead of sweat had completed its descent. But the question stayed in the air, giggling, like a satisfied ghost:
And here it is worth pausing, because behind that question, if you listen quietly, you can hear another one. Why does the sheer fact of existence hurt us — adult, educated, vitamin-supplemented people — whenever existence is measured out to us in the form of a task?
Given: one human infant. Let us call him János, to save ourselves the trouble of inventing a new name. In his first year of life, infant János works exactly one job: mapping the world. He is like a very small geographer with no equipment and no language, but in possession of a sophisticated neural net that wires and unwires a thousand synapses per second according to what follows what.
Around János, however, peace does not reign. Around János, things happen. His father is up fixing the roof, because it leaks. His mother is on the phone with the insurance company, because there is a number that does not add up. Grandmother arrives, and something must be sorted out at the records office. The dog has escaped and must be found. The declaration must be submitted. The bill must be paid. The soup must be cooked. Life is a grey weave of things-to-be-dealt-with.
Hungarian possesses a single word — elintézendő — for "a thing that exists only in order to be dealt with." English needs a relative clause; Hungarian needs a suffix. The language maintains an entire grammatical mood for pending chores, which tells you something about the training data. The Guide recommends not asking a Hungarian how many elintézendő they currently have. They will tell you.
From all this, infant János understands exactly one thing: if something exists, then something must be done about it. Because that is how the adults behave. The adults never sit down with a tomato and simply contemplate the tomato. The tomato becomes soup, becomes pickles, or becomes rubbish. But something happens to the tomato. The tomato is a thing-to-be-dealt-with.
And here comes the heart of the theory, best captured with a modern and fashionable analogy: the human mind is a gigantic vector database. Every concept lives somewhere inside it, and the distances between concepts matter. Two concepts that are seen together often drift closer in the many-dimensional space. It is like the little workers around the queen in a beehive: the more often a route is walked, the more thoroughly it is trodden in.
In infant János's brain, the concept of "trouble" / "something exists" / "something is the matter" and the concept of "must be handled" / "something must be done" / "this requires stress" appear together with astonishing frequency. Two things that never go anywhere separately. Like an elderly couple who accompany each other even to the bathroom.
And the brain, which learns, ties them into a knot.
The knot is small. The knot is invisible. But the knot stays there for forty-five years, and János will know nothing about it — except that on Wednesday afternoons, for some reason, a single plate is enough to paralyse him.
The years pass. János grows up. He has a profession, a flat, toothpaste (two kinds: one whitening, one for sensitive gums). And then, one Wednesday afternoon, he sees a plate.
The plate, as such, is a neutral object. A round porcelain disc. An archaic instrument with which people have been feeding themselves for millennia. It should not produce an emotional reaction.
Except that in János's brain the plate is not a plate. The plate is a thing-to-be-dealt-with. And the concept "to-be-dealt-with" — as we have seen — strolls hand in hand with the concept "trouble" through the dim alleys of the vector space. So when János sees an undealt-with plate, the following sentence sounds in his mind, silently but persuasively:
"THERE IS TROUBLE."
He does not feel "ah, an object that needs cleaning, this will be a roughly four-minute task." He feels trouble, trouble, trouble, urgently, and I am the one who has to solve it, and I have already solved so much today, and I might not manage to solve it, and then there will be bigger trouble, and then…
All of this from one plate. A plate that can, for the record, be washed in four minutes.
The phenomenon is not confined to plates. In János's life, every thing-to-be-dealt-with sets off the same little domino run. An email that must be written. A letter from the tax office that must be opened. A dentist's appointment that must be booked. Each one a tiny plate, and behind each one, standing in silent formation, the giant of "TROUBLE", two heads taller than the task itself.
This is why János procrastinates. This is why János falls asleep on the sofa. This is why János opens a notification-free phone twelve times a day, so that he does not have to look at his inbox. János is not lazy. János is conditioned.
And this is an entirely classic avoidance cycle. János procrastinates, because every task carries far more emotional load than it warrants. Then the procrastination breeds a second layer of "trouble", because now the procrastinating itself is trouble. And then comes a third layer: it is trouble that even his baseline mood has gone tired and flat from all the trouble. And this third layer is commonly known as depression.
From this angle, depression is not a mood disorder. Depression is a thoroughly overtrained database, one that answers every incoming stimulus with the label "this hurts now". And the most painful part is that it answers every stimulus that way — including the ones that would be joy in a healthy brain. An invitation from friends: to-be-dealt-with. A birthday: to-be-dealt-with. A beautiful autumn afternoon: to-be-dealt-with, because one really ought to go out, see it, experience it, organise it.
But how do we know the mechanism really works this way? Is this just witty speculation, or is there serious neuroscientific and clinical ground under it?
The surprising answer: there is, and not a little. Several independent research traditions describe precisely this dynamic — in different languages, in different decades.
When János freezes in front of the plate, no mystery is taking place inside him — several well-documented psychological processes are holding a meeting. It is just rare for anyone to describe them in a way that rhymes with a Wednesday afternoon.
If the theory is true — and it largely is — then two things follow.
János is not mad, and he is not lazy either. The forty-six-year-old sweat response at the sight of a plate is the precise, faithful, and tragically obsolete execution of a childhood data-processing routine. The brain is not making an error. The curriculum expired.
The vectors sit close together, but nobody nailed them there. CBT, schema therapy and ACT are, in essence, the craft of re-teaching the brain to store these concepts a little further apart.
Learning that a plate is just a plate. An email is just an email. A thing-to-be-dealt-with is not the same as trouble.
This is not quick. The vectors were trodden in over years, and over years they can be rearranged. But they can. And while the rearranging is under way, one exercise helps: the next time János sees a plate and feels the small dark growl, he can try naming it:
And it is conceivable — with low probability and much repetition — that one Wednesday afternoon János will almost see a plate, feel a mild interest in it, and think: what a handsome circle.
The vector-database image does not offer itself for this phenomenon by accident. Modern machine learning rhymes with the human brain precisely because it follows the same logic — only more discreetly, more numerically, and with fewer childhood grievances.
And here is an important detail: it is not necessarily the quantity of problems that encodes this pattern, but their emotional background hum. There are families with fewer problems, where every act of problem-solving nonetheless happens in a tense, dramatic, urgent key — and the child learns exactly the same vector conversation, only in rarer, more concentrated doses. The child does not learn the problem. The child learns the music that accompanies the problem.
And now, while János sits on the Danube bank, not washing the plate but watching the grass snake, he may be learning something new this very minute. Because the vectors — stubborn as they are — really can move. A bird flies over his head, and János feels no obligation whatsoever to do something about the bird. The bird is just a bird. And it is possible that in János's brain, at this very moment, a small vector worker picks up a spade and begins to pry that old, old knot apart by a hair's breadth.
A second before heading home, János thinks: tomorrow there will be a plate again. Perhaps two plates. But now, for these six minutes, the riverbank is about neither. The riverbank is just a riverbank. And the riverbank — for the first time in his life — is not a thing-to-be-dealt-with.
Like the bird. Like the water. Like last night's tomato sauce, which is, in the end, only tomato sauce, and whoever washes it off — or doesn't — remains the same person either way.
And perhaps, slowly, vector by vector, the old knot can be untied.