I keep thinking about why the “rewire your brain” language became so dominant. I think it’s because it flatters us. It tells us change is clean and efficient. That it’s a matter of finding the right technique and applying it correctly.

The organic metaphor is less flattering. It says change takes time. It says you can’t control it, only influence it. It says some things need to decompose before new things can grow, and that decomposition is uncomfortable and slow and not something you can optimise your way through.

But the organic metaphor has one advantage the mechanical one doesn’t. It’s true to how change actually happens. And working with truth, even uncomfortable truth, produces results that working with a comfortable fiction never will.