Seven Layers Deep: Understanding Your Life Through Bean Dip

You’re trapped at a mind-numbing party, and it’s as exciting as listening to your spouse retell the same story for the 389th time. The guests bore you more than reading your friend’s fanfic, the 2010s-era playlist grates like zesting a lemon onto an open wound, and there are odd noises coming from behind the bathroom door that’s been locked since you arrived. 

Then, you see it. Across the room, next to a strategically placed bag of chips, salvation. Seven. Layer. Bean. Dip. Hope is kindled. 

You make your way over, ready to immerse yourself in its depths of flavor and mouth feel. But then you notice something. Why are there scrapings off the top? It’s as though someone took a chip and only got onions on it, maybe a drop of salsa juice. 

You watch in horror as one of the stock fish posing as guests does just that. A chip dabs at the surface of the dip like an astronaut bouncing off the atmosphere on reentry. The offender walks away, ignorant of the missed flavors waiting just below the surface. 

That flavorless philistine is you, dear reader, and the party is your life. You have been scraping the surface of true depth, but I am here to show you the way. To truly live, you must plunge deep into the layers of life’s bean dip, coming out the other side a more complete person. 

What separates a tasteless life from one swimming in flavor is the dip of the mind—thinking. Far too often, we splash in the shallow puddles of instinct—the chopped onions and sliced olives, as it were. We leave behind the meat and beans only earned through the hard, pure sweat of the mind. Surface scrapers get surface lives.

Going just one or two layers deep with our thoughts is a recipe for disaster. Instead, one should approach important topics just like one would a delicious bean dip—seven layers deep. 

I wrote recently on the critical thinking crisis, but this Wandering will go—dare I say it—a little deeper. Up front, this is not therapy or academic naval gazing. This is a simple technique you use to understand your own thoughts, or complete lack thereof. It takes you from a reactive life to an intentional one. A few minutes of thought, some existential angst; now you’re off to the races. 

Come, friend. Plunge into the depths with me and taste the flavors of life you have yet to realize you’ve missed. 

Putting the Critical in Thinking

There’s an old joke about how 50% of Americans are dumber than the most average person you know (that’s right, statistics jokes!). We can leverage that point further. How many deep thinkers do you know? I’m going to guess not many. 

So if we did that same 50% judgement, where do you think the average American lies on the shallow to deep thinker scale? Something tells me it’s not a nice, even bell curve. One step further: if the majority of folks are on the shallow side, statistically, where do you think you are?

This isn’t entirely your fault. We live in unprecedented times, where you are expected to always be connected, always be moving, always be hustling. We dance on the strings of algorithms run on supercomputers, and our 1.0 version brains still identify the sugar in Twinkies as a survival boon. Is it any wonder most of us live in a shallowness of thinkers?

That said, we make a lot of decisions that have major impacts. It’s worth knowing that the information and beliefs feeding those decisions are well-informed and not slopped from some algorithmic feeding trough. 

Questions like what career to undertake, qualities that matter in a partner, political beliefs, life goals—these deserve your time. But if your response as to why you believe what you do on any weighty topic is “That’s what I’ve always thought,” then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Don’t just take my word for it. The psychology field is littered with papers talking about how people with deeper self-reflection make better decisions or how shallow thinking leads to superficial life outcomes. Harvard Business Review even wrote a whole piece on how reflection is what separates great professionals from the mediocre masses. 

If we don’t ask ourselves why we think the things we think, we sacrifice our agency to external forces. Maybe it’s your parents, or your instagram feed, or that one coworker that never shuts up about turmeric. Whatever the source, if it’s not you, that comes at a cost. And my friend, that cost is rarely one we enjoy paying. 

The Seven Layer Technique

Here’s what we’re going to do. I will go spelunking with you through all seven layers of the bean dip. We’ll blow past the surface levels most people pretend to be satisfied with. Then we’ll move into the layers where you start uncovering inherited beliefs versus personal convictions. After that, there’s the zone where you discover uncomfortable truths and core values. And finally, we reach the bottom of the bean dip—your authentic foundation. 

Are you ready? You look ready. Here’s the technique, in all its complexity and glory:

Ask yourself “why” seven times

That’s it. This is dipthinking at its finest. Just like losing weight, there’s no need for fancy fads or photoshopped Instagram models—calories out must exceed calories in, period dot. As Bruce Lee said, “the height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” You’ll walk away from this with a practice tool to use on any important belief or decision, and the confidence that comes with knowing your thoughts are your own. 

One warning, before we begin. Just like how a proper bean dip will lay waste to an unprepared digestive system, this process may cause some discomfort. You will likely discover that some beliefs you’ve held close you don’t actually own, and that can lead to some hard questions. But those are questions worth asking to discover who you are, so lean into the struggle. 

Now grab your chips and let’s dig in. 

How to Dipthink

As we begin this journey into the dip of life’s greatest questions, we must remember to start at the beginning: the question. This is your chip, the conveyance upon which the flavor of the dip is transported to your taste buds. 

The most important aspect of your chip is that it has heft. You’re about to load up seven different layers of meaning on it—that requires significant tensile strength. A weak chip will snap under the pressure, just like a weak question will fail to pull as much from the process as a strong question would. 

Running the question why you wanted a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch is like expecting a translucent potato chip to hold anything beyond a thin layer of oil without snapping like a twig. Asking why you can’t stop eating those potato chips even though they go against what you think are your weight loss goals, however… now we’ve got a solid tortilla chip ready for serious spelunking. 

Let’s pick a chip we all might relate to as an example: why do I want this job? Onto the first stop on our journey, the surface scrape. 

Layers 1 and 2: The Surface Scrape

As our question chip submersible begins its voyage, we start at the first layer: the onions of instinct. Like when you cut into an onion, this is what slaps you in the face and turns you away. It’s instinctive, with little thought behind it if there’s any at all.

In our example, let’s say the instinctive answer as to why you want this job is because it pays well. Simple, clean, and shallow. It fakes doing the job of real thought well enough that many people would stop there. Woe unto such misled souls. Deeper we go. 

We pass the onions and find ourselves in the olives of false security. For most, this second layer is what passes for deep thinking. They have taken things one step farther, and thinking they now have the giant shoulders others might stand on, pat themselves on the back and call it good. Again, woe. 

Continuing our example, this second layer of why might return the answer “because I need financial security.” Answers like this give false security by appearing deep without having any actual depth. Yes, financial security is important, but literally everyone needs that. It’s why we need that individually where things get interesting.

These first two layers consist of the shallowest thinking. They’re hard to dig through because a) thinking is hard, and b) shallow thinking reinforces itself in the mind (if you have an hour, this video does a great job explaining it). It costs less energy for us to react instinctively, so the brain prefers to save those calories for running from lions and avoiding awkward social encounters. 

But you are ready to feel the burn. Buckle up as we dive deeper into our dip, to the layers of inheritance. 

Layers 3 and 4: The Inherited Zone

The third layer is the first with some heft to it: the cheese of inheritance. Much like how certain dairy products can produce blockages, this layer can be hard to push through. It’s the first indication that your thoughts aren’t yours as much as you once thought. 

As you question your own desire for financial security, “I need financial security” morphs into “Because I feel like I need a certain level of wealth to be happy.” Suddenly, we’re in territory that challenges you. 

But enlightenment waits for no one, so deeper we go. We pass the cheese and move into the salsa of recognition. Like cartographers scrawled on the corners of maps when they got poetic, here be monsters. This layer often opens us up to reflections like a fun house mirror, only when we do a double take, we realize we actually look like that. 

Your fourth iteration of asking why on a potential career choice now takes a turn. Suddenly, you realize that your linkage of happiness to a certain level of wealth stems from how much your parents stressed about finances in your childhood and your desire to avoid that. This could spur a whole separate string of questions, but we’ll leave that aside for now. 

The inherited zone questions help us reach the first real drivers in our lives. We dove under the surface and started identifying root causes—in this case, a desire to not end up like our parents financially. This is akin to Toyota’s lesser Five Why’s technique, one designed to help identify root causes in corporate processes.

But we aren’t building cars here, we’re building lives. Why stop now when the juiciest layers still lie before us? If you thought the inherited zone was uncomfortable, just wait for this one. Onward, intrepid explorer of the internal psyche!

Layers 5 and 6: The Discomfort Zone

Ahh, layer five: the sour cream of conflicting values. That slightly acidic taste that somehow compliments all the others. This layer takes the revelations of the external forces from the last two and plunges into our internal values. 

Now you realize that it’s not a simple ‘wealth equals happiness’ equation. No, the understanding about your parents twists that previous answer on itself. It’s not happiness, it’s self-worth—something deeper. You now recognize that you have tied the number in your bank account to your worth as a human being. Ouch. 

Sometimes the only way out is through. As the sour cream fades behind us, we cross the border into the meat layer. Packed with protein, suffused with grease, this layer has real flavor for those brave enough to probe its depths. 

For you see, asking why a sixth time in our example makes you realize something. You don’t want to be that person that layer five showed you. It conflicts with who you think you are as a person, or at least who you’d like to be. You’re on the cusp of internal revelation that might lead to external revolution. 

The research on this is clear: deep reflection leads to more conscious decisions and authentic living. Self-worth and satisfaction come from aligning our actions to our values, which is a hard thing to do if you don’t understand what those values are. The discomfort zone shows us those, for good and for ill. 

There is but one layer ahead of us now. The penultimate layer, the bottom of this undredged lake just waiting to be explored. Cry havoc and let slip the refried beans of enlightenment!

Layer Seven: The Foundation

One cannot have seven-layer bean dip without beans. They are its cornerstone, the pillar upon which the dip’s entire flavor palace rests. It is the congealed, gummy glue that brings the whole package together, and you have reached it. Bravo. 

You reconsider the job offer. A seventh why interrogates the thought of why this job goes against your values. And then—enlightenment. You recognize that while it may give you wealth and security, it fails to accomplish something more important to you, helping others. You thank the job offerors for their time, politely decline, and resume the search with a clear North Star to follow. 

Putting the Layers Together

Hopefully this example shows the power of the technique. Like water pressure, it gains strength the deeper you go. Also like water pressure, if you’re not adequately prepared before plunging into the abyss, you’ll get crushed. That’s why you need both a proper question and the right mindset. 

There are a host of questions useful for this process, far more than I could ever list. The career example we went through is likely one of the more common ones, but there are plenty of others. 

You could assess what you want out of a romantic relationship, moving from “they’re hot” to “we share core values.” Alternatively, platonic relationships work as well—less “they’re hot” and more “they’re amusing” on that one. Of course, there’s always politics, moving from “my family votes this way” to “wait, that politician voted for what?” Your mileage may vary with that one. 

Point is, this technique benefits from having legitimate questions as its target. But hey, if you want to run your latest fan theory about bad television through it, you do you. 

As for mindset, you need to go into this beanstorming process with one word at the forefront: humility. Any layer below one or two requires you to recognize that you have something to learn, which is hard to do if you come into it thinking you know all the answers. 

You also need humility to recognize that it’s ok to change your mind about things. Despite what every teenager feels, you never truly have all the answers in life. It’s a constant game of back and forth, and if you aren’t light on your feet, you’re liable to get crushed under the steamroller of reality. 

Side Effects May Include Indigestion

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Seven layers? Isn’t that overdoing it a touch?” That depends entirely on what’s more important to you—fast decisions, or better decisions. 

Toyota is one of the world’s largest car companies with what’s probably the best reputation for dependability. If you don’t believe me, look at what brand is slapped on the side of trucks insurgents used to drive around Afghanistan. Here’s a hint—it wasn’t a Ford or Chevy. 

Do you think Toyota uses their Five Why’s process for kicks and giggles? No, my friend. They use it because some steely eyed Japanese businessman with the iron will of a 17th century Shogun has determined it is the most efficient way to ensure their products reach the market in the best possible condition. To do otherwise would bring dishonor on the dojo, and the same holds true for your life. 

“That’s all well and good,” you counter, “but I trust my gut.” Friend, I haven’t trusted my gut since the first time I got food poisoning, and neither should you. Research consistently shows that going with your gut tends to result in confirmation bias, unconsciously going with the status quo, a lack of critical thinking, and overconfidence. 

Intuition has its place, but it’s generally with snap decisions.  Anything that isn’t along the lines of ‘how best to run from this tiger presently chasing me’ would benefit from additional thought. 

“Yeah, sure,” you say, growing increasingly irate. “But what if I find out everything I thought I believed aren’t really my thoughts?” That is exactly the point. If you haven’t put in the effort, you’ll never know. Can you live like that? Sure, most people do. But is that the best way to live? I don’t think so. 

This also isn’t me saying everything you believe right now is wrong. You can absolutely go through this process, realize you have multiple inherited beliefs, and decide you still believe in them. We can inherit good things, too! The idea is to make sure your beliefs—whatever their source—ultimately come from your decision to believe in them. That leads to authenticity, and authenticity leads to a better life. 

Dipthinking to a More Flavorful Life

Return once more to our imaginary party. You watch as person after person approaches the seven-layer bean dip, grab a chip, and scrape along the top without a care. You, however, know that flavor town lies beneath the surface. These others… they don’t know what they’re missing. 

Every decision you make in life is a step on a path. Major decisions serve as forks on that path. If you don’t analyze why you think the way you do, you’re letting external forces choose your path for you. You have one life to live—shouldn’t you make sure it’s yours?

This isn’t about perfection—it’s about intention. You can choose right now to live a more authentic life. Pick a question today you care deeply about and set aside a few minutes to dive into it. I promise you’ll find it easier than you think, and more impactful than you’d imagine. The deeper you dig, the higher you rise.

Don’t settle for a surface life as a surface scraper. There’s a world of flavor just under the surface of your mind, and all it takes is having an appetite for it. After all, the authentic life is only seven questions away.