You’ve Been Pressing That Button Your Whole Life

Arram Sabeti

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You’ve Been Pressing That Button Your Whole Life<br>How Mr. Meeseeks illustrates the cause of suffering as described by Buddhism and parts work

arram<br>Jul 21, 2026

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In the show Rick and Morty there’s a device called a Meeseeks Box. Press the button and a blue muppet pops into existence to accomplish a task, like opening a jar. The moment the job is done it dissolves in a puff of smoke, which it’s happy to do, because for a Meeseeks, existence is pain.<br>You’ve been pressing that button your whole life.

RomeoStevens@RomeoStevens76

The Rick and Morty episode 'Meseeks and Destroy' has probably the most incredible spiritual teaching I've ever seen on tv. Spawning goal seeking selves with an ill formed goal who thus don't know how to despawn and fuck everything up is a core insight of contemplative practice.

8:51 PM · Oct 5, 2021

5 Replies · 20 Reposts · 281 Likes

You are not a single person. You’re an anxious committee that has agreed, for mostly legal reasons, to share a name. Most of its members are lovable idiots, still running the best plan they could think of when you were nine.<br>This is the operating model of parts work, a popular family of therapies, Internal Family Systems (IFS) being the best-known. It calls these mini-selves ‘parts’. For example, you might have a part that flinches at authority, or one that narrates your life in the worst possible terms, or one that reminds you that the librarian in Multnomah County still remembers what you did in 2007. Each thinks it’s protecting you, certain it’s all that stands between you and badness forever. In other words, the mind is a war cabinet that is also, somehow, a daycare.<br>People have been noticing this for a very long time. The oldest example I found is an almost four thousand year old Egyptian papyrus, where a man argues with his own soul, and loses. Fifteen hundred years later Plato saw inner conflict as proof the self isn’t single, “not the same thing functioning but a plurality.” By 1886 Nietzsche was calling the soul “a subjective multiplicity.”1<br>Psychiatry rediscovers this and gives it a new name roughly once a generation. Pierre Janet described trauma as splitting off semi-autonomous “fixed ideas” in the 1880s. Jung called complexes “splinter psyches” that “behave like independent beings.” The modern textbook version, structural dissociation, puts everything from PTSD to multiple personalities on a continuum where “emotional” parts are fragmented from an “apparently normal” part.2<br>So what are they all pointing at? As far as I can tell something fundamental about human minds, and possibly minds in general. Years of meditation and parts work have made it obvious to me that Internal Family Systems is describing something first substantially mapped by the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago. In Buddhism ‘rebirth’ isn’t about dying and coming back a strawberry; it’s describing a mental process where selves appear and disappear, being born and dying from moment to moment.3<br>Once you understand what Buddhism is saying the parallels are overwhelming:<br>In IFS you’re a bunch of parts. In Buddhism you’re a flash-mob of transient selves. In IFS you suffer when you ‘blend’ with a part and believe its stories. In Buddhism that’s identification and delusion. In IFS no part is the enemy. In Buddhism no state is the enemy. At some point you start to think these people are describing the same animal from different ends. In IFS you heal from capital ‘S’ Self, the calm, compassionate core present in everyone. In Buddhism the knots untie themselves when met with enough clear, kind awareness, also present in everyone.<br>IFS is popular with meditation teachers. One teacher explicitly told me that IFS Self is just the smallest touch of what the Buddhists call no-self. This matches my experience. After a meditation caused my sense of self to disappear for a few minutes I wrote:<br>“It felt obvious that the natural reaction to suffering is compassion and that this is especially true if you’re not tied up in knots with fear and anxiety about yourself.”

I’m not saying IFS and Buddhism are identical. IFS works directly with parts: you learn a part’s history, what it’s protecting you from, what it’s afraid of, then gently let it notice where it’s confused. Mainstream Buddhism doesn’t really care about working with parts or understanding their history. Their universal solvent is awareness and equanimity. Meet whatever arises with enough of both and the conditioning unwinds on its own. One of my meditation teachers called the difference “content versus context” - engaging with what is appearing, versus noticing that everything is appearance.<br>The ambitions differ too. IFS wants you to be a harmonious committee, Self at the head of the table. Buddhism aims past that, at seeing through the fundamental confusions in your model of reality that cause all suffering, particularly confusion...