2012-05-05
Explanation
This comic uses the metaphor of a CEO and their advisors to describe the experience of consciousness and internal mental conflict. In the first panel, a man in a business suit says "Sometimes I feel like I'''m just the CEO of my brain, listening to a horde of advisors." The "advisors" are depicted as small brains floating around him, each giving different instructions: "Eat now!" "Okay." "Work harder!" "Okay." "You need to relax!" These represent the competing impulses and urges that the conscious mind must constantly arbitrate between.
The second panel delivers the punchline with the caption "And that I'''ve made some terrible hiring choices." Now the brain-advisors are giving far worse advice: "Eat a thousand Twinkies." "No?" "Base your decision on race." "No!" "Jump off that ledge!" "How do you even exist!" The joke escalates from a harmless compulsive eating urge to racism to an intrusive thought about self-harm, illustrating the dark side of the brain-as-committee metaphor. The man is horrified at his own mental impulses, reflecting the common human experience of having intrusive or unwanted thoughts that feel alien to one'''s conscious values.
The votey panel shows one of the brain-advisors telling a woman (likely representing the author'''s wife, Kelly) to "Change your last name to Weinersmith!" -- a self-referential joke by cartoonist Zach Weiner, who indeed took the combined surname Weinersmith after marriage. The joke implies that even that personal decision was the product of a rogue brain-advisor rather than rational thought.