Three Things #14: Apr. 17, 2022
On keeping yourself honest, keeping your feet on the ground, and paradigm shifts
It’s been another week of self-reflection, and reflecting on big, hairy, abstract concepts.
Thing #1: When Things Are Going Well
I’m generally a very critical, analytical person. I’m always analyzing my progress and my team’s progress, and considering how I can do better. I’m hard on myself. But I’ve noticed that I have a tendency not to be as analytical when things are going well.
I think this is an artifact of laziness. It’s too easy to think, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We’re disinclined to look too closely at things that are working well lest we somehow jinx them. Of course, this is a bad idea! It’s probably just as important to analyze things when they are going well, because a.) it’s possible that they could get even better, and b.) they might not keep going well for very much longer, and if we look more closely, we might get a warning sign. Other, more broken things tend to feel more urgent, but the reality is that sometimes we can achieve more by improving the things that are already going well than by trying to fix the ones that aren’t.
This feels especially true of big picture stuff: career, personal life, family. There was a moment in a previous life, about 12 years ago, when everything felt amazing. I had a great job, which was challenging and rewarding but also gave me some freedom. I had my own place for the first time. I lived abroad and would spend weekends exploring, learning, and drinking in local culture. I thought this was happiness.
There was always some nagging feeling in the back of my mind that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t all there was to life, but I silenced it. I considered making a change but I postponed it again and again because things felt pretty good.
Eventually, a series of things happened starting with my mother’s unexpected death and culminating in my leaving this seemingly perfect life behind me, moving back home, and going back to school. Only a year or two later I was able to look back and realize that, in spite of all that I had walked away from, I was actually much happier than I had been a year or two earlier. And today I’m much happier than I was then. I thought I knew what happiness was then; now I must really know.
It makes me wonder, is this really happiness? How do I know? Can I always end up somewhere better if I walk away and hit reset? But there’s only so many times you can do that in one lifetime, and the cost goes up as you get older and take on more responsibility. The thought of hitting reset today is much scarier than when I was young, stupid, and unattached.
The more important question is, how can we keep analyzing, how can we keep ourselves honest and check in and see how we really feel? How can we honestly ask ourselves whether we’re happy, and know whether to believe the answer? And how can we work up the courage to change something when the honest answer is, “well, maybe not” for too many days in a row?
I’m not sure. Meditation helps. So does having close friends and family members who hold you to a very high standard and keep you honest. Happiness is complex and multifaceted but I think a workable definition is living a life that’s as closely aligned as possible to your ideal life, the life that’s the most meaningful and rewarding—or, put another way, when your actualized self is aligned with your idealized self. To this end I think looking yourself in the mirror once a day and asking yourself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” as Steve Jobs memorably suggested, is a pretty good place to start.
For more: Take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. On the left side, write down your idealized version of yourself: the version of you that you’d boast about in your autobiographical life story. Then, on the right side, write down all the ways your actualized self agrees or disagrees with this idealized version. How far apart are they? How does this make you feel?
Thing #2: It Creeps Up On You
(Filed under “things that begin making sense as you get older.”)
It wasn’t that long ago that I traveled as cheaply as possible—and was proud of it. I always flew economy class, usually in the cheap, auto-assigned, center seat with the least leg room. I stayed in hostels or the cheapest possible hotels. I was proud that I knew the best spot in a bunch of cities for a cheap, filling bowl of noodles under five bucks.
I remember a night on the road when I had a connection from a ferry to a train. The ferry arrived around 1am and the first train left around 5am. Rather than shelling out $50 for a cheap hotel room, I slept on the floor in the train station. Not because I had to, but because I could. It was chilly and the floor was uncomfortable, but it was bearable.
I did these things, and was proud of them, for several reasons. First of all, because when you’re young, you can get away with them, and because at that age, “poor is sexy.” I had a romanticized notion of being “poor” (in the way that wealthy Westerners use this term ironically, not in the global sense of the word). Secondly, I wanted to experience the world the way most people experience it—and most people in the world don’t have the option of spending $50 on short notice for a “fancy” hotel room for a long nap. Thirdly, I simply didn’t feel the need for luxury, and didn’t want to get used to it. Finally, I wanted to keep my personal burn rate as low as possible for as long as possible, because when you don’t need a lot of money, it makes life a lot simpler and gives you a lot more options and a lot more freedom. (That’s one of the most paradoxical things about wealth: initially it gives you more freedom, but if you’re not careful, it subsequently takes away your freedom as you begin to rely on it.)
Most of all, however, I think I was afraid of losing my grounding. I’ve always felt it’s paramount to keep my feet squarely on the ground and remember where I come from (I do not come from wealth or privilege). I want to meet people where they’re at. I want to be able to look anyone in the eye—anyone, anywhere, from any place and any social group—and know that I can see eye to eye with them, can communicate with them, and can have some sense of empathy and understanding of where they’re coming from. The more detached and luxurious my lifestyle, the harder that becomes. I always wanted to avoid becoming one of those wretched ivory tower elites out of touch with the world.
Fast forward a few years and I knew something changed when, last year, I chose to pay out of pocket for a business class flight for the first time ever. I actually don’t think any of the things I just described about myself have changed. What has changed is that I’m doing more, I have way more responsibility and way less time, and things that seem small, like a comfortable bed, a few hours sleep, a smooth connection, a decent meal, and a reliable internet connection, are actually sometimes extraordinarily important and valuable. I think I’m better able to see the big picture: while part of me aches every time I pay an extra $10 or $100 that I feel like I didn’t have to pay, because I could’ve roughed it or just taken care of it myself, I understand the dynamics of comparative advantage and recognize that everyone wins when each of us spends the maximum amount of time operating at the top of our license, as they say in medicine.
Then, of course, there’s family. I don’t need much comfort or luxury, but I want the people around me, the people I love and care about, to be as comfortable and safe as possible.
If I’m honest with myself, I realize that as I grow older—slowly, inexorably—I am turning into that which I wanted to avoid. It creeps up on you, in spite of your best intentions. And you let it, because your priorities have changed. I feel like there’s sort of nothing I can do about it, and I’m sort of okay with it, but I’m also sort of not okay with it. It’s a strange, conflicted feeling.
I think desire for comfort and convenience is like youth: ultimately, it’s a mindset. Easy come, easy go. There’s nothing wrong with paying for or enjoying comfort, especially as a means to greater productivity towards some noble purpose, as long as you’re not used to it and you’re willing to give it up at any time. As long as you don’t feel entitled to it.
And as long as it doesn’t put you out of touch with the rest of the world. That still matters to me more than almost anything else.
For more: What did you most fear becoming when you were younger? Reflect on how your lifestyle, your needs, and your priorities have changed over the years. What’s the long term trend? Do you risk turning into something you feared? How do you feel about that?
Thing #3: Paradigm Shifts
I find the concept of a paradigm shift utterly fascinating.
Imagine that you know a change is going to happen. Maybe you even know when, where, and how it will happen. You have as much time as you need to prepare for it. In spite of all of this, you’re simply incapable of preparing because you’re incapable of knowing what the experience will be like. You’re incapable of knowing who you will be, how you will feel, and what the world will look like on the other side. There’s a clear before and after, and the after is simply unknowable during the before.
I think the simplest and best example of this, on the personal level, is childbirth. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend with other people’s kids. It doesn’t matter how many stories you hear or how much advice you receive. It doesn’t matter how you were raised, and it doesn’t matter how many books you read or birthing classes you attend. Nothing truly prepares you for it. Even one day, one hour before it happens, you still don’t know who you’re going to be on the other end. You just know that a lot of things are going to be very different.
There are also much larger-scale examples of paradigm shifts. The concept is the same though the scale in terms of people, impact, and time, is naturally much larger. An individual or a society in the midst of such a macro shift is probably totally unaware that it’s happening. It’s almost a hallmark of macro-level paradigm shifts that they’re not even recognized until many years or generations later by historians (take the Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance).
My favorite example of such a shift is the invention of time. For dark eons of human history, there was only the vaguest notion of time. People woke up more or less when the sun rose, toiled, played, and socialized, then went to bed more or less when the sun set. Candles and gas lamps gave people a little more agency in terms of when they worked and slept, but not much. The two inventions that introduced a standardized, modern notion of time to the world were the mechanical clock and electricity.
The mechanical clock directly prefigured the industrial revolution (although it arrived several centuries prior). Previously, time was a local phenomenon and keeping time synchronized across great distances, using imperfect measurements like the sun, was next to impossible. The time might be off by as much as tens of minutes from one town to the next (which made early train travel very messy). You couldn’t expect workers to show up at a factory at a given time since there was no way to communicate it, other than vague concepts like “sunrise” or “high noon.” The mechanical clock led to the rise of shift work and a standard work day, and of course, to factories and the industrial revolution.
And electricity, of course, gave us the ability to work and sleep more or less whenever we want to, day or night, year round. Followed to its logical conclusion, perhaps someday we’ll all be living underground or in outer space, with no sun to guide our cycles whatsoever, and we can all be synchronized to something else entirely. Try to imagine for a moment how different the world must have looked and felt prior to the standardization of time and the proliferation of electric light. If you’re more creative than I am, you might be able to, but this is something I really struggle with, just as I struggle to imagine what a post-solar future might look like.
As amazing and beneficial as these paradigm-shifting technologies are, there’s also always risk in making sure they serve us rather than the other way around—but I’ll leave that question for another issue.
For more: What other examples of paradigm shifts, at the personal or macro level, can you come up with? Can you visualize what life was like before they happened?