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The SECOND illustrated book from Tinkered Thinking is now available!
SPIN CHESS
A Chess app from Tinkered Thinking featuring a variant of chess that bridges all skill levels!
REPAUSE
A meditation app is forthcoming. Stay Tuned.
THE FALLEN DANCER, PART II
January 11th, 2023
The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.
Part II: We’ll see
One of the most famous parables comes from the Huainanzi, and ancient Chinese text that records a series of scholarly debates at the court of Liu An, Prince of Hainan sometimes in the second century BC. In Western society, this parable is often referred to as “The old man lost his horse“, “Maybe so, maybe not”, or simply: We’ll see.
Here is a translation from Les grand crates du Hainan zi, Clare Larre et al.
Good luck and bad luck create each other
and it is difficult to foresee their change.
A righteous man lived near the border.
For no reason, his horse ran off into barbarian territory.
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But his farther spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”
Several months later
his horse came back with a group of good, noble barbarian horses.
Everyone congratulated him.
But his father spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you bad luck?”
A rich house has good horses
And the son mounted with joy to ride.
He fell and broke his leg.
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But his father spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”
One year later
the barbarians invaded across the border.
Adult men strung up their vows and went into battle.
Nine out of ten border residents were killed,
Except for the son because of his broken leg.
Father and son were protected.
Hence: Bad luck brings good luck
And good luck brings bad luck.
This happens without end
and nobody can estimate it.
In the common western version the volley between observers and the father is “You’re so lucky!” or “Oh how unlucky!” And to each, the father simply says: we’ll see.
What is the highest utility that we can glean from this parable? While parables generally have a fairly obvious lesson that’s intended to be laid bare for any reader to notice and understand, the lesson offered by this parable is more subtle than what at first seems obvious.
It seems that the lesson of the parable is summarized in the end. That good and bad luck are linked, and one brings the other. And it seems like life is a never ending series of one step forward followed by one step backwards - and that in the grand scheme of things luck levels out to a neutral futility. But notice again those first two lines, specifically the second: it is difficult to foresee their change. That’s the whole point of this parable, and it’s chief value.
But, while this is a cute story about unintended consequences and second and third order effects, does it really unearth the nature of good and bad luck in a way that we can understand?
What’s strange to realize about this story is that it doesn’t actually contain any bad luck. All of the bad luck turns out to be advantageous in some way, and all the good luck is… well, lucky.
So again where is the bad luck?
THE FALLEN DANCER, PART I
January 10th, 2023
The Fallen Dancer will be a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.
Part I: Why are Evil people so lucky?
Luck is a strange entity in life. Sometimes it seems as though the world is karmic, as though luck follows the logic of karma, and that people who deserve it get their comeuppance. But then often, or perhaps more often, it seems that people who don’t deserve it - get incredibly lucky. What is going on here? Is this merely proof of a cold, unjust and uncaring universe? A cruel god? Evidence of past lives that either uplift or damn our circumstance in this life? Or is there something else going on here?
These questions contain a fundamental flaw. One so enormous that it’s impossible for the perspective that gives rise to such questions to even glimpse it. The flaw is with the perspective that generates these questions. A more interesting question might be: does your perspective on life have an impact on how lucky you are?
At first this sounds like some supernatural, hocus pocus nonsense. It would be understandable to assume that a sharp turn is about to occur, diving into all manner of balderdash like “manifesting”, “mystical energy” and “positive talk”, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Instead, let’s examine the pieces of the puzzle: what exactly is luck? It’s unexpected leverage. Luck is a sudden increase in personal agency due to some external aspect of new circumstances. For example we don’t instantly increase in agency in terms of what we can actually do. We don’t wake up with entirely new skillsets downloaded into our brain, and we don’t wake up with extra arms to type twice as fast. Luck is a change in circumstances that allows for our current level of agency to become magnified. Our actual agency doesn’t change, but reality has some new aspect that makes it potentially much more susceptible to the influence and effort of the agency we do have.
A few examples can help illustrate this and it’s useful to mix in the largest magnifier of agency: money. Consider this lucky turn of events: Getting a call and finding out an unknown uncle has left you a ton of money. That’s lucky. Money increases our agency without any change in who we are. Our agency is magnified because money is fungible and we use it exclusively in the context of other people. We pay people to do things and we pay for the fruit of other people’s labor either in services or products. So our agency is magnified by money by enabling us to utilize other people for our own design.
Compare this with a dedicated start-up founder who is given a sum of money by an investor to bring a business to life. That investor-money is functionally the exact same as money from that long lost uncle, or winning the lottery even. So what is different in these circumstances?
Many lottery winners end up penniless just a few short years after their windfall fortune. And many start-ups similarly fail, essentially meaning all that money is squandered in both cases. A lack of agency and ability is magnified in each case.
But consider the flipped version of the start-up founder who successfully employs that windfall of investor money in order to bring a novel idea to life. The money simply magnifies the vision, hard work and overall agency of that start-up founder.
Returning to that initial definition of luck as unexpected leverage, it’s worth examining whether the leverage really is unexpected or not. The case of the long lost uncle and windfall inheritance seems like it fits the bill. But what about the start-up founder who gets investor money? Is that unexpected? Perhaps luck isn't always unexpected..
Let’s examine the same set of examples in terms of a slightly different definition of luck: luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
Opportunity fits nicely into what’s already been laid out. Opportunity is that slight change in reality which presents the possible magnification of one’s agency. But what about preparation?
What exactly is the preparation for the lottery winner who ends up penniless, or the start-up founder who fails, or the start-up founder who succeeds?
The lottery winner who ends up penniless in a few years is a much different person then the driven hardworking start-up founder who succeeds. The money doesn’t actually impart any actual agency to the person who receives it. Money only magnifies whatever agency the person already has. In the case of the lottery winner, the only real agency might be an ability to spend that money, which is no agency at all, that’s just feeding desire and pleasure through consumption. So perhaps in such a case the money magnifies a lack of agency. Whereas the start-up founder’s agency is presumably an ability to work hard to turn a novel idea into a reality. And the hard working start-up founder who fails? Shall we chalk that up to bad luck? Perhaps.
But what is bad luck? Is it simply the opposite? Is bad luck an unexpected decrease in agency? What about that popular definition of luck as the intersection of preparation and opportunity? What is the opposite of preparation meeting opportunity? Preparation not meeting opportunity? That’s not bad luck, that’s just the absence of luck - status quo, so to speak. So what is bad luck?
The Fallen Dancer is the result of a curiosity that has long circled the concept of bad luck. For many years that curiosity was stuck in a holding pattern, yielding nothing, discovering nothing, the mechanics of bad luck remaining elusive. Likewise, a twin curiosity circled the question that forms the title of this introduction: why are evil people so lucky? These two fruitless curiosities were haunting, and then one day, a single line from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations clicked in a way that had escaped during previous readings. A fundamental error in perspective revealed itself. The Fallen Dancer is the result of discovering that error - a chronicle of a subtle but profound shift in perspective that reveals the connection between these two intractable questions.
MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 8: INTEROCEPTION
January 9th, 2023
On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking.
One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.
Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter
Session 8: Interoception
Take a moment to sit and arrange your posture. Maintain a straight back with plenty of space for the abdomen to expand.
Once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. We want a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8
Inhale till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Then..
Inhale again till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.
Some people have a talent for interoception - the ability to feel what’s going on inside of the body. There are the classic 5 sense of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell - those are all exteroceptive, meaning they sense things that arise from outside the body but we actually have more sense - we have interoceptive senses. Some people, for example, can feel their heart beat without touching their own wrist or neck. It’s just a light pulse that radiates throughout the whole body.
However, most people it seems have very little interoceptive ability, and it’s useful to gain a bit of that ability. With a little more interoceptive power we can zero in on issues that are easy to fix. Muscular tension is probably the biggest and most obvious example of interoceptive sensing. For many we hold tension in our bodies chronically, to our detriment, both physically and mentally. Simply being aware of the body, all its party and how they feel can be a great stress release and we’ll focus on that during this session.
But before we start its worth noting another section in the app: one labelled NSDR. This stands for Non-Sleep-Deep-Rest, which is also referred to as Yoga Nidra. These old practices are excellent for reducing stress, and recently it’s been shown in scientific studies that NSDR practices can even restore brain chemistry to an impressive degree if sleep deprivation is the issue. If the research continues to hold up it appears a 10 or 20 minute session of NSDR can be more effective than napping for an hour. These practices are also useful for getting to sleep if falling asleep is a challenge, so do make sure to check out that section of the app.
Here we’ll do a simpler version of what essentially adds up to an NSDR protocol, it’s just a simple body scan, and there’s a visualization that can help with this exercise.
Imagine hovering above you is a thing sheet of light, similar to the thin wall of light that shoots into a dark room from a cracked doorway. But this wall of light is parallel to the ground, like a ceiling made of light.
Now imagine this sheet of light slowly descending toward you, and as it touches the top of your head your body begins to poke a whole in this sheet of light, and the light in turn traces a line around your head, and as the sheet of light continues to fall, this ring of light fluctuates with the contours of your head, your face, your ears, and onwards it falls.
As you imagine this, focus on the that part of your body where the light is touching you. Try to slowly bathe your body in attention from the top down. Try to feel in great detail everywhere the light is touching you and everything inside of this wavering ring as it slowly moves down your body.
As the scan descends feel your eyes, your nose, your lips and your neck, down to your shoulders, your collarbones and your back. And onwards around each of your arms and down your torso.
Feel as it courses over your elbows and down your forearms, and around your abdomen.
Allow your attention to wash down your hips, and down your thighs to your knees where your hands might rest. Down your wrists and across your hands down all of your fingers to their tips.
Let your attention continue to fall over your knees, down your shins and to your ankles and then over your feet, down to your toes.
How well did you do? As your attention coursed downward, were you able to notice anywhere in your body where you are holding unneeded tension? Perhaps you noticed your stomach is a little upset, or something is sore from yesterday’s work out.
Perhaps you were able to pin-point little areas of pain due to your posture - either because you’re slouching a little or because your body is still getting used to sitting while meditating. Do you find that simply paying attention to that tightness helps release and relax that area of your body? Just like a thought that once noticed, fades into nothing…
This body scan will be valuable as it’ll help you realize the parts of your body are strengthening and the posture that may have felt uncomfortable at first is beginning to feel very comfortable.
Let’s try this body scan one more time, with fewer words and a bit more silence.
Imagine that sheet of light above you slowly descending.
It touches the top of your head.
<Wait 2 seconds>
Courses over your face
<Wait 2 seconds>
Spreads out to your shoulders
<Wait 2 seconds>
Over your chest
<Wait 2 seconds>
Down your abdomen and your arms to your elbows.
<Wait 2 seconds>
Over your thighs
<Wait 2 seconds>
Across the backs of your hands
<Wait 2 seconds>
Over your knees
<Wait 2 seconds>
Down your shins,
<Wait 2 seconds>
Your ankles..
<Wait 2 seconds>
You feet
<Wait 2 seconds>
And your toes.
We’ll start incorporating this body scan into future sessions. Paired with our breathing exercises it will add to the ability to relax the body and enjoy the session.
Now, let’s transition from coherence breathing back to deep exhales, and try to notice any thoughts that pop up as we go through out counts.
Inhale till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Then..
Inhale again till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends.
A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FUTURE MOVES
January 8th, 2023
The loading bar was nearly complete. Lucilius watched with rapt attention, curious if it would work. The last few percent clicked into place, and a black square in the center of the screen where Lucilius could see a dim and dark outline of his own face, lit up. He leaned forward into the bright screen, amazed at the sight of the faint triangle pointing to a side, floating in the center. He clicked play and the movie started.
Artificial Intelligence could now generate movies from merely written stories. Lucilius had a few that he’d knocked together over the years and he’d been delighted to see how well the machine worked.
But, he’d been given access to a cutting edge version of the platform by a friend and he’d decided with the increased capability and diversity of settings and training he’d take it much much further - as far as it could go. To find it’s very limits. Just out of curiosity.
He’d scanned every single thing he’d ever written long hand. He collated every single text conversation, email, letter. Every photo and video of himself. Everything he had ever produced, he took 3D scans of sculptures, he uploaded all the books he’d ever read. Absolutely every single earthly trace of his existence, he’d poured into a digital format. He even had detailed scans of his brain and body uploaded for reference.
He trained a new model based on all of this personal and historical data. And now Lucilius was in a kind of trance he’d never experienced before: he was watching a generated movie of his early life. He was stunned as the story on the screen reflected his own real memories with unsettling accuracy.
Lucilius watched for days. Regenerating the same movie with longer and longer timelines, pushing the resolution, the detail. He realized he could even create movies of specific days where there was adequate data. Moments he’d written about, the known locations, the historical weather data, all of it seamlessly woven together. He could even move the camera around while the movie played, and it was as though he were spying on his old self with a resolution his memory could hardly ever hope to approach.
After a solid week of this. Lucilius needed a break. He went for a long walk to process this new found sense of his own life. The sun had set but the sky was still bright with the light of the fading day. So many memories that had been locked within him had reemerged, and it was as though he now had a fresh perspective on who he was. Who he’d been as a person, and how he got to where he was now, as he walked the darkening water’s edge.
He watched his feet push into the damp sand. Small waves folded and spread flat, washing against and around his feet. He looked out at the expanse, the gentle curve of the watery horizon hiding what lay beyond.
It occurred to him then, his mind seeming to touch the horizon, wondering what it looked beyond all that he could see. A deep realization flooded his body with a shiver that he could not feel as exciting or ominous. It was a curiosity that he had no stance on. But having now had the idea, he could not deny that deep drive of wonder. He turned from the water’s edge and ran home.
He brought up the platform and looked at the generative conditions for the movie of his life. He clicked on the date spread and typed in a future date.
And then he pressed play.
He saw himself, sitting at a computer, watching a screen that had the image of himself sitting at a computer, watching a screen that had the image of himself sitting at a computer.
With jittering synchronicity he and the image of himself leaned back, a bit startled.
The visions of himself laughed nervously with himself, and they all reached forward and scrubbed forward. The recursion collapsed and Lucilius saw himself walking the beach, the time now midday of the following day. He watched himself stop abruptly and then turn and run back home just as he’d done before.
He watched himself sit again at the computer, and toggled the view to zoom in. He watched himself change the parameters again, extending the timeline, but this time, he also edited the prompt for the movie. Lucilius squinted, confused, but as his image added more and more to the prompt, his eyes went wide and a cold shuddered through himself. He watched as that future image of himself wrote out a particular ending for the movie. The description was replete with all sorts of goals and experiences that Lucilius had long thought about and yearned for over the years.
He watched himself press play and scrub forward in random increments, as though taking quick readings of the course of his life in different leaps of days and months, weeks and years, until it all began to fall into place. The additional prompt elements began to materialize in Lucilius’ life, through his hard work, through seemingly random occurrences - things even outside of his control seemed to fall together like an explosion in reverse, the pieces condensing, like the colors of a Rubik’s cube hauling an emerging order from their chaotic movements.
Lucilius stood up in a rush and walked away from the computer.
Was he bound to walk the beach tomorrow? How could he have an idea tomorrow that he now already had? He looked back at the computer. There was no way it could be accurate. It was impossible. But, if it was, had he fast-forwarded his future by a day?
He walked back to the computer and pressed pause. He scrubbed back the movie’s time till it showed him walking on tomorrow’s beach again. He scrubbed forward until he could see the full prompt. He paused, wrote it down, and then opened up another instance of the platform.
He put in tomorrow’s prompt and initiated generation.
Nervously he sat back, watching the loading bar. Unable to believe that it might work. But how could it work? He’d fundamentally changed his own future against the vision this machine had produced…
The movie loaded, and Lucilius started scrubbing. He tried to check in at similar points he’d seen his own self do. The intervening narrative was very similar, but the details seemed slightly different. The future prompt still materialized as it had in the other movie, it just all came together with just a tiny bit of a different flavor.
Lucilius stood up and paced the room for a few tense minutes and then he raced back to the computer. He changed the future prompt and watched the new movie, seeing a different life path, leading to that desired outcome.
Then he changed it again. He wrote up a bad ending for his life, generated the movie and scrubbed into it. Very quickly he was so horrified by how the narrative was unfolding that he stopped it. Deleted the movie and sat back again.
Over the next few days and weeks Lucilius made the unconscious decision to study the movie that lead to his dream outcome. He took cues from his future self, and even generated metrics for all the days: how many hours he worked on which project for all given days. Who he saw and met with. Who he talked with. He studied and recorded all of it and then took this as his plan of action, trying as best he could to enact the movie he’d seen, and daily he would go back to the movie and watch the day at 100 times the speed, slowing it for key moments and noting how he needed to progress.
Without realizing it, Lucilius had caged himself within a track to his dreams. But their lure was so great that he simply didn’t think about it - the trade off seemed well worth it.
Then one day, his phone buzzed. It was a message from the friend who’d given him advanced access to the generative movie platform. His friend wanted to know what he thought, and if he could come over and chat about it. He had something particular about the platform he wanted to show Lucilius.
Lucilius looked at his notes for the day. There was nothing scheduled with his friend. Lucilius looked back at his friend’s message, assuming he was supposed to ignore the request.
He put down the phone, his heart twisting at the unexpected conflict. The phone buzzed again.
“I promise it’s a detail you’ll like.”
For someone who held curiosity as the core engine of his life’s compass, he was suddenly confused about how he’d gotten into such a constricted rhythm. It seemed worth it, he thought. Still seems worth it, he thought, thinking about the way his life would end up.
But curiosity wove it’s tease up through Lucilius and he picked up his phone and responded.
He scrapped the rest of his day, figuring he could regenerate the movie from this new point and still get there, and went and got groceries and cooked a dinner for his friend’s arrival.
He opened the door and Lucilius felt a strange relief and freedom to see his friend. They embraced and Lucilius’ friend laughed a bit.
“Soo, how’s life?”
“Uh..” Lucilius realized he hadn’t shared his experiment with anyone: It was never in the plan.
“It’s been.. interesting,” he admitted.
His friend laughed. “Yea, I bet.”
The two sat down to eat and the food and the wine was so good that for a few beautiful minutes they simply couldn’t talk.
“So good,” his friend finally said, leaning back. “So..” He said looking at Lucilius..
“Was this in the movie today?”
“What?”
“Movie of your life.”
“How did you…?”
His friend shrugged. “Guess.”
Lucilius was taken aback. He glanced at his computer. “Have you been able to see what I’ve been doing with the platform?”
“No - well.” His friend laughed. “Sort of… I guess.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Think about it.”
Lucilius was confused. He looked at the deep red wine as he swirled the glass. He took a sip and as he did, he momentarily imagined what it looked like from his friend’s point of view. He nearly choked and put the glass down.
“Was this dinner in your movie?”
His friend gently nodded.
“Whoah…”
“So, does life feel a little… constricted Lucy?”
Lucilius let out a sigh and was flooded with a sad relief that he didn’t realize he’d been feeling and he nodded.
“I said there’s something I need to show you…”
“Ok?”
His friend picked up his own glass of wine and walked over to Lucilius’ computer. He pulled up the platform and clicked into Lucilius’ future prompt.
“A bunch of guys working on this got into the same sort of trap. It got a little weird. But we figured out what to do.”
He spliced Lucilius’ future prompt and then added:
rand_intervening_structure[time_param: present - future_prompt_emerg, structure_variance: 100, entertainment_level: 85, interest_capture: 99, absurd_delta: 15]
“You want to balance you absurd delta and your entertainment level, that’s the sweet spot that we’ve found.”
He hit generate and soon Lucilius was watching a far different future of his own life, picking up from the very moment he was leaning in to watch his friend add to the movie prompt.
“Whoah, what the…”
His friend paused the movie, and turned to look at him.
“Cool huh?”
“Yea…” Lucilius barely said, still trying to process.
“But here’s what you missed Lucy. Watch this..”
He watched as his friend clicked generate again and the future movie they’d been watching vanished and within seconds a new one appeared. He started scrubbing through it and Lucilius’ jaw dropped. He was watching an absurdly different life, and many minutes later as he was lost in a smiling trance as he watched how much he was laughing with someone he’d never seen before, the movie froze. His friend had paused it. And Lucilius shook himself from the reverie.
“You can hit generate as many times as you want, whenever you want, and you’ll get something totally new each time, but it’ll still lead you to the future-prompt you’ve written.”
Lucilius finally sat down and picked up his glass of wine. But he couldn’t take a sip. He started laughing, amazed at what had transpired.
“Is this for real? Does this actually work? Like will it really lead to these futures we’re writing for ourselves?”
His friend smiled, took a sip of his own wine, and then shrugged.
“I guess we’ll see.”
SEEING THE FUTURE
January 7th, 2023
The practice of visualizing a goal apparently has enough validity behind it that the idea survives. But then again there’s plenty of patently ridiculous, fairy-tale-like ideas and practices that have perpetuated for centuries and even millennia. So mere survival is not necessarily a great metric for assessing the utility and ultimate efficacy of an idea or practice. But for the sake of exploration here, let’s simply take it as a correct assumption that visualizing the future creates a self-fullfilling prophecy and it does have a meaningful and directive effect on how the future actually turns out.
This assumption is definitely correct on a hyper-local level: We feel hungry, and we visualize going to the kitchen and making a sandwich, we imagine the particulars of the sandwich, and even have feedback loops while visualizing the future. Will that combo taste good? Nah, swap this ingredient for that, add this. Ah, perfect. And then with the perfect sandwich envisioned, we get to work.
Does this same exact thing exist on a much larger scale?
A fair question, but that’s actually not the best question to ask about this topic. A more interesting question is: given that we don’t know whether it’s a correct assumption or not, how do we hedge our bets?
Is it safer to assume that it’s true?
Well there’s two possible cases here. If we assume it’s not true and we are careless with the way we envision the future, and imagine a bad one, and it turns out our assumption is wrong, then we end up with a bad future.
The other case is if we assume it is true, and given the obvious incentives here, imagine a great future. If the assumption is correct we end up with a great future. If the assumption is wrong, then it’s a crap shoot whether the future turns out good or bad, which still leaves us open to the upside of potentially having a good future because it’s still in the cards.
So even if we can’t verify whether visualizing the future has a causal impact, we can still be pretty sure that the best course of action is to assume that our consistent visions of the future are the more likely outcomes.
Now let’s consider all the dystopian movies and stories we have coursing through the cultural bloodstream of this planet. The Terminator movies, the Matrix, the Black Mirror series… Putting aside the fact that we are really good at imagining horrible outcomes, what does this thick dystopian thread in our collective imagination mean for our collective future?
Just the other day I came across a post where someone pointed out the fact that all our dystopian movies seemed to becoming true.
Is this just correlation? Or is causation perhaps also at work here?
Again, given that we can’t determine for certain if causation exists or not, which is the safer assumption to make?
Sam McRoberts, a friend of mine, has a great way to phrase what I see as our current predicament. It’s a kind of mantra that resonates with me the more I think about it, and the more I write.
Change the stories, change the world.
If we started producing interesting utopian visions of the future that celebrated what we can and might do as a species, would our collective direction change?
Again, what’s the safer assumption in this case?
Also, what’s the harm in trying?
It’s a pet-ponderance of mine whether the task of producing a positive story comes across as somehow, cheesy or unrealistic. Authentic artists are generally imagined as tortured souls, and what kind of tortured soul produces an interesting utopian vision of the future? It’s somewhat a contradiction in terms, is it not?
S.I. Hayakawa thought about this topic and pinned advertising as the reason why artists who wish to be seen as “authentic” started avoiding the cheerier subjects of life. Before the rise of advertising we had sonnets that celebrated the best of life. Now we seem left only with cheery jingles to goad us into spending money. The irony of that dystopian shift certainly isn’t lost here..
The Lucilius Parables that appear on Tinkered Thinking are a consistent attempt to package a quick and pleasant experience that hopefully gets someone to think a bit differently. To consider the world in a new way. And often the effort is very deliberately an attempt to imagine a positive utopian version of the future.
Change the stories, change the world.
There’s enough negativity. We aren’t untalented at imagining the worse because in some very real ways we’re probably hardwired to look for the negative. Avoiding the dangers of the natural world is evolutionarily baked into the way our brains are set up.
But: the chief innovation that evolution has also given us is the ability to mindfully reflect and choose otherwise. We can self-train in imaginative and novel ways that seem unusual to the natural world of animals.
We can shift specializations in ways that a bee can’t even dream about.
Change the stories, change the world.
The other double-edged innovation evolution has given us is that we are creatures that operate on stories. Our human OS is not at all like a computer, nor are we like animals despite our fundamental roots in their kingdom. We run on stories, and the question is again: are we running on a good story or a bad story?
What story is culture telling you?
What story are you offering to our collective culture?
What story do you tell yourself?