A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A NICE PLACE

November 24th, 2019

 

 

A tiny plume of smoke rose each time the hot soldiering iron touched the circuit board.  Lucilius leaned back from his work, the suspicion of completion settling down on him.  Footsteps accompanied a shadow from the bright outside and Lucilius looked to see a friend materialize from the bright blind.

 

“Whatchya working on Lucy?”

 

Lucilius smiled at his friend.  “You gotta check this out.”

 

Lucilius moved around his work table and swiveled two lazyboys around, recliners that were heavily wired. 

 

“Here, sit in this one.”

 

Lucilius’ friend nodded, looking at the contraption and then sat down and settled in.  Lucilius handed him a helmet that was leashed with more wires.

 

“Where we going Lucy?”

 

“You’ll see.”

 

The two put on their helmets and then Lucilius flipped a switch.  Instantly the two found themselves standing in Lucilius’ garage.  His friend looked at him. 

 

“What happened?”

 

“Look around,” Lucilius said.  He watched his friend glance around at the garage, then bump his shoulders.

 

“Everything’s the same, but like we were sitting in those recliners a second ago.”

 

His friend paused. An unsettled look of confusion tainting his look. “How’d you do that?”

 

Lucilius smiled.  “We’re still sitting in those chairs.”

 

His friend looked at him, suspicious.  He looked closer at things.  He look at his own hands.  He sniffed the air.

 

“Get out.”

 

“No, seriously, I built a simulation.”

 

“Are you kidding, this is unreal,” he said.

 

“Well that’s sort of the point,” Lucilius chuckled, watching his friend pick up objects, looking at the details, squinting as though he might see pixels or something.  Lucilius went to his table of electronics and started fiddling with one of the circuit boards while his friend continued to wander around the garage, as though he were looking for some poorly rendered part of the simulation. 

 

It was as though the man were a kid again, investigating every little detail of the world around him, as though it had secrets that it might share, details that he might discover.  After a time the man stood up from his investigation, realizing that he hadn’t looked at Lucilius’ garage in real life with this much detail, and that he probably wouldn’t be able to notice mistakes anyway.  He looked at Lucilius.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

Lucilius had his tongue clamped, sticking out as he concentrated.  He touched a soldiering iron to one last piece of a circuit board and then sat back in relief.  He turned to a monitor and tapped out a command on a keyboard.  The screen flooded with processes.

 

 

“Yes, ok, it’s working.”

 

“What’s working?”

 

“Sit in the recliner.”

 

“Again?”

 

“Yea, you’ll probably notice the difference with the next one.”

 

Lucilius’s friend sat in the recliner and looked around for the helmet.  He grabbed it without Lucilius’ help and put it on.  Lucilius watched the processes on the screen until they came to a stop.  Then he sat down in his own recliner, put on the helmet and flipped the switch.

 

Instantly, the two found themselves standing in the garage, looking at the recliners.

 

“I thought you said this one was different.”

 

“It is.  You’ll notice it in a moment,” Lucilius said, making his way to his work table, tapping away at the keyboard and reading output.

 

His friend meanwhile simply stood, looking around squinting.  “Something is different,” he said.  Lucilius glanced up with a smile, watching his friend slowly realize.

 

“It’s like I can . . .feel more.”  The man looked at his own hands as though he simultaneously wondered what they were and couldn’t separate from the overwhelming sensation of their existence.  That cloud of tingling radiating from his limbs.  The shape of it seemed to diffuse, as though he wouldn’t even be able to tell the shape of his own body if he were to close his eyes.  And then he did it.  He closed his eyes.

 

“Whoah.”

 

“What are you getting?”  Lucilius asked.

 

“It’s like I can…. I can feel the room around me.  And when you talk it’s like I don’t just hear it, it’s like I can feel the thought rumble up before you even make a sound.”

 

Lucilius glanced back at the computer screen.  Processes had stopped. 

 

“Ok, next one,” Lucilius said.

 

“Again?” his friend asked, still puzzled and amazed by the subtle shift that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

 

“Yep.”

 

The two sat in the recliners, put on their helmets and Lucilius hit the enter button.

 

Instantly the two found themselves standing in the same garage, looking at the empty recliners.

 

“Whoah, what’s going on here Lucy? It’s like I can feel everything I see.. and taste all of it.”  The man looked at his own hands and then at the table that Lucilius was taking a seat at.  Lucilius began typing away.

 

“I can feel which keys you’re pressing.  Lucy this is getting trippy.  I’m honestly not really sure where I am in all of this.”

 

Lucilius smiled.  “Just float your cloud-of-an-experience over to that recliner.”

 

“Again? We’re gonna do this again?”

 

Lucilius chuckled.  “We’re just getting started.”

 

Lucilius’ friend sat in the chair, and each time he found his eyes open again, it was as though he dissolved a little more into the space around him, along with Lucilius.  Even the floor and walls of the garage, and all the equipment Lucilius had, seemed to be less in its own place than it was somehow connected to everywhere else.  Every few times they entered a new simulation, Lucilius sat for a minute in meditation to gather himself, all the while his friend slowly felt as though he were losing his mind, the only anchor now being Lucilius, who seemed to understand, with some sort of deep confidence where they were and where they were going.  To his friend, reality felt as though it were melting and being drawn in towards the two of them as though the light of their very consciousness were like points of gravity.  Soon they no longer sat in recliners, but merely existed in position, and the cold rigid hardware of the equipment gave way to a structure of light that Lucilius manipulated at will, each time, forming a connection between the two friends until finally they popped into a very deep simulation, one that was experienced as almost pure light, where language barely still existed, but only as thought between the two. 

 

“How deep are we Lucilius?”

 

“I’m not sure.  I lost count.  I’ve never gone this far before.”

 

“Is there any further to go?”

 

“We could keep going forever.  But I think this marks a kind of elbow in the curve.  I can hold it together this far, but beyond this, I just don’t know.  Maybe if I had a stronger meditative practice I could bring us farther and back but I’m just not sure what’s beyond this point.  I don’t know if I’ll have the conceptual ability to reverse if we go.  The mere thought of simulations and how to stop manifesting new ones, all that -I think- will collapse into a perpetual process, and I don’t think we’ll have any sense nor ability to stop it.”

 

“It’s so peaceful though.”

 

“Yea, it is, that’s why I built it.  I thought it might be. . . nice to come here.”

 

“Let’s go.”

 

“Into a deeper simulation you mean?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You realize what that means right?”

 

“I do, but if we go back, we’ll go about our regular lives, and we’ll probably die one day.  And you can spend that whole time trying to be present, even though each moment is passing by - dying as it fast as it comes up.  But here, it’s as though you’ve found a way to crack a moment open and dive down into it.. . .

 

 

and if we keep going, it’s as though we’ve found a backdoor to eternity.  It’s as though instead of trying to outlive time, you’ve figured out a way to pause it, here in this place that you’ve created.”

 

“But we’ll have no way of returning.”

 

Lucilius felt the ponderings of his friend radiate throughout all of reality.

 

“Whether here or there, we are always stuck in the present.  But this is a gift you’ve created, one that gives me the chance to truly appreciate a single moment, forever.  Maybe no one has ever had this chance, and I don’t want it to slip by.”

 

“Ok,” Lucilius said.

 

“Let’s go.”

 

THE GULF

November 23rd, 2019

 

 

Perhaps the most salient feature of any person is whether or not they keep their word.

 

This simply means that a person’s actions are in harmony with the things they say.

 

 

It goes without saying that people who do not strive to achieve this harmony are less trustworthy. 

This gulf between words and actions determines to a huge degree our reputation.  The larger that gulf, the harder time we will have maintaining a useful reputation among people.

 

This can all go south in two ways.  Either our words do not accurately describe the actions we will take, or our actions fail to follow the description we have given.

 

Both stem from emotion. 

 

We describe ourselves and our plans in a way that is both pleasing to ourselves and –we imagine- pleasing or impressive to others.  This is one aspect of what drives our individual language.  The other potential emotion to drive our language is a deep knowledge and understanding about what emotions will actually propel our future actions.  If these two things are the same then it’s likely we are honest and trustworthy.  However, it’s possible to be unintentionally dishonest in this respect because we are not in touch with this deeper understanding regarding the fundamental drives and emotions that power our actions for tomorrow and next week.  We may speak only in a way that pleases our idea of ourselves and our idea of ourselves in the minds of others.    If this description has no correlation with who we turn out to be as evidenced by our actions, then our ‘dishonesty’ becomes evident over time.

 

Problems can arise in a slightly different version of this gulf.

 

We can describe our hopes and plans for action, and genuinely wish for ourselves to take these actions and then when push comes to shove, there turns out to be little to no emotion to make that push.

 

We must wonder, is our desire for this course of action merely intellectual?  Do we just like the idea of being seen as the person we describe when in reality there’s no real drive to become this person?

 

 

This is a troubling situation that seems to befall many people in the form of procrastination.

 

We must wonder, if something is really that important, would we procrastinate?

 

Perhaps, but where is that emotional impetus we need to get going?

 

This is the $64 Million dollar question of self-help.

 

All of this boils down to accurate description and emotional regulation.  We can be the sort of person who has no emotional regulation, but be perfectly honest about the way we know we will behave, or we can speak about a different person we hope to be, and then do the difficult work of regulating and manipulating our own emotional environment in order to make the actions come about that will fulfill our words.

 

We bridge this gulf through both methods.  By both being more accurate and honest with how we actually behave, and then looking under the hood of that behavior and tinkering with the emotions that drive those actions. 

 

More honest accuracy with ourselves about who we find ourselves to be allows for an easier exploration of the emotions that power such a person.  And inevitably, we gain more agency over our behavior through this symbiotic relationship of honest reflection and emotional tooling.

 

The first step, of course, is looking hard and long at the words we use.  If they don’t reflect the way we act, then it’s the first and easiest step to take.  Changing language is faster, easier and far more straight forward than figuring out how to sculpt the arc of emotion.   And of course, this change in language is the first step when it comes to sculpting the emotions that will create the person we strive to be.

SEEDING PLANS

November 22nd, 2019

 

Things don’t always go according to plan.  This is an often spoken understatement.  Things rarely go exactly according to plan.  But where do we go wrong in the formation of our plan?  Do we simply wave this question away with a few words about the unpredictable and the unexpected?  Perhaps.

 

Let’s play around with an analogy in order to explore the nature of plans.

 

Let’s say you are given a box filled with random seeds and you are tasked with cataloging which seeds are produce which types of fruit.  What will this process look like?

 

Naturally, you plant every different type of seed you find in the box.  And the smaller, faster growing plants are going to yield their fruit fairly quickly, whereas the tree species might take years to reveal their secrets.  And those larger trees might not ever produce any kind of edible fruit.  The intuition behind this is obvious, but let’s apply it once more to plans.

 

Do we make small short plans?

 

Or do we envision many months and years into the future?

 

Often we think these go hand in hand. 

 

Well, of course we want a long term plan, and in order to get there, we need to break it up into smaller plans.

 

In this sense, our short term plans are really just expressions of a long term plan.

 

The real question about short term plans is:  do we form these plans with a genuine interest in the results they produce or do we form these plans because we expect them to lead towards our long term results?

 

This is a subtle distinction.  If we are making short term plans, but with a larger grand plan in mind, we are likely to create blindspots for ourselves, falsely interpreting the results of short term plans so that they still fit into the narrative of a large grand plan.

 

Our approach to life is often polar:

 

We are either taking it as it comes or running full speed towards some goal. 

 

But where is the middle ground?

 

Might it be more effective to make small plans that purposely fit into no larger hope or goal?

 

Are we more likely to take in the information from short plans if they are derivative of a larger goal or if they are undertaken for it’s own sake?

 

Another way of approaching this distinction is to use the perspective of curiosity.

 

Does curiosity have a grand plan?

 

Or does it discover as it goes?

 

 

TALL POPPIES

November 21st, 2019

 

The Father of History, a man called Herodotus once reported a story which has gone down in history as a parable about how to govern.  The story goes as follows:

 

 

A king known as Periander sends a messenger to another king named Thrasybulus with a question about how best to govern his city.  Thrasybulus, upon hearing the request does not respond but instead leads the messenger outside of the city and into a field of wheat. Without saying a word he walks along and cuts off the tallest ears of wheat, throwing them away, continuing until he has destroyed all of the tallest poppies.  The messenger then returns to Periander and reports that he received no advice.  When pressed the messenger tells him about his experience with Thrasybulus in the field of wheat and Periander interprets this as a metaphorical directive to destroy the leading citizens of outstanding influence or ability in his city.

 

 

 

Now, as a metaphor shared between tyrants, this interpretation makes sense, and a thinker like George Orwell would be quick to agree that this is how dictatorships often operate.  The parable has given rise to something called ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ which describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, and criticized because of their superior status.  And it’s perhaps part of the reason why many people do not work as hard as possible to realize every last ounce of their potential: it simply seems and feels safer to coast along invisibly in a sea of normal, never causing a ruckus. 

 

However, there remains an alternative interpretation of Thrasybulus’ actions to be mined - an ecological one that offers a fresh spin on an old and insidious idea.

 

Cutting off the tops of wheat plants would not kill the crop.  If anything, this pruning will make the individual plant stronger.  It’s a fundamental feature of biological systems that organisms of all types grow more robust when stressed in like ways. 

 

But beyond this, the pruned pieces fall to the ground where they can be reincorporated into the soil, making it richer, and the diminished height of the plant frees up sunlight for surrounding plants. 

 

And after all, what is the point of a plant producing fruit and seed if not to spread that back to the ground where it can stimulate growth once more?

 

Far from killing leading citizens, this parable makes more sense as a story about reinvesting profits.  Even if that’s not what the tyrant Thrasybulus intended.  One might go so far as to see a lesson about taxes and wealth redistribution which has become a topic of increasing discussion as we see individual parts of society grow far taller above the rest, whether that be Jeff Bezos and his fortune, or the monopolies of Google and Facebook when it comes to data and influence.  The growing Presidential candidate for the U.S., Andrew Yang, perhaps embodies this fresh interpretation with his introduction of the Freedom Dividend.

 

On a smaller scale we can apply this fresh interpretation to a single company - any innovative one that reinvests its profits into research and development and thereby furthers it’s ability to grow through the use of its invention.  Tesla is a good example of this despite the wide variety of opinion about the company.

 

On an individual level, we all have tall poppies growing in our life.  Whether that be a great idea left undeveloped, time wasted watching reruns, or relationships we don’t nurture.  Many of us simply complain about the morass of normalcy we find ourselves while remaining blind to the tiny asymmetries that surround us and offer opportunities to level-up.

 

Zooming out, we can see a larger mechanism at play here regarding unintended consequences.  As a tyrant, Thrasybulus undoubtedly thought he knew what he was doing when he offered his silent advice.  Meanwhile never realizing the flaw of his metaphorical action and the benefit he was providing to his wheat field, including the individual plants he was cutting.  But actions ultimately speak louder than our interpretations of those actions.  And in the case of this parable from Herodotus, it may be that it’s taken thousands of years for the unintended message to arise through a fresh interpretation.

 

Some fruit simply takes a longer time to hit the ground.

 

 

This episode references Episode 42: level up, and Episode 580: Resourcefulness

NEVER FINISHED

November 20th, 2019

 

 

A brilliant professor once said “You never finish a piece of writing, you just stop working on it at some point.”

 

Creative pursuits of all types incur the problem of this paradox, that is: how much is just enough?

 

Go beyond and something becomes over written, cluttered, over painted, thinned out too much.  The issue is even more apparent with the sculptor of stone.  The whole goal is to take away just enough and no more, because none of the cleaved stone can ever be added back.

 

Perfection is an asymptote.  One that we can always continue to approach but never really ever touch.  It is a phantom, an illusion that embodies a paradox of luring us on while giving less and less the more we give.

 

The trick is to follow the phantom just far enough.  Perfection itself wants to be chased, and the creator likewise needs to find out how far they can go… how far they should go.

 

But we grow only by taming the chase with just enough play.  Knowing how to see when things are ripe, or just about to rot is a matter of skill as much as any artistic expression.

 

Our modern world constantly tells us to push farther, work harder, add more, and take whatever you want no matter the cost.

 

But this perspective is zero-sum.  It’s as though perfection were a living breathing thing to be hunted down.  But this is not the point. 

 

More and more we need games that we can play forever, games that we can pause at just the right moment, when the painting is just right, when the sculpture needs no more. Games that we can return to knowing there’s more to explore.