THE PLANNED TRAP

June 9th, 2021

The puzzle of motivating one’s self on a project that does not have a clear and near incentive is very difficult is a very difficult one to solve.  It’s the reason for the countless self help books that are published at such a constant or even accelerating velocity.  For the audience of such books, the main issue is that rewards for constant efforts devoted to some area of improvement are often very far away.  Losing weight, getting fit, getting rich, quitting the boring job, becoming a master of skill, doing something you love for work.  All of these are, for most people long drawn out processes.  They lack all of the urgency that something like a baseball rocketing towards your face would inspire.  For such clear and near events we are remarkably well suited.  We duck.  

The first or next step to any such long drawn-out goals is often simple, straight forward and fairly easy to get done.  But instead of taking such a step, we begin to plan, strategize, write a to-do list, ready the work area, and inevitably squander our energy on different forms of procrastination as though that next first real step can only be taken when everything is perfect, and the plan accounts for every possible contingency that might throw our drive from the trail.

A broad goal cannot be planned in detail, the steps can only be discovered as they are taken, and any plan is best encapsulated by a definition of the goal itself, not some path we imagine might force it into reality.

Each moment brings a new branching set of possible actions that may bring us closer to our goals with differing amounts of progress.  Sometimes, perhaps even usually, our goals are closer than we think but the plan gets in the way because the round-about route is the only clearly visible one.  And once the nose is to the grinding stone, a myopia for quicker paths overtakes our perspective, fuelled by a blind attachment to the plan already decided on.

The plan quickly becomes a trap, one that works in two ways.  Making the plan is a waste of time that could be better spent actually trying to carry out the first item on that fantasy trail, and it can blind us to other, better options that emerge as the situation changes as a result of the actions we do take.

INVISIBLE PROBLEMS

June 8th, 2021

Put up with something long enough and it becomes normal.  Normal is invisible.  It’s in the countless details that we miss every single day as we go about daily life.  The way sunshine ricochets off a scatter of tree leaves, the gums stuck to the sidewalk edges.  The faceless people on the busses and subways, walking past us, all with expressions we fail to pay any attention.  For the most part this is an important filtering process.  We have to filter out a huge amount of information in order to function.  We just don’t have the time, energy or brain space to deal with every little bit of reality.  But this normalizing of details that perpetuate creates crucial blind spots that can keep people under the thumb of life that is not nearly as good as it could be.

Sleep deprivation is a very common one.  It is possible to get used to consistent nights of three to four hours of sleep, despite how unpleasant this makes the days and how detrimental it is to long term health.  We have surprisingly poor memories can quickly forget just how much better daily life is after a solid night’s rest.  The problem becomes invisible because it becomes normal, which makes it harder and harder to address because it ceases to have any obvious pertinence.  

Obvious problems we fix.  When someone calls several times a day, leaving voice messages about something we have failed to attend to, the effect can be nerve-wracking.  (As a short aside I once worked with someone who I noticed got a lot of stuff done.  When I commented on the fact, she responded by saying “It’s easy, I just call people several times a day and leave them voice messages until they do what I need.”  There is nothing quite as effective as being obvious. And to couch this in the terminology of a different field: All press is good press.). Obvious - the word - has an etymology that means simply ‘frequently encountered’.  And here, a strange contradiction seems to emerge:  Why isn’t everything normal also obvious?  We encounter the normal everyday so wouldn’t that make all these invisible things obvious?

The answer hinges on novelty.  What is obvious in a pressing way has to be new.  Something becomes obvious in the sense that it’s frequently encountered and invisible if it’s encountered with such frequency that it ceases to be novel.  This is the process of becoming inured, and it’s how something as miserable as constant sleep deprivation can go from an awful experience that severely discounts your ability to perform during the day to just a new normal that is totally devoid of an idea that life and one’s performance could be better by a significant order of magnitude.

DEBUG THE SOUP

June 7th, 2021

In programming there’s a grave mistake that’s quite easy to make.  It happens when the program, instead of having an end, loops back on itself.  This is called an infinite loop and it’ll heat up your CPU faster than a microwave.  In all other parts of programming, debugging takes place through the use of print statements, or logging values to a console.  It’s from these local values that a coder can make sense of where the program is going, and where it needs to go.  But when an infinite loop occurs, any print statements happen like an infinite stutter and the console is quickly backed up with thousands of repeating statements within a second or two, and it doesn’t stop until the environment in which the program is running is killed outright.  This inconvenient detail can make it quite challenging to debug an infinite loop, because often it’s not possible to examine the problem without activating the problem.  The infinite loop is a bit like the universe telling you that what you want can’t be done, and the only reasonable way to react is to rebel.

Many efforts result in infinite loop - like outcomes: where our effort seems to have no effect on the reality we are trying to impact.  We change this variable, we rewrite the function, but still the same dead end swirl of “not working”.

One way to zero in on the issue of an infinite loops is to start subtracting bits of code.  Taking out chunks eventually results in no infinite loop which signals that the missing chunk is the problem.

We can do the same with our efforts in other areas of life.  We try to do so much, putting everything together at the same time, but the melange of variables quickly obscures exactly what is having an effect, if any.  This is the virtue of starting small and trying to make a minimum viable effort have a minimum observable impact.  Once the correlation is strong enough to safely imply causation, then a new dimension can be added to see what the new effect might come about.

With an infinite loop, that subtracted chunk of code - which is clearly the culprit - can be whittled down even smaller by subtracting smaller and smaller chunks of the problem until the issue has been narrowed down as much as possible.  Such a problem is not solved by reasoning but by a process of elimination.  

Process by elimination is of course a form of reasoning, but it’s a tool we rarely use in view of our efforts.  We almost always reason forward: if I do this, then that will happen.  But our idea of what to do is usually multifaceted with many moving parts and variables.  Rarely do we simplify to a single action for the purpose of achieving a singular result.  We want it all at once, so we try to do it all at once, but the effect is muddled.  But by using a process of elimination, like removing most food types from a diet in order to introduce each one at a time to notice their result, we can see what effect actually correlates to which input.  

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MANIFEST EFFORT

June 6th, 2021

The spring light in the garden was perfect for reading as the afternoon approached.  Lucilius flipped a page and readjusted his glasses.  He took a sip of his tea.  All was right.

He heard an excited holler from the house and he smiled.  The screen door clapped the announcement of it’s use and a friend staying with Lucilius while he got back on his feet took a chair next to Lucilius.

The pause was loaded, and Lucilius let it stretch, knowing the growing anticipation.

“Good news?”  Lucilius asked.

His friend exhaled deeply, smiling into his hands as he rubbed his hands.  

“Yea, real good news.  The issue I thought I was going to run into? Not going to be an issue.  I just can’t believe my luck.  It seems like this whole thing might actually work.”

“Well you’ve been working hard at it,” Lucilius commented, happy he could help out a friend while they took a chance - that little risk to beat out a new path and make something happen in the world.

“I mean, I’m not just feeling lucky, “ he said, now looking at Lucilius, “It’s like all sorts of odd lucky things are happening.”

“They’re only happening because you thought of them happening in the first place.”

It was met with a laugh.  “That sounds like some of that wishy washy manifesting stuff.”

Lucilius shrugged.  “Well, what exactly do you think that word means?

“It’s just wishful thinking.”

“Well,” Lucilius said, “if that’s the definition you’ve got than I’ll have to agree with you, but even handwork towards a goal has to start with just the idea, the fantasy that the goal might actually be possible.  To manifest a wish is to work hard to make it real, but what is hard work without the goal in then first place?”

A humble smile met Lucilius’ comment an d Lucilius mirrored it.  “It’s happening my friend, you’re making it happen.”

ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

June 5th, 2021

Much behavior is for the purpose of avoiding risk.  Go to a good school to get a good job.  Get a good job to have a stable income.  Have a stable income to protect against the risk of poverty.  Keep working to keep the risks at bay.  Such logic rides on the assumption that a person wouldn’t be able to deal with adverse situations, or that such situations would be wholly bad. Adverse situations require creativity to solve, and challenges build character, and yet we try to limit our opportunity for such things as much as possible by smoothing out life with predictable paths.

It’s a mark of the confident creative to willingly allow the situation of life to sharpen to a pinch that induces a new level of ingenuity to escape.  This is often seen as a negative, to piss away time having fun, travelling and all the other wishy washy activities of youth that are benevolently labelled as “finding yourself.”  For many this lack of seriousness is a set up for later failure.  And for some people this is exactly the case.  After the wanderlust subsides or the resources that fund it subside, many such people get back on track - that predictable track which is primarily purposed for avoiding the risk of adverse situations like poverty.

But for some, this situational pinch is seen ahead of time as a kind of motivational tool, one that will and can galvanize the spirit to transform the lessons of creative wandering into a creative upgrade.  This is the entrepreneurial spirit before any thought of business even enters the picture.  

The entrepreneurial spirit is rather counter to the predictable path and sees that avenue as a setup for failure, as being stuck in a perpetual loop and cycle of risk aversion as opposed to embracing that risk to experience the real goods of what life has to offer.