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.

LOW ODDS, RARE MOVES

June 4th, 2021

If the odds are against you, then you have to do something that is rare, literally. All this means is that something unusual, different and unexpected is more likely to work. Inevitably, this means something counter-intuitive, and a better way to think about that is as something that doesn’t necessarily ‘feel right’.

Take for instance poverty and fasting. Fasting has become trendy in health circles, and for good reason - there are tremendous benefits to fasting. There are short term cognitive benefits and long term benefits for the body and for longevity.

Now think for a moment about the overlap between trendy health circles and poverty? We can’t imagine there’s much overlap at all. Poverty is well correlated with unhealth. Robert Sapolsky details the neurological implications of poverty and how chronic stress creates an interlinked cascade of poor health outcomes. One aspect of chronic stress as induced by poverty is decision making ability. The chronically stressed individual is far less likely to think about the long term and constantly optimize for short term gains. Another ramification of chronic stress is a predilection for unhealthy food, which is unfortunately also a lot cheaper, generally, than healthy food. The idea of fasting and genuinely entertaining it’s potential benefits just doesn’t have a high likelihood of occurring as something worth seriously entertaining for someone who is chronically stressed.

But think about how fasting could impact the mind, body and health of someone who is chronically stressed. As mentioned there are short term cognitive benefits. Fasting can sharpen and deepen one’s ability to focus and in some sense clarify one’s attention. On top of this it saves time and money, both things that are generally stretched to their limit for someone trapped within the maze of poverty. Money could be saved to then buy healthier food which can be purchased less often. All of this is rather counter-intuitive. It just doesn’t feel ‘right’, even though it makes sense. In terms of how it feels, it’s about as uncomfortable as it would seem to be cruel if you told a poor person to take up fasting. But as weird as it seems, it would be a decent suggestion if it wasn’t taken as an insult.

We can examine a slightly more improved situation and still find counter-intuitive benefits. Take for instance someone who isn’t as poor but who is holding steady so to speak. Rent gets paid, there’s plenty to eat, but that’s pretty much it. The work has no chance of social mobility, no promotions, just more of the same work. And now let’s say this person wants to better their life, switch careers with the hope to make more money and do something more fulfilling. What’s a person to do if all time and money is already spent in order to just keep living? One avenue is to realize that the cost of rent is not an absolute. Our newly ambitious individual could move into a van, save all the money that would normally go to rent, or start working part time since costs have suddenly decreased by a huge fraction and devote the extra time to learning new skills for a new career. Again, the odds were against the person who is living pay check to pay check, but that trap of treading water can be short circuited with an unusual rearranging of circumstance. A public parking space is free, even if bylaws make living in one a bit of a questionable and grey area. Again, it doesn’t feel right to give up one’s roof an shelter, but doing so creates a lot more leverage.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF PROGRESS

June 3rd, 2021

Evolution is often visualized as a slow but constant change.  There are countless computer generated simulations of the morphing ape face into a human one. This is also how we like to think work happens: you show up to a job and start working and you don’t stop until it’s time to go home.  For some forms of work, particularly manual labor, this might be the case, but if the work is creative of any kind, this sort of consistency is a fantasy, just like our visualizations of evolution.  The process of both is one of fits and starts, sprints and potentially long plateaus where nothing much happens.

If a particular species is perfectly adapted to it’s environment, then there is virtually no evolutionary pressure on that species to change.  It’s only when circumstances shift, when it gets colder, or hotter, or a new predatory or food source turns up that evolutionary process kicks into action.  Given the distribution of genetic mutations, there is a chance that an off spring of the current generation is slightly better equipped to handle the new environmental circumstance.  Perhaps the genetic mutation creates a thicker coat of fur and the colder environment is no problem.  Or perhaps it’s less fur in a hotter circumstance.  Or this one can run faster and avoid the new predator or has a different shaped set of teeth to dig into a new food source.  This match up of genetic mutation and environmental change is a lot like luck.  That one individual gets lucky because they have an advantage compared to the rest of their population.  This advantage generally enables the individual to have more offspring and eventually, if the mutation and the environment change both stick around for long enough, this new branch of the species will grow and displace all the other individuals in the population that lack the genetic mutation.  But again, this shift in population morphology requires a change in the environment.  So what happens to species morphology if there’s no change in the environment?  For the most part, nothing.  Sharks, for example, are older than trees and while they’ve changed shape and size over the eons, they haven’t actually changed that much.  Whales on the other hand are the ancestors of a small land animal that walked on four legs.  

The creative work process is an evolutionary one.  It hinges on discovery, which is akin to the randomness of genetic mutation and the unpredictability of environmental changes, which means it’s also, very inconsistent.  Or rather discovery and creativity can be very inconsistent.  The writer who can’t seem to start the next book for years and years is a good example of the stagnancy that can occur in the creative process which is similar to the shark’s complete lack of pressure to evolve.  

The geography of progress is an evolutionary process.  It is not linear and it’s only as consistent as the pressures that are applied to it.  Creativity and innovation needs push and drive in order to occur, otherwise, like that blocked writer, or that shark, things stay the same, and that can go on for a very long time.

HUNTING THE DEVIL

June 2nd, 2021

When the devil is in the details, it generally means that you’ve missed something, something crucial that has wide ramifications.  It’s an understandable obstacle.  We are incredibly limited on the amount of information that we can discover, consume and integrate into our plans and idea of how things work.  Usually the devil pops up to thwart our plans when everything we thought necessary has already been put together, rending much effort useless.  It’s obvious that figuring out these details ahead of time is crucial.  But how do you hunt for the devil?  And what happens if you find him?

What happens to the discovery of a crucial piece of information before it’s effects jeopardize our efforts?  Suddenly the devil in the details becomes inverted.  That crucial killer piece of information becomes a tool which can be used to tinker with plans in order to effortlessly incorporate it.  It’s the difference between the discovery you’ve lost the ten dollars you had in your pocket right when you’re trying to pay for something and discovering an unexpected ten dollars when you don’t actually need it yet.  The point is that you will use the surprise ten dollars.

The devil in the details is more like a nugget of gold if found early.  At the very least, even if the detail means that a goal or a plan absolutely cannot succeed with total certainty, the good in this is that it saves all resources that would have been spent before the fateful and unfortunate discovery of that devil in the details.

Hunting the devil requires somber and sober mix of optimism and pessimism.  Optimism is too often an unbridled enthusiasm that things will work out.  This simplistic perspective is out of touch with reality.  As depressing as it might be, the pessimist is usually correct.  But pessimists rarely accomplish much.  It’s the optimists who can harness the powers of the pessimists that manage to get new things accomplished.  Hunting the devil requires the pessimistic powers to imagine that he’s there, hiding somewhere, in the details of your future plans, waiting to trip you up.  The pure pessimist just stops all effort at this point, and this is where a tempered optimism is crucial.  The pessimist oddly has the more useful imagination initially with obstacles, but it’s the optimist’s imagination that is far better equipped to incorporate that devilish detail and find a way that it can potentially become an asset.  

For an optimist to harness the power of the pessimist, it’s absolutely crucial that the optimist recognizes and acknowledges that the end goal in mind, just might not be possible.  Strangely, this makes it more likely that the end goal will eventually emerge successfully, in some form or another.