Tag: Future

Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist? - George Herriman, Michael Tisserand, Joe Abittan

Pessimist, Optimist, or Just Mist?

Posted on by jabittan
In his biography of George Herriman, author Michael Tisserand included numerous comics from Herriman to demonstrate his artistic skill, wit, and general approach to comics. One of the book’s chapters started with the written words from one of Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics from April 23, 1921, and stood out to me:
 
 
“Ignatz: Now, “Krazy,” do you look upon the future as a pessimist, or an optimist?
Krazy: I look upon it just as mist–”
 
 
I really enjoyed this line of dialogue when I first read it in Tisserand’s book, and still get a chuckle as I read it now. It is a witty pun, an accurate reflection of our predicament with looking toward the future, and feels entirely fresh 100 years after it was written.
 
 
I feel like I notice false dichotomies everywhere. It is easy to see the world in black or white and tempting to live in a world defined with dichotomies. They make our lives easier by slotting things into neat categories and helping us reduce the amount of thinking we have to do. Unfortunately, living a life that accepts false dichotomies is dangerous and deluded.
 
 
The false dichotomy that the comic pulls apart is the false dichotomy of pessimism versus optimism. If pressed, probably all of us could say we were more of an optimist or pessimist, but it is probably not very accurate to really define ourselves as one way or the other. At any given time we may be more or less optimistic or pessimistic on any number of factors and our views for any of them could change at any moment. We may also be deeply pessimistic about one important area, but very optimistic in another area with no clear reconciliation between those two optimistic and pessimistic feelings. For example, you could be very optimistic about the direction of the economy, but pessimistic about the long-term sustainability of current economic practices given climate change. It is hard to pin yourself as either pessimistic or optimistic overall regarding the economy in this situation.
 
 
Some of us may try to avoid this false dichotomy with a trite response that we are neither an optimist or pessimist, but a realist (or nihilist or other -ist). This dodge acknowledges that the distinction between optimist and pessimist isn’t necessarily real, but fails to provide a legitimate alternative. Is there any exclusionary factor between a realist and an optimist or pessimist? A nihilist might be optimistic that society is going to collapse, even if they feel pessimistic about what will happen to them. My suspicion is that people who call themselves realists simply want to avoid looking like they are optimistic or pessimistic without merit, and as if they base their optimism or pessimism off data and not vague feelings.
 
 
I think that Krazy in the comic is addressing the dichotomy in the most reasonable way possible, by acknowledging the difficulties of predicting the future and accepting that he is overwhelmed with the mist. His answer rejects the false dichotomy of optimism and pessimism and embraces the conflicting factors that might make us happy or sad, financially well off or ruined, or lead to any number of potential outcomes. Rather than trying to hold positive or negative views regarding our futures, the best thing to do is admit that we don’t really know what will happen, but to try to place ourselves in a position where we can have the best outcomes no matter what takes place, even if all we see is mist.
Thinking Forward to Prepare for Obstacles

Thinking Forward to Prepare for Obstacles

Posted on by jabittan
A useful technique I learned for overcoming obstacles is to think ahead to the challenges you are likely to face and how you can overcome those challenges. If you only think ahead to the success you will have and picture a perfect life once you reach your goal, you will be less likely to actually achieve the success you desire than if you think about the challenges that lie ahead. However, dwelling on only the hard parts and obstacles can also be unhealthy. The key is to look ahead not to the obstacles themselves, but to how you will overcome them.

 

When you think about things that can go wrong in your life, you should picture yourself  getting through those obstacles. You should be realistic and specific in thinking things through. “I might encounter X, and if that happens, then I know I can do Y and ultimately be successful or at least manage a reasonable level of comfort.” If you start your plan for how you will overcome those obstacles, you will be more likely to persevere when the going gets tough. If you only think about how nice it will be once you have reached your goal, then you will be unprepared for the obstacles that you will face along your journey.

 

While this is a much more healthy way to think about the future, it is not the most common way for us to think. Most of us anticipate the things that can go wrong, but never get to the next step of thinking through the ways in which we can prepare for and overcome the problems we fear. What we usually end up doing is living in dread of the troubles ahead.

 

In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca writes, “Why, indeed, is it necessary to summon trouble—which must be endured soon enough when it has once arrived, or to anticipate trouble and ruin the present through fear of the future? It is foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.”

 

Seneca recognized the dangers of living in dread. If we think ahead to the future and only worry about what negative things we may face, then we turn our present moment, which might be quite peaceful and enjoyable, into a negative space consumed by the thing we hope doesn’t happen. Seneca encourages us to be more present and grounded in the current moment. I would argue that looking ahead and thinking of how we can overcome obstacles and truly understanding how we can adjust to and adapt to these challenges can help us be more confident in ourselves, and help us ultimately live with a greater sense of presence. It will also help us prepare for those times when we do face the obstacles we are afraid of.

Prestige

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about using dominance to gain status by intimidating, bullying, and bulldozing ones way to prominence. Driving people’s fears, pushing them to submission and capitulation, and using others to attain what you want are part of the strategy for dominance. While dominance may increase an individual’s status, it is not a great approach for a larger society that needs to operate well together.

 

Prestige is an alternative form of status seeking behavior that seems like it may help societies mesh together better. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson write in The Elephant in the Brain, “Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits-think Meryl Streep or Albert Einstein. Our behavior around prestigious people is governed by approach instincts. We’re attracted to them and want to spend time around them.”

 

We can certainly have problems with prestige, in the forms of celebrity worship and out of control egos, but the authors argue that our prestige desire is part of what drives humans and progress forward. With our large brains and political societies, we want to develop status not by just dominating others, but by showing that we can do difficult and complex things. That we have the resources necessary to spend our time, energy, and attention on things that would otherwise be trivial or meaningless to a hunter/gatherer’s survival.

 

Our art work is impressive, even if it is not that useful. Developing the iPhone is certainly useful, but it is also a hard thing that requires insight, creativity, and persistence, skills that are hard to display unless you do something unique and challenging. We want to associate with the people who attain prestige because they demonstrate qualities helpful allies that may benefit us in the future. Obviously, if we are of the opposite gender, then mating with these high prestige individuals will help us ensure that the genes we pass along also receive some of the status benefits from our mate’s prestige, helping them find more allies for more help further off in the future. Prestige seems to encourage the things that helps society stick together and be successful in a world where we may otherwise have just preferred to bulldoze our way over others to take what we want directly by force.

The Challenge of Trying to Enlarge the Pie

Posted on by jabittan
I often feel that we are moving so fast toward the future that we are advancing beyond our means. I think we are in some ways exceeding the capacity that we have evolved to fit, and this is creating great challenges for humans across the globe. We have new technologies, new social structures, and new understandings of our places in the world and in the universe more broadly that exceed the type of living that we evolved to succeed with.

 

A passage from Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s book The Elephant in the Brain highlighted this for me. They write, “Despite the fact that it’s possible to cooperate, politically, in ways that “enlarge the pie” for everyone, this is the exception rather than the rule – especially for our distant ancestors. In most contexts, for one coalition to succeed, others must fail. Importantly, however, members within a coalition can earn themselves a larger slice of the pie by cooperating – a fact that makes politics such an intoxicating game.”

 

The line about our ancestors being incapable of expanding the pie for everyone is important. Without much technology, without shared languages and translation, and in a state of constant threat from nature, it is easy to see why our early ancestors were limited to a state of competition with each other for social status, sex, and politics. There simply were too few humans, too few easily accessible resources, and too few scalable technologies for everyone to be sufficiently comfortable and connected.

 

We now live in a new world, where literally 7.5 million people in the San Francisco metropolitan statistical area are constantly thinking about ways to build new technology to scale to improve the lives of all people, not just the people they are connected with. We understand that our actions can have global manifestations, and that we need global solutions to address climate change and other existential threats. Our technology and ways of thinking have surpassed the world our ancestors lived in, and have created a new game for us to play, however, we are still stuck in the zero-sum mindset of our ancestors, asking what we can do to get a bigger share of the pie for our narrow coalition.

 

Understanding why we fall into thinking about narrow coalitions is important. Recognizing the way our brains work and why they are limited helps us see new potentials. Understanding how we can change our thoughts and how we and others will react in a world that offers so much more is key to actually living up to our new potential as a global species.

Creating History

Posted on by jabittan
Physics often times does not align with what we expect. But really, there is no reason that the physics we experience here on our planet with our limited senses should lead us to perfectly predict how physics and reality play out across the universe. Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is an excellent physics book because it takes readers with little scientific background through the complex paradoxes and challenges of physics to explore the furthest reaches of our scientific thought. Author Amanda Gefter herself is not a physicist, and learned to understand physics first as a hobby, and later (as detailed in her book) as a bit of an obsessive search for the universe’s ultimate building block.

Along her journey, Gefter introduces us to John Wheeler, a physicist who wrote with an almost poetic style when describing the complex science that he worked on. Wheeler helps us understand that one of the things within human experience that is so fundamental to how we view reality, is not quite as solid as we would expect. He is quoted  by Gefter writing, “We used to think that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us.” When we study physics we are actually adjusting and changing the past. We are not looking at an independent system that existed before us a certain way. When we measure and observe the past, we actually can change it from the present. This is explained by Gefter with further help from Wheeler by describing experiments with photons to measure how sub-atomic particles travel. Light is made of photons, but it acts as a wave, with probabilities based on the wave function determining where the photons of the light will be. Once, however, we make an observation of a single photon, the probabilistic wave function ceases to exist, and the photon acts as a particle, and not as a wave. Up until we make our measurement however, the photon is a series of probabilities and behaves as a wave, the same way a wave behaves in the open ocean, and not as a particle on a direct path.

Gefter writes, “Delayed-choice experiments have been carried out in laboratories, and each time they’ve worked just as wheeler suggested. It’s an established scientific fact: measurements in the present can rewrite history. No, not rewrite. Just write. Prior to observation, there is no history, just a haze of possibility, a past waiting to be born. ‘There is no more remarkable feature of this quantum world than the strange coupling it brings about between future and past,’ Wheeler wrote. If observations we make today can create a billion-year-old past, so, too, can observations made in the future help build the universe we see today.”

In the quote above Gefter is describing the same experiments with photons, but looking at photos billions of light years away from us that had to travel across the universe and split on one side or another of a black hole, universe, or other star to reach one of our telescopes. The path taken by a given photon is best described by the probabilistic wave function with all the features, such as frequency and amplitude, of physical waves that we can observe on earth. But once we make an observation in a telescope to measure the path the photon took around a galaxy, black hole, or star, the wave function no longer describes the photon, and the photon has to have followed a set pathway, a pathway that was not determined until it reached our planet, billions of years after it was emitted from its original source.

The physics is beyond my ability to describe, but the key point is that we are human and have limited brain space and experiential ability. We can only experience first hand so many sensations and realities. More possibilities exist than we can experience and understand. Thinking that we can ever describe reality in the most comprehensive manner is a great dream for scientists and physicists to work toward, but we will always be limited by the fact that we are human and can only experience the world in so many ways. Things that we take to be so certain, like history and the passage of time, seem to be interconnected with the present and the future in ways that we can’t quite explain right now.

Becoming the Master of Our Own Destinies

Posted on by jabittan
Why do we hesitate before taking on new opportunities, especially when those opportunities are ones that we tell people we have wanted? Why do we wait for another person to be a catalyst for action in our own lives? These are questions that Colin Wright asks in his book Come Back Frayed. He looks at our hesitation during times of opportunity and our lack of self belief during  times of challenge, and encourages us to be the ones who drive and dictate our lives instead of leaving our lives to be shaped by people beyond us.  He writes,

 

“We create our own continuity. We mustn’t depend on someone else to construct our frame works for us. … But we are the masters of our destinies and direction. We are the most capable, competent, correct people for this particular job. All we have to do is recognize this and accept the responsibility.”

 

Wrights quote comes after an explanation of how our reactions to struggles either provide us with opportunity for growth or keep us from being able to change for the better. By adapting to the obstacles we face and using the experiences and challenges as building blocks for growth, we can make sure that our personal evolutions are marked by positive changes. When we do this, we create our own future. We decide how we will react to the world around us and build our own scaffolding toward the success we desire.

 

Throughout his writing, Wright seems to acknowledge how much of the world and universe truly lies beyond our control. We cannot shape how other people will behave, we cannot control natural disasters, and we cannot truly predict any future event, but this does not mean that we must surrender our lives and allow ourselves to be pushed in any direction by the forces outside ourselves. Instead, by controlling our mind (the only thing we can possibly have control over) we can shape the direction of our journey through the choices and reactions to those outside factors.

 

The first step in this process is accepting responsibility for our decisions, actions, and thoughts. From this point we begin to decide how we will react to what goes on around us and if we will use adversity to propel us forward. It requires that we stop looking at limitations in our lives as reasons not to move forward or pursue a goal, and it requires that we elevate our vision of what we believe possible for ourselves, recognizing that our mental framing will determine how creative our future can be, and how persistent we can be on our path forward.

 

I want to also push back against Wright’s quote and some of the suggestions that this perspective may create. Controlling the faculties of our mind and accepting responsibility for our own agency does not mean that we will find economic success, which is the default version of success that American’s refer to.  Epictetus certainly believed in his own agency in his thoughts, decisions, and reactions, but he lived as a slave for much of his life without an opportunity to pursue wealth. The forces that are beyond us may be so limiting as to squash any hopes that we have of reaching specific goals, especially in a world so easily shaped by inherent bias, but nevertheless, we can thoroughly evaluate our motivations and goals, and always find a reasonable measure of success which does not tie in with monetary figures set by people external to us. Wright’s suggestion encourages us to pursue great goals and to be the agents driving toward those goals, and while it is important to practice building that mindset, what we also must consider is how arbitrary those goals can become, especially if not set by ourselves and our own true reflection.

The Power of the Present

Posted on by jabittan
Marcus Aurelius believed in the power of the mind and our ability to control our thoughts to overcome our challenges and find peace with ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in.  In his book Meditations he wrote down his personal thoughts and struggles so that he could return to what he had learned from philosophers and life experience. He kept the book as a journal that he could use to help himself learn and grow through difficult situations, and one topic he returns to throughout Meditations is the idea of being present in the current moment.  Aurelius wrote,

 

“Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? for thou wilt be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this.”

 

His paragraph speaks about  recognizing our present moment and taking our mind off events in the past that we cannot change and away from the possibilities of the future that we cannot predict.   He also recognizes that our present moment is the only moment that can truly impact where our life is heading, and reminds the reader to look at the present moment with all the clarity possible.  Seeing each moment as it exists right now helps us change the way we think and ultimately change our perception of the present moment.

 

Living in the present is a challenge because we are constantly pulled toward the history of our  past while simultaneously pushed toward a future that we cannot see. We bring the lessons, pains, emotions, and fears of our past with us as we move toward a future that we desire and wish to be better than our current circumstance.  All of this, Aurelius would argue, ultimately fails us on our quest to become the best version of ourselves possible.  Worrying about what has befallen us allows our past to impact our future, and stressing the future takes us away from the present, preventing us from being able to maximize our current actions.  For Aurelius, in stoic fashion, there is only the present, and it is up to us to recognize the present and take all the necessary steps to create the perfect present for ourselves regardless of our history or future plans.

 

What the Roman emperor also builds into his thoughts about the present moment is our ability to choose how we wish to experience the present.  We can decide that the present action, fortune, or obstacle in front of us is insurmountable or an aid for us on our journey.  If we approach life shying away from our challenges and looking only for what is comfortable, then we will never achieve our fullest potential.  What Aurelius in his quote above urges us to do is forget our past and future and focus on our ability to be great in this current moment.  It is only our opinion which determines whether anything is good for us or negative, and it is in our power of mind to decide how we will react to challenges and behave when faced with arduous tasks. Ultimately, we create the reality of our present moment.