Combining loose ends with meaning

Meaning comes from engagement, what you spend your time on.

I believe that there is no Meaning with a capital “M”. We create our own meaning and since I put more stock in actions than words, I think what you spend your time on is the best reflection of where you draw your meaning.

A failure to find meaning as a failure of nerve

From Venkatesh Rao On Infinite Loops

On Arthur C. Clarke’s distinction between a failure of imagination vs a failure of nerve: Arthur C. Clark has this wonderful essay called Failures of Prophecy, I believe, and he talks about two kinds of failure in thinking about the future, failure of imagination and failure of nerve, and he makes the very interesting claim that the failure of nerve is, by far, the more important. A lot ofpeople are extremely imaginative, they can take in the vast amount of confusing information in the world now and come up with very imaginative sort of interpretations and sense-making constructs. But very few people can look the confusing or mess of reality in the face and say, “This is actually the nervy, courageous thing to do,” And go against their instincts. And it’s easy to, I don’t know, spend as much time as you like on the fun imaginative stuff and never do a courageous thing in your life, whereas the nervy thing is kind of the hard thing to do. So that’s where that particular phrase came from.

“Paycheck people” The Paycheck People connection is, I guess, the industrial economy over a century, has created this gamified environment relating to work where it is easy to get through life never making a hard decision ever. So long as you’re smart and imaginative, you will always be valued, you’ll have a job, somebody will give you interesting problems to work on. If you have the right kind of imagination, maybe you’ll come up with good answers, but your courage is not routinely tested. And this, I think, was probably the case in most sectors in the, at least, developed industrialized world, and the paycheck economy in particular, until, I would say, the mid to late nineties when things started wobbling and the old certainties were really starting to unravel and it became clear that you could not go through life only being smart and imaginative and playing the game that was laid out in front of you because at some point, you had to make courageous decisions, and the paycheck world is not really set up to allow you to make courageous decisions.In fact, in the paycheck world, I would argue, courageous decisions are, generally, decisions that kind of break the gamification model of the world itself…. In the brief time I was paycheck employed for several years at Xerox, I dropped a few bombs, I made few bold decisions, but what was shocking was not that a few senior executives kind of spotted me and chose to sponsor me and back my decisions and help me take, I don’t know, risky decisions and risky projects, but the complete lack of reaction in the rest of the corporation, and this, I think, is generally true. It’s like it’s outside their frame of reference to understand risk at all. It’s like, all right, you make this narrow band of maybe very intelligent and imaginative decisions, but within an extremely narrow band of acceptable risk. And beyond that, risk-taking is for senior executives, weird people in the investing world, artists and creative types who live hand-to-mouth and are starving. Risk is not within the frame of reference for how to navigate the world. And I think that’s kind of why I relate the paycheck economy to kind of a structural failure of nerve, it sort of trains you to not have nerve, it trains you to survive without it, and I think there’s a cost to that over a long term.

If you’re mired in the “paycheck economy”, you may be in such a routine that more existential questions about meaning are ignored or not given space. How does Venkat think about this?

Meaning I think is extremely strongly related to the first topic we were talking about, nerve versus imagination. I think meaning-making begins when you first take your first courageous decision in your life and then realize just how much agency you have. To what extent you are operating in a condition of learned helplessness in institutionalized environments. And the first time you sort of make a reach for a truly autonomous decision, despite the risks, you realize how much more opportunity there is to do so. And for me, the first time that happened was actually long before my leap into the gig economy, when I was unhappy with my first PhD advisor. And I made the decision that even if it’ll costs me my financial aid and I’m sort of adrift for a while, I’m going to break up with my PhD advisor and sort of go off in the wild for a while and find another advisor and new funding.And that is what I did. It was very sort of a tough decision. I quit that advisor, I lost my funding, I had to go off and work at a startup for a year. Then I came back, worked with another advisor I got along with better. But I think that flipped a switch in me where after that, solving for meaning became so easy and so much second nature because it’s not an intellectual problem. You don’t have to be smart to solve for meaning-making, you just have to be courageous. You have to do the tough and hard thing as opposed to the maybe intellectually complex but easy thing. So I think I’m a reasonably smart guy, but I think what unlocked meaning-making for me was that first choice to make a tough decision. And after that, it was brain-dead obvious to me. Anytime I came to a fork in the road, it’s like, “Yeah, this is obviously the more meaningful thing to do, so I’m going to do it.”

How the world obscures this

I would say that today the world is set up in a way where it’s actually hard to learn this meaning-making trick except by accident. And one of the things that I think this growing conversation around the gig economy is doing, is sort of reinforcing the intense practicality of looking for meaning. A lot of people don’t get this.If you look at conversations about meaning-making in the abstract, the way talking heads talk about them and talking about lost voice, listening to podcasters and getting radicalized, that level of conversation about the meaning crisis, it seems like a philosophical spiritual problem that should be addressed with religion and philosophy, ideas and so forth. It’s not. It’s really as simple as meaning-making is unlocked when you first learn to take courageous decisions and keep doing that, so it becomes a habit. And after that, you kind of unlock this idea of fixed point futures and all these other little tricks become sort of self-evident.

Learning to make meaning is the most intensely practical thing you can do. It’s not a matter of spiritual retreats and going on soul-searching journeys and having shamans take you on Ayahuasca retreats and things like that. It’s not about that at all. It’s the first time you come to a hard decision in your career or life, make the hard decision, see how good you are at making tough calls, and then keep doing that and meaning-making will take care of itself.

And I think that’s a lesson that the emerging conversation in the gig economy is driving home for a lot of people. And a lot of people who stay in the paycheck economy, stay in an environment that makes this way too hard, that tells them, “You have to go on spiritual retreats and read Zen philosophy and take drugs to learn meaning-making.” And it’s not that hard.

The “tragically lucky”

At age 23, it’s very tempting to conflate agency and determinism in scripts. You think you control your future, you think you can make a very specific future happen. You think “I’m a smart guy, I have these resources at hand and I can solve the problem and solve the equation of how to turn my talents and resources into the outcomes I want.” And then of course, life hits you in the face. You realize it’s much more complex.Then you ask, “What happens next?” Do you then refactor your sense of agency as in “I still have agency, it just doesn’t work the way I thought it did, so I’d better get about understanding how the world actually works and understanding how agency actually operates.” That’s one path.

The other path is of course the world sort of mashed my plans to bits and pieces and I’m going to be helpless from here on out, and that happens to people too.

So I think a naive sense of youthful agency does not survive first contact with the enemy…but for some people it does. And of course, there are also people who just get lucky in a very naive sense in the sense that they plan a particular future and actually it unfolds because they never get hit in the face with conflicting reality. So there are people I know who are these spirits who go through life everything having gone exactly as they planned.But there’s a certain tragedy there, which is, they think they’re super agenty then things go out exactly as planned and they become president or whatever, and then they’re like 60, 70 or these old people and they come across as children. I talk to them and they’re like, there’s a sense of a lost child about them. It’s like they were never really tested by life, so they’d never really actually learned what was going on. It’s like they’re 60 or 70 and they act like children or 23-year olds maybe. And part of the reason is they were on the surface, they were super lucky that things bent as they planned, but at the deeper sort of philosophical level, they’re the most intensely tragic figures in the world because things went exactly as they planned. The most interesting thing that can happen to you in your life is things don’t go as you plan. And because that forces you to come to terms with what’s the actual nature of the world, what’s the actual nature of agency.

[Kris: I think most people’s desire or goal in life is to become tragically lucky. Ignorance is bliss and all that. Hard to think of anything more boring.]

Finding a healthy sense of agency

2 versions of the problem

a) There are people who were so battered down by early life traumas that they never make those naively optimistic 23-year old statements at all.

The first challenge is to get them to that place of naive optimism in the first place. So I think of that as a much more basic challenge of humane treatment of young people, which is if they’ve been battered, just create kind environments for them where they can develop some confidence and say, “Hey agencies, actually I think that exists”, even if it’s at a very toy level. So often when I’m thrown into position of trying to mentor younger people, which I try to avoid, I’m not a mentor type person, but when I am thrown in the situation, my tendency is to ask “how burned are you? How much are you a devastated landscape of bad parenting and bad childhood conditioning that we have to get you to the starting line of being a naive optimistic age 20?” And this requires kindness and nurturing, and I’m not very good at that, other people are better.

b) But let’s assume some people are already at that starting line of naive optimism

How do you ensure that you when throw them into reality a) they don’t get tragically lucky. Let’s hope they don’t get tragically lucky. Throw them in something that actually challenges their assumptions about the world and breaks them in some way. But then how do you ensure that if they’re broken, they’re actually not going to react with complete helplessness, but then sort of pick themselves up and say, “No, the world works differently and I’m going to rethink what agency means.”

And I think yes, that is a learnable, teachable skill, but it’s one that the industrial environment with schooling and the paycheck world is actually anti-optimized for. It’s designed to teach you exactly the opposite of that. It’s designed to take you from an naive starting point and keep you tragically lucky for the rest of your life. And if they fail at it, you’re tossed by the wayside. That’s what the industrial world is set up to do, make you tragically lucky or throw you into the garbage heap.

In the developing world, more people are thrown by the wayside, and in places the US more people enjoy the tragically, enjoy is the wrong word, but suffer the tragically lucky outcome.

We don’t want either of those outcomes. We want you to be thrown into the world, into a test environment where you’reactually tested and then you kind of learn the skills through trial and error of acquired realistic agency

The dizziness of freedom

Or as Russ Roberts said “What was once destiny is now a decision”

George Mumford on the dizziness of freedom:

Freedom is not free. The dizziness of freedom is because you’re on a road less traveled, you’re on shaky ground. The ground you’re on is moving to the degree that — I’m going back to 1846, Søren Kierkegaard, and he said that one side of the coin is freedom or potential. The other side is anxiety or uncertainty. So he called it the “alarming possibility of being able.” So when you grow, when you change a behavior or a habit, you have to experience anxiety. You have to experience uncertainty. You have to experience discomfort.

You get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Before you have freedom, you don’t have to think. You don’t have to reflect. You don’t have to take a risk. You don’t have to be vulnerable. Now you’ll be in freedom and you’re going through a different door. You’re trying something else. Then the dizziness is you do this thing, you can do that thing.

So you start understanding there’s no meaning in the universe other than what you give it, that when you do one thing you lose something else. If I have five choices and I make one, I lose four. So now I’m in here, now I’m worrying about, did I make the right choice? The uncertainty is a military term they use, VUCA, V-U-C-A. From moment to moment things are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. So you have to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity. That’s part of life. This is what life is about. It’s about saying “yes and”. Yes, it’s frustrating. It’s unpleasant, and it’s okay. This is it. When I grow, this is what comes with it. If I achieve my goals, you look at the positive, but there’s a negative.

The other side is you’re in a rowboat with people. You change, they’ve got to change. They’ve got to move. They don’t want to move. Or they got you in a box and now you’re out of the box. So now they’ve got to see who you are. They’re going to keep you in a box and get mad at you. So for whatever reason, but it always comes down to discomfort, being uncomfortable. The nervous system is wired this way. If it’s pleasant, we approach. If it’s unpleasant, we avoid. And if it’s neither, we’re indifferent, we space out, because the nervous system does so. When you impute meaning onto something, and say, “It’s going to be great. Even though it’s uncomfortable, I know on the other side, this is the only way out.”

Once I commit to that and I have the experience of going through it and then coming to another level of grace, of ease, of peace, then I continue to do that. That’s what I talk about — the superpower trust. You need trust, but when you can verify it through insight, through information, through experience, now it goes from confidence to conviction, and then now, you get on a beneficial cycle where things keep getting better— the rich get richer, because you know that if you learn and you achieve, it’s going to generate enthusiasm and you’re going to want to learn more. You’re going to want to commit to it, because you know that — this is what the elite performers do. They see those things as challenges. “Oh, this is great. This is an opportunity for me to express myself.” So that mindset is the growth mindset, but it’s also pursuing excellence.