According to Evernote, I wrote this in August 2013. Doesn’t look like I’ve ever uploaded it, so… I’ll just leave this here and think about the problem of continuity later.
Woke up earlier than usual today which is a good thing but I still left for work at about the same time. I’d like to start going to work earlier, I think it’ll make me more productive. I’m a little tired of all the productivity talk though. After a while there are diminishing returns, you stop talking and just do. But this is my daily meditative writing practice so I gotta just go with the flow on this one.
I was reading Tim Harford’s Adapt yesterday. It’s a great book that describes the importance of careful, randomized trials in making sense of reality and making decisions in complex situations. It reveals the value of good feedback loops and reiteration, and how even the things that we take for granted as successful ir perennial were mostly started by people who had no real idea what they were doing. The world is a lot more volatile and chaotic than the best little narratives we invent to explain it. Ties up nicely with Taleb’s ideas about randomness and black swans.
As I was reading though I was reaching chapters that were tackling really big problems- it started with the development of solutions to specific problems in science and engineering, then foreign aid and city development (reminded of Jane Jacobs’ the nature of economies, which I have been slowly reading over coffee at JFDI)… When it got to climate change and economic crises, though, I felt an interesting urge to stop reading and do some pushups and some work. I ended up not doing very much work but I did do the pushups and felt better for it.
My thoughts went something like- it would be cool to develop more clarity when thinking about big problems, but those aren’t things that I can directly affect by myself. I have smaller problems to worry about that I CAN affect, and I can’t do much about the big problems until I get myself in order first. So I’m starting to get into this zone where I’m looking at my information diet and being more mindful of what I’m consuming. I don’t have the luxury of sitting around and reading books all day. I have to earn it by first dedicating time and energy- both limited- to the things that really matter. How do I decide what really matters? I have to pick the things that I can influence and focus on those.
I think I’m developing a better sense of what I need to do with my work and the sort of direction I should take. That’s quite clear, spending more time on it is procrastination. Next I need to further weed out distractions.
Yesterday I was trying to talk about many things at once but I think the underlying thing I wanted to explore for myself was deciding how to plan one’s information diet when indulgences are so pleasurable yet frustratingly ruinous (maybe not for everybody, but definitely for me). I also don’t like the idea of being information anorexic as a sort of perverse self-flagellation. Life should be lived. These are the internal political constraints I live with.Perhaps perverse self flagellation might be the global optimal in my life, just as communism as imagines at its finest is the perfect system on paper. But it never works out because people are imperfect, irrational creatures.
Now that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I’ve played around with ideas of individuals being fractals of larger entities but I haven’t thought of self-management in the context of political ideology- I liked to think that corporate management gives some clues into personal management, but politics seem to make even more sense. Managing a self is like managing a nation-state, and what is theoretically optimal may not necessarily be implementable because of the messy and inconsistent nature of agents within the system. So I think i can be pretty confident that the development of the self (analogous to the state rather than the nation) will have to take political compromise into account.
Now it gets interesting. Why should I bother so much about the politics of the country when I haven’t even fixed the politics within myself? You have to love yourself before you can sustainably love others, you be to be independent before you can inspire independence, if you do no good at least do no harm- and all of this is contingent on the one thing you have the most legitimate claim to dominion over (and even that is debatable) yourself.
Wow. So maybe getting all angry and riled up about singaporean politics, human rights and foreign affairs and whatnot is my way (I can’t speak for others) of distracting my populace (me) from the problems at home (me). It’s propaganda, smoke and mirrors, symptomatic of denial or a refusal to address actual problems… because those with political power (the conscious decision-making present self) benefits at the expense of the rest of me (unconscious, future, powerless, marginalized.)
That’s the source of unhappiness and general malaise in me- the state is fucking the people, denying them the right to grow, to flourish, to criticize policies. There is no democracy here, it’s a dictatorship. Without internal transparency, the welfare of the person-state is determined largely by foreign affairs with other person-states… so it’s phenomenally important to spend time around good people.
But the transparency bit is so important. We have to allow for the flourishing of that within us that is greater than us. Life is miserable otherwise. So when we fantasize about being some sort of leader… we already are. We lead ourselves. And the “selves” in this case is/are more than just the conscious person who takes credit for things. We lead a whole group of people in our head- the musician, the writer, the lover, the friend, the laborer, the hunter, the chef, the conversationalist, etc.
Clearly the language we have for talking about ourselves and our internal worlds are horribly, horribly limited. But yeah my inability to lead myself hurts others. I’m less of a friend, husband and colleague than I ought to be because of a failure of personal leadership. A failure to recognize that even when I’m absolutely alone, there are persons within me who are counting on me to help them realize their potential and/or desires. A part of me wants to travel, but I typically squash that guy out of my mind because it is a distraction from what my conscious decides is best.
It seems obvious that the conscious really ought to consult the subconscious more, because the non-conscious has the power to make the conscious feel really, really shitty. They can hold the person-state hostage and everything can go to shit. I think that’s at least vaguely how some suicides happen, or depression.
Of course for the sake of brevity and conceptual limitations I’ve spoken about this entirely within the context of an individual person-state. That’s like discussing a nation-state independently of international affairs. The result is an oversimplified model… we can’t explain and understand people in vacuums, we have to take broader inter-personal and social phenomena into account. Just as international affairs can help or screw up a country, so too can people screw up other people.
Something like that.