One of my todo list items is “write a blogpost about framing”. I think I wanted to write some sort of “teach people how to frame things” article. But how can I teach people about these things, if I don’t even know if I’m particularly good at doing it myself? How am I framing things? How can I frame things better?
Framing is about perspective. It’s about what you choose to focus on. There are effectively an infinite number of things going on at any period of time – and an infinite number of things that happened in the past, and a larger-infinite set of things that could possibly happen in the future. An infinite ways of being. Thinking about all of this can be overwhelming, which ironically tends to have me picking the default options, default settings. And that leads to a stale, predictable, formulaic life. Which is boring. And boredom is something I desperately want to avoid. (Why? What’s wrong with being bored? It feels wasteful, unimaginative. A little boredom from time to time is okay, it’s normal. It can be like sadness, in that it’s the honest truth about a situation. But the point is to use these feelings to help you navigate your life.)
So. That’s one way of framing things. Life is short, so it shouldn’t be boring. It should be interesting. What does interestingness mean? Where does interestingness come from? How do I become more playful, more curious, more inquisitive? How do I honour all of those things?
I also find myself thinking about… how am I already framing things? It’s always tempting to try and design some sort of perfect, ideal state from scratch – and it’s also quite useful, I think, because then you can aim to work towards that. But before you can work towards some new state, you also need to know the state that you’re currently in. So… what’s the state that I’m currently in? How am I currently framing things? I need to be painfully honest if this is to be useful.
I’m 28 years old. I feel like I haven’t quite come to terms with this yet. I read something somewhere once about how it takes several years to get used to being a certain age, by which time of course you’re no longer that age. Some parts of the present can only be made sense of on retrospect. As Hannah Gadsby said in her amazing Netflix special Nanette, hindsight is a gift.
At the same time, you don’t want your daily life to be dominated with the concern of how it’s going to seem on retrospect. I feel like there’s probably an ideal-ish ratio here, something maybe with the Golden Ratio or 80/20 rule. You’d should spend maybe 5-10% of your time documenting it and sharing it with your past and future selves, and the rest of it enjoying the present moment. This is to help enrich the present-ness of future moments, as well as to get you more meaning and satisfaction out of your concept of your own past. History isn’t static; it’s always changing. It doesn’t technically exist; it’s all imagined and hallucinated. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s as real as money or national borders (which also has imaginary value).
I was talking with Dinesh about blockchain, and I found myself thinking about how old ways of thinking are limitations. WaitButWhy talks about this in the Secret Sauce post too. Part of our worldview is inherited from the conventional wisdom of our culture(s) and our times, and by the time ideas make it to the mainstream, they’re almost inevitably watered down, simplistic, vague, and generally not very helpful or interesting. They’re tepid, lukewarm, generally optimised to avoid upsetting people, avoid offense, avoid danger and disaster. Mainstream thinking is designed to keep you safe. While I want to avoid catastrophic outcomes, I’d also like to take risks, try new things, explore, expand.
Circling back – I think life should be framed as an adventure, but I’ve often fallen into the trap of framing it as an ordeal. As I get older I worry about my mortgage, my marriage, the responsibility of maybe having kids, the inevitable funerals. Life can seem like a kaleidoscope of worries. And yet… life is also about having delicious prata, a teh and a cigarette at 3am in the morning. Life is about meeting and laughing with friends, old and new. Life is about seeing things from a new perspective, about travelling, about possibility. About a sense of accomplishment, about personal growth, about learning and being amazed.
Okay, hotshot. So you’ve painted a pretty picture, an ordeal on one end and adventure on the other. You can probably turn this into a 2×2 by introducing some other variable. Happy ordeal, unhappy adventure? Not particularly useful or relevant in this scenario. Let’s just go with the root question – how do I transform my life from ordeal to adventure? What does ordeal look and feel like? What does adventure look and feel like? That feels like it could be a subject of a whole ‘nother vomit. I suppose it could be all memoir-esque.
When did life start to feel like an ordeal? When did the promise of adventure first come about? Can we trace this all the way back to the beginning, for me? What are all the assumptions? What have I inherited that is no longer useful, that I can dismantle and shake off? What are all the points on the journey that I have taken so far, and how have they shaped me? What bits am I overvaluing, what bits am I undervaluing? I have a precious opportunity at the moment right now to completely re-evaluate my life and tell the story from a whole new perspective. I believe that that’s a decent enough process to figure out how I should be framing things. I need to walk the landscape of my life and memories. What do I remember? Should I start chronologically? That feels like it. My recent political/peopling consciousness is going to be a part of it for sure, whether I intend it or not. Let’s do this