I’ve been struggling to write for a while. My reflections used to feel like tides crashing up against walls of a dam, eager to break free – the only barrier between thought and paper were 1. time, and 2. finding cohesion in the chaos. Now, it’s been feeling a little more like sparse sputtering flames, very much like candles nearing the end of their lives – still inherently scented, but with only whiffs of each at once, insufficient to fill a room.
I figured it’s not just writing; the writing is but a symptom of a larger set of causes. Thus I write here in an exercise to flesh out my current mental models – in hopes that through verbalizing do I figure out (and if worth revisiting, iterate on) my missing internalized premises; or maybe someone reading will give me a thoughtful nudge to augment my existing mental frameworks. I’ll be very grateful for that.
A silly, silly life
Before beginning, a quick word on visuals / mental models.
I frequently mention the idea of framing and mental models. Maybe a little too much. I’ve once very incorrectly used them as sets of truths instead of sets of symbols, conflating phenomena with reason, occurrences with causations. That’s a dangerous place to be in, and perhaps the very takeaway I should have learned from an Economics education – that models are incomplete, inexhaustive, and you can hardly place them on spectrums of co-existence and contradiction. Yet, despite its limits, I believe framing matters so much as starting points. After all, aren’t most of our ‘lived experiences’ just ‘memory’ hand-picked to fit into our narratives? Of course we can ‘connect’ the dots looking backwards. As Watts puts it: “Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense.”
Acknowledging its futility in explanatory power, I still find it a helpful exercise in trying to find some semblance and reason in my little breath of a life.
The full quote is here:
“By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another. Nor is the interval between these two nights an unclouded day, for the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain…
… If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense.” — Alan Watts
Funnel visual
The first idea is the contradiction within the funnel. I thought about this on a stroll home. Isn’t it interesting that on average, the very mechanisms that demand interesting, well-lived, diverse individuals are the same ones that often have the most challenging and time-consuming jobs. Doesn’t this, again on average, churn out people that were less interesting that they had entered, simply because of the all-consuming nature of these roles?
I might (and probably am) coming at this from naive angles. This is probably a premature incomplete conclusion. But if the experiences of those around me are representative of this ‘funnel contradiction’, doesn’t it seem like a slightly counterproductive mechanism? I’ve sensed a normalized expectation that life has to be put ‘on hold’ these few formative years out of school to focus on careers, and that life re-classifies now into indulgences and guilty pleasures that we need to ‘earn’. Maybe it isn’t mutually exclusive – life can be work, vice versa, and we should be expected to find a congruence between them. Yes, that sounds ideal, but for folks in the optionality play route, how often is that happening?
At the same time, I do recognize the counterfactual. My formative years are for learning (cognizant of folks who believe otherwise, e.g., comp, prestige, purpose, etc.). And learning comes only with exposure, and thus, by that logic, learning scales with time invested into work. This thus justifies making work an all-consuming nature of our lives. And maybe it’s accepted as a rite of passage; that it’s inevitable. You rarely hear of successes without the hard work – and this is exactly the work that happens in the proverbial weight rooms. I get it. But then again, won’t that be the role of education/college? Are the first few years of post-graduation now reframed as extended years of schooling, especially in broad-based industries like consulting and banking? And operating under the premise that it is extended education, what exactly are we learning? If college were that of Excellent Sheep’s thesis of discovering identity and independent thought, then are post-graduation first jobs for the learning of hard technical skills instead? And if it were for hard technical skills, considering the number of folks in these jobs, are there really that many of us needing the same hard technical skills for our next endeavor?
Clearly, I have no idea. I would love your thoughts.
Rivers visual / Ladder visual
The second and third visuals are that of rivers and ladders.
I’ve conceptualized paths as meandering rivers. And with its meandering, if we oversimplified our sense of ‘progress’/‘growth’ on linear x-y axes, some moments could often feel like plateaus or regressions. A close friend mentioned why he loved the gym so much – because 1. numbers are tangibly measured, and you know your progress (both instantly and accurately) and 2. it’s a constant set of metrics, universal across geographies – 100 lbs in the US is still 45 kg in Japan. And thus unlike our sense of growth, it’s a sense of certainty and respite.
I buy that argument. Further extending it, how are we to ever know if we’re deviating if we are meant to meander? Even more, is there by definition a deviation if we believe in the meander? I haven’t formed an answer to this. While first jobs aren’t always aligned with the ‘life == work’ ideal, maybe they are deeply necessary, for the argument of extended education or something else entirely. I’m unsure.
Now for the ladder visual: but do I buy the argument that life progresses with incremental steps like on a ladder? That if we skip steps we risk a fall, and if we fall, we’re bound to get harmed?
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Ah, perhaps I’ll continue with these visuals another time (I have a ‘carrot on a treadmill’ one that I have struggled to verbalize, though I thoroughly enjoy the visual). It’s time for dinner. Friends are in the living room. It’s been a sweet weekend of reconnecting, and I’m starting to relearn how much more I cherish these simple pleasures of friendship and good company.
May your weekends be great too. Sending hugs and love.