What is Lost?

My experience of growing older has largely been to gain traction on progress, and learn (terribly slowly) to improve that traction, and identify and minimize whatever lessens or breaks the cycle of learning, and adapt those processes to problems in different domains. This progress (solving problems) not only occurs slowly, and the second-order progress (solving for solving problems) not only occurs slowly, but they both occur selectively, so that we are left with hard problems (first order), and hard types of problems (second order).

I sloppily transition the implied "I" into the explicit "we" so soon in this post because neither order of problem is unique to me, nor is the outcome described above. But even if we accept that we will solve easy problems, and then lose some momentum (though hopefully not altogether) on our way to solving gradually harder problems, then we can resign ourselves to the process, and proceed knowingly towards the task at hand. Maybe we are even lucky enough that such sober resignation will instill in us an appreciation for putting one foot in front of the other (in lieu of the quantum leaps forward we all dream of) - in other words, a work ethic.

Perhaps well and good, but I lament what is lost in this process.

Progress is seldom unequivocal, and many times we gain with one thing at the cost of another. In other words, progress is seldom as great as it seems, though it is hopefully still represents progress on balance. It is fairly uninteresting to make this point about the unseen effect of the aforementioned "first-order" type of process - i.e., we start locking the door to protect against burglars but then one day we lock ourselves out of the house on accident. But there are several other ways we can classify what we lose.

The hidden drawbacks of the "second-order" processes are troubling because their very nature makes they, themselves more likely to be hard problems. If it takes us time to learn to change our environment, then it is more difficult to intentionally and meaningfully change the way we go about changing our environment. If we were rational about this, we would step into the world of "second-order" problems with great reservation and care for this reason alone.

I really have two concerns, then.

The first is that we lose our aesthetic sensibility as we instill rationality onto our own thought processes. But, maybe losing our aesthetic sensibility is just part of growing older, regardless. I punt that one.

The second is the risk we run of ruining what is working in our life as we attempt to fix what is not working. The other, implied risks in that scenario are that it would be so difficult to know, until it is too late, and the possibility that it could not be undone.

Until now, I did not grasp how dispassionate, and distracted, and irritable, and unforgiving I have become, simply by being fixated on solving problems. This is both the unforeseeable and inevitable effect of learning to see problems everywhere, which I alone am responsible for. I learned to see problems everywhere when I discovered that I could fix [certain] problems systematically, but I did not have the foresight to see the dominoes that I was preparing to knock over, nor did I have the wisdom nor the grace to see that using a hammer on something besides a nail invites domain risk that should be considered carefully, and attempted carefully, and with low expectations, lest anomalous positive results be extrapolated with tragic results.

Unfortunately, the idea that fixing (or in this case, undoing) bad behavior requires only self-awareness, and some sort of internal passion is tragically incorrect. Separately, I have spent years, decades, my whole life, with myriad bad behaviors that I despise, that I would scream with rage for the persistence of - if only that same persistence hadn't dulled their company into something quietly tolerable. I have to remind myself that this is the world - that we all grow up with some deeply-ingrained habits that we will likely never shake, and that they will probably be a mixed bag. The rest is just a race of our ego versus our wisdom, though only our wisdom will stop before acting to ask, "What is lost?"

Maybe I can fix up the machine that got me here well enough to fly me home. I suppose that is the real test. Did I learn the right lesson - indeed, any lesson - from this?