Regret Minimization

"After your death, you will be what you were before your birth."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I had a girlfriend for a few years in my mid-20s who believed in heaven, who used the word for comfort upon occasions of loss, or uncertainty, such as when my grandmother died, or when we talked about what happened to the baby - if fertilization had, indeed, taken place - the time she took the 'morning after' pill and sat, forlorn, for days in her room afterwards, thinking about our future children, who she couldn't have then known we would never have.

We had talked about having children - about what they'd look like, and how we'd raise them. And, she said she would teach them about heaven, too. I didn't believe in heaven - I even wanted to, for the certainty and the comfort of my soul. The problem was, I had been infected by a self-sustaining process of reason and pattern-matching, which had discredited the idea. There was no way to fit the idea of heaven into our universe - it would have been an insult to the rest of it.¹ I had even hung onto the idea long after this realization had first occurred, but time did me in. It's amazing how slowly the gap between rote knowledge and true internalization (or, 'feeling it in our bones') can be in closing.

The metaphor for our lives that has long resonated best with me is that we have been propelled (I picture a cannon, but that's just me) into a foggy sky. At any given time, we can see only the most proximate of our vast surroundings. By our expectations, and our intuition, we know that we will rise, slowly level out, and then begin descending. We don't know where the ground is, but we know once the descent starts what is coming. We cannot change the nature of our end, though while we are airborne, we can manipulate our trajectory some small amount. Maybe we even have a guess as to whether one trajectory is better than another - although that sounds like a more difficult matter, epistemologically, to me.

Years of the traditional business problem-solving mindset have taken their toll on me - when I face any life problem now, big or small, the first thing I ask is, 'what am I solving for?' And, I seek an answer in the specific form of one or two goals (any more than that and it starts to muddy what the real priority is). Then I look for one or two things that can be measured for each - things for which optimization would tractably help achieve that goal. It's a simple process that can be used for virtually anything, so long as you define each goal and its representative measures properly. Along came my daughter, who I want to have a good life. Well, how do you define that as a goal? And what do you measure to know you're on the right track?

My mind went to some ideas I've since rejected - "total happiness" being the first, but also the most nebulous and useless of all, I suspect. Happiness may be the most obvious facet of a good life, but it's far from the only one.

I had a dream that my daughter was old - and I knew at once that I must be old, too. I knew that my wife - her mother - was already passed away. My daughter had no friends, and I was afraid that I would die before her, and that she would be left to die alone. But, dying alone was, for a long time, something I was afraid of - was I just projecting my own past fears?²

I used to be afraid of it. I got over it when I realized that my fear of dying alone was really my fear of dying too soon - which is to say, dying with regrets. Nobody has to die with regrets - they can forgive themselves for anything that has happened in their past (which is not to say it's easy), and they can be mindful of the present. I only have a problem with those two things because I'm not good at either of them.

But I want to be. I want to spend time with my parents while I can. I want to spend time with Signe while she's this age that she will, of course, never be again. And I have the means to do so, if I can only get A connected to B, whether by a straight line or not.

I don't know what I need to do for my daughter to have the best life she can. But the best hunch I have right now is for both of us to learn regret minimization - to identify regrets as early as possible, and minimize or eliminate them whenever possible. I'll learn to do this, and as she grows, I'll teach her to do this, by words and my own examples.

Then again, maybe I think all of this because I'm just over-compensating for myself. That's what parents do, right?

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1) For what it's worth, the closest I can come today to a notion of heaven is by Simulation Theory, which begs the question, what are the characteristics of the world in which the simulation is running? That is, to me, one of the most interesting philosophical questions.
2) There was a period of a few years when I was quite literally afraid of Antony and the Johnson's song, "Hope There's Someone," because of the nerve it touched.

What does it mean to be a man?

I've been reading James Reeve's "The Road to Somewhere," within which, he repeatedly asks "What does it mean to be a man?" No matter, what he's calling attention to is not his own provided answers - which are shallow stereotypes, if not caricatures of stereotypes - but the absence of any satisfactory answers to that question in the modern world, period. James' great-grandfather built his own cabin and raised several children in it; his grandfather was a company man who did well for his family as sole breadwinner before ending up in a nursing home following a stroke; his parents struggled to make ends meet at a mix of legitimate and illegitimate jobs; James builds websites. The modern world came earlier each generation for their pride and self-determination.

Or, who knows. Maybe James' family is just a bunch of losers who aren't made for this world, and are falling by the meritorious wayside to those who are. If that's true, then my gut tells me that I'm in the same boat as James' family.

I have a one-year old daughter who reminds me every day that I don't know what it means to be a man. Does it mean I'm always gentle, so that she adores me? Or always stern and unbending, so that she grows up disciplined? Does it mean I never get mad, or never get sentimental, or never get nervous, or scared? Or that I know, at once, the time for each of these things, as if this wisdom were part of my genetic programming?

Does it mean that I never get bored by mundane repetition? Or that I hide the feeling? Does it mean that I enforce patriarchy? (If that's the goal, then I am losing quite badly - we gave my daughter my wife's last name!)

I think that more than anything, being a man is supposed to mean that I already have all these answers. But I don't, and neither does anyone else. Maybe being a man means acting confident even when I don't feel it? Or acting confident even when I know nothing at all? Maybe Donald Trump is 2018's most archetypal man, because he is pure bluster - an id that follows an ego, a body that follows a voice - having broken free of the constraint of objective reality so completely. If this is one of the things that has changed in the modern world, then I am sure of it - I am not made to live in this time, and I will fail more every year.

What I really feel, as a man with a one-year old daughter, is: uncertainty that often paralyzes me from acting at all; fears that I can't dismiss, that leave me bouncing between spastic anger and a nervous sadness; and a gratitude that comes to me in strange moments - to have been chosen for this to happen to at all, because I have never felt ready nor capable of what it takes. But the world didn't care, it chose me anyway, and when the uncertainty and shame subside, I'm left with a quiet honor, and the desire to be a better father.

What I'm Trying To Do

"It's entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It's there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, it will come."

- Franz Kafka

I've been writing for perhaps seven years in something that - on a long time horizon at least - resembles a routine. Beyond that, I struggle to describe what it adds up to, perhaps because superficially, it adds up to very little, except a large number of pages filled and a large proportion of stories unfinished. But issues of focus and work ethic aside, there is no concrete thing that I am striving for - I'm not trying to finish a book (though I have fixated, at times, on the idea of bundling one or more collections of writing), and I'm not trying to express some particular worldview - at least not explicitly.

Of course, the truth is that I not only possess a worldview, but am rather consumed by it - both needing to understand how I should be living my life, and observing how that worldview evolves over time with new experiences. But, I think I'm getting ahead of myself.

There is an undercurrent to my sensory experiences of the world - the way my feelings color every moment, the way I am more than a computer, recording events - a gap between objective and subjective experience. What I have come to know - and more so yet as I have gotten older, and come to understand the common boundaries of the material world - is that I feel a grandeur and sanctity to existence that can only be experienced when the noise of the material world is adequately quieted. And though I can't hear it when the world is noisy around me, it comes to me without fail when I produce the proper conditions. From this, I can only conclude that it is always there, underneath everything, waiting for me.

Whether we're talking about simple emotion or this mysterious "otherness," you can call the difference between my experience and that of a computer a soul, or whatever you want, but as far as I can tell, my worldview is in service to it. I want to feel better more, and bad less, but I also want to silence the material world and learn to hear existence as it actually is. To be greedier yet, I want to share those experiences with others. I'm not sure how many ways this can be done, but I do know one, for sure: just teach someone to slow down, and listen in this way. That has to be the best way, when successful, because they will be seeing the world through the filter of their own soul. But, it's not the only way.

Writing has, on so many occasions, given me an opportunity to examine that other world - the one that transcends the material world and extends into something greater, and perhaps eternal. When I go back and read my writing later, with the distance of time, I see time and again that both the narrative and formalistic framing of the story pays substantial attention to the gap between objective and subjective experience. In some cases, there is still something of a proper narrative, and it is simply tinted by the formalistic frame. In other cases, the story itself seems only interested in exposing the characteristics of that other world.

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to make the latter follow the arc of a proper short story, and for a long time I couldn't figure out why. Essentially, I would try to impart an artificial narrative onto the top of the story, to give it shape. But, doing so never produced the shape the story wants. I'm at a bit of a loss for how to proceed, now, knowing that I have chosen the *wrong* narratives. The only question left, I believe, is whether any narrative is possible that will marry up to the formalistic frame I wish to use.

It's probably a semantic matter in the argument I've made above, that I have yet to detect. Oh well - onward I press.