Grinding Knottedness and News From Abroad

Something from a month ago I never got around to posting:

In watching this Denmark situation wind up into a knot, I've repeatedly suspected we were at peak knottedness, but it just keeps knotting up further. It's painful in a grinding, chronic sort of way. I suppose it's like anticipating a bottom in the stock market while holding positions that are decreasing in value, telling yourself that it is transitory before they will reverse higher, and that if you can just ride out the pain, you'll be better off in the end.

Now some more facts have come to light that make the situation more complex - er, knotted:

1. My work has informed me that I will no longer be able to work part time after the beginning of the year.
2. Merry talked to someone who recently moved from the U.S., and they are on a 'waiting list' for child care - the implication being that both Merry and I would not be able to work on day one of moving, even if we were both willing and able.

If that weren't bad enough, Merry's potential employer has continually delayed her on-site interview. Having concluded this is the 'next step' to making a decision, this leaves Merry and I at an impasse until this can occur, or until we hit a self-imposed deadline of the end of November. Then today, her potential employer suggested the visit may not be possible until January!

Conceptually, I see two paths forward:

1. Continue to navigate this knotting as far and long as it takes us, until one or more natural points of resolution each act to un-knot some portion of it all.
2. Set boundaries (time-based or otherwise) on how far we are willing to let it take us and make decisions at those boundary points with the best available information at the time.

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And last week, finally - news from abroad:

Merry finally heard from her potential employer - the position is no longer available, as the entire group is being dissolved! I suppose we should see this as dodging a landmine. Certainly the magnitude of the news - in as far as it impacts the team she would've worked with - is much larger than we could've guessed; the woman who would've hired Merry onto her team is herself soon out of a job. What if we had gone sooner!? We might've just arrived when this news hit.

Superficially, it relieves the constraints that had been piling up behind this situation. But now where should all the energy flow which we had summoned for this decision?

As we were considering the possibility of moving, we occasionally talked about what we might do if we stayed. There were plenty of possibilities. In the shadow of a possible move across the globe, options like relocating in Omaha, or taking more substantial time off, suddenly appeared quite trivial, by comparison. Without an outside pressure acting on us, will these possibilities simply evaporate? It seems very possible. And so, we need to find a way to capture the positive energy this situation has produced.

I'm leaning heavily towards not working after the middle of 2020. Signe is an age where I want to spend more time with her. I also want to spend more time with my parents, more time focused on hobbies and exploring other interests, and more time doing structured things that I've rarely had the time and focus for around a work schedule.

I could travel some, too, of course, but that wouldn't be the main drive. I have started to understand that the promise of travel is not wholly what it seems - it is, in part, an empty promise - a mental snare, in a sense, like any bad habit. It can bring us new experiences and a broader perspective, but none of that is guaranteed. And really, is travel the only means to achieve a broader perspective? I am starting to think of travel as a mental hack - a way to achieve certain things with the least mental exercise, whereas something like meditation requires more discipline, patience, and focus, but costs 100% less money.

None of this is to say that I will stop traveling immediately, or stop traveling, period. There remain plenty of reasons to do so. A few weeks ago I went on a hiking trip to Zion, and the hiking did not require "broader perspective" or "inner peace" to have been more than worth the time and money.

Running Out The Clock

Merry and I expected to have our flights to Denmark purchased by now. She'd be scrambling to be ready for her interview and presentation, and I'd be fervently organizing the logistics of our trip to get the most out of a scant couple days there. Then the company decided to delay the process - we're still not sure why.

Not that the initial rush of this whole proposition hadn't already mostly worn off, but now we have a delay of several weeks to contend with (and of course, there's no real telling how long it will be, or if the position will still even exist). But it does give us a little time to further de-stress about this, assuming we need that.

For my part, I've already succumbed to a state where I feel like anything would be fine - nothing would be great and nothing would be terrible. But this is almost certainly not a real assessment. More likely, the impenetrable maze of pros and cons has simply congealed into an impenetrable mass of incalculable tradeoffs. And so, lately, I've just been throwing different decision frameworks at it to see if anything sticks:

1. My dreams still seem to be activating on the Jungian "Hero" archetype as I detailed in my last post. I still think this supports the idea of going, but that makes some assumptions about how such archetypical activation really works - how precise the mechanism is, and whether it's best thought of as 'encoded wisdom' or 'an epiphenomenon.' I'm far from educated enough on any of it to know.
2. An ROI framework requires converting the intangible value of experiences into money (or vice versa) - which is profoundly difficult to do, in my experience. Before my semester abroad, I could never have guessed the 'return' that the intangible aspects of that time gave the trip. Quite the contrary, when the financial crisis occurred that fall, I was certain I had profoundly ill-timed my trip - quitting my job and going quickly cash flow negative. Just when the market was tanking, I was least able to take advantage of it (an aside: I did take out student loans and invest that money). It's remarkable how wrong we can be, even when we seem most certain. In the end, the financial characteristics of the trip were overshadowed - by an order of magnitude - by the experiences I had and friends I made. Having said that, I don't think I can just assume the lesson is: "All trips overseas will have huge positive intangible benefits." It seems more likely that the real lesson is: "the unfamiliar option has a much wider distribution of possible outcomes, both positive and negative."
3. I suspect a "regret minimization" framework would over-weight new experiences above the financial drawbacks. It might also equalize my worries over my parents against the benefits to Signe of having more varied experiences.

The 'rhyme' of the world (how constellations of events possess such peculiar patterns that are anything but random) continues to amaze me. (And teach me!) At the same time, the cadence is slowed to a tempo I should've suspected, for nothing of the civilized world moves at human speed. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if we never make it there for the interview. After all, we got greedy and started telling people about it before it was at all certain. Such behavior, all by itself, is often enough for the world to cancel its plans on you without further ado.

The Call To Adventure

I'm so sick of thinking about moving to Denmark that I'm sick of realizing I'm sick of it. Again and again, I turn the pros and cons over in my head until they mishmash into something utterly without meaning or usefulness. Never before have I given so much time to a real-world decision, and been left with so little to show for it.

Because of this, I've started considering alternative decision models. The most obvious one was to simplify the list of pros/cons to only the most important and then score them, or rank them, or something, to try to simplify the equation. That made the list more approachable, but it didn't fix the fact that different items are "denominated in different currencies", so to speak - some tangible, some intangible.

The last few days, I've been thinking about applying a heuristic based on Jung's "Hero" archetype. This occurred to me when I started suspecting that my dreams were resonating on the "call to adventure" stage of the archetypal cycle (things like confronting people or situations I'm afraid of).

Let's assume my assessment of the dreams are correct, and are linked to this decision (thoughts of it has consumed so much of my waking time, I assume the link must be there). What are the implications? The "call to adventure" is a necessary stage of the Hero's journey, which is to say, it is a necessary stage for personal growth. (This is also intuitively true, I think - "no pain, no gain.") This path certainly portends 'pain' in the sense that there will be unfamiliar and no doubt trying situations to overcome, requiring sacrifices.

I guess this means that the situation is "resonating" that archetype in my psyche. It's not really a decision model, but I suppose that suggests that I should do this because it will help me grow? Is that the conclusion any time a series of dreams seem to indicate activation of the hero archetype? "Go, now!" I feel like I should better understand where the "wisdom" inherent in this psychic signal begins and ends.

One reason I'm hesitant is because these dreams didn't occur when the possibility of moving first came up - they happened after I had been fixating on it for weeks. How surprising should it be that something I've obsessed over for weeks found a way into my dreams? If I thought obsessively about buying a fancy car long enough, maybe my psyche would mold the hero archetype onto that, too.

Most of my anxiety with modern decision-making is our innate inability to understand where a specific option fits in the context of all possible decisions. Examples:

• "Should we move to Denmark, or stay in our house?" Well, I don't know, but what about moving to Spain? San Diego? Closer to downtown Omaha? To a bigger house? To a smaller house? To an apartment? Live in an RV?
• "Will moving to Denmark make me grow as a person?" Maybe? But even if it will, is it the only, best, or most efficient way for me to grow?
• "What's best for Signe?" I don't even know the answer to that question in Omaha, much less in a place I've never visited. I can't dislodge a fallacy if it was never lodged onto anything in the first place.

In other words, questions we ask ourselves about how we use our scarce time may be presented as binary. But, virtually all decisions are part of a matrix that consists of a multitude of dimensions. We can't hope to analyze the matrix itself - all we ever really have is heuristics to apply against the limited data we possess. I have always felt that the gulf between these two approaches is much wider than most people seem to believe. If I'm right, then in this gulf lay a truth about the futility of trying to analyze the sort of things that have been occupying me for this last month.

And yet, somehow, I doubt that this knowledge is quite enough to convince me to simply stop. But if I'm lucky, perhaps I can at least figure out how to apply some proven heuristic (Jungian or not) to the problem in a novel way.

Life is Short, But I Fear That's Inactionable

Paul Graham wrote a little essay that, in my opinion, literally everyone should read. An excerpt:

"Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was."

And this:

"If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did."

I went back to it, hoping it would help me think about Merry and I's pending decision. I don't think it did. But who knows, maybe a lightbulb will flick on this afternoon, or later this week. I can only hope.

I'm admittedly a little superstitious about life. I'm fond of the phrase, "the world is not random," by which I mean that the world may not be predictable, but blessed with hindsight, it isn't stochastic, either. This leaves me trying to predict what awaits Merry and I, regardless of what we choose.

Now, maybe this belief is an egregore that will grow and grow until it paralyzes me completely. Even very simple decisions occasionally get hard in the right circumstances. Sometimes I get fixated on saving money. If I'm going from point A to point B and I have extra time, I used to slip into a coffee shop to write for a bit. But sometimes I'd fixate on the fact that one place had no decaf, but the one that did (or the one that sold water) was several miles further away. It wasn't uncommon that I would stop my car somewhere as I thought about this. Occasionally I'd end up not going to either. But I digress.

We all develop an intuition for how our actions affect ourselves. I've said before that we create the past like erosion lays down sediment - our decisions "pile up". And yet, the literary concept of the fork in the road - of staring down one big decision - remains a powerful one. What awaits us down each of these paths? When I first read Frost's "The Road Not Taken", the implication that our decisions are irrevocable eluded me. After all, I had gone hiking. From the story, I took the delight that I - or you, or anyone - had all the time in the world to explore both trails. Now that I've made mistakes - including big, lasting mistakes - the irrevocability of decisions seems their defining characteristic.

I'm haunted by the question: what will happen if we go? Who am I hurting, and who am I helping - if even just probabilistically - and do they deserve that? Who matters in this decision, and how much, and in what ways? Does money matter? How much, or to what limits? What are we willing to sacrifice, and to what ends? Is pain in the present worth joy in the future, or vice versa, and how could I know? If I hadn't been born so neurotic as to ask these questions, I might be busy laughing at someone like me.

An economist would say I'm trying to inter-temporally optimize our needs. Curiously, I am aware that I've been routinely discounting the needs of one particular person - myself. For some reason, the idea that it's all unknowable is fine for me, but not everyone else. I think I'm trying to hold myself to a higher standard when my decisions affect others, especially my loved ones. But no amount of stubbornness will let me see the future. This is clearly a flaw of cognition.

In any case, the part of me that offers an instinctive answer tells me to stay here. Where is that answer really coming from, and why? Do I know in my gut that I have it good the way things are? Am I afraid of change? Am I afraid that I will screw up our short lives? How risk averse is too risk averse when you might not get a second chance?

Or maybe I'm just activity-averse. Charlie Munger says to wait for a big edge, then bet big. Maybe my gut's just not detecting a big edge.

It's also possible I'm just ready to rest. Maybe I don't want to wait on the phone 175 times to update our mailing address. Twice.

After all, for every plausible-sounding philosophical justification, there's a corresponding behavioral motivation that is simple, banal, and far more likely.

A Period of Hysteria

It's August already, a period of hysteria in what had been an ordinary, and even quiet, summer. One day a few weeks ago, Merry told me that she found something like her dream job, at a research institute outside of Copenhagen. "Would you ever consider moving there, doing something like that?"

I thought of idyllic days, cozy nights, simplicity, doing something for ourselves, romantic, unexpected. I've long talked about how my time overseas changed my life. To excuse a painful pun (aren't they all?), it had made the world seem bigger. Now we could do this together.

What begins on the surface propagates downward, and vice versa. I research jobs, rental housing, geography, public transportation, daycare and education, tourist attractions. I spend whole days trying to understand international tax law and then stress about the conclusions. I start having dreams where I can't find Merry, can't find Signe, where my baggage on a trip is lost, where my friends that I live with are all out somewhere, having fun, but I can't contact or find them. When I wake up the sense of the dream lingers with me, as if its still there, just under the surface. What did Jung say? "We're probably dreaming all the time, but consciousness makes too much noise to hear the dream while awake." Every recent morning, waking to orange twilight, I walk through the house with the ghost of a dream trailing a quarter step behind me.

I dwell on such thoughts throughout the mornings, sometimes for the whole day. I look for excuses to avoid work, or leave early. I need to attend to what I'm feeling, though I don't know how. Years ago I might've gone on walks or to a bar to try to kindle something like nostalgia, as if the recollection of joy was a cure to inner turmoil. Now, having used this salve so frequently, I fear that it scarcely remains.

We're both stressed. We'll know soon enough, we tell each other. Merry corresponds with the person who would become her boss. We try to make decisions in a conscientious order. Merry doesn't want to ask for referrals until we rule out the obvious reasons we wouldn't go. The deadline to apply is days away and Merry races to update her resume, write a cover letter, and collect referrals. I've got a sinus infection, and sit drowsily imagining that I can see the decision tree that awaits the submission, but have I ever been right about any complex manner? Do such things ever occur the way you predict?

I start selling things online just in case, as if having five things less will matter when we have to find a home for a thousand. Maybe, amidst days of uncertainty, I'm grasping for anything I can control. People want to buy things but then don't show up. I debate which day to give up on selling our couch and instead drag it out to the curb. It'd be gone in ten minutes. Is it worth the possibility of making $25?

I imagine what toys of Signe's we'd take with, how she'd likely never again use the ones we don't choose. I have to remind myself that they all accrue not to themselves, but to her happiness. It is not a sad thing to leave behind something that she has already found the joy in. By the time we return to the US, she'll be four. If we stay beyond the initial contract of Merry's job, she might be six. Or ten. There's no way to know.

In the first days of this news, I thought mostly of my parents. I wondered whether I could leave them. I thought about it so much, and so often, that I eventually gave up. I had traced over the reasoning for staying or going so many times that there was nothing more of the issue to be explored. Most of the arguments were simplifications. "Leaving them behind." "Being a part of Signe's life." Most things in the modern world are simply matters of what you're willing to trade for them - whether money or other things. Would they buy some plane tickets to see their granddaughter? Would we all trade some comfort for some adventure?

What do we want our lives to be? At first, I thought this question was a philosophical diversion to the real issue, but as the days go on I discover that it is slowly tearing me to shreds. There is no simple answer, no easy way out. In its context, we cannot simply fall back on staying, because I am no more sure of the answer here than I would be anywhere else. I am a writer who doesn't write, and is mediocre at it when I do. I'm a musician who doesn't make music. I'm a literature lover who hasn't read fiction in years. I'm a father who doesn't know how to cherish parenting. I wish to travel by myself and find myself, but I never take the initiative to do so. Maybe with all of these things, I avoid any semblance of a finish line, lest I discover it is a canard - that I am living with an identity that I can never embody. This way, I can go on desiring something. Otherwise, faced with no answer - with a void - I would be forced to start over, to grow.

Isn't Copenhagen a good place for starting over? Not because it's magical, but because it's different? Isn't that what happened the last time? The initial excitement of the possibility of moving having long dissipated, I'm left suspecting that this is its best justification.

Seismic Shifts

I've arrived at this point by operating for years under an essentially unchanged framework - trying to be a little wiser each day, trying to systematically remove harmful and counterproductive habits, and continuously optimizing how I spend my time and resources. It all sounds great on paper. And yet, now when I turn around, I can no longer see the shoreline. There's nothing recognizable out here, no reference point for me to reverse my course towards. What happened? Was my strategy unsound? Or am I imagining this? Was I wrong then, or am I wrong now?

I've been thinking about Jung seriously for the first time in many years, and trying to understand what is going on inside of me. There are so many things that feel out of balance in my life:

1. Free time just brings me anxiety that I will waste it - a self-fulfilling prophecy, since anxiety annihilates joy.
2. I rarely find any sort of connection - even tenuous - with other people, and so I have almost completely stopped trying. Even my friends seem to be drifting away, one by one, and I find myself with less and less to say to them.
3. I feel like I've forgotten what was special about Merry and I's relationship, and how to re-engage with it.
4. I've long had a vision of fatherhood as becoming someone my child could admire. But now that I'm a father, I don't feel admirable, I most often feel clueless and without inspiration to be anything more than merely present.
5. I live in my head, trying to weave feelings and impressions into stories, but it feels like this well has run dry. Mostly I just find myself re-reading what I've written and longing to feel more of the same things that I've already written, or express them in deeper ways, without quite knowing what that means. What does it mean to have taken so much time unearthing these old impressions? Should this produce some particular effect, like setting off some psychic chemical reaction? I guess I had come to believe that hard-won expression was supposed to produce a virtuous cycle with inspiration.
6. I dream often of staying in or exploring unfamiliar houses, often populated by a mix of people I know or used to know. These dreams seem very exciting to me, but despite their repetition, I don't know what they are trying to tell me.

I have an overriding psychic feeling of "something large passing me silently in the dark," to quote a source I can no longer find. It is as if substantial dislocations are occurring subliminally, whose effects upon my consciousness go by, barely noticed.

I have only my own optimism to tell me that I will overcome this, and a primitive sense that what I am facing is a natural process - one I have gone through myself and merely forgotten, in part. My hope is that, amidst my own incomprehension, I have found a clue in Jungian psychology, described here:

“[...] to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. [...] If he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.”

- Marie-Louise von Franz 

Or, stated simpler:

"When things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

False Narratives

Before I begin, I should admit that my mental state is poor. I slept little last night, then I went to work for seven hours, my brain wired to a nonstop task list of decision trees ever since. Now I'm in the sort of still-sleepless mid-afternoon sub-deliria that makes it feel like it might be any time of day and I might be any place, as if my grounding to the present is as thin as a thread.

Maybe my mental state matters, or maybe not. For months now I've been dreaming vividly - just about since I cut significantly back on caffeine. (Is it possible that caffeine systemically muffles - or perhaps garbles - the unconscious?) My dreams have taken a decidedly dark turn in the past week, and the world feels like it is closing in around me. The obvious questions to ask myself, then, are: why these feelings, and why now?

I'm reminded of Ballard fearing the future would be a "vast suburb of the soul," everything having already been experienced. I wonder if my subconscious isn't telling me that I'm stuck in place in some way and that I need to shake off a stasis. It's a suspicion that didn't come from my consciousness. If it had, I could be sure that a dream wouldn't also be telling me, because the unconscious doesn't amplify the imbalances of the conscious, it compensates for them. But I came to the theory of personal stasis only recently, when I realized how much time I spend trying to make my days productive, yet finding, over time, that my life lacks a sense of meaning.

Ever since becoming a father, I've been plagued by a narrative that I can't escape: that I'm trapped. This was probably borne of a prior narrative that was also reductionist: that I would find joy in personal freedom, and particularly the freedom to travel. This prior narrative, I am only now fully realizing, was always a sort of "manifest destiny" fallacy - the belief that, given more degrees of freedom, I would seek, pursue, and capture whatever happiness was waiting for me out in the world.

We *can* find happiness in the world we don't yet know, and freedom to try new things is a fine way to explore the possibility, but it's far from a miracle cure. When I think about the travel I've taken, I can remember moments of happiness, others of frustration, and many of boredom, a distribution that is only moderately different to that of my everyday life at home. My current narrative is probably equally inadequate - first, am I really trapped, or have I made a conscientious decision to be present? And second, should that mean I'm any worse off?

Now that I've written the questions down, I'm satisfied that I know their answers, which I framed in an essentially rhetorical voice, anyway. So if I'm not trapped in a life I don't want, then what is actually going on with me? I suspect it's more likely that I'm trapped in my own false narratives. But in my defense, false narratives persist exactly because they're not obvious. So what are these narratives? Let me list a few, on the off chance that it will help me begin to separate the underlying problems from what the narratives have unjustly added:

1. I have a persistent feeling that "I'm not doing what I want to be doing with my life," though when I stop to ask myself what I want to be doing, the answers don't hold up to scrutiny. e.g., "Traveling." Well, fine. But it won't magically make me happy, it's just a different sort of okay. Nor will it make my life intrinsically meaningful. And yet, either something is missing in my life, or I need to reset my expectations downward, until it lines up to whatever meaning I can find.
2. The same thing, except in the day or even moment. The desire to make the most of my time expresses itself daily in irritation at the trivial and a despair at being helpless against the basic construction of the world. Like, I'm stuck in traffic for the 700th time, what am I doing with my life? Is there a world where that's a satisfactory local maxima? Could it be in this world? What if the way out of that is to be unemployed? What is the tradeoff between being stuck in traffic occasionally and having no income?
3. At home, I relegate myself to menial tasks like cleaning and organization, then find myself defeated that I can't make any decisions without Merry's review and approval. Usually, these same things aren't priorities for her, and I feel bad continually badgering her, so the impediments persist. Should I just stop asking? A clean and organized space is one of a small number of things that are sufficiently under my control to make me happy. Except, even that's not under my control! Can I just reprogram myself to accept a state of constant disarray in my surroundings?
4. I wonder if Merry and I will ever be attracted to each other again. We scarcely seem to notice each other except when we're taking care of Signe, or talking about Signe. Is it because we've suddenly become the two lowest priorities on each other's long lists? Do other couples find their attraction to each other reduced by 99% after having a child? How does anyone ever have a second one? I know I'm new as a father, but "having a child" and "having a romantic relationship" appear to me as opposite ends of a continuum. The closest we come to connection nowadays is our explicit mutual acknowledgement that we're tired every single night (which requires about 15 seconds of interaction), and our desire to spend 100% of our evenings with our phones, and 0% with each other. Are our romantic lives over? Did we make that decision implicitly when we had a child? It feels that way to me. Or is there some other explanation for this? Is age, or toxins in the water, lowering my testosterone levels?
5. I'm eager to meet new people, but I don't know how to. This occurs all the time and everywhere. Merry and I went to a party with her coworkers the other day and I spent about 90% of the party watching Signe. (Because I have to, right? I can't even articulate how impotent I feel not to know the answer to a question like this, or be able to figure out some puzzle as simple as how to watch a two-year old and talk to anyone else, at all, because she requires constant vigilance that she not put herself in a hazardous situation. Or do I trust she won't hurt herself, or that others will parent for me if she starts to do something dangerous? Why wasn't anyone else at the party having these problems? Was this something I ironically failed to observe because I was busy watching her?)
6. I'm worried that, by not having friends with similarly-aged children, nor much of a family or community life, we're depriving Signe of beneficial social experiences. I worry she will grow up disadvantaged by not knowing how to play with others or tolerate sharing. I worry that she won't have many friends. I have dreams where I go to see her at her school and she is always alone on the playground, occupied by something off in the corner while the rest of the children play together. Pregnant in all such dreams is the feeling that I, myself, cannot replace friends she will gain on her own, if for no other reason than that I will die before her, and she will be left alone. 

To this last point, is it common for parents to extrapolate every success and failure out over the rest of their children's lives? What kind of neurosis do I have, and how will it project itself onto Signe? I already fear I am a control freak - but what good does worrying do for someone who is so poorly equipped to deal with problems? When I consider my own life, I have to admit that I have failed at almost everything I've ever done, and that the islands of "success" that I see in my life are profoundly modest accomplishments compared to what others around me achieve. It isn't unusual that I spend many years learning to accomplish something that others can do in almost no time at all. Sometimes it seems to me that one of my defining personality characteristics is my ability to delude myself into thinking that common measures (e.g., competency at some skill) are the "wrong ones" because they don't correlate with a good life, or whatever. Like, that's what I convince myself of. "I don't have to be good at my job to have a good life." "I don't need friends I can talk to if I have a rich internal dialogue." "I don't need to know how to effectively parent my daughter, she'll probably be fine anyway."

I recently listened to Farnam Street's interview with Naval Ravikant, where he talks about teaching himself to live "in the moment." It's obviously an old platitude. But what does it mean to "live in the moment," while simultaneously striving to better yourself? How does a person improve without re-living and contemplating their own past actions? Or is it just something you turn off, like your work brain on the weekends? Like, "today's a 'living in the moment' day, cool, let's go to the beach!"

States of Mind

I came home from a week-long solo trip to Utah a few years ago anxious and a little bit irritated. And though it had primarily been the prospect of the trip being over that had caused this, what I was really irritated about was my own inability to enter the "vacation mindset" more than I had on the trip. You know the one - the state where your everyday worries like work disappear from the back of your mind. In this state, you can have experiences like laying down to sleep in a tent at night and experiencing the ambient sounds around you, or thinking of the day's experiences, without additional narrative. To me, this means that the world comes to act merely as a canvas against which I can enjoy the nature of existence.

After the trip, I lamented how hard that state of mind had gotten to enter. Now, in 2019, I could assume I won't enter it again for many years, if ever. A strange thing has happened in the last 20 years, since I graduated high school. Even as I have gotten much richer, and my skill set has grown - both ostensibly making it possible to work less and worry less about whether I could work later - I've observed my degrees of freedom seeming to shrink, not expand.

I'm not claiming that the world has clamped down on me somehow - rather, that by misunderstanding what that state of mind requires, I have built my life in a way that makes achieving those circumstances nearly impossible. But it's not like there was some "golden age" of the freedom to inhabit the states of mind I wanted - at least, I don't think so. In my early 20's, I had the time, but not the mindset - I spent all my time depressed, feeling as if the world owed me more than it had given me. The only states of mind that linger with me from those times are the ones I used recreational drugs to enter, and those were exceedingly small proportions of my time (it's to their credit, I suppose, that I still remember them so vividly).

In my later 20's, and specifically from the last couple years that I lived in the Dewey house, until I started working again after going to Europe, I was probably in as close to a happy equilibrium as I have known. I was often busy, but I didn't care enough about work to worry about it when I was gone, and nothing else in my world registered. I had already taught myself how meaningless things were, and thus I never worried about what I didn't have or what I could lose. It was nice to travel, in part, because it didn't feel like anything was being left behind. Though it's probably an exaggeration, my mindset was essentially: "worst case, if I couldn't return, so what?" That was essentially phase one.

At some point after I met Merry and had gone back to work full time, I found myself fearing a particular change in myself. I told Merry about it at the time - I remember saying to her, that what I needed to succeed at all the new goals in my life was to apply my work mindset to my personal life. I predicted (fearfully) that this would not come without side-effects - and now I can see that I was more right than I could have then guessed. When I started applying analytic and project management principles to problems in my personal life, I opened floodgates that I couldn't re-close. Soon, those approaches overtook whole domains of my personality, where a sense of gestalt had alone thrived. My fixation on aesthetic experience was replaced with "measurable outcomes" and "continuous improvement."

The effect this had on my ability to access different states of mind was to make the hurdle to access them progressively higher. Eventually it became something of an oddity, even on a week-long trip, that I would enter a state of real relaxation. More likely was that I would spend the trip acting as I did in my everyday life - my thoughts jumping rapidly between half a dozen concerns, both immediate and far off, planning and optimizing and re-planning and re-optimizing the trip as I went, trying to "maximize enjoyment", as if such an equation not only existed, but required continuous monitoring.

If this wasn't the death knell of such states of mind (and maybe, in time, it still would have been), then having Signe was. Having a young child to care for essentially ensured that I will *never* part from my anxieties, just as it has ensured that I will never have any sufficiently long stretch of time to try, anyway. The thought of being away for a week feels like a pipe dream - but let me be specific. It's a pipe dream for two reasons - not just because her presence practically prevents it, but because I wouldn't want to be away from her for that long, either. Emotionally, having a child is like buying a house that you will never sell and never pay off the mortgage on - it consists of both an asset, bringing immense joy, and a liability, demanding your time and energy - forever.

Today, I seems to possess only one state of mind - the multitasking, hyperactive engine that wants to suck in problems and spit out answers aligned against a broader world view, rinse and repeat. This is true even when I'm doing something I consider recreational, like writing. Perhaps the best I can hope for in those circumstances is a temporary focus, where five of the six concerns-of-the-day drift off for a little while. There seems to be little such thing as an aesthetic mindset left in my life. And though I might have once thought that this "grand unified" mindset could be the best of all worlds, today it feels more like a prison that I am trapped within.

Baby Daddy

We call pictures of Signe when she was younger 'baby Signe', so it only stands to reason that an old picture of myself from when I was a baby is 'baby daddy.' The picture is novel, but it's also candid in a way that I don't think of many old pictures of myself being - maybe that's just because I don't remember ever seeing it before. After all, familiarity with a thing (like seeing an old picture often) overwrites our feelings about it more rapidly.

I'm such a sentimentalist - at least, I can be. I am continuously on watch for the 'me' that is always in the process of un-becoming - the person I was, that drifts away into the past. It's undetectable in the day-to-day, but in a stray memory that gets unearthed, I occasionally catch a glimpse of who I was five or ten or twenty years ago, but no longer am. Much of this is the person I left behind through experience and hopefully becoming wiser. Yet thoughts of my own past naiveté rarely embarrass me - more often, they make me wistful.

But that picture of myself as a baby seems to have triggered something else entirely. It hurts to look at that picture - into my own eyes, almost forty years ago - and have no connection, no matter how tenuous, to my personality or mental state then. It is 100% disconnected from my life today. And though not unique, necessarily, this picture is the first one that has caused me to dwell on this reality.

Nobody has any but a buried, arcane link to their own early childhood, yet I find it sad to be separated from it so completely, and permanently. It is a reminder that this shadow will only creep further over my life - through my childhood, and adulthood - as I grow older. My memory's fidelity for any age in my life will only decrease with time.

While I was feeling bad about this today, I started to think of Signe, and what I can do to make her life great. How can I ensure that the love I feel for her results in happiness, even meaning, that she will find in her own life? That's when it occurred to me that the experience of giving love as an adult is not the same as the experience of receiving it as a child. As an adult or a child, our feelings are products of our life experiences, but a child has a fraction of the experiences from which to form conceptions. When I became a father, I didn't understand that Signe had to be *taught* love. But even now, when we hug, she doesn't feel the love I'm feeling. My love is the memory of my own life experiences. She's feeling a love that she is only now learning. But in a way, the gesture is how we cross that gulf, which makes it more special.

I wonder what my parents think of when they see the picture of baby daddy. They've always been sentimental (it's likely where I got it from), and they've had more - and different - life experiences than I have. I think of my mom emotionally gushing over any of a large number of pictures like that one, and how my reactions to her sentimentality have evolved over time, from puzzlement, to embarrassment, to a quiet understanding that her feelings are hers and worthwhile. When she gets old enough to think of such things, I hope Signe understands my feelings, but I shouldn't expect that to happen quickly, and maybe not ever. I hope she doesn't think less of me for having grown sentimental over that picture of myself, so many years ago, nor our pictures of baby Signe, which by then will be growing decades old and beginning to feel lost to a past that neither of us can exactly still conceive of.

Ten Years

It's been more than ten years since I started this blog - not that that's a notable event, especially given that I've been journaling in one of various forms for well over twenty years. But what it does mean, given my motivation for starting this blog, is that it's also been ten years since I was living in Europe. It seems like yesterday - no, really, sometimes it really feels so remarkably close I can hardly fathom it - which is a sentiment that is sure to make the truth more depressing. But should it be?

I've accomplished plenty in ten years, but what I haven't done is maintained the velocity or dynamism  that I possessed then. Perhaps I grew comfortable with things - maybe one day they became "good enough." Whatever drove me with such urgency in those days is long past. I struggle even to imagine what it'd be like if I could suddenly return to that mindset, what I'd do differently, and to whose benefit and detraction it would be.

Even if I could "return" to that mindset, I don't know what the nature of such a change would be. I certainly wouldn't just start acting like I did then - that'd be a disaster. But what if I could plant some similar motivation within myself today and then meet it as the person I am? Although that seems like a more elegant solution - largely because motivation is seen as some deep, innate thing - I'm not sure that artificially transplanting motivation is much different than artificially transplanting surface-level behavior. But if there's something better yet - "more natural" even than modifying my motivation, perhaps - I haven't figured out what it would be.

But wait, why am I having to formulate this in the first place? Surely it is the lack of any such motivation in my life, right? So, is the idea of finding such a motivation just a canard, and therefore bound to fail? I mean, it's not like they just fall out of the sky, right? Is the idea that I can magically instill myself with motivation just a sleight-of-hand owing to my mental model not resembling the real world? Maybe. But, oh well, for the time being, I'm going to explore the idea of finding motivation, anyway.

In 2008 and 2009 I feared I was running out of time to take control of who I was and who I would become. And though I navigated that personal crisis (I hate the term, but I don't know what else to call it), the urgency of time has not really abated - I am every bit as mortal today as I was then, and almost surely closer to the end of my life, lifestyle changes notwithstanding. So maybe all that I lack is the necessary visceral grounding to the knowledge that my life is finite and that I will soon look back upon every day that I wasted as a precious opportunity missed. I need to find the sense of urgency to experience life in the time I still have, because it is draining out of the hourglass, faster every year.

How's that for motivation?

Internal Productivity

My friend and I were discussing productivity as a means to happiness and I told him something that I hadn't thought about in a long time - it used to be the only way I thought about such things, but times change and my thoughts about the world mostly evolved beyond simply distinguishing the mental realm from the physical.

But anyway, he said that being productive, and getting things accomplished - especially getting things built - makes him happy, and that he had a fear of dying without a sense of accomplishment. He and I have known each other long enough for him to understand how few projects in the physical world I feel compelled to do (think: things like home or vehicle improvement / maintenance), so he knew that wasn't true of me.

But what is true, I told him, is that I have a corollary desire to set right my mental and spiritual state, so that when I die I am in a place of peace. And, being productive in that sense - identifying and removing mental complexes, coming to understand myself better and find my place in the world, etc...- gives me, as far as I can tell, the exact same thing he is describing - satisfaction, and though it, happiness.

I'm not sure how profound the parallel is, but it felt worth writing down.