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.