A Portrait at 45

Today I turn 45, and though not one for milestones, this year more than most begs reflection. It is most obviously marked by my dad's difficulties with dementia and physical injury - and transparently, my fears for him echo upon myself, too - infirmity awaits me just as surely. Yet I also sense that I have come now to a certain 'rightness' - a harmony with my life's circumstances, a belief that I am basically whole, that any remaining imbalances exist generally around the periphery. This does not necessarily reassure - wholeness leaves mystery nowhere to hide - it is both an admission and acceptance that this is all I am.

I went back to work last winter, a change refreshing in its normality and in the basic good faith of my coworkers, whose trust I take as my own to earn (I believe have largely done so). I had spent last fall working at SpeedPro, following Merry's departure from Boys Town, and now I spend occasional nights continuing to build and refine tools for their production processes. I continue to do this because they rely on me, and because it satisfies me to build entire 'things' - to thoughtfully align software to real-world human action is, I believe without irony, a modern artisanal medium.

I have also moved slowly towards woodworking - first with my dad and now whenever the practical need arises (these are rarely complex or elaborate in any way). I find myself in the familiar dilemma of enjoying an idea (in this case the Christoper Alexander-ish notion of designing spaces in harmony with people) more than the process itself. Thus I care more about curating a space than that the woodworking itself is executed with procedural or technical precision. So perhaps I should call what I am doing design and not woodworking.

Some ideas that are especially alive within me at this age:

1. Jung's theory of psychic complexes and the necessity of "making the unconscious conscious." This is a lens through which I view events every day, as I try to learn to treat myself and people around me better.
2. To this end, the most critical "meta-lessons" to teach my kids are their own power of agency, and the freedom to pursue meaning in the world. More selfishly, I want my kids to love me as much as I can rightfully deserve.
3. AI will necessitate "zero trust" systems in virtually all parts of society, as every window of implicit trust is an arbitrage opportunity for bad actors, and AI plunges the cost curve of these attacks downward. And though the Red Queen Race will surely continue between security tech and its exploitation, blockchains (if not necessarily particular cryptocurrencies) will benefit proportionate to the degree trust in nation-scale social and financial organizations and infrastructure erodes.
4. Looking further out, Enlightenment-era human values must be made integral to any autonomous forms of our increasingly-powerful technologies if the world is not to devolve into a state of all-domain war from which few of us - and perhaps none - would be likely to survive.

Some art that has particularly shaped me the last couple years:

1. Bruno Schulz's collected stories, so often circling the father, a sort of quester/trickster demi-god, alternately inspired and pathetic, familiar and unfamiliar, coming and going, finally a symbol of the maximal possibility space of both art and life.
2. Peter Handke's Repetition, in which the narrator's quest for his unmet brother becomes a Campbell-ian Hero's Quest - a departure from modest means and a return home to reintegrate into a patrilineage forever altered in his eyes. The mirroring of the narrator and his lost brother throughout has lingered with me ever since, as have the words of WG Sebald in perhaps my favorite single piece of literary analysis.
3. Paul West's Words for a Deaf Daughter evokes a parent's particular lament: that the gulf to a child's inner world is uncrossable, and after a certain age, whatever closeness we might have achieved will inevitably wane.
4. George Stewart's Earth Abides, a book most centrally about letting go of that which is unspeakably close to us.
5. Kay Sage's work generally.
6. Hailu Mergia's seminal album Wede Harer Guzo, especially the title track.
7. Various ambient and near-ambient albums that approach a form I previously wrote about.

A few years ago I filled my free time primarily with writing and occasionally with reading - now that balance has flipped, as I seldom find my inspiration aligning with the time, energy, and focus required to write. Occasionally I will read some old story of mine and find myself nodding - the images that inspired them still feel true, though I seldom know how to improve meaningfully upon them. Perhaps that's simply a sign they are done, even when they haven't achieved the release I sense is possible.

I have spent the last 25 years gradually accepting life's fundamental loneliness. Where I once thought I would eventually discover ways to find people "more like me", now I suspect that very premise was always a projection, that it is primarily myself I remain distant from, that I don't yet fully understand who I am or what I need. Will my life pass with a greater version of myself still undiscovered?

To wit: I continue to struggle as a father to Eamon, who just turned four, and the persistence of my frustration suggests the problem is me. Is my anger that Eamon disobeys me just mirrored anger that I so often disobey myself, failing to follow through on my own intentions? Not for the first time, the race is on to discover how to fix myself before I permanently damage someone I love.

Much of life seems to be variations upon this, and as despair creeps in, I increasingly wonder where I can possibly find shelter. Simultaneously, the knowledge that my family needs me takes precedence over anything else - the exciting destinations I desire to visit, having a bigger house or better things. Instead, I ask: what will give me the strength as I get older to hold out against the wolf at the door, the ever-shrinking world around me? Of this, I see only the faces of my children and Merry, and I know that it is only if they should dissolve away that I would be truly defeated.

Despite all I have just confessed, I am basically content. I get to be close to my family and my parents and I have many long-time friends that I can always pick back up with wherever we left off. Only today, I woke up 45 years old! The path in front of me is, in a sense, easy to understand: with my feet stable beneath me, I must reach for any forms of greatness I can while the chance to do so still remains.

The Threshold of Pop Music

Of pop music's defining attributes, I believe its most essential is its immediacy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore a great pop song playing. It is infectious, it compels us to feel the joy or pain or desire it expresses. And the greater of these heights it reaches, the greater it is generally considered.

And I love that as everyone does - at least I do on my own terms. I often find the most popular pop songs to be emotionally saccharine, leaving the equivalent of a bad taste in my mouth. But the heights of the form that speak to me - the ecstatic moment where melody reaches out from within the musical form - can still take my breath away.

Despite all this, for a long time I haven't been much interested in the 'melodic moment'. For many years, I have been drawn, instead, to ambient music, as best expressed long ago by Brian Eno: "If you leave your personality out of the frame, you are inviting the listener to enter it instead." Indeed, that may be the opposite of that 'ecstatic moment', the moment when our attention is most intensely compelled. (Indeed, Eno has also stated that ambient music is "music you can ignore".)

This may feel like a binary, but I'm interested in it as a possible continuum, because what I'm attracted to lately isn't the magnetic pole of "ambient", but what happens when we turn the dial up ever so slightly, to where form and ego first begin to materialize. What are the 'primitives' that first emerge, and how do they cohere as sound moves into the known realm of music, where instrumental and vocal personas form the familiar framework of songs?

Just as exciting, perhaps, is the idea that we may not know all the primitives that are possible, nor the range of the known, nor the ways they might combine and break apart, or move, or mutate. Can a voice be made egoless, neither embodied nor disembodied? Can we reproduce our own internal monologue as it exists at the liminal state of sleep, or disinterest, neither the language we know, nor incoherent, true to some unexamined form? Can footsteps be neither the sound of walking nor a 'found rhythm', yet without decoupling into 'phantom sound'? Can we hear the sound of breath without presuming a person who breathes? If the ambiance of the room I now sit in were a starting point, what embellishments would make this room both unfamiliar and interesting, yet not simply uncanny? What are the smallest changes to the sound landscape that would tug on my attention, and why?

Can we paint a picture of sound that works like great cinema, to a profound and singular effect with minimal attachment to our existing auditory vocabulary? What I'm thinking of is an aural equivalent to the visual impression of the bedroom scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a world where electronic musicians have now had access for decades to synthesizers and computer-based audio generation and engineering capable of forming most any sound imaginable, is there still a lexicon of undiscovered sounds, and within it something that could be considered a language waiting to be discovered?

Almost all of my creative time over the last decade has been devoted to writing (I've probably even spent more time drawing than making music). If I had taken the path of music instead - or if I were still to veer towards it - the questions above are the ones I would most want to explore.

Elon Musk Purchases Twitter

Today, Twitter accepted Elon Musk's bid to buy the social network. I am optimistic that he will make improvements which will increase Twitter's value substantially, perhaps even 1-2 orders of magnitude over time.

Most of the debate around Twitter rests on the premise that it (and other social networks) must strike some careful content curation balance in service to The Truth. Unfortunately, The Truth in question is not the objective truth (as we might assume), but rather something like the Overton Window, comprised of the current set of our society's consensus beliefs. This means that consensus untruths are welcomed while inconvenient truths are often forbidden. (For instance, Twitter banned many users in the spring of 2020 for claiming that masks wouldn't stop the spread of COVID-19. The given justification was that this was not "scientific consensus". Of course, a few months later, consensus emerged that... drumroll... masks didn't stop the spread of COVID-19! Did Twitter management learn anything from such episodes? Anyway, I digress.)

I think Musk's plan to allow anyone with a government-issued ID to become verified (the current "blue checkmark") will circumvent this issue over time, because your credibility will become yours to protect or waste, as you see fit. The second piece is allowing users to customize their Twitter feed filtering and sorting, ideally by open sourcing content curation algorithms, so anyone can be a curator.

Wait, you say: people don't care about credibility - many verified accounts will lie as much as ever! Well, that's true. But, Twitter's problem has never been liars; rather, it has been keeping liars' tweets off the feeds of people who don't want to read them. Those people (like everyone else) would have a rich ecosystem of curation algorithms to choose from, both free and paid. Interestingly, I think this approach strengthens Twitter AND established media institutions, by giving them an opportunity for greater relevance while binding them to Twitter's platform. Certainly an organization like the New York Times would have tremendous opportunity in curating a feed for their subscribers. Twitter could even facilitate payments between the three stakeholder groups - Twitter might charge a content curator a platform fee per user who subscribes to that curator's algorithm (in which case the subscription would be free to the user), OR, at the curator's election, Twitter could handle user subscription payments - an amount offsetting some or all of the platform fee, and remitting any balance above back to the curator. In other words, the curator can choose to price their product to the user at a level above, below, or breakeven with Twitter's per-user platform charge. (And, advertising could still exist within this framework - served by Twitter at a frequency set by the curator, with ad impressions and/or click-thrus offsetting the platform fee.)

If curation will be a free market competing on quality, then why verify accounts at all? Quite simply, because it is likely to be a powerful data point helping algorithms to isolate signal strength.

Policing the truth of tweets (regardless of how it is defined) is unrealistic and will remain so for a long time to come. After all, who arbitrates the truth? (A hopeful answer: blockchains, eventually.) At a minimum, the effort is enormously expensive. But, pushing curation into a third-party marketplace will spur competition for effective algorithms. It may be that arbitration above and beyond optimizing user engagement is unnecessary. (I know, I know, engagement selects for sensationalism. But is that still true when many options exist?) A more elegant solution would emerge from the data itself - the network and emergent sub-networks of tweets and tweeters, constantly forming, shifting, and dissolving. Is Charlie Munger's "seamless web of deserved trust" possible amongst large groups of people, who seldom experience reciprocation on a one-to-one basis? Or does that miss the point, that the problem isn't "in-group" trust, but tribalism itself - our innate tendency to polarize into factions that stop listening to each other? Solving for gradual de-polarization (perhaps in the guise of empirical thought) sounds like a big market opportunity, itself! At a minimum, lots of things become possible (yes, both exciting and terrifying) when curation is allowed.

I think people forget that Elon Musk is the most successful product manager of his generation (this coming from a mediocre product manager of seventeen years). By obsessing over the idea of getting content curation *just right*, Twitter management have ignored that they are still in pole position to someday be *the* platform for all self-authored content. It is reprehensible to me that in 2022, Twitter still hasn't scaled to longer-form content (e.g., buying Substack or building a competitor), not to mention reached out to meet other similar mediums (e.g., visual and performative arts) wherever they are found online. But those are small irritations compared to the ability to surface valuable and worthwhile content to billions of people. After all, that’s what's at stake.

Eamon Glen Hubbard

Our son and Signe's brother, Eamon Glen Hubbard, was born just over a week ago. All went well, Merry and Eamon are healthy, now we are all home again.

We had a harder time naming Eamon than we had with Signe, a fact we explained first with gender (we had several girl names we liked when Signe was born, but had trouble finding inspiration for boy names). We knew (or perhaps justified) that we needed to see him before we named him, as we had with Signe, and indeed, his scrunchy face and head of thick blond hair prompted us to eliminate most of our list.

Eamon was a name I first liked because it seemed vaguely western and cowboy-ish (though perhaps this was just a liminal influence of Longmire). Caring for him in our room, the name took on a certain appropriateness when Merry realized it was a near-anagram of "no name"! We settled tentatively on it and started looking for a complementary middle name.

We first considered some options which "flowed well" (e.g., Eamon Gray, Eamon James) but these held no meaning to us. On the last morning in the hospital, I suggested Glen, telling Merry that Glen Canyon was a place my grandmother had first told me about. It was her I had most wished to link Signe's name to, though no workable opportunity had presented itself then.

What does it mean to name a person for a place, albeit one eliciting association to another person? First, it's worth noting that "Glen" is actually two references - the specific Glen Canyon in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, named by John Wesley Powell on the 1869 expedition of the Colorado River and submerged beneath Lake Powell in the 1960s, and glen, the term for a secluded valley. Extrapolating from the latter, Eamon Glen implies a fictional or undiscovered place, ("a glen named Eamon") and, to me, at least, is euphonically pleasing (i.e., Tolkien's "Cellar Door").

This also provides a foundation beneath the specific place of Glen Canyon, a place neither my grandmother nor myself ever visited (though I did jet ski on Lake Powell in 2002 and visit Hole in the Rock in 2008) and which Eamon and I remain unable to visit - at least, until such a fortunate future age when Glen Canyon dam may be removed.

At that time, the sandstone will be 'bleached' by the water and the old riverbed and stream beds covered in a thick layer of sediment, much of which may be toxic. Riparian zones could take decades to reappear, and the canyon's original biodiversity may never recover. Assuming Glen Canyon re-emerges, it will resemble a wasteland, of no use to either of its previous constituencies - those who enjoyed the canyon, and those who enjoy the lake. What meaning could someone possibly find in that third state?

It wouldn't stay inhospitable forever. And within that slow recovery it powerfully evokes the archetype of redemption, in which something lost is recovered, in a diminished form which nevertheless retains a core essence. Or stated from the perspective of the redeemer: the process by which meaning is derived from loss (such as the loss of a loved one), honoring its memory and finding new life within it.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago, yet she is often the one I think of even now when I am struggling with moral decisions - what would she think if I did [x]? Clearly there is still life in my memory of her, a small part of which I give to Eamon Glen. We are thrilled he is here with us.

R.I.P., Walter Scott, Jr.

Walter Scott Jr., a prominent Omaha philanthropist, recently passed away at 90. I had a link to him: for a couple years, I threw his money down the toilet.

I was a Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship recipient in the college of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at UNO. I found out a few weeks before I graduated high school, and having applied to too few other colleges, I had already decided to attend UNO anyway, to stay close to my high school girlfriend. At my parents' urging, I called to check in on my application - because I had never heard anything - and they called me back the next day to tell me I had been accepted!

Walter Scott had big plans for the IS&T program at UNO in 1999, but at the time it was just the Peter Kiewit Institute for Technology and a lot of empty land. I was most of the way through my first semester when I fell into a severe depression. I ended the semester with two A's, a D, and two F's. Two weeks into the spring semester, I stopped attending classes altogether.

That May, my parents helped me make an appeal to Scott's scholarship administrator to reinstate me that fall, given that I was undergoing treatment and, we believed, showing progress. They agreed. This time, I was an inaugural resident in the new Scott Dorms, intending to focus myself on school life.

I didn't. I moved in, but only lived there a week. I never attended a single class. Over Thanksgiving, my dad went and got my stuff out of my dorm - I was too ashamed and embarrassed, I couldn't face my dorm mates. I couldn't even admit to myself what I had done - I didn't have the strength to face the darkness of my own failings.

It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depression, during which time I developed myriad coping mechanisms. One of these was to "reverse engineer" equanimity for my life situation - whenever I made a mistake, I would say to myself: who was I to have known where that decision would lead me? I was an 18-year old whose naiveté and ignorance were not only plausible, but to be expected. The consequences of my actions, I concluded, were tragic, but they could hardly have been avoided.

It took me many more years to fully internalize my sense of personal accountability, and to think frankly about what I threw away - not just a philanthropist's money, but my own opportunities, and time. And yet, to try to dig the root cause out of the past - not my academic failure or depression, but the behavior that precipitated those - seems so intractable as to be pointless. Those propensities were a part of myself as far back in my memory as I can reach. It was inevitable that I would have to face them. Could I have maneuvered around them so as to limit the damage? The question seems detached, by my estimation, from reality.

A different question: was I predestined to this particular outcome, or should I have been more accountable?

Well, both, along a continuum, I guess. The reconciliation of the two requires a belief that every day is an opportunity to become a better version of ourselves. If I lacked resilience from a young age, then the right time to start building resilience was whenever I became aware I needed more. Same with temperament, same with discipline, same with patience, same with focus, same with anything. And it's still true.

We can all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. But resilience is our defense, and even without knowing where I would've ended up, I do wish I would have known the value of possessing resilience earlier.

Goodbye, Avantas

Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.

I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.

Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.

We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.

Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.

I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.

The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).

I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!

When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?

Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.

But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.

What is Impenetrable? + On getting older

In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard recounts a long series of failed attempts to write about his dad, redeemed only by the completion of My Struggle itself, in which he talks about him at length. Something about the subject of his dad and their relationship was hard for him to capture in writing - below I offer what is likely a flimsy and/or unoriginal hypothesis.

Capturing the essence of any real thing is not trivial, but it is harder yet when we are close to it. In our myopia, our understanding is often distorted. What I think is happening in these instances goes like this: we possess a mental construct of some thing (such as Knausgaard's concept of his dad) for which the core contents are inaccessible, the construct itself being impenetrable. In such instances, the 'surface' of this construct (the part we can still examine) are associated emotions which we have reinforced through repetition - an example being Knausgaard's reports that he felt anxious when he thought of his dad, even when he wasn't there - indeed, even after he had died!

Evidenced by the fact that My Struggle was published and it talks about his dad, Knausgaard got past his writer's block. But did he successfully capture the essence of who his dad was? I'm unsure.

It's been said that the best part of his book is his focus on the real, meaning what actually happened. He writes plenty about his dad and how he acted: the strict discipline and swift punishments, his fear from a young age, his dad's alcoholism and their awkward relationship as he becomes an adult. This brings the reader into Knausgaard's own state of doubt, rendering it clearly. But it never produces a satisfactory explanation as to why his dad is how he is, and Knausgaard draws few conclusions of his own.

It's a limitation of style, to be sure - Knausgaard mostly avoids speculating - and trying to answer why -which helps keep the book in the past, where it is at its best. But those why's might have been evident from what is written - certainly a person's actions can tell a coherent story, which I'm not sure they do in this case. It's odd in a book that he has said is about his dad that his dad's motivations remain so inexplicable (and note: saying he was "just an asshole" categorizes - and thus similarly fails to explain). 

Other readers might find the inexplicability interesting - I think it was a drawback for me, but that's okay, I did greatly enjoy the book as a whole. Left nagging at me is the intuition that there is something left un-penetrated in Knausgaard's understanding of his father. I suppose my flimsy hypothesis, then, is that Knausgaard hasn't fully come to terms with his memories and feelings for his father.

Before I go further: it's entirely possible that if I'm right, it just makes the book interesting in a different way. The risk, of course, is that I'm armchair quarterbacking his writing in a way that isn't useful or is off base. That's okay, it's just a sense that I felt compelled to explore by writing down. And besides, I'm getting old, it's about time to start telling stories whose points approach ephemerality, if not total nonexistence.

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In my own past, I've found quite a few topics to be impenetrable in the same sense - on some I've reached a breakthrough, while others I haven't. Sometimes it's hard to know - truth be told, it's probably not binary, but rather a question of degree. If that's true, then it follows that I only have my own intuition to tell me whether I've arrived at a satisfactory place. (Of course, this suggests lots of interesting possibilities, such as the epistemic uncertainty regarding how completely we have penetrated such a topic.)

I recently started writing about my early 20s. Disconnected as I've been from facts about that time period, my preconceptions were mostly made up of the things I've repeatedly told myself, which are self-reinforcing and reductionist. But a truth still existed! I just had to penetrate the surface that had formed over those memories. The process of doing so seemed to correlate with a period of intense dreaming, which I imagine as the psychic equivalent of how massaging a knot out of a muscle releases toxins.

Today I turn 40, and I find myself pondering what remains impenetrable in my past, and how to go about massaging those mental knots away. One of my biggest realizations this year has been that such 'humanist' pursuits (and not material ones) need to be my primary emphasis in the second half of my life. Otherwise, what may become impenetrable is my own pathological avoidance of the feelings and experiences of everyday life.

The Years of Magical Thinking

It's October of the Year Which Shall Not Be Named, we've just gotten an early season snowfall, wind is breaking the seals around the windows, and Signe is crying in the next room, asking for a hug while Merry gives her a time out. My door is closed, I'm supposed to be working, but for the past few days I've found myself fixated on a particular corner of my memories, the time period after graduation in 1999 until I moved into the Dewey house at the end of 2003. I spent most of this time on antidepressant medication, in and out of therapy. I remember it as a painful time, I've long glossed over it, generalizing it to myself as "the years I spent depressed", much of it spent alone in my room, during which I made little progress on anything that mattered.

Where did this sudden curiosity begin? I suppose it was reading Knausgaard's autobiography, which is well-calibrated in observing distant topics, and engaging even about the banal. The "anxiety of influence" inspired me to write about my 20s, though I first intended to focus on the later years, when I lived at Dewey. I wrote about finding the house, what it was like those first few months, and what changed when I met my ex-girlfriend. But an energy kept pulling me backwards. Perhaps it was simply the narrative impulse to explain why. Why was _____ the way it was, why had _____ happened, why did I feel _____? All of these answers lay in the past, so I went searching for evidence - primarily pictures, but what I found were my old digital journals, which I had kept from the beginning of 2000 to mid-2004. What I've read in them over the past few days has re-awoken a world I had largely forgotten.

The events of those years have been weathering and congealing in my brain for over fifteen years, so of course I had forgotten plenty that occurred. And not just certain events, but the reasons for them, their sequence, how I felt about them and made decisions. And of course, most of my memories have proven vastly simpler than what I wrote in my journals. For example, did I spend a lot of time alone in my room? Well, yes, though mostly sleeping or journaling. I spent the rest of my time doing what most people do at the same age - working, in classes or doing homework, and seeing friends.

Harder to quantify, though qualitatively true: I despaired for joys past and to watch the days of my early adulthood burning away in the stasis of a life I didn't know how to live. I struggled with questions of meaning and often got hung up on the "meta" layers of decisions. Meanwhile, my tactical, day-to-day decision-making was atrocious, I didn't yet understand that success is usually a long series of small victories. I was discovering the world and was passionate about many things I was finding - music, writing, people. My writing lacked nuance, swimming in hyperbole. But I was sincere, I had real feelings, in getting excited over new possibilities I often went too far. More than anything, I was prone to magical thinking, often convincing myself of the impossible. I would do anything to shield my ego from the truth, that I was a novice at most things, and couldn’t avoid the hard work required to find my way. Instead I told myself that my misery must be other people's faults, or fate, the plight of the universe, or whatever steered its course.

It hasn't bothered me to be reminded that I was full of delusions. I already knew that, it was only a matter of degree, and the particulars I had forgotten, or repressed. And it reminds me that somewhere along the way, I did manage to climb out of the hole I was in - after all, I ended up where I am today. Things are not perfect in my life, but they are better than 21-year old me had any right to believe in. And indeed, there was a real magic in my thinking then, because imagination is a double-edged sword: engaging with the fantastic has its own capacity to enrich us. Maybe it's the imaginative potency of those years that my mind has latched onto the last few days, as the pendulum of my life may have since swung too far to the other end of the spectrum, where every minute is grounded in practicality (the constancy is, itself, practical). It's not too late to think magically again, though moderation this time might go a long way.

UBI and Inflation

Time for my one economic bloviation of the year - at least I'll try to predict something.

Armchair economists (and plenty of actual economists) have been predicting inflation for years, based on ballooning budget deficits. But both treasury yields and inflation 'break even' measures suggest little market concern. Why would this be?

I believe Robert Shiller generally when he says that the Great Recession changed people's mindsets in a lasting way. Monetary velocity has plummeted as budget deficits have ballooned - part of this may be explained by foreign dollar holdings (foreign governments turn over dollars slower than US consumers). The remainder, however, must be explained by people's time-value preference for spending and saving. Since 2008, people have essentially felt less certain about their own future financial security, and they are saving more to compensate. A third factor is that we are slowly inflecting from a pension-based system to a savings-based system. The latter puts the onus on the individual to concern themselves with things like withdrawal rates and adverse market fluctuations (and the popular narrative is that these are becoming more severe when they occur).

If all this is correct, I predict that we'll get inflation when a UBI (Universal Basic Income) program is passed, which I suspect may just be a matter of time. Why? Not because of budget deficits, but because UBI is essentially a state pension. It would increase perceived financial stability because it would be a permanent income stream (assuming people found the legislation's permanence credible).

When I say, "not because of budget deficits", what I mean is that I believe inflation will follow even if the program is deficit-neutral. I don't even have to know the details - my prediction assumes the dollars being spent into existence in this program will have a profound impact on monetary velocity. Why? Because, as I said, UBI is like a state pension, and thus eliminates the need for proportionate savings. Just for argument's sake, if UBI were $1k/month ($12k/year), how much required savings per person would that eliminate just to 'break even'? It depends on withdrawal rate, etc., but assuming an annual 4% withdrawal rate, it would offset $300k of savings.

What would happen if every American suddenly realized they could do some combination of: spend $300k of savings they already had, or forego saving $300k of future income? Would that have a profound effect on inflation? My modest guess, as of August of 2020, is yes.

Goodnight

The other night putting my daughter to bed, she gave me a hug without me asking and said, 'love you, daddy', and I had a moment of recognition for how fast she is growing. I also imagined, quite suddenly, that she will be there when I die, standing over me as I lay in a bed, and in that moment she might bid me farewell much as I bid her goodnight so long before, as if pushing out from the shore onto a lake shrouded in fog into which I would, in a moment, disappear.

In that gesture, my daughter was also a primitive sort of savior, guarding my passage into the following realm.

(It's not that I believe anything awaits, but if this is all we have, then it is more important yet.)

The Unveiling

In his 2008 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett described the financial crisis which had just passed: "As the year progressed, a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world’s great financial institutions was unveiled." His choice of the word "unveiled" struck me from that first read, though I couldn't put my finger on why. Now, living through the modern Coronavirus pandemic, I think I finally understand it.

The world today is no different than it was a few months ago, but it did resolve itself to the present in one particular way - a relatively lethal, and quickly-propagating virus spread across the globe. It could've happened at any time and place, but the world has just unveiled to us that it will happen here and now.

For me, this has occurred with a peculiar backdrop:

1. At the beginning of March, we went to Arizona for Merry's work conference and a family vacation. I had kept up on the virus's spread and I knew we were cutting it close to travel when it might already have been spreading through the local population.
2. I planned to finish working in June of this year, by which time I expected to have both adequate money in my checking account and IRA to constitute a safety net. Now my real estate businesses are in distress (tenants aren't paying rent) and my IRA value has collapsed, making this unviable.
3. Now, due to the virus, all our travel plans have been put off and we necessarily spend almost all of our time at home. Merry and I both work from home and Signe's daycare is closed.

There are many silver linings, though:

1. Though Signe being home while we have to work is a logistical nightmare, it is also "immersion therapy" for a degree of accountability to my family that I had avoided for the past three years.
2. I get to spend lots of time with Signe every day, as her language and imagination are quickly developing.
3. Going nowhere and without daycare expenses, we spend almost no money.
4. My habits are strongly-formed, and anything that pushes me out of them is probably a long-term benefit. To give two examples: my drinking has decreased to almost zero, and I have cut out buying many things that had grown habitual.
5. Much of this is a glimpse into what a post-work life could be like, before I choose to go through with it.

When I look out the window in this new world just unveiled, I see something quite different than before. I see a world in which travel is impossible - indeed, much of the outdoors are literally off limits - and quitting work is financially infeasible. The world didn't change - before & after photographs out that same window would be indistinguishable - this unveiling has simply occurred with ruthless speed, along an axis I of which I had never conceived, and I stand disbelieving the sight before my eyes.

Another Country, A Second Reading

I wrote a story a few years ago called Another Country that is still my favorite thing I've written. And then I mentally let it go. About six months ago, though, I went back to proofread it and clean up some grammar (stuff that should've happened before I ever considered it finished) before finally showing it to a friend. That re-reading allowed me to see aspects of the story that weren't apparent to me when I wrote it. I've read about this phenomenon, but I had not experienced it for myself until then.

What did I notice in that second reading? Mainly, that the story contains a metaphor of women - and specifically possible romantic partners - as countries. Both are 'places' that we may visit for a length of time - short or long - and in which we may experience a great deal or a little, shallowly or deeply, leaving us anywhere between unchanged, and profoundly changed. (Funny: the metaphor isn't just apparent in the story - it's almost heavy-handed, making it that much more remarkable that I didn't notice it while writing it.) Furthermore, any Freudians would likely notice that "country" is even prefixed phonetically by an especially foul (though pertinent) term.

It wasn't just that the metaphor eluded my conscious consideration - the whole notion that this was a story about women, or relationships, was not what I considered myself to be writing. It began as a story about travel, and the way places imprint themselves on us. The women worked their way into the story, I think, as part of the natural 'backdrop' the narrator experiences (or so it seemed at the time). I can only suspect that from that point, the metaphor took hold subconsciously, which pulled them further into the story, reinforcing the metaphor, in a virtuous cycle. This would at least explain the relative elegance of the narrative alignment to the metaphor - the narrator's encounter with each woman feels harmonious with the place - not in the sense that the women "belong" in their locations, but rather that you believe his memory of each country could never be separated from his memories of the particular women. And, vice versa.

It's interesting to me that Gabby, herself traveling between countries, seems to transcend the framework in which the other women exist. So what is she? She could be seen as the counterpart to the narrator - someone else whose romantic attachments change with each country. Interestingly, both characters' home countries are referred to - early in the story, their having departed them, and near the end, their returns (the narrator's occurring in the story's last line, albeit only in his mind). This parallels the way our relationships exist within the bookends of our lives, as we arrive and depart from this life alone.

No Way Back

It it tempting to view life as climbing a mountain of greater and greater recognition of the workings of the world around us. This may or may not be true, but by certain outlying moments of my life, I've come to the conclusion that the steps a person climbs on this journey slowly evaporate behind them. The journey we each take cannot be retraced, nor do we necessarily retain the steps we've taken - no matter what we believe we have gained, our memories of learning are one and the same with the wisdom of knowing, and as the memories turn to echoes in our psyche, all we are left with is habits of thought and action.

"That is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They don't grow wise. They grow careful." - Ernest Hemingway

A More Refined Take On Alternate Realities

I went through a period after high school where I was obsessed by the idea of alternate realities, and later, their relationship to so-called "multiverse" theories in physics. Of course, I didn't yet understand topics like probability and expected value well, so my conception was basically, "everything is happening somewhere", which isn't what the theory actually suggests.

In a nutshell, even a very large number of permutations on the same building blocks should NOT be expected to produce stochastic output (though it may, of course, at one or more resolutions). It's more likely they would produce distributions and clustering of the same nature that we see in our single universe when we analyze most discrete phenomena across a large number of observations.

So what? Well, at some point it occurred to me that the first rule of ecology ("you can never change just one thing") is probably intertwined with this. Those early thought experiments of mine always took the form of, "what if the past looked just like my past, except for X?" (e.g., "what if I had done better in college classes my freshman year?") These might be fun to think about, but there's no reason to think that they are viable "alternate realities." After all, how likely is it that some alternate universe is different in one way that is so local? (Everyone is the same except me, and my differences don't manifest at all until the age of 19.) You can have fun, I suppose, assuming not very much would have to change for a different sperm to have fertilized the egg I grew from, but even that is a flawed assumption, is it not? After all, they were all obeying the same physics that all of history had to obey. Are you telling me that a change that would make a different sperm win wouldn't have had an effect even 5000 years ago (much less a billion - outlier variations tend to amplify through time) that would've led to a meaningfully different present?

Something that might be more useful to consider: what would make my example alternate reality plausible? In other words, let's answer that question first, then work backwards. The reason this might make sense is because nobody who is examining the implications of alternative realities as a way of understanding themselves and their own past decision-making actually cares about whether envisioned alternate timelines are likely reconcilable into the multiverse.

It's not crazy to think that if my brain chemistry had been a little bit different, lending more to discipline and less to impulsiveness, I might have succeeded my freshman year of college. But I likely would have grown up with different experiences, giving me a different personality (not *just* "more discipline"), and making it unlikely that I would have been at the same college, with the same friends, the same perspective on life, or the same values.

I think it's a MORE rigorous thought process this way - at least, in the way rigor matters for what we're trying to assess. When the difference first occurred to me, I perceived this as "sucking the fun out of the exercise," which is how it often feels as we solidify a process that felt creative, but I think it also helps train me in planning for the future. Because the future also requires a careful dose of imagination, tempered by an understanding of how the world works. It only stands to reason that the more fully-formed is the latter, the less space exists for the former.

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.

------------------------------------------

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