The Search for Meaning, part two

"Isn’t that what being young is about, believing secretly that you would be the one person in the history of man that would live forever?"
- David Aames, Vanilla Sky

Boy, does that quote hit the nail on the head for me. I really believed that - quite exactly - when I was young, but it was more than that, too. I imagined the graduation speeches, and television interviews, and one-off dinners with prominent people that I would give; a gift of my extended wisdom, the sightlines of my brain that stretched farther than others for reasons that today I can only describe as "heroic". (Thanks go to Jung, who correctly saw that Superman is not arbitrary.)

It is sad to look back and see that such boundless dreams have been extinguished by nothing more than the passage of time, but such is life. The ultimate mystery is alive in the universe; what complaint regarding our existence can be brought forward that is not a misunderstanding? Indeed, I am fascinated by Leibniz' posit that we live in the best of all possible worlds, although my view of a "God" does not require that it be so. On the other hand, I am philosophically unsophisticated; perhaps a few years of concentrated reading on the subject would bring around one or another of my supporting positions.

What more is there to say? The thoughts of youth trail off now, although I try to hold on. We are what we used to be for only so long, and I - perhaps in contradiction - try each day to fall asleep a little wiser than I was when I woke up, even as I try to hold on to what I was. Which do I want more? I push on bravely because the past will fade regardless. I don't ultimately want complicated things; only to be happy.

The Search for Meaning, part one

I learned in business school that execution matters more than ideas in delivering value to the customer. I suppose that execution is similarly relevant in the search for meaning in the world. It has done me little good to sit on the couch and read amazing books, gaining knowledge and yet failing to process it into action. My world - hidden away in my mind - rhymes but it lacks rhythm.

I experienced a troubling period of boredom late in my stay in Finland, after many of my friends had left and all the "easy" things around to do had been done. I often went ice skating alone, or walked to the coffee shop and read. This was at the tail end of a particularly active period of time in my life - both Finland and before - but also foreshadowed a particularly frustrating period of inactivity over the six months following my return home.

I have continually attempted to deconstruct myself over the last several years, to attempt to understand what I am doing wrong and fix it. More than any external changes in our lives, internal ones require bravery. By the fall of 2008, I had already long wanted to make myself more a person of action. But despite my readiness, it was the external world that shoved me into action - I had merely to not resist. The period of time proved nothing of my ability to coerce activity from the world.

I didn't mind - indeed I basked in it - but I should have seen the recoil coming. I returned to what the persistent parts of my personality required me to return to - a frustrated introvert. The summer and fall of 2009 were painfully inert for me, as I waited in expectation of further opportunity to step up and shake my hand.

Failure: it has been said that the world looks like a nail to the man with the hammer. Perhaps I was guilty of seeing the world through one lens. I tried to fix the situation with medicine combined with thought, but I mistakenly believed that thought was the hammer and all change looked like a nail. Our minds are not so robust, but they can do an exceptional job of appearing to be to us.

Failure #2: we are all creatures of habit, but the variety of habits from one of us to the next is enormous. As much as true self-awareness cannot exist without honesty, we can be blindsided. I have crossed the boundary of the popular definition of "alcoholic" and returned, but my addiction was never physiological. My psychological addictions, numerous and robust, have required hosts of otherwise irrelevant habits. The search for meaning - marked by uncertainty, doubt, and fleeting solace - leads those of us compelled by its promise to places outside our discretion. I can not explain where the existential comfort comes from when I sit with my close friends at the bar, but I do not complain. I am happy there and with them, and if it is indeed a delusion that there is some grand reason for me to feel that way, then long live the delusion.

The Closest I Will Get To A New Year's Resolution

I have always believed in the adage that the best solution is usually simple, but this is a difficult thing to remember in regard to ourselves. Many of us who analyze ourselves do so out of habit, and thus do so restlessly, ceaselessly, confabulating problems and confabulating solutions and playing a game akin to "throw every idea against the wall to see what sticks". At times I have been stuck too much in a process of analyzing my every changing habit to try to understand its genesis and ultimate destination, but this is a losing battle. We ruin ourselves when we try to wire ourselves for self-improvement but do so in a way that does not respect the rule that the best solution is usually simple. Unfortunately, all this time my unstated creed seems to have been "urgency", rather than "simplicity".

What do I want to accomplish? I want to see the arc of my life in a lucid way, come to terms with it, and proceed by my own design, with the knowledge it affords me (or offends me) with. And, perhaps now I am at a stage where I can see that - through no particular virtue of my own, but rather as a simple arrival at a clearing in the fog that occurs throughout life if we maintain sufficient honesty and patience.

Ten years ago, my life shifted from an external struggle with the world to one resolutely internal, and I have little reason to believe that it will ever shift back again. By the scale of the internal, I am sobered to look back and assess how far I have come in that time. So little has passed before me. I feel that if I have proven anything, it has been that one human has so little chance to change the world. We are at the mercy of the tides.

McCarthy wrote, "In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments." How true this has been for me. In many stages of my life, I have guarded my precious sentiments dearly, wanting to believe they are eternal. In every case the turning of the world has slowly washed them clean from me. What did a notion like "true love" ever do to me, in the end? Nearly kill me? For what? To believe that I belonged to something? Or to believe that something belonged to me? In the end, it simply engendered new sentiments. My life today is in the notable decline of the echo boom of sentiment from this one initial folly that has reverberated through my emotional life, from then until now. More conclusively, curing me of my sentiments has meant curing me of my personality, a shameful outcome in a world that I once believed I was destined to make a difference in.

What remains for me here? Can I be surprised again? Can I find anything to sustain myself above the sadness that returns so consistently?

I have asked these questions before, certain that the answers were bleak, and yet, in time I was proven so very, very wrong. I hope that it is true again. I want to believe that this place, so defined in my mind by the actions of an inscrutable past, also precedes greater joy to come. I wish for myself that I may outrun the gravity of apathy into a future filled with meaning.

The Mistake of Dualism

Of all the illusions that the mind bestows on us, one of the most invisible is the illusion that consciousness is a robust and ubiquitous presence in ourselves. We build ideas of the mind's working but we do so by mapping lessons we learn elsewhere in the world to it. To quote Cormac McCarthy:

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part"

The mind is chimeric in our visible universes and we are not equipped to understand it; we are equipped to understand where to find berries and how to associate sets of stimuli.

One of the recent illuminations that introspection has given me is to be skeptical of dualist concepts - that is, pairs of concepts, working differently but both explaining one thing, that we believe represent that thing correctly. For its part, dualism is a bad word in consciousness studies, and perhaps for good reason when you pull it apart in concept. Quite simply, dualism is the acceptance that no practical model exists for a phenomenon, so the next best thing is to have two that both do part of the job.

I had just woken today when I caught myself thinking that the man of id, confronted by dreams and instincts, is separate from the man of ego, reasoning what these things must mean and how to deal with them. But, in truth they are and can only be one man. The man of ego does not exist separate from the man of id; he is and has always been a product of their interaction, and vice versa. Instincts and logic are imperfect anchors; often so imperfect as to be inoperable. They do not have the luxury of existing in a vacuum; rather, they are always and everywhere set upon by external forces that they themselves affected but can never decidedly control.

Ultimately, dualism is a mental weakness. Dualities like this exist in our mind because of two facts:

1) We believe our minds police and enforce their own logical rigor; and

2) The mind does nothing of the sort

Such a combination is commonly known as a "cognitive bias". We may like to believe that we are more mentally resilient than we are, because our analysis of our resilience is a gestalt response, which itself is subject to all sorts of memory survivorship and other biases. Humans consistently overestimate their mental resilience in comparison to empirical testing.

A strange question to end with: would life be better or worse without cognitive biases? For my part, I'm not sure it would be possible to enjoy it at all.

Background on the Name

Unlike some of my more mentally restless friends, I do not create memes for myself. But, you have to name an online journal something, and Johnblog sounds horrible. I called mine Psychedelia on Dewey St. because it is an amalgam of myself but is not catchy. (Why should it be? Assuming someone reads it someday, I wouldn't want to worry that it was a superficial trick) Not giving it a name would have seemed either apathetic or intentionally anti-social, neither of which is a good characteristic to impart on something you send out into the world. (Things that are blatantly anti-social can be just as memetic as anything else.) In other words, it is not superficially special, and I hope that it stands on its own merits; this is my mature self believing in honesty and simplicity and fairness.

"Psychedelia" is so very nebulous, although anyone who has felt themselves in a psychedelic state (whether drug-induced or not) will relate to it as a concrete idea. However, few will find a common definition. In this case, this common uncommonality is a quality I liked in the word and so here we are with it.

For someone who makes few investments but makes them big ones, it is inevitable that even great success is usually a story, overwhelmingly, of the best few ideas. Out of ten investments, one may be responsible for 75% of the returns. For instance, last year, I put a significant portion of my wealth into Clear Choice Health Plans - a regional health insurer - and I walked away six months later with 275% of the money I put in. That made me far more than all of the other investments I had last year.

Life imitates life; patterns are everywhere. If Clear Choice Health Plans was my #1 investment up to this point, then stumbling into living at 3302 Dewey was my #1 social choice (sorry, Finland - a close #2; but then again, that wasn't my idea). All told, I lived there for almost five years, from November 2003 until September 2008. I was living at home and going to UNO part-time when Jeremy convinced me to go looking at houses - he knew enough of our friends that were looking for a place to move to, so we got a paper and went looking one night. We found it almost immediately.

If there was something serendipitous about the random events leading us to finding the house, there would likewise be many things that occurred in due time for me that entered my life with an existential grace that cannot be seen except in retrospect - the arc of a life is too long and subtle, but time burns away the fog.

Despite being in school, I was in a profound mental and lifestyle rut when we moved in. I was on antidepressants not because I was depressed but because I was mostly just shut off. There was an urgency to change into something that I could not put my finger on, but the next six months awakened me. I was helped by being more social more often and meeting more people. I was also inspired to play my guitar more regularly and pay attention to my progress. I found things that I wanted, even if they were sometimes out of my reach. So what. Everybody that is not the Buddha must desire something. I went running or biking. In my mind, it was Spring the first sunny day of January; I was outside, not willing to wait for the temperature to agree. That Spring, particularly, but really all of that first six or eight months, gave me momentum that - profoundly - I have not since lost.

I was the only person who lived in the house the whole five years, and after we had decided to move in, I was often the person responsible for keeping us there at important points - typically when multiple people would move out and we would have to decide between moving on or finding other people to move in. I have fond memories of each group of roommates; some are particularly strong. Particularly, when Mike and Shannon moved in and we focused on music, I stayed quietly ecstatic for months.

Even more so than after moving in, the final Summer and Fall unfolded with such a poetic elegance that it is hard for me to articulate, perhaps because it is hard for me to even process it. It is often an unsung gift when life finds a way to wake up a person who has fallen asleep to their motivations and desires. To me, the Fall began early - a few weeks before school - and it ended the day I left for Mexico with the Richardsons. In between lay the awkward and painful (and, often exhilarating) transition that existed between the past and the irreconcilable but inevitable future.

That Fall, I was working part-time as Avantas' only Product Manager (it is near joke-worthy to consider someone attempting to do this part-time; indeed, perhaps someone at Avantas was asleep at the wheel to even assume it possible, much less a good idea?) while going to school full-time. This would be a handful, but the time between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon belonged to me, and it was a time that Phil, Brandon and I typically set about attempting to drink Omaha. In addition, my mental state reached lows during that Fall that I had not experienced in close to ten years; I was torn apart inside; by stress, by confusion - and for someone so new with the feeling - I was torn apart by my determination - a feeling I didn't know how to moderate. Shamefully, I was torn apart by a greed for more - greed that obscured the thankfulness that I should have felt for what I was fortunate to have had. Indeed, patience for what we anticipate is to thankfulness for what we say goodbye to. But all is well if it ends well.

For a while, I was certain that it would not. I was moody and unpredictable. I was sometimes devastatingly sad. More than a couple times, I had to leave a classroom because I would start crying uncontrollably. I didn't know why. The mind is prone to confabulation. In the absence of other reasons I could understand, I might have thought that I missed someone. The truth is that I DID miss someone, but I was crying because my fortifications for mental coherence were down; for weeks at a time, my mind had been alternately inundated with stress and then alcohol, stress, then alcohol.

It has been observed that the real effects of stress occur all around the edges of a person. It can shorten your life, but it can also focus your efforts in extraordinary ways. Despite the most demanding class load of all my time in school, I ended the semester with a 4.0. I also walked away from my job at the end of the semester exceedingly proud of the things we had accomplished in the last six months. I had found time for a vacation to Mexico; how bad could it have been?

The last couple weeks at our house on Dewey were a slow, brutal chaos. I balanced the demands of work and school with my need to say goodbye to that part of my life, as well as the overwhelming demands of cleaning a large house that had often gone months on end without proper cleanings. In the end, it was a languorous Autumn evening when we drove away for the last time. By then, I had decided on going to school in Finland for the Spring semester, and I imagined that my life would circle back to something close to the Fall by the time I was back the next Summer, but of course it never did.

Going away for five months is a profound point of transition for someone who has never lived away from home for longer than a couple weeks at a time, and so it is hard to connect the past of the event to its future. Maybe it is not meant to. I think my mind is better off with the transitions, because I have a hard time creating them for myself. We have some years in our life, in which we will do some things well and some things worse. I may feel the essence of the world around me, but I often struggle to change. A profound sign helps immeasurably. A profound period in a life deserves, at least, a profound exclamation point, and then we can take a deep breath, and try to believe in ourselves a little more, and proceed.

Reductionism, part one

I have tried recently to make my life, as I perceive it, simpler. This is not the same as making my life simpler. For instance, I could stop going to work, but I would hardly perceive my life to be simpler three months later. Quite the contrary. At its best, work disciplines my mind and challenges me. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I mostly like it and am actually enthralled by it sometimes. I am in a position that requires creativity that is not trivial in the business world, and that is an exceedingly rare thing. I can integrate things I learn from other disciplines into my work: statistics, risk management, cognitive bias. Somewhat paradoxically, Munger's "latticework of mental models" is a way of simplifying the world, because we train ourselves to react to events in more effective ways. Although it often goes unnoticed, we choose to make our thought processes as complex as they are, a choice that is fine until it is not fine, by which time it is a habit. Cluttered thought begets stress, which begets too many unfortunate things to mention. Stress and fructose are too often our killers.

A Steady Pace of Breath

I feel that my life lately can be defined most summarily by the near and distant implications of accepting knowable causality in all facets of my life. But what started this? I think there was a tipping point precipitated by a few things:

1) A growing understanding of statistics (predispositions, tails, perturbations, etc...)
2) Somewhat related - a growing understanding of logical rigor and the need for mental consistency, mostly from reading ten years' worth of weekly columns by John Hussman
3) Cognitive and consciousness study and philosophy of the mind, in accepting that there is a science to cognitive thought and behavior, and the concluding acceptance that true free will is incompatible with mathematics.
4) Somewhat counter-intuitively - maturity, and specifically the existential acceptance that whatever happens to me is my own doing of which I am aware.

From all of this, slow changes came about in the way that I see the world and my place in it:

1) I have to be happy with myself first (and urgently), at whatever the cost to others around me. Societal norms do not mitigate this fact when they conflict with it, and in fact can provide perceptually violent opposition to it and should be treated with such knowledge. Compromise of yourself by the pressure of societal norms is an affront to BOTH yourself and society by extension.
2) I must isolate myself from individuals who would threaten my mental constructs, either inadvertently or intentionally. This necessity overrides feelings of loneliness because loneliness fades, while the pain caused by compromising your values or thoughts increases perpetually thereafter.
3) A truly humble nature is unassailable and is exceedingly rare. It is ignored by the impatient but the happiness that humility brings is exceptionally persistent; it is an illusion that a humble person wants for the things that separate them from others, but it is instantly recognizable that others continually want, despite what they already have.
4) Cognitive biases are so ingrained in ourselves and in society that we cannot avoid exposure to them. However, knowledge of biases is a means to eliminating them in our own actions. As an exercise of item #1, it must be concluded that eliminating a bias must always take precedence over conforming societal pressure or memes.
5) It is important to be at peace today, and at peace now, because we are here today, and here now. This is not a commentary on the unknown; this is a commentary on people's belief that there will be a sudden and simple opportunity to change aberrant thoughts and behavior "tomorrow".
6) Personal connection may be impossible, but what is wrong with being your own audience? Ultimately, the joy of a personal connection is just another cognitive bias. Only we will ever truly know ourselves. Understanding this fact is the only way to find joy for things that we can't find other people to share our thoughts with.