Regret Minimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean to be a man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I'm Trying To Do

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

- Franz Kafka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patterns of Thought

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
- Marcus Aurelius

He's right, of course. It's easy enough to say, but like all things, it is something else entirely to come to comprehend this as a truth deeply, to "feel it in your bones." Time has done much to bring it closer to me, to help me understand exactly how it operates - how it is true as a function of the machinery of the world which acts on all of us. 

I suppose I came to understand it first as I vacillated for many years back and forth into and out of depression. It became apparent to me that nothing much was actually changing in the world - that only the way I judged myself was shifting. Those days, I didn't do much - I was fixated on discovering a good life to live, a way to be self-satisfied as a function of the outer world. I pursued this mostly by observing the world passively, as if I might notice something that I could then put into action. It would take years for me to see that this effort was misguided, as I repeatedly fit whatever spurious explanations I could find onto the fleeting satisfactions that came to me. Maybe they were, even, brought in by the tide of the outer world, but that is hardly the point - what kept me from happiness was myself, my own evaluation of myself, that I had failed at something profound - the keeping of a self-opinion that accepted myself for who I was.

The proverbial role of "responsible adult" has since brought the same puzzle back to me in a new form. I find my time overcome by the roles and responsibilities into which I have stepped, and I am sad for it - disappointed that all the effort I have put towards freeing myself of obligation has gone the other way. What is to be made of this disconnect? Did I make some mistake in failing to do what I set out to, or have I fundamentally misperceived what has happened?

Maybe both. I certainly can't rule out that I have made one or more mistakes, by my own criteria - that I have acted in a way contrary to my goals. But I think the larger issue - and probably larger by far - is that I have misperceived what has occurred. The state I find myself in today is simply one where I am too eager to picture myself the victim of time and circumstance, to feel helpless when I am not. The evidence for the alternative - that there is no time to be had, nothing to be done for me - evaporates when I force myself to look upon my situation, and especially when I force myself to observe what other people have proven possible. There is nothing in my day that precludes me from having what I want except my own eagerness to jump to reductive and self-defeating conclusions of what I am capable of.

What kind of life will I live if I allow this to continue? I think this implies a tragedy that stoicism understands. When Seneca stated that we must live every moment to its fullest, it was with an almost mathematical formulation, that there is only one path to living our own best life, and that is to control our patterns of thought to see each day, and each moment, for what it is: opportunities we will never again possess.

For Signe - To Stay Young

Signe, you are almost five months old, and each day you are doing new things and becoming more aware of what is around you. I've already mourned so many times what of your babyhood has come and gone, as I watch you play or feel your size as I pick you up. I hold you against my chest and we look into the mirror, and the face whose eyes catch sight of me is not so tiny as it once was, and is more full of awareness, smiles more readily and carries more expression. I try to remember those moments when you smile at me because they are perfect - you are simple and your reactions are perfect in their simplicity. Nothing else I accomplish in my day is so pure as to see you smile at me.

I am scared for my dad, Signe - I know that your grandfather will pass away before I'm prepared, because I will never be prepared. It is the same with your grandmother - and yet there is something more with my father, because he is a man and I am supposed to be a man, and even now, at my age, when I am uncertain how to be strong, I find myself thinking of him and wondering what he would do, and when I am sad I think of him and I wish for him to know that I am suffering, and to tell me that everything will be okay. He has, my whole life, been sensitive and unafraid of his feelings as no other man I've known, yet he seems brave for it, and unafraid, the very antithesis of the doubt and fear that so often consume me, for the mortality of myself and everyone I love.

Signe, the other night I dreamt you grown, with a baby girl of your own that you brought to us, your parents, her grandparents. I had so many times tried and failed to imagine what your face would look like grown, and in my dream I saw you clearly, and your face was yours, yet different. Your same innocence was in your eyes and your smile. If you have a child, it is likely that he or she will never know their great-grandparents, but if they come to a world that I am still in, I will speak about them, because they gave me all the best characteristics of myself. It is the same as how I see my grandmother in my father, and in myself - and though my memories of her fade, my sense that she is a part of me only grows stronger with time. I'll tell your child about my grandmother, too, because with time she becomes mythical to me, transforming from a person that I knew into a facet of the world that is eternal. She has become all of nature to me, the sanctity we owe the natural world and the awe that we feel for it.

Life is so short, and passes so fast, and we are too soon old and too late wise. Each moment matters - I'll try to remind myself of that often, to become a better father and a better friend. Time will judge me in that effort - time, and your happiness. I wish you that happiness - of loved ones who humbly learn how to care for you, and raise you to be self-possessed, self-aware, and compassionate. I am so excited to be part of your life, and I wish for nothing to come between us, to keep us from teaching each other and sharing all the joys of being alive.

For Merry - To Assume Nothing

Merry, do you ever ask yourself how you got here - how unlikely it was, many years ago, that the characteristics of this one future - who you married, where you live, what our life is like - would come to be? The day that I met you at Lake Zorinsky, could you have guessed what we would one day have, could you have foreseen our life together, or our daughter?

How do you think of us, Merry? Are we a rock with a few cracks that we need to keep at work sealing, or are we two birds in a storm, flailing with all our might against the wind, that we not be separated? Maybe I am a fatalist, but for the mistakes I judge one or the other of us to make on any given day, when things are not perfect between us, I see only myself to blame in the grand scheme of things, and believe that only I have the opportunity to deliver us a better future, because you have proven yourself to understand, already, what we need. And before you can contest this, can we examine the evidence?

I didn't want to date you, because you didn't strike me as someone I would date; you were too easy to talk to, to good a friend, too kind and too genuine. You were Susie Derkins and I was Calvin. You were patient and found a way to convince me, and even then it didn't click for me until I realized just how many days you made me happy; how could I not want to be with you? I fell in love with your kindness, your patient affection, and your smile.

I didn't want a pet to take care of; I told you that if you got a cat, it would be yours, and not ours - what more insensitive thing could I have said? And yet you found Rocky, and acted quickly, and then welcomed me to be part of his life. And only once he had settled in as an equal part of our family was I spinelessly ready to call him "ours," right when I ceased to deserve to.

I didn't want to have a child; I endlessly hedged myself by saying that I thought I would want one "some day, just not yet." At least when you told me you were ready I had the sense to listen, and from understanding the episodes above, to trust that you might know better than me. You gave birth to Signe, and I have discovered one day at a time that I needed her to help me be whole, to give me a chance to be a better person, the same way you gave me that opportunity.

I may never know why you chose me for any of this. I'll never understand what you thought I could give you. You've admitted to being in some bad - or at least complicated - relationships before ours. Perhaps you are just bad at picking partners, of which I am one, and perhaps I was simply lucky enough to recognize and hold on to a good thing. You would probably dispute this claim, but I ask, are you so sure it is not the case? Are the virtues you see in me real, and if they are at least that, then are they at all rare?

I've thought a lot about the legacy of each of the decisions above, and what it will mean for us many years from now. Nothing is written in stone, yet certain implications of each seem clear. I will try my best - which has, by my own judgment, often been quite poor - to be a good partner and father. It is all I can do. It probably won't be smooth, but it will be a genuine attempt, I promise. I'll give you, Rocky, and Signe the best life I can, but you must know how little conception I have of what that means, or how to do it. Age seems to fill me not with wisdom, but with doubt - to make me more certain each day of how much I don't know, of how little I can control.

But I know I love you, and Rocky, and Signe. I know that somehow, we've made it here, and for that I am grateful. Of all the alternative lives I can imagine for myself, there is none that compares to this one. Though I can't understand what sort of luck it took to get here, I promise never to think that luck will bless our future - it will be our own decisions that will bend our lives towards meaning and joy. To remember so is all I can give you. I love you and the life you've made us, and I'll try to give us a future worthy of it.

Ten Years From Now

In a podcast with Tim Ferriss, Debbie Millman posed a method for directing self-progress structured as a writing exercise:

“It is Winter 2027. What does your life look like? What are you doing? Where are you living? Who are you living with? Do you have pets? What kind of house are you in? Is it an apartment are you in the city are you in the country? What does your furniture look like? What is your bed like? What are your sheets like? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of hair do you have? Tell me about your pets, tell me about your significant other, do you have children? do you have a car? Do you have a boat? Talk about your career? What do you want? What are you reading? What are you making? What excites you? What is your health like? Write this one day ten years from now. So one day in the winter of 2027, what does your whole day look like? Start from the minute you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee or tea, all the way through until minute you tuck yourself in at night. What is that day like for you? Dream big, dream without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it. Write like there is no tomorrow; write like your life depends on it because it does. And then read it, once a year, and see what happens.”

This is an improvement over the typical "New Year's resolutions" in so many ways that I don't know where to start. Most importantly, she notes that there should be no holding back - the purpose of imagining an ideal future is to make sure we don't remain anchored to the present, and both this encouragement and the ten-year timeframe make it feel more possible to me, even now, before I have started writing.

To be the blue-sky optimist that assumes, all at once that this is basically a good idea, I immediately find myself considering how often I should read it, and how often I should revise it, but I guess those can be problems for later. For now, I'm simply going to attempt writing it.

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In ten years, my enduring joys come from the people I love. Each day I try to elevate my own life as a means to elevate theirs. I am patient and kind because I have practiced being so, and because neither will ever cease to be important. Comfort and pleasure are lesser virtues, whose existence I only consider when I have first done what I can for my loved ones.

My thoughts are clear because I am healthy. I am healthy because I eat well and am physically active. I eat well because it tastes good, and because I listen to my body. I am physically active because I like to have fun, and because the world is worth exploring. Neither "diet" nor "exercise" are obligations I monitor or goals I set.

I work because it challenges me and I enjoy it. I am good at what I do - if for no other reason than that I could never enjoy doing something I was poor at - and my colleagues know that I can be trusted at my word, and trusted to excel at my duties. To be good at what I do is to better those around me. The amount of work I do is in natural balance with my life.

I am seldom in a hurry - I enjoy being in one place for long periods of time. I read to learn and I write to better know myself and the world. I travel, by myself and with my family, to see the world, to understand it better, and to have new experiences. People know they can trust me, ask me anything, confide in me. I enjoy routine but am never beholden to habit. I give my things away because there is almost nothing I want. I am prudent in the things I do - I avoid unnecessary risk - but I do not fear what the world may bring us.

Gratitude for what life has given me protects me from despair. My constant wish is for time - I will always want more time.