David R. MacIver's Blog
Notes towards planning the future
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/notes-towards-planning-the-future.
Hi everyone,
I’m still working on the question of “How does one find purpose?”, which I started talking about in Choosing what to do. I don’t really have any good answers for you today, but I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in progress.
Pruning the future
Please compare and contrast these two tweets:
::: {.twitter-embed attrs=“{”url”:“https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221”,“full_text”:“We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.”,“username”:“waitbutwhy”,“name”:“Tim Urban”,“profile_image_url”:““,”date”:“Fri Mar 05 16:14:34 +0000 2021”,“photos”:[{“img_url”:“https://pbs.substack.com/media/EvunkwFXcAAotvp.jpg”,“link_url”:“https://t.co/RSZ1d3W642”,“alt_text”:null}],“quoted_tweet”:{},“reply_count”:0,“retweet_count”:13603,“like_count”:59030,“impression_count”:0,“expanded_url”:{},“video_url”:null,“belowTheFold”:false}” component-name=“Twitter2ToDOM”} :::
This is true, but on the other hand…
::: {.twitter-embed attrs=“{”url”:“https://twitter.com/willlowthewhisp/status/1379546884558225411”,“full_text”:“Indefinitely preserving optionality is actually a definite reduction of options because some things require an early start or many years work”,“username”:“willlowthewhisp”,“name”:“willow 🌱”,“profile_image_url”:““,”date”:“Tue Apr 06 21:29:42 +0000 2021”,“photos”:[],“quoted_tweet”:{},“reply_count”:0,“retweet_count”:35,“like_count”:352,“impression_count”:0,“expanded_url”:{},“video_url”:null,“belowTheFold”:false}” component-name=“Twitter2ToDOM”} :::
“Optionality” here means something like “the ability to make choices”. For example liquid assets like sitting on a giant pile of cash in your bank account is a high optionality option, buying a house is a low optionality one - it intrinsically constricts your choices for the future.
Tim Urban is entirely correct that it’s still “all in our hands”, but many of the choices we make today are ones that heavily restrict our future options. If we don’t make big choices, we don’t keep our options open forever, we just fail to achieve anything big.
One of the things I (and many others I talk to) need to do, I think, is learn to be more intentional about how we select those future paths. We can’t choose our precise path now - and indeed it would probably be awful if we could - but we can still do things that open up and close down paths more intentionally.
And, sometimes, we get to a critical branch and have to choose, and there’s no good way to do that, because you’re genuinely choosing between two incompatible options. e.g. I’ve talked to people trying to decide whether to have children, and one of the things that you have to grapple with there is that both options have the possibility to be amazing, and will change you in different ways, and you cannot fully evaluate them without becoming them.
Grieving the loss of your other lives
Urban claims we think a lot about those other black lines, and I don’t think he’s wrong exactly, but I’m not sure we do a particularly good job of it. It’s like the distinction between “overthinking” as I use it (cf. Overthinking overthinking) and as other people use it (where it basically means “ruminating”, which tends to be unproductive). Instead of productively thinking about these other paths, I think we end up in a constant dance where we are compelled to think about it, try not to, and fail, because trying not to think about things that are important to us never works.
The principle I’ve been trying to explore (with some success) that the way to go is to grieve the alternative versions of our life paths that we did not take. Each of those dark paths in the section labelled “The Past” is a version of ourselves that does not exist, and that is legitimately sad, and by accepting that and working through it we can work with these feelings more productively.
How does this work? Well, I’m still figuring that out, but I’m fond of (most of) the post The art of grieving well:
I’d like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth. It doesn’t happen only when someone dies. For instance, people go through a very similar process when mourning the loss of a romantic relationship, or when struck with an injury or illness that takes away something they hold dear (e.g., quadriplegia). I think we even see smaller versions of it when people break a precious and sentimental object, or when they fail to get a job or into a school they had really hoped for, or even sometimes when getting rid of a piece of clothing they’ve had for a few years.
In general, I think familiarization looks like tracing over all the facets of the thing in question until we intuitively expect what we find. I’m particularly fond of the example of arriving in a city for the first time: At first all I know is the part of the street right in front of where I’m staying. Then, as I wander around, I start to notice a few places I want to remember: the train station, a nice coffee shop, etc. After a while of exploring different alleyways, I might make a few connections and notice that the coffee shop is actually just around the corner from that nice restaurant I went to on my second night there. Eventually the city (or at least those parts of it) start to feel smaller to me, like the distances between familiar locations are shorter than I had first thought, and the areas I can easily think of now include several blocks rather than just parts of streets.
I think coming to terms with this process is probably key to being able to make good decisions about the future, because otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for certain regret: Every time we prune the tree of the future, we know we’ll regret the paths not taken.
Communicating intentions to your future self
I read Source of Power recently, and buried in it is a section I really liked:
In observing teams and reviewing their attempts to communicate goals, I have identified a few types of information that are important for describing intent (Klein, 1994). There are seven types of information that a person could present to help the people receiving the request to understand what to do:
The purpose of the task (the higher-level goals).
The objective of the task (an image of the desired outcome).
The sequence of steps in the plan.
The rationale for the plan.
The key decisions that may have to be made.
Antigoals (unwanted outcomes).
Constraints and other considerations.
All seven types of information are not always necessary. Instead, this list can be used as a checklist, to determine if there are any more details to add. In my company, whenever we begin a new project, we go through the relevant items in the checklist. We try to make sure that everyone working on the project has the same understanding of what we are after.
In context this is about people communication their intention to subordinates, but I think perhaps it’s worth thinking of our future selves this way. When planning for the future, we can think of our future selves as someone we can communicate our intentions to in this way, although they’re certainly not a subordinate.
Feeling trapped by your past self
With any ongoing practice of introspection you tend to run into the same underlying emotional issues over and over again, and a recurring one for me is something in the space of “feeling trapped”. I find that I often react this way to authority figures and plans constraining me.
This seems to trigger a lot with past plans too unfortunately. I look at the things past me has committed me to and go “You’re not the boss of me, me!” and feel a really strong resistance to follow through. This is probably part of why my PhD went so badly (although I think past-me also legitimately committed me to a plan that turned out to be bad. It’s complicated).
Feeling trapped has a sort of panic response that tends to cause me to do anything to get out of the trap, which often involves throwing the plan I’ve committed to. This is obviously unhelpful.
The present is the future of the past
I think these two features of grieving and feeling trapped have an interesting common feature, which is that the way we react to our past self is the way we expect our future to react to our present self, so maybe a lot of the problems with planning just naturally get fixed by working on general emotional issues, especially ones focused on how we relate to our past.
I don’t necessarily think that’s all that one needs to do, but perhaps until we’ve worked on that it’s actually premature to think in terms of making plans - the first thing to do is to remove the blocks that prevent us from doing that.