Reflecting on what I'm good at, reflecting on reflecting

I'm turning 33 in a few days and I think that has me reflecting on my status in life. What surprises me is that I sometimes feel like a mid-twenty-something, and people often mistake me for that and treat me accordingly. I'm certainly more confident now than I was when I was, say, 26. Experience has shown me what I'm good at and for those things I'm bad at, it's given me the maturity to seek out help and improve to the extent feasible. But I still don't quite have the authority I associate with some of my peers in age, let alone my elders. Maybe it has something to do with having kids. You could say they exude a parental authority.

I've been recently having the experience of working alongside people who are particularly competent in at least a couple specific areas. It has me realizing how much better I can be at certain things, and wondering what sort of fundamental phenomena underlie the performance I'm observing. Two very fundamental intelligences or abilities are emerging in the theory I've got so far. The first is decisiveness: a capacity to make quick, sufficiently effective decisions. I think the key here is avoiding paralysis analysis that's driven by anxiety. That's driven by such internal monologue as, "Did I forget something?" and leads you to keep doubling-back to the same areas of mental exploration, never coming to a solid mental clarity on the state of a particular aspect, and making progress difficult. In the process you also risk losing the bigger picture, since by spreading ad hoc mental analysis out in time you push the limits of short-term memory. It's rumination. It's obsessive and compulsive. Some people just don't do it but those who do need to be able to recognize it and intervene to keep it from gumming up their thought process. This is reminding me of an article I read long ago about the nature of genius, describing it as a quicker certainty of analysis than the vast majority of people exhibit, so my elaboration here can be thought of as exploring the details of that.

The other fundamental ability is related. It entails being able to store, retain, and extend successive aspects of a mental model, successive considerations in making a decision. The first ability is about being able to recognize — recognize when you're ruminating, recognize the cognitive consensus your thoughts are converging on — then make a definitive mental note to facilitate progressing thoughts and progressing actions. This second ability is less about recognizing a conclusion and more about building out a mental space — a diagram, if you would — of the matter under consideration or the system you're examining, for whatever purpose. You can think of it as a prerequisite to recognizing a conclusion, though on close examination I think we'll find there isn't so clear-cut a sequence. The key to it is restrained imagination. The imagination enables the visualization — or for the less visually-oriented — a math-sense or body-sense or sound representation of the topic. Keeping this imaginary world restrained is necessary to keep it from growing so big you start losing pieces of it, or losing track of what you were trying to accomplish to begin with. I can't plan properly if I keep forgetting a constraint. For some reason the example I'm coming up with right now is deciding to plan a bike trip while one of my arms is in a cast — probably not the greatest solution to the question of how I should spend my weekend. Maybe a couple days reading something engaging at home would be a better idea.

Imaginary worlds grow too big or unwieldy (unless you've really committed preexisting components to memory) when you start to contemplate tangents, or when you keep getting distracted by completely unrelated thoughts — invasive thoughts — but then keep trying to come back. I would argue that the latter places a lot of downward pressure on how big your imaginary world can manageably be. If your mental flow is punctuated by a fleeting but momentarily consuming thought about an issue at home, or what kind of music you want to listen to later, etc., then in the interim your mental world atrophies. You start losing pieces that would have stayed in place otherwise. When I tune into the introspective currents that are more or less constantly flowing through me over the course of my day, I can feel the looming threat of such distracting invasive thoughts. I can feel emergent impulse to break away from reflecting on a statement my colleague just made or a thought I just had about my code. I think a lot of it has to do with the habits and lifestyles that tend to come with having a smartphone. I've cultivated enough ongoing awareness — metacognition or mindfulness — that I'm able to continue directing my thoughts when something else threatens to take over, but I'd like to be better. I'd like fewer instances of something threatening a takeover at all. This is all just a long way of saying I want to improve my ability to focus, concentrate, and act. I think it starts with putting yourself on a sort of stimulation diet and seeing lines of thinking and action through without pivoting to something else, until you build up enough agency to handle a higher-stimulation environment with more moving parts.

How does adopting technology and knowledge impact quality of experience?

A fundamental pattern in history is the adoption of technology and associated or prerequisite knowledge and its impact on the quality of the experiences of those around it. The advent of history — the written word, a way of storing and transmitting knowledge of events — is itself an instance of this phenomenon. With the advent of history, societies changed, the quality of life of their members changed, their way of understanding the world and how they responded to it changed. This broad idea transcends time and scale. We can examine the impact of technology and knowledge on a contemporary business, its performance, and employee satisfaction. We can apply the lens backwards in time and ask ourselves how the development of technology and knowledge — say, Newtonian physics — impacted a society's economy, its cosmology, and the opportunities it afforded different members in education, work, or other ways of achieving their ends. Similarly, we can look at the impact of, say, the tech industry in San Francisco or Boston on the lives of their communities today.

A key tenet in the exploration of this question must explicitly address a common (today and in the past) assumption that additional technology and knowledge is inherently better. The benefits of technology and knowledge are ubiquitous but that notion is not fundamentally true. There are technologies we decide to ban or never pursue — chemical weapons, human genetic engineering, personal data mining — because the implications are at odds with the values we converge on as a society. Likewise, additional knowledge is not always a good thing. It can introduce noise into a system and compromise decision-making.

Quality of experience as a term encapsulates several ideas. First, it refers to the way in which a person understands the universe, how it works, and their role in those dynamics. An early Christian sees the earth as the center of the universe and the outcome of their life as a function of how they have conformed to the prescriptions set out by God and articulated by their religious community. A fatalist sees little role for individual agency in their life. An ambitious professional in our day easily sees the world and their life as a series of challenges-turned-opportunities in advancing their stature. Second, the term refers to the emotional element of how a person relates to their ideas of the world. When my world is a battle between good and evil, I might regularly experience trepidation, wariness, pious resolve. In a more epicurean world where I think I should be enjoying my life, there's greater levity and I might find myself in a mode that's more impulsive, indulgent, and celebratory. The impressions we have of what the world is, and how we define our relationship to that world around us — is it safe? am I responsible for things? — determine how we feel about life and ourselves. This is separate but related to quality of life, which is defined by more external, observable factors, such as mortality and literacy rates, nutrition, income, etc. It's also worth noting that one's mental model and ensuing emotional existence determines character and behavior. Will my piety make me magnanimous and kind, or vindictive and strict? Will my hedonism make me appreciative and fun, or insatiable and reckless?

Do most people struggle?

The segment of society I grew up in struggled to overcome barriers to basic steps. We struggled to get out of bed, to make that phone call, to leave the house on time. It's a lifestyle defined by loose ends, unfinished starts, or just unstarted starts. I saw it in my mom, her friends, my cousins, and myself until I cultivated better habits. I wonder what it is that puts us in this state and keeps us there on so many counts, for years, and too often for whole lives.

I have seen the alternative. I saw it in more functional classmates in school, in neighbors, in people at shops and offices who took care of their affairs in a more organized, proactive, and timely manner. These people often were members of a different socioeconomic category — more affluent, more stable, with more resources and options. Was it a cause or an effect of their mode? More likely than not the relationship wasn't unidirectional.

A troubling aspect of my observations is that I don't think I've seen the same predicament in other parts of the world. Living in Ukraine and China — and traveling extensively through other parts of the world not exactly known for affording wealth or opportunities to ordinary citizens — I find the constraint is not the initiative of locals but the opportunities they have. There's probably sampling bias coming into play here. In my years abroad I taught English, and that standing lent itself to putting me in contact with the more proactive sort, those who took the initiative to acquire a foreign language. Outside of the classroom I saw taxi drivers, proprietors, and consumers vying for improved standing or the accumulation of wealth. Perhaps that segment that struggles remains disproportionately and significantly invisible to the public eye. They're not in evening classes or working a gig or running their errands. They're languishing behind closed doors, in dark spaces, working to muster the energy to engage their worlds toward their own benefit.

Could there be something singularly American about the struggles I saw intimately growing up, and that I still occasionally brush up against? One differentiating aspect of America is that for all of our wealth, our income distribution is pretty warped, leaving big segments of society feeling inferior to others. Could that account for the paralysis? Pop science articles have told me that this sort of perception has an adverse effect on well-being. Even in a place like Ukraine, where a small elite has an incredible amount of wealth, the rest of society is clustered closely together in poverty, establishing a sense of camaraderie among most citizens even, with the rich — oligarchs — operating as a uniting opponent in some ways.

Looking into the past I think about the trials of simpler societies, of hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, and pioneers. Of serfs and slaves. Accounting for infant mortality, I'm told life expectancy wasn't so terrible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still I'm not convinced that a typical life in cities, on farms, or on manors was beyond daily struggle. Plague, turmoil, war, famine, and other misfortunes were far more significant factors then than for the American lifestyles I'm familiar with today. My friend imagines that if he were a fourteenth-century peasant reflecting on his life, he'd likely recall big holidays, weddings, festivals and the like as the highlights, before struggles to make ends meet or navigate the vagaries of society. I think he's right. The hard work of earlier or less affluent times and places is taken as a given and fades into the background of consciousness. It's a constant. The highlights are the deviations.

Would the people I think of as struggling today have a comparable experience? I'm not so sure. Again, I think of the heterogeneity of society, and the unavoidable dissemination of media and information that draws their attention to their relative standing. I think a lot of people today understand themselves as marginalized have-nots. The operative word there is marginalized. When you see yourself as part of a community overcoming poverty more or less together, even allowing for the occasional exception — the duke, the lord, the chief, the mandarin — you're more likely to take comfort in the notion of a solidarity or at least a relative fairness in working toward well-being or livelihood in parallel with peers. I'm suggesting that in turn that comfort can strengthen someone against the sort of rut that can take down initiative.

Interesting connections

Christine, Joseph, and MySpace

I met two of my best friends on MySpace. This was back in 2004 when it was just taking off. Before people were inundated with social media it was far more acceptable to reach out and forge bonds with strangers. Nowadays people tend to add as a contact on LinkedIn or Facebook only those people they've met in real life. So, even though I lived in a different city than them at the time, Christine and Joseph, who were roommates, stumbled upon me and reached out on account of my professed interests in electronic music, body modification, and the Soviet Union. We grew close over the next few years and we're still friends. I visited each of them in their respective domiciles as recently as this summer.

Ford Seven and Girl Talk

Christine and Joseph eventually connected me to a place called Ford Seven. Just a sprawling apartment in an old building in Cleveland—sprawling enough to roller skate! The place was known for its antics and events. This is where the mashup artist Girl Talk played some of his first shows, and he took off from there. Another character who was a part of that scene was Antonio. He's a gifted hairstylist by all accounts, so gifted he was even Courtney Love's personal stylist. Well, at least for a few weeks. I never got the full story on what happened there.

The Fund and Street Fight Radio

The Fund (aka the Fund for Public Interest Research) recruits young idealistic (and/or desperate) people to fundraise for nonprofits, either door-to-door or by accosting people on the street. I worked there each summer in college, and Zack was my boss two of those summers. He went on to become the potato salad guy. He also ended up spending time working on the same farm in France as my friend Natasha, who used to live at Ford Seven.

In college I made good friends with a certain Lauren. And while I was at the Fund, I worked with Ljubica, who now hosts Cold Pizza Party. Ljubica has collaborated with Street Fight Radio, and one of the hosts of that was Lauren's first boyfriend.

Reality TV

Katie, who I met through Lauren, worked at a dry cleaner's in high school. She used to let her friend Akashia sleep on the couch in the shop. Akashia went on to compete in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, but not before stealing from the cash register. I coincidentally gave Akashia a Tarot card reading once when I was in high school. A kid I was on the cross country team and in art class with went on to compete in Project Runway, and Katie's friend Irina ended up in the same writing program at Bard College as Christine.

Battles over fate

Some of history's greatest battles have been over the definition of the world and how best to interact with it. When people are particularly concerned with their fate as defined by an afterlife, they concern themselves with how best to attain a desirable position in it. This historically manifested in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years' War, and played a part in the earlier Crusades. Of course, there were agents who used religious conflict to negotiate and attain material wealth, power, and other assets outside the purview of a Christian afterlife. Still, the fact that religion served as such a notable vehicle to those ends speaks to the orientation of societies at those times.

As society came to focus more on outcomes in people's lives—in contrast to their afterlives—we see greater focus on questions of how best to organize and run society, such as in the Renaissance, Enlightenment and later movements. I believe this change in orientation came about as a result of improvements to productivity, increases in quality of life, accumulation of wealth (including such simple things as surplus food), disposable time and other factors that facilitate education, related investments, reflection, and innovation. Once typical people were freed (or relative freer on average) from the time and mental demands of a subsistence lifestyle and this development went noted by aristocrats, society came to focus more on ends and means in this life.

The trend has continued as we've redefined our locus of control from faith to the political system and beyond. We've redefined what it is to be human—this tying into the history of race in the US and other countries. We've redefined what it means to be a citizen, a decent person, a successful person, etc. Many of these redefinitions have resulted in the enfranchisement of more people. Think of the waves of feminism: the first priority was equal legal rights and the later priority became equal social and professional opportunities. These developments have broadly coincided with great global productivity, wealth, and leisure time. Today a lot of rhetoric is focused on the level of individual interactions. Is it acceptable to employ aggression to dominate and control interactions and their outcome? What about prejudice and other heuristics that reinforce problematic historical patterns? How much should one benefit from being born into a well-connected family or other windfalls? Our lot, or at least how we perceive it, is no longer so much a function of how devout we are. Nor are we entirely concerned with the influence of legal and political protocols. We're identifying levers of the world and our lives in more granular, less formal interactions and patterns.

Conquering the conquerors

I've noticed a pattern in history of the conquered becoming the conqueror. I can think of several manifestations. The first is Rome and the Germanic tribes that harried its frontier. In time these tribes would take Rome's place but carry its torch. This is what happened with the Franks in France, retaining the language and many of the institutions of Rome, as well as what would happen in the general area of modern day Germany, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire.

The two other outstanding cases that occur to me carry us across Eurasia. During the Islamic conquests, it was Arab power structures that subsumed and converted Persians. In time, however, Persians came to dominate the power structure, in the administration of the Abbasid Caliphate. In turn, those ethnicities then on the periphery - nomadic Turks and Mongols - would go from populations encroached on or pushed back to the new rulers of extensive, urbanized domains. This brings us to China, where the Mongols established the Yuan dynasty, ruling over their former suzerain for a hundred years.

Could there be something fundamental to these three examples? It only makes sense that in time the wealth accumulated in a society would become the prize of a new contingent of people. It might not be a meaningful abstraction that I've presented at all. For instance, wealth and power were changing hands among groups within Rome. Is that really any different from it passing into the hands of, say, the Lombards? At the same time, there are many distinct groups that have never "conquered their conquerors."

Some thoughts and language on thought and language

I don't think in English. Sometimes I think in Russian. Sometimes I think in images or something like a scene from a movie where many non-verbal aspects of a situation develop and play out. My thoughts used to be more closely coupled to their representation in spoken English, particularly early on in college, where my main mode of digesting information and expressing myself had become the word. This was in contrast to how I'd spent much of my free time in high school -- drawing for hours. And later in college I would focus more heavily on a different symbolic system - mathematical notation - as I undertook more coursework in statistics and econometrics. The cumulative effect of these experiences has left me with thoughts that aren't dominated by any particular medium. Sometimes I'm rehearsing a conversation in my head. At other times, I'm thinking in a sort of raw mode of concepts themselves, without their being tied to their corresponding word in English or Russian, or I might be visualizing shapes interacting with each other in a kind of space, such as when working with a matrix of data for work.

Now I don't overestimate how unique this is. It's often a matter of degree. That said, I have encountered multiple instances where others describe their cognition in contrast to mine. A parallel can be drawn in the different ways people read. Many people subvocalize when they read, registering minute movements of the physical pronunciation of words as their eyes pass over them, perhaps hearing the words in their heads. An alternative mode of reading doesn't involve subvocalization, and can become a largely visual experience. This likely typifies the reading experience for those who've learned only the written form of a language. Think scholars who've learned enough of a language only to use written sources in their work, or who are working with a dead language, the spoken form of which is no longer known.

A number of these concepts are explored in The Arrival, a movie that left a strong impression on me: the mapping of spoken to visually-represented language, how the mode of thinking dictates what is even possible to think. We benefit from a long history of packaging up concepts into a shorthand representation. There was a time when we didn't have the means to represent or conceive of numbers. Imagine how greatly extended our ability to manipulate our worlds - internal and external - has become. If I'm recalling a documentary I once saw accurately, and if it was accurate itself, Einstein expressed that one of the greatest challenges in his work as a physicist was finding the means to capture what he'd already conceptualized. This leads me to believe that for all its expressive capacity, dealing solely with language as we've inherited it can keep us from expanding the realms of personal - or more generally, human - insight. I wonder what future developments in language will afford us.