#84 - Life has many big puzzles for you if you don't care about who you'll become
The final piece on navigating life's transformative experiences
Hi there! Welcome to issue #84 of this weekly missive on all things decision-making 📪
There are times when the objective truth is unknowable. Is there even an objective truth when you’re considering whether or not you should have a pet? If nothing after is going to be like anything before, what use is calculating the expected value of your choice? How would you even know what the payoff could be? Or what your preferences will be, for that matter?
Wait—I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s do it right.
To keep a dog or not…
A couple of years ago, a dear friend of mine was in a pickle. Her husband and seven-year-old son wanted a dog; she didn’t. She loved dogs but couldn’t—in Darwinian style—ignore the costs of keeping one.
We had/have a British cocker spaniel. As friends and pet parents, we had credibility to counsel on the matter. And that’s how we were brought in by the father-son duo.
Our friend’s reasons were rational: she didn’t want to be tied down by petcare once the husband went to work and the child to school.
And we offered practical solutions from our own experience–hire a walker, give the neighbor a key, use a kennel, and so on. Over the years, my wife and I have creatively solved the problem of freedom from pet care, so we had a fair bit to share.
A few minutes into this, I remember running into a wall. No matter how I tried to, I couldn’t put into words the impossible joy of having someone love you unconditionally–even when that someone barked for no reason and begged for treats shamelessly.
I had experienced the joys of having my own little tail-wagger and I was capable of describing myself point by point but none of that mattered to the problem my friend faced.
The experience of being a dad to my cocker spaniel had transformed me. I was a convert. My friend was trying to look in from outside.
I gave up. I stopped trying to describe the ineffable. To keep a pet or not is nothing but a version of L.A. Paul’s vampire problem. Once you have a pet, you are changed forever. You can only see the world through the eyes of this new person.
Not surprisingly, that conversation with our friend couldn’t cross the cost-benefit perimeter. Being transformed, I had lost the ability to identify with my earlier pet-less self, much less to mirror the emotions of a pet-less someone else.
It is not just the questions of marriage or pets that carry a kind of transformative power.
Contract and covenant
My mum-in-law is a practicing Roman Catholic. She spends several hours every day in prayer. This has been her routine through her time as a French professor and mother of three children, and continues to be so in retirement. At 74, she remains active, beat two years of COVID with good cheer, and jumps at the first chance to cook for parish feasts.
The idea of doing something that gives us energy is for it to transcend the time we spend at it. It should change who we are.
The best theory I have to account for the joie de vivre of my mum-in-law, to borrow from Russ Roberts, the author of Wild Problems, is that she sees her life as following no contract but fulfilling a covenant.
A contract is contingent on conditions. I’ll do good if people are good to me. I’ll be honest if others are honest with me. A contract fences tame problems.
A covenant is a promise to stay true to a goal. It has no contingencies built in. I’ll lead a good life no matter what.
When what guides our actions changes from a contract to a covenant, we stop keeping score. We stop looking for a better deal. We stop comparing our lot with those of others.
A calling has us commit to a higher ideal. But we don’t always have to find a calling. Sometimes they grow underfoot while you’re moving ahead, one step at a time. A habit, borne out of curiosity and followed diligently, can lead to a calling too.
When we make meditation a daily habit, it transforms not just how we feel in the moment but also who we become.
When we make a habit of eating healthy, we no longer have to leash ourselves at the dessert table. Indulgence has no gravity.
When we write every day, the emotional cost of missing a day, even occasionally, eats up our waking hours–until we are hunched over our desks again.
No matter how we find our calling, we find their transformative powers too. Once we’ve answered a calling, we no longer are the same person we were before.
When informed choice is a myth and best is the enemy of good enough
From the disintegration of Walt White to the vampire-problem thought experiment of L.A. Paul and the pet predicament of my friend, it appears that the challenge with wild problems is not just one of knowledge. No matter how many hours we spend contemplating the life of someone who’s been there and done that or that of our own future selves, we cannot aspire to know what it takes. The answer to a wild problem is at no point an informed choice. It is a leap in the dark.
Imagine yourself as an eligible peahen. You’re perched on the branch of your favorite tree, and you just woke up from your siesta. As you lift your tiny head up, you see a rainbow running through the sky.
All of that beauty pales as you look below. Down on the forest floor is a comely specimen. A virile peacock with the largest tail of feathers you have ever seen is strutting for you. ‘Dang!’ you say to yourself, ‘this one is good.’ Almost immediately, your peabrain goes into overdrive. You run your special algorithm and wonder if you should make a move. But what if there’s someone better? ‘I’ll pass,’ you say to yourself and you drop a shit. The prancing peacock gets the message, slinks with his giant tail between his legs.
As the days go by, you keep an eye out for better suitors. A few more appear but none as striking as your boy on that rainbow day. Every waking hour, you go over the remains of that day in your head.
‘It sure couldn’t have been easy to carry that huge plume on his bum,’ you tell yourself, ‘and yet he hardly broke a sweat. I don’t know his metabolic age but he sure was fit. And keen–or else he wouldn’t be doing that crazy dance. He must’ve been good at getting food too. And I’m sure he’s great at mounting too–alas!’ Your misery is complete and you spend the rest of your days wallowing and waiting.
Even if we’re a self-aware peahen, it is common to have to come to terms with the limitations in our wild pursuits only after the fact.
When we’re looking for a life partner, we do not know what information is valuable and we cannot go back once we reject a suitor. Computer science teaches us that the most elegant strategy in such a scenario is to explore first, then exploit. That still doesn’t answer our questions of what makes for optimal exploration (it’s 37% but it makes sense only if you know what your denominator is) and how to go about it (Go on all dating apps? Do an open house? Date everyone in our pin code?).
What do we make of all this? The most important lesson is grim: there’s no perfect match.
Perfection is a mirage.
Any woman traveling by road in India knows this problem. When to stop to pee? Should you stop at the first chance even if the place looks shabby? Or should you wait for a cleaner place—a motel maybe? What if there isn’t one soon?
You can’t go back to a place once you’ve decided against it. You don’t know what’s to come.
The problem with looking for the perfect place to pee is, how do you know that this one is better than all others in the past and all to come in the future?
This quandary is mirrored in your search for a perfect life partner, only it gets trickier. You can bet your life’s savings when you see that perfect loo, but there’s no way you can make that call about another human being.
The kinds of perfection you’re talking about is different. One is static and independent of you (the best loo) and the other calls for a kind of dovetailing (a perfect fit for you).
That’s why, much like the dithering peahen, we have to submit to signals and proxies.
We do not, thankfully, have to look for the same signals as a peahen, but we have to look for signals nonetheless. What could we look at?
First, there’s no equivalent of the peacock’s tail. And then what makes a good signal keeps changing. My parents’ generation (baby boomers) leaned on tradition. They looked for matches by wealth, social status, or education. That level of uncertainty would cripple a lot of us today. We enjoy better means. Algorithms and apps abound guide us in our search for the unknown.
But unknown it still is. Perfect continues to be the enemy of good enough. We continue to drag our feet, continue to hope to beat the odds, continue to wonder ‘what if…’
No matter how informed we are, wild problems can only elicit wild guesses from us.
The ultimate wild problem: economics or ethics?
Writer Ryan Holiday on his podcast The Daily Stoic recounts an incident about someone who worked with him. This person—let’s call him Brian—was part of a group climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa.
Midway, one of the mountaineers falls sick and needs medical help. Without anyone’s bidding, Brain aborts his attempt to scale the mountain and takes the sick climber to the base for help. The climber gets the attention he needs and survives.
Ryan asks Brian how he made the decision to climb down, after having spent all the money and time to be there on a mountain across the world, and knowing that he may not get a second stab at it.
Brian says he had already decided before he left for the climb that if anyone in the group were to fall sick, he would accompany that person down. He had also shared this with the group to save everyone a likely moral dilemma in difficult circumstances.
Classical economics would pull out the income versus price model to do the math for such a decision. If the cost (price you pay) of aborting was greater than the benefit (what you gain) from the same, you stay on. If the benefits outweigh the costs, you abort.
The costs are clear–money and time spent and a reasonable possibility of no second shot (because of age, family, lifestyle), leading to a lifetime of regret.
The benefits though are harder to pin down. How do you measure the satisfaction Brian got from his selfless act? What was in Brian’s self-interest depended very much on the kind of person Brian was. His choice only revealed his character. A completely different choice would’ve made more economic sense for you.
Brian’s story points to a case of situational ethics. Viewed through this narrow prism of economics and self-interest, the right thing to do seems like a slippery thing.
If this is true, we should all stop to ask ‘What do you mean?’ when someone–anyone–counsels us to do the right thing. How can we assume, going by Brian’s story, that the right thing is the same for all?
Because an appeal to do the right thing is an appeal to our best self.
The right thing exists outside of the remit of trade-offs and calculations. The value of the right thing is incalculable because our core values are not for sale. The right thing is always to safeguard what we stand for.
You may wonder if Brian’s decision had been different if he was climbing with his girlfriend or wife. Would he have left her up on the mountain and taken a stranger down to safety?
The book Wild Problems calls this the exception that proves the rule. In the situation described above, Brian’s sense of self as the kind of person who helps a fellow traveler facing grave danger would be in conflict with his identity as someone who will protect their loved ones. That he can make a choice between the two only would prove he has a hierarchy of values.
Few of us are like Brian. Few of us pre-commit to our values. Yet, we are quick to show outrage at the suggestion that our values are up for sale when in fact they are every time we’re willing to subject them to math.
Situational ethics can tear us into shreds. We may tell ourselves, ‘Oh, I’ll think about it and make sure to do the right thing in the moment’ only to find ourselves swamped by forces we’ve never confronted. Instead, we’re better off making a promise: ‘I’ll do the right things without thinking about it. I’ll not put my sense of self up for sale.’
And once we make such a promise to ourselves, we’re forced to ditch the math to salvage our self.
The problem with wild problems
‘What’s it going to be like?’
When asked to consider a radically different future, we get to face our blindness. We imagine faster cars, better roads, smaller phones. Yet, we cannot imagine a fundamentally different experience to what it is today. A vampire doesn’t mean a little less light, a little more blood, going back to the point about the inadequacies of extrapolation.
When faced with tame problems, we can learn from the lived experiences of others by asking pertinent questions: How did you start a company? How did you lose weight? How did you make the pasta?
Wild problems stonewall us in two ways: we cannot know what it’s been like for someone else (no matter how good our questions) AND we cannot know what it may be like for the future us (no matter how vivid our imagination).
For every Darwin who married against his own written judgment, there’s a Kafka who stuck to it and did not make the leap. This piece isn’t about handing you a formula for what you must do. There isn’t any. It is about pointing and naming the challenge posed by wild problems. In doing so, it tries to tell you that the problem with wild problems is not what you think it is. And that you can make the fact that a wild problem presents a lifetime decision work for you by committing to the new you and privileging your principles.
What remains then for you to do?
Perhaps the question, as philosopher L.A. Paul suggests, worth asking is ‘whether we want to discover who we’ll become.’
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Thank you for reading! I would love to know what you make of long-form series like this and how I could make this newsletter more useful for you. Drop a comment. Write to me at satyajit.07@gmail.com.