#82 - The problem with Wild Problems

Part 1 of essay on stepping forward to life's deepest questions

Dear Curiosity > Certainty readers and subscribers, a happy new year to all of you! 🎉

Let’s start 2023 with something different. You won’t find a bunch of short pieces on a topic in this issue. This time round, I’m casting my net in new waters. This is the first part of an exploration on an idea that I tripped over last October. The idea wasn’t mine. Still, it’s the kind of idea that people nod their heads to when they hear it. Here it goes:

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Economist and podcaster Russ Roberts in his book Wild Problems slots problems into two buckets–wild and tame.

Tame problems are data problems. They are measurable. They have been solved (tamed?) before. There’s a playbook that you can follow and expect similar results. That’s because rational thinking can get us through the tunnel of tame problems. Tame problems can be solved by logic and any problem that can be solved by logic will have been solved already.  

Wild problems have subjective goals that are hard to measure and lead to outcomes that are hard to reverse (if not irreversible altogether). The solutions to wild problems don’t reproduce too well, or not as well as those to tame problems. This brings us to the playbook for wild problems–it doesn’t exist. The answer is at all times: it depends. Think: finding a good spouse, having a child, or emigrating. 

The point Roberts makes is that it’s much easier to answer the when and where if you already know the why or whether. The why must always lead. The other way round is the tail wagging the dog. The tame minding the wild.

In a when-or-where decision the options can be measured and compared, the solutions bring the same benefit regardless of the seeker, and the opportunity cost is calculable.

In a why-or-whether question, we do not have this luxury. The destination is hard to define and the path to it remains uncharted. Most tellingly, the answer depends on you, the seeker: Who do you want to become?  

Wild problems are: 

• immeasurable (pros and cons are inadequate)

• irreplicable (no one clear path to success)

• multi-dimensional (vector, not scalar)

When we reduce wild problems to pluses and minuses, we ignore dimensions. Pros and cons don’t capture the intangibles of meaning and purpose–that’s the flatness in the analysis. And no amount of systematic thought can tell how our life preferences may change once we decide–will we be happy or will we regret who we become?

As the human mind is in the habit of, when faced with a question that’s hard to answer, it tends to replace it with one that’s easier. It follows then that to take a crack at wild problems, we show up with the same toolkit we use for tame problems. 

Darwin’s dilemma 

If wild problems are hard to measure, the metric we can use to assess them cannot be obvious. But we often act like it is.

On April 7, 1838, Charles Darwin, one of the greatest scientists of all time, was facing the wild problem of whether or not to marry. He brought a scientific approach to solve the riddle. In his diary he made a list of pros and cons on two facing pages. 

The pros included ‘children (if it Please God),’ ‘constant companion,’ and ‘freedom to go where one liked’ while the cons captured his fears around being ‘forced to visit relatives,’ ‘no books,’ and ‘means limited.’ 

In the above April list, the cons outnumbered and outweighed the pros. 

Something about the analysis didn’t sit right with Darwin who came back to it in a few weeks (July) and decided–against his own explicit judgment–to marry (Marry - Marry - Marry QED).

Darwin’s initial approach involved cost and benefit. This is purely utilitarian. If the benefits of a choice outweigh its costs, the choice is rational. Yet, even after making an exhaustive list of pros and cons for the wild problem staring him in the face, one might suppose that Darwin could not account for their magnitude (how bad could a con be?) or their probability of occurrence (what were the odds?) or indeed his preferences (what did he value and in what order?). 

It was weeks later that perhaps he had an inkling of what mattered to him and that is how he decided in spite of his own list.

Charles and Emma Darwin (1840).
(Composite image from two contemporaneous portraits by George Richmond.)

We’ll never know Darwin’s why. But we know that Darwin remained married to Emma Wedgwood for forty years, fathered ten children, and went on to become the scientific luminary that we all know about.

It is at once sobering and heartening that one of our greatest scientific minds found himself in the same trap that we find ourselves in, and devised the same escape as us.

Changing the metric for wild problems

We’re familiar with the metric of pleasure and pain. They are, as Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, measures of experienced well-being. Pleasure and pain tell us how we feel moment to moment.

But there’s also life satisfaction–how satisfied we are with our life–and it can deviate markedly from fleeting pleasure or pain. Movies offer a vivid glimpse of this: When the girl finds love, she’ll be happy enough to break into a dance in rush-hour jam; after breaking up, she’ll be crying even with a tub of ice-cream in hand. 

Paul Bloom, psychologist and author, in his book The Sweet Spot invents a curious term: chosen suffering. He uses it to draw attention to the choices we make in disregard of pleasure. We jump off the pleasure treadmill to have children, run marathons, get an education, or go to war. And while we may not enjoy these chosen experiences moment to moment, we’re sure they are formative. They make our lives fulfilling. 

Can education improve life? Can money buy happiness?

Such questions show us the difference between experienced well-being and life satisfaction. 

Some kids hate going to school. But having grown up, they all believe their lives are better off because of having had an education. The wealthy may not be the happiest but the poor are more miserable. Money boosts our life satisfaction, even though the stress of living moment to moment is more or less similar for everyone.

Here’s the hitch: Sometimes we think of a life-satisfaction problem in terms of an experienced-well-being problem. We ask: What’s the upside and downside to working hard to get an education or to create wealth? 

In the moment, there may seem to be far more cons than there are pros. There are better ways to spend your time, more pleasure to be had just shooting the breeze with friends. Yet, we feel something’s missing in the analysis, much like Darwin did. 

This is a hole in our thinking that we’re unable to pinpoint, much less fill. The hole is plugged by one question only. Who do we want to become?

If we see ourselves as successful, the cost of not becoming who we identify as is incalculable. What would be comparable to that pain? There’s no counterfactual we can imagine where we live and enjoy the life of someone who doesn’t care about success.

Victor Frankl spends three years between 1942 and 1945 in Nazi death camps. In that time, he loses his parents–father dies of exhaustion and mother gets the gas chamber–and his wife and brother–both murdered in Auschwitz. As a psychiatrist, he has a close view of the shock experienced by first-time inmates in the camps he’s held in.

Frankl chooses to live his life with grace. Even in those dire circumstances, when the temptation to save himself at the cost of others is high, he decides to live in a way that reflects his values. He organizes a first-response team to curb suicides and mental breakdowns among inmates in Terezin. On stolen strips of paper, he reconstructs the manuscript he was working on at the time of capture. 

We’ll never know for sure but it’s worth imagining how Frankl’s life satisfaction and experience well-being would have tracked across those years in camps.

In my twenties I wanted to be a writer. I quit my job to write a novel. That was one of the most satisfying periods in my life. Was the day-to-day easy? I was living in a cubbyhole and instead of building a career and a bank balance like others my age were, I was spending all my money on cigarettes and books. 

Pursuing a life is living an identity. We’re willing to sign up for great pain if it matches with how we see ourselves. If you were to plot the life satisfaction and experienced well-being of the youth as they go to war, could it look something like this?

And perhaps the life-satisfaction graphs of war veterans and farmers move in opposite directions with time. Maybe a higher percentage of veterans regret going to war than farmers miss a life outside the farm. 

Going to war is an extreme example. Marriages are common. Most marriages track life satisfaction that would be impossible to guess going by day-to-day well-being of the spouses. What is the value of companionship? What does it mean to you to explore life together with a partner?

If we asked an imagined set of participants every year about their satisfaction with their life, as they went through marriage, perhaps such a graph would reflect their assessment. 

Even those we think live hard lives find their existence more fulfilling than we can imagine. Think of the Amish people. They have chosen lives untouched by technology. Chosen to deprive themselves of the comforts of modern life. I could not find any definitive life-satisfaction surveys on them but their rate of depression is lower than the average US population.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes, ‘The goals that people set for themselves are so important to what they do and how they feel about it that an exclusive focus on experienced well-being is not tenable. We cannot hold a concept of well-being that ignores what people want.’ 

What people want depends on who they want to be.

All wild problems are identity problems

In his notebook, later curated into The Will to Power, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche scribbled:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures. 

Nietzsche believes that pain must be embraced by those who want to fulfill their deepest desires. Like Paul Bloom, Nietzsche accepts the suffering-lends-meaning equation. If we aspire to become someone, we must be willing to endure for it. He suggests that there’s a perpetual gap between who we are and who we want to be and eclipsing it demands hardship. This is the gap in any wild problem. It demands from us that we be willing participants in their own torturous transformation.

What can make us sign up for such self-inflicted punishment other than who we want to become? Consider these wild problems and what they may mean to us:

Marry or not marry = Do I see myself as a good life partner?

Have a child or not = Do I find meaning in life as a parent?

Emigrate to a foreign land = Does this place help me realize my deepest aspirations? 

Start my own company = Do I want to be the kind of person who’ll regret her temerity at 80?

Divorce or not = Does this relationship stop me from being who I want to be?

There’s uncertainty on the other side of each of these wild problems. Information about the as-yet experience is inaccessible to us. What makes us leap into the darkness is a belief that it takes us closer to our ideal. ‘The change is worth it,’ we tell ourselves, ‘because it will make me who I want to be.’

On the cusp of the leap, we’re trapped inside the fog of self-doubt, as Nietzsche wrote. But it is only the leap that’ll clear the fog. On the other side of the leap is knowledge about ourselves. We’ll find out who we are.  

When people say, ‘I’m like this…’

If we can only find out who we are on the other side of the leap, how do people foretell their as-yet un-experienced life? When people say I’m not a marriage person or I’m not an opera person or I don’t want kids without being married, visiting the opera, or having kids, how do they know?

For every decision you take, consider your life in two halves–inner and outer lives. The outer life is what you experience living the consequences of that decision, moment to moment. It is pain or pleasure and it is fleeting. Working out may feel painful in the moment but the discomfort passes. 

The inner life changes less often. The feeling of being fit can light you up for days and weeks. It helps you see yourself in a way that’s hard to describe. It makes you feel alive. Or it can weigh you down and keep you down, like being in an unhappy marriage. That’s the inner life. 

How does that happen?

When we haven’t experienced the inner life of a decision, we often fixate on the outer life and because the outer elements by definition are clear, we go by them. We think we’re sure about what we want and we’ve all the reasons ready. 

But our abstraction runs shallow since we cannot project forward into the inner life. In the absence of a lived experience, we take what we see in the outer life as a reliable extrapolation. Like we may think of living with a spouse as an extension of living with a roommate. 

Yet, we cannot imagine the dark by imagining light and then thinking of it as slowly fading away. It is not linear like that. Something about the texture of our lives changes when we go from light to dark, outer to inner life, vicarious to lived experiences.

Looking in from the outside, we may think:

Marriage is about what you have to give up (as Darwin’s list showed).

Kids mean taking responsibility for someone else.

Investment banking is about the freedom to retire at 40.

Each of these thoughts is inadequate and inaccurate.

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Thank you for reading! I would love to know what you make of this long-form piece and how I could make this newsletter more useful for you. Drop a comment. Write to me at satyajit.07@gmail.com.