I was laying in bed and watching a movie a couple of weeks ago. It was Saturday night around maybe 9pm. A friend texted me to see what I was planning on doing. I told her that I was probably going to bed.
I sort of felt guilty. Maybe I should go out?
I don’t go out that much anymore. At most a couple of nights a week. If I do go out, at most I’ll usually have 2-3 drinks and I’m pretty much always back home and in bed by 2am.
I’m generally way more worried about things like health and productivity and how things I do affect it than I used to be.
A big part of this is because I’ve really resonated with Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy concept. I read Man’s Search for Meaning about two years ago and the book was a fundamental paradigm shift for me. The basis of logotherapy is that the fundamental drive in humans is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler), but meaning.
I resonate with what Joseph Conrad had to say about work and meaning:
Since I’ve reached a similar conclusion for myself, I’ve increasingly felt that what gives life purpose is meaning and striving towards bigger things. So getting drunk and being hungover for a day seems like a real waste.
That’s time and energy that I don’t have to work on things that are more meaningful to me and so I think more rewarding in the long-term.
Defined Long-Term Goals vs. Unpredictable Upside
I believe good habits are the foundation to achieving long-term goals and for how to balance your life. By putting in place habits, systems in your life, you can consistently move yourself towards meaningful long term goals
One example is diet and exercise. All the most short-term, delicious stuff isn’t going to pan out very well in the long term if you eat it consistently. I spent most of my life eating a crappy diet and the cumulative effect was not surprisingly feeling like crap.
From that perspective, I think putting systems into place that involve foregoing short term pleasure makes sense.
But there’s to be a major problem with this…
Strict systems and habits decrease optionality: how to balance your life
The main problem with this is that habits, routines, and systems eliminate optionality Optionality, a concept Taleb advances in Antifragile, is the idea that instead of trying to predict what is going to happen, you stand more to gain by positioning yourself in such a way that you always have options. That way regardless of what happens, all you have to do is evaluate it once you have all the information and make a rational decision.
I watched a discussion between Taleb and Daniel Kahneman in which Taleb gives the example of the rational flaneur vs. the tourist (or touristification as a concept). It’s ultimately all about how to balance your life.
The tourist’s schedule is set in place. If something unexpected happens, it can only cause negative consequences like make him late for an appointment or delay a tour.
The rational flaneur has an entirely different perspective. If something unexpected happens, he merely evaluates and decides with the full of benefit of hindsight how to take advantage.
Taleb explains the idea as it relates to education or learning:
“…soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality.
Good students, but nerds— that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning— actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library.
Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock. Even their leisure is subjected to a clock, squash between four and five, as their life is sandwiched between appointments. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters— those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. Sports try to put randomness in a box like the ones sold in aisle six next to canned tuna— a form of alienation.”
[Emphasis is mine]
What I’m trying to figure out is what “the right type of rigor” looks like in real life. How do you construct systems that constitute the “right type of rigor” while still allowing for “randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living.”
I’ve been really habit based lately. My life over the last few months looks a lot more like a tourist’s life than a flaneur’s.
There’s a lot of things that I could be doing that offer lots of optionality: trying new food, traveling more, spending more time making and deepening relationships. All of these things generate large amounts of optionality.
The reason I haven’t been doing these things I’ve realized is mainly out of fear. I haven’t travelled as much as I probably would have liked to in the short term because I don’t want to lose a lot of productive work time. I haven’t tried enough new food because I don’t want to fall out my healthier habits.
My fear is that once I start breaking it then the habit is broken and it becomes a long-term problem.
This is, from a more meta-perspective, quite stupid. The long-term difference between 365 days a year vs. 340 days a year of productive work isn’t that big. But the optionality to be gained of having 25 days where I do cool new stuff like travel vs. 0 is excellent.
The problem for me is that of hard vs. soft rules. I usually like to have hard rules for myself because they eliminate decision making. I get to conserve that willpower for more important stuff. The problem with hard rules, however, is that they destroy optionality.
I guess the way that I’ve approached this for the last few months is that I always plan to stick to my hard/long-term schedule, but try not to feel guilty if I want to go try something new.
I went to the Reunification palace in Ho Chi Minh City on a Monday afternoon a few weeks ago. I had planned on working, but a friend asked if I wanted to go. I did. I’m a history nerd. I love that kind of stuff.
I went, and it was really cool. The museum was interesting. I had a good time hanging out with my friend and getting to know her better. I didn’t regret it. I’d worked Saturday and Sunday so taking some time off Monday didn’t make me feel guilty.
But if something cool to do had come up the next day, I probably wouldn’t have gone, I would have felt guilty, like I needed to work.
I know that five years from now, looking back, I’ll be happier if I move marginally slower on improving long-term goals like work and health and allow myself more optionality to do stuff like travel more, try new food and meet new people.
In fact, I believe that I’ll have made more progress on my long term goals by allowing for those things because they’re all convex. Meeting one new key person could provide more upside than hundreds of hours grinding away on work.
The solution I’ve come up with is to set up a structure and framework which builds habits that you strongly believe will lead to you being able to realize meaningful, long term goals. But you don’t make that schedule so rigid or oppressive that you aren’t allowed time for the unexpected, the serendipitous, the highly convex.
I’m still not sure exactly what this actually looks like though. One of the main problems I have with Taleb’s concepts is that they resonate with me tremendously at a philosophical level and in the examples he gives. However, they’re so counter to the way my brain has been conditioned to think, it’s hard to come up with ways to apply them in my life.
Here’s the implementation ideas that I’ve come up with:
- Once a week, I do a GTD style weekly review. I added a reflective portion on how I deal with people after reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. I added a question in there to ask myself: “Was I a tourist or a flaneur this week? Why?”
- I plan to spend most all of my time sticking to my systems and working towards long-term goals, but consistently allowing time and energy when I see clear upside. This does leave the problem of not creating optionality, merely allowing it to happen when it presents itself though.
This is pretty weak overall, but at the point of writing this, I haven’t come up with anything better. As always, would leave to hear any other opinions/thoughts.
It’s been a while since I wrote this, and since then I have really put a lot of effort into defining habits and rituals that can allow me to stay focused while still allowing optionality.
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Last Updated on July 30, 2019 by Taylor Pearson
Good text, sir
>”I added a reflective portion on how I death with people after reading ”
I guess you meant ‘deal’.
Indeed I did. Valeu 🙂
Maybe you could give yourself 1 or 2 cheat days a week, just like a lot of people with strict diets do (you do that as well right?). The difference would be that you don’t determine in advance which day it is going to be. So instead of taking all Saturdays off to do fun stuff, you just see whatever day makes most sense that week. This week it might be Monday because your friend asks you to go see a museum with her and next week it will be Saturday because you want to attend a barbecue at another friend’s house. Does that make sense?
That makes a tremendous amount of sense. That’s approximately what I’ve ended up with and I think it’s a pretty good point to start from. I’m probably just anal and trying to over optimize and already pretty decent system..
P.S. Come to Saigon!!!
Its a difficult tradeoff between creating options and focusing on a path. If you take the spontaneous adventure on Day 2, when do you stop? Before soccer moms, the 9-5 schedule actually benefited Taleb’s model: by introducing the 40 hour workweek and a weekend you could balance the structure and meaning with time for randomness. This is getting phased out as the declining middle class creates a pressure to do more in the day, to create meaning out of the soccer participation rather than a delightful play and optionality.
I’ve been leaning towards intentionally working a schedule with cheat days, as Yamile suggests, to add more randomness. The challenge when you don’t have a suburban M-F tempo with your community is not knowing when the cheat days will/should occur because you have to sync them with others if you want it to be a social experience.
“This is getting phased out as the declining middle class creates a pressure to do more in the day, to create meaning out of the soccer participation rather than a delightful play and optionality.”
Yes. I was circling all around this, but never really figured it out. Thanks.
“The challenge when you don’t have a suburban M-F tempo with your community is not knowing when the cheat days will/should occur because you have to sync them with others if you want it to be a social experience.”
The social experience is key, because that’s the real optionality that I’m trying to leverage.
I had an interesting conversation with Dan about this though. He referenced the book One Big Thing:
http://www.amazon.com/One-Big-Thing-Discovering-What/dp/159555484X
I haven’t read it, but the point he made was compelling. In the early stages (more relevant for me than you), you’re better off worrying less about exposing yourself to optionality and more about developing a single, key point of leverage (generally a skill). By diving deeply into a single skill, you gain more leverage for the future that exposes you to greater amounts of optionality.
The argument being that less optionality in the short term in exchange for greater depth and proficiency in a single skill gives you greater optionality on a longer time line.
Seth Godin is the perfect example. He spent a long time pounding away in obscurity, but he’s leveraged the skills and connections from doing so to live a tremendously flaneur life.
P.S. Eagerly awaiting your return sir. Saigon just isn’t quite the same. Though, it’s still pretty damn awesome.
This is really interesting, Taylor. I had no idea you had such a depth of philosophy behind your travels and endeavors. I’m definitely going to have to mull this around for a bit. I’ve been considering embarking on some travel later this year, and this has definitely given me pause for consideration (not in whether I go or not, but in how I approach the traveling). Excellent work, sir. I look forward to reading future installments.
Thanks man. After you do a bit of rumination, would love to hear your thoughts.
An excellent written essay that brings back memories of our past conversations. My first immediate thought is, “ the grass is always greener on the other side”. I envy your self-discipline to stay in on most nights to chase your dream of finding meaning in your life. On a
weekly basis, I wake up hungover, having regretted costly and time consuming decisions
that occurred the night before that ultimately could have been avoided. The only thing that keeps these recurring actions in repetition is the human interaction that comes along with it. Never have I woken up on one these mornings, and regretted a conversation or a pool game over beers that I had with one of my close friends or even a newly acquired friend. I like that you have resonated with the ideology that the fundamental drive in humans is not pleasure or power, but meaning. I
agree completely. However, as you later mention (or thoroughly hint at), the meaning of life is entirely subjective.
I am three days away from moving to Central America for the summer. Before you left for Thailand, I remember your anticipation towards the packing process. Simplifying one’s life into the possessions one can fit into a backpack is very rewarding and exciting. It is
always a challenge to see how small of a backpack can be managed. One of my favorite quotes is by lao tzu, “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”. Keep writing. Love you brutha. dhilge
“Never have I woken up on one these mornings, and regretted a conversation or a pool game over beers that I had with one of my close friends or even a newly acquired friend.”
Word to your mother. It’s easy to discount the value of those conversation because they seem trivial at the time, but the connections (both depth and breadth) are just so meaningful.
Thanks for the Lao Tzu quote. I like that one. I haven’t seen it in a while though and it made me smile. Thanks for the encouragement. Love back at you Higle.
Really a great post with a lot of ideas and emotion that I resonate with. The content depth and variety make it so that it could have been two or three posts by itself.
A man’s search for meaning is a must read, thinking about logothearpy and reading the book got me thinking about my life (events, relationships, jobs) not as what I want from them but what they want from me…
I had never seen that Taleb quote on education before and I love it. It resonates so deeply personally but it is also so counter to the current education paradigm and how students are brought up in public schools and college.
As for the tourist vs. flaneur I think it’s awesome how decided you are on your systems and habits, but habits especially living abroad, need to include habits of spontaneity. One of the best habits I picked up living in different parts of the world was to routinely disrupt my typical routes around my community. Living abroad you find shops you like, areas you know and because it’s easy and comfortable you stick to them. When you are up to it and have some minutes to spare, taking a left you’ve never taken instead of the right you always take can really lead to some great finds and adventures. Seriously!
Cheers
tourist or a flaneur
I come back Man’s Search for Meaning a lot when I’m thinking about these sorts of things. It’s so easy to get sucked up in my own mind and forget about the bigger picture and other people.
I’m getting better at that Flaneur bit. Long motorbike rides through Saigon certainly have their pull…
Hey nice post! Really enjoyed reading this!
“My fear is that once I start breaking it then the habit is broken and it becomes a long-term problem.”
I find each time a break a habit then try to reinstate it it becomes easier. It’s most obvious to me when straying from an eating plan. Each time I return to it I adapt quicker and with less consious effort on my behalf.
It would be interesting to know how this translates into other habits (non-food related) and if becoming better at re-instating them carries over and I become better at creating new habits I decide to pursue.
That’s an interesting point Matt. I hadn’t made that connection before. It reminds of weight lifting when I used to play football in high school and college. Even, If I took a month off, when I came I would have lost some strength but it was MUCH faster to regain it than it was to gain it initially. I imagine that’s part physical and part psychological.
Maybe it’s like you’ve already established and greased the pathways so you just have to fall back in instead oc reating it for the first time.
Yeh, I used the concept to try and beat my lindt chocolate addiction. First step was to go one day without chocolate, followed by one day off. Then 3 days followed by one day off etc.
While I still crave lindt balls at times it’s much easier for me to go for much longer periods without caving as I know I’ve done it before and it’s really Not That Hard. But they just taste so annoyingly good haha.
(By the way I remember the book I was trying to think of during our chat today. You have probably come across it before but Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone is a very interesting read. Also if you haven’t come across it Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying was eye-opening.)
Now back on topic…
Haven’t had a Lindt chocolate ball in forever! My mom used to buy those all the time, haha.
Good Job Taylor,