An Ever Moving Target Seized
Halloween weekend was rather cold and wet. Every significant holiday in the US since May ’21 has been rained out in southern Maine. Our Memorial Day barbecue became games and beers inside. Ditto July 4th, Labor Day, and even the day we celebrated Oktoberfest with the neighbors.
Oddly enough, Thanksgiving was moderate and beautiful. I’ll lie about that years from now when I tell stories about my first year in Maine.
There is a Scandinavian saying of which I am quite fond:
Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær.
It translates to "There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing" (source). The phrase has become better known internationally in the past few years thanks to Linda Åkeson McGurk’s well-received children’s book. I don’t know where I first heard it, but it’s something I thought of often during my first (admittedly mild) winter in New England. There is such power in the decision to appreciate what one might otherwise call a dreary day.
During the rainy Halloween weekend, I walked around downtown Portland with an outsized feeling of contentment. Or maybe it was eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia is sometimes translated from ancient Greek as “happiness,” but it is distinct from how we tend to think of that word today. A more appropriate translation might be “good soul” or “good guardian.”
Conversely, happiness derives from the Old Norse word hap which means “chance, fortune, good luck.” At the risk of being overly reductive, eudaimonia is a choice, happiness is a result of happenstance (yup, same root). While a good spirit may be chosen, good fortune simply befalls one.
Eudaimonia “has nothing to do with chance and fortune and everything to do with thought and design.” I’ve often thought of this as the content-happiness divide, but eudaimonia strikes me as closer to the feeling I’ve long called contentment. It is a feeling more deep-rooted, and thus more stable, than happiness. Eudaimonia is cultivated. It is purposefully crafted over time. It arises not from pleasure but rather principles and values.
Socrates likened it to wisdom; Plato went so far as to insist it was an impossible state of mind for the unjust, disorderly man.
Aristotle suggested that the true nature of a thing is best understood by looking to its root purpose. For him, this was determines by continuing to ask the reason behind the reason. I have a great appreciation for design thinking, so I like to think of this as continuing to ask “why” until you’ve gotten past all abstraction to the root problem, question, or concept.
Aristotle believed man’s essential nature to be rationality. For him, man’s supreme good is thus eudaimonia because it results from a life lived in accordance with rational principles. If our essential nature is rationality, nothing can be more important than to develop the ability to live of good spirit.
I don’t necessarily believe rationality to be humankind’s essential nature, but perhaps it is more central to “humanity” than is intelligence (something I’ve perhaps railed against in the past).
This all led me to wonder how the idea of happiness came into its current meaning and primacy. Perhaps it was Epicurus, who’s ethical theory was hedonism, who intertwined these ideas. With pleasure as the central tenet of a good life, happiness as we conceive of it today very clearly becomes the goal.
Epicurus identified a distinction between pleasures which cause harm and those which maximize pleasure in the long term, so it is hard to imagine he would advocate a life of dangerous addiction no matter the temporal pleasure. Even so, I believe his conflation of eudaimonia with happiness sets one up for disappointment, for a life lived with experiences which never live up to expectation.
I think of it in terms of the goals which one chooses to guide one’s life. A goal of writing a book is perfectly achievable; a goal of becoming an international bestseller is something which you are exceedingly unlikely to obtain. With one’s heart set on the latter, how can one help but be dissatisfied?
Eudaimonia seems to be something worth pursuing. Happiness, while perfectly lovely and something everyone ought to experience from time to time, seems to me a far more hollow goal. It is something which carries in it the preconditions of dissatisfaction. I’m reminded, at last, of one of my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Solving for X
X is a phenomenally interesting letter. X marks the spot, indicates contents—be they pornographic, alcoholic, or unassessed—appropriate only for adults, and is associated with adventure, exoticism, and the unknown. X is sleek, sexy, a bit scary, and marketers know it.
It’s safe to say the letter X has been imbued with more singular meaning than any other letter of the Roman alphabet. But why is X so commonly used in math to represent an unknown variable?
The reason is surprisingly simple. In the early 17th century Rene Descrates wrote La Géométrie, an appendix to his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method in English). In it, he presents his method for seeking clarity on a given subject. The work is said to be the first to propose uniting algebra and geometry, and in it Descartes proposed standardized symbols for algebraic constants and variables.
Constants, Descartes suggested, ought to be represented by letters from the beginning of the alphabet. Think of c, the speed of light, and e, which often refers to Euler’s number. Variables would come from the end of the alphabet. This standard aids in comprehension of novel equations.
In the original manuscript, Descartes used x, y, and z for variables. This will be familiar to anyone who took high school math, as these symbols are often used for variables in three dimensions (there’s algebra and geometry in cahoots right there). So then why do we seem to always default to x for the unknown?
The answer is technical constraints. In the early 16th century, all printing was done either by hand or via typesetting. Commonly used letters tended to wear out quickly, while lesser used letters might last ages. If you’ve ever seen an old book which uses ‘f’ in place of ‘s’, you’ve seen this constraint at work: ‘s’ comes up often and, because of its shape, tended to break more easily.
In French, the letters ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ appear more frequently than does X. The same is true of many Romance and Germanic languages. So when the publisher made edits prior to printing, many Ys and Zs throughout the manuscript were replaced with Xs and a norm was born.
I’m fascinated by norms that arise almost entirely from historic technology constraints. If you have any favorites, please don’t keep them to yourself.
An Ear for Languages
Have you ever encountered a spoken language, foreign to you, and tried to figure out where the speaker might be from? There are thousands of living languages spoken today, but in the West you’re likely to hear exceedingly few spoken with any regularity. A dozen, maybe? Two dozen if you try and live in a major metro area.
I recently came across this great little game called Ling Your Language. With recorded samples of nearly 100 languages in over 200 dialects, you’re challenged to listen to clips and determine what languages is being spoken. It has single and multiplayer modes, and it’s a ton of fun. For the right group of nerds, it might just make for a holiday hit.
Aids to Creativity
I’m not generally a fan of listicles, except of course I am. Based on the continued incredible popularity of BuzzFeed and similar websites, I think most of us like a good list. At their best, they break down a complex (or, more often, fairly simple) idea into its constituent parts.
The reason I say I’m not generally a fan is the same reason I expect a lot of people wouldn’t want to admit to liking them: they don’t tend to provide much in the way of new insight on the topics they cover and they are, at worst, a kind of easy to digest slurry no matter the audience. But purees have their place.
I recently came across a listicle with a fairly typical name: 50 Ideas That Changed My Life. The listed items tended towards novel lenses through which to view the world, or names for phenomena you might not have previously heard. Quite a few items caught my attention because they are concepts that I find rather helpful as aids to creativity.
1. Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.
The author has put his example questions in the frame of inversions of how one thinks about work, but I find this as useful a mechanism for fighting anxiety as it is for coming up with fun home projects. While it isn’t always the easiest thing to turn “what if everything goes wrong” around into “what if everything goes right,” it’s certainly helps to still unfounded, guttural fears.
3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.
Again, the author here thinks of this a bit different than I do. I am a firm believer that constraints are what make engineering projects (1) successful and (2) possible. Where constraints to creativity do not exist, I tend to look for a way to impose them. One of my favorite constraints is the broadcast clock, a timetable template for creating radio programs. 99% Invisible did an excellent episode on it back in 2013 that is still very much worth a listen.
20. Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut’s uniforms.
The Bike-Shed Effect is an excellent tool for a facilitator or group leader. If you come to an important meeting having already considered the most trivial, easy to understand minutia related to the topic at hand, you’re well armed to interrupt tedious diversions for the more significant work at hand. You can always come back to the color of the astronaut’s uniforms.
23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
This one goes hand in hard with applying constraints to creative thinking as a spur to focused creativity. By really and truly internalizing the knowledge that complex systems that work only arise from simple systems that also worked, you realize how important those constraints can be. Ask yourself: what am I making, and what is absolutely essential to make that work, Then make ONLY that.
39. The Paradox of Consensus: Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Unanimous agreement sometimes leads to bad decisions.
This final example is endlessly useful and important. Consensus is so glorious, and feels exceedingly rare. Unchallenged consensus, however, is often a sign of lacking rigor or even problematic thinking. That isn’t to say it can’t be right some of the time; you’d be hard pressed not to find consensus about killing an innocent 5 year old child (If you were wondering, don’t do that). What this paradox captures well is that consensus ought to be challenged if it hasn’t come about through reflection and debate.
There are always people who will tell you they are not creative. I don’t buy this for a minute. They may not be practiced, they may not enjoy the creative process, but creativity is part of being a human. Sometimes you just need a set of tools to guide the way.