Very sad, but beautiful. The following passage especially stuck with me:
"Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.
"The illusion protects us…from realizing how transient our preferences and values are which might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.
"Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Okay, that’s kind of a mouthful. I’m not good at pithy marketing slogans. Knowledge of Jake’s impending death brings with it the certainty that my life is about to undergo tremendous, nonconsensual upheaval, inevitably changing my preferences and values, though I don’t know any details except that I’ll change in likely vast and unexpected ways. Without the comforting illusion of stasis, what can I do to assuage the anxiety caused by reality? That’s what the videos are for."
I've used this observation when designing surveys. Ask people "How well do you know this code on a scale from 1 to 7?" and people reasonably experienced with the code usually go something like 5 or 6.
If you instead ask "Think back at how much you have learned about this code in the past two years, then try to imagine how much you will learn in the next two years. How well do you know this code today, on a scale from 1 to 7?" and the answer ends up in a much more realistic 2–5 range.
>as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.
This is literally true. Absent of a serious mind practice, our memories are built upon the sands of rationalization. Looking back is not a reliving, it's more like a realization that changes happen. Looking forward? We are notoriously poor at guessing our future mindsets, especially charting a course to happiness.
Aversion leads us towards suffering, the dissonance between what we think the world should be vs what it is. The same goes for desire.
Fortunately, we are adaptable, almost infinitely malleable, in the present moment, although our ego makes us resist this ... pliability.
I used to think in terms of future me and past me also, until I drew a line in the sands of my rationalizations, and focused on the present moment. Future me, his joys and sorrows, his problems and their solutions, are above my pay grade, because he is as far from me as the edge of spacetime.
There are two ways to help him: Live in the present moment, so he has memories of the wonder of incarnation, and cultivate mental and physical suppleness, so his options remain open.
I would say to the article writer... revel with thy beloved as you observe the wonder of the present moment. You are not responsible for all the moments that make up a life.
The perception of the past is different from the perception of the present or the future. Probably it has something to do with lived experiences as compressed information versus the guesswork of the unknown future.
I’d wager it’s a protective mechanism, honed by evolution.
The sense of self is important to maintaining a coherent handle on reality, and to building social bonds - if you see yourself as an ephemeral phenomena - as you are - then it makes both matters considerably harder, and harms your chances of survival.
For example, people like to talk about “forever”, when the reality is always anything but - yet they earnestly mean and believe it in the moment as to accept that this too is transient is too painful, and leads to an avoidance of commitment due to the understanding that this is not forever.
We have to keep our blinkers on, lest we get spooked by the passage of time and the fleeting phenomenon that is a human life.
> When Jake looks at me, he sees me at 25, showing up to our first date in a grey mini-dress, black boots and red lipstick. He sees me at 29 in a striped bra and panty set in our 35th story Seattle hotel room, pressing me against the cold glass. And he also sees me as I am now. I’m all these ages at once, as he is to me. Love isn’t just blind to ugliness, but to decay. Look at two 80-year-olds gazing at each other like teenagers and you’ll know what I mean.
I wish more people knew this. I think if they did, they would value each other more.
Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca's Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]:
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes. You have something to do: wrestle bravely with disease. If it shall compel you to nothing, beguile you to nothing, it is a notable example that you display. O what ample matter were there for renown, if we could have spectators of our sickness! Be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
And if you have lost, or are losing, someone you love, read Letter 63 [1]:
So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: "The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed." If we take the word of Attalus for it, "to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?"
One way of anticipating who you'll become over time, I've realized, is to look at your parents. The same flaws and frailties you see there are the ones that will manifest and cause terrible in your life. The same values and decision making processes will guide you down parallel paths. You will find that the challenges they are going through are the same ones you will encounter one day.
Be kind to your parents, and hope your children will be as kind to you.
My partner and I are together for 5 years now. We'll probably move into the same apartment in around a year and are both in our mid-twenties. We have serious long-term plans together (obviously).
The thought of loosing them to an illness or accident is very soul-crushing and I don't even want to imagine what the author of this article is going through currently, and will have to endure once tragedy has struck.
I really like this part: "Love isn’t just blind to ugliness, but to decay."
> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.”
After reading her article and your link, yes, and that seems to be caused by the practical impossibility to brute force an optimized path when there're too many possibilities.
It's like the curse of dimensionality but in a dynamic space: she can't ask for a complete set of videos to cover all the possibilities.
She can't ask for the top probabilities either, as this would require at least a sparse sampling of this very large space (ex: how likely is the aliens landing possible, not just in Phoenix like in her example, but at all?)
The desire to control your own destiny (or at least to optimize it) seems to cause a lot of anguish, as if the brain was running into a computability problem and the impossibility to compute was measured in a variable called $existential_anguish.
When trying to control puts you into a state of anguish, you’ll know you have lost control, since you don’t set out to suffer like that. Ironically, you’ll want to surrender control, then you can move to a better state.
The solution I’ve found is to try to optimize less. And to develop trust that your future self will be able to handle whatever comes. And to realize that shit happens and that’s okay too.
My favorite form of this is in Hedwig and the angry inch...
"One day in the late mid-eighties, I was in my early late-twenties. I had just been dismissed from University after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock 'n' roll entitled 'You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.' At 26, my academic career was over, I had never kissed a boy, and I was still sleeping with mom. Such were the thoughts flooding my tiny head on the day that I was sunning myself... in an old bomb crater I had discovered near the Wall. I am naked. Face down, on a broken piece of church, inhaling a fragrant westerly breeze."
> I’ve talked to friends who’ve lost a spouse, sometimes to death and sometimes to savage divorce, and they universally say that one of the unexpectedly hardest things is not being able to ask: Remember that one place? Or that time? Remember when I…?
Wow, the author managed to capture the feeling of loss perfectly here.
I've come to call that "phantom lover syndrome". Spending a long time with some one, they really become part of you (and vice-versa), and not just metaphorically. The brain keeps reflexively sending signals in that direction, and the void where there used to be a response can be very painful.
It was a sad, yet beautiful read.
Some of my fav passage from the article.
"Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood"
"Until 2020, I thought Jake and I would live in New York forever. New York is so fun! But, realistically, we stayed too long, our goals and priorities changed, and the cost and struggle of the city stopped outweighing the desire for a kid and to be close to family."
Maybe get as much footage as possible for later AI can recreate and even generate conversations in 3d in vr, sounds unhealthy however. You need to move on in a healthy way
"Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.
"The illusion protects us…from realizing how transient our preferences and values are which might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.
"Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Okay, that’s kind of a mouthful. I’m not good at pithy marketing slogans. Knowledge of Jake’s impending death brings with it the certainty that my life is about to undergo tremendous, nonconsensual upheaval, inevitably changing my preferences and values, though I don’t know any details except that I’ll change in likely vast and unexpected ways. Without the comforting illusion of stasis, what can I do to assuage the anxiety caused by reality? That’s what the videos are for."