A friend sent a Nicholas Taleb quote, that got me thinking,
“They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.”
Here’s what I was thinking
Guessing Taleb is more against conformity than brutalist architecture 😀. Our boxes are both our habits and also our predictability in general . Even though Steve Jobs chose to wear the same turtleneck and jeans he said this gave him the freedom to be an asshole in many unique ways. Just kidding.
But in the West Worldian sense, we strive to not be predictable, to not feed into the recommendation systems. We say no to being a statistic, but West World and statisticians, especially those at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, say that’s not possible. But I think that’s only true in aggregate but you cannot predict very well what an individual person does at any particular moment. (This is shown well in the AI Snake Oil book).
And often when I think about innovation and doing the cutting edge thing, I also think of the cave men before us who did not trade stocks or write programs but they still found local fulfillment.
And I also think of Victor franks and Man’s Search for meaning. Finding purpose in connecting with your reality even if you’re in a concentration camp. But also that your agency is your meaning especially in moments of suffering. People in Frankl’s world were fighting a different algorithm. Will you let them break your will.
And yet you really don’t need to believe in free will to be virtuous. I’m still probably misunderstanding this but in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the surrounding text, we understand that stoics like Marcus believed in logos and fate, but they saw it was still up to them to reason about the situations in the present moment and make the courageous and meaningful choices. This means I think, they did not try to look for meaning. They just decided to embrace the suck.
“What stands in the way becomes the way”
So I don’t think meaning is about fitting to some curve or avoiding it, it is kind of our personal journeys and trying to do the right thing in the ambiguity of it all.