The Drama of POSSIBILITY

I am just now beginning to hear through the grapevine the college admissions results of former students. It's quite an exhilarating feeling, let me tell you, even from the sidelines a continent away.

Some months ago, Stanley Fish wrote a column about how he found himself entranced by the spectacle of the NBA Draft. Ultimately, he ascribed his fascination to the idea that "what [he was] witnessing was the repeated renewing of hope." For me, it's a compelling explanation. One cannot help but feel in awe of the promise and potential on display. The idea of an unmolded life that just sits ready for the taking is...exhilarating. Cherish it! you want to scream both for yourself and for the world.

A couple months after graduating from college, I e-mailed a professor who had been particularly influential for me. He responded by writing, "Your life sounds full of PROMISE now, keep notes on your days..." His capitalization of that word, "promise," made an impression on me, and that's why I remember the e-mail.

These ritual cycles--the birth of a newborn, the election of a new president, matriculation and graduation--all enact the drama of rebirth and POSSIBILITY. It's a beautiful thing, central in my mind to our existence as human beings, and one cannot forget it. Even during the profanity that is separate from the ritual moment.

"From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility," anyone?

To Oysters and Elk

2010, Year of the Tiger

I was getting my hair cut today by a middle-aged Chinese woman. We were chatting. She asked me my age and went on to comment that I must be a Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac calendar. She prophesied good things for me in the year ahead, which was nice to hear.

I got to thinking about the twelve-year cycle that the Chinese zodiac calendar runs through. It's comforting to think about time in cyclical rather than linear, sacred rather than profane terms. Rather than a straight-shot march through the years, a cyclical imagination of time gives me an anchored sense of continuity. 2010, Year of the Tiger. The next one after won't be until 2022. Puts things in a different light.

Themes

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of my company was recognized for her leadership as one of the top 100 women in the hedge fund industry. She wrote up a speech to accept her award and distributed the transcript internally. In her address, she identified key themes that have run consistently throughout her life and career, and she concluded by urging others to do the same. It is an exercise in introspection and self-awareness that serves to guide one through life's decisions.

I have written in this blog, on and off, for a little over a year now. Reading over old posts, I can identify a couple themes that have been most prevalent in my mind for at least the past year or so.

1) Living probabilistically. For me, thinking probabilistically is a way to deal with the limits of individual agency, a mode of thinking that encourages one to confront randomness proactively by tweaking those variable that are within one's control. The focus is not on short-term variation but rather on long-term properties.

2) Intellectual humility. Having deep conviction in my own fallibility, I try to approach problems and questions from the perspective of discussion and not debate.

3) Responsibility. About a month ago, a high school friend was in town visiting, I was hanging out with her and her friends in my apartment, and conversation grew more intense and drunken. A guy threw out a comment about being answerable only to yourself and how you should pursue whatever career it is that makes you happiest. Invariably, I get a very strong and negative reaction to such comments. I believe in relational being, and I believe in a notion of responsibility that supersedes the individual.

4) The beauty and richness to be found in stories, especially those that connect in unexpected ways.

5) The power of ecology as a metaphor. For understanding cities. For understanding policy-making. For understanding people. Currently, I obsess over the idea of triple bottom line thinking and what I am now going to call Maslow's ecology of needs.

For now, I feel pretty comfortable with these themes being drivers of my personal growth for the years to come.

Yikes. There is such a thing as too much introspection. And indeed, you, my imaginary reader, are beginning to make me blush self-consciously. Too much sincerity. Too little sarcasm.

"Relationship Science"

Yesterday, I read The New York Times Magazine's feature on marriage.

In line with the thinking of my previous post about cities, the salient question for me is, What kind of a problem is a relationship?

With language reminiscent of that used in The Corrections (Franzen), Elizabeth Weil describes her marriage variously through the lens of economics, psychoanalysis and military strategy.

Economics:

[Marriage is] an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."

Psychoanalysis:

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir.

Military strategy/Politics:

...I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives.

Perhaps we'd been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. (emphases mine)

The problem to me seems to be that Weil approaches her marriage much as she would other facets of her life, that is, with the same industry and the same resources at her disposal. She says as much: "...I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseum, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this."

In regarding her role in her marriage as a "project," Weil tries to dissect her marriage and analyze it as she would other problems. She tests hypothesizes. She gives herself exercises and homework assignments. She appeals to expert advice: marriage counselors, sex therapists, psychoanalysts, relationship scientists. There is even mention in the article of a "Love Lab," where one purported expert claims 94 percent accuracy in predicting whether a married couple will last longer than six years.

Absurdity in my ears. Management consultants get assigned to "projects," not life partners. Being in a relationship is fundamentally a different kind of problem than a work project, an investment decision, a weight-loss plan or an international treaty. It is an area of life in which our maximizing tendencies come up against a wall and our typical modes of thinking meet their limits. Thinking otherwise can be of real detriment.

I think Weil's efforts to grow in her marriage are admirable. But something about the way she sets out to improve her marriage strikes me as deeply wrong. Something in my gut tells me that we need to draw upon a different set of resources when thinking about matters of the heart. As a culture, we have let the language of economics and politics infiltrate our thinking about relationships. We increasingly regard love as something that can be demystified with the right application of analytical tools. Despite our best efforts, relationships resist demystification, rightfully so in my mind.

What kind of a problem is a relationship? What are the implications of how we choose to answer that question?

What kind of a problem is a city?

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

...The tactics for understanding [the life sciences and cities] are similar in the sense that both depend on the microscopic or detailed view, so to speak, rather than on the less detailed, naked-eye view suitable for viewing problems of simplicity or the remote telescopic view suitable for viewing problems of disorganized complexity.
In the life sciences, organized complexity is handled by identifying a specific factor or quantity—say an enzyme—and then painstakingly learning its intricate relationships and interconnections with other factors or quantities. All this is observed in terms of the behavior (not mere presence) of other specific (not generalized) factors or quantities. To be sure, the techniques of two-variable and disorganized-complexity analysis are used too, but only as subsidiary tactics. (433-440)

That's Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. If we take the metaphor of a city as a living organism seriously and recognize cities as emergent phenomenon, then what is the appropriate analytical approach for cities? Although my friends tell me that Jacobs is dated in her understanding of how the life sciences are studied, I think the basic point remains: Cities are not "understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages."

For me, this is a profound point, especially given the ubiquity of the statistical approach in social science thinking today. What is more, the framing of the problem determines the nature of the solution. Moving forward, the question is, How does one combine the sensibilities of Jacobs' street-level humanity with the empirical rigor of an econometrician?

Are You Interesting?

Ben Casnocha writes a lot about interesting-ness: what it means to be interesting, how to be interesting, how to determine quickly whether someone else is interesting. Sometimes, I like what he has to say about the topic, particularly when he says something along the lines of, "The way to be interesting is to be interested."

But for the most part, his thoughts leave me a little bit peeved. Who are all these people that Ben comes across in daily life that he deems so uninteresting? Does he meet so many inexcusably boring people that he feels compelled to write about how to be interesting so regularly?

At one point in my life--namely, during the intellectual awakening of my adolescence--I would sneak away from social gatherings to read James Joyce. His words--"Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared." (Dubliners 91)--sent fireworks off in my head as I exclaimed to myself, "How true and how sad it is that so many people muddle through life in zombie-like fashion!"

So I admit it. I've made my fair share of snap judgments about people I find uninteresting and not worth my time. But, taking a break from Joyce, I started talking to people and took a stab at understanding others. Everybody's got a story to tell, obstacles encountered and overcome, dreams foiled and realized, hearts broken and filled. Looking back, I regret every single time I have written someone off as being uninteresting.

Back to my question: Are you interesting? Yes, you are.