Vision - why our hopes and dreams matter

For a long time, I was dismissive of talk about "dreams": of the desire to change the world, or accomplish great things. It seemed to me, that the only people who talked seriously in this manner were delusional optimists, or people with sufficient money to avoid the unpleasantries most people in society have to confront.

But now, entering my 3rd decade of life, I realize that the alternative to having dreams, is waiting to die.

Not too long ago, when I thought about the great thinkers, inventors, and scientists that contributed to the development of civilization as we know it, I, in a sense, categorized them as an entirely different species from the one I belonged to. The great achievers were superhuman, whose capabilities for thinking, problem solving, and imagination were utterly out of reach for someone like me. I was just normal, you know.

This, however, is not true on a number of levels. The trite observation is that, of course, all of these great people were Homo sapiens just like each one of us. But I believe that, on a deeper level, the true capacity for attaining great {intelligence, expertise, creativity} is mostly the same for everyone. (This is where this article starts sounding like the self-help books, but I think it's unavoidable.)

I'm not saying that genetics are irrelevant to intellect, but rather that, modulo socioeconomic circumstances and obligations, the factors we do have agency over, like what we do and think about greatly shape our capabilities regardless of what our DNA or life history contributes. And with enough time, dedication, and resources, qualities and achievements one might consider superhuman are within reach for anyone.

Neuroplasticity

The basis for my confidence in a universal human potential for greatness is neuroplasticity. The brain is extraordinary, and neuroscience is still very much in the early stages of understanding it, but what we do know is that the brain changes in response to what we think about and what we do.

Our habits, addictions, and skills are all encoded into neuron pathways in the brain. Each time we exercise one of these pathways, it gets stronger, and the longer a pathway goes without activation, the weaker it is.

This was a devastating realization to me. Regardless of whatever philosophy of "free will" one subscribes to, the very real lived experience of being able to decide what to do or think about means that every day we are influencing the very structure of our brains. Every day I spend choosing to indulge in brainrot online is literally forming my brain, and therefore forming who I am into someone optimized to consume brainrot and waste away my life. (For the uninitiated, please substitute brainrot with "meaningless or unhelpful creative content".)

This is an enormous amount of responsibility thrust onto every human being.

Not only are we driving the car, but the car automatically adjusts the tires, engine, and suspension according to how we drive. Coast on an endless highway wandering aimlessly? Your car will downsize from the turbocharged V6 to a naturally aspirated in-line four with half the displacement. Push every lap at the limits of your engine and tires? The vehicle will pick up an extra electric motor, fit a bigger turbo with bigger boost, and get stickier tires.

This is either a win more or lose more type of situation. Those who start early in life with good habits are likely to reinforce those good habits and get paid in dividends for their {competency, good work ethic, grit}. The compound interest side of things. Those who start with poor habits are likely also to stick with those, and leave themselves with less time to invest in themselves or things they care about, increasing the resistance to change course. The compounding debt side of things.

An assertion I've seen floating around is that it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something. My back of the napkin math estimates that to be about 5 years of 40 hour workweeks on that one thing to get good. Given the state of typical adult life somewhat elaborated in Buying time, is it any wonder I thought that superhuman achievement or ability was categorically out of reach?

Vision

So, during those moments day to day we do feel we're in control, how do we decide what to do? I suppose the thesis of this article is something like this:

Who we are is shaped by what we do. What we do is a subset of what we think we can do. What we think we can do is a subset of our vision for ourselves.

Somewhere in the stew of our {values, ethics, beliefs about the world, lived experiences} we find this amorphous spirit I refer to as our vision. From it, we derive answers to classic questions like, "Where will I find myself in five years?", and "Do I belong here?" Our vision is in a sort of perpetual negotiation with our wildest hopes and dreams, and deepest wants and needs. It is tempered by our past failures, our understanding of reality, the support or jeers of our peers, the traditions and structure of our society. OK, this sounds like mostly bullshit but I really don't have a better way to describe this thing without roughly painting around it in budget acrylic paints.

To set a goal for yourself is to participate consciously in the aforementioned negotiation. To set your eyes a little higher and ask, "Why not me? Why not now?" (credits to Graham Weaver from a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business) and question if any of the assumptions built into your current vision are self-limiting with no basis in fact.

Hence, why the choices are: (1) dream or (2) wait to die.

The strange miracle of human consciousness is that there's something like a violation of Newton's first law going on. Even in the absence of an external force, from within our psyche, we can exert changes to the velocity of our lives. Dream. Lift and broaden your vision. Expand what you believe you can do. Do. (It's me, the self-help guru.)

Or leave Newton's first law be and wait until the last stop on this line.

Fuck the system

I alluded in Buying time to my perception of this phenomenon of corporate work dimming our vision, intentionally or not.

Few of us are fortunate to be working our "dream jobs", and so we make a compromise. We need to pay the bills, so we enter into gainful employment doing something that likely aligns neutrally with respect to our goals and dreams. (This assumes we've already thought through what our goals and dreams are, which may already be too out of line with the typical experience, but alas.) When we first start working, we keep the dream safely stored on a prominent table in the living room of our minds. A couple weeks pass and we still remember that, at heart, we are not merely a corporate drone, but a dreamer waiting to spread their wings. The months pass by and the living room gets a little crowded with office politics, bikeshedding on design docs, and manager 1:1's, so you tuck the dream away in a further corner of the room. The years pass and you glance with nostalgia at the dream in the corner, before packing it into a box labelled "childhood toys" and moving it to the attic.

This might be overly cynical, but it remains the reality in late stage capitalism that most paying jobs come from companies that make money (or are eventually expected to make money). And, unfortunately, the correlation between profitability and usefulness or social good is not consistent (cf. the very profitable US private healthcare insurance industry).

No matter how much we try, boxing up our professional career to insulate the remainder of our identity from it doesn't work perfectly. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives and should there be any dissonance between our values and what we accomplish at our jobs, our identity will be compromised. In the negotiation of our vision, there will be a growing pile of evidence against the realization of our hopes and dreams, until we can hardly pry our eyes up from the day to day slog.

I guess you can count me an advocate for a universal basic income system, even with all the gotchas with such a solution. There's a systematic suppression of the human spirit that happens today, where for the vast majority, the only way to survive is to compromise and eventually forfeit their capacity to be great and do great things.