Things I’ve Grieved
I think grieving is a fundamental rationality skill. Often, the difference between the Winning Move, and your Current Path, is that there is something really beautiful and good about your current path. Or there was something actually horrifying about reality that makes the Winning Move necessary.
There is a skill to engaging with, but eventually letting go, of things that are beautiful and good but which you can’t have right now.
There is a skill to facing horror.
I think these are a general skill, of looking at the parts of reality you don’t want to accept, and… accepting them.
When you are good at the skill, you can (often) do it quickly. But, I definitely recommend taking your time with cultivating that skill. My experience is that even when I thought I had grieved major things I would turn out to be wrong and have more processing to do.
I originally wrote this list without commentary, as sort of elegant, poetic appendix to my previous post on Deliberate Grieving. But I was afraid people would misinterpret it – that they would think I endorsed simply letting things go and getting over them and moving on. That is an important end result, but trying to rush to that will tie yourself up in knots and leave you subtly broken.
Each of the following included lots of listening to myself, and listening to reality, forming a best guess as to whether I actually did need to grieve the thing or if there were clever Third Options that allowed me to Have All The Things.
Things I have grieved
Relationships with particular people.
The idea that I will ever get a satisfying closure on some of those relationships.
The idea that I will get Justice in particular circumstances where I think I was wronged, but the effort to figure that out and get social consensus on the wrongness wasn’t really worth anyone’s time.
Getting to have a free weekend that one particular time, where it became clear that, actually, the right thing for me to do that-particular weekend was to book last minute tickets for EA Global and fly to London.
The idea that a rationalist community could work, in Berkeley in particular, in the way I imagined in 2017.
The idea that it’s necessarily the right strategy, to solve coordination problems with in-depth nuance, allowing persnickety rationalists to get along, and allowing companies to scale with a richness of humanity and complex goals....
…instead of looking for ways to simplify interfaces, so that we don’t need to coordinate around that nuance.
You do often need nuanced strategies and communication, but they don’t have the same shape I imagined in 2020.
The idea that I get to live in a small, cute, village… doing small, cute, village things… and ignore the looming existential risk that threatens the village.
That even though I decided that my morality would never demand that I be a hero… there nonetheless just isn’t a coherent, enduring shape that fits my soul that doesn’t make that the thing I ultimately want for myself. Even if it’s hard.
That idea that, despite feeling old and cynical… it doesn’t actually seem that useful to feel old and cynical, and I should probably find some self-narrative that has whatever good things the Cynical Oldness is trying to protect, without the counterproductive bits.
Most generally:
That the world is big, and problems are many, and competent people are rare, and most long-lasting problems actually just require a someone quite intelligent, dedicated and agentic to solve them.
Those people exist, and they are often motivated to solve various small and medium sized problems. But there are too many small and medium sized problems that nonetheless require a really competent person to deal with.
There will often be small and medium sized problems that I, personally, am uniquely equipped to solve, but there are too many and I can’t solve them all, and dealing with one would mean leaving another problem that was either bigger, or that I personally cared about more, unsolved.
There will be problems and annoyances and tragedies and horrors and small petty sadnesses, which will never get solved.
I fee very in agreement to that last one, about all the small and medium sized problems I see, and could fix, but only by giving up on others.
Reminds me of Asimov’s, “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
That even though I decided that my morality would never demand that I be a hero… there nonetheless just isn’t a coherent, enduring shape that fits my soul that doesn’t make that the thing I ultimately want for myself.
Reading that, I’m not sure whether you’re grieving because you’ve given up on that belief or because it’s true. I hope the former. The desire to be a hero is dangerous—a hero needs villains. As Nietzsche said, he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do what you can, but we all fall short of perfection. We all burn fossil fuels, for one thing. A bit of humility is in order.
It’s not your job to save the world. That’s God’s job, and if that job has driven God crazy it would explain quite a bit.
If it’s God’s job, then it’s definitely not going to get done, because something that doesn’t exist can’t do anything.
Now you’re getting it. The world can’t be fixed. It can’t even be survived. But it can be a nice place to live.
The worst people in the world, the Stalins and the Osama bin Ladens, try to be heroes but they’re as flawed as anyone else. If they start to succeed those flaws can manifest in horrifying ways. They often destroy imperfect but necessary things in attempts to build perfect things that can’t exist, like true Communism or functional political Islam. Humility and temperance are called heavenly virtues for a reason.
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