The person “I” “was” in 2009 is subjectively a grandparent to me now.
I believe I am now slowly progressing toward the level of maturity “I” “should have” had ten years ago. Most of the intervening time has consisted of a combination of stagnation and disastrous missteps.
I’m not sure there’s much advice I’d give those past selves in practice, since most of the important bits I think they would have inevitably misinterpreted out of context. What I would most want to do is try to compress their necessary experiences so they’d require less overall time, leaving someone like me showing up in, say, 2014 instead; this would have given a very high positive delta in expected value of my life. There are certain people and situations I would have warned them not to wait on; there are certain elements of material life I would have warned them to attend to more thoroughly to avoid me being mired in their executive debt; and there are certain gestalts which I would like to transmit to them which I would have to think for a very long time to be able to put into a form that can be unpacked from words. But the specifics are all too high-context to be useful here.
If I tried to generalize the most useful bits, I would say something like: seek out ways in which your developmental environment didn’t provide useful examples of things that people who are good at having the sort of life you want to have do, and then force yourself through any discomfort necessary to acquire new examples, with a heavy lean toward visceral examples and experience, as well as not being afraid to try synthesizing examples yourself (while avoiding clinging to these as authoritative just because you made them in a way comfortable to you). For people with more directly material desires than mine, this may read as applying more to superficial cultural traits, in which case I would still say, don’t be afraid to assimilate if the people you’re assimilating to are admirable to you. Contrariwise, make sure they aren’t just expressing attributes you like on the surface, because that signal will get drowned out by posers being louder than achievers (used broadly, including in senses that don’t read to the dominant culture as “achievement”); look for deeper evidence that they are good at following through.
The problem with all this is that upon rereading it, it sounds like pretty vapid Normal Life Advice, and this reminds me of how I currently think these sorts of personal retrospectives are best handled in the context of people who’ve already been following each other’s life tracks, are loosely aligned, and have enough of a subconscious-layer (“system-1”, I suppose) emotional bond with each other to avoid most of the message getting lost to internal misalignment friction. Which would imply that if you don’t have such people, having them can have a very high mutual long-term value, which in turn is just another phrasing of “make and keep close friends, dammit”, which is yet another piece of Normal Life Advice…
The person “I” “was” in 2009 is subjectively a grandparent to me now.
I believe I am now slowly progressing toward the level of maturity “I” “should have” had ten years ago. Most of the intervening time has consisted of a combination of stagnation and disastrous missteps.
I’m not sure there’s much advice I’d give those past selves in practice, since most of the important bits I think they would have inevitably misinterpreted out of context. What I would most want to do is try to compress their necessary experiences so they’d require less overall time, leaving someone like me showing up in, say, 2014 instead; this would have given a very high positive delta in expected value of my life. There are certain people and situations I would have warned them not to wait on; there are certain elements of material life I would have warned them to attend to more thoroughly to avoid me being mired in their executive debt; and there are certain gestalts which I would like to transmit to them which I would have to think for a very long time to be able to put into a form that can be unpacked from words. But the specifics are all too high-context to be useful here.
If I tried to generalize the most useful bits, I would say something like: seek out ways in which your developmental environment didn’t provide useful examples of things that people who are good at having the sort of life you want to have do, and then force yourself through any discomfort necessary to acquire new examples, with a heavy lean toward visceral examples and experience, as well as not being afraid to try synthesizing examples yourself (while avoiding clinging to these as authoritative just because you made them in a way comfortable to you). For people with more directly material desires than mine, this may read as applying more to superficial cultural traits, in which case I would still say, don’t be afraid to assimilate if the people you’re assimilating to are admirable to you. Contrariwise, make sure they aren’t just expressing attributes you like on the surface, because that signal will get drowned out by posers being louder than achievers (used broadly, including in senses that don’t read to the dominant culture as “achievement”); look for deeper evidence that they are good at following through.
The problem with all this is that upon rereading it, it sounds like pretty vapid Normal Life Advice, and this reminds me of how I currently think these sorts of personal retrospectives are best handled in the context of people who’ve already been following each other’s life tracks, are loosely aligned, and have enough of a subconscious-layer (“system-1”, I suppose) emotional bond with each other to avoid most of the message getting lost to internal misalignment friction. Which would imply that if you don’t have such people, having them can have a very high mutual long-term value, which in turn is just another phrasing of “make and keep close friends, dammit”, which is yet another piece of Normal Life Advice…
The doing is always the problem, isn’t it?