Why optimism
Optimism: My chat on optimism. Radical Acceptance: on reading Yiyun Li memoirs after her sons’ deaths. Let kids be kids: Zvi on giving children freedom
Radical Acceptance: on reading Yiyun Li memoirs after her sons’ deaths.
Let kids be kids: Zvi on giving children freedom
Toxicity chemicals: Jeremy Grantham on pollutants
Links: Energy cost of GPT, wrinkles, philanthropy.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been more stuck in my head than usual. I think this has been mostly caused by a series of external negative events outside, or seemingly mostly outside, my control.
Even with some great conversations that would lead me in a more future looking, optimistic way - and by nature most would say I have high optimism - it’s been a moderate string of knocks. But, I’m coming round.
I still think Samir Varma is correct when he argues that regret is one of the most useless of emotions. (See our chat here).
But, our brain derives seemingly great utility by indulging in dreams (fantasy, stories) and the dreams of what-ifs are strong. It’s in part why we like lotteries. It’s in part why so many dream of what might have happened if they had bought bitcoin when they first heard of it.
I’m reminded of my chat with Leigh Caldwell who puts forward a neuroscience framework for why stories and day dreams are so powerful for us.
I do think an underlying amount of stress and challenge does make mental resilience harder. Mental resilience needs practise much like exercise needs practise.
So it was good to dwell on my chat with Sumit Paul-Choundhury. Sumit’s wife died young. He writes how he became an optimist. Much of what he argues about rings true to me:
Essentially, being a pessimist, you give up the potential upside. And so that's where that falls down. That kind of idea of agency, the ability to direct, that's also the root of the optimism gap, the gap between how we view our lives and how we view the collective future. Because it's to some degree because we believe that we have control over our own lives, which you know, is true to some extent, maybe not as much as we think.
He importantly distinguishes practical optimism from blind faith.
Optimism has quite a few benefits over pessimism. I see this when I chat to young climate-anxious people. Being driven to change things helps what you want to change - and helps yourself.
Another part of the conversation with Sumit I had not dwelt on much before it came up - is how our ability to act upon on our future and present changes the likelihood of a scenario playing out.
A pessimist might be slightly more accurate in assessing the probability of a risk event happening. But, an optimist might go and do something about that very risk event making the probability assessment moot. We have an ability to effect change on the world.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury has written 'The Bright Side', a book about optimism. Sumit discusses how his wife dying reshaped his views on optimism, differentiating between pragmatic optimism and blind faith. He explores how having an optimistic outlook, seemingly against his scientific training, aligns with good mental health.
"Believing in a better tomorrow is not the same as saying that today is great."
We touch on the evolutionary logic behind optimism, the impact of agency on perception, and how alternate histories can inform future thinking. Sumit also reflects on the role of optimism during personal grief and provides insights into his writing process and the broader importance of the arts and humanities. The conversation closes with advice for optimism in younger generations and an emphasis on appreciating everyday human interactions.
"Postcards from your future self can be more helpful than New Year’s resolutions."
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods.
This idea of fostering agency is why - if at all practical - I am in favour of letting children have more agency over their lives and to play more.
You have this in my conversation with Peter Gray (podcast here). Recently Zvi published a long blog also arguing for the benefits of letting kids be kids. Zvi makes the rational arguments:
Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on many more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:
It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.
It hurts the lived experience of children.
It hurts children’s ability to grow and develop.
It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.
It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.
Sumit’s ideas around agency, optimism and human flourishing apply here as well.
Of course, a bunch of these ideas seem easier said than done when social media, society and circumstances challenge you the other way.
I’ve been dipping into the works of Yiyun Li, in particular, Things in Nature Merely Grow.
I’ve only read a few chapters - and the whole book is only a few chapters - because each chapter has left me in deep rumination. On the surface the book is a memoir giving you a glimpse into what Li is thinking and doing post the deaths of her children - Vincent and James.
Beyond the surface there is a complicated exploration of life, grief and words. I draw on one notion and that is of the inadequacy of words.
Li writes:
Vincent, and James’s death left us in a different place than Vincent’s death. And yet a new alphabet can only be symbolic, as I have but this old language to work with. Words tend to take on a flabbiness or a staleness after a catastrophe, but if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.
There is no good way to say this: words fall short.
And yet these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence. I can ask questions—answerable or unanswerable—but it is likely that by the end of the book I will have failed to find the right questions, just as I will have failed to pinpoint the exact moment when James’s contemplation of suicide shifted from Vincent’s to his own.
And Li writes:
That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive—this is a fact that eschews any adjective. Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.
When Vincent’s phone was returned to us, only a corner of it was fractured. When James’s backpack was returned to us, among a stack of papers, all unused, there was a pencil. It was broken into halves at the same moment James died. These are facts, too. And I think about them often.
In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to. It’s not much, this holding on, and yet it’s the best I can do.
Riffing on what Zvi wrote and Peter Gray argues, in this Guardian profile Sophie McBain writes:
[Li] knows, however, that she parented them with thoughtfulness and care, and she fought to create space for them to live as they wanted and be fully themselves. She has been thinking a lot recently about how her son Vincent, who as a young teenager insisted on walking to school alone, a two-mile route through woodland, would often leave the house armed with pepper spray. The pepper spray would not protect him, she knew, but it gave him a sense of control and independence. “That pepper spray is about how we brought up our children, or how people bring up their children. You have to let them be, but the world is so bad, right? It’s not a safe place.” As hard as it is, she accepts her children’s decision to end their lives. “Respect and understanding are the two most important things I’ve given them,” she says. “This is a very sad fact of our lives, they took their own lives knowing we would accept and respect their decision.”
And Li writes:
I did not stop writing or take time off from teaching when Vincent died. Writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry – all these activities are time-bound, and they do not compete with my children, who are timeless now. There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.
And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.
I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heatwave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life
I have this definition of Radical Acceptance, which is what Li practises:
Radical acceptance is a psychological concept that involves fully acknowledging and embracing reality as it is, without resistance or denial, even when faced with profound pain or loss. It doesn't mean approving of or resigning to the situation but rather recognizing the truth of circumstances to reduce suffering caused by fighting against them.
And I have Li:
"Radical acceptance to me means this is. This is it. I accept I lost my children in this manner, and nothing I say or do or don't say or don't do will change that fact."
I’ve faced some moderate challenges and I’m unsure I’m as deep into radical acceptance as Li.
Is there moderate acceptance?
What is, is. What was, was.
Regret is mostly useless.
But, what will be, will not necessarily be.
Our lives, climate; war, love, AI - these futures are unwritten and if we so choose, we will have a role in writing them.
I’ve read a recent Jeremy Grantham viewpoint on environmental toxicities. I think he over states some of the case (for instance his brief mention on autism rates, which I discussed in the last post here) but he does highlight how much man made chemical and plastic has been created and put out into the environment over the last 100 years and still at an accelerating rate. Worth a ponder.
"Of the challenges facing humanity this century toxicity is the most underrecognized. “Toxicity” means the cumulative negative health effects from some of the hundreds of thousands of new chemicals invented since World War 2. Almost none of these new chemicals were tested for long-term safety for humans and nature. They are now poisoning us more effectively than lead in paint and gasoline once did. Toxicity is a major and totally unappreciated contributor to the accelerating population collapse that faces the developed world, and stopping toxicity is going to be necessary (though far from sufficient) to stymie that collapse.
The most important negative action of these chemicals (used in plastics, in pesticides, and in products like shampoo or perfume) is endocrine or hormonal disruption. That is, they interfere with the body’s internal signaling and development system, which during key developmental windows, like in utero and puberty, can permanently affect our development. The vast majority of chemicals on the market have never been tested for long-term effects and they cannot now be tested on humans for ethical reasons, but animal tests and human correlation studies show that tiny quantities of some of these chemicals absorbed in utero can respectively cause lifelong weight gain, neurodevelopmental disruption, and impairment of fertility.
The most famous class of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, PFAS, are known as “forever chemicals” because they take so long to break down. PFAS refers to hydrocarbons where the hydrogen atoms have been replaced by covalent fluorine, a pattern that presents naturally only in toxins, and even then, does so extremely rarely. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that these chemicals are innocent until proven guilty as we currently do in the U.S. ......
....World population is thus likely to be far lower than the 10 billion+ currently projected by 2100. 6 or 7 billion seems far more likely, and if this trend continues further, it could be down to only 2 or 3 billion by 2200. This guarantee of falling workforces and a rapidly aging population will change everything: in the short run, clearly for the worse, as capitalism and society will surely be stressed, perhaps terminally so; in the long run, if we can withstand these stresses, quite possibly for the better.
“For the better” because arriving at a far smaller population will be a great help in reducing toxicity and the related stress on nature, climate, resources, and agriculture. But the interaction of toxicity with global demographics and the ultimate future of humankind is also the most complicated issue I’ve ever written about, rife with confounding factors.
Full opinion piece here:
According to Time… These are the 100 most influential people shaping the future of giving at a pivotal moment.
Neurodiversity. “A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, meaning they have a condition such as autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia, according to a leading psychologist.
Francesca Happé, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, said reduced stigma around these conditions had led more people both to seek medical diagnoses and to self-diagnose.
She said: “There’s a lot more tolerance, which is good — particularly among my children’s generation, who are late teens and early adults, where people are very happy to say ‘I’m dyslexic’, ‘I’m ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]’.”
Times: https://lnkd.in/efxMxVTWHannah Ritchie: “My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.
If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.
But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too.” Post here.Wrinkles. Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Same Pattern Every Time After Long Exposure to Water. Post here.