I first read Kavi’s post on tattoos, which started with how he turned down even a temporary one. I could relate to that, and the post made me wonder what was my discomfort with getting a tattoo.
My immediate thought was optionality. But thanks to some excellent coincidence, right below that post (in my feed) was one by The Marginalian which gave me a different perspective.
We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.
A theme has been emerging, even more stronger since I wrote “Living a life of Intentionality“. Pithily summarised as “At this age, I prefer an identity that provides the least friction and regrets in the life I want to lead.” How do I get there? A key factor I identified for myself is acknowledging the difference between my wants and likes, and deeply questioning my wants. Where does that get me? From that post, Intentionality helps you have your needs and considered likes as anchors. When that happens, a whole lot of clarity emerges – what you spend time and money on, people whom you will go overboard for, how you plan your days, weeks and months, and what can get you out of those lil twinges of envy and seemingly deep pools of a mid-life crisis.
But while I was trying to get there, I encountered a strong opponent – myself, or rather, my identity. I first brought it up in Marshmellowing. The key point in the first was how in my approach to getting what I needed/wanted, my larger desire for ‘freedom’ led me to optimising for optionality – a huge bias for scenario planning. I think the identity I created thanks to this is aptly called the Marshmallow mind (by Frederik Gieschen), and its best expression is a poem I read in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, attributed to A.E. Housman
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
In Marshmellowing – The Prequel, I wrote about my path to this identity/self image from childhood. A great description of it appears in Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. In the personality section, Sapolsky practically described my (former) Type A personality down to a behavioural “time-pressuredness” (research by Meyer Friedman and colleagues), default hostility, and a persistent sense of insecurity, the last being a predictor of cardiovascular problems. Add to it disciplined, discomfort with ambiguity, and (formerly) repressive in terms of emotional expression, and you have my profile! Damn!
My self image, and increasingly my identity was the kind of person who thought in a certain way and behaved in a certain way. While its origins was my ‘responsible child’ identity that possibly repressed my freedom of emotional expression in favour of (parental) attachment, in adulthood, it transformed into a “responsible adult” self image that ironically optimised for freedom and optionality, and underplayed the need for attachment. It became an identity, and many of my decisions were biased in that direction.
It is only in the very recent past – through reading and reflection, that I have begun to be at least a little fine with unplanned-ness. As I wrote on LinkedIn, the universe’s tendency is randomness! An excellent read in a different context was The Tao of Physics. I realised that In both quantum field theory and eastern philosophies, physical phenomena (including us) are mere transient occurrences in an underlying entity. How humbling that is!
I think I have made progress by moving from fixed goals through fixed strategies to fixed goals through flexible strategies. I hope, after we are confident of financial freedom, that I can move to flexible goals and flexible strategies. Meanwhile, the biggest task in all this is the mindset. Mindset made the identity, and now it has to dismantle it. Erich Fromm wrote this a long time ago – “Life, in its mental and spiritual aspects, is by necessity insecure and uncertain…The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity without panic and undue fear“. Decades later, we have a pithier version.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” That played out well in this context. I remember seeing this (image below) in a Farnam Street newsletter a while back and it validated something I had been doing for a while. In any situation, can I place myself such that circumstance/environment doesn’t cause a decision I’ll regret? Because, to quote from Ozark, “People make choices. Choices have consequences.”
Optimising for this is the reason behind almost everything I had built as a muscle – planning, granular detailing, specific scenario planning, constantly aiming for predictability (or at least optionality), the people I let in and how much, and deliberation on what I do. And that mindset, I told D recently, is probably coming in the way of the life I want to lead.
A little more of context setting before we address that. This is where the master appears – in the form of this post. If we go by the image below (from the post), I am successful and on that line dividing miserable and happy. Just to clarify, there is no ‘reaching the top’ in my case. I define (my) success as being able to say ‘I have enough’ on wealth, health and relationships, and can still retain my curiosity.
At this point, I have the Marshmallow mind (context), and the post accurately describes my conundrum.
So you do the work. You sacrifice. And because you’re sacrificing while others are out having fun, success becomes more and more important to your identity. You slowly forge the chains that can keep you up there, in that top left quadrant, in which you thought only other people could get stuck. But that pivot to living a fulfilled life doesn’t happen. Marshmallow Mind has become too powerful. And Marshmallow Mind lives in the future...Marshmallow Mind tricks us into believing that the rewards for delayed gratification compound forever. They don’t. Eventually, they turn into a trap whose escape requires a radical break with our old identity. As Buffett put it, “the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
The Marshmallow mindset affects the way I react to things, because the muscles are a habit now. And layered on that is a self image. It’s time for some mellowing. As Tim Ferriss says in this phenomenally good conversation with Gabor Mate, sometimes, you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need. I think life has done its bit in terms of multiple kinds of losses, gains, and lessons.
But the challenge is that my system will resist the learning! More about that in another post, citing another fantastic podcast. For now, the plan is something that I heard in that podcast, where the guest’s daughter’s karate teacher says, “Get your butterflies in flying formation”, because what I seek is “the rapture of being alive“.
P.S. Seems I caught this a couple of years ago, I now need to take some concrete actions 🙂
