bad point well made

Grizzly bears and hedonic abundance

I used to think that life consisted of good and bad opportunities, all mixed together in a disordered mess. It was my tedious task to sift through them one by one, disaggregating and discarding the bad ones šŸš®.

When digging for music, I'd spend many hours trawling through what I then considered the only sources of music that mattered. If I found a label I liked, I would click through every one of the (sometimes hundreds) of releases on Discogs. There were certain blogs and channels I'd check fanatically. The releases that I did not or could not listen to, the stones unturned, made me uncomfortable. I would listen to it all and I would miss nothing šŸ˜¤.

There are problems with this approach. Any time you wish to exhaustively explore anything, thereā€™s an implicit assumption that your characterisation of scope is exhaustive and also that it is feasible to explore that scope given your constraints. It seems to me that these two points rarely hold and if they don't, then maybe there are better ways to explore.

If my scope is ā€œall music that I will enjoyā€, itā€™s unreasonable to assume that Iā€™m going to be able to (a) map out a complete and exhaustive closed set of tracks to listen to šŸ—ŗļø and (b) practically listen to all the music within such a scope using the meagre waking hours from my meagre little human life ā³.

Itā€™s not as if I actively believed those things to be true, itā€™s more that my actions were consistent with these assumptions and therefore not a principled way to approach the problem of ā€œI want to find good musicā€, given the reality of the situation.

Itā€™s the obsessive tourist ticking off nuggets of experience from their itemised list (or worse, spreadsheet). They have almost certainly mischaracterised the scope of experience and therefore also the practicality of exhaustively experiencing their holiday destination.

Salmon and the creative process

In creative pursuits such as music or art, thereā€™s a tendency to view the process as a journey that starts from a point of imperfection, moulding the product linearly towards a single unique state of artistic perfection šŸ™‡āœØ. The proverbial search for the perfect snare. This implicitly assumes that for every imperfect starting point there exists if not one, at least a small handful of perfect "solutions", a practically traversable space.

We can view the creative process as a tree growing outwards from an initial kernel and branching with every distinct decision or action. The perfectionist (perhaps pessimist?) will always interpret this as a configurational nightmare. For them, every branch point holds a gloomy potential path towards a creative dead end. There exists one gleaming enlightened track through the forest towards the perfect solution to their creative ā€œproblemā€.

This to me feels like a mischaracterisation of scope. The configurational space of enjoyment is vast šŸŒŒ.

Yes, at the outset there is a much larger pool of possible unenjoyable outcomes, but as long as we wield our taste and curiosity to manoeuvre ourselves into a fruitful part of the tree, things look much more positive. Here, there arenā€™t just a handful of enjoyable outcomes, thereā€™s enjoyment aplenty. The pressure of picking the ā€œcorrectā€ path falls away when you realise that most paths are ā€œcorrectā€ in some way. The macro state of an enjoyable creative product is highly degenerate i.e. no need to deep the snare.

There are, of course, many other enjoyable alternative outcomes that could have been and will probably never be experienced. But thatā€™s no reason for sadness, in fact, thereā€™s a beauty in the uniqueness and value of what was created in a way that there wouldnā€™t be if the final creation existed alongside all of its infinite alternate reality siblings. This salmon chose me.

It seems to me that (at least some of the time) thereā€™s abundance we often donā€™t appreciate or at least our actions implicitly suggest we donā€™t appreciate. Abundance of ideas, abundance of enjoyment and abundance of experience. Just there to wallow in.

The grizzly bear life model

I am no longer the obsessional hedonic perfectionist. I joyously embrace chaos. I am the grizzly bear, fishing for salmon.

The grizzly bear understands roughly when and where salmon migrate. Having found a good spot, they wade into the middle of the river where thousands of salmon swim around them. They're not interested in catching all the salmon, they don't need to. The grizzly bear barely moves - the salmon come to the bear. The bear plucks out one salmon at a time. The grizzly bear understands abundance.

Open thoughts