Francesco Rosselli , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
If I had to synthesise the three most predominant and recurring threads in my life — technology, travel, and writing — the three areas of activity that, in different forms, have woven themselves into many different spheres of my life, my three greatest loves — if I had to integrate them into one word, it would probably be: exploration.
Is that true?
In technology the thing I love most is taking a new idea — researching all of its connections to what already exists — breaking down the idea and understanding all of its subcomponents and implications — concretising the different buttons, screens and interactions needed to bring it into existence — building a basic version one — launching it — finding people to test it — really trying hard to figure out why they’re using it whichever way they actually end up using it — tweaking it, refining it, iterating it — and beginning the cycle again.
Understanding the abstract theories behind technology is interesting; seeing the impact of new technology is cool; but that process of building — that fundamentally creative process — is what I find to be most magical.
There seems to be some deep affinity between creativity and exploration, and I’m only just beginning to map it out. As you immerse yourself in your chosen field, the practically-infinite space of possibilities — which I’ve also heard referred to in some form or other by novelists, painters and musicians — becomes ever more tangible, ever richer, more-interconnected, more real, more alive.
What about travel?
OK, just backpacking around the world can eventually get boring.
What the hell! I just said a few paragraphs ago it was one of my three greatest loves! What kind of blog/’stack am I running here???
Alright, what I really love is not travel, in the concrete sense, but a broader activity that could be called understanding-the-world or voyaging.
I used to wonder why history was my favourite intellectual topic. I felt very strongly that if I focused on something intellectual it would be history — not psychology or literature or anything of that nature — but I wasn’t perfectly clear why.
There is an obvious connection between history and technology: technology alters the foundations of the world that historical agents operate in, while history provides the ‘zoomed-out’ context that reveals the true significance of technological advances.
In the world of startups, one activity I enjoyed was mapping out an industry, understanding the key players, engaging in hardcore puzzling out of the various dynamics at play (economic and otherwise), and attempting to project out likely future timelines.
That activity has clear parallels to studying history — investigating business strategy in such a manner essentially means ‘zooming in’ on one area of human activity, during one short period of history, in one delimited part of the world. If business strategy involves a ‘medium-macro’ perspective on the world, history would then be the ultimate macro perspective.
Furthermore, seeing this link — obvious in retrospect, but usually overlooked — clarifies the intellectual aspects of running a business, and the decisively practical aspects of studying history.
I thought that this connection sounded cool, and for a long time I had the vague-ish notion that I was going to explore it further. During my late twenties I read a wide range of heavyweight writers and thinkers, from Edward Gibbon and Carl von Clausewitz to moderns like Nassim Taleb and Peter Thiel. I consumed significant amounts of dense material on the rise and fall of companies, nations and empires, the success and failure of ambitious enterprises in a whole range of fields, and the underlying principles of such things.
Very powerful material — aesthetically, writers in this category felt (to me) like they were constructing great oily engines of iron and steel — engineering the abstract machinery that underlay our mighty civilisation.
And so they were important, right? And I found it interesting, so it was probably the best thing to work on … right?
I don’t know. It didn’t sing to my soul.
What the hell? You’re supposedly some genius guy, or maybe you’re just talented, or maybe you’re just some joker — but nobody knows because you never do anything — and you’ve walked away from a bunch of really promising opportunities — I mean, get a load of this kid — thinks he’s too good for w, x, y, z… what the hell is he doing with his life??? — and then you finally find something you can do that seems interesting and worthwhile — and it doesn’t sing to your soul??? What the hell is this? Art school? Kindergarten class? Do you want a therapy dog with that? Do you want to start a career as a Starbucks barista while you ‘ideate’ some more vague nonsense that’s never going to see the light of day? Do you WANT us to revoke your membership card for the serious dissident early-twenty-first century intellectual party?
Yes. I still can’t fully explain why, but it’s not really a great surprise that consuming all of that heavyweight theory began to weigh heavily on my heart.
I want to tie things back to the initial discussion, and to the three threads I identified above. What is the connection between history and travelling? The connection between history and technology I’ve just discussed, and I’ve explained, briefly, why I didn’t pursue it whole-heartedly. What about the connection of history to the other key thread of my life?
About six months into my vagabonding period, I remember that I asked myself this question. Why did I really keep getting drawn back into studying history? Similarly: why had this desire emerged more strongly the more time I spent travelling?
The answer came to very quickly, and was very obvious in retrospect, though somehow I’d never properly made the connection. I studied history because I wanted to understand the world. I travelled because I wanted to understand the world.
But also:
I went travelling because I wanted to embark on (physical) voyages through the world. I studied history because I wanted to embark on (mental) voyages through the world.
Duh.
Making that connection was a huge, huge, mental and spiritual boost at the time.
(There was also a meta-boost that may be familiar to anyone who has engaged on deep internal ‘self-work’: asking myself one — rather obvious — question, and gaining a clearly correct answer without significant effort — led to a huge and persistent positive effect on my mood. Naturally this led me to: keep asking myself questions.)
To continue the narrative: I would like to say that after grasping this insight I immediately picked up my pen, along with some good reading material, and began the task of mining the latter to fuel the former.
In reality, I still couldn’t let go of the idea of connecting all of my intellectual interests to technology, somehow.
I remember walking around the Ximending shopping district in Taipei thinking through the possible connections:
If you want to build the future, you need to understand the world.
Randomly I bumped into a friend I’d known from a different part of the world (it wasn’t completely random, as I knew he’d just arrived in Taipei, but I wasn’t expecting to bump into him on that particular walking street).
He asked me what I was doing standing in the middle of the road.
“I don’t know. … Thinking. Deciding where to go.”
Without going into great detail, most of what I’ve done over the four or so years since then has been sorting through and filtering out the junk in my mind.
What am I doing? I’m supposed to be writing!!! Why am I spending all of my time thinking?!?
(To explain the joke for those who don’t get it: writing is thinking. The idea of a writer overthinking is equivalent to the idea of a chef overslicing or a soccer player overkicking. Yes, theoretically, you could overdo it, but it’s unlikely to be a major problem.)
But why have I just now started writing?
I am continually fascinated by one idea in particular — one I grasped in basic form years ago, but also one that I keep discovering new aspects and implications of — the idea that reality consists of practically endless layers.
Let me expand on this briefly.
Hopefully every functioning person is aware of the everyday layer. Some people act as if this layer is the only layer that exists. People work, go to school, eat, shop, socialise, debate, fall in love, engage in dramas, and otherwise go through the routines of their lives.
Another layer is the fundamental physical layer. Some people, after studying a little abstract science, come to believe that this layer is the only layer that exists. At root (as far as we know) our universe consists of nothing more than a sea of quarks and other elementary particles, quarking about (or whatever the verb is), in total ignorance of the larger-scale structures they make up — you, I, and the world we live in. Perhaps we will discover that deeper layers exist, and that quarks are really made up of quarkulons, or some such thing, but the ultimate implication will be the same.
If the fundamental layer is the only meaningful layer, then our universe is pretty-much meaningless. Nothing at our human scale has any real significance.
But is that true?
I claim that there are many, many other layers of reality.
There are, in fact, whole other levels of complexity at the biological layer — in fact there are many biological layers and sublayers, some of which I wrote about briefly in this post.
There are also many psychological layers and sublayers — some of which I wrote about briefly in this post.
You can zoom out on humanity, abstract away the details of everyday life, and look at some of the layers of culture and of social evolution — I wrote about some of them in this post.
There are whole other tiers of layers and sublayers, many of which are fractal and recursive, spread out as they are throughout time and space. Furthermore, the layers interact in complicated ways — they aren’t independent, but nor are they all the same.
(In technical terms, what I am claiming is that something essentially new appears at each layer — that a whole is something different to the sum of its parts.)
Even more interestingly, as humanity advances, the interactions between the layers become even more complex — which can cause problems when you live in our universe and attempt to move around in it, but at least guarantees there is no shortage of things to write about.
Advances in artificial intelligence may well create yet more complex layers of interaction — meaning that both human beings and AI will have plenty to do if we successfully make it to the posthuman future.
Writing is not the only way to explore the vast and endlessly fascinating universe we inhabit, but it seems to involve an intriguing mixture of mathematical precision and artistic perception that fits with the way my mind naturally works.
And that is why I do what I do!
Image Source: Psychonaut Wiki. Found via the Qualia Computing blog.