Bricks and Bottles: How we Create and Store Value
2030 words | The metaphor for Time in Bottle refined. Value comes from building an identity, working on our skills and collecting credentials.
In a Nutshell
Last post, we discussed the metaphor of "Time in a Bottle" , which alludes to how people want to *make something* out of their time, somehow preserving it for future use. The rest of the post talked about systems versus narrative people - those who give up on elaborate narratives and simply pursue their passions, versus those who always seem to be in love with one vision or another. I distinguished between systems and narratives people to get at how people perceive *value*, and in this post I’ll propose another break-down. Let’s split the original metaphor of bottles into bottles (same word, different usage) and bricks, each of which stores a different kind of value.
The metaphor for "bottles'' addresses how we make personal progress by accumulating memories that help define our moral compasses and our identities. The metaphor refers to the resemblance of beautiful and meaningful memories to the figurines that hobbyists present in wine bottles (see the picture for this blog post). Each memory we collect has a chance to be cast as a figurine in a bottle - a time-capsule that at one point we build and at another point we can savour. However, just as how a collector values some of the bottled miniatures more than the others, in this post I guess at what kinds of memories give weight to one's past.
The metaphor for "bricks" addresses how we progress in our pursuit of external and intellectual goals. People try to be organised in their pursuit of problem solving and engineering, but any difficult project eventually gets messy. When we do something new, the work can expand like a cloud, despite us wanting it to progress as a line: messy notes, random code experiments, a hundred threads of unpursued ideas. All too often, work is wasted as the cloud dissolves. Careful planning aside, how do we ensure that the cloud turns into something tangible? Some, learning from the astrophysicists, rely on the phenomenon of gravitational implosion: they do so much work that eventually something needs to come out of it. Others trap the cloud in a pretty box - they take what they have and present it in a compelling way.
Like a child with a box full of LEGO, one's stockpile of bricks determines what they can build. Most people that I respect share the quality of having lots of bricks, and using them well. Through tact, talent or sheer quantity of work they accumulate massive stockpiles of material. With them, they build fortresses of knowledge (professors), skills (martial artists), or things (open-source code projects).
Bricks
The metaphor of bricks addresses how we make external progress. Bricks are built from and help improve productivity - our ability to pursue external goals. Brick-making activities include studying, working and blogging.
Like how there are systems people and narratives people, I like to distinguish between systems bricks and narratives bricks. They are both bricks in the sense that they compress clouds of work and thought for future usage, but differ in what we use them for.
Systems bricks are internal. They apply to intrinsic things such as skills and intellectual understanding. Each blog post I write is one of my systems bricks. Before I write about some topic - say about impact - my understanding is implicit. It begins like a crumpled ball of paper, where upon unfolding it, I see a child’s drawing of a map. Writing is laying one’s understanding bare, re-drawing the map, and folding it back up into a neat brick. The bricks become (pardon the analogy) like mathematical objects - concrete things where it's clear how the parts are related to one-another. Like mathematical objects, they become linked to other concepts that I have and become tools and abstractions for deeper thinking.
Narrative bricks are external. They include one's academic transcript and diploma after graduating, scientific publications, and software projects. One can study for years in university, but decide on the last year to not graduate. Would all of that tuition and effort be for nothing? Hopefully not: although the ex-student wouldn't have gotten any narrative bricks, they would have collected systems bricks and memory-bottles. It’s a common opinion that fancy schools largely differentiate themselves via the narrative bricks they offer and not necessarily the systems bricks - Harvard might not make better mathematicians than Germany's KIT, but the general prestige of the diplomas differ greatly. Because humans aren't clairvoyant, we evaluate one-another on our narrative bricks, hoping actually to estimate the systems bricks. I have faith in the overall prediction process, but I'm sure we've all met people who have gamed this human tendency.
How exactly people compress their work into narrative bricks clearly differs from case to case but a common theme is in going the last mile, whether this means finishing the degree, documenting the code, or making a nice colourful slideshow so your team knows what you've done.
While one builds advanced and personalised skills with their systems bricks, one builds stories and qualifications with their narrative bricks. As stated above, people initially judge one another on the narrative bricks, and you're the one that chooses how your bricks are presented. Line up a few bricks and you've got yourself a solid linear regression. For example, here’s four narrative bricks (3 truths and 1 lie):
Narrative Bricks:
I worked at Tesla
I studied Biomedical Engineering as an undergraduate
I read a lot of books
I build web-app for e-commerce
Now let's say that instead of doing my Masters back in 2021, I decided to apply to a consulting company. I could assemble these narrative bricks into a banal yet defensible motivation letter, but hopefully you get the idea!
When pursuing productivity, bricks are the primary objective but bottles are an invaluable by-product. In some cases, bottles and bricks exonerate the people who devote their lives to work. Some people are fortunate enough to have both clay and sand flow in their stream of time spent on work. They can sift this stream: the work get condensed into bricks, and the memories are piped into bottles. Some of my best memories come from the work that I've done, whether that's the time that I've spent working with great people, or the self actualization that came from exerting creativity, achieving what I thought undoable, and enjoying the consequences of important decisions.
Bottles
We accumulate many bottled figurines over our lifetimes, but clearly they're not equally valuable. While characterising what makes the past meaningful is difficult, a few guesses won't hurt. A recurrent theme in my most valuable memories is that they involve me having earnestly given or been given to. Generosity and gratitude. As you might expect, this isn't the first time someone's noticed this. Psychologists know this as Otherishness.
I think that giving and receiving creates meaningful memories because they're highly correlated to beauty and weight. Forming a connection through this kind of exchange is a beautiful thing. Although the precise definition of beauty is personal, I see it roughly as a feeling of awe - that recurring theme that drives people to form religious conglomerates and turns our eyes towards the clouds basked in setting sun. Weight too is difficult to define, but I use it as some triangulation of the following examples: meeting new faces at a house-party has negligible weight, since there's no commitment to the future, nor to memory. Throwing a birthday party for someone has *some* weight, since it's probably not life-changing, but you hold the potential to create an invaluable memory. Taking care of an ailing parent is *very* weighty.
Weight is a double-edged sword. Too much weight can be crushing. Caregivers frequently report having worse relationships with their parents than before. Health professionals study this as Caregiver Burden. Yet I see weight as a necessary condition for defining ourselves. Living a life without weight is probably like indulging in Soma, Alduous Huxley's perfect drug that gives complete bliss while avoiding side-effects and resistance. While a buoyant life of Soma is great, what happens when you wake up from the dream and there's no more Soma? The ship sinks under the clouds and there's no armour against the monsters underneath.
Summary and Bottles & Bricks In Conversation
Time, like the wind, is a resource that, unless harnessed, simply flows by. While a breeze provides value only for the present, wind energy and big batteries pay future dividends. What value can we get out of our time? Last post, I differentiated between value from the pursuit of passions and value from the achievement of personal narratives. Here, I differentiate between value towards external goals/knowledge and towards the development of personal character. We collect the former in discrete bricks of skills and accomplishments, and the latter in bottles, by experiencing and capturing the memories that make us ourselves. Preferably without too much booze.
So much for metaphors and theorising. If you wanted to use these concepts, what could you say?
"Time in a bottle is a great concept, but I don't want to live life like a machine - only doing things so I can bottle them up for later. So rather than thinking "how should I bottle time?", I'll think "in what ways am I losing a lot of time?" "
"Consulting sounds like a solid building block towards my career, but I'm not sure if I'll like the social setting. I'd rather go into research instead - maybe I'll only have enough bricks to build a small chateau rather than a mansion, but at least it'll be full of bottled memories!"
"I've just spent all weekend building a theoretical model, proving that little green men live on the dark side of the moon. Now it's time to collect the brick: summarise the key steps, put it on my CV, and get hired somewhere!"
"I create habits to put in the raw hours needed to get systems bricks. Occasionally, I grab narrative bricks by pulling an all-nighter to finish a deliverable."
Appendix: The Meaning of Life, Forwards and Backwards, Revisited
In an earlier post, I wrote that the meaning of life is so complex that we probably can't hope to find a literal answer. Instead, it's best to define one or more meanings of life to guide us in our actions. I introduced the terms forward meaning of life, referring to a phrase that helps you choose actions that optimise your happiness, and backward meaning of life, referring to a phrase that helps you collect "good memories". For example, one’s forward meaning of life can be to have impact on society, and one’s backward meaning of life can be to find love.
However, many readers were understandably confused about the backward meaning, not the least because I didn't really specify why memories are so valuable. Is the purpose of the memories just to recount them and in doing so feel good? If so, this would be redundant with the forward meaning of life, and would prescribe that people memorise jokes and recite them to themselves all day.
Using the above idea that bottled memories are ones that give identity, we can attempt another definition of the backwards meaning of life. While the forward meaning of life remains an attempt at happiness optimisation, things don't always go smoothly. The backwards meaning of life consists of building a self. Despite what the Buddhists might say, having an identity is probably invaluable. It provides robustness as we pursue our forward meaning of life - as we collect our bricks and use them.
To see how memories and our resulting identity can make us more resiliant, imagine if we didn't have anything grounding us to who we were. Say that Bob, age 30, is an ambitious postdoctoral researcher. He's just finished a 3-year study on the cellular mechanisms of human aging. But he didn't control the variables right, his results didn't turn out, and the paper that was supposed to get him his professorship instead got him into a marginal conference. What next? If his relentless pursuit of research was all he had been doing, maybe he’d give up. However, drawing from the wisdom of Lex Fridman's guests, if he had formed a strong identity centered around having built a family, maybe he’d have the strength to push through the failure.
For the Machine Learning engineers: when people get new information (Bob, realising that his last three years of research were fruitless), they update their policies (Bob needs to decide whether to apply for his next post-doc position or to go into industry). Identity is a regularizer term that prevents people from overfitting their policy updates to noisy observations and consequently going down a highly suboptimal trajectory.
March 20th, 2023, Zurich