Time in a Bottle > Systems and Narratives

1600 Words | We want to make the most out of the present and grab hold of our time. In doing so, should we go with or against the flow?

Most of us work harder than we need just to survive. Why do we aim for good grades rather than just passing? Why do we look for love when we could fill our time with Netflix and Reddit? We work hard to convert our excess time today into future value. All around me I see people fervently preserving their time in glass bottles, and I try to do the same. Yet I feel the cork is leaky and the wine often spoils.

How best to age our time?

Systems and Narratives

If our goal is to convert our time today into value tomorrow, it's probably helpful to define value first.

Value is defined in relation to our goals, and our goals depend on whether we're system-based or narrative-based. This distinction is adapted from a similar concept from motivational psychology and is mentioned by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits. If someone were to chat with a systems-based life guru, it might go like:

Guru: Out of what you're doing right now, which things do you value the most?

Bob: I'm currently taking six courses in school, learning Spanish, skiing every weekend, maintaining a blog and attending dance lessons. I'm also working on a few papers. I guess I *really* just want to get better at doing math, and improve my ability to write thoughtful articles.

Guru: How can you incrementally improve at these two things?

Bob: I can commit to spending two hours on math exercises a day, etc.

If the guru were narrative-based, it might go like:

Guru: Who's your biggest role-model?

Bob: Hard to choose between Einstein and the Wright Brothers.

Guru: Now tell me, what do you want to do with your life, where do you want to be ten years from now, one year from now, and one month from now?

Bob: I want to have an impact. In ten years, I want to be transforming the health industry in Cambodia. In one year from now, I'll be a management consultant at McKinsey to get business knowledge. To do so, I'll wrap up this semester's course-work within the next month.

Roughly speaking, systems-based people look for passions and build competence. They're a common breed in Silicon Valley. They might dismiss narrative-driven people as being grandiose and unrealistic. Systems-based people do well if they can narrow down their interests enough that they can drive systematic improvement. Narrative-based people motivate themselves through strong long-term visions and seeing their progress towards the visions. They do well if they can keep their narratives abstract enough to be flexible (see my example a few sections down) and if they think enough to keep their narratives and sub-narratives updated. They might dismiss systems-based people as being superficial and perhaps even dangerous - Professor Boyd of Stanford jokingly credits certain fields of mathematics with keeping otherwise dangerous people off the street!

I've met both kinds of people, and it's not clear which path makes one have more impact or happiness. In terms of happiness, I like to see this problem through the forwards and backwards lens - that is, by asking how one perceives the present and recollects the past. A successful systems-based person probably enjoys the present more than a narrative-based one, by finding interesting things and getting dopamine hits by making continuous improvements. On the other hand, living by a narrative almost by definition gives one a compelling life in retrospect. By subscribing to a narrative, you get invested in a story and rejoice or suffer based on its actualization. Under sufficient dosage of hard liquor, I wouldn't be surprised if some narrative-based people could directly recite their recollected memories into elaborate autobiographies.

In reflection, I naturally gravitate towards a systems-based lifestyle, but I'd probably find it more rewarding to create and live by narratives. In engineering, systems-based people become excellent individual contributors - people that do the hands-on engineering work of designing and coding - and narrative-based people are probably suited for management. I love engineering, but I'm by no means a 10x engineer - Silicon Valley jargon for the vaunted employees at the tail end of productivity. I value impact, and I think that I'd have a better appreciation of my impact as a manager. IC's can have a huge impact on society - for example by writing code that is used by millions. But my irrational mind cares more about the visible impact of my actions on the wellbeing of those around me, such as how my leadership could give my team the joy of progress.

Having a Plan

Regardless of whether you identify with systems or narratives, I believe that plans are the spice of life. Whether deliberately or not, we're constantly in motion. In space, in the spectrum of pain and pleasure, in our career decisions, in whether we're alone or with friends. Regardless of which realm, I find it important that our actions and decisions are covered by an overarching narrative and levels of top-down reasoning descending from the narrative.

For example, there's lots of awesome people in my university, and if I could, I'd have two hour lunches with new people every day. Yet if I did so, I'd compromise on my other objectives, and maybe all the memories would all blend into one. So I set a narrative: "I want to build meaningful relationships with my friends, and still keep the time to meet new people and get inspired". This narrative guides me to set plans, like: "every week, I'll go to a new seminar and talk to someone". It also leads me to form expectations, like "at the Neuroeconomics Seminar, I'll meet neuroscientists", which can be confirmed, which helps me process things efficiently, or disproved, in which case I'll remember my mistakes better than if I had no expectations. Narratives, plans, expectations.

In this example, I'd update my expectations constantly, my plans on the biweekly level, and my overall narrative - if it's true to me - on a yearly level. Since updating these levels of strategy takes lots of thinking-time, I'd resist the urge to simultaneously pursue more than a few distinct narratives.

Nassim Taleb, in the Black Swan, points out that lots of the things that affect us the most are completely unpredictable. Is it a fool's errand to chart a detailed course through the stormy waters of life? In certain domains, I certainly imagine it is. But as homo sapiens and not the purely rational homo economicus (the assumption in standard economic theory), we probably find more value in the process than in the results. And having a narrative and a strategy imbues the process with emotional investment and intellectual satisfaction.

An Application of the Narrative Principle

I want to work with people that do deep technological feats, such as building complicated models of society and nature, and systems that work with mathematical reliability. While I'm not sure whether I'll end up in academia or research, both provide possibilities for this narrative. In academia, I would work as a professor or research scientist. In industry, I would manage a research team or work at a deep-tech startup.

What this narrative means for the next half-decade is to complete a PhD program, where I can be driven to improve by a mentor and inspiring peers. What it means for the next six months is to do well in my current research project, where I'm working on algorithms and corresponding proofs in the mathematics of behavioural modelling. This project is important because doing applied math research gives intuition on what kinds of theoretical guarantees are feasible. I'll also work hard on my courses, since getting good at long mathematical derivations teaches careful and penetrating thinking - a crucial skill for bringing a team to consensus and learning from mistakes.

Time in a Bottle

Coming full circle, what can we do to spend our time wisely today, for the future? The answer depends on the individual. Does it interest you to come up with a narrative, remember it, and commit to it? Then try coming up with something, then weave a tapestry of causality from the abstract narrative to your goals for the next week. Or is the world a garden of systems, each harbouring a lifetime of passion? Then borrow something from the garden and nurture it.

Of course, instead of all this theoretical stuff you could just listen to Jim Croce

If I could save time in a bottle,

The first thing that I'd like to do,

Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away,

Just to spend them with you

If I could make days last forever,

If words could make wishes come true,

I'd save every day like a treasure, and then,

Again, I would spend them with you

Who says a narrative can't be romantic?

Desert: Get Interested or Get Out

So much for the main course. As desert, agnostic of being systems or narratives-driven, I've learned that being in the present is probably one of my core values. Today, I chatted with my roommate about audio versus physical books. It was a fascinating conversation, except that I noticed halfway through that I hadn't registered a word he was saying. Being in a sleep-deprived and mildly anxious state, I was simultaneously following an internal train of loosely correlated thought, and given that I could cognitively process what he was saying, I was shocked at my poor recollection.

A possible explanation comes from the neuroeconomists, who claim that working memory is a limited resource, and shared amongst various things, and (although contentious) things must pass through working memory before going into long-term memory. For example, a common experiment is to:

Show the participants a computer screen with objects at seven different positions and ask them to remember each object’s shape and colour. In the first round, assign equal points to all seven objects, for remembering them properly. In the second, tell the participants that the middle object is worth twice the number of points. As expected, the participant tends to do much better on the middle object, at the cost of the other objects.

If some combination of working memory and attention forms the cork of the bottle in which we store our time, and splitting these resources evenly across our scattered thoughts and the present leads to neither being properly remembered, the implications are troubling. One of my biggest fears in life is to aimlessly and endlessly flail about, making no progress in any direction. Math tells us that if one moves in a random direction for n steps, the amount of distance they cover from the starting point is only, in expectation, the square root of n. The cost of splitting our attention seems even worse. Perhaps in the realm of working memory and attention, one half plus one half equals zero.

So, in conversations, reading and whatever I do, it's probably a useful principle for one to get as interested and immersed as possible. If it's really not possible to get immersed - fatigue is a killer - one'd probably do well to go somewhere quieter, politely change the topic or do something else. One gimmick you might find me trying is the classic Sherlock - trying to predict what will be said. It's done miracles in keeping me awake at lectures.