Tag Archives: perspective

Hindsight is 10/20

When we look back at things in our past, we really don’t see things 20/20. There is no perfect memory, no perfect reflection on things long past. We don’t have 20/20 hindsight vision, it’s more like 10/20.

You remember that amazing moment that you cherish? …You probably don’t remember the struggle to get you there.

You remember that infuriating exchange with someone? …You probably don’t remember the insight you gained, or how you changed your behavior for the better afterwards.

We recall special memories, (hopefully far more good ones than bad ones)… the stories we tell and retell with nostalgia, held up as if they are 100% true. Perfect reflections of what actually happened. But each of these memories are tempered with emotions that require our memories to fit the story we want to tell.

Our we making them up? Yes and no. No we aren’t fabricating them with an intent to misconstrue what actually happened. But yes, we are making them up because we are only choosing to tell the part of the story that fits the narrative.

Hindsight is far from perfect. It’s just us highlighting the parts of our lives that give us meaning and purpose. If it was 20/20 we wouldn’t hold on to the memories the way we do. We need to cloud our vision of past events to make them worth keeping.

Time warp

It’s hard to believe that we are at the end of the school year. As I reflect back the year seems to be a blur.

The older I get the greater time warps. Looking forward, future events can seem so far away, then looking back the same amount of time can seem like it was just yesterday. A week to wait for something can seem like forever, yet a month can fly by… even if that month included a week that felt like forever.

I often wonder if our brains get affected by our age, not just from a metabolic standpoint but from our perspective. To a 10 year old 5 years is half of a lifetime. To a 50 year old it’s just 10%. So now that I’m in my late 50’s, a year can fly by as a somewhat insignificant amount of time.

It just reminds me to appreciate each day. To find in each day a moment worth remembering, with reflecting on. Or at least a moment worth enjoying. Take away these moments and the days, weeks, and even years slip by… almost unnoticed.

We live in time warps, where the perception of time fluctuates. If we don’t want time to disappear on us, it’s up to us to spend time wisely, and meaningfully.

We need to create moments, not seize them, but rather savour them, find joy in them, and cherish them.

Undefined

I do not think I’m unique. I don’t believe this is a flex. I’m sure we all have it. We all have that undefined part of us. The part others don’t see. The part that we hide not because we are being candid or elusive. No. It’s not that. It’s… unexplainable. Undefined.

It’s the ‘I’ that only I know. It keeps me grounded, yet it also makes me uneasy. It keeps me centered, yet can also make me a feel a little unbalanced. It boosts my confidence, yet can cripple me with doubt. Undefined.

I know it’s there, but I can’t see it, can’t illuminate it, and yet it is ever-present. It can feed bravery as much as cowardice. It can protect me, and also make me feel vulnerable. It has its own voice, a voice that’s within, yet doesn’t feel like mine. It offers alternative perspectives I didn’t know I had, has questions I should know the answer to, but don’t. Undefined.

It’s not a schizophrenic voice, it’s uniquely mine, but not of one mind. An undefined perspective, an undefinable perspective which I know serves me more than hinders me. I know it’s at the core who I can be without inhibitions, without restraint. Powerful, thoughtful, full of potential… and yet somehow undefined.

Sphere of control

Do you ever think about the things that consume your thoughts and how much control you have over those things? What are the things that concern you that you can change versus those that you cannot change? And how does that compare to the time spent on these different things?

There’s a difference between living in anxiety and stress versus living a life you design for yourself. Spending time thinking about, and worrying about things beyond your control is anxiety building and stressful. On the other hand, although you might still feel stressed about making good choices and doing the right thing when you have the ability to control the outcome, this is far more empowering. Worrying about what you cannot change is playing victim to circumstance. Whereas, strategizing about doing well with the things you can change is designing your own circumstances.

Sure, there is still room for doubt. Yes, you might make mistakes. It’s possible to worry too much about things you do have control over… but in all these cases the opportunity is there to alter your own destiny. Meanwhile the person perseverating about things they have no control over is punishing themselves with worry and anxiety with no potential for positive outcome.

What’s within your sphere of control? That’s the healthy place to focus your attention.

Truth and bias

I was listening to Chris Williamson on a podcast and he said this quote.

“People think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

~ First attributed to William Fitzjames Oldham

This reminds me of another often quoted phrase, regarding there being three sides to every argument, the one side, the other side, and somewhere in the middle is the Truth.

I had a phone discussion with a friend recently and we were discussing politics. We saw the topic from two totally different perspectives. I then had face-to-face discussion with another friend about a global issues and again we came from completely different perspectives. In both cases neither of us changed each other’s minds.

In one case I want to be wrong, in the other case I wish that I was wrong, and that my bias, ultimately my prejudice, could be changed. In both cases I recognize that getting new information really didn’t change my view… even though I might be happier and see things more positively if the other person was right.

Am I just a symptom of the times? Am I a victim of misinformation, who is choosing to believe perspectives that are intentionally biased? Am I not able to see the truth somewhere in the middle because I lack perspective, or am I blind to my own prejudice?

It’s getting harder and harder to find narratives that are clearly true. Arguments tend not to be about seeking truth but rather earning airtime, and garnering clicks & shares. The math is such that a false accusation will get millions of social media likes and reshares, but the correction barely gets seen. A fake video gets major attention. A blatant exaggeration or even a lie is simply accepted as close enough to true and accepted.

It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t lead us to the Truth, ‘somewhere in the middle’. No, instead we are left rearranging our prejudices and biases, and sticking to our points of view without ever really thinking.

Our eyes deceive us

Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. We’ve all heard the term, “Your eyes deceive you,” and the reality is that there’s a lot more to this saying than we think… because our eyes are always deceiving us.

We don’t see the same range of colours as other species of animals. We don’t see bands of light such as infra red. We have a blind spot that our minds fill in. We see a version of the world around us, and while it’s a fairly accurate perception of the world, it’s still only a rendering of what’s there.

So there are many things that we are unaware of. Things that happen too fast for us to fully see. Even our frame rate for seeing things affects what we see as and interpret. We don’t see a hummingbird’s wings in flight. Do hummingbirds?

We can’t see as far as a hawk. Nor are we as aware of movement in our peripheral vision as hawks. Birds wouldn’t be very good flying hunters if they only had the eyes of a human.

On top of our eyes naturally deceiving us, our mood and disposition further skews what we see. We see half of a glass of water and some consider it half empty while others see it as half full. Different observers can see two people conversing and can feel curiosity, jealousy, or even no interest in the conversation. Each of these perspectives alters the meaning behind what we’ve observed, and ultimately colours the experience for us… changes what we think we see.

I find it an interesting thing to think about. Our visual impression of the world is just that, an impression. It’s a form of deception. We have a specific lens of the world that is not true as much as it is interpreted. And, it is interpreted based on a reasonable facsimile of the world, not a true view of reality.

We are observers with imperfect observation tools, which while deceiving us also gives us a good enough grasp of reality that we can share our experiences… and others find what we experience to be congruent enough with us that we walk around believing we see the world as it is. But really we don’t. We are constantly being deceived by the limitations of our eyes. And for the most part we believe that the world we see is the world that actually exists, not just our limited but effective interpretation.

A Moment in Time

In a way, we are all time travellers. None of us experience time in the same way. We can be engaged in the same activity but for one of us time flies by and for another time seems to slow down. Have you ever been in the company of someone having way more or less fun than you? Do you think your perspectives of time were the same?

What’s the difference between time well spent and time poorly wasted? What is the experience of time for someone bored versus someone excited? What’s the experience of time for someone with a severe tooth ache waiting for a root canal versus someone terrifyingly waiting in line for a scary roller coaster ride?

Ask a 90 year old where the time has gone and compare that to a school-aged child wishing they were older and more independent.

Are we spending our time well or wasting it away? Ask a person at the end of a shift, a person at the end of a holiday, and a person at the end of a life. No answer will be the same.

Are we experiencing time or are we just letting time lapse? Either way we distort time, we alter how we perceive it, we quite literally time travel. We don’t just travel through time, and we don’t just live in the present. We worry about the past, and fret about the future. We also let the past hold us back, and let fear of the future restrict us. Or inversely we let the past inspire us, and the possibilities of the future motivate us.

We are constantly time traveling, so much so that we can’t really define the present, for we are so seldom actually living in the moment. For ever single person this moment in time is a completely different experience of time.

We are all time travellers experiencing time in our own unique way.

Purpose, meaning, and intelligent robots

Yesterday I wrote Civilization and Evolution, and said, “We have built ‘advanced’ cages and put ourselves in zoos that are nothing like the environment we are supposed to live in.”

I’m now thinking about how AI is going to change this? When most jobs are done by robots, who are more efficient and cost effective than humans, what happens to the workforce? What happens to work? What do we do with ourselves when work isn’t the thing we do for most of our adult lives?

If intelligent robots can do most of the work that humans have been doing, then what will humans do? Where will people find their purpose? How will we construct meaning in our day? What will our new ‘even-more-advanced’ cages look like?

Will we be designing better zoos for ourselves or will we set ourselves free?

Civilization and Evolution

Evolution is a slow process. Small changes over thousand and millions of years. I’m not thinking about bacteria becoming antibiotic resistant or moths changing colour over time to match their environment. I’m thinking about modern humans (Homo sapiens) who emerged approximately 300,000 years ago. Sure, certain traits like lactose tolerance evolved approximately 5,000–10,000 years in some populations, but for the most part we are a heck of a lot like our ancestors 100,000 years ago. Taller due to better nutrition, but otherwise pretty much the same.

And when we think about civilization as we know it, we are really talking about the last 2,500-3,000 years… and yet we are the same humans who lived as nomads and hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before that. In other words we have not evolved to live in the societies we currently live in.

We didn’t evolve to live mostly indoors, away from nature, and out of sunlight for most of our day. We didn’t evolve to use artificial light at night before going to bed at hours well past dark. We don’t evolve to do shift work, or to sit at a desk all day.

We didn’t evolve to work for made up currencies so that we could go to buildings where we buy food that is over-processed, over-sweetened, and filled with empty calories. We didn’t evolve to spend time in front of screens that distract and overstimulate us.

We are simple but very intelligent animals who have not evolved much at all since we lived in small communities where we knew everyone, and knew what to fear, and how to protect ourselves from dangers.

Yet we now live surrounded by people we don’t know, and we are triggered by stresses that we evolutionarily were not designed for. Everything from being in constant debt, to working in stressful environments, to information overload, to time pressures, social comparison, choice overload, conflicting ideologies, environmental noises and hazards, and social disconnection.

We live in a state of overstimulation, stress, and distraction that we have not evolved to cope with. Then we identify diagnoses to tell us how we are broken, how we don’t fit in, and why we struggle. Maybe it’s the societies we have built that are broken? Maybe we evolutionarily do not belong in the social, technological, and societal structures we’ve created?

Maybe, just maybe, we are trying to live our best lives in an environment we were not designed for. Our modern civilizations are not well equipped to meet the needs of our primitive evolution… We have built ‘advanced’ cages and put ourselves in zoos that are nothing like the environment we are supposed to live in. And we don’t realize that all the things we think are broken about us are actually things that are broken about this fake environment we’ve trapped ourselves in.

And so we spend hours exercising, moving around weights that don’t need to be moved, meditating to empty our minds and seek presence and peace. We spend hours playing or cheering on sports teams so that we can have camaraderie with a small community. We spend thousands of dollars on camping equipment so that we can commune with nature. And some people take drugs or alcohol to escape the zoos and cages that we feel trapped in.

Maybe we’ve built our civilizations in ways that have not meaningfully considered our evolutionary needs.

Reflections of China

Living in China for two years, from 2009-2011, I was surprised by how market-driven the economy was. I was surprised by the brightness of the cities at night. And I was surprised by the focus on growth and development.

The running joke was that the national bird of China was the building crane. I remember being downtown in Dalian, a ‘small city of 6 million’, (as the city was described to me), the first time I heard this national bird joke. From where I stood, looking to the sky I counted 11 building cranes. The construction of new buildings seemed to be everywhere. The Superintendent of schools that I worked with lived in a very nice neighbourhood near the ocean. Her high rise apartment building had less than 25% occupancy, and yet there were 6 or 7 other high rises being built near her building.

And everywhere you turned downtown, there were shops, underground markets, and in the narrow side streets pop-up markets with items on sale. Go to the fancy mall and buy a $3,000 original name brand bag, or go to the underground markets and get a similar in quality knockoff for $200, or go to the pop-up market and get a similar but much cheaper, lower quality bag for $25.

I should note that when I say ‘underground markets’ I am not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about entire shopping malls under the city. Floors of sub-terrain buildings under the buildings. These underground markets are often the only place you can find grocery stores. First floor stores are too real estate rich for a grocery store, so these are always one floor down.

Public transit was cheap and efficient. Restaurants were affordable too. Starbucks cost as much or more than here in Canada, but in China you always have to pay well for Western comforts and amenities. The desire for status is as strong there as anywhere in the world.

When I was hired it was by the outgoing superintendent, who had the job for 17 years. I remember him sharing a story with me on my first visit the June before moving there. We were being driven from the city to the suburb of Jinshitan where the big high school was located. We were driving through Kaifaqu, and he told me, “When I started here 17 years ago the road here was a pothole filled dirt road through a tiny village, and now it’s a city of 1 million people.” Imagine moving from a village to a high rise filled city in 17 years. I would not have believed it was possible anywhere else, but having lived there I know it’s possible in China.

Until recently, most people didn’t have a sense of the scale and the development of China. But in recent weeks there has been a flood of information on social media that has made it possible for people to see what life in China is like. And the reality is that while there is poverty there, it’s probably much worse in North America. While the middle class is different, the economic reality for a middle class in China is probably better than the debt-ridden middle class in the west. And the infrastructure and cost of transportation is incredibly less in China than almost anywhere else in the world, with faster and more efficient travel.

Add to this the most sophisticated electronics and manufacturing industry anywhere in the world and China is an international powerhouse that will shock most people who have illusions of China being a developing country. I can say that even 15 years ago it was farther ahead than people imagined, and in China 15 years of advancement is equivalent to 50 in most other countries. It will be the dominant economic force in the world if it isn’t already.