Happy Monday morning. If that sentence sounds oxymoronic to you, then you might enjoy this edition. It’s coming to you late due to a combination of overeating stuffing and potatoes and forgetting my computer on a little family trip. So this edition is short and to-the-point.
We are living in a remarkable age of human history. Yet we spend most of our lives thinking about the future and our plans for it. Readings like these can help us keep a little more of the big picture in perspective.
Read widely. Read wisely. Happy Monday.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. The Funnel of Human Experience
LessWrong (7 min)
Summary
The author plots human population over time and argues it is also a graph of total human experience. Because of the population explosion, more total human experience is happening now than ever before. As the author surmises, “It turns out that if you add up all these years, 50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now.”
Below are a few of the implications the author details. The article lists several others and offers reflections on how we teach history and how we spend our time.
Selection
If you want to expand on this, you can start doing some Fermi estimates. We as a species have spent…
- 1,650,000,000,000 total “human experience years”
- See my dataset linked at the bottom of this post.
- 7,450,000,000 human years spent having sex
- Humans spend 0.45% of our lives having sex. 0.45% * [total human experience years] = 7E9 years
- 52,000,000,000 years spent drinking coffee
- 500 billion cups of coffee drunk this year x 15 minutes to drink each cup x 100 years* = 5E10 years
- *Coffee consumption has likely been much higher recently than historically, but it does have a long history. I’m estimating about a hundred years of current consumption for total global consumption ever.
- 500 billion cups of coffee drunk this year x 15 minutes to drink each cup x 100 years* = 5E10 years
- FLI reports that 90% of PhDs that have ever lived are alive right now. That means most of all scientific thought is happening in parallel rather than sequentially.
2. We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment
New York Times – Opinion (8 min)
Summary
“What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation.”
Selection
“The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.
“When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.”
3. The Missing Key to Productivity Is Reflection
Jocelyn Glei (9 min)
Summary
We tend to define productivity as “executing tasks,” and, therefore, subconsciously think of “reflection” as a waste of time. But the author argues that reflecting on your performance is one of the best ways to improve it. Therefore reflection is one of the most productive ways you could spend your time. Maybe that’s not practical for a Monday morning, when you are replying to the emails manic people sent you over the holiday. But by this afternoon, you might be ready for a different kind of productivity.
Selection
It turns out that once you’ve accumulated enough experience, reflecting on that experience to “articulate and codify” what you’ve learned is the most powerful way to improve your performance in the future. There are two reasons why this is true:
1. On an emotional level, reflection increases your self-efficacy, which is essentially your belief in your capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to achieve certain goals. When we reflect on our past performance and identify what is positive (and negative) about it, we are giving ourselves feedback that makes us feel more confident, capable, and certain of our ability to complete future tasks. And, as a result, we do perform better on future tasks.
2. On a cognitive level, reflection increases your understanding of the task. Think of Albert Einstein’s saying, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” By reflecting on past experience and performance, we refine our knowledge of exactly how we achieved what we did—deepening our understanding the causal relationship between our actions and the outcomes.
Postscript
This weekend over breakfast, my daughter asked my wife and I, “In your age, did they have waffles?” That is an amusing and humbling way to start a morning. First, she thought we might be old enough that waffles hadn’t yet been invented when we were kids. Second, she thought there was a big enough gap between her and us that we had our on “age.” Awesome. Jess, my wife, had an interesting response. She explained that when we were growing up (by the way I still feel like I’m growing up), things were pretty much the same as they are now except we didn’t have cell phones and computers didn’t really have the internet. I’m sure if we thought about it more, we’d come up with a long list of other differences. In fact, BuzzFeed’s business model at some level is based on writing articles like “17 Things You’ll Only Understand If You Grew Up in the 80s.” But our daughter doesn’t have the attention span for 17 things, so on a practical level, I think Jess’s two differences are a pretty good summary…
I have this phrase that I sometimes over-employ: “Life is now.” I use it as a reminder that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to me, so I better make the most of the present moment. I use it when I catch myself dwelling too much on what I hope for or fear about the future. I also use it as something of an emotional snapshot, when I want to capture the feeling of a moment I’m really enjoying.
The second article helped me understand a little more about why I even feel like I need the phrase. We aren’t built to live in the moment. As humans, we can envision the future, and we are aware of the reality of death, so we constantly think forward, anticipating ways to keep ourselves safe, while trying to distract ourselves from the reality of our own mortality. The default mode of my mind is to live in future anticipation, so to be present and appreciate the current moment is often an act of the will and my conscious effort.
It is even more of an effort to productively think about the past. Yet I couldn’t agree more with Glei’s thesis in that third article. When I worked at Bridgewater, Ray Dalio used to say “Pain + Reflection = Progress.” I think there is a lot of truth to that. But I also have read that any sort of practiced activity + reflection will create progress. Unfortunately, I often skip the second part of the equation.
Too often my life is a blur of moving from one activity to the next without reflection. I like juggling things, often more things than I can manage, which means I rarely feel like I have time to just sit by the fire and think about how things are going and what it all means. I will confess that part of the reason I write The Weekend Reader is to force myself to have a weekly time of reflection. In a sense, you are my accountability partner to ensure I am living an examined life, and not rushing through it without reflection. So, thank you.
We are living in a remarkable moment of human history. According to the thesis of the first article, 15% of all human experience through history has been experienced by people who are alive right now. So in a very real sense, life is NOW. The questions I have are: do people who are alive today have 15% of all cumulative human wisdom? Do we have 15% of all of history’s joy? As we binge-watching the “golden age” of television and lay in bed mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, what will our 15% of human experience amount to?
Read widely. Read wisely.
– Max
