I love this design pattern. However, I should point out that societies only function because everyone has been deeply conditioned to believe that chalk lines are solid walls. In fact, this conditioning is intimately connected to our sense of self, and perhaps even our definitions of "good" vs "evil".
At some level, training people to "see through fake walls" is a profoundly subversive (perhaps even spiritual!) practice, and should be undertaken with caution...
I'd have to think about that for a long time, but my feeling is that this really really depends on how you approach this, and how you think about ethics and so on. I don't think acting creatively from a place of high integrity is, on average, corrosive. Being power-grabbing and agentic and unconstrained by ethics, on the other hand: we've all seen what ppl like that are capable of when they walk through walls.
Interesting post, but I think the idea of (paraphrasing) "figure out exactly how much X you need, so you can optimize your life to get it" is just...not how most people work. There's a range of X's, some of which are sufficient in some contexts, some of which are insufficient in some contexts etc. Obviously you know your friend better than me, so perhaps your description of what he wants (write music and perform live) is complete, but to me it seems like it's a distillation that removes a lot of the meaningful part of doing those things.
Perhaps it's just me, but when I do this kind of exercise, thinking about, concretely "ok, what is the atomic unit of enjoyment I want to have" it kind of robs everything of the actual enjoyment I get out of it. This happens to me often when looking at my (vast, mostly unfinished and unplayed) library of steam games. What would be most fun? What will cause me the most joy? It feels like trying to talk myself into something I don't really endorse. I either want to play a game even before looking, in which case I need no justification for myself as to why it would be fun, or I don't want to play one particularly, in which case they all seem the same.
There's not a perfect amount of game playing then, that I want to optimize for, because it's so volatile, and so contingent on my circumstances. Rather, what I want is the freedom to play games when it strikes me, and a life wherein the decision is not just allowed, but satisfying, fulfilling in some integral way. In other words - and I think this is what your solution seems to be missing - I want my actions to be consistent with the story I tell about my life. It is this story that I care about, really, not the actions themselves.
All this is to say, I think you are maybe misidentifying the nature of the constraints in a fundamental way. At least, that's how I would feel in (my imagined version of) your friend's situation. The constraint is not "I have to be in the Music Industry™" but "music has to feel like a meaningful part of my life." The variable that is sensitive to change here is not "time spent music" but "feeling of life satisfaction". Two people could have the exact same perfectly optimized routine, but one think "wow, despite all these challenges I make time for music" and the other think "I only get to spend this miniscule fraction of my life making music".
In that sense then, not wanting to pursue music at all costs, feeling trapped in a certain conception of music, is not just about being unwilling to optimize for what you want, but about not feeling like you are getting some other fundamental aspect of a fulfilling life in those lives - dignity, fairness, justice, grace, perhaps. That would be what I communicate to my friend - my empathy for their struggle, and their fundamental dignity as a person, the tragic beauty in creating art in a cruel world, the nobility of a life devoted to art at any cost.
All that being said, I'm just a random person looking at a bare sliver of your private friendship, so please do not take what I've said as casting aspersions on you, your friend, or your mutual friendship. Just my two-cents on optimizing
Love you interspersing where you are in the field or patting the horses while talking with your friend (I assume on the phone)
Part of the reason I follow you Henrik is because you are giving an example of a non-default path and help me lift my eyes off the worn standard path and see all the little deer paths darting into the bushes.
I also like Craig Mod for this reason. Elevating creating art and investing in meaningful time with your family instead of just chasing money or climbing up along a conventional life path.
This part of the footnote really drove things home: "And here I come, saying, “Maybe you should change your schedule slightly so you can jam two more hours every week?” My experience is that small improvements like this compound."
I feel like when I’ve discussed this I usually call it life as multidimensional chess. Like, growing up was like playing a game of chess, with rigorous rules that did not suit me at all. It felt depressing and insecure, being poor at the game I was supposed to be playing. Slowly I learned to make ‘illegal’ moves, like moving a rook diagonally. For example; quitting a great job that didn’t feel right, with no alternative lined up. Only to find that I could make good money as a freelancer and have more free time to spend taking care of friends and family. Then increasing those moves and discovering that pieces can be moved outside of the board, like 3D chess, over time the number of degrees of freedom seems to increase further with no end in sight.
If you're referring to my comment in footnote 1 I just want to clarify that when I say identity is his problem I don't mean that he wants social status, or at least not in the way that most people think of that term. I mean his conception of himself and what success should look like *are* the chalk walls. Now I don't know if that's what's actually happening with him, but that is the hypothesis I'm trying to get at.
To harp on the chalk walls analogy, it sounds like you're asking him to step outside the chalk walls, or at least realize that he can redraw his existing ones (contradict, expand, or redefine his identity). What he probably wants is a new set of predrawn chalk walls he can step into (a different "acceptable" identity), which I suspect is what the big change thing is about.
I've always felt 'domain-less'. I can't feel life in cinema as a filmmaker would or food/culinary arts as a chef would. I certainly don't find joy in "jamming" like a musician could. I just don't think there is an activity I can perform constantly that brings me fulfillment. But I do wonder if identifying one's constraints can itself become the solution space of their design process - essentially playing from one meta-level above.
I'm about to graduate from college and I've spent the past 6-8 years building what I think is a 'floor' or safety net - college plans, financial literacy, dual enrollment - all for the sake of freedom and time to explore. I think it bought me a lot of time and space to wander and try new things, but now I find myself in a position where the freedom I've created feels both liberating and disorienting.Maybe I might be treating 'having a clear domain' as a constraint that doesn't actually exist. Is embracing the design process itself as my domain - becoming skilled at identifying real constraints, relaxing false ones, and navigating by intuition when necessary - "real"? How would one even define this?
Maybe I don't need to fit within existing domains? Maybe it's recognizing that the ability to move between them and see chalk lines where others see walls is my strength? I'm a big fan of Virgil Abloh for this reason. It's pretty interesting from a bodily sense too. Feels like much of my "work" these days is entering into the somatic realm. A ton of depatterning.
I don't know if everyone has a zone like that. For me it was a gradual honing in. I began by drawing -> animated films -> films -> liked writing scripts more, mostly because it was easier and faster. A separate track was playing music -> getting bored that doing live shows was so hard -> started to just read the lyrics as poetry and that was much easier and faster and gave me more joy/hour -> then all of that converged on, maybe I should just write. So it was this gradual exposing myself to new things and listening to my body, what I liked, what irritated me, until I honed in on a practice that, so far, feels endless.
Dr. Skeptismo over here is curious about his theories of causality, but they're honest questions: did Jacob go thru a ~western k-12 system? and how affluentish are/were they in their 20s/30s?
i feel like i observe this sort of a pattern left and right (and in myself!), and often near the root causes is a belief about scarcity of resources (yes, money) and what is allowed to be done about that.
Nice writing, Henrik. I especially appreciate the pragmatic, concrete approach you espouse. I listen and watch closely, knowing that you have used this approach successfully. You have earned my respect.
I also wonder how many people have reached out to you privately and asked for a consultation as a result of this post? It would seem to me that a great many creatives who are prone to dreaming and becoming trapped by imaginary constraints would benefit greatly from your practical wisdom.
I sincerely appreciate this article. I have read it three times. Cheers.
I am grateful that you publish in English (although you might write in Swedish). The problem of how to create an income seems daunting when your best skills are not valued in the marketplace or if the field is flooded by other people who have the same skills. This piece has helped me--I have sympathy for your friend.
Good essay, thank you for sharing. I think it'd be interesting to consider that the desires to be signed to a label and put out an album might also be basic, irreducible desires, because they are constitutive of the desire to be a musician.
Nice essay. In life I often solve a problem when I want to help a loved one, but they don't want it. Similar: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
I feel that a lot of the times, we hesitate because we are too timid. We do have an idea of what to do but what if it’s too weird, too crazy? What would others think?
This lack of courage in our own ideas is frustrating and I believe it could lead to this sort of lack of focus.
What do you think about people’s lack of guts to just do what they want to do? Even if it’s a little on the crazy side. As most interesting things are.
> he doesn’t want to compound in an open-ended way; he wants to crack the problem. He wants to figure out, in one grand moment, what he should do to make the problem go away. Sometimes, he talks about maybe inventing something and then living off the income from that.
This hits so hard, because it's the frame of mind from which I operated, but also because I see this manifest in so many people I'm close to and like your conversation with your musician friend, I feel this belief is at the core of their identity. They want to "make the problem go away" or "crack it." Some examples:
1. My friend betting all his savings on his next feature film and hoping this one makes it big, instead of improving his craft through smaller projects that get him inbound leads.
2. My cousin who hates her corporate job and wants to bake more but can't imagine "baking two hours more per week." She visualizes upending her whole life to become a national online bakery products manufacturer before giving up the dream as it's too big.
3. So many investors sinking money by looking for the next 100-bagger stock instead of realizing the power of compounding over time. I co-founded the Market Sentiment newsletter. Most of our writing is just focused on finding interesting ways to say that "compounding slowly with an index fund is the most practical solution for most people". Yet the articles that perform the best are the ones that explore novel and wild ideas.
4. People postponing their passions for retirement and then having no clue where to start when retirement age hits (so they just keep working to avoid that existential emptiness).
It's crucial to understand the constraints that really matter. Like you said elsewhere, the intersection in the Venn diagram that meets all your demands might not exist.
> Take a close look at what you assume the solution to your life must look like. Are there any of those assumptions that you could turn into variables instead?
> But the point is: you have to loosen some constraints to give yourself a chance at solving the key problems: they are hard enough in themselves.
At the risk of sounds exactly like the friend you are criticizing in this essay – I find this type of advice to be so passé to the point that it makes me angry for one particular central reason: it never seems to want to account for the real, significant, painful, and irreversible costs that one might have to incur by relaxing constraints.
These are not abstract costs that one imagines for oneself like crossing the 'invisible chalk lines', but the fact that real people in real life – people who are supposed to love you and support you – will actively make you feel ashamed for 'not respecting chalk enough'; even after you show to them how that the way you are walking still lies within the values that you both share.
In the past year, I have started eating meat (primarily for health reasons) after a lifetime of being vegetation on religious grounds. Since I still care deeply about fulfilling the religious ethics of non-violence I was raised with; I've made painstaking effort of sourcing animal products from family farms that treat and slaughter their animals with great care. This has the added benefit of being environmentally friendly, as it doesn't contribute to the horrific practices and carbon footprint of factory farms.
Most of my relatives (with the exception of my parents, and even then, I can tell they disapprove deeply in their bones), and most of my co-religious friends growing up, have nevertheless become extremely comfortable labeling me as an unethical piece of sh*t who should hide this part of 'who I've become' in public.
I have similar stories in about nine to seventeen other areas: being exiled from a friend group of guys because I pursue monogamy as a gay man (which they believe that is intolerable and based a foundation of internalized bigotry); being barred from participating in a sports league that I enjoyed because the captain found out I work for a right-wing organization (which he only found out through internet stalking me); being blacklisted from a large recruiting network by an old contact because I wrote an essay with clear feedback on poor company practices (which is something he specifically asked me to produce while we were both employed there); to out list a few.
A lot these circumstances are not just things that 'happened several years' ago and that I have to learn to get over with time. They are still happening today with consequences that I have to bear alone for trying to actualize what I believe has value by doing the very thing you promote: taking small steps in unexpected ways.
I am taking time to write this out is because I imagine that for every one person who reads this essay and finds inspiration, there are another nine people who feel exactly the same as me, but they will never end up commenting on your post because they feel ashamed enough as it, without having to also face the alienation and deep grief that comes with stepping outside of the box and having a permanent, irreversible target put on your back because of it.
> If you don’t relax some constraints, you might discover that there is no viable life in the Venn diagram of assumptions you have about yourself and the world.
→ "But when you do relax them, you find that even if you have a shot at solving the problems, you become a fugitive from everything that was supposed to keep you cherished and secure, and those close to you eagerly relish in blaming for you for bringing that upon yourself."
Maybe instead of just writing about solving one's problems relaxing constraints, you should expand your essay to include a section on how to do so without losing the respect, connection, and belonging of those who are supposed to be your friends and family: but when push comes to shove they (and everyone else in the world) prove repeatedly that the only way to keep those things is to stay inside the lines.
I love this design pattern. However, I should point out that societies only function because everyone has been deeply conditioned to believe that chalk lines are solid walls. In fact, this conditioning is intimately connected to our sense of self, and perhaps even our definitions of "good" vs "evil".
At some level, training people to "see through fake walls" is a profoundly subversive (perhaps even spiritual!) practice, and should be undertaken with caution...
I'd have to think about that for a long time, but my feeling is that this really really depends on how you approach this, and how you think about ethics and so on. I don't think acting creatively from a place of high integrity is, on average, corrosive. Being power-grabbing and agentic and unconstrained by ethics, on the other hand: we've all seen what ppl like that are capable of when they walk through walls.
Interesting post, but I think the idea of (paraphrasing) "figure out exactly how much X you need, so you can optimize your life to get it" is just...not how most people work. There's a range of X's, some of which are sufficient in some contexts, some of which are insufficient in some contexts etc. Obviously you know your friend better than me, so perhaps your description of what he wants (write music and perform live) is complete, but to me it seems like it's a distillation that removes a lot of the meaningful part of doing those things.
Perhaps it's just me, but when I do this kind of exercise, thinking about, concretely "ok, what is the atomic unit of enjoyment I want to have" it kind of robs everything of the actual enjoyment I get out of it. This happens to me often when looking at my (vast, mostly unfinished and unplayed) library of steam games. What would be most fun? What will cause me the most joy? It feels like trying to talk myself into something I don't really endorse. I either want to play a game even before looking, in which case I need no justification for myself as to why it would be fun, or I don't want to play one particularly, in which case they all seem the same.
There's not a perfect amount of game playing then, that I want to optimize for, because it's so volatile, and so contingent on my circumstances. Rather, what I want is the freedom to play games when it strikes me, and a life wherein the decision is not just allowed, but satisfying, fulfilling in some integral way. In other words - and I think this is what your solution seems to be missing - I want my actions to be consistent with the story I tell about my life. It is this story that I care about, really, not the actions themselves.
All this is to say, I think you are maybe misidentifying the nature of the constraints in a fundamental way. At least, that's how I would feel in (my imagined version of) your friend's situation. The constraint is not "I have to be in the Music Industry™" but "music has to feel like a meaningful part of my life." The variable that is sensitive to change here is not "time spent music" but "feeling of life satisfaction". Two people could have the exact same perfectly optimized routine, but one think "wow, despite all these challenges I make time for music" and the other think "I only get to spend this miniscule fraction of my life making music".
In that sense then, not wanting to pursue music at all costs, feeling trapped in a certain conception of music, is not just about being unwilling to optimize for what you want, but about not feeling like you are getting some other fundamental aspect of a fulfilling life in those lives - dignity, fairness, justice, grace, perhaps. That would be what I communicate to my friend - my empathy for their struggle, and their fundamental dignity as a person, the tragic beauty in creating art in a cruel world, the nobility of a life devoted to art at any cost.
All that being said, I'm just a random person looking at a bare sliver of your private friendship, so please do not take what I've said as casting aspersions on you, your friend, or your mutual friendship. Just my two-cents on optimizing
Love you interspersing where you are in the field or patting the horses while talking with your friend (I assume on the phone)
Part of the reason I follow you Henrik is because you are giving an example of a non-default path and help me lift my eyes off the worn standard path and see all the little deer paths darting into the bushes.
I also like Craig Mod for this reason. Elevating creating art and investing in meaningful time with your family instead of just chasing money or climbing up along a conventional life path.
Loved this. Thank you for writing.
This part of the footnote really drove things home: "And here I come, saying, “Maybe you should change your schedule slightly so you can jam two more hours every week?” My experience is that small improvements like this compound."
I feel like when I’ve discussed this I usually call it life as multidimensional chess. Like, growing up was like playing a game of chess, with rigorous rules that did not suit me at all. It felt depressing and insecure, being poor at the game I was supposed to be playing. Slowly I learned to make ‘illegal’ moves, like moving a rook diagonally. For example; quitting a great job that didn’t feel right, with no alternative lined up. Only to find that I could make good money as a freelancer and have more free time to spend taking care of friends and family. Then increasing those moves and discovering that pieces can be moved outside of the board, like 3D chess, over time the number of degrees of freedom seems to increase further with no end in sight.
Edited to include an example
If you're referring to my comment in footnote 1 I just want to clarify that when I say identity is his problem I don't mean that he wants social status, or at least not in the way that most people think of that term. I mean his conception of himself and what success should look like *are* the chalk walls. Now I don't know if that's what's actually happening with him, but that is the hypothesis I'm trying to get at.
To harp on the chalk walls analogy, it sounds like you're asking him to step outside the chalk walls, or at least realize that he can redraw his existing ones (contradict, expand, or redefine his identity). What he probably wants is a new set of predrawn chalk walls he can step into (a different "acceptable" identity), which I suspect is what the big change thing is about.
I've always felt 'domain-less'. I can't feel life in cinema as a filmmaker would or food/culinary arts as a chef would. I certainly don't find joy in "jamming" like a musician could. I just don't think there is an activity I can perform constantly that brings me fulfillment. But I do wonder if identifying one's constraints can itself become the solution space of their design process - essentially playing from one meta-level above.
I'm about to graduate from college and I've spent the past 6-8 years building what I think is a 'floor' or safety net - college plans, financial literacy, dual enrollment - all for the sake of freedom and time to explore. I think it bought me a lot of time and space to wander and try new things, but now I find myself in a position where the freedom I've created feels both liberating and disorienting.Maybe I might be treating 'having a clear domain' as a constraint that doesn't actually exist. Is embracing the design process itself as my domain - becoming skilled at identifying real constraints, relaxing false ones, and navigating by intuition when necessary - "real"? How would one even define this?
Maybe I don't need to fit within existing domains? Maybe it's recognizing that the ability to move between them and see chalk lines where others see walls is my strength? I'm a big fan of Virgil Abloh for this reason. It's pretty interesting from a bodily sense too. Feels like much of my "work" these days is entering into the somatic realm. A ton of depatterning.
I don't know if everyone has a zone like that. For me it was a gradual honing in. I began by drawing -> animated films -> films -> liked writing scripts more, mostly because it was easier and faster. A separate track was playing music -> getting bored that doing live shows was so hard -> started to just read the lyrics as poetry and that was much easier and faster and gave me more joy/hour -> then all of that converged on, maybe I should just write. So it was this gradual exposing myself to new things and listening to my body, what I liked, what irritated me, until I honed in on a practice that, so far, feels endless.
endless. i love that
I think this column by Prof Barry Brownstein speaks directly to your footnote https://substack.com/home/post/p-158523764?source=queue
Dr. Skeptismo over here is curious about his theories of causality, but they're honest questions: did Jacob go thru a ~western k-12 system? and how affluentish are/were they in their 20s/30s?
i feel like i observe this sort of a pattern left and right (and in myself!), and often near the root causes is a belief about scarcity of resources (yes, money) and what is allowed to be done about that.
That could be the case yeah. He isn't the most scarcity mindset person I know by far, but more than me.
Nice writing, Henrik. I especially appreciate the pragmatic, concrete approach you espouse. I listen and watch closely, knowing that you have used this approach successfully. You have earned my respect.
I also wonder how many people have reached out to you privately and asked for a consultation as a result of this post? It would seem to me that a great many creatives who are prone to dreaming and becoming trapped by imaginary constraints would benefit greatly from your practical wisdom.
I sincerely appreciate this article. I have read it three times. Cheers.
I am grateful that you publish in English (although you might write in Swedish). The problem of how to create an income seems daunting when your best skills are not valued in the marketplace or if the field is flooded by other people who have the same skills. This piece has helped me--I have sympathy for your friend.
Good essay, thank you for sharing. I think it'd be interesting to consider that the desires to be signed to a label and put out an album might also be basic, irreducible desires, because they are constitutive of the desire to be a musician.
Nice essay. In life I often solve a problem when I want to help a loved one, but they don't want it. Similar: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Great read.
I feel that a lot of the times, we hesitate because we are too timid. We do have an idea of what to do but what if it’s too weird, too crazy? What would others think?
This lack of courage in our own ideas is frustrating and I believe it could lead to this sort of lack of focus.
What do you think about people’s lack of guts to just do what they want to do? Even if it’s a little on the crazy side. As most interesting things are.
This is so good!
> he doesn’t want to compound in an open-ended way; he wants to crack the problem. He wants to figure out, in one grand moment, what he should do to make the problem go away. Sometimes, he talks about maybe inventing something and then living off the income from that.
This hits so hard, because it's the frame of mind from which I operated, but also because I see this manifest in so many people I'm close to and like your conversation with your musician friend, I feel this belief is at the core of their identity. They want to "make the problem go away" or "crack it." Some examples:
1. My friend betting all his savings on his next feature film and hoping this one makes it big, instead of improving his craft through smaller projects that get him inbound leads.
2. My cousin who hates her corporate job and wants to bake more but can't imagine "baking two hours more per week." She visualizes upending her whole life to become a national online bakery products manufacturer before giving up the dream as it's too big.
3. So many investors sinking money by looking for the next 100-bagger stock instead of realizing the power of compounding over time. I co-founded the Market Sentiment newsletter. Most of our writing is just focused on finding interesting ways to say that "compounding slowly with an index fund is the most practical solution for most people". Yet the articles that perform the best are the ones that explore novel and wild ideas.
4. People postponing their passions for retirement and then having no clue where to start when retirement age hits (so they just keep working to avoid that existential emptiness).
It's crucial to understand the constraints that really matter. Like you said elsewhere, the intersection in the Venn diagram that meets all your demands might not exist.
> Take a close look at what you assume the solution to your life must look like. Are there any of those assumptions that you could turn into variables instead?
> But the point is: you have to loosen some constraints to give yourself a chance at solving the key problems: they are hard enough in themselves.
At the risk of sounds exactly like the friend you are criticizing in this essay – I find this type of advice to be so passé to the point that it makes me angry for one particular central reason: it never seems to want to account for the real, significant, painful, and irreversible costs that one might have to incur by relaxing constraints.
These are not abstract costs that one imagines for oneself like crossing the 'invisible chalk lines', but the fact that real people in real life – people who are supposed to love you and support you – will actively make you feel ashamed for 'not respecting chalk enough'; even after you show to them how that the way you are walking still lies within the values that you both share.
In the past year, I have started eating meat (primarily for health reasons) after a lifetime of being vegetation on religious grounds. Since I still care deeply about fulfilling the religious ethics of non-violence I was raised with; I've made painstaking effort of sourcing animal products from family farms that treat and slaughter their animals with great care. This has the added benefit of being environmentally friendly, as it doesn't contribute to the horrific practices and carbon footprint of factory farms.
Most of my relatives (with the exception of my parents, and even then, I can tell they disapprove deeply in their bones), and most of my co-religious friends growing up, have nevertheless become extremely comfortable labeling me as an unethical piece of sh*t who should hide this part of 'who I've become' in public.
I have similar stories in about nine to seventeen other areas: being exiled from a friend group of guys because I pursue monogamy as a gay man (which they believe that is intolerable and based a foundation of internalized bigotry); being barred from participating in a sports league that I enjoyed because the captain found out I work for a right-wing organization (which he only found out through internet stalking me); being blacklisted from a large recruiting network by an old contact because I wrote an essay with clear feedback on poor company practices (which is something he specifically asked me to produce while we were both employed there); to out list a few.
A lot these circumstances are not just things that 'happened several years' ago and that I have to learn to get over with time. They are still happening today with consequences that I have to bear alone for trying to actualize what I believe has value by doing the very thing you promote: taking small steps in unexpected ways.
I am taking time to write this out is because I imagine that for every one person who reads this essay and finds inspiration, there are another nine people who feel exactly the same as me, but they will never end up commenting on your post because they feel ashamed enough as it, without having to also face the alienation and deep grief that comes with stepping outside of the box and having a permanent, irreversible target put on your back because of it.
> If you don’t relax some constraints, you might discover that there is no viable life in the Venn diagram of assumptions you have about yourself and the world.
→ "But when you do relax them, you find that even if you have a shot at solving the problems, you become a fugitive from everything that was supposed to keep you cherished and secure, and those close to you eagerly relish in blaming for you for bringing that upon yourself."
Maybe instead of just writing about solving one's problems relaxing constraints, you should expand your essay to include a section on how to do so without losing the respect, connection, and belonging of those who are supposed to be your friends and family: but when push comes to shove they (and everyone else in the world) prove repeatedly that the only way to keep those things is to stay inside the lines.