Self-help for cocoons

and what's on my mind

This is the fifth part in a series. But it can be read on its own.

1. First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us

2. Scraping training data for your mind

3. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to you

4. Look for people who likes the illegible you of today, not your past achievements (Writing as communion)

5. Self-help for cocoons ← you are here

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I find it useful to think of myself not as an individual but as an individual + a social context. The things I value and pay attention to and do are all influenced by the people, books, blogs, etc, I surround myself with. When I change the composition of that milieu, I change. Often quite abruptly. Things that seemed essential to me when I was in the poetry world (lying awake at night worrying if I had made a mistake using an Aeolic verse form instead of free verse) seemed like a strange dream two weeks after I had left. I have talked about this before: “First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us.”

But in a way, I feel like I didn’t go far enough in that essay. Talking about a social milieu and how it shapes you, makes it sound like the milieu is something separate from you, something that surrounds you. But it is more like an extension of you. Or perhaps you can say that the self and its milieu is a coupled system. At least that is how it feels to me. My friends and my books are a cultural cocoon that I spin around myself. I craft a context within which I live, and that context becomes an extension of my mind, which allows me to think, and live, in ways I couldn’t otherwise; it crafts me.

Sometimes the best way to care for yourself is to extend care to the cocoon. If the cocoon is healthy and vibrant and thriving, the smaller self that lives inside it is usually ok. Just as there is self-help, there should be a self-help for cocoons.

What would that be?

For instance, people, as a rule, feel happier in situations that are rich in social capital. So one way to care about yourself is to create social capital in your milieu. You can reach out to interesting strangers to create weak links and bridging social capital. You can introduce people you know to each other, so that you create denser connections (or you can ask your friends to introduce you to people they think you might like, which, graph theoretically, amounts to the same thing). Since I live on an island in the middle of nowhere and so has a large share of my social life online, deliberately making my social graph denser is important. The internet by default feels atomized, devoid of social capital: when I can talk to my internet friends about friends we have in common, it feels more homely.

Also, anything that makes my friends grow and become more agentic is experienced by me as an invigoration of my context. So caring for the unfolding of my friends, too, feels like a sort of extended self-help.

Often when people talk about how we are influenced by others, they use the much-quoted line, “You are the average of the five people you spend most time with.” The subtext here is that you should look for cooler people and cut the losers from your life. There is truth to this. But it is important to note that curating your milieu isn’t only, or even primarily, about being picky. It is about how you relate to people. It is, after all, not people who make up your milieu, but what they share with you. You might spend time with the most extraordinary people and have a terrible time if you don’t know how to prompt them, and vice versa.

Working at the art gallery has for me been something of a study of this phenomenon. I get to see thousands of people walk into the same space and interact with the same people, and it is wild to see how differently the space and the people feel depending on the guest. Some make it wildly generative, others drag a cloud around them. By changing how you relate to people (becoming a better listener, asking questions that you are genuinely curious about, making people feel safe, and so on) you improve your social context, and, directly and indirectly, yourself.

What would authenticity mean when applied to cocoons? If your interiority is closely intertwined with your social context, it follows that there is no authentic core to your being. John Psmith phrases this more strongly: we should be suspicious about the things the voices in our heart tell us that we want, because what we want “might not really be what we want, but rather what something else wants through us.” This conclusion, which I agree makes sense, is jarring for me since I live by the idea that you should lean into your curiosity and “unfold yourself.” For, what are you unfolding? What your context prompts in you.

Trying to square this last point with my felt sense of an inner source of authenticity, I come to this: being authentic isn’t about introspection, purely, but a complex dance with your context. You move through the world and interact with aspects of it. Each encounter reveals something about you, and you use those insights to shift your milieu. So you milieu is changing as you learn, and you are being changed by the milieu in a coevolutionary loop. Authenticity isn’t a truth about your core. It is a state induced by a specific context. How do you recognize an authentic state? A good sign is when your context prompts you to do things that surprise you in a delightful way.

Personal update

People often think of mushrooms as those capped things that pop up from the ground—but those are just the fruiting bodies of a much larger, and stranger organism, that lives underground, spanning sometimes an entire forest, with microscopic thread-like filaments (hyphae) forming decentralized networks, merging with the roots of trees through mycorrhizae. This is not only a metaphor for the phenomena I talked about in the essay above, it is also a metaphor for the essays themselves.

What arrives in your inbox is just the fruiting bodies—about 5 to 10 percent of what I write. The rest is research notes and journals and long email conversations with various people that help me think and so on. I thought it might be a bit interesting to show a sort of compressed glance into that underworld. So here’s what I’m thinking about right now. If you have any ideas or inputs on these topics, I’d love to hear from you.

I just finished reading Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes biography, as well as Keynes's “Essays in Biography.” They were both great, and there are several threads from those books that I think about right now. One, in particular, is about The Apostles, the secret student organization that Keynes was “born” into as an undergraduate student at Cambridge, a deeply formative experience for him and many many other exceptional thinkers—among them, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Tennyson, and, to a lesser degree, Wittgenstein.

It is clear from their biographies that this experience altered their lives, remade their values, made them harder working, and so on. How did that happen? Are there any recurring patterns in groups that have this effect? How do they find and cultivate talent?

Thinking about this topic, I went back and reread Grothendieck’s account of being part of the Bourbaki circle, which Johanna and I have written about here. Bourbaki shares many characteristics with the Apostles. It produced exceptional talent, it was made up of 12 active members, and so on. Here are some printscreened quotes from Armand Burel about his experiences in Bourbaki:

I’m not sure what, if anything, I will do with this research. Perhaps I’ll do a smaller piece about these types of very intense and structured groups that forge talent, or I’ll do a broader piece looking at different types of groups and friendships that have been instrumental in the shaping and enabling of exceptional talent. See this tweet + reply for suggestions of other groups that have had similar effects.

Another thing I’m thinking about, and might or might not write about, is depictions of healthy and transformational love stories in fiction. These are hard to find! I wrote some notes about why last year. But in the interim, I’ve had many people send me examples, and Tyler Cowen also helped me by asking his readers for suggestions—so now I have a ton, and I have been reading, and rereading, a few of the novels mentioned to see if I have anything interesting to say about it. One thing I hadn’t realized when asking the question was how much it would reveal about the diversity of people’s philosophies of love. Agnes Callard, for instance, recommended Mating by Norman Rush. I see what she means, and it is a book that in many circles is a sort of romantic ideal, and it is way better than most—still, it made me realize that my idea of love is not that. My favorite depiction of love, by the way, is the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I’m only half joking. It is the first example in the history of literature of people changing by talking to each other, and there is something so profound about Sanchos commitment to the Don’s inner world, even at times when he doesn’t understand it, and the way they both grow through their banter.

I’m also casually interviewing various people who are involved with building frontier AI models or researching AI safety, to get a sense of what, if anything, they have changed about how they live in reaction to their projections of where we are going.

So, as you see, there are a lot of threads being pulled. Most of this will never congeal into anything interesting enough to warrant me sitting down for 20 hours to type an essay. Or it will be another year before they do. But that is ok with me: I’m not in the content business. My goal is not to put out words at strict cadance but to think. Though let me know if you liked getting a look behind the scenes and would want more of that. Also: don’t hesitate to reach out if you are thinking about any of the topics above! Or, anything else you think I might be interested in or have something interesting to say about.

What are you thinking about?

It is March 6. I’m sitting by the fire which hasn’t caught fire fully yet because I got lost in writing and forgot to tend it. My hands are cold. Now, I’ll go out and cut and burn the bramble that is spreading along the edge of our farm.

I hope you are all fine.

Warmly
Henrik