Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

Giacometti’s studio

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Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
—John Stuart Mill

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.¹ Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

• When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.

  • A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.

  • A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).

  • An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader's mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.

• The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context.

  • To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

• The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

• If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.

• It is a feedback loop between you and the context. By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design. Your design ends up smarter than you.

• The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.²

  • Applying to university, I looked in the catalog and thought, Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to be a diplomat! I spent half a year applying to the political science program and going through all sorts of schlepp. Then, after 18 months, I realized I didn’t like it at all. It had been a vision. I panicked, dropped out—and then came up with a new vision.³

• Instead of trying to force a vision, here is how you can lean into unfolding.

  • You observe the context (when applying to university, trying to figure out what my career should be, this would have meant, among other things, observing what kind of tasks I liked doing again and again and again; what kind of people I want to surround myself with; how the job market looks; and what I am interested in).

  • You form a mental model of the context (a guess about what kind of work I should do).

  • Then you use that guess to decide how to take your next small step in the context (“Maybe I should email someone who does the kind of work I’m considering and ask them what it is like?” “Maybe I should do a small project in your spare time?” “Maybe trial and error is a waste of time right now, and I would do better by figuring out who is the best at doing this, and study them?”).

  • Acting like this produces new information, and you update your understanding.

  • Repeat from the top.

• Having spelled this out, I can see several ways to get better at unfolding. Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.

• Here are some questions to ask.

  • Can I increase the amount of information I get from the context?

    • Are you looking for a partner? Talk to people who are happily married and ask them what they did. Run experiments. Are you unsure about having a kid? Ask if you can babysit your cousin's kid.

  • My preconceptions are a filter that reduces the amount of information I get from the context. How can I filter less?

    • A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status? Maybe you would have more time to write if you took a high-paying job, consulting part-time, instead of funding your writing by selling pieces to magazines? 

    • By unbundling things, by seeing through the abstractions, you get more information. You can use this information to unfold in more fluid ways—which to less perceptive people will look incomprehensible, like you are walking through walls, or like you are cheating. This is the hacker mindset.⁴

    • It will be easier if you can overcome your social fear of looking stupid or incomprehensible. Wanting to be understood by others, or not wanting to contradict ourselves and our established identity—these are major blockers to unfolding.

    • Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else. Venkatesh Rao has a good description of this mindset.⁵ 

  • Can I increase the speed and precision with which I act on the context?

    • A painter does not want technique to get between them and the canvas. The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback. By increasing the speed at which you can act on the context, trying new things will become cheaper for you—and so you will take more risks, and extract more information from the context. Write faster, prototype faster, ask for feedback faster. Velocity is underrated. It sounds crass and careless—speeding up. But it doesn’t have to be. When I improve my listening skills, for example, I increase the velocity at which I can get to the heart of what my wife is thinking about. Dropping the cost of mutual understanding means that the kinds of conversations that we would previously only have had if we had the whole day off—now we can do that over lunch. This is lovely. Not everything can be sped up like this (a shared history can’t, nor virtue), but where it is possible, speed lets you learn and unfold to a deeper level.

• If you cycle through this feedback loop ferociously for ten years, you will end up with a well-designed life. It will not look like you imagined it would. It will have unfolded around you, and you will struggle to wrap your head around how you ended up where you did.

• You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don’t have to remember. The form does.

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This ended up being a dense post. Let me know if there is any particular part you’d like me to unpack. There will—I think—be a few follow ups. (Also, the footnotes on this one is about as long as the post itself, so keep scrolling if you want more.)

As always, a big thank you to the paying subscribers who fund my work. I wouldn’t have been able to keep going for so long without you. If you want to support Escaping Flatland, I am not yet fully funded (ie I can’t afford to write as much and as ambitiously as I want):

Another way to help out is to share the essays with people you think will find them valuable—in your group chat at work, on social media, by printing it out and mailing it to your grandfather, etc. Do not underestimate this. It is how almost all of you ended up here.

Finally, I’d like to say a special thanks to Spencer Kier who helped me figure out what to do with this piece. And, as usual, the best ideas were Johanna’s.

Warmly
Henrik

1. The most complete treatment of the idea of unfolding is in book 2 of The Nature of Order. An easier way into the topic is Ryan Singer’s video summary of Alexander’s work.

2. By this, I do not mean that you can’t have long term goals. A goal is a tool that can create coherence in your life, and make the things you do add up to something bigger. My goal is to write a few good essays. The problem is when a goal becomes more than a direction, when you start to visualize the specific design you want to end up with. You want to hold long term goals loosely so that you can easily course correct when the context gives you new information.

Further, when I say that you should be vary of  visions I do not mean that you should never take a leap to a new context (move to a new city, start a new career). What I say is that if you do, you want to make contact with the new context as soon as possible, preferably in a small, low cost way (go to the new city for a week, talk to someone who has the career you are considering switching into, doing a small weekend project). 

For example, in 2020, Johanna and I left Sweden for Denmark. We had reached an impasse where we could not proceed by rearranging our lives piece by piece and hope that we would get the outcome we wanted—because we wanted to homeschool our daughter, Maud, and that is illegal in the context where we lived, in Sweden. We needed to take a leap. But this leaps sprang from unfolding in our context. Deciding to homeschool was the result of years of reading and thinking and working in schools. And when we had ruled out that there was a path to what we wanted in Sweden, we spent two years traveling to four countries to talk to people who homeschooled or ran democratic schools. We mapped the context. Then we found this island—it fit. We traveled here twice. Then we rented an apartment for nine months. And eventually, we bought a farm.

Having lived here for four years now, we’ve seen a lot of other homeschooling families who come here in a non-unfolding way. They come here with a romantic vision of island life and homeschooling. But they haven’t explored the financial and emotional strains involved in homeschooling, and they haven’t thought about what it means to live on an island far from everything—yet the first thing they do is to buy a house. The house is in the wrong part of the island. It is moldy. After a year, they run away to some other island hoping that will be better, or they divorce, or they burn out. Don’t try this at home. There are ways of unfolding big leaps.

3. This wasn’t all my fault. The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions. Even if you are clever enough to unfold in your spare time, that is of little use, because you can’t finetune and adjust your education anyway. This is one of the reasons we homeschool our daughters.

4. Gwern, from “On Seeing Through and Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset”:

In each case, the fundamental principle is that the hacker asks: “here I have a system W, which pretends to be made out of a few Xs⁠; however, it is really made out of many Y, which form an entirely different system, Z; I will now proceed to ignore the X and understand how Z works, so I may use the Y to thereby change W however I like”.

[...]

In speed running (particularly TASes), a video game pretends to be made out of things like ‘walls’ and ‘speed limits’ and ‘levels which must be completed in a particular order’, but it’s really again just made out of bits and memory locations, and messing with them in particular ways, such as deliberately overloading the RAM ⁠to cause ⁠memory allocation errors, can give you infinite ‘velocity’ or shift you into ⁠alternate coordinate systems in the true physics⁠, allowing enormous movements in the supposed map, giving shortcuts to the ‘end’⁠ of the game.

[...]

In robbing a hotel room, people see ‘doors’ and ‘locks’ and ‘walls’, but really, they are just made out of atoms arranged in a particular order, and you can move some atoms around more easily than others, and instead of going through a ‘door’ you can just cut a hole in the wall⁠⁠ (or ceiling) and obtain access to a space. At Los Alamos, Richard Feynman⁠, among other tactics, obtained classified papers by reaching in underneath drawers⁠ & ignoring the locks entirely.

[...]

These sorts of things can seem magical (‘how‽’), shocking (‘but—but—but that’s cheating!’ the scrub says), or hilarious (in the ‘violation of expectations⁠ followed by ⁠understanding⁠’ theory of humor) because the abstract system W & our verbalizations are so familiar and useful that we quickly get trapped in our dreams of abstractions, and forget that it is merely a map and not the territory, while inevitably the map has made gross simplifications and it fails to document various paths from one point to another point which we don’t want to exist.

5. Venkatesh Rao, from “Don’t surround yourself with smart people”:

[. . .] a domain-specific ability to see reality in unsentimental ways, and act on reality in appropriate ways.

Appropriate needs some qualification. I don’t mean socially appropriate, technically appropriate or somebody else’s idea of what’s appropriate in a given situation. I mean in the sense of the zen idea of the ripples in a pond in response to a tossed stone being appropriate.

The stone-in-the-pond metaphor describes behaviors that are neither under-reactions, nor over-reactions, nor irrelevant or superfluous in relation to the situation. The pond is your mind and the ripples are your subjective experience of what you’re doing. The ripples are completely determined in a physics sense, but paradoxically, are completely free in a subjective sense. You suffer no anxiety due to dissonance between expectations and reality. There are three principal components to this non-dissonance:

• Knowledge: In part this sense of freedom is due to knowledge: you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold. If you fire somebody, they’re going to be upset, and if you know that ahead of time, you can be all pond-like about it. Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.

• Detachment:  Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.

• Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack. Yeah, the tooth is about to get painfully pulled. Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.