Incantation 3 — Okay, Compared to What?

April 29, 2022

Microcosmographia lxiv: Incantation 3 — Okay, Compared to What?

Microcosmographia is a newsletter thing about honestly trying to understand design and humanity.

This most powerful incantation may be my most important discovery of 2021.

Any judgment you make, especially about yourself or your situation, must be in comparison to something else. Explicit or not, you hold some model to measure against.

Let’s take an easy example up front, from my dear friend and Microcosmographia narrator Jon Bell. I have a tendency to complain about Apple software design and quality, and Jon has a tendency to challenge me in a way that I interpret as, “Okay, compared to what?” Honestly, who is doing a better job than Apple at these jobs? While taking into consideration all the variables needed to deliver such sophisticated products to such a vast, varied audience? Of course, no one is. I was once again comparing against some imaginary ideal in my mind (perhaps against the imaginary ideal of Apple media event keynotes), instead of against anything that has ever existed on this planet. Another way of phrasing it is “what should they have done?” And if you have a better answer than people who have this as their entire job, you could probably have a successful career in the industry! (That’s not meant to be dismissive, it’s meant to be inspiring — come and help us make it better!)

So it’s a helpful way to reconsider complaints you might have about anything — a product, a person, a place, a global geopolitical stae of affairs.

What happens when you apply the question to yourself, and your own life: “Okay, compared to what?” If you’re dissatisfied or ambivalent about something in your life, what life with actual evidence of existing would be preferable? It can be invigorating to march down a list of possible answers, starting with the most unrealistically lofty.

• Some imaginary ideal — This should be immediately rejected. It doesn’t make any sense to compare yourself to people in made-up stories, any more than it does to compare actual products to the claims of media event keynotes.
• Celebrity — Of course, anyone you know only through their fame and brand are hardly real people any more than imaginary characters are. There is a real person behind the artificial one, but you don’t see them. It’s healthy to recognize that even the most genuine-seeming celebrities, who seem almost like friends, are still creating a character, an image, to admire and enjoy. You love that character. They love that character. You both contain an image of that character and what makes it valuable inside of you. It’s fun and enriching for everyone, but it’s not a real person to compare against.
• The prominent and notorious — Even people who aren’t celebrities per se, but are known in your school, your industry, or your social circles, are just smaller versions of the same phenomenon as celebrities. Maybe some of them genuinely have stories and attributes to admire and to learn from. But after considering those you can march right on.
• People you know — This may be the most reasonable step, assuming that these are people you know reasonably closely and whose experiences are relatable to your own. If you seriously consider whatever difference there might be between you and them, you should realize that at the largest scale, almost everything about your experiences is nearly identical to theirs. Any seemingly dramatic difference is actually at the margins of an almost completely overlapping Venn diagram. If that doesn’t seem true, continue on to the following steps about the really contrasting comparisons.
• Your past self — You’re more mature, more experienced, wiser, and generally more you than you have ever been. Even past experiences that you may miss and long for are still contained within who you are now. If there’s anything good in your life now, it is most likely the result of good decisions and hard work; if you don’t believe that, honestly imagine what it would have been like if you’d made bad decisions and been lazy all along the way.
• Any human on earth — If you have the luxury of reading this letter you are probably better off than almost everyone on the planet. Almost anything that bothers you about your life, there’s a much more tragic version of it that you successfully avoided. A situation that you could be in that’s so bad you would give anything to instead have what you really do have now.
• Any human in past eras — If you exist now, you almost certainly have it better than nearly every human who has ever lived. The safety, comfort, knowledge, opportunity for connection and belonging, and range of pleasurable and meaningful experiences furnished to you is unthinkable even for the most vaunted emperor of a few centuries ago, let alone anyone of the prior 200 millennia of our species.
• Any pre–homo sapiens — Our weird species is precisely as intelligent as it needs to be to create the sort of civilization that unlocks all of this. One notch less intelligent and we couldn’t do it. One notch more intelligent may come artificially, but not via normal evolution. Even being able to perceive, recognize, and appreciate most anything that matters to anyone is a tremendous privilege that only came to us recently, and that we only barely acquired.
• Any less-conscious creature — The previous comparison gets even starker when you consider that nearly all living things that have existed, or could exist, are drastically less conscious than you.
• An absence of consciousness — Some of the most effective meditation sessions I’ve had have been ones that focus on the idea of all subjective experience as occurring in a pure, boundless field of consciousness. Sort of like how in quantum field theory, “particles” are actually excitations of various fields corresponding to the elementary particles. Compared to a completely still field of consciousness, with nothing occurring, what a blessing it is to have any subjective experience at all.

That last one, the first time I successfully held it in my mind and took it seriously, led me to an experience I am pretty comfortable labeling 見性 kenshō — the zen concept commonly translated as “recognizing one’s original nature”. At the most basic level, you’re made of perturbations in a pure field of consciousness. “Consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.” Getting to the point where you can really believe that, even just for a moment, and then compare it to everything you get to experience, regardless of its positive or negative valence, comes with a dang boundless sense of gratitude and love. This sure does make it easier to remain patient for the crucial five extra seconds you need while interacting with a four-year-old who needs to brush his teeth, or to part ways with a video game collection you’ve spent twenty years accumulating. And even to at least survive in the face of greater challenges than those.

Thank You and Be Well

This one took a while but I think I am in a bit of a writing golden age, thanks to a mutually creativity-nurturing friendship with Jon Bell. These letters are fodder for the Anatomy, which you can read; and I’m also making unprecedented progress on the Labyrinth, my complementary fiction writing project, which you can’t. I’ve even written a non-zero number of poems of late.