Video Games, Systems, Consequences and the Afterlife

I'm a fan of video games. I think that the world will get better as we build more effective simulators to teach systems dynamics that include the behavior of nations at war, ecosystems, financial and labor markets, popularity, and the change in social norms. Different dynamics are tough to understand as prose or equations; sometimes the patterns become easier to see when they play out in video simulations that let us see causality that simulates centuries within an hour. I don't think that we've really understood how powerful this potential technology is for teaching systems dynamics that so define our world.

There is one lesson that these video games gloss over, though. And it may be the most important lesson of all.

What we enjoy or suffer today rarely has anything to do with today.

Mark Zuckerberg made $1.5 billion today. I'm not even sure he went into the office today. He may have stayed home with a cold or may have had a really important strategic meeting. I don't know what he did today but I guarantee you that it does not explain his gain in wealth today. That is the consequence of things he did years ago.

Probably 99.9% of what we enjoy or suffer from today is the consequence of something done in the past. Little of it even done by us. Today my portfolio is up. It is the result of investments and sacrifices I made in the past, but that's the least of it. It's also the result of the Dutch who came over to New Amsterdam and recreated the stock market they'd first established in Amsterdam. It's the result of countless employees and entrepreneurs who have created equity out of thin air. It's the result of laws that protect private property. And so on.

That lesson that evolutionary biologists and religious teachers would both teach you is that causality does not stop at death. There is an afterlife. The lives of people in the future will be diminished or enhanced based on what you do in your lifetime. I suppose it is a kind of evil to believe that your life has no consequence and a sort of good to believe that it does.

If you are looking for cause and effect that can be experienced within a day or even a year, it is easy to get discouraged. Little of consequence plays out that rapidly and if you are measuring the impact of yesterday or last month's efforts on today, you'll conclude that there's not much that can be done. But the stories that inspire are those of the immigrant mom who worked two jobs to get her kids through college. There is generational causality and it doesn't end with her grandkids. One of the reasons I love history is that it explains so much of what defines today. We are the product of decisions made centuries earlier.

The community you live in is the product of the despair or hope of past generations, their action or inaction, their creativity or conformity. One definition of foolishness might be to believe that nothing we do has any consequence; one definition of wisdom might be to believe that what we do has consequences for generations. (Even if that consequence is to have made no difference because even not making a difference makes a difference.)

Finally, I leave you these words of advice from one of my favorite people.

The Buddhists have a good piece of advice: “Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” It is this serious playfulness, a combination of concern and humility, that makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. One does not need to win to feel content; helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of the consequences. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Where Economic and Psychological Progress are at Odds (a partial explanation of how obviously bad policies can make for good politics)

Trump listens to his gut. While he may not be self-made man, his facts are, and he shows a disinterest in sustained thinking or nuanced thoughts.

His reliance on instinct and disdain for theory has taken him past what we know of how economies work to what he feels about how individuals feel about psychology of work. Freud could better explain Trump's economic policies than could Keynes.

Over the last couple of centuries, the economy has obviously made us more prosperous. Our prosperity from our work has increased more obviously than our contentment, though. What has obviously worked economically has less obviously worked psychologically. This is partly because of division of labor.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the book that was arguably the first to define capitalism, opens with the account of division of labor as a force that had multiplied productivity.

THE greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour … seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. ,,,, To take an example ... the trade of the pin-maker. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands ... Each person... might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day …

By Smith’s calculation, division of labor bumped up productivity somewhere between 240 to 4,800 times. As Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, for the first time since the ancient Greeks, productivity began to rise in the West.

If anything, this process has accelerated and deepened. This month I'm working with a client's product development team intent on rolling out a next generation computer chip that can be used in self-driving cars. The team involved in planning includes a couple of folks from Scotland, a couple from India, one from Malaysia, a couple from China and one from Austin, TX. The team working on project tasks includes an even larger swath of countries. 

We don’t just divide labor to focus on different tasks within a factory. We now divide labor across continents.

But this comes with a price. What makes us more affluent makes it more difficult to be engaged. Division of labor makes it harder for employees to see – or experience – how their tasks feed into finished products. And when a product is dependent on the efforts of so many people, it becomes harder to feel as though your own efforts make a difference.

Obviously gales of creative destruction that obsolete jobs, companies and even whole industries are the most visible element fueling the support for Trump’s promise of a national economy that won’t lose jobs to overseas competition. I suspect, though, that this curious alienation that comes from the steady division of labor that has started with pins and extended to transistors so small that their state can be changed by subatomic particles (true story), is a big part of why we don’t feel more certain of the gains that have come through this process that has made us part of a global economy.

Trump's protectionist policies will stymie this force for progress. His economic policies are awful. To me, the fact that policies which reverse the increased specialization and global trade take us backwards is hardly worth arguing. (Although I have argued it here.) The bigger question is why Trump's anti-trade policies won so many converts. I think the answer is, in part, psychological. Progress has made us more affluent; it has also made it harder for us to be engaged in our work.

Csizkzentmihalyi reported on a studies of where people find flow. People doing more traditional work like farming are more likely to find flow - or engagement - work. People doing more modern work are more likely to find flow in leisure. Tasks that we can see the whole of - building a cabinet or sheering sheep or cooking a meal - are tasks that are easier to find flow in than tasks that are merely some small part of a larger process. 

What does this mean? Economic progress is at odds with psychological well being. As our work becomes more specialized and we're more productive, we run the risk of becoming less engaged in our work and less happy. 

I do think there is a fix for this and it goes back to Csikszentmihayli's work on flow. For the last 100 years - well, at least the last 50 years or so -  we've focused on the quality of the product, what we experience as consumers. At its current peak of evolution, this focus on what customers experience with your product is called UX, or user experience. It's a big deal and rightfully so. It's a big part of how we've made the post-Adam Smith rise in productivity translate into more happiness as a consumer. What's next? We focus on our work as producers. We can create video games that engage and delight; we can also design work - just as we design products - to engage and delight.

I won't pretend that the only problem with globalization is that specialization can lead to stronger feelings of alienation than more traditional work. I will say, though, that as we become better at designing work to engage us when we are wearing our producer hat, jobs and work will become less a matter of angst and anger than it has in recent decades and will make it easier to sustain support for a process that has not only made us more affluent than our ancestors but more affluent than they could even imagine.

Flow as the Compass for Social Invention

We’ve now reached a curious and potentially powerful point in history in which our social reality will be less defined by any one dominant institution or certain traditions than the act of intentionally engaging in social invention. It will, however, be social invention to a particular end.

A lot of our practices are about imitating. This is the opposite of inventing. We don’t call it imitating. We say that we’re studying principles of organizations and looking to apply what is proven or successful. But we’re imitating.
The problem with this and the practice of it is perhaps seen most readily in our approach to work within organizations.

In his book, Good Business, Csikszentmihalyi quotes Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto. He makes a critical point about how individuals are fit into organizations.

“The notion of job implies that there’s been some supreme architect who designed this system so that a lot of parts fit together and produce whatever the desired input is. No one in a job can see the whole. When we ask you to join us, we are saying, ‘Do you have the skills and the willingness to shape yourself in this way so that you will fit into this big machine? Because somebody did this job before you, somebody who was different from you. Someone will do it after you. Those parts of you that aren’t relevant to that job, please just forget about. Those shortcomings that you have that really don’t enable you to fill this job, please at least try to fake, so that we can all have the impression that you’re doing this job.’”

“It’s a Procrustean concept, and it studiously and systematically avoids using the most valuable part of you, the part of you that makes you different from other people, that makes you uniquely you. If we want to be a great institution, that’s where we ought to be looking. We ought to be saying, “What can you bring to this that’s going to help?” Not, ‘Here’s the job, just do it.’”

What does Shapiro mean by “a Procrustean concept?” Procrustes was a figure in Greek mythology who forced travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies when they were too short or cutting off their legs when they were too long. It is probably true that the vast majority of employees are both stretched to the limits of their capacity in some aspects of their job and literally cut off from real and crucial parts of their self in others. In either case, fitting into a job in such a way does little to realize their own potential or, by extension, the potential of the organization.

In fact, such programming of one’s actions is antithetical to what any society would hope to see emerge: genius. “One admires genius because one has the imagination to see that there is no mechanism in him or his work, nothing that can be analyzed and rationalized, ” Barzun writes. Again, imitation is the opposite of creativity, a way to suppress genius.

And yet tailoring even a job to the individual is something we rarely do. We prod students, congregants in church, employees, and citizens into a particular way of being. We are focused on what is “best” without regard for what is unique.
But what if the purpose of social inventions like church, school, and business was to provide a forum for the individual to realize his potential and not simply realize the vision of some leader?

In this world, the guide to progress will be rooted in the psychology of engagement, in what makes us most happy.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has spent decades studying what makes people most engaged. He has called the state of engagement “Flow” and has found that it is in this state that people are most happy, most creative and from which people are most likely to emerge more able and developed. In short, the path of flow – found in challenges that stretch us beyond those in which we feel in control (much less bored) and less than those that make us feel anxious (much less overwhelmed) – is the path to self development. It is by following the path of flow that we find our own unique path and realize our potential.

If you can imagine a world in which learning and work follow the path of flow for the individual, you can begin to imagine a world in which social invention is necessary – where work and learning are as dynamic as a video game that raises the challenge as the gamer gets more skilled. This world is not chaotic, but it certainly is not static or generic.

And such a world is congruent with the basic theme of progress since about 1300: increased autonomy. We have increasingly given the individual more options and more freedom on how to construct his own life.

Accomplishing this will require massive amounts of information that is custom to the individual. That is, this kind of world could only sit atop an information age. There are a great number of obstacles to creating such a world but the major obstacle at this point in history is simply awareness: very few people are aware it is possible or even that is desirable. It’s time we ended this. Pass the word along. It’s time we stopped settling for somebody else’s life and created the context for our own.

Love, Meaning & Flow

Bernard didn’t even pause to sip his coffee. “You thought it was a crisis of meaning," he told me as I was sitting down, not even wasting his breath on a simple Hello. "You think you can approach things philosophically. It isn’t a crisis of meaning and you can’t just approaching things philosophically.”

I was in a foul mood and had not wanted to meet Bernard. I responded with a serious tone, “It isn’t? What are you babbling about, Bernard?”

“You think this is a crisis of meaning. It isn’t. It’s a failure of love, not philosophy. You can’t approach everything philosophically.”

“Sometimes love seems so overrated.”

“That is such a condescending way to put things. Do you really think so lightly of love?”

“No,” I said, feeling like maybe I did but not wanting to admit it. “I mean, human beings need something more than just affection. Life has to have some kind of meaning for people. Even puppies can love.”

“Ha! You think that meaning is just about meaning? Meaning doesn’t stand alone. In fact, meaning itself is not a thing - it is just a web, a way to connect things.”

“Bernard, could you be more convoluted today?” I asked, seriously ready to just walk away and noticing for the first time that Bernard could be classified as an old fart.

“You want a happy life? You want to feel better than you do right now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then first thing, accept some coaching. You either change feedback or it changes you. I’m trying to give you feedback.”

“I’m all ears.”

"Your ears are kind of big. And you know what? Ears keep growing – right up to the time you’re my age."

“Great,” I tried not to smile. His stupid humor was kind of cheering me up, which I found annoying in my present mood.

“Use your ears. Shush.
“First of all, you want happy, you learn from Csikszentmihalyi. You find flow, or engagement in events. You lose yourself in tasks. Good. But if the happiness from flow is going to last, these tasks have to have some meaning."

“That’s what I said,” I retorted, a little miffed that he was trying to advise me with my own advice.

“Lesson one: this is not about you, so just listen.”

“Got it,” I said churlishly.

“Sometimes you think you do. Got it. And just remember, anytime you start feeling confident, it just shows how little attention you are paying. But what is meaning?”

“I can talk now?”

“Yes. I asked you a question. What is meaning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Now you are talking sense.
"You look up the meaning of a word and what do you find? Other words. The meaning of words is just more words, which at some level makes no sense – at some level, meaning seems meaningless. It's just a web of connections. But when you read the other words, you learn what the word means. Meaning comes out of the interaction of one word with other words. Meaning comes out of relationships. This is just like life.”

“Life is meaningless?”

“No, you twit. Life has meaning when one life connects to other lives. So, if you want happy, you need two things: flow or engagement in the moment or in tasks; and a sense of meaning, a sense that your activities, your own life, connects to other people, to something bigger.”

Why are you telling me this? I told Life Hiker this a few weeks ago.”

“Sure, but if all you have is these pieces, they eventually collapse. You missed the most important and final piece of the happy puzzle."

“I did?”

“You did. And I don’t know why these things surprise you. You’ve missed more than this, but this is important. If you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t feel for anyone, it sucks all the meaning out of your life. Flow is unsustainble without meaning; meaning is unsustainable without love. You can't stay engaged in meaningless tasks and you can't sustain meaning without love.”

“So, all this to say that we need love? What is this, Bernard, you’re writing for Hallmark now?”

“You have no idea how stupid you look in the very moment you are feeling so smart,” Bernard told me, looking disgustedly at me.

“But you don’t just wander around passing out love like advertising brochures. Love has to be earned and sometimes people you are supposed to love are so far from lovable. What about when you just don’t feel like loving them?”

“’Don’t really feel like love,’” Bernard mocked me. “You think that people need to be worthy of love?”

“Well sometimes they’re so petty or jealous or full of contempt…” I trailed off.

“Because of that, they don’t deserve to be loved?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling like sticking it to him.

“Well, you are right,” Bernard said, surprising me. “They don’t.”

“So you agree with me?”

“No one deserves to be loved, really. I mean, not if you get technical about it.”

“My point!” I exalted. “So, when love fails we become philosophical.”

Bernard snorted. “Could you be more dense?” he stared at me. “Have you not heard a thing? Philosophy depends on meaning and meaning is all meaningless if the connections you make are to people you don’t love. You don't love because deserve to be loved. You love because it gives your life meaning. No philosophy can save you from a failure to love.”

“So we love to find meaning?”

“Well, yeah. That and it simply feels so much better to love than not love."

I paused a long time, letting my ugly feeling slowly drain from me. “So, love is better than philosophy?” I asked.

“Love is a philosophy, you twit.” And at last, his coffee now cold, Bernard took a sip.

The Power of Love & Trascendance - an excerpt from Csikszentmihalyi's Evolving Self

One of the men who most influenced my perspective on the modern world is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I'm still amazed that Csikszentmihalyi's book The Evolving Self isn't continually cited. It gets my vote as the most overlooked and underappreciated books of our time.

Central to his thesis is the notion that a fully developed self comes from two often competing needs: the movements towards greater complexity and integration of that complexity into harmony, bringing those disparate elements into a whole self. Complexity results from pursuit of what makes us individuals, and he calls a person joyfully invested in complex goals a transcender. What follows is an excerpt of Evolving Self, using the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy as an example.

WHAT TRANSCENDERS ARE LIKE
There are many individuals whose actions demonstrate what a life dedicated to complexity could be like. But they cannot be reduced to a type, for there cannot be a single path to reaching personal harmony. Because differentiation is one-half of a complex consciousness, each person must follow his or her own bent, find ways to realize his or her unique individuality. And because we are born with a different combination of temperamental strengths and weaknesses, and with different gifts, and grow up in different family contexts, communities, and historical periods, each of us displays a characteristic pattern of potentials. Therefore, there is no such thing as a typical transcender, nor a best way to achieve complexity.

[Csikszentmihalyi gives an account of the early life of Faludy, a Jew who ended up imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp. He lived through this, migrated to the US, but returned to socialist Hungary. Again, he was imprisoned by an authoritarian government, somehow surviving this ordeal in a Stalinist-era prison from which few survived.]

Yet it was precisely in this dreadful environment, where inmates were whipped to labor from dawn to dusk, with slops to eat and rags to wear, that Faludy's muse really started to sing. His prison verses are among the most lyrical ever written in that genre. They deal with the most realistic and painful aspects of life in a concentration camp: hunger, frostbite, and brutality of ignorant and frightened men. Yet these clinical accounts of entropy are narrated so concisely and elegantly that their tragic content is transformed into a thing of beauty.

In fact, this was precisely Faludy's intent. In order to maintain his own sanity, and that of his fellow prisoners, he tried to give meaning to an otherwise intolerable existence. In one of his last poems before being released Faludy wrote:

What was the best thing I learned?
That after need
left my ravaged body
love did not leave.
Susy [his wife] became a light, silvery mist; shimmering always
before my eyes
even when shut
in pain, in gnawing hunger, as senses left,
love stayed,
love, the eternal fire, burning without harming,
not born of scalding desire,
no dreg of glands,
no juice of sex organs,
Dante, not Boccaccio,
Apollo, not the world of the dead.

Let Ziggy Freud go soak his head.

In the extremity of a life-threatening situation, the former rebel sought sustenance from the most hopeful aspects of the past, from the most meaningful memes of his civilization - and from the love for his wife. Perhaps one of the most touching aspects of Faludy's oeuvre is that originally it was not written down, for the simple reason that pencil and paper were not available in the camp. At first Faludy memorized each of his poems. Then, to avoid losing them through death or forgetfulness, he had fellow prisoners learn them by heart as well. In one case, toward the end of his captivity, he composed a long elegy for his wife, and each part of it was memorized by different inmates. Some of these prisoners were freed before Faludy, and went to visit his wife, to bring news of her husband and to recite the part of the poem they had memorized. At the end of the recitation they would typically announce: "That's all I learned. But in a few days Jim Egri should be released, and he will come and tell you the next twenty verses."

When Faludy was finally allowed to return to civilization, and then escaped once more to the West during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he published his prison verses, relying on his memory aided by various mnemonic devices. (For instance, he had made certain that the first poem he composed began with the letter "A," the second with "B," and so on.) Soon after, he started to receive letters from all over the world, from Brazil to New Zealand, containing corrections to his poems. They were written by former inmates, now scattered across the globe, who had committed to memory the harmoniously transformed accounts of their deadly experiences. Most of these corrections were incorporated into later editions of Faludy's work.

Faludy's life serves as such a valuable example for two complementary reasons: In the first place, it is so idiosyncratic in its specifics as to be obviously inapplicable to the lives of most people. How many of us have such a gift for language, have suffered so much persecution, and triumphed over so many obstacles? Yet despite - or rather, because of - its uniqueness, Faludy's story is typical of those individuals who have been able to fulfill the potential complexity of their selves. He is certainly not a saint, but he may not qualify as a Confucian sage or a Bodhisattva, either. But he learned to find flow in complexity; he learned to transform entropy into memes that create order in the consciousness of those who attend to them, and so because of him the world is a little more harmonious than it would have been otherwise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, 1993, pp. 208 - 213.

Flow & The Pursuit of Happiness

My daughter recently wrote a paper for her humanities class, a paper about Freud, Kafka, and Happiness. This seemed to me rather like writing a paper on Stephen Hawking and athletic prowess. But as I tried to explain what little I knew of Freud and modern psychology, it made me aware that my favorite psychologist may actually be my favorite philosopher.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi popularized the notion of flow - the mental absorption that both makes us the happiest and the most productive. I've found this notion immensely helpful and still see his ideas as a starting point for making daily life happy.

Freud argued that much of our behavior is motivated by subconscious desires that we little understand. For him, sublimination of the sex drive explains the desire to paint, play guitar, or write poetry.

Skinner argued that we do things for hope of reward, or to avoid pain. By controlling rewards and punishment, we can control behavior, this behaviorist argued. Sadly, his philosophy of human behavior is still the most influential in the definition of businesses and schools.

Freud and Skinner's explanations of motivation seem so clumsy, like Rube Goldberg devices. It's hard to believe that Freud and Skinner are completely wrong. Motivations are complex. But these explanations seem more convoluted than complete.

Csikszentmihalyi observed that people engaged in tasks as varied as painting, rock climbing, novel reading, chess playing, and motorcycle riding didn't seem to be subverting sexual impulses into more socially acceptable behavior. Nor did the painters, for instance, seem motivated by the prospect of rewards: by a particular point in their career most had lost illusions about finding fame and fortune. Rather, he learned that the absorption in the task was, itself, the motivation.

We seem to be happiest when we lose self consciousness and are so absorbed in a task that we lose track of time. Additionally, this full engagement in an act that requires our complete attention generally leaves us more able, better equipped to face the next challenge. Flow is a path to development and improvement.

So, what makes Csikszentmihalyi a philosopher? The implications of his psychology suggest a different society. Rather than teach children to learn only as a means to rewards, we would coach children on how to find flow, how to find meaning. That is, we'd coach them in becoming absorbed in tasks that make a difference, that gives the tasks (and by extension their lives) meaning. Rather than focus on outside control - doing what leaders reward - we'd focus on internal control - doing what brings us flow.

This suggests a very different society, a place where the locus of control is with the individual and not outside of the individual in leaders or institutions who control or influence behavior.

Centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness. The notion that individual happiness might be a valid basis for governance was a revolutionary idea. Csikszentmihalyi has done as much as anyone to help us to better understand happiness. I find it fascinating that fully realizing this happiness ultimately rests on creating a society where the individual is the locus of control over the individual life. As it turns out, happiness and liberty really are intertwined. How we pursue happiness is our philosophy put into action. Offer a new psychology and you have effectively offered a new philosophy.