Note:
I’m no longer going to publish every Wednesday. Or at least, I might not.
I have spent almost two and a half years now publishing a note every Wednesday. I did this mostly as an exercise in discipline — a way to build the skills necessary to write for an audience. And now I’ve done that, so it’s time to ease off the gas a bit.
Publishing a note every week has become demanding. Especially with everything else I’ve had going on lately.
And most of what I’ve had going on lately has been launching the new version of the Spectra Markets website. Brent, Mollie and I have spent months going over design, copy, features, and content and going back and forth with our developer trying to get this project done. It has been an unrelenting pain in my ass. But it has also been a lot of fun and I’m very excited about it.
By summer, we’ll launch our first course in Spectra School. Feel free to subscribe to our newsletters for more information as it comes.
So… my life has been pretty demanding lately, as has my writing.
You may hear from me on Wednesdays, you may not. I’ll publish when I have something to say.
Now, today’s note.
Sherry Ning asked a question on Twitter: Do people get what they deserve or what they take?
There are two ways to think of this question. One is about positive deserving or taking, and one is about negative deserving or taking.
The negative side means “if you’re getting treated badly, do you deserve it? Or is it just happening because you allow it?” The answer to this one doesn’t require a full essay: sometimes people treat you badly, but you can usually solve that problem by drawing boundaries. You can’t force people to treat you well, but you can certainly tell them to go fuck the dog when they don’t. And that usually solves the problem.
But for the positive side of the question, things are more complicated. The positive side asks, if you want a thing, do you get it by taking it or deserving it?
Well let me say that I don’t think there’s a correct answer to this. Life is messy, and the answer is both. You can get what you want by deserving, and you can get what you want by taking.
Also, this is not just a question of what, but of why or how. It’s a practical question but also a moral question.
There is no cosmic balance making sure that no one can take too much without being punished, or that no one can give too much without being rewarded. There is no divine road-side truck-weighing station where you have to pull over every so often, weighing your load and then settling up for what you’re carrying into the world.
If it were that neat, we wouldn’t have to ask such questions. The answer would be obvious. We’d all just settle up with the government in April the way we do with our taxes, and that would be that.
So, as with just about anything you’ll read in this newsletter, my answer is both. You can’t be a rug, and you can’t be a sociopath. Neither one is good — for you, or for the world.
A note for people-pleasers
Something that we spend too much time doing — even in the US, although I would wager even more so in England for instance — is deliberately going through our days trying not to step on anyone's toes. We avoid, and shy, and people-please ourselves right into irrelevance. We try so hard not to distract, annoy, or create conflict that we end up doing almost none of what we actually want to do and too much of what we don’t.
At least those of us who are people-pleasers. Which, some of the time, includes me.
We don't want to make people feel weird, so we don't say things like “you have fucking awesome teeth.” Even though that’s what we want to say. We don’t look people in the eyes and say “no,” because what if they really wanted such and such example thing? We don't want to make anyone's day inconvenient, so we'll sit at a stop sign for 140 seconds waiting for just the perfect opportunity to go without cutting anyone off. Meanwhile, the people behind us at that stop sign wish we would die. But first they wish we’d go.
If you’re a people-pleaser, you see other humans almost the way a physicist sees particles: they’re endlessly colliding with you, and there isn’t much you can do about it, and there isn’t a satisfying explanation as to why. They just are the way they are, like scientific phenomena, and your job is just to deal with it.
But when you think of yourself, you think of all the ways you need to restrain and constrain yourself to fit better into the world. You, like me, are a square man in a round world. Or woman. Square man in a round woman.
Others are natural phenomena, unstoppable forces, but we are something more — something that must wrestle with itself. Something trying to fix the world by not being a sociopath. By not colliding with others in a way that makes them unhappy.
But the truth is, sometimes you have to be a little bit of a sociopath. Sometimes you have to just do exactly what you want to do, and be the phenomena in other people's lives. If what you do is a little inconvenient, that's their problem. They're adults too — part of their job is to deal with the world as it is. And the world as it is includes you.
I heard a bit of city-navigating wisdom one time: if you're walking towards a stranger and will soon pass them, keep your eyes fixed on where you're going and they will move out of your way. You don't have to do that awkward dance of trying to figure out who's zigging and who's zagging; you signal to the world "I'm going there. Right there." And the world, more times than not, will respond by letting you.
I've tried this. It works. Only a fool or a criminal would deliberately get in the way of someone who knows precisely where he’s going. This is also why criminals have an aversion to people who are strong and carry themselves well. It's not just muscles that make them stay away — it's the fact that when you look at someone who carries himself well, you also assume that he’ll know how to move, fight, or outsmart you. Otherwise why would he carry himself so well?
You can be a good person while also being a wee bit of a sociopath. If you don’t show the world what you want, it’s most likely not going to deliver it to you.
Why we need the word deserve
Over the long term, there is one thing that statisticians, traders, quantum physicists, economists, and psychologists can agree on: the best you can do in this life is the word “tend.” There are no guarantees. You can run a simulation a million times, and some of those times you aren't going to get what you deserve. You can do a million nice things, and you still may end up without a reward for it.
These are the basic unfairnesses of life. No system is perfect and life may not deliver you a return on your investment.
But you can behave in a way that will tend to create the desired outcome. If you stretch that out over numerous decades and numerous areas of life, increasing your surface area for luck and goodness to hit you, you will tend to get most things you want or need. Because most systems tending to work means that some of them will.
Not only does that work, but we need to believe that it works.
Think of the structure of stories. Stories need to have some sort of resolution. The actions in the end of the book have to directly follow from the actions in the middle of the book. Not only that, they have to meaningfully follow from the actions in the middle of the book, in a way that resonates with what humans need to believe. Humans need to believe in redemption; humans need to believe in the word “deserve.” Therefore the ending, to some extent, has to show people getting what they deserve. Whether that’s good or bad. You can’t just throw random endings into the last pages of a book and expect it to resonate with people.
Imagine The Lord of the Rings, but Frodo wasn’t redeemed at the end by Gollum’s final attempt on the Ring. (Gollum attacked him, lost the fight, and fell into the mountain destroying both himself and the Ring.)
But he was redeemed, because he deserved to be. Because he’s the one whose mercy kept Gollum alive up to that point.
Or imagine Frodo stubbed his toe, fell into a swamp, and drowned. And then the One Ring was just there in the swamp, and then the story ended. Tolkien just decided to stop writing.
Well, sometimes life is that random and meaningless and crude. But a book can't be, or it isn't worth reading.
A human bias, and one that shapes our storytelling, is that the end of a story dumps context onto all of the preceding actions and characters and situations. The middle derives its meaning from the end.
What that means for humans is, that's why we believe in karma, and words like “deserve,” in the first place. Because randomness isn't satisfying to us — we want to see causality, always. It’s how we give meaning to our actions. And, although causality doesn’t always rule our lives, it does tend to.
So questions like “do people get what they deserve” are, to us, incredibly meaningful. They make some modes of operating worthwhile and other modes of operating not worthwhile. Some people believe we do get what we deserve, so they do good and then wait patiently. Some people believe we don’t, so they just take what they want.
Deserve things, and then ask for them
Life is random. The universe doesn’t obey human biases and absolutisms, the same way a computer can’t morally justify it’s output to you: it was simply running a program. The output of that program is yours to do with what you will.
Furthermore, life is unfair and people can become CEOs by stomping on others. That happens.
But those people tend not to have too many friends when they end up needing them. They tend to be less prepared to deal with the randomness and unfairness when it’s not in their favor. Long-term, you can do better than stomping and randomness. The Lord of the Rings is like a parable — the point isn’t that it happened, but that it happens. People do in fact tend to reap what they sow across time.
You should deserve the things you want. But… you should also be willing to be a little inconvenient to others if you’re serious about getting them.
Drink some water and be a wee little sociopath.
JDR
“If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.” - George Carlin
The new site looks amazeballs! (my attempt at saying what I really feel). Your posts have made me a better man if in no other way then by the mere fact that I drink more water nowadays. For a while I delved into the psychology of true sociopaths (after an encounter with one), and there were some positive things I picked up from that. Firstly, I learnt that sociopaths pay more attention to others than normal people. They are better listeners and much more attentive to things like body language etc. I also learnt that a lor of us normal people hide our sociopathic tendencies behind moral facades. Think of the football fans who end up hurting each other after a match in support of their team, or a cop who goes too far to catch a criminal. That made me aware of my own tendencies to do this. Another thing I learnt is that sociopaths are more creative in thinking up solutions to problems because they have a wider range of possible actions. I think this is what ties in with your post. There was a story in Kevin Dutton's book 'The Wisdom of Psychopaths' about a landlord who was having trouble evicting a tenant, and Kevin asked some psychopaths what they would do in that scenario. Long story short their solutions seemed more likely to work. I think normal people can benefit from leaning into their sociopathic sides to some extent.
Great post! I look so forward to your posts! I will be sad if they are less frequent. Keep writing. You have a gift!