Our lives are run by paradoxes. Often if you think one thing, it implies that you think another contradictory thing. Or if you observe one law of the universe, there’s another equally valid law that contradicts it.
You realize that a thing works a certain way… but it makes no sense for it to work that way.
For everything you see, think, say, and do, there are not only differing opinions and objections available, but there are paradoxes baked right in. From physics, for instance:
Niels Bohr observed that light acted like both waves and particles. Only one of which could be technically true, although both are true to our senses.
… all the way up to human relationships. For instance:
The best way to operate in a relationship is to give without expecting anything in return. And yet the only reason partnerships exist is to meet the needs of both people. You need to have expectations, and yet you’re not supposed to. It’s like when someone walks into the room with your birthday gifts: you act tickled and surprised, even though you absolutely knew this was coming and would have been disappointed if there were none.
Or Solomon’s Paradox: the pattern you see over and over in life that good advice-givers don’t follow their own advice. Even if someone has the answer to your problem, they have trouble solving that exact same problem in their own life. In my experience, many mental-health professionals have bad mental health and toxic relationships. Because life has a great sense of humor, but also because that’s often why they wanted to practice psychology in the first place.
Or the idea that happiness can only be attained if you’re not looking for it. Happiness is like a cat for people who don’t like cats. The moment you start doing something else, there she is, ready for your attention. You turn your head, make eye contact, and pet her, and suddenly she has better things to do.
In case you can’t tell, I don’t like cats. They’re all subtlety and no wisdom.
Paradoxes can be extremely jarring. Unless you embrace them, in which case they make perfect sense. Here are some more places in our lives where paradoxes are in charge.
There are paradoxes in our thinking
» Here’s a tweet from Sherry Ning that I enjoyed. She highlights how completely rational thinking is, in matters of people, completely irrational. We are often taught that being rational and unemotional is optimal thinking; but that’s really only the best strategy if you’re a trader or a scientist.
When it comes to issues of people, Sherry says, feelings are the facts. Great decisions that involve groups of people are often not rational at all— they’re about happiness and sadness, not efficiency. If you run your family on purely rational decision-making, you’re going to have an extremely unhappy family.
» Another mental contradiction: you can actually be too smart for your own good. The reason: it’s impossible to learn when you think you don’t need to.
Michael Burry, for instance, one of the guys about whom the movie The Big Short was made, will forever be famous for being one of the people who called the 2008 housing crash. But ever since then, he has continued to call for crash after crash after crash and refused to learn about how the markets have changed. People don't even listen to him anymore. Michael Burry is no longer an expert on anything — he's an expert on the way things were in 2006, and that's all.
The wisest people are also the most curious… forever. As Socrates said, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. If someone insists upon their own knowledge, they are doomed to be complacent and dumb. Because they’re done learning.
» The more available something is, the less you want it. Human beings disproportionately crave two things: progress towards a goal, and the feeling of novelty. This is why, psychologically, it is a manufacturer's guarantee that you won't know what you've got ‘til it's gone and you'll always covet what you don't have. It's baked right into how our brains work. The good news is, like many biological functions, you can train yourself out of this. And you should.
» And one more, from Morgan Housel:
”Happiness is the gap between expectations and reality, so the irony is that nothing is more pessimistic than someone full of optimism. They are bound to be disappointed.”
There are paradoxes in our behavior
» To paraphrase Rob Henderson: it is simultaneously better and worse for our groups if we conform.
It’s good to conform because it makes groups work; dissenting can cause turmoil. Part of what makes any group or society work is the feeling of harmony, the sense that everyone is on the same page and wants what the others want. A group without harmony is not a group at all. If we reject the ideas of our group or try to correct them, we risk looking selfish, cavalier, or overly individualist.
But at the same time we have a chance at correcting behaviors that are no longer working. Henderson says, “The problem with conformity is that it deprives a society of the information it desperately needs.” With no one to introduce new ideas, we’d act like cavemen in a life that is no longer lived in caves.
» Benford's Law of Controversy (From Gurwinder on Twitter): “We tend to fill gaps in information with emotion. We fear what we don’t understand, love what we naively romanticize, etc. As such, the things that fire people up most are usually the things they understand least.”
» Another confusing thing about human behavior: almost everyone suffers from impostor syndrome, which would imply that the entire organized world is made up of impostors. Which it is. Because everyone other than sociopaths suffers from this.
The only way to finally feel like you are worthy of doing something, is to do it when you still aren’t worthy. In order to feel like you can write a book, you must first write a book. To feel worthy of leading people, you have to do it when you have no idea how, and figure it out.
The only way to be an excellent influence on other people is to be deeply worried that you aren't.
There are paradoxes in our relationships
» The harder you look for a mate, the less likely you’ll find one. This is not the case with most animals, but it’s generally the case with humans. We all know the stereotypes of men who spend all their time trying to impress women, and we know how unimpressive it makes them look. Most animals sell themselves by selling; we sell ourselves by passively advertising.
The more fine you are on your own, the more attractive you are. Your self-fulfilling competence and your independence make you more appealing as someone worth impressing and sharing things with.
I used to spend time in online dating apps, before I realized how terrible they are. In online dating, there are two kinds of profiles: those that talk about what kind of partner the person needs, and those that talk about the person herself and what she's up to with her life. Lists of demands versus lists of what someone is offering.
I think you can already guess which kind of person was more attractive to me.
» The more access you have to the world, the more anti-social your world becomes. Social media, ironically, is profoundly anti-social.
One benefit of life in small communities, like an old village or a large family, is that you get to solve meaningful problems. You see some issue that needs to be overcome for the good of your community, and you work together for a solution. In this way, your community gets to see meaningful progress on issues that matter. It’s like glue that holds a group’s members together.
But in a world where social media makes every problem everyone’s problem, and your “communities” are scattered all over the globe, you don’t get this positive feedback loop. You don’t get this sense of community progress. Because few or none of the problems on your group consciousness can actually be solved.
Social doesn’t just mean speaking to people — it means benefitting from cooperation and shared goals. The internet has deeply undermined our ability to work on meaningful shared goals and actually reach them.
Social media takes the entire world’s problems, and assigns them to the consciousness of every village. We can't make progress on many or any of them, so we feel worse about our lives.
There are cultural paradoxes
» Segal’s Law: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.
(One more from Gurwinder) “Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives.” Globalization has made all nations more and more like each other, and consequently less and less interesting.
You could easily argue that America no longer stands for something. And I don't mean that as an emotional cry for help, I mean it technically. I mean the U.S. can no longer politically or economically afford to stand for much of anything, because our interests are too spread out. We rely on too many immigrants, too many economic inputs, too many competing value systems to sustain us. We can't stand for anything anymore, in the same way that important sports franchises can’t have controversial opinions: they can't afford to alienate their sponsors. There are too many opinions that matter.
This issue also applies to other countries. We have sacrificed our individual identities for a global economy, a global people. It’s simultaneously beautiful and hideous.
Think about it: if you knew someone who was simply an amalgamation of everyone you'd ever met, you'd probably find that person extremely uninteresting. They'd be so balanced. So flavorless. They'd be boring and forgettable.
» Another thing about culture: our political identities revolve almost entirely around the people who represent us the least. Our political discourse is just each side picking out the lunatics on the other side and screeching at them.
We are all identified by our lunatics, even though we have almost nothing in common with them. Tragically, the people who hold the most power over our culture are exactly the people who shouldn’t.
There are paradoxes in the way things work
» Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.
Targeting logical measures of success often leads to perverse incentives, not useful ones.
One example of this is how public school systems started comparing themselves to each other based on test-passing rates. They began using test scores as a literal target. As a result, schools began focusing all their attention on getting kids to pass tests, instead of actually making them smart, well-rounded individuals.
Another example from my childhood: my father once gave me a snack and a plate and told me “don’t even get that plate dirty, I don’t want more dishes.” So I licked the plate clean.
» Free will itself presents a paradox. If you believe in free will, you can hold people accountable for their actions — and you can also encourage people to do better, and you can believe that doing so will be meaningful.
But if you don't believe in free will, there is no reason to hold anybody accountable for their actions and there is no reason to encourage better behavior. It just means that we are all cosmic dust mites who can't control ourselves. That serial killers are a perfectly reasonable phenomenon and that abusive narcissists are merely unlucky to have been born that way.
If you don't believe in free will, you are logically forbidden from having values. You are logically forbidden to cast moral judgments. But since human beings do in fact have beliefs and values, since human beings do in fact get angry when someone is murdered or regretful at mistakes... we have no choice but to believe in free will. Which makes no sense… and yet makes more sense than anything else I’ve said in this essay.
» Similarly, in Alcoholics Anonymous, you simultaneously have to believe in accountability and not believe in accountability.
Imagine a man who was molested as a boy. When he gets sober, his sponsor is going to tell him this:
Hurt people hurt people. Don't be angry at the person who did this to you. Forgive them, because you don't know what they went through and you have to assume their own traumas and damages led them to do this.
And then your sponsor will also tell you this:
You are responsible for your own actions. Your traumas and damages are no excuse to do the things you've done, and you must make amends for them and stop doing them.
In other words, if people hurt you then it's a natural consequence of their circumstances; but if you hurt others, it's a choice. People have their own traumas, damages, biases, and delusions; you have to accept theirs, and remove yours. This seems unfair, but it works. It's the only way you can finally clean yourself up and get sober.
Sometimes paradoxes can literally save your life. Which is why AA is still around 90 years later, and which is why I’m still here.
» And finally, you may have heard the concept of “process versus outcome”: you should measure your success in a field or an endeavor not by the results you get, but by whether or not your process is improving. Whether or not you’re improving your skills and your decision-making, which over time will lead to better outcomes.
This sounds paradoxical, because it is. The only way to measure your process is by the outcomes. But it’s still a vital piece of wisdom, because it helps you see through the whims of good and bad luck. And that’s the whole point.
People who can embrace the natural paradoxes of life, work, relationships, culture, and their own silly thinking tend to be more adapted for solving problems and understanding the world. They're not something to be avoided, they're just part of the way things work.
Many creative people I know have a kind of quiet fondness for paradox. A strange friendship with it. Even if they aren't aware of it themselves, it often comes out in their work.
It's what makes comedians so great, so essential. They can point out the places where the things we do make no sense, and they can do it in such a frank manner that we have to laugh at ourselves.
What makes life funny is that it's so tragically, unreasonably horrible. What makes life so interesting is that it's absurd.
Drink some water and do things that make no sense, which is almost everything.
JDR
“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Justin, This is one of your best. Thank you.