Zooming out, Zooming in, and In-between

The Halloween decorations are up at the hardware store. I’m ready to turn into a pumpkin, but may we savor these final moments of summer.

Often before I’m ever able to write anything, I need to sit in silence for a period of time. You might be imagining this as a moment of peaceful reflection — an image of someone staring out a window, twirling a pen, deep in thought amidst a rising mixture of steam and smoke (what’s more romantic than coffee and a cigarette?). But only in my dreams could I ever appear so interesting.

Instead, it’s more like the following: I sit down in a chair in our office, immediately think about how I wish the chair were more comfortable, adjust the chair, not much better, maybe I should redesign our office, or maybe I should go get a snack before making any big decision, but I did just eat, though I haven’t peed in awhile, do I have to pee? god forbid my bladder acts up mid-sentence…. wait, wait, focus, look at iPhone notes, ugh I forgot to respond to that message, wait, back to the notes, any interesting observations? anything of merit? is there anything to say? why am I even doing this? who cares, how silly this is……

And then, finding myself slightly sweaty, mediocre thoughts begin to bubble to the surface. But they’re just enough to get going, propelling me into a duck dive through that initial 15ft wave of self doubt, where I then come up to the surface past the breakpoint, a little shook, but refreshed, and I can finally see the horizon. Bubbles continue to rise and start congealing into little mounds that make funny shapes. Structure begins to form, perspective begins to assemble. It feels surprising each time — still silly, but surprising. And the delight in that surprise is all I’m ever really after, I guess, because that feeling somehow provides enough fuck-you-energy to make it past the inevitable voice that questions why do anything at all.

I recognize there’s nothing unique here. Self-doubt is seemingly the quintessential dilemma of any creative pursuit. But I still can’t help but wonder whether the more prolific amongst us are less afflicted or just better at creating amidst these obstacles of consciousness. Though given how much writers write about self-doubt, I’m gonna guess it’s the latter.

There was a recent NYT op-ed exploring the negative impacts AI could have on creative writing, particularly discussing the benefit of sitting with uncertainty.

When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible.

It’s a nice re-frame to thinking about doubt as an essential part of the process. In my case, out past the waves, my mind often appears to drift between one of two directions….

Zooming out

When life feels overwhelming, there is something uniquely enticing about zooming out to try and grasp the “bigger picture”. It’s an attempt to put our current moment in context, helping us feel less alone in our challenges and offering a sense of companionship with the past over shared ambitions for the future.

From this vantage point, I experience three luxuries.

1. I feel like I can make some sense of the world. History is data, which we can put into graphs, and project forward to come up with calculated predictions for what’s to come. To be clear, I’m not particularly skilled at this. But I often find myself drawn to those that are — and it doesn’t seem to matter that many (most?) predictions end up being wrong. The comfort is in the potential for clarity amidst immense uncertainty. Predictions serving as talismans to hang around our psyche, or scaffolding for a world view in which to take comfort.

2. I feel like my problems are less problematic. When realizing our lives barely register as specs amidst the vast cosmos of time and space, it’s hard to maintain the sense of self-importance required for experiencing angst. The stars could give a shit whether we’re fully self-actualized in our employment. Life is a mystery and that is the gift.

3. I feel part of something bigger than myself. Even though the stars might not care, we’re wired to seek meaning and therefore there’s something inevitably moving about trying to orient our efforts within an arc of societal progress (yes, this is hard to do at the moment). I guess the point is that it’s nice to feel a sense of belonging to causes greater than ourselves, and not completely surrender to the future being deterministic — enough small points on a graph can bend a curve.

There seems to be a certain culture of people who are gifted / inclined to view life in these zoomed-out terms. They span domains — economist, analysts, physicists, historians, engineers, investors — but you could sort of group them together as “systems thinkers”. They are often the people that you find listening to things like the Dwarkesh podcast, active on economic substacks, and regularly use terms like “macro”, “alpha”, and “exponential”.

And there are times when I’ve got a foot in this camp. I often find these perspectives intellectually stimulating regardless of whether I’m always in agreement. But sometimes I spend too much time in this discourse. And when I do, I can feel a little….. bleh. It’s not depression, but rather a certain numbness, a disconnection, a dulling of life’s resonance.

It’s a little counter intuitive because zooming out far enough has the potential to cause the pleasant overview effect that astronauts talk about. But maybe the issue is that if you’re constantly analyzing life from above, you begin to overlook the actual life in front of you.

Too many graphs, not enough flowers. Too much thinking, not enough being.

So when I get lost in the clouds, I have to gently remind myself that it might be time to zoom in a bit.

Zooming in

There are some obvious ways to do this.

One route is to move towards the more meditative, slightly woo-woo. I’ve got my familiar voices of wisdom I might turn to in these moments: Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach.

Just the other day, I tuned in to one of Tara’s talks and found myself writing down the following, which feels relevant to this particular dilemma:

Thinking is a great servant, but a terrible master, because what happens when we’re really believing our thoughts, really caught inside them, is that they perpetuate…a sense of separation, they end up creating distance between us and others….. In terms of evolution, thinking is not the pinnacle of our human potential. There’s more. Our potential is in the direct realization of reality itself, not the representative images and sound bites we spend time inside, but this loving awareness that is our essence.

Now, I can’t say I’m regularly living within loving awareness — nor do I even fully know what this means exactly. But I am attuned to that certain shift in my reality that takes place the closer I pay attention to life unfolding, moment by moment. When someone tells you to “just be more present”, you have every right to slap them. Hard. But “Presence” remains undisputed on the alter of self-help and eastern religions for good reason. As Bill Hader once joked on Dan Harris' podcast: “it’s annoying that the hippies were right”.

Another route to zooming in is zoning out to others zooming in. There must be some reason that one of the most relaxing things is to watch other people cook food. I remember in high school, laying in bed, there was an unbeatable sense of calm that would wash over me when turning on the cooking channel. Alton Brown was my Dam Rass. Watching people fully immersed in a craft, tediously working towards some tangible output, is one of the purest forms of delight.

There’s likely a common thread connecting get ready with me videos, How It’s Made, and HGTV. The more mundane, the better. Transcendence through specificity.

It’s almost as if, when you keep zooming in, the overview effect can re-appear — sort of like how deep sea could possibly be confused for deep space.

But if you zoom in all the way, I guess you’d end up at the quantum subatomic level? I’m clearly not a physicists and I’m too lazy at the moment to do much research, so this take is likely to be rife with over simplification and factual errors. But one of the most interesting and talked about aspects of quantum mechanics is that by nature these subatomic particles are in multiple possible states simultaneously, what’s known as superposition. For a simple analogy, in the quantum world, before it's measured, a coin would be in a state of "heads" and "tails" simultaneously. It’s only when measuring (or observing) the particle that the superposition of states instantly reduces to just one of those states.

And this gets me thinking about how we can often seem to experience life in multiple states at once — simultaneously zoomed-out and zoomed-in. It’s only through the diligent placement of our attention, through the act of intentional observation, that we can collapse our reality into focus.

In-between

This essence of moving between states makes me think about a previous Ezra Klein podcast featuring Katherine Shulz: Our Lives Are an Endless Series of ‘And’. It’s a beautiful conversation about our various, often contradictory, experiences of aliveness: “we live with both at once, with many things at once — everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.”

It’s worth a listen in it’s entirety, but I’ll leave a short section below where she reflects on the power of the word “and”:

In distinction from every other conjunction that the English language has — “but,” “if,” “or” — all of those actually describe a necessary relationship. “If,” “this,” “then,” “that” — that’s a causal relationship. It actually tells us something about the two halves of the sentence we’re creating. The beautiful thing about “and” is you can stick any two things together with it. They can have absolutely no relationship to each other — I give you “apples and oranges.” Or they can have every relationship to each other — “Romeo and Juliet.” Or none on Earth — “crab apples and tuxedos.”

So part of this feeling of “and” is the sense that everything is connected to everything else. Which, I want to say, can be a really beautiful thing. The sense that everything is connected to everything else is also the sense that we can make a difference. If indeed we are all connected, then our actions matter: They matter to each other, they matter to people far away, they matter to people we will never meet because they’re not even born yet. It’s overwhelming, but also kind of hopeful. Kind of exciting.

A closing quote

How do you cultivate curiosity? By embracing things beyond data and numbers (which again, are gorgeous in their own right) and by allowing people to explore things beyond optimization. - Kyla Scanlon

A parting song

I was regularly listening to Amos Lee in my late teens / early twenties, and still love him. His early albums sit within a special place in my psyche. There’s one particular song I catch myself humming along to often: a rhythmic, catchy, moving reminder that life’s more than supply and demand.