Endless Expansion
May 29, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson
Listening: Elegance by Nikita Lev
Quick Notes
Rearranging: I’m shuffling around a few projects this week, moving three of my curation-focused emails (Climate Happenings, Notes On the News, and You Probably Don’t Need) under the (also curatorial) umbrella-project, Aspiring Generalist. This won’t change anything for subscribers (except maybe which email these publications arrive from), and if you’ve paid for one of the projects that are moving, you’ll receive a paid sub (for at least as much time as you have left) for the amalgamated project (so you’ll have a paid sub for the one you bought, plus the others). Also: AG subscribers can choose which of these emails they want to receive each week
Poll: Interesting answers on last week’s poll! Though, as was pointed out by a few people, before publishing it I somehow managed to delete an option that would probably have been chosen by many people (“both threat and opportunity”). Oops! This week’s poll (below) is hopefully more complete!
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status and/or quick notes about what’s happening in your life.)
Endless Expansion
One of my primary aims in life, since I’ve been old enough to think about such things, has been increasing my range of options: upping the level of freedom I enjoy, basically.
That can mean a lot of things, and there are many paths one can take in pursuit of more optionality, but for me it’s generally meant aiming to have enough money that I can afford the things I want and need, sufficient time so that I’m not constantly stressed and scrambling to fit things into my day, and a well-maintained body and mind so that I’m capable of doing the things I want to do and cognizant enough to think about the things I’d like to consider (and continue considering well into the future).
The main reason I’ve adopted this approach this core directionality is that it allows me to change as I grow, rather than trapping me on a single path toward a finite range of destinations.
We might optimize for monetary success, for instance, only to realize in our later years that we’d really benefit from more (and more developed) relationships, more time, and/or less stress. And we might have this realization from a standpoint in which pivoting toward those (perhaps long-held and ignored, perhaps newly developed) other ambitions are incredibly difficult or (seemingly) out of reach.
It’s also possible to cultivate new passions, discover new beliefs and ideals, and to experience disruptions that rewire our desires to the point that all the investments we’ve made over the course of our lives no longer apply; our assets becoming liabilities, our well-carved paths toward meaning becoming, overnight, mere deviations and distractions.
Aiming for a type of growth and a category of assets that allow for malleability, iteration, and change, then, seems (to me) prudent in the face of future unknowns, both of the external and internal variety.
One interesting thing about growing older is that our capacity to take advantage of the options we have tends to diminish (for many of us, anyway) because of how we’re shaped by society and biology.
Many of us stop listening to new music by the time we reach our early 30s, for instance, our old favorites carving well-worn paths into our sense of taste that makes exploring beyond a small catalog of existing favorites a non-trivial task. We have to want to expand beyond that cozy finitude, consciously remind ourselves to do so, and then put in the time and effort necessary to act on that intention—and that can be a tall order at a moment in life when there are countless other priorities demanding our energy and attention.
This tendency toward music seems to be of a kind with other sorts of exploration, as our teens-defining surge in “let’s explore and try new things” chemicals has well and truly subsided a decade or two later (again, for most of us), and society seems to reinforce this tendency, especially in our current era of the algorithm in which our sources of music (and other things) can, and often do, shape all of our future experiences based on our existing preferences, without us even asking them to do so.
I’ve been thinking about this degradation in exploratory impulse in the same way I’ve been thinking about the diminishment of bones and muscle mass I expect to experience in the coming years.
These losses are a locked-in reality for essentially everyone, but that doesn’t mean we can’t counter the aspects of our lives that limit our cultural inputs (the growth-inducing work and experiences that tend to catalyze internal growth and change) in the same way we might try to stave-off osteoporosis by changing our habits and taking some supplements, while reducing the impact of muscle-loss by adjusting our diets and exercise regimens.
It’s one thing to desire and even aim for a life of endless expansion (in the sense of personal growth and exploration), and another to implement such an ambition, though.
Because another thing that happens to us as we grow older is that we, by choice or as a consequence of unfeeling fate, are burdened with all sorts of responsibilities that are arguably equally important, and in some cases even more pressing and vital (caring for kids, keeping the rent or mortgage paid, supporting ethical causes, etc) than raw creative enlargement.
By the time we decide to question and maybe even break free from confining, curiosity-dampening boxes, then, our daily dance cards might already be full, at which point setting aside time just to seek out and listen to new music might seem like a waste of precious resources.
This is part of why I’m thinking about things from this angle, now, as comfort zone-breaking efforts are already more cumbersome than they once were, and I expect they’ll only become more so the older I get.
Ensuring these efforts are on my list of priorities, today, and investing in making them more habitual (and thus, over time—hopefully, at least—less effortful and draining) is thus vital to the plans I’m mapping and actions I’m taking.
The degree to which I’ll manage this (at least at the level I hope to) is still in question, but like planting a tree, I feel like the best time to have started thinking and behaving in this way was twenty years ago, and the next best time is right now.
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(My new book is about growing older with purpose and intent, and grabbing a copy is a great way to support my work!)
Interesting Links
On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon, the Great?
“Alexander is such a well-known figures that it has been, for centuries, the ‘doing thing’ to attribute all manner of profound sounding quotes, sayings and actions to him, functionally none of which are to be found in the ancient sources and most of which, as we’ll see, run quite directly counter to his actual character as a person.”
“They are the smallest living birds in the world. There are 366 known species of hummingbirds, with the smallest being the bee hummingbird that measures at two inches, and the largest being the giant hummingbird, which is 9.1 inches long. Most live in the tropics, largely in Central and South America, but there are around seventeen species in the United States. They have long needle-like beaks, can fly forward, backward, up, down, and in zigzags. They flap their wings faster than any other bird, up to fifty times per second, they have the largest heart-to-body-size rate in an animal, and that heart has typically 500 to 1200 beats per minute, according to The Hummingbird Handbook (2021) by John Shewey. When in a state of deep rest, and to conserve energy, the hummingbird can slow down its heart rate to only fifty beats per minute, and drop its metabolism by 95 percent.”
Acoustic Location and Sound Mirrors
“Acoustic location was used from mid-WW1 to the early years of WW2 for the passive detection of aircraft by picking up the noise of the engines. Horns give both acoustic gain and directionality; the increased inter-horn spacing compared with human ears increases the observer's ability to localise the direction of a sound. The technology was rendered obsolete before and during WW2 by the introduction of radar, which was far more effective.” (Note: some fun/funny images in this piece)
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Poll
I’ve had several conversations about this topic recently, and I’m curious where folks stand on it:
Outro
I did something bad to my back a handful of days ago—I suspect while doing my kettlebell exercises—and I’ve been taking things super easy, on the workout front, since then.
Back in the day, I probably would have tried to power through and would have escalated this minor injury into something more substantial, and I’m glad I now have the presence of mind to chill out and let my body mend when that’s what it needs, but it’s still agonizing (both in the sense that it’s painful, and in the sense that I was establishing a nice running-and-kettlebelling rhythm that’s now been disrupted).
What’s going on in your world? Have any advice for dealing with mid- to lower-back pain from a probable strain? Drop me a message about whatever’s on your mind, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Hi Colin,
Your Endless Expansion intro above resonates and reminds me a bit of the nomadic lifestyle I live which necessitates keeping things open and flexible. It prompted me to buy your newest book.
Thanks from a long time reader via RSS,
Ray