The Oppressive Present
Ignore the latest thing, live freely and be hard to control
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”
― Danny Kahneman
Everything seems like the most important thing if you don’t know about all the other things. That is why teenagers can feel like their lives are dramatic and unique when they are neither. But many older people are suffering from the same histrionics of pandemic proportions. Social media mobile apps exacerbate this trend to ever shorter attention spans, cramming ever more vapid minutia into shorter and shorter cuts. This gets people excited by the latest thing, while losing any grasp on all the things that came before. A few times when I’ve traveled for extended periods, I didn’t remember to cancel my newspapers (I’m the last in my neighborhood to get physical copies) in time. When I come back weeks or months later, it is funny to see breathless headlines on problems that would have upset me at the time but were totally irrelevant by the time I read them. They were the current thing several things ago. I was far better off reading books than articles. But in practice, more time is being diverted from day to day articles towards second to second snippets.
There’s a hippie bumper sticker that can be found on Subarus with Vermont license plates that reads “Think globally act locally”. It is only inadvertently profound. A corollary is “think historically act presently”. There are more answers to today’s problems that can be discovered by reading Marcus Aurelius than doom scrolling TikTok, or even listening to podcasts from even the most astute observers of whatever Joe Biden or Donald Trump last muttered.
I’ll propose three reasons why the present is overrated and one idea on what to do about it. First, you are an almost infinitely insignificant percentage of large complex systems. It is sensible to round this influence down to zero. You are 1/8,110,080,941th of humanity; given your inability to do much about many of them and your inability to do anything whatsoever about those in distant undeveloped lands, it is hubris to think of yourself as one eight billionth of the cause of or solution to global warming. It is sensible humility to admit that this rounds down to zero. Hope that the weather is nice next century but don’t give it another thought.
You are 1/341,600,968 of America and 1/161 millionth of the electorate. How much of your day should be spent on this 161 million person committee meeting? 1/161 millionth wildly overstates your influence. If you think you are 1/161 millionth of the decision, then you are delusionally arrogant. I live in Connecticut. Using the binomial probability formula, my state will have tie votes that I could break for president every 8,696 years. So the chance that I’m needed is 0.046%. If that makes you optimistic about your relevance, it shouldn’t. A quick and dirty estimate of Connecticut’s 7 out of 538 electors being the tie breaker in the Electoral College is 1% if Connecticut were a median state. But it isn’t! Don’t for a second think that your vote picks the president once every 869,600 years. No way. Connecticut has over a 99% probability of voting for a Democrat. If I like that or not it doesn’t matter. The likelihood that 1) my vote breaks the tie in Connecticut and 2) a >99% odds state breaks the tie in the Electoral College is… not one in a million years. The probability is that it won’t happen before sun death 7.5 billion years from now which is a fair definition of zero.
Another reason to discount the present: backlashes. One of the most bipartisan, most universal miscalculations is that voters often just get sick of one thing then the guy peddling the other thing thinks that they fell in love with him. They over steer and create a backlash. Almost every president of my lifetime gets this by the first midterm, often in aggregate reversing most or all of whatever his election mandate promised. It will happen again. Most strong reactions are overreactions — don’t react too strongly if the guy you hate more wins. It might impact your actual life less than you think. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Literal answer from me: yes. Every administration. And that is no commentary on their profligacy, corruption, or ineptitude. It is a commentary on the ability of people including my own bad self to transcend a constant background noise of profligacy, corruption, and ineptitude. And some of the extremes of what you’re most against will be the best case for your cause.
Third and finally, hard science offers lots of data to analyze; social science doesn’t. There’s been millennia of violence, squalor, and poverty but just a few recent centuries of modern markets and liberal democracies. Sure there are some broad brushstrokes of first principles that you might feel justifiably confident in supporting, but the details are far from certain. You could be wrong. I can be wrong. The smartest people of basically every age were essentially wrong about everything, when it comes to the details of what they were fussing about day to day. Lots of sincere, fervent debates were over which witch, Catholic, or protestant to burn at the stake. Today’s sincere, fervent debates are probably not going to look all that much better to future generations. We might be asking entirely the wrong questions and you (and I) might have entirely the wrong answers.
In short, when it comes to the national and online latest thing, I probably don’t matter. But if I matter, a can easily be counterproductive. But if I matter and am productive, I’m likely wrong. So opt out. I am 1/5th my household, ½ my marriage, and 100% of people up before the others so I can do what I want. And there is no use in fussing ineffectively and unhappily about our freedoms without doing something about the ones we have. Be smart enough to educate your kids. Teach them well — the old ways and virtues as well as the current passing fads. Be rich enough to pay your own way through retirement. It is only of passing interest when the bond market finally balks at the government’s lunacy if you’re self-funded. I like my local police, but they’re services are not required if I get an intruder. Be the deadliest thing in your house at night. Your private property should be private and your property. Dig a well. I buried a natural gas tank the size of an 18-wheeler. I hope that my utilities work, but I don’t rely on anyone to keep my family fed, hydrated, and warm. It is funny to overhear debates about whether or not it is possible to build a wall to keep people out. It… is. Once you can teach, afford, and protect your family, politics becomes secondary. If you can’t, then the government becomes a husband proxy and an abusive, unfaithful one at that. You will put up with anything in return for vague promises of future subsidies.
