Epicycles

I've been thinking about something I observed back in my America post about skylines: self-similarity. You can tell a lot about a city from a few minutes in it because of the way the small-scale patterns reappear at a large scale. While not everything has this self-similar property, a lot of human things seem to, which probably indicates it's something about the way we think. It's much easier to make a system that deals with everything the same way, which seems suggestive in a we're-just-the-first-thing-that-worked sense.

This idea seems particularly relevant when trying to think about large-scale behavioural or emotional goals. Let's say you want to be happier, or calmer, or more creative. Generally the kind of advice you'd get for something like that is to make a plan starting with the goal. So if you want to be happier, just figure out the things that make you happy, figure out how to get them, then go do it. While that works fine for certain kinds of goals, I think that self-similarity makes it difficult to use that process to change yourself.

It's easily possible to be unhappy in the pursuit of happiness, or angry in the pursuit of calmness. If retiring to Barbados is how you're going to be happy, then you've got a fair stretch of non-Barbados unhappiness between here and there. If you need to clear your mind of thoughts to be calm, but you're not good at it yet, then it might just make you more irritated until it works. The point is that the long-term path can take you backwards in the short term. A large-scale change can push you in the wrong direction at a small scale.

But while that works if you're talking about a single achievement, I don't believe it makes sense for changes that are more about your general behaviour or emotions. I don't think if you're unhappy, you can move to Barbados and then become happy. Rather, I think it's the self-similar action of millions of tiny decisions and reactions in the small that cause those emotions to appear in the large. If you're unhappy because lots of little things that you do make you unhappy, then moving to Barbados won't change that; you'll just be unhappy and warm all year round.

That's not to say that long-term goals are unimportant, just that they obey a different set of rules. These external things, facts about the world and your place in it, yield to logic and planning. You want to be an astronaut? There's a finite number of particular steps you can take to achieve that. But internal things, facts about how you feel and what kind of person you want to be, I think they require a more organic approach.

If it's small-scale decisions that lead to large-scale behaviour, then you need an approach that goes bottom-up, not top-down. In other words, use that self-similarity to find goals in the small that represent your goals in the large, and work at them. Rather than a five-year plan for your life and work, think about the five seconds when you notice a particularly nice tree. I think your reaction in that moment will have a lot more impact on your happiness than career achievements or international relocation.