One of the biggest things to notice looking back over the past three or four years is that my personal progress doesn't track that of American society or Western Civilization in general. Specifically, there have been points where, just as I think I've gotten things figured out and a reasonable course of action prepared, events in my personal life and the general milieu horrendously contradicts that progress. Let's look at a case from each arena.
The most extreme example, of course, would be my parents' decision to move. This proved to be financially irresponsible and an extreme instance of planning fallacy, but let's ignore that bit for now, because I couldn't demonstrate that then. Let's look at the emotional context of this decision.
I was told about this plan on Labor Day Weekend of 2016. I had, a few months earlier, completed my first year back at university. I spent the fall and spring semesters living in a private dorm which I had hated for a number of reasons, which can ultimately be traced back to the character and behavior of my neighbors (though that the doors slammed by default certainly helped nothing). During the spring semester I drove back to Kansas City almost every weekend and by the end of that period felt that my parents had a pretty reasonably understanding, at last, of what engineering school was like from a student's perspective.
Despite some struggling, I emerged from my pseudo-sophomore year with decent grades. I'd gone from flunking thermodynamics to loving it. I'd discovered just how fun orbital mechanics can be, once Kerbal Space Program gives you a visual intuition for it. Academically, things were improving.
That summer, I took the last courses I need to catch up with the standard plan of study for someone graduating in with the Class of 2018. I did well in those courses, after which point I'd exceeded the material I'd flunked at Purdue. From an academic standpoint, things were looking up.
Furthermore, I'd moved into the apartment where I'm writing this very blog post. It's much quieter and also cheaper, dramatically so when you consider the expanded floor space. That seemed like an even greater benefit when my then-girlfriend said she wanted to move in with me after she graduated.
From my perspective, everything in my personal life was looking up. Moreover, we'd just a year previously finished selling my late grandmother's house, which was an ordeal like no other. Why in God's Name anyone would want to repeat that Sisyphean torture stumped me, but became completely incomprehensible in the context of my rapidly-improving life.
We all know how that worked out. In the year since then my relationship ended acrimoniously, the move still isn't done, and the time demands placed upon me did nothing to help my grades. None of those things are reversible, but that does nothing for the fact that most of them didn't have to happen in the first place.
Speaking of things which didn't have to happen, how about we talk about the general milieu? I'm thinking, of course, about politics.
You see, I used to be a very extreme libertarian, as a saunter through the archives of this blog will reveal. In January of 2015—late on the evening of January 31st, to be precise—I was presented with an argument, from a fellow libertarian, which my informal rationality training made it impossible for me to accept. Without digging into the details, I realized that the non-aggression principle may exist on the map, but it doesn't exist in the territory. From there, I started questioning my entire moral-political structure, and decided that I had to start over from scratch.
I was studying meta-politics, group dynamics, looking at statistical rather than just-so stories—in summary, moving from the larval to merely adolescent stage of intellectual development. Sadly, I haven't made terribly much progress on that front since 2015, because I simply haven't had much time and mismanaged much of the time I had back when I had it. Then again, I wouldn't have had this problem if I hadn't been arguing on the Internet late at night on a Saturday night in the first place.
The point is, I was developing as the world around me devolved further into tribalism and bad epistemology. I don't want to rehash the details of the 2016 pre-primary campaign, but suffice to say I saw a lot of irrational behavior which culminated in the political class feeding a professional troll into the White House. The Carthaginians would be very proud.
It was painful to watch, and even more painful to do nothing about, because I didn't have my philosophical house in sufficient order to present a viable alternative. I still don't, but made the necessary moves—unfollowing people, using Facebook dramatically less, taking Twitter off my phone—to avoid the worst of the political news that never mattered and only wastes mental space. If I'd had any sense, I would have done that before the primaries. Sadly, my past selves were more akratic and less committed to my long-term well-being than my current, still problematic self.
The point, here, is that I could see all the errors everyone else was making (as well as my own), and wondering how they didn't see the mistakes being made. Many of the people involved had no excuse not to know better!
I doubt there's any real solutions to this problem, besides further isolating myself from those who choose to live unconsciously. Choiceless mode may be comforting, but once you progress there's no going back. Civilization does not follow my trajectory, and to stay sane, I may need to decouple my trajectory from it.
