Preface
First of all, thank you for reading my newsletter Crossroads.
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Today's topic
Right now. At my Desk. I am building expectations. My sons are supposed to make dinner - hamburgers - and I am not sure what to expect.
In general, my expectations concern more important and far reaching things. Like progress in school or other aspects of their development.
I often tend to suppress expectations since I'm not always sure what to do with them. They create all kinds of feelings: happiness, excitement, worry, agony, anger.
I have heard that the gold fish has a short term memory of seven seconds. Would be nice for a change. No need for expectations.
The online writer and educator David Perell often talks about the Never-Ending Now as a characteristic of modern life.
"Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but barely goes anywhere. Stuck in the fury of the present, we’re swept up in dizzying chaos like leaves in a gale-force wind. Even though on the Internet, we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to novelty instead of timelessness. We’re trapped in a Never-Ending Now — blind to our place in history, engulfed in the present moment, overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos."
A life in a Never-Ending Now is indeed a life without context - no history, no future, no expectations.
It makes me think of the encounter between a disoriented Alice and the mysterious Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Alice doesn't care about outcomes but most people do.
That's why most of us can't avoid, or are even eager to, build expectations on how things will turn out.
Expectations are our best guesses.
In a statistical sense, they are the best guesses we can make given all information we have at any given moment.
But they are not only tools to draw inference on the most probable future.
Expectations are also normative. This is also how most people think of expectations.
Which of many possible outcomes are preferable? Which outcomes do we wish to occur?
Without a normative interpretation of our expectations we might as well roll the dice like The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart.
In that Novel Luke is the nerd run mad. He decides that, in pursuit of ultimate freedom – or nihilism – he will make decisions using dice.
He offers the dice options, and they choose for him.
As a matter of fact, we often develop an expectation on what we want before any information has arrived to us.
We have hopes about our kids before they are even born. We expect a nice day even though we know nothing about it in the morning.
Incoming information might or might not change our minds of what we want to happen.
Our normative drivers are strong.
When things we care about, such as the kids, our jobs, our household economy, drift away in unwanted directions we feel tempted or even obliged to act. In order to correct what has gone wrong. According to us.
My expectations on my own life are formed by what I want it to contain. What I wish will happen and not.
Expectations drive me forward, they remind me of what to accomplish.
This is also where the problems start.
Sometimes, when my expectations call me to action, I act. But sometimes I wait.
For me, waiting has nothing to do with indifference. I really do care about my kids and a lot of other things too.
My hesitation comes from me being a problem oriented guy. I tend to wait a little bit longer for the situation or the problem at hand to materialize. I prefer to wait until I am a little bit more sure about what I'm dealing with. Since situations or problems tend to develop and change I've learned from experience that it might be a good idea not rushing into solution to quickly.
Solution oriented persons behave differently. They want to solve faster. Put out the fire before it has spread. Better to act now than be sorry later. If they get the chance to get in control of an unfolding situation or an emergent problem they take it since they've learned that it might soon be impossible to control.
If a solution oriented and a problem oriented person is confronted with a common challenge they often disagree about the urgency of action. They might both care as much about the topic, but they differ about The How and When.
Since many of us, me included, are not fully aware of our hidden and sub-conscious assumptions and perspectives we don't always see the dimension of problem-solution orientation.
Instead we end up suspecting each other for not caring about the topic at hand.
If you don't wanna act it's because you don't care, the solution oriented says.
No, it's complicated, the problem oriented says.
And indeed it is.
As this simple table shows, action or non-action have more complicated explanations than indifference.
A problem oriented person might or might not act, even though it really cares about the topic.
A solution oriented person, on the other hand, often act swiftly on topics it cares about.
As a consequence, a solution oriented person may interpret a non-action by a problem oriented person as indifference to the topic, while the in-action is just due to another perspective on the topic.
And so on.
My hesitancy about my own expectations boils down to an insecurity about when to act and when not to.
It is a constant struggle between my problem orientation and my will not to feel and seem indifferent.
Am I just unable to take decisions? Or am I rather able to decide when a decision is needed and when it can wait?
I hope, there is something to this quote:
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
―Charles Bukowski
Zooming Out
Zooming out, to the world at large, I have a sense that our strong expectations, their weight on our shoulders AND their weight when putting them on the shoulders of others get more problematic in times of change.
The reason?
I think the sum of expectations are the sum of progress.
Expectations raised by strong tailwinds and a business cycle boosted by artificially low interest rates which have played down future risk. Path dependent, fueled with years of confidence.
Now, those expectations probably serve us the same recipes once again. Even if The World has changed in important ways.
If so, a glimpse of light in our tunnel of economic hardship might as well be a train coming in the opposite direction.
Uncritical general reliance on strong expectations could figuratively be Weapons of Mass Deception.
So what should lead us forward if our current expectations lead us astray?
First of all, we live in a New World Order.
More than 30 years ago, the Iron Curtain fell and at least My Generation thought; this is it.
No more big power conflict. More internationalism. An everlasting Liberal World Order.
Now that period has come to an end.
Big power conflict, less internationalism, less liberalism. More Realpolitik.
And a new one. An imminent need of The Green Transformation to tackle climate change.
In this new setting we all need new expectations.
I think we need to accommodate the return of future risk.
Expectations need to contain more than a straight Stairway to Heaven.
Since we might stumble on our way upwards we need resilience.
We all need to diversify more. Secure redundancy. Both on the individual level, in groups and in society at large.
Maybe even we, who consider us Generalists, come into vogue?
But I would still not recommend my kids to choose The Generalist Path.
Better become good at something specific.
That is definitively what I would do if I got the chance to start all over again.
But what would I choose?
You get the Picture?
Me in a nutshell.