Arrival Fallacies

I recently attended An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and His Piano in San Francisco. During the (excellent) show, he spoke some about the arrival fallacy:

I've been aware of the concept for some time, but hadn't heard of a proper term for it. I've been thinking about how it applies in my life. I think it's largely an obstacle to me being present in the moment, causing me to focus my attention instead on the pursuit of some goal. I'll list some past and current goals that qualify as arrival fallacies for me, then analyze the extent to which "arriving" lived up to my expectation.

Past

• First job post-graduation
• Marriage
• Paying off student loans
• Coming out to my spouse as polyamorous in my romantic orientation

Current

• Paying off divorce-related debts
• Returning to work (I'm on a multi-week leave)
• Cohabiting with a romantic partner

Reaching some of the past goals did produce enduring benefits for me. For whatever reason, debt generally stresses me out- so completing my last debt via paying off my student loan felt great at the time, and has provided enduring peace where before (and otherwise) there'd be a low level of anxiety. Similarly, my worst mental health occurred when I was poor and underemployed (and for a period, unhoused) in the nine months after graduation. Being fully and adequately employed since landing my first full-time job in California, brought me great relief on day 1 and has continued to provide peace and reassurance and belonging in the thousands of days since.

Marriage was also significant: I experienced a big psychological boost from the social reinforcement of that move, and I felt more security and belonging in my relationship with my partner at the time. Similarly, disclosing to my wife that I identify as polyamorous in my romantic orientation felt massively relieving (compared to the preceding two years of closet life) and the changes that disclosure led to continue to pay substantial dividends in my life. 

Other smaller milestones, however, have been more mixed: for example, taking several weeks off work. I was distracted for a year or two by this belief that I wanted/needed substantial time off work, and was spending too many months and years in a lifestyle where most of my spoons were spent on work, at an intolerably high opportunity cost.  The time off hasn't been as awesome as I'd envisioned. However, arriving at that time off has helped me put to bed the angst associated with that belief, since I now have data instead of speculation, about what several weeks off would feel like. 

On reflection:

1. I've been unsuccessful at going for any substantial period of time without 1-2 arrival fallacies guiding my energy investments
2. My goals are less fallacious than I thought: many of them provided substantial short and long-term happiness (largely by reducing what were otherwise, enduring rivers of anxiety and worry)
3. I could practice striving and arrival fallacy-ing less. However, leaning in to them and achieving them faster, such that I replace belief with experience, is also a decent strategy: at least as long as goal selection is tempered with pragmatism (targeting Olympic gold in swimming, for instance, is infeasible and would be far too opportunity costly to be worth pursuing)

Conclusion

I'm not sure how to live without these medium-term horizon goals, and I find they do help me marshal energy and achieve generally worthy things that matter to me personally: so interestingly, I plan to keep it up, coupled with critically questioning myself every so often on my cost/benefit beliefs, e.g. that a given milestone will pay off as much as I believe it will.

My inner voice that identifies what matters to me is perhaps not as misled by the arrival fallacy as I thought it would be when the analysis wheels starting turning at Tim Minchin's show. 

Why Parenting Sucks So Hard

Why does parenting suck so hard?? 

I've pondered this question for many an hour. It's perplexing in a way: most of us parents are pretty nice, kid-friendly, capable people who you'd think would make good parents (i.e. consistently treat their kids well and stay sane). Us parents certainly thought so: before multiple unrelenting years changed our tunes. 

I will attempt to partially explain why parenting sucks so hard, using the metaphor of four job roles.

Parenting roughly breaks down into these four roles: 

1. The Manager. Plans what we are gonna do, where we are gonna go, when we eat, how we respond to kid complaints and requests and resistance and "they've taken 20 minutes to brush their teeth so far and still aren't done."
2. Equipment Master. Responsible for answers to questions like: did we pack the shoes before leaving the house? What do we need to bring? Did we leave the goggles by the pool?
3. Doer in Chief.  Puts the sunscreen on, serves the food, packs the lunches, does the cleanup, drives the car.
4. Attention Provider. Interacts with the kids: does all the playing and nagging and cuddling and responding. Examples: responds to "can I watch the tablet" and "daddy come wipe me" and "it's my turn to choose the treat first!," plays blanket forts, cuddles during Bluey, joins for bike time and dress-up.

Most of us are reasonably capable of filling most of these roles. The problem is three-fold. 

One: but few are naturals at all four roles. Consider the hypothetical brother-in-law: playful and patient and long suffering, and could interact with the kids for ages. On the other hand, he's pretty terrible at managing: doesn't get them to bed on time, runs out of food and toilet paper because he lives only in the moment, doesn't clean up the kitchen.

Two: Trying to do more than one role at once, decreases performance in the other roles. Much as a master painter's works suffer when she tries to also juggle while painting, we do worse when we have to fill multiple roles simultaneously. Every so often we catch glimpses of this truth, in those small slices of time when the other roles fall silent. For example, at last all the utensils and children and food are all at the table at the same time and there's no night routine deadline immediately looming and the only task is to finish eating at some point in the next fifteen minutes: you suddenly exhale, laugh internally at the way your six year old is stuffing butter wholesale into their baguette with their fingers, and realize you're ready for once to respond calmly to whatever unreasonable demand or misbehavior next assaults your senses: cue a rare moment of attention provider excellence!

Third problem: IT'S TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR NORMAL HUMANS TO PERFORM ALL FOUR ROLES SIMULTANEOUSLY FOR MULTIPLE HOURS A DAY, DAY AFTER DAY, FOR YEARS IN A ROW, WITH THEIR SANITY INTACT. Let me emphasize this. It's too much to ask for normal humans to perform all four roles simultaneously for multiple hours a day, day after day, for years in a row, with their sanity intact. If there were four adults present performing the four roles, that would be one thing: but usually it's just 1-2 parents wearing all the hats. Which is exhausting. It's a burden on your mental health. It's oppressive. It's overstimulating. It's relentless.

When parents respond to these three problems, it's usually in one of three ways. First, by giving up: either on their mental health, or by disengaging or escaping from parenting in one form or another. Second, they adapt - say, by divorcing (so they get breaks) or shoveling cash at nannies and childcare centers. Or third, they get lucky - the other parent carries the load, the in-laws help out, or they're that rarest of human who can perform all the roles over time without losing their ever loving minds.

El fin

Finding your tribe

At a recent non-monogamy potluck I hosted, one of the attendees remarked to me how happy and relieved they were at the event, hanging out with "their tribe."

This made me think: is the non-monogamy community I'm so thickly involved in, my tribe?

I'd say no. Yes, I share the non-monogamy identity, and that provides a kinship. And yes, it's a relief to attend and host events in that community, where I can be open about that part of myself (as opposed to work and extended family settings, where I "turn down" or conceal that aspect of myself.)

However, it's far from the center of my many overlapping identities. Overachiever, tech employee, father, fitness freak, intellectual, writer, ant enthusiast, heterosexual, *post-conformist, altruist, curious student, runner: many of these identities are better guideposts to my ideal tribe.

Honestly, nowhere feels like my tribe right now. I'm too conventional and overachieving to fit in the non-monogamy community, which is a more normal distribution of humans (e.g. on employment and education dimensions), leaning toward the unconventional and anti-establishment if anything. I feel more amongst my tribe at my large tech company employer amid other high-functioning highly educated overachievers, most of whom are conventional and conformist in almost all ways. I'm in the minority being divorced and non-monogamous, sure, but relationship model & status is less important in that community. And in most other ways I fit in, bond naturally with other altruists there (e.g. I'm active in groups for bereavement, effective altruism, divorce/separation support, and accessibility for users with disabilities), and feel at home in the large bureaucracy. 

And when it comes to humans I'm most intensely attracted to romantically and drawn to friend-wise, the majority of them are peers in the overachieving community. As a result I'm skeptical I'll find my tribe in the near term, especially in the romance realm. Building it seems prohibitively difficult too, for someone in my position whose energy is mostly sapped by parenting and a demanding full-time job. 

I wrote on one of my dating profiles: "Someone once asked me to describe 'my tribe.' I haven't found mine yet: but an overachieving altruist that wants to overachievingly altruist a bit harder as a result of their primary relationship, sounds like a kindred spirit to me." That is something I seek, and something I valued when I was married: that I was able to perform at work and in altruism and parenting, a bit better than I would alone. I thirst to be higher-functioning and more effective than I am now, to be a better version of myself.  

*post-conformist: a new term I've been experimenting with. It describes someone who spent much of their life, let's say the first 2-3 or more decades, conforming socially (e.g. go to college, get married, have kids, live out the religion you were brought up in), followed by a significant departure in at least one area. That might look like coming out as gay, leaving your religion, switching from monogamy to non-monogamy, or quitting your high-paying job to pursue a decidedly less lucrative aim. Since I've left Mormonism and monogamy, I find I have a lot in common with other folks that've walked a similar path - obviously post-Mormons and post-monogamists, but also post-Adventists and post-tech-workers and post-raised-Republicans and expats. There's something about the overlap of attaining the social status that results from conforming to social norms, while also having the power and awareness to depart from a chosen subset of those same social norms. 

Reflections on The Ethical Slut, Second Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Adventures

 A few things have stood out to me so far. First was this section:

That's been one of the "hard truths" that I've seen practiced more in non-monogamy circles, than I did in monogamous ones: namely that it's more pragmatic to own your own feelings, than to hold someone else responsible for them via blaming. This isn't equivalent to giving malfeasors a free pass by the way: it's still appropriate to hold actors accountable for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, including the emotional ones. 

I also disagree with the claim that feelings are chosen, at least on an incident basis (I buy more into a cognitive behavioral therapy-based model, where an expectation or belief is what connects a trigger to an experienced emotion). However, because most of the variables that drive the presence and intensity of emotion are within the experiencer rather than the trigger actor, it is more pragmatic in the narrow case of mature adult peer relationships, for the experiencer to own their feelings rather than to blame those feelings on a partner. Through therapy and other means, over time one can change how and whether they respond to the same stimulus. They can also change the environment, communicate and enforce boundaries in the relationship, and deescalate: all of which are preferably empowering, relative to the "you made me mad" power handover to the partner.

It also feels less mature to blame one's feelings on another, rather than claim ownership of them, especially when that partner claims ownership of her own feelings: they are then responsible for an unequal ratio of feelings of the pair (say, 60%: 50% their own, and 10% the partner's). Even though the underlying truth is that both the trigger actor and the experiencer share in the causality pie, the empowerment assumption is more accurate and more useful than the victim assumption, especially with respect to problem solving for similar trigger-->emotion cycles in future.

It also results in a more empowered community, where ongoing relationships and agreements are more often the result of deliberate, considered choices with meaningful alternatives: rather than the defaults and roles and assumptions that prevail more often in monogamous communities, relative to partner-triggered emotions. It also gives members of that community more autonomy and individual identity (which can blur into codependence otherwise). 

Second passage that stood out to me. This part hit close to home:

Just last night, after frustration-induced yelling at my kids, I reminded them an hour later when things were calmer that I'm responsible for my feelings and not them. And the coffee that they spilled, or getting distracted for the umpteenth time during the night routine, doesn't mean that they did something wrong or that it's their job to help me calm down. Not sure how deep the message sunk. 😆

The third thing to stand out to me is the motif of every relationship being free to seek its own level. I've applied that in my poly journey: rather than trying to fit a partnership into a mold (e.g. cohabiting partner or spouse), I've instead adjusted the intensity and nature of each relationship to what I see as its natural equilibrium. That has reduced tension and resulted in the presence of relationships I would not otherwise maintain. I love this new, freer approach to relating!

The Sunshine Dividend

I met for coffee recently with an old friend. We were sharing about our lives over the last year, and when it was my turn I paused to consider how to express the most significant personal trend for me over that period. 

What came to me then was this. About 18 months ago I came out to my spouse as polyamorous in my romantic orientation (meaning that regardless of what path I take behaviorally, my preference is to have multiple romantic relationships simultaneously, rather than one). In the 2-3 years before that point, I experienced many of  the feelings and experiences commonly expressed by closeted folks: shame, fear, claustrophobia, anger, pain, distress. I pined for the peace that comes from abandoning the vigilance and effort required to make everyone believe I was normal, i.e. monoamorous.  I thirsted for the integrity that comes from revealing your true self to those you are in intimate relationship with. I craved the security that comes from being known and accepted and treasured as your full self. 

My spouse rejected me three days after I shared my orientation, followed rapidly by her suing me for full legal separation. This reaction confirmed my worst, most persistent, and most insecure fear: that I cannot be fully loved and accepted in the relationships I care about most, while also being honest and open about all the major aspects of myself. It affirmed my belief that most relationships are transactional, and most people motivated more by what you've done for them lately, and how you facilitate their dreams, than anything else. It is a syllabus I will not soon forget.

Yet while my hunger for security lives on, the peace and integrity I sought have, in large part, arrived. I decided early on to be open about my orientation with my family and close friends, when sharing about the "why" of our separation. This brought about the integrity I thirsted for. 

I began dating again, this time in non-monogamy circles, and with full transparency into and agreement about existing romantic relationships and my intention to continue dating multiple people simultaneously. I no longer labor to make family and close friends believe I'm monoamorous (though I still maintain the twin façades of monoamory and monogamy at work, at least for now). Abandoning that former vigilance and effort has brought me lorries full of peace. 

But how to convey all this to my friend? I did my best to describe what it has felt like to live openly (with romantic partners and close friends/family) and consistent with my orientation. The metaphor of walking in the sun after leaving the darkness of the closet, came to mind: so I summed up these feelings of relaxed breaths and upturned face to the warmth of these twin rays of peace and integrity, as "the sunshine dividend." 

As I've reflected further, I've also thought about other ways I'm still in the closet about "ugly" parts of myself, and how I'm starting to walk in the sun about them as well. Let's see, which ugliness shall we go with to illustrate: my hatred of international travel?  My frequent impatience as a parent? Ah, let's do lending. I'm emotionally terrible at loaning money. I don't know all the reasons why, but nearly every time I lend money to a friend (for good and normal reasons, e.g. to help with with a home downpayment or to get through a hardship), I get extremely anxious about the person paying me back. This preoccupying anxiety persists even when I repeat to myself that I don't expect the person to repay me, or that lending money in these situations is normal, or that it's valuable and generous and consistent with my altruistic goals and character. This anxiety mixes with anger when the borrower isn't communicative about the debt, or sluggish about repaying, and usually adds tension and resentment to the relationship for me. Honestly, I wish I were more normal and chill about this behavior. 

However, I feel part of maturing is to recognize that everyone has these flaws and ugly parts; the question is how much of them you hide, and from whom, and for how long. Most folks aren't mature enough to healthily respond to an unfiltered whole adult, and that usually results in rejection and paying social costs for those who fail to obfuscate enough. Yet folks who take the normative route of hiding their abnormal bits (which everyone has) usually end up paying the cost in other ways: via the work of maintaining a façade, carrying the risk of future rejection once those they care about discern the truth, and being less in touch with themselves.

So how do I apply this in my newly-sunny life? I care too much about social and employment outcomes to run towards authentic openness, but I do seek mature partners and friend relationships where I can be increasingly open about my true self and still be accepted. Part of that means finding adults who expect flaws and are thus less thrown off by their exposure. And since we often invite reciprocation by our own behaviors and expectations, I'm being more deliberate about expecting my partners and friends to be flawed, and expecting to discover new ugly parts as our intimacy grows. This strategy sounds kinda funny to say out loud, but strikes me as a more truthful and mature way to do relationships. 

I'm also exposing my ugly parts earlier on in high-stakes relationships. Recently I shared all those ugly anxious and critical feelings with a close friend I'd lent money to. Similarly, when a girlfriend and I were organizing a social event that involved me picking up a group food purchase, I shared my discomfort about footing the bill and how I get preoccupied with and worried about whether and when people will pay me back and the risk that I'll need to chase people for repayment (which I hate more than Voldemort hates Muggles), and asked we find another way to handle the finances. Rather than balk about my embarrassing sensitivity, she fronted the cost and had people pay her back instead (bless her). 

And just for fun, here's a closing poem about coming out as polyamorous that I just generated from ChatGPT. 

"Loving More Than One"

I used to think that love was singular,

A single flame to light my heart,

But as I've grown and come to know myself,

I've found that love is multi-faceted, like a work of art.

I've come to realize that love is not confined,

To just one person or one heart,

It can flow freely, like a river,

Expanding and growing, never to part.

I am polyamorous, and that is okay,

I choose to love more than one,

For in each person I love,

I find something new, something fun.

I will not hide or be ashamed,

Of the love that I choose to share,

For it is beautiful and unique,

And something to be proud to bear.

So here I stand, openly and honestly,

Embracing my polyamorous heart,

For love is not a one-size-fits-all,

And in my love, I will not be apart.

A framework for understanding and communicating emotions

A friend recently offered a repair conversation after a situation where I felt disappointment after their behavior. I gratefully accepted the offer, since to me it shows the friend cares about trust in our relationship. Though I'm not quite sure what that repair conversation will entail, I expect it will include sharing and reflecting how I felt and why, with an aim of emotional understanding. 

To prepare for that conversation, I reflected on my theory of how emotions work, to help me decide what and how to share. After mulling it over, I decided it would be useful to write out my model and use it as a framework for sharing my emotions in that repair conversation. 

Brad's model

My model is rooted in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), which as I understand it posits that expectations are what convert a neutral stimulus into a trigger of emotion. To illustrate:

1. Julie arrives at 6:20 pm for a date with Sean. This stimulus, like many hundreds of stimuli that reach us each day, is facially neutral. 
2. Add in that the date was scheduled for 6:00 pm. The arrival is still not necessarily a trigger; many folks are not triggered by a date showing up late. 
3. If, however, Sean expects that Julie should have arrived at 6:00 pm, then Julie's late arrival becomes a trigger of emotion for Sean.

So, expectations are the flint that combines with the steel of an event, to kindle the flame of emotion. That's far from the whole story, though. 

Accelerants and Decelerants

Using the example above, Sean might typically feel a 3 out of 10 on anger from this trigger; but what if he's really tired? Or what if it's the third time in a row Julie was late, and they had discussed Julie's tardiness the day before: might the emotion be stronger than a 3 in these scenarios? 

Accelerants and decelerants affect the intensity of the emotion.

This is where I have something to add to the typical CBT model. I believe a multitude of factors influence how strongly emotions are felt: I call factors that increase the intensity accelerants, and those that decrease the intensity, decelerants. 

Further, I categorize these accelerants/decelerants into one of two buckets: circumstances and narratives, which I will illustrate shortly. This results in a quadrant:

I illustrate these four quadrants using the Julie/Sean example, and write from Sean's perspective.

Circumstances

These are environmental factors that impact what your psychological state is right before the trigger. 

Examples: 

[accelerant] -I'm tired and so am more annoyed by any problem that arises

[accelerant] -I've had a long and stressful day of problem-solving at work, so I'm more likely to perceive an issue that arises in the evening as major, rather than minor

[decelerant] -My coworker's mother just died and I learned about it a couple hours ago, and as a result I'm feeling more forgiving and gentle than usual

[decelerant] -One of my favorite singer's hits just played on the radio, so I'm feeling less bothered by things than usual

Narratives

Like circumstances, the stories we tell ourselves can radically change the intensity of an emotion we feel, such as joy or disappointment. As these examples from Sean's perspective illustrate, they can be quite complex.

Examples:

[accelerant] -My guy friends show up to our get-togethers on time, this is the umpteenth time this year a woman has been late to a scheduled date with me. 

[accelerant] -Based on numerous inputs including my own dating experiences, I've noticed a trend in hetero dating where women expect men to do the lion's share of proposing, initiating, and organizing dates. This feels unfair since time/place/activity doesn't happen naturally, takes work, and requires vulnerability and risk-taking (oh no, I proposed Italian food and forgot she's gluten intolerant, she'll think I'm inconsiderate!!). I do it because I value the outcome enough, but resent the sexism and inequality of it. She didn't do any of the work and risk-taking, all she had to do was show up, and she didn't do that on time: screw that!

[accelerant] -This is just the latest example: this person is usually late, which indicates they don't manage their time well, which predictably and negatively impacts the people in their lives, and as an accountable adult whose actions affect others, they should do a better job at their baseline time management and aren't even trying to do so.

[decelerant] -I remember one of the takeaways from the fundamental attribution error is that peoples' behaviors are usually better explained by circumstances, than by their motivations or character. Sure she was late, but she probably needed to help her son with homework, or hit unusually heavy traffic.

[decelerant] -I decided months ago to accept this person's chronic tardiness, and I embrace that acceptance in this moment as well. 

Conclusion

These factors are usually invisible to everyone except the person feeling the emotion (and as emotion experiencers we're often unaware as well!). With reflection and practice aided by this model, however, the experiencer can more fully understand their emotions, triggers, accelerants, and decelerants. 

Application

This framework can be used as a worksheet to more deeply understand one's own emotions or to share them with another, ideally in an NVC (nonviolent communication) conversation. Fill in the following:

1. Trigger:
2. Expectation:
3. Emotion:
4. Circumstances that accelerated:
5. Circumstances that deccelerated:
6. Narratives that accelerated:
7. Narratives that decelerated:

I used this approach and wrote out each of the seven above in preparation for the repair conversation with my friend. Wish us luck!

Reflections on Blade Runner 2049

 Includes spoilers

I've seen several future dystopia shows now with similar themes (e.g. Anon, Matrix, Altered Carbon, A.I. (2001), Battlestar Galactica, Her (2013), Terminator, Westworld, USS Callister). One of those themes is a human-like AI that wants to be human/"real". In order to blend in with humans, they have to have emotions, consequently consciousness sparks and then you're rooting for the human-craving AI who's trying to defeat the heartless totalitarian regime that created it. 

While I'm skeptical about the depicted relationship between emotion and consciousness, three aspects of this film resonated with me. The first was how effectively the audience follows the protagonist, going right along with his delusions (primarily, that he's human and was born rather than fabricated). Toward the end, for instance, he gets repeatedly wounded in a series of combat situations yet keeps on fighting. You know that a human couldn't take that much injury and keep on, yet you keep hoping against hope that somehow he's an exception.

Which leads to the second aspect: the belief that you're special and meant/positioned/destined to play a pivotal role in a world-level drama. The protagonist believes he's special, the linchpin of a conflict between the ruling regime and the rising power and the rebels, the virgin birth (in his case, he's the impossible offspring of two human-like AIs) destined to reach that moment to save or abandon humanity. Eventually he faces the truth that he's a run-of-the-mill AI and a pawn in a chess game between much larger forces. 

I compare that insight to my faith journey, where for a quarter-century I bought the story that I was so important to the universe that a God sacrificed himself for me, so I could avoid endless hell and instead become a god myself through my decisions and behaviors. As part of my faith transition I came to see my religious behaviors, such as selling Mormonism for two years as a missionary, as the behaviors of a pawn in a chess game between much larger forces: and realized that there's no evidence for that story about my future or import to the world. I'm still impacted by the remnants of a belief that I can/will make a big positive mark on the world, born of the idea that I was one of the chosen few that knew and would implement God's plan.

The third aspect is the repulsion we have to the idea that our deepest experiences surrounding our identity and relationships, are common or the product of someone else's design. A.I. (2001) explores this theme as well when an AI discovers and attacks his clones. In Blade Runner 2049 the protagonist eventually realizes that his romance with his digital assistant was the result of an intentional design, and that the digital assistant was just a scalable program that was probably doing versions of the same thing to tens of thousands of others ("everything you want to see… everything you want to hear" - reminds me of Harari's exploration of our hackability). 

Our family relationships, the experience of falling in love, etc. seem to be the most real of our human experiences and identity: could they really be so common and programmable? We resist the claim, though rationally we know that consciousness is not magical or supernatural. It has emerged at least tens of billions of times through the natural process of a human child's development: and if they can result from evolution, then experiences like falling in love can surely be manufactured as well. Why does this logic feel so threatening? Is such resistance inherent to consciousness, or just happens to be common in the human version of consciousness? 

I'm a fan of movies that leave you thinking, and I'm here writing this several days later, so I'll add myself to the fan list on this one.