Am I Going "In The Right Direction?"
An attempt to embrace living non-linearly
Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash
Are we going in the right direction?
If we are trying to get from Boston to Atlanta, I can tell you with great specificity which direction is right (i.e. moving us closer to our goal).
Head southwest. Drive about 1,000 miles. Call me when you arrive.
The same holds true when my wife and I are making a new recipe for dinner. Follow the directions. Add ingredients. Mix, heat, and eat.
The right direction is super clear: a linear progression from beginning to end.
If only the rest of life were so easy.
(alas)
There are no directions for how to live. There is no recipe to follow.
(Truth be told, there are many “recipe templates” for life offered to us consciously and unconsciously by parents, society, etc. Despite my attempts at self-authoring, I’m still using templates and recipes given to me by my culture and upbringing. How closely I follow this recipe is my prerogative. I’ve always been a bit of an improv guy in the kitchen.)
There is no preset destination. Most of the time, I don’t know where I’m going.
If I don’t know where I’m going, then there is no right or wrong. I’m just going.
People judge this as aimless. Don’t drift. Have purpose. Son, you need some direction in your life. (I’m not sure whose voice this is, but I’m imagining a paternalizing elder.)
So I make up little goals along the way to orient myself. We all need some structure to our days. We also need signposts that say we’re growing up, we’re making progress.
Even time itself appears to us linearly. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. The days and years unfold along a nice timeline. Getting older itself appears to have a direction.
But what if the passage of linear time is an illusion?
Can I disabuse myself of the notion that my life can, will, and should progress from beginning to end in some smooth, linear way?
Which Way To Our Goals?
I’m not referring to “right direction” as a moral imperative, but more as a goal-orientated destination. The “right direction” implies that one way will move us towards something we want and another way (presumably the opposite way) will move us away from that goal.
In a linear world, this all makes sense.
However, we live in a non-linear world: From our body, to our brain, to our hyperconnected global economies, we are increasingly subject to non-linear dynamics.
This confuses our ability to pursue goal-orientated actions because we aren’t sure of the consequences of moving in one direction versus another. Our logic of how to achieve our ends is upended.
From personal challenges like staying healthy to the biggest, juiciest, most “wicked” problems like climate change, political polarization, and global war, we must confront the inherently complex situation of finding “the right direction” when the path is not a predictable straight line.
Nonlinear dynamical systems describe changes in variables over time, may appear chaotic, unpredictable, or counterintuitive, contrasting with much simpler linear systems. ~ Wikipeida, “Complex Dynamic Systems.”
Unpredictable. Chaotic. Counterintuitive.
Seems like exactly where are and where no one wants to be.
From Stright Lines to Squiggles
What is non-linear like?
It’s a squiggle. More precisely, it’s a lot of squiggles jumbled together in a mess that doesn’t have a clear start or end.
For example, some aspects of the weather are seen to be non-linear, where simple changes in one part of the system produce complex, disproportional effects elsewhere. This nonlinearity is one of the reasons why accurate long-term forecasts are impossible with current technology.
This is also one of the reasons meteorologists are terribly untrustworthy — non-linearity pisses us off.
To be more accurate, it pisses off the logical, linear part of our mind that has been classically conditioned to see the world in a Newtonian cause-and-effect, A leads to B sort of way. It upsets our thinking mind that wants to know what will happen because knowing means safety, satisfaction, and security.
We’re Poorly Equipped To Think About This
Our cognitive apparatus evolved in a world that was much more linear, local, and lunar (as in aligned with slower seasonal changes happening over the course of weeks and months).
We lived, hunted, gathered, and played within a relatively small swatch of earth. We were afraid of the shadows at night, but not a war on the other side of the globe or stock market crashes. Our minds had the gift of worrying about hyper-local changes in our immediate environment.
Now we are embedded in a world that is non-linear, global, and instantaneous. We’ve crossed the Rubicon from physical to virtual, from places to pixel, from being only impacted by our immediate environment to being impacted by news, events, and updates from every corner of the globe.
Our world now stretches from pole to pole, continent to continent, and it’s happening fast. As the number of inputs has skyrocketed, the number of possible interactions has also grown exponentially. Non-linear dynamics ensues.
Yet, our thinking hasn’t evolved to keep up. (I say “our” but please correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t want to make any assumptions about your thinking.)
To put it in a Piagetian frame, we’ve gone from concrete operational to formal operational thinking, but that is not enough. A classically conditioned mind stuck in a postmodern, neoclassical world is at war with itself — a struggle to find the right direction ensues.
An Example of “No Right Direction”
More personally, the body itself is a complex, adaptive, and emergent system that follows non-linear dynamics. It has many parts which are interrelated into an organic, higher-order whole.
In other words, the body is greater than the sum of its parts. And those parts interact in all sorts of non-linear ways.
When I work with people who have clear body goals (e.g. lose 20lbs) the question of “right direction” seems obvious. If the scale goes down, you’re moving in the right direction.
At one level of analysis, this is true (in that it is aligned with your goals.) If you come back to me next week and you’ve lost weight, you’re moving in the right direction.
Yet when I ask you what you did to achieve this, cause and effect get murkier. When we step into our lived experience and ask if any single decision will move us towards our goal, the right direction becomes a lot less clear.
How do you know you’re moving in the right direction at any given moment?
This is the golden question, so let’s return to the weight loss example to unpack it.
Eat less. Exercise more. Fewer calories in, more calories out. Shift energy intake and expenditure and the laws of thermodynamics will do their thing.
This is common advice, and there is a grain of truth to it. Calories matter in determining your weight.
At the same time, there are lots of things that matter: hormone fluctuations, microbiome composition, hydration status, glycogen stores, etc. We’re dealing with a sizable number of factors that interact with each other in multiple ways. This is what makes working with bodies so wonderous and so frustrating — it doesn’t follow our linear thinking. It plays by its own non-linear rules.
You can certainly try cutting our processed carbs, intermittent fasting, or any number of other attempts at limiting calories and controlling your food intake. But whether any individual decision is moving you in the right direction is amazingly difficult to assess. You have to wait and see.
People hate when I tell them this. It not only offends their sensibility, but it seems to undermine my supposed “expertise”.
“What do you mean you don’t know if waking up at 6am and going for a 5-mile run is moving me in the right direction.” (i.e. the direction of losing the weight you want to lose.)”
I respond by saying that going for a morning run could help move you in the right direction. It will burn a few hundred calories. Yet this is pretty much the only thing we can say with certainty (and even then, exactly how many calories you burn is highly variable and difficult to measure without a lab setup.)
The issue is that running will have numerous, difficult to predict effects on your body and mind:
It will impact your hormones, potentially disrupting your natural cortisol rhythms which could have the opposite effect you want.
It might make you hungrier and lead to eating more.
It might unconsciously have you move less during the rest of the day to conserve energy.
It might create inflammation in your body and too much can cause aches that diminish your happiness and lead to self-soothing with food.
It might create a psychological health halo — I went for a run today so I can eat whatever I want — that justifies subsequent over-eating.
Conversely, it might be the best part of your day. It might clear your mind, get you out in nature, reinvigorate your breathing, and remind you that you’re strong, powerful, and can do hard things.
There’s as good chance it might do all of these things. And more. The hard part is knowing how all these pieces will interact in the long-run. Will they move you in the right direction? This is the struggle.
What does it mean to embrace non-linearity?
I am trying to embrace non-linearity across all domains of my life, and it is asking me to be with it, in it, and attuned to it as best as I can as it evolves from moment to moment without assuming I know where anything will lead.
It is really freaking hard.
Will this comment to my wife increase our intimacy or decrease it?
Will this new software improve my productivity or be a waste?
Will eating this for breakfast help me feel energized or make me tired?
It depends. Can I accept not knowing?
More importantly can I not get paralyzed by indecision and move forward regardless? (Perhaps this would be a good moment to discuss faith?)
When it comes to my body, I’m trying to accept that what I think might be the right direction may not lead me exactly to where I want to go. (This also presumes I know where I want to go, which is saying a lot.)
To the very least, it means accepting that what got me here may not (or almost certainly will not) get me to where I want to go next — assuming what once worked, will still work, is faulty reasoning. In fact, it’s problem that lands a lot of people at my doorstep scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do next.
To this, I offer this piece of wisdom;
When the body confounds you, frustrates you, and makes you question your sanity, remain humble and listen. It’s not trying to ruin your day. It’s trying to keep you alive. You might not understand its ways, but you can still appreciate its effort.
The body will make changes to protect itself. Some of these changes are annoying or even painful. At the biological level, these involve reciprocal transactions, feedback loops, tipping points, and cyclical interactions that constantly self-correct based on new inputs. It’s really complex under the hood.
Maybe we need to admit that despite how much we know (and I do really appreciate how much science has elucidated about the body) there’s still way more we don’t truly understand. I’m not claiming that it’s not understandable, but that we cannot accurately model and predict outcomes with our current level of technology or thinking.
Letting go of “in the right direction” means letting go of thinking we know exactly where this will lead us. Maybe we’re not supposed to see the linear path from here to there. Wouldn’t that kill the joie de vivre.
~ Jeff