Sunday Scrawl #1: Learning Not to Know When my parents sat me down in the living room the night before I was supposed to leave for college, I thought they were going to tell me they were getting a divorce. At the time, it was the most terrifying upheaval I could imagine. Instead, they told me that the Nintendo Game Boy that I’d gotten for my sixth birthday first released two hundred and nine years ago. They told me that the last Backstreet Boy passed away one hundred and twenty three years ago. They told me they had paid a hefty price to raise me in a daydream of the past, and that beyond the careful curation of the town I grew up in, technology was leagues beyond anything I’d ever seen. Every disease I’d assumed would someday kill me had been eradicated. Only a handful of accidental deaths happened worldwide per year. The beginnings of space colonization were underway. It wasn’t a world without want—things like food, shelter, and healthcare were all abundant, but if you wanted more, you’d have to pay. I suppose I should’ve been angry, but my sense of justice and right conduct broke beneath the sheer logistical enormity of what pulling the wool over my eyes had demanded. My parents had practiced for nearly a year to scrub their speech of anachronistic language. When I’d learned to drive, our car had been microadjusting my steering. I had never been in real danger. I learned it was my parents’ second time raising a family in a cultural and technological time bubble. They’d started with the 2040s, but they’d wanted something more exotic the second time around. They said they’d enjoyed their time together, and that they loved me and one another very much, but that after my younger brother’s time to “leave for college” came, they’d probably go their separate ways on their next adventures. “Better to end on a high note,” my mom had said, as if that explained it all. In retrospect, the cracks in reality had always been there. The weird tradition around not seeing or talking to college-bound friends and siblings until you, too, headed off to get your education. The fact that despite the statistics, nobody ever seemed to die. I didn’t go to college. I went to something closer to elementary school for eighteen-year-olds. Societal integration courses were part of the package, and all of us time capsule kids spent four years catching up to modern society. It was both compassionate and practical for them to put us all together, hundreds of kids from dozens of time periods. We were all clueless together. Looking back on it, it would’ve been easy for those to have been been some of the best years of my life, to meet people with wildly different, but still relatable, experiences. Things didn’t go that way. I was lonely during those years, and melancholy. Grieving, without ever knowing it, for the life I didn’t get. Eventually, everything felt so alien that I started emulating the games I played as a kid. I found custom software I could run in immersion rooms to simulate the cathode ray tubes of my childhood TV. Buying an antique would’ve been way too expensive. So many words had drifted in meaning, and so many were new. Even after four years of study, it still took all my skill just to keep up with the conversation, and when I spoke to those who had grown up in the real world, it was painfully obvious that something was different about me, and they’d ask, and I’d explain my childhood, and suddenly I’d be a bauble, not a person. I’d be considered, remarked upon, and then placed back on the shelf. As the years wound to a close, everyone started making plans. Some of my peers wanted to travel. Many moved on to normal higher education. The only thing I could imagine doing was going back to raise time capsule kids of my own. I could be anything; I decided to become my parents. To do so, I’d need to save up a lot of money and find someone willing to be my wife for about twenty years. I made a bit of money working as a perspectivist—someone with uncommon life experiences and worldviews. Most of my gigs were social gatherings, where I’d offer a unique experience for the adventurous conversationalist, which usually devolved into the same questions about whether I had really believed in the world I’d grown up in. Occasionally, I’d be brought in by a corporation doing research on whatever speck of their target market I represented. I was fortunate that my parents were early adopters of the long-term historical tourism craze. My job options would have been limited if they had been late to the bandwagon. I’d been working as a perspectivist for a few months—long enough to know that I wasn’t saving nearly as much as I needed to be, not long enough to allow myself to know that—when I met Jask. Her mother hired me to provide entertainment at her twenty-fifth birthday party. I was supposed to be something interesting for the guests to pass the time, ranking somewhere between the houseplants and the caterers in importance. When we started talking, she was asking me all the regular questions, clearly a little bored. Five minutes in, she went off-script, asking how it had felt to learn that I didn’t really have to support a family, asking how my relationship with time had changed since leaving home. Her mother came by and hinted that she should spend more time with her guests, and Jask ignored her. She spent the whole party talking to me. She paid to extend my time, so I stayed. A little past midnight, she told me I was free to go if I wanted. I didn’t. She kissed me, more of an experiment than anything else, and I didn’t stop her. We had a strange connection. She loved me from the first day, but she loved me as early physicians loved cadavers. I was a mysterious thing which existed to be pulled apart and examined. In time, though, something deeper began to bloom. She was wealthy in a way that made my savings largely irrelevant to the choices available to me, and she was fascinated by the prospect of raising time capsule kids. A year later, we took several tests, signed a novel-length contract, forked over a massive sum, and moved into a lovely house which we agreed to tell the kids had been built in 1964. Todd is seven now, and Sandra is three, and I love it here, but learning not to know is so much harder than I’d imagined. I’m not supposed to know that Todd developed a growth that “modern” medicine can’t detect or treat, so we’ll need to add a pill to his dinner next week so he stays asleep while a robot from the future excises it. I’m not supposed to know that the real reason the Thompsons “moved away” six months ago was that one of them couldn’t take the pretending anymore and spilled the beans to their daughter. I’m not supposed to know that Jask—“Elaine”, in this world—is cheating on me. I don’t think she’ll ever understand how it feels to me. I’m not mad. We don’t see the world in the same way. To her, this is a playground, and this is just another slide. She knows I know. We each get a daily report. She’s mad at me, I’m sure, for not finding a way to “find out”. She craves the encounter, craves the shouting match and the death glares and the shame, all of it. For her, this is a part of it in the same way that the joy of raising the kids is. She has always embraced the vastness of experience with open arms. It’s why I love her. It’s also why she loves me. She told me once that I’m the first truly new thing she’s ever found. I don’t think I could explain to her how it hurts me, because I’m not sure she’d understand. I could tell her that I was hurt, that I was really, truly, out-of-character wounded because of what she’s done, but it probably wouldn’t reach her. Authenticity is different for her. Authenticity means achieving the closest possible alignment with the person you are trying to be. All the advertisements frame historical tourism that way, as an opportunity for an encounter with an exotic way of being. I’m the one who’s trying to make it something else because I grew up in its thrall. I can’t figure out which one of us loves this experience more: her, cherishing every facet of this world without partiality, reaching her hand into the murky depths of it and relishing the texture of the grimy grit at the bottom, or me, desperately clinging to the solemnity of an era when choice was still entwined with consequence.

Space to Play I remember childhood as the slow advance of a great laboring Seriousness. When I was in middle school, an awareness began to settle on me that great beings known as “colleges” watched from afar; by high school I understood that I ought to order my life to be pleasing to them. Nobody was entirely sure what, specifically, we ought to be doing, so orthodoxy was the subject of considerable debate. When such things were discussed, Seriousness draped around our necks like lead aprons. We need Seriousness, sometimes. Seriousness is what sweeps in after tragedy, bringing rules and regulations, the eyes of good society bearing down upon you. When you’re having a good time and things start to get dangerous, Seriousness rips through the fun like a cold wind through a T-shirt. But we forget that Seriousness is a means of control, and not a very sophisticated one at that. Wonder and folly alike wither away beneath it. Seriousness is not the same thing as responsibility, though Serious people like to believe it is, and it can only create the desire to flee, not the will to chase. Seriousness is one of the feelings that settles over a competitor before a tournament—the cold understanding that the time has come to execute at the limit of what you are capable of. But if Seriousness is for operating at your limit, then why would you be anything but Serious? Because Seriousness isn’t enough. A good competitor will have a hunger, too, a desire that Seriousness is too crude to create. That drive will push them to train, to attempt to push beyond their limits, risking failure, to prepare them for the next time they need to be Serious. Training isn’t that different than being Serious, though. So why would you ever do something very un-Serious, like play? Play is for fun. Play is to preserve a piece of us that Seriousness does not understand, the feather-light joy of being swept along by life like a seed caught by a breeze. Also, every once in a while, play is for redefining the limit of your abilities entirely, or inventing whole new games. I am not the only one to lament the smothering gray creep of Seriousness into childhood and, for that matter, adulthood. But I do wonder what becomes of a society that values Seriousness to the extent that we do. Does Seriousness bring out the best in us, as we seem to believe? Or does the immense weight of the future only serve to pin us in place beneath it? A Serious society assumes there is no feather-light joy, that there are no new games to be found and no new ways to play the old ones. A Serious society believes all it can be is a slightly more optimal version of itself. Students who are Serious won’t take classes that might wreck their GPA, and they grow into adults who won’t look stupid even in front of their friends. We fossilize before we’re even dead. If the Seriousness weighs heavily enough upon a person, if their life is stable but nothing more and they live in a kind of comfortable unfeeling stupor, there is little that can shake them loose except mortality reminding them of what awaits. Perhaps that is the way to live, squeezed between life and death, shimmying between the two immensities like a climber up a chimney, but if the Reaper himself must show up to get you to attend a pottery class, something has gone horribly wrong. I played a lot of video games as a kid, and made up games with my friends, and as I got older such things often served as refuges from the Seriousness. I wonder what happens when every shelter from the distant judgmental gazes erodes away. What happens to us when no private spaces remain for us to be unskilled and uninhibited? Do we decide that we are finished with becoming and settle into being? Do we cede the world to belong only to the skilled and the shameless? Perhaps, without space to play, we do. Perhaps it is already theirs.

Care Doesn’t Scale I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply rewarding and she really cared about the kids, and this way the kids—who otherwise might not have had any consistent parental or sibling figures in their lives—grew up together as a family. I was struck by how reasonable the arrangement was. If you wanted to design a social system to care for children who have lost their parents, I don’t know if you could do much better. With four children, each kid can get individual care and attention, but there were four social workers each had three 24-hour blocks per week, so they had time to have their own lives with enough flexibility to take vacations and sometimes have two workers with the kids instead of one. To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one. Of course, you could probably add a few more children, or subtract a social worker, as a cost-saving measure. It’d be less sustainable, but it wouldn’t significantly change the experience. But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost. With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle. We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person. There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for. The enormity of the scale of human suffering makes individual effort feel futile, driving people towards solutions that scale—we should build more housing, reform healthcare, reform the financial system, have a different kind of government, change the incentives, etc. Adults often come to see small-scale solutions to major problems as childish. Yeah, you could make a couple of sandwiches for the hungry—but there are billions of people who need better access to food. Maybe your effort is better spent working on solutions that can scale. So it is that children who feel bad for the guy on the street grow into college students who have strong opinions about socialism or technological development. Then something shifts again when those students graduate and start working and have kids, and suddenly they’re thinking a lot more about bibs and bottles than economic models. Some people see the waning of fervor for grand causes as a sign that people are losing hope in a better world, becoming complacent. Others see it as a natural part of getting older, as a healthy way of focusing on what they can control, of not getting lost in self-righteous hypotheticals. There’s probably some truth on both sides. But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. Unscalability is anathema to the engineering mind. It’s weirdly terrifying to consider that you could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect. It’s been a good opportunity to re-examine my worldview. I’ve regarded low-scale activities with a kind of casual dismissal for much of my life—not that I don’t respect or value people with occupations operating at an individual level, but I was always skeptical about pursuing such things myself because some part of me thinks “we live in a massive world in a time of massive reach. A textbook could educate thousands of people, a speech could inspire millions, great software could touch the lives of billions. Why would you choose limited pursuits when you can do something limitless? Isn’t unbounded potential for scale better than the mere individual?” Software engineering as a field is made up of people who are very conscious of missed opportunities for scale (“why isn’t there an API for this so I don’t have to call in and wait on hold for an hour?”). And that’s not a bad thing! Software has added a ton of value to the world by making things accessible to everyone that used to be accessible to only a few. Scale isn’t bad, at least not necessarily. Industrial is perfectly capable of being better than custom. Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor. But there’s some part of me that twinges with a sense of insufficiency when I think about doing something small-scale. I mean, this very second I’m writing a blog post—converting these thoughts into a format conducive for consumption at scale. It can be tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant. It doesn’t help that people whose work can scale get access to fame, wealth, and power that will rarely be available to people operating at an individual level. And yeah, sometimes small-scale work is just wasted effort, the result of being too proud to see that the same result could be achieved with less work. But sometimes things can’t scale without changing. Care doesn’t really scale without becoming something else. Thinking about this has helped me reframe how I feel about things like parents looking after their children, things like my friends taking time to chat with me. It’s not that I cynically didn’t think those things were important; it’s just difficult to shake the sense that people, that I, should be doing bigger, better things. For care, though, it doesn’t get bigger and better. If your goal is to educate the world, you can look for ways to educate thousands or millions. If you want to inspire the world, the billions await. But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do. There’s something oddly comforting about that.

‘Small Village’ of Supposedly-Deceased Intellectuals Found Alive, Thriving at Caribbean Resort Gabriel Martinez, a 35-year-old confectioner living in the Cayman Islands, thought he was posting a simple promotional photo when he snapped a picture of his ‘cocoa-banana-surprise’ and posted it to Instagram last week. Instead, he ignited a scandal still blazing its way through the publishing world when his followers noticed a gathering of prominent intellectuals sitting at a table in the background. Such a gathering—including a bestselling novelist, two Nobel prize winners, and an acclaimed journalist—was already noteworthy, but it was particularly remarkable because everyone seated at that table was, supposedly, dead. A firestorm of confusion ripped its way across social media, prompting a curious group of well-connected locals to poke around a bit. Within hours, they discovered several hundred ‘deceased’ public intellectuals enjoying posthumous sunshine and martinis at the resort. A few hours later, when the gig was clearly up, the ‘deceased’ released a statement explaining their actions, including this illuminating paragraph: “For those of us who have reached a certain level of fame, there’s a moment after you die when the public comes together to remember the significance of your work, leading to one last big sales boost for your books. We call it the ‘bucket bump’. In the past, that payday went directly to your publisher, and hopefully your family, but eventually some economists got fed up with it and started faking their deaths once they were done writing and doing speaking tours. It worked well, so these days, it’s standard practice—you’ll work with your agent and financial planner to decide the timing, and then a specialized contractor will convincingly fabricate your demise. We found a resort owner who gives us massive discounts because he wants his kids to grow up surrounded by the major intellectuals of the day, and now we usually live out the last few years of our lives here. We hope the public can empathize with the challenging predicament we face, and we regret any pain or feelings of betrayal caused by our deception.” Many people seemed unimpressed with the statement, leading some people to denounce their former favorite writers, including this indictment from an East Coast senator: “Our intellectuals, lauded for their honesty and integrity, systematically lied to us for their own financial gain. Graveyardgate is NOT a victimless crime. We needed their knowledge, their wisdom, now more than ever, and we found them huddling under a blanket.” Several dormant social media accounts, many of which still claimed that the account holder was deceased in their bios, flared back to life to disparage the remark. “I spent my career BEGGING for funding. I dipped into my own savings, delayed my retirement, to fund my work, and then LITERALLY THE DAY I DIED everyone and their mother is singing my praises and whipping out a credit card. I don’t regret any of the ‘pain or feelings of betrayal’ I caused at all. You people deserve this.” “need us now more than ever?!? excuse me?!?!? i was retired seven years before i took my bucket bump. i answered e-mails. i took interviews. this is my life’s work, i’m happy to discuss it. sometimes people reached out but mostly it was crickets. then i ‘die’ and all of a sudden it’s ‘oh she had so much more to teach us’ as if you’d been banging down my door this whole time. um no? if you cared so much about my abilities maybe you would’ve asked me to use them sometime in the past 7 years?” “It IS a victimless crime, though. You’d be surprised how many household names, people who singlehandedly reshaped the public discourse on a major issue, have cash flow problems. For a while we had a brilliant solution—decouple the public’s flurry of mourning and spending with the actual day of death. The public still mourns, I still die, just not at the same time. All the money made from selling my book is money I earned—the fact that I had to fake my death to get it is incidental. Just because the public sucks at funding research and the arts doesn’t mean we’re not allowed find solutions. Honestly, bucket bumps were an elegant way to get around a well-known problem, and I certainly didn’t mind seeing everyone say something nice about me for a change. Oh, well, guess that’s ruined now, too.” One post in particular, hastily deleted, has led to rampant speculation: “it’s not like we just stopped working either. we’ve made some serious breakthroughs here and written plenty of books. often the insights are significant enough that they’re not plausible for existing thinkers so we have to find someone new to deliver the message. you ever seen someone have a book that’s absolutely brilliant and their subsequent work is hot garbage? yeah. odds are the first one was us.”