hedging uncertainty

+ SF meetup details

Hiro - Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Japan, 1962

Quick housekeeping; I’m hosting my second irl meetup in San Francisco next weekend (Sunday). Last year’s was really fun. If you can make it, excited to meet you there!

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There’s only so much uncertainty one can stomach at any given moment in time. When you’re deeply uncertain about one part of your life, it’s necessary to find sturdiness in other areas, else you feel unmoored from reality. I call this hedging uncertainty.

We make this calculus regularly on what knobs of life to turn at any given moment. Pull the peripheral levers, hope the center will hold.

As Flaubert said, be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. My interpretation of Flaubert’s statement is that for you to feel psychologically safe to explore, you require other foundational methods of grounding yourself. The artist who wants to go full time into their art might require financial padding or an intellectual milieu that re-affirms their potential to take the leap. The entrepreneur who takes high risk bets in an intense work environment might seek stability and consistency from family. This quest for steadiness is underpinned by deeply individual preferences.

There are many different types of uncertainty: shapes, textures, altitudes. You have to contain enough self-knowledge to know what type of uncertainty you’re willing to bear. I’m confident in taking social risk, less so financial. I’m okay with external change and less so internal mistrust. One of the hardest places to be, in my opinion, is to live a life that looks good but feels terrible inside. The outside world can shift rapidly as long as I maintain internal equanimity.

It’s a foundational skill to dig at your doubt or worry. Mine it for meaning and depth. What specifically activates your fear of going headlong? Is your worry about the place, time, situation, person?

At the same time, I’m beginning to make peace with life’s fundamental uncontrollability. How little we know. The proceeding sequence could contain well-ordered safety and comfort, but also excess, tension, surprise. Isn’t that what we yearn for in art, in music: the risk one takes to deliver some core truth of the human spirit? The humility of being confronted with ourselves. The proposition of any great attempt of originality is that it might die and fall on its face and tremble. But in taking such large risk it could propel something novel into the world: a sliver of truth from a structureless environment. A moment of pure beauty. Some forms of uncertainty are deeply inherent, and perhaps without it there’s no illumination, mystery, and delight.

Foucault:

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is also true for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

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Parts of my investing job now often feel anthropological, more a story of human ardor than one about technology: What level of risk can I stomach? Can I believe the future that you believe in? What stakes am I willing to wager on a few human beings? Imagine only knowing what happens five or ten years from now if you were right on some hunch. You’d have to get comfortable with impossibly long feedback loops.

There are many ripple effects of this flow of logic. Relationships have impossibly long feedback loops too, far beyond duration of occurrence. I often reflect upon the permanence of some lessons, deeply absorbed into my bloodstream. Some experiences haunt you; some give the past a dignified glow. Memory sits outside the realm of logic and rationality, outside what can be conveyed through sound and vowels, and instead feels deeply embedded inside your heart.

In The Mill, V tells me she is only able to walk down an illegible career path because she has people who love her. It’s simple, really, though we like to complicate everything. The strongest hedge against uncertainty. The paradox central to life is that through togetherness with other human beings we discover our own self-possession and inner freedoms.

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Walking through Polk and cutting across into Sansome, a man clutches onto a lottery ticket. Wild-eyed, he scribbles out the numbers. Then he sighs, his shoulders slacken. He folds the lottery ticket, kisses it tenderly, slots it cleanly into a ridge of a streetlamp. Almost like a little memento or signpost to come back to later. Breadcrumbs trailing back to the start. The light changes. His eyes glint in the sunlight.

I wonder what other certainties he wished for, in his gambler heart.

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Went to a few fabulous Litquake (SF’s literary festival) events with friends — pictured: Grace Cathedral poets (with AZ and B), Jane Hirshfield and Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost reading (with K and AL), oh and Make-Out Room (the bar) like you’ve never seen it (poetic).

Leftmost picture is DIY halloween costumes in progress. Queen of Hearts or Gambler? I’ll let you decide.

Below is a picture from Maggie Rogers' concert in Chase Center. It was marvelous. She’s a true talent. I adore this video from 2016 where Pharrell Williams visited an N.Y.U. music production class to critique student songs. After he listened to her song Alaska he said “I have zero, zero, zero notes for that”. He went on to say:

I’ll tell you why. You’re doing your own thing. It’s singular…. you either like it or you don’t. But you can’t compare it to anything else. You have to be willing to seek, to be frank in your music, frank in your choices. Your whole story, I can hear it in the music.

There’s something we can all learn: use elements that aren’t necessarily popular. Melodically, sing things that don’t seem popular. Well perhaps you’ve heard it before, but maybe you’ve not heard it used in that way.

What a moving response. I love the concept that originality requires sincerity, and that to evoke things you haven’t felt before you need to use techniques you’ve never used before.

Just began reading Werner Herzog’s Memoir, Every Man For Himself and God Against All. C recommended The Uncontrollability of the World over dinner, and will pick that one up. I found this cute shop in North Beach and really adore these Studio Ghibli SF inspired art prints by Benjamin Seto.

I’ve also been listening to The Killers again… and forgot how good Change Your Mind is:

(I especially like the renaming of MUNI to Mewni)

French song of the week…