I was on LinkedIn recently because a friend wanted me to check out their updated profile, so I was confronted with the sheer monotony of that soulless website again, and the themes in what you wrote made me think about exactly that.
Sure, some people find their living on there, but 99% of LinkedIn is just looking to the people next to you and wondering what you can do more, but not out of curiosity, but rather to simply posses more, achieve more, or sound more important than somebody else.
In the end if you'd ask them what joy or purpose, what new passions or knowledge any of these pseudo-achievements brought them they would likely not know what to say.
Thanks once more for enlightening us and making us think, Sam!
Perfect analogy. LinkedIn is the ultimate self licking ice cream cone. There is a wider and more epic world beyond that digital rabbit hole. Thanks for jumping in, Kai.
From Philip Pullman’s “The Rose Field”: “Was that what the imagination did? See connections between things, connections otherwise invisible, and find a meaning in them?
The connection between the shepherd and his flock who held up the coach in the picture and the ones she'd seen a few minutes before on the real road: the meaning of that lay in the fact that she saw the similarity, not in the things themselves, which, unless she saw them, might as well be contingent and meaningless. She had to be part of the process for the meaning to exist at all.”
If you haven’t read (or reread) them in awhile, I think you’d enjoy both His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies — lots to ponder as an adult!
We see tunnel vision as a bad thing, and focus as a good thing. But they are largely the same thing.
To excel at one thing is to lose ability at other things.
That's life. It only becomes a problem when a person fails to realize that other people, with other interests, are just as valid as he is, with his interests.
Steve House and I recently discussed the limits of imagination, and why we couldn't wrap our heads around something 25 years ago that is easily (commonly?) accepted today. We used simple math, based on precedent and our own accumulated experience, to identify a target — one that we could not see beyond, convinced as we were that it was already a great leap forward.
You wrote, "... people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously."
Entrenched as we are in limits and norms established and accepted by others, it is indeed the rare individual who steps out or up to see past a distant horizon. I think @Uri's comment here that we, "reason from precedent, not possibility", is lucid and relevant; yes, we need precedent as a foundation to push against and launch from, but too often it becomes an anchor, a tar pit, blinding us to possibility. We couldn't possibly go THAT far past what's been done, which brings us to comparison.
Comparison, especially to other human beings, binds us to the limits of their imagination, which in the very best case raises our own, but the cynic in me has been proven correct over and over, their limits become ours. One second faster is indeed faster, but it's a far cry from leaving the map altogether.
To build on Mark's comment regarding "...people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously."
I believe this to be so ingrained within us as a species that it became the "motto" of my old company: "What you don't see". With the full sentence being: “It’s what you don’t see that ultimately gets you. And you can’t know what you don’t see until someone makes you see it.”
The real risk is that what we can’t see gets treated as impossible. If there’s no clear picture, no example, no precedent, it’s dismissed rather than explored. Over time, imagination narrows not because people lack it, but because staying within what’s visible and accepted is rewarded. The edges disappear. We stop looking past the map and focus on improving what’s already drawn, until someone else moves beyond it and forces us to catch up.
Nailed it with this: "imagination narrows not because people lack it, but because staying within what’s visible and accepted is rewarded." It is conformity. At one level it is ignorance and one simply does not know another way. At another level it is fear became one may know of another path and refuse to take it. Excellent riff.
This is gold—wisdom born from boots on the ground experience, pain, and trial and error, will trump speculation, guessing, or academicizing. Thank you for your thoughts on this, and your many more tangential thoughts on your stellar substack.
Sam, CrossFit…I could say so much but start with the injury rates…nough said. Today our collegiate and national team oarsmen and women have access to the very best that athletic nutrition, conditioning, medical, mental and so forth training possible, that money can buy. But the racing times are only notionally faster that 50 years ago when I was racing at their same ages. Seems a boat can only be physically pushed through the water so fast. So why do they and us old timers keep rowing and racing? It is to quote Mallory “because it is there.” Somehow the cave man instincts come alive in the process of a race. The hardest are two boats pitted against each other over a winding course of 3-4 miles. Who will yield? Who will find that last bit of primal instinct that leads to the ability find that last gear to change up to to push just further enough. Find the purple tunnel and manage its edges before you go black. We don’t know how strong we are, most people never try to find how far they can go, it’s simply too hard. Then there are those that constantly have to test themselves, to walk as close to the dog team as possible, without getting eaten. Who can blame the dogs, some asshole bird is pissing them off and besides, they are hungry. Those who choose to push limits mentally and physically don’t have to worry as much about comparisons. Their are their own worst competitor. More! Harder! You are not pushing to the edge enough. After a while you do it so much it becomes almost easy. Like a SEAL team flowing through a kill house, ballet really with deadly intent…doesn’t get much more real. Great post!
Yes to this: “because it is there.” And Yes to your love of voluntary suffering and perspective. I too would not blame the dog, but prefer to learn from it as one small creature on this earth also making its way through life. Thank you for these excellent thoughts.
The creative posture you mentioned really struck me as insightful. I am currently a student at St. John's College in Annapolis and this year is steeped in Greek literature: Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides; they all talk about the power of sight in different ways. For example, why did Xerses just--have--to see his army of 2+million assembled? Why did he weep at the sight? And echoing Plato and Aristotle, if perception (like sight) is an activity of the body, can we really see the Beautiful, the Good, the Just as related to the invisible Soul?
So that, the question you inspired in me: I wonder how deeply imagination is linked to the invisible, to that of the Soul? Maybe there's a way to remove that perfectly controlled environment you mentioned to see the fascinating layers beneath it, whatever they may be, inching along toward what is invisible.
This is my first time commenting on your blog, but I have been a reader for some time, and I thoroughly enjoy your writing. Cheers mate!
Andre, thank you for dropping these excellent thoughts. Your research sounds fascinating—why did Xerxes have to see with his eyes? Was it for his benefit, or the benefit of those assembled to know their existence only mattered BECAUSE Xerxes could see them? I can how time can be lovingly spent on these thoughts.
Unfortunately I am not sure how to answer your question. I'm still scoping it out and playing with this idea, and maybe I'll get a little closer in a future essay, but my sense if your line of reasoning is on the right path. We can see it everywhere and in everything the more we pressure test, think, and ask questions. It is a good fight.
It's interesting because so much of an Uber competition harnesses the resiliency of our capability while missing the larger dynamic. I think it is function and utility. Where are those crossfitters going to use those skills outside of that competition?
One of my all-time heroes in the world of red teaming said: "Entrenched social systems are incentivized to hold contrarian perspectives at bay. Regrettably, the defenses that preserve the status quo often fail against novel threats and hazards."
One of the reasons I delved deep into the world of adversarial simulation and how bad actors think is because I wanted to understand why humans were/are notoriously bad at preparing for failures they can’t yet imagine. We reason from precedent, not possibility, and mistake the absence of known threats for safety. When something has no name, no story, and no historical analogue, it rarely gets stress-tested, red teamed... Thinking two or three moves ahead is an attempt to outrun that cognitive lag, forcing scenarios into existence before they arrive unannounced, fully formed, and already too late to stop.
Civilization evolved faster than cognition; we’re running modern worlds on ancient firmware. Five thousand years on, and our greatest limitation isn’t technology, it’s the imagination beaten into shape by a world that no longer exists.
Uri, this is dynamite: "We reason from precedent, not possibility, and mistake the absence of known threats for safety." If you have written more of this subject elsewhere, I would be eager to read it.
"The linguist spent most of 1977-1991 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he developed a special affection for the region’s tribal societies. These fiercely independent people have never been conquered and their most sacred values are courage, revenge, hospitality, generosity to the defeated, and honor. “Much of my ethics, personal characteristics, and values,” Vogel explained, “were acquired in these surroundings.”
He sounds exceptional. But you may have a more charitable view of this standard than I do. If he has attained it, he is something beyond Nietzsche’s Overman, something even more real, and I would like to meet him.
Is your definition superhuman the hypothetical human that Nietzsche described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra who evolves from camel to lion then back to child? If that is the case, I stand corrected. I enjoy Nietzsche's aphorisms but weigh them against his very sad life. I had a student and a colleague who were driven slightly mad by his writings. Both believed they were the ubermensch and old Friedrich was speaking directly to them. One traded Nietzsche for Christianity, the other for big waves.
Hence the “real” qualifier. Ideas are probably useless if they make someone lonely and insane. But he was onto something. That is fascinating it can rub off onto a reader—it may be like psychedelics done by those disposed towards insanity.
I am fan of Walter Kaufmann who did the most comprehensive translations of Nietzsche and was a philosopher in his own right. He unriddled all the riddles brilliantly and yet kept his own path ideologically.
You psychedelic analogy is apt. Both men were extremists before and after they read Nietzsche, but he was the match to their gasoline. Saw the same thing with Marx, but Marx was much more boring to read! Most claimed to read him, few did.
It is amazing how hard that fight seems to be. How many thinkers and philosophers have tried to come up with the solution and failed to do so? It is ironically up to each self.
I was on LinkedIn recently because a friend wanted me to check out their updated profile, so I was confronted with the sheer monotony of that soulless website again, and the themes in what you wrote made me think about exactly that.
Sure, some people find their living on there, but 99% of LinkedIn is just looking to the people next to you and wondering what you can do more, but not out of curiosity, but rather to simply posses more, achieve more, or sound more important than somebody else.
In the end if you'd ask them what joy or purpose, what new passions or knowledge any of these pseudo-achievements brought them they would likely not know what to say.
Thanks once more for enlightening us and making us think, Sam!
Perfect analogy. LinkedIn is the ultimate self licking ice cream cone. There is a wider and more epic world beyond that digital rabbit hole. Thanks for jumping in, Kai.
Of course, I’m always learning new things as well, essays like yours help with motivation and inspiration along the way.
From Philip Pullman’s “The Rose Field”: “Was that what the imagination did? See connections between things, connections otherwise invisible, and find a meaning in them?
The connection between the shepherd and his flock who held up the coach in the picture and the ones she'd seen a few minutes before on the real road: the meaning of that lay in the fact that she saw the similarity, not in the things themselves, which, unless she saw them, might as well be contingent and meaningless. She had to be part of the process for the meaning to exist at all.”
That’s a beautiful line.
If you haven’t read (or reread) them in awhile, I think you’d enjoy both His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies — lots to ponder as an adult!
I’ve never even heard of him. I’ll check it out tonight, thanks Lou.
I suspect you’re in for a treat.
We see tunnel vision as a bad thing, and focus as a good thing. But they are largely the same thing.
To excel at one thing is to lose ability at other things.
That's life. It only becomes a problem when a person fails to realize that other people, with other interests, are just as valid as he is, with his interests.
Beautifully said. An argument for a more generalist approach to life: failure, trail and error, curiosity. Thank you for this.
Steve House and I recently discussed the limits of imagination, and why we couldn't wrap our heads around something 25 years ago that is easily (commonly?) accepted today. We used simple math, based on precedent and our own accumulated experience, to identify a target — one that we could not see beyond, convinced as we were that it was already a great leap forward.
You wrote, "... people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously."
Entrenched as we are in limits and norms established and accepted by others, it is indeed the rare individual who steps out or up to see past a distant horizon. I think @Uri's comment here that we, "reason from precedent, not possibility", is lucid and relevant; yes, we need precedent as a foundation to push against and launch from, but too often it becomes an anchor, a tar pit, blinding us to possibility. We couldn't possibly go THAT far past what's been done, which brings us to comparison.
Comparison, especially to other human beings, binds us to the limits of their imagination, which in the very best case raises our own, but the cynic in me has been proven correct over and over, their limits become ours. One second faster is indeed faster, but it's a far cry from leaving the map altogether.
To build on Mark's comment regarding "...people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously."
I believe this to be so ingrained within us as a species that it became the "motto" of my old company: "What you don't see". With the full sentence being: “It’s what you don’t see that ultimately gets you. And you can’t know what you don’t see until someone makes you see it.”
The real risk is that what we can’t see gets treated as impossible. If there’s no clear picture, no example, no precedent, it’s dismissed rather than explored. Over time, imagination narrows not because people lack it, but because staying within what’s visible and accepted is rewarded. The edges disappear. We stop looking past the map and focus on improving what’s already drawn, until someone else moves beyond it and forces us to catch up.
Nailed it with this: "imagination narrows not because people lack it, but because staying within what’s visible and accepted is rewarded." It is conformity. At one level it is ignorance and one simply does not know another way. At another level it is fear became one may know of another path and refuse to take it. Excellent riff.
This is gold—wisdom born from boots on the ground experience, pain, and trial and error, will trump speculation, guessing, or academicizing. Thank you for your thoughts on this, and your many more tangential thoughts on your stellar substack.
Sam, CrossFit…I could say so much but start with the injury rates…nough said. Today our collegiate and national team oarsmen and women have access to the very best that athletic nutrition, conditioning, medical, mental and so forth training possible, that money can buy. But the racing times are only notionally faster that 50 years ago when I was racing at their same ages. Seems a boat can only be physically pushed through the water so fast. So why do they and us old timers keep rowing and racing? It is to quote Mallory “because it is there.” Somehow the cave man instincts come alive in the process of a race. The hardest are two boats pitted against each other over a winding course of 3-4 miles. Who will yield? Who will find that last bit of primal instinct that leads to the ability find that last gear to change up to to push just further enough. Find the purple tunnel and manage its edges before you go black. We don’t know how strong we are, most people never try to find how far they can go, it’s simply too hard. Then there are those that constantly have to test themselves, to walk as close to the dog team as possible, without getting eaten. Who can blame the dogs, some asshole bird is pissing them off and besides, they are hungry. Those who choose to push limits mentally and physically don’t have to worry as much about comparisons. Their are their own worst competitor. More! Harder! You are not pushing to the edge enough. After a while you do it so much it becomes almost easy. Like a SEAL team flowing through a kill house, ballet really with deadly intent…doesn’t get much more real. Great post!
Yes to this: “because it is there.” And Yes to your love of voluntary suffering and perspective. I too would not blame the dog, but prefer to learn from it as one small creature on this earth also making its way through life. Thank you for these excellent thoughts.
The creative posture you mentioned really struck me as insightful. I am currently a student at St. John's College in Annapolis and this year is steeped in Greek literature: Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides; they all talk about the power of sight in different ways. For example, why did Xerses just--have--to see his army of 2+million assembled? Why did he weep at the sight? And echoing Plato and Aristotle, if perception (like sight) is an activity of the body, can we really see the Beautiful, the Good, the Just as related to the invisible Soul?
So that, the question you inspired in me: I wonder how deeply imagination is linked to the invisible, to that of the Soul? Maybe there's a way to remove that perfectly controlled environment you mentioned to see the fascinating layers beneath it, whatever they may be, inching along toward what is invisible.
This is my first time commenting on your blog, but I have been a reader for some time, and I thoroughly enjoy your writing. Cheers mate!
Andre, thank you for dropping these excellent thoughts. Your research sounds fascinating—why did Xerxes have to see with his eyes? Was it for his benefit, or the benefit of those assembled to know their existence only mattered BECAUSE Xerxes could see them? I can how time can be lovingly spent on these thoughts.
Unfortunately I am not sure how to answer your question. I'm still scoping it out and playing with this idea, and maybe I'll get a little closer in a future essay, but my sense if your line of reasoning is on the right path. We can see it everywhere and in everything the more we pressure test, think, and ask questions. It is a good fight.
Can't wait to read this one! I've been on this thread of thinking all week.
Let’s go. I’m stoked to hear your thoughts.
It's interesting because so much of an Uber competition harnesses the resiliency of our capability while missing the larger dynamic. I think it is function and utility. Where are those crossfitters going to use those skills outside of that competition?
One of my all-time heroes in the world of red teaming said: "Entrenched social systems are incentivized to hold contrarian perspectives at bay. Regrettably, the defenses that preserve the status quo often fail against novel threats and hazards."
One of the reasons I delved deep into the world of adversarial simulation and how bad actors think is because I wanted to understand why humans were/are notoriously bad at preparing for failures they can’t yet imagine. We reason from precedent, not possibility, and mistake the absence of known threats for safety. When something has no name, no story, and no historical analogue, it rarely gets stress-tested, red teamed... Thinking two or three moves ahead is an attempt to outrun that cognitive lag, forcing scenarios into existence before they arrive unannounced, fully formed, and already too late to stop.
Civilization evolved faster than cognition; we’re running modern worlds on ancient firmware. Five thousand years on, and our greatest limitation isn’t technology, it’s the imagination beaten into shape by a world that no longer exists.
Uri, this is dynamite: "We reason from precedent, not possibility, and mistake the absence of known threats for safety." If you have written more of this subject elsewhere, I would be eager to read it.
This is part of a larger post mostly focused on security: https://modernadversary.com/the_danger_of_defending_yesterday.html
This is awesome. The content is stellar, yes, but your site is also well done. I value your work.
"It is to always wonder what lies on the other side of the seas.
And yet… I have never seen this embodied in a single human."
Let me introduce you to one. Sylvain Vogel, the greatest scholar I have ever met and also a very dangerous man.
:
https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/sylvain-vogels-world-of-extreme-linguistics/
"The linguist spent most of 1977-1991 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he developed a special affection for the region’s tribal societies. These fiercely independent people have never been conquered and their most sacred values are courage, revenge, hospitality, generosity to the defeated, and honor. “Much of my ethics, personal characteristics, and values,” Vogel explained, “were acquired in these surroundings.”
He sounds exceptional. But you may have a more charitable view of this standard than I do. If he has attained it, he is something beyond Nietzsche’s Overman, something even more real, and I would like to meet him.
Is your definition superhuman the hypothetical human that Nietzsche described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra who evolves from camel to lion then back to child? If that is the case, I stand corrected. I enjoy Nietzsche's aphorisms but weigh them against his very sad life. I had a student and a colleague who were driven slightly mad by his writings. Both believed they were the ubermensch and old Friedrich was speaking directly to them. One traded Nietzsche for Christianity, the other for big waves.
Hence the “real” qualifier. Ideas are probably useless if they make someone lonely and insane. But he was onto something. That is fascinating it can rub off onto a reader—it may be like psychedelics done by those disposed towards insanity.
I am fan of Walter Kaufmann who did the most comprehensive translations of Nietzsche and was a philosopher in his own right. He unriddled all the riddles brilliantly and yet kept his own path ideologically.
You psychedelic analogy is apt. Both men were extremists before and after they read Nietzsche, but he was the match to their gasoline. Saw the same thing with Marx, but Marx was much more boring to read! Most claimed to read him, few did.
Marx is much more boring, and much less wholesome. Nietzsche makes me want to understand the world while Marx makes me want to burn it.
"To thine own self be true" Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet came to mind.
It is amazing how hard that fight seems to be. How many thinkers and philosophers have tried to come up with the solution and failed to do so? It is ironically up to each self.
Great essay, Sam! Good follow up from your discussion with Kyle.