Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast: Worst Case Scenarios

Aesop, asses, frogs, and optimization

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

“It is difficulties that show what men are.”—Epictetus

---

This wisdom from the SEAL Teams is as applicable to pistol shooting as it is to the rest of our lives: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Part of what I am doing here at What then? is slowing down. The way I write—without bullet-points and highlights — is designed to slow me down, as well as readers if this is what they are looking for. I named What then? after a question Epictetus would interrogate his students (and himself) with relentlessly: τί οὖν, or “what then?” It is a forced pause. It is slow.

Not long ago, a glance at a fable would make my eyes roll into the back of my skull as if I were reading a textbook on accounting. But the more I see TL;DRs, bullet-points that appear to be ripped right from ChatGPT, and how-to manuals, the more I distrust all of it.

I find myself caring less for shallow speed and more for slow depth in the same way I learned to shoot a pistol. Less for “Here is how to live” and more for “Here is why it matters.”

I now admire fables. It is stunning how they can condense millennia of wisdom into less than one hundred words—and possibly even diagnose an entire culture.

So let us slow down to speed up with Aesop…¹

“An Ass Sunk down into a Bog among a Shoale of Frogs, with a Burden of Wood upon his Back, and there he lay, Sighing and Groaning, as his Heart would Break: Hark ye Friend (says one of the Frogs to him) if you make such a Bus'ness of Lying in a Quagmire, when you are but just fall'n into't, what would you do I Wonder, if You had been here as long as we have been?”

Here lies Aesop’s brilliance: the ass is much larger and stronger than a paltry frog. It can carry loads of wood on its slabs of muscle. It has expensive possessions to give it an edge: saddles, straps, and carefully curated alfalfa. And yet once it ventures into the bog it does not suffer with nobility or grace — it sighs and groans. It breaks.

Prior to his woes in the bog, the ass fancied himself hard. Once faced with this crisis, the ass found himself humbled. What, then, might the ass do with this newfound wisdom? Said another way, what would the ass do at present? Will he train for the worst case scenario and keep one foot in the bog for the rest of his life? Will he own it?

Most asses do not.

I can see him pouring concrete and turning the bog into a parking lot. What will he do next? Will he build a gym on the lot, do his five sets of five deadlift in an air conditioned room, and drink a bit of creatine? Will he slip a Whoop around his furry leg and Oura ring on his hoof? Will he invest thousands of dollars into a cooling mattress that will tell him his heart rate variability and how much he tosses and turns in the manic pursuit of eight perfect hours of sleep every night? What about a sauna and cold plunge? An electrostimulation suit, a red light panel, a ketone tracker, a vagal stimulation necklace, blue light glasses, and, O God, where is the unpleasant green powder and pulverized adaptogenic mushrooms I am supposed to drink every day instead of eating vegetables at a fraction of the cost?

In a word, will he dedicate his life to optimization?

Alas, this satire starts to sting as I watch my inner frog-self slowly give ground to my inner ass-self.

I also feel the urge to optimize every aspect of my life. I dislike glowing screens, electronics, and metrics, because I find myself obsessively caring more for the metrics than for what the metrics are supposed to measure—preparation for the bog. But I rejoice in deadlifts. I am in awe of my barrel sauna and my cold plunge. I savor my daily transition from 210° to 32° and the existential awakening that follows as if I had just smoked 5-MeO DMT and saw God, but for real this time. Surely this will prepare me for the bog? And yet despite my love of sauna and plunge and their illuminating brutality, once the ambient temperature drops below 50°, I find myself complaining about the cold. Is this not madness?

There is wisdom buried beneath this contradiction. Savage, ancient wisdom.

If a man strengthens his muscles yet they wear out when he has to carry a injured child or dog over hills of mud and stone, then what good is the gym? If a woman spends money on what can be gotten for free in the bog and is left unprepared for the trials of the bog, then what is she paying for? If we turn the bog into a concrete jungle and then try to replicate the virtues of the bog, then why pour the concrete in the first place?

The bog is not merely foul water and plant matter. It is grief, fear, tears, failure, poverty, war, streets, and grit. The bog is reality, and optimizing for a fiction is not the same as optimizing for reality. It is to go fast without ever learning to go slow. No amount of money, digital devices, noble intentions, or anxious data collection will change this.

A reader waiting for a bullet-point takeaway may ask at this point, “Why does any of this matter?”

I will answer with a quote from one of my favorite — and slowest — thinkers, Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” What will remain when the world no longer exists? When parking lots crumble and trees reign once again? When the power grid is sabotaged and the war for water begins? The bog will remain. And who will inherit this bog and help those in need? The learners.

This is why it matters: the learned want knowledge for the sake of knowledge while the learners want to use it. The same distinction exists between the optimized and the optimizers: the former want optimization for the sake of optimization while the latter ask, Will this work when the hammer falls? Am I living in accordance with nature or falsely mimicking it?

Optimization must account for the bog. If optimization means being “fully perfect, functioning, or effective as possible,” then true optimization means making things as suboptimal as possible. And what better place to do this than in that which is demonized — the bog?

I am not saying we should sell our houses and sleep in a clay tub like Diogenes, or burn our saunas and cold plunges to live in the desert like an Aborigine or the arctic like an Inuit.

What, then, can we do?

But it strikes me that we have not yet heard from the hero of our story. Small and overlooked, yet rugged and bog-adapted: the frog. How might the frog respond to hardship so that we too can do the same?

“My bank account is zeroed out and I am broke.” I practice poverty and care nothing for possessions. Bring it on. “I will break a bone.” I have not made my mind a slave to my body but my body a slave to my mind and I love a challenge. “The temperature is -10°.” Yes, and I will command my breath. I am a learner and have no patience for the learned. “I will stumble into a bog.” Then I will go all in and I will see God in the effort, for I have made space every day to do the hard thing — shiver, sweat, lift, VO2 max, restrict calories — not just for this corpse I walk around in, but for the visuals in my mind of the worst case scenarios.

Do you not know I do this so that I may be of use in reality?

So that I may slow down to speed up?

So that I may embrace the bog of the mind?

So that I may carry the bog within?

---

To help What then? reach more readers, please consider adding a like, restacking, and sharing this essay to help spread the good word.

1. Sir Roger L-Estrange translation