Back in high school, I was quite anxious about math competition results. I was good at pretending to be “nonchalant” in the exam room, but the second I walked out of the building, I would pull out my phone and calculate how good my chances of qualifying for the next round were, based on every cutoff in the last decade. Silly mistakes would haunt me for weeks.
Everything changed at a rationality program in my junior year of high school. I was in the middle of a class, but I couldn’t focus; I needed to know if the USA Math Olympiad cutoffs came out in the last five minutes. To my surprise, one more refresh loaded a different page. My score missed the cutoff by a couple of points.
Regrets flooded my mind: I didn’t divide by two on a combinatorics problem, I added two numbers incorrectly, I misread a straightforward AMC problem …
I could feel my heart racing, the blood in my head pounding, my stomach dropping, like a sinking void sucking my torso into my body. I sat with this feeling for a while — maybe five seconds — and slowly, the tense feelings began to subside. My regrets lingered, but they were joined by realizations that a bird I hadn’t noticed was chirping nearby, the yellow-green grass was softly blowing, and the instructor was still teaching (oops). As I continued to focus on being, I became more and more peaceful after mere seconds; a feeling that eluded me for months during my previous competition performances.
Excitedly, I told the instructor after class. When friends asked me for advice, I quickly highlighted this story as Exhibit A to illustrate the importance of mindfulness. More or less, I stopped worrying about my academic status — college acceptances, grades, competition results — for the next year and a half. Finally, I had discovered the cure for stress.
Yesterday, I noticed myself refreshing websites for grade reports; my former tendencies were rearing their ugly heads. I tried my mindfulness trick, but the effects quickly wore off. I was frustrated; had I not grown in the last eighteen months? Maybe, what I viewed to be progress was just the result of a large set of fortunate circumstances: my competition results didn’t matter because I was in my senior year of high school, my college decisions didn’t affect me because I was quite happy to go to many colleges, and my internship rejections didn’t bother me because I don’t want to be a technical person after college, anyways. Maybe I had just been luckier instead of wiser.
This line of reasoning is dangerous because it is completionist, which means it expects any solution to solve a problem fully. Specifically, it presents a very binary view of progress: in this case, I must be luckier or wiser, but not both. I also evaluate success from failure in a similarly absolute way: I win when I don’t habitually worry about results, and I lose when I do. But, surely there are many more dimensions of nuance embedded within a true evaluation than I realize! I can be both luckier and wiser, and I can think about whether I have made progress through evaluating how frequently thoughts about my grades would enter my mind, how often I would entertain such thoughts, etc. All of a sudden, not only do I have a fuller picture of my growth that does not end in hopelessness, but also a valuable learning opportunity. Addiction is impossible to extinguish, but when I begin to evaluate success as not just all or nothing, I can learn that my mindfulness practice did help me better tackle my addiction by making such instances less frequent; however, no one solution is complete, and there are many other things I can also do that might help me further overcome this habit. Now, a previously intractable problem becomes extremely tractable because there are so many dimensions in which I can make progress.
I’m quite the idealist, so I’m very prone to seek out one-size-fits-all solutions, but there is one trope that is particularly tricky for me to handle. A few weeks ago, I told a mentor I wasn’t very good at caring for people, hoping to find a way to care more. He thinks I already care a lot, to which I remarked that I didn’t know how good and bad could be quantified. But that is exactly the problem. If I don’t have a way to define good and bad, then how do I know that I am not “good” at caring for people? A continuously moving bar for success, according to the Buddha, is the very definition of suffering.
But, any meaningful definition of good, bad, love, responsibility, honesty, perseverance, diligence, or any other value is definitionally open enough to interpretation that completionist thinking is even more enticing yet absurd than usual, because a poorly-defined bar is especially prone to moving in all-or-nothing ways. For example, I stopped blogging because I felt that every post I wrote in the past didn’t capture the “real me”, but importantly, the “real me” will naturally change over time anyways.
An aspect central to such judgments is that they are strictly dependent on interpreting external results. If I study too much and neglect my friendships, I am not loving, but if I study too little because I spend too much time with friends, I am not diligent. If I make a joke that offends someone, I am immature, but if I never joke around, then I am uptight.
My current model for a good measurement is that they should account for how aligned I am across every reasonable world. Here are a few illustrative examples for why I believe this:
I told someone that I liked them, and after a pretty unfortunate situation — much of which was my fault — I drew the conclusion that I shouldn’t have told them how I felt about them. But, this view suffers from the reality that romance is often a long-tailed distribution: there is a low chance of a great outcome and a high chance of a bad to neutral outcome. In that satisfying world, I would consider my confession to be a terrific decision.
Many times, when I’ve intentionally shared more negative feelings with my parents, I’ve gotten a response that makes me feel worse. So, until very recently, I considered telling my parents about my life a pretty bad idea, but this thinking neglects that there are many more “good” worlds than I previously realized. The world where we both feel a closer relationship and deeper mutual understanding is certainly “good,” although probably unlikely in the short term, but so is the world where I learn to appreciate the essence of their care and don’t feel worse, even if I won’t feel more understood. There are many other worlds that each provide a meaningful basis for evaluation.
On the flip side, I have a bad habit of unconsciously lying, and most of the time, no one will notice unless I bring it up. Even in the times when no one notices, beyond my view that lying is morally bad, I’ve been trying to internalize the embarrassing world where I would get caught in a lie. (Part of why I deeply want to be more honest is because I believe that the world was created to be good: there are so many positive feedback loops that almost always, what is good is good for everyone, and giving and receiving are deeply intertwined. Honesty forces me to interact with the world and internalize those feedback loops firsthand.)
Unlike abstract value-based objectives, which easily lend themselves to a completionist framework, evaluating specific worlds grounds those values into multiple dimensions to make tangible progress on.
Moreover, by examining definite worlds, one can attain concrete data on the likelihood of different possibilities. For example, I had a few friendships where I consistently initiated much more than they did. Whenever I felt lonely, I would think about how they didn’t appear to care about our relationship. It was only after months that I considered that not only was there was a world that they didn’t care, but there was also a world that they did care but were scared to take initiative, and a world where they didn’t know how to take initiative, and that I could share how I felt with them in a way that would genuinely clarify their intentions to me. Notably, the conclusion would be satisfying in all three worlds.
Striving for a clearer way to evaluate myself is very difficult, but I am trying to make progress. More precise measurements are correlated with greater awareness of detail, so I’ve been trying to discover more nuance in my feelings than just “happy” or “sad” through journaling. Over the summer, I’m working on a personal project that explores how we can better receive feedback for education, and I’ve started asking friends what specific parts of what I say are helpful or unhelpful when I get asked for advice.
Now, I need to decide whether these attempts are good or bad.