May 6, 2024
in the moment that i am starting this essay it is twilight at an outside bar; houston has begun its summer ramp-up into its intolerable one-hundred degree weather, the air muggy causing my cotton shirt to stick to my skin, though it is my fault to begin with that i wore it to a running club, this club being one of my attempts to meet people upon moving to a new city, though one of the issues being that i am writing this essay instead of doing so. reggaeton is playing over the speakers and a cool breeze onset with twilight is enveloping me; fairy lights are overhead; the air is pulling the remnants of the last two miles from my skin. before writing this i had begun reading agnes callard’s aspiration and though i’m ~20% through, it seems the kind of book which may become the best i’ve read this year. already it hits upon thoughts that have been rolling around in my head for years.
“rather, i am claiming that aiming at this goal when one’s knowledge of it is limited is a matter of trying to learn what a goal amounts to”
the concept of wanting versus having has featured prominently in my mind for the past few years. the reason why is no longer a major feature in my mind; the relevant concerns banished, but the shape of the problem remains – at one point in my life (and likely in the future), i made a significant choice without the ability to know what lay beyond it. the terminus of this path (though i have not fully reached it) is much different than what i could have supposed; information from my current self sent backward in time would fall on deaf ears. to attempt to change a fundamental part of myself had to “come into contact [with] the value not by realizing it but by learning it”
“the problem is that because one (or both) of the options promises a substantial change in preferences, the agent doesn’t have a single, stable set of preferences that could provide the input for a decision procedure”
an uncomfortable fact of life is that actions are not strictly in the form of agent a causing change x->y but rather that a is necessarily transformed in the process as well. a is not a catalyst but rather a fellow reactant such that a and a* are discontinuous. in this it is not given that a and a* will approve of each other, not to speak of a, a*, and so on’s vies of their unmodified selves. this raises the question of whether anyone can truly consent to anything if their modified self would like to return to their unmodified state. the extent to which blame may be placed on a past self versus overly-permissive structures is in debate (though not in these terms).
“a stepwise increase in commitment can end up locking the person into a career or marriage without his ever having made a definite choice”
something i’ve been thinking about lately is the process by which people find themselves in a “situation” – by this i mean those less than optimal but not rock bottom, and how to escape these traps. here, callard offers one such explanation. when one is deposited into a new land, they cannot necessarily gauge the height of a hill without first summiting at least one; it is only then that they realize there are larger ones to climb.
“i might for instance, adopt the mannerisms of the kind of person i’m trying to be. if this were an act of aspiration, it would pain me somewhat to do so, because it is not enough for me to act like that person when what i want to be is be like that person”
on a less academic note, something that i’m personally struggling with is the degree to which i would like to be social. in the past, i’ve been able to undergo long periods of reclusion (probably unhealthy) and sustain a double-digit number of unique social events per week (better?). upon moving to a new city in which i knew ~0 people well and starting a full-time job, it needs reflection exactly the kind of person i would like to be! i don’t think that i’ve grappled with this before. furthermore, i am both social and tend to become somewhat anxiety-ridden in large social situations – i would like to kill the latter part of me. in the past, attacking this barrier required me to act as if i were a person who does not possess the qualities i do. though i may be anxious in a situation, i am best as if i pretend to be a more sociable person. this works well – i am rarely left wanting for discussion once engaged in a topic. however, the part which i struggle with is the activation energy for going up to people and starting conversations.
“an agent who is intrinsically conflicted cannot achieve the reflective distance from her conflict that is necessary in order to even arrive at the state of uncertainty that would have to prefigure such a decision”
it is a common expectation that one make their decisions rationally (i.e., that they weigh the pros and cons of it in a detached, unbiased manner). this pretension is more or less impossible – no matter how hard we try, we cannot be detached from ourselves for the decision to change from a->b requires that one must be a before they can be b.
“given our finite lifespans and limited resources, we cannot devote ourselves to valuing all the things we see from valuable”
true and its not going to stop me from trying.
“we will face up to the fact that deliberating as though one didn’t have certain feelings, desires, and thoughts doesn’t change the fact that one has them”
a common pretension is that we may objectively observe our own minds; unfortunately, we cannot escape the fact that these thoughts originate from the entity we are analyzing. to act as if one may dissect their thoughts as if they were lying on a mortician’s table does them and the thinker a disservice. we (insofar that we can point to a singular entity) are comprised of several interacting layers of abstraction such that isolating any individual node is near impossible.
“when we want to eat the cookie irrespective of what we will have to pay later on, the thought-content of the feeling is that only this pleasure matters”
recently i’ve been trying to lose weight – i’ve been at a bmi of 25.1 since i was a kid and think that it would be interesting to be on the other side for once. i’ve been able to successfully do this and it’s one of the more frustrating experiences of my life. consistently reducing my caloric intake requires an additional amount of daily fore thought that i can only hope to lessen in time as my body recalibrates. this passage captures the thought which gets me back on track consistently: that i am trying to eliminate my future self’s frustration.
“the work is visible in her struggles to sustain interest in the hobby or relationship or career or religion or aesthetic experience which will later become second nature; in her repeated attempts to ‘get it right’, attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in; and, most generally, in the fact that she always wants and strives to be further along than she is”
when i began to run i did it with the mindset that i would like to be the kind of person who runs – some element of that (dedication, habit, physical fitness) was an aspect which i would like to have for myself. upon initiating running, these aspects did not come naturally. getting out of bed at 6 a.m. each morning (i had 8 a.m. classes in college and cannot eat before running) was an exercise in a quality that i did not yet have – every morning was a struggle. gaining these qualities was not a step change but rather a continuous buildup to them.
“his challenge lay in resisting social pressures and exercising autonomy in the service of doing what he wanted all along”
the discussion of agency is all the rage; that one “can just do things” is generally correct – lately for some of my endeavors my limitation is neither social or mental but rather physical (sleep, fatigue). though in the realm of mental limitations, i’m struggling to figure out the way in which i should exercise this muscle.
“adults are, to various degrees, responsible for the kind of people they have become. they play some role in shaping their own interests, passions, idiosyncrasies, and moral sensibilities”
i find this to be the essence of the book – i began aspiration because that who i am and who i would like to be seem to be a gulf away from each other; the inevitable dominoes of the status quo make me profoundly uncomfortable and given my responsibility in this, i would like to change my path.