Being Meta-stable

As I delve deeper into what it means to live a good life, I’ve been discovering some fascinating cross-disciplinary research.

Nicholas Christakis, who originally trained as a doctor and is now a social science academic, weaves a compelling argument that we have evolved genetically as a species to be unusually prosocial, to create societies that are full of traits like love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching. To care for others not just because they advance our agenda in some way, but for their own sake. To extend this caring beyond our immediate family and friends to strangers and, among the best of us, even to enemies.

And yet.

We don’t have to turn to history to find multiple examples of behaviour that it would be a stretch to qualify as prosocial. To take a topical example: I have been struggling with intense frustration these past days as I see people here in France flouting – some with glee – the government’s measured and proportionate directives to contain the spread of COVID-19. Putting I before We, whether in the streets or in the shopping aisles.

It turns out that we’ve also evolved genetically to favour what social psychologists call in-group bias. Us versus Them. One explanation for this, according to Christakis, is that preferring our group to other groups actually facilitated cooperation as human society grew in size. But, thankfully, he says that we can actively choose to counter this. By zooming out: expanding the boundaries of our in-group. Or by zooming in: seeing each person as unique rather than as a reflection of their group.

The operative word is ‘choose’.

We can choose, every minute of every day, to rise to the better angels of our nature. Easier said than done when we’re (I’m), for example, in the throes of vigorously passing judgment on an unsuspecting soul. The essential step is to notice that we’re stuck in a self-made, self-justifying box. As soon as we notice, we can choose. We can choose to get out of the box. What often works for me is thinking of someone in that moment who brings out the best in me, my out-of-the-box person. Another method I use, and which dug me out of my COVID-19-related frustration, is to deliberately notice the good. To celebrate what’s right with the world.

How are you bringing out the best in yourself?

What would it take to build a world in which each of us earns enough doing work that matters?

One shift that seems to me to be necessary, if not sufficient, is to nudge our culture a little further away from thinking of ourselves as completely free individuals, and a little more towards seeing that we are all inextricably connected.

I first came across this tension as a child growing up in a Western country to Eastern parents. (For a fabulous and more recent example, watch The Farewell.)

“Blood is not always thicker than water”, I would assert to my parents, as we had yet another lively discussion about some controversy in the extended family, and even as I would refer to the relative in question by their specific label which would convey to any outsider exactly how they were related to me (e.g. husband of my mother’s second oldest sister).

“Why should we help so-and-so? Haven’t they shown themselves not to be deserving of help?”, I would continue. (Forgiveness is, ahem, not one of my top character strengths.) My parents would proceed to explain to me how people do not act in isolation but as a function of their social context (a concept I would later relearn through the prism of social psychology). That different cultures have different social norms and that it’s important for us to balance the two. In this case, balancing independence, widespread in today’s Western culture, with interdependence, still prevalent in most Eastern cultures.

As one of my favourite social scientists Hugh MacKay puts it:

So here’s the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identity and we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our desire to connect and belong.

He then advises us on how to embrace the tension between the two:

Every community has its differences of opinion, its social divisions and its cultural tensions, which is simply to say that every community is both diverse and, inescapably, human. If you want to master the art of belonging, you’ll need to accept the imperfections, the complexities and the tensions and deal with them. And the best way of dealing with them is to overlook them. There’s a lot of tolerance – a lot of forgiveness – in the art of belonging.

(I clearly have my work cut out for me.)

Where do you sit on the spectrum between independence and interdependence?

PS: The title comes from my favourite alternative Australian anthem.

I grew up believing that money had the potential to cause a lot of problems. Not having enough. Having too much. Always wanting more. Measuring relationships by it. The unstated obligations and ensuing misunderstandings, especially across cultures.

But I couldn’t avoid it. As they say, money makes the world go around. I decided to deal with it as rationally as possible. To earn enough, save enough, spend enough, give enough. And to regularly take a deep look at what ‘enough’ means.

I’ve always had a thing for challenging my preconceived ideas. When I left the academic world, though, I drew the line at working in finance. I settled instead for a job in the nuclear power industry – an industry I had some doubts about but in a company that seemed to be tackling issues responsibly. As I progressed in my career, I avoided taking on jobs that seemed to be explicitly aimed at making profit for the organisation. I tweaked each of my roles, focusing on what made more sense to me: reducing nuclear proliferation, debunking misconceptions about nuclear power, resolving contractual conflicts, building bridges across organisational silos, developing teams.

For someone who had decided to deal with money rationally, I admit that there was a fair amount of irrationality in my aversion to finance. How did I expect the company to keep its factories open and its operations running safely, hiring tens of thousands of people – including myself until recently – without making at least a small profit? And if I thought that its raison d’être, its reason for existing, was on balance beneficial for society, why was I so reluctant to contribute to that?

I’m still exploring how I think and feel about money, in conjunction with the ‘yes and’ of profit and purpose. What I can say for now is this: just as I believe in a world in which each of us earns enough doing work that matters, so do I believe in a world in which every organisation makes enough profit serving society.

How is your relationship with money?

Everything in moderation.

The world isn’t black and white.

No man is an island.

These are just three of the mantras I remember from my mother growing up (leading to plenty of eye-rolling from me and my sister).

All of these, together with finding the right balance, and so many more, reflect a similar concept at their core. That we become better, that the world becomes better, when we embrace the tension of ‘yes and’ instead of succumbing to the comfort of ‘either/or’.

Lightbulbs lit up in my head as I started seeing this everywhere: Independent and Interdependent. Profit and Purpose. Acceptance and Change. Atelic and Telic. But they gradually dimmed as I began putting the concept into practice.

Turns out it’s really, really hard.

At some point during the altMBA last year, after having ruminated about the tension between scarcity and abundance, my mind suddenly leapt to how we model dynamical systems – essentially anything that moves. If we imagine little red balls rolling along the blue curve below, we can see that it would take a lot of energy to get the first red ball out of A, that the second ball between B and C will almost certainly roll down into C, and that a small push is all it would take to get the third ball out of D, over the little hump into E.

In dynamical systems, it’s all about reducing energy. If you drop a ball, it might keep bouncing for a while, but eventually it’ll lose energy and stay still on the ground. The ball at A is in what we call a stable state, a state of least energy. The ball between B and C is unstable – it’s heading downwards. The ball at D, though, isn’t really stable, but it isn’t unstable either. It’s somewhere between the two.

Meta-stable.

And this is how I make sense of why embracing the tension of ‘yes and’ is so difficult. I’m like that little red ball, perpetually being pulled towards the stable states of A or E – the ‘either’ and the ‘or’. Getting out of ‘either/or’ (A or E) takes huge amounts of energy. Finding which version of ‘yes and’ (B, C or D) is the right one for me takes more energy as I go on a mini-rollercoaster of exploration, feeling uncertain and vulnerable in my instability. Even when I finally settle for a version of ‘yes and’, I know that it’s only temporary, that the right metastable state for me will change as I change, as the context which I’m in changes. And all the while, I have to resist gravitating towards the oh-so-comfortable ‘either/or’.

It’s not easy. But I believe that it’s work worth doing.

What metastable states are you exploring?

I decided at some point last month to post every week. Writing – and sharing what I write – is still new for me. Turning it into a habit will likely take a few months. Current behavioural science provides plenty of wisdom to increase the chance of this happening. Piggyback on an existing routine. Make it frictionless to do. And build in a dopamine hit when it’s done.

Despite my routine being disrupted (in the nicest way possible) these past few weeks while I’ve been on the road, I’d set everything up so that I could keep that weekly commitment. I posted on schedule the first week. And then the second. But by the third week, I was feeling uneasy. What’s more important here, I was asking myself. Is it spending the next couple of hours communing with my screen so that I can honour my commitment to myself (me, my, I)? Or is it being fully present with people I love and care about deeply, most of whom I seldom see? Using the language of character strengths, do I need to activate Perseverance, or Love?

This is, of course, like so many things, a false dichotomy. It’s not, and rarely is, a case of either-or. And Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the Buddha’s noble eightfold path, to name just two wisdom traditions, remind us to be weary of dogma, of clinging rigidly to extremes.  

Here, Perseverance was pushing me to maintain a streak. I decided to privilege Love, trusting that Perseverance would get me back on track once I was back at home. On the spectrum ranging from pushing through with my weekly commitment no matter what… to giving up at the first hurdle, I found the right balance. Not for everyone, and not for all situations. Just for me in this precise context.

How do you find the right balance in striving for your goals?