exiting the simulation

a working theory on thinking and living in the present

i started skiing at the ripe old age of 24 and rapidly fell in love. on my first trip i was so nervous i could barely eat anything, fell countless times in countless ways, angry cried while trying in vain to put my skis back on after falls, and even so i knew for a fact that i would be coming back. i ended up skiing 6 days that first season with no annual pass, something no sensible US skier should ever do.

i found this very out of character for me. i am not an adrenaline junkie and, more importantly, i am a perfectionist who hates nothing more than public demonstrations of my imperfection. to this day i still can’t really explain my love for skiing, but let me offer this long-winded attempt.

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

i have this theory that we can all find ourselves somewhere along the continuum of “doing” vs “simulating”. doers find it natural to enact their ideas, perhaps analogous to collecting data and learning through empirical experiment. simulators, on the other hand, spend a lot of time theorizing about the situation, comparing options, and simulating the outcomes of each possible option before taking an action. doers are effective (or rash), while simulators are thoughtful (or stuck in decision paralysis). i strongly identify as a simulator, so much so that i’m incredulous at the fact that doers exist. i simulate nearly everything. i simulate projected outcomes of career and life decisions: where to live, who to date, what job to accept. i simulate the experience of eating all my lunch options to decide what to order.

part of my theory is that simulators are intensely and unforgivingly outcome-driven. we feel the need to simulate because we strongly desire a certain set of outcomes and strongly fear the complementary ones. we want to take the right steps 1 through n to get to some desired outcome at step n+1. however, a good simulation involves projection, and these projections often inform whether or not we choose to even take the first step down a path. after all, it’s perfectly sensible to conclude that if we don’t like the outcome, there’s no point in bothering with the path at all. the crucial problem with this, though, is coincidentally something i learned working on fluid dynamics simulations: errors compound as you roll out a simulation. if the simulation is slightly wrong at step n, it will only become more wrong at step n+1. thanks to this critical problem, after some (surprisingly low) number of rollout steps, even the best simulations diverge completely from reality. i believe our simulations of life to be no different.

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here’s a concrete example. in an attempt to find my shape in my newly single life, i went alone on a round-the-world ski tour last month. i started in Zurich where i transferred by train to a quaint little ski town in the Austrian alps called Ischgl, had a 30 hour stopover in Hong Kong on the way to Tokyo, and topped it off with skiing in the fresh powder of Hokkaido. as a simulator, i planned meticulously. i reserved flights, hotels, and trains months ahead of time; bought little organizer pouches for my small objects (lifesavers, btw); even organized my emails so i could easily find every relevant logistical detail. but, as every travel story goes, i made a number of fundamental miscalculations.

throughout the trip, i lugged around a full checked bag-sized suitcase (45% of my height) plus my 175cm-long ski bag (108% of my height), which in hindsight was more than a little insane given the circumstances. during a 10 minute walk on day 2 (of 24), i quickly realized how treacherous of an experience lugging these bags around would be. my good friend N kindly walked me and my luggage onto the train at the Zurich station, but i could barely contain my anxiety about the upcoming transfer to Ischgl that i’d have to execute alone. the ski bag would only fit overhead, so i had to get that down somehow without knocking someone (or myself) out. i am basically incapable of carrying either of these bags individually, let alone both of them, so stairs are out of the question, and when i arrive at my stop i have about 5 minutes to get through the station and catch the bus to Ischgl. sitting on the train, i just wanted to work or write or appreciate the scenery but i couldn’t focus on much other than simulating the experience of doing all of these actions.

when the train arrived at my station, the man sitting across from me helped get my ski bag down, another carried my suitcase down the stairs, and a kind group of Canadians skiers got my bags into the crowded bus. Ischgl, a ski town, unsurprisingly turned out to be both hilly and icy. as i was struggling up one such icy hill to get to my hotel, two kindhearted snowboarders ran up to me, took one bag each, and walked me all the way to my hotel. they even invited me to eat with them after finding out i was traveling alone. my takeaways from this story are threefold: 1) you can plan as much as you want but you can never plan for everything that will happen, 2) vulnerability (in this case traveling alone with bags that are way too big for me) gives people an opportunity to connect, and 3) there are a lot of incredibly kind people in this world who willingly offer of themselves without hope of reciprocation.

after arriving in Ischgl i rapidly found out two critical pieces of information: 1) this is not a town that people travel to alone, and 2) men outnumber women by at least 2:1. all of this is to say that, as a solo female traveler, i stood out like a sore thumb. and if there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that i hate standing out. my first reaction to these observations is that i’d made a mistake — i was careless and didn’t collect the requisite information to construct a realistic simulation. but instead, everyone i met there called me brave. they called me admirable; they said i was doing what they only wished they could.

so my simulations, like most simulations, were wrong. but most importantly, if they were right i never would’ve come and yet i don’t regret it for a second.

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there is a second gripe i have with simulation and outcome-driven thinking, and that is the curse of perfectionism. i simulate not because i want any old outcome: i want the perfect outcome. the natural and logical reasoning is that perfect outcomes are hard to come by, so they need to be planned for meticulously. but what does perfection, or even “goodness”, mean in a non-verifiable context anyway? in the absence of a real metric, it’s easiest to measure goodness by how we perceive other people to perceive it. and that audience we invent for ourselves is where the problems begin. for one, this goodness metric changes with the people in your life, so good enough is never good enough. remember feeling like the hottest shit after getting a 95% on a test and humble bragging to your friends only to find out that they all got 100%? i didn’t feel so hot after that.

so what does this have to do with simulators finding it hard to take action? since other people are now part of the equation, simulators view any action as a public performance diligently attended by each of their real or imagined critics: a venue where mistakes are harshly and immutably recorded in the public consciousness. doers, on the other hand, view actions as training reps, an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.

i’m not a great runner, but i used to be a really shit runner. i vividly remember one cold december night in high school, amidst our neighbors’ twinkling christmas lights, all i wanted was to run all the way through this 6 minute song without stopping and i couldn’t. for years after that i wished for a treadmill in a hermetically sealed box. i wanted to get better at running somewhere safe from prying eyes and judgmental passersby in hopes of one day emerging from my box triumphant, a “good” runner. practicing running is good the same way that theorizing is good and simulating is also, to a healthy extent, good. but reading this example doesn’t feel good, and that’s because the scenario is fundamentally flawed: i wanted to plan out my steps meticulously to achieve perfection alone, in hiding, and only then could i emerge from my cocoon perfectly formed. but this road is not only never-ending, since perfection is not really real, but even more importantly, it is lonely.

i can’t talk about running without mentioning my dear friend T, who is a runner as gifted as he is hardworking. despite the fact that on any given day he would prefer to run twice as fast and twice as far as i can, he always makes time to run with me and anyone else in his life with any interest in running whatsoever. people like T remind me daily that there are more important things than being “good”: in his own words, “life is too short to run alone”.

despite not being a big quotes person, i’ll conclude my thoughts on perfectionism and the role of real/imagined critics with a quote. i oddly discovered this one in the bathroom of E’s office and it’s been running around rent-free in my head ever since (edited for gender inclusivity):

It is not the critic who counts: not the one who points out how the strong stumble or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the one who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends themselves in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if they fail, at least they fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt

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of course, the one thing i simulate the most is my career. i have always described myself as career-driven, i spend the majority of my waking hours working, and naturally i wish to spend my life doing meaningful work. for a long time i wanted to sit alone, formulate my theories about what is and is not worth doing, run simulations of doing those things in the privacy of a hermetically sealed sandbox, and one day emerge making only perfect and most sensible choices. i found my comfort zone in the liminal space between thinking and doing, where i can apply familiar tools of questioning and analysis to what i should do without the perceived finality of actually doing anything. unfortunately, though, this is a dangerous space. it’s easiest in this space to deceive ourselves into believing that doing is imminent: after all, we are thinking about what to do. in reality, however, we could spend our whole lives searching for meaningful work and never take the first step towards actually doing it.

writing this section was honestly very difficult for me. being thoughtful about how i operate in the world is one of my core values, but i didn’t know how to distinguish between thoughtfulness and simulation. how can we be thoughtful and goal-oriented without over-reliance on simulation? Henrik Karlsson’s post crystallized this idea for me with the vocabulary of “unfolding” (originally coined by Christopher Alexander): the slow and iterative molding of your life from the inside out. the paradigm of unfolding actually relies heavily on thoughtful analysis: in each iteration, we observe the kinds of activities/ideas/people we naturally gravitate toward and take a small step in that direction. simulation, on the other hand, orients our thoughts on the future rather than the present. instead of following our current intuition, simulation drives us to shape our lives today by backtracking from a fantasized future version of ourselves. so, in fact, thoughtfulness isn’t at odds with simulation at all — it just means paying attention to who we are today and using that understanding to shape the life we want.

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despite my tireless pursuit of meaning in life, somehow i’d overlooked the fact that downhill skiing is an exercise in futility: you ski down just to go up and ski down again, almost always covering no net ground. but i’ve never wished for it to have a higher purpose, nor have i wondered whether spending my time in this way is meaningful. i was too busy having fun, and yet i’m able to write all of this today because of skiing. so maybe sometimes doing can come first and meaning will come later.

we probably all fall on one side or the other of the doer-simulator spectrum, and my only offering is to advocate for balance. i, the simulator, have always above all else valued logic, thoughtfulness, and good sense. but maybe i like skiing so much because it’s one of the only times in my life where i’m forced to exit the simulation and act purely from intuition, and i could use a little more of that in my life.

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like i mentioned, this was a particularly hard post to conceptualize/write, so i talked about it with about 15 million people. thanks in particular to J, who i stole the “simulators perform/doers train” metaphor from, my draft readers E/E, and A who has some magical ability to get me to finish what i started.