Metamorphosis

I have a good friend that I talk to a lot about our respective plans post-graduation (we’re both seniors in our engineering degrees). This post stems from thoughts that stemmed from those discussions.

People tend to change a lot over their lives. Sometimes it’s predictable by the person or those around them, oftentimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s a newfound love for a food, sometimes it’s a few extra pounds, sometimes it’s a completely reshaped view of reality. And sometimes it happens over weeks, days, or hours, but far more commonly it trudges along so gradually that you don’t realize until years later, looking back and noticing you were different back then.

Sometimes, change is on purpose. You fix a bad habit, or instill a new good one. But far more commonly it is unconscious, or a direct cause of something in your life. I think it’s fair to say that the most impactful changes in people’s lives are usually in this unconscious category. The winds and tides of the universe, not the oars that we row with.

These are rough and unpredictable seas in which we travel. We all get better at navigating them over our lifetimes - learning how to row our oars to reach various currents, hopefully towards calmer water, where the waves are weak and stand little chance of tipping over your boat. These places are not free of tsunamis, though. As humans, we’ll never really find a place with no waves (nirvana), but we try to get close.

In these oceans of change, navigation is difficult: maps are rare, the stars are different every night, compasses find no north pole to point to. We plot our paths through them only from memories of past courses and tides - ours and others’. There are many rumors of faraway, exotic places that sound only half real.

Some sailors are content or even determined to stay right in the same place. Some have a clear direction, with routes planned years in advance and only deviated from in the most dire circumstances. And some have no long-term destination, but only a desire to improve their abilities to chart and navigate as they take advantage of random currents.

These navigational methods are not exclusive to each other, and every person uses some mix of them, a mix that changes over our lives. Since I realized my navigational abilities as an early teen (the typical time that people start to chart their own paths to some extent) I spent a few years mostly anchored in one place, then a few travelling in a straight line, and recently have become more of the last type, and I get the feeling that I will continue to be like this for years to come, at least.

The difficult thing about these seas, though, is how long it takes to get anywhere. There’s not enough time to see every part of them. When you choose one place to go, it makes others unreachable, just by nature of having a finite amount of time to sail: in comparison to this amount of time, the seas are unimaginably vast.

The nature of these travels being personal transformation makes them extremely difficult to predict the further into the future they extend. Where you are in the seas - who you are as a person - changes your navigation in a way that you can only ascertain by experiencing it.

To finally bring this metaphor to fruition, think about two things in this framework: extended travel and philanthropic giving. Both are things that are possible for me to do, by virtue of being born middle-class in a first world country, which puts me very solidly in the global upper class. Both signify personal states that many have their spyglasses aimed on throughout journeys, but never end up reaching, due to too many destinations planned beforehand, too little rowing, or a combination.

Both are also places that people nearing their final harbors tend to wish they had gone to, or stayed more time in. This makes them a place I want to go. I think that many sailors underestimate how similar they are to each other. No matter how you prefer to navigate or what seas you like to spend time in, the odds are good that you are close to all the rest, and at the end your wishes and regrets won’t look too different from the rest.

Extended travel is a particularly unpredictable sea, or at least it makes future navigation less certain. You’re introduced to a lot of new ideas, ways of living, and changes you could make. Some will stick, maybe in big ways. This opportunity for change is very appealing to me.

In my current incarnation, I am always looking for change. To me, it seems like the point of everything. Every year I hope to look back on my year-younger self and see a different person, and ideally a “worse” person. Judgements of changes, though, is difficult. We very quickly forget our justifications and reasons for living a certain way, and wonder why we could never see the “right” way to do things. The way we perceive our past is entirely a function of our current state. We’re biased against our past selves. For this reason, it is difficult to trust that I really was a “worse” person a year ago, or that I will be a “better” person a year from now. For example, maybe I’ll look back on this post and think the writing is bad. But I hope and believe I won’t look down on it for that, the same way I don’t look down on the things I wrote in elementary school. Man, this kind of meta-meta-meta-cognition is hard to put into words. I think I’ll stop trying to explain it and just get on with the post.

Philanthropic giving seems like an even easier thing to push down the road than travel- there’s a lot less in it for you, and while for travel you can say that you don’t want to waste your prime years, money available for donation tends to increase with age. There’s an argument to be made that the longer you wait, the more total you can donate - keep reinvesting money into making money until you reach a point you are satisfied with the amount you can donate. However, I think that for a lot of people (the majority?) that point doesn’t ever happen, really. It requires sticking to a plan for a long time, through the large personal changes that come with more money. The same is true for travel: Work a 9 to 5 for 10 years while planning to travel at some nebulous point in the future when you are ready for it, and I believe that point is much less likely to come. Relying on your goals to stay the same through large personal change is a very risky endeavor. That’s why my goal for travel (completely foreign countries for months at a time, at least) and donating (double digits percent of income per year, and a specific type of donating which I’ll probably elaborate on in some future post) is to start doing them as soon as reasonably possible, within three years of graduation. I consider it very risky to extend the timeline any further than that. Already, three years is a lot of personal change for most people in their 20’s.

The reason I want to prioritize these things so heavily is because I want them a lot right now. An interesting question worth asking is why I should be so against personal change causing these things not to ever happen. This is just the bias of the present that was discussed previously. I don’t know what my future self will be like and I don’t trust them to accomplish the things that I want to do now. But why should they do things that I want to do, if they don’t want to do them? I think that it’s because they are things I will also believe are good much later in my journey, because dying people tend to wish they had done more of them. But should I prioritize the possible opinions of my later self over the real opinions of my current one? In reality, I don’t think I will ever veer too far away from my current thoughts on travel and donating, in which case a lot of this discussion is moot. However, change is very hard to anticipate. Comparing myself to a year ago, there are many changes I never would have expected, and I’m sure that the same will be true for me in a year. Should I be so confident I will keep the same views on these topics? Well, I guess I’m probably not overly confident if I’m writing a whole post about accepting personal changes.

Metamorphosis is a difficult thing. Accepting that you might be a completely different person from a year to the next is difficult, and even more so for longer-term change. Accepting that you had goals that you don’t believe in anymore, and old dreams that will never be accomplished, places you’ll never go. Realizing that the same is true for many of your current goals and dreams, and reaching peace with that: trusting whoever you develop into, no matter who they are. As a caterpillar, trusting whatever emerges from your cocoon, on no real logical basis. This doesn’t feel right, but what’s the alternative?

That’s all. I’m glad that this is a more rambley post, the wider variety of things that I write, the more I’ll feel like writing and the more open I’ll be to exploring new ways of writing. I think the same way about experiences in general. Trying to work on putting less effort into posts and being happy with posting whatever I end up with when I get to the post conclusion. The only way to build experience is through doing. This improves my skills quicker than editing. More fun too. And a more clear window into my current self, for your, future self, viewing pleasure. Hope you’re doing well out there in the future.