Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? (Full)

Slack enables exploration.

Exploration enables exploitation.

Exploitation destroys slack.

This feels to me like the result of very specific/narrow criteria for "success" and personal ambition, which haven't applied to most people I hang out with. (Except for becoming more risk-averse about things that have high tail risk or might destabilize one's life once you have kids, which seems very reasonable to me and a worthwhile tradeoff for the category of person who values having children a lot.) In particular, the nurses I worked with didn't come off to me as feeling constrained-by-success in this way. 

I currently both feel pleased with my life trajectory, and also like I have a lot of freedom to go in a completely different direction this year if I want. My original undergraduate degree and job were in ICU nursing, I later pivoted to nonprofit operations & finance work, and then left that to work on writing a novel. I'm considering whether I want to continue with writing or do a programming or data science bootcamp (both of which I have minimal background in), and both of these feel like very viable options. It's...honestly kind of hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be reluctant to start learning a new skill I know very little about, and I'm definitely not worried about being judged by my peer group for it. I do think I'm pretty lucky in what peer group I have, and also in having a background that doesn't lend itself to people having those expectations of me. 

Something about this hit me pretty hard in a way that other similar things hadn't. 

I'm reminded of this SMBC about how you can have multiple lifetimes (it takes 7 years to master something, that's several different things you could be great at over the course of your life, which'd shape your life in very different ways). But, people tend to get stuck in the thing they know.

In my case...

...hmm... I feel some kind of creeping horror at growing stagnant. But I also feel something like "don't have the time to actually learn new things from the ground up." Or, I know that I'm pretty-okay at the stuff I'm pretty okay at. I could learn totally new skills, but, it'd be years before I found out if I was especially good at them and whether they were worth it.

I really like the pattern you used of starting with parables and following up with your motivation for writing the post.

I think the parables did a great job of quickly (and entertainingly) giving you an idea of what the post is about via "show don't tell" and "concrete before abstract [LW · GW]". In particular, I like that you provided a handful of them. One or two might have been a little ambiguous but having a handful makes it pretty clear. When I write this out this all sounds like obvious writing 101 sort of stuff, but in my experience writing and my experience reading the writing of other people, it just always seems to prove more way more difficult than it seems.

I also really like the idea of mentioning your personal motivation/inspiration for writing the post. I'm having trouble putting my finger on why that's useful to have, but I have a pretty strong sense that it is useful to have (most of the time).

(I notice that this comment sounds a bit like an instructor grading an essay. I don't mean for it to come across that way, I just really admired those things about your writing.)

If I were to come up with a Clever Title for some of this, I might call it The Trap of the Local Maxima. 

I did childcare and disability care in college, because it was a better option than being a cashier or something. Then I graduated and it was a recession, but I could use my childcare experience to get nanny jobs. And so on, and so on. 

Now I have about 15 years of childcare experience. It is REALLY EASY for me to get GOOD PAYING nanny jobs. I can literally go on to a website, send out 5-10 applications to what I think are the best jobs there, and be working within a week. 

Every now and then I try to do something else, but it is harder to find other types of jobs given my resume, and when I do the job is usually harder than nannying, and pays less. (I was recently an Office Manager, which had expectations I couldn't live up to, and paid less than nannying. Now I do some Virtual Assistant work that is mostly writing / social media which is nice and easy, and a similar amount of pay per hour, but not as many hours per day)

I don't even LIKE being a nanny. I never CHOSE it as a career. I don't PARTICULARLY like children (not in the way most people who choose childcare do). Kids are easy, but my people-skills are mediocre when dealing with e.g. parents or other nannies. 

I tell myself someday I will semi-retire and be a dog walker.

I have some areas of artistic expertise where everyone around me is kind of like a level 10 and I'm a level 80. When I try skills near to it, I'm immediately a level 25, and so I actually feel pretty good exploring them. Note that these are not the core skills that my reputation and social status rest on.

I can think of many examples where I think this sort of dynamic happened in the world. I feel some impulse to not name them all because it's psychologizing others a bit. But I'll say one that I thought of lately was wondering why Nate Silver didn't do any forecasting around the pandemic, and this sort of answer was what I settled on.

You say you resolved to live life like a failure, which I like. I have something like this, but those words don't quite resonate with me. Paul Graham says to try to feel like a noob often, and he has the great line "the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally", which I also like.

This reminds me of Seneca.

Your modern parables give a better frame for some of his advises:

"Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”"

All of this would have made a teenager hate the idea of success altogether. I was not a teenager anymore, so I formulated a slightly more sophisticated answer: Regardless of how successful I become, I resolve to live like a failure.

I strong upvoted for this line

This is a huge ugh field [? · GW] for me that I have been meaning to explore for a long time. I think the reason why I never actually explore it is because it feels like a very deep rabbit hole that is intimidating to start going down.

When I was a sophomore in college, after reading How to Start a Startup, I decided that I wanted to start startups, make a ton of money, and then use that money to make the world a better place. And I wanted to pursue these goals really, really hard [? · GW]. My mindset was:

I care about achieving them so yes, I'm going to make an actual effort to achieve them. But if I fail, then the fallback plan is still good. It'd be reaching for the stars but landing on the clouds. Eg. having a cushy life as a programmer that would provide me with way more money than I'd know what to do with, the ability to retire early, as an upper-middle class person in a first world country in the 21st century, with a million interests that I could spend time pursuing, etc.

Fast forward eight years, I haven't really had any success and my happiness set point has changed. Achieving my goals makes me feel normal. Call it a 5/10. Not achieving my goals, and feeling "behind", which is where I spend most of my time, makes me feel anxious. Call it a 2/10. It shouldn't be like that though. I should feel like a 7/10 when I don't achieve them and a 10/10 when I do.

One path forward is to fix this bug in my brain. But is that possible? Well, "possible" is a very low bar. I think a more useful question is whether it is plausible. In exploring that question, I look around at successful people, similar to what you've done in this post, and I find that they all have similar problems. Their set point changes, it feels normal when they achieve their goals, upsetting when they don't, and that their default state is "feeling behind" and trying to "keep up". It doesn't feel like there are too many exceptions to this.

I'm not inside other people's heads so I can't say for sure, but if it's true, well, I think it is a pretty big blow to the idea that being ambitious makes sense. Not a fatal blow — maybe when you go under the hood and look at the gears it turns out that this is a fixable problem — but still a big one. Another thought: maybe some goals are important enough that they're worth pursuing even if doing so won't make you happy.

One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.

-Steve Jobs, 1998

The freedom to legitimately make a wider range of decisions is possible to expand while increasing success in some cases. I see most software engineers go down a path of increasing their financial obligations along with their incomes. I have tried to limit this over time, and instead, I take about 2/5 of my time off long-term. As a 32 year old, I've taken multi-year breaks from employment and lots of multi-month breaks. Funny enough, in this time I've gained niche software engineering skills in things that I would probably not have been able to acquire at work, which has opened up a variety of interesting jobs that I don't think would have been accessible via a path of continuous employment. For me it has been the opposite of the fear that most people are inclined to believe where the next employer will see a "resume gap" and be uninterested. In my time off of work, I have been able to build many personal relationships that would not have been accessible if I were working 40 hours per week continuously with a measly 4 weeks off per year. More relationships => more opportunities. More time for relationships => higher quality relationships => higher quality opportunities. This lets me work even less over time, and usually for 3 or 4 days per week when something interesting crosses my path. The labor market is extremely inefficient and it can often be exploited heavily to gain personal freedom and success simultaneously.

There's a lot of attention paid these days to accommodating the personal needs of students. For example, a student with PTSD may need at least one light on in the classroom at all times. Schools are starting to create mechanisms by which a student with this need can have it met more easily.

Our ability to do this depends on a lot of prior work. The mental health community had to establish PTSD as a diagnosis; the school had to create a bureaucratic mechanism to normalize accommodations of this kind; and the student had to spend a significant amount of time figuring out what accommodations alleviated their PTSD symptoms and how to get them addressed through the school's bureaucracy.

This points in a direction of something like "transitions research," an attempt to identify and economically address the specific barriers that skew individuals toward immediate modest-productivity strategies and away from long-term high-productivity strategies.

Imagine if there was a well-known "diagnosis" of "status-loss anxiety," in which a person who's achieved some professional success notices themselves avoiding situations that would be likely to enhance their growth, yet come with a threat of loss of status. It's like the depressed person who resists mental health unseling because it implies there's something wrong with them. Being able to identify that precise reaction, label it, raise awareness of it, and find means and messages to address it would be helpful to overcome a barrier to mental health treatment.

In economics jargon, what's going on here is not so much the sunk cost fallacy as a combination of aging, opportunity cost and diminishing returns. Learning takes time, aging us, and this means we have less time to profit off a new long-term investment in skill-building. Increased skill raises the opportunity cost of learning new skills. Diminishing returns means that, if we learn a skill that increases our profit from A + B to A + 2B, that this is less intrinsically valuable to us than when we increased our profit from A to A + B. All these forces together, along with status considerations, coordination issues, and misaligned incentives, conspire to work against learning and investment.

I don't know if "loss of freedom" is quite the most apt frame, though it's not inappropriate. I think the central point is that success and pressure go hand in hand. The more successful you are, the more others want to make use of your skillset, and the greater the stakes are for doing your job right. You become more aware of the problems you could solve, if you only had more time and energy, if you had fewer other obligations or one more skill. And you may become anxious about placing yourself in situations where you look incompetent, lest others make the assumption that your lack of skill in the new area somehow reflects a lack of competence in your previous area of expertise - a perversion of the idea of Gell-Mann amnesia.

As overwhelming as these problems can be, I like the idea that a simple personal practice of beginner's mind can take us a long way towards overcoming these barriers. Just because the problem is big and complex doesn't mean that the solution can't be small and simple.

Relevant quote from Paul Graham's recent essay What I Worked On:

One day in 2010, when he was visiting California for interviews, Robert Morris did something astonishing: he offered me unsolicited advice. I can only remember him doing that once before. One day at Viaweb, when I was bent over double from a kidney stone, he suggested that it would be a good idea for him to take me to the hospital. That was what it took for Rtm to offer unsolicited advice. So I remember his exact words very clearly. "You know," he said, "you should make sure Y Combinator isn't the last cool thing you do."

At the time I didn't understand what he meant, but gradually it dawned on me that he was saying I should quit. This seemed strange advice, because YC was doing great. But if there was one thing rarer than Rtm offering advice, it was Rtm being wrong. So this set me thinking. It was true that on my current trajectory, YC would be the last thing I did, because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten Arc, and was in the process of eating essays too. Either YC was my life's work or I'd have to leave eventually. And it wasn't, so I would.

Humans, by default, define success in part by social approval, and status is a zero sum game. If instead your goal is to live a life that you find meaningful, in a community you choose, and you manage to genuinely not care what the rest of society thinks of that, you end up with a lot more options. I may need lots of prestige to become a tenured professor at a top university, and getting that prestige is very costly, so yes, if that's the kind of success you want, you're going to pay in giving up other options. 

Could Michael Jordan, instead of trying to become a professional baseball player, have retired from pro sports and founded a recreational league for former pro athletes interested in playing a wider range of sports? No sponsorships, no TV deals, no salaries, just playing for fun in a still-high-level environment? I don't see who could have stopped him, he had enough money to do it and I doubt he would lack for interested participants. I've certainly heard enough stories of pro athletes who lose all joy they ever took in their primary sport. 

Your Tetris player could have created a pseudonym and a second account where he never used his signature move, then later start incorporating the signature move into the second account's play. Or just not care if his play suffered for a while, the surprise everyone with a comeback once he has two well-practiced signature moves. Who doesn't love a comeback story? And then if he does it again, people won't be surprised by it as much.

Deborah can tell her husband how unhappy she is, and if he worth having as a partner he'll understand. They'll sell the expensive house, live somewhere nice but modest, and she can write whatever she likes.

So yes: society lies to everyone about what "success" is and means. I'm a Harvard grad myself, and while I didn't know this until several years in, most of what you get by going to a place like that is the opportunity to gain status, to form certain kinds of connections that are helpful for playing certain social games, and to be seen as a certain kind of person when it's useful to do so. The math, physics, comp sci, and everything else you learn are the same there are at hundreds of other good schools.

Also, even in high status environments, it is sometimes possible to cultivate a reputation for being eclectic in various ways, but you have to be savvy enough to pull it off while still clearly "fitting in" enough to be worth keeping around. Flouting some norms can be an act of claiming high status, or it can be done in such a way it's seen as adding more diverse but useful viewpoints.  You can be the person people go to with problems so hard the conventional approaches aren't working. Anna can rightly claim she was able to solve a major problem because of the other niches she studied, and if that doesn't help she can look for a new advisor at the cost of a slower path to graduation. Or, she can leave academia (like most PhDs and PhD students do), live a life that provides her free time, and study anything she wants, publishing anything useful along the way. Does her field of pure math require full-time work and lots of grant funding, or just basic, widely available tools and her brain?

I am not sure if this would solve the issue for you, but I try to make passive income towards not being dependent on work, so that I have the freedom to do what I want. But I am really not sure this would solve it because I think you pointed out that even wealth can be a limitation. It depends how much time you spend to maintain in it and how successful you are with it

The contrast between this post and lsusr's rejoinder [LW · GW] reminds me of the Objectivist idea that success within the system always corrupts (to put it in LW terminology, you can't feed Moloch without feeding Moloch), and of Moral Mazes [LW · GW]:

Its thesis is that this is the result of a vicious cycle arising from competitive pressures among those competing for their own organizational advancement. Over time, those who focus more on and more value such competitions win them, gain power and further spread their values, unless they are actively and continuously opposed.

Once things get bad in an organization they tend to only get worse, but things in general get better because such organizations then decay and are replaced by new ones. Unfortunately, our society now slows or prevents that process, with these same organizations and their values increasingly running the show. 

Investment and flexibility become impossible. Even appearing to care about anything except the competition itself costs you your allies. Thus things inevitably decay and then collapse, flexibility returns, cycle repeats.

Involvement with such patterns is far more destructive to humans than is commonly known.

This reminds me of the book "Four Thousand Weeks". The core idea is that if you become productive at doing something, then society will want you to do more of that thing. For example, if you were good at responding to email, always prompt, and never missing an email, society would send you more emails because you had built a reputation of being good at responding to email.

I think the real reason is that exploration is a stage in life; it naturally ends with parenthood.  Our goal in youth is to explore the world until we find a way to succeed.  In adulthood, our goal is to maintain a stable environment so that our children and students can safely explore.

Curated. This is an idea I've thought about a little before, but this post says everything so cleanly and clearly, and helped me think about it in ways I had not before. The idea carries with me stronger for reading this post.

And the writing is great. I normally emphasize readability in curation notices, but here I feel like I also want to call it 'poetic'. Whatever.

(And yep, I see the irony in curating it, but the irony does not seem to me worth it to avoid. If Alkjash disagrees I will obey his preferences of course.)

I think learning about xrisk has this kind of “binding you” quality. Once you know about it and you care enough, you can’t look away.

p-adic quasicoherent topology

I'd love to chat with you sometime about this. I have scheduled an appointment on Calendly (link provided for those who haven't used it before)

Also: quick question: is there actually a connection between p-adic quasicoherent topology and matroid theory, or is that just for narrative? (I don't know much about matroids)

Brian Josephson is an interesting example, his discovery of the Josephson effect at the age of 22 won him a Nobel physics prize. At about the same time that the physics prizes started to pour in for his discovery he switched hard into studying telekinesis, meditation and psychic powers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson)

Now, specifically in his case it is tempting to reason as follows: If he spent the rest of his career working in physics he would always be primarily known for that thing he did right at the beginning. If he wanted his new work to match the success of the old he had to go for the high-risk high-reward stuff. Telekinesis probably doesn't exist, but if it does... This is my interpretation of his strange change in direction. Other people might instead suppose that the early success gave him the space to work on more-or-less whatever he wanted at a university, and what he wanted was the new age stuff.

This resonated a lot with me! (And I'm far from as successful as I would 'like' to be - or would I??? :angst:)

Speculative and fuzzy comparison-drawing

I was reminded, I'm not sure exactly why, of this interesting entry I recently came across (I recall I was led there by a link buried in a comment in Slate Star Codex somewhere...) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

While I wouldn't necessarily endorse all of it, it's an interesting read. As I understand it, the capability approach advocates a certain way of drawing lines in practical policy-making. Its emphases are on

• ‘functionings’ ('beings' and 'doings')

  various states of human beings and activities that a person can undertake

  example beings: ...being well-nourished, being undernourished, being housed in a pleasantly warm but not excessively hot house, being educated, being illiterate, being part of a supportive social network, being part of a criminal network, and being depressed

  example doings: ...travelling, caring for a child, voting in an election, taking part in a debate, taking drugs, killing animals, eating animals, consuming lots of fuel in order to heat one's house, and donating money to charity

• 'capabilities'

  a person's real freedoms or opportunities to achieve functionings

Here's a passage which we can hold alongside the premise of the original post

The ends of well-being freedom, justice, and development should be conceptualized in terms of people's capabilities. Moreover, what is relevant is not only which opportunities are open to me each by themselves, hence in a piecemeal way, but rather which combinations or sets of potential functionings are open to me.

For example, suppose I am a low-skilled poor single parent who lives in a society without decent social provisions. Take the following functionings: (1) to hold a job...to properly feed myself and my family; (2) to care for my children at home and give them all the attention, care and supervision they need. ... (1) and (2) are opportunities open to me, but they are not both together open to me... forced to make some hard, perhaps even tragic choices between two functionings which both reflect basic needs and basic moral duties?

[emphases in source]

Although that summary of the approach and the excerpt I've copied don't articulate this 'success as enemy of freedom' idea, I wonder if it would be helpful to consider the idea with the lens of the capability approach? There's a certain paradoxical symmetry of the examples, which I think is what the OP is drawing attention to. The challenge would be to draw out whether the mechanism is societal or part of human nature or some combination thereof or (...) and what measures we might take (individually or collectively) to mitigate it!

I relate very much to your old roommate who commented on your studying Go and attributing it to your intelligence. While I have always imagined myself living in a small wooden cottage with plenty of time to pursue my interests, I find it very difficult to evaluate a freedom/success trade-off while still in university. Even though I could make the case that I will most likely live more-than-comfortably as a data-scientist no matter how well I perform at the next examination, I still can't shake the feeling that I should be pushing myself to the limit. I feel as if the "fog-of-war" for determining future freedom is too thick, but I realize that I haven't actually tried to make a plan.

So here's the first outline of a "wooden cottage" plan:

1. Graduate with a masters degree to ensure employability
2. Acquire units of purchasing power in local currency
3. Pay off debts, build a heap of gold coins under a mountain
4. Scare off dwarves and a hobbit
5. ??? 

I'll figure the rest out later, but thank you for planting the seed in my mind.

I enjoyed this post, although I don't necessarily think sucess is essentially what is taking our freedom away. Firstly, what do you understand by sucess? I believe it might be highly subjective. 

Do you think success is economical, professional, intellectual...? Is it a static goal or is it a journey? That changes how it influences your freedom. In essence, the definition and meaning that you give to your own life will change very much I free do you feel. 

I don't think that success itself is the reason of constrained freedom, I believe that "identity" is. I have always thought that defining one self translates to limiting what we could be. When we are five years old we could be anything! All we learn is new, exciting and you don't really have a sense of identity developed enough. You could be really good at that and that is intrisically exciting! When we are young we have a curious and ambitious mind not yet defined (hence this sense of freedom: nothing in your life is yet defined). However, with age, external constraints and the natural path of life limits your options. For example, specialised careers or studies, creating a family or mastering any skill...   All of that defines what you are in a very strong manner (to society and to yourself) and that can definitely limit your freedom. 

I believe that as we age and we take important decisions in our lifes, our freedom is affected by the loss of possibilities. However, it all depends how you perceive yourself, how much do you want to organise and box your identity and what are you after in this life. 

I don't really agree with the concepts used here, nor with the conclusion.

The basic idea behind this article is that an increase in responsibility & standards in one field limits one to that field, this is simply untrue, or at least often not true.

For example, an academic might indeed get piegenholed into studying the niche they got good at, but that is only true until tenure.

A financial advisor might indeed be stuck doing boring backhanded deals and attending highhigh-class class NY bars to get access to the best dark polls, but that's only until they have enough money to quit working.

***

In part, the problems you outline are ones regarding how people put less value on freedom as they progress through life. But this is only natural and happens regardless of success levels.

However, given a change in value is possible, transitioning from a field to another should be easier, not harder, with success.

***

So the conclusion of putting on baby wheels when learning something new is not one I'd agree with. Indeed, I'd rather push myself much harder than I would push young me, since my previous experience and knowledge is likely to give me a better starting point for many endevours, at least for most of those I could potentially find interesting.

Even if it wouldn't, the "don't push yourself too hard" is simply a counter-biasing tool, useful only for saying "Hey, remember that X thing you are really good at, well, Y is completely unrelated to that, so expect to be mediocre at Y and take it slow".

I have changed occupations thrice - from a PhD student (dropped out) to lab technician (in a different lab, for children), from LT to bookshop cashier/..., from BC to the-one-who-proofreads-articles-and-stuff in a lesser research journal. I kind of expect to switch at least once more, to a librarian or postman.

All of it revolves around the need to be home for the kid, and around hating some aspects of the job. (The lack of science; the late hours; the cold; and currently, the need to be reputation-wise.) And there was freedom in every thing I've done, although not exactly freedom to do what I wanted to do. Just - freedom to see the world. I think it should not be underestimated.

Valleys of bad rationality [? · GW] and Reason as memetic immune disorder [LW · GW] come to mind after reading this. I think framing it these ways is useful.

Pursuing success is... well... good, we can say. But there are some serious dangers along that road. It makes me think that mental health maintenance/self-care should be an important component of the art of rationality.

I want to keep being successful despite the costs to my freedom, but that's because I view my success as a service (hence I get paid for it), not as a source of my own happiness. Esse quam videri.