Yesterday, I did an activity analysis of how I spend a retirement day. It’s a method we used at work where you interrupt yourself every ten minutes and then instantly note down what you are doing and what you are thinking or saying. You don’t have to do it all day long. You can randomly choose a couple hours here and there. It revealed some surprises, but the main thing was predictable. I spend a lot of time reflecting. These reflections are about; things in general, matters in the news, how to tackle jobs to be done, but by far the biggest category is things that have already happened. I look back on people and events and, like an MOTD pundit with infinite replays and the advantage of knowing how it turned out, I obsess about how I could have done better, or how things might have been better if fate had been kinder. Then comes blame, guilt, regret, exasperation, the pain of re-running the timeline up to the moment when disaster happened… and I get bogged down in the frustration that I can’t go back and change it. Consciousness abhors a vacuum and in retirement with nothing to do these disaster replays queue up to dominate the empty moments. This is a common old person trap. We all remember, as children, the pain of listening to old people repeating stories from their past. It’s even worse when you have to listen to yourself. The only escape is never to leave yourself alone with nothing to do. That’s why I started the Build-a-plane project. Until I start something else, I am trapped.
Another thing nature abhors is wasting energy, so there must be a purpose to this reminiscing and the form it takes. To start with the form, for me that form is an “inner monologue”, or dialogue, as I prefer the two-way Socratic inner question and inner answer approach. Words and scenes play out in my mind and my mind then constructs an analysis in the form of a dialogue rather than a monologue (though monologue is what the psycho-academic literature prefers to call it). My dialogue is a version of events presented like a tv documentary to the audience of “me”, and as “me” I sit as judge, jury, prosecution, and defence. It’s busy in there. My philosophical principle when handling this process is to try and be as brutally honest as possible. Why not just honest? Why brutally honest? “Is there any other kind?” as Colonel Jessop said. If I choose to blame, laugh at, or mock and chastise myself, then it must be deserved and therefore it must be brutal. I physically wince and groan as I experience these re-runs. And, why does nature require me to expend this energy? My suspicion is that nature is doing this to increase the chance that I will learn the right lessons and do better in future. In which case, as my future is now clearly reducing, and my role in world events is diminishing, why the frick bother? It’s a biological and logical fact that the stock of my life’s remaining projects is a fraction of the ones I have left behind. So why is this still happening? What will I do with this learning in the few moments left to come? For this I have no answer. Maybe it’s an evolutionary biological switch that can’t be turned off. Maybe nature did not foresee humanity living to a point where it gets this old and has time to spare. Like a windmill in a barren landscape my brain carries on turning long after the farm has been abandoned.
Anyway, I don’t mind. What’s the alternative, daytime telly?
The past is one thing, but the future is another. Analysing it is even more intriguing from a processing viewpoint. The person I have my closest, most intimate, relationship with is myself. Nobody else, including my Mum, wife, children, various dogs, friends, highly paid therapist gets anywhere near. An interesting question is whether this proximity and volume of experience allows me to claim that I am the person who understands myself the best. Does anyone else know me better than me? Obviously, this kind of question is unscientific but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Let’s dig in. What is it to know someone? What can you know? Their physical dimensions and appearance? Well, that changes over time. So, can you only know someone at a given point in space time? Are we referring to knowing the person, the physical being or the person the personality? What is that? You are a different person today than you were yesterday and you will become tomorrow. In our consciousness, where we conduct our inner conversations, we assume there is continuity. From infancy to old age, we consider ourselves a continuous person. How can that be? That’s absurd. We learn new things and forget known things every day. My daily experiences change me every day. I go to sleep at night and the relay baton of me is picked up the next day and feels the same, but it is different to the one I held last night, last year, or ten years or fifty years ago. Biologically, physically I am constantly changing, so I must be mentally too. There is no steady state. My psychological and philosophical engine is a tiller swinging through the currents of life. Maybe, there is a permanent core, but the margins change, and if there is marginal change there is no steady state. If you met me ten years ago, you did not meet the same person you meet today. Maybe that’s why the inner dialogue likes to replay and reinterpret the past.
The future gets a different treatment. My Stephen Hawking is page 47, what’s yours? Everyone has a personal “Brief History of Time” page where they gave up. I reached the point where he managed to get across the concept of the future cone, the cone of future possibilities. I used this a lot to confuse and intimidate colleagues in business. The cone starts at the unique point in time and space which is your current position. Imagine this as a dot. To the right of the dot is the future, which contains all the possible dots (places) you can go from the now dot. To the left is the past which is the line of places you have actually been. Future possibilities spread out in a conical shape (it’s conical because of Physics), spreading out like sounds from a megaphone pressed against your lips, but instead of sending your sound in all directions from the source, your future can only proceed down one straight line of dots like a pinprick of light from a torch rather than a beam that spreads wider the further it travels. The future cone line you travel on is approx one neutron wide and tall, possibly less. At any point in time and space you have the potential to travel down an infinite number of those straight lines originating from your “now”. Husserl is the philosopher who drove students nuts with the phenomenology of trying to pinpoint where now is. How long is now? We know it is after the past and before the present but how long is it? Nowadays, the boffs at CERN* might say that depends on your instrumentation. Anyway, the moment when you set off on one course, all the others, that were equally possible futures, are destroyed. When you reach the next point in time, which is actually the smallest fraction of time later, a time so small that nothing can measure it, the cone of infinite future possibilities unfolds itself again. This is how your whole life proceeds. It’s a miracle anyone gets to page 47. The thing to remember about this is that in one lifetime you can only experience the smallest fraction (1 out of N) of the possibilities available to you. That shouldn’t panic you into weighing things up in detail to ensure you make the best choice, because there isn’t time and anyway, statistically, it is impossible to make the best choice because “best” is subjective and cannot be scientifically defined and even if it could the odds are N to 1 against you correctly choosing it. So, it’s much more important to minimise delay and get on with making a choice, any choice and then adapting to it and improving it. And, if you thought that metaphysical musing has no application, consider this. My advice to execs who are considering investing in grand projects or making big acquisitions is based on the above. Don’t waste time on research and selection. No amount of research by McKinsey or even competent advisors will guarantee you make the best choice. Just choose a likely one quickly and use the time you have saved to deal with the unexpected challenges that always accompany all big actions. Those challenges aren’t reduced or avoided by spending more time trying to make the best decision. On big things, it is impossible to identify all the factors that end up determining the outcome. Big stuff happens that you could never know about: Covid, Russia invading Ukraine the UK voting to leave the EU, Boris becoming Prime Minister are just a few recent examples no rational well-informed person would have predicted that had huge impacts on business plans, risk assessments and long winded, pretentious justifications. “Just crack on” I say. “Roll the dice”. The only way to guarantee a win is to have an infinite number of dies, or to follow every single possibility. Portfolio theory messes around with some of this with lesser and greater degrees of success.
Retirement inner dialogue compared to before retirement inner dialogue seems to spend less time considering the future dimension. I find that unsettling. It implies there is less future, which is biologically true but somewhat discomforting. If you don’t plan for the future and strive to get there you are, in effect, accepting a static state, which we might as well call being dead. I don’t think human beings are like that. I think they are like fish; they need to move forward to make the future pass through their gills to give them oxygen of life. Watching daytime telly, doing coach trips, taking cruises is mentally standing still or sliding backwards into the suffocation of non-existence. There has to be a project. … What will it be?
- On the Major Projects MSc at Oxford we had a lecture from the head of CERN in which he started with some Physics to justify why they were spending all that money on whizzing stuff around in circles. Anyway, he said something like “the Universe is X% matter, Y% anti-matter, Z% Dark Matter but our calculations suggest there is another form of matter out there that we cannot see or explain”. At this point I put my hand up. I was in the front row under his nose, so he had to stop. He wasn’t used to being interrupted. I said “I know what that is…” He looked at me and after a theatrical pause I looked him in the eye and said “It’s Doesn’t Matter”. He huffed and carried on without acknowledging my razor wit. Actually, it didn’t get the laugh it deserved but it was a great feeling to still be a class wag at the age of 54. For a moment in the privacy of my nut the ghosts of my old schoolteachers groaned down the decades.
