We are the result of thousands of years of evolution. And like we all know, the modern life didn’t really exist back then, when evolution was pulling the strings and picking our physical and psychological makeup. This is a problem. One only needs to consider the obesity crisis, or our limited sense of understanding statistics to realize that we’re very far from being optimized for our current environment.

One particular example is the nonlinearity of many professions. Take a writer, for example. A writer spends hour after hour, working on the new manuscript with very limited feedback. The feedback he does get, is essentially coming from friends, who have either willingly or through coercion agreed to read the book. Or, if the writer is at least moderately successful, some feedback might even come from a professional editor. But now, consider the income of writers. It is highly nonlinear: some writers  - like J.K. Rowling – have their income counted in the millions. Most, however, make do with a few bucks here and there (or have a “proper” day job, and write at night).

Now, if you ask a writer whether their work is “going well”, or something similar, what could they say? I’m pretty sure that they have actually very little idea how it is going. Pages appear (and then disappear through editing). But the connection to the actual payoff is tenuous at best. Writing today means the book may come out next year – or in 10 years. Furthermore, there is little common knowledge about what makes a book good, or an author successful.

The key, we see here, is that the writer’s life is a nonlinear one. You can’t tell progress from walking backwards, because they look exactly the same. Of course, this is not true of just writers. In fact, this is true for almost any creative profession: artists, scientists, designers, or maybe even business strategists. They’re all living in the same nonlinear worlds: some people earn thousands of times more than others, and there’s very few signs that a result is good – other than its popularity.
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The actual problem in relation to emotions is that our emotions love linearity. We love to see progress, and we’d like to see it every day. I presume this is why many creative professionals like renovating, knitting, or just something where you do stuff with your hands. Because, once we move from creating ideas to creating physical items, we enter the linear world. When you renovate a room, there’s only so many floorboards to replace – hence linear progress.

When we don’t get that linear emotional sense of achievement, we become skeptical of our work and progress. For some, it may even become bad enough to get depressed. For others, I think it's just a big rollercoaster. Sometimes, you're over the moon about what's happening - and sometimes, you're having that angry "this isn't fucking working" moment.

Fortunately, I think there are ways around the problem. You can create a – admittedly somewhat false – sense of linear progress. By thinking of actions that you constantly should be doing to improve yourself, you can also construct a sense of moving linearly forward. For example, I have as a goal every workday to do two things: 1) write at least half a page, and 2) read at least one article. Of course, these are not have truly linear payoffs: one day’s writing may be the turning point to a good publication – or just a lot of nonsense. Likewise, one article may be much more vital for me than another.

However, the point being that mentally ticking off these boxes (or physically in Habitica) creates an illusion of linear progress. This is false, like I said above. But, crucially, it helps to create emotional value, because I’m getting a sense of accomplishment every day from it. And even if it’s not true progress, it’s ok, because both of the actions are important enough for a scientist to never be a waste of time. 

Well, hey there! If you’re reading this – thanks for still following this pipeline J

It’s been a little hectic at this end of the Web. Between two conferences, four paper drafts (no, they’re still not finished), getting married, and moving to Germany there’s been a certain lack of time for this project! Now, however, things are settling back to more or less normal, which thank goodness means I can pick this blog up again.

If you know me IRL, you might have heard, but anyway: I’m spending the next 12 months fortuituously at the University of Mannheim as a visiting PhD student. Needless to say, I’m very excited! The Department of Banking and Finance seems great, and full of awfully nice people. Also, taking a walk around the main building is certainly awe-inspiring:

A random finding of the last weeks is that going offline is not necessarily bad for productivity. I travel daily to Mannheim by train, which takes about 1,5 hours, depending on how many Gleisstörungen or other delays Deutsche Bahn happens to throw my way. Anyway, since I don’t have a German mobile yet, I’m in the train without a Web connection. Originally, I thought this was going to be a problem, since it’s hard to program anything when you can’t read stackoverflow, it’s hard to read articles since you can’t tap into anyone’s comments on the paper, etc. But, as I found out, it’s also hard to pretend you’re working when you can waste time on Facebook! So far, the daily train rides have worked well for my productivity, resulting in a lot of concentrated reading, data analysis – and this text!

On the other hand, I remember reading somewhere that pretty much any change in the environment increases productivity at first, but the effect wears off in a few weeks. Well, I guess we’ll see about that soon enough!

Another interesting thing is how going abroad shows the importance of System 1. I hadn’t really remembered just how much System 1 is the guiding light in the everyday. I mean, when you buy something from the grocery store, it’s mostly the same stuff as before. When you take a bus, it’s the same bus. When you walk to the gym, it’s where it’s always been and the equipment is exactly the same. However, all this changes with moving abroad.

When I wanted to buy cream for a sauce, I had to spend 10 minutes looking at different packages, trying in vain to determine which kind of cream it holds inside. When I was at the gym, I spent a lot of time looking for the right equipment. And when I take a bus or train anywhere, it takes half an hour to plan everything for the trip – especially since I didn’t have mobile Internet until just a few days ago. So everything where I could’ve normally relied on System 1 is now the business of System 2 instead. So instead of lazily cruising around my day, I spend an inordinate amount of time having to think things through. Having to weigh options and choose carefully. Having to look for information since there’s no schema in my head.

If you like, you could say that this shows how the ultimate rational model is not a good model to strive for. In a certain sense, you could be right. Then, on the other hand, all of the choices in my everyday are very small ones. So from the perspective of a meta-choice strategy, it totally makes sense to relegate those ones to System 1. It really doesn’t matter what cream I buy (at least not very much), so it’s a good heuristic to buy just what I’ve tried before, and what I know will work out. I really don’t want to spend my limited mental choice on rationally comparing the different cream packets. Because – as I’ve seen here – doing that will just tire you out really quickly. Better to rely on heuristics.