Risk
I'm thinking about Risk these days. Not the board game, but the concept and my relationship to it. Risk is the possibility of something undesirable happening. Loss, harm, distress. The more risk you take on, the greater the probability that you will experience an outcome you do not want.
I come from a risk averse family, many immigrants, though not all, do. Perhaps starting over in a new place, without the safety net of home and family was/is itself enough risk without heaping on more (more as assessed by the best measure you have which is unfortunately often a measure calibrated by society than reality).
K introduced me to a new concept recently or at least a twist on an old idea. The concept is, if you are not experiencing any failure, you are taking too few risks. He explained it to me through a finance lens, if your job is to take big bets for great reward and you never fail, then your bets are not bold enough. There are things that people in finance will do to hedge risk, so that if a bet goes south they are partially covered by some other bet going in the opposite direction. Minimize loss, maximize reward. Ideally, you will always be winning and you will always be losing and really it's about the proportion of the two. Without risk, without not just the prospect of losing, but actual loss you may never reach the heights you seek.
This is such a strange concept to someone who hates the idea of failure. (Another strange concept is the idea that it could be someone's job to take big bets with other people's money based on what they think other people think might happen if something does happen)*. But right now I'm thinking about risk, not our financial system.
A related idea came up recently. I was reading The Extended Phenotype on the train. In the chapter I was reading Dawkins argues that natural selection is not a perfection-seeking mechanism. The form and nature of organisms is not an ideal fit to their environment. At first glance this may seem counter intuitive, one thinks of natural selection as moving towards more and more optimal solutions as organisms evolve to meet environmental pressures.
Dawkin's argument is that rather than optimizing, evolution is satisficing. An organism needs to be fit enough for it to survive long enough for its genes to continue on. Enough does not mean optimal. Nature in this sense is a kind of lazy designer (I relate).
The example he gives is bats. Bats evolved one way to fly, bats wings are skin stretched over bone. This gave them an advantage in seeking food and avoiding predators.
However bats wings are not the only way to fly. In fact, according to Dawkins (though seemingly not supported by current literature?) they are an inferior design solution for flight.
Dawkins argues that bats will never evolve wings. Bats have marched their way up a "local maximum" of evolution and it has given them enough of an advantage that evolutionarily speaking they will never "back-slide" to the point where they might start over and find their way to the "global maximum" of feathers.
Natural selection is always molding with pre-worked clay. Not only does the "final" form of a creature need to be evolutionarily advantageous, so does every still frame of evolution in between. Nature will not give up an advantage in favor of the unknown. Evolution does not make big bets, on a global scale it does not and cannot accept risk by its own mechanism.
So, a question to ask yourself, a question I am asking myself is are you satisficing or optimizing? To be clear, I think satisficing is a perfectly valid answer. I have, in many aspects of my life, fallen in love with the gentle kindness of good enough. As an approach, it can feel like a necessary antidote to a world that seems to harass us with allegations of inadequency. What I find valuable is being honest with myself about what local maxima I have found myself on. If I am content (another underappreciated state) then good. But if I am longing for at snowy peaks then I want to ask myself, do I want those heights bad enough? Would I risk walking off this hill, not knowing if I can ever return? Would I pay the cost?
How much risk am I willing to take?
This spatial metaphor feels much better to me than other ways I've considered these topics in the past. Perhaps because embedded in that metaphor is the idea of a journey through space. Perhaps because to take a journey is an act of volition, regardless of where one ends up. Perhaps because to move through space means to move through time, a recognition that all change takes its time.