Tantalus and How to be Unhappy: No Roads Lead Directly to Non-optimization

There are the three Greek damned, Sisyphus doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, the most famous of the three, Ixion rarely talked about because his punishment, being bound to an endlessly spinning wheel of fire being rather pedestrian, and Tantalus where we get the word tantalize.

Like all ancient myths, there are many versions, the particulars here matter little so I will take the most pleasant version of his punishment. There he sits to this day in a resplendent field, chained. He is cursed with eternal hunger and eternal thirst along with his eternal life. Just within reach are the most luscious juicy grapes one can imagine. As he grabs for them in his hunger the wind is fated to move them just out of his reach. On his other side there is the freshest stream, as he reaches for the water it is destined to recede, just enough that he cannot so much as wet a single finger. So, there he sits with eternal desire exactly in between the two things that could satisfy him always just out of reach.

I think in many ways this describes an important aspect of life. Imagine you are lonely and you desperately want company. Imagine you are not and someone is needily begging for your attention and friendship. Is there anything less attractive? If you are that lonely person desperately seeking genuine connection how satisfied would you feel if people only interact with you out of a sense of pity?

Imagine you are miserable and you try to make yourself happy. What are you likely to do? Splurge, give yourself permission to let yourself go? I think we have all been guilty of this

How long does it take for such hedonism to leave a bad taste on the tongue? Is there a way of trying to be happy directly that doesn’t ultimately feel hollow instead of fulfilled?

Trying to make someone for whom you love and desire love you in return, especially through mere usefulness to them is also unlikely to turn out profitable, at best, actions will be performed without their delicate essence. Instrumentalism in place of love.

We convince ourselves often it is okay, we need much less convincing when it is in fact, okay.

The best way to hold onto sand isn’t to squeeze.

There is an easy answer to all this, or at least as easy as complicated human stuff gets. The things we truly want, truly need are not the things that can be directly grasped. The things we need aren’t within the first level of direct optimization but instead the maddeningly complicated layer above, in my parlance the non-optimized layer, the one carved out through evolution to solve the commitment problem to allow for human cooperation. The only one we can truly and deeply care about. Which was the focus of a previous essay so I will not belabor the point here.

It seems an almost contradiction of terms to optimize on something that by its nature is specifically made to be not the result of rational optimization. Reaching out when the very act of the reaching destroys if not fully, then in essence what is sought.

This is also why propaganda makes for poor art. Even if an author of a work (here author and work are used broadly) has an idea of what they want to display, if the work is too directly focused on this aim it comes off stale, cringey, or simply preachy rather than engaging or persuasive. Even undeniable masters such as Virgil cannot fix this fully, how hollow is the Aeneid is next to Iliad? Homer was Greek and yet the trojans were given even depth in the Iliad. The necessity of writing an origin story in a similar vein under the sponsorship of the emperor of Rome himself doomed it in ways Virgil’s other works were not.

The world is a very big very complicated place. This, as pointed out in receptor theory enhances the relative returns to the fakeness of things, especially going off narrow measures. The more around you and the more complicated, the harder it is to actually assess the real. This means we need to rely on proxies, that is, if I am an employer getting to know your actual ability is very costly, so instead I’ll trust the grades and prestige of your university. The university in turn didn’t really have too much time to get to know you to make the decision to admit you so they too rely on proxies to make their decision. It is proxies the whole way down, exerting their distortions and molding the reality they are meant to reflect.

As the world scales and formalizes, we will feel punished again and again for not just directly maximizing, this gets worse the more proxies are bad measures of the fundamental truth. But remember the things that really make a human life worth living aren’t those same proxies we use for interpersonal comparison with those we don’t deeply care about.

It might also be that all the disingenuity we are rewarded for trains us, in general, to be overly practical, to reach out directly for the measure of a thing rather than understand and genuinely engage. All too often we mistake the shadow for the form casting it.

I know it is hard given the incentives, but it should be pointed out that those at the very top, Nobel Prize winners and the like were unable to get to their position by directly grasping either. Direct optimization produces nicely measured mediocrity and little else. Not to say some engagement for the sake of appearance isn’t also necessary.

How to Seek That Which Cannot Be Sought?

Hopefully, I have convinced you that the most important things we want exist away from direct optimization and are therefore out of the range of direct attempts at grasping. So, what to do about it? I remember some conversations with students where I would explain that often the most important thing was to be genuinely curious, they asked, how can I look genuinely curious[1]?

Do I have any resources? I hate to break it to you but there is no secret path to non-optimization. I suppose if you believe in this sort of thing, you at least know how you have to look, if that is your take away from this then I am sad.

People of course can be fooled. But there is also something unique about genuineness that people pick up on, especially over long repeated interactions. This is to the best of my reasoning why there is the popularity of figures such as Joe Rogan, especially in the space of talking to people for several hours at a time and then publishing the results unedited for millions. Is he the smartest guy? Funniest? Wisest? No, and he certainly says and does very many very boneheaded things regardless of your political affiliation. But millions listen and why? My best guess is he comes across and mostly is genuine. What are the chances that if all your secret thoughts, feelings and opinions were laid to bear, if all your private conversations were recorded that everything would truly be in line with conventional beliefs? That there would be nothing above wide-scale criticism. No one is perfect, everyone knows this, and yet most are terrified of others seeing their imperfections. Being a public bonehead in a way is a costly signal of authenticity. Showing open curiosity without the strict filter ensures a person will make mistakes but at the same time allows us to trust them as a person. How many bastions of the right views (however this is defined by their audience) turn out to be hypocrites in action, how surprised are we? Doesn’t it almost seem like those who are the loudest, proper, and ideologically pure in a way that is especially marked by antagonism of the ‘other side’ are the most likely to closet skeletons? This is because those people are the most likely to be directly pandering for money and status.

My advice to take away from all this is simple and trite. Like most simple and trite advice, it is also enormously hard. Usually, it is a lot easier to scoff, walk off, and continue to live out a slow hollow misery while feeling sophisticated about doing so.

There is nothing wrong with achievement, there is nothing wrong with playing the game to some extent. But if you are thirsty in the desert of humanity my advice is to try to be more genuine in your interpersonal interactions. Don’t use others as tools, don’t revel in your usefulness if others do similar to you[2]. We always show personas, just make sure they are subsets rather than fabrications and it is okay to at least on occasion reveal yourself more than is strictly wise. No one is perfect and no one thinks or expects that you are. You are not one step away from doom.

Be more genuine to yourself as well, in the modern world I think it is common we not only instrumentalize others but also ourselves. We focus on the appearance, the proxy, rather than the baseline reality. But you will only get one life and there will be no one to applaud how well you managed your metrics in the end.

Try to find things you genuinely want to do, people you genuinely want to interact with, don’t force or coerce others into your company. Work on yourself. Think what it is about you that could be genuinely developed and try to do it.

Don’t be like Tantalus, don’t grasp out for that which retreats.

But most of all don’t try to show people you are genuine, be genuine.

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[1] Curiosity is my favorite attribute in a student and the one most predictive of success as I do my best to design my class to not be easy to do well in without actual understanding. In this time of progressively weakening proxies, it gets less true by the year.

[2] Though having some usefulness to others is almost a baseline requirement for the happiness of most of us. Don’t revel in it just means don’t subordinate yourself to others, don’t instrumentalize yourself either.