On Living With Compromises..
How much are we willing to compromise?
I’ve been thinking about the choices I made in life. And I've also been thinking about the way we make, or refuse to make these choices.
These past couple of years definitely have been the most challenging period of my life, and I am sure people can relate. Covid/post-covid, seeing family/not being able to see family, career/career gap, and the list is endless.
But I’ve been mostly thinking about what we give up when we make the choices we make. And how we decide that something is worth giving up, for the opportunity cost that might (or might not) come according to the “roll of the dice” we fancifully call “decision-making”.
“Oh Well, the decision paralysis again….. 🙄”
But wait!
Is it me, or every decision we make becomes heavier and heavier as we go on in life? I say this as I’m thinking of the decisions I took in my 20s were a lot lighter on/for me to make, than they are now. Is this a sign of “growing old”? How do we navigate, or how did it look to us that our parents or elders were very able to make decisions a lot easier than we seem to be doing now, in spite of the apparent and in some cases incomparable advantage we have in terms of living conditions than they did. I mean, they didn’t have to face a pandemic (or maybe some did!), but I want to think that they didn’t face this much information.1
I genuinely believe that as we go on in life, every decision we make comes at the expense of a loss we incur somewhere else. I tried to make sure that my life is a “win-win” as much as possible for everyone involved in it, but the more I thought about these decisions I made more than 10 years ago, I think to myself: how random was that decision? but how significant it is now!
Do we really ‘calculate’ these decisions as best as we could? or do we illude ourselves with the optimism bias? But then, can we generally go on in life without that bias? As an article I’ve been reading said: “It is necessary to have some optimism.”
“Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom [Seneca]. Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”
~ Michel De Montaigne.
“Only the fools are certain or assured.”
Obviously, we all know this “intelligent people are full of doubt,”2 and I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine who was a teacher who told me: “I struggle a lot more with intelligent students, because they have a bigger capacity, yet this can throw them into a spiral if they’re not interested, or if they think the classes ‘are not enough’”. And this got me thinking: is this doubt self-inflected?
What I mean is: are we living in the age of self-doubt? This is definitely beyond the 1st “age of doubt” in the Victorian era.
The ability to gain insight, apparently is a double-edges sword. Concepts like ‘Information Overload’ and ‘too many choices’ were not apparent to us in our lives when we were growing up even at the beginning of this century. I remember times in my life where there were actual pauses and what I would call an information ‘blackout’ during the day: driving from one place to another, going out with friends, and places were 3G wasn’t about the ‘speed a page can load’.
Let me go back to my main idea: Our access to so many lives (our friends in social media), articles, and general knowledge, is not helping us moving forward in our lives. Not only that, I don’t think it is helping us do anything with our lives.3
As I am writing this I am remembering two things:
Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies: I remember Tom, the once-bright Phd candidate. This is a testament (albeit a fictional one) to how intelligence can work against you.
A conversation I had with one of my best friends couple of years ago: Both of us are in the 2nd half of our thirties, and still feeling like we know nothing. I remember asking him: “Why did it feel to us that our parents were already set with everything in life in their 20s or early 30s, meanwhile here we are, just trying to get beyond this month, and we’re full of doubt?”
But hey, let me get back to compromising.
As I move forward, I think of the losses.
I was in discussion with a friend of mine about the “relative” difficulties we both had to go through in the path for self-actualization, and the challenges we faced from almost everyone in our respective communities regarding the social pressure we faced, and I do remember saying: “I am done fighting. I just want to cruise in life.”
I come from a culture in which comfort is celebrated, and conforming is essential to the individual within the community he/she belongs to. Hence, the inclination towards individualism is not only frowned upon, but also discouraged, and sometimes you hear phrases like: “Why do you bother?, you have a job that pays you, and your family is around.”
When looking at these factors, they all allude to external factors in someone’s life, and the idea that someone can self-actualize at the expense of some of these comforts is a form of lack of sound-judgement.
I have certainly made decisions that no one in my family has made and that has given me significant and life changing experiences, and also enriched me in person in ways I can never fathom, comprehend, or even begin to appreciate fully. I would never have gotten these life experiences had I stayed in my $110K engineering job when I was 24 (my peers at that time are now earning well above $180K), but my thought at that time was the same at this time: “I am not phased by the riches, but will I stay in this job just for the 30-40 days of vacation and be miserable for the 300 days of the year?”.
I think the biggest tradeoff for me was being the only person in my family who is spending extended times away for them, and I sometimes think: Is self-actualization really worth all this? Or will I even reach a state in which I am completely at peace with these decisions?
I think of these questions again and again, and wonder sometimes if given the chance to repeat these crossroads, will I take the same decisions that will lead to the same spot where I am now? And I generally think I would.
One of the most important authors & influential on my life that I read for happens to be the first Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic.4 I remember reading this phrase in one of his books:
“If I were offered to live again, I would refuse. But if I had to be born again, I would choose my life.”
And I think about this a lot.
I also think of his notion of the moral responsibility of freedom. That is another teaching I carry with me but I remember this also:
“A weak man runs from freedom and responsibility.”
Maybe there’s another time to talk about him always joining the concept of freedom with the moral responsibility to act according to it.
The Desire to Live, And The Desire to Rest.
Being a descendant of an immigrants (both my father and my grandfather), I feel like part of the justification that I make for myself is that both of them did leave their families and their homes in search for a better life, and that this decision although hard, they carried with them most of who they are. The strive for something more is not the strive for more of life’s basic necessities which they did in their times, but there is a sense of restlessness. My travel & compromise is more cultural than economical and this adds another dimension to these aspects that weight my decisions on the regular, or have been at least.
Do these compromises become easier as we go on in life? I’m genuinely asking because this is the type of conversation no one will tell you they made a mistake in, or not give in easily to talk about in that depth.
I’d love to think that the compromising can end soon. Or the feeling that I have to lose something to gain something. I’m appealing to the ‘wiser’ reader to share some of that experience. Is my life harder than the average life? Yes, if your metrics are the ‘generally’ Western reader. But it’s incomparable to the girl who walks 4Kms every each way to go to her middle school in Malawi. I am still in the top 5% of the world’s population, and for that I am blessed beyond comprehension. And grateful.
Parting thought..
When I was a child I memorized a poem by Imam Al-Shafi’e, not carrying much weight to it. But then it has shaped some of my thinking about striving and struggling, being a piece of advice from one of the most prominent personalities in Muslim history.5
There is no rest in residence for a person of culture and intellect,
So travel and leave where you're residing!
Travel! You will find a replacement for what you have left,
And strive! The sweetness of life is in striving!
I've seen that water stagnates if still becomes pure if it runs,
But not if it doesn't flow.
If the lion doesn't leave his den he cannot hunt,
And the arrow will not strike without leaving its bow.
If the sun stood still in its heavenly course,,
then people, Arab and non-Arab, it would bore.
Gold dust is as the earth where commonly found,
And in its land, Oud6 is but another wood in store.
If one travels, he becomes sought out,,
If one travels , he is honored like gold..
And this poem resonates with me so much. We say: “Nothing good comes easy” as part of our shared human experience, but is there a middle ground? Is there good enough that we can settle for.. Let’s see..
Thank you for getting This far..
Other things:
Maybe this too:
We can talk about how beautiful the music sounds, or the album cover. Choose which one you like!
- How the pandemic is affecting our simple decision: https://www.fastcompany.com/90613292/how-the-pandemic-may-be-affecting-your-ability-to-make-simple-decisions
- How to save yourself from Informational Overload: https://hbr.org/2021/09/how-to-save-yourself-from-information-overload
- Or Headline Stress? I never knew such thing existed: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
- Maybe a last one: I’ve been thinking of editing, but I figured I want this to be rough, because I am writing this as rough thoughts, just going with where the train goes.
(I’m just noticing how much I’m using the slash mark, and thought to myself: what’s going on there? where is this coming from?)
I thought it was Abraham Lincoln, but it wasn’t!
Sometimes I question my own behavior: why would I want to listen to a ‘short’ podcast even when I’m taking a shower? I use the 15min podcast to make sure I am not staying too long, but sometimes I put nature music just to relax, why can’t I use the shower sound to pause then? humans are weird.. 🙄
In fact, I would consider his literary work ‘life-changing’ in my life and I am indebted to him for my intellectual growth. His book ‘Inescapable Questions’ is a fantastic intro to the small number of books he has in English.
I think the approximation to the non-muslim reader is that he is a founder of a school of thought within Islam such as Catholicism, or Lutheranism. Created a school of thought/jurisprudence that is followed by hundreds of millions across the world.
The perfume, obv.