On Qualities

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Alter Ego, Witkin, 1963.

Quick Summary: This Substack is Part 1 of 2 on the strangeness of education. In this one, I look at (1) the strangeness of quantitative goals (2) the strangeness of focusing on qualitative ones and (3) whether it is even possible to achieve qualitative goals.

My last few weeks in stats:

Days spent reading Percy Jackson: 3 (also 1% of a year)
Percy Jackson books read: 10 (or 5,000 pages of teenage fiction. Or 3.5 ‘War and Peace’s’)
Over-priced cappuccinos consumed: 62
Number of deep profound realisations*: 0
Number of existential crises about lack of deep revelations/ purpose/ general growth: c. 290,583

3 entire days spent reading Percy Jackson. No adventuring, no socialising, no big transformative life experiences - it’s hard not to fall into a Big Panic frame of mind and tell myself I’m not even gap-yearing well. Shouldn’t I at the very least be having an epiphany? Just a small one? But there’s not been so much as a minor revelation.

I think the Big Panic comes because I want evidence. I want a clear, hard, tangible, tick-off-able goal. I’m used to quantitative goals - A*’s, miles run, grades. Quantitative goals are quantifiable. There is some sort of metric attached to them, some clear way of marking progress.

Given quite an insulated upbringing, quantitative goals are an enormous focus as we grow up. I watched ‘Our Generation’ at the National a couple of years ago. Alecky Blythe - the writer - conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with 12 teenagers over a 5 year period. She uses them to build up an uncanny picture of teenage life. One of the things that struck me was how much time was spent talking about exams. The rigamarole of GCSE’s, A-Level’s, mocks, assessments and fretting was a major thread for almost all teens, regardless of background.

I was reminded of this by a passage from Orwell in his ‘Such, such were the joys’, his account of a miserable few years at boarding school. He writes of the difficulty of conveying to ‘a grown-up person the sense of strain, of nerving oneself for some terrible, all-deciding combat… over a period of about two years, I do not think there was ever a day when ‘the exam’, as I called it, was quite out of my waking thoughts. In my prayers it figured invariably: and whenever I got the bigger portion of a wishbone, or picked up a horseshoe, or bowed seven times to the new moon, or succeeded in passing through a wish-gate without touching the sides, then the wish I earned by doing so went on ‘the exam’ as a matter of course.’ I winced reading this. One of the things I’m most ashamed of is moving from taking every eyelash as a wish that my grandfather would come back to life to wishing I would do well in exams instead.

But these quantitative goals of education are an oddity in so many ways. In having a clear, definable metric. In how effort seems to translate quite linearly to output. In the sense of trading in possibilities - reaching these quantitative goals seems to increase the scope of what you can do, whilst in the Adult world, they seem to move you further along a specialised path. I think when I first started the business of Adulting, I wanted to find a similar set of quantitative goals. I wanted a Line, like the one that had taken me from GCSE’s, to A-Level’s, to University, where if I worked hard and kept on it, I would eventually arrive at the Emerald City, attain Eternal and Beatific Peace and finally sort my eyebrows out.

And I don’t think this is unique. I look at some people trying to clamber a career ladder, or put special significance on milestone birthdays, or re-entering into education, and I feel like a lot of them are searching for that same sense of certainty that seemed to be promised by the Line. But - shock, horror - the real world isn’t really like that. It’s more ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’, with a hundred doors to go down, and all of them shutting at a faster rate than ever - except with trapdoors, and back passages, and unexpectedly weird routes, some of which are only unlocked with an Eton signet ring.

One of the things I realised in my year in the City was that you couldn’t (and this sounds awful) ‘win’ anymore. And that you couldn’t really ‘win’ all along. Maybe you have the best quantitative metrics - before, good grades, now salary or title - but this came at the expense of qualitative things. Prioritise exams, and maybe you’ll be less good as a friend, daughter or sister. Prioritise career, and maybe you’ll read less or spend less time outside, or on your friendships. Prioritise far-off, suspended possibilities, and maybe you'll miss out on certain, close-by joys.

I took this year because I needed to focus on qualitative things. This wasn’t a particularly nice realisation. Failing in a quantitative metric (getting a C in Biology) is a bit less personal than realising you’re not as kind, not as friendly and not as fun as you would like to be. It hurts a bit more. But it was necessary - even if sometimes I find the absurdity of this choice slightly terrifying (I walked away from a career in consulting for… a yellow year).

It’s an absurdity that’s exacerbated by how I don’t know if people can change, or by how much, or if change would have happened anyway. There’s a dramatic neural rewiring that takes place up until around thirty, and a meta-analysis by Roberts that suggests age brings greater agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability anyway. Maybe any change I see over this year will be less epiphany-based and more… growing up.

But there’s a few things to take comfort in. One is a really cool paper by Harman. This suggests that personality traits are much more a product of the environment we’re in than some immutable feature of how we are. So - for example - an aggressive person isn’t necessarily aggressive. They simply spend a lot of time in aggression-inducing environments. And because we tend to spend a lot of time in the same sorts of places, we observe our personalities as much more stable than they are. Who we are is like epigenetics; a product of both our environment and how we are disposed to react to it. And the former is changeable. I like the Lauren-in-Kenya more than Lauren-in-London, so maybe it makes sense to think about making a move to Kenya.

The second thing that I take comfort in is that trying is a necessary, even if not a sufficient condition for change.** The third is, even if who we are is unchangeable, then I’m unchangeably a trier - someone who hopes to be better. And that seems to have a little value, all on its own.

***

A recommendation for anyone who also felt a bit ‘Aaaagh’ after leaving education. David Epstein’s ‘Range’ is a really good account of the advantages of trying out different lives, particularly early on in your career. A phrase I loved was ‘we learn who we are in practice, not in theory’, through ‘flirting with our possible selves’ and becoming a scientist of ourselves (more in ‘On Generalisations’.) You work out what brings happiness through experiments, not through introspecting in an armchair, and so trying out different things to find out what best fits makes an awful lot of sense.

Thank you for reading! Part 2 will be about some of the risks of these illusions, looking at the ‘myth of meritocracy’ and the strangeness of effort, and exploring an idea I’m thinking of as ‘fit-not-more’.

*I’m using epiphanies in the loosest possible sense here. Much of this gap year has felt like a long, torturous route to basic common sense.

** Not necessary in the super-super strict philosophy sense - as the paper by Roberts shows. But there’s at least an intuitive appeal in that idea.