Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

Character is a moving average of our actions

Lee Krasner, “Portrait in Green” (1966)

My favorite Ted Chiang story is called “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.” I have thought about it at least once a week for the past 4 years. In the story, characters can interact with a “prism”, a device that allows you to FaceTime with yourself in an alternate universe. There is an elaborate (maybe plausible?) scientific explanation for why this works. Practically, this means that anyone can pay to communicate with their alternative self. 

The characters in the story find this possibility intriguing. They want answers to “what if” questions that explore counterfactuals – “what if I married Andrew, would my life be better? But there is a catch: they can only find an alternative universe that explores these “what if” questions if the person had been on the knife’s edge. If, for example, they were adamant about never marrying Andrew, they’d be hard pressed to find a timeline with the answer to that “what if.” But if the person did waver, a new “what if” could be explored. Ted Chiang has said that he wanted the story to reflect that “an individual’s character was revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.  If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.”

I think he’s of course right – the unchangeable across time and even worlds does speak to your character. But I think it’s only half of the picture.

Here’s the other half: in the story, Jorge slashes the tires of his boss’s car, and doesn’t want to tell his wife. He thinks that if he explores other timelines to find out whether vandalizing the car was just a knife’s edge fluke, he can justify lying to his wife. Jorge gets the information he wants, and lies to his wife. Once he does that, the narratives of tire-slasher-Jorge and the other Jorges diverge. Jorge was a stand up guy. But This-World-Jorge is now a tire slasher, a liar, and feeling like he wants to do it again.

Character includes our set of unchangeable qualities. However, it also is a moving average of our actions. We slide into becoming the people we are. We are not good people or bad people, but people who do bad or good things. It’s another way of thinking about “growth mindset” at work: you are not a smart person, or a good worker, you’re a person who made smart calls, or a person who did good work recently. 

I think about this idea weekly because I am always casting judgment upon myself. When I was down in the dumps about doing some bad work at Stripe, I had to constantly remind myself that I wasn’t “fundamentally bad at work” but just someone who had done some “bad work lately.” I am often too scared to do something and think it’s because I’m fundamentally not brave enough. In those contexts, I imagine “what would a braver person do” and just do that. It’s funny, it actually works.