February 26, 2013

• These questions are not for dreamers.

  JDN 2456350 EDT 19:57.

   

  There is a certain class of questions that people will ask, thinking they are encouraging you to be a dreamer. In fact, they only make sense for people who are not dreamers, people who have poor imaginations and very limited horizons. When asked of someone who really is a dreamer, the questions reveal themselves to be nonsensical.

  (Tangentially, I have a funny story about my intensive Japanese class. I was asked by my sensei, Patrick-san-no yume-wa nan desu ka? "What are your dreams?" I was unable to articulate my answer in Japanese, honestly I still am, so my response was Watashi-wa wakarimasen. "I don't know." But in fact I do know; indeed I have richly defined dreams that haven't substantially changed in the last 15 years. I'm gradually getting close to achieving them, though much stands in my way. The reason I answered wakarimasen was simply that I don't know how to articulate my dreams in Japanese.)

   

  The questions are things like this:
  "If money were no object, what would you do?"

  "What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?"

  "If you could achieve anything you wanted, what would it be?"

  "How would you live if no one could get in your way?"

   

  The answer they want you to give is something like this: "I'd write a novel." "I'd be a teacher." "I'd become an astronaut." They're really asking for your dream career, what you'd like to do with your life if all the petty obstacles were removed.

  But in fact, what they have asked is more like, "What would you do if you were omnipotent?"

  If money were no object, that would imply that economics is no object, and I am limited only by laws of physics and human imagination. I could build a billion Dyson Spheres, colonize the galaxy, make everyone immortal.

  If I knew I couldn't fail, well I'd be even more powerful. Now I seem to have logical omnipotence, the ability to achieve anything as long as it is logically coherent. My galactic civilization now consists of beings of perfect wisdom and morality, instantaneously teleported wherever they desire.

  Achieving anything I want sounds about the same, so that leaves only how I would live if no one could get in my way. That's more limited; it's perhaps still economically constrained, but no longer ideologically or politically constrained. I'd eliminate religion, end world hunger, establish a world government, and reverse global warming.

  Clearly these are not the questions you really meant to ask, because they're quite trivial; I can't actually do any of these things, and there's no reason to think there is anything I could do that would change that fact. They are pie-in-the-sky fantasies, nothing more. At best maybe I can nudge the world slightly in that direction so that maybe it gets there in a few centuries (or more).

   

  I think these are the questions they meant to ask: "If you knew you would be financially secure, what career would you like to have?" "If you were going to found an activist organization, what would its cause be?" "What do you hope to achieve in your life?"

  Apparently, people who aren't dreamers can't distinguish between those two classes of questions. I find that somewhere between amusing and disturbing.

  • 8:27 pm
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