This post was originally posted on www.albertdong.com. On June 5th, 2019, it has been transferred here.
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Greetings from the Iberian peninsula! Spring break finally came around and the squad is in Spain for the week. The past week has been quite humbling for me so I‘ve been depleted emotionally as of late. With a bit of luck, this trip will be one of replenishment and reflection.
Anyways —
Lately, I’ve been toying around with the value of dreams and I think they’re quite overrated. At their core, they are the visual manifestations of our expected optimal future, built on our assumptions and knowledge from a given moment in time.
Human desire exists in the abstract. But what is abstract is intangible and intangibles are resistant to visualization. As such, we need to concretize them by dropping them down layers of abstraction until we reach a layer in which they become conceptually fungible and physically actionable. That is the dream.
However, each time we drop down a layer of abstraction, we sacrifice a level of accuracy in the representation of our original desires. It’s a tradeoff between breadth and depth. The rain is an imperfect encapsulation of the spirit of melancholy. By the time we reach the layer of tangibility - the dream layer - we will have bastardized our original desires.
Furthermore, once we reach that layer and create the dream, it becomes the standard by which we base our decisions against rather than the layer of abstract desires - the base layer - that the dream is meant to represent. The dream becomes a symbol — we use them to refer back to our original desires rather than simply remaining cognizant of the desires themselves. But since the reference is imprecise, the symbol is imperfect.
To concretize the dream, we synthesize the abstractions in our current layer with our present information - situational events, emotional state, cultural inputs - to derive a level of tangibility that brings us to the next layer down.
To use the dream as a goal to strive for, a node in our decision-making framework, is flawed. By visualizing them, we endow them with a baseline level of permanence — the act of reevaluating and redeveloping a dream is one which requires significant mental energy that we often lack the emotional support and temporal resources for. The dream is a node that is outdated the moment it is born.
As such, they reinforce notions of our future desires based on information from the past rather than the present. It veils the desires, that which is used to build the dream, behind the dream itself — reversing cause and effect.
When evaluating opportunities, the formula should be:
— DERIVE decision node FROM desires PLUS present information
But most of us follow the following formula:
— DERIVE decision node FROM dream
— present information NOT CONSIDERED
— desires ASSUMED STANDARD
Using dreams to reference desires presupposes that the state of our known information at the time of the dream’s birth is the same as the state of known information at the present — this is rarely the case.
So to make sure that our actions are always aligned to our desires, I believe we should remain cognizant of the abstract desires that we hold dear and continuously reevaluate what they mean to us at that present moment - synthesizing it with present information to build the decision node we use for the present situation at hand.
However, this has proved to be extraordinarily mentally taxing in practice. It may be part of the reason why I have more existential crises than most people I know.
However, the goal is that, with time, a variant of this concept will be discovered that is better suited for my cognitive process while still retaining the fundamentals benefits. Alternatively, the current weaknesses - the amount of mental energy to concretize abstract concepts - may be strengthened with practice. Also alternatively, it can just be proven to be wrong.
But right now, I believe there is something here and that success here can enable long-term positive returns towards the quest of self-actualization. Will let y’all know how it goes ✌🏽
Special thanks to Joseph Vukel for helping me make sure my thoughts are coherent here