June 11, 2007
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sandbox life
I recently started researching various sandbox programs that can be run on your home computer to add a new layer of security to your computing experience. The idea behind them is an extraordinary one. Create a separate environment where everything you do doesn’t matter at all. At the end it can all be wiped out as if it never happened, erased from history at least as far as the rest of your computer is concerned. What a wondrous thing!
This got me to thinking about how cool it would be if in the real world you could have sandboxes. Whenever you wanted you could choose to enter into a mode where all choices you make have a fundamentally “experimental” character to them. You could try a bunch a things, try as hard as you can with them and see if they work out. If they don’t, throw out the session, wipe it away as if it had never happened and continue on with your life. Unlike with reset points you don’t even end up taking up more absolute time. You don’t go back to the point before you entered the sandbox, rather you simply exit the sandbox and from that point on your decisions have permanence to them.
To use the classic trivial example. I could decide today that tomorrow I am going to march into my bosses office and demand a raise. But realizing this is a risky business, I decide to make tomorrow a sandbox day.
So tomorrow comes and I go through my normal day until I build up the courage and march in and ask. There are several possible outcomes. One I could get shot down in a manner that is extremely embarrassing or worse could even lead to my ultimately being fired. Two, I could not get shot down, and the encounter could end up completely neutral with my status not changing at all. Three, I could not get shot down and not be given the raise, but determine that my boss has gained a new found appreciation for my ambition that might lead him to provide more opportunities for me to distinguish myself so that I can get that raise, or four I could be given the raise but my boss might feel more wary of me creating greater tension at the office and life unpleasant for me, or five I could be given the raise and all is well.
Now if 5 happens I’d obviously keep the results. With 1 I obviously discard the results. If 2 happens I would probably discard the results anyway so that record of my having asked for a raise doesn’t exist? Why have unnecessary extra data lying around? If 3 or 4 happens I might consider keeping it but I’d have to think about it. 3 might lead me to have to do more work which I might not like, and 4 might lead me to end up having to get a new job which I may or may not be happy with doing. In these cases I just stay within the sandbox for a few more days to see how it turns out. Once I reach a point where I can determine that I definitely want to discard or keep the results then I can exit the sandbox either dropping everything that happened or saving all of the data back to the real world life environment. And best of all in none of these situations do I have to suffer through replaying that unpleasant day at work again. The world moves on.
How awesome would that be? You’d have a situation where you could act with total impunity. Who needs to worry about what other people think or what they might do or how your life might be ruined by a momentary lapse in judgment. Just so long as whenever you are about to make a questionable decision, remember to put it in the sandbox and your safe. In fact you’d probably want to keep all of your decision points inside the sandbox until you are sure of their consequences. Now obviously to be perfectly safe you’d combine the sandboxes with the save points (both inside and outside of the sandbox). Then even if you screw up and fail to discard detrimental event sequences because they “looked” beneficial at the time, you can go back and do it again and do it in the sandbox too so just in case it turns out differently you can re-evaluate whether you want to keep the results.
Perhaps one of the great problems with the world is that we don’t have the power of sandboxes cushioning our decisions. This tends to make us too cautious and too unforgiving. It makes us cautious because we tend to think of all of the potential negative consequences of an act and hold off from doing it until we are positive that we can do the thing in a manner that causes no harm, or more often until we are sick of waiting. Ironically the “sick of waiting” scenario is the worst of all worlds, because you end up acting without thought even though you spent a great deal of time thinking about it, just because the dwelling was so much more unpleasant than the acting.
Not having sandboxes also makes us unforgiving of one another. This is a little counterintuitive to understand at first as your first instinct is to think that if everyone knows that there are “no take backs” in life we’d all be rather sympathetic about how unpleasant an experience it must be for each of us when we make a Bone Headed mistake. We know our own capacity for stupidity and we know how very complex navigating the gargantuan world of possible outcomes can be. You’d think that would make us appreciative of the difficulties others face and forgiving of them when they lapse and don’t meet the challenges appropriately?
But alas it isn’t so. Rather, we dwell upon how hard we had to work and how careful we were to make just the very best decision in a particular circumstance and then when we see someone else who makes a bad decision, it kind of pisses us off. We get indignant.We think: why didn’t he try harder! What’s wrong with him, didn’t he stop and think! It offends us to think that after all of our hard work somebody else might act on whim and shortcut past our anguish and uncertainty. It offends us when it works out for that other person even though they didn’t try very hard, and it offends us just as much when someone screws up for we assume that the cause of that screwup is their lack of sufficient trying.
But if we lived in a sandbox world! Oh how different it would be! If somebody else screws up you’d just say to that person, “you better erase that last event”. And it’d be done and nobody would be offended in the least. We’d expect screwups as we know that everybody is trying things about relying on the power of the sandbox to prevent hardship.
Of course, that probably means the sandbox world would end up with the exact opposite problems as the non-sandbox world. People would be not cautious enough. We wouldn’t take the time to reason through alternatives discarding the very worse and saving us all time and energy. Why bother! If it doesn’t work, we’ll just erase it! We’d live in a chaotic world where everything is changing left and right.
And we’d also probably be [I]too[/I] forgiving of one another. If someone says or does something vicious or cruel to us in the current world we condemn that person, but in a sandbox enabled world maybe you’d just erase it and thus avoid the need to be judgmental. We’d be letting people get away with choices that they should be responsible for, and it’d just be kind of screwed up. Even if someone screwed up and made a mistake that they committed rather than discarded with their sandbox, we’d be less likely to pass judgment on him just because we ourselves would have so much experience with screwups and mistakes under our belt and be so used to making questionable decisions that we’d have a hard time condemning anyone for their choice. We’d think, it could have easily been me, every time no matter how terrible the crime. And perhaps worst of all we wouldn’t go through that hard complex and rewarding process of struggling to find forgiveness within ourselves for things that are usually unforgiving. We’d forgive on a whim. The very idea would lose all meaning.
Ironically there are probably people who live in this world as if they were in a sandbox. They jump from job to job, from relationship to relationship, from adventure to adventure without a second thought about the consequences of their decisions. Indeed these people tend to stand out to our minds and inspire a kind of ‘awe’ in us at their free spirited lifestyle and unwillingness to compromise. Sometimes they even inspire us to try and choose to live more like this, since it would make us less prone to worry and fear and less inclined to take things too seriously. We would feel “free” and our actions would be our own. No need to be perfect. No need to even be careful. Just live and be happy and do whatever you want.
But the problem is, when you live in the real world as if you were in a sandbox you have to suffer a third kind of negative consequence. Obviously you have to be more forgiving of others and yourself and you have to be less careful with your decisions. Maybe your ok wit that. But the third is much harder I think for most people to tolerate.
You also have to be less caring.
That is the great detriment of the free spirit lifestyle. In order to act as if you were in a sandbox, since you can’t actually erase the consequences of your careless actions, you have to live with them somehow. The only way to do that is to not care. Not care about the harm you cause or the people you hurt. Just live on free as a bird, but just as likely to crap on the people you encounter and not clean up after yourself.
Obviously we don’t want that! But we don’t want to live in tense equilibrium terrified to do anything and angry at everyone who ever does either. So what kind of life can we lead that splits the difference? I haven’t found the answer. Obviously there must be some kind of Aristotlean balance. My current theory is that the most important component of achieving that balance is to strive for a deeper appreciation for the present. You have to live in the now, enjoying things that are as much as they can be enjoyed while setting aside the things we want changed or made better and calmly and comfortably think about how to slowly move toward that better state piece by piece. No need for major shifts or big momentous turning points. No need to stop caring either. Just care primarily about the things that are good and appreciate them before dwelling on the bad. Maybe this is sort of like a Zen philosophy. Or is it Tao? I don’t know, but it makes more sense to me now than other ways to lead ones life.
Of course if you live this way and things don’t get better and you can’t find a way to move toward a better state calmly and carefully without worry, chances are good that you will be inclined to act and that means either a cautious action or a sandbox action and in either case the consequences might not be pleasant. Or they might be. Who knows? Its just too bad that it is so difficult for us to live happily in the present forever…
