People, like me, who are prone to anxiety love to use future uncertainty to prove how right we are to be anxious. People, like me, who are also drawn to intellectual interests and quantitative modeling, love to rationalize and quantify how future uncertainty proves just how right we are to be anxious.
This can be explained, in part, by my tentatively hypothesized Two Taco Metaphysical Model (“TTMM”). Here is an example.
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A brilliant moral philosopher sits in her silent room, alone, thinking about the overwhelming need in the world. She is filled with emptiness. She feels weak, and a gnawing lack inside her core. Exhaustion weighs on her, and she is wracked with an undefined longing. She examines all the suffering in the world, the people going hungry, the horrors of pigs being tortured and cut up into frying bacon strips, the potential for artificial intelligence consuming the world, and finds the possibility of any solution vanishingly small.
The emptiness inside her grows; it becomes urgent. She examines all of her moral underpinnings, finds them wanting, and is filled with existential angst, wondering if how she is living her life is truly fulfilling, or is missing something of critical importance. She moves her mind through skeptical epistemology, post-colonial critiques, hard consequentialist ethics, the history of modern genocide, and is delving into the possibilities of a nihilistic post-post-modern zeitgeist when she hears her stomach growling.
After eating two hearty veggie tacos, with just the right amount of lime juice, she finds the gnawing inside is mostly gone.
She then takes a brisk walk in a park, talks (and has a good cry) with a friend, has hot loving sex with her partner, gets a good night’s sleep, and wakes up, refreshed to a new day. For some reason, most of her existential questions are resolved. She goes to the gym, and then spends the day focusing on the work that is in front of her and in her control. She even makes good progress on her draft paper on applied moral philosophy.
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The Two Taco Metaphysical Model is an outgrowth of a practical understanding of cognitive biases (or defensive or coping mechanisms) characterized by intellectualization of somatic or emotional concerns. I hypothesize that the malign version of TTMM is an endemic disease in communities concerned about future risk.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that TTMM is dramatically over-represented in people who use abstract thinking to solve their problems. This includes many people in EA communities, though I can't verify this empirically (more research is needed). Still, if this this sounds familiar I encourage people, like me, who are drawn to anxiety and speculative thinking to closely examine how frequently and positively your future modeling updates when you are in a healthy physical, emotional, and social space.
To be clear (all jokes aside) I am not minimizing real urgency. Fear about the future is not always a cognitive bias, or based in physical or emotional needs abstracted into future projections. If a violent ex-boyfriend is stalking you, then you may have a reasonable fear for your future safety. Please do not minimize your fears. You may even need to take dramatic action immediately.
This can be true even for abstract geopolitics. If you lived in Eastern Ukraine in 2012, and had enough information, you could have legitimately projected that your life, and the lives of your entire community, could be in danger within the next decade. In both situations, your future projections could lead you to take concrete actions to avoid both legitimate risks, either individually or collectively, and intense anxiety would be reasonable emotional signals based on these risks.
But even for these situations, the problem is that sometimes we can't tell, in the moment, whether the fearful future projection is based on legitimate risk or an abstraction of basic emotional and physical needs. And this is why we need to think about tacos.
This is not a groundbreaking insight. But as with all perennial wisdom, it's worth remembering, and practicing, until it's an ingrained habit.
To treat TTMM, we can make a checklist of healthy ways of living, and do those first before trusting our anxiety-laced predictions. Before we stress, why not eat the taco? (And sleep, and exercise, and laugh, and cuddle with someone.) The future may be more fulfilling than we imagined.
And if the future is still rationally grim, at least we’ll face it on a full stomach.
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[No generative artificial intelligence was used in the creation or editing of this post. Photo by Chad Montano on Unsplash]