Crossing Deserts and Progress Bars
On the nonlinearity of perceiving progress on a task 🐪
Hello!
Welcome to issue number *check notes* 10 of Light Gray Matters!
10 issues out of 100. It sounds like a milestone, but also one that is far from the end goal. Far by exactly 90 other newsletter issues.
Last week, Visa wrote:
That sounds about true. There’s something strange in our perception of numbers and progress. When I wrote issue #1, it felt like I had done the impossible, and doing it 99 more times would be a walk in the park. At #5, somehow, the remaining 95 sounded more daunting than the initial 99.
Something similar happens with time. An event you’re really looking forward to is happening in three months, and you think, “That’s coming pretty soon! Three months isn’t a very long time.” And somehow, when the event is only three weeks away, those three weeks feel much longer than the three months ever did.
But then, of course, when you’re actually close to the event, say a few days or a few hours, those days and hours suddenly seem to speed up — and before you know it, the event is over. When you read a book, you may spend forever in the middle part, and as soon as you reach a point close enough to the end, it seems as if the book reads itself, and then you’re done.
It’s as if there were an attractor at the end. When you’re far from the end, you don’t feel its pull. The closer you approach, the faster you go.
Hmm, this image seems more potent than I expected. Let’s explore it more.
Say you’re setting out on a task. The task is to cross a desert between two oasis towns. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume these towns look as amazing as Ghadames, Libya:
and Siwa, Egypt:
(this doesn’t matter at all, but why not make this intellectual exercise aesthetically pleasing?)
When you leave Ghadames, you are energetic and eager. Your pack is full of food and water. Your camel is well rested.
You walk for a number of kilometers and it all goes well. You can’t wait to get to Siwa! But then, eventually, you start getting tired. The desert seems endless. Your camel wants to take a nap. Your water reserves are getting low (it probably wasn’t a great idea to splash some on your face when you were hot earlier).
Occasionally, you pass a milestone — perhaps a landmark mountain, or a small village where you can resupply. This boosts your motivation a bit.
But inevitably, there comes a time when you’re in the deepest, longest part of the desert. When both Ghadames and Siwa seem unbelievably far away. When it seems you will never reach your final destination — and instead, just die here of dehydration after having eaten your camel to at least avoid starvation.
Until…
Until you can see it. There, in the distance. Siwa. You recognize the hill above the town. And suddenly, the hardships you’ve been enduring are forgotten. You quicken your pace. You think of the water and food you’ll find in the oasis. Even your camel seems more enthusiastic (perhaps due to having not been eaten).
The town of Siwa is an attractor.
What’s really happening is that a completed task is attractive, in itself. Humans like closure. Think of how many people are loath to abandon a book, even if they don’t like it. When the end of something is in sight, we rush to it to get the little burst of satisfaction.
Conversely, the beginning of a task is often a motivator. Either because you’re excited about doing something new, or because you feel compelled to do something you were asked for.
It’s the dark, deep desert in the middle that’s the hard part. And as a result, the entire task does not feel linear (even if it is).
And as I near the attractor of finishing this newsletter, my thoughts are going to progress bars in computers. In the olden days of me using Windows, they used to look like this:
Well, except that they never seemed to be stuck at 35% (unlike several writing projects of mine). The cliché, to me, is that progress bars would fill very fast to near 100%… and then just hang out there for a while. And I would shake my head and wonder, “what’s the point of a progress bar if the program must still wait after the bar is full?”
Now I wonder if that was on purpose — a way to avoid the despair of the deep, dark desert.
As always, I remain
Nonlinearly yours,
Étienne
P.S. Ugh I just realized that last week, I promised to talk about niches. Please consider this post-scriptum to fulfill this obligation, and rest assured that I will write about it next time. At least, unless a better topic comes up.
On Twitter: Snowmen of Montreal
My Tweets that got the most traction this week were pictures of the very… creative snowmen and snowwomen and snowanimals and snowthings that people made in a nearby park after last weekend’s snowfall:
(It wasn’t the most viral thread about Montreal snowmen though; this one circulated much more!)
Salon: Ted Chiang Book Club, Part 1
I will also be hosting another Interintellect Salon soon, on January 31st! I’ve been fantasizing about a book club on my favorite science fiction author, Ted Chiang, so I decided to make it happen.
If you liked my desert crossing analogy in this post, I think you will very much enjoy Chiang’s Tower of Babylon story. Read it and come discuss it!
