The Speculist

When Imagination Fails

Here's a little background on Practical Time Travel for those just joining.

I wrote last time that imagination gives the first whiff of reality to the nonexistent. Imagination is a good start, but if we only imagine the future we’re trying to reach, chances are it will never be any more than a whiff.

Once in a great while, imagination becomes reality. This can be a wonderful, transcendent experience when something that we’ve dreamed of comes to pass, or it can be the horror of having our worst fears realized.

But when it happens, how does it happen? How can we make the good things that we have imagined for ourselves real, or prevent the bad ones from happening? Foremost, we have to recognize the simple truth that sometimes, probably most of the time, imagination comes to nothing. Why?

1. We imagine the impossible (and vastly unlikely)
   
   We imagine saying exactly the right thing in the argument we had yesterday. We imagine aliens coming down and blasting our obnoxious geometry teacher to atoms. We imagine where we would go on our first date with Halle Berry. We while away the afternoon spending that $60 million Lotto jackpot.
   
   Imagining the impossible isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can be satisfying. It can be fun. By using our imaginations freely, we expand our thought space, our own personal iSpace. The more we imagine (whether practical or fanciful), the more real possibilities we have to choose from.
   
   But imagining the impossible can be dangerous if we’re serious about making things happen in the real world. If we focus too much on the impossible, we lose time and other resources that we could be applying to creating the future we want. It’s easier to dream about dating Halle Berry than it is to strike up a conversation with that new girl in Purchasing who kind of looks like her and who might actually go out with you. It’s easier to plan what to do with Lotto winnings than it is to start putting money away every month and make an effort to learn about how wealth is truly built. If we’re content to live out our lives in an imaginary world, fine. But that’s not practical time travel. Practical time travel is about arriving at a real future. To do so, we have to decide on an achievable destination.
   
   That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think big or go for long shots. It means we have to, at some point, wean ourselves from the scenarios that are attractive in their non-threatening non-reality — the wishes we don’t mind dwelling on because we are already convinced they will never come true. If the rest of the world believes that a thing is impossible, but you’ve looked it over and decided otherwise, great! Be a dreamer. God speed you in your endeavors. But if you think it’s impossible, then you’re absolutely correct.
   
   
2. We imagine the possible, and then never really do anything about it.
   As Henry David Thoreau so poignantly wrote, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." No one knows this better than a would-be writer. Do you know any of those? I know several, plus I’ve been one most of my life. Would-be artists, actors, and musicians fit the type as well. Sadly, so do a lot of would-be teachers and truck drivers and MBA’s and you name it. That woman handing you your venti café Americano (with room) is a would-be lawyer; that guy from IT who treats you with such disdain when you have computer trouble has been secretly designing computer games for years.
   
   And it isn’t just career choices. I’ve been living in Colorado for more than 20 years and have been a would-be skier the entire time. Actually, my ski experience is instructive, because I can pretend that I’ve done something about it. After all, I gave cross-country skiing a try just 19 years ago. And it’s only been about ten years since once of my Posse ringleaders decided he could teach me to ski "in about ten minutes" and took me up to the slopes at night where I proceeded to almost kill myself. (Annoyingly, another Posse member was there and did pick it up in 10 minutes. Jerk.)
   
   This is how we persuade ourselves that we are trying to do what we’ve imagined and assessed as possible. We write and write and write, but never attempt to publish anything. We read books on how to take the LSAT, but never actually get around to taking the test, much less filling out a law school application.
   
   
3. We imagine the possible, do something about it, and quit when it doesn’t work out.
   
   This is where our current step in the practical time travel process, reimagination, comes in. When we imagine a what, we’ve taken a small step towards achieving a particular future. When we imagine a how to get us to that what, we’ve taken a much bigger step. When we start acting on that how, we’re active time travelers. When a particular how doesn’t work and we quit, we’re failed time travelers.
   
   Say you decide you want to travel to a future in which you have ten million dollars. You have thoroughly imagined this what and have come up with a good how to get you there — commodities trading. You’ve been reading up on the subject and are ready to dedicate yourself to learning how to build a fortune doing it. So you start out with a few thousand dollars and in a couple of years, through some very shrewdly leveraged moves, you’ve made about half a million. Then disaster strikes the frozen concentrated orange juice market and you’re left penniless.
   
   Now what?
   
   To carry on from a disappointment, we have to once again engage our imaginations. Sometimes we have to reimagine the how, sometimes we have to reimagine the what itself. Quitting isn’t always the wrong answer. If, after we engage our imaginations, we find that the what that we can truly achieve (or the how that will get us there) is no longer what we want, then we should quit.
   
   Maybe $10 million wasn’t really the goal you wanted after all. A couple million would, in fact, provide everything you want and you could get there a lot more quickly and with less stress. Or maybe you find that you just can’t keep yourself interested in commodities. Real estate would be a more interesting challenge for you.
   
   So you abandon your $10 million future in favor of another that you like even better. Is this new future possible? Do you have a how to get there? Will you act on the how? Then go for it. That’s what a time traveler does.
   

There are only two ways for a practical time traveler to fail. One is to die trying to reach a particular future. Unless this occurs because the time traveler failed to take necessary precautions, it means that time simply ran out.

Thus the Practical Time Traveler’s motto: Live to see it.

Running out of time is the great tragedy of human existence. It shouldn’t happen to anyone who has something useful to do who wants to keep at it. Top people are working on solving this problem.

The other way to fail is to abandon a sought-after future without reimagining it. As soon as we disengage our imaginations, we are finished as time travelers. But the flipside of that is that if we don’t quit, don’t run out of time, and don’t get mixed up about what is possible, we can choose as a destination any future that we desire.

Posted by Phil at November 17, 2003 01:06 PM | TrackBack