🟢 “Dazed but not dead”
Reflections on the appropriateness today of the historical Walsh family motto (and why anyone who doesn't have their head stuck in the sand might feel the same)
(5 min read)
Brief Walsh history
During our extended family reunion that we had this past weekend, I refreshed my memory about the history of the Walsh name.
The first Walsh was Haylen Walsh, son of Phillip “the Welshman” Brenagh in 1171 in Ireland.
Some believe the surname comes from the Olde English word “waelisc”, meaning “foreigner”.1
These days, Walsh is the 4th most common surname in Ireland and the 265th most common in the United States.
Now to the relevant part:
The Walsh family motto in Latin is “Transfixus sed non mortuus”.
Some people translate this to “Transfixed but not dead” (or as Google Translate puts it, “Stupefied but not dead”).2
This general idea of “Awestruck but not dead” is how I’ve been feeling recently, which I’ll elaborate on below. 😀
What a crazy time
My favorite writer, Tim Urban of “Wait But Why”, explained in a 2018 interview with Tim Ferriss:
What are the major leaps for life?
You can count on one hand for all of life.
Simple cell to complex cell. (Big one.)
Complex cell to multi cell. (Big one.) We have animals now.
Ocean to land. (Big one.)
I would say the fourth that fits on this same list is:
Going from one planet to multi planets as a civilization.
That’s happening in the next decade with SpaceX.
No one is talking about it yet, but they will be.
These days, I’m constantly thinking about how wild it is—not just that humans will soon be multi-planetary—but also…
Any list about forthcoming major milestones would likewise mention:
technological singularity (a superhuman artificial general intelligence iteratively improves itself, rapidly becoming so much more intelligent that it’s alien to humans)
direct thought transfer / uploading our minds to the cloud
immortality / longevity escape velocity
age reversal
post-scarcity, post-money society (as we use nanotechnology to manipulate atoms and convert pond scum to diamonds, etc)
WHAT?!?! 🤯🌀
Most of us will witness not just 1 major milestone, but many.
100,000 years of human history feels like 499 pages of nothing
I love the analogy Tim Urban offers in a different 2018 interview:
If human history’s a thousand centuries, about 100,000 years.
[Imagine] there’s a 500-page book telling the story, and every page is two centuries.
If you’re an alien, and you pick up this book, and you’re trying to understand what the human history is like, the first 450 pages, the first 90,000 years gets us to just hunter gatherers. That’s it!
Migrations and hunter gatherers, and very, very slight biological changes.
You are bored as an alien reading that book.
Page 450, the agriculture revolution, and you have cities, and you have the first wide scale cooperation, this Colossus [global human civilization] takes a huge leap forward.
Things start to get a little interesting.
And that’s just the last 50 pages of the book.
And things do develop in a kind of interesting cool way.
Page 490, you have Jesus, you have A.D. starts at 10 pages ago, and you have Islam starts at page 493, and around page 497 you have imperialism gets rolling, then you have the enlightenment the next page.
And right at the beginning of page 500, the very last page, you have the industrial revolution, and you have the entire Colossus [global human civilization] kind of like goes on steroids.
The Colossus grows up very quickly and becomes far more powerful.
The populations balloons from less than a billion to seven billion on page 500 alone.
And every other page before page 500, transportation meant walking, running, sailboats.
Page 500 we’re going to the space station, we’re flying around planes and cars.
Communication on page 499 and earlier meant talking to people and writing letters with your hand.
Page 500, we have FaceTime, we have internet.
If you’re the alien reading this book, suddenly you’re on page 500 and you just can’t believe what you’re reading, and you’re so riveted that you’re saying:
“Oh my god, this is the story. This is what this has all been leading to. What’s about to happen?!”
You turn to page 501, and you’re just like “something big is about to happen here.”
We all were born right then.
It’s crazy.
Our future is the uncertainest
I can’t stop myself from sharing a third snippet from Tim, especially since Katie and I are still wondering whether we should have a kid.
Tim Urban concluded his May 23, 2023 post with:
Every parent in history has brought their baby into a world with an uncertain future.
But our future is the uncertainest.
My baby might live a life a lot like mine, just a little more futuristic.
Or she might live to 500.
She might live most of her life with a brain-machine interface implanted in her head, thinking with her own superintelligent AI.
She might suffer through civilizational collapse.
She might live in a world that would seem like utopia to us today.
She might live on Mars. She might meet aliens.
She might die in the apocalypse. There’s just no way to know.
It makes all of those fun, exciting, terrifying conversations about the future hit just a little harder.
By now you can probably see why the motto of “Awestruck but not dead” might apply.
We’re still here, even if we’re in some ways paralyzed by the amount and intensity of the changes looming on the horizon.
(Well, I’ll speak for myself.)
“This time is different”
Some of the most common advice in investing is to abstain from ever uttering this 4-word phrase:
“This time is different”.
At Bridgewater, we studied macro economics and observed relationships of different forces and codified our understanding into “timeless and universal principles” that then automatically determined which assets we should trade at which prices.
Decide your rules ahead of time so that the actual decision-making is instant, emotionless, effortless, and explainable.
We saw cycles repeat themselves throughout history.
Ray Dalio frequently explained:
It’s a mistake to rely too much on your own life experience because sometimes patterns take more than 1 generation to repeat themselves.
Often, investors would make bets too confidently, just because they’d never personally seen a certain type of rare event happen.
Ray would warn us:
You’d be an idiot to ignore lessons from history.
And yet…
What if the future looks NOTHING like the past?
I’m nervous to say it.
But I can’t not say it.
Our world is less predictable in 2024 than it has been in all of history.
And I expect that the unpredictability will only continue increasing, at least for a while.
Is there ever a time it would be rational to think “This time is different!”?
I think it’s now.
This. Time. Is. Different.
Comforted
I’m finding myself oddly more at ease knowing that many geniuses (including former Chief Business Officer of Google X Mo Gawdat) agree that we seem to be headed towards an imminent utopia or a catastrophe.
Perhaps it’s like the peace some people feel when they’re on a plane that they’ve learned will likely crash.
“It’s out of my control.”
I’ve spent 40 years trying to control too much anyway.
I started applying for full-time software engineering jobs again.
As usual, there are too many managers and engineers for the available positions.
So I get ignored a lot.
But it’s bothering me less and less because I see that everything is ephemeral anyway.
We can think about risk differently.
I’m excited to see how life plays out.
And in the meantime, I’m trying to learn how to savor the present more.
🕙 What we learned in recent posts:
🟢 5 mental shifts that saved my (physical) life
💬 Question for you:
What upcoming changes in the world are you most excited for or worried about?
Has your anticipation of any of them changed your current behavior and decision-making?
Reply or leave a comment!
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Phillip had been part of Strongbow’s invasion of Ireland in 1170.
Given the impaled swan on the coat of arms, a more accepted translation is “Pierced but not dead”.
I’ve also heard “Wounded but not mortally.”
Womp, womp. I hope you have a more uplifting family motto. 😉
Life is certainly amazing. I love that it is just part of the universe and doesn’t really have any point
What a family motto! Such a fun idea to dive into it.
And interesting times indeed. Just thinking about it how in one lifetime personal computers came up, mobile phones, AI and cars that can drive on their own. Space X will be interesting to see. I wonder how it would feel to be on a different planet. Still lots to explore on this one too though.