Rob Wiblin: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. Another post that you wrote in the past that really stuck with me to this day, is to say that people don’t want to acknowledge the messiness of life and decision-making, that, when they’re asked a question like, “Why are you doing what you’re doing today?” they give us this neat narrative where it’s like it seems inevitable that they ended up where they are. But in fact, it was just a total mess. They were making all these decisions, and by some random chance they’ve ended up where they are. To this day, when people ask me to give a narrative like that, I just kind of reject it. I refuse to do it because I don’t believe the story I’m going to tell them. Is that as important a post to you as it as it was to me? We’re overly invested in narratives. That’s the theme of my TED Talk, but narratives are also impossible to avoid, so we’re always living with this contradiction. Then economists have this dual problem. They have simple theories, and the world’s always more complex. My personal program is to stay connected to the humanities, to remind me of that complexity, to keep on reading fiction, take an interest in anthropological kinds of issues. The whole notion of culture — which no one is even sure what the word means — but it’s reminding you all the time how much what matters is something that’s hard to pin down or have a simple theory about. If you’re both overly invested in narrative of the human and your main field is economics, which has simple theories, you need to take these countervailing steps.…

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