First Principles

In engineering school my most difficult exams began with the terrifying words:

“Using first principles, derive the equations you will need to solve the following problems.” 😳

Many decades later I have learned to appreciate those scholastic horrors since success in those classes required a true and deep understanding of the science/principles, which translated into an ability to figure out some appreciable brain teasers in the real world.

The wisdom didn’t come easily though. As with most young folks graduating out of post secondary education, beginning their personal journeys into the real world, I thought I knew everything. What I didn’t know is that the “I” was really just an ego propped up by youthful self-confidence.

Years later, and several scars of wisdom later, I tamed (or continue to tame?) my ego. Not just through the normal feedback loop of “make mistake —> learn something from it”, which tempers the self-confidence and smooths the rough edges of the chip on one’s shoulder, but also through the growth of a nagging feeling inside that things in the world aren’t quite the way we’re told they should be by our leaders, talking heads, or mainstream society.

I knew I always seemed to look at things, and the world around me differently, but I did not know why nor did I think it was particularly unique. I just knew I had a yearning to understand things at a deeper level than needed for day-to-day functioning.

I did what lost professionals do — I read the self-help literature. It taught me how to be a better cog. It didn’t teach me why the machine felt wrong. Why did I feel less satisfied the further I progressed up the path of success.

Then it happened.

On an innocuous long weekend at an outlet mall, somewhere outside a large city, amongst fields of crops blowing in the summer winds, pocketed with remnants of a natural watershed singing with birds, bugs, and blooming flora… It struck me. Hard. Like a slap.

I was sitting in my car, parked somewhat away from the frenzy, watching innumerable people darting in and out of a store with packages, rushing into the next store. My mind presumed they must be engaged and enjoying themselves. But, the expressions on their faces, nearly every single one, was quite the opposite – almost a desperation, some urge driving them on, chasing… something.

I turned away to look at a red winged black bird that had just perched on a reed at the edge of a stormwater collection pond, its piercing song jolted me back to the present.

Suddenly, I made a connection between that little bit of nature singing to me and the cognitive train wreck my brain was having as I watched people buying stuff endlessly. This is all wrong, this system we’ve created. Consumerism, as a system, is fundamentally flawed. In two ways. At the personal level, and at the global level.

But there was more. I also saw suddenly how this was wrong. How I was wrong. The nagging and the dissatisfaction I felt were flares telling me I was looking at things incorrectly, looking in the wrong places for answers. Instead of looking in wisdom literature, I should trust myself to simply look at the world around me as would look at any engineering problem I set my mind to. Don’t look for platitudes or take other people’s words on faith. Oddly enough, I began to see the world through a lens that allowed me to decode the noise and understand things at basic levels, and to tie things together to understand how complex systems work and affect ourselves and the world around us.

This moment didn’t give me some divine wisdom. No. It gave me something more valuable. It gave me a toolbox, a process, and a path to see clearly through the complexity of it all. A means to discover, test, and experience reality as it is, not as I want it to be.

Look at the fundamentals. Look at first principles. This is the process.

That’s what Seeing Clearly is all about. It is my hope that through my writing I can share the little bit of wisdom I’ve gained — enough to understand the world a little bit better, not as I want it to be, but as it actually is. And how I’ve come to find peace with that.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not sure anyone does. But I’ve learned to ask better questions — starting always from first principles. Strip away the noise, find the fundamentals, derive from there. Sometimes what we find is uncomfortable. But uncomfortable and true beats comfortable and fictional