The Procrustean Bed

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“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Ancient Greek myth of Procrustes is an archetypical allegory for what we as homo-sapiens do daily to better comprehend the nuanced and ever changing world we inhabit. The myth broadly goes something like this. An Ancient Greek man, our Procrustes, owns a farm house and two beds where he often hosts wary travelers on their sojourns through his land. When he hosts these unwitting travelers, he freely offers one of his two beds. None of these unfortunate travelers ultimately can fit depending on the bed he fits them too. He amputates, and stretches, and mutilates his victims in order to fit them to the bed. Finally, our hero, Theseus comes along and offers Procrustes the taste of his own bitter medicine and fits him to his own bed. This beautiful allegory exemplifies what we do to challenging ideas, complex concepts, and even our conceptions of other people. We reduce complex problems to something we can more easily comprehend and compress extended timelines to crisis and immediacy. When there is an absence of evidence, we expand these ideas without a foundation and take creative liberties with the truth to develop a more complete picture. We’ve taken an arbitrary metric, the limits of our understanding, and instead of expanding our limits through study and intellectual evolution, we have stretched, shaped, and limited ideas to our framework. This inevitably leads us to incomplete understanding and creative license over what we proclaim as the truth.

“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This tragic reality is exacerbated by the fact that we are constantly inundated with information. Information, like nutrition, requires time and energy to digest. Deep thinking finds no corollary to Moore’s Law. Intellectual comprehension takes time, humility, and deep work to achieve. The informational crisis of our time amounts to the classic debate of quantity vs. quality. When Homer can produce the Iliad, a work that will endure throughout all time and where every line of his prose is worthy of quotation to the modern inverse where hundreds of thousands of works of literature are published yearly, yet so few, if any, of these works is worthy of deep study. The antidote to this tragic reality is deep work, which can only be attained through a returning to the natural state of man and through a separation from the advertisement-rich, yet intellectually poisonous world of social media and technology. This is not an advocacy for a Luddite mode of living, but for a healthy integration of technology that maximizes utility, and limits the common side-effects of hyper stimulation that we are faced with daily. Establish boundaries, return to nature often, and ponder ideas in the absence of external influence. Develop and evolve your own philosophy and live with principled integrity. Become intellectually curious once again.