Optimize or Improvise?

Fun in the Face of Information Overload

Chess is not a fun game for me. It’s stressful.

When I play chess, it is enrichment time, but it’s not fun. Chess is stressful for me because in any given scenario, there’s always an optimal move to make: losing the game means my strategy and my choices were imperfect. Failure could not be more clear.

As a former straight-A student, and a former “gifted” kid, imperfection is deeply painful for me. Chess brings all of this up, which is why it isn’t any fun.

My peers and I took root in a world where we could research things before living them. The upside here is that we can find instructions to do things in under a minute online – we get to live the autodidact’s dream. Want to repair a hole in your jeans? Here’s a video. Want to make a paper pop-up card? Here’s an instructable. Want to learn to turn a profit trading currency in the foreign exchange market? Here’s a six-week course. Knowledge is at our fingertips – it’s an exhausted idea.

The problem with this way of learning is that it takes the risk out of learning and the discovery out of living. Certain risks should not be taken: don’t jump into the pointed rocks, as tantalizing as the cliff dive seems. But other risks – especially creative risks – should, and must, be taken in order to push the envelope of possibility for the species.

In a world where we read reviews on everything from restaurants to doctor’s offices before we pay a visit, the unpredictability that breeds creativity begins to wither. This is because creativity thrives in a world where people crawl out from the room where blue light blooms (the digitally-mediated world of simulated experience) and find their way into embodied being in the world, where it’s messy, in process, and real.

And let me be clear what this is not: it’s not taking childish, destructive risks – like the impulse to smash the lego your older sibling spent decades building before you arrived in the house. I’m talking about the value of intentional, courageous, and measured risk in the service of imagining a more whole, just, and harmonious future – risk and discovery that broadens the horizon of possibility, for the self and the community.

When I first met my partner, he said something that shifted the way I look at workouts: “You go to the gym to live your life. You don’t live your life to go to the gym.” The purer purpose of fitness is to create a greater range of possibility for the body, cultivating the ability to lift a heavy object off the ground even and especially as the body grows older; or, building the capacity to sprint across the street to grab your friend’s bag that she left at the restaurant down the street, even when you’ve already walked the many blocks to the theater and are minutes from curtain time. Weightlifting, like any regimented workout practice, can become a hyper-fixation – and online fitness resources seem to be increasingly focused on research-based approaches to routines – which have their place; science is awesome and useful – but these can overshadow the purer impulse of fitness practices to express the full range of ability of which the human animal is capable.

I say all this because it’s a microcosm for the way optimizing might not be as optimal as improvising, in the very long run of building a practice and achieving a thing. Finding enjoyment in practices is key to keeping them going, and perpetual practice – in music, for example, but also in an art like fitness – is key to long-term creativity and health. Take it from Walt Whitman, writing under a pen name in 1858:

It is the resolution, the disposition, that is of the main consequence; with that, all obstacles will be overcome. The true benefits of training, indeed, lie in their permanent continuance; it is an affair for the whole life.

[By “Mose Velsor,” 26 September 1858.]

In a world where artificial intelligence will probably surpass most humans in its ability to optimize a process – or in its ability to develop a guide to optimizing a process – it’s worthwhile for us to focus on that which makes us unique as the little extensions of the universe-experiencing-itself that we are. Namely, that to play, to improvise with the body in motion, is our superpower, and a boundless source of joy and triumph that can make us feel ecstatic about our humanity.

And of course, lifting or exercising along the lines of a research-backed program is deeply valuable, and can set the foundation for an ongoing healthy physical practice. I love science and I’m not a hater. Lots of creators and coaches have great resources which can help folks start a fitness journey from the vantage point of optimization. However, I want to argue up the value of fun in physical activity. If a certain sport is fun, or if a certain modality of physical play is enjoyable – and especially if that means of movement will keep a trainee coming back for more – then why not pursue it? Why not explore – through lived physical experience – how that fun form of activity can integrate into a broader physical practice?

Zooming out to the broader question underlying this digression about physical training – about optimization versus improvisation (as in the case of physical training versus play or sport) – I return here to discuss which modality is more useful in the cultivation of a creative habit. My personal opinion, speaking as a younger person, and one easily lost to analysis paralysis, is that finding the courage and means to begin, even if it means lurching forward without knowing where exactly that forward movement is headed, is valuable. Therefore, improvisation – without a clear sense of where one is going next, where the ink on this page is headed, where this breath leads – is the undervalued strategy. It’s the best and worst advice, too often traded, and famously sloganized: just do it.

It’s too easy to search online for the answer to a question which is better researched through living than search-engine-ing. The latter course starves one of the experience, which is often what holds the real learning anyway. It’s my bet that in the golden age of the library the answers discovered through embodied research probably stuck more effectively than the one-second answer generated by a search result. The impulse to search first, rather than explore, deprives the searcher the activity of the search itself, which can be a memorable and enriching journey in and of itself.

To circle back to fitness for a moment, and to take a personal line, I think about how when I was a teenager I spent hours reading online about fitness, searching for the perfect weightlifting program and nutrition plan. It was good book-learning, but ultimately those hours might have been exchanged for time spent trying shit out in a gym, meeting people who know more than I do, failing in realtime and learning from those failures – in other words, charting a course forward through the fog, discovering the road just ahead only as soon as the headlights illuminate it (this metaphor is from Anne Lamott’s brilliant book of writing advice, Bird by Bird).

This act of creative discovery – a movement forward that acknowledges that we can’t know what we don’t know til we go – is essential to the genesis of new strategies of being, new ways to survive, and new systems that can supplant the tired ones.

A week or two ago, I was playing guitar and jamming with my flatmate and best friend, and we were trying to tease new music out of thin air; like, let’s just pick some chords and go, and try to sing, too. It’s not something either of us have a lot of practice at, but it’s fun, and we’re figuring it out together.

After a rough (like, please nobody listen to this! rough) attempt, my flatmate shared something he’d learned from an instructor in a course where non-musical students were working on musical improvisations:

Ask yourself, “What can I do that would make this more beautiful?” And maybe the answer to that is nothing, or to keep steady, to keep doing what you’re doing.

This kind of creativity requires a sense of surrender to the whole – to the whole musical picture – and that the artist really pays attention to the group. It’s surrender because the artist has to forgo individual whims. For example, having a thought or idea of what to play might seem right in the artist’s head, but that’s the problem: they’re in their head, and the thought represents a detachment from the group’s collective improvisation in the present. If, in the present, the musical picture is ordered and harmonious, a “good idea” might ring dissonant with the whole. This way of seeing is distinct from the faculty of mind which is at use when optimizing – it’s a sort of creative focus that requires the artist to be playful and open, and to listen attentively, so that logic can step aside, so a group might generate something truly original.

While, as an artist, I am much more in favor of an improvisational approach to living, I can’t discount the value of optimization, especially in those areas where optimization serves the needs at hand. If a recipe – especially in baking – calls for a certain ratio of flour to water, one must stick to that ratio, otherwise the texture of the baked good might end up wonky. However, dominated as the internet is with manuals advising us on the perfect morning routine or the perfect workout regimen or the perfect way of taking notes, there is value in being pliable and playful. There is courage in getting lost, and there can be fun in the journey out of a labyrinth.

Life is not like chess. There are no right answers, not exactly. (Well, philosophical moralists would disagree, but rigid morality is not what’s being discussed here!)

If life has no ideal sequence of moves one can make for a flawless lifetime match, why get all tripped up trying to be perfect? Why not just play?

And hey – maybe the same could be said of chess, even though there are right answers. Maybe I could just play. Maybe I’ll try doing that. Maybe I’ll report back.

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