The other day I was in the kitchen fixing lunch when I saw a flicker of movement over to my right at the window.
For a split second I registered a fast-moving black shape with shiny blue highlights, beating wings, and a white tuft beneath a long beak.
Before I even understand what I’m seeing, it’s all over.
My spider was gone.
Since the fall (we’re heading into spring here in Opposite Land), we’ve had a decent-sized house spider hanging out in the outside corner of our kitchen window. We leave it there because why not, it eats flies and other undesirables, and I don’t mind spiders while they’re minding their business.
That lasted until the tui bird decided to pull a daylight sneak attack.
No more spider.
Tui are a New Zealand native bird with a shiny blue-black color and a pleasant song. They aren’t birds I’d associate with violence given nectar is their main diet, but then I am not a spider hanging out in its web.
For my lost spider the tui presented an Outside Context Problem.
That term comes from a novel called Excession by the late Iain M. Banks, which I finished re-reading last week.
An Outside Context Problem is an encounter with something that breaks your universe. It fits no previous experience. You have no terms to talk about it or explain it. There is no frame of reference for what is happening.
The spider exists in a tiny world made up of its web and a few signals in and around it. Spider-world doesn’t include gigantic flying monsters erupting from the void to devour it. The spider has no way to respond to that.
I find it handy to think of human beings in a similar way.
Humans live in much larger and richer worlds than spiders, some of us anyway, and we have a much broader range of responses.
But it’s the same principle. There’s things we can expect and adjust to, and there’s things we just aren’t built to comprehend. Encountering them is an adventure in high strangeness.
There’s likely a lot more of that second type, which is utterly terrifying and a source of magical wonder at the same time.
The Outside Context Problem makes for a handy idea which I use often to explain my constant bafflement at the world.
More precisely, my bafflement at many people in the world and their behavior.
You probably don’t think like this, as it’s like asking the goldfish how the water is, but we’ve all grown up in a society built around systems.
It’s normal to most of us to live in highly artificial ways that don’t feel artificial.
There are many stupid, pointless, humiliating, and occasionally cruel rituals that we accept without question, even though they’re artificial systems someone built and everyone goes along with.
Systems are powerful because nobody needs to be in charge of them. A well-designed system works because it removes the need for human decision-making.
Systems are dangerous because nobody is in charge of them. The whole thing runs on autopilot and human contributions work as parts.
System blindness is a big problem for decision making and good judgment.
Long story short, we’re real bad at those.
We end up like the poor spider who didn’t even have the brain to so much as conceive of a tui swooping in to eat it alive.
Some of it we don’t have much control over. Our fates are not in our hands when it comes to epic-scale geopolitical and economic forces, or the great historical cycles of civilization.
We’re systems-blind on smaller scales, too, and in areas where we do have a lot more control than the faceless bureaucracies controlling our fate.
Your physical activity and nutrition and stress levels are all products of the systems running your life, for example.
I’m no hermit guru at the top of a remote mountain (yet) but if I do have one skill, it’s the ability to see a little further and a little deeper than most.
That comes down to two things.
Positioning yourself to avoid costly mistakes or an easily-predictable crisis can get you a long way, before you even get to talking about making direct moves.
The other thing is where you put your attention.
Even if they don’t call it that or know they’re doing it, how many people can you think of who obsess over every last detail and get antsy if any tiny piece falls out of place?
I know lots like that.
Folks run themselves ragged to “optimize” everything. The punchline is that the more you focus on making each part work at its best, the worse the overall outcome.
Not all causes have equal effects.
Best results happen when you forget the pants-on-fire micro-managing and work from the few points of leverage that make an outsize impact.
Training yourself to see larger contexts, delays, bottlenecks, feedback loops, and leverage points — and these turn up in lots of places throughout your day — can pay off huge dividends in time saved and stress avoided.
Doubt it would have helped my spider, but they don’t like to read.
Matt Perryman