The Size of Our Worlds and the Pandemic
Great. You’ve stumbled across yet another article with pandemic in the title. At times, I feel the horse has been beaten dead when it comes to people talking about their pandemic struggles. Like many others, I was making peevish remarks about the situation within the first few weeks of April 2020. There was a moment, however, where my perspective took a turn. Having noticed I was complaining about many things, my mom fiercely critiqued me:
When I was at your age, we were fearing our lives because we were in the midst of a war. It’s silly for you to complain about a couple minor inconveniences.
At first, I thought her statement was a bit out of context, but the fact of the matter was that she was completely right. I’ve never faced adversity on the same scale as that of my parents. After all, many of us have the privilege of living in a first-world country, the thought of having our freedoms and luxuries taken away from us at any moment almost seems foreign. More than anything my mom’s words were a succinct reminder that we have a responsibility to be gracious for our lives; to even have the opportunity to improve ourselves is something many don’t have. For that reason, I will be attempting to flip the traditional pandemic reflection on its head by looking at how our perspectives and thinking habits can change with some time indoors.
Many of my peers are not aware that I always had a strong passion for the humanities. In fact, I was originally planning on majoring in a combination of literature and philosophy as opposed to my current STEM-focused degrees. I’m attempting to combine both of my passions in this article by providing a quick taste of statistics and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). To start off, I would like to introduce an epistemological framework known as Bayesianism.
In a Bayesian perspective, you admit that the ground truth of an external world is unknowable to you as a human being and that your current state of knowledge/personal belief is a hypothesis of this ground truth.
In probability and statistics, we update this state of knowledge, our prior probabilities, through the process of inference to hopefully progress our knowledge into a new state of posterior probabilities. My current work as a quantitative researcher is implicitly dependent (pun intended) on Bayesianism as it is an inherent part of most modern research methodologies.
In the context of this discussion, you can think of “prior probabilities” as the current world you interpret, which is different for everyone. A Bayesian framework inherently comes with a dose of humility since you are assuming that the external world of reality is something out of your reach. We develop our worlds with three main ways of knowledge: perception/observation, reason, and imagination/intuition. I’ll mainly be discussing how the size of our worlds, i.e. the breadth of our perception, reasoning, and imagination, is constantly changing.
Young children often provide a unique perspective here because they have a nearly limitless curiosity and the size of their worlds fluctuate quickly. On one hand, they are constantly perceiving, familiarizing themselves with what we call civilization. They are also developing their reasoning and imaginations as they study and find their own passions in life. When I reflect on my primary school days, I recognize that the size of my world would vary quite rapidly. I remember myself being 10 years old wanting a particular toy with an intense passion. My parents couldn’t afford it due to financial constraints, but the toy was on my mind for multiple months on hand. Without noticing it, nearly my entire world was about a physical object for a short period of time, a case of tunnel vision if you will. This concept of tunnel vision, i.e., an immediate (and usually temporary) reduction in the scope of your world, is key here. Although it is somewhat expected in young children and is merely an innocent desire, it can be detrimental in adults, specifically ambitious creatives.
I would argue that travel is one of the most valuable privileges that people in first-world countries have. It is an extension of the adventurous spirit and one of the hallmarks of The Cansbridge Fellowship experience. But like many things that came with the pandemic, my hopes for an internship in Asia came to a quick halt. Moreover, I was in a province with very long lockdowns and faced limited travel in my local vicinity. What I found was that staying inside would induce a particular form of tunnel vision which was very hard to break out of without external stimulus. After all your perception is inherently constrained since your movement is limited, so your mind will need reasoning and imagination to compensate. But even with sufficient reasoning and imagination, a lot can be forgotten in terms of one’s perception. It is easy to forget that the universe is of infinite size (to our current human knowledge), it is easy to forget that you will most likely die as an individual who has only experienced a mere fraction of planet Earth. It is easy to forget the principle that there is an external world (the ground truth) that we know almost nothing (or nothing at all) about. To put it simply, I felt my thoughts were being reduced to their most linear form, that the possibilities which lie beyond my awareness were slowly fading away.
As you can see, this can be pretty bad for someone who likes to do a lot of work involving creativity. Here’s what helped me break out of my bad case of tunnel vision.
Know it’s what you want
It’s quite easy to lie to yourself. Many people intentionally constrain their world and focus on living inside it. This can be for many reasons but usually, it’s due to fear and comfort, each decreasing the incentives of discovering the external world. There is also the mindset that being curious is somewhat disrespectful to what you currently have, i.e., desire and gratitude are somehow mutually exclusive. Being open with yourself is a prerequisite to a larger world as well as the recognition that it may come with many hardships. Seeking a larger world is not necessarily “better” by any means and it’s important for you to understand that it’s truly what you desire.
Gamble a bit
If you have the privilege of doing so, try redefining the way you see your world (easier said than done). I, fortunately, have this privilege due to the continued support of The Cansbridge Fellowship and Mitacs, giving our cohort numerous opportunities to redefine what we call normal. A larger world comes with the reshaping of your thinking process, that is, how you perceive, how you reason, and how you imagine. This is beyond simply trying a new hobby but rather taking on a bit of risk when it comes to interpreting your own existence. It is incredibly difficult as it requires being in touch with yourself and a willingness to let go of components of yourself that may have been with you for long periods of time. If you’re a sunk cost fallacist then doing so may not be for you.
Others
It is important to recognize that there are many other people who go through the same difficulties and share your desires for a larger world. Forming relationships and spending time with other people should not simply be a method for you to fulfill your desires, rather a part of your exploration of the outer world. Empathize with others, learn about their interests and try to go a step beyond on a personal level. In my case, I’m fortunate that the Fellowship is filled with extraordinarily adventurous people whose experiences are no short of inspiring. They’ve also continued to provide support as a family, which I can confidently say has shined a lot of light into my pandemic tunnel.
