A couple of weeks ago I ran into a commitment problem I’ve seen before. I was talking to a local business owner and, like many business owners, they talked about their devotion to their business and their unwavering dedication to their customers. But in the same conversation, they talked about some tedious and repetitive manual actions with a bunch of spreadsheets that would have made their customers job far easier. It would have taken hours to modify these huge spreadsheets and make them better. There was some way to automate them too, but that would have taken hours to do too, so they concluded in a huff, “I’m not going to do that shit.” It was beneath them.
I respect this person quite a lot and I had just spent hours setting up a document to properly center and print hundreds of nametags for our company’s holiday party, so at first I felt a bit like a Luddite too willing to slave away. The nametags were tedious work and I almost said “screw it” and quit several times. I powered through not because of any virtue but simply because it was required and my mood in general was pretty positive. Humming Christmas music will do that. But I can easily see another world where I would have cast the work aside. After hearing about the spreadsheets, I thought maybe I should have!
A few years back, I encountered the book Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. Knuth is one of the deepest pillars of mathematicians holding up the entire computer science community. He is also a devout Lutheran and has taken the time to talk about how his work informs his faith.
Knuth did a lecture series based on the book too, and someone finally put it on YouTube (it used to be a crappy WAV file on his Stanford site). Knuth goes through his own up arrow notation and how you can use it to create power towers and define very large numbers. He calls his example Super-K, which is very simply 10↑↑↑↑3. This number is enormous, far bigger than anything we can even conceive. It expands out to a power tower that has so many levels you can’t even describe that number using every atom in the known universe. And yet, Knuth says, “Super-K is really quite small as finite numbers go. Almost all of them are larger than it.”
His theological point here is that the idea of infinity is often a red herring. He points out that infinity is only translated in the Bible 3 times. Knuth says Psalm 139 is more to the point:
How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand..
I’ve grown fascinated with how people use hyperbole in conversation these days. I always let it go because it’s silly and senseless, but everytime someone shows up late to a party and says “It took forever to get here!” I want to scold them for their mathematical imprecision more than their lateness. And people say this sort of thing all the time. It particularly bothers me when it’s meant to convey the depth of one’s emotion.
Love: “I’ll love you forever!”
Frustration: “My to-do list is endless!”
Devotion: “I would do anything for my customers!”
Except you won’t. In fact, you won’t even spend a few tedious hours working on a spreadsheet because it’s beneath you.
I call these phrases ‘adverb infinitudes’. Adverbs are bad enough, as Stephen King reminds every writer. Our world today is full of emotive and performative kayfabe - people underpinning the depth of their worldviews with infinite emotion. We expect to win arguments based on who feels it more strongly. Greta Thunberg became a media phenom with this type of kayfabe. She had it down pat - the angry stare, the quivering lip: “How dare you.” Who can top that? After all, diamonds are forever and the Energizer bunny keeps going and going and…
Adverb infinitudes are bullshit. We love them because we want to hide our weaknesses. We want to fly to the stars but our emotion gets ahead of us and our feet are still stuck in the mud. What we really need is to use our emotion to help make our lives more concrete. The depth of our feeling can help us take one step at a time and just keep going. “I will love you next Tuesday at 4 PM” is a far more powerful idea than “I will love you forever.” It’s defined, concrete and very real. It’s saying that no matter what is going on, no matter how bad my mood is, or how mad I could be, or whatever other stressors exist in my life that at this specific time in the future I will still love you.
Focus on the concrete is as countercultural as it gets. Revel in the glory of the unexceptional everyday and you will find the ability to increase your capacity forever. The real power of the finite numbers is not how big they can get (infinity is just a set-theoretic term for size anyway), but that no matter where you are - whether you’re at 2 or 100 or Super-K - it’s an easy +1 operation to get to the next number. Do that enough and the numbers will start to get big.
I don’t regret the hours I spent making nametags for a party. It was a Tuesday at about 4 PM.