multi-tasking

It’s remarkable how one’s self-conception can evolve over the years. I’ll post this as a bit of (auto)biography, not because my own case is of inherent interest, but because the topic is interesting in its own right. And the topic is this… We generally assume that we know ourselves better than others know us. Most of the time we think we have a good read on our own strengths and weaknesses, and in both cases (strengths and weaknesses) we tend to think that we have identified abiding personal traits. But of course, some of these supposed abiding traits are really just surface phenomena that have to do solely with our present situation, and are easily changed when our situation changes. Other traits are more durable, but it may take years to identify which ones they are.

15 years ago, I would have called myself a terrible multi-tasker. My self-assessment was that I could only get work done if focused intensively on one project for a lengthy period of time. And perhaps that was true many years ago. But now I find myself a multi-tasker to an almost absurd degree. I won’t even list all the numerous activities in which I’ve had to be involved in the 44 hours since returning from Paris. And, I find that I like it. It’s energizing.

Another one already mentioned on this blog… As recently as 10 years ago, I would have described myself as a highly introverted person. That seems like the sort of thing that should be a fundamental and durable personality trait, right? Well, it only took a few semesters before Egyptians (Egyptians, the most outgoing nationality I have ever encountered) were asking me how I could be so friendly and outgoing and know so many people. It sounded simply wrong at first, but then I realized they were right. The Egyptian environment somehow brought out a different side in me. It had been there in some sense, but was somehow smothered by the American high school, undergraduate, and graduate environments. Or maybe it was simply smothered by youth, in my own case, for whatever reasons.

Going back to the late 1980’s or so, I must have been one of the quietest students in seminar at St. John’s, often horrified about speaking, and rarely able to formulate my points before the discussion had already moved on. It was almost impossible at the time to imagine myself as a teacher, but a few semesters later I found teaching easy and exhilarating, and a few years after that I found public lecturing to be the same, right from the start. Still not sure how that happened.

Or again, go back to as recently as the summer of 2002, and you would find me with not one philosophical publication. And at the time I was 34 years old, no baby any longer. But just seven years later I’m on track to write more by retirement than anyone will want to read. (That’s partly because I’m one of those to have flourished under the “publish or perish” mandate. As I’ve explained before, there was a hard 60% tenure quota in Cairo at the time, which we had already exceeded in Philosophy. I loved it here and wanted to stay, but had zero chance of staying unless I really blew down the door on quantity of publications. So I did, and the habit stuck.)

I suppose there are two lessons from all of this. The “metaphysical” one (and here is one point where I always agree with Paul Churchland) is that introspection is vastly overrated as a source of immediate, infallible knowledge. It is quite often the case that we learn who we are through the feedback or mediation of others, not through digging around privately in our own psyches, which in fact is usually a hopeless exercise in which one can barely distinguish between the important and the unimportant.

And that leads to the second lesson, which is the “practical” one aimed at younger people… You don’t really know yourself yet. It takes a very long time. You have to see yourself in different situations at different ages, just as great cathedrals must be viewed in different moods at different times of day.

So I guess I will check the box and classify this as an “advice” post.