Complexity & the Pool Analogy

I've spoken about how the fundamental problem of the human condition manifests itself individually as a crisis of complexity before, but I recently thought of an analogy which can be used to visualize this concept as a progression through life. The seeds of this idea were planted by Sisyphus55 on YouTube, whose channel I highly recommend if you're looking for a calm, soothing voice and stick figures to help you understand philosophy.

The analogy follows a human in a pool as they move through their years on Earth. When you're a child, the walls of this pool are clearly defined, and your feet rest upon a solid, tiled floor such that the water only comes up to your shoulders. The pool's breadth contains the amount of decisions you have to make, and the amount of physical and metaphysical space you are allowed to traverse, while the depth of the pool represents the depth of your life. These bounds are often set by parental figures, as they govern not only how far a child is allowed to run, but also what questions they are ready for. A decent parent will allow a child to explore within their supervision, potentially getting bumps and bruises along the way, but will always set boundaries on their play, so they have walls to cling onto when they need to. As a child's life will generally hinge on simplistic questions, the depth of the water holds no threat; they can paddle around and splash a little, but they need only stand if they get tired.

I recall the days when the hardest decision of my life was which color popsicle I should pick, or which Nerf guns I should bring to the park. A time when my backpack consisted of just a few folders and pencils, and my school time was divided equally between singing seasonal songs, reading books, playing, and making art. I remember this time with a painful, wistful longing, which can be deemed "Nostalgia". It was a time when my pool was shallow and small.

The next stage of physical development in humans is preadolescence - around the age of 11-14, and here the pool grows for the first time. Now, the water comes up to your neck, but you can still breathe comfortably, and while the walls of the pool have definitely receded, they're remain highly visible and tangible; if you need them, they're just a short swim away. These years are generally marked by some leaps in a child's independence, though parents will still set some strict boundaries on play. During middle school, when I was a preadolescent, my parents allowed me to go downtown with my friends for the first time - a major leap from playing in the park under their watchful eyes. I'd receive twenty dollars, and my friends and I would venture downtown after school, grabbing lunch where we wanted to, perhaps getting some frozen yoghurt, and going to Sweet Mimi's for some candy - having innocent fun and yet knowing there were limits. My mother would come and pick me up from the library, and I'd go home to complete my assignments. My backpack had a few binders in it now, and maybe a textbook, and there was less art and more rote subjects in school.

A significant leap comes when the next stage arrives: young adulthood. I hesitate to call it true adolescence, as that word carries some negative and immature connotations, but they are, for all intents and purposes, the same. This will occur around the age of 14-18, and here we observe a large uptick in responsibility, independence, and mental faculty, and so our pool stretches and deepens. Now, the walls are so far away they're hard to see, much less to swim to, and the floor drops out. You can still see the bottom, but it's murky and ill-defined, like trying to see the floor in the deep end of a heavily chlorinated pool. You need to swim constantly to maintain your position, and you begin to develop the ability to perceive life beyond the strict realms set forth by your parental figures. You start to develop an individual philosophy, whether you're aware of it or not, and subconsciously you doubt everything your parents dictate to you. Learning how to drive marks this period emphatically, as you are no longer beholden to your parents for travel. Perhaps you've even procured a car, in which case you're experiencing freedom hitherto unknown to your mind. Forget going downtown, you could drive into the city, go to a restaurant, and be home in time for dinner.

The first inklings of complexity meet this liberation. Academic nihilism lurks as you take harder and harder classes in high school, and as you begin to doubt your strengths academically, the culture makes you question who you are as a person. Responsibilities start piling up faster than you can react to them, and before you know it you're taking multiple AP classes, leading or attending numerous club meetings, playing school sports and perhaps even club sports, and finding time for your extracurricular hobbies. I remember my backpack being laden with textbooks, notebooks, and a computer in these years, and for the first time ever, I carried it all around with me, as I was loathe to use my locker and my school allowed backpacks in class. 

Then comes adulthood, and the pool ceases to be a pool and turns into an ocean. In college, there are still walls, though they're so faint they appear as mirages, and you can't see the bottom any longer. You can perceive it, but even that may just be a vain hope. You need to swim harder now - waves slosh you around vindictively, and at every moment you're fully aware of how tired you are. Desperately, you begin praying for a wall to hold - perhaps just a floating plank of wood to cling on to so you can rest, but none arrives. As your pool grows beyond your fathom, the walls of your world cave in around you. Existential questions turn into nihilism, and soon "being alone" becomes "dying alone". If only a ship would come by... all you need is someone to throw out a life-preserver... even if they yank it back after some time, at least you'll have rested, though the pain in your body will be fresh and searing. You begin to lose track of time, and soon you're unsure if the darkness which envelops you when you blink is the back of your eyelids, or the pitch black abyss of night. Either way, you're well aware that the darkness seems to last just a little longer every time.

At this point, you have reached the same limit your parents reached in their lifetimes. Perhaps you've even broken past it. Now you're in uncharted territory - the unknown, and there are monsters here that you can't even begin to fathom because nothing your parents have gone through could prepare them to prepare you for it. You find yourself thinking nostalgically about the past so much that it sickens you. You dissatisfied with your life - perhaps you played a loser's game and witnessed someone else play a winner's game. Above all, you know in your heart the walls of the pool will not shrink again - not on their own, and you're too damn tired to do anything about it.

So of course, the natural question arises, as it has in the past: what's the solution? I've just gone on an overtly pessimistic, and one might even say dark, rant about the inevitability of nihilism in one's life, so how does someone circumvent it? Well, there are methods on an individual basis which can be used to curb nihilism and somewhat shrink the walls of the pool again, if only in your perception, but that's a post for another time. This essay was meant only to set up and discuss the pool analogy, and to parallel it to the growth of the average human being.