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It’s time for the afternoon update with Jack Heald, The Dad You Wish You Had.
I’m gonna talk today about maps, models, and reality. Often times we believe that what we are perceiving with our eyes, hearing with our ears and our other senses is in fact reality. Sometimes that’s true. To a greater or lesser extent, most of the time it’s not true at all. We all have our own mental map – our own mental model – of what reality is.
The place I first stumbled upon this was when I was involved in an online community back in the early days of the internet. We were all very interested in theology. We talked about different ways to perceive our relationship to God, to one another, to our communities. Everybody seemed to have slightly different ideas. And of course, the discussion inevitably devolved into who was right and who was wrong.
That’s not always the best way to view maps and models: “right and wrong.” The example that I’ve always liked to use:
I lived in west London. Often times I liked to go down to the Houses of Parliament because my favorite place in the world is right across the street from Parliament: Westminster Abbey.
Now from my flat in West London – in Chiswick – there were a number of different ways to get to Westminster Abbey. I could take the surface transportation using the bus. I could take surface transportation using my car. I could walk. I could take the Underground. I could ride a bicycle a bunch of different ways to get there.
If I was trying to send somebody from my house to Westminster Abbey, they’d need to know how to get there. They needed to know where they were at the moment and they needed to know where they were going. And then they needed a method – a pathway – to get there. I’d provide them a map.
If they had a car and wanted to drive, I’d say, “well here’s the map to get you from where we are right now to Westminster Abbey.” But if they wanted to do a combination of walking, public transportation, take the Underground, I’d actually give them a different map.
If we got into argument about which one was right or wrong, that was a stupid argument. Because both are right. Both would get you from where you were right now to where you wanted to be: Westminster Abbey. There wasn’t a right or wrong. There were just different ways of getting there.
If you wanted to get from where I was to Westminster Abbey though, and I gave you a map that would take you to St. Paul’s? Well, there was a right and a wrong.
If the map or your model of reality doesn’t get you from where you are to where you want to go then and only then can you say it’s wrong. But if the map that I use gets me to where I want to go, and the map you use get you to where you want to go, there’s not a right or a wrong. There are just different maps. Different models of reality.
My favorite way to get from my flat to Westminster Abbey was to take the Underground. I lived just right off the District Line. So, I could walk out my front door, turn right down to the end of the street, turn left, and walk two and a half blocks down an alley. The Underground entrance was right around the corner from that.
I would buy my ticket, jump on the District Line heading east and get off at the Westminster stop. And I was just right there. I was very close to Westminster Abbey. I could come up out of the Underground and walk across the street in front of Westminster Abbey.
However, if I wanted to take somebody and they didn’t want to do the Underground, if they wanted to go in a car then I’d walk out my front door, turn left, go find my car parked somewhere on the street, get in the car, turn around and drive south until I hit the A4. Then I take the A4 into town and I can’t remember the streets that I have to pick up. eventually I end up down around the Horse Guards and Trafalgar Square. And I wander and find my way down to Westminster Abbey.
(I was much better at getting to Westminster Abbey via the Underground than I was getting there via car.)
Now the interesting thing about the map from my house to Westminster Abbey via the surface streets would look completely different than the map to get from my house to Westminster Abbey via the Underground. In fact, the Underground map in London really doesn’t bear any particular relation to reality as far as scale or distance or even twists and turns in the track itself.
Really, the only thing that the Underground map will show you with any degree of reality is the various stops on the Underground and their relationship to one another. The Underground – if you superimposed it over a map of the streets of London – wouldn’t make any sense at all. In fact, it wouldn’t overlay well at all. You wouldn’t be able to see the Westminster Abbey stop. And my Turnham Green stop would not coincide on the Underground map and a street map. They just wouldn’t lay over each other. They wouldn’t map at all to one another.
And yet, that map would get me from where I was to where I wanted to go if I took it.
Let’s turn that around to everyday life.
Many of us have been given maps or models of reality that guide us to where we want to go. And we can oftentimes get into arguments with one another about whether or not our map or your map is right or wrong.
That’s not the right argument – whether it’s right or wrong. The question is, “does it get you to where you want to go?”
I want to just give a couple of examples about mental maps – mental models – that we’ve all been handed over the years that you’ve undoubtedly been handed. And talk about whether or not it gets you to where you want to go.
Here’s a mental map or a model of reality that we’ve been handed:
The relationship between men and women and what it means to be masculine or feminine. Currently, there’s a map – a model of reality – that’s floating around the ether, that’s in the cultural atmosphere. it says that gender is a social construct. Men and women are essentially interchangeable. And the only difference between men and women is something that’s been made up by the culture that we live in.
Is that a good model or a bad model? Is that the right model or the wrong model?
Well it depends on where you want to go. If where you want to go is you want to create a workforce that perfectly matches the gender distribution of the general population, then that’s probably a pretty good map. But if you’re trying to have a functional inter-sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex, that’s a terrible map. It will not get you where you want to go.
Here’s a better map: masculinity and femininity are real things. They actually exist. They’re very different. They’re not made-up. They’re not imposed. They are part of our biology and our biology has arisen from literally millions of years of evolution.
You can no more pretend to be the opposite gender then you can pretend to be a different species. It is not something you get to pick.
If you’re wanting to be in a relationship… If you’re a man wanting to be in a relationship with a woman, the model that says that “gender is a social construct” will not get you where you want to go. It just won’t. It’s not real.
It’s like me giving you a map to take you to Paris, when all you’re trying to do is get to Westminster Abbey. You won’t make it. You won’t get there.
Here’s another mental model; its falsehood is quickly becoming evident. We’re dealing with the fallout from the failure of this mental model – of this map – in a huge way. Here’s the map.
If you go to college and get a college degree then you’re going to be able to make a good living and have a good life.
That model clearly no longer works. College degrees now cost literally three times the rate of inflation, than what they cost when I went to college. In other words, had I paid an inflation-adjusted amount from my college degree – at a private college I want to remind you – it would literally be a third of what that same education costs today.
Furthermore, the market for those kinds of degrees doesn’t even exist anymore. If you think that getting a college degree and taking out a gigantic loan to pay back over the course of your life, which – by the way – you cannot get out from under because you can’t declare bankruptcy and get out from under those kinds of student loans. If you think that’s gonna get you to where you want to go in life, you’re almost certainly wrong.
Here’s a better model: Learn a trade, a vocational trade. Any job that can be outsourced to India or to China is going to be. But when your plumbing is broken, when your toilet is overflowing or you’ve got a pipe a broken in your in your basement, that’s not a job that can be outsourced to another part of the world. You need a real warm body on-site fixing it.
If you’ve got the skills to do that kind of work, on-site fixing those problems, you’re never, ever, ever gonna be out of work.
That’s a mental model that will work today: learn a skill, learn a trade, don’t bother with college.
There are very few jobs that require a college degree.
I’d like to hear your thoughts about mental models – ones that work, ones that don’t.
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