No Such Journey

What is a journey?

An common refrain in internet writing is to announce the start of — or denote progress along — an individual's journey around ... something. This something is often a virtuous signal of some sort when self imposed: starting their weight loss journey, progress along a running journey, the end of my guitar journey, and unfortunately one of the most frequent, finding themselves along a cancer journey.

What Makes a Journey?

A journey is some combination of the following:

• An internal state change (I'm going somewhere emotionally or intellectually)
• An external state change (I'm going somewhere physically)
• Always has "steps" along the way
• Always has a start point
• Sometimes has an end point
• Usually self-imposed (Cancer being a critical exception here)

Being on a journey is a bit of a post-modern phenomenon though, and for some interesting reasons I think.

With the preface that Ngram's are a pretty weak signal, we can witness an uptick in this reference to journeys (writing, life, leadership, cancer, grief) starting in the 90s but really kicking off with mass adoption of the internet in the western world in the early 2000s. A good example of this is the dramatic upward spike in describing ones "writing journey" and "healing journey."

This language is fundamentally tied to the idea of self-improvement though, and the insane rise of self-help phenomena in the 1990s. According to sociologist Micki McGee, the self-help industry saw a dramatic rise in the early 90s, serving to shore up a decline in almost all other publishing realms — with 1/3rd of Americans owning one or more self help books by 2005. Today, self-help is a 13bil+ USD market (some interesting stats here, though I wouldn't take the data is reliable per se). The idea of self-help is at its core tied to this idea that one can re-invent the self with some combination of willpower and guided steps. The only thing standing between you and the you of your imagination is a journey.

The Best Journey

Ultimately, this is bullshit. Our capacity to construct ourselves is incredibly contingent on our environments. We have a perception that we can "self-fashion" (McGee writes about it here) our identities independent of the communities and context that brought us about (i.e. we didn't fall out of a coconut tree). The internet reinforces this perception through the shared experiences and cyclical user-generated marketing of many consumption communities — and that is good business. Hell, it's a foundation of the coaching and self-help industry generally, and central to a core tenant of self-help: that there is a "best" journey that you can pick.

A promise of "The Best" is a red herring, however. Websites like Wirecutter, outdoor gear lab, etc. are all predicated on this idea that there is a "best" product out there for your needs, and we happen to have some experts to tell us what works. The self-help ecosystem does a similar thing: the idea that there is a best way to approach a particular way of being, a particular life — usually from a lens of efficiency and time-to-acquisition. This approach becomes the prescriptive journey.

There are some very positive examples of this journey-based self help working: For example, Alcoholic's Anonymous describes an explicit journey towards sobriety via its steps, but creates a context for supporting that transformation through community, accountability, and acknowledgement of an identity that already (and will always) exists — that one is an alcoholic —, but that is engaged with each day through choosing sobriety. In this case, three qualities exist:

• The self and its identity already exist in a state
• The journey is to control an existing state
• The stages of the journey are connected and self-reinforcing

Unfortunately, we more frequently see negative examples. The most egregious examples are centered around consumption communities where purchasing better gear or a particular course becomes the pathway to mastery.

• Fitness communities often discuss supplement and purchases as core to a "journey" (/r/weightlifting and /r/running)
• Music communities emphasize purchased products over created output, a journey starts with a purchase (/r/guitar or /r/synthesizer)
• Fan communities emphasize "rare purchases" and belong through acquisition (For some reason /r/thinkpad is the epitome of this)

In each of these more negative cases, there's a different dynamic than the AA model we saw:

• The self is moving towards another self — with a paywall in-between
• The journey is to get to the you-who-does-a-thing from the you-who-does-not
• The stages of the journey are ambiguous and individual for those who made the journey

Narrative

Why do some journeys feel "noble" while others feel "icky"? What I've landed on is that the journeys that feel "noble" are the ones that have already happened. A journey is descriptive. It's something that happens to someone through some combination of circumstance, context, and self-determination within those bounds. A journey is highly individual and contingent, and as defined by its disruptions as much as anything else.

As a designer, a successful journey is framed as a description of someone's actual experience — with hypothesized interventions introduced along the way. We start from people's experience, and experiment with what might be from there. A prescriptive journey is destined to fail, with the designer designing for no one.

What if we want to embark on a journey for whatever reason? The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson comes to mind. In that series, he maps the story of many characters coming together and overcoming particular trials that cause a "snap" — a realization that of self and place that unlocks special powers and forwards an increasingly supernatural plot-line. Unlocking those powers involves an oath: "Life before Death; Strength before Weakness; Journey before Destination." That last is a continuous and effective reminder for those characters — all of whom are explicitly on the hero's journey — that they are incomplete. And at very stage, the journey splits, recurses, reverts. Part of what makes the journeys in that book relatable (and why it's several monster books long) is that the journey we EXPECT from that character is rarely how it turns out (for us or them).

If we project others' reflective narratives on our own path, we doom ourselves from the start. Perhaps one of the reasons the AA 12-step journey works so well is that there is no capacity for project — rather each step can only be personal and is taken alongside a intrinsically inclusive community. The "destination" is to continue living with yourself, and the journey is doing that every day. The analytics are how many days of sobriety exist between the start of the journey and now.

So how do we forge our own journeys? I think there are two paths:

1. The Emergent Journey
2. The Attrition Journey

An Emergent Journey is one that happens: you arrive at the destination. It happens naturally: the context and the circumstance side of things. My accidentally becoming a programmer while I was studied political science and eventually landing at IDEO: emergent journey and narrative. It works in retrospect, but good god don't follow my example. In some ways this is useless to reflect on because its one where — at best — our mechanism of controlling it is to put ourselves in the way of opportunity (or disaster). Right place, right time, and someone who becomes the right person.

An Attrition Journey is one where you have a destination you sought after. It will be absolutely painful to get to, but the reward seems worth it. This journey is measured in protracted efforts, small goals accumulating, and eventual shock when you emerge out the other side a different person. Many of those who have transitioned careers effectively experience this, eg. two Canadian friends who transitioned into software development did exactly this with brilliant results. I suspect this is also the experience of folk who go through AA.

The thing to realize about the attrition journey is that it feels linear when you describe it, but living it is like life as a shephard's tone. Continuously moving but never getting anywhere. The salvation only occurs at the inflection points: if you've ever practiced a piano piece and suddenly got that chord sequence to work and sound like you imagined; or suddenly figured out why R-squared works the way it does (I weirdly struggled with this); or threw the perfect pot after countless collapses and minor adjustments. That's the inflection point. And that's the part of the attrition journey that gets told.

So what makes this attrition journey work? I'd suggest the following:

• Find a community that can reinforce you as you becoming something that is You Plus (as opposed to someone else). Part of this is learning to spot the consumption communities and avoid them.
• Find a macro-motivator that makes the journey somewhat organic to serve as a bulwark if a localized motivator falls apart. This might be habit stacking for music practice; a study partner commitment; or taking on a paid gig that throws you outside your comfort zone.
• Understand the incremental steps and sequencing without being dogmatic (and be careful about eternal skill stacking). Reading biographies and then breaking those out into postit notes (instead of linear notes) can help here, i.e. they become tools to unblock, instead of prescriptive journeys.
• Do some kind of tracking. This can be a daily journal, a todo list you check off, or some public commitment. Whatever it is, the key part of attrition strategy is to continuously wear away at the problem — and tracking holds you accountable.

Odysseus just knew he had to get home. The Sirens, the Witch, the Cyclops, the Suitors — they're just part of the story that gets told after he set down his oar.