Schrödinger's Life

On living without asking for anything

Photo by Christopher Bill on Unsplash

Have you ever not done something, because if you started, you’d find out whether you could actually do the thing? Or maybe you avoided talking to someone about something important, because if you never ask for anything, no one can disappoint you?

I call this living Schrödinger’s Life, after the quantum physicist’s metaphorical cat in the box.¹ You all probably know of this thought experiment, whose party name is “the paradox of quantum superposition.” The thought experiment is designed to help people like me with English degrees understand how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics (that’s the school of Bohr and his acolytes) seems to prove that things can exist in a multiplicity of states until they’re looked at, basically.

In this thought experiment, an absolute sociopath has put a cat in a box with a flask of poison, a dollop of radioactive material, and a Geiger counter that will smash the flask if it detects radiation. The natural assumption is that the cat will die. But according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat is (very creepily) both dead AND alive until we open the box and look at it (fixing its position), and see whether or not it is indeed pining for the fjords.

This thought experiment was meant to point out how ridiculous Schrödinger found the Copenhagen interpretation (how can something be both dead and alive, simultaneously?), and yet people latched onto it, both because it’s an unsettling and interesting thought experiment and because it does a beautiful job of helping people understand what is a fundamental paradox of quantum physics, an entire field we don’t fully understand and which is fiercely contested (here is a fun book about this subject, if you’re curious).

The cat in the box is also a great psychological metaphor, which helps explain why this tortured cat escaped the lecture hall and joined Pavlov’s dogs in the collective zeitgeist. It’s a fun metaphor! As an english major, I don’t really understand physics but I can and will beat a metaphor to within an inch of life (or its simultaneous death, if it’s in a box with a flask of poison, a geiger counter, and a dollop of radioactive material). And this metaphor helps me explain some curious behavior that I’ve seen in myself and others.

For example, as a professor, I have witnessed students scupper their graduation, failing sophomore classes as seniors, classes I know they could waltz through as I know their abilities. Obviously I can’t read their thoughts, but I suspect they do this because it is the one class that is keeping them from graduating. Somewhere in the dark recesses of their brains, a voice is whispering to them that if they don’t graduate, they can’t succeed or fail at life. They’ve climbed into their own lil Schrödinger’s box, and my emails asking them to send me anything for a research paper, really anything!, so that I can pass them, go unheeded.

That said, I always empathize with these students because I have built my own Schrödinger’s boxes. Most recently, I put off applying for full professor for a year because if I didn’t apply, I couldn’t not get it. This is dumb! I’m already administrating a robust, very complicated, and very busy MFA program. In other words, I’m already doing the work of a full professor. And I’m not getting paid as a full professor! Insisting on camping out in my own little Schrödinger’s box meant I probably missed out on a year of extra salary (and a year of that compounding retirement money, etc).²

More problematically, I have packed and studiously observed many a relationship-orientated box, full of radioactive materials and flasks of poison and irritated cats. Sadly, I would rather eat a flask of poison than talk about my feelings, not because I don’t know my feelings or that I’m bad at communicating, but because if I never tell anyone how I feel about anything, they can’t tell me they feel differently. This gives me a false sense of control—like I can eke out a relationship that may, in fact, be dead, if I never open the box by asking any questions or initiating any serious conversations.

Of course, as a friend (who is also a therapist) reminded me on their podcast during an interview, this stance means I can also never know if I am loved. We were speaking about creativity, but relationships are a very similar cat, in a very similar box. If I don’t take risks, I don’t get rejected and I don’t get judged. But, as he pointed out, I also can’t let people see all of me, which means I actually can’t be loved. What a terrible paradox (almost as terrible as the paradoxes at the heart of quantum physics). In building our little Schrödinger’s lives, we give ourselves the illusion of safety, but we’ve actually amputated the parts of ourselves that are most lovable and engaging—the soft, flawed human parts to which other soft, flawed humans can connect.

Just to warn you: if you’re waiting for the volta, when I tell you how I’ve figured this all out and what I can teach you, you’re waiting in vain. I don’t have a pithy admonition or piece of advice to give anyone. This is something I really struggle with, and I think it’s just hard to be honest and open with people who hold our tender hearts or our even more tender egos in their hands. And we do risk real rejection. That’s the rub. I think a lot of stuff about “putting yourself out there” and “being vulnerable” tries to assure their audience of an equation in which this is how we win at life. If we’re finally vulnerable, we’ll be seen and appreciated and wheeee! We’ll get everything we’ve ever wanted. And that’s not untrue. I think opening up and having desires and expressing those desires is an important step on a journey that can lead to us achieving what we really want.

Eventually.

Because we might actually be in a position where this person, or this job, or this goal might not be for us. We open up, we’re vulnerable, we ask for what we want and…the person or the company or whatever gatekeeper says “No.” Instead we learn we are barking up ye olde wronge tree. And then we have to give up whatever fantasy we hold about them or about our lives with that promotion, or that goal achieved, or whatever.

This is what Cheryl Strayed talks about in Tiny, Beautiful Things with her own perfect, beautiful metaphor, in response to a query about how to live with making really difficult choices:

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

I love that image of the brave soul smartly saluting the life they didn’t get. But when we really wanted something (a dream, a partner, an opportunity), it would be really easy to become not the saluter but, instead, a straggly-haired ghost from folklore, forever stalking the widow’s walk from which she gazed out at sea for the husband that never returned, even after death. We can also become obsessed with what could be, even as we’re living in the moment, and it’s a moment that isn’t serving us. In the past, there were times that I was so unhappy with someone or something, and yet I was so fixated on this beautiful mirage I knew was just over the horizon that I stayed, rather than choose to open the box and see the cat was now a stinky, gelatinous mass.

So I think what I’m saying isn’t something fun or quotable. I’m really just saying that this shit is hard, but we don’t serve ourselves when we refuse to open the box. Indeed, Schrödinger’s life is a form of self-abnegation. We choose fantasy over truth, and we can’t see our true selves or our true needs when we’re so focused on the contents of a metaphorical box that may or may not hold a dead cat. That said, it’s taken me about four decades on this earth even to start attempting to choose myself, and reality, over the beautiful dreams I’ve been wont to drape over rotten, dead cats. And I constantly wish life were a beautiful fantasy. But instead it’s hard work, and if we don’t choose ourselves and choose reality, we’ll never be able to put our precious energy and even more precious attention on the things that choose us back, the things we should be focused on, whether than a dumb, metaphorical, maybe-dead feline.

So I guess that’s my pithy quote. In this New Year, let’s all choose ourselves, and reality, even if that means identifying and unpacking the Schrödinger’s lives we’ve so carefully built and think we need to maintain. They don’t serve us.

Take the cat out and bury it, then move on to what’s real and what’s reciprocal.

Finally, I’m sorry if you love cats and you found this post traumatizing. I’m also sorry if you love metaphors, and you also find this post traumatizing. I promise no real cats were harmed in the making of this newsletter. I can’t say the same thing about Metaphor, but she’s resilient.

1. NB: Schrödinger was a brilliant physicist, but, because we can never have nice things, also a pedophile. That said, he did manage to avoid espousing nazism, which a lot of his other non-Jewish physicists couldn’t hack.

2. I just submitted my portfolio! I’ll let you know if the cat is, indeed, dead. ;)