Learning to Live in the Liminal Space 😶‍🌫️

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake

Unavoidable Fundamental Question(s)

A few weeks ago, I turned 30 (🎉!!) and while I’ve never really been one to ascribe too much weight to my birthday the experience has given me some room to reflect on my past decade and look forward to the next. With that reflection, one fundamental question keeps coming up. It has many different forms and pops up in many different contexts (relationships, family, work, self, etc), but the core premise is always the same…

How do I live my best life?

This is a huge question and one with way too many broad strokes to tackle in one piece. If you get too close to it or try to define it too explicitly, it generally finds a way to wriggle away from your grasp through forcing a change in perspective (and thus forcing you to re-ask the question).

In my early 20’s I was living my “best” life in terms of my financial future and my career progression. I was able to work my way up the career ladder at a well respected company while saving up enough money to set myself up financially for the long term. Through the narrow lens of my bank account and my LinkedIn profile I was living my “best” life. But this life came at the cost of my free time, my peace of mind, and my ability to invest in relationships outside of work. Those were the tradeoffs inherent in my choices given my capacity at the time.

Currently, the pendulum of my life has swung in the opposite direction. I’ve used some of my savings from my early 20’s to change my priorities and invest more in my health (physical and mental), my freedom (in terms of ownership over my time), and my relationships (family, romantic, friends, etc). This has undoubtedly been a great investment for me in myself, but has also left me feeling a bit lost and alone at times in search of the deeper meaning and purpose I used to get from solving hard problems as part of a team greater than myself. By optimizing around new priorities, I traded some “best” aspects of my old life for a new set of “best” aspects in my new life.

No matter how you define “best” in this equation, there will always be some element(s) that get left out. Fundamentally, there is no objective right answer here. Whatever you optimize towards will naturally guide you away from other elements that you care about. Certain things in this equation are orthogonal to one another, and thus by saying yes to one you inherently say no to the other (or at least shades of yes and no, as not all tradeoffs are binary).

At the end of the day, this type of problem (or fundamental question) has a degree of subjectivity to it. The answer depends on the audience (you) and the context of your current environment and frame of reference to determine what best means to you at this point in time in your life. It’s the type of problem that by definition is a moving target that will naturally change as your lived experience changes your perspective and your goals/desires/etc shift as a result.

Using the optimization mental model here to try to find an objective “best” life doesn’t work. It will never be a reliable way to guide you to a clear answer. Whatever answer you find will be fragile and short-lived at best.

We need a new mental model.

Liminal Space

Ok… so how should I approach these subjective “moving target” questions? What’s a better way to think about these types of dynamic fundamental problems?

Today, I’d like to plant the seed of thinking about these vague subjective problems using the lens of liminal space.

Liminal space is a term that has multiple definitions depending on the domain. In AI (and mathematics), liminal space refers to all the unmapped space that exists in a multi-dimensional plane. In architecture, liminal space is the part of a room or building that is empty and a transition zone meant for passing through (like a hallway or an empty backroom). Regardless of the context, liminal space always refers to the idea of “unexplored terrain” - an area of mapped (or unmapped) territory that is not currently occupied, covered, or traversed at the present moment.

Personally, I believe that our lives contain liminal space as well (not in the physical sense of the word but in the metaphysical sense). By imagining that we all reside on a continuum of human thought and experience, I believe that visualizing where you currently reside on that spectrum and where the liminal space is in your life can help give a better frame of reference for tackling complex problems and helping you better understand your current situation. While not perfect, this lens provides more freedom than the optimization approach and allows for the ability to live in contradiction to past identities while still appreciating the nuance and complexity of the whole.

There doesn’t need to be an objective “best” answer.

There only needs to be more liminal space to explore.

Shedding Restrictive Labels

Allowing yourself to live in the liminal space leaves room for you to explore new identities while avoiding the trap of being boxed in by other people’s (or society’s) labels. Liminal space thinking opens the door for you to define your own game, map out your own playing field, and create your own definition of success. It’s a fluid mental model that doesn’t explicitly provide any goalposts and thus doesn’t put you in conflict with anyone else besides yourself.

Society at large (and human nature in general) is set up to try to simplify us and map our individualized experiences with labels and with data. Pop culture uses labels and tropes with implied connotations in the attempt to create connection and reduce people into well understood archetypes and narratives that garner attention (ex: “Druggie pop singer heads back to rehab after latest relapse”). Big tech does the same by using behavioral data and clever design tactics to bucket us into predefined categories that advertisers can target. Regardless of industry, across the board society generally tries to understand the world by simplifying people into numbers, categories, and narratives that can be easily defined, mapped, and modeled in an objective way.

By defining people via labels and data, there is an attempt to eliminate the fuzziness of the human experience and thus create an objective playing field on which problems can be simplified, optimized, and “solved”. This works for objective problems (ex: “how do I balance a household budget?”) but breaks down when trying to oversimplify subjective nuance into an objective lens (ex: “how do I live my best life?”). For individualized human problems, the same labels and data that help us in one domain can narrow our perspective and box us into a singular identity and way of thinking.

Sometimes the answer is not to try harder to solve the problem. Sometimes, the “answer” is to admit that this is not a problem to be solved in the first place, to remove the labels and connotations that surround it, and to just let it live in liminal space.