Part 1: The Umbrella Problem

My three-year-old brought me a puzzle game that he needed help with today.

The puzzle said: SAVE THE CAKE.

There was a cake with one lit candle and rain falling around it.

Before he handed it to me, he said, “I don’t know how to draw an umbrella.”

Honestly, good thinking.

Rain is falling on something that needs to stay dry. What keeps things dry in the rain?

An umbrella.

So I drew an umbrella over the cake.

It didn’t work very well.

The game accounts for gravity and basic physics, so the umbrella fell in a way that wasn’t particularly useful. On the second attempt, instead of drawing another umbrella, I drew a simple arch over the cake. I made it high enough in the middle that it wouldn’t hit the candle and wide enough that the rain would run down either side.

Puzzle solved.

And for some reason this little cake puzzle immediately got me thinking.

An umbrella was a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem. In real life, people figured out a long time ago that if water is falling out of the sky and you don’t want it falling on you, putting a portable canopy over your head works pretty well.

The problem only appears when we forget the distinction between the purpose and the thing we invented to accomplish it.

The puzzle never said:

DRAW AN UMBRELLA.

It said:

SAVE THE CAKE.

Those are very different instructions.

The moment I started thinking about making the umbrella look and behave more like an umbrella, I was solving the wrong problem.

The cake doesn’t give a shit whether the thing above it qualifies as an umbrella.

It needs to stay dry.

When the solution becomes the rule

We do this constantly.

Someone encounters a problem.

They discover a solution.

The solution works.

Other people learn the solution.

Eventually, enough time passes that people inherit the solution without necessarily inheriting the reasoning that produced it.

And somewhere along the way, this is one way we accomplish the purpose quietly becomes:

This is how it is done.

Those aren’t the same thing.

An umbrella has a shape because that shape serves a function. If circumstances change enough that another shape performs the function better, insisting that the solution continue looking like an umbrella doesn’t preserve the purpose.

It preserves the umbrella.

I think we do this with considerably more consequential things than cake.

We inherit ideas about what a good family looks like, what responsible adulthood looks like, what education should look like, what successful work looks like, what femininity and masculinity look like, what good parenting looks like, what faith looks like, what relationships look like.

And many of those forms didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

Somebody was trying to solve something.

Sometimes they were solving a real problem extremely well.

Sometimes they were solving a problem that no longer exists.

Sometimes they were solving their problem.

Sometimes the solution was compromised by fear, control, limited information or the conditions of the time.

And sometimes we’ve been faithfully reproducing the solution for so long that nobody remembers to ask what the hell the original problem was.

What is this for?

That’s becoming one of my favorite questions.

Not:

Why don’t I fit this structure better?

But:

What is this structure supposed to accomplish?

That question creates room.

Because once I understand the purpose, I can evaluate the form.

Maybe the form is brilliant.

Maybe I understand it better now and want to preserve it.

Maybe it needs modification.

Maybe there’s another way to accomplish exactly the same thing.

Or maybe I discover that I don’t actually agree with the purpose in the first place.

All of those possibilities become available when I’m no longer preoccupied with drawing the correct umbrella.

The danger of inherited forms

I don’t think the answer is to reject traditions, systems or inherited wisdom simply because they’re inherited.

That’s just conformity wearing an edgy little hat.

Sometimes people before us figured out some very good shit.

The point is to understand why.

What was this designed to protect?

What was it designed to produce?

What problem did it solve?

Does that problem still exist?

Does this form still accomplish its purpose?

And perhaps most importantly:

Have I mistaken the form for the purpose itself?

Because when that happens, something strange becomes possible.

We can preserve a solution so faithfully that we eventually sacrifice the very thing the solution was created to protect.