Over a month ago, we cleaned and rearranged our kitchen cupboards and drawers, moving various things around including the cutlery. It didn't move far, just one draw over to the right, but still, I find myself opening the wrong drawer when looking for a fork.
Old habits, Die Hard
Yippee-ki-yay, Motherfucker.
I wonder how much of the challenge we face in the world is brought on by our learned habits. If you consider how many people blame their current existence on their parents, this should indicate the potential of the problem. If so many of us feel that we can't change our learned behavior from childhood, how are we expected to change what we have learned culturally?
We have become accustomed to having people manage our lives for us, governments, corporations, social platforms - that protect us for a cost. A world of reliance where the value they give is convenience, while the value they extract may outweigh the benefits. It is not that everything they do is bad, it is that it is a process of give an inch and they will take a mile and what we have given over is most of what makes us unique as humans.
There is a concept of competitive cognitive artefacts, things that compete with us for skills. For example, there are plenty of these in the personal tech arena, where things as simple as a digital phonebook has replaced our need to commit numbers to memory and things like Google means we don't have to commit anything to memory. While this should save "bandwidth" to spend on other things, the less we exercise our skillsets, the less capable they become. This happens in many facets of life, including the forming of relationships, which we have outsourced to corporations like Tinder.
But, our life management skills have also been lessened to a great degree by our continual outsourcing of activity that we used to manage in-house, ourselves. We rely on employers to provide us work and income, banks to manage our money, governments to provide for our well-being and corporations to offer the goods and services we need to live, or want to live with. For a long time now, very little of our lives we actually do ourselves, yet we feel like we have skills and agency.
While we complain about the state of the world and our personal position in it, what we are actually doing is complaining about the things that we have enabled to exist and supported to take root and grow. We can blame the governments for our economic position or a corporation like McDonald's to make us fat, but all decisions are opportunity cost based, all markets driven by supply and demand of some kind or another. the opportunity of convenience is often saddled with the potential cost to our skill set in that arena, as when we rely on a crutch, our legs become weak.
Sure, there are times we may need something to lean on for our legs are already weakened, but when healthy people start acting like the ill, it is a slippery slope that will increase our reliance on support providers. We can see this in the social platforms where we give up our rights for convenience and then complain about being targeted and marketed to, as well as not having privacy and being demonetized when we are deemed bad for profits or, no longer necessary for profits. We throw up our arms and threaten to leave, but who are we kidding, where will most of us go without the skills necessary to provide for ourselves?
Of course, this is where crypto is looking to change the status quo, as it targets the economy and therefore the participants within it by offering alternatives - but each decision has that opportunity and the cost, with the cost of crypto being that it is going to require doing what we haven't done collectively for a very long time - take responsibility as individuals. This requires rediscovering the lost art of "self-management" and the development of skills that will reduce our reliance on what is fast a centralized bank of authorities and start to build both self-sufficiencies and a network of independent providers that can be trusted - which is where blockchain comes into it.
This process takes time, but it has to be done by individuals with intention, if those people want to have some control over the direction of their lives. It is not that we have to do it all alone, it is just that we need to each be able to do some of it while providing something for others that can leverage us, while we leverage them. In essence, we become a mass tribe of hunter gatherers again, where some hunt and some will gather, but all will participate in the well-being of each other in some way.
The thing is, that the world we have created isn't "that bad" as we have been able to organize ourselves at a global level to face issues (create them too) and collaborate on masse for pretty good outcomes, though far from perfect. The problem with it is that in order to do this, we have built a quickly tightening source of providers who with their accumulation of wealth and power, have the ability to accumulate more. They have the opportunity to do this because of the way we have organized our demand and support, the cost is that it is untenable and will lead to a collapse as the concentration at the top gets too heavy and the entire system falls down.
What we want to do is be able to improve upon the model, which means ensuring that the economic collapses that so many people think are necessary, don't happen. Recessions are a feature of the current economic system because the system is fundamentally flawed in the way it operates, not because it has to be this way. The system is so broken in so many ways that the driver of it is non-existent assets that have nothing to do with the practical considerations of life itself. It breaks because while the majority of participants just go about living their lives, those "entrusted" (the outsourced authorities we hire) to manage activity, are more interested in extending their own wealth and power model, than creating a system that benefits all.
We aren't the hunters and gatherers, we are the hunted and gathered.
While we are herded into a global tribe, we are managed like cows to be milked on a farm and slaughtered when our milk production doesn't cover the cost of feed. To change this model, we essentially have to take responsibility for ourselves. Yet - who wants to do that?
Responsibility is work and investment and while there is the potential for reward, it means taking risks. We are already risk averse as humans, but we have also been culturally programmed to reduce our exposure to failure by relying on a centralized authority to manage us - while we still fail - it doesn't feel like "we" failed - instead, they failed. We have someone to blame for the mismanagement of our lives we experience, the people we have paid to manage our lives.
People talk about the "powers that be" as if it is a group that has orchestrated their position, without realizing that we gave those in power their position, by continually giving up our responsibility in return for convenience and a sense of security. "Sense of security" isn't security - there is no such thing as secure, as that requires certainty, and the only certainty is that everything is uncertain.
It is all about our own habits and the way we manage our lives. If we continue to give up our skills and self-sufficiencies, we will continue to become increasingly skill-less and reliant on others. It isn't convenient to rely on each other, it isn't convenient to build trusted relationships, it isn't convenient to support many sources globally, it isn't convenient to hunt and gather rather than being provided for by a central authority.
But, it is getting more convenient by the day. Eventually, the culture flips from one of reliance to one of responsibility and new habits emerge.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
