Let's face it, humans are pathetic creatures.
It is not that we have to be, it is just that we tend to be, because we are wired with some eccentricities that put us in the way of ourselves. Many of these circuits are both feature and flaw, where in one context they can empower us, and another crush us. A simple example of this is our desire for sweet food, where it was a signal that food was okay to eat and rich in nutrients, and the sugars helped our brains grow. But now we can have it whenever we want and in any volume, the feature has become a flaw that sees us with spiralling health issues like obesity, depression and ironically, reduction in thought ability.
We are also lazy.
Lazy is a feature.
It helps us because being lazy has encouraged us to develop and innovate, finding ever-easier ways to accomplish what we need to do. Whether it was sharping a stick to a point to help us hunt, or creating a robot vacuum cleaner so we didn't have to do the strenuous task of walking around our own home for ten minutes. Laziness creates a desire to avoid and when there is also a need attached, we are pretty good at developing technologies to help.
However, it is also a flaw, because one of the other circuits we have as humans is the weighting we put on how we feel right now in this moment, or in a close future. This means that our laziness feature optimizes for now, even if we are going to be heavily negatively impacted in the future. Similar to eating what we shouldn't eat too often, our laziness combines with our desires means that we end up optimising our choices in ways that do not support our wellbeing, our growth, our financial health, and every other part of life a person might find important.
While I am no expert at doing this myself and probably in the bottom 50% of success rate, I think that we should use the optimisation feature readily, but intentionally. We should investigate and choose where we are going to set our defaults and then create systems that keep us aligned. For instance, with how we eat, how we move, how we rest, how we invest and how we socialise. These key areas impact heavily on our daily life and entire life experience, so they shouldn't be left up to unintentional chance, but intentional decision making.
Once we have worked out what kind of experience we want to have, then we can go about optimising and automating the process to make it easier, but with an intentional feedback and review process, to ensure that we continue to be aligned, or if we want to adjust and change the direction of any part of our experience. However to do this requires us to invest energy into thought, discovery, planning and practice. We have to be open to some failure, some readjustment, some walk-backs. But do this for key areas, and I believe we would have a much more rewarding daily experience.
But optimisation is only useful in some areas and when we are looking to grow our experience, optimisation can move from feature to flaw, where we keep doing the same without exploring alternatives. Optimisation means we can get stuck in our ways, rather than expanding. So what we need to bake into our experience is randomisation so that we can expose ourselves to disruption. Disruption is what we try to avoid with our optimisation, but without it we will become stale and stagnate. In nature and the universe, disruption is a constant, but because we have got so good at optimising, we feel that we can secure some level of stability, until it breaks. And human rules always break, nothing we create can last in an environment we don't have complete control over.
So we should also consider what parts of our life can remain unoptimised and where we can accept disruption, risk and uncertainty. One area not to optimise is our creative self, so that we can be free to think, to move, to act as freely as we can - where we can be a bit messy, and non-judgemental of the outcome, immersing ourselves into the process. Another is our education, our learning - we can be open to new ideas and thoughts and be prepared to make mistakes to learn and dive deep, not quickly. Another part we might not want to over-optimise are our hobbies - if you enjoy it, savour the experience rather than force it and if it doesn't happen, that is okay.
And lastly for now, while I said we should optimise how we socialise, I do not mean to make every relationship into a business transaction with an expected ROI. I mean that we ensure that we have created space in our lives where we routinely put ourselves in social situations that support our growth, even if uncomfortable. And the time spent with people that inspire, encourage, or help our development in any way, isn't an inefficient use of time - it is part of being human.
Our optimisation abilities have lead to a great deal of technological innovation, however the desire to constantly make things more efficient has made us increasingly robotic in the way we behave. We are increasingly predictable, increasingly thinking more narrowly as a species, and increasingly hitting up against disruption from the universe warning us that attachment to the structures we have built, is a fool's game.
Life isn't convenient, nor should it be. Life is a challenge and the goal isn't to survive for as long as possible, but to do as much as possible with the life we have. That doesn't mean travel and see the world, it means to use our senses to experience the world and explore our capabilities to create connections with others. At the end of the day, the relationships we have are all we have in this world and optimising them for profit is costing us everything we value.
People are messy. You and I are too.
Don't be lazy in a way you don't live.
Be lazy so you live more.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
And you may be rewarded.
