There is a mental model called inversion.
According to inversion, when we face a daunting conundrum,
the most pertinent course of action is to think backwards.
Namely, by going back to the fundamentals of the issue
and trying to deconstruct its main constituents,
we end up increasing the chances of solving it.
Or at least decreasing the chances of allowing it to inflict misery upon us.
Inversion, despite its very useful nature,
is an arcane term for most people.
Most people ignore inversion and they do so in a very irresponsible fashion.
They firmly believe that the best way to solve a problem is just by
capitalizing on conventional wisdom and preconceived notions.
They cling to safe patterns that they feel accustomed to
and they repeat these patterns perpetually without questioning
or without the willingness to test something more innovative.
The origins of this behavior are multifarious.
For starters, we have the path of least resistance.
This has its origins in physics where it is used as a heuristic
that describes the approximation of the tendency to the least energy state.
In colloquial language, we use it to allude to the proclivity of humans
to avoid personal effort or confrontation.
Then we have the notions of ego and identity.
When a person is faced with a situation
that challenges the essence of their identity,
that is the substrate of their belief system,
the mere thought of challenging this belief system
convulses the backbone of their being.
Finally, we need to deal with the unbearable struggle entailed
in every aspect of the fabric of the societies we have created.
Humans weren’t ready to face the ramifications
of being primal beings in technologically evolved worlds.
Despite the fact that living conditions keep improving
and wellness indexes keep rising,
psychologically, humans aren’t doing well.
Many philosophers and psychologists have
attempted to shed light on the ways to deal with this predicament,
with Jung being the one that has offered the most intriguing one:
Every person has a shadow
that is comprised of the darkest facets of one’s character,
and the way to battle and eventually control the shadow
is to encourage the emergence of the heroic element within our psyche.
Unfortunately, not all of us can embrace the heroic aspect of our personality
and, thus, we end up in a perennial state of struggle and grievance.
As you can imagine, it takes a combination of
courage, emotional resilience and tenacity to be ready
to navigate within this complex construction that we have assembled.
And the interesting part is that due to entropy
and due to our proclivity towards growth,
complexity increases exponentially.
There is no way to avoid that and, for better or for worse,
the best idea is to make peace with complexity
in order to alleviate the frustration that it causes.
The word complexity originates from the word complex,
which means “composed of interconnected parts.”
The reason I use the etymology of the word complexity
is to allow awareness to grow through understanding.
I have always been a huge proponent of the systems thinking philosophy
and one of my strongest beliefs
has always been that confusion is a result of a lack of integration
of parts within thinking systems.
We become confused because something is missing,
or because something doesn’t feel right.
The composition of interconnected parts that gives rise to complexity
is not in tune with our awareness and, as a result,
the melody of our world becomes distorted.
Humans don’t like distortion.
Or at least we are not programmed to like it.
Our role is to become maestros of our part of the world
and orchestrate the right composition through an elaborate process
of wise selection of distinct elements.
We can’t really become maestros of the whole world
because the whole world is beyond our scope of understanding
and the composition becomes too vast.
When the composition becomes too vast,
it feels like a mish-mash of chaotic elements
and we end up floating in an ocean of
far-fetched possibilities and opportunities.
Nobody likes to float aimlessly.
Nobody likes to feel lost.
This somewhat lengthy but necessary introduction served as a prelude
to the challenging question: “what should I do with my life.”
This is a question so common, but at the same time so potent,
that I don’t really know how to handle it whenever I need to face it.
It is strongly related to complexity
and one cannot go about answering it without showcasing
a rather basic understanding of how complexity affects
almost every decision we have to make.
The “what should I do with my life” question
arises usually when complexity has overwhelmed the individual
to such a degree that decision making becomes quite arduous,
even for the simplest events in life.
The amount of external stimuli
that increases exponentially through technology and through social networks,
affects our possibilities and also our desires.
When we are interconnected with so many agents around the world,
we feel that we want everything,
even if we don’t really possess the capacity
to imagine what everything would feel like.
I guess that’s why everyone is so enamored
with the idea of parallel universes.
We want so many things that only multiple
interconnected versions of ourselves can offer that luxury.
In this perilous landscape,
most of us fail to recognize one paramount detail about human nature:
We are quite fallible creatures
and it is this fallibility that we need to reduce
in order to make our experience more tolerable
and eventually come up with
sagacious decisions when it comes to
"what should I do with my life."
In this current point in time,
two seem to be the most pertinent rules
we need to follow in order reduce fallibility:
To pick our battles wisely and to embrace slowness.
When it comes to struggle, you need to be ready to fight it.
You need to be ready to actually fight every single actor
that is imposing more struggle upon your world.
Because struggle in itself is a very abstract notion.
What exactly constitutes struggle?
Struggle doesn’t commence organically.
It manifests itself via interaction and conflict with entities
that don’t share the same interests, needs, and belief systems.
Every goal you have, every process you try to put in place,
every dream you want to materialize is susceptible
to hurdles and unpredictable events.
The world feels like a huge battlefield
and you need to be ready not to just fight,
but to fight the right battles.
It is a fundamental principle of strategic warfare
that each strategist needs to know their strengths and weaknesses
in order to understand their capacity to win.
But winning is not just related to fighting,
but also knowing when to fight and whom to fight.
When people embark on endeavors nowadays,
most of the time, they do so without properly evaluating their strategy.
They ask the question “what should I do with my life”
and they haven’t even taken baby steps
towards cultivating more self-awareness
and realizing what they are actually capable of.
I know people that want elusive things
and keep fantasizing about them
week after week, month after month,
year after year, yet nothing happens.
When you create fantasies about future events
in your life that keep remaining fantasies,
you start to lose touch with reality
and you just bolster the delusional aspect of your world.
When I meet such people, I tentatively ask them:
Have you prepared for the battles that you have to face?
The look on their face resembles an elegant mixture of
confusion, unpreparedness, and sometimes even embarrassment.
Then, I become more adamant and I tell them:
Don’t ask me “what should I do with my life.”
Just pick your battles and pick them wisely.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou introduced, back in 1988
in his Magnus opus “Being and Event,”
the philosophical notion of the term event.
According to Badiou, an event is an unpredictable break
in our everyday worlds that opens new possibilities.
What an event does is that it serves as a rupture in being
through which the individual finds realization
and reconciliation with truth.
In order, however, for this rupture to manifest itself
and have an impact on the constitution of the individual,
being there is not enough.
The individual needs to achieve oneness with the event itself.
This philosophy accounts for all sorts of events,
but the way I interpret it
is that it serves as an allusion to depth and slowness.
Famous physicist and philosopher Richard Feynman used to say that
“everything can become interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
That kind of thinking and way of life can’t emerge organically
in the fast-paced world we have created.
It requires taking a step back and realizing that
the only way to enact control over the processes
that we decide to internalize
is to slow down and take our time,
even if the whole world tells us otherwise.
Through slowness and depth emerges a new way of being.
One where the notion of time and experience is
re-engineered through the prism of meticulous introspection
and observation of our existence.
Not necessarily one that leads to over-analysis
and results in further paralysis,
but one where slow thought creates its own time and space
and hedges the individual from most calamities
that mindless living can beget.
With slowness and depth,
one can be always ready
and use whatever tools are in place at any given time.
Italians have a name for this:
arrangiarsi – more than ‘making do’ or ‘getting by’,
it is the art of improvisation,
a way of using the resources at hand to forge solutions.
With such a mindset,
you no longer need to ask “what should I do with my life.”
You are just ready to “do” whatever life throws at you.
Life can be difficult, I know.
But how often do we ponder our responsibility
in the hardships that we encounter?
How often do we just pause and reflect
on what is our role in how serendipity
enforces happenstances upon our experience?
We can’t just float aimlessly and expect life to make sense.
That’s why we sometimes need rules.
Even just two rules for life can make a big difference.
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Take care,
see you soon, Adrian out.