There is a mental model called inversion. According to inversion, when we face a
daunting problem, the best 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 unknown term for most of us. We are kind of “programed” to believe
that the best way to solve a problem is just by capitalizing on conventional wisdom and what
“already works.” We cling to safe patterns that we feel accustomed to and we repeat these patterns
perpetually without questioning or without the willingness to test something different.
The roots of this behavior are many. For starters, we have the path of least
resistance. In physics, “the path of least resistance is the physical or metaphorical
pathway that provides the least resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity,
among a set of alternative paths.” In colloquial language,
we use it to allude to the proclivity of humans to avoid doing the hard things.
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 destabilizes the backbone of their being.
Finally, we need to deal with the struggle entailed in many levels of the societies we
have created. Humans weren’t ready to face the consequences 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.
Complexity has infected the fabric of society and things that seemed simple in the past,
now require more effort than before. This makes us feel sad, frustrated, stressed, and lost.
As you can imagine, it takes a combination of courage, emotional resilience and tenacity
to be able to properly navigate within this complex of landscape.
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 symphony 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/conductors of our part
of the world and orchestrate the right symphony. We can’t really become maestros of the whole world
because the whole world is beyond our scope of understanding and the symphony becomes too vast.
When the symphony 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 is the meaning of life?” This question is so common, but
at the same time so potent, that I don’t really know how to handle it whenever I have to face it.
Creating meaning in life is a very personal process.
I can’t answer this question for you. What I can say, is that the creation of
meaning is affected by complexity and one cannot create meaning without showcasing
a rather basic understanding of how complexity affects almost every decision we have to make.
The amount of external stimuli that increases exponentially
through technology and through social networks, affects our pursuit of meaning.
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 enjoys the idea of parallel universes. We want so
many things that only multiple interconnected versions of ourselves can offer that luxury.
In this weird landscape, most of us fail to recognize one paramount detail about human nature:
We are quite fallible creatures, meaning we are capable of making mistakes or being wrong,
and it is this fallibility that we need to reduce in order to make our experience
more tolerable and eventually come up with a proper meaning for our lives.
In the current point in time, two seem to be the most relevant rules we need to
follow in order reduce fallibility: To pick our battles wisely and to embrace slowness.
Struggle is a very abstract notion. What exactly constitutes struggle?
Struggle doesn’t commence organically. It manifests itself via interaction and
conflict with entities and systems that don’t share the same interests, needs, and beliefs.
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 we embark on endeavors nowadays, most of the time,
we do so without properly evaluating our strategy.
We ask the question “what is the meaning of life” and we haven’t even taken baby steps
towards cultivating more self-awareness and understanding the world better.
We want elusive things and keep fantasizing about them week after week, month after month,
year after year, yet nothing happens. When we create fantasies about future events in
our life that keep remaining fantasies, we start to lose touch with reality and we just
bolster the delusional aspect of our world. Whenever I reach this point, I take a step
back and ask myself: Have you prepared for the battles that you have to face?
Before you start chasing the meaning of life, 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 rapture in being through which
the individual finds realization and reconciliation with truth. In order, however,
for this rapture 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 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 constructed. It requires taking a step back and realizing
that the only way to assume 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 place and hedges the individual from most calamities that mindless living can create.
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 – 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 is the meaning of life.”
You are just ready to create meaning with whatever life throws at you.