Jargogled Impressions.

As kids, we never let the impossibility of our desires keep us from staking out our claims. The probabilities of success behind an endeavor was unimportant in how we approached things around us. Counting the stars, building a rocket ship, creating your own house, building a cave, aspiring to be a cricketer, or an actor; we were able to dissociate our fascination for things that we saw around us with what we could realistically become or do. Then, we grew up and tore these silly mental models apart. And let the world dictate to us what we could or could not do.

If you review the current literature around personal improvement and growth, you would find numerous studies anchoring on our natural instincts as a kid (being curious, unbiased, responses to stimuli, open-minded, unafraid to ask questions, imaginative, creative, Pavlovian tendencies, etc.) and how, going back to these default modes of operations can help us grow and expand our capabilities. These studies seem to be cashing in on the massive trend towards personal optimization that takes the ideals of personal freedom and liberties to the next level by releasing the factors of success and growth from its clutches of luck, circumstances, and good fortune; And if you still cannot succeed, that’s on you and you alone.

I read somewhere about people from diverse occupational domains like entrepreneurship, arts, design calling themselves crazy as they went about breaking the established wisdom and default modes of operation in their respective fields. So somehow, we went from everyone being able to think about how to be crazy in our ideas and our aspirations, to being pawns in this big game of societal life. And let only a few frontier-crazy folks lead the way towards being remarkable.

How did we come to this impasse? What decisions and governing conditions drove us towards being hesitant in our interactions with the world; was it the fear of failure that we imbibed early on in our lives that led us to constantly seek the tried and the tested? Taking risks is of course a spectrum and all of us, in our own small way, take risks at some points or other in our lives. But some end up taking risks that go above and beyond the appetite most of us can have, and in their perseverance and grit, chart out a path that we then begin following. What separates those people with the ability to take risks from the rest? Risk-taking ability is a spectrum and not a binary attribute – and depend as much on the context as it does on the person’s abilities. But research has consistently indicated a core, foundational personality trait that often drives probability of risk-taking. What drives the cognitive and emotional capabilities that affect our ability to assess and respond to risks?  

Is it your standard nature versus nurture debate that can shed light on this? Numerous studies have either debunked or asserted the importance of genes in the IQ and confidence that humans can exhibit. Genetic advantage or not, I do think that nurture has a role to play in modulating the ways we interact with the world around us as well. How we perceive the world around us affects the intensity of our play with it and this perception can be attuned through guided understanding of the human psychology, history, philosophy, and epistemology. Our brain is shaped through our interactions; our interactions create a flywheel effect on everything we do subsequently; and that has a big impact on how we lead our lives. Our education system then, in a sense, has a heavy load to bear in helping us understand the world around us, or at least give us a mental model to scaffold the myriad complexities of the world in manageable, explainable, and digestible boxes.

Our education system and the associated methods/tools we use reflects our current best thinking on inculcating the spirit of enquiry for the young of today; we try to keep these tools up to date by constantly testing and assessing the methods we deploy today to train our future generations. If you believe that the world has changed dramatically for the better (as do I), then you will find the education system of today to be working well. There will always be a need to refresh these methods and tools for sure, but broadly, given the pace of technological and societal change we are witnessing, it seems the flywheel of education and progress is humming quite well. You can always throw the wrenches of poverty, extremism, tribalism, inequality, climate change, mindless capitalism, etc. on the progress that we have made over the past century. But problems will continue to be the yang for the yin of the progress, a balancing force. No rise or growth can come without a corresponding opposing force to challenge it.

So broadly, my focus is not on the forest of human civilization that the education system tries to address but the trees of individual desires and ambitions that we instill in ourselves from an early age. At a more micro level, the progress does break down, evident in the discontent and unhappiness I see people around me carrying in their daily lives. Some of these are existential angsts and cannot be done away with. But in many cases, it’s the desire to be heard, to be seen, to be valued that comes in the way of them being happy with their lives. This most basic and communal of human desires leads to many a lost soul who carry with them a self-made guilt of not carrying through the obligation of being valuable to the world. But none of us really have any obligation to be useful in this world, except of course to the people around us (family, friends, etc.). This idea of being at the frontier of human progress has been drilled into our psyche through the stories of human achievement, through the massive social media outbursts that broadcast every big and small accomplishments. It leads us, naturally, to be extra curious about the purpose of our existence. And we conclude, often, in the “evident” need to excel in a chosen discipline to leave behind something of value for the humanity we see milling around us.

Note that it’s not the meaninglessness behind these thoughts and ambitions that I want to highlight here and am not really advocating nihilism here, although it may seem to veer dangerously close to that. But releasing yourself from this responsibility of being “useful” may be, just maybe, what the doctor ordered in the times we live in today. Focusing instead on the things that excite and interest us, regardless of their practical implications, may be the perfect anti-dote to this relentless movement towards human progress that is driving people insane. Taking a walk in the woods to unearth the hidden life of nature and trees around us, looking up and wondering about our place in the multi-verse, reading fiction and leading a thousand lives are activities that don’t really have any “purpose” other than to immerse ourselves in the present. And they don’t need to be. These activities are the risks that you can take to craft meaning behind all the things we do in our pursuit of happiness.