Jargogled Impressions.

Jonathan Franzen said something along the lines of, people who are the most stuck up about authenticity are probably the least authentic people.

I have heard from psychological research that people who are constantly thinking about happiness are likely the unhappiest and there’s a direct causality here.

I guess the same can be said about existential dread – the more you think about mortality, the more you’d drown in existential questions.

In business, if we extend this logic, leaders who are the most vocal about culture likely take culture seriously, but if their hiring patterns are not rigidly designed around the ever-shifting cultural priorities, then their talk is basically loose talk.

As an ex-consultant, I have closely observed many organizations across industries as a visitor. And these are organizations with strong brand recall and association with a particular business culture. Across hospitality, software, insurance, life sciences, etc. these organizations have a mission statement and an espoused culture. It used to surprise me how the ones most focused on, say, being digital-first and consumer-centric, had in fact glaring holes in their internal organizational and IT setups. Many enterprise software companies with some cutting edge market offerings struggle with actually adopting the same tooling and software internally for their own processes. While Amazon is famous for crafting internal tools around processes and turning those around as commercial products, most companies fail at adopting their own products and services.

We all know people who are constantly complaining about the amount of work they have, the meetings they are double/triple booked on, the relentless pace of unread emails sitting in their inboxes. These are the same professionals who seem to be always busy – no matter the day, month, year.

Such behaviors are a bit different from confirmation bias though. Confirmation bias is the habit of looking at information selectively such that it aligns automatically with a preconceived notion or idea.

But with such behaviors, people surface ideas more frequently, and in doing so they are prone to prescribing for themselves a process they unconsciously tie themselves with and never seem to come out of. For instance, those who talk about productivity so much often end up spending their time finessing the tools (aka notion, Roam Research, Coda, Evernote, etc.) or their processes (Eisenhower, OODA, Pomodoro, etc.).

Missionaries spread the word on their religion and end up talking at length about their faith. They often become hostage to the beliefs they so prolifically espouse, and in so doing, they end up relegating the goals they started with when they embarked on this journey – to help people, to alleviate suffering. We could ascribe these tendencies to evil, but often people exhibit these behaviors as they are prone to fall in line with the processes and the mental blocks they have so carefully but unconsciously crafted.

Trolls revel as pranksters in the pseudonymous online game. However their pursuit of “schadenfreude with bite” can get dismantled when met with indifference. When not paid any attention, trolls move on to a different area of operation. 

In a sense then, when we overly focus on some things, we end up trolling ourselves. We end up reveling in our own aggrievement, and in turn can create a perpetual machine of agony and dissatisfaction.

Instead, do this: try to be indifferent to the majority of things happening in your life when it comes to outcomes. Pay heed to your efforts and be conscious about it, but when it comes to the outcomes inculcate a degree of indifference to things other than the few that you most care about. Doing so can end up taking away a lot of hurt, offense, sadness, and anxiety that you have to deal with. People tend to equate this with a buddhist mindset – taking sorrow as part and parcel of our lives and as something that is essential for us to live. Sure, it’s that but sorrow is more profound that we mostly deal with in our lives. For the day to day setbacks – or the million little pin pricks – we need something more tactical than a philosophical thought. After all, when you are down and under, you would be hard pressed to surface these abstract ideals and leverage them to pick yourselves up. Instead, what we generally need is more a tool that helps us navigate these treacherous waters rather in-differently and unconsciously.

Extended cognition has been proven to be an important driver of mankind’s rise to the top of the pecking order of living things. Our ability to extend our brain to the physical environment and tools around us helps us expand the scale and reach of our brains – both for retention as well as for quick decision-making. Writing has been for long this tool of extended cognition. Computers and mobile phones have recently become our extended brains and are increasingly making inroads into what was earlier primarily our brain’s R&R. With AI, this trend is only going to extend further, even far into the realms we do not know today. A few decades from now, we’d be willing to take dependency on AI tools which would work as much as a black-box as our brains are today but as they will be able to do the job for us, we’d be happy to dump these tasks and focus on more novel areas of operation for humans. What would those be if AI tools will take over a number of human facets of work? 

Anyways, in much the same way as extended cognition, we must do away with our abstract philosophies and instead extend our philosophies to the physical world around us. When you think less about the big moral and philosophical questions and instead design tasks that abstract them away, (concerned about human existential catastrophe? – stop thinking about it and instead channel your cognitive energy into contributing to our effort to combat climate change) you would be doing yourselves a huge favor. Sometimes, being ignorant and a fool is what’s required to orchestrate our day-to-day lives around joy as opposed to perpetual anxiety. 

P.S: I think Kierkegaard would approve.