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.
Hi guys, hope you
enjoyed today’s video.
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If you want to watch more
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Take care,
see you soon, Adrian out.
