Shared understanding is something I have been interested in for a while and have written about in some of my earlier posts – Default in our stars, An IG Story* – among the most recent ones. While the posts were primarily on the individual context, my concern has also been at the societal and species levels because the ability to create and act on a shared understanding is what got us this far. Variety, serendipity, and the opportunity to debate, agree, disagree, identify biases, agree to disagree but hopefully in a civilised manner.
(more…)Tag: narrative
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The illegibility of freedom
I often blame evolution for my compulsive planning. “Blame” is probably the wrong word, since I think of it as one of only two factors that gave our species an edge. The ability to project – think about the future and come up with ideas on how to navigate it had, and continues to play, a role in survival. (The second is language, which gives us the ability to communicate and organise people around ideas). Projection leads to some level of planning that does at least two things. One, by charting out the knowns and unknowns, make the entire journey more efficient and predictable. And two, by seemingly knowing the path ahead, one can create a narrative, that makes the past, present, and future legible.1
I also console myself that both of these are phenomena in the world at large. An earlier era was complicated but offered opportunities for planning to increase efficiency. Starting from agriculture to the printing press to the first and second industrial revolution, we have progressed and systematically improved human lives with increasingly efficient systems and processes. That is probably what led to our techno-capitalist hubris that we could know and solve everything. But we now live in a far more complex world. We can project, but the variables in planning have exponentially increased. That doesn’t stop us from expecting though, and we use everything from astrology to machine learning to rid us of uncertainty. It manifests in everything from company projections to predictions & trends to even daily apps. We trust Amazon, Uber and any of the food delivery apps, because they are predictable.
But in our efforts to maximise predictability and make the system of the world legible, we have created increasingly connected and correlated structures, so that the risk of one epoch-changing event is now magnified. It has also led to an attitude of zero-wastage, in terms of time, thoughts, processes etc. That, in turn, has reduced our exposure to unknowns and the potential to create low-risk scenarios from which we could learn how to handle larger crises. There are other side effects too.2
And these themes also reflect in individual lives. In my own life, I have relied on planning to make life as risk-free as possible and craft a legible self-narrative for ourselves by focusing on income and investments. Correlated. This also means that there is a desire for predictability, and an urge for efficiency. Which further means that the exposure to anything that doesn’t provide this is reduced. All of this, to achieve the freedom I seek. In The Impulsive Path to Freedom, I wrote about how I was trying to move beyond efficiency and into an abundance mindset by creating money and time slack. In If it makes me happy…, I pointed out the realisation that more than a narrative and meaning, what I probably seek is the feeling of “being alive”. The idea is that the slack will enable me to have a more visceral experience of life as opposed to one that is mechanised and optimised for efficiency. Time, for the mind to play.
Intuitively, one would think that it’s the control (predictability, efficiency) that would automatically provide the freedom, but to me, that control is a never-ending quest. In fact, it’s the opposite – giving up the need for control – that allows me to free. But this also brings in unpredictability and the possibility of things not being planned or going according to plan. Not a comfort zone for me at this point. I now realise that I won’t be able to approach it in a binary fashion. It’s a continuum I have started on, and I have no idea where it will take me. And that, is the illegibility of freedom.
1 A big little idea called legibility
2 The loss of life skills and memory that I brought up in Regression Planning, the increasing inability to have an informed opinion – In Other Fake News, what gets lost in the race for efficiency – An efficient existence, and the attempted conversion of whatever agency/free will we have into predictable behaviour, as I wrote in Default in our stars.
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Enough / Efficiency
In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that advances in technology would increase productivity to a level that we would only need to work 15 hours a week. I wonder what he’d have to say about 996. It’s also ironic that despite the amount of time that technology has helped us save – Google Search, Facebook for easily connecting with an extended social network, Amazon Prime delivery and a host of other companies that deliver not just products but services as well – we still have a time deficit! I am generalising, if you have proven Keynes right, congratulations. But for the rest of us, what happened?
A couple of reasons are obvious. One – the ease that technology brought into our lives has also made us spend more time on it, thereby negating the saving. Two – this time spend has also exposed us to more stimuli that makes us want more. The second reason, by extension, has gotten us hitched on to a never-ending ride – efficiency for its own sake. (more…)
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The narratives of our lives
This wonderful post at Ribbonfarm got me thinking about places as narratives. Specifically, it reminded of something I wrote a few years ago on the subject – Watermark. The conclusion of the post that got me thinking was this – The space we inhabit is more topological than ever as we locate our positions within networks instead of maps and this may be the most true narrative about the present age: No matter where in the networked world we’re coming from or traveling to, we’re already there.
Indeed, places were probably the earliest narrative that existed – in our early days as a species, we probably didn’t move away much from the place we were born. As civilisation evolved, I think many more institutional narratives were added – religion, nation, culture, and so on. In the era of consumption, even brands (media and otherwise) have attempted to invade the space. For example, in our own lives, there are many narratives that we consciously or otherwise become part of – the kind of books we read, the music we listen to, the movies we watch – in short, popular culture. Each generation has its own set – from Ramayan on TV to Facebook.
Sometime back, I had written about the internet being the zeroth place – the one that supersedes all the other places, including the physical ones, in our life. Especially with a social layer, it has the capability to accommodate all our narratives – individual and societal. The Ribbonfarm post talks about how the default nature of the digitised era is to store, and no matter how much data our society manages to produce, we’re even better at finding places to keep it. In that sense, it isn’t just geography that the internet seems to have removed as a driver, but time itself. The other day, when I was reading The Confusion, I happened to read a post from 2005 which summed up how I felt about The Baroque Cycle in general. Yes, I tweeted about it. 🙂 But I still can’t be sure about the evolution, and wonder if the abundance of storage might drive us to consciously seek out ways where the information will not be stored. eg. the rise of Snapchat.
I have always felt that narratives are a way to fulfill our sense of belonging. Across time, this role has been played by several entities. The internet has made it possible for even the smallest of niches to have its own narrative. Where does it go from here?
until next time, comment on the narration? 🙂