Accessible, Practical Wisdom
In the richest cities in the richest country in the world, you can still see the most abject suffering in the streets every day. Evidently, with all of our wondrous technology, it is still really easy for a person’s life to become hell. It’s frighteningly easy to make astoundingly bad decisions like taking extremely dangerous, addictive drugs like meth or fentanyl.
What are we missing? How do we avoid these traps and thrive? Well, we have a lot of problems, clearly. But we can start with the basics. Doctors will often ask about sleep, diet, and exercise. The question is worth asking because these foundations are shaky for so many of us. It can be hard even to attend to these basics. There are always things to worry about and react to. We need all the help we can get to master even the basics.
If you really want to excel in these areas, and you can afford it, you can hire expert help. You can hire a personal trainer and a cook. You can consult with a sleep expert. This is prohibitively expensive for most people.
What if you could have your own set of assistants for exercise, diet, sleep, and more at free or low cost? We are headed in that direction. With the increasing ubiquity of sensors and increasingly intelligent software, anyone with a smartphone and smartwatch can get a wealth of data and insights about their sleep, diet, and exercise.
We may get to the point where an intelligent assistant is on par with a good personal trainer, at a far lower cost. Maybe you could pay $10/month for world-class coaching in exercise and diet. Maybe you could easily, reliably track everything you ate with image recognition and get back useful feedback on optimizing your diet.
For a long time, it has been possible to go learn how to do all kinds of things. But it has required a lot of work. Software that personalizes itself for you based on your inputs and its general knowledge embodies wisdom in an accessible form. It makes it easy for the best practices in an area like exercise to become your practices.
Life is not easy, and it never will be. But increasingly we have intelligent tools to help us navigate its challenges and thrive a little more than we could before.