Managing Modern Life
We can't fit our lives in our heads anymore. The world is too complex. Managing it is too hard. It's tiresome. A few are perfectly adapted to this world of hyper-abundant information and opportunity and can shape it into their dreams. Think of Elon Musk or Sam Altman. More will throw their hands up and join a cult that gives them all the answers in one neat package. Think of QAnon or woke. This leads to disappointment and often disaster. We need to be able to *grasp* this super complex world so each individual can navigate their life according to their own values and vision of the ideal life.
Imagine life in the hazy, distant past. You would be a member of a small band of perhaps 50-150. You would be focused on securing food and shelter. You could migrate to one of a few places in pursuit of better food and shelter. Each member of the band would have a few possibilities of what to specialize in, which might not be freely chosen. You might hunt or gather or cook or take care of children. So, there were a manageable number of possibilities at the individual and group level.
Contrast that with life today. We have so many more choices and so much more freedom, which is great. Or it could be great if we were up to the task of navigating it all. But it's obvious that many of us are not. Most obviously, there are the addicts collapsing on the sidewalks of the West Coast. Less obviously, there is the average person who wishes their life had more of a purpose but muddles along anyway.
We need better tools and systems to thrive in this strange world. We are not biologically evolved for it. We need to culturally evolve for it.
Let's try to think about it from first principles. Life is made up of concentric circles of concern. You have to take care of yourself, first, but also people around you to a lesser extent. You have to take care of your home but also your neighborhood, town or city, and state or region or country. You have to take care of today while setting yourself up well for next week, next year, and next decade.
In managing all of this, you generally want to have tight feedback loops so you can learn from experience and continually improve. So you need to somehow track and continually optimize in all of these areas, on all of these scales. That seems kind of simple, conceptually, but extremely difficult to execute. It's the challenge of a lifetime.
There probably isn't one perfect system to do this. There's probably not one that works for everyone, or even for one person in every stage of their life. But we should all try. It might be a notebook. It might be a fancy Notion or Obsidian setup. It might be a big text file. It might be a lot of things, but it should be something.