Category: Personal Choice

How the World Becomes More Addictive

In this post ‘The Acceleration of Addictiveness‘, Paul Graham makes the case that the world becomes increasingly addictive, because of technological innovation.

internet_addiction“The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”

Paul Graham then goes on to remark that it took about 100 years for society to develop antibodies and new customs to reject cigarettes. Thus, “unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us.”

And seeing how people get addicted by their smartphone nowadays it is certainly a concern. People that abstain or are able to limit their consumption are becoming fewer apart, and we also have more difficulty concentrating on a task without interruption.

This however, will become an essential skill in the Collaborative Age and we probably need to educate ourselves and our children how to have safe havens and time spans without connectivity and computers.

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What the True Cost of Happiness Is

I recommend the read of the post ‘The Hidden Cost of Happiness‘ by Mark Manson. It is not about ‘money can buy happiness’ but about the efforts we need to do to be truly happy.

happiness-free-lunchAccording to him, these are the five main ‘costs’ associated with true happiness:

  • You must accept your imperfection and flaws,
  • You must take responsibility for your problems,
  • You must feel the fear and do it anyway,
  • You must find a deeper purpose for your actions,
  • You must be willing to fail and be embarrassed.

In this view, happiness would thus be based on self-awareness and action, taking full responsibility of what happens. What do you think?

 

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How We Can Shape the Fourth Revolution

The big talk at Davos this year was about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is best explained in Klaus Schwab‘s post ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond‘. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is in fact quite close to our Fourth Revolution in its premises, although of course the perspective is slightly different. Still it brings some interesting thoughts about the transformation of the world.

Industrial Revolutions
Industrial Revolutions

In particular, Klaus Schwab states that “An underlying theme in my conversations with global CEOs and senior business executives is that the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption are hard to comprehend or anticipate and that these drivers constitute a source of constant surprise, even for the best connected and most well informed.” Even the best informed at Davos are struggling to anticipate what will happen.

Klaus Schwab goes on to describe the social tensions that are arising, in particular in the field of inequality: “in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production. This will give rise to a job market increasingly segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions.” Governments struggle to adjust and respond, and there seem to be a number of different path humankind could take in the near future – some acceptable, others not.

Finally he concludes that it comes to us to define what is acceptable or not, based on humanistic values.

How much can we influence collectively the path that the Fourth Revolution is taking? Reactions from governments are always too slow compared to the evolution of services, and it will come down to all of us to find the right governance to make the Collaborative Age an Age where most of humankind can see progress and contentment. Yet it will be tough and there will be crisis. The best solutions remains to be found.

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How to Make Hard Choices: Rely on What You Want to Be

Philosopher Ruth Chang’s TED talk on ‘How to Make Hard Choices‘ is quite an interesting insight into how we take tough decisions. According to Ruth Chang, we generally think we take the option that looks like the safest: “It’s a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we’re too stupid to know which, and since we don’t know which, we might as well take the least risky option.”

There’s another way – I actually do have in my bag  a dice to help me take tough decisions when I can’t decide.

chooseBut in reality, Ruth shows that what we choose is actually what we want to be – and then after we rationalize to promote the option we prefer. “Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be?“. This is related to out unique capability to put our own selves into our decision, by projection of what we want to be.

As Ruth concludes: “we become the authors of our own lives“. Not everyone does it, but that is a unique capability that allows us to tackle tough decisions in our lives.

Take 15 mins to listen to this interesting talk:

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Is the Smartphone Tax on our Time and Attention Worth It?

Following up from our previous post ‘How Mobile Phones Distract Us – A Real Life Example‘, Seth Godin speaks of the ‘Paying the smartphone tax‘. Because we are constantly distracted by the device, because we confound urgent and important, and because it seems that it only takes a short time to respond, our lives are deeply transformed. This is a tax on our time and attention. Is it worth it?

phone on trainWhat I personally find annoying is the amount of focus that smartphones tend to command when I am looking at something or interacting with it. It is extremely dangerous – even if I forbid myself to interact with my phone in clearly dangerous situations such as driving, I find myself sometimes in awkward situations because I was not paying attention to my surroundings (missed a bus or train stop looking at his phone anyone?). So the tax is sometimes very high.

Seth concludes “Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can’t live without”.

Our lives have become more interesting as a result of having a smartphone, but the tax we pay for it on our time and attention might sometimes not be worth the value. Maybe it is time to do an assessment and decide that there might be situations worth shutting the device down?

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How to Have Sufficient Control on our Life to be Happy

“The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives” says Rory Sutherland. As we know, feeling in control of our lives is both a need and in some respect an illusion – in particular in the ever more complex world.

life controlWe are thus constantly struggling to adjust between this feeling of control and the reality of the events and constraints that shape what we do and what we decide to do.

I believe that what is important is to have a number of areas almost fully under our control, even if the rest is not. We can be fully in control of our garden or some part of our house and at the same time acknowledge that we can’t do anything about the condition of the economy. It is great also to be in a position to see that efforts that we are making towards some goal bear fruits.

Therefore, I believe that what is really important is to have a few areas where this feeling of control is sufficiently high to give us happiness, and acknowledge at the same time that other areas will never be – and not be sour for this.

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Are You Suffering from Nomophobia?

Nomophobia is the most common phobia nowadays: the phobia of being without one’s phone. (literally: NO-MObile-PHOBIA)

nomophobiaMost people are anxious when they misplace their phone (and most don’t spend one hour without checking it for updates!) – so don’t feel special if that is what happens to you.

It’s quite tough to remember the time when we did not have any mobile phone, and then we had a mobile phone that was dumb. Still, amazingly, people did live well and be happy at that time. It just required a bit more advance planning for appointments and navigation…

Anyway, here’s a link to a nomophobia test. Some questions as an extract – do you recognize yourself?

  • I am annoyed if I can’t look information up on my smartphone when I wantto do so.
  • Running out of battery in my smartphone scares me.
  • If I have no data signal or can’t connect to Wi-Fi, then I constantly check to see if I have a signal or can find a Wi-Fi network.

Be aware of your nomophobia – it starts to be a condition that is studied by psychiatrists!!

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How Acknowledging our Limits is Source of Happiness, but Is That Enough?

Acknowledging in general our limits (physical, social, economical, geographical etc.) is generally required to reach happiness.

Happiness_LimitsThis is probably because not acknowledging these limits leads to permanent dissatisfaction, jealousy, to constant craving for more or for something different. This craving troubles the internal piece required for true happiness, and prevents from being sufficiently in the present to appreciate what happens around us right now.

This explains why people suffering from severe disabilities can be happy, when they acknowledge the limits these disabilities place onto them.

Some people also create their own limits to find happiness, even if they are just illusions created by themselves – in particular, in the social environment.

At the same time, many systems exerting social pressure based on the respect of social limits use the same argument to state that happiness is still possible in the context, how harsh the rules might be.

We thus need to acknowledge those limits, but the question remains of how much should be respect them? In an interesting contradiction, we also need to challenge some of them to be truly satisfied.

That happiness paradox is an aspect we will investigate in a series of posts.

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Why Most of Our Problems are Problems of Perception

“Engineers, medical people, scientific people have an obsession with solving the problem. in reality, when actually once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception” – says Rory Sutherland.

perception_problemsRory Sutherland is a name in the advertisement industry and probably knows better than most the power of the frame of perception in which people are. Changing the frame is often the solution – alas it is also often hard and long to do. That’s a tool that coaches are using though when it comes to helping people overcome challenges or situations where they feel loss of control.

The key of Rory’s point, however, is that scientific, objective, mathematical approaches are certain to fail. It is all in the way people look at issues. Therefore even if it is difficult, effort needs to be made to change the frame of perception rather than to try to persuade using objective arguments. It comes down to effecting deep changes in people, and this needs a lot of help and support.

Is your problem a real issue or only a problem of perception? What about changing your frame of reference?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni’s always excellent blog, and the post ‘The Power of Reframing Things‘

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How Our Attitude to a Problem Might be the Problem

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude with the problem” – quote from Pirates of the Caribbean, which we all know is a famous Hollywood philosopher (at times).

problem_attitudeStill I like this quote because it summarizes very well the issues we all face sometimes. And it is also directly linked to the issue of what to do when we have to face truth (and we don’t want to hear it).

We all face problems, some large and some smaller. And at the end it boils down to our attitude with regard to these problems. Depending on our attitude they can destroy our lives and make us miserable; or build on our problems to find opportunities to transform our lives.

Next time we face a nagging problem, let’s ask ourselves whether it is not our attitude that is the problem.

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How to Overcome Your Limits

Imagination is the real limit of what you can or what you can become. And we are all somehow locked into the limits of our imagination.

imagination_limitHence one way to overcome our limits is to give free flow to our imagination.

It is an interesting approach because it does not call for action or overcoming our fears. It just suggests as a first step to dream ourselves into what we want to be, beyond the limits we impose to our imagination right now.

Do you put any limits to your imagination? What if you would remove them and dream about what you really want to be? Imagine… and make it happen!

 

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Why We Need to Enroll our Environment in any Change Intent

Marshall Goldsmith, well-known coach, writes in his last book ‘Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last‘: “Our behavior is shaped, both positively and negatively, by our environment— and a keen appreciation of our environment can dramatically lift not only our motivation, ability, and understanding of the change process, but also our confidence that we can actually do it”

change_environmentThe core theme is that it is quite difficult, even impossible, to change anything without taking into account our environment, and in particular our social environment. It will require to inform them that we intend to change; and even to draw the people around us to participate actively to our change. That is in particular the case when they are affected and easier if they support the change.

Because without changing our environment, most of our change efforts are doomed. Everyone must recognize that you intend to change, and that you are changing.

If you intend to introduce a substantial behavioral change in your life, make sure to involve the people around you, up to having them play specific roles!

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