The Secret of the World

Does anyone know what they are doing? Is society just scaled, moderated, middle-managed, dysfunction? Has there always been a low grade entropy to everything around us and we just didn’t have the informational infrastructure to know about it? 

Because of the overpowering force of so much ever changing content, we take in what we can, attempt to make sense of it, form conclusions, inane opinions, and try to get shit done. No one knows wtf they are doing most days, and that’s usually ok. 

The essence of the human condition is to get just enough done in any given pursuit. Sure, there are exceptions of paranormal high achievement and perplexingly motivated individuals, but even these people do just enough most days - there are just a lot of days involved. On a long enough timeline, with enough internal and external resources and motivation, anyone can get pretty good at something and get called an expert. 

But, mostly, we just do enough to get through - the assignment, the class, the degree, the shift, the meeting, the whole goddamn week.

Some may call this apathy or lack of caring, but it is really just exhaustion. There is so much to process and respond to, so we try to figure things out as we go along and prioritize the most critical. Personal capability and intellect always exist in relation to the other humans in our space. Everyone’s intellect and capabilities have to organize in a coherent way to make decisions and do things. Hence, cooperation to accomplish something, like designing a skyscraper or scheduling a surgery. 

The point is that we are capable of getting really important things done pretty well with a high degree of precision, but it requires a lot of coordination, a personal and a collective incentive, and a certain ‘herd’ intellect - meaning we’re rarely working in isolation on something, and even independent work exists within a larger collective. 

But, back to the secret. No one really knows what they’re doing.

This isn’t incompetence (usually), just priorities, energy, and incentives. Bad incentives naturally produce negative outcomes. Priority means doing one thing at the expense of not doing another thing. And energy is simply the sum of our physical, mental, emotional, and social drive to do things.

So, we’re all just navigating these things all day every day our entire lives. We have some pretty good maps, the canon of human knowledge, a lot of policies and procedures, robot proxies, and really good drugs, but we’re still making it all up as we go.