Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
The secret of happiness is variety,
but the secret of variety,
like the secret of spices,
is knowing when to use it .
~ Daniel Gilbert
We live in an immensely rich and infinite universe. Life is like an obstacle course that presents various situations and challenges, many of which cannot be foreseen at all, or at least meaningfully grasped in advance, to the degree needed to adequately plan for these.
So how do we plan for the unplannable?
Fight fire with fire: Requisite variety
You are a child of the universe: the universe is not just outside you; it also extends into you, embedded deeply within you.
So maybe that is why you have been up to the many many challenges that have continually arrived. You have survived. Even thrived! You came here, not knowing how to walk. But you did. You didn’t know how to make sounds that could reach others around you so that they could get a sense for what runs through your head. But you learned this, even gaining extraordinary proficiency in the basic language and communication skills that we often take for granted.
Just as the universe sprung you from within it, it sprung all kinds of other things – fruits, vegetables, breathable air, and so many other resources – that, along with you, form a harmonious whole that makes everything work and sustain. Magically. Miraculously.
The many capabilities inside you – the capabilities that you are barely aware of – are the fire of nature that “fights” the fire of nature all around you and employs its bounty to your advantage. The variety of these capabilities has been clearly adequate to the programmed-in goal of survival in a vagary- and uncertainty-studded universe that continually throws things at you for you to catch and handle.
The universe outside is big! The one inside is not as big. But it is good enough to deal with a lifetime of challenges that will be thrown at you. It has requisite variety – a set of elemental capabilities, the most important of which is an ability to weave these elements together along with other resources available outside you, so that you can meet each situation and circumstance as it appears, almost as if you are conquering a challenging and unpredictable video game that is not designed by you.
But alas! It is possible to stray far from the real universe, infinite though it may be, into some strange parallel worlds that yield nightmarish experiences.
Don’t throw cold water on the fire!
The very capability – imagination – that helps you adapt, innovate and flex to real-world demands can do much more than it should, taking you down some very destructive paths. We see this phenomenon in our emerging artificial intelligence (AI) systems, something that has been labeled by those in this industry as “hallucination”. But the same phenomenon is much harder to see in yourself although it exists and is the motherlode from which the AI hallucinations derive.
The issue arises from the fact that we have become way more than the naturally intelligent systems we were born as. We have extended ourselves with our symbols – words and numbers – effectively layering these on top of our natural resources. The means of words, numbers and the “logic” around these have effectively become ends unto themselves, allowing us to create infinite worlds that bear no resemblance to the real world that we must live in.
This is how we lose our way. If we fabricate all kinds of nonsensical ideas and theories that sit alongside the real-world parallels in our heads, it can lead to a couple of problems. First, we are limited-resource creatures. If we end up using up these resources to deal with windmills as Don Quixote did, we will have little bandwidth to recognize and engage with the things that actually matter using our embedded gifts from nature. Secondly, voodoo doesn’t work! If we imagine that our actions in the parallel worlds we fabricate yield anything useful in the real one, we will be sadly mistaken. We will end up seeing the symptom of this mode of operation – an intermittent and unpredictable lack of successes in the real world – and blame it on fate, uncertainty and the erratic nature of the real universe rather than on the generation of strange hallucinations inside ourselves.
To keep the fire of the universe alive within you, you may need to look suspiciously at the words and numbers, and the shenanigans you may be performing with them. Those are not the requisite variety needed to thrive; they are often things that can best be seen as a “wreck-with-it” variety, something that you should look to use with extreme caution.
Toward an exquisite fire
Words are not the only things we need to be careful about. It is important not to bring things and people around you that can limit your ability to deal effectively with the various things that the universe will certainly throw at you over time and in different circumstances that cannot be fully fathomed right now. A thoughtful life involves building or acquiring new elements that increase your internal variety beyond the natural gifts that the universe has blessed you with. If the fire within you keeps getting extended with valuable external elements rather than getting diminished and constrained, you are well on your way. Toward exquisite variety!
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. [email protected].
