Our History, In The Making

Our Reliance Of Objectivity In A Subjective Experience

History is always being made, unfolding in every passing moment. As it passes, we have a seemingly innate fascination/infatuation in identifying ourselves, our identities to events of importance. We write ourselves and play the role of an informed observer, innocent bystander and celebrity of “I was there” status. We desire to be a part of peak-and-valley moments of perceived importance.

These highlight experiences make up less than 1% of our lives but the more entertaining, the more emotionally involved, the more heroic or story-like, the more we perceive and tell ourselves and others that they matter. Our frame of reference is completely subjective, yet we attached and come to rely on the objectivity of the moment and our relationship to them.

It’s difficult to separate out objectivity, the comparison of seemingly unrelated events and purpose across time, from ourselves and appreciate the subjective nature for the pure form of delight that comes equally and consistency with each fleeting moment.

We pay attention to the moments the matter, according to what we know and how we’ve come to define comparative importance or “worth”, performing a rationalize judgement / evaluation and passing over the other 99% of life. We’re seemingly unaware of near everything that is happening on a moment-to-moment basis and that is a massively underrated opportunity.

“The more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched the become in a particular way of viewing the world… As we gain knowledge, about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.” — Originals

Our experience is then our crutch and as we accumulate experience, we become increasingly naive of our own intuition and more susceptible to false positives (creator, self-validating perception) and false negatives (risk adverse, evaluation oriented perception).

So, as we grow and develop our depth of knowledge and expertise we ought to our trust our ignorance of all else in the intelligence and experience of others.

An Individual is not an island.

Raw Thoughts To Chew On…

“It’s exhausting trying not to be yourself. That’s why you’re tired, stressed, anxious and insecure. Be you, just keep it simple.”

SIGHT UNDERRATED

We underrate sight, while overrating our ability to see. As we undervalue our attention and energy, and overvalue our self-awareness and empathetic posture. We all want to be and hope and see ourselves as great people with great intentions but few are willing to accept themselves as less there of and put the work in, which is life-long, to develop themselves as the best version they can be; for themselves and more importantly, for others.

YOU BELONG HERE

Some people indulge in substance, materials, fashion, screen, games, travel, experiences, mediation, competition, love, lust, work or many, many other options to avoid the life, obstacles and opportunities afforded to them. When you accept the realization the you belong here, the desire to be anywhere but falls away. It seems almost meaningless to be or do anything otherwise. And alas, the we begin again.

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” — Henry David Thoreau

KILL YOUR BEST DARLING

We need to kill our darlings and give our original ideas away to the scrutiny of brighter minds of varying perspectives, not only to save ourselves from confirmation bias and false positives but to encourage purpose, refinement and survival of only the fittest works, however irrational, odd and delusional they may seem at their onset. Creating truly original work is and ought to be a painful process of scrutiny, iteration and core competence.

TASTE UNDERRATED

Our patience and persistence to develop “tastes” outside of food / nourishment is highly undervalued /underrated. We craved the easy, comfortable, self-validating quick-fixes that pump-up our identities and the stories we tell ourselves through what we display in the eyes of others. What we put on display.

THE SHIELD OF BEING GOOD

On the days when the shields are low and automation is erratic at best, we are not at our social best, we run on near pure survival out of self-interest. “Good” and certainly “better” takes energy and effort. It takes intent, as it should, to uphold the social and cultural norms we’ve silently agreed to conform to. Being “nice” and a good human means giving up some of our survival and self-interested instincts and shielding / protecting ourselves and others.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 308,471+ people.

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