005: The legacy we inherit
505 words.
This was written in point form through bus and train rides through the day, in true spirit of dialing down the scope.
We are the product of our environments. The control we exert over them can be varying, but in any case, we are inheriting traits and stimuli with factors we have little or no control for. This is not a complaint, or a justification, but just an acknowledgement of our inherited legacy.
Something to remember that our parents, the architects of our original environment, aren’t experts at it. They were ordinary people who were thrust into the chaos and obligations of parenthood, with varying levels of willingness. At that same time, they were navigating their own leg of the highway that is their life. Everything is for the first time, and they would be muddling their way through it in their own way.
What first needs to happen, is unpacking the learning responses to the stimuli. It may be some hidden want that we mask through a conditioned persona, we have learnt to obtain indirectly, or forsake in pursuit of a higher ideal. Leaving this technical debt leaves us vulnerable to ‘loopholes’ or events that hit us and leave us blind-sided.
Without resolving this technical debt, we have an incomplete judgement, because our prediction of the long-term consequences will never be accurate.
The way to deal with it is self-awareness to first find out what those responses are, then to figure out their origin is. Has there been some unmet need or unresolved trauma? We may not have had the ‘viewing resolution’ to look at them clearly.
The ‘television’ is how we view our lives, and only gets better resolution with deliberate investment, in the form of reflection and introspection.
Why is so hard to unpack our inner emotional state now? The digitalisation of our world seems to have obscured our view of what we are deep down, and we are trying to find it again. In tribes and families, we would rely on our elders more closely to find that guidance.
Today, we find ourselves adrift from our tribe, an irony of the connectedness we now find ourselves in, both physical and digital.
Introspection is a skill to be cultivated in today’s age of information abundance. Despite the abundance, there is still a lack of wisdom in guiding our actions for the future
- The world is changing too fast for us to exercise our evolutionary judgement
- The new judgement is to find the timeless principles that have guided us through the previous centuries
As the rate of change increases, the way to hone our judgement is to perform repeated progressive summarisations of what we know and experience. Why PS instead of iteration? We want to take notice of and record what jumps out at us, what makes our breath pause. We want to repeatedly refine our knowledge and experience through the challenges of our lives, until they become the timeless gems we can rely on in our lifetimes.