Daily musings #584 - Sunday, 28 August 2022

The more you know the less you act. I realized this clearly when I wrote about Existential crises a couple of days ago.

Why is it that I am having fewer crises now? Because of more knowlege and learnings on how to respond to them before they become a crisis. That is good right? Wrong!

I actually prefer the time when I had more crises. It forced me to change faster. It forced me to find answers that I would not have otherwise found. It made me take risks. It required me to use my naiveness bordering on stupidity to find things to act on. Because when one is cornered, one has nothing to lose. Or very little to lose and a lot more to gain if it pans out. That was my response in my 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000s.

But along the way life gets in the way. And you focus on stability. And predictability. And you take fewer risks. You use your knowledge to select your responses. But this stability and predictability come with a cost. They cause stagnation and therefore decay. Everything has a half-life. If you are not actively revitalizing you are actively moving towards entropy. Entropy leads to a lack of resilience and a move away in the opposite direction from stability and predictability.

The answer to stability and predictability is actual continuous renewal. And this renewal requires naivety and a large basket of tries and options, the opposite of what more knowledge creates - the numbness and muted responses - which are not really the best use of knowledge. So in order to put one’s knowledge to use, ignore your knowledge and then act, and perhaps the options you need to maximize yourselves will find you.