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Life Complexity - The Mental Challenges Of Modern Living

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Our societies and lifestyles have become too complex for ordinary people to keep up.

We have ever-changing technology, massive cross-cultural encounters and interactions, political and ideological diversity and conflict, religious pluralism, roller coaster economics, constantly evolving jobs and work and education requirements. Who can keep up?

As intelligent as humans may be, we all have real limits to our mental capacities. We are not evolving or even developing the mental aptitude’s necessary for our rapid rates of change and therefore cannot adequately adapt in time.

As we add new layers of information, awareness, and skills required to navigate our modern world, we eventually get to the point of saturated capacity.

When we are required to function beyond our mental capacities, we will experience higher stress and dysfunction.

Many, if not most, modern lifestyle participants only barely cope with the normal demands of living, and only with a lot of help from alcohol and drugs.

No, we cannot just simplify our lives. We must live, function, and compete in the modern world. Many are not coping well.

If we are to survive and thrive in this ever more complex world, we must learn how to manage our individual involvements and activities, and learn how to optimize our mental capacities to meet our mental health needs. If we are to survive and thrive, we must be a lot more intelligent and strategic than we needed to be 100 years ago.

If we have the opportunity, we should chose and prioritize the following:

1. A natural diet of food and nutrition we can understand, access, and maintain for optimum health.

2. Work and physical exercise habits that are adequately challenging but not injurious.

3. Heathy physicals and emotional environments.

4. Habits of healthy emotional expressions and control.

5. Adequate education and collection of accurate information and skills about things critical to our survival, well-being, and  happiness.

6. Building and maintaining only healthy mutually supportive and rewarding relationships.

7. Finding and participating in activities that build the human spirit by providing motivation, encouragement, and satisfaction, therefore providing meaning and purpose to life and living.

We cannot roll back the rising tide of human progress and technological change. We cannot make things that are inherently complicated simple. We cannot escape to a time and place where life is lived like it was a hundred years ago.

Our only choice is to do all we can to arrange and manage our lives in the world in which we live. The seven points of priority can certainly help.

EgoPilot supports healthy lifestyles based on a better understanding of ourselves and our many human challenges.






Twelve Truths about Truth

 

1. Truth is free, fair, blind, impartial, unaffiliated, unaware, amoral, and available to anyone who has the means and the will to collect, discover, extract, or deduce it, from its  infinite lodgings in the universe

2. Truth can be used for good or ill by those who know it.  

3. Truth is just valid information.

4. The best way I know to collect valid information is through the scientific process.  

5. Anyone with the means can use science to discover truth, for good or ill.

6. Science is not the culprit.  It is merely a process for discovering the commodity of truth.

7. Truth is not beneficial to everyone’s agenda.

8. When truth helps to advance a cause, it is valued and promoted.

9. When truth threatens a cause, it is feared and hated.

10. Truth empowers.

11. Truth, with the exception of moral truth, does not determine right or wrong, good or bad.

12. Moral truth is the reality of how human actions affect each other for good or evil.

 

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Believing - Facts Matter

 

 

There is so much discussion and argument online these days about what people believe. The explosion of information-sharing technology and social media has put the notion of believing fully in the spotlight.

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Four powerful factors have further spread and amplified this discussion here in the US in 2020.

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The COVID-19 pandemic and the evolving information stream about it have been muddied by massive amounts of politicized misinformation and conspiracy theories.

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Secondly, the 2020 US Presidential election, considered one of the most consequential in modern history, was rife with charges and counter charges of weaponized misinformation and demagoguery.

 

Thirdly, millennials seem to be challenging traditional religious ideas and dogmas as never before in recent history. More and more young people are demanding proof of religious propositions and are refusing to accept things on blind faith like their parents seemed to do. The third factor has become even more significant in light of the political alliances that have developed between political parties and fundamentalist and evangelical religious factions.  

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The fourth factor was the explosion of social justice causes and debates about institutional racism, white privilege, and lack of accountability for police violence, especially in relations to their dealings with minorities. In this arena, lack of transparency leading to hidden miscarriages of justice in law enforcement, has all but destroyed the credibility of law enforcement officials.

 

It been particularly difficult, even for intelligent well-educated people to figure out what to believe this year. Perhaps this is a good time to stop and examine how we come to believe the things we do.

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Unlike in other years, what we believed this year has resulted in life or death for many, still confused or misguided about the truth of the pandemic. Unlike in other years, what American voters believe will have direct result in who they elect to control the government of the most powerful country on the planet. Unlike in other years, if we don’t get a handle on social justice and law enforcement practices, we may descend into uncontrollable cycles of civil unrest, violence, and destruction. Unlike in other years, if we don’t get to the truth about the pandemic and the best ways to  reduce its infectious spread, many more Americans and others  will be sickened and die.

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But what about religious beliefs? What do they have to do with all of this? Why are they also coming under fire?

 

My best guess is that more and more people are being forced to challenge the very structure of believing and how we come to believe the things we do. Many more people are experiencing massive cognitive dissonance, forced upon them by the damning realities of what has happened in 2020, because these real events clash with what they have come to believe.  The conflicts between science and medicine and religion and politics have taken center stage and more people are forced to choose one side or the other.

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This explosion of cognitive dissonance is being met in different ways. Some chose to deny evidence of reality that does not fit their preferred explanations of things. Others come up with creative and imaginative alternate explanations they find more palatable. Still others simply compartmentalize information and keep contradictory evidence away from their previous beliefs.  

 

Those not as adept at these types of mental gymnastics and gerrymanderings must resolve their cognitive dissonance by re-examining their beliefs and making some hard and consequential choices.

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For those who think that facts and truth matter, here a few pointers that can help in this process.

 

1. Examine every important belief you use to make key life decisions.

 

2. Ask yourself - Is this belief based on fact, theory, or dogma?

 

3. A fact is something that can be independently demonstrated in the real world outside of our private mental spaces.

 

4. A theory is an idea of how something is or works. A valid theory is one that is based on facts and follows rules of logic to arrive at conclusions. A theory must be tested and demonstrated in the real world to become a fact.

 

5. Dogma is what is officially held and taught as fact by groups or organizations. These doctrines may or may not be based on fact or valid theories.

 

6. A belief is what the individual chooses to accept as fact. Beliefs exist only in the mental space of the believer. Though many others may share a belief or subscribe to a theory, that by itself does not make it a fact. People have several ways to establish accepted "facts" in their belief systems.  They typically include:
 

• personal experiences and interpretations

• testimony from trusted others

• authoritative statements

• reason, logic, and extrapolation using other accepted facts

• common knowledge

• a combination of any of the above

 

7. Facts have three critical elements:

 

they can be demonstrated in the real world outside of people’s heads

they can be logically deduced from other facts in a process called reasoning

they exist in the real world independent of anyone’s beliefs

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In testing our important beliefs, we must seek facts, we must critically examine theories, and we must not rely on unproven dogma. If we can do these thing consistently, we will arrive at the most valid information available to us.

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This process demands work, discipline, and risk taking. We may discover that some of our treasured beliefs are not actually based in facts. Then we will have to decide how to deal with the cognitive dissonance such discovery creates. If truth matters to us, then we will seek it. If the feelings we get from our beliefs are more important to us, then we will ignore the facts and protect our feelings.

 

Keep in mind however, that we can get away with ignoring facts only for so long. Sooner or later, a year like 2020 will come along again, and our lives, well-being, and future, will depend on knowing and accepting facts, no matter what we would prefer to believe.

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Don't Hold On Too Tight

 

Learn to loosen up and let your body flex with the movements and pressures that life's changes and challenges bring.

 

When the boat of life rocks and sways and lifts and drops as it hit the intersecting waves of life events,

 

Or when it twists and turns and stalls and heaves when pushed and pulled by the ever changing currents of our time,

 

Like a skilled sailboat captain, keep your balance on the deck so that you can steer the ship and keep going.

 

Don't hold on too tight.

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Loosen up and let your body and mind flex with the the stresses and anxieties that life's changes bring. This way you can shift your balance and keep your footing and not tip over.

 

 

Be more like tough rubber than tough wood.

 

For rubber expands when stretched and relaxes when not under pressure. It absorbs the shocks to itself without ripping or shattering.  It can be twisted and bent and yet returns to its own form when released.

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Wood is good, but not very flexible or as resilient.  It cannot absorb as much pressure by compressing itself.  So when it's pulled, pushed, or twisted too much, It cracks and breaks and cannot be the same again.

 

Don't hold on too tight.
 

Be willing and ready to let some things go.

 

Sometimes we survive by cutting the sails for a while and just letting the winds of life blow us along or just blow past us. When things calm down enough, then we should reset our sails, chart our course, and capture the winds that will take us where we need to be.

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