Truth Bomb Tuesday: Our operating system is outdated. Don’t let it rule your life.
Imagine a simple, old-school computer game.
In it, there are objects to avoid, and objects to move towards. You move towards the good things and away from the bad things. You get points if you get the good things. You lose points if you hit the bad things.
This is pretty basic, but I feel like it’s a pretty good description of a human’s standard operating system. We’re really not all that complex. We are drawn to good things. We run from bad things.
Where it gets complex is understanding what is good and what is bad. Is the random cat on the street an opportunity for affection or a disease vector? What is your coworkers Instagram post actually trying to say? If you’re buying a car, is fuel efficiency a better ‘good’ than a sunroof?
That’s largely what intelligence is for. Deciding whether a complex thing is good or bad, and how good and how bad.
But there are big drawbacks with this operating system.
And the big one to watch out for is the ‘quantum’ effect.
And what I mean there is a thing can change from a good to a bad, or from a bad to a good, depending on the quantity.
Take sugary food for example. In an energy-poor environment, a Mars bar would probably give you enough energy to last a week.
Energy is good.
But if you have a Mars a day, you’re going to put on weight and mess with your metabolism.
And so you can easily have too much of a good thing – sugar, sleep, stimulation, sun.
But the basic operating system doesn’t recognise this, and it has us chasing ‘goods’ long after they’ve stopped being healthy for us.
That point is probably well understood, but it’s the same story on the other side of the coin.
Some bads are fatal in the extreme, but very healthy for you in the right dose.
Take exercise. Burning all that energy could be fatal if you burnt through all your available resources and starved yourself. But in the right dose, it tones the body and is good for you.
But the basic OS doesn’t recognise this, and we generally have to coax ourselves into doing enough exercise.
And many of the bads we face in modern times are almost never delivered in fatal doses.
Take the cold. Being wary of getting cold is good because it will stop you from dying. But here in Queensland, it’s almost never fatally cold. And yet I still struggle to convince myself to get out of bed in the morning.
Same story with hard work, public speaking, trying new things, meeting new people, taking calculated risks with your money and so on.
These are all important opportunities for growth, but as far as my operating system is concerned, these are ‘bads’ to be navigated around. And if these are things I want to engage in, I need to lean against my OS’s natural aversion.
With me so far?
Now, the way I see it, there are two ways to lean against your OS’s natural aversion.
The first is to convince yourself that the bad is actually good. Spend enough time building a connection between exercise and good health, and you’ll stop seeing it as a bad.
But the other way is to just learn to be with discomfort.
Your OS pushes you away from ‘bads’ by making you feel uncomfortable. This feeling unsettles you and inspires you to move.
But we don’t have to listen to it. We can just be with it.
If it drops below 20 degrees on the farm, I could freak out and run inside and put on all the heaters.
Or I could just say, ‘Oh well. Now I am a bit cold. I hear that. I hear the prompt. But I’m just going to be here in the discomfort. Discomfort is just another sensation. I know it’s not going to kill me.’
These days I kind of think that the second strategy is more effective.
What we are doing is putting the OS in its right place. It’s right that it alerts us to potential threats. Its right that it gets to highlight ways to avoid it. But it is not right that it gets to call the shots and drive our behaviour.
That can, and should be, a conscious choice.
If I go inside and put a jumper on, that should be my conscious choice. I shouldn’t be driven there by my fears.
Because if we don’t get this system in check, it will have us running this way and that, running to this and fleeing from that.
And our life will never be under our conscious control.
And if our life is never under conscious control, then we can not consciously create the life we want to create.
So learn to be with the discomfort of things that won’t kill you. This is the key to freedom.
DB.