The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting with friends, and spending time with your cat.
But, who here is really winning?
Imagine our society as a living and breathing organism with its own agenda. What would be on its agenda? First of all, like you, society would want to not die. Second, like you, it would want to thrive.
Ask yourself – how can the society achieve these things?
The only agency our society has is via its constituents, i.e. you and me. The society acts by having its members act. (It’s pretty much the same for you – your agency is realized by your body cells).
So, for a society to survive and thrive, it needs to reward its agents when they do things that help in its preservation and growth. This reward comes in the form of social approval. You invent something new, the society benefits and in returns showers you with the dopamine hit of public applause.
So far, so good. Nothing wrong with a mutually beneficial exchange. You do something good for the society and the society gives something back to you which feels great.
EXCEPT THIS BASICALLY NEVER HAPPENS
Out of the 8 billion people on Earth, how many can actually get to a unicorn status, win Nobel prize, write best seller books, travel around the world or get to a million subscribers?
Because our world is dominated by winner-take-all power laws, the odds are practically zero for most people to get to an outcome they see daily in their feeds or news articles.
And yet it’s beneficial for the society to create a reality distortion field so people start believing that all this is not just possible, but is actually achievable only we work a little bit harder. Only if we hustle more. Only if we work 80 hours a week.
You see, ultimately the society stands to benefit from this competition between people. Highlight and celebrate the lottery winner to fool enough people into competing with each other to make everyone life better.
Ask yourself – who really benefits when you sacrifice your health to take one more meeting?
It’s not you obviously. Rather, it’s the society because only when millions of people take one more meeting, someone somewhere will stumble upon something which is hugely valuable to everyone.
How else will humanity stumble upon the next transistor if everyone is sleeping an extra hour instead of using that time to search for the next big thing?
Yeah – it’s a crazy asymmetric dynamic!
If you think about it, our society is structured a lot like the actual lottery. Pubilcize a multi-million dollar jackpot winner and have hundreds of thousands of people shell out their hard earned money. Tax the jackpot and build roads with it.
WHAT’S GOOD FOR SOCIETY MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR YOU
In most modern cultures, direct coercion doesn’t exist. Nobody can make you work harder than you want to. However, with our infinite algorithmic timelines, we’re immersed with indirect coercion.
But, you do not have to participate in the lottery. You can choose to quit. You can decide to not compete. You can choose to not participate in the lottery, where you’d almost likely lose more than you receive in return.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean inactivity. (Life is a game, where inactivity means death.)
Rather, what this implies is something very simple – don’t confuse what gets social approval with what’s right for you. Social approval exists to attract participants in a game that ultimately benefits the collective at the expense of an individual.
You can be smarter. You can turn the game around.
ENJOY THE RICHES WHILE PLAYING YOUR OWN GAME
Once you overcome your desire to compete with others, you can actually just sit back and enjoy the outcomes that others compete to produce for you.
Read great books, watch interesting movies, dance to the music, use latest gadgets, and eat good food.
Let others compete hard to let you enjoy these things, while you do what you find most fun. It could be tending to your garden, working at a sensible pace, making coffee, building tiny weird games, or whatever else makes you come alive.
I hear you ask: won’t society collapse if everyone did this? I’d argue the opposite. If everyone did what they find most fulfilling, our net happiness will rise. Artifacts useful to the society will still be produced, except with less anxiety and burnout. People will still write books, but without an intent of it trying to be a bestseller but with an intent of honing and enjoying their craft.
In this world, greatness will still occur without being aimed for. Everyone will chase butterflies of their curiosity and do things for their own sake instead of hustling to be on the top.
People will stop playing finite games, but focus entirely on creating infinite games with their lives.
The point is not to avoid working hard, but it is to work on things you find fulfilling while completely ignoring what you think is the objectively right thing to do (which is often an idea implanted into your head by the society).
Remember: there are no rules!
(Except physics, of course!)
Join 200k followers
Follow @paraschopra
Get new essays on your email: