We, as humans, always strive for more complex things. Having better jobs, building businesses, driving more sophisticated cars, learning more complex ideas.
We have this inner drive because this is the natural impulse of evolution. The arrow of evolution always leads to greater complexity.
The physiosphere ( Matter ) evolved to a biosphere ( Living organisms ). And the living organisms gave birth to consciousness ( Humans ).
You can find many examples of this pattern.
“Atoms become molecules, molecules become cells, cells become organisms, and organisms become minds: each step adds depth and complexity.”— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)
This is the reason why you want a promotion and you get bored if you are stuck doing the same thing for years at your workplace. This is the reason why you want to build a business and learn new skills. It’s embedded in your nature to become a more complex being.
But here’s the problem. There is another natural strive. The strive for Clarity.
We like to have a clear system in our lives. A framework that tells us what to do. Therefore it’s much harder to quit a 9-5 job cycle after years of being stuck in it. Anytime you attempt to become a more complex and developed person you are faced with the unknown. When you find yourself in the unknown it’s easy to get confused and go back to your comfort zone. In this case complexity breaks down to entropy. That explains why 95% of people either never try something outside of their job or give up after 2 weeks.
Here’s a breakdown on how this pathology occurs.
Too much differentiation → chaos
This means emphasizing complexity without the ability to see the whole picture.
The self expands. You take new roles, learn skills and ideas, start projects, but there’s no integrating center.
You loose psychic energy when your attention is split into too many things. Your attention becomes fragmented. This ultimately leads to entropy, confusion, anxiety.
// Example needed
Because of that today’s world is so dangerous. It’s easy to get lost in the endless content ocean – podcasts, videos, news, shorts. Consuming all of this leads to no integration, no inner synthesis. Pure information without structure and implementation becomes noise.
Too much integration → rigidity, stagnation, regression
On the other hand focusing too much on the big picture is as big of a problem. Without integrating the parts leading towards it, you become overly ordered. You oversimplify and become self-protective.
This brings us back to the 9-5 cycle. You’ve mastered your job, your everyday life… your whole worldview. And yet everything feels dull. Life is efficient but empty.
Oversimplicity leads to fixed beliefs about how things “should be”. You tell yourself that you want happiness and security from life. Rich people are not automatically happy, right? Therefore you make the false assumption that you don’t have to seek a promotion or start a business in order to earn more money.
In other words both of these pathological thinking “modes” keep you away from growth.
Good, but how do I “combine” complexity and clarity?
Between these two extremes lies the sweet spot of evolution. This is what the Hungarian psychologist Mihaily Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow.
Find the right Challenge / Skill Ratio
“When challenges and skills are not in balance, psychic entropy occurs — a state of disorganization in consciousness.”— Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)
This is one has the potential to put you in the top 1% and it’s the reason why most people don’t make it. You have to learn how to find the balance between challenge and skill. The time, when your skill are matched with the challenge, is when you learn and achieve the most.
The majority of people connect flow only with single short-term activities like gaming, writing or learning. But in my view you can think about it as a more constant state in your life.
Anytime you feel bored, observe. Most likely the challenge is too boring or it lacks meaning.
Here is a nice diagram from Dan Koe:
Anytime you feel overwhelmed, observe. Most likely the challenge is too great for your current skill level and you have to change something.
Deconstruct your big goal into smaller goals
“This is the same tension between differentiation and integration. Differentiation is breaking the world into smaller, manageable parts. Integration is holding those parts in the light of a larger purpose.”
In order to appreciate both the big picture and its components, we have to dissect our meaningful goal into actionable steps.
For example, your vision is to build an athletic body and lose body fat, as a person who has never worked out in his life.
You have to create a plan for your first week of getting to know what working out and being active is.
Your weekly goals will consist of doing simple things. Visiting the gym for the first time just to try the machines or going for one daily walk around your block. Than your weekly goals will be the foundation for your monthly goals. Those could be sticking to a work our program or archiving certain diet objectives that you set to yourself.
Here’s a framework that is hard not to work.
- Creating a vision
- Setting a meaningful goal that aligns with the vision
- Breaking the big goal into clear goal
- Breaking the clear goals into daily steps
Accept the chaos in your life so you can change it
There is a great saying that chaos / entropy is the natural state of your mind.
If we observe the laws of physics, we’ll see that on the first site all natural processes move towards greater entropy.
If you put a drop of ink in a glass of water, the ink will always disperse randomly throughout the water. And this process always goes that way, towards disorder. You can never see dispersed ink gather itself into a drop.
But this is only one part of the story.
The instability of forces or influences that are not balanced ultimately leads to a higher and more structured order. This is called “order out of chaos”.
The Universe was pretty chaotic at its beginning. But with the arrow of time moving forward, order began to arise. Stars formed from gasses, than galaxies and so on.
In other words life always follow the path of chaos moving towards greater complexity.
Therefore you don’t need to panic when you feel confused. It’s actually a good sign that you are changing toward something greater.
It’s a normal stage of development and it’s up to you how you handle it.
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