Information overload and action gaps
A way you clean up a trash can that’s been tipped over by the monkeys at night, snacking on the leftovers, is to soften and begin picking up the first piece of garbage, and the next one, until the trash can is back standing up and the ground is clean. Further, you may implement a way to prevent another monkey attack in the future. Then move on to the next task.
AI systems have been proving helpful in providing information even more easily than in the times of Google search and earlier. You ask questions to a chat or automate a research workflow overnight, and you get answers, citations, links to resources, and anything you might ask for, in seconds to minutes.
So many of us continue indulging in gathering information, seeking intellectual understanding, knowledge, and insights in order to reduce the noise of ruminating thoughts, feel at peace with oneself and the world, make more money, attain more social capital and higher ranks, etc., etc.
Yet, it seems apparent that more information and intellectual understanding doesn’t lead to such outcomes without an experiential understanding; one that involves both body and mind.
We often seem to forget: there’s a body. And the body is far more “intelligent” than we propose, yet we don’t treat it with the same multi-level approach as we do with the mind. Not many people develop body skills at different levels of difficulty in multiple disciplines, allowing adaptations to happen throughout the nervous system.
The gap between prescriptions and actions remains despite all the technological evolutions human civilization has seemingly been undertaking. The doctor prescribes a medication; you don’t take it at the prescribed frequency, but stop beforehand or never start. ChatGPT lays out a plan for finding a girlfriend, and you discard it.
That is fine if there is a choice not to follow the prescription. It may be less fine if you ask for the prescription and for help, announcing how important this is for you, but then you don’t follow the prescription and keep complaining about your situation, the world, doctors, engineers, and how awful it is being you.
The gap stems from a lack of wanting to “face the dragons”; to soften up and allow the required execution to occur, however slowly it might, untying all the knots accumulated over a lifetime. Such an attitude is one of humility and inquiry into all the things (made up and not) standing in the way.
Therefore, there is no need for elaborate systems to plan, define, track, and review your objectives in the short, medium, and long term. This practice can be useful for some people at some point in time, because no practice is to be discarded completely; it is individual and context dependent.
At some point, there is no other choice but to do the next thing that there is to do; to soften up and take a small action that’s driven by a full-body knowledge that this is the right, and maybe the only, thing to do. Then there can be more money, higher social ranking, and all those things you seek—because they tend to come the most when you’re busy doing something else, not chasing and not running away.
