Our brains aren’t geared for adulthood
The non-negotiable need for focus
Times are changing too quickly, and our brains are unable to keep up.
This is the answer I landed upon after being somewhat plagued by a thought I couldn’t get rid of: that surely, the prominence of mental health issues couldn’t, alone, be owed to the progress of research and awareness in the field.
I believe that, on average, our generation of adults are experiencing higher levels of mental strain than any other generation of adults has ever had.
My thinking ignores outliers. For instance: I acknowledge that World War I might have been mentally straining, but note that it only saw the direct involvement of less than 0.1% of the world’s population, it saw fewer fatalities than those seen by TB and Malaria over the last 3 years.
In another contrasting example, we know that the advent of smartphones has involved 37% of the world population. More interestingly, 95% of people aged 18–34 living in the US own a smartphone. While seemingly incomparable to WWI, daily smartphone use has more of an effect on the psychology of the average human now, than WWI had on the psychology of the average human then.
I believe that the slow-moving nature of evolution, in our fast-paced time, can prove to be a weakness. The management of this weakness requires more effort, awareness and discipline than has ever been required by any other generation before us.
Going back in time
Around 10,000 years ago, the dominant structure of human life was nomadic bands. To survive, groups of people would gather together and move from place to place in search of food, water and grazing land. These groups had no fixed home, and were mere puppets to the seasons.
Human life expectancy was averaged at 33 years at the time. To be a successful member of the band, you had to spend your youth moving with the band, learning how to hunt or gather food. It was unlikely that the skill requirement for a young nomad, 3 generations prior, would have been much different. That is to say, that the skills from nomad to nomad, across the band, and across generations, had little variance.
The agricultural revolution
Fast forward a few millennia, humans saw the first great revolution. The agricultural revolution (also known as the neolithic revolution), which saw the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The ability to farm and raise livestock allowed humans to live in fixed locations — villages, towns or cities.
The centralization of agriculture meant that only a few members of a village had to manage the production of food. The rest were then able to garner specialized skills, form complex political structures and contribute to the growth of industry and commerce. This allowed humans to form towns, and eventually cities.
The revolution saw an increase in the variance of skills within groups of people living together. Yet, the variance in skills from generation to generation was still narrow, but increasing ever so slowly.
This specialization in skill introduced pedagogical debt to societies, i.e. any new valuable skill needs to be taught and thus incurs teaching debt. An individual with skills valued by their village would have to pass on their skills to another villager, lest they take their skills to their grave. Valued people were quick to realise this and began harboring their skills in their families where they could, passing skills down from parent to child, preserving business and the “family recipe of doing X.”
Addressing pedagogical debt
While an expert carpenter could teach his son how to pick the best wood, and how to make the best cuts by example — a civil engineer would have a difficult time explaining the complex calculations involved in keeping a bridge up to a 9 year old child.
This created a need for special institutions whose sole purpose was to teach. In the 5th century, what’s currently thought to be the oldest University, Nalanda University, was founded. Nalanda was a large and revered Buddhist monastery in the ancient Kingdom of Magadha in India.
Universities were the bridge to fill the gap caused by rapidly growing societies, whose functioning depended on a collection of various sets of skills.
As the story goes: Farming allowed permanent settlement, settlement fostered roads, roads allowed for trade, the creation of trade partnerships created the need for more roads. Increased trade created the need for faster trade; hence trains, railroads, accountants, engines, engineers, war specialists and psychologists…it goes. The trend was divergence of skill, specialization and focus.
It was then, that a young member of society could dream to be whatever they wanted to be.
Born out of this were our Isaac Newton’s of Cambridge, James Watt’s of Glasgow, Allessandro Volta’s of Pavia, Albert Einstein’s of Zurich and even some informally educated Leonardo da Vinci’s of Florence, to name a few the history books specifically tell us about.
Freedom of skill
Neatly skipping the industrial revolution, we arrived at the Information Age — where we are today. The variance in skill has never been greater. We see all kinds of greatness around us, and naturally aspire towards it and the fruit it yields.
Unlike our nomad predecessors and early villagers, not only can we take completely different career paths compared to our parents, we have to. The speed at which technology is advancing, leads to dramatic changes in what skills are required from generation to generation. Even our future doctors might have to learn how to calibrate an AR device that assists heart transplants, tuning it differently for each patient.
We cannot say with certainty which skills are needed for tomorrow, and we therefore can’t rehearse for it. We can only trust in our ability to learn.
An unrehearsed life
Parenthood is a strong reminder of what it means to be unrehearsed. Parents usually aren’t amazing at parenting; solely because they’ve never parented before. They learn as they go. No amount of reading can serve as a rehearsal for the amount of effort that is required to be a good parent.
We, as young adults in the digital age carry the same curse of being unrehearsed:
Observation 1: ‘Becoming’ valuable
Stepping into adulthood reveals many things to us. One, in particular, is the manifestation of value. Before adulthood, we would have usually spent the majority of our lives in school, learning to become valuable citizens.
When we step into adulthood, when the bulk of our learning is over, it has us discover our value in society and the different ways in which we can contribute. Parallel to this, we begin to see our peers contributing in different ways too. Like a field of flowers blooming all at once, making their mark in society.
Observation 2: The head with a million eyes
While this manifestation of skill is not new to our generation, it is scary to think that there have never been adults in existence that have had the same level of awareness about the lives of others at the scale and depth as we do.
My mother, at age 25, could never have known what 5 of her friends, let alone her favourite celebrity, had for breakfast. She would have only found out about 10 years after her graduation that one of her college friends became a successful entrepreneur. Perhaps only after 20 years, that her friend from chemistry who was as thin as a rake became a body builder, had children and lost his great shape all again — if that’s the first thing he wanted to say after seeing her for the first time in 20 years. To her, none of those things mattered or made it to her day to day life.
We, on the contrary, know all of those things about our friends, our role models and even our old high-school classmates.
The need to be good at everything
Envy is a human universal that glows when we perceive a comparable person as having better traits or possessions than we do. It has been found to be quite the complex emotion, and newly seen as useful — It serves as a call-to-action, helping us know what we want.
We now know that it plays a role in helping us independently attain similar or better resources than those owned by envied counterparts.
My belief is that our brain’s formula for envy isn’t ready for carefully tailored personalized media that is designed to sell us things; and our social feeds, which show us only happy and successful images of our friends. We see too many images of what we want, and our brains tell us that we can and should attain.
We see around 4,000–10,000 marketing messages everyday. Any image that speaks to an idea of success we identify with, carries the potential of triggering the desire to attain. It’s no surprise why so many of us strive to be great at too many things:
Meditation, dieting, exercise, work mastery, healthy relationships, wealth, time management, charisma, spirituality, mental well-being, public speaking and business. You name it.
The confident human brain
It is one of our strengths as humans to know, confidently, that we have the ability to achieve or outdo what another person has successfully done.
However, it might be our greatest weakness that our brain hasn’t reconfigured itself to know that we can’t succeed at so many things at once.
When we set too many goals, each already being difficult on its own, the time and effort spent on each is spread too thin. This results in slow progress, lower morale and a dimmer outlook, among other things, that snowball and make failure inevitable.
Focus
Focus means that your goals and objectives are clear, and that your work and time is dedicated to those goals and objectives.
If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any. — Jim Collins
The greatest illusion of our time is that we need to be great at everything. If we use data, we’ll find that no massively successful person tried to be great at everything. They typically focused on one thing, and had everything else supplement it. Once success was achieved, they’d take a grab at the next slice.
The fruit of focus
Isaac Newton, an extreme example, focused on the fields of Mathematics and Physics, gave us the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and the first reflecting telescope. Despite his incredible achievements, Newton had massively neglected the pleasures of everyday life and any kind of romance. At the time of his funeral, Voltaire said: “Newton was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women.”
Newton, although an extreme example, was very far ahead of his time. His work, beyond imagination at the time, required a great amount of focus. Stories like Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to drop out of college to work on Facebook, or Bill Gate’s unbending will to code in a time where access to computers and coding time was limited, or Jobs’ obsession over the Apple I prototype aren’t too different to Newton’s. They all serve as examples of the importance of focus.
It goes without saying that the requirement for most goals to succeed is time. Call it the 10,000-hour rule, or the 5-hour rule or the things-take-time rule.
The fact is: Goals have a time requirement, and any time, otherwise required, spent elsewhere is antagonistic to the goal. Working towards 10 goals is antagonistic to all of them. Highly ‘successful’ people are commonly known for 1 achievement.
The generation of adults in the information age need to be disciplined in understanding what we want, and what we ought to work to achieve. We owe it to ourselves to filter out the noise and focus.
These are great slideshows describing how some of the most successful entrepreneurs find focus: https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/286302
A friend of mine, Masharty wrote a really cool article about cleaning up: It details not doing everything at once, and rather focusing on the important things first, getting to the rest later.
