There is really only one question, ever.
Given the state of the world to my knowledge, what should I do next?
Answered shallowly, the answer may be
order pizza for dinner
drink a beer
finish a task on my list
continue or start a conversation with a friend
post on social media
edit a plan or a poem
shoot a gun, make love, spend money
The attraction of the shallow answers lies in how do-able they are.
Social media beckons, a feed as linear as time and digestible as sugar. Familiar routine offers a menu of known actions. Work, as defined by others, is also chunked into digestiible slices and returning a liquid reward, feels perhaps healthier. And expression – artistic, conversational, musical, or the written word feels like a missing mineral, that we didn’t realize we craved until we taste it.
How to weave these small next steps into the pattern we want – and what does that even mean when one moment we want to remake society and the next we want an ice cream sundae?
In our professional lives most of us have known patterns, best practices, colleagues to guide us, and a mission prescribed by our job. On the personal side self-help books abound, and a few cultural groups of changemakers are perhaps starting to share successful practices. Cultural movements define new terms – eg gaslighting, the dictionary term of the year – to synthesize complex behvioral patterns into a word that can be weilded like a weapon.
Much of this happens organically, as it perhaps must. But moving with the flow has proven susceptible to sophisticated manipulation, so we don’t know if our next step is truly ours, if it is driven by our own core self, our values and beliefs and needs, whatever makes up your self – or is it simply what a well funded AI driven cancerous growth is driving us towards?
How then, to make our next step in tune with our inner music, to harmonize with others who share genuine values with us, as tested by dynamic behaviors and not lip service?
To be continued – the how, indeed. Test cases, relationships, and a language evolving from ourselves; uncertainty and critique and feedback. Skepticism but not cynicism. A common past, and test by follow the money. Check in code and patterns to build value based things. Much of this is happening, but how do we recognize it and defend against takeover in the future, is part of the question of how. The devil, as always, hiding in the exploits of the details.