“Un héros, c’est celui qui fait ce qu’il peut. Les autres ne le font pas.”
Romain Rolland

Don’t do what you should do, do what you can do.

You’ll be eternally shocked and consistently surprised by how much more success doing the latter will bring you than doing the former. Most ironically of all, doing what you can do will bring you closer to doing what you should do than the reverse process.

Doing what you should do is about internalizing social guilt complexes (which aren’t necessarily bad, just…ineffective, counterproductive and rigid at the wrong time). Doing what you should do is slavery. Honorable slavery, but slavery nonetheless. Doing what you can do, on the other hand, is rooted in freedom, optionality, possibility. Doing what you can do unleashes your little-c creativity (which is awesome because, as it turns out, every expert on the subject freely admits that Big-C Creativity is just sequences of little-c creativity — sort of like proteins versus amino acids).

A hero is just someone who does what they can. Nothing more. The only difference between heroes and ordinary people is that the latter (consciously or unconsciously) refuse to explore the state space of action options that are literally right in front of them. We’re not talking about climbing mountains here; we’re talking about lifting pencils, opening mouths. Shuffling feet. Clicking screens. Easy things. Brutally easy. Insultingly easy.

Don’t (over)reach. You don’t need to. Don’t do great things. Do easy things that help.

The subtitle of this post is “the case against obligation”. Now, since I’m not Alan Dershowitz and conspicuously lack that man’s charming chutzpah and raw intellectual pugnacity (the man is an utter bulldog; I would hate to be in a dark alley at night arguing against him), I’m not going to write you a whole book about it. But let’s address a common instant obligation:

“But, Khatz, you Japanese-speaking, Ancient Rome-loving, crazy, decadent African despot, absent the mutually binding ties of obligation, no society, no civilization, can long stand! What you’re calling for is touchy-feely hippie anarchy! Anarchy, I tell you!”

Calm down, Chicken Little. It ain’t like that. Am I saying that we do away with the “mutually binding ties of obligation” at a foundational level? No. What I’m saying is that obligation, used as an operating action principle, is worse than useless.

For example: faith is, arguably, a good thing. But if you’re sitting in front of your computer screen praying for a stock you shorted to go down, then ya done foxed up. If a person needs daily reminders to not murder busfuls of adorable schoolchildren or (worse) not punch me in the face, then that person needs to be locked up and medicated indefinitely; they have problems deeper than gentle nagging can likely fix.

Prayer is not an investment strategy. Obligation is not a thriving strategy. Obligation is great for creating taboos: we shouldn’t need to refine our arguments against incest; it’s fine to just be grossed out by it and move on. It is decidedly not great for creating or executing a plans to learn and grow.

We need more creativity in our lives, not less. Slavery (even, or perhaps especially, the metaphorical, honorable kind) suppresses creativity — in no small part because the rewards for good slave behavior range from minimal to non-existent (typically, the best one can hope for is to avoid punishment). The incentive system is all screwed up. This is not how happy and successful lives are created.

There is a time and place for everything. Some things, like language, can be practiced at any time, in any place. Most things cannot. The bathroom is the only appropriate place to snap a deuce (if you’re out camping, hold it in and wait till you get home lol). Obligation, ideas of duty, these are something that belongs at the physical, hardware/firmware layer of the human behavior protocol stack (google “OSI Reference Model” for details on what a protocol stack is and how it works). They have no place at the application/software level. Brow-beating, berating and guilt-tripping yourself into doing “the” right thing (or not doing “the” wrong thing) is like trying to turn a cake into a cookie by re-baking it. Sure, they’re both made of wheat, eggs and milk, but it’s the wrong time and place for that.

When you’re coding or designing a webpage, do you think of gravity? No. Why? Because you hate the laws of physics and reject “Kepler-Newtonian gravitational values”? No, because gravity is both fully implicit in and totally irrelevant to HTML.

Is everything made of quantum fields? Sure. Do you run theoretical physics calculations in order to cook food? Do you balance chemical equations and worry about covalent bonds and atomic shells? I wouldn’t advise it, and, furthermore, I would be strongly disinclined to eat at your house if you did.

Obligation’s place is to undergird our actions unconsciously and implicitly. We bake it in through early, gentle, consistent, long-term conditioning. It’s a root thing. Silent. Invisible. It simply does not work for explicitly guiding and informing our actions, that is, for working at the branches, leaves and flowers of behavior. That’s where high-level strategy, tinkering, and clever environmental manipulation come in and, indeed, shine.

Obligation is heavy. Obligation is the very ground itself. Solid. But most things are IKEA furniture. Light. Mobile. Disposable. Don’t confuse the two. It creates clutter. Move and discard the light at will.

Should you tinker with the idea of whether or not to feed cows to cows (as happened in the UK and the US, resulting in BSE/CJD)? No. Instant no. Hard swipe left. To quote Cartman: “it’s wroang”! Should ya tinker with how you learn or play or exercise or work? All the time. All day. Every day.

#immersion #SRS