Life Experiment 27, 2021

Hey There.

Chances are that if you are reading this newsletter that you are pretty well off. At the moment, you probably aren't worried about your survival.

That's great, but it brings me to today's topic:

Why do we always want more?

Let's say we have it 85% the way we dreamt. Most of our wishes are fulfilled. But the last 15% is bugging the shit out of us.

For the price of getting the last 15% right, we are willing to wrack the other 85%. If anyone's wondering.

Yes, I took the 85%/15% analogy from the Sex/Life series that aired on Netflix last week. All I can say is that the series is a bit fucked-up (literally) but totally binge watchable. But don't expect any profound/deep life lessons from it.

Although 85/15 applies to other areas of life: career, relationships, free-time, ... not just the kinky side of it.

No matter how hard we try there will be certain percentage of things that bother us:

I think that the ratio of 85/15 or 90/10 is OK. Such a ratio probably indicates that things are as good as they could ever be. Although if sth is 50/50 or, even worse, 20/80, you might want to consider how to change things.

With health, food, job, place to live, stimulating work, I've been on the path of wanting more. Trying to improve every last damn detail instead of enjoying what I have.

I have never heard of a scientific explanation why we desire more and more (although it probably exists). My observations (on a sample of one) are that us wanting more isn't a rational thing. It's more instinct-driven.

I don't know. Maybe wanting more and more is probably the result of the world we live in. After every 3 seconds, we are reminded how we should also buy X, get fitter, more intelligent, prettier or whatever else.

Not to mention how large an effect in wanting more all those movies and TV series have on us. I mean, Netflix is a desire generation, attention-grabbing machine. Designed to suck us into the world of fantasy.

Netflix certainly has a drug-like effect with some of its content. A ten-episode series. Alright, for the next 10h I'm in the fictional world.

One active "movement" to combat the desire for more is Minimalism , which I've been practising now for years. But Minimalism in itself isn't enough. Yes, it allows us to deal with the supper-plus of physical possessions. But Minimalism doesn't focus that much on the mental, digital clutter and all other forms of clutter we manage to pile up in our lives.

Of course, the consumption and the desire for improvement or desire for more are not necessarily harmful. They cause progress. But they can definitely be bad if we give too much into them. Then, the consumption and the desire for improvement can become toxic.

For example, if I haven't watched as many series, movies, read as many books and articles, I would have "upgraded" my world/life view far less often than I did.

Consumption definitely leads towards more aha moments. Trying to flip the perspective and re-think our life assumptions is always good.

But is this drive to do better still good if we just improve for the sake of improvement? Consume for the sake of consumption?

I use this weekly newsletter as a way of thinking. As a way of re-evaluating my life and I really enjoy that part of the process. (Not 100% sure that you readers do too.)

One compelling aspect of "weekly" analysis is that I get to constantly re-evaluate my life assumptions. Of course, often, I re-confirm the conclusions I made in the past. But sometimes, I realise that some of my assumptions were completely wrong. That my assumptions about life/world lead to blind spots.

Discovering blind spots is not just OK. It's great. The life analysis sessions are an integral part of my Life Experiment .

After all, the point of experiments is to make assumptions, test them and see if we made the correct assumptions in the first place.

To wrap up this desire for improvement discussion, I have another essay for you: How do you know if you are overthinking it? . The essay is one of the results of the Twitter Space from Thinking Masterminds with Indy. This week we are discussing Formal vs Informal Learning .

Cheers

Ziga