By the time you are fifty, you would much prefer stable. However while facing the challenges of a world that is always changing rapidly, aim ing for getting stable when becoming older is a dangerous wish to make.
『… in the twenty-first century, you hardly afford stability. If you want to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant – not just economically, but all socially – you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvest yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.
As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encounter before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms and the need to change your profession every decade. What is right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you and absorb and analyze it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?
To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and greater reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown…』*
So the best advise to young people is that rather than listening to those experienced old guys, listening to their own hearts. To keep themselves mentally flexible and emotionally balanced and to learn always with open hearts.
Now algorithms and big data are becoming knowing us much better than we do to ourselves, so they might be able to easily push our emotion buttons correctly and manipulate what we think and behave. How to cope with such challenges? We need to spend adequate effort to know ourselves better.
As the author own experience, meditation is a very effective method for himself. Sit down, calm down and close eyes with crossed legs. Focus only on breathing in and out without thinking anything else. It’s not easy since our mind is quite easily being distracted to think other things. Under meditation, you will meet your pure self and you finally can control yourself without spending effort to control. Because that is who you are.
Where am I from? Where am I going to? Who am I? These are three fundamental philosophical questions we need to answer in our whole life.
World climate change, biotechnology, robots and algorithms intelligence are imminent challenges to the human kind in twenty-first century. In history, It takes 5 millions to 7 millions for us to revolve ourselves gradually and become a dominant species as we are now. But do we still have enough time to continue to revolve and eventually survive in the future? To be or not to be is really the question.
Try this question first: who am “I”? This is an acid test about how much we understand the meaning of life, and death. If you say you don’t know exactly who you are, I would acknowledge that you are honest so much as to accept your own ignorance and that might be a feature to help you survive in the future. Congratulation! But please don’t keep staying there.
*：《21 lessons for the 21st century》， Yuval Noah Harari
2020/10/23 who am “I”? Damakey
