Ego, Ayahuasca, Scarcity and Antifragility
Simple is best.
In Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is Your Enemy, he teaches that we cannot be afraid of the uncontrollable.
We cannot worry about what we do not control.
If you can’t control it, forget about it.
After an ayahuasca ritual, I had the confirmation in how much our ego is a “doll”, an “avatar”.
We only live in him and with him, but we are not him.
In the book Scarcity, by Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, I learned that whoever is in a state of scarcity tends to have more and more scarcity.
And there is no way to be 100% “scarciless” (neologism).
We have to fight against it all the time. We will always be juggling to balance the scarcities. We cannot create an agenda with perfectly concatenated schedules.
Well, we can’t control anything; we need to let randomness just be.
We only know this: “we don’t know what is going to happen; but it will happen”.
That is, whoever tries to control uncontrollable things, tends to lose control of the entire agenda.
And that comes from our ego, which does not admit that it cannot control things.
If the person knows that he/she cannot control anything, and, therefore, admit that a randomness will occur, he/she must leave a slack in the agenda; even though he/she has to sacrifice something he/she would be doing.
Herein, we have the concept of Mental Bandwidth, that is the ability to perform and support simultaneous tasks in different aspects of life, that maybe got being mitigated by scarcity and consequently, creating more scarcity.
Whenever we calculate the cost of something in time and money, we must also remember the cost in terms of bandwidth — and the scarcity it will generate.
In the long run, whoever leaves room for mental bandwidth ends up doing better.
And, in Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, we learn the concept of a new word: antifragility. Just a digression: it is an entire book to define a word. It is as if it were a Dictionary dedicated entirely to a word.
In it, the author teaches that in most modern institutions, there is such a desire for control, statistics and predictability, to reduce the chance of mistakes.
The mistakes are, in fact, reduced, but when they happen, they are catastrophic; in the other hand, if we admit and allow the nature of things to just act, there would be more mistakes, but within a variability without such drastic changes.
The same way as modern institutions, professions got so specialized that, if the society as we know it today changes radically, we would have millions of people without a specified function.
This comes, again and again, from our ego and our inability to accept lack of control as something normal and natural.
The scarcity itself is a fragility, resulted by not accepting the lack of control: we disregard the randomness factor, because we think we are in control of things and that we won’t be surprised.
To live is to know how to live in the natural way. Let things flow. Let things be as they are.
Simple, efficient and prepared as much as possible. Without forcing things. Without wanting to impose order and patterns where it doesn’t exist.
Amazingly, the simple is the most difficult of the obvious.
