Too few people are dying in the western world due to lack of food and more and more people getting obese and it is one of the leading causes of mortality. The world of abundance has its own challenges and if we try to fight with the old mindset that will not get long-lasting results. First, we need to see what are the common challenges of an abundant world.
Too many options
As the word depicts, an abundant world has too many options. This happens to me all the time, you go to Netflix all pumped up to watch a good movie and after 15 minutes you lost in the list of movies after movies. This is the classical example of too many options. You end up watching either nothing or just old shows you have been watching before.
In psychology, we call it opportunity cost. This happens to everyone who is mortal. I remember reading Robert Frost's poem about two-path leading through woods, he picked the less traveled, and that has made all the difference. It takes me years to understand Robert didn’t say it was good for him that he chose the less traveled path, he just said that made all the difference. And that difference is could either be good or bad. His life would be completely different if had picked the other path. He lost all the upside of the other path which he didn’t choose! This is an example of opportunity cost.
Then how to deal with opportunity cost? I think Warren Buffet gave the best advice. When the interviewer asked him how did you make an investment decision that made him the best investor in the world, he simply said pick your circle of competence. He explained he only invested in business he understood and didn’t invest in companies he didn’t understand even if they might have given him more return.
This is great advice I think. As he advised, create a list of 20 items you really want to do in order of priority. Take the first 5 and delete the rest of them. This is the way to not let you lost in the endless stream of opportunities in the world and settle down with few. You won’t go insane that way.
Addiction
Why we get addict is really an interesting question. What causes addiction? I think addiction is our effort from escaping reality. Sometimes reality is too much for us and the only way to cope is to leave the reality and enter the dreamy world of addiction. We need to plan our life in order for us not to get addicted to either substances or situations.
Similarly, if you are addicted to video games or watching Netflix shows, you must ask yourself, why are you doing this? The only way to break the loop of addiction is by questioning your reality. You must question yourself about your own behavior. And the next step is to ask for help.
Asking for help isn’t about asking other people to help you but asking your own help to fix your life. My best advice is to read books and go into the depth of the human psyche and behavior. There are many great free courses available on YouTube by universities like Stanford where they discuss in detail why and how the human mind works. You may follow this video too if you are interested.
Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3nkAWijQlBnkwnr9wfcuderVe
Too much scrolling
I didn’t add this part in the addiction part because this requires your all attention. Last year I removed all social media apps from my phone and using them only on my laptop. That actually worked and my social media uses and urges dropped like 90%.
But the main question is why social media is too much addicted. The right answer is too good. It has everything. Your social group, the activities they do, the pictures they share, and tag you along. This is just too good for our mind to avoid and we are hooked. No other task is as good as using Instagram or Twitter. I spend hours and hours on Twitter reading people’s tweets and that felt so good. However, I had to realize and accept at one point that wasting too much time on Twitter and Instagram is just not going to produce anything fruitful in life and it was sucking time from my reading and actually working towards any productive thing. I accepted my flaw and took steps to correct them and am somewhat successful in that. Nevertheless, I need to reduce my YouTube hours now. Which is harder than I expected.
Not enough time
The last thing is Time. You must use your time effectively and the only way to use your time wisely is to take care of it and not waste in mindless tasks. From addiction to higher screen time, at the end of the day, we may not have any time left to do anything useful. Days, months, and years will pass and in the end, we wouldn’t have achieved what we could have.
Reading Deep Work by Cal Newport helped to find these flaws in me. Not having enough time is not a random event in our life. If we sucked ourselves in scrolling and mindless activities, no wonder we will feel miserable. Cal recommended giving each hour a task. You should plan your every minute. I don’t think it's easy but he is doing so I guess we all can at least try to do that.
I use note-taking and time blocking to do my activities. In future essays, I will explain how I use them and it may be useful for you as well.
