Real people?

The complexity of people is too much...

We don't look at people as people. I believe this is rooted in fear and confusion related to the complexity of people. For too much of our lives, we spend 40 hours a week at work or school solving simple problems with barebone logical frameworks that have "correct answers". We then move on to confuse these simplifications with reality. This is the mental equivalent of a Mixed Martial Arts specialist only training by lifting weights. They might "look" muscular but those muscles don't have many functions interacting with anything other than gym equipment. Simply put, we have many mental, social, and cognitive skills that are oversimplified and never directly connected back to the complex world. As such, I don't think we have the social and cognitive skills we think we do. We don't understand mathematics, science, politics, and psychology like we think we do. Simply put, they are all gym skills, those B.S and M.S. and M.D. degrees look great but are so detached from reality that authentic social or environmental interactions are both rare and awkward. Our real-world usage of these skills is about as disconnected from reality as a treadmill is from a forest trail.

OKAY. We get it.

It is easier to identify a problem than come up with a solution. The issue is that is exactly the Penrose staircase. It ISN'T a PROBLEM. It is life. Once we blindly simplify life into problems we lose sight of what life IS. Life is NOT a problem, nor are any of its intricate processes. The issue is that the overall trend in America is that we are slowly slipping towards isolation by confusing life with problems. Life is warping into a Problem for solving. That is to say, it is becoming cold, hard, and simple. It is becoming deductive. We are master surgeons, reducers, and "deducers" of life. As such life is becoming reduced and deducted. Balance is the key. Understanding life may require deduction, but life is inherently an inductive process.

Paradigm shifts.

We have separated our inducers (hippies and spirituals) from our reducers (doctors and the bulk of society). We need deductive inducers to meet up with inductive reducers. If we could find a way to a new state of balance between induction and reduction we could reframe our perspectives to reflect our world in a simultaneously simple and complex way.

The healthy future.

Our travels into reductive thinking, discrimination, and compartmentalization practices are not evil or even "bad". They are and were essential parts of growth and exploration on the part of humanity. We now have powerful/deadly tools that can be used for inductive processes. We have played with destructive and reductive toys like guns, cars, bombs, high-rise apartments, armies, and slavery. We have compartmentalized our people, animals, and plants. We have learned how they function and interact at varying levels of environmental simplicity and isolation and now see that they have become fragile and prone to collapse without the support of a rich and complex environment. It is time to consider how we want to embrace complexity, and how we want to LIVE.

The transition from isolation to holistic life

The key is how to initiate a transition from isolation and reductionism to a holistic life. Nucleation of simple patterns can achieve this without catastrophic system damage. Dr. Christopher Alexander had wonderful ideas of how to achieve this through physically structuring human communities. In tandem, we need flexible core perspectives that lead to the nucleation of ideas that pattern our environment holistically. That is to say that healthy living truly comes to life when our perspectives and attitudes constructively interact with our physical environments. Our attitudes and perspective could be shaped by our answer to the question "what is life". My answer is: Life is not complicated, it is complex. Complexity is the behavior of an adaptive system whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, collectively leading to nonlinear dynamics, and novel characteristics.

Painted in less rigid terms

Life is a symphony of whirling beauty. It changes every second, clashing and harmonizing with splashing colors. It is a pattern of incredible depth that gives birth to new and exciting possibilities.

Citations and inspirations:

Page, S. E. (2012). The hidden factor: Why thinking differently is your greatest asset. Teaching Company.

Alexander, C. (1977). A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. Oxford university press.