Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
Living, working intentionally is important. But being intentional is not necessarily about having a plan and executing it. It is about mindfully making choices and seeing the results unfold without being caught up with the outcomes you’ve been expecting.
One of the difficulty with human’s mastery over nature and ability to manipulate the environment is that we fail to grasp how little control we really have.
If life could be somewhat on autopilot, would you prefer that? Do you enjoy the process of living life or is it only particular outcomes, achievements and moments you relish with most of the process better off discarded?
Is it not the variations, the serendipity and the surprises that makes life more of life? Life is precisely beautiful because we are not robots, not automatons running programmes and having things run in a predictable course.
From a single dimension, with all that complexity in life, efficiency and productivity is sacrificed. But from the perspective of the entire system, it is enriched. God made the world with its multiplicity, colours and complexity so we may appreciate it for all its richness rather than to boil it down to a single measure.
I’ve been thinking about being a human a lot. And wondering about our energy levels and supply as we go through each day, engage in different activities. What does it mean to live sustainably as a human. We have our ebbs and flows, just like wind energy and the sun. But they are sustainable; the sun will keep shining somehow and the wind will blow. They would come and they would go; you don’t know when or how much exactly, but roughly, we know.
Maybe we humans are built for that level of precision; it is perhaps unrealistic for us to try and compete with the robots, to be more productive, to be more efficient. We do perhaps because these attributes are more measurable. Why not we consider how we can be more creative, more imaginative? It’s probably not even comparable from one to another; not to suggest we can measure these. That multi-dimensional, unmeasurable attribute of real things in the world, in nature, is from God.
But maybe sometimes, we can be that biofuel, to be firing when there is a need for electricity, rather than just be generating power intermittently like the sun and the wind. Even though considered as a renewable, biofuels technically requires much more process, a highly interconnected circular economy system to capture and utilise the feedstock. So in order to fire with that regularity, we must still respect some kind of rhythm, some pattern of energy use.
What does your education teach you about cars? Usually nothing much. I never did the road safety course which are supposed to be conducted in every Singaporean school. I do not remember what happened but it is likely I was unwell the day my class went for the course. What I do remember is that there were people on bicycles, people who were pedestrians and then people driving little cars. Those driving the little cars were seen as the privileged ones.
I often hear that with a car, one feels free – perhaps that one can just drive anywhere. For me, I don’t like to drive and so the real value of a car to me, is that it’s basically a huge mobile cabinet or storage that I can bring around with me. I can put different attire in it and be able to change out more easily without having to lug a huge bag with me. And of course, this mobile storage actually can carry me with it.
But what are we really doing to the world as we indulge in the ‘freedom’ of driving around and moving a mobile cabinet around an urban space? We are holding a lot of urban possibilities hostage, while also causing pollution, emitting more carbon into the atmosphere, sustaining yet more businesses that are digging oil out of the ground. It is shameful, to say the least.
So what should we do about private transportation over short distance? I have some ideas, which can be implemented together in some cases:
Close more roads on weekends, allow weekend street markets to bloom.
The modern yes man is not the one who only says yes to the boss. He is the one who is saying yes to everyone but himself and his family. And at the end of the day, he burns out. We all are always craving for something additional, something incremental and new that we forget in doing so, we forgo the default that we have worked so hard to have in the past.
We worked hard to support, care, pursue the ones with love but work itself tend to overwhelm and get prioritised above those we care for. And of course we are telling ourselves the story that working is the way we love and care. That is the danger of boiling down our lives and identity down to a single parameter, be it money, career progression, a job title, or what we can own.
My faith has long warned me against that. God has blessed us with so much but we often end up focusing on distilling all that blessing down to a single parameter like money, and focusing on what we are missing, and thinking we haven’t had enough. It certainly doesn’t prevent me from falling back into the trap though. And I guess this post is here to remind myself.
Does change in the world put more pressure on you to review the status quo and push forward with change plans? Or does it cause you to give up entirely because “nothing you do matters”? What is the story you tell yourself about change, status quo and your agency?
Our old carbon-based economy is interlocked and we all need to rewrite our story around that and envision a different reality for our future. But because things are moving so quickly, one can either feel incredible pressure to change, to communicate something, or to think that others will do the job, I’ll just do the same. What we don’t realise is that the change we see, and feel are just a result of hedonic adaptation that causes us to miss out so much that is still in status quo.
Without a change story, it is hard for us to process and digest change. We get overwhelmed by it, and we shut it out deliberately to preserve our sanity. Old-school companies want to stay in their old ways and continue “business as usual”.
Communicating something, trying to tag on the new green buzzwords and “join the conversation” prematurely without thinking about the change story is going to cause trouble. You might end up getting lost instead, in the twilight zone between the comforts of status quo and leadership of change.
So take time, resources, capacity to consider what is the change story.
Do you live life or does life live you? People think of this general notion of the various milestones and pathways in the passage of living as “life” and “live that out”. We would take ownership of a life that was prescribed for us, constructed by others, expected by society. And we put upon ourselves more and more constraints. I’m not talking about actual commitments, just perceived ones.
Steve Job shared his perspective of this in a 1994 interview that was recorded and I think it sums up perfectly why it is important to rewrite our stories. Not just as an individual, but also as a generation.
After slightly more than a year of writing daily on my blog, I’ve started working on refining, rewriting and updating my ideas in the same or longer format. These articles will be posted weekly on my Medium page. It’s been a joy sharing my ideas and I’ll be doing more periodic consolidation and eventually publishing them into a book if things work out as I hope.
Meanwhile, for those who are sitting on the fence about writing, blogging, publishing, I highly encourage you try things out yourself.
Humans are poor at thinking probabilistically and this is mostly because reality tends to be a collection or a series of outcomes. Things happen and it seems like things are one or none. There’s no ‘chance of’ rain because it either rains or it doesn’t. So it would seem that probability is an abstraction, something that exists only in the minds of people.
So it might make sense to think about a range of outcomes instead. When we consider our goals and our visions of the future, it’ll be useful to think in terms of scenarios and to actually be rigorous in thinking about them. It is useful to consider if you want to be a manager, what are the conditions to fulfill it, how it would look like in terms of your family life, your friendships and relationships. If we think of our goals in the isolated way in a single dimension, we will never be able to grasp its implication in other dimensions of life.
By thinking of scenarios in a more complete manner where you look at the various goals and the claim on your resources, you can better think appreciate the “chances” of realising some of your vision. Because quite likely, they can be mutually incompatible.
I struggle with Meta’s value creation model; it takes people’s attention, passing it to those who value it, and makes off with the money in return. They then mine for more attention, more screen time, more private data to get more value. This sounds compelling but if their interest remains diametrically opposed to the large user base they boast of, it’s doomed to fail at some point.
Why not focus on long term value that is sustainable, aligning their own interest with the users’ interests. Collecting a fee from companies to provide identity verification services based on user data without handing over private data. Or collecting subscription fees to help users protect their private information and allow it to be securedly shared with treasured connections?
There are ways for Meta to reinvent itself to be a giant worthy of its position amongst the tech firm. Just exploring the metaverse isn’t going to be enough.