The New Human OS

Root Cause

Humans evolved in a physical world where survival was a function of proximity to ourselves. Things physically closer to us were more "important" than things far away. A sabre tooth tiger in the distance was far less threatening that one in the distance. 

But, today, we live in an increasingly non-physical world. We have meetings via Zoom as though the person is "there" in front of me but of course it's just pixels on a screen. We may have stock portfolios that can crater due to events on the other side of the planet. Our minds were not designed to function on the scale and speed of events in our world today. 

While we can't just upgrade the "hardware" in our heads (our brains), we can upgrade the software (the way we think and conceive). 

The challenge is that our mental models and even our language stem from this physical underpinning and it perpetuates and conception of the world from our human point of view - specifically how we expereince that world - versus how things actually are. 

While most of us want the "same" things: love, money, freedom, etc., our inate selfishness has some undermine common protocols for their own selfish purposes. Indeed, competiton for resources, is the way of the natural world, greed has humans take it to a ridiculous extremes far, far beyond the level of need. it is this orientation that prevents peaceful societies from evolving. 

It all comes down to our thinking and perception. We have to shift the way we conceive of ourselves individualy and collectively if we are to transcend our current circumstance to the conscious future that is desperately winting to unfold but being held back because humanity is in a perpetual argument with itself. We are in a more complex world than we are able to comprehend. A new mind is required. 

Nature of the Solution

Without getting into the "what" or "how," let's focus on the nature of the solution: what attributes it must entail. 

1. It needs to be able to encompass all that there is. In other words, it needs to be able to take a "holistic" view of "all of it" at the largest scales. 

2. It needs to provide analytical specificity at the most granular scales. For instance, it's great to have a political and  economic system based on "democracy" and "capitalism" but we also need to create "rules" for how that executes at the transactional level. 

3. The solution needs to be "universal" and generalized such that it can handle any situation, yet have the adaptability and articulation to respond to unfolding new events. 

4. It needs to represent any concept from the concrete and immediate (e.g., food on my table) to the intangible and invisible (e.g., the "electricity" that powers my computer). 

5. It needs to be robust over the long term and highly dynamic in the short term. 

6. Finally, it needs to effectively bridge the "outer world" - our external reality and the "inner world" - our perceptions and interpretations of it all. 

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What's The Problem?

What's Working

We have made remarkable progress from food production to mental health to subatomic physics. Incredible technologies allow us to hold video calls with someone across the globe as if they were "there." And, again, we have developed societies and economic models that have pulled billions of people out of poverty over the past 100 years. We are amazing when we apply ourselves constructively. 

What’s NOT working

•  Humans are the most sophisticated animals on this planet. But you wouldn't know it from our behavior. 

• Our conscious minds have evolved to create and manage complex societies to encompass broad "collectives." But our individual minds are still governed by our "animal instincts" of survival. 

• While we can imagine the abstract and conceptual ideas of family, company, country, and world, we are still bery much rooted in a self-oriented physical paradigm. Our consciousness has developed as a "layer" on top of a much "older" brain but quickly disapears when our immeidate selves are or simply feel threatened. We must transcend this "survival" mindset if we are to build truly effective societies. 

• For all the wisdom that has been shared throughout time from religious texts to Tony Robbins, we don't seem to be learning. So it's not for lack of conscious teachings or knowledge: it seems to be our inability to truly embody and live by those wisdom principles. What's going on?

• Even though we know certain fears aren't "real" (e.g., fear of failure or rejection), it can hold us back from pursuing our greatest dreams and wishes. To which I reply, "WTF?!"

• We "know" we only have this one Earth, we are knowlingly destroying it. Our greed for the now is far greater than our plans for sustaining the future. Can we really say that's "smart?"

Unnecessary Suffering

For all our prowess and ability to pursue happiness, we remain mired in our self-induced suffering. To be clear there is real suffering - when we are starving or a loved one dies. That is not the problem. There is an inordinate amount of what I call, "unnecessary suffering" that keeps us from everything we say we want. Thoughts of "I'm not good enough" or "I don't belong" drive people to depths of loneliness and depression. Worse, these feelings severely limit our ability to express our unique selves. 

This is insane and clearly not the workings of an evolved mind. Up to 80% of our thoughts are negative. Yes, these stem fro an evolutionary tendency to avoid risk, but we are still terrified to speak in front of audiences even though we "know" we won't die. 

I could go on. The point is twofold:

1.  We lack the capacity to process information beyond a certain scale. Even though we can have a notion of another person in another country around the Earth, the importance diffuses quickly with distance such that we justify our local actions because we can't viscerally comprehend the impacts outside our realms of immediate influence or exposure. 

2. Greed and corruption seem to overpower the conscious ideas of fairness and equity - even though we pretend to espouse those values.