Most people run on defaults.
In computer or mobile, there are a lot of settings you can tinker with, so that you can get from your device what you want out of it. When you get a new device or install a new Operating System, there are settings that are already set there. Such settings are called the device’s defaults.
Just like there are device’s defaults, there are life’s defaults. Let us derive some points from the analogy.
The reason there is an option to tinker with settings, is so that the user of device can make the device fit them. However, most people do not go tinker with the settings UNTILL they encounter a problem that bugs them a lot. Only then will they look on how to fix that specific problem or ask a geeky person to fix it.
The point to notice, is that the user will have the device’s settings tinkered only for things that bugs him a lot. But there would be a dozen other options in the settings that also could have made that person’s experience with his device significantly better, but he didn’t even know about them, and hence he did not change them. [Post under editing]
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He didn’t know that he shouldn’t think of devices as given, he should think of them as invented, something made, something designed, by someone. The devices are a product of someone’s intention of making them. The particular way that device behaves is because someone decided to make it behave that way. If the device works that is because someone did put intention into it1.
But the point here is not merely that everything you see is a product of someone’s intention, but it is that someone else’s intention can’t make things any better for you beyond a limited extent. The ideal thing human beings can do for others is to make things with better defaults and providing a way to change them, but they can’t make things work for you, unless you put your own intention into making something work for you, and unless you make your own decision of what you want to get out of that thing.
So, default2 is the situation that exists without the intention of the person to whom that situation concerns. And when there is no intention involved of the person about any particular thing that concerns them, that particular thing usually does not fit them. In this essay I’m not worried about the defaults of the devices people use, but about the defaults of lives that people live.
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
—John Stuart Mill
The idea of having a life that fits you is very well described by Henrik Karlsson in his essay titled Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process, that you should read further to understand that aspect. An excerpt:
“Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.”
“When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.
- A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.
- A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).
- An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader’s mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.”
And so when I say, most people run on defaults, that means they do not put intention into what they do, and hence let different aspects of their lives to develop in a way that does not fit them. And when they don’t intentionally work to develop their lives a form that fits their inner context, they are essentially trimming their their inner context by forcing it to fit whatever form is developed by defaults.
Many people run their lives on default3 and a telltale sign is that such people seem to have problems in some important aspect of their lives that are solvable (and still remain unsolved)—problems that do not involve any real tradeoff, or, opportunity cost, except, for the effort one has to put into resisting the inertia of defaults.
So, that is the problem of default. The way we solve this problem is by keep asking ourselves questions (about why we are doing things we are doing, and the things we ought to be doing, why we are doing them in the certain way we are doing them), and by deciding to do whatever we do with intention, and then using that intention to work on developing a life that fits.
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding
- Sometimes, devices do come out even with not much intention put into them. These are what make up the crappy devices. ↩︎
- As the word default is very common for device settings (or device behavior), the closest word to that for human behavior is norms. But when people think of norms, they usually think of culture…, and religion…, and, our beliefs…, and grand and abstract things like that. Of course, these things are sources for defaults, but it is a very limited view of the defaults for humans, because there is a whole lot of things that you wouldn’t think of, when you’d think of culture or religion or social norms, etc., that too are defaults. ↩︎
- The thing about defaults is that they are not so easily noticeable because the defaults in different social-circles vary, just like the defaults of different operating systems vary. People might even look down on defaults of another circle while themselves running on defaults, just different ones. And this makes it tricky because some defaults are apparently better than others. There was a certain period in my university-time, when I used to think that the things are so better in certain private universities (as I was in a very inexpensive and unfancy public university), students there take much more interest in learning different things and doing different things, and so on. Only after observing and interacting with students and graduates of those institutions for some time, I came to realize that earlier I wasn’t looking closely, and hence missing a very important about people at these places. It was that they belonged to a place with different (and apparently better) defaults, but they too were running on defaults, and NOT doing whatever apparently interesting things they were doing, with intention.
Defaults do not necessarily mean stasis, and just because someone is not static and constantly doing something, does not mean they are not running on defaults. The defaults are like inertia of an object in motion. Or like streams with heavy flow of water. Different places have different streams (or defaults) running in different directions, with different speed. And the thing to do, is not to jump from one stream to another, or to try to swim upstream, but to get out of the stream. ↩︎