Not Acknowledge the Status Quo

The challenge many a times is to not overturn the status quo or fight against it but to ignore it entirely. The moment we engage with a status quo and bend our will to do something for it or against it we give our power entirely to it. The status quo reduces our identity to binaries of ‘for’ and ‘against’ and we forget what it was we set out to do in the first place. The things that we like and we want to do will sometimes be limited by the artificial constraints around us but to engage in fighting the constraints and forgetting our dreams is not always a solution. At times its more important to side step the constraints than to fight them in order to keep alive our dreams. We need to prioritize what we want to do and acknowledge that we have a limited amount of energy to execute that which is precious to us. You might be able to win the battles you engage in but do you want to prioritize winning a particular battle? Thats the more important question to ask in our finite lives.

To adapt to the new or stick to the old

In his blog article defending change (or the status quo) Seth Godin argues that its easy to take the stance of either sticking vehemently with the old and not giving the new a chance or entirely getting sucked up into the new (like technophiles) and denigrating the old. He says

What’s truly difficult is being a fair arbiter. I fall into this trap all the time. We begin to develop a point of view, usually around defending the status quo, but sometimes around overturning it, and then the arguments become more and more concrete. While we might pretend to be evenhanded, it’s very hard to do. Sometimes, we end up simply arguing for or against a given status quo, instead of the issue that’s actually at hand. And the danger is pretending you’re being fair, when you’re not. - Seth Godin

its necessary to take the good parts of both arguments and align them and see more holistically and objectively to the new options in life be it opportunities or technologies. To add to what Seth says, I feel we don’t think very clearly at times because of our conditioning and our passions. Our conditioning exaggerates the benefits of the old and our passions exaggerate the benefits of the new. Somewhere we need to step away from both of these and focus on the change in question more clearly. It helps to question where are beliefs about the advantages / disadvantages of a change are rooted, in conditioning, in our passions or in logic.

Be Useless

While writing my morning pages this morning came up this line.

Come up with something useful everyday.

Every day, no matter what, I make a poem and post it online. Most days they’re mediocre, some days they’re great, and some days they’re awful. (Jerry Garcia: “You go diving for pearls every night but sometimes you end up with clams.”) But it doesn’t matter to me whether the day’s poem was good or not, what matters is that it got done. I did the work. I didn’t break the chain. If I have a shitty day, I go to sleep and know that tomorrow I get to take another whack at it. - Austin Kleon