Life on autopilot

“Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.” Ford delivers this monologue in a gripping episode of Westworld, directly attacking the human condition and the way we live our lives.

This kind of introspective analysis of agency and free will is nothing new. Many renowned science-fiction authors have tackled the subject in a variety of contexts. The amazing thing is that, even though we’re all aware of the state that we’re in, we’re perfectly content — as Ford puts it — to keep it that way and to not change a thing.

In game design, there’s this concept called a “First Order Optimal Strategy.” Say you’re playing an open-world sandbox game where the game presents various challenges of increasing difficulty as the game goes on. If you, as a player, have figured out a strategy that works every time, there’s zero incentive for you to change that strategy. You will simply keep doing the same thing over and over again until the game forces you to change it by switching things up in the challenges. If you figured out an aggressive button-mashing combo in Street Fighter V that can KO the opponent in seven seconds, you’ll likely keep doing it until the opponent is forced to do something about it.

This “First Order Optimal Strategy” can be extrapolated to our lives. Once we’re done with school and university, there’s no real dictated path for our future and our success. People just sort of get jobs and either stay with the one or keep swapping until they find a good one. And once they find a good one, they have zero incentive to change it. Once people have fallen into the trap of job security with a stable income, it’s fairly easy to just keep it that way for the rest of their lives. Life isn’t forcing you to change your first order optimal strategy, so why bother?

If people could view their entire life in one moment, I wonder if that would incentivize them enough to change something. From the age of one to twenty-five or so, there’s constant change and disruption happening in our lives. Beyond this point, it’s up to us to create that change and make room for new opportunities. I sort of find myself at this turning point now, and having read a lot of multi-dimensional science fiction and having watched a lot of non-linear time based cerebral films, I’m trying to actively force myself to change my first order optimal strategy.

It’s very, very easy to simply accept what falls into our lap as “good” and be content with it, listening to our bosses and managers about what needs to be done the next day and living life one day at a time. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a sense of comfort and solace in that kind of life. But our time on Earth isn’t infinite and we won’t be around forever. If we are to live meaningful lives and have our tombstones say something of actual value instead of the generic “Great father, loving husband, etc.”, then we need to take manual control of our lives and change our first order optimal strategy to something else entirely.

This is, obviously, easier said than done. Life-changing decisions aren’t made on a whim and aren’t made alone. There’s other stakeholders involved and your decisions affect the lives of a lot of people. It’s not a purely objective decision either. Upheaving a perfectly good life to try something different requires a lot of courage and forces you to face your insecurities head-on. It’s uncomfortable, it’s daunting, and it can be so overwhelming that you’ll want to avoid making the decision entirely and find something else to distract you.

But life isn’t a scripted video-game or an open sandbox with infinite lives where you respawn at the last checkpoint after you die. And yet we live it like one. We level-up and check things off as we keep aging: school, university, marriage, kids, anniversaries, birthdays, and more. The only sensible way to break the loop and force others to do the same is to change the strategy. I’m definitely swapping mine up in 2017, and I’m excited to see where it leads me.