A Frayed Mind

New Year’s resolutions don’t work. They’re a bad way to turn one’s life around. The most common of which are: eating healthier, exercising and saving money. The idea, presumably, is that you want to maintain these habits for life - but the trouble is that you’re forcing a sudden change on yourself and expecting it to stick. Most of the time it won’t. In fact, 45% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, less than 20% of people keep them for two years. The motivation is there when you start, but motivation is short term. In order to create something that stays ingrained in you for the rest of your life, you need a system to fall back onto. Where goals can fail, systems prevail. If your goal is healthy eating and exercise it makes sense to think that signing up to a gym, promising yourself you’ll go 5 times a week with your PT and starting to eat broccoli and beans for dinner every night is a good idea. But this isn’t sustainable. This isn’t the way to create lasting habits

Our civilisation is changing. Rapidly. There are different eras that intelligent species inevitably go through. I’m sure there are more official, or accurate definitions out there, but here are a few I have thought of. There’s the primal stage where the dominant species of the planet has yet to become as intelligent as they will - tribal warfare and violence reigns supreme. There’s the middle ages where religion ruled largely on the basis of fear and where the foundations of reason and enlightenment have yet to be established. Currently, we are living in the age of information. The age of information is as big a step forward as the industrial revolution was, if not bigger. I’d say it really started to kick off at the beginning of this century. The marking of this age is the fact that we are able to find any piece of information at almost any time. It’s a tool that was never afforded to previous generations. But with great power comes great… corruption. We are in the age of information.