Not Living On Autopilot

Staying Engaged in a Rapidly Changing World

I’m at a cocreated island retreat. Days are filled with co-working, talking to interesting people, workshops, sauna & cold plunges. A day here feels like a week in my normal life — the events of the morning feel impossibly distant come evening.

Autopilot and Time Compression

Back home, days fly past. When settled into my routines, I chug along on autopilot, barely noticing life passing by. When I travelled to Barcelona this February, the first week felt about as long as the final three weeks. When I routinely commuted by car, I sometimes found myself “waking up” at the destination, having driven in a zoned-out trance-like state.

My brain engages in compression, shrinking similar experiences and mushing them together.¹ As life grows habitual & automatic, it stops being interesting, zipping away without registering. Conscious attention is useful to make sense of new things — events that seem ordinary get pushed into the spam-box.

Living on autopilot makes sense in static and predictable environments, such as the ones our distant ancestors lived in. The world didn’t change much throughout a lifetime — habits acquired through upbringing and youthful experiences were likely to serve you well into old age.

The benefits of autopilot are obvious — it requires less brainpower, allowing you to get along with less food. Humans have a general aversion to expending energy — avoiding workouts and thinking unless other impulses override energy-preserving laziness. I keep avoiding cardio, even though I know it will improve my energy levels over time — my instincts prefer to preserve calories in the short term.

A Shifting World

We have shifted our environment since the days of our ancestors. We’ve turned food from a scarce resource into an abundant temptation. We have removed most natural sources of exertion, eliminating naturally occurring workouts from our daily lives. We keep shifting the world, unleashing transformative technologies at an accelerating rate. Habits grow stagnant, built on shaky foundations that dissolve as soon as they form.

It’s important to be attuned to the changing world. The nature of our challenges shifts constantly. The tools available to us flourish as technology and culture evolve. It’s hard to resist the pull towards stagnation and autopilot — a needed skill to function in our world.

Besides these practical considerations, it’s nice to experience the flow of life, a richness of expression that unfolds as life grows intricate.

To achieve this, I make sure to meet with exceptional people, connecting with those who are different to me. I meditate and reflect as a way to keep in touch with reality, and I attend strange events where I have experiences that shake me up.

Adapting to the challenges of our modern world requires going beyond the pull of our instincts, shaping them into structures fit for the environment emerging around us.

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P.S: I’d love to hold space while you reflect on big topics in your life.

Here’s a statement from my client Frans-Lukas, shared with his consent:

“I've attended Jonathan's philosophical guidance sessions four times, and the experience has been transformative. […] I often share the concepts discovered in Jonathan's sessions with my friends, and they've significantly impacted my life.“

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Here are some other people writing about our changing world, variable passages of time and similar:

• Colligo
  - Present Shock

• The Security Industry
  - Future Shock Redux

• Thyme is Honey
  - Learning THIS About Time Changed My Life ⏳

• Johannes Hagemann
  - How much faster do we age when we get older?

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/out-the-darkness/201107/why-time-seems-pass-different-speeds-part-2-1