Post 2: Exploration vs Exploitation

Life hack: Explore more in your life

Last week I opened the blog with a question: can humanity evolve to be in harmony with the Universe? That’s a big and deep question that will take some digging into. Firstly, I just wanted to state that I do believe we can and I have an idea how.

This week, we are going to delve into exploration and exploitation. How exploring more, going on adventures, and having more variety in your life can lead to you having a good life. The same is true for humanity.

This week on a podcast[i], I heard something that resonated with me. Tali Sharot a Cognitive Neuroscientist mentioned that the good life comes from the combination of 3 factors[ii]:

· Happiness

· Meaning

· Psychological rich life

Happiness is joy and comfort, meaning is your purpose for humanity, and a psychologically rich life is variety, interest, and curiosity. Happiness is a choice, it’s a state of mind. Meaning is how you bring your purpose to life. Both of which we will delve into later. The psychological rich life resonated with me as the missing piece of the puzzle. A psychologically rich life is diversity in your life, trying something new, putting yourself outside your comfort zone, and going on an adventure.

"Too much of a good thing is a bad thing"

Why do we need a psychologically rich life? Our brain works by pattern matching and putting everything in a box to be able to process all the information that it gets flooded with. Our brain seeks out the comfort of knowing what something is. It makes it easy to process, and it’s safe. However, that leads to boredom. You may have heard of “too much of a good thing is a bad thing”. This is something I firmly believe is true. Even if that good thing gives us happiness and meaning, eventually we will become bored. That’s why we need a psychologically rich life to go out and explore and keep our brains on their toes and keep them stimulated.

Studies[iii] have shown that if you are already thinking of a change, however big or small, you will be happier making the change[iv].

So why don’t we all do it? Well, exploring something new is risky to our brain, we don’t know how it will work out and we build up all these fears to describe what could go wrong. However, if we don’t explore we don’t progress personally or as humanity. If we did not explore, we wouldn’t have left the comfort of the cave, our African ancestors wouldn’t have left Africa, and Nordic explorers wouldn’t have gone out in their longboats. These previous explorers were more optimistic that the uncertainty contained hope of something better than their fears held them back.

"If we did not explore we wouldn’t have left the comfort of the cave"

How can we become more risk tolerant to do more exploring in our lives? Simply we need to:

1. Tackle fears

2. Build optimism.

Tackling fears (this is a much bigger topic that we will go into later). Some tips I have used include telling myself that no progress was ever made by being static. Would JK Rowling have written Harry Potter if she hadn’t left Portugal and her relationship? No. The second thing is the fear and story told inside your head are always worse than reality. Face that fear, write it down and then plan how you would deal with it if it did happen. After that, it doesn’t seem too scary.

Building optimism, for me visualization works. I visualize the positive, imagine what will happen if I make the change, and how will that feel and look like.

Finally, what’s the cost of staying static? There is always a cost of doing nothing. In this case, it’s at best boredom and worst misery.

"Cost of doing nothing is at best boredom and worst misery"

Not all changes will work out. When working in exploration for Oil and Gas we talk about the chance of success of finding Oil. Finding oil in new areas where someone hasn’t found it before is hard, typically we would come up with chance factors for the best locations between 10-30%. That sounds pretty low right, would you drill? The answer is yes, you must drill and accept that 8 times out of 10 you will fail because likely 2 times you will hit Oil. The reward of all those failures is worth it when Oil is struck.

In life though, all your changes, experiments, and explorations will never be a complete failure. Even if the goal is missed, you will always learn something and give your brain an amazing experience as you give it a psychologically rich life. When you try something and face fears you typically realize the change wasn’t so scary and the fear wasn’t so large. Therefore, even if you fail you are more likely to try again. You become more optimistic.

"Adult Comfort Disorder (ACD)"

As kids, we would try everything and be curious, as adults with fear we get into our comfort pits, ACD (Adult Comfort Disorder).

"There is a balance between continued exploitation of the good things and exploration of new things in life"

Saying that as with everything there is always a balance, as you go through life you find things that give you meaning (e.g. job) and bring comfort and joy (e.g. relationships). Therefore there is a balance between continued exploitation of the good things and exploration of new things in life. The exploitation vs exploration balance. Sometimes a big drastic change isn’t needed, parts of our lives just need a bit of re-sparkle, a bit of variety. This could be achieved by a smaller change, having a break, trying something different, coming at it with a new perspective, and changing routines. Whatever gets us out of the pit of comfort to experience it in a new light.

Exploitation vs Exploration balance applies not only to us as individuals but also to society.

"Is humanity exploring enough? Or is humanity exploiting too much?"

What do you think as a society are we exploring new ideas, concepts, and beliefs enough, or are we stuck in our comfort pit?

To live a good life, to end your life thinking: “wow what a ride”, get out of the comfort pit, explore and try something new. (Adaptation from Bear Grylls[v], an inspiration on this topic)

P.s. This blog is an exploration for myself to share ideas, wisdom, and thoughts that I have gained from others. Hopefully, it inspires you to continue to aim for the good life. Historically I am great at starting things, but not always keeping going. Please like, comment, and share these posts if you find them interesting and that will keep me researching and sharing.

[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZK1nawEXQ&t=463s [ii] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/rev-rev0000317.pdf [iii] https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/ [iv] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/18/us/freakonomics-steven-levitt-study-wellness-trnd/index.html [v] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6mZJRb9MZY