Maths is short for mathematics, which is a plural, "Math" makes no sense.
I am not great at advanced maths, but I was very good at putting two and two together. Things that I could visualise, cut up in my mind and piece together, were simple for me, So all the basic maths, the calculations where I could slice up some fruit or a pizza into fractions or percentages, was fine. But there was always one rule in maths, show your working.
A problem today.
Perhaps it is because people have been conditioned to "live in the present" (as if there is a choice), that they focus only on the immediate experience that is right there in front of them, now. I reckon that this is part of the reason that people are hyper-reactive to experience, as well as why they are unable to control emotions as well as in the past, because emotional management requires patience and reflection, to evaluate and calculate what kind of reaction is required. It takes going back and exploring at the working to see what led to the the current outcome. What was the situation, and what about my own variables created my feeling and my range of possible responses.
Everyone apparently hates maths now.
Maybe it is because we have become accustomed to using mental aids, algorithms to do the work for us, that we have forgotten that everything takes work - there is no outcome in the universe that doesn't have a lead in process. Yet, when we don't see that work happening, like using a Casio calculator to get an answer to an equation, we also get out of practice of knowing whether the answer is correct or not. We just have to assume it is. The calculator has turned into Google and AI in recent decades, but the process is the same - we aren't doing the work ourselves and as such, we aren't building the skills necessary to do the working, nor building the experience to check the answer.
Checking the answer requires going back and looking at the working process that went into getting the outcome. But if we don't know how to do that, or if we don't know what variable went into the equation, if all we have is the outcome, it is impossible to check.
Every movement has an origin. And every origin began from a movement.
The universe is a massive series of reactions to movement. Change is inevitable as long as something is moving. If everything was still, nothing would change. But what this also means is every experience we have, every situation we face, every outcome, has a process that led into it. But if we are hyper-focused on the now experience, our reaction that will be the origin for the next reaction and so on, will be based on how we feel, our intuition, our defaults, our automatic response - our conditioning.
And for those who believe that intuition is infallible, you are part of the problem. Intuition is simply experience speaking unconsciously. That experience might be evolved through species evolution and genetically passed down, making it more an animalistic response. Or learned from the nurture side, with nurture being all of our living experience in the environment we have been part of. Yet as we know, we aren't very good at parsing our experience into clear lessons, and a lot of our beliefs are based on what would mathematically be considered, lazy thinking. Because rather than though, we use how we feel about a situation as evidence. But how we feel is tainted and tarnished by a lot of misunderstood and unprocessed experience.
Feelings are highly fallible.
Which makes reactions to feelings highly inappropriate. There are times where we can safely immerse ourselves into the feelings of the moment, but there are also times where our feelings should be disregarded completely. This is especially true in today's culture where we have been conditioned to feel a lot of outrage and suffering, making us feel like eternal victims. Because what we end up doing is reacting on the feeling, and even with best intentions, often exacerbating a bad situation without having any understanding of what led into the situation to begin with. Rather, what we are doing is shifting the movement further down the chain, kicking the snowball down the mountain, starting an avalanche.
But as said, people tend not to be interested in doing the work to understand their situation before trying to find ways that lead to better outcomes. Maybe it is because the human brain is super lazy and will favour thinking fast over thinking slow. Or perhaps it is because the human brain is impatient and wants answers now. Or perhaps it is because the human brain seeks pleasure over pain, and thinking takes energy. Whatever it is, the human brain would rather feel good now, than discover what led to the feeling bad now. Humans want the pill answer, rather than discovering and treating the actual causes.
This could be because treating the causes is far harder than treating the symptoms. The symptoms are what are experienced right now, but the cause of the symptoms started in the past, before the symptoms presented. That is important to note, because what it means is that the causes are like our past behaviours that have led us into a situation of current experience. And what that means in terms of our situational outcomes, is that we caused our own illnesses.
As I see it, society has been failing for decades. In my experience, I have personally witnessed the degradation across many variables. Some I don't know what the origin movement was, some I have some idea, and some I think I know, but all these variables keep shifting in a direction. And like a stream heading down hill, it will find the easiest path.
I lived in a tropical area that flooded regularly from frequent cyclones. So the cause of the flooding was torrential rain. However, while the city would flood, once the rain eased a bit, it would quickly dry again, because of the infrastructure below the city. This infrastructure was not naturally there, it was built to handle the uncontrollable conditions, to create a controlled, liveable environment. To do this, the town planners had to understand the cause conditions, the variables, and then build for them.
They had to work backwards, before they could work forwards.
Similarly, a lot of the social problems we face today have causes in the past that have led to the conditions we have now. But, we don't have the infrastructure to deal with them and we aren't likely to have it, because we aren't willing to understand the causes of the symptoms. We don't want to acknowledge them, because what it means is we would have to change our behaviours in ways that we don't want to change, because it is inconvenient to make the changes. Instead, what we do is get flooded by the conditions and then expect someone else to build the infrastructure to save us. And in these conditions, we will simultaneously get flooded by our emotions, without the personal infrastructure to handle our personal situation, or be helpful in exploring the lead-in conditions, or building the infrastructure required to deal with it.
We have become eternal victims, expecting a saviour.
Maybe Jesus or some other fictional character is going to save you, but I make the assumption that we are here as a species that has evolved in a way where we can systematically and intentionally change our behaviours and in so doing, change our outcomes. The problem is, that we also have evolved in ways where we favour laziness and feeling good, even when what is required is uncomfortable working.
For a better future, the maths doesn't add up.
We keep acting in the same way, expecting a different result, even though our actions have led us into where we are today - which as mentioned, I see as a degrading society with increasing apathy, disconnection and violence. The same actions we have done don't keep us where we are though, because those actions keep kicking that snowball down the hill, making the problems larger and larger, which makes the problems so big, people believe nothing can be done - and the apathy, disconnection and violence worsens.
And the issue we have as humans conditioned to only favour the now, and only seek feel-good situations, is that to make any significant changes in the future, the changes we make now will be uncomfortable and disrupt our current conditions. Even if we are suffering, we don't want to change. And on top of this, even if we do change, the shift toward better will begin so slightly and take so long to build, that it will be generations before there is significant positive, visible change. Because it took generations to get to hear now - and there is momentum to keep rolling down the mountain, until the cliff arrives, with the abyss below.
Most don't want to understand this.
Because it feels bad. Instead, most people want to focus on their own experiences and highlight the various conditions they have and the feelings that they evoke, and then attribute any goodness to themselves, and any badness to others. And anything negative, is someone else's fault. Which if only looking at symptoms, appears to be the case. But symptoms do not appear in a vacuum, they are part of a much larger ecosystem of movements that have lead to their creation. If those movements aren't identified and instead allowed to continue unabated, the symptoms not only grow in size, but create more and more symptoms.
They become cancers that metastasise in more and more parts of the body.
Currently, the problems of the world keep growing, because we are unwilling to understand their causes. Instead, we focus on individual symptoms without recognising that they are part of structural problems of our processes. Dealing with symptoms is a losing battle, because upstream, the structure will keep creating an increasing number of problems. The river of problems keeps fracturing into an expanding delta of issues, that make it increasingly difficult to deal with. We are getting flooded, and even if the rain did stop, we don't have the infrastructure to move the water.
If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.
— Albert Einstein
But, we no longer want to spend any time thinking about the problem, and instead only want to react to our feelings about the experience of the problem. We might want a solution, but we don't want to understand the conditions that need to change, how to change the, or what they need to be changed into. We want a calculator answer, but we have no idea what to input into the calculator, because we are incapable or unwilling to investigate the equations, their meanings, or their relationship with the outcome. We do not work backwards. Which means, we do not learn from the past.
I don't expect anyone to understand or care about (let alone act) on any of this, because that is not the cultural environment we have created. Instead, there are a lot of intelligent people who act like idiots, focusing their attention on symptoms rather than causes, because that is far more compelling and emotionally rewarding than traversing the spiderweb of movements that led to the outcomes we have.
We will keep getting flooded.
While we might not be able to control the cyclones and hurricanes, we can understand their patterns and build infrastructure that minimises the damage. Similarly, we might not be able to beat human nature, but we can design our environment to limit the damage, and maximise the good. But we won't. Because we have been conditioned to be reactive to our emotional valence of the moment, which is almost certainly not the best action we could take.
We were problem solvers.
A problem used to present a challenge to overcome for humanity, which has been the driving force that has evolved us the way we have evolved. But now, we are no longer problem solvers, because we do not possess the skills or have the will to understand the problems. Instead, what we do is enlarge the problems we face, and create more problems in the process.
There is an inevitable end to this human calculation.
Pi might be an irrational number, but the life of a species is not. All things come to an end, and while some species have become extinct through external forces, we might become the only species to have lived on earth to intentionally end ourselves through a process of decisions to act, react, and not act - based on how we feel.
Even when we know better.
Taraz
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