A mother of three young children is ten minutes into her thirty-minute drive home after a challenging day at work. She will not remember anything about her commute. The prefrontal cortex of her brain that controls executive functions is consumed with thoughts of her kids, husband, parents, boss, clients, friends and other commitments. The basal ganglia of her brain that coordinates automatic behaviors is managing the driving on this ordinary trip home.
In our modern day, we want much more than work and family. The prefrontal cortex is fully consumed managing our five to ten complex goals across our life domains:
- Family – being a good parent, taking care of a sick parent
- Relationships – maintaining an intimate relationship, having a social life
- Career & Education – ensure career supports lifestyle and provides some purpose,
- Creation – creating something like a book, side business, or building a home
- Achievement – run a marathon, lose weight, save money for college tuition or retirement
- Community – coach youth sports, volunteer for a worthy cause or help someone in need
- Lifestyle – maintain a healthy lifestyle or a meaningful retirement
This may explain why cases of depression, anxiety and stress are rising. When innovations free us from physically demanding and routine activities, we typically replace it with more complexity.
Complexity – is the unpredictability of many impacting elements (i.e., people, communities, and realities) operating and interacting in both certain and uncertain ways.
To achieve something meaningful, it requires managing complexity. We must align with the uncertainty of people and communities (i.e., family, work, organizations, local communities or governments). While it can be hard to interpret how our realities (i.e., behaviors, beliefs, environment, health, social, technology) are affecting us, it is even more difficult to predict how realities affect others. We cannot predict how people, that impact our lives and goals, will act or react.
We may not realize how complex our lives have become while consumed with our daily activities. To comprehend how complex human life has become, we need to fit in some time to reflect on a time when life was less complex. It was though, physically demanding.
For much of human existence, until farming was invented 12,000 years ago, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain evolved over millions of years to help us survive within these lifestyles. About one hundred and fifty years ago our world began to rapidly change. The evolution of human prefrontal cortex has not the time to keep up.
Robert Gordon illustrates how physically demanding living in 1870 was his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. While people had their share of uncertainty, such as farmer with rain, insects and commodity prices, there wasn’t much they could do about it. There were fewer diet books, sources of entertainment and people complaining their work wasn’t meaningful.
Much of the available descriptive literature on living conditions of 1870 portrays a dismal existence of week-long household drudgery for housewives and dangerous, back breaking working conditions for husbands.
While steam engines, cotton gins, railroads, steam ships, telegraphs and rudimentary agriculture machinery helped ease the burden of human labor, it was still a physically labor-some environment as it was throughout most of human existence. In 1870, there were no automobiles, electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, radio or telephones. Life expectancy was forty-five-years old. Seventy-five percent of the people lived in rural areas and almost half of the population worked in farming.
Diets – were mostly what farmers could raise on their own land like vegetables and pork preserved by being smoked or salted. Summers brought a variety of vegetables. The winter consisted of food that could be preserved like turnips, beans and potatoes or derivatives of corn and wheat like cornmeal and flour.
Clothing – was made at home with needle and thread. Most adults had one or two every day sets of clothes. It was a very labor-intensive effort to make clothes for family members and to mend the cloths that required repairing. Ironing required heating a metal iron on the kitchen stove and being careful not to scorch the material.
Home Heating – there was no central heating. The only rooms with heat required chopping wood, hulling wood or coal, keeping the fire alive, removing the ashes and waking up to extreme cold.
Indoor Flush Toilets – were nonexistent. The urban dwellers relied on chamber pots and open widows and had to empty them in the back yard. The rest of people we lucky enough to have access to an outhouse.
Dark hours– there was no electricity so nighttime required a set of candles or kerosene lamps. The candles, wax lamps, and kerosene lamps required filling, cleaning, emptying and wick-trimming. A one-hundred-watt electric light bulb produces almost one hundred times the lumens of a candle. This required them to fit more work into daylight hours, making winter months even more challenging.
Cooking – involved fresh wood and coal carried into the house and ashes carried out. It required carrying 50 pounds of fuel for cooking each day.
Transportation – travel by rail, steam ships and horse drawn carriages was too expensive for most people. Few families could afford owning a horse. It wasn’t easy for those who had horses or hired them, there were few roads and they were pitted with ruts and pools of mud after rain. In the fall of 1872, horses throughout the northeast caught a strain of flu and could not be used for work. Cities came to a standstill.
Mail and Deliveries – were still two decades away in rural communities, where seventy-five percent of people lived.Sending or receiving letters required traveling to the nearest village with a post office and waiting in line for a mail clerk.
Purchases – It was a labor-intensive effort to go into town to purchase anything. The country stores had limited products and could charge high prices. Catalog buying came later in the century. Consumer spending went almost entirely for three necessities of food, clothing and shelter, with virtually nothing left for discretionary spending.
Laundry – they carried water into the house eight to ten times per day. Washing, boiling and rinsing a single load of wash required fifty gallons of water. They used washing tubs, washboards and had to carry away the dirty water. A typical North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles and carried thirty-six tons of water each year from a well, stream, or creek.
Bathing – this required lugging a heavy wooden or tin tub into a bedroom or likely into the warm kitchen. It required several trips to the well, stream, or creek to carry enough water. The water was boiled on the kitchen stove to be emptied into the tub. After the bath, the water had to be carried outside to be emptied.
Communications – newspapers were available mostly in urban areas. Magazines came later in the century. The newspapers and railroads used telegraphs, though it was not affordable to most people. Most communication was letter writing or showing up at someone’s home and waiting for them to come home.
Life Expectancy – was only 45 years old due to infant mortality, poor sanitation and contaminated food and infectious diseases. Human and animal waste contaminated the streams and lakes used for drinking water. Most of the improvement in life expectancy after 1870 was in reduction of diarrheal diseases, typhoid, tuberculosis, and diphtheria from clean water supplies.
Work & Income – Eighty-seven percent of the workforce worked at jobs that were hazardous, tedious, and unpleasant. Forty-six percent of people worked in farming, 8% were domestic servants and 33% were blue collars workers doing routine and physically demanding work. Weekends off, the forty-hour work week and child labor laws didn’t come till the next century. Over 50% of the boys aged 14 -15 were in the labor force, this doesn’t even include those who worked on their family farm.
In addition to farming, many people were employed in the horse transportation business. Horses consumed one-quarter of the nation’s grain output and most transports were pulled by horses. Occupational misery were the jobs in horse manure removal. The average horse produced twenty to fifty pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily. This required a lot of labor to dispose of five to ten tons per square mile in cities each day.
Retirement – men “worked till they dropped” due to death or a disability, the concept of retirement didn’t exist. In 1870, only 34% of the population lived past their 65th birthday. Eighty-Eight percent of the people aged 65 – 75 worked in the labor force.
Entertainment – except for a few traveling musicians or circus performance, most entertainment was limited to playing cards and home board games.
Modern Day Complexity
While 1870 may sound dull, boring and physically demanding, it was much less complex. If almost every waking hour was consumed with securing basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, there were less complexity to manage. It is much different today.
More impacting people – social in 1870 was with family, now it is with the world via social media, globalization. You may need to manage interactions with five to ten groups of people for just one child. School, teachers, sports, organized activities, doctor, dentist, friends, playdates, and even more if you volunteer to help. Any of your five to ten complex goal likely requires addressing the uncertainty of many people.
More impacting communities –This includes informal and formal communities like industries (Banking, Information Technology, Medical), organizations (Companies, Governments, Non-Profits), locations (Towns, School Districts, Neighborhoods), Groups (Social Circles, Facebook Friends, Book Club) and families. You could be impacted by the communities in your and the communities in the lives of the people that impact you.
More impacting Realities – culture, economic, education, environment, globalization, health (nutrition, exercise, medicines, treatments options), institutions (like governments, education, healthcare – their costs go up, while their outcomes don’t improve), political (slow to adapt to the modern day), rules (more laws, regulations, social norms), science (scientific knowledge doubling every few years), security (now cyber threats), social and technology (artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology).
More Changing Realities – any good plan is subject to the accelerating change within our modern day. We must constantly be managing the complexity of adapting to change.
More choices – While we want more options, they add complexity after we factor in the impacting many people, communities and realities into our decision making.
More infrequent decisions – these are complex decisions that require a lot of learning to make a unique decision based on the immediate circumstances. Most of these decisions didn’t have to be made in 1870 or were made less frequently. They include new jobs, job skills, technology, healthcare options, health insurance options, retirement saving options, or helping our teenagers figure out their futures. Infrequent decisions can be consuming trying to learn enough about the impacting elements to make good complex decisions.
In school, we are taught how to use formulas to calculate the answer with certain elements. This doesn’t help much with complexity as there are often too many uncertain elements. We may not even know how we will react to the activities involved with achieving our complex goals like losing weight or living a healthy lifestyle. We can’t possible expect to know how other people, that could impact or goals, will act or react.
The basal ganglia will continue getting relief as self-driving cars and automation replace routine activities. This will free us up to add even more complex goals to our lives and more demands on the prefrontal cortex.
It is more likely that human life will continues becoming more complex than less. Our future well-being will be related to how well we manage complexity at home and at work. As routine work gets replaced by automation, artificial intelligence and robots, our income will mostly come from non-routine work.
We will need to improve our abilities to manage complexity. This will require developing frameworks designed to achieve complex goals while addressing the many impacting elements (people, communities, realities). We will need to processes within these framework to help us manage the incremental improvements until we get it right. Just like Thomas Edison did over three thousand times until he invented the lightbulb.
Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon, Princeton University Press, 2016
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