“Up, down, up, down, up, down, …”
What comes next?
You know the answer - it is “Up”
How did you know it?
Your mind inferred some sort of structure, and made a guess
I mean - we do not know - what truly will come next.
But we are pretty sure - due to the repetition - and we expect it to be “up”.
There could be a breakage of pattern, but the fact that we expected an outcome - that hints at underlying structure.
Look at your favorite music
There is a structure to that - and one almost waits for one’s favorite parts of the music. At least I do.
So - our feeling of “familiarity” hints at what makes things meaningful to us.
Consider something like the following:
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Something random like that - doesn’t hold our attention much.
You skip through such stuff.
Why? Because we cannot figure out - “What does it mean?”
So the biggest point of our life is that we get a feeling of familiarity - that we get meaning.
We may be wrong sometimes as well - that’s part of the adventure but that sense of familiarity is what keeps us interested in music, story, problems.
The possibility of becoming familiar is the most alluring part of music.
Likewise, it is difficult for us to keep any interest in things that seem random, things that we cannot seem to comprehend, and things which we think we will never understand or become familiar with.
So - to be interested - we must perceive at least part of the underlying structure of the thing, and hope that you can unravel more, test yourself moe.
That’s important.
I am building organiazations, such as Hexmos and software tools like LiveAPI
Our goal with the tools and teams that we build is - to aim to construct interesting, alluring and satisfying structures.
Another observation - I’ve had is - a person who seems not to be able to find their place in the world - feels disoriented, becomes more and more of a madman by the day.
Look at any strongly religious person - you will rarely see them depressed and dejected beyond comprehension - the reason being - their mind is structured under a scheme. There is a structured organization to their mind, so it is not falling apart.
A mind that is so sceptical - that it is unable to build any structure at all - cannot survive - because it is too unstable, too random - too free.
From a psychological, or mental level, excess freedom of “anything is possible” means - insufficient structure - leads to lack of meaning, purpose and a constant sense of “falling apart”.
So we want good structure - along with a sense of adventure to unravel more of it. That is what gives meaning to human life.