"So open your eyes
And hope the rest of us do
Check your mileage
And turn off
The autopilot
Cuz you're driving in autopilot
Woah"
- Doggod, "Autopilot"
I have this feeling too many times: most of us run our lives like in an autopilot mode. We all tend to like the same thing at the same time. In a sense most of humans are predictable. Pretty scary for me when I put things that way. It reminds me a startup idea by engineers I heard a while ago. They analyse someone behaviors, tastes and so on, and they come up w/ an algorithm that predicts (and pretty well) what you're gonna do next.
Wow. In fact the more I think about it the more I'm scared. And not really by the fact that we're 'analyzed' all the time; I mean it's probably a price to pay if we look for efficiency and speed; but I'm scared by the fact that our deep human nature is that easy predictable. Damn! Can you imagine that a second?
It makes probably sense in some ways. We're lazy by nature. One objective of our brain is to find the best comfort zone possible. Why? That's its way to optimize our chance to survive. At the end of the day one of the main goal of our brain is to survive. So we create patterns, routines. You enter the shop, you say 'hi', you look at the price, you order, you pay, you say 'thank you' and 'goodbye', you leave. That sequence is easy, this is secure, so you repeat it all the time exactly like that, and at the end this becomes predictable. What if sometimes you break it? Like you change one parameter. It becomes instantaneously scary. The funny thing is that one: each time you try to go out of your comfort zone you'll love it for sure! Trust me it will have wonderful effects on your brain, your inner yourself, your body itself. I loved that article by James Altucher on the subject. He tried to ask for a special price in a Starbuck. Go read it and discover how he felt at the end.
I'm afraid that most of us, humans, share the same kinda comfort zone. Which leads at the end to the same things, the same goals, the same tastes, ideas, views and so on. It's probably intensified by the media, advertising cos, fashion, trends whatever we call it but by a group of institutions and people who have a great influence on what we think. I don't blame them. I blame us. We're too easy to be influenced. We lack curiosity first and a true open-minded approach and finally, we lost our deep sense of critics.
The result? We eat what we're told to eat. We think what we're told to think. And here comes the end of the world... but it's not a problem, we found a new pair of jeans in sales. Let's go and buy it no?