1. Balance: Not what’s right, but what’s right for right now

My central idea: We are all just tight rope walkers trying to maintain our balance on the tightrope of time. As each day passes, we take a step forward involuntarily, as we balance an infinite number of issues and dichotomies (hot vs cold, work vs play, salads vs donuts). Once we tilt too much in either direction, we fall off and cease to exist.

Take the simple issue of the temperature of our room. Lean too much towards hot, burn to death (fall off the tightrope). Lean too much towards cold, we freeze to death (fall off the other side of the tightrope).

As the tightrope walker goes though time, at every step of the way, the winds in the environment change speed and directions, and we need to constantly adjust our weight distribution and lean in certain directions accordingly to compensate for the wind, so that we can maintain our balance on the tightrope and stay alive.

When we come to winter, when the winds blow us towards the cold side, we need to turn on the heat, shifting our weight towards the heat side, this keeps us more or less balanced.

Conversely, on a warm summer day when the winds are blowing us towards the hot side, we’d do the opposite and turn on the air conditioning, else we’d feel stuffy, or if things get even hotter, die from heat stroke

I will attempt to explain 3 extensions to this idea.

1. Almost everything exists in a dichotomy (new vs old, communism vs democracy, risk vs reward)
2. Every single living organism, and collection of living organisms is a tightrope walker (you, your family, Microsoft, Italy, all of Humanity)
3. To correct for any imbalances, overcompensating is only normal

While I can’t tell you how to perfectly balance yourself, I can tell you that we shouldn’t be looking for an absolute objective moral right, or a method that will work under all circumstances. It’s a waste of your time because no such thing exists. Instead we should be considering the best move for our circumstances now. We should be looking at how the winds are blowing right now, and what we need to do to keep our balance on the tightrope. A few examples.

Example 1: Personal — Work vs play

This is an obvious one, all of the 20th century workforce is looking for the elusive work-life balance. Work too much, we get psychologically burnt out. Play too much, we end up with no money, and never applying ourselves.

If the winds are blowing us towards work, with more projects being piled on our plate than we can handle, we know we need a break. So we lean towards play a bit more to stay balanced, and go have pizza with some friends or have a little quiet time to ourselves with a good book.

Example 2: Governments — Free market vs Central government economy

On to something a bit more consequential. Ask any functioning economist and they will tell you that none of them on their own is the answer. All functioning economies need to have elements of free market to spur entrepreneurism, and government control to keep things in check.

During the early days of the internet, when the winds are blowing towards innovation on that front, and corporations driven by profits might starting to encroach on quality of people’s lives (e.g. tech’s invasion of privacy, internet scams). Seeing this, governments stepped in to regulate the space a little to keep the country in balance between tech entrepreneurship and citizen’s wellbeing. Again, tilt too far in either direction, the country might cease to exist.

Example 3: Corporations — Explore new technology vs Sticking to traditional business

Where should management focus our resources? That’s certainly a difficult question, do we invest fully into new technology and abandon our tradition? We’d be giving up all our short term business and run out of money before the new technology comes online. Do we stick to traditional techniques totally? That doesn’t work too, we’d be left behind eventually. So most successful corporations find some balance between the 2.

Of course this is a fairly simplistic view. In reality, managers need to read not just the current winds, but also the forecast of the winds to come (future industry trends, future market demands etc). They’d also need to take into consideration the current focus of their company (where they’re currently leaning towards), and adjust from there.

Overcompensating for imbalances is only normal

When we feel our room is too warm, we usually turn the air conditioning too cold, and then when it’s starting to get chilly, the turn the temperature up again to what’s probably perfect. Else we adjust again.

My point is this is true for most everything. After our major exams when we’ve completed some major work, we don’t go back immediately to the perfectly balanced. We usually party extra hard, before slowly adjusting towards being balanced.

Political movements, trends, policies, all tend to move in the same way. Abuse of power by males in authority, led to the #metoo movement and eventually cancel culture which can feel like an overcompensation, starting to stifle discourse. But it simply is just a needed overcompensation, before the shift slowly back to a balance in power (between traditional power and the power of the people to cancel it).

Takeaway:

The next time you are faced with a problem, don’t fret over finding the absolute right answer that works for all circumstances. Find the move that will give you the best balance for our current position in time and space, and allow ourselves to adjust as we go along. Is your worldview not ideal for the current cultural environment? Let’s adjust. If your business model doesn’t fit the near term consumer landscape, maybe lean in a different direction.

When we see people, countries, and corporations make changes, what they are really doing is adjusting to changing wind directions and their existing momentum.

Instinctively we already know this. Should we give in when our kid asks for an ice cream? We know it depends on many factors, including his recent diet, and whether we have been spoiling him a lot lately among others.

All your favorite maxims to live by, tumblr quotes, one-liners from motivational speakers, none of them are absolutely correct under all circumstances. “Good vibes only” might be a nice print out to hang on the wall, but not a good idea when you’re mid way through an acid-trip. you can’t take it to the extreme, and negativity exists for a reason (more on that later). What you can do, is use it to rebalance your life a little to remove some of the bad vibes so your mental health is more centered.

I wish you the wisdom to stay balanced in a rocky world.

*Disclaimer: all this is just conjecture, I’m reserving the right to adjust my position/ opinions at a later date.