evolving complexity requires downtime for play 🤸♀️ ie contexts in which you can fuck around for much longer, before you have to find out .
13 tweets · August 2023 · 37 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
evolving complexity requires downtime for play 🤸♀️ ie contexts in which you can fuck around for much longer, before you have to find out .
"play" as "exploring new possibilities not because they're better, just because you can and and it's fun" which results in getting out of adaptive local optima
but play requires a break from immediate survival pressure
I initially wrote "complex life requires periods of chill" but this generalizes a lot eg after the black death, there were so few people that each person was in some sense more wealthy relative to the land that humans had control of which spurred innovation & commerce
more generally, perhaps humanity as a species was able to innovate in part because it was able to survive with less effort because we banded together to become a superorganism that was top beast meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human…
thus many people don't have to worry about survival most of the time—and not just academics and priests! also housewives, who have lots to take care of but also safety & stability or specialists who were skilled enough to make plenty of wealth in a small fraction of their time
but also memes simply do not need NEARLY as much play to evolve as genes do no matter how much downtime/playtime a peacock gets in its individual life at a zoo, it can't invent a new species with that spare time
increasingly - things are changing faster than before - there's a lot of pressure - but also less is truly urgent *this hour* for most people but if you confuse the pressure for urgency, you fail to play, so you miss huge opportunities two steps away
like if you're a farmer or a hunter-gatherer, there are very intrinsic needs for survival that require you to do food-related stuff basically daily obviously for anyone working a job, you need to work to not get fired, but the work itself isn't inherently urgent-to-your-needs
also obviously if you're running a business and the business is losing money or falling into a trap where it gets behind then further behind, you need to fix that asap
but approaching it with urgency might result in cutting costs and firing people, which actually can send you further into the trap you're worried about vs pausing to ask "what strategies are we not even considering? let's play with those"
I think this all points at a mindset shift something like:
same vibe
