Is it? Of. course, we all know, it‘s not. The mere capacity of wearing the biggest brains in the history of our planet does not seem to be a sufficient condition for either a peaceful, healthy, nor a stressless or happy life. Self-help books and often quoted old pearls of wisdom apparently suggest the opposite: those individuals who know less, who live far abroad, who own less, they would lead a healthier, happier and peaceful life. How do these observations go together?

A Contradictory World

We experience so many man-made contradictions each day: although there is common knowledge about many aspects of life, and although — thanks to the internet — this knowledge is available worldwide, people now and then behave as if this knowledge wouldn‘t exist.  Without going into detail, we know that there is a huge climate change taking place, that we can‘t peacefully live together with the help of weapons, that we must not and don’t need to let people die because of hunger, that our planet’s ability of self-preservation is coming to its end, etc.. Yet still, we act as if we do not know all that.

We don‘t necessarily have to address the big problems. Actually, discussing global challenges is quite easy — none of us is responsible for solving these problems by herself. To solve them, we would need.….…and how long would that take!?

It makes much more sense to devote oneself to solve smaller problems — problems that occur around us, or — problems that occur or start in ourselves. These problems are so close that we can see them more clearly, and potentially in their entirety. This, again, would mean we could analyze these problems and find solutions to them. As discussed in my previous text, we know from neuroscience that situations — e.g. problems — don‘t exist in an objective way, but in our individual perception, only. And this seemingly obscure aspect is, in my view, at the center of the above mentioned schizophrenic behavior of human beings: all knowledge, all facts are individually interpreted and used for drawing very different conclusions from them.

Gnothi Season — Know Yourself: Consensus At The Level Of Consciousness

Intuitively, we try to prove to others that our views are based on facts — or — the „right facts“. That means, we imply that we could reach an agreement if only the other one would accept our fact-based arguments. I don’t believe this to be the best approach to reach conversational consensus — because of a certain impossibility of synchronizing our very disparate knowledge bases, views, and attitudes. I‘d rather suggest reaching consensus at a deeper level, at the level of consciousness. I assume that, at a very basic level, all human beings want the same: we all strive to meet our needs according to Maslow. However, we use different tools to achieve our goals. 

How could a consensus at the conscious level look like? Let‘s look at a very common example of a conversational problem of today: A person (the sender) says something that, from the perspective of another person (the receiver), should not have been said because of its derogatory nature. If the receiver allows for the notion that the sender‘s original intent was. not to use a derogatory word, but she either was drunk or there were other circumstances that made her using this word, then the receiver could forgive — since she feels that the spoken word does not reflect the sender‘s original intent. Of course, forgiving is a lot harder if the receiver does not have the impression the sender acted in good faith.

Gnothi Seauton - Know Yourself

I believe that, if we first assume that people intend to act in good faith, and secondly we try to synchronize with them at the consciousness level, we will discover more common grounds than we imagine. We gain a higher level of understanding of others and their — formerly strange — behaviors. And we will improve our ability to accept the differences between ourselves and others. In the end, we are human beings and our basic needs are similar. Let‘s try to understand each other better. By doing this, we have turned towards a bigger problem than the above-mentioned world problems: we have addressed the mother of all problems: our self. Or, as the ancient greek had inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi -Gnothi Seauton — Know Thyself!

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Think of finishability as an antidote to information overload, as the Economist’s Tom Standage suggests. One of the integral features of the Internet are links between different contents. Linking one content to another provides the reader with more, related, deeper content — a footnote 2.0 if you want. We could not imagine an internet without links, not as consumers or readers, and not as businesses relying on the power of links; e.g. publishers, search engines, etc..

What‘s Behind The Next Link?

We all click on links, lots of them, day by day. And then? After years of having clicked on evermore links, there appears this feeling of being lost, of having wasted too much time surfing, or of having clicked on links just to prevent ourselves from doing other stuff which has to be done — there he is the procrastination demon.

What a relief if there is someone or something who / which tells us to stop clicking once more. Be it our significant other demanding quality time, or a simple search result answering a question in a way that doesn’t need further requesting. And this does not refer to simple minds only, being satisfied with simplified views they get from TV, tabloids or cracker-barrel-talks. Even the most intelligent of my friends cherish some finishability. To know there’s some end to a topic, some answer to a question is reassuring for all of us.

Adding Meaning To Things

For me, finishability has an even broader meaning than as an antidote to information overload. Finishability is giving meaning to things and behaviors. Finishability adds a reassuring element to content, to action, etc.. It helps to go on, to proceed, to reach the next level. People who never get this feeling of finishability will most probably have a feeling that they miss something. And they probably look for the missing thing in the next situation, and the next one.

Finishability means to be satisfied with what I have, with what I bought or with what I just experienced. You might argue that what I bought, saw, or experienced had to entail finishability, otherwise, I could not see it. For me, this is a question of my personal presence: If I “see” finishability in things and actions, I can go on and proceed to the next level. I’m the one who decides about the finishability of things and actions, not somebody else.

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About 300,000 years ago, the fire had become a household means to heat, to cook, and the basis for some other important innovations. For the first time in their millions of years long history, the human species could overcome the lion, slash-and-burn entire forests, and more. The ability to cook alone reduced the mortality rate of mothers and newborns: mothers could give birth to babies years before they developed their enormous heads relative to their remaining body. No other animal needs around 15 years of growing up before being able to care for oneself.

Fire and cooking have proved to be fundamental game-changers for human evolution. And yet, another ability of Homo Sapiens is at least as important: language, oral, written, and other forms of communication have laid the foundation of human evolution of the last 80–100,000 years. Language is the main tool we have been using to become the superior species of the planet.
Language enables us to transport information, to socialize and to bond with or gossip about others, and to communicate what doesn’t even exist; just think of fairy tales, myths, or — much-loved in technology — the future. Studies show that a modern human being can regularly interact with a group of 150 people. Interaction and communication in groups of more than 150 need some tools to structure communication — without that, communication is flawed and brings disastrous results. (Doubt that? Just look at big enterprises.) The ability of making use of a fictional language and to create content and appropriate communication structures that allow us to spread stories, gossip, or beliefs among thousands, a hundred thousand or even millions is what differentiates us from the other animals.

For now, language is our most personal instrument to express ourselves. But what about our actions? Actions speak louder than words. And sometimes, we see differences between a person’s actions and her words, that is, if we actually see her acting. If there are discrepancies between what we do and what we say — or if people just don’t know what we do, or what the reasons are for how we behave — how should there be any understanding between us? How should we really get the meaning of another person’s words or actions?

Imagine, you are bullied away from the left lane of the highway by an aggressive driver. Anger comes up — you start flashing your headlights, you honk, or you even curse him. What if you knew that he just learned about his 5‑year-old’s critical accident and that he was desperately rushing to the hospital? Wouldn’t you perceive a lot more sympathy for him?
We all interpret other people’s actions from time to time. Often, we judge these actions — in most cases on the basis of very limited knowledge of the respective contexts. More information about the people you interact with and more information about the contexts of your interactions would certainly help in understanding each other much better.

Imagine a tool that provides you with every kind of data of your personal behavior and data of your environment, weather data, data of the situation you are in — in short: your contextual data. This tool would help you to know everything about yourself — even things you had not been aware of before. It would act as your personal mirror.  You could use this tool not only to inform yourself but others as well. You could inform your significant other about your actual mood, or you could inform your kids about being late to fetch them from school. You could inform strangers that you are in a hurry — so they could let you pass or would offer you to check-out at the register. Imagine, this tool would do that automatically, effortlessly — without any intervention from your side. You could decide who receives what pieces and quality of your personal behavioral information.

Couldn’t such a tool change your life? And that of people you communicate with? Couldn’t this tool play an integral role in social interactions? Wouldn’t this tool help people to understand each other much better?

This tool is not fiction. This tool will be launched in 2015. It’s an app we are developing at our company Datarella. Its project name is LifeLine. On your smartphone it collects your behavioral data, analyzes and visualizes the data, and sends it back to you in a meaningful feedback loop. You decide which information you share with whom — all information is yours. LifeLine helps you to know yourself and other people better.
It’s very early to assess the implications of LifeLine, but I’m very confident that it will change the way we live, that it will help us to understand each other significantly better. In that way, it could play a role in helping to facilitate the next level of human evolution. That might sound far-stretched, and we will experience a lot of skepticism, indignation, and outright fear when it comes to integrating all that data into our lives.

To accept one’s own data as important, meaningful, and vital, to learn about the advantages of sharing this data with others and to experience the benefits of openness and transparency (you might call it post-privacy), all that takes time. I think, future generations won’t understand why it took their forefathers that long to accept data as an integral and vital element of their lives. Future school kids will laugh at our anxieties and they will ask their teachers how we could afford not to manage our data, how we could have survived without an active personal data management. This claim isn’t difficult to make: the data exist, it will be available for anybody. Shouldn’t you take care of it and make the best possible use of it?

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