This essay is an attempt at creating a strategy to design my life intelligently because it’s in shambles right now.
The concept of intelligent design says that agency is a distinct causal category in the world. And for someone who’s been screaming about high agency since 2021, I haven’t implemented it as much as I would like.
High Agency and Building
High agency is the willingness to create another story apart from the one that reality attempts to give you. You find a way or make a way. Eric Weinstein explains it so articulately, “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?”
I’m so interested in the concept of building. I know it’s become a buzzword for especially mediocre products in this day and age but it still encompasses a lot. Just seeing how people in my circle have built their lives and projects from small wishes to huge forces is all I need to see. This feeds into a universal exponential growth law of some kind.
And here we have Moore’s law. Moore had observed that every year, semiconductor manufacturers were able to double the number of transistors on a single microchip and halve the cost of building them.
Today, we call his observation Moore’s Law. The law predicts exponential growth and increases. Double exponential growth could lead to rapid advancements that far outperform what came immediately before. Nevens summed it up as such: “it looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you’re in a different world.” Although this law is primarily applied in quantum computing, it’s a useful mental model to have when you want to take something from 0 to 100 intentionally.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” – Steve Jobs
Iteration or Innovation
But building without innovation can create something stagnant. I know the creative industry loves the idea of iterating and following an already laid out blueprint. But your touch should be apparent when people come across your work.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel talks about how we’re
quickly moving towards automation and designing machines to do most of the work. And when I think of that concerning my work, I know I don’t ever want anyone to view it and think of it as one in many. And this is what a major focus on iteration does. Just as man and machine are made to be complementary, so is iteration and innovation.
Peter Thiel demonstrated what sets apart businesses that move markets — they generate new truths that are not algorithmically deducible. Thiel shows that the mind has unique powers which are not reducible to routine and automation and that focusing our efforts in the direction that our minds are specially built for allows us to create more economic prosperity.
We should focus on the idiosyncrasies and innovation that come from our minds. People have intentionality and creativity. We form plans and make decisions in complicated situations and we create new things either out of nothing or inspired by something.
The Faux Design
Another thing that I think of when it comes to intelligent design are morning routines or day in life content scattered on most social media platforms. Social Media has created this perception of what a carefully planned life should look like. The carefully aesthetically shot videos of what several individuals do in a day to optimise success has a lack of nuance to them. Is this trend an extension of actual careful design or a faux replacement? Having an aesthetic imperative life might just induce enough endorphins to help you think you’ve made a feasible change. Meanwhile, your life just looks pleasing but isn’t. The internet makes us perform for the wrong person, that is, if we should even be performing for anyone at all even though that person might be ourselves.
I used to be enamoured with this kind of content until I realised that it never really inspired or pushed me to take action. It only put me in a state of comparison and I’m sure that has to do a lot with me than the content. Moreover, intelligent design also requires designing your content input strategically; it should only lead to high agency.
“The way I define ‘intelligent design’ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.” -George Lucas
