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Knowing Thyself in the 21st Century

Knowing Thyself in the 21st Century

How tech makes self-discovery both easier and harder.

Josh Cadorette
October 27, 2022

Howdy from Los Angeles, CA,

Welcome to the 3 new subscribers from this past week!

How about those Philadelphia Phillies? 4 more wins to glory.

This week, we're taking a look at how self-discovery has been altered by innovation.

Knowing one's self is an ancient idea with a modern application.

"Know thyself" is a phrase that dates back to ancient Greece when Socrates (469-399 BCE) proclaimed "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

You can't know everything, but you must constantly strive to develop an objective point of view of yourself - your habits, values, knowledge, and behaviors.

I believe you can accomplish this through 4 things:

Time - can you allocate hours in the day to self-discovery?
Solitude - are you capable of spending time with yourself?
Challenge - are their circumstances which cause you to go outside of your comfort zone?
Community - do you have people around you who understand your pursuit of self and provide support/guidance?

Despite it's roots as an ancient idea, the widespread application of self-discovery is quite modern due to variable #1 above.

Leisure is a relatively new thing. Most people didn't have time to ponder their nature over the last two millennia. They were too busy trying to survive.

If you're basic needs aren't met, you aren't able to pursue yourself. You're just trying to get by.

Yet, advancements in technology and wealth creation in the 20th/21st centuries have given a great number of people their time back to pursue self-discovery, if they so choose.

Portrayal of Socrates drinking hemlock poison after being charged with corrupting the youth in Athens and being sentenced to death. How ironic is it that admitting you know nothing propels you to become a lifelong learner, while proclaiming you know all leads to ignorance?

Tech has made knowing thyself both easier and harder.

Time is no longer the primary barrier that we face in pursuit of ourselves due to the increases of efficiency in our lives.

We can ship things to our doorstep in two days, order food from an app, and make a living without commuting to the office.

We have the time to face ourselves. We don't have the attention.

We are now saddled with finding clarity of thought in an era of abundant media and tools.

Advancements in technology have robbed us of our solitude, challenge, and sense of community.

Moments of solitude have been vacuumed up by our phones. The same convenience that gave us our time back has robbed us of challenge. Our sense of community is dictated by social media algorithms that fail to facilitate critical thinking.

The result? In order to pursue self-discovery, we've begun to move back in the direction of our ancestors' lifestyles by intentionally making our lives harder.

We spend our leisure time lifting heavy weights, hiking mountains, and conquering rock walls (something I wrote about previously below.)

This is a profound change when contrasted with the goals that the generations before us worked towards.

Difficult Things & The Van Broke Down Part III | The Build

Building the future of business, tech, & society (+ a van too.)

https://thebuild.beehiiv.com/p/difficult-things-van-broke-part-iii

Previous piece that I wrote which outlines 2 hypotheses of why my friends and I are increasingly doing difficult things in our free time: 1. Workforce Transformation and 2. Fewer In-person Experiences.

Case in point: a lad and his van.

I left my corporate job because I wasn't being given the chance to know myself better.

Societal "advancement" has made our lives so noisy, convenient, and lonely that I intentionally sought out a step "backwards" towards survival mode in order to find solitude, challenge, and community.

So I bought a van to build out, live in, and make my life harder by design.

Part of me imagines my ancestors looking at me and asking, "what the f*#! happened to society that you are choosing to spend your free time with less amenities + challenging yourself in the outdoors when you can be under a roof with a full kitchen, A/C, and a bathroom???"

I imagine myself responding, "Modern innovation has given us convenience, but we found out that a life that's fully optimized for convenience isn't one that is true."

4 important points and the bottom line.

Having the resources to know one's self and willingly embrace difficulty is a privilege.

The job I had gave me the financial means to make this happen.
Modern tools help me make this work, and I'm not arguing against prosperity.
I am not in complete survival mode in the van, and I'm not making the case we should fully re-enter survival mode.
I have the resources to opt-out of vanlife at any time and get a roof above my head (ya know, one that doesn't move).

So, yes, societal advancement (specifically the rise of knowledge work/remote work paired with mobile banking, GPS technology, and nearly ubiquitous wifi) has allowed me to take a step towards a more survival focussed lifestyle in the form of vanlife.

But here's the bottom line: we previously assumed convenience = advancement. That's incorrect. Self-discovery = advancement.

We must leverage the time we've been given back from our increased convenience in order to do something wildly inconvenient - get to know ourselves.

For me, that looks like journaling, sending these newsletters, vanlife, hiking, and meditation.

The question becomes, what does getting to know yourself look like for you?

The Chris Farley skit is a timestamp of our cultural transition towards doing wacky things in pursuit of self-discovery. Living in a van down by the river was the ultimate punchline of a life gone wrong in 1993. In 2022, myself and others have opted into this in order to pursue self-discovery and advancement. Wacky times indeed.

What I'm paying attention to:

The Future of Governance (9 min. video) - Bilaji Srinivasan joins Lex Fridman on his podcast to discuss what governments will look like in the future.
I'm Glad God Didn't Answer My Prayers about My Hair (10 min. read) - Grace Smith discusses the notion of giving yourself permission to be yourself. This intertwines with this week's article on knowing thyself quite nicely.
Stop Collecting Intellectual Prizes and Build Something (5 min. read) - Thomas Waschenfelder discusses the difference between building leverage and collecting accolades. Learning isn't inherently bad, but doing and iterating is better.