THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF LIFE

"We tip toe through life to arrive safely at death."

You're born. You school. You career. You Family. You retire. You die. That's pretty much the recipe, right? How crazy is it that as complex of beings as we are, we can pretty much map out 99% of the populations life. 

Life is an experiment. However, we as humans get too content too quickly. We are creatures of habit—we crave consistency. This doesn't mean we're good at creating positive/productive consistency in our lives, but that we innately like it. It's predictable and safe. For this reason we don't experiment. We draw a conclusion on life that we're content with and then stop experimenting. This leads to regret at the true conclusion of life (death). "Why didn't I ever try ________", we somberly ask ourselves as we know time is up. That's my biggest fear in life.

You know when children are picky/stubborn eaters? Most children go through that phase around ages 2-4. Psychologists and evolutionary biologists believe it has to do with a protective mechanism in the brain to keep us from eating something that will kill us. They will only eat the foods they like and claim they don't like foods even when they haven't the slightest clue what they taste like since they have never tried them. Then they try a new food and it becomes their new favorite food. Or another example would be listening to a new artist or song and all of the sudden you wonder where their music/that song has been your entire life because it just introduced you to a new love of music. As David Hume would say, "we cannot know anything outside the relations of ideas a priori." Epistemology. Fun stuff.

The way we live life as a species has become mundane, repetitive, and frankly: the definition of insanity. Imagine a research lab where they run experiments hoping to find a cure for a terminal illness that plagues the world. Doesn't matter what it is, but it's terminal and there's no cure. To run an experiment using the scientific method as constructed by Aristotle, one must follow this pattern:

1. Observation/question
2. Establish research topic area
3. Hypothesis
4. Test with experiment
5. Analyze data
6. Report conclusions

Imagine this research lab came up with a hypothesis that a new compound could work as a drug to handle the symptoms of this illness so you're able to live with it. They test with an experiment, analyze the data, report that the drug was unsuccessful and then... suit up and run the same experiment again with the same variables drawing the same conclusions. Then, they suit back up and run the same experiment again. Then, another research group decides to run the same experiment with the same variables and they get the same result. Then another, then another, then another. Yeah... this sounds crazy and like a colossal waste of time right? Right.

This is what we do in life. We're told we can be whatever we want to be, then we slowly get pushed towards experimenting with the same hypothesis as everybody else—running the same experiment even though we know what the results will be regardless of how we feel about them. Are you happy to know you're embarking on a journey where the conclusion has already been drawn? Walking a path that's already been walked? Sure it's easy, the instructions and procedure are already laid out for you, but what's the fun in that? Write your own procedure, mess some things up, learn, grow, share those lessons with people. That's literally all we get to do in life.

The scientific method is how we should live our lives. Why conduct the same experiment over and over when we already know the conclusion? Life has so many hypotheses to be tested, so many observations to be made, so many questions to try to answer. Now, I'm not saying you should be a full-blown contrarian and not go to school, not work a career, have no family, etc. just because. You need to have a reason and not everybody is built for that way of living. The standard path of life (born, school, family, work, retire) has proven to produce a fairly stable/productive society and has allowed people to do great things and live fulfilling lives. But we need to be conscious of that decision and of the fact that we're re-running the same experiment. If it doesn't sit right with you, good. Make a change.

Let's assume we all strive to live purposeful and fulfilling lives. I think that's fair to say. I've never heard anybody say they want to live a non-purposeful and unfulfilling life (though I'm sure they exist).

There's just one nagging question that persists in my head always:

1. Even if I feel fulfilled and purposeful with the process/conclusion of my current experiment, are there any variables I could change that would make me feel even more purposeful and more fulfilled?

Let's take our example of the 2-4 year-old and run an experiment:

1. Observation/question: My favorite food is macaroni and cheese
2. Establish research topic area: Foods and my enjoyment of them
3. Hypothesis: Given that macaroni and cheese is my favorite food, I will not like peanut butter and jelly because they're different
4. Test with experiment: Try a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
5. Analyze data: I felt happy when eating peanut butter and jelly, I enjoyed the texture, I craved more peanut butter and jelly
6. Report conclusions: Hypothesis was wrong. Peanut butter and jelly is my favorite food

Now, what would be the logical thing to do here based on the results of this experiment? Experiment again with a new food right? Correct! So why do we not do more experimenting? Because to experience, one has to experiment. To experiment, by definition, means to not know the outcome. That leads to feelings of discomfort. We reject discomfort and adopt comfort. That stagnates our growth as individuals. That leads us to feeling unfulfilled and unhappy.

The PB&J scenario a silly example of the scientific method at play. However, this is a lost art of functioning. We all know the ignorance of children claiming to not like foods when they don't have the first clue about taste, texture, or nutritional value. But, to recognize this and encourage them to expand their horizons because they're operating on ignorance is hypocritical.

Everybody loves to do something. I love to ____________. Whatever you would put in that blank is up to you and only up to you. However, unless you're experimenting day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you're just as ignorant as the 2 year old. See, just like the 2 year old hypothesizes their favorite food is macaroni and cheese and that they do not like peanut butter and jelly, they have no idea until they try. And turns out, it's their favorite food. They wasted valuable time of their life without their favorite food due to their ignorance. We mostly make decisions based on ignorance rather than knowledge. Thats human custom. We look at the phases of our life/life milestones based, not on our own experience, but on the experience of others. But we're all collectively made up of more ignorance than knowledge—it's the blind leading the blind. This is the reason for the existence of the Dunning-Kreuger effect. The more you think you know the less you probably know, the more you actually know, the more you realize you don't know. 

We're 99% ignorance. I'll let you read more about that here.

So you have a group of individuals that adopts the same experiment as everybody else and convinces themselves that safety, security, and avoiding challenge will make them happy and fulfilled. Then you have those who fall in love with the idea of something and suffer from self-inflicted feelings of unfulfilled desire. Shoutout to social media for this one. As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. Many people see individuals doing things on social media and think "must be nice. I wish I could be doing _________." But again, unless you're currently experiencing that thing in the moment you have those thoughts, those thoughts are the embodiment of ignorance. 

"We suffer more in imagination than in reality."

This is the flip side of our experiment. Thinking about a different experiment that we think would work, but never running it because we've convinced ourselves we can't. But really we just don't know how and that scares us and make us feel those feelings of discomfort so we retreat back to safety and write those thoughts off as just a pipe dream.

So, what do we do about this? Adopt the scientific method. Live your life like your own experiment. Ask your own questions. Make your own observations. This means doing things on your own timeline both on a macro and micro scale. There is no right or wrong approach, it's your approach or somebody else's approach. I don't like to talk and not back up my thoughts. I've always wondered what it would be like to live out of a rooftop tent/my truck. I like the sound of the minimalism. So I'm moving out of my apartment and into my truck. For those who read these in their entirety and made it to this point. I'll keep you posted on that journey. Hopefully starting mid-March 2024.

Key take away: do something different.

~ Bonde

P.S. Wrote this one quickly, might of rambled, might be some grammatical mistakes. Been a busy week.