Water

It is said that the average person is permanently in a state of seeking his own happiness. And the movement is inherent even to those who are unaware of such success or unwilling to suspect. I would like to start the story with a short story that David Foster Wallace told graduates of one of the US universities.

“Two young fish swim and calmly communicate with each other about something (as far as fish are able to communicate at all). Older fish swims towards them, and when they are equal, the old fish says, “Hello guys, how's the water?”
An awkward silence and young fish swam further. After a while, one young fish turns to the other and asks, “What is he talking about? What nafig for some water? ”.

The essence and depth of this strange story is that everyone understands it in their own way. And everyone, at the level at which he is at the moment.

I work in the worst company in my entire history of work in IT. This is not the most severe purgatory, where people burn at the stake for bugs, and those who have broken the deadlines are forced to lick the pans with their tongues, as carelessly as possible. On the contrary, the external component looks quite decent, a large company, lunches with colleagues, corridors and cubicles, an unexpected laugh scattering in space. And the very pursuit of happiness, invisible and elusive, does not allow to relax, it seems that all is not right. Not that, and not so. And even creates an image of the company in such an impartial light. It can be quite difficult to figure out what exactly does not suit you, and why you feel comfortable at one place of work, and in similar conditions, on the other, nonsense comes out. Reason suggests - "in any incomprehensible situation, start to engage in self-digging and analysis." What I, in fact, started.

If you believe Darwin's theory, and in my opinion, it most logically describes the process of human formation and fits very well into that aspect of the evolution of the living, which we can observe today, the formation of the brain, to put it mildly, has passed a large number of stages. Starting from the simplest organisms, fish, amphibians, mammals, and ultimately to the prefrontal cortex (prefrontal cortex) is inherent exclusively to the human individual. Those. the functionality was built up sequentially, on the basis of the existing codebase, and all this can be looked at as an onion, which in layers receives all new modules and functions that give new abilities to the owner of this, on the basis of what already exists. If we had the opportunity to look at this code, it seems that this implementation is far from the ideal architecture. My main claims are for very strong connections with everything, spaghetti code, confusing conditions if, case, touching one area will affect many others, etc. Nature is not very steamed with quality, - “moves and lives? Normally, if I test something, it is only in production ”(Or maybe we do not know about the existence of the Staging environment ???). The result functions of course, and survives, but agree, with proper refactoring, it could be a little better.

If you look at what this evolutionary heritage is responsible for, at different levels we will find the basic functions responsible for digestion, reproduction, the nervous system, etc. I would like to draw attention to the functions of interaction with other individuals. Animals communicate with each other. Starting from bees and ants, which can transmit information about the presence of food, to monkeys, which can alert the flock quite accurately "- Eagle" when it is better to hide in the bushes, or "- Leopard" and then it is better to climb higher. These are patterns that have been worked out to automatism for many years. Everything is good, just an ambush is that this is not enough, and in order to reach the next level in development, you need to acquire cognitive skills. At least this is the way we know it. And the monkeys remain monkeys, with all their complex primitivism. It is worth noting that if people communicated at this level, then probably we would be ... the same monkeys.

So what is a man? The crown of creation, the seller, the administrator, the marketer or CEO - these are all highly developed individuals who, as a result of evolution, gained an indisputable advantage over other inhabitants of the planet Earth, learned to distinguish wheat from chaff, think and act based on rational motives, right? Prefrontal cortex, we use it.

- Wrong! :(

Rather, partly wrong. Of course, we have learned how to make rational decisions, and sometimes even quite successful in this. Why, you cannot run away from the heritage, and all the same patterns of monkeys, they have not gone away, we just got a rational level from above in the form of prefrontal cortex. And this does not mean that everything else suddenly took and turned off as if by a monotony of a magic wand. Taking into account the rather poor architecture and high coupling of everything with everything, this leaves us no chance even to simply redefine some functions. It will still pierce the bottom in the form of some unexpected archaic reactions. Moreover, these low-level functions have been used so long and so often that we simply do not pay attention to them, and they are performed outside the range of the rational cortex, and their execution time constitutes the overwhelming majority of our daily life. We just do not notice what kind of water we swim in every day.

Here I would like to define some of these functions. Perhaps you have already guessed that these are feelings and emotions. The ones that show up as anger to a colleague who dared to do a code review and find problems in your ideal code. Those who hate the boss for not paying due attention to your merits. Those who make me dislike the company in which I work for trying to control and lack of trust, which in turn causes a storm of protest at the ego level, and gives out many internal reactions in response to such disrespectful attitude. And those of course who make you happy when meeting a beautiful object of sexual arousal.

Considering the above, and the fact that, by and large, we still have a functioning monkey and lizard brain fully armed, this is the key definition of us, reasonable people:

Man is NOT a rational being who has emotions.

Man is an emotional being who can rationally think.

Priorities are reversed. And this allows us to see what we have not previously found an explanation for and simply blamed on a good or bad mood. In order to bring closer the simplest human happiness that we talked about at the beginning of thinking, one should first of all satisfy his low-level brain, with its corrals, self-centeredness and accumulated psychological trauma, then the rational part is much easier to find a way out of a difficult situation. In communicating with others, this also brings clarity, because the understanding that the person we want to help or with whom we negotiate first of all needs help and stabilization at a low level, which will allow the rational part to see reality with minimal cognitive distortion, relying on solid ground. And, you see, to talk with a person who adequately assesses reality is much easier than with someone who is bombarded with anger or irritation. The same goes for yourself. It is quite difficult to reconfigure your water and learn to take into account your emotional state and those around you, during communication. Especially in conflict situations. If you have not previously paid attention to all these psychological problems, it may be that the described approach can help you look at everyday situations from a different angle, and begin to notice what was previously left outside of your radar.

But, as in astronomy, a new outlook said: “True, we do not feel the movement of the earth, but, having admitted its immobility, we come to nonsense; while admitting a movement that we do not feel, we come to laws ”, - and in the history a new view says:“ And indeed, we do not feel our dependence, but, having admitted our freedom, we come to nonsense; while admitting our dependence on the external world, time and causes, we arrive at laws. ”
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In general, this is of course an extensive topic that can be dug infinitely deep and, of course, not covered in one article.

Write if you want to continue thinking in this direction.