How to navigate endless life advice
Navigating through days and weeks can sometimes feel increasingly confusing. Social media feeds, morning news shows, podcasts, blogs, Whatsapp groups, conversations with friends and family can all feel filled with different pieces of advice about how to live your life. A few common, modern day examples:
Set time limits on social media.
Take a cold water plunge every morning.
Meditate.
Don’t drink caffeine until 90mins after waking.
Stretch everyday.
Drink 2, 3, 4 (?) litres of water a day.
There’s a million bits of ‘advice’ out there. Sometimes contradictory. Often sounding difficult to achieve, unpleasant, or seemingly impossible to create habits around.
Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a filter to help figure out which bits you should think about trying out, against the ones which don’t feel intuitively right?
I was a fairly mediocre science student at school. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more interested in the physics of everyday things - like Why Do Liquids Sometimes Run Down The Side Of The Container When They Are Poured Out? But when it came to chemistry, I always had a love-hate relationship. It made my brain hurt, and not in a good way, or because I’d hovered over the bunson burner for too long.
But much like the relationship between hydrogen and oxygen molecules, something stuck in my mind over time. And it was a concept called ‘half-life’.
Full disclosure; for some reason I never really understood the idea behind it at school. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised that I’m subsconsciously living the concept most days.
I’m now going to hit you with the words no one wants to read after someone has mentioned ‘half-life’ - Let Me Explain. But bear with me for a second.
"Half-life" is a concept that helps us understand how long it takes for something to become half of what it used to be.
It can apply to many different things like games, food, and even some types of medicine.
An example. It’s a hot day as I’m writing this. I empty a few blocks of ice into a glass of water, and one falls onto the counter and slowly starts to melt. If it takes 10 minutes for the ice cube to melt halfway and become a small piece of ice, then the half-life of that ice cube is 10 minutes.
Source: Farnam Street Blog
The concept helps us understand how things change and become smaller or less in amount over time. It helps us to understand the rate at which things start to fade away, or lose significance.
And this is really useful to apply to all those bits of advice swirling around us in the world:
How long does it take for an idea, or concept, or piece of advice, to become smaller, or less noteworthy, or lose up to half or more of its significance. The idea being that:
The longer something has been around for, and maintained its substance, the more likely it is that it’s something we should put our weight behind.
Another example. I work in marketing. It is an industry that has, in recent times, become defined by chasing ‘fad’ ideas.
Around 2010, the future of marketing was getting people to ‘join the conversation’ because we’d all really want to talk to our favourite brand of oats.
Pokemon Go, a 2016 augmented reality game, was going to change marketing as we knew it and brands rushed to advertise in its virtual world that was going to become the future. When was the last time you heard of, let alone played it (if you ever did, which I’m sure most didn’t)?
Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Metaverse’, where’d we all live virtually with avatars representing our every move in a version of the popular game The Sims brought to real-life, has already been killed off by the man himself. But that didn’t stop the industry leaping all over the concept as the future over the past 5 years.
And now you can’t turn around in a field without being confronted with AI marketing theories.
The point is, the half-life of these ideas was astoundingly low. In other words, they had no staying power. They came, caused a large fuss, and faded mostly into insigificance.
The longer an idea sticks around for and remains significant, substantial, the more we should give it credibility. The more we should invest in it, not less. Because it’s more likely to continue sticking around. It’s proven that it has an impressive half-life.
So what does half-life mean when it comes to navigating the world around us today, and all the endless advice, tips and hacks that our media bombards us with?
It means we should look to the things that:
Have been around for a long, long time and,
That we still see evidence of being significant today
When we apply those two simple lenses, it narrows down the list quite neatly. But first let’s examine those two filters in a bit more depth.
What is a long, long time?
Well, if you chart the course of what is generally recognised as a defining era of modern civilisations, the establishment of language, story-telling, cultures and economic structures that we largely still recognise today, we’re going back somewhere between 40,000-70,000 years ago.
A long, long time ago.
How do we know what is still significant today?
What are the activities and approaches that, all across the globe and spanning cultures, we still witness on a daily basis as being fundamental to cultures and societies in the modern era.
For me, that narrows down to just a handful of fundamental, first principles ideas that have evidenced a half-life I can believe in:
Community: For as long as we’ve been around and progressed, humans have existed in communities. They have developed ways to support each other, in order for the greater tribe to progress.
Conscious meaningful connections: There are natural limits to the number of meaningful connections we have hold in our lives (it turns out that number is around 150). Beyond them, it becomes harder for us to figure out what and whom we can trust, and this starts to invite conflict.
Physical exercise: From nomadic tribes, to the labour required in producing resources, we have always been a physically active species in order to keep progressing and growing.
Consuming natural resources: Processed items - such as canned beans or condensed milk, made to be preserved for longer periods of time - first made an appearance in our diets in just the 18th century. Not a long, long time ago.
As a species, we love arguing and debating, and none more so than in the era of technology and social media. But I imagine you would be hard pressed to find many people who would argue against the validity and significance of the above ideas. Their half-life has stood the test of time.
When I reflect on that list, it makes things seem a lot simpler in terms of what I perhaps should be doing more of, or less of. And isn’t that the point of advice - to make things simpler?
How can you use the Half-life of Ideas in your daily life?
When you encounter a piece of guidance, or a habit suggestion, or life-hack, ask yourself two simple questions:
Does this feel like it’s rooted in something that has been around for a long, long period of time?
Does this feel like something that would span cultures and regions as being important to the development of societies?
If the answer to either question is ‘no’, then it has a questionable half-life. Does that mean you shouldn’t do it? Not necessarily. It just means proceed with caution. It’s likely not black, nor white.
It’s probably Grey, and that means you need to figure it out for yourself, rather than investing in it as accepted wisdom.
Like the vast majority of things in life.