Getting the ball rolling
I had trouble starting this blog post. I really did.
But now that you are aware of this 'inertia,' is there anything that you can do about it, so as to not artificially inflate your cautiousness?
The sad thing is, I can't really point it to any overarching legitimate excuse. I always had the desire to write content: whether online as a means of displaying my thoughts to the world, or offline as a means of retaining my thoughts for my future self. I always had ideas for what to write: philosophy of art, geopolitical trends, business economics, derision of institutionally-based norms, etc. I always had the ability to write pieces of content commensurate with the length of my to-exist blog posts.
You guys already read the title, so you know that the reason for my inability to start was much more mundane. It is Newton's First Law of Motion (a.k.a. Inertia): An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.* This is truly a component of my id, since I cannot possibly defend my reluctance with reason. And I truly dislike how I succumbed so easily to this elementary and instinctual part of my nature.
If you must know anything about me, it is that I am governed by reason. Further, perhaps a deviance from the majority of the rational population, I am actually heavily opportunistic. I tend to be more prospective and open to future opportunities rather than planning things as they ought to be.
So when a gilded opportunity comes up in the form of the idea to create a blog post, coupled with an innate desire to express my philosophical thoughts into writing, it is irrational how 'inertia' can really block the marriage of the two. And yet, here I stand, 2 years since I first gained a taste at the enjoyment I extract from writing content online.** This irritates me.
But of course, my purpose for writing this blog post is a little bit more than to express my primal emotion of irritation. Instead, I observed how this 'inertia' really does more than 'slightly irritate' all the rational opportunistic people out there. This inertia is exactly what prevents a lot of us from taking the 'leap of faith' that we frequently need in order to embark on new opportunities.
The 'leap of faith' is a commonly used adage that originates from Søren Kierkegaard, who used the term in Fear and Trembling to describe actions that seemingly defy reason. So unfortunately, my little analogy with my blog does not really apply here, since reason dictated that I should create my blog post. However, consider all the opportunities that seem to defy reason at face value: founding a business when only 35% of US businesses survive 10 years, writing a book when barely 2% of books sell 5000+ copies, and marrying when 40% to 50% of all marriages end in divorce.*** These are all opportunities with high costs of execution and unjustifiably low rates of success (let's call them high-risk opportunities). And yet these are all actions that may yield tremendously great benefits should they succeed.
Here is, then, what I (along with perhaps other rational opportunistic people) fear. Most of the time, I am able to rationalize opportunities through cost-benefit analysis (or some other derivative rational analysis) so that my opportunism appears to be somewhat carefree. These are instances where rationality harmonizes with opportunism. However, say one of these high-risk opportunities come along. These are instances where rationality does not harmonize with opportunism.
We have a conflict here, since it appears to me that only 2 substantial factors drive opportunism: rationality, which is now the opposing force; and faith. Now, the problem is not that there exist instances where the objection of my rationality outweighs that of the strength of my faith. The problem is that for any opportunity whatsoever, our friend 'inertia' acts as a party-pooper. Because we all have this 'inertia' psychologically embedded within our ids, there will always be a cost to taking an opportunity: the cost of disrupting our normal workflow in order to entertain the opportunity. For opportunists, this 'inertia' is apparently antithetical to everything that they stand for. And for rational opportunists that are confronted with high-risk opportunities, this means that they will be economically inefficient in their decision-making--the artificially-higher costs of the high-risk opportunities will force our friends to forgo the opportunity in favor of unnecessary cautiousness for many cases, even if they would have taken the opportunity had there not existed the 'inertia' factor.
So yeah, this 'inertia' is indeed a party-pooper.
But now that you are aware of this 'inertia,' is there anything that you can do about it, so as to not artificially inflate your cautiousness?
In reality, there isn't much we can do except be aware of our prudent nemesis. Whenever we try to rationalize any opportunity, we have to understand that there exists a primal instinct which slightly favors inaction over action. Whenever we try to quantify the costs and benefits of the opportunity, we can try to artificially inflate the benefits of the opportunity to account for this slight inclination. Of course, just like economic externalities, it would be nearly impossible to correctly quantify how big this 'inertia' plays a role in our decision-making. However, as long as we are indeed aware of this 'inertia,' then we can have solace in the fact that we are taking more opportunities now than if we had not been aware of this cheeky sourpuss.
*And an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction, for you punctilious physicists. Although, I don't think this part of Newtonian physics is relevant as an analogy.
**Check my Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Evan-Dhika. I haven't posted in over 2 years, though.
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