Today’s Rewards Come From A Weird Place In The Past

Here’s a lesson on never to compare yourself with others

I must have been in my second year of high school when I concluded that it was all pointless.

I was seated on one end of the goalpost on our slanted football pitch. We had no training on that day. It must have been a weekend. As a member of the school team, we barely trained on the weekend.

Someone approached me and asked if I thought I’d beat person X in the coming exam. Talking about who would top in one exam over another was a common thing around the exam period. I was used to it.

This time around, after thinking long and hard about it, I didn’t find any good reason to continue stressing over it. Pointless worry was the only thing that lay on this road. From that point onwards, I cared less about my position.

Academia, however, has a way of spinning you back into such a hole even if you didn’t consent to it. They would still compare you.

When the national results were out, they compared me to others. I was more than pleased with my result, but the comparison has never left my mind.

To the point of developing a theory of evolution showing how comparison, in certain instances, is pointless, I’ve discovered more and more reasons why one should never compare themselves to others.

A powerful one, however, comes from the past. A hazy one. A weird place.

You can always resort to this weird place to remind you never to compare yourself with others.

Tell me what do you see, when you’re looking at me

My close friends can hardly imagine seeing me silent.

I can be silent for hours. But they can never believe me.

That is, silent outside an exam room.

Music is my muse. Silence, however, is the material I use to create. Worldly silence, when my mind runs its cogs.

These friends have barely seen me seated in my room, reading a book intently. Most of those who have were my high school classmates and family members.

What they see when they look at me is the weird image that stands out from all the instances they have interacted with me. This image is most available to them with the least amount of effort. It applies to everyone.

Brains utilize the easiest paths to solving problems. A hyper version of is an easy one to recall.

However, the ability to retrieve is often downplayed compared to the ease of recall. Two different words with two different degrees of effort. Retrieve and recall.

My ability to retrieve every detail in the recent trip to Naivasha is different from the ease with which I can recall the highlights.

I can recall the waterbucks, but not retrieve how we scattered around the fields as we took pictures of them.

I can recall seeing the hippos up close during the Lake Naivasha ride, but not retrieve the sequence of how we put on the orange floaters before and after boarding the boats.

I can recall how we sang the music in the minivan but can’t retrieve all the music we sang.

It’s easier to recall but difficult to retrieve all that we experienced.

An offshoot of the classical heuristic — availability heuristic.

Daniel Kahneman highlights two components of this rule of thumb — retrievability and recall. Recall is easy. Retrievability is hard. Especially when you have to make a list.

Remember those exams where you were asked to list 6 or 8 reasons why Jesus climbed a donkey? It was easy to come up with the first two answers. It became harder to list the rest.

That is the difference between recall and retrievability.

The same goes for having a list of what people think about you. Worse still, when they compare you to others.

T-Pain asks:

Tell me what do you see, when you looking at me

They don’t see the whole of you. They only see the bits they can recall with ease. It takes us to the next point.

I’ve done been through the pain and the sorrow and the struggle

Your life is a journey that even you don’t have complete recollection of.

Availability heuristic talks of how we cling to the memories that are available to us with the least effort.

Your retrievability is worse than your recall.

Most of what we can recall are the offshoots from the norm. I can easily recall the times I spent my New Year's on top of a water tower vs the times we spent in church.

We search for the peaks in our lives. Who cares about the terrain of Mt. Kenya or Mt. Everest? Unless it’s your speciality and have to create maps. We only think of the peaks.

Life has its peaks. These are the highlights we recall. They are the same highlights that others recall. Furthermore, what is a highlight to you might not be a highlight to another. The rest become difficult to retrieve.

To compliment someone is to give a highlight. A highlight is a peak moment you picked from the interactions.

The other is the end moments.

I’ll remember the moment we made that turn and parked the car, to bring our trip from Naivasha to a close.

I remember the last time I saw my girl board the Nissan to head home in November.

I remember the time I alighted at Westlands from my grandmother’s burial to pick a bike to take me to a meeting where I was a panelist.

We remember the end because it’s the easiest bit to retrieve.

These two bits — that which is easiest to recall and easiest to retrieve are the facets of the availability heuristic. Peaks are easy to recall. Ends are easy to retrieve. It’s the peak-end rule.

What most see when they look at me are tied to the availability heuristic’s key components — recall and retrievability. The peak-end rule guides this.

The result is a weird past that most of us don’t even know. Even weirder is the evolutionary history.

I go hard forever, that’s just how I’m designed

Bold.

That’s the adjective I use to describe organisms.

Organisms are bold because it is literally them against the world. My definition of an organism, however, differs from the mainstream understanding of the term. Regardless, it encompasses it.

When you’re bold, small tides don’t shake you.

It’s how you’re designed. For the keen readers inclined towards evolutionary biology, it does not mean that my theory smacks of an unseen designer. It’s a figure of speech.

Making it to the point where you’re reading this article requires an indifference to stimuli. You could have been listening to some form of music. You could have paid attention to the night or day noise in your immediate surroundings. You could have decided to see that notification when it pinged on your device.

But you decided to read a sentence at a time. If your concentration does not rival that of a goldfish, you could have read the entire article, unmoved.

Organisms are wired to withstand millions of stimuli outside them. I’m writing this article on the toilet seat, as I create space in my innards by releasing excess waste. I barely consider the pressure the seat has on my glutes.

My focus is on this post.

By the time I flush the toilet and go back to my initial position where I had started jotting down these words, I’ll barely remember the pressure of the toilet seat on my bum.

Evolution works by creating security systems to shield organisms from injury. We don’t need to know what these systems are, but we can know the principles they use to operate.

The goal of every organism is to avoid annihilation. The toilet seat will not annihilate my bum. Evolution ensured it. I can seat comfortably and make a poo with little worry.

Some of the components of organisms from ancient history are puzzling. We know very little.

At the level of a highly malleable science, that is, evolutionary biology and complexity, we know so little. How, then can you compare yourself with another? It’s impossible.

Don’t bother.

See me coming from nothing

Springing from evolution is another field I find interesting — complexity.

One branch of complexity is emergence. Emergence speaks of qualities we cannot directly explain.

Consider sugar. It is made up of carbon, hydron, and oxygen. Once combined, in various quantities, they have taste. But individually, these elements lack this quality.

Our receptors are keen on picking the compounds of sugar, but not the elementary components.

Different types of sugars taste differently. Lactose, fructose, and glucose are different. They are made of the same elementary components but taste differently.

Firstly, we cannot tell where taste emerged from these three elements. Secondly, we cannot know why they have different tastes besides the obvious fact that their molecular structure is different. Worse still, some prefer one taste to another.

Emergency is a topic that discusses how properties spring independently without direct links to their primary components.

See me coming from nothing

— Maino

Achievements and losses can also have such a quality. Often, we’d praise our achievements and link them to some other quality we possess. Bravery, discipline, or talent.

Losses too have an emergent property, but we’d also want to link it to a mishap somewhere. Laxity, indiscipline or ineptitude.

We can’t tell with certainty. It’s a weird past.

When your parent or colleagues compare you to someone, they don’t have these features in mind. They only talk about the results. Not the mechanism. Also, they will hardly mention luck.

They compare your present state to someone else’s weird past. They don’t know about your weird past. Heck, you don’t even know much about your weird past despite you having the best knowledge about yourself compared to any other person.

Comparison, the kind that downgrades you, is pointless. You can use it to fuel your ambitions, but it has negative effects, forget it.

As I close…

Knowledge is multidimensional.

I can compare 6cm with 7 cm. Length. A single dimension. Bring in other dimensions, and it becomes difficult.

You can’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

Organisms are complex entities. Complexity boasts of emergent qualities that cannot easily be linked to what we can recall or retrieve. We all have a weird past.

We are unique because of our weird pasts. What’s easy for you to remember might not be easy for me. If you’re to compare yourself, do it in a way that suits you. Boldly, but it should not belittle you.

You’re not just a highlight. You’re a story. The best person who understands that story is you, even though you also know bits and pieces of it.

How can someone else know more about you?

You’re those highlights and the missed ones. You’re all the above.

If it will only make it worse, why bother comparing?

PS: We also compare ourselves in our careers. If you wish, however, to jump the line and cut your journey in half, visit The One Alternative Academy. It’s the unique school with no grades, no tests and no diplomas — no reason to compare you with others.