In the modern world, we are faced with many complexities we must handle, but most of us lack proper knowledge on how to do that well.
Most of our ancestors had relatively low levels of complexity in their lives. For survival, they needed to gather and hunt for food, or raise crops, and needed to find or build shelter and create tools. They also needed to maintain good relationships with the people around them. But that was mostly it.
In contrast, our modern world requires that we take care of a myriad of errands and challenges, many of them quite complex.
Example: Finances
For example, one of the most complex areas we face is finances.
- We need to maintain a budget
- We need to make sure we get proper insurance (health, car, home, travel, disability, etc.)
- We need to make many decisions related to how to invest our savings: in which types of investments, how much in each one, how to maximize tax benefits, and do all that in an environment which is very chaotic and uncertain, where interest rates or inflation rates may go up or down, the stock market may crash, housing prices may become a bubble or plummet, and new types of investments (such as crypto currencies) may turn up a big profit but may also turn out to completely lose their value.
- We need to make sure that we end up having enough savings for the future when we will be old and our expenses will rise (increased medical needs, decreased mobility, etc.)
Paradox of choice
The modern world has provided us with plenty of options to choose from. On the one hand, this is of course an advantage, because more options may be available to us that are more suitable for us. But on the other hand, it leads to the “paradox of choice”, where we are faced with many decision points and dilemmas, and this may lead to increased anxiety of making a wrong choice, or FOMO (fear of missing out on the alternatives).
Add also about: choice overload, information overload, fear of missing out (fomo)