Inefficient but Soulful

Weekly I/O#50


Efficient methods rarely create emotional arousal. Meaningful and soulful experiences are inefficient because they can't be standardized. Non-standardized things are harder to scale but also harder to destroy.

Podcast: Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations [The Knowledge Project Ep. #141]

Emotional arousal rarely happens with efficient metrics. Everything that feels soulful in life is inefficient. Vacations to inefficient places are usually more meaningful. The food we find soulful is typically inefficient to cook. The more something becomes efficient, the more cookie-cutter it becomes. Standardizing is the friend of scalability but also the enemy of soulfulness.

Hinduism is an example of non-standardized things. Hinduism is not as scalable as many other religions because there's no one book, ten rules, or one God. It's like an open-source religion that people built principles on and keep evolving with. Therefore, Hinduism is mainly distributed through birth but not through scaling to other societies.

However, non-standardized things can be harder to destroy. Standardized things are easier to scale but also easier to be disrupted because the areas of attack are clear. On the other hand, something built inefficiently is harder to destroy because you don't know what to destroy and how to destroy it. There is nothing to attack. There are no areas of attack that you can say, "Okay, these are the three points on which we can attack". Non-standardized things are harder to scale but also harder to destroy.


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