Radical lifestyle experiments
I recently found myself in a Ryan Holiday rabbit hole, where I came across this face-slapper of a statement (from his piece “Every Situation Has Two Handles”):
I’ve come to see this pandemic as a radical lifestyle experiment that would have been impossible under any other circumstances.
I never thought of the pandemic in terms of being a radical lifestyle experiment, but it has been exactly that. He points to a few, but here are the unplanned “experiments” that have most intrigued me:
Can we dramatically, on a dime, turn around our air pollution? Yes. It turns out we can.
Can workplaces function, even THRIVE, if there is no one “place” of work? I’ve seen plenty of clients who not only survived but outperformed past results, even when they were no longer physically located together.
Can we swing back from the extreme of being “always busy, all the time”? This one still holds a bit of mystery for me, as I think we realized how much “extra” we cram into our lives when it got cut back for us – but the question now is how much we will try to bring back as things re-open and extracurriculars are back on the table?
What I find interesting – sometimes to the point of faint disturbance – is that we would never have allowed ourselves to run these experiments voluntarily. They seemed too risky, ridiculous, downright unrealistic. It took unavoidable shutdown of “normal life” as we knew it to force our hands.
But maybe even more important than some of these “experiments” that we unintentionally tested is this insight: we have proven – in some cases even overnight – that we are in fact terrible judges of whether something is realistic because so much more is possible than we ever thought.
And that to me is the most radical experimental finding, one that will no longer allow us to use excuses like “Well that could never happen” or “There’s no way that would work” and opens the door for us to start asking “HOW could we make this work?”
Chemistry class, junior year of high school…so many experiments still to come!
