This is the perpetual question.

Every moment of every day, you can decide to do something different. But deciding is itself arduous. And it only gets more arduous every day, as the number of options increases. Though, for many, the high cost of exploring alternatives prohibits their discovery and evaluation. Taking an alternative route itself has pre-conditions that incur a cost. One that is often unaffordable.

I am lucky. Though, like people who have achieved a certain degree of independence in middle-age, it has come at the expense of time already spent. I now have much less time, and also less “energy”: including metabolic energy and emotional drive (which is undoubtedly a product of the former). I’m wearing down. I’m getting tired.

To put it simply: change is expensive. As we get older, we can less afford the cost of change.

There is one strategy which I have available, but have not fully exploited: delegation. But this entails a different kind of risk. And it still requires personal change and effort. To delegate is to lead; it is to be a leader and a manager. These are skills, and require time and effort to acquire, let alone master. No one simply turns into a leader overnight. Especially if one spent most of one’s life as a functionary, doing what one was told.

It’s hard enough deciding what I should do. Deciding what others should do, just because I might hire them, is not easier. It’s probably harder. That is, if one takes responsibility for their likelihood of success. It is certainly trivial to make demands on people, but much more complicated to ensure such demands are feasible.

All change depends on feasibility. Some people avoid the effort of ensuring feasibility. They substitute hope or empty optimism. I don’t agree with such people. Mindless optimism and hopeful belief, without substantial ground, is no different from frivolous fantasy. OK, we cannot know everything. We cannot predict the future, no matter how much effort we expend on study, experiment, theory, and simulation. But we can eliminate the largest causes of uncertainty and risk. Or recognize that they cannot be eliminated, and spare ourselves the misery of wasted effort.

We should do as much preparation as reasonable, and as little as necessary, but no less. But most people do almost none, which is quite a bit less than necessary.

By “most” I mean, most people who try to change. Of course, most people do not try to change at all. Most people are extreme pessimists, or highly conservative; they assume all efforts to change will fail. Most people try to preserve the status quo. This is optimally efficient, metabolically, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, change is inevitable. As the environment changes, so much the individual. That is adaptation.

The question becomes: how does one exert the minimum effort to achieve maximal adaptation to unavoidably changing circumstances?

Even then, there is the question of what to change: oneself, or one’s environment?

In this case, changing the environment, in an attempt to preserve the status quo, means resisting or foiling others’ attempts to change it for their benefit. That is the essence of conservatism and reactionary politics: to prevent others from bettering their world, and improving their lives, because it will otherwise impose a cost on oneself, or increase one’s risk of loss or suffering. Most people do not like changes to their environment that imposes a cost on them. it is rational selfishness. Except that they take it too far. Even a change that reduces the misery of millions, and only imposes a minute cost on them, raises vociferous objections. People can be extremely self-centred. Even if the long-term consequences are that they—along with everyone—pay a tremendous price.

Most people don’t believe in the future. Maybe they have good reason. What is the future? It’s imaginary. Even if there is evidence and good argument for some expected outcome, it can be dismissed as unlikely or impossible, or no better than any other self-serving prediction. We don’t know how to talk about the future. Not productively. Not in a reasonable way, based on common precepts. The future is whatever people need it to be, to rationalize their preferences now.

This is significant. Because the future is an inherent expectation of all organisms. Neither inorganic matter, nor simple biological machines—like viruses and prions—care a whit about what happens. They behave. We can argue—though it is pointless—about the level of complexity required to attain a state of self-interest. Does it require self-awareness? Does it require a nervous system? Pointless, really. Maybe protozoans don’t care. They swim or float around, eating what they find. But they still sense their environment. They move towards food, and away from danger. What else is necessary to evidence self-interest and an innate desire to survive?

The role of living beings is to imagine and prepare for the future. It doesn’t matter how simple the representation of that future. It doesn’t require a symbolic description. It doesn’t require language. It doesn’t require sociality. The future, as an expectation, is the fundamental quality which defines living things.

Humans are no exception. We spend every moment anticipating one future or another. What varies is how far into the future we look, and how many variables we try to consider when making our predictions. And maybe how often we revise our system of prediction, by adding new variables, removing obsolete ones, re-prioritizing the rest, and increasing the sophistication of our models and the simulated interactions of all the parts. Even still, our models are inadequate. By necessity of mathematics, computational complexity, and metabolic thermodynamics.

The nature of reality imposes a heavy cost on attempts to predict future events. All prediction systems operate within the context of that same reality, and influence the outcomes. Everyone mostly knows this, although we often forget, or leave it out of our predictions. Because it leads to infinite regressions, making it simply too costly. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to make predictions. Assuming you can afford them. It just means they can never be perfect. Or even that good, really. Only just a bit better than someone else’s. Or restricted to a highly—artificially—constrained environment.

Better predictions alone are not enough to improve one’s outcomes. One must be able to influence events in a consequential manner. Understanding a system—a prerequisite to prediction—does not imply that one can modify it. We can predict the behaviour of the sun, and the motion of the planets, and other cosmological events, but we cannot alter them. Many people devote vast energies to making predictions, forgetting that they will never have the power to influence the systems which they are predicting, for they will never have the necessary control over the component parts of those systems. They will try, but inevitably fail.

Control is an enticing mirage. Perhaps the most enticing, for many people. We will do almost anything for control, or even the perception of control. In fact, perception is all we ever get. Control is always an illusion. But it is so comforting—so calming, enthralling, intoxicating, addictive—that we often cannot give it up. We crave control like nothing else, and fear and hate any threat which might cause us to lose that feeling. It is our greatest and most terrible delusion.

How do we gain control? How do we prevent our enemies from gaining control? We always think in terms of who has control, and who benefits. Power is only useful insofar as it provides control. As long as we see the world competitively—and our evolutionary origins make this inescapable—then we will obsess over the gaining and preserving of control. We will respond with hatred and violence to anyone or anything that seeks to reduce that control. Loss of control is our greatest fear.

Unfortunately, few things remind us of the fragility of our control as thoughts of the future. The future is a place of change, and with general change comes the specific change of our control over our future. Today is when we use what control we have to try to take more control, at best, or take actions to preserve that control, at least. For many, there is no other point to life.

So I ask myself, do I seek more control? Perhaps. Do I seek to prevent others from gaining more control? I certainly want to prevent them gaining too much. Does that require me to gain control? Or, less autocratically, would I rather control be transferred to others, who might abuse it less? How would I achieve, or help achieve, this aim? Without having and preserving some for myself? And without help from others, in coordination?

But I am no less tired for trying to understand the complexities of how human beings attempt to evade the inevitable end which our biology necessitates. The long-term future—for each of us—is unchangeable. Though not everyone agrees, having fooled themselves with dreams of an afterlife, and through relations and special contracts with imaginary supernatural forces. Reality is too awful for some to tolerate. They see no alternative but to escape into fantasy.

I am surrounded by fantasists. It is a near-universal indulgence. Sometimes it helps keeps things stable. Other times it acts as an amplifier of sources of instability.

None of this answers my initial question. It only makes it harder to answer. And it’s only the first question. The next is, “What should I do?” The third is, “What will I do?” But even if I make no decisive steps to do something different, or to devise and execute some master strategy, I will just keep doing the same old things. But perhaps in a superficially different way.