The state of your mind determines your experience of the world
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” — Eleanor Roosevelt.
Experience is all we have
For 10 years I have been guided by this quote because I can’t think what could possibly be more important than our experience? It is our life.
If we break down our experience — it’s how we think, feel and act as we move through the world. How we think about information we see around us, how this makes us feel and ultimately how we act as a result. Experience is all we have, so why not make it match what you want out of your life?
Who is in control of your experience?
As a designer, I have always been concerned with the end customers/users/viewers experience of the work I produce. Does it have a positive or negative impact on their experience? Does it have a positive or negative impact on the world? What is its purpose and how does it inspire people to behave?
The darker side of this, of course, is how design can be used to manipulate our experience to deepen the pockets of others — for example, the first thing I learnt in my graphic design and visual communications class was about colour semiotics: the meaning we convey through colour, in other words, how we can use certain colours to make people think, feel and act in a particular way.
It’s why Facebook is blue, because blue is a colour that means corporate, calm and safe. It’s one of the reasons Facebook has all of our data. It was at that moment that I realised that most of us, most of the time, are not in control of our own experience.
Taking control of your own experience
As I became more interested in our experience (and what controls it), I delved deep into studying behavioural science and behavioural economics, looking at how patterns and modes of thought determine our experience, and how we can use this to our advantage.
I realised that with knowledge and self-awareness, we can be in control of our experience, which was empowering.
I decided that no longer would I allow designers (like me), marketers, Silicon Valley technologists to determine my experience of the world and how I wanted to live.
Really taking control of your experience
What soon became clear was that everything is working against us — there are so many unknown unknowns, so much that my brain was doing that I was unaware of, so many systems, beliefs and modes (what I now refer to as glitches) that I reinforced everyday by thinking, feeling and acting, repeating. And all of it was affecting my experience of the world.
Our brains are so complex and there are people out there who understand them so much better than we do, we barely have a fighting chance in truly making our own decisions and driving our own experience. But there are chances — everyday we are faced with a tsunami of information, choice and a million moments in which we can choose, or choose not, to act.
As we learn more about how to think, rather than what to think, we get more chances to ‘choose our own adventure’, to choose how we think, feel and act and to choose the experience we have.
Takeaway: Design the life you want
I believe that with this knowledge, we can all be empowered to transform our experience of living. You can design the life you want. You are in control of your thoughts, how you perceive things, respond or react, process information and as a result, how you feel and act.
The cognitive ‘glitches’ are vast and many of them are still being discovered today by psychologists, behavioural economists and behavioural scientists. We have a lot to learn, but when our whole experience of living is at stake, what could possibly be more important?
Gltchs is a content-driven platform that explores how to think, not what to think, because learning how to think means taking ownership of how we feel and act — transforming our experience of the world, how we interpret the inflow of information and how we operate in our careers, relationships and daily lives.
