We Can Reach Fitness by Returning to the Optimum Condition

Have you ever sat down and thought about your values? 

Values are important, motivating, and provide guidance.

I’ve done a lot of values work in therapy and find it challenging. I value many things, but prioritizing the top five to ten is difficult and dynamic.

One thing I have learned during over a decade of values work is that many human values suck. 

I think a lot about universal or ‘optimum’ values

Are there ‘optimum’ human values? For my purposes, optimum is an adjective meaning most favorable or desirable. The best. In biological systems, we can think of optimum in terms of homeostasis or balance. Please see here for more on that. 

An example of optimum is transportation. Can we identify an optimum mode of human transportation? Many suggest it is the bicycle: 

Science of Cycling: Human Power | Exploratorium
© The bicycle is a tremendously efficient means of transportation. In fact cycling is more efficient than any other…annex.exploratorium.edu

In the case of transportation, we skipped past ‘optimum’ in pursuit of ‘better’. Now we burn jet fuel to fly around the planet. This uses more fossil fuels and creates more problems associated with that industry. 

We also change our values

Change is inevitable. Everything is impermanent and evolves. Sometimes, we change toward improvement. Sometimes our pursuit of ‘better’ leads us astray. Words like improve, better, and success, are extremely subjective. 

Modernity induced a key shift away from optimum values and toward money, status, and power. Currently, artificial intelligence is exacerbating this transformation.

With each technological advancement, we need to revisit our values. We are mistaken to believe that each step along the evolutionary ladder is an improvement. Rather, organisms experience increases in efficiency that facilitate new abilities. But these advancements are not always the optima.

Consider, briefly, biological respiration. An amphibian requires minimal energetic investments to oxygenate cells across moist skin. Humans, on the other hand, must breathe. While humans can be more active and grow larger and more complex, are we ‘better’?

So with evolution, knowing what is optimum is key

Humans evolved the ability to choose, which itself becomes a selection pressure. We can influence our evolution. If we want to remain extant we need to make better choices.

Valuing money, status, and power leads to our demise. To enhance evolutionary fitness we must revisit our past. In our past, we may find more optimum values to guide our future.

Supporting podcast audio:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/15247790

YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/H3MtJEPU1p0

I will be assisting with delivering my future floating home for the next few weeks but will post when I can. Please check out my back catalog here and on The Neurodivergent Professor podcast and YouTube channel.