What I Learned This Week (5-oct-2021 to 11-oct-2021)
This week I understood that we are only imitating life and the impact that autopilot has on our daily lives.
Let me elaborate this idea.
In the week I did the “Day 18: Queues and Stacks” in https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/30-queues-stacks/tutorial and learned about the difference between an “stack” and “queue”, both of them are ways to collect objects in a place, we called this “data structure”. The main difference between this two data structures are that the “stack” use a logic called LIFO (Last In, First Out), LIFO basically means that the last object you add to the “container” or list will be the first in get out of the container. Think in the “stacks” as a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen, the first dish you put in there is the last you’ll wash because it’ll be in the bottom of the pile, so the last dish you added to the pile it also will be the first dish you’ll clean.
In the other hand we have the “queue”, this data structure works differently, the logic of the queue calls “FIFO” (First In, First Out). You can think in this way to work as the line of people in any store, if someone get in the line first, it’ll be the first person who will be attend.
So as we can see, this two ways of work are just analogies from life, we only make advantage of what already happens around us.
Until here everything seems to be fine, but here’s another thing (a bad one) that comes with the delegation of more and more human activities to our computers… the idea that we can handle more activities than we really are capable to.
The idea of handling a lot of activities (read a book, do exercise, chat with family and friends, be aware of the newest in some technology, take care of yourself, the pets and watch a tv show, etc…) makes us very anxious people and that is very bad, not only for us, it’s bad for our environment too.
The usual is we start thinking in autopilot when we have a heavy load of activities that we can’t properly handle, this means that we treat all situations with the same lightness, since we know that we do not have much time, we prioritize finishing the tasks as soon as possible in order to continue with the next activity. The above, causes that we do not give their fair importance to the decisions that we must make, there are times that this does not impact much in our lives (if we choose water of one flavor or another in our meal), but when it is an important decision, like choose between two events to which you were invited on the same weekend, we usually choose the worst option because it is the easiest one (confirm attendance at the two events and in the end not enjoying either of them the way we would like).
Luckily for us there are many useful tools that can help us to avoid the autopilot, but first of all we need to realize that we’re living in autopilot and understand the impact that this way of live hit in our daily activities.
The good people of Marks and Spencer made a great study of the autopilot in the british life, you can check it here if you want to know more about this topic: https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/documents/reports-results-and-publications/autopilot-britain-whitepaper.pdf
As we can see, the technology industry and real life are two sides of the same coin and both impact their counterpart with the same weight.
While the former tries to emulate the latter, the latter uses the benefits of its counterpart to make any required task more efficient.
In conclusion, not everything is 100% good or bad, things must be used but with measure. We must not forget that technological tools are just that, tools at our disposal. What really has value is ourselves, we are the ones who must make the decisions regardless of whether they are small or large, we must assume the main role in our lives, only then will we have a calm and happy life.
