Antonym: The Overwhelm Edition
Plus documents that have chats with each other.
Dear Reader
Emotions are data - often the most valuable data we have access to about our context and our ability to operate within it.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed at the moment. In fact it’s almost inevitable for two reasons:
The complexity of the world we have made and expect ourselves to operate in; and
That we are on a roller-coaster of a new revolution (even if only in the sense we can feel ourselves being cranked up to the top of the first peak before the ride begins.
As George Rzevski says, every technology created to solve a problem also introduces new complexities, which in turn require additional technologies to manage. Progress may be an upward curve, but close up the line of the graph is made of a multitude of cycles of innovation and adaptation.
Image: From The Future Is Digital, by George Rzevski
Amidst this constant change, feeling overwhelmed is natural and unavoidable. Revolutions are chaotic and fractal, playing out on every scale from the personal to the societal. The old business axiom of "evolution, not revolution" is misleading - it falsely implies we can simply opt for a slower pace. In reality, we must learn to continually adapt, finding the benefits of rapid technological advancement while dealing – or just about coping with – the challenges.
So how can we respond when we find ourselves in a state of overwhelm, with uncertainty and emotions running high?
In the horrid moments overwhelm that came with running a business during the pandemic lock-downs, I made use of RAIN, a mindfulness framework by Tara Brach for when you are experiencing intense emotions, using four steps: Recognizing your emotions, Allowing them to exist without judgement, Investigating how they manifest in your body, and practising Non-identification to avoid defining yourself by them
I’ve adapted that model to help me also think about work practically. RARE (Recognise, Accept, Reflect, Experiment) helps me get from a sense of things being impossible, to a state of curiosity and movement, doing something and being interested. It’s helped me feel calmer more often, so I thought I’d share it here:
1. Recognise: The critical first step is to recognise when you are in a state of overwhelm. Pause, step back, and acknowledge your emotional state. This self-awareness is essential to avoid rash decisions or poorly chosen words.
2. Accept: Identify and label your emotions, whether it's overwhelm or something else. As Tara Brach suggests, say "yes" to your feelings. This simple act of acceptance can have a remarkably calming effect and help you gain clarity on your mental state.
3. Reflect: Once you've found a place of calm and awareness, zoom out and examine the situation from a higher vantage point. Contextualise your experience within the broader trends shaping our world. Draw upon frameworks like the interplay of technology and complexity or systems thinking to make sense of the inheren
t uncertainty at play.
4. Experiment: In the face of uncertainty, experimentation is often the wisest response. By testing different approaches on a small scale, you can gather valuable data, mitigate risk, spur innovation, and cultivate resilience. Experimentation enables evidence-based decision making and continuous improvement as you navigate uncharted territory.
Documents that have conversations
Talking of experiments, one that we’ve been playing with this week is getting interesting research reports to talk to each other.
Everything that can be a bot will be a bot, is one of our sayings at the moment at Brilliant Noise.
Custom AI chatbots are very different to the previous generation of chatbots — they are so easy to make on ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft Copilot and Poe that they can be made for a task, for a specific meeting, and they are especially useful when you have a large document.
We tried turning three academic research reports into bots this week. The results aren’t quite ready to show yet, but here’s Stanford University’s AI Index Report 2024, a huge collection of useful statistics about AI use globally – as a chatbot on Poe. Leave a comment on this post if you can’t get access.
Try the bot here and view the whole report here.
The report is a massive 500 pages, so using a chatbot to find interesting stats and insights is perfect: For instance:
There’s a big age gap in attitudes and adoption of generative AI tools.
China has the highest rate of Gen AI usage in its population.
Emerging research suggests using generative AI will change our brains.
In the experiment, we’re having the AI report offer useful data into a conversation with a paper on AI use in the UK intelligence services and a new one on the economic impact of generative AI. I’ll report back here, but will also have more on our sister newsletter, Brilliant Noise’s BN Edition.
That’s all for this week…
In the spirit of minimising overwhelm, I’ll stop there. Thank you for reading. If you like it, stick a share on it and see you next week.
Antony
P.S. Today’s lead image was generated using the new beta of MidJourney in a browser. I was trying it for the first time and it is far easier to use than the Discord version with amazing results. Here’s what it looks like:
Here are some more images that almost made today’s cover image, as it were, from my prompt: “a point of view photograph of being on a rollercoaster as it reaches the first peak, in a 1980s kodacolor style”.
I picked the feet-first image to lead as it seemed like a stress dream. Here are some others that I also liked in different styles:
