Why are you doing that?

TLDR: Copying is the fast track to immortality.

Why go to college? Why get a good job? Why have kids, then send those kids to college?

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Your default reason for those time-consuming and costly endeavours may be, 'because I want to'.

But does that express true desire, or is it rationalisation after-the-fact? Was a concerted effort made to explore alternatives?

After all, the virtue of conventional goals are taken as givens, such that non-pursuit - rather than pursuit - must be defended. Parents need not justify their choice to procreate, while the childless are expected to explain not having children.

Arthur Schopenhauer enters the chat:

Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.)

He is not the only one to question the extent of our control over desire.

Marx said, "man" makes his own history, but not under the historical conditions of his choosing. Mill attempted to secularize the paradox by observing that we are slaves to habit, but can step back and form those habits. 

More recently, Girard described our desire as 'memetic'. That is, we are not merely influenced by others, we mimic them.

I'm not going to sneer that humanity are a bunch of sheep, because there are very good reasons in favour of copying. 

Apart from sociological reasons, such as peer group belonging:

• Innovation is comparatively expensive, with inconsistent results.
• Because successful innovation must be demonstrated, it is easy to copy.

Evolutionary Biologist Prof. Pagel said in his 2019 Gifford lecture:

We're really faced with quite a profound realisation about a social animal, which is that the strongest selection acting upon our cleverness might be to be good at copying. Recognising a good outcome when we see it and acting upon that rather than be good at innovating ourselves.

That intelligence - our individual problem-solving ability - is so varied and heritable points to it being less important to our survival than, say, the number of eyes or toes we have.

This raises the question whether some types of intelligence are more important than others. 

Humans are exceptional at detecting and responding to social cues, which would be unnecessary if we relied on independent thought. The most important type of intelligence for us may therefore be that which aids the copying of good ideas from others.

So odds are that our goals are copied, as is our insistence that they are freely willed.

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Two questions arise:

1. Do we also copy HOW we go about achieving goals?
2. Could conforming simply reflect common sense? After all, the crowd is often correct, or at least not fatally incorrect.

You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on. 

- Benjamin Franklin

Established pathways to success remain attractive after their use-by dates. That is, after the advantages they confer have been eroded by changing circumstances.

A college degree, now at increased cost, may now carry a lesser probability of a stable career. Yet higher education remains popular.

It has become common wisdom that the goal of shelter must be achieved through home ownership, despite rocketing house prices in developed countries.

Boosting earnings is the default path to financial independence rather than, say, avoiding costs. 

The inefficient updating of practices is known in sociology and economics as 'Path Dependency'. Again, there are good reasons for following in others' footsteps, including sunk costs, economies of scale, and mimicry needing less brain-work than novelty. However, path dependency carries the risk that resources saved through copying would have been more than offset with less popular but more effective alternatives.

The world has been slow to adopt electric cars, Keynesian economics (there's still push-back from fiscal conservatives), and even that Cold-war invention called the Internet.

In Freakonomics Radio #498, Stephen Dubner says:

Adoption can be incredibly unscientific, driven by social appetites as well as what’s called path dependence: once a given path or process has been established, it can be hard to tempt people onto a new path, even if it’s better.

So we copy our means as well as our ends.

This begs the question, "Why bother?".

That is not to say that life is, per Camus, an absurd search for meaning in meaninglessness. Life may have - or appear to have - meaning, (but we probably copy that too).

What drives us to choose between adopting and innovating, between copying and inventing, instead of doing neither? 

Why expend the energy to chase abstract, long term goals beyond immediate survival, like holidays or careers, let alone decide whether to approach them through mimicry or inventiveness?

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The answer is death, according to Terror Management theory. 

That is, the tension between knowledge of our inevitable death and our innate desire to live manifests as either:

1. Denying death, primarily through religion, and/or;
2. Pursuing symbolic/virtual immortality by:

... living a life that our culture would tell us is a life well lived, so that we shine among the populace that we grew up with ... we're seen as an exemplar of our peers in our communities ... a success story that will be remembered after our death.

-- Ross Menzies, 'Mortals and the fear of death' on ABC Radio National's Big Ideas

Terror Management theory is not merely armchair psychology. It has been put to the test. In laboratory studies, subtle reminders of death measurably influence decision making.

We are hardwired to replicate others, and to feel vulnerable if we don't. 

Let's not end on this dismal note.

It is too easy to conclude that people are purely panicky plagiarists. Far from dismissing personal agency as yet another copied delusion, we can use this knowledge of our tendencies to ascertain where we have choice that matters.

That would be in who we choose to copy.

To that end, the dismantling of real and virtual borders by transport and computing have laid before us a smorgasbord of subcultures from which to take our cues. There are social media groups for all of them: meme investors, child-free, early retirement, social conservatives, and more. At the very least, we now know that there are more tribes out there than the seemingly uniform society that surrounds us.

If we do not want to, but cannot help from mimicking our neighbours, then we should expend less effort fighting this urge, and redirect those resources to finding more agreeable neighbours.

Don't like keeping up with the Joneses? Get better Joneses.

Another insight concerns the incremental nature of progress.

Pure invention can be dangerously avant-garde, missing targets that do not yet exist. At the same time, copying on its own will not lead to advances.

Innovation often involves the novel joining of ideas. That is, the creative combination of copied concepts. Add morality to cuneiform and you get legislation. Add touchscreens, batteries, and the internet, and you get the iPhone. Add stock indices to mutual funds and you get index funds.

So your breakthrough will more likely be achieved by integration rather than invention. Wide exposure and an omnivorous approach to knowledge increases the odds of this happening.

If you are happy fitting in where you are then it's not going to matter where you got your desires from. Congrats. You don't have to do anything.

But if you are somewhat dissatisfied with what's on offer, or feel ashamed for refusing it, then take note that you will likely not find a solution through your own ingenuity.

Rather, find your tribes, and help them join.

And maybe, along the way, try to feel less bad about dying.