Integrated System ~ Field Notes ~ 3
In many ways, a Scandinavian log cabin is an integrated system … one that is self-regulating, self-sustaining, and self-healing. It’s made of what grows around it, and the logs are hygroscopic. They drink moisture when the air is damp and release it when dry, so the cabin breathes with the seasons. Their thick mass buffers temperature, soaking heat by day and giving it back at night.
The human body, like the rest of nature, is an integrated system that tends to thrive by default.
It is for this reason that “healthcare” should truly master the art of the emergency and not much else. Though, what truly causes an emergency is another topic.
The idea of chronic medication, save some rare cases, only erodes the spirit and the body, not the least of which through its various “side effects”. That side effects even exist is perfect proof that we know not what we are tampering with.
Singapore is far from perfect. But the city-state runs remarkably better than many others. The streets stay clean, the trains run on time, and crime is rare enough that people reserve café seats with unattended laptops. Most citizens own homes built by the state, and greenery threads through nearly every district despite the density. Corruption is low, and public services simply work.
And for these reasons (and more), Singapore will probably never be a booming startup hub that America or China is. Someone would say this is a bad thing, but I wouldn’t be so quick to make that conclusion.
Why? Because large-scale innovation is overrated. One should be able to trade/talk/interact with others directly and just do things. A decentralized, integrated system. Innovation then, would be centered around quality, taste, and inspiration not “problem solving”. A startup that tries to “solve healthcare” is, I’m sorry to say, doomed to fail. The macro is way too complex for ambitiously engineered top-down “solutions”. The art of artisanship, quality, uniqueness, taste … these are the true talents of the human; machines may be deployed for various automatable things.
They tell you to learn marketing, coding, writing, speaking, … and a dozen other things. They coax you into approaching life in a piecemeal fashion. Piecemeal leads to burnout precisely because it is piecemeal.
The world is a fragmented place, and it creates roles, departments, and categories to support its fragmentation.
But there is a way to approach the multi-dimensional nature of nature in a holistic manner. To become something of an integrated system. Why is this beneficial? Because nature is multi-faceted, like the human organism, and so anything less than a multi-faceted life is less than ideal for the body and spirit.
We love LED lights today, don’t we? But a star whose light reaches us in different colours across the day along with, of course, the invisible parts like infrared, all of which our bodies integrate wholly, LED is the mere light portion of this.
But it’s less about light and more about the systematic de-integration of what nature gave to us complete. We take things apart, create piecemeal fixtures, and call it science because we isolated something interesting.
A thing must be integrated, or discarded. It must not “hang around”. Now, a note on sacrifice as it pertains to integration.
GSP, an MMA legend, was not the best striker, wrestler, or grappler … but when put altogether, he was arguably the GOAT. He functioned as an integrated system that was greater than the sum of its parts.
Nothing in his game was sacrificed. Every skillset reinforced the next. The takedown threat made the jabs land all day, jabs that left one open for a level change tackle when least expected.
I say all this to say, a human’s life requires no sacrifice at the purest, most cleanly integrated level. One can enjoy delicious food that also happens to provide great nourishment and vitality. One can make work feel like play. And so on. If something feels like a sacrifice, something somewhere has not been seamlessly integrated.
They key is to create things you don’t need to maintain. We were to made to nurture, much more than we were made to maintain.
To nurture is to build an integrated system that largely runs on its own, and that yields fruit in the process.
To maintain/manage is to cause death by a thousand cuts.
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