Everything is hard

everything requires balance and balance is hard

Balance is literally everywhere.

It’s the reason almost any of us have jobs. While we are starting to automate everything, there are so many things that require, or are just better, with a human touch, and I chalk that touch up to balance. Be it minor adjustments to fine-tune something that was automated or something that’s simply too subjectively defined to set explicit rules for it yet, it’s all a balancing act of inputs. It’s why we keep hitting “0” to get to the human customer service agent rather than go through the endless phone menus. It’s the reason we still have someone working next to the self-checkout machines in a supermarket. The aspect of human curation and interpretation is something that is defined by balance. (just to acknowledge it, this is where we could go on a really deep tangent on machine learning and what neural networks and bottom-up vs. top-down approaches mean for AI, what problems it can solve, general AI, artificial superintelligence, and a possible singularity, but let’s save that complex discussion for another day)

It’s the reason stereotypes exist, it makes people easier to understand. It’s really hard, impossible actually, to actually talk deeply to everyone, to listen to their stories, to understand where they came from, what their motives are, and how we should react to their existence. So we look for patterns all the time to shortcut that. Be it gender, skin color, alma mater, job, clothes, location, how they sound, etc. As trite as the saying is, correlation isn’t causation, but that’s exactly what stereotypes are. At the same time, we don’t want to overanalyze, we’d have no time for anything else, but we don’t want to under-analyze either and just use stereotypes, so we try to strike a healthy balance and hit our PC comfort zone.

It’s the reason relationships are hard. Platonic, romantic, professional, whatever. We want flexibility, we don’t want to be locked in to friends, a job, or SO too early. But we also want the simplicity of having something defined and understandable, something reliable. We want to know we made the right decision and won’t regret it when we get choose one to commit to. We want to know we made the right decision and won’t regret it when we break up and wonder if we fucked it up down the road. We want relationships with people who want and like us, because otherwise we feel neglected and rejected. But we don’t want them to want and like us too much, neediness is unattractive. We want it to be challenging, so we can grow, but not too much, elst we’ll break.

It’s the reason people don’t get or know how to explain or teach basically any creative endeavor (or why it sounds silly when we try to come up with methods for it, like “brainstorming”). What sounds to use in a song, where to start painting and with what, what a character should say, but even in regular “non-creative” life decisions, choosing what to put in a room, planning a trip, picking an apartment, or deciding what to have for dinner, they’re all balance games. It’s why we look for inspiration, someone else’s opinion, a recipe, something to copy, anything to help ease the difficulty of having to solve it on our own.

It’s even in the case of extreme things. Balance isn’t a 50–50 game. Minimalism requires an intense balance of choice because you have so few things, and each placement matters a lot (e.g., Yves Klein’s monochrome works). Maximalism requires an intense balance of choice because you have so many things but you need it to make sense (e.g., My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). If you want to be the quiet person who delivers that line of clarity at the end of a conversation, that shit better be crafted and incisive af. If you want to be the primary voice of a conversation, you better have some organization and repetition to it, or people are going to get lost in your words and stop paying attention half-way through.

It’s what makes things beautiful and feel right. It’s why we often do the majority of something fast, but it takes forever to get it “right.” Balance is delicate, it’s not static, it’s why we consistently tweak the same things time and time again. It’s why Nest made a thermostat. It’s why the correct answer to most preference questions is “it depends.” It’s why it’s okay to not have everything defined always, it would be too constricting, we try to define just enough things so that it doesn’t feel aimless, until the next time it feels aimless again.

Writing this “essay,” how much should be anecdotal vs. conceptual? How long should this be? Is this ranty stream of consciousness style too off-putting? Is the glitched out image that intentionally makes it somewhat difficult to read too much? Does it sound too pretentious? Maybe I should use less questions? Maybe I should use more questions. Maybe I should say more definitive statements. I probably should proofread this more or think more carefully about my diction. I also don’t want to lose the frantic nature of this either, though. But I don’t pretend to understand how to teach or convey balance to people. I don’t pretend to even understand balance as a general concept.

Balance is hard af. That’s okay. It’s cool.