Stop Hacking Your Life
You can optimize technology, but a human being is a living organism that takes time to grow, so the things that matter most have to be nurtured rather than hacked.
Asked about biohacking, Dandapani questions why we want to hack everything instead of doing the work. Optimization suits technology, not living organisms. He offers a change of language, from hack to nurture, and points to the closeness with his daughter built over seven years and a friendship built over an afternoon on a veranda, neither of which could have been shortened.
What this talk covers
- Optimization works for technology, but we are not technology; we are living organisms that take time to grow and evolve.
- His closeness with his daughter came from seven years of giving her his undivided attention, his presence and his love, and there is no way to hack that.
- Our nervous system is the most profound and sophisticated set of wires and nerves in the universe, so you can learn to know your own mind and body instead of asking a ring how you slept.
- Change the language from hack to nurture, because when you change language you change thinking, and when you change thinking you change behaviour.
- Nurturing a friendship takes time, patience and repetition, like sitting on a veranda for three hours, and it cannot be compressed into a five minute call.
But we're not technology. We're the living organism. We take time to grow and evolve.Dandapani
Questions
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He is skeptical of applying it to being human. You can optimize and make technology more efficient, but a living organism takes time to grow and evolve, and the things that matter most cannot be hacked at all.
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He says no. Get to know your body and your mind directly. The nervous system is the most sophisticated set of nerves in the universe, and if you learn to understand it you do not need a ring to tell you how you slept or an app of data to review every day.
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Nurturing. Shifting the language from hack to nurture changes how you approach relationships and business, because nurturing requires time, patience and repetition.
Transcript
545 words · 2:57
The biohacking is everywhere now that you're saying it. Wow. It's like everywhere. Why are we hacking everything?
Why don't we just do the work? It's like optimization. Everything must be more optimized, right? Yes.
Because we do that with technology, which it's fine. It works for technology. You can optimize. You can be more efficient.
But we're not technology. We're the living organism. We take time to grow and evolve. And if you're asking about evolution,
if we keep going down the direction of just trying to hack everything, it doesn't work. relationship with my daughter. I've been nurturing it for the last seven years by spending
time giving her my undivided and my presence, my love. And that nurturing builds my closeness to her. How can I hack it? There's no way to hack it.
You know? And once we realize that, then we stop going down this crazy path of hacking everything. And I have to do cold baths and I have to do this and
wear a ring on my finger. Please ring. Tell me how I slept last night. I can't believe you're saying that because I took off.
I had a whoop on. I took it off. I was like, I'm done with a technology telling me how well I slept. I'm like, I'll get out of here.
How you slept. Yeah. Yeah. I wake up in the morning and I asked myself how my, our nervous system
is the most profound, sophisticated, you know, set of wires and nerves in the entire universe. And if we can learn to harness it, understand it, comment down and get to know it, we can learn so many things about our mind and body.
We don't need a ring to tell us how we slept and to look at all the data every day on the app. You know, no, just get to know your body, get to know your mind. You know, I think one of the one of the most important things that we get to do, at least
in the professions that we have, is that we get to change people's language. Because ultimately, when you can change language, you change thinking, you change thinking, change behavior and a small thing like shifting your language from hack to nurture has something huge beautiful in how you approach relationships and business. Yeah, that's that's amazing. I really
like that. Bio nurturing. Bio hacking, bio nurturing. Nice. Yeah. You know, John, John, when you came here, we we spent what half a day together. We sat on a veranda maybe for three hours, right? Looking at nature, John, we were chit chatting. But there's no way to hack that and just get on a five minute call.
And in that time we spent together and then going out for lunch and talking. We were nurturing our friendship. That's right. And that requires time and patience and repetition. And yeah, how would we hack it? We couldn't hack it.
You actually making me think about all the things that I am so good at nurturing and so impatient with like I've got to bring that nurturing idea into the symbiosis of all aspects of my life and allow things to breathe.