Ecology
Everything is connected to everything else.
The default mode of perception is through the lens of you, the individual. This filters out into every form of analysis, where the focus is on either you or other specific agents.
Just consider the entire self-help industry, or the popularity of biographies about successful business people. In most cases, the idea is to zero in on the intelligence and capabilities of a person or a very small group of people, with little regard given to other factors.
It’s simple, easy and frictionless—it plays right into our expectations. When you only need to consider one variable, your brain lets out a metaphorical sigh of relief since it doesn’t have to do much thinking.
An alternative that is far more accurate, especially now, is the ecological way of thinking. Ecologists know that you can’t accurately describe an organism without also describing how it interacts with its environment. It is from this simple, but brilliant, thread that everything else follows.
Ecological Scales
Ecologists use scales that determine how any given study is conducted:
At the individual level, a single organism within an environment is studied.
At the population level, a group of organisms of the same species in a shared environment is studied.
At the community level, groups of at least two different species in the same environment are studied.
At the ecosystem level, communities and their physical environments are studied together.
At the biome level, every ecosystem of a specific type across the planet is studied.
At the biosphere level, every ecosystem on the planet is studied.
When you look at these scales, you realize that the individual level is the least informative and least useful in many cases. Not to say that individuals don’t have anything worth studying—they certainly do—but if you want to get to the real meat of how the world works, you must go further up the hierarchy.
The ideal level for most analysis is the ecosystem level. This gives you an excellent mix of low-level and high-level details for figuring out how the world works. Ecosystem analysis is that goldilocks zone of “just right” when it comes to useful, generalizable data.
It provides that appropriate level of context where interactions between different groups and their shared environment shines. The levels below tend to be too granular, and the levels above too general.
Regardless of what level of analysis is chosen, there’s always a relationship to the environment, which includes not just an organism's physical surroundings, but other organisms as well. Environment shapes the behavior of organisms, who in turn shape the environment in the struggle for survival. All of this creates a feedback loop. The ecological stance thus reminds us of a fundamental truth: nothing exists in a vacuum.
Ecological Problem Solving
While this may seem elementary, it’s amazing how few people apply this style of thinking when trying to solve complex problems. It’s so much simpler and easier to focus on the individual level: you can allocate responsibility for outcomes without much thought to what external factors influenced a given set of behaviors. Cause and effect chains are easy to figure out when you have so few factors to consider.
A common example is to look at why your bank account isn't what you want it to be and conclude that you simply need to work harder. While it's easier to think about, you're better off taking into account other factors, such as the political situation at the office, current market conditions, profitability of the sector, and so on. Maybe at the end of the analysis you conclude that you really aren't putting enough effort in, but starting and stopping at the level of "me" is rarely a good idea.
This tendency provides for quick and psychologically satisfying answers that are dangerously incomplete or even flat out wrong. Once again, this stems from our natural tendencies and the fact that we evolved in much simpler environments.
When you only interact with a few other humans and a small set of other species in an environment you’re intimately familiar with, the individual level of thought may very well be enough for you to survive and reproduce—and that’s all that matters in the evolutionary struggle.
We now live in a world where the environment changes rapidly and presents a level of complexity our brains are not equipped to deal with. Cause and effect chains are blurry, if they exist at all, and our notions about how impactful individuals can be are outdated at best.
Start With Environment
So the lesson here is simple: for any given problem you want to solve, you must move beyond the individual level and incorporate environmental interactions. If you learn nothing else from our time together, this can still improve your perception of problems dramatically. Rather than trying to read more books, watch more videos, and otherwise fill your own head with data, you should begin with the world around you.
There’s a quote by William Mace that you should keep in mind from this point forward:
Ask not what's inside your head but what your head's inside of.
Consider the example of a drug addict. Much of their addiction is fed by the environment they find themselves in. That environment is filled with peer pressure, desperation, crime, and all kinds of other feedback loops that keep them locked in a downward spiral. The first step in any recovery from addiction is therefore to remove the addicted person from the environment which feeds their habit.
It's convenient to place the blame squarely on the addict and chastise them for a lack of discipline, but the reality is that we are always subject to influence from our environment. In many cases, people can't find their way out of deep holes specifically because their environment won't allow them to. Like a fish that doesn't realize it lives suspended in water, it's impossible to see solutions when your environment blocks your vision.
If you're facing a serious, complex problem, chances are high that your environment is playing a part in your inability to find a solution. Even if it's a largely positive environment, that positivity may be a happy mask put in place to cover a fear of change.
Always remember this: What you do should be dictated by the environment you find yourself in, not your personal need to feel safe or satisfy a metric. If there's a fundamental mismatch between your actions and your environment, collapse is inevitable.
What kind of ecological systems do you find yourself embedded within? How can you be the fish who jumps out of the water and sees the world that lies above the surface? These are the questions you start asking when you adopt the ecological mindset—and doing so will change your life.
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