Your IRL Algorithm

How to open up to new perspectives and opportunities In Real Life

Recently, I have listened to a few interviews with Kyle Chayka on his new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”. Chayka talks about all the ways algorithms have harmed our collective experiences and squashed our innovation and creativity. It’s pretty clear that algorithms are narrowing our lives and interactions online, but what about our real life algorithms? How is the way we live limiting our expectations, perspectives, interactions, idea generation, creativity and opportunities?

Routines and habits are tools to make our lives easier and allow for more brain space for other things. Being regimented is highly regarded in our society. But sometimes these habits and routines can hold us back. There are benefits to letting go of our routine sometimes. Your changes don’t have to be big to be impactful. We can play with our IRL algorithms in gentle ways.

The more we break out of our familiar routines, the more likely we will be able to consider different options. Going to work on a different day might allow you to run into a colleague you haven’t seen in a while leading to a unique conversation and perhaps a different perspective. Taking your dog for a walk on a different route might cause you to notice something that sparks a new idea.

Years ago, my mother-in-law practiced yoga with an instructor once a week. The instructor asked her to simply fold her hands differently. There is a natural way we clasp our fingers together with the right or left thumb on the outside. The instructor asked my mother-in-law to do the opposite, folding her hands in a way that was not natural for her. My mother-in-law was a successful psychiatrist in her 70s who had learned to rely on routine and habit to organize her busy life from back in the days when she was a single mother. Clasping her hands differently was so challenging for her (try it, it’s not easy!). The discomfort she felt doing the movement was an opportunity to do things a little differently. This tiny crack in her well worn routine could potentially open up new ways of seeing the world.

Here are some suggestions for mixing up your IRL algorithms:

-Eat dinner for breakfast or breakfast for dinner.

-Change the way you connect with a complicated relationship.

-Drop some time consuming routines from your day if the effort/reward equation no longer makes sense.

-Take up a hobby that you are not good at but enjoy and just have fun with it without trying to perfect it.

-Read books about characters that are very different from yourself. How are you more alike than you expected?

-Meet a friend at night for drinks instead of in the morning for coffee or vice versa. How does this change your conversation?

-Get up from the floor using the opposite foot. 

These changes in our everyday algorithms will allow a type of wakefulness that can turn our brain on in a creative way, open up new ideas and opportunities, and allow us to live a more engaging life. 

What are some changes you could make to your IRL algorithms? Please share in the comments.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Scroll down for:

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Do Your Rules Make Sense?

This is a blog that I wrote a year ago that reminds me of the idea of IRL algorithms. It is the idea that we all follow rules that we established long ago that may not longer serve us. I share some of the rules I had decided to rethink and perhaps you will think of some rules you no longer need to follow as well.

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This podcast was fascinating. As a huge coffee shop lover, I had never considered the fact that they look the same all over the world and why that is. “The eerie similarity of coffee shops all over the world was so confounding to Kyle Chayka that it led him to write the new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”. In today’s episode [of Decoder Ring], Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere—it’s just easier to see them when they’re spelled out in latte art.”

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