Experimenting With Life

Engaging in a bit more experimentation in your life can yield substantial benefits by uncovering new information, ideas, and insights that you might not discover otherwise.

What I read: “Experiment with Everything” by Brian Klass. Published August 8, 2023.

Everyone wants to improve their life. We want things to get better. We want to improve ourselves. We want to find the activities and interests that make us happiest. We want to find the best solutions to life’s challenges.

Yet, many of us, myself included, fall into ruts of habit and sameness. Rather than make the changes we need, we simply plod along day-to-day doing the same things and often expecting different results.

Lately, I’ve been realizing that I need to break out of some habitual ruts. One of the ways I’ve thought about doing this is to inject some more randomness and informed exploration into my life. In short, I want to undertake more experimentation with my life to see what works well and what doesn’t.

Brian Klass tells the story of Max Hawkins’s own version of experimentation. Hawkins, a Google software engineer, wondered one day if his highly optimized life was really allowing him to live life to the fullest.

Hawkins decided to randomize his life to see what might happen if he embraced a bit of chance.

To inhabit such an optimized existence meant that he was following preferences that may have kept him from exploration. In a radical rejection of his old ways, he put his programming skills to work, and designed a series of algorithms that would randomize as many aspects of his life as possible.

Over several years, Hawkins regularly deferred to random algorithms as a guide to how he’d make choices. Food. Clothing. Even where Hawkins decided to live was often chosen at random by the programmed tools he designed. He fully embraced randomness. It was a way to experiment with life.

Every single one of us who uses social media has fallen prey to optimization algorithms. Like a post? The platform serves you up another one similar to it. Watch a certain television series? The streaming service analyzes your viewing habits and suggests movies and series its algorithms believe you’ll also like. Buy a book online? In an effort to sell more books, the online book retailer suggests other books in line with what its algorithms have decided you might want to read.

I’m not saying there are all downsides to algorithmically suggested things. There is a usefulness to it. But it also places us into life patterns that don’t allow for the joy of discovery.

Remember when you could stroll the aisles of a bookstore and randomly grab a book that looked interesting? I miss that the sort of randomness, and that randomness might have sometimes served me better than me clicking on the email from the book retailer suggesting my next reading purchase.

Such randomness can be taken to extremes. Were our lives to consist of nothing but roll-of-the-dice decisions, I doubt that would be sustainable, or enjoyable. A certain amount of predictability is an important part of avoiding what scientists refer to as decision fatigue.

But I contend most of us could use a lot more experimentation in our lives. Experimentation is the testing of news ideas to prove whether they are good ideas or not. Some will be. Some won’t be. However, without some experimentation injected into our day-to-day existence, we’re going to be end up with a lot of the same over and over. Some of us don’t want to live that way.

But learning a few lessons from the Max Hawkins school of life would do us all good, because experimentation is the key to not just surviving, but thriving—in our lives and in our societies.

Most of us should explore more than we do. It gives us new perspectives. It exposes us to new information and ideas. It helps us understand other people better. It can open a door to something big like an entirely new career or place to live. Or it can open a door to something less monumental like a new favorite type of tea or a great book we stumbled upon at the library.

Klasas points out that the evolutionary process is a type of invisible exploration that’s often powered by random mutations. Randomness in evolution is nature’s way of testing what works and what doesn’t and nudging the best adaptations forward to live on while others might not.

Evolution just happens and much of the ways it tests the best and the not so good is entirely by chance. But we humans can  apply some thought, reasoning, logic, and deductive thinking that allows us to intelligently experiment with our lives. Klass suggests that “experimentation is life’s secret to success.” That experimentation is what helps life flourish.

It’s a lesson we too readily forget, stuck in our routines, our checklist existence, with lives that are too often scripted months, even years in advance, cramming ourselves into the boxes of Google calendars with repeating events and an utter lack of serendipity. In the balance between explore and exploit, we are too often led astray by a fixation on exploitation without experimentation.

What’s good for us individually can be good for us collectively. Not only should individuals be encouraged to experiment with their lives more, so should society experiment with a wider range of potential solutions to improve life on the planet.

The experimental method used by science and other disciplines seeking the best information is a relatively new construct. But the experimental method has given us so much of what’s good in our lives such as life-saving medicines and useful technologies.

Our reticence to experiment and explore is evident in the making of public policy and legislation. Rather than undertake vigorous experiments to arrive at the best course of action, often a legislator decides what they believe will work without putting in place any testing whatsoever of that idea. I know occasionally some government agencies and legislators do leverage research in their decisions, but one only has to look to some of the legislation being passed in states governed more by culture wars than facts and logic to see the lack of experimentation on full display.

While encouraging our legislators and leaders to consider the experimental conclusions of others and perhaps engage in some experimental fact finding of their own is a good idea, it’s the experimentation on a personal level that I’m most concerned with for this post.

In my own life I can fall prey to ruts and single-minded thinking. I’ve tried to spark my personal investigations with more randomness. One example is that occasionally I’ll travel to some part of my city of San Francisco I don’t know well, then walk back home from there by whatever meandering path I decide in the moment. I’ve met new people that way. I’ve discovered interesting new stores and restaurants. I once passed a yoga studio I didn’t know existed and ended up taking classes there for a while. This type of discovery improves my life in so many ways.

Another thing I do is experiment with how I live my daily life. In the past I wrongfully believed that there were certain “best” ways to live a life, get things done, make a decision, travel, and so on. What ended up happening is I’d try to determine the single best way to do and be as though there are only single solutions to such quandaries.

I’ve referenced the wisdom of Ram Dass before and he has a wise visual that explains the folly of assuming there is only one correct way to live or do something. He told us to imagine a pyramid. At the pointed top of the pyramid is the goal, the outcome, the whatever it is we seek. To travel up the pyramid you could chart a course in a straight line or all around the sides and you’d still end up arriving at the top. There are many paths to a goal.

Life experimentation is picking out various paths up that pyramid and deciding what works best for you, or just as often what works best for you at this point in time since we all change as people as do our situations.

And yes, we should try more off-the-wall ideas out too, Max Hawkins-style, because the best solutions aren’t always intuitive or obvious. That doesn’t mean we should all start getting inked, our chests emblazoned with images randomly selected from the internet. But it does mean that harnessing a little bit more evolutionary wisdom—and putting ourselves in explore mode a bit more often—would do all of us, and our societies, an enormous amount of good.

When I read Klaas’s article, it reminded me of another I read recently, “You Don’t Have to Follow the Same Routines Forever” by Eyal Nir. Nir’s article speaks to the idea of experimentation from a different perspective. Rather than being held captive by long-term routines, we can also benefit from short-term routines which are in essence a way to experiment with our lives without self-committing to doing something the same way forever.

Experimenting with short-term routines has myriad benefits, including satisfying our need for novelty, boosting our skills and creativity, and helping us grow and learn more about ourselves.

I encourage you to experiment with your life. Read books you might not normally read. Travel somewhere you’ve never been. Have conversations with people outside your own particular worldview. Take a class in some random subject you never considered before. Test out different ways to exercise. Alter your daily planning and productivity methods to avoid boredom and to craft a life that works for you per your own set of needs rather than what some best-selling guru tells you to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” I concur.

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