The Art of Self-Complacency
May 5th, 2020
The art of complacency, self-satisfaction, smugness, it is something we experience in every aspect of our life. When you describe someone as self-satisfied, it is indicated as someone how is “too pleased with themselves about their achievements or they situation and they think that nothing better is possible” (Collins Dictionary, 2018). How is this feeling embracing our lives in everyday routine?
How can we achieve something and be satisfied at what we have actually done during fragmented parts of our daily routine? For some people it is connected to their work. They feel proud of their job most parts of their working routine, and have moments of complacency, where they feel “I am proud of doing this, and I feel good with myself for doing this”. They might have a highly valued job, where they learn something, they do something of value every day, sometimes they believe they do.
People working with technology, advancing A.I., believe their innovation will change humanity for a greater benefit (or is it so? Putting millions out of their jobs? It really depends on which perspective you put it into), teacher working with kids are educating the future, stock brokers (do they still exist in human forms?) are obsessed with cash flows and ROI, and when a day closes with a +5% the buzzing of self-complacency kicks in. It's not only about the money, you are beating the market, you feel like God.
For many, most of us, can reside in very insignificant forms of self-satisfaction, connected to digital-global recognition: a response from our social media. How many times our story has been viewed on Instagram, how many comments, likes we get, many people outside our network like our picture, we are growing our audience organically. Our complacency hits the roof. It means the world to us, when tons hit the like. The gratitude towards self-complacency, self-regard, dictated from global recognition, makes us make our standard, often regular and dull life more interesting than it actually is. We tend to tell everything about ourselves: what we ate for breakfast, post a picture or a story of us walking our dog, our vacation, but is the routine, more than the holiday time, what makes us spy into other people’s life. When we post pictures of our travels, we know that underneath the skin we’d like to make other people envy us, because we are there and they’re not. I am not a social media addict, I use them though, if I want to flash a nice picture in front of someone else’s screen I’ll do it. Social media addicts are fulfilled to complacency they probably do not realize what their life would be without them, or how their life used to be. The joy of having a strong number of dedicated followers, a good ranking score which in the future will become the norm for our social status (Black Mirror, anyone?), has embraced them so deeply they live with complacency, at every post, at every like, view, every minute. We are an immutable, permanent online presence now.
Another form of complacency stems from what we are able to create with our minds, perhaps the most satisfying, priceless form of self-satisfaction. Inventors, scientist, programmers, artists, movie directors, writers, entrepreneurs fall on this category (real entrepreneurs; if you have a restaurant, a shop, a bar, you are not an entrepreneur you simply have your own business). You might like your job, you might like your boss, however if you are an employee, and you are just following orders (yes you do follow orders), and do not create anything from scratch, not a project from scratch, not an business plan, not an idea, you are stuck with following orders. You apply a business solution, a service that has been already created, you follow a defined set of instructions that have been already written, you get complacency from executing it well. With time, as executing the same tasks, repeating the same processes become routine, dull, you get tired of your job and want to do something else. Then you switch jobs, learn new, already created tasks, instructions and business processes, get self-satisfaction for execution until they become routine again, and the story repeats over and over again.
We become bored with processes someone else has dictated, our new ideas are not welcome, we cannot change or create absolutely anything new. I get tired of often reading requirements for applicants such as “ability to think outside the box”, “self-starter”, “can think on his own”, “entrepreneurial spirit”, when many of these startups or SMEs have the fastidious attitude (and arrogance) of wanted to micro manage everything. You have new ideas? They might not be welcome. You want to think differently? Do it somewhere else.
The complacency of creating something new is always remarkable. When I create a new painting, or now that I'm coding, a new working web app or a data structure, the rush of complacency is very often something I can cherish. "I was able to create this from scratch", "I thought this through", "I solved this problem to get to this", and I do feel a sense of achievement, a creation that sprung from my mind, through a medium, into a recipient. Often, when I look at it, the sense of complacency dies within minutes, and it is always, and I say always, a good thing. The sense of complacency is meant to die quickly, cause it's a terrible thing. This type of self-gratification it should be meant to dissolve quickly, cause nothing, rather than a plateau of boredom, can come out of it. I learn when I forget. I am also full of shit.