My notion of open mindedness revolves around the independent and inquisitive truth seeking spirit. Because they know that courage without fear is madness, they understand that faith without doubt is madness too. They are not afraid of the unknown and are comfortable with uncertainty. With this comfort comes a fluid and evolving approach to uncovering truth.

There are two stages to being open minded. The first revolves around the serene acceptance of our natural limitations, courageously and humbly admitting that we do not know, or do not understand. The Open Minded accept that no matter how much they know, there will always be infinitely more they don’t know.

The open minded never denigrate the foreign or alien concept. They rather intentionally nourish diversity knowing full well the importance of difference in developing thought. In a more active manner, the open minded expand their understanding, intuition, and ultimately their empathy by engaging with the unknown through exploration.

The open minded are disciplined in their exploration. Though they are curious and fascinated with the workings of the world, they investigate information’s integrity and do not take anything at face value. They entertain ideas without accepting them, they listen, ask questions and seek to understand before being understood. They are humble as they seek to constantly update their perspective and understanding of what is healthy or not, to the best of their abilities. In this manner they are more closely aligned to truth and live with stronger conviction, rendering them free from the shackles of social convention. Armed with Truth, they more easily dare to be different.

Open mindedness presumes the freedom to stray from the beaten path, to experiment, test check and repeat. To be open minded is to be tolerant and patient with ourselves and our community as we learn from each other’s varied perspectives by safely talking them out. We speak of failure without fear of reprimand and together grow closer to Truth. Learning how to think is how we become true individuals with robust value systems we can proudly stand by. Dialogue and the art of disagreeing are key ingredients. One’s freedom ends where the other’s starts.

Without the freedom to think, to experiment and to express, we are oppressed and that can have tragic consequences on thought and self-development. There is a category of once oppressed individuals being suddenly exposed to a variety of overwhelming freedoms. For instance, they are unequipped to navigate themselves with the once off limits opposite gender, drugs, alcohol or general entertainment. For lack of experience with the world, their instincts and desires are untamed and unleashed to dire consequences.

Worse yet, the resentment against the institutions that suffocated their self-expression translates into a rejection of the morals they have learned. They become provocative rebels without a cause other than to reject the status quo. This is not open mindedness. It is rather a mindlessness without discipline or identity. There is no depth or meaning in being a slave to our desires.

A wholesome society depends on its ability to foster diverse set of open minded individuals. That means providing a safe space for exploration, discovery, dialogue, critical thought and scrutiny in all domains. That is what it means to be open minded; to be a genuine, cooperative and peaceful servant of Truth.

I was always curious why corporations had mission statements but humanity didn’t. We are an organization after all. Chaotic as we may be we are united at least in that we share the same planet and race. After much thought I concluded our mission is to create beauty so life may be pleasant, and to stimulate harmony between everything so we may continue to exist. We live and work for progress, for life. Progress is abundance for all. Progress is the making of robust wholesome cooperating systems in the individual, society, and the environment. The purpose of all technology is to empower humanity in its quest.

It’s worth repeating: technology vastly empowers us, but I think we tend to lose touch with that reality. We become accustomed to our powers, they are normalized and taken for granted. But consider the Scientific American Magazine’s parallel between the condor and the human. The condor is the most efficient creature in moving from one place to another. In contrast, humans are some of the least efficient, until they are given a bicycle, in which case they became the most efficient. Steve Jobs famously said the computer was like giving the mind a bicycle. Technology makes us more powerful than millions of years of evolution intended.

Once our upgraded minds were connected with the internet and smartphones, we came to be informed about anything anywhere very conveniently. This isn’t a privilege of the affluent west anymore; the technology has become so affordable that India’s population saw a 1400% increase in smartphone penetration between 2014 and today. The smartphone has been commoditized (they all look the same and do the same thing) and the consumer application are largely the same from person to person. Social media and entertainment dominate.

The next evolution for consumer technology is for it to blend in to our environment seamlessly, usable with as little friction as possible. But voice activated smart devices & assistants, thinner phones, and bigger screens won’t change the world. Despite the tremendous amount of brain power invested in this direction they are not paradigm shifting.

Our smartphones are far more powerful than we’d ever know what to do with. The best and brightest are working tirelessly to make them more powerful still with neural networks, machine vision and artificial intelligence. All for what? I kid you not: cooler (but ultimately useless) animated camera filters. Consumer tech is touching on the the law of diminishing returns : more efforts are needed for less meaningful innovation.

As a matter of fact, the more tech we introduce to the population the more distracted our minds are, the less we can think, the more agency we are ready to give up for convenience. Automation and artificially intelligent robots could take the jobs of even lawyers and doctors.

IQs are dropping when they used to increase 3 points every decade, and I’m pretty sure part of the reason is too much tech. We’re not using our memories to remember phone numbers or studying maps to get to our destinations. Our minds are too dazzled with a constant avalanche of enticing new content from media streaming giants and (often dubious) news outlets. Even cars are about to drive themselves!

That’s a lot of brainpower left unused (or misused), and a known principle of how the brain works that “neurons that fire together, wire together” and if you don’t use it, you lose it. This is not empowering at all. The more agency and free will we outsource, the less we exercise our mind, the stupider and more useless we become, the more vulnerable to becoming a useless class we are, destined to be at the mercy of a benevolent despot AI.

But things aren’t so bleak yet. If one is to read Hans Rosling & Steven Pinker, things are far better than they have ever been. Life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide.

This kind of progress is as exciting as tech development used to be. Consider the global outrage at the polluted world seen in BBC’s Blue Planet led to the EU banning single use plastic, which drove corporations to adopting reusable containers for consumer goods. Or genetically enhanced crops that generate 40% more produce, the record breaking spread of renewable energies and toilets that make excrement into fertilizer.

Tech that would be a gimmick in consumer tech is very impactful elsewhere. For instance, machine vision on drones in agriculture can spot troubled/diseased patches, virtual reality can be provide surgeons with precious training. Even smartphone accessories can be useful for specialists : engineers and doctors use them to more readily collect and organize data to easily extract meaningful insight.

Silicon Valley’s big wigs are not short on audacious big picture long term goals. Google’s X is all about these moonshots (which often fail), going so far as to try to cure aging and death as if it were a disease. Elon Musk is famous for his more immediately impactful big (and risky) ideas. He is breaking tremendous ground in transportation above and below the earth and in Space. He’s also backing brain-computer interface technology to eventually have augmented minds (the mind not on a bicycle, but on a rocket ship).

Even the smaller actors are taking a stand. Startups are increasingly refusing to accept venture capitalist money for fear of losing control and being pressured to prioritize profits above anything else. BaseCamp gives its employees 4 day weeks and Patagonia’s new mission is to save the world. Millennial investors are placing their money in funds with strong environmental and social governance (ESG) where impact is more important than profit. The will to do good is real, and the course of action is very clear.

Bright as the current picture maybe in contrast to the past, current trends draw a menacing future. Food, water, and air security & carbon capture, waste management (and recycling), infrastructure, transportation, clean energy and urbanization are only some of the pressing issues at hand. In the battle for sustainable progress great minds are being squandered in underemployment, non creative prestige careers, or busy making filters and streaming algorithms to distract consumers.

The market responds to consumer behavior and companies seek and respond to demand. As such, consumers vote with their spending and must do so in an informed and militant fashion. We as consumers have a responsibility to reliably inform ourselves. As our understanding grows, we’ll become more excited about topics that are traditionally considered boring but are essential to our survival (like waste management or carbon neutral infrastructure). Corporate and government efforts will go towards that which we pay attention to with actions.

For that to happen the consumer must learn to be more serene, materially and mentally decluttered, free from wanting anything useless and gimmicky. When that is done, we’ll be free to look outwardly, see the big picture and consider the long term (really long term) state of the world and where to act from now. The strategy works, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet are the world’s wealthiest men thanks to such an outlook.

I think that just maybe the silver bullet to fulfilling humanity’s mission statement: progress for life’s sake.

Addendum:

Living in Saudi Arabia, I have learned that air conditioning is a critical and can cost up to 60% of our total power generated during the summer. Any hot country will depend on AC for its development. Lee Kuan Yew, largely credited with Singapore’s success story, recognized the importance of AC as as it allowed people to have desk jobs. Sadly, the more countries develop, the more AC they’ll use, the more pollution they will make. It’s why I think this cooling film for buildings which doesn’t use power or refrigerants, is especially promising and exciting.

I thought I’d throw in a worthwhile consumer technology prediction.

The last bastion of smartphone differentiation is the camera. Photos appeal to our emotions but are not likely to save the world. The improvement on the smartphone’s camera will allow it to replace giant cameras. I can imagine Apple getting inspiration from the pocket sized 16 lense Light Camera that takes SLR quality photos. After all, there are rumors Apple’s next flagship phone will have 3 lenses instead of the 2 the current model carries.

In the same theme, the devices and their services will need to help us sort, sift and choose from the many photos we take so we may enjoy quality over quantity. If we’re flooded with content, we become overwhelmed and far more likely to dismiss it. Google Photos & other photo decluttering apps already exist. Apple is rather shameless in integrating successful apps into its own services. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

That same technology could help us parse through information to separate relevant and useful information from noise. To be effectively informed and empowered so we may take the appropriate action for true progress.

A good thing about my Arab heritage is its tribal culture and its implied sense of community. By living away from extended family the need to fulfill the need to belong through community was heightened. It made me acutely aware of my own separateness; a feeling exacerbated by friends frequently coming in and out of my life (as is customary in international environments). I was so thirsty to stay in touch with loved ones that I would write long emails every week to most of them. Today, I know that this separation anxiety is what made me so tech obsessed. All the tools promised a constant connection that would rid me of alone-ness; Blackberry offered always on mobile chats with BBM, then facebook augmented the experience and Apple delivered a finishing blow.

As much as I was a fan, I am now horrified. I believe smartphones are tapping into our social need to bond to worsen our alienated states, diluting our focus by flooding us with information and diluting our relationships with many low quality bonding moments.

I’ve been growing resentful of my smartphone for sometime. My friends first made me aware that I had a problem when they noted that even as I napped I firmly gripped my iPhone 6S+. Another cousin recommended an app called “Moment” which would track how often I would check my phone and alert me if I checked it too often. I didn’t think I checked it more than 40 times a day or that I spent more than an hour a day on it. As it turns out, I spent over 4 hours a day on it and checked it over 150 times.

This triggered an alarm. Even though I clearly remembered what it was like to be in a state of flow during my school days, I didn’t remember the last time I was in deep focus. I was addicted to the red dot on every app; I simply had to check what was new to get my dopamine fix and satisfy my need for positive reinforcement. Every like on every carefully crafted Instagram and Facebook post made me feel more validated. I felt terrible if there weren’t enough notifications and pathetic to depend on the mass’ approval for my own self satisfaction.

The resulting addiction translated into mindless scrolling on Facebook, passive peeping on Snapchat and Instagram, consuming irrelevant and trivial information from news outlets (high and low quality). All of this became a part of a ritual that fruitlessly and surreptitiously drained my time, splintered my focus and made me unable to enjoy my solitude. Every time I found myself facing a challenge of any sort, either intellectual or social, I compulsively reverted to my phone as if some new random information was going to save me from my angst.

When with company, I was always gripped with the urgency of responding to texts and robbing myself of the experience of being fully present with the other. Silences of any sort were quasi unbearable. The very thing I needed to benefit from (social connection), I was avoiding to favor a poor substitute. More than 80% of communication is through tone and body language, with less than 20% depending on words; texting leaves far too much room for misunderstanding, is slow and doesn’t communicate enough of the other in an exchange. The worst is that I made the person I was with feel as if there was something better I was afraid of missing out on somewhere else.

On social media, I was giving myself constant fear of missing out as I grew envious of the samples moments framed to look better than reality itself. Not only do everyone’s experience start to resemble one another and lose their uniqueness without a story to be vividly told, I also grew envious of the more glamorous lives on display. Despite knowing that I have a good life (thank God), and despite knowing that I was only seeing a fabricated sample moment, I still semi-consciously compared my life to the ones on display and grew envious and less content with my life.

This happened despite knowing that satisfaction and gratitude are necessary ingredients to happiness and that they depend on perspective. It makes sense for researchers to consider Instagram the worst social media platform for mental health. Realizing what my smartphone & social media tag team was doing to my mental health grew a profound resentment in me (not to mention the terrible effect they have on posture).

It took reading an essay by Nicholas Carr in the Wall Street Journal discussing the weakening of our intellect by smartphones to become aware of what was happening to me. I saw that the mere presence of a smartphone is enough to make us dumber by interrupting focus and by sapping intellectual energy in resisting the urge to check it. The effect on memory is notable as we’ve grown accustomed to outsourcing the task to our devices, we remember where information is stored but not information itself. Knowing facts feeds systems of thought, without them an analysis is far less thorough,

I suddenly became aware of all the nuisances the smartphone was causing me and I immediately purchased a 2017 Nokia 3310 dumb-phone (the indestructible phone). I christened it Carl. It has the Snake game, can make and receive calls and has a 2MP camera. Texting on it is torture. I carry it when I am at work and when with people and I leave Sophia (my smartphone) behind.

My smartphone is still active, but I only use it for music in the car and for navigation. I realized that although I have many apps, the truly useful ones are rarely used and I kept them. However, I deleted the apps I used most frequently because they turned out to be the most useless (except whatsapp, but I turned off all its notifications). I have removed all the reading apps from my iPhone and have embraced the likelihood of boredom/silence (both which are important to creativity and innovation).

That being said, I do not want to be socially alienated and Saudi Arabia is one of the countries with the highest per capita internet/social media use. For that reason I allow myself at most one hour of social media time on my iPad per day. In an effort to increase the relevance of my experience I started to unfriend/delete/unfollow those with whom I do not share a real world connection. After all, Dunbar’s number limits our theoretical maximum number of active meaningful relationships to 150 at a time. Crucially, I do not look to post private material as often as I used to; I only share that which I feel is truly enriching. I’ve learned to enjoy the sights for myself rather than to consider the entertainment value of a moment for my followers.

Needless to say, my focus has since grown better, my productivity is higher, my social interactions are more satisfying and I spend significantly more time talking on the phone. I also read longer articles and more books with less interruptions.

There are times where I find myself grabbing for my absentee phone and I am grateful that it is far from me. I am forced to be present with the situation, however uncomfortable I may perceive it to be and I am relearning to adapt how I engage with my varying environments. There is no doubt that smartphone addiction and its withdrawal are real (Adam Atler’s “Irresistible” discusses the addictive nature of technology). I found it particularly shocking that tech luminaries including Steve Jobs would strictly limit their children’s use of tablets and smartphones. As if they knew it would cause their children the kind of harm I described. I worry the excesses of the incoming virtual reality revolution maybe more harmful still.

Ultimately we are what we do and we do what we are; our very identity depends on good work and that depends on focus. If we cannot think, then we cannot be. A shallow and reactive automaton life is far less satisfying than one of conscious intent. The unexamined life is not worth living; it is time to move the smartphone away from the center of our attention and place it at the margins. They are too small a window to experience the world through anyways.