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Ostensibly, the long-term goal of Overachievement Oriented Parenting is to get one's child into a top university.
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This is one of the most important symbolic displays of prestige we have in the United States. Once there, students experience a world of insane activity and busyness the likes of which they have never known. In a recent
Harvard Magazine
article by Craig Lambert about the university's “superhero undergraduates” a student says, “College here is like daring yourself to swim the length of a swimming pool without breathing. A lap is a semester. I want to do everything I possibly can.” Naturally, she is completely exhausted. Her fatigue has several levels, first a “goofy feeling, like feeling drunk all the time; you're not quite sure what's going on.” Next, she says “there's this extra level of exhaustion, where you feel dead behind your eyes. The last four weeks, that's where I've been. I get sick a lot.” Getting sick a lot is seen as a sign that you are truly pushing yourself to your absolute limits. If you're not getting sick a lot, you're not trying hard enough.

Another student at Harvard quoted in the article marvels at how few intellectual discussions occur outside class. Apparently, if there is no officially-recognized academic advantage to be gained by having an intellectual discussion, then it's pointless. Pursuing your own interests is even called “independent study” so that you can still write it on your CV, but students who actually have interests outside of padding their resumes are quite rare. Students are worried about having to “explain away” gaps on their resumes.

The majority of these students, it seems, have no idea what idleness is, much less how to enjoy it. They cannot see the intrinsic value of sitting at a café for several hours with a few friends discussing French cinema. Ironically, many of the people they are studying at Harvard were masters of idleness.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir spent hours sitting at cafés debating each other or anyone who cared to join them. These intense discussions often served as the starting point for some of the couple's great work. Yet for this group of students with perfect academic credentials and thousands of hours of meticulously planned extracurricular activities, their time has been structured with purposeful tasks since they were toddlers.

The current generation of college undergrads at elite universities have been groomed, managed, coached, and steered without ever being allowed time to reflect on their true interests. According to the article, when Harvard does not schedule enough social activities, the students
and their parents
get anxious.

This kind of crazed and constant activity suppresses brain activity in the most important neural networks. We know too that depression and anxiety are associated with abnormalities in the default mode network. While there is no grand study linking all of these issues together, I believe a very strong case can be made that the way in which we are raising our kids—to be hyper-competitive overachievers—will in the long run increase their risk of mental and physical illness.

Overachievement Oriented Parenting is already making our children less creative, less social, and potentially less moral. Idleness, especially during childhood, could turn out to be critical to our development into moral and social beings. What can we learn from Rilke and Newton, two towering figures of science and literature? Both men sacrificed personal relationships and often their own well-being in order to pursue some higher intellectual purpose. In Newton's case his purpose was transforming math and science in ways which still affect our lives some three centuries later. Naturally, Isaac Newton possessed unique gifts which allowed him to see relationships among physical and mathematical concepts that few people in his day (or even today) could comprehend. Rilke's purpose was to dive as deep as he possibly could into his unconscious and discover universal truths about humanity.

In our hysterical rush to make money, gain status, compete for scarce jobs, jockey for promotions, make our kids athletic and intellectual geniuses, and organize our lives down to the second, we are suppressing our brain's natural ability to make meaning out of experience. It is through our brain's amazing natural meaning-making ability that real and profound creativity can happen. It is becoming clear that the resting state of the brain is essential to this process.

Had either Rilke or Newton lived today, their contributions to science and art may have been seriously compromised by the pressure to be productive.

5

“Self-organization: the appearance of structure or order without an external agent imposing it.”

—Francis Heylighen

“… I soon understood that in serious work commanding and discipline are of little avail.”

—Peter Kropotkin

The idea of self-organization goes against our mechanistic intuition about causation. Common sense says: things that are organized must have been made that way by some external intelligent force because order cannot just spontaneously appear. But this isn't true.

In nature, adaptive self-organization is the rule rather than the exception. Science and engineering have discovered that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to control self-organizing systems. Science has made valiant attempts at controlling events such as the weather, epileptic seizures, or spontaneous social movements. But these attempts have been in vain.

We can describe and predict weather, the brain, and social systems quite well. But we still can't explain them. Why has it proven so difficult for rulers, bosses, managers, dictators, capitalists, and time management gurus throughout history to control the most advanced self-organizing systems in the world?

Many scientists theorize that our economy is a self-organizing system. However, we will see that when these systems are pushed too far away from a state of what's called “criticality,” they can collapse or completely change how they respond to the environment.

Whether the system we're talking about is an individual human being, an entire society, or the climate, staying within certain limits is essential for the system's stability. For humans, this might be why being idle is so important: it allows your system to return to what are called “stable dynamics.”

According to the Polish physicists Jaroslaw Kwapien and Stanislaw Drozdz, a complex self-organizing system is “built from a large number of nonlinearly interacting constituents, which exhibits collective behavior and, due to an exchange of energy or information with the environment, can easily modify its internal structure and patterns of activity.” Examples of these types of system are convective air masses, turbulence, fractal coastlines—and of course, brains.

Unfortunately, there is a trend in the organizational leadership literature to use complexity science for the goal of business success. The strange thing is that no one is suggesting yet that we should instead use the brain's self-organized behavior as a model to argue against imposing external organization on your life, since this more accurately reflects the brain's composition and dynamics.

Self-organization is a feature of complexity. It sometimes goes by another name: emergence. This means that complex behavior of a system displays macroscopic characteristics that none of the system's constituent parts display.

Extremely complex behavior at the system level can emerge from the interaction of simpler parts of the system. One illustrative and intuitive example is an ant colony. E.O. Wilson's book
The Superorganism
describes the amazing societies that ants and other social insects build. These insect societies are called “superorganisms” because even though they are made up of thousands or even millions of individual ants, ant colonies adapt and behave as if they are one being.

Ants are among the most successful species on the planet. The number of ants alive at any given time has been estimated to be around ten million billion. And given that a human weighs approximately one to two million times as much as an ant, ants and humans have roughly the same global biomass.

Ant colonies are capable of very complicated behavior. For instance, ant colonies can learn. A colony quickly finds the best route to a food source, the best place to dispose of dead ants, and even learns to regulate the internal temperature of a nest. Yet each ant has a very tiny brain. An individual ant has no idea what it is doing. How does the extremely organized complex behavior of ant colonies arise out of millions of dumb ants each doing their own thing? Especially given that an ant colony has no command and control structure.

An individual ant follows a set of very simple rules when going about its daily business, based on whether he's a worker, a drone, or a soldier. These behavioral algorithms appear to be genetically inherited. For example, ants follow a simple rule when meeting a moving object and sweeping their antennae over it: if the object smells like I do, I follow it. If the object doesn't smell like me, I will kill it. Sometimes, ants do this to the point where they follow each other to their doom, in what is known as an “ant death spiral.”

Ants also spread information through chemical trails. When following other ants, they can smell the trails and know to turn left or right. Forager ants that find food sources begin leaving a certain chemical trail, and telling other ants to follow them. Soon a column of ants is headed toward the food.

Thus information about the location of a food source spreads quickly through the colony. An individual ant follows several of these simple rules using its sensory organs. When millions of these ants interact the self-organized complexity of the colony emerges. For instance, many individual ants will become suicidal in defense of the greater colony. Adaptive knowledge and information can be processed by the colony, but not by individual ants. Therefore, there are certain attributes of the colony that no individual ant has.

Consider a football team: the team has properties that each player does not, one of which is being a football team made of eleven players. Certain behaviors are only visible at the colony level of description. Yet if we examine each ant, we find a rather simple creature capable of only making quick decisions. While each ant is programmed to do a limited number of things based on context (find and carry food, follow or attack other ants), an ant colony can learn the best route to a food source, can build enormous networks of tunnels and nests, and can even grow fungus in complicated underground gardens.

Both ant colonies and brains are examples of spontaneously occurring macroscopic order from a vast ocean of randomly interacting parts on a microscopic level. When you have millions of simple ants obeying just a few rules, the possible outcomes of these ants interacting can become enormous.

In fact just one “computer” ant following only two simple rules seems to behave like a complex dynamical system. In computer science, there is a famous cellular automata model called Langton's ant. Imagine an ant called Langton randomly walking around on a grid made of black or white squares. Langton only has two rules: (1) when he lands on a white square he turns 90 degrees to the right, flips the color of the square to black and moves forward one square, (2) when he lands on a black square he turns 90 degrees to the left, flips the square to white and moves forward one unit. No matter how you set up the grid initially, no matter what arrangement of black and white squares you use as an initial configuration, after about ten thousand steps, Langton will start making a repetitive “highway” pattern of one hundred and four steps for infinity.

In other words, no matter how he starts off, Langton will converge on this complex pattern. This is only one ant, using only two rules. Langton provides insight as to how the behavior of ant colonies can be so spectacular in the real world. An example of self-organized ant colony behavior that is particularly intriguing comes from colonies of New World tropical army ants.

When the colony is resting during the day (even ants are idle!), it would be a waste of time to build labor-intensive nests. Instead, the ants form a shelter called a bivouac using their own massed bodies to protect the queen and young ants from intruders. The ants connect their bodies to each other and form into a kind of tent structure all without a boss ant telling them what to do.

The temperature and humidity inside the shelter is tightly regulated by the ants adjusting the shape and position of the bivouac. To forage for food, a column of hundreds of thousands of ants streams out of the shelter, grabs anything that moves, and reverses direction back into the colony, behaving like one organism stretching out an arm. During the night, the shelter dissipates and the colony moves onto the next site.

It is important to realize that each ant cannot have any idea that he is forming a part of the overall bivouac structure; much less that he is a member of a larger colony. To the individual ant, he is just connecting to his neighbors because the time of day, the temperature, or other environmental cues have exceeded a threshold that triggers his “connect to my neighbor's body” rule.

Similarly, the individual neurons in our brains do not in themselves know that they are part of your brain, or that they make up “you.” Your consciousness is very much like the army ant's bivouac. One of the persistent philosophical illusions we've had for centuries is that there is some place in our brain where a little person named Homunculus controls the actions of our brains. Or that even without Homunculus, there is a specific part of the brain that is somehow the command and control center, dictating what the brain should do.

What neuroscience has revealed is that there is no such control center in the brain. There are hubs in our brain networks whose activity is more influential than others; however, there is no one single hub that dictates action. Our brains are much more like an ant colony: billions of neurons collaborating to give rise to our selves without any external or internal agent. In other words you are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon.

Neurons, like ants, follow algorithms and make quick binary decisions based on signals they receive. When a certain electrochemical threshold has been reached by incoming signals to a neuron, and its oscillation is in partial synchrony with its neighbors, it fires an action potential which propagates to other neurons to which it is connected. This activity can cause other neurons downstream either to fire or not to fire depending on the context. The appearance of extremely complex organization arises from the interaction of billions of smaller and simpler parts.

The interaction of billions of individual neurons using trillions of connections allows for the emergence of the infinite array of human creativity, just as an ant colony is much more creative and adaptive than an individual ant. Naturally, the comparison between ants and humans only goes so far. And as I've pointed out, the analogy really only works at the level of neurons in the brain. An individual human cannot be equated with a worker, a drone, or a soldier ant. The number of behavioral rules an individual human follows is not known, and is potentially infinite.

We can also become aware of what rules we are following and exercise a degree of choice over them. And most importantly, humans can create novel rules to follow. Yet there is one important aspect in which our brains and ant colonies are very similar: as complex self-organizing systems they have adapted to certain parameters. When these parameters are pushed too far, for example by climate change, ant colonies can collapse.

Because individual ants have very few degrees of freedom in their behavior, their collective behavior is very harmonious with the environment. It's the same with the individual neurons in our brains; they live harmoniously together in our skulls. In contrast to an ant, a human brain as a whole has a potentially unlimited number of degrees of freedom. This gives us our unique intelligence and creativity. It may be what also prevents us from enjoying slavery—unlike an individual ant.

Bertrand Russell defined work as, first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. He goes on to say that the first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.