I would like to preface this lens with a short detour on 'energy'. This energy I believe comes in two forms, the first I will explain as a finite reservoir that models the caloric battery which exists inside all human beings. This energy brings life to our daily activities and is what sustains us through times of growth and suffering, pleasure and pain. We replenish the reserves of this reservoir by consuming nutrients from our environment, and utilise it for both physical and mental activities. Consider the food you eat both regularly and on occasion. Consider how different types of food make you feel after eating them, both immediately, shortly after, and also many hours after.

What I can tell you from carefully monitoring the feelings I get after eating certain foods, and altering my diet to 'smooth-out' the energy release during the day, is that I have noticed profound effects, those of which have contributed to the paving of this particular lens. For example, during a typical day in the office, my day begins with one small productive piece of work at home (such as preparing my knapsack) in order to burn the initial jolt of energy after waking and await the first hunger. Once the feeling strikes, I craft myself a bowl of cereal, often two Wheet-bix with a few tablespoons of another, more sedimentary cereal, then topped with something that has a high sugar content. This generally provides my body with enough energy to ride my bicycle to the metro and survive the train ride to work. Then when I reach work, my body has begun releasing the energy stored in the milk and cereal. This next burn lasts until lunch. Then once lunch strikes, I have a main meal and also a small, sugary treat to supplement the delay between the meal and its digestion. This then generally satiates me until I make it back home for dinner.

There is also another reservior of energy that I am still yet to fully grasp, that is the one of a carnal nature. My hypothesis is that it is bottomless, and I believe my own personal experiences have led me to fleeting experiences that only scratch the surface. Take for example, an exceptionally pleasurable experience at an art gallery that I had visited recently. Coming out of the museum, I immediately was overcome with the desire to get the next best 'hit'. One might argue this to be the rush of anticipation produced by dopamine. At the time, I could imagine some scenarios in my head that would be ideal in sating this. Perhaps a lavish Korean dinner followed by a night at a niche bar, lots of whiskey, some heavy tunes, and a sardined pack of shirtless patrons crowding the dancefloor. I could imagine this in my head, but I did not know enough about my local environment to know if it was in fact possible to find such a place. My predispositions regarding my geography had given me the tendency toward seeing this exploration as a certainly fruitless endeavour. I have some personal contempt about the culture, government and environment where I live, but I didn't see this as important at the time since I was 'here now', so I had to make-do. Consider an additional piece to this, that which I was engaging at this time with other people - my friends. As such, I must also respect their wishes and desires, and also understand that what appears at the conjunction of my desires, their desires, and the environment, may be limited - or even an empty set.

That said, my hypothesis postulates an ideal environment where there exists an infinite set of resources/stimuli (including people). An environment where in your immediate locality, there exists all potential things that you could desire, all novel enough to dismay even the slightest apprehension of the mundane, and to also stimulate your natural curiosity. The people in this environment would have such a conjunction of desires that you would almost certainly get along well with this mob, however, there is enough diversity to keep things interesting and genuine. In such environment, and ignoring any necessary bodily function (such as sleep), is there anything stopping you from continuing to engage in all of these activities? Reading this from the perspective of someone employed full-time, there exists a particular, and childish yearning for such an environment. Perhaps the aesthetic of such a hypothetical is only significant when one is enduring an absence of it. That is, if this were a real lifestyle, would it appear as the same grandiose utopia that we see it currently as a bystander? Or would we see this as mundane if we were to live our lives in this particular world?

Unfortunately I believe we are hitting the edges of our understanding when it comes to this point, and if we are to make any further progress on answering these questions, we have to live this ourselves, or at least simulate it. My personal hypothesis is that such a utopia is possible since the immediately local universe around us is finite, and so are we as biological machines. As such, there should be some threshold between what is in our environment and what is the maximal amount of pleasure we can possibly experience at any tangential point in time. However, after the experience subsides, there is the will of the human condition that transitions us to a new state of pushing that boundary. Bringing this back to our hypothetical, this 'machine' that creates such environment would have to generate increasingly more pleasurable and novel experiences for the client as they progress.

Given this, it is possible to argue that we live in such a utopia already, and we simply exist at one particular tangent. The only difference is that we regularly reach the ceiling of our immediately local resources, the most common one being money. The fact that these resources are scarce at present means we cannot progress to the next ceiling, and it is the survival instinct that takes over during the time in-between the state of now and then.

A side note: The premise of the hypothetical utopia I write about is intended to be a natural one. If you see this like I do, you will envision exceptionally pleasurable experiences and environments that do not contain drugs that depress or stimulate. This is consequential of the local environment providing the right opportunity, and making it easy enough for you to find material experiences to sate you. The reason I wish to detour on drugs is that this line of thinking had reminded me of a lost anecdote which I cannot locate in my historical musings. That anecdote stated that cocaine (when taken in progressively higher doses), led to this "ceiling" of pleasure being broken each time - to the point where we can only assume the ceiling is infinite as otherwise the subject would not be alive. This here I believe is a notable application of a future lens that I want to write about, and also reinforces the notion of this "bottomless" reservior of carnal energy, at least in the realm of neurochemical stimulants and their uptake in the human body. But one important take away from this is that this process required progressive doses of the drug to experience this ceiling, which one could infer that the cells in the brain and body were able to adapt to accomodate this new maximum in excess - or perhaps there is something we are yet to discover here.

The example I have provided so far is of the ideal, and what I see as a distant possibility. If I were to describe this using a metaphor, it would look like a slightly hilly field of grass with many harmless animals, plentiful, lush shrubery, comfortable places to lie at all times. Getting around is as easy as a stroll, and there are always new types and colours of animals to look at. This would be a form of convergence, it's not difficult to find new experiences and resources in your environment, everything is free flowing. If you were to see this on a continuous graph, I would describe it as an irregular sine wave in the sense that it is not a random walk - as a random walk could lead to an infinitely rare possibilty of travelling in one direction. The y-axis here can be imagined in a duality of sorts; one, the difficulty of engaging with or exploring the environment (I will refer to this as the "minima face"); two, the value or pleasure that you receive from the environment (the "maxima face"). So you could argue that the example above is quite Aristotlian as it considers almost a perfect average if you were to disregard my flambouyancy.

Let's now consider the minima face using an absurd example. I encourage you to think about a person and their body in the third person located exactly in the current position you are right now with respect to the rest of the universe (most likely, you will be standing somewhere on earth). Then imagine this person is yourself, and you are in a Tamagotchi, complete with a simulation of your immediate geography around you. Just below the screen of the Tamagotchi you will find zoom and pan controls. Please zoom out such that you can no longer see yourself, and instead, the entirety of your current city is contained between the edges of the screen. This is your environment.

I'm sure that you could point to any location in this environment that is unexplored, and come up with a solution that would move you from your current position, to that new position. Each different position will have a cost associated with it of course, for example, to get to the city to the north of my workplace, I would need to catch a train, then potentially a Lime scooter from the station to the particular point that I specify. Not only is this a monetary cost, but it is also a mental one. You need to perform mental gymnastics in order to facilitate your journey to the absurd both before, and during. Of course as you sit here imagining this scenario in your mind, it is folly, and I hope this can provide some entertainement to you. However, without adequate reason, one would be unlikely to consider the trip on such vacuous grounding. What would be the reward when you get there? How would you explain this in an example where you are trying to convince your friend to come along too? Would they be unlikely to accompany you without any promise of some sort of charcuterie? Either answer to this rhetorical would be valid for this lens, however, the point I am trying to deliver here is that it costs energy to perform such a search, and often people rationalise these costs. Regardless of such, travelling here to observe this particular location may uncover some interesting opportunities for commerce, some scenic treasures, a new place to hang out with friends, or simply a cool Summer's breeze. But it is also a possibility that you will discover nothing of value - or even negative value.

Extrapolating this to the analogy of the continuous 2-dimensional plane we have, you might see your current position as a local minima. In order to go left or right along this plane, you have to expend energy, money, and willpower to get to such an absurd location. Most people I assume would act quite rash here. If I would tell them that we are going to go to this location without any other utterances about its importance or some impending reward or experience when we arrive, these people are certain to decline the invitation. This is the cloud of fog that shrouds your environment. It is as if you are at the basin of a large canyon. You don't know what's on the other side of each of the mountain crests, so why bother scaling them? Of course some people will anyway, and I'm of the belief that some people act on this impulse of possibility through two particular drives:

1. The beauty of their imagination giving them a glimpse of what could be, and hence the drive to explore such.
2. The fact that their current environment is presenting a ceiling for carnal will, and they have enough caloric energy to try something novel.

The idea here is that if you know what is or what could be on the other side, and it is pleasurable enough to put in the work (synonymously, if it were essential to your survival), you will go and get it.

I'm sure that our homonid ancestors had a similar behaviour with regards to their physical environment, that which would be to exhaust the local food supply (for example, either through unsustainable consumption or overpopulation), and then travel across seas to find new ones. In order to embark on such a journey, they would have to stockpile much food and essentials to make the trip - this being the store of 'energy' that they need to consume and expell over the duration of the trip (and to climb the 'gradient'), as they would be risking their lives with any less. They then spend this energy searching for more food in their new found locale, hopefully finding that it contains enough abundance to sustain them, or an excess that will help them to thrive. But you can see that those who cannot achieve such hoarding of supplies would be blocked from making that journey. You would be "stuck".

This 'stuckness' implicates emotionally that there is an awareness of what is beyond the minima or maxima that you are in. Generally I see two side of this:

1. You are aware of what lies beyond, and you do not have the resources to attain it. This is the minima face in-action.
2. You are aware of what lies beyond, and you do not see it as valuable enough to chase. This is the maxima face in-action

In the first case, you would feel disdain and some sort of suffering, at least until you come to terms with your situation. It would feel as if a dog were chained to a pole and forced to watch another dog eat its meal. The latter is a far more subtle feeling, often subconscious, and it could simply be a result of ignorance. It is a feeling of homeostasis, comfort that what you have in your current environment is the best that you can possibly have, and an arrogance that blinds you from the possibility of there being more beyond your maximal pedestal. But this arrogance is virtuous, as it means that you are free from desire - and hence disappointment.

This stuckness can be good or bad depending on how you let yourself react to your environment, and that which is beyond it. It can also be the end from the means, the first of which can lead to acceptance of disability and scarcity, and the second which can lead to acceptance through ignorance (or limits of imagination).

In this concept of stuckness, I deliberately omit any situation where you are unaware of what's beyond, because naturally, you will have an imagination and curiosity that can lead you down this path. It is an open road rather than one with a favourable stop along the way.

One thing I quite enjoy about this lens is that it concicely applies to your thoughts as much as it does to physical reality. I like to think of daydreams and critical thinking as the 'radar' that tries to detect what's over the mountains - what's beyond the maximas that are nearest. It's possible to convince yourself to go along with something you would initially consider as most absurd. However, with some diligent meditations, you might be able to consider a vague scenario in the realm of possibility which you would consider to be preferable - and so preferable that you are willing to risk expendeture of resources to get there.

Consider an extreme of such thought. Imagine you were born into a country that teaches its citizens that they are the only country in the world and that the rest of the world is just water - an ocean with only one island. No other countries exist. You will likely go into school and then adulthood with this assumption, in-part because there is no evidence in the environment to refute it. You have not observed any sliver of evidence that rubs against your early view of the world, so the lay man will generally not entertain the thought of it being wrong to go and seek such discordance with their religion. But supposedly, those that are a little more ambitious will choose the school of Plato and become skeptical.

In these musings so far, I have shown the effect from the perspective of the self, but I believe it is also important to exemplify the grand effect of the summation of each individual experience that makes up the human race. I invite you to imagine as many different people in your life as possible, all individual cases, people that have optimised their life for their own survival and pleasure. Each person, growing up with their own personalities and unique local environmnet, would possess their own specialisation in certain areas or have certain hobbies and interests that they have meticulously honed. It is most likely that you can safely say that no two people in this group are alike. This I believe is the 'human search algorithm' being demonstrated.

You can think about these people and their experiences as random walks from a central point in a multi-dimensional, discrete plane. It's not likely for any two paths to be totally identical, but it is reasonably likely for them to intersect, or for some person's path to briefly follow anothers for some period of time. As you increase the amount of people travelling from this central point (as you can imagine, this would be their birth), you will find that more and more area is covered. This area you can consider as 'things being done'. The role of inheriting historical knowledge here is that it generally directs people down a converged path that we think (as a species) is a favourable one, this would accelarate the speed of this walk (at least temporarily) so that we can explore and experience things that are trascendental to our understanding. The combinatorical domain here is immense, and hence why we need trillions of humans to form something as beautiful as the fractal that this random walk creates.

Naturally, the next in the line of questioning is "what are we searching for?". This I wish to leave as deliberately unanswered, as it would be naive to assume we seek only pleasure as a collective force. I believe there is something more metaphysical that we as a species also desire which leads us to the most wonderful places in the universe and also our own imaginations. Without this question, we would not be on this journey, and not witness the beauty and the horrors of the existence of our race in all its glory. However, for an individual, it would be fairly easy to answer this question of "what am I searching for?" - probably a snack in your fridge or a great text to excite your intellect!

Distillation

Are we doomed to this behaviour of diligent exploration and inescapable addiction to the thrill of the chase and the pleasure of the kill? Is this the limit to our freedom as human agents?

This lens suggests that this is the limit, something so primal that we can delude ourselves into thinking that we are denying this destiny at any tangential point in our lives, but in fact, we are simply progressing it subconsciously. So instead of fighting it, this lens encourages you to pick it up and run with it, make it your identity.

When you are commuting to work, consider taking another, different route.

Everywhere you go, make deliberate note of things that seem valuable to you which you may want to visit later. Chances are, a subset of this collection of knowledge that's valuable to you could be made useful by someone else who has an intersection of interests.

Whenever you say to yourself "There's nothing I can gain from this", always question it. Think about some delusional and surely uncertain possibility that seems valuable to you, then participate without any expectation of making it a reality.

Know that whenever you engage in social media, you are fishing in a lake that doubles in size every day.

Whenever you pout at a possibility left restrained by your lack of abilities or material wealth, find comfort in what you have around you already.

Always be skeptical about the root of your personal 'random walk'. It is honorable to turn around and go back in a different direction so long as it is saddled upon your full volition.

Know that comfort is a sign that you have reached the limits of what you know, and that there is always more that you can attain so long as you wish to expend the energy to chase it.