Let’s have a less tough 2025 by factoring in ‘bounded emotionality’

I know social media tends to be a place where people like simple, positive messages. Especially on days like New Year’s Eve. But sometimes it is maybe necessary, and even a bit empowering, for us to also be authentic and out loud about negative feelings, and give each other permission to feel that way. I have found 2024 to be a tough year, on a micro and a macro level. From elements of my personal and professional life, to my feelings about how the world is evolving. I feel guilty saying that because I am not personally stuck in a war zone. Nor in poverty. And neither I nor my closest humans have a life-threatening illness. But there it is. I don’t know about you, but recently it feels hard to handle the torrent. The combination of volatility in the world, good things and bad things, big things and small things and the constant need to contextually switch between them is quite overwhelming. From wars and geopolitical instability, to divisiveness between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, to positive and negative uncertainties about what AI, robotics, the internet of things and quantum computing will do to our world. And some of these things act like ‘mind viruses’ . I hate to bring up such an unpleasant thing in a LinkedIn post, but earlier this year I heard a news story about someone in the UK getting arrested for running a ‘monkey torture network’ on the dark web, where participants can pay to have their darkest fantasies enacted and live streamed. For some reason, this story lodged itself in my head and won’t let go. When we have feelings about the world, we always have to recognize that part of it is about how the world is, and part of it is about us as the observer. The observer is always part of the system. A term I have loved since I came across it is ‘bounded rationality’. Coined by Herbert Simon in 1955, It is the idea that when we understand how people make decisions, we have to recognize limitations in how much we can process. In this post I would like to recognize that we also need to factor in ‘bounded emotionality’. My intention in posting this rather dark message is to say, let’s all try to ensure we recognize and adapt to our very human ‘bounded emotionality’ in how we conduct ourselves as individuals, companies and societies in 2025 and beyond. Both in terms of taking care of ourselves, and in terms of how we interact with each other. There are well-known individual coping strategies, in terms of limiting how much news we absorb and how much we context switch, meditation, mindfulness, exercise etc. But maybe there is even more in terms of how we design our work processes, communities and societies to recognize our collective and individual bounded emotionality. Happy New Year. #unthink #unask #unlearn #2025