Try Everything!

"One thing at a time" is for losers

Build rail or use driverless cars? Put up nuclear plants or wind turbines? Feed the poor or travel to space? Why not try everything!

My daughter watched Zootropolis last night, and found it a little challenging. That’s OK, she’s only four and there are quite a few adult themes peppering that movie, plus policework and (implied) murder. And she cried at the end of Kung Fu Panda 2, so it’s probably not age-appropriate, but we watched it anyway. 

One of the reasons I like it is humour aimed at the parents, high-arcing over the kids’ heads, like the joke about sloths running the DMV (har-har, that joke even works if you live in Ireland, where car stuff happens a lot faster). There’s side-quips at wokeness, a great many police movie archetypes made fun of, and an actual Godzilla reference thrown in for fun. And a really good title song. 

It’s by Shakira, it’s called Try Everything, and even for a man who prefers The Prodigy to pop, it’s genius. It’s all about trying, failing, being beaten down and getting up again anyway, which the four year-old doesn’t notice but sure resonates with me, and every other adult on the planet! Which is probably why the song didn’t fail, unlike the movie’s stubborn fluffy bunny protagonist, and became an instant hit. 

It’s even got a nice moral to it, but the irony is that trying everything is a pretty crap strategy for any single individual, because we’ve only twenty four hours in the day…

…But it’s a great strategy for an entire civilization!

“Birds don’t just fly, they fall down and get up,

Nobody learns without getting it wrong.”

We’re half-bred monkeys dragged from a tribal past where the rule was death and resource scarcity, and thrown into a world so gleaming and energy-rich that our instincts are scrambled. We naturally assume that we have to concentrate on one thing, one goal, and the muscles of the tribe must be focused.

There are no more berries! We must hunt the mammoth!

The herds flee, we must till the terrace farms!

Our water grows sour, we must go to the next valley!

But in today’s world, none of that works. We don’t all line up behind the elders to do the One Big Thing, and then move onto the Next Big Thing after that, and so-on. There are too many of us, and our world is too complex. Grown in capability, we can till the fields, pick the berries, hunt the mammoth, reach the next valley and fly to space all at the same time.

Try Everything!

Our tribal lore doesn’t work anymore. It mouths shaman-platitudes in a world of silicon sorcery, ineffectually navel gazing in the tides of infinity. We don’t have to decide anymore, we are eight billion techno-cyborgs against nature, doing everything at once. And if we can do everything at once, that means we can fail at everything at once, too. Fail and fail and fail and get up and try again.

Shakira’s song isn’t about a bunny trying to make it as a cop in an animal city. It’s not even about her own personal story, or yours or mine. It’s about the entire human condition, mixed and spun up and spread out on the world to bubble and froth.

Fail.

Fail.

Fail!

Try again!

I listened to it and remembered the dark, sleep-deprived nights a couple of years ago, when our daughter would scream and wail through the night because she’d lost her snuggly blanket, which we’d removed so she couldn’t drape it over her head in her sleep. Over and over again she would wake and I would soothe her, then again, and again. Stories, songs, soothing lights, cuddles. Nothing worked. We grew into a sleep-deprived half-life, the world muffled in our ears. 

And then one day I did the obvious, and tied the snuggly blanket in a knot, and left it with her. A knot means no suffocation, no problem. Sweet dreams. 

Success!

At the other side of the Irish sea  a vast construction project patiently spends and cranes its way to completion building the world’s most expensive nuclear power plant. On the other side of Britain the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Dogger Bank, pile-drives its way to completion as well. Team Nuclear and Team Wind row at each other, each proclaiming their way to be the best, the One Big Thing we should all concentrate on. 

But we’re not tribal chimps; we can just do both! And carbon-capture schemes too, and weird stuff with AI, and houses and hospitals. The lot. Across the ocean a billionaire wants to shoot AI data-centres into space on re-usable rockets. It might be lunacy but go for it. Others want to deep-drill the planet’s crust with microwave lasers to tap the heat of the underworld. Go for it! Or fire up jet planes with rotating explosions. Go for it!

A forest city. Electric transit lorries. A tidal barrage across the Mersey. A mirror-finished Saudi city in a line 170 kilometres long, underscoring the desert in an edit seen from space. Sure, why not? Is it a trillion dollar boondoggle? Yep, but who cares. Go for it!

And be ready to fail. Again and again. 

It's the same everywhere. A Puma, the big lion-like cat thing in Argentina, goes hunting for big Llama-like creatures twice its size and typically does ten or twenty failed hunts for every one that succeeds. It doesn't know how to give up.

And so with us: Most new businesses fail, most factory improvement projects don't hit their target, most new drugs are bogus, most new authors don't sell and almost all attempts to chat up pretty blondes end with polite refusal.

But that's OK, because the rare successes make up for everything that goes before, and then some.

Remember the lessons of history. The first steam engine ever patented was an unsafe commercial flop. It took decades before Thomas Newcomen built on the principles of Thomas Savery and others to create a useful steam-powered pump… and it was another 57 years after that when James Watt patented a separate steam condenser that made steam power efficient, and another twelve years after that before he figured out how to turn the output into rotary motion for machinery and transport. That's over eight decades of patient, plodding failure and improvement before the world finally had a reliable engine to power the industrial revolution. And even that was ultimately replaced, and so were its replacements, and theirs too.

Failure all the way down… or success, depending on how you see it.

Try Everything!

So let's ignore the divisive refuseniks who claim pragmatism but deliver only the word “no” in fancier words. You will know them by their tribal language.

“Let's fix the problems on Earth before we go to space.”

“We don't need more power. We need to use what we already have more efficiently.”

“We’ve got enough already. We don't need another.”

Fuck these shallow-minded cretins, who claim to speak for everyone but instead see only the short horizons inside their own head. Their lack of vision doesn't justify them freezing the world in aspic.

Instead let's realise that we're not a monkey tribe in an autumn valley, teetering on the edge of wintery oblivion. We're a civilization with billions of brains that's figured out how to create force & energy at will and is on the verge of learning how to infinitely multiply intelligence itself. 

And for something that big the best bet is not to procrastinate too much. Instead reach out with hydraulic hands and electric blood and try a million things all at the same time, until you find what works. And then multiply that a million times until it's everywhere.

Do that enough and the lives of our children and grandchildren will be unrecognizable from our troglodyte slouching towards progress.

Ignore the naysayers.

Try Everything!