The Status Quo

I’ve been thinking about the status quo lately and how that relates to our inability to make decisions. There seems to be a correlation with us being average and the state of the current economy. We’re stuck in a country full of “averages”, average people living average lives, doing average things, eating average food (actually I would consider most of the fast food junk substandard or worse, but that’s another blog post for another time). All because we meet the “status quo”, we’ve hit our numbers and that’s it. Now, I’m not picking on people who seek to be average, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just feel that if a environment or system encourages you that it’s OK to be average, then that’s something we should all be wondering about.

Studies have shown that there is some sort of “Status Quo Bias” that is scientifically linked to our apprehension of making difficult decisions. That being said, I’m pretty sure that the part of the brain that makes decisions learns how to make those decisions based on the environment in which we are being raised in. It’s easy to make the default and safe decision, but if you can easily make the status quo, why not attempt to reach past it?

The most important thing to take away from the status quo is the statistics associated with them. Too often people read those statistics and they may think to themselves, “hmmm… I’m exactly where I need to be..” or maybe “wow…I can’t believe that’s the average!”, I hope we all aspire to say the latter. When you really think about it, it’s absurd to let the direction of our lives be controlled by numbers and charts, is that really what it’s come down to? All of sudden we have the statisticians, analysts, and economists of the world becoming psychics with crystal balls. It’s important to understand where those numbers come from and what purpose they serve, it simply conveys the current state of things, not predict it. People might argue that a scientific prediction based on current analysis has it’s place, but I feel that it has no place in dictating the lives and futures of us. Let’s not live up to the status quo, but look at it as a base for which we need to improve ourselves upon, let’s acknowledge it for what it is and not be fearful of it.