This is the fourth in a series of micro-essays I developed from a talk I gave in 2018. The talk and essays explore foundational truths I’ve learned during the first half of my statistically-expected life.

Our tools are also our lenses.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the cliché “To someone holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The simplest interpretation implies that we humans latch onto the first tool we encounter and hit everything with it. While this may be a debilitatingly narrow view of an admittedly trite phrase, the concept itself generalizes to a powerful principle: Our ability (or inability) to influence the universe dictates our perception of the universe. A hammer is not only a default motion, but also a lens that makes everything look nail-shaped.

It’s rare that the average person thinks, “If [insert novel idea] existed, it would make this problem go away.” But this is the essence of the hammer → nail proverb. We often fail to engage our cognition and creativity to solve emerging problems, deferring instead to a tool—any tool—that worked once, even when that successful case bears little resemblance to the issue at hand.

We shouldn’t criticize ourselves too harshly, however. Our species has been conditioned for eons to repeat past motions. Humans’ ability to repeat patterns with little deviation has yielded agriculture, cooking, and the instinct to flee from anything with sharp teeth. This adaptation allows us to make decisions and take action without engaging the cognitive portions of our brain. This is a feature, not a bug. Conscious analysis and creativity take time and cost calories. Our earliest ancestors couldn’t spare either. This development of instinctive reflexes certainly deserves some of the credit for our species’ success. The fact that we’ve survived this far means that many of our past motions worked. It’s really pretty reasonable to take those habitual behaviors as a starting point when we encounter something new.

Taking this one step further: There is no adaptive advantage in developing the ability to sense phenomena that we can’t respond to. The instinct to avoid animals with sharp teeth only makes sense if we have the capacity to take preventive or defensive action. A futile instinct imposes cost (anxiety, cognitive load) without any benefit. We should expect that any such inefficient instinct, and the perceptions triggering it, would drift out of any species’ genetic coding as more efficient individuals had marginally more survival success (enabling them to propagate those streamlined genetics).

Our species’ relative success has granted us a reality in which we’ve eliminated most of the threats that drove our ancestors’ adaptations: Famine, ferocious beasts, and warring tribes no longer threaten most of us. (Please don’t derail here by diving into the fact that some people still face mortal threats like these. Statistically, we’ve turned the tables and made any acute threats to our survival mostly extinct. We can talk about war and poverty offline if you’d like.)

In a twist of irony, our success as a species has turned the instincts that originally made us successful into one of the biggest impediments to advancing even further. We no longer rely on animal instincts to save us from danger or provide us a meal. We’ve created systems that deliver safety and sustenance without requiring any thought from us at all. Most of the problems that remain are the kind that can only be solved by thinking.

We’ve also developed the ability to detect phenomena outside the spectrum that dominated our ancient ancestors’ chances for survival. X-rays, telescopes, customer sentiment, and mathematical modeling all deliver data about the universe around us and allow us to choose our behavior with more accurate and precise information about how our actions will affect our future state.

Still, when confronted by a new challenge, nature has trained our brains to disengage. The concept of “fight or flight” is a perfect example of this tendency. When surprised by an emerging threat, our instincts rip control away from our cognitive center and compel us to either flee or defend. Which of these two subcouscious urges winds up winning is likely based on what we’ve done in the past—regardless of whether that move actually worked (bad decisions rarely kill us any more, remember?). Those behaviors we employed in the past? Those are our tools and they’re a combination of both actions and perceptions. Our ability to address problems dictates how we see those problems (and whether we can even see them).

TAKEAWAY: Master the tools you have, but also master the process of acquiring and creating new tools. Remember that you have a bias for seeing the world through your personal tool-lenses.

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