Alan Gutierrez

There is a term out there. Lifehacks. A hack in computer science is an elegant solution to a problem, that comes through minimal effort. A life hack is the same, applied to our day to day. I’m reading through two articles about the Shangra-La diet that are lifehacky, one at Creating Passionate Users and another at Aaron Schwartz. In this example, our brains are programmed to want food when it is abundant, we can hack obesity by tricking our brains into thinking food is scarce. In the prior, Kathy Sierra puts down the essence of Lifehacks by saying that you have a brain and a mind, the brain is concerned about legacy issues such as preditors or hunger, while the mind should be worried about career advancement. (Let’s gloss over the huge percentage of the world population for whom neither preditors, nor hunger has become legacy.) I’m finding that Lifehacks are getting pressed to their limit, however, especially in the culling the unhappy meme. A clever hack does not ignore a problem. It addresses it. Culling the unhappy is a Lifekludge.