Even though you are a hypothetical baby, you will need to start figuring out what you are going to do with your presumably long hypothetical life. That is today’s topic.

Louis CK has a bit where he says that older people like me have it easy, because we have most of our life behind us—maybe I’ll only need to buy one more coat in my last 25 years or so. A youngster like you, however has a ton of decisions to make over a period of decades, so how will you make use of this life you have been given? I’m trying to teach you things that I did not know while I was growing up, but I’m out of my league here. This will totally be your life, not mine at all. I’m only here to offer some navigation tools, not a purpose, not a “meaning of life” for you. By the way, all of these lessons (soon to be 100) can be found here.

But, again, we need to focus on your personal challenge: what you should do with your life. Perhaps this will remain a nonstop question until you reach old age and look backwards. Yes. I’m sure of it. It would be too damned hard to answer this question when you are young, even when you are a young adult, because you will have no basis for making even a wild guess. You’ve barely started out and the rate of change of culture and technology has reached dizzying speeds lately. And it’s really not fair to ask this question to someone who has never before lived a life. But people will ask you over and over and you’ll probably say something. What will you say? Cat Stevens asked the question in a song that I love:

Oh very young
What will you leave us this time?
You’re only dancing on this Earth for a short while
Oh very young,
What will you leave us this time?

The Cat’s song made it sound like Life will be happy travels, but it might not be happy at all. You’ll find out, of course, but only by taking one step after another. And another and another, and then you’ll look back. And you’ll look in your mirror. And you’ll squint as you look forward. And you’ll look back again and again and it might or might not make any sense. You might love your life or you might hate it. You might even commit suicide. I wish you the best, of course, but this is not a rehearsal. You are now using live ammunition. As Shakespeare wrote in MacBeth, this is a tale told over and over. It’s only fair that I tell you that life can be wonderful or dangerous (or some combination) and it has sad endings for many of us:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If you are lucky enough to get old and if you then look back at your life, you still might not understand why you did the things you did. Writer Harlan Ellison arrived at no such insights:

[My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we have done any particular thing, whether it’s buying T-bills or why we would live in a house in the mountains or why we took the trip to Lake Ronkonkoma, or whatever it was, the only rationale that ever rings with honesty is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We’re really no smarter than cactus or wolverines or plankton; and the things we do, we always like to justify them, find logical reasons for them; and then you go to court later and the judge says, “Well, didn’t you know that it was doomed from the start?” I’m waiting for someone to say to the judge, “Because, schmuck, I’m no smarter than you.”

From A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love, Compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, p. 50 (1991).

But wait a minute! You are an animal. The other animals don’t seem stressy about optimizing their limited Earthly existence. Maybe that’s because they don’t have the cognitive capacity to project their existence into the future. They certainly don’t foresee and fear their deaths either. If they could see that their mortality, maybe they would be fretting with us in accordance with Terror Management Theory.

But let’s get pack to the topic. How will you figure out what to do? If you are religious, the Ten Commandments won’t offer meaningful help, With the exception of remembering the Sabbath and honoring your parents, the Commandments don’t give you any advice about what to do with your life—they only tell you what to avoid doing. Moral rules like the Golden Rule and Utilitarianism don’t tell you what to actually do.

Will you be motivated by potential rewards in the afterlife? I’ve done considerable research on this topic. I received some leaked documents of numerous decisions made at the pearly gates. Unfortunately, there decisions were all rejections. None of these excuses succeeded in getting a recently dead person admitted into heaven. Not a single one of these excuses unlocked the gates of heaven:

I spent a lot of money to restore my 1972 Camaro to mint condition.
I mostly got my gambling addiction under control.
I worked hard to gather one of the most extensive baseball card collections ever.
Many people told me that I was always cheerful.
I worked hard and played hard all of my life.
I memorized the plots to almost every episode of Everyone Loves Raymond.
I once won a contest by eating 27 hot dogs.
I have 18 grandchildren. I always phoned them on their birthdays.
I always helped my friends to shopping for cool clothes and cosmetics.
Except for a few times, I never cheated on my spouse.
I worked hard to send my kids to a prestigious college.
People said that I always bought them the most memorable birthday gifts.
My well-groomed front yard was always the envy of my neighbors.
I cooked nice meals for my family, without complaining.
I was a champion tri-athlete. I trained for thousands of hours and, one time, came in 37th place in a competition.
I won a local beauty contest when I was in high school.
I prayed every day and every night. And I went to church 3 times each week.
I was promoted to upper level manager at my job when I was only 28 years old.
Once each year I volunteered to work at the local soup kitchen on Thanksgiving.
I sent Hallmark cards to all of my friends and family on all major occasions.
My high school football team won the state championship two years in a row.
Many people have told me that I could tell very funny jokes.
I always said please and thank you, even to strangers.
I was superb at solving crossword puzzles.
I kept my kitchen absolutely clean between meals
I traveled to every state and to 30 other countries
I was a season ticket holder for my city’s baseball team.
My 3 kids all have high paying jobs
I was an impeccable dresser all my life
I was the best poker player in my state for 8 years.
I read 3,000 romance novels.
I know more about movies and tv shows than anyone else I know.
I babied my two Corvettes for 25 years.
I silently suffered for 38 years even though my alcoholic spouse mistreated me.

By the way, these same leaked documents indicate that there is only one “commandment,” it appears on a banner over the Pearly Gates and it is this: “Don’t be a Dick.” Interesting, but, again, this is unhelpful. You still need to figure out what to do, not merely what to avoid doing.

I can offer you my own ad hoc approach to living my own life but this is only my own way of cutting my path. It’s not a formula for anyone else:

I try to be pleasant and helpful to people around me, including my children. I look for ways to do my part to encourage human flourishing, but my ideas on this often conflict with the ideas of others.

I am not religious. I’m not a Christian, but I think that this statement, attributed to Jesus, is one of the smartest things ever said: “Love your enemy.”

In my view, happiness and pleasure are stunningly overrated as life goals. One of the main problems is that pain and suffering are often intrinsic and unavoidable to achieving a meaningful existence (Discussed in Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning (2022)). I try to plan my weeks to allow meaning-making and memory-making. This takes lots of hard work, planning and patience to turn these possibilities into realities, because I am not a joiner.

Instead of seeking happiness (which will not result in happiness), Emily Esfahani Smith urges us to seek meaningfulness in our lives. Her article in The Atlantic is titled “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness.” Here’s an excerpt:

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment — which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

I very much like the way Esfahani Smith sets out a fourfold path to meaningfulness that includes these four elements:

1) A Sense of Belonging, meaning relationships “where you really feel like you matter to others and are valued by them, and where you in turn treat others like they matter and are valued.”

2) Purpose, or “having something worthwhile to do with your time,” says Smith. “It’s this pursuit that organizes your life and involves making a contribution to others.” Smith writes and speaks about the best ways we can find purpose in our own lives. This includes locating our strengths and talents, what our unique perspective on the world is, and bringing that all together to give back.

3) Transcendence, “those moments where you’re basically lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life and you feel your sense of self fade away.” Transcendence, for a lot of people, is part of a religious pursuit, experienced through meditation, prayer, and other expressions of faith. But you can also experience it in nature, or at work, explains Smith.

4) Storytelling, the final pillar “surprised me in a lot of ways,” Smith says. “Storytelling is really about the story that you tell yourself about your life, about how you became you. It’s your personal myth.”

I have found that nurturing deep mutually vulnerable friendships feels right and I crave long conversations on deep issues with my friends. I like being in a close romantic relationship and I’ve been in two marriages that total third years. That said, I have not had much success with romance lately.

For me to feel like I am in sync, I feel compelled to speak in unvarnished ways on controversial issues in our toxic cancel culture. If not me, who? I know dozens of smart people who are afraid to speak out today for fear of losing their jobs and social standing. I also feel “compelled” to speak out because I’m self-employed and I’ve never been a joiner, so I feel less pressured than most people to compromise my views by any group. As Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, membership in groups bind and blind, but I have the luxury of seeing things without any of the distortions caused by membership in in-groups. I speak out in many ways, including through my website writings. Since 2006, I’ve written more than 7,000 articles, and I don’t make any money doing this, through advertisements or otherwise. This sometimes makes me feel like a nuisance, a gadfly. This helps me keep at it, because it feel like I’m channeling a bit of Socrates.

Speaking out on controversial issues can be stressful, especially when combined with my work as an attorney. That is why I also work hard to create art to help give me a sense of balance. I do this by composing music and creating visual art (see the digital art on the right and I’ve posted some of my music at the end of this article). Walking in nature is another version of experiencing art. As Vincent Van Gogh wrote, “If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.”

I always try to be kind, even when I am steeped in stress, litigation or controversy. It helps keep me on track to remind myself that I’m always and forever “auditioning” for whatever comes next. A good reputation is hard to earn, but easy to lose.

Finally, I am driven to the contemplative life. I don’t have an option. This is how I am wired. I don’t know why. Nietzsche phrased this compulsion in a way that makes sense to me (The Gay Science, Preface, Paragraph 3):

Life–to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for illness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit, as the future of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, a real, proper X, that is the penultimate one before the final one. Only great pain, that long slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put aside all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, average–things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us “better”–but I know that it makes us deeper.

That, in a nutshell, is my schtick. I would never suggest that this could be or should be anyone else’s formula. Everyone needs to cut their own path. Godspeed, Hypothetical Newborn Baby!