How to Be a Human Being: Chapter 5: The Problem with Problems

How to Be a Human Being: Chapter 5: The Problem with Problems

You meet a lot of people who tell you that their lives are not going well, or that their lives are unfair, because they have to deal with a lot of problems. This is a very strange thing to say because without problems, you would not have a life. There is no such thing as a life without problems.

People who complain about their problems have concocted a cartoon life in their heads, a cartoon life that bears no resemblance to the real world. From the moment you are born, you will need to take care of things that pop up, simple things, complex things, irritations and dangers. You will need to feed yourself, get rest, get exercise and find a way to pay for the things that will keep you alive. If you don't do these things, you will stop being alive. Dealing with problems is another way of saying that you are alive. Cemeteries are filled with people without problems.

How does it get into people's minds that they will go through months of life where every relationship is perfectly smooth, where money flows into their lives without effort, where every mechanical device they use will keep working perfectly, where they already know everything they need to know? Where people walk up to them and desire to be their friend even though they are not willing to work for that friendship? Where people give them compliments, honors and trophies even though they didn't do any work to earn them? Where attractive people crave their body for sex even though they excel in complaining that real life is unlike life in their heads?

You know the kind of person who is much more enjoyable than people who complain about their problems? People who work hard to figure out their problems. Especially people who work extremely hard to be extremely good at what they do. If you adopt this mindset, you might find yourself thinking: Why wouldn't I always work really hard at everything I do? Some might see "accomplishments" as problems because accomplishments aways require work, but that mindset is dysfunctional, so please beware. That attitude will keep you locked up in a mental prison where you will continually work on developing new ways to complain that being alive requires work. What kind of parent would you be if you saw your relationship with your children as one filled with problems rather than delightful moments where Life is going on?

Perhaps the people who complain that life is a series of problems have a hidden agenda. Perhaps they think that other people should serve them, should be their servants for free. I suppose some of them might get lucky and find someone willing to enter into codependency with them, but that is not a shining example of human flourishing.

My advice is to work hard to accomplish the things that are important to you and to always do it joyously, remembering that it is a great privilege to be alive. It can be a joyous Zen experience even to do the dishes or to brush one's teeth. Simple ordinary things are magic if you only pause to appreciate them.

As the Stoics wrote, "The Obstacle is the Way." When you work hard to get accomplish the things that matter to you, those accomplishments will mean more to you. You will develop good character as you get better and better at working hard to achieve your goals. Your hard work will make you feel self-actualized and more able to help yourself and help others.

I used to get frustrated by the tedious parts of my job. I wanted to do only the fun and glamorous parts of my job. One day I realized that my own attitude was dysfunctional, so I drew a bigger circle around the things that constitute my job. Doing my job means doing all the things necessary to achieve my goals, the glamorous things and the "tedious" things. Doing the tedious things is the only way to get to do glamorous things. These things are all along the same path. This change in attitude has made a world of difference for me.

Nowadays, I don't HAVE to do tedious and boring things. I GET to do those things. I get to be a healthy and vibrant human being who treasures my job, which invites me to engage in real-life problem-solving in order to achieve awesome real-life goals. To complain that my job is nothing but problems would be terrible way to live. I substitute the word "challenges" instead of "problems," and working hard then becomes a bit of a game too. I enjoy knocking off those items on my to-do list as I work my way toward what will hopefully be a good day.

If I didn't have job problems, I wouldn't have a job. If I didn't have life-problems, I wouldn't have a life.

In conclusion, I sincerely wish the following for you: I hope you have lots of problems for the rest of your life.

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Our Modern Tower of Babel

This is a riveting and disheartening tweet-thread, begun when Brent Williams asked a rather simple question: "Name all the words that have a different meaning now then they did in 2019."

Check out the thread. Many of these suggestions seem spot-on. No wonder we have such a difficult time talking with each other. No wonder so many have given up trying to converse with people from other tribes. We are living in modern-day Babbel. Here are some of the many candidates mentioned in the tweet-thread:

Dangerous Conversion Therapy Woman. Man. Phobia Healthy Vaccine Science Freedom Pandemic Insurrection Vaccine Racism and Racist Gain of Function Public health expert Gender Misinformation Left Wing and Right Wing, Liberal and Conservative Peaceful Violence Fact-Checker Truth Equality Fascist Conspiracy Theory Safe Trusted Freedom Infrastructure Progressive Fact Anti-vaxxer Inclusion Diversity News Reporting Tolerance

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Twitter Suspends, then Reinstate’s “Defiant L,” Whose Quest is to Expose Hypocrisy

"Defiant L" has raised the exposing of hypocrisy to a high art, day after day. I don't think we will ever run out of hypocrisy based on the sheer volume of these posts. Note: Twitter recently suspended "Defiant L" with no explanation, but now the suspension has been lifted, after a massive outpouring against the suspension.

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How to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 4: You are (Indeed) an animal.

Chapter 4: You are an animal.

I need you to listen very carefully because most of the people who enter your life are extremely uncomfortable with the thing that I’m about to tell you.

You are an animal, a human animal. You are a tail-less primate, an ape. Your DNA is 99% the same as the DNA of a chimpanzee. We have great great great . . . grandparents who are also the great great great grandparents of modern day chimpanzees, and that’s just the beginning. We are cousins with every other living thing. You and that potted peace lily hanging near the window are biologically cousins. We are part of an extremely complex web of life, not separate from it or in charge of it in any meaningful way because that web includes our bodies. And even this deep relatedness to every other living thing is only the tip of the iceberg because, as Carl Sagan noted, we are made of materials that were manufactured by ancient stars.

Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff. . . . The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

There are real-life consequences to being made of elements and being part of a vast ecosystem. Mostly, life is not like a video game. You will get only one body and if you ruin it, you don’t get a another body. You’ll need to take care of your body or the laws of physics and biology will cause your body to be ruined and nature does not care about your feelings. If you fail to take care of your body, you’ll become miserable and you might even die young. You would think that these well-demonstrated risks would cause all of the human animals to take care of their bodies, but everywhere you look, you’ll notice a lot of other human animals ruining their bodies by over-eating, seeking out addictions and acting recklessly. For example, you won’t believe how badly many people drive. Many of them willingly take their eyes off the road while their car is streaking down the highway in order to watch cat videos or to check the stock market.

Here are some additional amazing things. All of us carry around clear evidence that we descend from other animals and sometimes the evidence is especially clear. For instance, some of us have vestigial tails and gills. As Neil Shubin reminds us, we each have an "Inner Fish." We have evolved to who we are and we continue to evolve, as evidenced by lactose tolerance in many of us. You would think that this overwhelming evidence, including our exquisite resemblance to the other great apes, would make it clear to everyone that we are, indeed, animals. But many of the human animals you will meet are extremely uncomfortable with that thought. They think of themselves as above the other animals on the “chain of being.” Perhaps it is due to their fear of death, which they work hard to paper over with various types of tribal pursuits and ideology.

There are mere bandaids because you don’t have much say in who you are. Your trillions of cells are interacting in complex ways with each other and with the outside world and you don’t have a clue as to what is going on with most of this action. Your brain will like do a good job (like it does for most other human animals) of convincing you that Life is essentially simple and understandable. Someday, you can read about the many experiments that have been done to demonstrate that fear of death triggers massively creative and energized denial of death. That area of study is called "terror management theory."

Your complex biological and physical properties mean that your thoughts and actions have deep causal chains far away from you and inaccessible to that person you think of as “you.” To the extent that there is a meaningful “you” is another topic for another day, however.

To summarize, you are the beneficiary of a great gift: a human body. Use it wisely because you only have about 1,000 months to use it and then your time is up.

You are also the recipient of an immense cultural basket of gifts. All of the ideas that have survived the test of thousands of years will be yours for the asking. All kinds of things like language, math, art. Treasures beyond belief will be offered to you. You are probably excited to hear this. But then you’ll notice that many, perhaps most people ignore most of these treasures. Many of them would rather rant on social media or engage in tribalistic endeavors like watching millionaire athletes for many hours per week.

Given our immense biological and cultural inheritance, you would think almost all of us would should great gratitude for how lucky we are every day in many ways. We are an odd species, however. We are difficult to predict, hard to please, impatient, insecure and generally unwilling to live in accordance the sacred principles we utter. We’ll talk again tomorrow. There is nothing simple about this precious life you are just starting to live.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 4: You are (Indeed) an animal.

Why Some Colleges Have Increasingly Become Cults

Here is an excerpt from an article Dr. Lyell Asher, posting on Peter Boghossian's Beyond Woke Website. Title of the article: "Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults."

[I]n the last twenty years, and in the last decade especially, higher education has gone from listing to the political left, to a full-on capsize into something that, at many institutions, more closely resembles a cult. Different institutions hit this tipping point at different times. But it was back in 2010, when I began hearing adults in positions of authority say “intentions don’t matter,” that I realized that something very different—and very stupid—was afoot. This mantra wasn’t shorthand for intellectually respectable arguments about the limits of authorial intention in literature, or about “intentionality” in philosophy. Rather, it was a dismissal of the “I-didn’t-mean-to-break-the-lamp” kind of intention—that basic component of moral evaluation understood by people everywhere, usually by the time they’re potty-trained.

This wasn’t coming from faculty either, at least not back then. It was coming from student-facing administrators whose increasing numbers and expanding roles on college campuses had been accompanied by—and accomplished by means of—subtle shifts in language. Students were no longer in a college; they were in a “community.” One began to hear in official pronouncements that “we’re all educators.” The word “collegial” began to mean little more than “compliant.” Something was “inclusive” if it coincided with that week’s political positions of the (mostly white) urban elite sporting advanced degrees. In a little over a decade this administrative class helped turbocharge a process that had been underway for several decades: transforming four-year colleges and universities from being among the best places to critically evaluate ideas, into being among the worst.

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