How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 23: What Are You Supposed to Do with Your Life on Planet Earth?

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).

[More . . . ]

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How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 21: Listen to the Sage Advice of the Stoics

I hope I haven't been away for too long!  Even though you are a hypothetical baby my absence might have caused you to get hungry for another lesson! What I'm trying to do here is to help you navigate this convoluted world.  I'm trying to teach you things that I did not know while I was growing up. I learned these lessons the hard way. You can find links to all of these (soon to be 100) lessons in one convenient place: Here.

Here's a couple mini-lessons. First of all, if someone wants you to offer some good advice but you can't think of anything, just offer them some of the wisdom of the Stoics of ancient Rome. Your audience won't even know that these writings are ancient. Here's another cool thing: Even though this is "philosophy," it is practical advice to help you in your daily life. This is the opposite of academic philosophy. 

Check this out. One of the key tenets of the Stoics is essentially the Serenity Prayer. Epictetus writes:

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.

— Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4–5

Compare to the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Here is another Stoic version of this same idea:

“Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice.”

— Epictetus, Discourses , 1.18.21

Why is this lesson so valuable? Because human animals screw this up so often! They need to hear this advice over and over, because we are wired to obsess and fret over things we cannot change. But here's a caveat: you shouldn't make excuses when you could change something but you are too lazy to put in the effort. You need to be honest with yourself about what you can change.  Then get to work on something you can handle. Don't waste your life away by fretting and obsessing. Many things have changed over the past 2,000 years, but the wisdom of the Stoics is as relevant as ever. Here's my favorite Stoic quote: “The Obstacle Is the Way.” Marcus Aurelius Is it possible to fit more wisdom into such a short quote?

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How to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Is the world something to be feared or something to be enjoyed? That is the most important decision you will need to make, day after day. Does the world seem like a scary haunted house or like a big playroom? The stance you take, avoidance versus approach, will have a profound effect, not only on what you accomplish, but on who you turn out to be.

I'll admit that Planet Earth is filled with many dangers, including spiders and snakes, but also automobiles and addictions to dangerous drugs. There are innumerable ways to ruin or lose a life and we are wired to see many of these dangers much more saliently than we see the safe and happy things. Daniel Kahneman teased out this deep instinct with his Prospect Theory. We see risks twice as big as we see benefits.

We have been wired to assume the worst. A snapped twig in the darkness of the forest might be a puppy, but the body’s operating assumption is to run because the joy of finding a puppy whereas the danger of a grizzly bear can kill you. We are wired to run at all of Life’s snapped twigs and metaphorical snapped twigs. Those twigs are everywhere, leading many people to curl up in a fetal position, afraid to leave their houses.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes this choice of Approach versus Avoidance as “the fundamental question of life.” This attitude affects almost everything we do, including how we approach education.

As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we’re in explorer mode, some features of it are, we’re more, we’re curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that’s your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years.

Conversely, if you spent most of your college years with your front, right cortex activated, because you’re told everyone’s against you, everyone hates you, you’ll never get ahead. It’s always been this way. Then it always will be this way. If that’s what you believe, you’re in defend mode, threat mode, and then you don’t trust people. Your goal is not to be curious. It’s to be safe. You’re afraid of things. And you think about books in terms of certain speakers in terms of danger versus safety. You see threats everywhere and you will cling to your team. And your motto is: If we defeat them, then we win. And that’s the incoherence that has been with us since 2015. We had an influx of students who were playing a very different game where everything was danger and conflict. And no, that’s not what a university [is]. You’ve misunderstood what we’re about and why you’re here. And so it’s been a tragic waste.

So what is your decision this moment and every other moment yet to come? Are you going to be an explorer, seeking out new worlds with uncertainty and risk? Or are you going to obsessively try to be “safe,” meaning that you will hide away and tremble as life passes you by?

Explorers often fail, they know it and they still explore. They know that failure usually doesn’t hurt you or kill you. They know that failure is a teaching tool and a way to build strong character. Long before Carol Dweck wrote about “growth mindsets,” the famous explorers felt it in their bones. They knew that human animals are antifragile, even though they didn’t know that word: they knew that they would thrive in the world because it is filled with stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. They understood Nietzsche’s point that “what doesn’t destroy you often makes you stronger.” They fe;t the wisdom of the Stoics in their bones: “The Obstacle is the way.” They would agree with Woody Allen’s observation that showing up is 80 percent of life.

There is one thing that does makes Explorers tremble: The thought that after they die, someone would carve this epitaph on their tombstone: “Here lies _____ ______ , who was afraid to leave the house.”

But what if you are afraid? What if you worry that you will get laughed at or humiliated, or criticized or called a name, much less that you might get hurt or even die? Heroes feel all of these things. There is nothing incompatible about being afraid and simultaneously being a hero. Heroes and explorers make themselves move forward even when they are scared. One of my favorite illustrations of this was noted by Nietzsche:

Sometimes during a battle he could not help trembling. Then he talked to his body as one talks to a servant. He said to it: “You tremble, carcass; but if you knew where I am taking you right now, you would tremble a lot more.”
Nietzsche cited (in The Gay Science, Intro Book V) this quote as an illustration of his own conception of fearlessness (attributed to Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611-75) a great French general).

So go hither and explore the world! Try new things. Plan to get knocked down, criticized and ridiculed. And then get up again and again. Channel Cool Hand Luke. Never ever give up.

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Aphorism 10: Don’t Put it Off for Later

I like to create video interviews of interesting people. One of the most compelling interviews I have made was that of Ben Fainer, a holocaust survivor. He spent six tortured years in several camps. I loved Ben's attitude. He was patient and forgiving in spite of all that he had been through. And he was a wise man too. Many other people have been moved by Bens words too. More than 100,000 people have viewed his video. He died a few years after we created his video, so I was especially glad that his words were preserved.

I had another friend who almost died in WWII. Like Ben, she was Jewish. Susan was in her late 80s when she mentioned that she had escaped from Europe to the U.S. through Japan. It sounded like an amazing story. She agreed to tell me all about her escape. We agreed to meet the following week on a Tuesday. She died that weekend, so we will never know her story. Her death has served as a reminder to me that once I recognize something to be important I need to schedule it and do it promptly. Or else.

And I know that life isn't always that simple. There are conflicting platitudes that remind us that it's not that simple: A) "He who hesitates is lost." And B) "Look before you leap."

When I conclude that something is important, however, I try to jump at it. You see, I'm in my 60s. I hope to be around for decades, but I might get the horrible diagnosis tomorrow. Or that car might swerve into my lane next week.

We are all traveling along a Life Arc and there is nothing you can do to slow it down. Your only option is to fill it up with quality experiences. Schedule it and make it happen, Laura Vanderkam reminds us over and over. Do that, or don't do that, thereby allowing the sands of time to slip through your fingers. Those are your only options. Live your life or fail to live your life.

Here comes the next hour. What are you going to do with it?

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Daily Aphorism #4: Homage to a Three-Pound Organ

The more I learn about the brain, the more I am amazed and confounded. It doesn't seem possible that brains should work nearly as well as they do. Let me rephrase . . . it doesn't seem possible that brains should work at all. For starters, what's with consciousness? Yes, we are exquisite survival machines, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should expect to have a front seat to the show, the sounds and lights and smells and touches associated with surviving. But we are plopped into front row seats and it's glorious and terrifying to be a conscious witness to our day-to-day adventures. This makes no sense to me. It seems that we could be exquisite survival machine yet not be conscious of anything. What is the value-added of being conscious witnesses? I'm not a believer in "free will," so I'm not convinced that it is necessary to have a conscious commander of my body. On the other hand, I can't believe that natural selection threw in would would seem to be an expensive add-on like consciousness just for the entertainment value.

All of the above is a mere warm-up to another miracle performed by brains. Today I was looking for a tiny bluetooth speaker, but could not find it. I decided to walk down to work in my basement on an entirely unrelated project, but my mind returned to the search for the bluetooth speaker. While standing in my basement, my three-pound brain retraced my steps over the past week, ruling out certain locations any playing little "videos" convincing me that the speaker was not somewhere other than my house. Then while my eyes were wide open, my mind generated imagery of me placing that little speaker next to a guitar case in my bedroom (two floors up). This imagery was vivid and convincing. I was now certain of where the speaker was, even though I wasn't yet looking at the speaker. I walked upstairs and found it exactly where my brain said it would be. My three-pound brain created an accurate model of my house and replayed my activities over the past week. It did this quickly and effortlessly, generating "videos" and a rationale for why I put the speaker where I did. Billions and billions of microscopic neurons doing something that seems impossible, even after I saw that it could actually happen. My brain did it without any programming by any sentient being. I has no central processing unit and no traditional software. As best we know, this set of miracles occurs as the result of this Hebbian insight: Nerves that fire together wire together.

My difficulties understand the magnificence of the brain reminds me of the story of the engineers who, studying the anatomy and physiology of a bumblebee, concluded that it would be impossible for such a creature to fly.

And now that same brain that found my lost object harnesses the intricacies of the English language, allowing me to share this story about how two ways in which ordinary brains are beyond-belief extraordinary. The only reason we aren't repeatedly stunned and disoriented by the amazing things are brains can do is because we have gotten used to such miracles, day after day after day.

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