Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice to High School Students in 2006

Excellent advice and excellent story that I found on HiExistence:

"In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City were given an interesting assignment: to write their favorite authors and try to persuade them to visit the school. Five students opted to write to none other than Kurt Vonnegut." Here is his response:"

November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Continue ReadingKurt Vonnegut’s Advice to High School Students in 2006

Bari Weiss Invites All of Us to Become “Founders”

Bari Weiss is one of my heroes. She was forced off the staff of New York Times a few years ago because she refused to be muzzled on important issues of the day. She is now building her own media institution. I don't agree with her on everything, but I do see eye to eye with her on most of the topics of this podcast, an address she recently gave to a brand new college. One of her themes is that we need to bravely tell the truth, even when it causes people to dislike us. Even when they call us names. And we should never feel compelled to say things we don't believe to placate the mob. She invites each of us to avoid cynicism and to become "Founders."

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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?

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

How to Be a Human Animal: Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and that Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and it Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Because you were just born yesterday, you probably have some questions about what to DO here on Planet Earth. First of all, eat, pee and poop. Over and over. Nonstop. This will allow you to grow up so that you can feed and change the diapers of other babies.

Another job is that you’ll need to be cute so that others will bring you food and clean up your scatological messes. You’ll quickly figure this out.

Here’s another job for you and it’s rather hysterical. You’ll quickly learn how to train adults to talk in “baby talk.” Truly hilarious. Fully adult tax-payer citizens who talk in somber and earnest voices most of the day. You—little you--will have the power, using sheer cuteness, to cause them to talk in little high pitched voices, saying things like “poopie” and claiming that they “wuv” you. Enjoy it while it lasts. You will have zero responsibilities for only a couple years and then you’ll need to start fending for yourself by coming up with a more clever schtick.

In addition to being cute, your job is to play. Play is your best way to creatively explore your world. Essentially, you’ll be doing lots and lots of experiments, including physics experiments (What if I drop this apple sauce on the floor?) and social psychology experiments (What will happen if I poop on this white living room carpet?). This will be your main job. Try hundreds and thousands of things and see what happens. Figure out the patterns. When something interesting happens, use your hippocampus to pack it away for future reference. For a couple years no one will blame you for anything you do, so play to your heart’s content. Have lots and lots of fun.

Beware that your parents might soon try to groom you to be a super-child so that they can claim to their friends that they are extremely good parents. This comes with the territory and there’s no way to get around some of some of these performance obligations. I would urge you, though, to keep playing as often as possible and for as long as possible. Some parents try to turn you into an academic superstar even when you are 2 or 3. Resist this! Lots of research shows that you are much better off playing on your own terms, including this article, which contains this quote:

"If this study doesn't put the nail in the coffin of academic training to little children, it's hard to imagine what will," says psychologist Peter Gray.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Gray believes these outcomes were predictable. When kids are pushed into academics before they are ready, he says, it disrupts the natural unfolding of curiosity, mastery, and joy. It's like being forced to take poker lessons before mastering Go Fish. Kids feel lost, bored, and dumb. They may decide they hate school, or that the only way to escape is by acting out.

Compare that to plain old playing, where kids discover how to make things happen, try out new ideas, and make friends. This requires learning "self-management," i.e., the ability to hold yourself together enough that other kids want to play with you. Those are real lessons—some of life's biggest, in fact. There's time for academics later.

But that’s just the beginning of the struggle. As you get to be a teenager and then an adult, please please please keep playing. Don’t let your inner child whither and die! I’ve seen countless adults who have forgotten how to play. They forget how to make believe. They don’t know how to creatively pretend. They’ve long ago forgot how to giggle. They are uncomfortable making their own music and art. They start calling these things “wastes of time.”

Beware of those serious adults. They think that their job is to look proper, but here’s the sad truth: To the extent that adults no longer engage in play, they die. You can see it in their dull eyes, eyes that formerly sparkled. It is well established that adults need to play in order to maintain their mental health. That is the conclusion of psychologist Barrett Brown. Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

Over time, adults who don't play ossify into hard lumps of properness. They worry about the craziest things instead of playing. Mostly, they worry about having money to buy things to impress their friends. Some of them will never have enough, so there will never be a time to pause this bizarro form of hunting and gathering.

So here’s my advice. 1. Start playing. 2. The entire world is your playroom. 3. Never stop playing.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal: Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and that Should Never Stop Being Your Job

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.

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