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 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.

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

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.

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

How to be a Human Animal: Suggested Reading for Every Newborn Baby.

I'm beginning a new creative project called the 100 Days Project. I've been invited into a group of about a dozen people who encourage each other to do something creative. I decided to write a rough draft book over the 100 days. Because the internet platform used by the group has only rudimentary editing tools, I'm going to post my 100 chapters here at Dangerous Intersection. I will title each chapter "How to Be a Human Animal: Chapter X." We'll see how this comes out. In this post, I'm including the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2.

It's not really a book for babies, of course. It is my existential lament that I wish I had learned a lot of these things earlier in my life. And I wish I didn't need to learn so many of these lessons the hard way. Here are my first few installments:

How to be a Human Animal: Suggested Reading for Every Newborn Baby.

Introduction

Welcome to the world, Baby! This Baby Book will offer you 100 insights on how to be a human animal. Other people will give you lots of good advice, of course, most of it boiling down to this: eat healthy food, sleep enough and don’t be a jerk. Absolutely. Those things are definitely important, but this book other important things that you don’t hear about as much.Being young is such a difficult way to grow up! You have no experience or training when you are young. You need to figure out everything. I hope that the insights in these 100 chapters will serve as a virtual mentor, to help you avoid some hazards and time drains.

If successful, this book will offer you a bit more quality time to enjoy some of the many awesome things happening on this big crazy sphere! Things like hiking trails, peanut butter sandwiches, miracle medical cures for many painful ailments, laughing, long-term friendships, creating and enjoying art, sunsets, sex, grapes, putting band aids on your child’s ouchies, campfires, Tetris, Bob’s Burgers, jazz, mentoring, puppies, late night conversations, good poops, Hubble photos, and looking into your lover’s eyes.

Enjoy your stay on Earth!

Chapter 1: You Are Lucky to Be Here

Hi, Baby. I have some good news and some bad news.

First, some good news. You are extremely lucky to be here. The odds were very much against you every being born. In order for you to be here, your 256 great great great great great great great grandparents each had to have sex at exactly the right day and hour. That would be impossible to coordinate, but it somehow happened. So congratulations!

We’ll talk about sex in more detail in a later chapter, but for now, please note that you benefitted from the fact that sex is such an incredibly strong instinct in our species and in all animal ancestors, extending all the way back to your proto-primate ancestors, the shrew-like critters that co-existed with the dinosaurs, the ancient shore-exploring fish such as Tiktaalik, and every other life form in your family tree. You are lucky that all of your ancestors were horny. This presumably goes all the way back to the first randy primordial bacterium in your family tree who, in fairness, you should think of as your grandparent. This immense journey from earliest life form to your primate body didn’t happen instantly, but neither did it take an eternity. Here is a thought experiment, a way to visualize your evolution rapidly as you drive past your maternal lineage at highway speed.

Chapter 2: You Get Only One Thousand Months

Here’s more good news. Those who keep statistics say that since you were born in the U.S., it's realistic to think you will live almost 80 years. From your infant eyes, that must seem like an eternity. Here’s some bad news: 80 years is only 960 months, which I’m going to round up to 1,000 because I don’t want existential anxiety to mess with your tiny bowel movements. Here are 1,000 dots.

Take away one dot each month and that’s all the time you get if you live 80 years.

Here is more not-so-good news. You won’t be fully self-actualized at birth. Evolution had to work a crazy compromise. The social and intellectual gymnastics characteristic of your species requires a bigger brain than your non-human primate cousins, too big to allow you to emerge from your mother’s womb fully functional at birth. A baby with a big functional human brain would endanger or kill the baby’s mom at birth. You are born severely underdeveloped. You will be mostly helpless for a couple years after birth and that’s just the beginning. You’ll need about 20 years to function fully as an adult. That’s leaves only 750 months for you to live as an adult (and that’s only if you take good care of your body). This thought terrifies most people, but if you are wise, you will bravely take note of your limited time and strive to make the best of it.

Eventually your body will completely break down and your body will completely stop working. You will not think any more thoughts you won’t feel anything at all and you’ll be dead. My operating assumption is that death is nothing to worry about. It will be a lot like it was before you were born. Again, that’s only my assumption.

Again, you’ll only get to live about 750 months. About half of the people I know consider this number of 750 months to be a curse and the other half use that number as an incentive to live a life they can be proud of. Will you celebrate this gift of 750 months by living a life that is well-informed, socially-interactive, creative and kind-hearted? Or will you waste it in the glow of TV and computer screens and obsessing about consumer goods and money? It’s your choice.

Keep in mind that little things eat up big swaths of time over a year. Should I keep my beard, which takes almost no upkeep? Or should I be clean-shaven, which takes 3 min/day = 12 hours per year.  I know this sounds like a silly illustration, but you can't argue with these numbers. Here's another example: If you watch a junk TV show for one hour per day for a year, that adds up to 365 hours = 45 full time work days down the drain per year. That's more than two months of full-time work!

The lesson: Your months will go by quickly, so spend them mindfully. Time is a non-replenishable resource, but most people don’t seem to understand this until it’s too late. When you are a young child, a day can seem like an eternity. As an active adult, time will dramatically speed up. Months will eventually start whizzing by as if they were days that are punctuated by 30 little naps. Think carefully about time management strategies, including daily to-do lists. If you don't your precious gift of life will swiftly slip away.

 

I wish I could make this post light-hearted, but it’s just too damned existentially important. You have been given a great gift by being born. In the end, hopefully 80 well-lived years from now, you will find yourself in one of two deathbed scenarios: A) I could have done some really cool things in my life if I had actually gotten off my butt to work hard at them, but I squandered my opportunity, or B) I worked hard to do some really cool things. Some of them succeeded, and others failed, but I learned a lot in the process, met lots of wonderful people and I’m now dying in good conscience. Epilogue: Here is a video featuring a watch that runs backwards. I'm not including this video to promote the product, but rather because this product pitch relates to the above post:

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal: Suggested Reading for Every Newborn Baby.