Life’s Meaning and Friendship Connections

We are intensely social beings. This is a predicament because it takes a lot of work to maintain social connections and even the strongest of connections can sometimes fail. It’s worth the work and it’s worth the risks, though, because this social predicament offers us our only chance to live a meaningful life.

Many people who are shy or (like me) introverted might be tempted to think that a meaningful life can be sustained by passively observing the world around us. We might be tempted to think that we can retreat into some sort of safe place, somehow living a meaningful life while watching the crazy, beautiful and (sometimes) dangerous social spectacles crisscrossing our space-time at a distance.

But a meaningful life is only possible when we work hard to forge deep vulnerable personal honest connections with others. Life can be meaningful only to the extent that we bravely reach out to others at the risk of failure and rejection.

Our journey is thus a non-stop crisis. The human condition compels us to keep approaching social intersections of danger and opportunity. There is no place to pull over to be neutral. There is no way to fully light up our potential by vicariously living the adventures of others, including the adventures of sports heroes or Hollywood characters. To the extent that we fail to take personal risks of connection, the meaningful life withers. If we had been given instruction manuals at the moment we were born, this would be Lesson One: Maintaining close personal connections with others is a necessity of life, as important as food, water and air. Chapter Two: A Life without close friendships is an emotionally impoverished life. Lesson Three: We will often fail in our attempts to connect with others and when this happen, it will hurt.

Lesson Four is that we can often get up, dust ourselves off and be better and stronger because of failures to connect with others. This “good” type of failure is only possible, however, if we can ridicule and silence voices that tell us to stop taking risks, whether these are voices of other people trying to “help” us or whether we are broadcasting these pernicious voices inside of our own heads.

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot recently. For the past year, I had been in a period of relatively blissful “normal” life, where everything seemed safe and steady, including an ongoing romance. But then a huge wave hit me from behind and everything was instantly upside down. It’s as if I were at a movie theater where the movie screen caught fire and I started thinking: “This incredible CGI makes it look like there is a real fire,” but then I realized it was a real fire. Then the announcer stated: “We’re taking a break from normal life. Good luck to you.”

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What To Do About Your Broken Heart

A broken heart can really hurt. It can physically hurt and it can be distracting, obsessive, depressing and unrelenting. The internet offers a lot of advice about what to do when your heart is broken, but this advice is anecdotal, hit and miss at best. That's why I then searched for articles based on science and I found one the offered an effective way to lessen the pain of a broken heart.

At Scientific American, Psychologist Guy Winch discusses a study that considered three strategies, to see which of these best helped heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.

In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.

According to Winch, although this unpleasantness might seem to be a big price to pay to reduce feelings of love, there are two ways to address this unpleasantness: 1) Remember that "when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship." When we force ourselves to remember the downsides of the relationship, we are correcting for these untrue idealized images that are causing the pain 2)  We shouldn't contemplate only the person to whom we were attracted. Instead, we should force ourselves to think of the dynamics  of the relationship itself.  That's where we can best see the problem, because quite often a relationship consists of two smart good-hearted people who merely lack the chemistry to be a pair.

In my experience, it might take some work to see the downside to a relationship, especially when one is the dumpee rather than the dumper. But it's not always difficult.  There might be low-hanging fruit, things like addictions or rampant dishonesty, things that would have been absolute deal-breakers on Day One.  If only your lover had revealed these things at the very beginning of your relationship.  Imagine a Match.com profile indicating: "I will tell you the opposite of what I'm really feeling when we discuss important issues."  Or "I will become annoyed when you come over to spend time with me because I'd rather spend time with my other friends, who like to get drink heavily."  For most of us, dysfunctions like these, if revealed up front, would destroy the possibility of ever having a first date.  Once a romance has been going on for months, the confirmation bias encourages us to overlook any evidence pointing to major problems like these.  Once the relationship fractures apart, major issues like these often become obvious, sad and embarrassing memories.  But once the relationship is over, stark bad memories like these are also the best medicine to lessen the pain of your broken heart.  The better the hurt, the better the cure.

Even in the absence of major issues, there are doubtless various reasons why any particular relationship failed.  There had to be friction and frustration, even if nothing "major," and even if the cause is ineffable. Even where one doesn't understand why the relationship was not smooth sailing, one certainly experienced that it was not smooth sailing.

Winch suggests the following as the best salve for a broken heart, whether the issues were major or minor:

If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and keep that list on your phone. Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memories, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.

I have tried this approach to the letter and I highly recommend it.  Reviewing your own long list of real grievances turns a wonderful movie about you and your ex-lover into a sad and frustrating movie that makes you want to throw popcorn at the screen and walk out.  Once you see your ex-lover as they were, not merely as you crave them, it's much easier to turn the page to a new chapter of your life.

What follows is Winch's TED talk on this same topic:

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Donald Hoffman’s version of the Matrix: Things might be Extremely Different than they Seem

I enthusiastically recommend this podcast featuring Donald Hoffman. Sam Harris and (his wife) Annaka sound, in equal parts, skeptical and intrigued, which makes for some deeply engaging conversation. Hoffman's thesis might challenge almost everything you think.  Hoffman argues that evolution has not honed us to have veridical perception (seeing things as they really are). Rather, natural selection has privileged evolutionary fitness to prevail over veridicality. This topic dovetails nicely with Andy Clark's theory of predictive processing, in which Andy portrays perception as a "controlled hallucination."

The first hour is free for non-subscribers. Here's the promo for the podcast:

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”


This teaser for this podcast is not mere hype.



An obvious example for illustrating Hoffman's thesis is color. We don't perceive wavelengths, much less the quantum physics even deeper down. To perceive these things would be too expensive (in terms of bandwidth) for rough and ready biological processors like human brains and bodies, and we don't need to fully understand the physics of the process in order to make use of color (or sounds or pain or shapes). For most of us, most of the time, we are trapped in the Matrix.

It is critical to note that there is NO COLOR in the objects "out there." Wavelengths of light are not colored. Color is something that is created only by the interaction between whatever is out there and our ability to engage with the world because it increases biological fitness. Here's the kicker . . . for Hoffman, everything is like color.  We don't need to understand the electronics and physics of the "objects" on our computer desktops in order to make excellent use off them.  Similarly, we often make excellent use of the things that we seem to encounter in the world, but it is entirely consistent with this observation that we don't deeply understand these things or we barely understand them.  A similar concern provoked Immanual Kant to divide the world into phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves).

The bottom line is that things might be incredibly useful to us as creatures trying to survive day-to-day, even when our understanding of these things is extremely lacking or even false. Useful trumps veridically-true to those of us who are often merely trying to survive to the next day. We human animals are happy to satisfice, even though we often conflate our hacked-up understandings of things with veridical truth.

In Paragraph 121 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche also pointed out that things that are untrue can often be useful:

Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live--by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error

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The Hidden Trade-offs Made by Successful People

Shane Parrish has written another excellent post at Farnam Street Blog. The topic is trade-offs. We can't have it all, and we can benefit when we recognize the trade-offs we must make in every aspect of our lives:

Economics is all about tradeoffs. A tradeoff is loosely defined as any situation where making one choice means losing something else, usually forgoing a benefit or opportunity. We experience tradeoffs in zero-sum situations, when a plus in one area must be a negative in another. A core component of economic theory is the study of how we allocate scarce resources and negotiate opportunity costs.

Economics offers tools that we can use as guides for getting what we want out of life if we take economic lessons and apply them to resources other than money. We all know our money isn’t infinite, yet we end up treating our time and energy and attention as if they are. Many of us act as if there are no tradeoffs—we can just do everything if we try hard enough. The irony is that those who know how to make tradeoffs can get so much more out of life than those who try to get everything.


Parrish notes that successful-seeming people all make secret trade-offs. They are not great at everything. I have wondered about this when seeing so many people who I suspect are of modest means, driving cars much more expensive than mine, going out to eat and drink much more often than me, and generally conspicuously consuming much more than me. I have this fantasy where everyone's budget and bank and credit accounts floated above them, and I could then confirm, "Oh, they aren't saving for retirement and they are one missed paycheck from disaster!"  The same thing happens with time as with money.  We can't be super-competent at all things. When we are proficient at some things, it is always at the expense of other things.

Can we reach homeostasis? It's not easy per Parrish:

We’re constantly going off-kilter in one area or another and having to make course corrections. When one area goes well, another is usually sliding. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. Focus on one area and it’s often to the detriment of another.


One solution to getting a grip on this problem that we must make trade-offs is to track your time. I did this for two months and it was extremely telling. I was spending time pursuing my declared life goals a LOT less than I spent time in mundane chores like cooking/eating/cleaning up, driving and various unproductive activities. I was unconsciously making choices to do less important things at the expense of the things that I treasure (good conversations with close friends, artistic pursuits, working on website and my book). I wrote about my approach to tracking time earlier here.

Parrish offers many other tips in his article. For instance, you need to get over the awkwardness that you won't be great at everything.  That would be impossible

I'm taking heed of the many good ideas in this excellent article.

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First Batch of Tumbled Rocks Keeps Me Grounded

When I was a boy, I saw rock tumblers for sale in the Sears Catalogue, but I never had one and never knew anyone who had one. Well . . . decades later I do have a rock tumbler and I have recently learned that there are lots of beautiful rocks to be found only about an hour from St. Louis.



After a month of tumbling in my basement, this is what rocks from a Missouri creek look like (a creek near Farmington, Missouri). They shine even though they are perfectly dry. They are fun to hold and fun to look at. They were all so shy, modest about their beauty, while sitting in the creek. But now they are spreading their little peacock tails. Up close, some of them look like abstract works of art. To see many more images, click on the title to this post and then check out the gallery of photos.

Since I obtained my rock tumbler (a Thumler Model B), I've reached out and found dozens of other people who are passionate about finding and polishing rocks, as well as making jewelry and other objects of art out of them. These rock hounds are all over the place, and all you need to do to make them show up is to mention rocks.



For me, this has been a wonderful hobby, above and beyond the thrill of locating a beautiful rock in a creek or in seeing these polished specimens. I tend to think in the abstract throughout the day. I do it at the drop of a hat. These rocks, on the other hand, are real. I want to hold them and feel them and admire their beauty. This hobby has been an excellent counter-weight to my tendency to philosophize. It has, indeed, kept me "grounded."

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