Hello again dear
reader.
With St. Patrick's Day
right around the corner. I had originally intended for us to have a conversation
concerning the history of alcohol, such as its many uses throughout the world
how it's made etc. But then I realized that times of conversations like that
have already been conducted by many people more qualified to conduct them than
myself. But as I already had conducted some planning research for a history of
alcohol or conversation. I began to wonder exactly why people drink in the
first place or why they think historically. And I of course came to the
conclusion that it's because life is and was hard and being mildly intoxicated.
Probably helped smooth out the rough bits, so I started doing research into
reasons people should get drunk. And of course came across many poets and
philosophers that basically suggested being drunk is a religion in its own
right, if properly orchestrated. However, I did not think that this would be
good for our long-term health. So I started to wonder if there were ways to get
that, warm fuzzy intoxicated feeling without all the negative side effects such
as a hangover and liver damage. The conversation that follows the reader is my
best answer so far on how to become philosophically drunk on life and have that
warm fuzzy intoxicated feeling. Anytime you want without negative side effects.
(However, I have recently discovered that there is such a thing as a
philosophical hangover, it comes from thinking too hard, about one particular
subject). So hopefully dear reader after today's conversation, you will be
inspired to become a philosophical drunk and stay that way...
At the Göbekli Tepe
archaeological site in Turkey, large barrel-shaped stone vessels were found
that may have been used to hold copious amounts of beer made from wild grasses.
These remnants indicate
that the production of alcoholic beverages could date back at least 11,600
years — to the Stone Age.
They also signify a
great and enduring truth: Life is hard. So hard, we’ve been trying to
escape it since time immemorial.
These days, we’re apt
to think of that truth in the past tense — life was hard, before we
invented a mega-ton of cool technology, and cured a host of diseases, and
lengthened mortality, and evolved from having to make a living from
back-breaking labor, and threw off the rule of oppressive regimes, and solved
the global proclivity for getting into massive wars. Now, life is good.
We even have shirts and bumper stickers that say so.
Yet our behavior belies
our words. We haven’t gotten any happier on average over the last half century,
even as advancements in technology and culture have exploded, and people in
fact seem to be craving a substance-driven escape more than ever. While
addiction to painkillers has gotten much attention of late, the use and abuse
of alcohol has also been on the rise. In a decade’s time, people who engage in
“high-risk drinking” (defined for men as having five or more drinks at least
one day a week) rose by 30%, while the rate of people with “alcohol use
disorder” went up 50%. Not only are more people drinking, they’re drinking more
than they used to.
Why? Well one can
hypothesize all kinds of theories, but the truth is that life remains
stubbornly hard. We have cured a thousand biological and societal ills, but
death and disease persist, and we have yet to eradicate the kind of
psychological pressures that thread themselves through everyday life — in fact,
they have arguably increased many fold. Gone is the threat of lion attack;
present is the anomie of living in a fragmented world, the loneliness of
isolation, the restlessness of FOMO, the existential angst of walking through a
grocery store, and being struck with the chest compressing sense of the
possible meaninglessness of it all.
Part of what makes life
feel especially hard for us moderns is that despite the persistent reality of
life’s thorny nature, our expectations continue to run in the very opposite
direction. In times past, people expected life to be hard — and their
spiritual traditions reinforced this notion. The Judeo-Christian religion
taught that we live in a fallen world, and that there’s no going back to Eden.
Buddhism taught that “Life is suffering.” Joyous moments were then seen as
exceptions to the rule — happy reprieves from the status quo. The feeling of
being a stranger in a strange land was not utterly inexplicable, but completely
predictable.
Today, we worship at
the altar of lifestyle design and personal development, a faith premised on the
idea that our lives and habits can be infinitely improved and perfected. We
believe that life’s disappointments, heartaches, annoyances, and friction points
are not inevitable, and can be overcome through the optimal prescription of
hacks and planners and maxims.
Certainly, much of what
makes life hard can be avoided through right living and thinking, and no
one should put up with unnecessary hardships and handicaps.
Far better it would be,
however, if we recognized that no matter what we do, it’s not possible to dull all
of life’s sharp edges — and to thus set more reasonable expectations for
our journey. As it is, we drink, but aren’t sure why, and even feel guilty
about it.
Far better it would be
if we realized we should be getting drunk. Even drunker than we are now.
Get Drunk On This
As a cure for the
difficulties of life, we’re often advised to become more present, more mindful,
more aware.
Yet the longer I live,
the more I’ve come to feel that this is exactly wrong advice — at least in the
sense of facing each moment in a state of unaltered rawness. Rather, we should
strive to go through life in a semi-permanent state of intoxication.
This is what the poet
Charles Baudelaire advised:
“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the
horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the
earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With
wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
Baudelaire was
definitely on to something, sans the wine bit.
While there’s nothing
wrong with an occasional drink to take the edge off, being perennially drunk
with alcohol can’t well be recommended. It damages one’s health, while doing
nothing to address the underlying cause of said edge, and in fact, quite
possibly making it worse.
But to be drunken
continually with certain other things, this we should indeed seek to do.
There are certain human
pursuits that can rightly be called mind-altering, and yet do not numb the
senses, nor merely distract from reality. Quite the opposite: they actually enhance
one’s experiences, allowing you to engage life more fully. They provide
the kind of stimulating, euphoric, emotion-heightening, inhibition-reducing,
confidence-inspiring buzz that alcohol can, without the hangover in the
morning. In fact, they leave you improved — healthier, happier, and better able
to shoulder the existential pressures of the age.
Such states represent
not an escape from life, but a vivid embrace of it; one is still present, but
loses the morbid self-consciousness that often accompanies stark,
inwardly-focused mindfulness.
In the conversation
that follows dear reader we discuss four of the very best of these states —
four of the best ways of going through life perennially drunk:
Physical Exercise
Of all of life’s
natural highs, physical exercise is certainly the most famous, and
understandably so; the potent, buzz-creating physiological effect it produces
has been well documented by scientific research.
Exercise releases
feel-good hormones like serotonin and dopamine, as well as natural,
morphine-like opiates in the form of endorphins which reduce pain and anxiety,
while producing feelings of euphoria and invincibility. Exercise may even spur
the creation of natural endocannabinoids, similar to the high-producing
substance found in marijuana. The natural buzz triggered by exercise arises
most strongly from repetitive, rhythmic variety (think running, swimming,
cycling), and is amplified both when the activity is engaged in with a partner,
and when it is done outside; research has shown that exercise done in nature
increases one’s feelings of vitality, enthusiasm pleasure, and self-esteem,
while diminishing feelings of depression, tension, confusion, and anger.
Exercise induces these
physiological effects because it produces stress (not all stress is bad!),
which triggers our fight-or-flight response, preparing us to face a challenge/threat.
Our bodies think we’re fleeing a saber-toothed tiger, even though we’re just
out for a pleasure jog.
This phenomenon
arguably produces a psychological effect that’s just as important as the
biological one.
While it might not seem
like subconsciously feeling that you’re in danger would be a good thing, it’s
something we moderns crave on a visceral basis. Though we don’t consciously
recognize it, part of the pleasure of exercise is surely in the way it mentally
elevates us to a plane where our strength and fitness and agility matter. Where
the stakes are higher than whether or not the traffic will be bad on the way to
work. It reconnects our bodies to something more primal, more essential. We
thrill to the fact that this normally inert lump of flesh is moving through
space, with a purpose.
When you reacquaint
yourself with the power of your body — when your muscles contract, air fills
your lungs, blood surges through your veins, and sweat drips from your brow —
you feel more alive than at any other time in your otherwise pedestrian,
sedentary day. It’s a feeling that’s keenly intoxicating.
Love
Ah, love. It’s oft been
compared to a drug, and the analogy isn’t far from the mark.
Research has found that
new romantic love affects the chemistry of the brain in a way that is similar
to cocaine and heroin. And just as with exercise, the fight-or-flight system is
engaged, creating that paradoxical combination of excitement and danger,
pleasure and pain.
On the one hand, the
uncertainty of new love (Do they like me as much as I like them? Will this
last?) Releases higher doses of cortisol, increasing one’s stress; On the
other hand, an explosion of hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine and
oxytocin create feelings of intense euphoria and contentment. The neural
pathways responsible for negative emotions like fear and social judgement are
deactivated, elevating one’s confidence and willingness to take risks. Energy,
motivation, and self-esteem soar.
“That’s wonderful,” you
may be thinking, “but the heady intoxication of early passionate love doesn’t
last.” It’s true that romantic love typically mellows into “companionate love,”
in which passion is replaced with a more stable, comfortable sense of
attachment. Which is a fine state, but not really “inebriating” in the way of
drug or drink.
Happily, research shows
that this leveling off process isn’t inevitable and that intense romantic love
can in fact last for decades. The even better news is that this passionate
long-term love not only maintains the confidence-boosting, pleasure-imparting
benefits of new infatuation, but does so in the absence of the anxiety which
accompanies a fledgling relationship. Instead of feeling stressed, long-term
partners, secure in the future of their relationship, experience greater
activity in the opiate-rich, pain-relieving parts of the brain, which protect against
stress.
Love — whether early or
aged — buoys you up and makes you feel ready to take on the world; it’s a pair
of glasses that makes every responsibility seem easier, every burden feel
lighter, every joy burn brighter. It’s no wonder men have done many a great
thing for the sake of love. Or that the longest longitudinal study on the lives
of men found that those who achieved the most happiness and success had the
most love in their lives. Or that among male fruit flies (which are
surprisingly good genetic models for humans), those that are sexually rejected
drink four times more alcohol than their brethren. We all crave the buzz of
mind-altering euphoria, and we’ll get it, one way or the other. Better to find
it in the arms of one’s beloved than at the bottom of a bottle.
Conversation
“Conversation is an
excitant, and the series of intoxications it creates is healthful.” –Ralph
Waldo Emerson
I must concur with
Emerson; a good, face-to-face conversation is surely one of the most
intoxicating pleasures of life.
The source of its pleasures
can be compared to an orchestral performance, with its combination of
competition, cooperation, and artful harmony.
Now, I don’t mean
competition in the traditional sense — a conversation in which people are
trying to out-do, one-up, and talk over each other will be a very poor
conversation indeed. But competition in the sense that each individual
performer is trying to do their best — to introduce an interesting topic or
insight, to make a genuinely funny remark. Like a musical or sporting performance,
there is in conversation the opportunity of risk and reward for each
participant — the risk of saying something dumb; the reward of contributing
something valuable. Each participant in a concert, or a conversation, wants to
shine.
Yet at the same time,
there is the paramount need for cooperation. Each participant must understand
the rhythm of the discussion. They must keep up with the beat, and make their
contribution at the right time, and with the right tone. They can only add to
what’s already been noised, if they’ve been intently listening to it.
When these elements
come together well in either a concert or a conversation, something musical,
and even magical results. In terms of the latter, insights emerge, laughter
swells, new, even life-changing
perspectives are gained. In terms of both, each participant creates
something bigger, richer, and more fascinatingly complex than they could have
on their own.
The comparison between
conversation and orchestral music is quite apt, but we need yet another analogy
to further unpack its pleasures.
So let us now make what
may seem an improbable comparison: engaging in conversation is also something
like riding a motorcycle. You have to very much stay in the moment, and you
cannot predict the twists, turns, and potholes you may encounter along the way.
It’s a continuous sequence of action and reaction. In a conversation, you must
listen to the tone and watch the facial expressions of those you’re speaking
with, and adjust what you’re saying accordingly, and instantaneously. You have
to think on the fly and improvise responses to unforeseen comments or
questions. At least for a good conversation, the need for focus is
total.
The hormones released
during conversation fortunately act as aids in this. When we talk with others,
cortisol goes down, and oxytocin goes up, which makes social cues seem more
salient and paying attention to social information feel more rewarding.
Emotions heighten. The clarity of our mental signals sharpens, as distracting
background neural activity dials down. We feel connected to the people we are
with, while the rest of the world fades out.
Music and motorcycles.
It’s no wonder we leave
a great conversation feeling totally buzzed.
Virtue
Of Baudelaire’s
proposed sources for drunkenness, perhaps the most intriguing is virtue. How
can someone get wonderfully sloshed on virtue?
It is perhaps not so
much the virtues themselves that beget a kind of healthful inebriation, but the
framework in which they exist. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes in After Virtue,
“to adopt a stance on the virtues will be to adopt a stance on the narrative
character of human life.”
When one decides to
live virtuously, it is typically because he sees life as structured in the form
of a certain kind of story. There is an ideal end — what the Greeks would call
a telos — that he is questing towards; the virtues are those qualities
which assist him in attaining it, while the vices are those qualities which
stymie his progress. To embrace virtue is to embrace life as a journey, in
which there is a right direction in which to travel, and in which obstacles
must be overcome to stay on course. Such a view of life, in which there are
real goods and real evils, inherently has a heroic cast to it. A genuine
purpose.
The exact nature of
that purpose, and thus what you specifically consider to be virtues and vices,
varies according to your perspective, but regardless, you end up with the view
of oneself as being a protagonist in an epic story, in which the choices you
make have real import and meaning. You end up thinking of your faith or
philosophy along the lines of how C.S. Lewis describes his:
“Enemy-occupied
territory — that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the
rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us
to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
Having a mission,
operating as an agent for Good, being willing to confront opposing forces, with
the risk attendant to pursuing such a commitment, this is indeed an
adventurous, exciting way to live.
Intoxicating even.
Conclusion
It’s good to
acknowledge that life is hard. It’s good to realize that despite what
toothpaste commercials and social media feeds tell you, life is not all shiny
effervescence. It’s good to recognize that while life has the potential for an
amazing amount of beauty and fun and joy, much of it is a confusing, uncertain,
anxiety-ridden, boring, frustrating, empty-feeling grind — punctuated by
occasional outright tragedy.
Once you countenance
this fact, it’s natural to want to get rip-roaring drunk. And you should.
Not with alcohol
though.
Get drunk on those
things that inspire a genuine, long-lasting loss of inhibition and sense of
confidence.
Get drunk on those
things that leave you with greater health, richer relationships, and a more
meaningful purpose.
Get drunk on those
things that allow you to get outside yourself, and transcend the narrow
confines of self-consciousness.
Get drunk on those
things that offer the perception of danger and the element of risk (and
reward), and magnify all of life’s emotional summits.
Get drunk on those
things that aren’t escape hatches from life, but passages to a more vivid
embrace of it.
Drink
up, drink deeply, and party on. Because life’s too short, and difficult, to go
through it stone cold sober.
Hello again, dear reader.
Today's conversation was inspired by a comment
recently made by a very dear friend of mine while we were sitting around
playing video games and feeling nostalgic. My friend commented that they wished
life had a "reset button" like a video game that would allow you to
reset the day and start over. Whenever you felt as though they hadn't gone
quite right, or you just needed a day to relax and destress. Well, as you can
imagine, dear reader is, intrigued me, and I began to poke around and do some
research to see if there really was such a thing as a "reset day."
And the conversation that follows is the best information I could find on how
to hit the reset button of life...
What Is a Reset Day?
Despite one’s best
intentions in turning over a new leaf, life happens. Forging new habits isn’t
easy, while slowly moving away from them is. The best way to deal with that
drift is to get re-aligned before you’ve gotten too far off track — to
constantly make little course corrections as you continue towards your goal.
But sometimes, one bad
week leads to another, and things flat out unravel. You just get totally off
track with the path you want to be on. In such a case, tinkering around the
edges doesn’t work. The momentum of your off-kilter current is too strong, your
schedule just too busy, to fully get back in a good headspace. You need an
uninterrupted stretch, a solid block of time in which you can clear the decks –
all of them.
Enter the reset day.
A reset day is a
weekday that you take off from work, dedicated to getting your life in order.
Yes, you’ll have to take a vacation day to fully implement it; more than half
of Americans don’t take all their vacation days each year — you’ve probably got
one to spare. It might seem like a short-term loss, but the improvements it
will make to your life will create a long-term gain.
Now you might be
thinking, why not just do a reset on a Saturday or Sunday instead? You could,
but in my experience, doing a reset day on the weekend makes it exponentially
less effective. You probably have some big chores you need to take care of on
those days, and if you have young kids, you’re likely shuttling them around to
different activities and/or they’re up in your business. Your significant other
has her own designs on your time. Also, you’ll be tackling a lot of to-do’s on
your reset day, some of which may require calling a business that is closed on
the weekend.
A weekday reset day
gives you eight dedicated, distraction-free hours, by yourself, to set your
physical and metaphorical house in order — to recalibrate everything that’s
gone awry.
Instead of constantly
putting out one fire, while another rages, you give yourself a chance to
extinguish all the hot spots. You give yourself an entirely fresh start, a
clean slate upon which to begin your efforts anew; it completely clears your
mind of all the cobwebs formed by unfinished to-dos, burdensome distractions,
and nagging questions. A reset day creates a “temporal landmark” – a date which
separates a past period of time from a present/future one and has been shown to
increase your motivation moving forward.
I’ve found I need a
reset day from time to time in my own life, and have had great success with
them. Below I share what I recommend doing on your reset day.
The 8-Hour Schedule
for a Reset Day
You don’t have to spend
exactly one hour on each of these steps; if one takes you less time, move on to
the next. But don’t spend more than an hour on any – you want to make sure you
get to each “phase.” In the 7th hour, you’ll get to tie up any loose
ends that remain from the previous steps.
You don’t even have to
rigidly follow this schedule/order; do what works for you. But I think this is
a helpful outline of the kinds of things you’ll want to tackle on a reset day.
Hour 1: Clean Your
House
Jordan B. Peterson says cleaning
your room can be the first step in getting the rest of your life in order, and Naval
Admiral William McRaven says making your bed can help you change the
world.
Your environment
matters. When it’s chaotic and messy, so are your thoughts. Once you organize
the place in which you stand, you’ll be in a better mindset to get everything
else sorted out too.
Now, you don’t want
your entire reset day to be taken up with cleaning; you just want to tackle
bigger macro tasks that have an outsized effect on how your house feels. Here’s
a good minimum to aim for:
- Empty the dishes from both your sink and the
dishwasher
- Remove all clutter from kitchen counters and wipe
them down
- Fold any clean, but unfolded laundry and put away
- Make your bed
- Take out trash if it’s full
- Vacuum any areas of the house with visible detritus
- Put rolls of toilet paper on empty holders, and stock
extra rolls in the bathroom
- Sort through stacks of mail
See how much you can
get done in an hour, but once an hour is up, move on to the other steps.
Hour 2: Do a Brain
Dump
Sometimes we get off
track with our goals, or at least don’t put in our full effort on them, because
we have so many “open loops.” These are unfinished tasks or unanswered
questions that run through our minds each day. While you’re working on a job
assignment, you start thinking about whether you should get your estate
planning done. When you’re playing with your kids, you’re thinking about their
college fund. Ten minutes later, you’re wondering about your new workout plan.
This back and forth
switching between the task at hand and those yet unfinished is mentally
draining. For me, I typically get off the rails when I’ve got too many of these
open loops going on in my head. My mind feels hugely scattered and distracted,
and instead of tackling all the things that need doing, I do nothing at all.
To tame the tyranny of
open loops, perform a brain dump by writing down anything and everything that’s
been weighing on your mind.
Think about all the
areas of your life: work, gym, family, friends, church, etc., and what tasks
need doing in each of them.
Also jog your memory
and try to write down any questions – big or small — that have been niggling at
you lately, but you keep putting off figuring out; i.e., you keep intending to
look up the answer, but even a google search seems like too much effort, and
you end up scrolling through Instagram instead.
Here are some examples:
- What workout program should I do?
- What’s the right form for doing a squat?
- How do I get started with the keto diet?
- How much would it cost to fly to New York City?
- What’s a good date/destination for our next camping
trip?
- What’s the best haircut for my face?
- What book should I read next?
- How do I trim my nose hair?
When I do my mind dump,
I use this Getting Things Done Trigger List to help me think of all the open
loops I’ve got lodged in my brain. For recording everything you dump, you can
use pen and paper, or another medium.
Hour 3: Take Care of
as Many To-Dos as You Can
Now that you have your
brain dump list, put a star next to each task/question that can be
done/answered in ten minutes or less. Stuff that just requires a quick, clear,
turnkey action or bit of research. Examples:
- Make an appointment with the doctor
- Watch a video on how to do a squat properly
- Read a quick keto diet start guide
- Sign up for a 5k
- Call plumber
- Pay bills
- Back up computer
- Pack up online order of clothes that didn’t fit for
return
- Buy new belt
- Create a Mint account to start budgeting
- Text message guy at church about activity next month
- Scroll through 100 must-read books; pick one to read
and request at library
See how many to-dos you
can knock out in an hour. Then move on to the next step.
Hour 4: Review Higher-Level
Goals
Ahhh . . . doesn’t it
feel good to close some of those loops? You can already feel weight being
lifted from your psyche.
Now that your mind is
unburdened from those annoying little doo-dads, you’re in a much better place
to review your higher-level goals.
As you review/create
your goals, ask yourself the following questions:
- How is my progress on this goal?
- Do I still want to achieve this goal?
- What’s one action I can take today to put me closer
to achieving this goal?
- What’s one habit I can begin working on today that
will take me closer to my goal?
Hour 5: Create (Or
Re-establish) a Routine
One of the biggest
factors in life feeling fragmented, restless, and unproductive is not having a
set daily routine. I wish this wasn’t true; I wish you could just do what you
wanted, when you wanted, and feel great. But for the great majority of people,
if you don’t have a set routine, your life invariably feels at loose ends. You
constantly lay your head down at night, feeling like you didn’t make as much of
the day as you could have.
So if you haven’t set a
daily schedule for yourself yet, now’s the time to do it. It can be useful to
schedule out every hour of the day/week. But things during your work hours
rarely go as planned. So concentrate on those parts of the day you do have full
control over: your mornings and evenings.
“Bookend” your day by
creating a morning and evening routine: Decide exactly what time you’ll wake up
and go to sleep, and what you’ll do in the 1-2 hours after rising and before hitting
the hay. Be specific and write down this plan! You can learn more about the
power of morning and evening routines here.
If you already have a
routine, but it doesn’t seem to be working for you, it may be that your routine
no longer meshes with your reality, and the way your schedule and
responsibilities have shifted over time. Despite these changes, you keep trying
to fit your old routine into your new life, and that’s a recipe for
frustration.
In this case, use your
reset day to adjust your routines so they better fit your new schedule. Maybe
you’re no longer able to do your ultimate, super productive morning routine
anymore that consisted of meditating, journal writing, exercising, planning,
and reading. No big deal. Decide which of those tasks are the very most
important to you, eliminate the ones that aren’t as important, and make that
your new routine. Maybe you just work out in the morning and plan at night.
It’s better to have a routine you can stick to than a routine that just makes
you feel terrible about yourself. Even in pared down form, you’re still getting
important stuff done.
Hour 6: Plan for Not
Getting Off Track Again
A very occasional reset
day is sometimes necessary, but you don’t want to make them a habit. You may
have one vacation day to spare, but you probably don’t want to part with a week
of them!
To minimize the chance
of needing another reset day (at least anytime soon), make plans for how to
avoid getting off track again.
Do some introspection.
What were the main things that caused you to go off the rails? Your constantly
messy house? Your web surfing habits? Not having a set to-do list or a routine
– or just not using them?
Whatever factors are at
the heart of the problem, spend some time creating an action plan to address them.
If your problem was not having a routine or to-do list, hopefully you’ve
already solved those issues in the previous steps. If you spend so much time
looking at your phone that you can’t get anything else done, “declutter” your
digital life and download some apps that will curb your goal-sabotaging
surfing habit.
An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure.
Hour 7: Tie Up Any
Loose Ends
If there is anything
important you left undone in the above phases in order to move on to the next
step, now’s your chance to tie up those loose ends.
Hour 8:
Unwind/Rejuvenate
After spending a day
getting stuff done, treat yourself to something relaxing that will help your
mind and/or body recover. Take a nap, get a massage, sit in a sauna, take a
bath, go for a hike.
Find something that
feels good and do it. It will really recharge your batteries. I know it can be
hard to justify this kind of “indulgence,” but think of it as “sharpening the
saw” — a pause that will allow you to cut through your goals much more effectively
once you resume their pursuit.
The Next Day: Hit the
Ground Running
With
your physical and metaphorical house is in order, you’re ready to take on the
world. The decks are clear. An effective foundation has been set. Use the
momentum you built up during your reset day to crush goals and slay dragons.
You got this.
Hello again, dear
reader.
Today's conversation is
sort of a combination of one of the famous motivational or thought-provoking
excerpts that I like to present every once in a while. To give you some food
for thought dear reader, and a standard informational and insightful
conversation; today's conversation is going to discuss self-reliance and
include 31 writing and/or meditation thought provoking prompts to help you dear
reader digest your own understanding of self-reliance.
People often think of
self-reliance as being a physical art, i.e. being able to survive in the
wilderness. For weeks at a time, with nothing more than a Swiss Army knife a
stick of gum and a few toothpicks or having the ability to repair just about
anything in the garage or around the house. However, self-reliance is not
always necessarily in the physical realm. Self-reliance can also be mental
strength as well. For instance, having the mental strength to go against the
use of a political or other organized group, when you feel, dear reader, that a
specific viewpoint is counterintuitive to your beliefs; it may require serious
mental self-reliance on your part dear reader, to stick with your decisions and
go against the grain of the group. So hopefully dear reader, today's conversation
will help you gain a better understanding of the importance of both mental and
physical self-reliance...
The goal of
self-reliance is to achieve sovereignty in our connected, civilized world. It’s
to remember that your judgments are valid — even if, especially if,
they’re unpopular. It’s remembering you don’t need to be on a side, that the
team colors people try to throw on you may not actually represent who you are.
There’s no magic bullet
for self-reliance. There’s no step-by-step system to achieve it. There are,
however, some practices that will help us move towards it. I, along with
countless others, have found journaling to be a particularly effective one.
Below you’ll find 31
journaling prompts designed to help nudge you toward self-reliance. They’ll
help you think about and articulate pieces of yourself you might not have
considered before — at least not explicitly. They’ll help you recognize your
beliefs and find areas where you’re not sure what you believe. They’ll help you
think about situations you’re in and decisions you’re making and what to do
about them. In general, they’ll just help you look in the right direction.
The aim is to help you
go deeper into yourself so that you might better reset your relationships to
yourself, the world, and the people you spend time with.
I’d recommend writing
on each prompt for at least twenty minutes. It’s likely that these will serve
as jumping-off points and you’ll end your writing session on a completely
different topic having followed your ideas on an open-ended — and self-reliant
— course.
You can start working
on these prompts at any time, and do as many a day as you’d like (though I
don’t recommend tackling more than two a day, to make sure you give each
sufficient space and time for reflection). However, the number of prompts — 31
— makes them particularly suitable for tackling one a day as part of a
month-long exercise. Commit to making the 31 days ahead the month where you
finally begin to live a life in which you make decisions with primary respect
to your own experience of the world. When you finally begin to pay less
attention to the opinions of others, and start really being true to yourself.
When you finally start trusting yourself.
Day 1
“The primary cause of
disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.” ―Jiddu
Krishnamurti
What is something you
have or are pursuing, that other people say is worthwhile, but you haven’t
found valuable? Do you continue to pursue it based on the promises of others?
Day 2
“The virtue in most
request is conformity.” ―Emerson
“People say that what
we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really
seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so
that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances
with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture
of being alive.” ―Joseph Campbell
Where do you find the
most meaning in life and feel the most fully alive? Is there something you’d
love to do but don’t because the world thinks it’s silly or worthless or wrong?
Is there anything you do that you consider virtuous yet the world looks down
on? How do you handle the tension?
Day 3
“I would write on the
lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at
last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.” ―Emerson
If we don’t trust our
whims to guide our exploration of possibilities for our lives, we’ll quickly
find ourselves relying on others for answers.
What areas of your life
have you shut off to whims? Are there any you’ve written off? How might you try
following them responsibly? (Is it writing an outline for a ridiculous-sounding
blog post? Picking up that book that feels “unproductive”? Joining the boxing
gym you pass daily? Asking that girl out you’ve had your eye on? Booking the
trip you’ve been thinking about?)
Day 4
“The objection to
conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your
force.” ―Emerson
What pieces of your old
identity do you hold onto that are no longer serving you or you no longer
believe in wholeheartedly? Are they worth letting go of?
Day 5
To compete is to choose
to play somebody else’s game. This can be a massive source of energy, but it’s
also a dangerous game. The billionaire investor and founder of PayPal, Peter
Thiel, said that the fierce competition in his college career nearly kept him
from doing what he actually was meant to do. He later wrote in Zero to One,
“All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
When we’re locked in
competition we tend to obsess on doing the same thing but faster, bigger, or
cheaper. Competition can blind us to opportunities to truly distinguish
ourselves.
In fact, the fiercer
the competition, the more similar things get. Harvard Professor Youngme Moon
writes in her book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd that, “The
dynamic [of competition] is not unlike a popularity contest in which everyone
tries to win by being equal parts friendly, happy, active, and fun. Or an
election campaign in which all the candidates try to be charming, serious,
humble, and strong. Once everyone starts doing it, no one stands out.”
Put simply, Moon has
found that, “The more diligently firms compete with each other, the less
differentiated they can become.”
Even more often than
businesses, individual lives are ruined by being too preoccupied with
competition to look around. Where are you competing in your life that you don’t
actually want to be (e.g., money, audience, position, possessions, looks,
awards, travel, experiences etc.)? If you weren’t worried about winning that,
what would you focus on?
Day 6
“These are the voices
which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into
the world.” ―Emerson
Self-reliance often
means following our quiet, inner voice more faithfully. It means not just
listening to what we say, or even to what we think, but paying
more attention to what usually lies beneath our consciousness. Picasso himself
knew that what he wanted to express wasn’t his own idea:
“To know what you’re
going to draw, you have to begin drawing. . . . When I find myself facing a
blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of
myself interests me more than my own ideas.”
Picasso wasn’t aiming
to express his ideas but ideas that seemed to be beyond him. He
understood that self-reliance wasn’t about absolute control and knowing the
answer ahead of time, but diving into the unknown and trusting himself to
navigate.
Write about a time you
listened to that inner voice, then a time you ignored it. How did each turn
out? How did the conversations with your inner voice differ? How can you become
better attuned to those subtle nudgings?
Day 7
Ultimately, we come to
self-reliance by forgetting ourselves. It’s the kind of self-trust many
new parents feel because they finally have this thing outside themselves that
matters much more than themselves. We can access it by caring about anything
properly (a project, a movement, an idea, a person, etc.).
Milton Mayeroff
describes this dynamic in On Caring:
“Direction that comes
from the growth of the other should not be confused with being ‘other
directed,’ where this refers to the kind of conformity in which I lose touch
with both myself and the other. Rather, by following the growth of the other, I
am more responsive to myself, just as the musician is more in touch with
himself when he is absorbed in the needs of the music.”
Ironically, no matter
how physically self-reliant we become, if we never truly care for something
outside of ourselves we’ll never become self-reliant.
What do you care most
about? As in, what do you give yourself to most freely? How could you care for
it a little more perfectly? How does caring for this thing outside yourself
actually help you trust yourself more?
Day 8
“[W]e go to far less
trouble about making ourselves happy than about appearing to be so.” ―La
Rochefoucauld
“These are the voices
which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into
the world.” ―Emerson
Many times we want what
we want for no other reason than other people want it!
Take time today to ask
what you want to want. Not what you want, but what you want to want.
Some example shifts:
from wanting attention to wanting to help; from wanting an easy life to wanting
the struggle; from wanting fame to wanting relationships.
Not all these sets are
mutually exclusive, but one usually comes at the cost of the other. If you
could choose your desires, what would they be?
“It is easy in the
world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” ―Emerson
Day 9
Our posture toward the
information we take in matters a lot.
How do you approach
your nonfiction reading (offline and online)? How do you treat different
authors or personalities? Are you having a conversation with the articles and
books you read? Are you marking disagreements you have with them? Are you
making connections between them?
Day 10
Self-reliance doesn’t
demand that you make public every belief you hold. If you were to talk openly
about every controversial opinion you have you’d be pressured to defend those
ideas as well. For some, that could turn into a full-time job.
What are your most
controversial opinions? Why do you believe them? Even if they’re not worth
talking about publicly, it’s worth exploring them yourself.
Day 11
“I do not wish to
expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not a spectacle.” ―Emerson
Is your life a show
you’re putting on for others? Do you use social media to connect with others or
to erect a facade?
How would you live
differently if it wasn’t about the show but about creating the best life for
you, your loved ones, and the other humans you share this planet with?
Day 12
“The big question about
how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer
Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.” —Warren
Buffett
An inner scorecard is
something we can create ourselves and then look at to know whether or not we’re
doing well. An outer scorecard is something the world creates for us and then
judges us by. If we accept an outer scorecard we forfeit our self-reliance.
In investing, Buffett
has often acted against the crowd — sometimes losing money when others are
winning and missing out on massive trends — and has credited his inner
scorecard for helping him stay the course when otherwise he might have
abandoned ship.
Today, make a draft of
your internal scorecard. Make a list of things that will help you know whether
you’re on the right course — even if the world’s outer scorecard can’t see the
wins.
Day 13
“Envy is ignorance.”
—Emerson
Envy of someone’s
wealth is ignorance of the relationships, life experiences, and health that may
have been sacrificed to gain it. Envy of someone’s power is ignorance of the
tragic sense of inadequacy that may have provided the drive to achieve it.
Even though we often
use Social Media Highlight Reels to gauge a life, we know we shouldn’t.
Divorces can be preceded by a slew of romantic travel pictures. Few go to
Facebook to talk about their crippling mental illnesses. One doesn’t post
updates about familial turmoil online.
Make a list of people
you envy.
Would you trade places
with them? Would you give up your whole life for their whole life? Would you
switch spouses, health, history, mental health, etc. with them? What are the
potential downsides to their position in life? What sacrifices might you have
to make in order to get the piece of their life you want?
Day 14
Self-reliance isn’t
standing alone. Asking for help from friends, family, or professionals is an
important skill.
Joseph Campbell has
said that, “The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate [the] dragon,
break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships.”
It’s not about giving
up or using other people as crutches. It’s about being self-aware enough to
know when you need a hand or where you could use an outside opinion.
How could you better
use the help of those around you? Where and how is your ego holding you back
from getting assistance?
Day 15
List a few big events
from your past that caused you suffering. Was there some growth — or even some
good — that came from them? What growth? What good?
More challenging: can
you do this with the situations that are currently causing you
suffering?
This is a baby step
toward Nietzsche’s amor fati — the love of your fate. Which is no small
thing:
“My formula for human
greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward,
not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less
to conceal it . . . but to love it.”
Day 16
In The Gay Science,
Friedrich Nietzsche introduces the idea of “Eternal Return”:
“What, if some day or
night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to
you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live
once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same
succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the
trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is
turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'”
Basically, Nietzsche
asks the reader to imagine repeating this life, as it is lived this time, over
and over again for eternity. Nothing would change. You couldn’t make different
decisions or take on different attitudes. And you wouldn’t be conscious that
you’re reliving your life.
If you knew you would
undergo an endless cycle of Eternal Return, what changes in your attitudes and
actions would you make to your life right now? If there are things in your life
you wouldn’t want to repeat for eternity, why haven’t you changed them yet?
Remember, the goal is not just to endure this life, but to love it — all
of it. To amor fati.
(If you’re interested
in going deeper into this thought experiment, check out the full article on
the subject.)
Day 17
“A man should learn to
detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,
more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain
alienated majesty.” —Emerson
Recall a time or two in
which you had an idea for something, left it as an idea, and saw someone take
advantage of it later. Are you glad you didn’t pursue the thing? If not, what
can you do differently in the future when an idea grabs you? Try to be
specific; a bold claim of, “I’ll seize the opportunity!” will likely leave you
in the same situation again. What’s the plan?
Day 18
After hearing Emerson
debase the value of novels, a young college student, Charles Woodbury, became
deeply disappointed in the mentor he nearly worshipped. Nervously, with
“quivering lips,” Woodbury said he simply couldn’t agree with the philosopher’s
stance.
“Very well,” Emerson
answered with a twinkling eye. “I do not wish disciples.”
This moment, Woodbury
later remembered, “was a long step toward manhood.”
If you want to think
independently, it can be dangerous to become a “disciple” of another person.
(You can know them personally or not.) Is there someone you reflexively agree
with? Take some time to humanize them. List off their scandals and mistakes.
Write down something they might be wrong about. How does this change the way
you read, listen to, or converse with them? Does it loosen their hold over your
opinions? Are you able to think more critically about them?
Day 19
Make a list of areas
where you’re deferring your life. Things you’re waiting to do. How can you skip
or dramatically reduce the wait?
Why are you waiting?
Are your concerns based in reality?
If they are, how can
you make sure you never actually “wait”? What kind of active preparation can
you engage in now to be ready when your time comes?
Day 20
List the 5 activities
that energize you the most. How can you spend more time with them?
List the 5 activities
that drain you the most. How can you spend less time with them?
Day 21
“God will not have his
work made manifest by cowards.” —Emerson
Our ennui often comes
from holding back, from half-assing what we should be fully committed to. Where
could you break through if you went all the way? Where are you holding back?
What feels stagnant?
How can you give it
everything you have? Does it need more time? More intensity? More care?
Day 22
“Enlightenment means
taking full responsibility for your life.” —William Blake
“This is not your
responsibility, but it is your problem.” —Cheryl Strayed
We’re responsible for
our lives. Even when crap happens we had nothing to do with, it’s still our
problem. We may not be responsible for causing it, but it’s still our responsibility
to figure out how to deal with it. What areas of your life do you blame others
for? Or society? The economy? Your genes? How can you take responsibility for
the situation they threw you into?
Day 23
“[I]mitation is
suicide.” —Emerson
How have you modeled
your life after others? Have you lost yourself in the process?
Day 24
“A man must consider
what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity.” —Emerson
Make a longer list
(15+) of your basic assumptions about life. Go back and look at each critically.
Is this true? Why do you believe this thing? Because someone told you it’s the
truth or because you’ve seen it proven? Or because it’s something you’ve chosen
to have faith in?
Day 25
“A foolish consistency
is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divines.” —Emerson
When is the last time
you changed your mind about a deep-seated belief? Is there a belief you’re
holding onto, despite an accumulation of contrary evidence, because you’re
stubborn, or don’t want to feel inconsistent, or simply are afraid to let it
go?
Day 26
“The voyage of the best
ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient
distance and it strengthens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action
will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing.” —Emerson
Recall a time where you
were thrown off course only to find yourself where you intended to be — or
somewhere better.
How can you focus less
on the end destination, and more on doing what’s right, right now, when
you’re forced to take a detour?
Day 27
“If we live truly, we
shall see truly.” —Emerson
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
wrote, “Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.”
Is there an area where
confidence or action could actually straighten out your thinking more than
another book?
Day 28
“At times the whole
world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend,
client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet
door, and say — ‘Come unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their
confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity.
No man can come near me but through my act.” —Emerson
Emerson’s exhortation
that “The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent”
is intimidating. It’s hard to be indifferent to all circumstances;
still, we can work to become indifferent to more of them.
To Emerson,
self-possession matters greatly, but the point was never to become disconnected
from your humanity. The sentence that precedes the above quote: “But your
isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.”
When the world seems
intent on outraging you, how can you maintain your sanity without becoming a
misanthrope?
Is it caring about the
right things? Is it being so focused on your aim that every obstacle is just
fuel for the fire? Is it learning to tame your desires? To be more aware of
silly frustrations? What will work for you?
Day 29
“When we blather about
trivial things, we ourselves become trivial . . . You become what you give your
attention to.” —Epictetus
Reflect on how you
distribute your attention throughout the day. How much of it is directed to
what is truly important? How often do you allow yourself to become trivial? If
we become what we focus on, what are you becoming?
Day 30
“All life is an
experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When we imagine future
circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out
details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to
ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about
the things that happen later.” —Daniel Gilbert
If we are to rely on
our own experience about something, we’ve got to have experience with it in the
first place!
We’re terrible at
imagining how we might like something or how we might perform. We’ve got to
experiment. To get our hands dirty and find out firsthand whether or not we
like the thing, or if the study applies to us, or if the thing we’ve been
dreaming about is really what we want to tackle.
Where have you been
indecisive, stuck between two choices about which you only have abstract
information? Where have you been making assumptions? How can you test those
assumptions? How can you conduct an experiment to get firsthand experience of
something?
Day 31
Having the help of
others is one of the best gifts in life. No matter how much help we get,
though, there is always a step that only we can take. Joseph Campbell talks
about this beautifully. Here he is in conversation with Bill Moyers for The
Power of Myth:
Moyers: “When I take that journey and
go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?”
Campbell: “If you have someone who can
help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by
oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s
ego. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”
Which dragon are you
battling now? How and where is your ego holding you back from making progress?
Have you been preparing too long to act? Have you been waiting for others to
finish the battle for you? Have you been using others to avoid the next step
you know you must take?
Are you ready to slay
the dragon yourself?
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