Stories and Wisdom from a Life Fully Lived

Category: Truth

  • In Lieu of One Life Purpose

    Instead of Your Life’s Purpose:

    A meditation on meaning that explores the non-linear ways life progresses beyond a simple conception of a personal mission.

    A common misperception many of us have regarding a meaningful life is that we have a special purpose in life—and that once we find it, all our confusion ends. We’re saved from the happenstance and absurdity of our lives.

    While some people may discover a mission that does this, most of us will not—at least not in a way that makes for a good “Hero’s Journey” story.

    Our infatuation with stories portraying “the hero’s journey” select for meaning stories that scratch a certain human itch. They project a narrative simplicity backwards onto lives full of false leads, crises, and dead ends. They gloss over long periods of despair, the noise of randomness, the elements of chance, and personal and moral failings to tell the story of someone special who carried out a special mission. We have been told these stories all our lives, so we have deeply internalized them. “If only I could find my purpose!” And there’s actually truth to this. It’s me. It’s the story of my life.

    There is an alternate truth to my life as well. It’s premised on the idea that life is full of randomness punctuated by sudden moments—crises and opportunities—with vast potential for meaning making, when our skills and virtues shine.

    Rather than struggle to discover a purpose or vocation, we become people who can recognize and exploit opportunities to create meaning as they arise—resourceful and audacious people who live adventurous lives.

    This approach means not waiting to find your story arc, but recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission (purpose).

    Where does meaning come from?

    Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe, there’s people always dying trying to keep them alive.”

    Bright Eyes

    The meaning I’m talking about is the kind that relieves a certain despair—the despair that comes from knowing that we must suffer and die and wondering if anything can be worthwhile in the face of these facts.

    Some sources of meaning seem to be:

    • participation in something larger that will survive ourselves—a nation, a family, a faith
    • creativity and flow states—bringing something genuinely novel into the world. When all our talents, including our deeply held and latent ones are used, this is more meaningful than when we are schlepping along.
    • love—when our sense of wellbeing has loci outside of ourselves—friends, family, and lovers
    • pro-social utility, or good works—creating a surplus of security and resources that others can use to survive and pursue their own sense of meaning
    • an internal sense of coherence, wholeness, and dignity

    Some people may find their sense of meaning is satisfied entirely from one of the above sources. Most of us, however, develop a portfolio of meaning—we have multiple sources of it in our lives, and cannot in fact derive it from only one source any more than we can be healthy on a diet of bread and water.

    What is the linear approach?

    The linear approach imagines that the meaning of our lives can be reduced to a mission, like the kind that fixes saints, heroes and social reformers in the historical imagination. “Created a vaccine.” “Expelled an occupier.” “Founded a religious order.” Of course, these accomplishments may admit multiple achievements or adventures—but are usually reduced to one overarching narrative.

    This imagines that if we found a sufficiently noble cause to devote our lives to—one to which our talents were suited and appropriate—we would be free to the suffering that is caused by the knowledge of death (and the possibility that it might strike at any time).

    Of course, there are people who have been personally fulfilled from devoting their life to a cause. For many, though, it does not work—our noble causes run into moral complexities on the ground, or are mirages based on a distorted vision of the world. They may leave us open to manipulation by careerist sociopaths, who know that we will chase any projected image that offers a shred of meaning, like a cat chasing a laser dot.

    What is the non-linear approach?

    The non-linear approach is different—rather than trying to discover a particular arc path and follow it to its conclusion, it recognizes that there will be many moments and opportunities to create meaning that arise in our life. The idea is not that we will take part in one story that can be easily wrapped up by our biographers—but that there are many adventures and quests that we can pursue. Rather than the attitude of the saint who is given a mission by God, it takes the attitude of the swashbuckling adventurer who goes out to seek his fortune.

    Instead of imagining yourself as the hero of a Hollywood movie, imagine yourself as a hearty ancestor that you might brag about when drunk: the one who rode bareback, founded a town, fought a grizzly bear, raised 10 kids, saved her son’s life by drinking the governor under the table, and went to the frontier to stay one step ahead of the hangman and her gambling debtors.

    This approach to the problem of meaning recognizes that, rather than trying to discern a mission, it is better to become a certain person—a person who can act on and recognize opportunities to make meaning when they are seen.

    Opportunism and Power Laws

    One advantage of the non-linear approach is that it does not demand that we devote every spare moment of our time to fulfilling some pre-ordained goal. It is more adaptive to the realities of power laws—of moments of high payoff or high risk—than of the day-to-day grind of accrual. If our lives are rich in opportunities for meaning, rather than defined by a singular narrative arc, we can act decisively at particularly important moments rather than imagining that every moment is equally meaningful. There are profound asymmetries and power laws at play in the pursuit of meaning—a split second decision might be the most important one you make; years of lounging around in cafes and on beaches might pay off more than years of hard work—if it results in one excellent idea.

    Trying to treat all of our time as equally meaningful and fungible because you can devote it to The Cause leads to absurdities. Consider this example of someone debating whether he should tell someone their car trunk is open:

    I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can’t actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I’m sure it has, in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car’s interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally, I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.

    Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify genuine concern for another’s welfare, or fear of guild for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn’t deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.

    But in my case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?

    Time is not fungible—a moment of opportunity, or a chance to respond appropriately to a crisis, might not occur again. Our creative powers do not flow smoothly and evenly like water from the tap to the drain, but chaotically like a babbling brook going from the mountains to the ocean—with different shoals, rapids, pools, and speeds along the way. Believing that our efforts must flow from smooth, even and continuous effort rather than coming in uneven bursts leads to unnecessary guilt and anxiety about “wasted” time.

    The need to regulate our time into a continuous flow is the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It is something we do to serve economies of scale in which we are interchangeable parts. But meaning, creative power and fortune arrive on their own schedules, and imagining that you can or should devote every waking moment to something is absurd.

    When there is only one possible source of meaning in our life, we adapt ourselves for efficiency: our goal might be to win souls for Jesus, or stop Skynet. We make ourselves machine-like. When the world is full of possibilities for meaning, we adapt ourselves for resiliency, flexibility and maneuverability. Resiliency, because we must survive long enough to take advantage of these latent sources of meaning, and flexibility, and maneuverability in order to act quickly and appropriately when they come up. Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.

    Interests and Projects

    Giving up on a life’s purpose does not mean there are not areas which are more fruitful to pursue than others. When you are interested in something, this suggests a fertile area. If nothing else, interests represent low-hanging fruits of reward-to-effort payoff: when you are pursuing an interest, rather than an obligation, you can use the energy you would otherwise need to browbeat yourself into actually doing things. Therefore it seems so easy to read about whatever your personal obsession is – astrology, kabbalah, entomology – rather than whatever the marketplace or superego tells you should pursue – tax law, Bible study, a programming language (these are examples only many people have interests or disinterests in these subjects!) Like the God of the Old Testament, we will love whom we will love, and we will be fascinated by that which fascinates us.

    If we have an interest, there is a challenge to make it meaningful – with some things, this will be easier than others, because our culture that tells us how to do has given a script to us so. More obscure interests represent more of a challenge – but also easy opportunities. A quick glance at the internet will reveal artists who are using new media to create works of brilliance in unexpected places. There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries. Your heroes become what they were by breaking genuinely new ground – doing things that those before them thought were unthinkable. To be like them, you must surf the void at the frontiers of meaning – and discover meaning where no one else thought it would be, transforming harsh barrens into lush gardens.

    The linear approach of finding a mission and dedicating one’s life to it – is typically best for those who have an overpowering, obsessive interest in something. If you are like this, chances are this article is not for you, and you are not grasping at meaning but hoping to read more about the Thing which so consumes your thoughts. If this is the case, your vocation has already chosen you.

    Selfishness, Love, and Integrity

    Because several loci of meaning – pro-social utility, love, and self transcendence – involve escapes from our localized self interest, we can feel guilt or a dearth of meaning when we act selfishly, when we cannot love as often or as deeply as we should, or when our interests do not lead down paths which generate surpluses and resources for others.

    Sometimes it is, in fact, necessary to put others first – you may have to take time out from your career or hobby to care for a child or an ailing parent, or to help your community or nation deal with some crisis. You may realize that you are spending too much time in the workshop and not enough time with your children. But taken too far, this thinking can also produce crippled, resentful individuals who give back only a fraction of what they would have if they were flourishing. Your children need food, clothes and education, and they need your love and guidance – but they also need to see you happy and engaged with life.

    Most of us have probably met some version of the pinched and crabby moralist – one who dedicated his or her life to some cause and did not get the spiritual payoff they thought they would, and are now resentful and controlling. There was a time when this was me. Thankfully, that period is part of my past.

    Instead of selflessness, strive for integrity. When you create, it should be things you think are good – that honestly portray your inner and outer world as best you are able. When you are honestly pursuing your own values and vision – and not subordinating them – you are more likely to generate meaning than if you are navigating a maze of compromises with some goal in mind. Especially if these compromises are dictated to you by a nagging superego that torments you with an image of moral heroism which you can never live up to.

    This requires faith and willingness to trust your values and intuitions rather than the well-worn stories dictated to you by culture. Recognize that the heroes whose lives inspired you did what they did, mostly by going out into the unknown and doing what others thought was impossible. This is not, incidentally, a guarantee that if you do so you will succeed – for the world to be a meaningful one, there must be uncertainty and risk.

    Meta-ethics and Meaning

    This approach to meaning – becoming a certain kind of person who can act appropriately in response to opportunities for meaning making – lends itself well to a particular school of meta-ethics, which is virtue ethics. Deontology, (a study of duty and obligations) represents the ethics of duty: the floor beneath which we must not sink, if we are to co-operate with others to pursue the goods of survival and flourishing. Consequentialism is the ethics of power and emergency, when there are clearly defined stakes which must be traded off against one another. In its utilitarian version, if flounders, precisely because a definition of “the good” requires more legibility than is typically available: of both our own values and the results of our actions in a real-world environment.

    The non-linear approach to meaning is about becoming the person who will, given a chance, act effectively to realize their values in this world, even if those values are not articulable except as a felt sense of meaning. It requires us to become developed along multiple axes of development: capable of risking it all in a dangerous, uncertain and beautiful world full of hazard and opportunity.

  • Just for YOU

    This is an excerpt from Marc and Angel’s Newsletter MarcandAngel.com

    You’re likely familiar with what’s known as the Serenity Prayer. It goes like this:

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

    There’s an important lesson here—one that’s very often glossed over…

    When a chaotic reality is swirling around us, we often try to relieve our anxiety by exerting our will over external things we cannot control.

    It helps us stave off one of the most dreaded feelings: complete powerlessness.

    With that in mind, I have good news and bad news.

    The bad news is that generally speaking, almost everything is outside your control. What other people do, whether it will rain tomorrow, whether or not your efforts will be appreciated—all of these outcomes depend on factors that aren’t you.

    That’s also the good news.

    The friction and frustration created by trying to change things you cannot change is the crucible where a ton of unhappiness is born. Accepting that most things are outside your influence gives you explicit permission to let them unfold as they may.

    Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it this way:

    “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our actions.”

    Overcoming the “three big un’s” that so many of us struggle with daily—unhappiness, unconvinced things will ever change, unsure what to do next—begins with understanding what you can control and what you cannot.

    The mental shift here is not easy. Most of us have spent a lifetime worrying about things that we can’t control. Society practically encourages this. For most, it’s a bona fide habit…

    A habit that should be replaced with a healthy understanding of how much we can actually change. Again though, it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around all this when you’re constantly hearing…

    “Why don’t you just get over it?” “Just let it go.”

    We’ve all heard some flavor of this advice before. And it passes the sniff test, to a certain extent.

    I mean, “time heals all wounds,” right? Well, yes… sort of. But wounds heal differently depending on how they’re treated.

    Left alone, a gash in your skin will leave a large scar and be vulnerable to injury again in the future. This is why we get stitches—it helps the wound heal in a way that limits the chance of re-injury down the road.

    Emotional wounds work the same way. Given enough time, most emotional pain will diminish—that’s true.

    But just “getting over it” leaves scars.

    In the emotional sense, scars equal baggage—baggage we carry with us into every aspect of our lives. These scars grow and accumulate until one day you wake up suffering from one or more of the “three un’s” (unhappiness, unconvinced things will ever change, unsure what to do next).

    Don’t get over it. Go through it.

    Honestly, I understand the desire to “get over” difficult experiences rather than facing them. Revisiting painful memories and facing our demons is really, really hard. And we’re hard-wired to not cause ourselves pain.

    However, as our parents taught us, ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away.

    And in addition to the scars, to ignore or downplay a wound puts you at risk for infection, emotionally as well as physically.

    Unresolved issues from the past take up residence in your mind and influence your decisions, your relationships, and your attitudes.

    They rob you of your happiness. Doing the hard thing now will be hard, yes. But it’s far better than the alternative.

    Of course, doing the hard yet necessary thing can feel impossible.

    One way I address this is the practice of being “hootless” meaning that I try to recognize the things I cannot or should not change, relax and just ‘let go’ of those things and let the river flow where it will. While I may influence the behaviour of others, that is best accomplished through example. Thus allowing them to choose their own behaviour rather than ‘shoulding’, bullying or coercing them to accept MY values. After all, aren’t we all responsible for our own choices and the consequences therefrom?

  • Truth

    Postmodernism: what it got right and what it got wrong

    We don’t actually do that much with most of our ideas. So their truth value doesn’t matter all that much.

    For example, I have all kinds of opinions about climate change, nuclear energy and my neighbor’s haircut. But I hardly use those as an input for decisions. Like I would when I accelerate from an intersection because I think the traffic light is green. If that view turns out to be wrong, my accelerating was a bad call and potentially dangerous. So truth matters there. But most of our opinions are not like that. They are like our thoughts on climate change. There are no actions we can take whose payoffs (for us as individuals) depend on whether our beliefs are true or false. The rare exception would be someone living near the Florida coast, say, who moves inland to avoid predicted floods. Or maybe the owner of a hedge fund or insurance company who places bets on the future evolution of the climate. But for the rest of us, and for most of our beliefs, they don’t have to be grounded in truth, because the truth value doesn’t have any effect on our life.

    This is different at the collective level. Most of what we know as a society is aimed at (ultimately) leading to better options or more informed decisions. Hence the emphasis on valorization in science.

    Truth is critical to political decision-making, because well-considered political decisions can only be made when the facts are on the table. If you want to go somewhere, you have to know where you are and how to get there. What problems and challenges does society face and how did they come about? What kinds of measures are possible? How well do they work? What do they cost? And so on.

    This raises a question. Why are some statements considered appropriate to base those decisions on—they are ‘the facts’—and other statements are not? Who determines what claims we take as the basis for making policy, and by what criteria do they do so?

    Who makes the facts

    Who is considered legitimate to provide facts—that is, whose opinion those in power should refer to in order to justify their decisions—is a matter of social structure. And, in our society, politicians must cite science to justify basing their decisions on certain ideas and not others. If the government rolls out policies that assume vaccines are safe and effective, it should cite scientific research demonstrating their benign functionality. They should not cite their mother-in-law’s analysis or their preferred religious book take on the subject. That’s not an acceptable justification.

    That position of science seems obvious to us now, but it’s heavily contested historically. In ancient Greece, for example, leaders had to justify war-related decisions by referring to the utterance of an oracle. (I know this because I watched the movie 300, which is historically accurate according to my mother-in-law). More recent example: In the fall of 1987, at the First International Conference on Scientific Miracles of the Koran and Sunnah (held in Pakistan), one speaker said, “If there is a contradiction between a definitive [Koranic] text and conjectural science, then the scientific theory is refuted.” For a long time indeed, it has been the religious consensus, not scientific one, that determined what was and what was not recognized as fact. Just ask Galileo and all the helio centrists who died at the stake.

    The fact that, today, science is considered legitimate to provide facts, and other sources like the Bible don’t have that status, has more consequences than you’d think. It explains why parents who unsuccessfully treat their children with prayer are charged with manslaughter, while parents who unsuccessfully try surgery are not. It also explains why evolutionary theory features in textbooks and creationism are not taught to our children as knowledge. “Because science thinks this is probably true,” is a good reason to teach a claim as such. “Because my ideology deems this likely,” is not.

    Why do they make the facts

    Anyone can believe and say whatever they want, but science is the only legitimate party that can turn claims into a fact—to something we base policy, curricula, and prosecutions on. It creates mutual knowledge that is normatively accepted. It produces “received” or “official” or “accepted” statements about some situation. If you wish whatever you believe to have that status, you need to make sure it becomes part of the scientific consensus.

    This arrangement does not sit well with many people who feel ignored or oppressed by this monopoly: creationists, homeopaths, astrologers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, Q’Anon followers, and followers of several other faiths. A common criticism on their part is that this structure excludes minorities—like them—from influencing policy and thus from power. But is that fair? After all, the scientific method is no less subject to uncertainty than other methods. And the opinion of experts is still just that—an opinion. An opinion of people with similar outlooks and biases. Old white men. A cultural elite, intimately connected to other powerful networks in our society. Isn’t that suspicious?

    That their interpretation can justify policy decisions, that your idea must convince scientific experts to be recognized as fact, is mainly so because they have won a power struggle. Or so goes the standard postmodern critique. How facts are chosen, expressed, valued and used, according to that philosophy, is always a matter of power relations and not of the truth, because there is no one objective, correct way to interpret those facts in the first place.

    The French philosopher Foucault, in particular, did not tire of proclaiming that “truth” is merely the product of a war of interpretations in which the victor imposes his dominant discourse on the loser. Likewise, Rob Wijnberg, editor-in-chief of The Correspondent, infers that “There is no such thing as truth, because—where there is one reality—every person experiences, interprets and describes it differently.”

    And if there is no such thing as truth in the first place, then why are they, from the establishment, allowed to decide what is true and thus what we base policy, curricula and prosecutions on?

    “Lazy postmodernism”

    Whether it’s true or not, this idea of ​​’everyone experiences the world differently therefore there is no objective truth’ is often used by postmodern thinkers as an argument for their claim that all claims of knowledge (such as those made by the Bible and those made by science) are equally valid. “The current attack on truth and factuality,” notes the Dutch writer Bas Heijne, is “the unfortunate result of lazy postmodernism that declares every truth to be relative and sees in science a conspiracy of a white, patriarchal culture to secure its own power and dominance.”

    The mysterious popularity of such analyses leads, first, to a changed attitude towards truth. The relativism of ‘you have your truth and I have mine’ seems more and more popular these days.

    Even worse: if the truth has many sides and interpreting reality is mainly a matter of interpretation, and a fact is nothing more than what prevails in the power struggle of interpretations, then my interpretation, my truth, is just as justified as the scientific one. I am not less right, just less powerful.

    Accordingly, I am justified in clinging to my truth with its accompanying “alternative facts”, and to demand recognition for that truth. Because I am just as sincerely convinced of my the correctness of my interpretation as the next person.

    My opinion should be given just as much respect, the same status, as any other.

    And so right-wing creationists insist that their ideas be taught alongside “science-based” theories. And left-wing populists demand the same status for their unscientific critical race theory.

    Whether it comes from woke activists bemoaning the dominance of white patriarchy, or from the alt-right opposing the dominance of liberalism, such rhetoric carries a promise. Those ‘hegemonic’ power structures should be questioned, everyone should be entitled to their perspective.

    But as soon as truth becomes a mere matter of perspective, everyone can make their own. Hence, while “the ideology of postmodernism [is] miles from Trump’s, the intellectual vandalism on concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ [is] similar,” according to philosopher of science, Maarten Boudry.

    Clearly, something went wrong with postmodernism.

    Too much relativism

    Let’s admit: facts are sometimes difficult to uncover, and can leave room for different interpretations. Reality does not just present itself on a tray, but is always approached from a certain perspective. Postmodernism has helped us to reconsider some simplistic views of objectivity and knowledge.

    Postmodernism is also right that the established powers that be have more influence on the distribution of money, time and energy necessary to uncover facts and build a shared picture of reality. Yet, there are many truths that are not the product of pure power alone. For example, it was eventually accepted that sugar is worse for health than certain types of fat, despite a lobby by the powerful sugar industry. Ditto for the statement that smoking is bad for you—now recognized as true despite the opposition of power.

    Postmodernism is correct that truth, for its association with power, is never fully divorced from politics and social conflict. So the question of holding command over truth leads to a battle for epistemic authority. However, the fact that truth and power are intertwined does not mean that truth claims are all about power.

    Postmodernism’s deflation of truth has gone too far in another way.

    Once again, let’s admit: neutral data doesn’t exist. Data can only make themselves known through an infrastructure that is set up for that purpose. So scientific facts are not a simple reflection of the world as it is, but the product of a wide network of research practices, validation structures, professional networks and political dynamics that create and sustain these truths. So we cannot speak of The Truth. But why should that lead to a relativism in which every view is equally true?

    From the shocking observation that facts do not come to us out of the blue, but are the outcome of a human-scientific process, you cannot conclude that therefore they are just another subjective interpretation. In fact, contrary to the postmodernist step from 1) criticism of the belief in The Truth to 2) the conclusion that all forms of knowledge are equally valid, you can gauge some claim’s likely truth value precisely from analyzing this very process. By examining how an idea came about, you can already make a first estimate of how likely it is to be correct. Does the statement come from some dated book, of which we know that many of its other claims—such as about the age of our planet—are incorrect? Or from modern experiments that have proven to work?

    Postmodernism amplifies the power problem instead of solving it

    But suppose that we abolish all criteria for factuality. This is what postmodernism seems to prescribe. Because we don’t want to privilege certain statements over others. That’s unfair and makes it all a power struggle. Have we then taken a step forward?

    Well, if objectivity and truth don’t exist, and if everyone is entitled to their perspective, why not white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, too? If you no longer believe in truth and facts, how can you fight lies?

    Without belief in a shared truth and in the ability to transcend our ideological differences and divergent perspectives, the law of the strongest is the only thing left.

    Precisely to prevent that, you need a shared understanding of what a statement ‘must do’ to get the (privileged) status of fact. To be included in policy decisions, prosecutions and curricula. Now that criterion is: the statement must convince scientific experts. Yes, this creates a position of power for scientists, whose analysis can’t not provide absolute certainty. But it is a fallacy to think that abolishing gatekeepers of truth also solves the (alleged) problem of power relations.

    Once you’ve abolished those, the hold of the ruler only becomes stronger. Now political decisions still have to be justified with a reference to science—so the ruler has no free rein. But if we see all criteria for factuality as equally valid (for even scientific truth does not escape power relations, so it is no better than other products of power relations), then any ruler can justify every decision in every possible way. Politicians can then, for example, shamelessly ignore scientific evidence, based on the opinion of the energy lobby.

    After all, the lobbies present their truth, which is just as true as the scientific one.

    Precisely without a shared standard against which to weigh justifications, when everything is equally true and equally permissible, the powerful ruler has free rein as in days of yore.