Most things don’t work. Ever since my early twenties when I found myself inexplicably unhappy, I’ve been looking for things that work. Resolutions and experiments. Things to do.

Quality of life is the only thing I was ever after. Not happiness exactly — because being happy all the time is impossible — but a day-to-day existence that creates it pretty easily.

A lot of things seem to work for a while, but then wear off or have a different effect. Some things have conditional or circumstantial effects. But there are five simple things to do that I’ve found to be consistently, disproportionately helpful in moving towards a more fulfilling life.

I’m not claiming mastery of these five things that work. But I am claiming that there is no question that they work. If I had to speak to a graduating high school class, this is what I’d tell them. If a meteor was about to hit earth and all I had time to do was shout advice to the people lucky enough to be allowed on the getaway ship, this is what I’d shout. I never have to puzzle about how to make life better, if I’m not already fully exploiting the outstanding benefits of these five things that always work.

1) Killing conspicuous silences

What makes life good, more than anything, is other people. The value of what those people bring to your life depends on how easy it is for you to be with each other. With almost everyone, we start from ice cold.

Alienation is born in uncomfortable silences. A part of my mind has a stubborn hangup about throwing things out there just to see if they trigger a dialogue. But that hangup has never served me.

Violating it has. It’s nearly always better to say something.

I do like silence, and I think sharing a good silence with someone you know can be empowering, but conspicuous silences do seem to be invariably harmful when you’re getting to know somebody. If a silence comes with tension, and they usually do, it’s best to interrupt it.

Whether I choose to let the silence fester, or take a swing at it with a dull question about how school’s going or whether a particular movie is worth seeing, I learn the same thing — relationships of any kind grow best when words are exchanged, and sometimes it takes a little push. Language is the best fertilizer, and if a generous application of words doesn’t help it grow, then nothing will. I am convinced nearly all of my friendships and acquaintances could have been halted in the beginning by a divisive silence at some point, had nobody offered something. As a rule, say something.

2) Keeping everything clean

I mean this mostly in terms of your physical environment, but there’s no way to clean up your home or workspace without feeling cleaner inside your head. Most people just have so much needless junk in their lives, and believe that each possession is only a possession because it’s necessary.

Things are useless except for the experiences they can provide, prevent or improve. But pick a random possession from your house and ask yourself what experiences it really is improving for you. Not what it could improve, but what its presence actually does for you.

Everything — on your desk, in your closet, stacked on your mantle — has a tax on the mind. If you don’t believe me, get rid of most of what you own, find a proper place for everything else and see the difference in how the day looks — in how life looks — when you wake up.

3) Having a big thing on the horizon

A trip, a major purchase, a move, a project. Something you know will happen, and will leave life different. An impending big thing is a lifeline that makes rough moments softer.

These things do often involve an exchange of money, but the net cost can still be zero. The decision to reallocate your time and money is free. Give up one thing for the other, that’s all you can ever do anyway. Bring your lunch every day, and know you’ll be visiting Italy. Kill your Starbucks habit, and take up watercolors. Cancel cable, buy a camera.

It also softens almost every disappointment between now and the big thing. Your presentation didn’t go well, but you’re still going to Spain next summer.

The big thing on the horizon reminds you that routine days don’t only add up to more routine days. Shakeups are on the way. Always have a big thing on the way. Write them all down and you have a bucket list.

4) Stopping and sitting

The most convincing proof that I am a totally irrational being is my relationship to meditation. There is no question of its benefits — not only does it have direct effects on my mood and physical state, but it leads me to better decisions, it leaves me more observant and grateful, it shrinks anxiety and self-consciousness. It’s been years since I’ve had any doubt that the greatest contribution I can make to my quality of life (not to mention the quality of life of others) is to stop and sit down and cultivate attention.

It’s an enormously high-leverage activity, yet I always seem to have something more important to do. I’ve chastised myself for not being disciplined enough to reserve 20 or 30 minutes for proper sitting meditation, but even a minute of committed sitting goes such a long way. It’s no-brainer if there ever was one. It helps absolutely everything.

5) Seeking out the like-minded

This is another thing that seems like it should happen organically, but doesn’t. No matter who you are, there are specific sensitivities in you that may not be getting the stimulation they need. We don’t pick our families, we tend to fall into friendships and courtships, and so the haphazard group of people that comes to populate your immediate home and social life is not necessarily going to nurture your finest sensitivities.

Nothing is better for your creativity, for your capacity to find and express what only you can express, than to find people whose artistic and ideological values you share. I’m not talking about making more friends, but that might be inevitable. Your friends don’t necessarily share them, and the people who share them might not necessarily be your friends.

I’d guess almost everyone has an artistic or intellectual interest that has been driven into hibernation by the values and expectations of the people around them. I wonder how many people would take up design, athletics, painting, photography, calligraphy, yoga or martial arts if there were only one other person in their lives who was already immersed in it.

***

Photo by bitzcelt

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NEW YORK, NY — Last Wednesday, thousands of students of all levels of education woke up to find their sole source of knowledge gone.

Visitors arriving at Wikipedia were greeted by a black screen, with a small number of words on it. The words, if read, explained that Wikipedia had temporarily shut its doors to protest a congressional bill that could shut it down permanently.

Having left their assignments until two days before their Friday morning due dates, the nation’s students had no time to read the forty or so explanatory words and instead made heartfelt appeals to Twitter, demanding it inform them of why they could not access Wikipedia.

Suddenly finding that they had no access to knowledge whatsoever, mass confusion descended on the student population, and the finger pointing began. Everyone from Julian Assange to the Soap industry was indicted.

After much investigative texting and all-caps ranting, Wikipedia emerged as the prime suspect in Wikipedia’s disappearance.

“I think Wikipedia planned this shit,” says class president hopeful Daniel Ornelas, having outdone his fellow students by skimming the three explanatory sentences on Wikipedia’s blackout page, or perhaps even clicking the “Learn more” link.

Once the perpetrator was identified, the outrage was emphatic and palpable as the students recognized the abject injustice in Wikipedia’s temporary refusal to continue to provide invaluable information for free:

By diligently studying volumes of text-message sized broadcasts, the more astute students learned that Wikipedia’s disappearance was due to a conflict between political forces and some manner of activism — but for the throngs of desperate classgoers, a day’s worth of Wikipedia access proved to be an unthinkable price to pay for any sort of protest, regardless of what it hoped to achieve. Assignments could be set back 24 hours or more, grades on the coming test could suffer dramatically.

Yet most students, too distressed by their impending assignments, gave up trying to decipher the complex motives behind Wikipedia’s inaccessible condition, and had no alternative but to continue shouting their grief into the surviving social networks.

Enraged at Wikipedia for not being there that day, students harbored no patience for the day’s other development — rumors about a possible connection between the catastrophic effect of Wikipedia’s temporary absence, and the reason it decided to make itself temporarily absent. Crucial schoolwork had to be done, and Wikipedia was not upholding its end of the unspoken agreement it has had with students since 2007.

Though it seemed like it might last forever, the horrific day eventually came to a satisfying close. Service was restored at midnight eastern time, and a nation of beleaguered youths were finally able to resume their educations.

As relieved students everywhere pushed aside their respective stacks of almost-used of library books and got to work, a Palo Alto senior addressed Wikipedia with a forgiving tweet, summarizing his generation’s sentiment almost perfectly: “As long as you never let this happen again, I don’t even wanna know why you’re being such a bitch today.”

****

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Photo by theexhibitionist

New Year’s Eve, for the first time, I had an alarming moment when I realized spaceships really were watching me through the ceiling. They knew where I was in the house. I was troubled by it and said so to my friend, but by midnight I forgot, and felt much better.

Rewind a week or two. I was taking adorable pictures of my toddler nephew typing on his grandmother’s iPad, when I had one of those bewildering, revelatory moments.

I realized I was photographing a member of the first generation that will be able to revisit its entire life in sparkling, high resolution. Between me, his parents and his grandmother, there are easily more photos of him than there have been days in his life.

His brother is six months now. In 2081, when they’re both old men, they’ll be able to access their childhood in extraordinary detail. They’ll see their first Christmases, their first bike rides, their graduations and wedding days all in high resolution images and HD video, and it might seem strange to them that previous generations did not have much access at all to their pasts, aside from memories and a few grainy photographs.

Contrast that with my father, (1947-2008) of whom I’ve only seen one or two pictures of as a child. In those pictures he’s someone I don’t know. He has a smooth sepia face that could belong to just about anyone except my dad. He wore a moustache from the day I was born to the day he died and I couldn’t recognize my father in any other face.

The kids born after about 2007 constitute the first generation that’s younger than Facebook. Today, it’s fairly normal for human beings make their first appearance on the internet when they are less than a week old. Think of how many newborn photos you’ve seen posted by your Facebook friends this last year.

The generation growing up now will be the first one for whom the internet has always been around. For them there will have always been a virtual world of data that follows and documents everyone and everything they know about. Every person they know has an online profile, every object they own or place they visit has a wikipedia article.

They will take for granted that everyone they know has information about them — photos, dates, quotes and other data — floating around in the ether, accessible from anywhere, and virtually indestructible. 

I’m still getting used to the idea. I have an app on my phone that lets you take a photograph of something, and it will tell you what it knows about it if it recognizes it. It works about 80% of the time. I can take a picture of a book and it will return the Amazon page for it or the Wikipedia article for it. I can photograph a business card and it will show me everything Google can find on that person. It can recognize public landmarks, art, photographs, and publications. It can recognize famous people in photos, by scouring Google Images for similar photos. It takes about ten seconds and it’s free.

It’s still fairly experimental, but it’s easy to imagine where this technology will be five or ten years. I’d bet any money that before today’s todders graduate high school, they’ll be able to point their phone at a person walking down the street and find out at least their name and a host of linked information, most of the time. Probably well before that.

This speculative article was big on StumbleUpon four years ago, and at the time it seemed so far away. Now it doesn’t.

When I was a teenager, all internet was dialup. You had to turn it on and off, and it occupied your phone line. Search engines were atrocious, virtually unusable. You couldn’t even find out the score to the Giants/Packers game last night. It probably wasn’t even on the internet at all, and the search engines of the day only had the vaguest ideas what you were on about.

You had to take what you could get, which was never quite what you were after. When you were done poking around at whatever decent websites you could find, you turned it off and went back to real life. Today, online and offline no longer have a clear boundary, and this coming generation won’t really understand that there ever was one.

Anyone born into a high-tech society at this point in the game will be totally, irreversibly accustomed to information served up on command, like my generation was born without it occuring to them that there was a time before TV.

When they’re teenagers they’ll be able to ask their phones “Did Mom smoke weed in college?” and instantly have pictures and third party accounts, if the data is out there somewhere. And there will be lots of data out there somewhere.

I was on Facebook before I ever decided to be on Facebook. Four or five years ago, I was at a pub with some acquaintances and they started talking about Facebook. Being a staunch holdout, I tuned out and waited for a new topic, because I had nothing to do with Facebook and wasn’t interested in it.

Then while I was spacing out, one of the girls poked me in the ribs. “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook, you know.”

Oh?

I did eventually cave, as many of you know, and now there’s more about me online than you could possibly want to know.

There’s really no going back now. Once something’s online, there’s no way to get it off. That’s a 21st century maxim that warrants some pondering:

Once you put it online, it belongs to everyone, forever. Thank you.

The three slippery slopes

I think we sometimes underestimate how much of us is out there, and how easy it is to find.

Whenever someone contacts me for an interview or some other request, if I don’t know who they are I Google them. I search them on Facebook, which almost always yields a picture of them even if they have an unusually tight set of privacy restrictions. If they have any online presence, I can find pages of what they’ve written or said, what online personalities they associate with, and what they’re into.

None of this is done with any sinister intention, I only do it because it’s easy and helps me understand a bit about who I’m dealing with.

If I wanted to get really nosy, I could find out what name they use to comment on blogs, and thereby find out their political positions, what makes them angry, major life events they’ve mentioned, what causes they support, who they vote for, what they believe their personal weaknesses are, names of many of their friends, and of course their age, place of birth, marital status, probably the names of their children, and if they’re especially careless or trusting, their home address.

I could do this all from a park bench, legally, with no exclusive tools or hacker knowledge — all just by examining what they’ve volunteered at one point or another. The only things stopping me are that I have better things to do, and that I’m not a creepy stalker. But not everyone is the same in those two respects.

If that’s not creepy enough, know that we’re only getting more exposed to the online snoop as technology improves and we use it more. Three other information-age realities promise to make us even more accessible to prying minds:

1) Putting data about ourselves into the public sphere is only going to get easier, faster, and less conscious

2) Expectations about how much can and should be found out on the internet are only going to increase

3) Finding any given bit of information is only going to get easier

We’re accelerating toward a society where it’s normal for our lives to be largely public. People who don’t want bits of their history and personality floating in the ether have to go to increasingly greater efforts to stay offline, simply because the internet is becoming more integrated into how we do everything. We use it more, we feed it more personal information, and we expect more information from it, and we think about it less. I only know a few remaining Facebook holdouts. They’re an endangered species.

Spaceships are watching me through the ceiling

I was part of the also-endangered “dumb phone” demographic until New Year’s Eve. While I was testing out the features of my new Android, there were a few moments in which I experienced that peculiar emotion that’s equal parts fascination and horror.

Among other features that are neat enough to be scary, I discovered that I can zoom in on Google Maps to the house I am in, until the house is nothing but a fuzzy brown shape, and watch a tiny blue triangle move back and forth inside that fuzzy shape, as I walk between the dining room and the kitchen.

In a surreal, horrific moment, I realize am the blue triangle, and unmanned spaceships are tracking my every move through the ceiling. Now, I know I can turn off the GPS capability at any time. But while it was on, I was sharing some frighteningly intimate information about myself, and I don’t really know with whom. As time goes on, the shape is only going to get less fuzzy.

We send data out to faceless databases and networks all the time without thinking about it, and anything that is broadcast can potentially be recorded. There are privacy policies and other corporate promises that claim to protect you, but really we’re just constantly throwing information into a giant black box that might as well be labeled, “Stuff I told the internet.”

Amazon knows that you start your Christmas shopping late, that you read left-wing authors, and of course it knows your credit card information and your street address. Google knows you want to learn more about auto-erotic asphyxiation, that you keep replaying My Heart Will Go On on YouTube, and that you probably have irritable bowel syndrome. It’s all circumstantial evidence about who you are, it might not be traceable to your legal name, but it’s all out there and someone’s definitely hanging onto it.

Let’s assume that we can totally trust those big companies with all that. Honestly, at this stage of the game, I do. I think. And it seems like we’re mostly protected from inadvertently becoming too public because what we broadcast is ultimately voluntary.

After all, we choose what we type and what we post. You might reason that you can curate your online self quite carefully, if you can just stay aware of what you’re sharing, and remember the world is listening.

But “voluntary” might be too simplistic a concept here. It’s not always so easy or simple to say no.

For example, I’m sure you’re aware by now that Mark Zuckerberg is imposing his vision on the Facebook world by converting every profile to a Timeline — an automated chronology of all the bits of your life you’ve put online, whether you realized you were doing it or not.

If you don’t want your life so readily chronicled for others, then no problem, right? Because it’s ultimately voluntary.

You just have to delete your Facebook.

Are you going to do that? A few will, and meanwhile the vast majority of us will continue to use it because it’s a big part of life, it has a lot of advantages, and we’re accustomed to them. If it means increased publicness, then I guess we’re game for that.

It’s getting a bit creepy when Facebook remembers more about my life than I do. It can tell me (or any of the other 500 people on my account) what day I became friends with so-and-so, or what was on my mind at 1:31pm April 11th, 2009, even if I have no clue. It seems to know where my photos were taken, even though I’m pretty sure I never told it.

Yet I can’t quite imagine opting out.

Why not? Because there are definitely parts of it I like. I can interact with the like-minded, learn from them, and watch their lives unfold from a polite distance.

So we let ourselves become a little more public, and it keeps us honest and keeps us connected.

But truthfully we have no idea what this tradeoff really amounts to — what liabilities we’re creating by making our details so accessible. If it seems like a fair price to pay, maybe it’s because we haven’t paid it yet.

***

How do you feel about your life becoming more public? Do you think it’s a healthy trend in general? Do you take steps to keep your information offline?

Wonderful photo by Gato-Gato-Gato

Stars, if you leave them for long enough, will eventually come up with the Mona Lisa.

And not in a hypothetical way, like those non-existent, proverbial monkeys who are always typing up MacBeth by accident.

What I’m talking about has already happened.

We trick ourselves into believing it doesn’t work like that, but it’s true. Star systems can and do eventually produce great works of art, and we’ve observed this. The great Alan Watts makes this interesting property of the universe clear using a simple analogy.

In his example, an apple tree produces apples every summer. As a botanist might say, at a certain time of year the tree fruits. An apple tree, more specifically, apples.

Imagine that aliens cruised by earth a few billion years ago. They checked for signs of intelligence, found only rocks and oceans, and they left.

Then they came back last week sometime, and found that there was a lot more going on. There were people, and a lot of other unfamiliar stuff that doesn’t look like rocks. Earlier they had seen that it was just a bunch of rocks. But in the mean time, the rocks peopled.

You leave rocks for a few billion years and they just might people. Evidently. As Watts puts it, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way as apples grow out of that tree.

But we’re usually a little prudish about saying it that way. We gloss over the fact that a dead earth became a living one, because that would imply that somehow intelligence does indeed arise from rocks, and something about that offends our normal way of thinking. We like to compartmentalize nature’s phenomena as if they work cleanly, like billiard balls – they can strike each other in the most complex ways, yet always be ultimately separate.

At worst, we apply a supernatural explanation to the whole show, because otherwise we’d have to recognize intelligence as a natural extension of the things that happen on a barren, unattended planet. For some reason we often insist nature couldn’t be that interesting or potent on its own. There has to be a super nature, to keep nature in its rightful, humble place.

It makes us feel special I guess, maybe that’s why we don’t give nature the credit. We’re special either way, but we don’t need special rules to explain how we’re here. For that matter, we don’t necessarily need to explain ourselves to ourselves at all. Whatever happened, we got intelligent at some point, and that’s great. It’s okay to wonder aloud exactly how it happened, but clearly it did. 

In any case, once a rock begins to people like that, you can check on it again in a few thousand years and you’ll notice an unstoppable profusion of buildings everywhere.

People, evidently, will begin to building if left for some time. They’ll building all over the place. And they have — look outside. In two weeks I’m going to be exploring the most buildinged place in the world. Nothing can stop people from their natural propensity for building once it gets started.

The people growing from this rock have indeed buildinged all over the place, maybe a little too much. Roading too. We’ve roaded the hell out of a lot of the landscape. This doesn’t make us distinctly special though. Spiders do something very similar with their silk road networks. They silk all over the place if nothing stops them. Check your attic. It just happens.

I don’t mean to make us sound so one-dimensional. People do much more than building. We wonder. We language. We family. We love.

And as it turns out, people eventually begin to art, and that certainly makes us special, if anything does. If there’s anything that redeems us from our propensity for violence and small-mindedness, that’s it — an inexplicable appetite for the deliberate creation of beauty and meaning.

At first it’s probably only the eccentric person that arts. Cave paintings. Eventually, though, nature takes its inevitable course, and people begin to art as profusely as they building. They art in public, and in private. They art on their desks at school, they art on retaining walls along the railroads, they even art their buildings. They celebrate art and those who art. They just can’t help arting. Try and stop them.

It may not always happen that way. There are people out there that don’t art. There are certainly rocks that don’t people. But clearly nature allows it to happen, and clearly there are places where nothing can stop it from happening. It’s not some violation of the rules. It’s fair game for certain corners of nature to art.

And again, it would be arrogant to assume that nature is not self-directed here. Many people just can’t stand that notion. They insist that nature must have an owner — someone commanding it to produce Guernica or The Beatles — but I don’t see any reason to believe that. Besides, whatever intelligent hierarchy there might be behind nature, there’s no reason not to call it nature too.

Whatever part of nature it is that allows Sgt Pepper to occasionally develop from cooling planets is exactly the part that allows trees to apple profusely, and rocks to people profusely. If evolution means anything, it can’t be only an isolated part of that process.

Evolution can only be the endless network of phenomena creating phenomena — and every conceivable part of life is its product. Using the generous amount of time they were given, the seas produced Old Man and the Sea, and the stars produced Starry Night.

We make a divide between man-made and natural constructs as if it really is two different systems, as if one doesn’t play by the rules of the other. We exalt ourselves by imagining we’re isolated from the system that created us and comprises us.

So it’s encouraging to realize that nature does produce the odd Guernica or Guangzhou Opera House now and then, and that your species is apparently the way it does it. But first some rocks had to do a lot of peopleing to get that level of arting to happen.

On that note, it gets a bit impersonal. Nature churns out people by the millions, and the odd masterpiece gets arted into existence. Most of those people weren’t necessary for that. It’s just part of a the same shotgun approach nature uses when it has mosquitoes give birth to 200,000 babies to give you a chance of getting bitten once or twice.

Think about your role for a moment. You are one of millions, and though it’s rude to say so, the universe doesn’t particularly need you in order to do its thing. But as of right now you certainly do have an extraordinary opportunity. Nothing is stopping you from being a conduit for some of the finest forms the universe ever created. Really. You may not be interested in anything people normally describe as art. That doesn’t matter. Speaking can be an art. Parenting can be an art. Sport can be art.

You don’t need to make masterpieces, but who better to do it? Masterpieces do come from the ingredients you have in you at this moment — the buzz in your bones that won’t let you sit for too long, a mind that can’t stop making inquiries, the desperate need to finally be understood, and whatever capacity for intrigue it took for you read this far into such a bizarre article. These qualities appear to be some of the universe’s rarest and most potent elements, and you’re riddled with them.

These are thoroughly human traits, and they grow in people like seeds grow in apples. Some people can’t bear not to put them to serious use, and would even court poverty to do it. But many people do manage to get right through to their grave without employing them, riding distractions and fleeting pleasures the whole way. It’s easier than ever to do that.

And from nature’s perspective, that’s fine. There are lots of people, and some pretty amazing things will get created no matter what any given individual chooses to spend their time on. But I suspect the human drive to create is more forceful and urgent than we typically give it credit for. The urge for a human to art isn’t a fringe thing or an alternative-lifestyle thing. It’s as vital and fundamental to us as socializing. It’s for everybody. Repressing it may be what’s bothering you all the time.

You have it in heaps. It may be nature’s greatest gift to you. One day that same benefactor will snuff you out like a candle. What a shame it would be if your gift was still in the box.

Yet we all experience a lot of resistance to exploring it, and that resistance comes from many angles. We worry that our work sucks. We makes excuses about talent levels. We see artists who we think suck and we don’t want to be looked at like we look at them. We worry our mothers will shake their heads. We wonder if there really is anything in our own heads worth saying. Throughout life we’re warned by unimaginitive people that it’s not useful to make art, that it doesn’t pay bills or help anyone.

So it’s easy to justify avoiding it, even though some part of you will never stop nagging you to get those seeds out of you and into the ground.

Photos by itonys, wazuluwazu, All Chrome, and Panoramas

It only took about ten Christmases before I realized how quickly the new-toy feeling wears off. I knew by the time New Year’s came around, I would lose that feeling I looked forward to all year — getting up to a dazzling world of new stuff.

Then one Christmas Day I felt that same predictable boredom, the same fading of abundance, creep in by dinnertime. I had eaten more chocolate than could actually be enjoyable, and played with everything once.

I felt like I had definitely lost something substantial since that giddy first hour of the day. Obviously I didn’t own any less by that time (not counting chocolate), but it absolutely felt like I did.

Of course, no matter how I felt about my possessions at different times of day, I was always rich and rarely realized it.

The same is true for me today, probably you too. Average income across the world is about $7000 per year. But that’s just a mathematical mean. The vast majority of people make far less than that. Only about twenty percent of the world’s population lives in countries with an average income that high.

So no matter what class you are in your society, if you’re sitting in front of a computer with some blog-reading time on your hands, you probably outclass (financially anyway) a sizeable majority of people alive today, and certainly almost all of the people who are no longer alive.

But that’s just money. Wealth includes power and privilege too, and not just because you can buy more of those things. It’s reasonable to say that someone with a thousand dollars is less wealthy than someone with a thousand dollars and access to political connections, say. Ability, knowledge, and privilege all contribute to wealth.

You’re probably not doing too poorly on that front either. You’re unlikely to be reading this if you live in North Korea. All sorts of people read this blog, but statistically you probably have the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to say what you like, the right to travel, the right to practice your spiritual tradition, the means to contact your political representatives, the means to practice your chosen art, and the means to self-publish your thoughts. Extraordinary and exclusive privileges, if you have any of them. 

These are riches, if the word means anything at all, and most of history’s humans certainly did not have the level of wealth you do.

It’s unlikely, though, that you would describe yourself as rich, or particuarly that you feel rich.

An iPhone! My Kingdom for an iPhone!

High technology has given superhuman powers to almost all of us, and these are riches of the most enviable kind. Today’s technology extends privilege way further down the economic scale than ever, so that a much wider swath of people can have incredible powers. You certainly have superhuman powers if you have internet access, even if you have to walk to the library to get it.

Imagine if you could transplant your life, and all its advantages, into an iron age society. Your house or apartment gets plopped down on a hillside at the edge of a farming village. All your devices work, you get internet and cable, water and heat. Don’t worry about technical issues like where you get your electricity from, or how you’d get cell service. Assume it is freely available to you within your means, as we tend to assume today.

Outside your doors, humans who are otherwise just like you are getting along with the powers they have available to them — just like you do today. They keep warm with wood stoves, they can work only by the available light of the day, they repair their tools and clothing themselves. They aren’t lesser people by any means, but even the most privileged among them couldn’t even dream of the powers and freedoms you have within arm’s reach right at this moment.

Imagine how they would feel toward you once they learned what you’re able to do with your lot in life. What do you think they might pay for even the simplest of the advantages you have? For walls that easily keep out the worst of the weather, for an accurate timepiece, for a machine that can perform basic math functions instantly without error, or even for a glowing blue cell-phone screen to find something in the dark. Undoubtedly they would be willing to toil an extra day per month to bring these advantages home for their families. Maybe much more than that.

And those powers are nothing compared to what else you can do with your riches. What would they pay to be able to:

• speak to someone across the sea

• have the knowledge of thousand encyclopedias in their pocket

• watch segments of the past (or someone else’s past) unfold in moving pictures, in real time

• see the face or hear the voice of a dead loved one

• heat the house without stoking a fire

• cook food in thirty seconds

• clean and dry their family’s clothing with ten minutes of actual work

• suck the dirt out of a rug

• get all their water from inside the house at whatever temperature they wish

• access instructions on how to do almost anything that can be done by humans

These are insane powers, which most of humanity could never have dreamed of, and they’re all yours, right now. Do you really think more money will make you feel rich if you aren’t blown away by what you already have?

The rich members of past societies may or may not have had more than you in terms of monetary wealth. Yet, it is undeniable that the age you live in gives you access to powers they could never have had, or even imagined. The contents of your crummy apartment certainly would have been worth more to them than all their piles of furs and gold.

And all of this is to say nothing of the intangible privileges you have, just by being alive here and now — rights, freedoms, moral advances, literacy, public education, and modern medicine.

The Makings of Being Rich

You’d think gratitude would increase alongside advantage and privilege. If you have more to be grateful for, you become more grateful. But clearly this isn’t true.

We’ve all heard stories of tycoons who couldn’t be happy, or lottery winners that end up ruined a few years later, wishing it had never happened. I can understand the possibility that having amounts of money that seem copious to you and me might bring certain problems we’re ignorant about. But I still always find myself thinking that these people must be particularly foolish or naive not to be able to make millions of dollars work for them.

But this kind of thinking is what’s naive. We do the same thing. Almost all of us are in an extremely high percentile of material and social wealth, even if you only consider the people who are alive today.

If our standards for wealth are where we sit on that spectrum — and what other standard could we have? — then we’re certainly rich, but how often do we feel rich?

That’s a totally different question. And clearly there is no real value in being rich by any material standard, if we don’t feel rich — if we don’t feel like we have more to be grateful for than most — and of course we do. That feeling of abundance, the opposite of the feeling of lack, is what makes riches attractive to anybody.

I think it’s important to reiterate that point. No matter what material things we pursue, we’re only ever looking for certain feelings. Money is attractive to us because we believe it will come with the feelings we want: abundance, security, power. That’s all the good it can do. Stuck on a desert island with a billion in hard currency is a terrible place to be, because you’re poor in all the things that matter.

How rich we’re able to feel does depend a little on what we do have in terms of privilege and material wealth. It’s hard to achieve feelings of autonomy if you have no clothes or no home. Yet it seems to depend more on what we feel entitled to, what our peers have relative to us — and most importantly — whether we think more about what we do have than what we don’t have.

The Manhattan investment banker who only grosses $96,000 a year probably feels like a have-not when he goes out to lunch with the big dogs. But he probably feels differently about his level of wealth and privilege when he’s being asked for change outside the train station.

How rich he is depends on how rich he experiences himself to be, which is quite independent of his financial bottom line. It’s dependent on how he values what he has and how he values what he doesn’t have, which changes from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Depending on his perspective, there is a huge range of possible levels of happiness within his means, and that’s every bit as true for you. The influence of our material holdings on our ability to experience wealth is actually quite small.

“Rich” is clearly a relative, emotional state, and your life almost certainly contains far more material (and social) advantages at your disposal than a random human life picked out of a hat. So for most of us, what we need to get rich is not more money, it’s to cultivate a shift in perspective. More money would still leave that necessary perspective shift ahead of you. Chances are you do have the makings of being rich.

If we break it down, the makings of being rich are:

1) Enough stuff to survive in relative comfort. I’m talking about the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid here: food, shelter, water, and decent health.

2) Some extra stuff, beyond the essentials of survival. Some toys, some technology, some art, some tools you could survive without. Most of us have way more than some of this.

3) Some friends. I don’t think this is optional, if you want to feel rich. Humans are highly social and I expect there are few people who can exist in a generally grateful state if they are alone in life. Luckily it is easier than ever to meet other people with like interests. Facebook.com. Meetup.com. Millions of forums worldwide. Use your superpowers here.

4) Some freedoms. Chiefly, to speak your mind and to do your own thing. This varies hugely across modern societies, but if you’re reading this you are probably near the better end of the stick. By the same token, everyone does live under some measure of political constraint, but most of us are still left with an amount of room to pursue happiness that would make most of history’s people envious. People have made rich and worthwhile lives with much worse.

5) The capacity to keep perspective when it comes to assessing a) the value of what you do have, and b) the value of what you don’t have. This is a skill and it can be developed.

Those are the makings, as far as I can see it, and for most people reading this it’s just a matter of working with the last one.

Here are a couple of ways to get better at that:

“Caveman gratitude” – Whenever you use a material posession, think of how valuable it would be to someone who didn’t live in a highly technological world. Remember that you are still only a naked animal, surrounded by a lot of stuff, and even the crappiest of that stuff confers powers that most of the past’s humans would find extraordinarily valuable. What would medieval serfs make of my “crappy” Panasonic point-and-shoot? Yet I have a mid-level Nikon DSLR, and I still salivate over the top-of-the-line stuff. Whenever you feel like a have-not, mentally drop your home and your stuff into an iron-age village and realize again that you live like a monarch with magic powers, right here in the far future.

Own fewer things, but better things – Respect your possessions. Get rid of low quality possessions. Get rid of any possession you don’t respect or use. Have a home for everything in your home, or get rid of it. If you don’t respect your lot in life materially, then you can’t feel like you have a lot worth having, and that’s what being rich amounts to.

Picture losing what’s important to you – This is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever learned to do. We just cannot have the necessary perspective to appreciate what we have until we understand what it would mean to lose those things. Do it with your possessions, your rights, and most powerfully, do it with the people you love. Those links will explain how.

Make 2012 your year to get rich.

***

Photo by Maczter

As the story goes, God told Charleton Heston two things to do and eight things not to do, and he listened. Then he passed the rules along to others, and human morality was born.

The commandments weren’t always easy to work with, they found. Specifically, many of them enjoyed violating the one about not killing. Chuck had passed on the divine orders in his own personal style, and couldn’t resist including the Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments somewhere.

There was a real awkward moment when God was telling Chuck specifically not to carve likenesses of anything in the Heavens, precisely at the moment he was carving His words into stone tablets. Chuck had smashed the originals during a tantrum, and without some notes he was always in danger or forgetting what right and wrong were.

This was about 33 centuries ago, and before then there was no right and wrong because the Heavens hadn’t mentioned anything about it yet. Murder and double-parking were rampant.

Even after Chuck and his friends knew the new rules by heart, sometimes they found they did accidentally covet their neighbor’s ox, or even his ass. As they knew, equally offensive to God as coveting one’s neighbor’s livestock was to covet one’s neighbor’s wife, or her ass, or any other material possessions of his neighbor’s. They had an especially tough time with this one, because as pious as they were, it’s really hard to obey rules against thinking.

They didn’t usually steal, except from indigenous populations, until many centuries later when Napster came out and a free-for-all descended that not even God could stop. 

They also kept arguing over whether it was Saturday or Sunday that they were supposed to take off. To this day, most of them think it’s Sunday, and so they stay home to watch NFL football, where they can vicariously enjoy their favorite runningbacks and wide receivers toiling away in total defiance of God.

He doesn’t strike them down, but interestingly it is NFL policy to play through any weather except lightning and hurricanes. These players, heretics though they are, will still sometimes name-drop God or His son as helpful conspirators if they happen to win. God is a Denver Broncos fan these days.

Honoring their father and mother was pretty easy compared to the others, and they took comfort in this. If God ever audited Chuck’s people (and despite His omnipresent threats, He often forgot) they could play up how well they honored their parents, and change the subject before it got to coveting and killing.

They did try their best, but Chuck and his followers found a lot of these commandments to be generally unworkable. The idea behind them was great though, by all accounts: a moral code that’s stamped, sealed and backed up by a well-known name.

But they kept running afoul of themselves. In fact, they slipped up so often that they began to suspect it was all an empty threat. They would never say so out loud, even though God was supposed to be reading all their minds all the time anyway. And so they continued to do the odd bad thing, or even just questionable things, but talked about doing good things all the time.

The problem they had, whether they realized it or not, was that the commandments denied them the opportunity to be moral beings themselves. It was God’s will, not theirs, and so their own individual wills could never be moral, only obedient. They were not invited to participate in either understanding or deciding what is right and wrong.

So the implicit expectation was to throw out any personal feelings that conflicted with what God told them, or what Chuck told them that God had said, or with what some sickly abbot in a church told them that Chuck said that God had said. Trust anyone bearing a cloth or collar before you trust yourself, was the inevitable message, and so they never did.

Now, that means under this system, which billions of people heartily subscribe to, human beings are devoid of any moral sensitivity of their own. Nobody would know, for instance, that pushing someone down the stairs is wrong, unless they’d been to church a few times at least.

It’s a Good thing for us then — I’ll go ahead and assert that without God’s permission — that many people don’t think that’s true at all. I wish I could say most, but statistically it doesn’t look like it.

How to make it all workable

I think that if Mr Heston and his descendants had looked at the Commandments in a different way, they may have gotten more consistent mileage out of them.

While Christianity has its famous dictatorial approach to morality, some other traditions also have moral doctrines, but they present them as precepts.

Precepts aren’t really that different from commandments, in terms of what they are: they’re ethical rules, prescribed by an institution, sometimes attributed to a deity or someone else more important than you. But you can absolutely discover your own.

Some people do treat them just like commandments — follow them, or to Hell with you. But that’s a shame, because they’re missing out on their incredible power. The difference is in how you apply them.

Imagine if instead of obeying a moral precept under threat of punishment, you took it on voluntarily, and the consequences of not doing it were yours to discover. You treat it as a personal commitment, in the service of your God (if you have one) or whatever else is important to you: human solidarity, world peace, evolution, or even just yourself.

Whereas in Christianity you have:

Thou shalt not steal.

in, say, secular Buddhism you might have:

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from taking that which is not freely given.

Same dif, on the surface, but the fact that it is ultimately voluntary is what changes everything. You have to understand why you’re doing it, first of all. You’re allowed to wait until you really are ready to do it, which is only once you’re actually ready to delete all those seasons of Mad Men you lifted from BitTorrent.

From tradition to tradition, the rules aren’t that different. Killing is widely agreed to be a no-no, same with stealing, harming people with your lewd sex acts, and lying.

The value doesn’t come in simply not breaking the rules — because sometimes you will — but in being aware of exactly what’s going on in your mind when you’re tempted to. Where do immoral actions come from? What’s happening in your mind when you’re doing the wrong thing? That knowledge is enormously valuable — if indeed you are interested in peace and happiness — and you can’t get it simply by following orders.

All moral transgressions come down to a decisive moment, between the instant you feel a desire to violate your rule, and the instant you respond to that desire. Most of the time those moments come obscured by the heat of emotions and conditioning, and reaction just happens, without any conscious choice being made. And if you’re Catholic you feel really guilty after.

Observing precepts trains you to become acutely aware in those decisive moments, and prompts you to consider exactly why you’re finding it so hard not to steal something right now. What are you attached to? What rationalizations is your mind coming up with right now?

That is exactly what the commandment approach misses: that moment of reflection on why you have such a hard time following the rule, and why you might want to. Just following the rule because you’re scared not to is a complete avoidance of morality.

The precept approach triggers you to zero in on that crucial moment, and all the feelings, rationales, and possibilities that accompany it. Commandments concern themselves only with the What, and precepts engage the Why, which is the whole reason for morality anyway. Why not kill? If the only reason you have is “To avoid going to Hell,” then Hell might just be the best place for you.

Whether you violate the rule or not is not as important as whether you watch what happens internally as that decisive moment comes and goes. This is where morality comes from — the direct, voluntary experience of doing the right thing (or not doing it), and the direct experience of the consequences that arise as a result.

In those moments, when you become aware of the pull toward doing the lazy thing, the easy thing, or the wrong thing, and you consciously don’t do it, there is an incredible feeling of freedom. That’s what morality is, freedom from the grinding mechanical hell of acting from fear, lust or reaction. Like I’ve said before, Hell is real, and it doesn’t wait for you to die.

Chuck and his epic cast never knew this kind of freedom. They were under perpetual peril and did what any self-preserving people would do. Commandments can’t supply morals because they deny you the autonomy to do the right thing.

The commandments leave you no freedom. The moral landscape they create is the opposite of freedom. It’s oppression, especially when you remember that you’re forced to play the game for eternity.

As Christopher Hitchens sometimes puts it, “It’s a celestial dictatorship, where eternal praise and submission is demanded. A divine North Korea, if you will. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.”

***

Photo by David Cain

I’m sick. I don’t get sick much. Somehow I still don’t quite believe I will ever get really sick but the statistics say there is a 100% chance I will die of something. So that means it’s either a violent end, or one day I get really sick.

Statistics also say over 70% of my readers are American, and some other statistics say that one-seventh of them do not have health insurance.

I’m making this statistic up, but for those without health coverage, probably a good 50% of their fellow Americans believe that their lack of health insurance is deserved. If they get sick they deserve no medical attention, because they didn’t tend their own garden well enough.

In America, you’re free to seek and acquire everything you need. Somehow, many people think this means the same as: if you don’t have everything you need, then you don’t deserve everything you need. No health insurance? Didn’t work hard enough. Simple.

My sinuses are blocking some of my brain right now so maybe I’m oversimpifying it, but isn’t that the basic philosophy, for many, many people?

The population contains two hundred million self-professed followers of Christ and most of them believe that it is absurd to pay a dime for someone else to see a doctor.

Makes me think of a joke:

How many Ayn Rand objectivists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

None. The market will sort it out.

I generally don’t talk about single political issues here. And I’m not right now. This post isn’t about health care. Or Capitalism. It’s about something way bigger, as always. 

There is a terrible notion out there that is relatively common: that haves deserve to be haves, and have-nots deserve to be have-nots. It sounds sensible if you don’t really think about it.

If you do think about it you’ll quickly realize that it means, to begin with, that the disadvantaged (for whatever reason) deserve less, are worth less, and that there is no justice until they have less. If someone gets to see a doctor without paying for it, for example, then they are getting away with something.

It implies that the mythical quality of “strength of character” is all that separates the haves from the have-nots, and that this quality is all the disadvantaged are truly missing, and that rightly they are to be blamed for that.

It presumes that being poor in a nation with a free market economy can only be a moral failing — rather than an inevitable product of the system, rather than a social condition whose existence is necessary in order for other people to be rich. Being poor can only arise from some kind of choice to be not good enough, as the popular “get off your ass” sentiment goes. Many people really do believe this.

If you get into an argument about this, all the rebuttals you’ll face can be boiled down to this:

Why should *I* be forced to help someone else?

Here’s why:

Because you’re better off if other people aren’t suffering so much.

Even if you truly cannot see a reason why the suffering of another person is relevant to you, there’s still an ice-cold pragmatic reason to redistribute wealth, if you need one.

No matter which way you dice it, you’re better off if you live in a society that does not create large numbers of destitute people as a part of its nature. Even if they don’t live next to you.

Crime, distrust, self-destruction, poverty and other conditions we all hate grow directly out of lives that are missing something vital. Education. Health. Self-respect and the respect of society.

Even the richest are better off if they are made to be slightly less rich in order to reduce the number of poor and destitute. Not even to be kind, necessarily, but just to live in a society that is unwilling to bear the enormous social problems created by a huge, incurably destitute lower class.

And such a society cannot exist without an obligation (not a suggestion) for the haves to contribute to the quality of the lives of the have-nots, even if it is more than they might “deserve.”

Nobody is able to create by themselves all that they feel they deserve. Even those who live at the top of the pile.

When I arrived at the conservation office I was absurdly early, like I am for everything that’s important. At 9:30 a bus would take me and 39 others to a ferry, which would drop us at the beginning of the Milford Track. From there I’d hike four days through cavernous glacial valleys, living out of my backpack.

After a day of scrambling to get all the right supplies: quick-drying clothes, sandfly repellant, cooking gear, matches, and food that didn’t take up much space, I was ready. Just early.

I sat down on the grass next to another traveler. We had the typical backpacker exchange: names, home countries, and current destinations. He was a German, about 20, headed to the Kepler track.

Our customary exchange ran its course quickly and soon there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so we just sat against our packs, enjoying the day. It was sunny, and especially quiet. Te Anau is a little town at the edge of the civilization, so there was no background drone of highway traffic. Nothing happening in the foreground either.

Neither of us had said anything in a minute or two, when he turned to me and asked with a straightforwardness that only a German could muster:

“So,” he said, “What are your dreams?”

Having met new people almost every single day of my trip, I had reflexive answers for almost every question a near-stranger could ask, but this one caught me off guard. Nothing came out.

It’s not that I didn’t know what I wanted in life. In fact I’ve got a life list, and I started trying to recall what was on it, but nothing was jumping out at me and I knew that after thinking about it so long, no answer I could give would be very convincing.

A few items from my bucket list were beginning to materialize: Learn my wines. Speak French fluently. Ride a Harley. These are things I want to do, but clearly none of them consume me enough that they’re right there in the foreground of my mind whenever somebody brings up the topic of dreams.

I was self-conscious about how I seemed to have to rake my brain for what should be more important than anything. I didn’t have a clear idea of my dreams, and I knew I was talking to somebody who did.

Finally I laughed and said I didn’t know.

“What are your dreams?” I asked.

“I want to have a boat and I want to go to Iceland.”

“In your boat?”

“No, my boat will not be that kind of boat. It is two different dreams.”

“Why did you come to New Zealand when you could have gone to Iceland first?”

“It is not the time. I am too young.”

I have 150 items on my bucket list. Looking at it, pretty much anyone could tease out a few values that are important to me. What I want is a life that embodies those values.

One of the items on my list was the thing I was there to do: hike the Milford Track. But I knew he was looking for a more definite, more resounding answer. Not just one of dozens of arbitrary items I want to get to, but the experience I couldn’t die without. The Milford is a truly unbelievable hike, but my interest in it didn’t exactly define me as a person. It only hinted at what did. 

About 48 hours later, I’m soaked in my clothes, crouched barefoot on top of a boulder covered in sopping, thick moss. A wet, roaring wind is blasting straight down onto my back. The air is a thick, swirling spray and it’s hard to take a breath without inhaling water. Wherever I look, there’s a rainbow in front of what I’m looking at, the kind you see in the spray from a watering hose, except this one is impossibly close — it was right in my eyes.

It was such a foreign and unusual moment that I felt disconnected from all the events leading up to it. It was like I had just dropped in to an unimaginable moment in some unknown person’s life.

I was at the bottom of Sutherland falls, at the end of a 90-minute diversion from the main track. A park ranger had told us it’s possible to climb around behind the main impact point of the 600-meter waterfall, if you’re careful and you don’t mind getting soaked.

This. This is my dream.

Not the swim in the waterfall pool. Not the Milford Track. Not New Zealand. But the feeling of finding yourself in a place you could not have imagined before you were there, and could never properly relate afterward.

Twenty-one months earlier, I’m sitting in the kitchenette of a basement apartment that looks like it’s furnished entirely from yard sales. I’m dating an outspoken French girl and she’s still getting to know me.

She brings our coffees and sits beside me instead of across from me, and I can tell she wants to ask me something but first has to find the English words. She finds them.

“I don’t understand. Why do you do what you don’t love?”

It takes me a minute to get it. The night before, she had asked what I love about my career and I told her I wouldn’t say I loved it but there are parts of it I like. This was a pretty normal sentiment to me. It’s what almost all my friends and acquaintances would say too, but to her it was genuinely bizarre.

She just could not understand a person carrying on in a career unless it was their dream. Or, at least, was leading to their dream — at the time she was the weather girl, Mademoiselle Météo, and openly hated it, but acknowledged it was a necessary step in becoming une journaliste.

A few lame answers had come up in my mind: Well sometimes life doesn’t work out exactly like you expect. The job market isn’t so great in all sectors, I’m doing what’s practical. Life has a lot of obligations, I have to take care of them first. I’m young, I have lots of time.

I don’t remember what I ended up saying, but I know it couldn’t have been a viable answer to her question, because there isn’t one.

Later that morning we were looking down from the Osborne bridge, talking about travel, and she decided in front of me that she was going to backpack through Greece, with all the same casualness with which I might decide to order rye toast.

In the summer we went our separate ways, and she went to Greece. She is now an arts and culture reporter for the CBC.

The German had the same clarity of purpose about Iceland and his boat. His dream was so matter-of-fact to him, such a foregone conclusion, that I wonder what he made of a well-spoken 29-year-old Canadian who could not even guess at what he wanted to do with himself.

Clarity is not normal

When I was in school there were some kids who knew what they were after from the beginning, but they were unususal. Most of us just wanted it to be Saturday. I look now on Facebook at my former classmates’ current occupations, and I may be projecting, but none of them look too dreamy.

I entered two successive careers with no clear vision of what I ultimately wanted my days to be like, and I think this is normal in my culture.

The whole boatride to the track, and the first leg of the hike, I was preoccupied with why so few people around me seem to know what they want their lives to be. It’s not really talked about all that much. It’s almost like dreams are embarrassing, at least outside of the self-improvement/daily-affirmation crowd.

My answer to the German’s question is becoming clearer now — and it turns out, has nothing to do with either of my two chosen fields — but man has it taken a long time.

Not that that’s a bad thing. The German may have had it totally wrong, found it too quickly. He was 20 at the time, he maybe had just seen a Sigur Ros video and decided Iceland is where his heart needs him to be. I don’t really know. I just remember wondering why I couldn’t say anything about what I want in life with such certainty.

Either way, there’s no question French Girl had it right, with her non-rhetorical question: Why do you do what you don’t love? If a person really knew what they loved, how much room could they let other things take up in their lives? How many of their hours or dollars would they let go toward something else?

You’d think the things we love are the things we’re most inclined to do, but this is just not true.

Love and attraction are not the same, not at all. Did I spend over $500 on Starbucks last year out of love? Or out of a thoughtless response to a short-term attraction that I feel at about 7:09 every morning on my way to work?

The loving thing would have been to drive on by and save that money for traveling. Or an apartment that doesn’t make me frown. Or to pay for some time off my job, so I can create something beautiful, or at least try.

Theoretically, if you know what you love, then every time you make a decision you’ll have a pretty damn clear idea if it’s taking you closer or further away from what you love. You’ll know the right thing to do. So self-love is a moral issue. It consists of doing the right thing, and nothing else.

Yet living that way is somehow not the obvious thing to do. “Live for the moment” is unquestionably good advice, but it’s easy to think that means “live for what you feel like right now.” I may be way off base, but think most of us live for what we feel like right now, making adjustments whenever it leads us into trouble. We’ll do what we can get away with until it appears we can’t get away with it anymore. Then we change something, a job or a partner, and find a comfortable spot from there. But there’s no real aim, other than to stay okay. Dreams remain hopes.

The compass-effect of living only towards what you love is undeniable. Still, I think it’s relatively rare in humans. Until people have kids, anyway. After that they’re usually hopelessly in love and they know where the compass is pointing. But even then, it means their energies are now invested in directing the course of another person’s life. So how many people really live for themselves, with a clear idea of what they want, and whether they’re getting in their own way or not?

It seems so simple and so intuitive, but it is definitely not normal.

These aren’t stupid questions:

Do I really know what I love?

What am I doing with my time and money and attention?

How much of that gets me closer to what I love, and how much takes me farther away?

Can I know, in each moment, which type I’m doing?

***

I’m curious. Honestly, do you have a pretty clear direction? Are you following the winding trail of cookies, or are you headed towards something real in the distance?

Photo by A Kid Who I Lent My Camera To, I Forget His Name

Someone wrote in with a comment that almost made me clap:

“You use the word compassion sometimes. I like the *idea* of compassion, but I don’t know, it irritates me. I’m not saying I’m not compassionate, I think I am. I just hear it used by a lot of people I don’t like. Not you, other people. Fluffy people who have all the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I hate that word but I still think it’s a good thing, whatever it is exactly…”

I added capital letters and removed an LOL or two, but he captured my thoughts exactly.

I avoid it too because it has undeserved connotations about sissiness and self-importance. But I guess I have let the C-word slip a few times, sorry.

Compassion, as a word, hasn’t really found a widely-accepted role in our culture. Not everyone is comfortable with it. I think part of its problem is that it contains the dubious word “passion.” Part of the ick-quality of this word comes from its shameless overuse in marketing this last decade (along with fellow bad words “dreams” and “excellence”) of everything from DeBeers diamonds to mortgage brokers.

I think it might help to clarify that the “passion” part of compassion actually refers to suffering, not to enthusiasm for watercolors or for the Allman Brothers Band. Think The Passion of the Christ, not “I have a passion for 1960s girl groups.” The “com” part refers to “with another.”

Politicians conspicuously avoid it, because it sounds like they support a welfare state. Too risky to bust out the C-word in a forum where you’re pandering for the widest and shallowest approval possible. Too many people don’t know what it means. The C-word is a bad word outside the Green Party.

Compassion is associated with bleeding heart socialists, self-help junkies, hippies who sob over dead trees, pasty-faced emos and any other people who suffer from throes of uncontrollable sympathy — even the misguided commies who want to give away health care! (Can you imagine?! Helping people without demanding their money! Some people are sick.)

The C-word has been relegated to these weak and senseless groups, when really it’s something that everyone would be in favor of it if they knew what it was and understood what its implications are. 

It has a murky definition. I looked up a few commercial ones and they’re no good:

Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.

A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

Makes me think the different dictionaries just copy each other, and haven’t had staff writers since Google came out. I don’t know how to know whether my awareness is Deep enough for Webster’s approval.

Maybe the dictionary people are the authorities here, but if they are then I have to come up with a different C-word, because what I think of as compassion is a little more specific than that. In my mind:

Compassion is a voluntary sensitivity to the internal experience of another.

Just like you are having a real internal experience whenever you’re embarassed, bleeding, overworked, marginalized or afraid, so are other people. They’re having them all the time, they’re just as real and intense as yours, and your presence and actions affect the flavor and quality of the experience others have.

To be compassionate is to act with a conscious understanding that others have an internal experience too. This is not the same as simply being kind, which can have all sorts of motivations that have only to do with your own experience. It’s also not the same as sympathy — simply suffering over another’s suffering — which generally keeps you preoccupied with your experience, now that it sucks too.

Yes, like it or not, everywhere you go, people are having intense internal experiences and your actions are always a part of it, or always have the potential to be a part of it. If you and I are sharing a booth at a diner, and I pick my nose while you’re trying to eat pea soup, I am affecting your current experience somewhat. I may even be dominating it, all with my simple gesture.

I’m not necessarily trying to do anything to your internal experience, I’m trying to do something to my nose, but the things I do invariably affect other people whether I’m aware of that or not.

It’s entirely possible to spend most of our lives heeding social conventions, apologizing whenever appropriate, and being otherwise courteous, without actually understanding the reality that others also have these ongoing, live, private experiences.

We’re all normally quite preoccupied with our own, and if you and I do happen to have coffee one day and I don’t pick my nose while you’re talking to me, it may not have anything whatsoever to do with my consideration for your experience. I may just not want you to think I’m someone who would do that, which has everything to do with my sensitivity to my own internal experience, and represents no evidence of my sensitivity to yours.

But once that fact really clicks in you — that other people are constantly having internal experiences which are no different than the one you’ve been having since birth — then the cat’s out of the bag. You can no longer deny that you must give consideration to that whenever you act, unless you’re planning on playing the sociopath angle for the rest of your life.

This is the foundation for real morality. When you smash your finger with a hammer, the pain is absolutely real, immediate and inescapable. When someone else does it, it’s the same thing. The same thing. It’s that awful, that painful. This truth is so simple, but we don’t necessarily comprehend that on an emotional level.

We also can’t pretend this only applies to humans. Your dog is having an internal experience every time you pet him, feed him, take him for a walk, or hit him. When I tell people I avoid animal products, if I don’t get a negative response, it’s often something along the lines of, “Wow, that’s so caring of you [to not eat that hot dog out of principle.] You must really love animals.”

I’ve always liked animals, but I don’t think I love them any more than the typical non-vegan. Deciding I won’t kill or exploit them for my pleasure doesn’t come from any special love, it’s just the most basic level of respect to give to another being whom I know is having a thoroughly real experience. There are plenty of people who love animals more than I ever will, who do not make this connection.

So what compassion amounts to is making yourself sensitive to the joy and suffering of others, and giving weight to that joy and suffering. Even if it’s not as much weight as you give your own, if you are compassionate then it is real and meaningful. To you.

But it’s voluntary, right?

“Why bother?” is not a bad question. The only experience you actually have is your own, so why not devote your energies solely to improving your experience, with no active concern for the internal experiences of others?

The short answer is that compassion is an effective way to make a better experience for yourself, if that’s your only real concern. I find I’m way more prone to unpleasant experiences like anger and frustration when I’ve drifted into that recurring ignorance of the fact that other people are constantly having a parallel (but not lesser) experience.

It also explains a lot of bad behavior. When people are having awful experiences, they’ll do anything to get out of it or improve it, including things that make awful experiences for others. I know that I’m most reckless with others when I’m suffering. It doesn’t excuse it but it explains it. It makes my expectations more reasonable and the world seem more understandable.

The long answer depends what kind of society you want to live in. If you like the idea of people around you acting with earnest consideration for your internal experiences, then the C-word should be prominent in your life, because that’s exactly what it is.

That’s what almost all complaints about society amount to: they don’t think of others, they don’t think of me. Virtually all of society’s problems stem from an absence of this voluntary sensitivity. Everything from the war in Afghanistan to the empty ice cube trays in the staff room freezer.

Clearly it’s a superior way to operate, and I’m sure it’ll catch on, eventually becoming fashionable among your friends and family, your employer and colleagues, corporate policymakers, elected officials, and the people who make the commercials louder than the show.

So please help us make the C-word cooler than it is right now.

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Photo by Marfis

And then he started using words like nyingma and shentong and I became more interested in my beer than anything else. Zen is a neato thing to talk about but depending on who’s doing the talking, it can get a bit too stiff for me.

But I perked up when he said the most rewarding thing he’s ever done in all his years is to sit and contemplate his own death.

I was in an expat bar in Chiang Mai on trivia night and an informal lecture had broken out. Half the room was shouting out answers to sports history questions, and the other half was gathered around a once-American philosophy professor, listening to him talk about Zen. I was trying to do both.

We chatted on the balcony later, and I asked him about what he said about death. I drank and nodded as he talked and smoked cigarettes.

“When you’re sitting there long enough that you finally see that unbroken line between here and your grave, that you really are that grave every bit as much as you are sitting here… you’ll never feel as free as that.”

The night was long (three bars long) and full of conversations, but that’s the one that was in my head when I was nodding off that night, and in the shower the next morning.

For the next few weeks I kept having these spells where I’d see something super ordinary — a stranger yawning at a bus stop, or something — and I’d get the sensation that I was looking back on it, as if I was visiting it from a place where that doesn’t happen.

It culminated on a beach in New Zealand a few weeks later. I had another spell, and realized what was happening. I was being repeatedly overcome by the simple fact that I was here. That doesn’t sound like an astonishing revelation, but it was, and that had something to do with being simultaneously aware that I will one day not be here.

Understanding those two insultingly simple facts — that you’re definitely here, and that you will definitely one day not be here — combine to form something beautiful. The professor called it anicca but we can call it impermanence. It’s irrefutable, and we kill ourselves trying to refute it all the time. Things change constantly, and when you insist they don’t, you suffer. When you can learn to go along for the ride, ordinary moments become compelling. 

The professor’s death-contemplation hobby is certainly worthwhile, but it’s just not something many people are going to do. Too formal, too weird, too Buddhist.

But you can experience the beauty of impermanence in a much easier way, every time you’re in the presence of people you’re close to. I’ve written about it before, when this blog was much smaller, but it’s such a reliable way to create that staggering kind of gratitude that I can’t recommend it enough.

When you’re with a group of people who are important in your life, take a step back and look around at what’s happening, and consider that there will be a time when these people are gone.

Life is a solo trip, but you’ll have lots of visitors. I say this a lot and always will. Your life is one long unbroken experience, and you’re the only one who’s there the whole time. Visitors will come in and out of your experience. Most of them are short-term and you won’t notice when they’ve made their last appearance.

In fact, even with the long-term visitors, it’s rare that your last moment with a particular person is one in which you’re aware that it is.

Every relationship you have is a chance overlap that begins one particular day and ends on another. You have little control over when either of those bookends appear. There is nothing worse than having nobody important in your life, yet we easily take for granted that this precious, fleeting overlap is happening right now in the room with you.

There are probably hundreds of acquaintances that you haven’t thought about since the last time they were right in front of your face, and maybe that was years ago. Those bit players are gone in the truest sense, but the people who matter are the people whose absence you can feel when they’re gone. The person who’s no longer beside you when you wake up. The pet whose nails you no longer hear clicking on the hallway floor downstairs.

One of the greatest things you can do for yourself is to learn how to feel that feeling while these people are still here.

Here’s how I put it before:

When you’re with your spouse, significant other, a good friend or a close relative, picture the moment, in all its mundane detail, as if you’re looking back on it from a point in life where that person is no longer around. No need to imagine any upsetting explanations for their absence; the part of your life that includes that special person is just over, and you are happy to have been with them while your lives overlapped.

Observe them as if you’ve been shipped back from the future, to see them once again on an ordinary day, with absolutely no reason to take it for granted.

You just have to recognize those moments in which you’re with another person you know and love, and for most people these happen constantly. Then consciously take a step back, and watch the moment as if it’s a memory.

There’s no feeling like it when something ordinary is happening, and everyone’s being ordinary, and yet in your private mental space you’re seeing it all from way down the road, after these wonderful people are gone. An ordinary moment, adorned with such irreplaceable people, is so rich and perfect that you’d give anything to be right back in the middle of it. And then you realize that you are.

It’s surprisingly easy to just watch the outside world do its thing for a second. You might be alarmed to realize that the world would carry on just as freely without your particular brand of opinions and witty comments. Believe me — and I mean this in the most encouraging way possible — it doesn’t need you at all and you’re lucky to be here.

It doesn’t need your friends either, but it seems to be accommodating the lot of you, for the time being anyway. So see all you can while the door is still open.

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Photo by Joseph Leonardo