individuality

The Only Reason to Behave Ethically

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At playtime in the early grades, teachers always told us we were supposed to share our toys.

We always did it grudgingly. None of us actually wanted to share them. But we figured there would be consequences if we didn’t, just as there were for not doing anything else they told us we should do.

“It’s not nice not to share,” they would say. And why should I find it preferable to be “nice?” Nobody ever explained that.

Whenever I inquired, I’d hear things like:

“Because it’s important.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

I always knew what I was supposed to say, but inside I knew would rather have the firetruck to myself than take turns with some other kid, and nobody ever gave me a meaningful reason why there was something wrong with that.

We grow up with this rigid idea that we should behave ethically, as if the word “should” itself is all the reason we need. Few of us were ever given a genuine reason for why we should want to do “the right thing”, without the implicit threat of being punished or ostracized for not doing it. Read More

by David Cain on August 2, 2010

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The Purpose of Life, Revealed

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Last week I ran into a few online discussions about those big, big questions that often come up in late-night conversations: Why are we here? What is our purpose?

Strictly speaking, as members of the human species we do have a purpose. But we didn’t choose it, and it might not be us who stands to benefit from it. In fact, you might find our purpose quite upsetting. Maybe you don’t want to know. If you want to take the proverbial “Red Pill”, read on. While it might be alarming at first, it is also very enlightening, and could change forever how you view yourself and what you want to do with your life.

Today’s post is a particularly long one, but it does contain the meaning of life, so it may be worth your while.

To understand it we have to start with a quick biology lesson.

Everything you do, you do for you

It really seems like no matter what we do, we are always serving ourselves in some way. Every action you take is to fulfill some desire that you have, whether that desire is to eat a chocolate cake, run away from a bee, or to help your nephew with his homework. You do it because it promises to deliver something you want.

Even charity and philanthropy always seem to have some identifiable benefit to the giver: recognition, tax rebates, or even just a good feeling inside. There are always incentives for our behavior, and so it seems that we cannot escape self-interest.

That’s okay though. Self-interest doesn’t need to take the form of blatant selfishness, as we tend to call it — taking something for yourself at the expense of somebody else. But sometimes it does, in the form of theft, greed, or physical domination.

Most of us have learned that we can usually serve ourselves better by complying with society’s values than we could by violating them. Approaching life by stealing everything you need would almost certainly lead to a less desirable situation for you than working for and buying everything you need. Read More

by David Cain on July 26, 2010

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How to Deal With People Who Frustrate You

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Deep down I knew better, but I couldn’t stop myself.

An opinionated Twitter acquaintance of mine had tweeted a snarky comment that dismissed all forms of self-improvement as new age feel-good fluff. It was such a sweeping, cynical remark that I felt I had to set him straight.

So I hammered out a sharp rebuttal, and felt a little better, but there was still uneasiness. He would surely come up with a counter-attack on what I said, and it would go back and forth until one of us let the other have the last word.

After a few minutes, I got the lesson he was trying to teach me: to let go of my need to be right all the time. I deleted the tweet and he never saw it.

A few years ago I learned an ingenious method for dealing with other people when they’re doing things you wish they wouldn’t do. It’s adapted from a technique by the late author Richard Carlson. It’s easy and works exceedingly well.

You go about your day as normal, but you imagine one difference:

Everyone is enlightened but you.

That includes:

The impatient, tailgating driver behind you The intern at work who drinks all the coffee and never puts on a new pot The friend who knows he owes you ten bucks but is waiting until you ask him for it The guy who keeps clicking his pen during the meeting The “greeter” at Wal-Mart who tapes your bag shut every time even though you’re a loyal customer who’s never stolen anything in your life Whoever tagged your garage door last night Your kind old Aunt Sally, who keeps on talking after you’ve said you really need to get going

Imagine all the people in your world are completely enlightened and aware of what they’re doing to you, and they’re doing it only to teach you something valuable. Your task is to figure out what.

A true master won’t simply tell you what he thinks you should know. He’s too wise to say, “Always be patient,” and expect that it will make you a patient person. Instead, he’ll create a lesson that challenges you. He will push a button of yours, and see if you know what to do.

by David Cain on July 19, 2010

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Good News: Happiness Doesn’t Exist

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Happiness is slippery. It doesn’t like to stick around. We know we’ve had it before, but it’s gone away, and we know there are certain things we have to do to find it again. Certain ducks have to be in a row. After all, if you didn’t have to do anything to be happy, you wouldn’t do anything at all. It can’t be too hard to find. Other people seem to be finding it all right.

Yet for all our efforts, we never seem to get this happiness problem nailed down, and there’s a very good reason for that.

When we start talking about solving the problem of unhappiness, it’s hard to avoid the topic of Buddhism. I know not everyone is a fan, but they have lain some important groundwork, even for those of us who like the idea of improving our quality of life but aren’t prepared to buy the whole package, with all its baldness and orange robes. Despite its promises of peace and enlightenment, I haven’t leapt in with abandon, so don’t worry, this article doesn’t delve into pratitya-samutpadas and tathagatagarbhas. It’s about a plain-jane concept you know very well: happiness.

Buddhism developed as a response to mankind’s search for happiness. In the simplest terms, it’s not a belief system but a methodology for being happy. Yet Buddhist literature is known for focusing much more on suffering than happiness. Its curious preference for morbid subject matter has led some to describe Buddhism as preoccupied with negativity.

The reason suffering has become Buddhism’s primary focus, rather than happiness, is that happiness, as we conceive of it, doesn’t really exist — at least not in the same way suffering does. What we refer to as happiness is really just what the absence of suffering feels like. Read More

by David Cain on July 8, 2010

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Home?

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I’ve been home from my overseas trip for a week now and I haven’t really stopped moving. Seeing all my friends again has been awesome, and I’m so happy to have more than four shirts to choose from. I have my beautiful car again, and my pillowtop queen is more welcoming than all of the eighty-some beds I toured abroad, combined.

But I have to say I don’t really feel home yet.

Right now, Canada feels foreign to me compared to New Zealand. I fumble with our slender coins when I’m paying for things, I forget that sales tax isn’t included, and I bump into people because I’m always walking on the left-hand side of sidewalks and hallways. I lose track of my possessions because I no longer have to collect them all into my backpack every few days.

I’m noticing a real difference in the behavior of people in public here too. There is a certain North American aloofness that I never really noticed before. People seem to be less comfortable engaging with strangers than back in Oz or NZ. They just want to go about their business unbothered. Most clerks don’t smile or (really) look at you. People drive slower and more relaxedly here, but at the same time they seem to be less aware of what’s around them.

I don’t mean any of this to be criticism — after all, while away I learned that Canada is definitely where I want to live most of my life — only comparisons I can’t help but make after looking at the planet from two very different angles. Read More

by David Cain on July 5, 2010

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Time’s Up

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It’s time to go.

By the time you read this I will be flying from Brisbane back to Auckland, where I’ll tie up some loose ends and have one last ice cream cone. Then I go home.

It’s been eight and a half months since I exchanged final goodbyes with my family at Winnipeg International. Before I disappeared through the security gates, my well-travelled sister hugged me and said, “You’re going to have so much fun.”

I remember thinking “Really?” It’s hard to believe now, but “fun” was not what I was picturing at that moment. That day I was quite nervous about the whole thing — enduring a 17-hour flight, navigating Bangkok’s chaotic streets alone, establishing myself in another country where I didn’t know a soul.

That seems like ages ago.

The gravity of my trip’s ending has been coming down more heavily every day this last few weeks. It’s been a sentimental week, as I seem to be doing everything for the last time: booking the last hostel, buying the last batch of backpacker groceries, confirming my final flight. It really does feel like the end.

It was so much more than fun. I had the time of my life.

Right now Brisbane is grey and rainy and I’m in a 24-hour internet café. I’ve come down with what is hopefully a mild bug, and my head is cloudy. The moment feels very heavy and words are failing me right now. But I’ll just say it feels like the most pivotal chapter of my life is coming to an end.

It doesn’t exactly feel like I’m going back though. My hometown almost seems like a new destination now, because I’ve become a different person.

If I think of how overwhelmed I felt on my first day in Thailand — stepping out of a cab, beyond exhausted, into Khao San Road’s sweltering gauntlet of pushy vendors, trying to look like I didn’t come straight from the airport — it almost seems like that happened to a different person.

It did.

The young man who was so nervous to throw himself into a new country last October is not coming back. He perished sometime between the 4am train to Hua Hin and the ice-cold swim in the Clinton River. I’ve never grown so fast as I have this past nine months. I am calmer, more grateful, more aware. I’m much better able to socialize, to walk into unfamiliar settings without trepidation, to live my life without explaining myself, to bear pain and tedium (thank you kiwifruit industry), to live with few possessions, to flirt (with people and disaster), to try new things on a whim, to be upfront about who I am, and to appreciate whatever I have, wherever I am.

My voice is a bit louder, my posture a bit better. I use words like “mate” and “boardies.” I say “it’s meant to…” instead of “it’s supposed to…”

I am still reeling from the whole thing. Something huge has shifted, and I won’t know exactly what until I’ve spent a bit of time back in Canada. There is so much to talk about, but tonight I’m as dull and dreary as the streets outside.

This is my last post from this side of the planet.

Monday evening, I will be home.

Photo by David Cain

by David Cain on June 24, 2010

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The Hidden Cost of Commitment

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Today I fired one of my bosses.

Last year I took on a commitment that sounded like a good idea at the time. It didn’t look like a lot of work, and it wasn’t, but I never really got on top of it. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t actually want to do it, but the signs were there from the beginning.

I always came to it with resistance, but kept going because it was temporary, and I don’t like to leave things incomplete. Well today I decided just to pull the plug on it, and I felt such a relief. I didn’t know how much it was weighing on me.

I am quitting David Goes Kiwi. It’s still there, but there will be no more updates. And I feel wonderful about it.

A travel blog really seemed like the right thing to do, but honestly I just never enjoyed writing for it. It was always out of date, and I couldn’t possibly share everything I’ve experienced, or even close. Often I struggled for words, and my posts came off like a budget guidebook. The pictures were much more interesting, but it was always way easier to post them on Facebook. But I didn’t post many on Facebook, because I felt I should post them on DGK first. It really just got in the way of its own purpose: to keep people up to date on my overseas trip.

It’s not a big deal — I’ll be home in a matter of weeks, so I would have had to wrap it up anyway — but the relief I felt today when I finally decided to ditch it was unbelievable. It was something that was only dragging me down, because I just wasn’t willing to make a proper go of it.

Now I can write for Raptitude without that faint, forlorn nagging of my second blog. Guilt, I guess you’d call it. The guilt of not doing a good job of something that was supposedly important.

The hidden cost of commitment

Commitments take more than your time. They quietly take up space in your conscience.

They sneak in there because they often don’t appear to be commitments at all. We usually think of a commitment as an explicit standing agreement between you and somebody else, a promise to do something. But most of our commitments are with ourselves. Something you mean to get fixed. Some goal you mean to get underway. Some situation you mean to put right.

Even if it never made it to any kind of to-do list, if you ever came to the intention to do something about it, your conscience will always sense you’ve left something important unresolved. It won’t always tell you what it is, but it won’t leave you alone. It is the pea to your sleepless princess. Read More

by David Cain on June 7, 2010

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If Society is Sick, What Should We Do About It?

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There is a quote, much celebrated by activists, cynics, and political science students the world over, that I think could use a second look:

“It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

I like Krishnamurti, and I think he’s being misunderstood here, but I’ll get to that. Taken at face value, I disagree.

Activists, particularly those who nurture a general dislike for humankind at large, prize this snarky quote because it seems to validate the notion that only others need to change.

If our society is profoundly sick and we should refuse to adapt to it, then what is it that we’re supposed to adapt to? Or perhaps the sneaky insinuation is that some of us are already perfect, and no adjustments are necessary. Indeed, the implication of activism seems to be that it is others who need to correct their course — CEOs of petroleum companies, mindless consumers, fans of Glenn Beck, people who talk during movies or don’t use their turn signals — they are society’s sickness, and if they can be made to shape up, we’ll finally be sitting pretty.

Society does have its problems: crime, poverty, war, pollution, overpopulation and political corruption. It’s no utopia, clearly, but what is the best way to approach these problems?

Misanthropes and other “the-world-has-gone-to-shit” types would have you believe the solution is to identify the groups and individuals responsible for the “sickness” of society, and find a way to disempower them, expose them, or destroy them. With some grassroots support and some elbow grease they can get some new policies in place, install a new breed of political leaders, and usher into fashion a more progressive philosophy about how to govern, do business, and treat your fellow man… and in the mean time, sourly refuse to adapt to the human world as it is now, because that would only encourage the evil corporations and lying politicians who make it so troublesome.

But that won’t work. The “sickness” is not that some nasty people have come into power, but that human beings across the board are still working primarily from their stone-age instincts. The detractors of The Establishment are just as consumed by their own needs for personal power, righteousness, security and social dominance as the people they so proudly hate.

We are so newly removed from our original stomping ground that we are almost completely inexperienced with running civilizations smoothly. We’re much more efficiently wired to orchestrate a successful mammoth hunt than govern a nation intelligently. Civilization is barely out of the package. Read More

by David Cain on May 31, 2010

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Why Sharing Our Opinions Matters, Even When They’re Recycled

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Guest posts are rare on Raptitude, but today my friend and fellow writer Lisis Blackston has come out of retirement to share some of her wisdom with us. Enjoy.

Sometimes it seems like everything we say on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or even in conversations is either “preaching to the choir,” or “falling on deaf ears.” Readers and listeners have already decided what they choose to believe, and they pay attention only to whatever validates their predetermined opinions. They seek confirmation, rather than education or enlightenment.

No matter what they believe, they will always find that confirmation, because an argument can be made for just about anything. For instance, some “truths” are complete opposites:

“He who hesitates is lost” and “Everything comes to he who waits.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Birds of a feather flock together” and “Opposites attract.”

So, why bother sharing our thoughts and opinions at all? Isn’t it a complete waste of time?

As a matter of fact, it isn’t. Tossing around ideas is a necessary part of our self-discovery process. Read More

by Lisis on May 27, 2010

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Never Forget Your Rights

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You have the right to remain silent.

You may give up that right, and anything you say can be used against you.

If you choose to waive your right to remain silent, you are solely responsible for the consequences, be they burdens or benefits.

The right to remain silent is also the right to not remain silent.

Silence has consequences too, and they are easier to predict.

By remaining silent, you cannot make your identity known to others, you cannot connect with others, and you cannot impress upon the world your own unique thoughts and values.

But it is still your right.

You have the right to a purpose. If you do not have a purpose, one will be appointed for you.

Nobody lives without a purpose for long.

The institutions of work, society, and commerce will readily provide a purpose, in their own interests, to all those who have not identified purposes of their own.

Your purpose is the collection of values for which your life will be lived. They may or may not be your own values.

If you have not consciously identified your purpose, be assured that you have been serving somebody else’s purpose. Read More

by David Cain on May 24, 2010

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Raptitude.com

individuality

The Only Reason to Behave Ethically

The Purpose of Life, Revealed

Everything you do, you do for you

How to Deal With People Who Frustrate You

Good News: Happiness Doesn’t Exist

Home?

Time’s Up

The Hidden Cost of Commitment

The hidden cost of commitment

If Society is Sick, What Should We Do About It?

Why Sharing Our Opinions Matters, Even When They’re Recycled

Never Forget Your Rights

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