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September 2014

shaving

Dear young men,

I want to tell you what I wish I’d been told, as I bumbled through the awkward years between 15 and 25. This whole letter might sound self-important, coming from a 34-year-old who writes mostly about how he’s just beginning to get the hang of adult life. Maybe it is, and you can take it or leave it.

All I know is that when I was negotiating that stretch between junior high and full adulthood, I could have used some guidance from men who were old enough to be done with that phase, but who were too young to be my dad.

But I didn’t have that, so like most of us, I picked up my strategies from the similarly confused young men around me. Even though that’s pretty normal, in terms of instructions on how to be a mature and respectful adult it’s hard to do worse than that — so I hope I can offer you a bit of insight you might not find among your peers. You’ll still have to choose who to believe and who to ignore, I just want to offer a different voice than the ones you may be hearing.

Some of what follows applies particularly to straight young men, because I’m pulling it from my own experience, but I think the principles behind it are pretty universal.

You will constantly have people telling you, both implicitly and explicitly, that you have to be a man. What that even means, in the 21st century, I don’t quite know. It certainly has a less specific meaning than it used to, and that’s a good thing. Machismo was never a good fit for many of us guys, and it clearly doesn’t make the world a more enlightened place.

Still, if you are male, you will be forced to relate to this increasingly irrelevant concept of “being a man” in some way or another.

Even though we humans are (thankfully) moving on from seeing ourselves as two distinct kinds of creatures, there’s nothing wrong with being a man, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There’s nothing wrong with doing traditionally “manly” things. Don’t be embarrassed by them. If you want to watch football on Sunday, or train in MMA, or grow a handlebar mustache, or buy a pickup truck, make no apologies.  Read More

crowd

During a moment in the checkout line at Costco, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be the worst time for the apocalypse to strike. There might have been two hundred souls in the building, and if we were suddenly thrust into a survival situation by nuclear attack or zombie outbreak, we would have hundreds of tons of food, along with plenty of pharmaceuticals, first aid supplies, and toilet paper on hand.

If a crisis forced you to spend weeks or months together with a fairly random selection of strangers, you’d soon find out which of these people are a positive, helpful presence, and which aren’t.

Like most people probably do, I like to think I’d be one of the more helpful and welcome members of this new post-apocalyptic family, but I’m not sure why I think that. It’s probably the “Lake Wobegon Effect” — our tendency to overestimate our value and capabilities in relation to others. It’s the same phenomenon that has 90% of us believing we’re better-than-average drivers. (Clearly about 40% of us are wrong on that count, but I’m still somehow nearly 100% sure I’m not one of them.)

As Sam Harris points out in Waking Up, one of the reasons we feel so comfortable watching movies and television is because they allow us to observe and judge the intimate happenings of other people’s lives, while at the same time being completely shielded from their scrutiny of ourselves.

In any case, I’m fascinated by how readily we make judgments about strangers, yet how little we actually know about their personality and character (until, perhaps, some unlikely crisis brings them to the surface.)

Over the years I’ve become more aware of my snap judgments, but they still happen all the time. I frequently catch myself damning certain strangers as altogether bad people, on the basis of one instance of their not using their turn signal, or having a conversation that blocks a doorway.

I’m trying to overcome the habit of justifying these casual, internal condemnations of strangers. Instead, I see if I can overcome my initial negative impression completely, whenever I notice I’m being judgey. My new response to that negativity is this: I decide to drop the low-level resentment, and instead become their secret ally, for the few minutes we are in each other’s presence.

I’ll explain what I mean. This practice started spontaneously on an ordinary day a few months ago:

I’m walking several blocks to a little grocery store down my street, stuck behind a slow-moving man who is walking directly down the center of the narrow sidewalk. There’s no room to go around without stepping into the street, or shimmying past him on the building side.

At first I have my normal reaction of disdain and character judgments. The usual self-righteous internal monologue starts up: Some people just never think about how they affect others! I would never be that unaware of my surroundings! And so on. The fundamental message of all of these thoughts is, “I’m better than you.”

It’s telling that I only become interested in the Ethics of Proper Sidewalk-Sharing in moments when I’m being personally inconvenienced. Even though the issue undoubtedly affects millions of people every day, it never seems to be an important topic to think about at any other time. Many or most of our internal moral complaints about others are really just petty reactions to being inconvenienced, and not any kind of meaningful examination of personal ethics or how to run a society. I’m learning to distrust these kinds of thoughts when I have them, but I still have them.

Anyway, on this occasion I’m lucky enough to feel a pang of guilt for judging this person. He’s a middle-aged man, dressed in a golf shirt and dad jeans, almost certainly unaware that he’s blocking all but the most aggressive and acrobatic attempts to pass him. Still, it’s not fair to deem him a less aware or less considerate person than I am, because even though I’m frustrated with what he’s doing right now, I really know almost nothing about him.

Although I tend to walk at Manhattan speeds wherever I am in the world, right now I’m not exactly in a rush. So instead of making a move to get past this man, I decide to just relax and walk a good ten meters behind him, at a pace of his choosing. And instead of my normal habit of presuming he’s an especially bad or inconsiderate person, I’ll presume he’s an especially good one, or at least good enough not to deserve bitter glares from a stranger.  Read More

Post image for Why Travel Makes You Grow

Being away from home makes you more conscious. When you’re at home, each day is so similar that you can navigate most of it via autopilot, without much conscious thought.

From the moment we wake up, most of our decisions have been made already: what to do for the first half-hour of the day, what time we get dressed, where we go when we leave the bedroom, who we will interact with, what time we’ll eat, where we’ll be when we do, what we need to worry about and not worry about, and so on.

When you wake up staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, with unfamiliar sounds in the background, and no routines to lean on, the day has a lot more question marks, and they demand conscious thinking and decisionmaking.

You remember more of what happens when you’re away from home, because life resembles your past experience so much less. The days seem longer and fuller, and details appear more significant, because you’re too far outside your comfortable grooves to let your mind wander out of the present into idle, irrelevant thinking. Your attention feels like it needs to stay on your surroundings, which is not true when you’re living a normal day at home.

Personal growth happens much more quickly. You have more challenges — how to get hot water out of this particular faucet, or whether it’s even possible, or where to find breakfast nearby — or how to find the answers to any of these questions without using your first language. All of this requires much greater application of inquiry, observation, and decisionmaking than a normal day at home.

Most of all, you become more conscious of who you are and how you live, because both are reflected back to you constantly when you’re temporarily unable to be who you’re used to being, and to do what you’re used to doing.

So a stint of travel in an unfamiliar land is just about the perfect setting for self-reflection. As most of you know, I just got back from three weeks in Ecuador, where I presented at a chautauqua, organized by Cheryl Reed from Above the Clouds Retreats. The idea of the chautauqua was to get away from our normal lives, convene with somewhat like-minded strangers, and exchange our ideas about the big-picture things: life paths, outlooks, bucket lists, and happiness.  Read More

Tortuga Bay

As most of you know I’ve been in Ecuador for the last couple of weeks. Internet access has been extremely spotty, and writing time has been scarce. Right now I’m on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galapagos Islands, enjoying my last week abroad, and it’s difficult to sit inside when there’s so much out there to see. When I get back I’ll resume my regular posting schedule.

The chautauqua was amazing and I’ll have a lot to say about it when I get time to sit down and work out my thoughts. In the mean time I’m going to share a few of the many hundreds of photos I’ve taken here. Click the thumbnail to view the photo in large size.

[If you’re reading by email and can’t see the photos, see them on Raptitude.com]

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