My brain, like all brains, houses an unbelievable quantity of remembered information, and a huge amount of that information is stuff I’ve watched on television. I always hated Star Trek, and frequently said so, but whenever I catch a clip of The Next Generation, somehow I’ve seen that episode before.

I was also never exactly a fan of The Oprah Winfrey Show, but I’ve surely seen several hundred hours of it. For years after it went off the air, I kept remembering a particular insight Oprah shared once. I forget the context, but Oprah was amazed to realize that she didn’t have to answer the phone just because it was ringing.

It was a significant insight to me too, not because answering the phone is a particularly difficult task, but because it meant there was an invisible freedom there, which I somehow didn’t realize I had. Even if I still answered every call, it felt like a choice. Before that, it had been a kind of a master-slave type relationship, in which some remote person could push some buttons and force my body up onto its feet (perhaps tearing me away from a Star Trek rerun).

I am slowly grasping another overlooked freedom, which is the freedom to let people be right (or at least feel right) even though I think they’re wrong. When someone tries to tell the world that Crash is a brilliant film, or that evolution is “just a theory”, I forget that I am free to let them continue to think so.

I gather I have a long history of arguing my views, even when I’m not sure why I’m doing it. One time I was respectfully disagreeing with a coworker about something, and after a particularly good point I made, his tone went from sporting to angry and he said, “Damn, you are one argumentative person!” I told him he was wrong, but later wondered for a few seconds if I was indeed argumentative. No, he was the argumentative one. Otherwise he would have realized I was right.

And this was before the internet was omnipresent in our lives, before it started joining us in the bathroom, back when “going online” was still just an activity you did for part of the day, rather than an additional mode of global perception we can activate at any moment. The typical person experienced far fewer moments in which it felt appropriate to argue a point beyond what politeness allows.  Read More

People mostly want the same thing, and many of us already have it, but we don’t really notice it.

I have no way of confirming this, but I bet that if you could interview people across different centuries and cultures, asking them what they wanted most, you would notice a distinct theme in their answers.

Some people would want great riches or power. Others would say they want something very specific: to invent a particular thing, or for a particular person to love them, or to win a gold medal or give an Oscar speech.

But I suspect most of them would say they want something like this:

I want to be able to do my work and spend time with my friends and family, free to live my own values in relative peace. I just want a fair chance to pursue love and happiness, and a stable, humble life.

You could call this “The Peacetime Dream”, a life with the normal share of ups and downs—necessarily including heartbreak, health issues, setbacks and disappointments—but which isn’t defined by war or persecution. Almost universally, people want basic stability and basic freedom, and to someone who doesn’t have those things they are clearly the best things in the world.

But to someone who does have those things, their greatness is not so clear. It’s easy to forget, or never notice at all, that many or most of us already have this state of affairs, more or less—certainly most people who read blogs in their spare time.

It’s also easy to forget that many (or most?) of history’s humans never had the Peacetime Dream. I wonder how many billions of individual human lives have been lived under tyrannical regimes, forced servitude, or during a war or a plague, or maybe all of those things.

I don’t know what your everyday worries are about, but I often worry about things like my work being criticized, the difficulty in making friends post-high-school, the ease of putting on weight at Christmas, the advance of age, the murkiness of our tax laws, and the declining quality of consumer products.  Read More

One day back in 2009, I was overcome by gratitude and published a short, gushing post thanking various strangers, teachers, family members and cats for what they had done for me.

I also thanked my small but growing audience for coming here. Raptitude was just over a month old and already it felt quite amazing that there were people I didn’t know who wanted to hear what I had to say.

This blog will be seven years old next month, and I can’t believe I’ve let so much time go by without directly thanking you for reading and sharing Raptitude. I try to tone down the sentimentality on this blog, but I honestly can’t tell you how much it means to me that you come here to read my long-winded reflections about self-defeating habits, existential absurdity, imaginary time travel and human frailty.

I’ve watched the audience grow from a size that could sit around a boardroom table to one that could fill a couple of Greyhounds, then a large high school, then a large concert hall. Today, the subscribers alone couldn’t fit into even the largest NHL arena, and it’s all because so many of you have told your friends about this little corner of the internet. Thank you so much for doing that.  Read More