Dear 15-year-old self,

The first thing to know is that high school, and everything that comes after it, is impossible to get right. When you’re a kid you don’t have to be anything except what you are, a kid. But when you’re an adult, or training to be one, all aspects of life seem to become concerned with trying to be a certain way: sufficiently cool, successful, independent, respectable, charitable, productive, original, normal, healthy, sexy, or whatever else you currently are not. This impossible goal is the great joke of human life that I will try to explain in this letter.

In high school, this mostly means one thing: don’t try to be cool. You will not be cool until your late twenties. It isn’t actually possible to be cool in high school—all high school students are hopelessly uncool, especially the cool ones. This will be obvious the moment you graduate, but in the meantime you might have to make a point of remembering it.

None of the respect you earn in high school will buy you anything after you leave high school. It’s like working at Canadian Tire for a summer and getting paid only in Canadian Tire money. Waste no energy earning respect in high school. Spend it instead wandering every sidestreet of geekdom and subculture you pass by. Instead of finding scraps of approval from uncool people, you will end up finding something real and lasting in Brian Eno or Nietzsche or Margaret Atwood or Public Radio. Find those grooves of meaning that you can follow into adulthood. When people give you a hard time for liking what you like, that’s a sign you’re on the right track. You are uncovering veins of precious metals; they are scrounging for nearly-expired coupons.

Get a shitty job. Work in a grocery store, steering shrink-wrapped pallets of cola through cramped warehouses. Spend hours daintily arranging shelves that you will later see customers destroy in minutes. This will pay for your food court lunches and headphones, and also impress on you the nihilistic reality of most of the work out there. Get a good, long, nasty look at how impersonal and irrelevant your role on this earth can be if you’re not careful. Get your face right into it, right into the filthy shelves and bins of expired yogurt and the empty eyes of your manager and make a vow that whatever you do with your life you will always be moving away from all of that.  Read More

I learned early on that criticism feels about ten times as bad as praise feels good.

For a while I assumed this was a neurosis only I and other recovering pessimists had. But when I started blogging, I kept hearing the same thing from other writers: one critical comment makes you forget a dozen positive ones.

It turns out this is normal for human beings. Criticism just weighs more on our emotions than praise does. We remember negative events more vividly than positive ones, and we give more emotional weight to a loss than an equivalent gain.

This makes sense from a survival perspective, if you think about it. There’s more urgency to remember dangers vividly than rewards. The trauma of negative events — whether it’s from a pointed criticism or a stubbed toe — teaches you how to stay physically safe and in good standing with the tribe. Positive events are beneficial when you have them, and it’s helpful to remember how you got to them, but there’s no benefit in staying preoccupied with them for a long time.

“Bad emotions, bad parents and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones,” wrote social psychology professor Roy Baumeister in a paper he co-authored, entitled “Bad is Stronger Than Good”.

A natural side-effect of this overvaluation of negativity is that we tend to be more passive in life than we would be if we weighed negativity and positivity the same. Bad outcomes seem to promise more in terms of punishment than good outcomes promise in terms of benefit, so it can seem sensible to speak out and try new things as infrequently as possible. As writer Elbert Hubbard put it, “To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”  Read More

If a thousand people “Like” this post, Mark Zuckerberg will spare this kitten. Please share!

Chances are you have a friend or relative who is constantly posting dubious “facts” on social media: that you can charge your electronic devices by plugging them into an onion, that entering your PIN in reverse at an ATM summons the police, or that this year Halloween falls on a Friday the 13th for the first time in 666 years. (Think about that one for a moment.)

We can laugh all day at our paranoid friends and computer-illiterate aunts for falling for Facebook hoaxes, but the basic offense here — passing along information without any attempt to verify it — is something most of us probably do all the time.

Bad information isn’t always obvious, and it probably wouldn’t occur to you to investigate a claim unless it sounded untrue to you from the beginning. There’s pretty good evidence that we’re much more gullible than we think: we tend to believe what we hear, unless it initially strikes us as unlikely.

After a belief passes the front door, it usually doesn’t get much scrutiny. It becomes part of your “body of knowledge,” which is just another name for your impression of the way the world is, and it remains there until some new belief utterly clashes with it and you’re forced to reconsider. We easily forget our reasons (if we ever had any) for believing what we believe, and we’re seldom asked for them.

Don’t take my word for it, but you can be almost certain that a lot of the things you “know” aren’t really true. I would bet money that some of the facts of life you currently feel certain about can be found on this list of common misconceptions. It may surprise you to hear for example, that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity in children, and that fortune cookies are actually Danish in origin, not Chinese or Japanese or American.

We do learn quite a bit about the world from direct experience. But clearly, most of our learning amounts to believing the beliefs of other people, whether they’re expressed in a Facebook post or in a textbook. You hear or read something, and if it seems true you’ll probably believe it. In all likelihood you’ll never try to verify that belief unless someone else challenges it, and it may never occur to you that it might be wrong. Once a belief has established itself, we freely tell others what we know, or think we know, and the process repeats.  Read More