#knowingourselves

[realpants4jesus]

We need not be afraid of the things God Himself put in our hearts.

Isabella Contolini

[kristinakaine]

I Connecting - Exploring our Soul

[knowingourselves]

Growing is hard.

 A lot of my work revolves around issues of human languages, and how they work.

 A common refrain in talking about the marvel of young children acquiring their first language is that they do it almost “effortlessly”: we have to go to classes for years and years to master a language, whereas kids just do it while chewing on a picture book. A colleague sometime later really shifting my thinking in countering that, in fact, children don’t learn language effortlessly. In fact, it’s one of their main activities for years and years on end, and it never stops – they don’t learn language for a couple of hours 5 days a week – it’s for all their waking hours every day. Learning language is hard.

 But it’s not just infants, and it’s not just language.

 I see this in my older children. They both came to us through the foster system when they were 17 years old. Any foster parent will tell you that children who come through that system come from hard places and have experienced trauma. Many are removed from situations that are already traumatic, and even if that weren’t true, the foster system inflicts its own traumas.

 People often ask me how my son is doing (he moved back in with us, so the question comes up). When I respond that he’s doing great, they ask what he’s doing – usually whether he’s in school or working a job. And he’s doing neither of those things right now.

 He is in fact doing many things – he’s learning music theory, learning to produce music on the computer, he’s reading, he’s writing lyrics, and becoming a musician in a way he’s always wanted to, but never actually worked at before. He’s learning that you can set goals that are long ahead of you but take years to achieve, he’s learning how to put 6 hours of work today on the single task of learning how to make one sound effect on one drum kick on one bar of one song that may or may not ever be good enough to perform in front of people: because that’s how you get good at a thing. He’s learning how long it takes to learn things, how to rely on other people’s expertise, how to trust other people. In a month he’ll have lived in the same place for longer than a year, something he’s never done before in his life. He’s learning that he has people who are his people who will stay his people, and that he has to rely on them, and that they are going to rely on him.

 But none of those answers “count” in a society where what “counts” are a select few sorts of successes. So when they learn that he’s not in school, and not working a job right now, they’re confused. So, then, what is he doing? The answer, of course, is that he is growing. And growing is fucking hard.

 So often people idealize childhood and youth, looking back on it as the idyllic time when the worries of life were not pressing down on you, when your main work was to go to school and to play at whatever captured your enthusiasm.

 I don’t really miss those days though. Because all of that is true, but I think we forget how hard growing up was. How uncomfortable you were at every new moment because you were doing new things that you didn’t know how to do. You were being asked to understand things you didn’t understand before. You were finding out that the way you did things before (screamed to get what you wanted) are no longer acceptable, and now you’re 2 years old and have to say please, and now you’re 3 years old and have to say it in a sentence. And now you’re 4 years old and have to wait 15 minutes to get what you asked for. And now you’re 7 years old and have to wait 3 hours to get what you asked for. And now you want bigger, expensive things and are told that you can’t have them at all, ever.

 Growing up was not easy. We often look at a three year old throwing a tantrum and condescendingly say, “oh, being three must be so hard.” The reality is that it IS hard. Because growing is perhaps the most difficult thing for a human to do, and it’s about the only thing that children are doing (why do we really think they’re whining and crying all the time?? If it were so easy they’d just be kicking it drinking their juice box and laughing at us in the horrors of adulthood). And they don’t even get much of a choice in the matter. The growing happens TO them. Now that I’m a grownup I have the distinct privilege of choosing not to grow anymore if I don’t really want to. I don’t have to learn new things, gain new skills, develop new character traits. I can spend the next 50 years of my life becoming an older (and probably crankier) version of the person I am today.

 I’ve wandered into the question of what the meaning of life is on several occasions. I’m not a biologist, but surely any biological definition would include growth as a core component: things that are alive are things that can grow. There’s something meaningful about growing. It’s why I find joy in watching our kitten get bigger each day and be able to jump a little higher, run a little faster. It’s part of why parents continue to find great pleasure in parenting their kids to adulthood despite their children quite obviously driving them crazy quite frequently. And I think it’s why grownups who have peace of mind about their lives are often people who are themselves working to grow. They are the wise ones, the reliable ones, the comforting ones, the ones who seem to have their finger on the pulse of the universe. And they always seem to be the ones that know that they have growing to do, and put in the work to keep growing. To be more patient, to be more kind, to be more skilled, to be more disciplined, to accomplish things they want, to love the people around them better.

 But, at the same time, these people never get to be complacent. Because growing is hard, and it doesn’t happen automatically. But they DO get to have peace of mind. Because at least in some small way, the meaning of life is to grow.

[knowingourselves]

American Discontent.

The title of this post is what I imagined the title of my book would be before I realized my thinking is nowhere near coherent enough (or interesting enough) to make for a book. I continue to marvel that we are as discontent as we are.

 I was talking to a student about the American Achievement Vice (our valuing achievement over most else) and the ways in which it is draining people of life, and the ways in which our cultural values in many ways are missing the mark (if the mark is imagined as ‘a situation where our values value things that are worthwhile in the real-world universe, such that living according to those values makes for a worthwhile life.’)

 So, we were discussing the ways in which chasing achievement endlessly is not happy-making, and in fact is generating massive discontent among many (otherwise apparently) high-achieving and ‘successful’ people. In the course of talking this student noted that many people had long since seen the emptiness of these pursuits, and perhaps even seen the wisdom of other ways of living, but simply don’t have the impetus to make a change.

 He pointed to a favorite phrase of his, from the US Declaration of Independence of all places: “…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Those fellows were insightful.

 We in the contemporary US have in essence created an eminently sufferable form of suffering. In any objective measure of standard of living, a majority of people in the US are living at essentially the peak of all humans in the entire history of humanity (whether this is a just or fair arrangement is a question for another day). Louis CK is right: everything is amazing and nobody is happy. We may be discontent in the deepest of ways and feel like we’re living a meaningless existence, but the amazingness of everything makes our discontent eminently sufferable.

From earlier in the same document is the more-famous statement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We of course have internalized this same concept as a central value, that we are free to pursue our own happiness. But these principles work against each other. We simultaneously are willing to suffer things that are familiar as long as we can bear it (and “bearing it” can go on for quite a while when we’re talking 8-9 hours of work followed by Netflix combined with all the food I could possibly eat). But we also believe we can pursue our own happiness. But there is no impetus to unsettle our current discontentedness when it’s so damn comfortable otherwise.

 I guess we have to ask ourselves what we care about most. Do we care about living a good life, living a worthwhile life? Because almost always this requires doing something different than we’re already doing. So we will always end up with a choice between what is comfortable and familiar, and what we believe is worthwhile. Perhaps in this context the only thing that differentiates people who grow toward more meaningful ways of life and those who don’t are that the growing people have the courage to face their discontent in the eye and choose the uncomfortable option.

[knowingourselves]

Discipline.

A couple of years back we can back from a visit to my grandparents, and were discussing the ways in which they were struggling with getting older. They were not wanting to give up their driver’s licenses, and were resisting some other kinds of aging-related changes. I remember discussing at length the ways in which I wanted to age more gracefully, how I wanted to be more OK with being 80 than it seemed like they were being at that point. Not that I spend a lot of time imagining my final decade(s), but at the very least I was thinking I could handle it with ease once I got there.

 At that very time I was going through a bout of knee tendinitis, which was essentially my first experience of my body not working as well as it did in my teens and 20s. And I was not dealing with it well – I was depressed over the fact that I had gotten back in shape but couldn’t keep exercising, and I was quite angry as well that shit was hard, basically. I was not adjusting well to a new reality where I could in fact still be active, but had to take careful care of my knees with special shoes, icing after exercising, limited the intensity of exercise, and so on. I was pissed off.

 It wasn’t until a couple of days after visiting my grandparents and judging them how I did that I realizing the grand irony (well, hypocrisy) of my condescending line of judgmental thought about them. And I realized, “If I can’t handle year THIRTY with ease, what makes me think I’ll be a good 85 year old?!?” Literally the only way that I can prepare myself for being good at being 85 is to do my best at being the age I am now. I can’t be a good 85 year old now because I’m not 85, but I can live year 33 the best that I can, than live 34 the best that I can, and then someday 50 years from now if I’ve worked hard, maybe I’ll be ready to be 85.

 I came across a book written in 1943 by Harry Fosdick entitled On Being a Real Person. Chapter #1 is called Shouldering Responsibility for Ourselves. While our control over the universe is minimal at most, it’s easy at times to abdicate any responsibility at all for what happens in our lives. When someone asked me the other day if I was a morning person or an evening person, I found myself saying, “well, if it were up to me I would be a morning person, but …” I embarrassed myself on the spot, because of course it was up to me when I choose to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. I have plenty of excuses about people/tasks/circumstances that make me stay up late, but the reality is that I allow that to happen, and I also don’t wake up early. That is up to me. 

It’s a central fact about human nature that what we experience today and what we choose to do today shapes the person that we will be tomorrow. And what we experience and choose to do tomorrow will shape who we are the day after that. Which means that 1) we have the ability to shape who we will be by making specific choices today, but it also means that 2) people grow slowly, over time. Sometimes long amounts of time. Sustaining everyday life—food, water, shelter—takes so little effort in some ways (at least, for some populations in this country) that it’s easy to start thinking that good outcomes should just happen at some point, or that personal change can happen with a decision to just be different.

 We know that Olympic sprinters and NFL linebackers and NBA small forwards must train their bodies to perform at the highest levels. But rarely do we think that we need to train our minds and spirits to respond to the world in a particular way. I can be a more patient person in a year if I work at being calm today when it takes 3 hours to transfer my phone number to a new wireless service. I can have more peace of mind about my life next month if I practice being grateful today for a slow morning, and the opportunity to see friends later. I can be a wiser person in a year from now if I take 10 minutes to reflect on my life today. But I can’t just, today, magically become right now patient, wise, and happy, just because I want to.  

 Humans have an incredible capacity to grow (if not actually change, at least to grow). And a central cognitive reality is that who we are in the future is shaped by what happens today. We don’t get to control all of that, but we do control some of that, and if we aren’t willing to shoulder responsibility for being disciplined in the areas we can be, we should hardly be surprised when we’re not the people that we wish we were a year from now.  

[knowingourselves]

Overachievers.

I recently started reading various things from John Wooden, the former UCLA basketball coach who was insanely successful in winning NCAA men's basketball championships, but who I've also discovered was a bit of of an everyday philosopher as well. Here is a gem from him: 

"No one is an overachiever. How can you rise above your level of competency? We’re all underachievers to different degrees. You may hear someone say that a certain individual “gave 110 percent.” How can that be? You can only give what you have, and you have only 100 percent. I preferred to judge individuals on the basis of how close they came to giving 100 percent, knowing they would never reach perfection, and they would certainly never reach 110 percent of perfection, but perhaps they would operate near their level of competency when their greatest skill was needed." Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (p. 71). 

In the book he dwells consistently on this definition of success, which is in striking contrast to any popular version of this idea currently, at least as far as I can tell: 

"My dad, Joshua, had great influence on my own personal definition of success, and it has little to do with fortune or fame. Although I probably didn’t really understand it at the time, one of the things he tried to get across to me was that I should never try to be better than someone else. Then he always added, 'But Johnny, never cease trying to be the best you can be. That is under your control. The other isn’t.' You have little say over how big or how strong or how smart or rich someone else may be. You do have, at least you should have, control of yourself and the effort you give toward bringing out your best in whatever you’re doing. This effort must be total, and when it is, I believe you have achieved personal success" Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (p. 52). 

Wooden constantly simplifies the universe into core simple truths. One major one strikes at the heart of the achievement vice - achievement necessarily involves performing better than other people to some degree, and that is quite beyond our control. We can control how well we prepare and how hard we work, but we can't control what other people do. This is why nobody overachieves. We either perform at the highest level we are capable (at whatever task we are considering), or we perform at some degree less than the highest level we are capable. Circumstances determine everything else beyond that.

It's striking that this is not a sympathetic pat on the back for the loser for trying hard (especially as this is coming from the man who won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years at UCLA). This is a simple fact of the universe - you can't control outcomes in the world, you can only control your own actions. So if you maintain a version of personal success in life that depends on outcomes, you are almost certainly sacrificing your peace of mind, because you are giving yourself over to the whims of the universe as to whether your needs are going to be fulfilled. Because there's nothing you can do to guarantee that things fall your way.

"It goes back to focusing on the journey rather than the destination. I was just as satisfied with my efforts in the fourteen years before we won a national championship as I was the final twelve years, when we captured ten championships. In fact, and you may have trouble accepting this, I believe we were more successful in some years when we didn’t win a championship than in some years when we did. Those on the outside had a higher level of satisfaction when we won championships, but I didn’t. I knew that each of the first fourteen years I made the maximum effort to do the best I was capable of. My effort in the 'worst' year was exactly the same as in a championship year. How the media, alumni, or fans viewed the results of that effort was their concern, not mine." Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (pp. 82-83). 

I'm realizing that if it comes to choosing peace of mind, or achievement, I want to choose peace of mind. And when the peace of mind comes from simply accepting your best efforts as success, rather than depending on certain outcomes, it ironically will also get you the best outcomes you could have possibly had anyway (since what else is there to give beyond our best effort?). Overachieving is a myth - there can in fact be no such thing. The difference with Wooden's approach there is peace of mind no matter what the outcomes are, as opposed to obsession with achievement, which effectively guarantees fear and anxiety no matter what the outcomes are. It seems so simple ...

[knowingourselves]

Contentment.

I recently caught up with an old friend that I worked with a couple of years ago. We had spent a fair amount of time while working together reflecting on how our school made it very difficult to be happy – we were overwhelmed and underappreciated and frequently unhappy. But he kindly was sharing that, upon moving to a new university, he started to realize that there were so many wonderful things about my school that he missed, and he wanted me to know that because he wanted me to be able to appreciate the things that I already do have.

  We know (sort of) not to long for things we don’t have – we have lots of sayings like “the grass is always greener on the other side” and “grow where you are planted” that emphasize the importance of leaning into the circumstances you are currently in. And it’s an old scriptural adage to say that “I have learned to be content in all circumstances,” and it seems kinda nice but kinda trite at the same time.

  But it’s worth seriously thinking about the question, “what do I need out of life in order to be OK with life?” Which of course gets a bit to “the meaning of life” sorts of questions, but perhaps a little more down-to-earth in the zone of “what’s important?”

  Contentment is perhaps not the same thing as happiness; not everyone would say so at least. But contentment has a pretty awesome logic underlying it. I don’t control the universe, as much as I wish I did, and that means that many things will happen in life that I can’t control. If I need certain things out of life in order to be OK with life, the simple truth is that I can’t control whether everything will fall into place for me to get those things (whether it’s career, family, house, friends, money, children, whatever), so I can’t control whether I will be OK with life. But if I learn to be grateful for the things I do have and to learn to be content no matter what happens, in a sense accepting my place in the universe, it’s impossible NOT to be happy. Contentment essentially is not needing or wanting more than you already have – and there is a deep safety to not needing or wanting more than you have. With the discipline of looking for contentment in all circumstances, happiness can never be snatched away from you.

  Some circumstances are brutal to learn to be content in. But an awful lot of us are in circumstances that are perfectly contentment-worthy all on their own (without all that much discipline on our parts).

  But we’re acculturated here to never be content and to always press for more… it’s the American way, it produces incredible levels of achievement, almost directly by virtue of high levels of discontentment. Being content doesn’t rule out achievement. But valuing achievement over everything else essentially rules out contentment. And if we are discontent, it is almost impossible to be happy.

  The tyranny of the new and novel makes us forget things that are old, but life on earth is old, and humanity is old, and perhaps some of the oldest wisdom is actually wise. Nothing here is new, but the correlations are pretty simple. One more way that the Achievement Vice undermines quality of life in the most basic of ways. 

[knowingourselves]

Who is your teacher?

If you ask anybody if they have ever had a very influential person in their life, they can surely identify someone. For me it was my high school science teacher; I was at a small school and performing well academically, but he used to give me Bs on lab reports not because I did worse than the people who got As (he confirmed that my lab reports were better) but because he knew that I could perform better than I had. He was unwilling to let me be content with comparing myself to other people and settling with that result. Instead, he pressed me to actually be expert about the things that I worked on, and to do the best work that I myself was capable of, irrespective of other people’s performance.

  In general my mentors were often my teachers, though at times they were peers at higher grade levels, sometimes in the classroom, sometimes on my soccer teams, sometimes my coaches. These are the people that I trusted to tell me about the way the world worked, and that I trusted to help me figure out how to get better at living life. And my wholly detailed and scientific surveys (i.e. asking people I happened to talk to in the last week) have confirmed that many people can identify these influential mentors in their lives.

  But at the same time, if you ask people who their mentor is today, or who they are currently learning about life from, or who they plan to acquire as a mentor, you will likely receive a relatively blank look in return. Not so much because many of us don’t currently have a mentor, but because it seems like an irrelevant question: students get teachers, but grownups just do life - they don’t need teachers anymore.

  This became clear to me when my wife and I met an older couple recently through a friend of a friend. We came away from our first meeting so excited because we both thought, “we want to be just like them when we grow up!” They are hospitable, generous people who freely give of their time and money and possessions to help other people (even strangers) – every time we visit them someone new is living in their house who happened to need someplace to stay. We’ve tried to foster a relationship with them in the last year, very intentionally, because we want to learn from them what it is that they know about the world, and what they do day to day, to help them be the kind of people who live like that.

  But in trying to acquire mentors in this way I realized just how strange of a situation this is – it hasn’t seemed like a particularly ‘grownup’ thing to do, to be honest. Why is it that we can identify people who have turned out to be influential for us, and highly value those people, but in the current moment we are wholly unconcerned with who those teachers in our lives are at present? It seems like this should matter to us.  

  Dallas Willard was philosopher from USC, who has written on many issues relating to character and theology. A question he asks over and over in his writing is, “who is your teacher?” His point is a simple one – that we know about the world always derives from what other people know about the world, and the people that end up being influential in our lives greatly shape who we end up as people. So presumably we should be intensely invested in who our teachers are.

  But something about the individualistic American culture builds an expectation that responsible, competent people are self-reliant. We accept that young people need teachers and mentors, but very few adults approach life with the thought process that they need to identify and arrange to be taught about life by somebody.

  Nonetheless, it’s a transparent truth of life that we only ever get to live each life stage once – I was never 29 before I turned 29, and since turning 30 I will never be 29 again. Occasionally we do things over and over (grading exams and washing dishes come to mind) but there are a vast number of events in life that are new. I may be able to counsel college students on how to navigate their 20s, but I’m pretty much bereft of knowledge about how to navigate your 30s (since I’m desperately trying to figure that out myself at the moment). But while our culture tells us to do many things, one thing it doesn’t tell us to do is seek out mentors at every stage in life.

  But this is one of those values-based questions – we may think we don’t need mentors, but we are all learning the next things in life from someone. So nobody can answer “who is your teacher?” by saying “I don’t have teachers.” We’re learning about what is valuable in life from somewhere. So who are we learning it from? And once we figure that out, we have to decide if those are the places we want to learn about life from. If not, we ought to be running out the door to find the teachers we want.

[knowingourselves]

A symptom, not the disease.

This is a blog that centers on issues of happiness, with really heavy doses of cultural, sociological, and linguistic analysis along the way. Quite the nerd haven. But I’ve wandered off the happiness track for a while here and want to bring things back around a bit.

  I read an essay in the Atlantic recently that claimed that the entire pursuit of happiness is a mistake in and of itself, because happiness is not what makes life worthwhile, meaning is what makes life worthwhile: happiness is transitory and self-centered, meaning is enduring and others-centered. This is the big claim of Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning. And Frankl and these others might not be wrong, as there are many situations where finding meaning is possible amidst extreme suffering (whereas anything akin to happiness is likely elusive). But I think happiness is still at the heart of the matter of living a good life, and not just because so much of our culture is centered on it.

  Happiness is a by-product of a life lived well – of living a life that focuses on doing the kinds of things that are part of a “good” life (which obviously needs more explanation). That’s not so profound, it’s obvious once you think about it – you don’t “do happiness” – if it were so simple we’d all have “done happiness” ages ago. The trick is figuring out what counts as living well (either in universals of humanity or particular aspects of our situation) and do those things. 

  As a small aside, I am convinced that a central aspect of creating happiness is a mindset of contentment. If I am content with what I have, with where I am, with who I’m with … I am not waiting or wishing or wanting for anything, so I certainly won’t be unhappy. I might not be euphoric, but nobody stays euphoric for that long anyway. This has to be a real contentment though, not being grudgingly resigned to my lot in life. Contentment in this way is essentially an antidote for unhappiness, because it’s impossible to be unhappy and content at the same time. It may well be that this contentment derives from living a meaningful life in the ways the Atlantic article talked about, and these two elements may both be critical aspects of the good life.

  But no matter what your definition of the good life I think there is at least one way in which happiness should be at the forefront of our attention: unhappiness is surely a sign that something has gone awry. We might not be able to agree on what exactly makes up happiness, but we sure as hell can tell clearly when we don’t have it. And this unhappiness is essentially a huge red flag that we’re not living our life well at this point. We should be grateful when we realize how unhappy we are, because we’re about to learn how to live a better life.

  The problem is, we spend a lot of time trying to treat unhappiness as if it is a disease – I’m unhappy and I need happiness treatments to fix that, so I look for things that make the unhappiness go away. But both happiness and unhappiness are by-products, not themselves the stuff of life. Unhappiness is not a disease, it’s the symptom of the disease, which is that somewhere else in my life I am not having my needs met in some way, or phrased another way, I am not living out all the “human things” that humans need to live and do to be whole.

  It’s not simple to find this of course, to figure out what those “human things” are. But this is why it is immensely important to understand human nature, because tells us exactly what those human things are. The pursuit of happiness may well be a thoroughly mistaken exercise in this sense – happiness can itself only be a by-product of a life otherwise lived well, and if we lose a clear sense of what THAT is, chasing happiness will be a fool’s errand. But we should be paying attention to our levels of happiness nonetheless, as unhappiness is going to be exactly the slap in the face we need to realize that we have lost the plot. 

[knowingourselves]

Virginity is a social construct: Thoughts on risky intellectual trends

For one reason or another, I’ve heard the statement “virginity is a social construct” three or four times in the last couple of weeks. Not sure why it’s bouncing around our campus so much at the moment or why students are talking about it within earshot of me, but so it goes.

  The first question that pops up is what does that even mean? The term social construct is generally used to demonstrate that a particular life pattern is the result not of fundamental natural laws of the universe (e.g. that light and sound travel at different speeds) but based on mutual (probably unconscious) agreements among members of a society that it will be that way. An easy example –everyone knows that pink is a girl color and blue is a boy color. Of course, back in the early 1900s when people first started dressing their kids according to sex here in the US, the earliest trend was for boys to be dressed in pink, and for girls to be dressed in blue. Of course, if it wasn’t obvious, there’s nothing penis-related about the color blue except that somehow we decided that gender differentiation of children by dress code was important, so we classified colors by gender and ran with it.

  Of course, one might argue that even if the color blue is non-penis-related, virginity is a thing that exists – there is obviously a period of time before a person has had sex when they (shocker) haven’t had sex yet. But the students aren’t wrong – we could envision a society where there is next-to-no importance placed on whether someone has had sex yet or not, in which case the concept of virginity (and all the importance we place on it, one way or another) wouldn’t exist.  I expect that society would be rare, but it could exist. It’s beginning to, in fact, in parts of this country. So our thoughts/feelings/prejudices/morals about virginity are the result—to a certain extent—of social values and social expectations on behavior. And therefore virginity (as a concept) can (and does) appear very differently in different places.

  Best as I can tell, the students declaring “virginity is a social construct” is meant to destigmatize various sexual practices and to clear people’s consciences, and perhaps also to reinstate and reemphasize the value of folks who have been marginalized by society for running afoul of restrictions relating to virginity. This is perhaps the most frequent use of the “X is a social construct,” in general. Traditionalists anyplace defend the old ways, whereas the progressives want things to change, deconstructing the social constructs. This paradigm can be applied to any range of hot-button social issues, like homosexuality, gender, race, (gay) marriage, but can also be applied to all sorts of less-broadly-controversial structuring of society, such as gender roles in marriage, gender roles in the workplace, what words are swear words, what are the right social “niceties” to show that you are polite and considerate. The progressive, younger folks insist that the older folks are outdated at best and hateful at worst, whereas the traditionalists decry the newcomers as morally bankrupt. Of course the younger folks eventually get older, become the ones holding onto the older ways, and the whole cycle starts over. But that’s a discussion for another day.

  I spend much time thinking and writing about how central social norms and social expectations are allowing us to accomplish human society at all. Much of this thinking is not about high-level dramatic social issues like gender and marriage, but instead is down at the simplest common-sense levels of how I manage to sense when someone is ready to end a conversation and move on to something else, or how I know when it’s my turn to talk in a conversation. But these are just as socially constructed as anything else, and they matter a lot to us knowing how to interact with each other throughout our day-to-day.

  The undercurrent of all of this undergraduate glee at discovering social constructs is often something like, “Since X is a social construct, it’s not really real, so it doesn’t really matter, so we can do whatever we want!” To phrase it in a moralizing sense, “virginity is a social construct, so I can sleep with whoever I want to as soon as I want to.” To put it in a context that’s more widely accepted, “gender roles are a social construct, so it’s no longer acceptable to expect wives to bear the bulk of domestic and child-rearing duties without assistance from their husbands.”   

  So what happens when we recognize the social constructs that are no longer working for us, and begin to dismantle them? Is our social world simply unstructured altogether? Will we settle into a “norm-less” world where anyone can just be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want to do? My thinking is, that’s simply impossible, because it contradicts the reality that every single person needs a complex, structured set of expectations about the world in order to function in the world. This is not only a major, essential human ability, but I think perhaps the fundamental human ability.  So we will nevertheless set expectations and norms about what is expected and acceptable and what is not.

  I don’t mean to defend social constructs in general as deserving to be left in place. But I think that two things happen in our systems of cultural values that we need to be wary of when we start quickly dismantling social constructs that our worlds are structured around. First, the processes of deconstructing damaging social constructs is long and hard, and usually very messy, and over these long periods an overarching value against social constructs starts to emerge (anti-culture as a cultural value, you might say). I suspect that this fundamental contradiction weighs on us much heavier than we realize. 

  Second, as we start to value the lack of norms on behavior in so many ways, we refuse and reject overt claims that anyone ought to do anything. But for all our desire to be autonomous and free, we are still masterful expectation-builders by our very natures, and we need expectations from the social world around us. So this expectation-void gets filled anyway (e.g. economic expectations, career expectations, lifestyle expectations), though I suspect this void is filled largely according to the wishes of the only people who are interested in telling us we oughtto do things (i.e. advertisers and institutions intending to derive a profit from our spending or work).

  We like to think that deconstructing social constructs is freeing – and in specific cases, this is true. But as a worldview, this misses the fact that social constructs build the very world that we live in, and we need them. It’s quite a tightrope to walk, and it needs to be done carefully. But it seems to me that most people either think the tightrope isn’t worth walking and we should leave things how they are, or alternatively they haven’t realized we’re on a tightrope at all. Is the point that virginity is not a social construct, or we should never change how we view virginity in our culture? Not at all. But the point is that it is not without consequences – sex is a high-stakes activity in so many ways—biologically, emotionally, reproductively, socially, professionally—and all people everywhere have social norms built up around sex to help people navigate all the high stakes-ness. To say that a cultural expectation about sex is a social construct, and therefore not real, and therefore able to be flat out ignored is likely to ignore the high-stakes-ness of the activity. It’s good, I believe, to examine ourselves and our culture and understand if our activities are healthy or not, but setting aside social constructs should be taken with great care to replace them with new sets of healthy values. Even if cultural constraints are not universal it does not mean they are dispensable. We sacrifice the social for the individual in so many ways, but I just don’t our human nature weathers this very well.

  These conclusions merit much more thinking and writing. But I’ve reached my 1,000 words and should let this fester on the internet a bit.

[knowingourselves]

The Power of Expectations. (part 2)

Part 1, last week.

  When I was a kid my mom would take us to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is the best museum ever for a kid because all the scientific principles it tried to teach were demonstrated with hands-on exhibits that you could play with. The geology exhibit about erosion had a massive sandbox in the middle of the room that was tilted slightly to create a downhill slope. There were hoses on one end where you could pour water onto the sand and watch it flow across the sandbox. The water would first flow everywhere, but eventually small grooves started to form, that let more water flow in that spot.  As more water flowed there, it created a bigger groove, that let more water flow there, and quickly a river would form. But if the river hit a rock, or a large mound of sand, it might throw some water left and some water right, created multiple grooves that might rejoin, or might not.  But these little riverbeds formed very quickly, and once they were formed they had a huge influence – if you poured water from another spot, once one of the streams found its way to the existing riverbeds, it would most easily and quickly run through those paths.  It’s not that it became impossible for water to flow in other places, just that it because most convenient for it to flow in the established ruts.

  Our social interactions are the same exact way. These unconscious expectations that we have about the way daily life should proceed become the ruts, the grooves, that our daily activities run in. It’s not as if the world explodes if someone walks directly to the customer service counter instead of standing in line with the rest of us, so it’s not as if the “stand in the line” groove is unchangeable. But at the same time, the world kind of does explode in our heads – that person is striking at one small but very basic way in which our social world is organized. The social world can in principle be organized differently – in rural areas in Kenya there are no line-forming expectations: everyone walks directly up to the door of a bus that arrives and everyone just squeezes themselves onto the bus at the same time. It seems like chaos to someone from a line-forming culture, but it works just the same to fill up the bus and get it on its way. But this is why culture shock in coming to new places isn’t just a discomfort with the food or how people greet each other – an entire slate of expectations, ruts, grooves of behavior can be mildly different, unsettling us to the core of who we are, because it is these pervasive little sets of expectations are what allow us to organize and understand the world we live in. It’s not that squeezing onto a bus is all that upsetting – it’s that we no longer know what we can expect from our world.

  The thing is, we evaluate and react to these expectations unconsciously, such that we don’t even realize that we have the expectations at all.  When you are reading these words, you are not thinking “Ok, in English the subject precedes the verb and the verb precedes the object, so the noun preceding the verb must represent the actor of the verb’s action …” In fact, language would lose its effectiveness if we had to devote so many conscious mental resources to processing what we hear.  Instead, you simply unconsciously process the structure of the language I am using and jump straight to its meaning, and react to the meaning consciously, whether by agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, being confused by me, getting angry at me, etc.

  The philosopher/sociologist Arnold Gehlen articulated this in a useful way, discussing the idea that norms of interaction can essentially be in the foreground (i.e. in our active consciousness) or in the background, practices that we actively participate in without needing to actively think about it, rationalize about it. An essential part of what makes us human is our ability to background quite complicated things – the grammar of my language, how conversations work, how to operate a car, whatever. This is why you know instinctively that in English you can run up a hill and run up a bill, but that while you can say run a bill up, you can’t say run a hill up. And even now you may see that there must be some little rule of how English works in your head, but you likely still can’t describe or explain that rule.  This is unconscious knowledge, something that we know without even consciously knowing that we know it, and then even once we figure out that the unconscious knowledge exists, we can’t even say what that knowledge is.  It’s a very different kind of “knowing” than we normally think of, like when I might say, “I know that the Philadelphia Eagles will always fall short in the NFL playoffs” – I can tell stories of past playoff failures, how their players are very good but not the best, how the football gods clearly hate Philadelphia, and so on. I have a conscious, reasonable basis for that knowledge.  The unconscious knowledge of language and cultural interactions surely just as much counts as knowledge (there is information that is obviously in our heads!) but it’s clearly knowledge of a different sort.

  This is part of why (and how) we have a sense that some kinds of conversations are appropriate, and others are not. We may not have ever been taught this, but it is a set of backgrounded expectations, the grooves that our social interactions flow in. So if my teenager daughter is having dinner at her friend’s house and her friend’s parents start talking about their sex life, both my daughter and her friend will likely be quite uncomfortable. It’s not as if a couple talking about sex is somehow a terrible thing, and there are social groups where people accept such conversations as regular, and others where it is not accepted as regular. And if someone mistakes one for the other (or, perhaps, just doesn’t care), it can unsettle people deeply.

  This can happen in instances where the transgression is even less obvious. Have you ever had a conversation with a ‘close talker,’ someone who stands just a tiny bit too close to you? If anyone were to ask you what the appropriate physical distance is between you and someone else in a conversation, you likely couldn’t give them a measurement in inches or feet. But you know it when you see it – if an acquaintance is standing a mere six inches too close to you, you are suddenly in a world of awkward discomfort. It’s not because humans must stand X inches away from each other – cultures do this differently. Many European and African cultures have much smaller personal space bubbles than Americans do. You can even watch a Kenyan chase an American around the room at a social event, as the American keeps backing away to keep the Kenyan out of her personal space and into “acquaintance space,” and the Kenyan keeps stepping closer to get the American back into her own acquaintance space. This personal space bubble is a deeply ingrained expectation that facilitates/normalizes interactions, but if you start messing with these expectations social interactions can start to break down.

  I talked a lot last post about how our expectations about the world are powerful and affect our experience of the world. The point this time around is that, not only that, but the expectations may be things we’re not even conscious of, at least not without some serious introspection. Sociality is central to the human experience and the pursuit of happiness, and these unconscious expectations are central to that sociality. The particulars will be the topic of many posts to come … 

[knowingourselves]

The Power of Expectations. (Part 1)

Most of us are used to the expectations game, as political reporters talk about it all the time—a candidate need not always do well in a debate, he may just need to do better than people expected, and they’ll come away with a great impression. This happened to us at the movies not so long ago. We were really looking forward to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and were all ready to see it, but when our friends saw it and reported back that they were completely disappointed in the movie. Our expectations crashed to the floor, but since we’d been planning to see it for so long, we decided to go anyway. We ended up quite enjoying the movie – not because it was nearly as good as we’d originally hoped, but after our expectations had bottomed out it turned out it was actually a halfway-decent movie that we were happy to have seen. It turns out, though, that our ability to expect things has a much larger and more powerful influence than we realize.

            When people talk about cultures other than their own, they normally talk about big-in-your-face kinds of things – different clothing, different foods, different ways of celebrating major life events. On the flip side, however, anthropologists have put a lot of effort into finding cultural universals—practices that all groups of people in the world have in common. The goal is to discover what human nature is at its core – what do you find humans doing no matter where they are, no matter who they grew up with? This can be a tricky task – you can find CocaCola in practically every small village in the most remote places of the world, but we don’t want to mistake successful globalization of a product for some kind of universal truth that human existence is incomplete without caramel-based soda (as much as their Open Happiness! advertising campaign would try to have us think that).

Last week I reflected a lot on how language and culture shows us that central parts of what we interpret as our basic nature is effectually incomplete. In the late 20th century Clifford Geertz came to a similar conclusion about culture that linguists have come to about language – we are culture-ready in specific kinds of ways, and that culture-readiness is what is universal among humans, but when it comes to the specific realizations of those cultures we end up acquiring can vary widely in our practices. That leads us to an important question about what exactly this language-readiness is, what culture-readiness is.  Essentially, both boil down to an incredibly powerful ability to build detailed expectations about the world (see, we’re back to the main point).

Imagine a situation where our friends Sean and Mary spent the evening at our house, and after leaving my wife says, “I really like Sean and Mary,” and in response I say, “I really like Sean …”  This comes with a very specific interpretation. If I just walked up to you out of the blue and said “I really like Sean” you might think I was a bit unpredictable, but at least it seems like a nice thing to say about Sean. But in the situation above, Mary would rightfully be quite offended if she overheard. And I could protest all I wanted that I was just saying a nice thing about Sean, it is clear to everyone that would hear the story that my silence about Mary meant that I in fact don’t like Mary. This is because we have specific expectations about a conversation, one of which is that a response to a preceding statement will be both relevant, but also as brief and concise as is possible to sufficiently communicate.  Since I could have just said “me too” if I liked both of them, but specifically chose to take more time to repeat most of the sentence to the exclusion of Mary, the only logical conclusion is that I didn’t completely agree.

The thing is, this conclusion only counts as “logical” because we all share expectations about how conversations should proceed, and when those expectations aren’t met we quickly reason out someone’s motives for acting against expectation. This is the exact same reason that we look askew at someone who walks straight to the front of the line, why we swear at the Volvo that merges into a tight space with no thank-you wave, why we get thrown off when the coworker who usually gives us a “hello nod” suddenly strikes up a conversation one day. We have expectations about how specific situations ought to proceed, and violating those expectations is a shot across the bow of our sense of “the way things should be,” and makes us either be angry at someone or assume they are simply in their own little mental world for some reason.

All of these interpretations are of course common sense, but that’s what is almost magical about it – how do we all happen to share this kind of common sense?  How is it that precisely what I didn’t say can carry the entire meaning of my contribution to the conversation? A whole language system couldn’t work based on what we’re not saying – a world of us walking up to each other, not saying things, and understanding precisely the meaning of the other. Instead we share a common sense that somehow leads us to the same conclusions from specific kinds of silence. And the reason we are able to do this is because we have very precise, detailed expectations that we share with other people about how a conversation will proceed, despite the fact that conversations in principle can proceed in an almost infinite number of directions. 

It’s almost crazy that it can take such a long discussion here to spell out how a simple human conversation or interaction achieves meaning when we all understand that meaning instinctively. This is because the expectations that we have about conversations are so deeply ingrained in us that they have become akin to instincts. This is a difference between social science and cognitive research, and (say) research in chemistry or physics. The natural sciences discover patterns and properties of the world that can then be harnessed in many interesting technological ways. The social sciences discover patterns and properties of human cognition/behaviors that are already being harnessed in incredible ways in human daily life. The result is not better mobile technology or faster airplanes, but hopefully, a clearer understanding of ourselves that lets us do better at living life.

Part 2 follows.

[knowingourselves]

Being social is more important than we think.

The most pervasive, persistent patterns in our lives are actually often the hardest to see: part of what humans are best at is internalizing patterns as unconscious expectations, and then simply taking them for granted, allowing us to use the limited amount of attention we are able to pay to things for other, newer things. This is awesome – it’s why I can listen to music and have a conversation while driving my car now, whereas the first day I drove a car back in 1998 I was terrified of sneezing while driving because I was sure I that with my eyes closed for even a second during the sneeze I would hurtle off the road, over a cliff, and into the ocean (or whatever the suburban New Jersey equivalent of that is – driving off the road into a Mafia-owned diner?). Eventually I became so good at car-driving that I can do it responsibly, carefully, and attentively, all the while rocking out to Colbie Caillat  Taylor Swift Vivaldi as I do so. Part of how humans work is that we get to take for granted things we do or experience frequently: it’s one of our fundamental abilities that allows us to deal with all the real-world complexity we run into daily.

  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the achievement vice is not only a crippling out-of-whack values system, but that in disproportionately overvaluing achievement, we are in that process undervaluing central human activities, specifically, our sociality. Human “socialness” is precisely one of these things that can be so taken for granted that it can be hard to even talk about how important it is. But I’m going to try anyway.

  Many students in high school Spanish classes have had the experience of having their teacher (if they are non-native speakers of English) ask them to take out a ‘shit’ of paper, which students always respond very maturely to. This is a completely reasonable pronunciation of the word ‘sheet’ for many non-native speakers of English, though. English has a massive variety of vowel sounds (not letters in the alphabet, but sounds – at least 13 different ones), whereas Spanish only has 5. All the different vowel sounds in English (such as the different vowels in beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, butt, boot, boat, bought, bite) can turn otherwise identical sequences of sounds into different words, and so English speakers are highly attuned to those differences in vowel quality. For non-native English speakers from languages with only 5 vowels, though, the sounds in beat and bit are both versions of the same vowel – they are very literally the same sound in their heads. So there really is no difference between ‘sheet’ and ‘shit’ for them. Non-native speakers of a language can be trained into hearing new distinctions in a new language, but the expectations that get embedded into your cognitive structures for language end up shaping what you are capable of perceiving (at least, without additional training into a new language system).

  (it’s not just an audio thing – we have visual expectations for language too, that also shape our perception of language. The McGurk effect screws with this, if you haven’t seen this yet, you should check it out.)

  (Every language has restrictions like these in some way or another, so I’m not picking on Spanish here. Swahili has two kinds of ‘ny’ sounds whereas English only has one, and in Swahili one of which appears in the word ‘Kenya’ and it’s not the one we use in English. It took me many years of pronouncing it wrong and having people chuckle at me for me to figure out the proper way to say it.)

  The same goes for much broader cultural values. I had a long discussion with a friend in Kenya this summer about how much their politicians are paid. I went into detail explaining how much the US Congresspersons are paid ($174,000) and how much the US President is paid ($400,000), with my motive being to give my opinion implicitly that it is troublesome that Kenya—approximately 10% the size of the US, with a much lower cost of living—has almost as many members of Parliament (and similar government offices) as the US does, who are paid as much or more than the US government officials are. His response very much surprised me—he was indeed shocked that US government officials were not paid extraordinarily more than Kenyan officials, but instead of saying that Kenyan officials ought to be paid less, he insisted that we need to pay our president more – he should be one of the richest people in the world once he is done being president, because he’s a very big man and he deserves it.

  At deep levels, his view of authority is very different from mine – nowhere in myself do I think that a politician in the US “deserves” to be in charge for any inherent reason other than with our consent, and while I recognize their contributions (and they’ll surely never be short of money anyway) I don’t believe that they “deserve” for their high position to be rewarded financially.  They work for me. And they make a very nice living wage for that important work. But my friend simply saw the place of a national leader very differently, that they need to be recognized as being set apart from regular people not just in their role in society, but in more inherent sorts of characteristics, that they quite simply are watu wakubwa ‘big people’ and that should be clear in their salary and lifestyle.

  So from everything from our perception of speech sounds to our value systems, the way we view and perceive the world is structured by our language and culture, which are of course different in different places. I am not advocating for what is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis here (that our cognitive abilities are constrained by our language), but rather am highlighting the fact that the expectations we have about the world are shaped by our language and culture.

  Let’s use the wide angle lens for a moment though. It’s very easy to view basic, universal human nature as what is left once you strip out all of the more variable things, the things that are change from group to group as you wander around the globe. Once you peel away the effects of society and our upbringing, what do you have left? This is the view that whatever’s left, whatever we started with before all our life experiences were added on, that is our basic human nature. (And there’s truth to this, and it’s very valuable to try to figure out what exactly ARE the universal constants, because they clearly exist.)

  But the lessons of language and culture should tell us that part of human nature is in fact the taken-for-granted things that we acquire through interacting with people. We can talk about “basic, universal” human nature as what’s left when you ignore all the changeable stuff on top, but in another way, you can say that human nature is incomplete in its base state, its infant state. We come into the world language-ready and culture-ready (expectation-ready, really), all prepared to internalize all the patterns we encounter around us. And those things become not only central parts of our identity, but the lens through which we experience and perceive the world.

  In thinking about how we are social, we tend to think, “Yes, I do social things, I work with people, I have friend groups, I have romantic relationships, I have a family.” But it’s easy to forget the foundation of that sociality: the face-to-face interactions where all that stuff happens in the first place. In this way, then, human nature is interactional – culture and language are completely central to the human experience, and they are unformed in brand new humans. So while it’s quite difficult to nail down specific cultural universals and language universals (linguists and anthropologists are still working away at it), part of what is clearly universal are the interactions by which language and culture are acquired and eventually taken for granted by little people and big people alike. So, again, human nature is interactional – we are very literally incomplete without social interaction. Sociality in this way is not just “a thing that humans do” – it’s baked into who we are, in such a way that it’s impossible to talk about human nature without talking about things like language and culture that only arise out of interactions.

  This brings us back to the point from the weeks-ago post, which is the point of the weeks-to-come posts as well: neglecting sociality for achievement is not a matter of sacrificing some fun things for the long-term valuable career or financial goals that we have.  The better description is an analogy with other fundamental aspects of human nature – it’s like giving up protein for processed sugar in your diet, or deciding to give up shelter and warmth in a northeast winter to sleep outside in your PJs “because it’s fun to be in the outdoors.”  The same way we have fundamental physical needs that need to be met in order for actual human life to happen, we have fundamental social needs for face-to-face interaction that have to be met for actual human life to happen.

[knowingourselves]

Self Esteem and the Achievement Vice.

Apparently in 2013 an Oregon high school had 21 valedictorians; at a school in Ohio, more than 10% of the class were valedictorians. How is it possible that so many students are the top student in their class? For teachers/professors this often comes up in the domain of grade inflation as well. Many professors at my own institution feel incapable of giving grades that are lower than Bs, and even Bs are dreaded by the students. Everyone has to be a winner.

We know this from the karate classes where everybody gets a trophy, or the elementary science fairs where everybody gets an award ribbon. Traditionalists have decried this for ages as over-indulging children, being overly-concerned with their self-esteem and how they feel about themselves and in the process damaging their development, not actually preparing them for the real world where not everyone wins everything. And to be fair, this is an important lesson to learn, because (as it turns out) we don’t control the universe.

  But the problem is not that we’re overly concerned with our children’s self-esteem, or that we’ve become such bleeding hearts that we can’t bring ourselves to tell someone a hard truth like, “you’re not very good at tee-ball.” The problem is that we’ve elevated achievement and accomplishment so highly that we value them above almost everything else, to the point that in most of our heads, achieving something = being valuable. So it ends up that a quite reasonable shared value of achievement (i.e. hard work and accomplishing things is good) is taken out of its context in the array of human activities, elevated to the point that it is one of the only things that has value. So how does a person become valuable? Achieve things, accomplish things.

  But where we end up is that if the value of a person derives from the extent of their achievement, it is vastly terrible to tell someone that they lost a competition, or that just one person in the classroom is valedictorian, and the rest are just regular people. We’re not telling people they lost a competition but should still feel good about themselves; no, we’re telling people that they are not valuable, but that they should still feel good about themselves. This doesn’t pass the giggle test - children and parents are smart enough to know that this is contradictory.

  In a sense, then, our classic American value on achievement has been dragged to such an extreme that we’ve conflated the notion of the value of a person and what they have accomplished.  But the thing is, deep deep down we know people are valuable. Otherwise, why not still just leave all but the winner award-less? But no, we can't do that, because we DO value them. But the problem is, there are no widely accepted cultural practices, sets of expectations, or shared social values that allow us to express this, so instead we want to give everyone an award, almost just for existing. This is why we’ll call the stay-at-home parent of a two-year-old heroic. In a way child-rearing is mundane—parents have been caring for their children for the entire existence of humanity. It’s inordinately valuable (and difficult) – but we have no way to talk about value other than achievement and accomplishment. So we call parenting heroic, extraordinary, despite the fact that usually what we're doing is completely ordinary. We just have no other way to express its inherent value.

  These are the results of valuing achievement above all else, which I’ve come to refer to as the Achievement Vice.  While parents and non-parents end up debating whether caring for a child ought to be considered heroic and extraordinary, and we criticize schools for recognizing 21 valedictorians, we’re all missing the point – the point is that raising children is difficult, doing well in school is hard work, but both are valuable and worthwhile. We just lack the cultural tools for recognizing this because so many of us take the Achievement Vice for granted.

  The Achievement Vice causes much more trouble than too many valedictorians (as discussed in my previous posts, and as I’ll talk about much more since I’m currently obsessed with this idea). But I’ll leave off here before I enter the tl;dr zone, if I haven’t already.

  There are of course other options in terms of prioritizing our values. We just don't find them acceptable, or, we think they are nonsense. And it’s no small problem, because the Achievement Vice has such a firm grip on our expectations for the world that it's almost impossible to notice it. As one of my favorite philosophers said, “the truly powerful ideas are the ones that never have to justify themselves.” In the US, at least, the Achievement Vice has reached this zone. 

[knowingourselves]

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. (Part 2)

In the last post, I discussed the idea that better understanding our basic human nature, and fundamental human motivations, can go a long way toward being happier. Specifically, if we have adopted a lifestyle that does not meet basic human needs, we can expect to be left feeling empty. We have a fundamental mismatch between what our culture values and what our basic nature needs.

Once while living in Kenya, I was staying in a flat owned by a man named Andrew.  Andrew owned a plot of land that was just down the road, and we used to wander in his fields and talk.  One day he was bemoaning the lack of rain and how poorly his crops were doing.  I was puzzled, though, because a very robust stream ran not 5 yards from his fields. I asked him why he didn’t just buy a pump from town and irrigate the fields. And he quite simply said, “That's not how we do things here.” This kind of thinking baffles me.  Why he would sacrifice basic needs like food security for the sake of preserving his traditional farming methods is beyond me. 

Now, if I were to try to explain to Andrew that I have so little time to spend with my family and my friends because I needed to write that extra research paper, because I needed to work on jobs to get consulting work. This will get me tenure, get me promotions, get me various kinds of professional success that will let me provide for my family and my future better. To me these things make complete sense, but he would certainly ask, “Why are you right now giving up the very things that you are saying you are trying to secure for the future?” And he would certainly be as confused as to why I sacrifice my social connections for my professional achievements as I am puzzled that he sacrifices his food security for maintaining his traditions. 

In one sense, Andrew and I are radically different, unable to understand each other’s most basic values.  On the other hand, we are exactly the same: each of us is unquestioningly adopting an approach to the world that is in fact not meeting the very needs that it is supposedly designed to meet. It turns out that the patterns and beliefs that are most central to our everyday lives are also the ones that are the hardest to notice: as a USC philosopher put it, “the truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.”  In a commencement address to Kenyon College David Foster Wallace told this story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Maybe it’s time that we figured out what the hell water actually is. Ethical philosophy has asked these questions for millennia: “What is real?” “What is the good life?”  To me these are ways of asking the question, “What makes life worthwhile?” This has come to be the quintessential example of an unanswerable question: “What is the meaning of life?” But our main problem is not that we don’t have clear answers for all of these questions. The main problem is that we’ve stopped asking them at all. At some point in our recent past we’ve grown tired of the endless religious and philosophical bickering about ultimate realities that has never seemed to resolve itself, and simply assumed that since there was no established answer, the question was moot. But it is impossible for humans to live without answers to these questions – we all necessarily come to some set of beliefs or assumptions about what is worthwhile, and then end up living by those assumptions.  It’s how we decide what’s worth working on, who’s worth spending time with, what places are worth going to. Abandoning the most basic questions doesn’t absolve us from needing answers to them in order to function, it only guarantees that we will passively adopt those answers from the society around us. 

This, however, leads us to the central problem: our society is designed for economic progress and rewards the professional achievement that creates that economic progress. It is quite simply NOT designed for our happiness. So we have put ourselves in a place where we adopt our core values from our surroundings without even thinking about them, core values that by their very definition are going to leave us unfulfilled.  This is what we’ve accepted as worthwhile in life.  No wonder we’re unhappy.

So - what now?  Should we do as Will Hunting said and just give up to become shepherds?  “Get a nice little spread, get some sheep and tend to them.”  Of course not.  We live in our world and most of us aren’t going to choose to abandon it.

But this is to the point – actually make a choice. Think deeply, intensely, and continuously about what is real in life, what things make your heart sing and your soul calm, what things make you happy in the deepest senses of happy. For some of us that will mean working hard and achieving some degree of success in our chosen fields. But you absolutely have to ask yourself whether you’re willing to give up everything to do it, and if so, WHY are you willing to do that.  We need to have answers to this question, of why we do the things that we do. Our problem here is not that we are a high-achieving culture—it is that we are a mindlessly high-achieving culture. If we are more thoughtful about the values we adopt, working hard to find the values that actually reflect what is real in the world, then maybe we can start to unify the things we envy and the things we admire and start to value activities that actually meet our needs.  And maybe we can be just a bit happier tomorrow than we were today.

[knowingourselves]

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. (Part 1)

Just over a year ago, I found myself in the car with my wife, rushing to the hospital.  I was doubled over with chest pains, feeling like I was dying.  But surely it wasn’t a heart attack, since it was the second time this had happened in a month. And once again, the doctor looked at me with skepticism in his eyes and muttered, “You’re way too young for this.”

The doctors never figured out what was wrong with me, but I eventually did –I have panic attacks. It turns out that when I am stressed, instead of getting headaches or therapy or drunk I get chest pains.  It was comforting in a way to realize this, because mysterious ailments are annoying. But at the same time I was suddenly faced with a related but less satisfactory observation: despite being in a job I love in a beautiful place, with wonderful family and friends … well, it turns out that Louis CK was right: “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”  I wasn’t actually happy.  This second realization was less comforting than the first, because instead of giving an answer it only raised more questions, and I’ve spent they last year trying to figure out what happiness is, or at the very least, why I’m so often discontent. The answer turns out to be simple to identify, and quite difficult to do something about: my unhappiness arises out of a fundamental mismatch between the things that I consider important and worthwhile and the things that my nature requires. 

Our culture values knowledge.  We value beauty.  We value individual freedom.  We value diversity. We value progress.  We value achievement.  And we agree that we value these things for the most part - we agree that they are good and worth working for. But we don’t ever question these things at all – they are what linguists call common ground: assumptions that we can depend on other people having and that they can depend on us sharing with them. A culture is precisely a massive compilation of these shared assumptions about what is valuable (among other things). But our culture is betraying us.  The things that we consider valuable are the things we construct our lives around in order to make them meaningful. Values that give us purpose and put our restless hearts at rest. But if we value things that are actually without value, we are essentially holding on to that Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card only to discover after 25 years that it’s worth $4.37, trying to cash in our stock in Myspace only to learn that it’s greatest value is comic, not monetary.  Which is perhaps still valuable, just not in the way that we were depending on it to be.

In the country we live in today, progress and achievement are particularly central kinds of cultural values. It’s why we study hard in school, why we work through lunch, why we check our email on our phone in bed.  We’re always trying to accomplish more, take the next step up the ladder, set ourselves up well for what comes next. It’s our consumer technology culture too – I can’t even manage to buy a computer because I’m always just waiting for the next one.  There’s never a time when buying this one now is best, because the next one will always be better. It’s progress.

Progress and achievement are particularly insidious kinds of values, precisely because they cannot ever be actually grasped.  Progress is a tsunami powering across the ocean, cresting, ebbing, and flowing, but never actual staying in one place.  You can keep yourself at the crest of the wave, achieving at the pinnacle of the set of folks you’ve chosen to compare yourself to.  The problem is that no one ever ‘wins’ the crest of the wave.  You either stay atop the wave, or it tumbles by you.  You can only achieve and progress while you are still achieving and progressing, but the moment you stop, you are now just someone who used to be an achiever. You have lost it, and another takes your place on the crest of the wave. The end result is that we’re scrambling to stay afloat in a sea that will happily drown us the moment we stop swimming. But if ‘achieving’ is the only thing that is considered valuable, then the game itself is fixed – I can’t possibly win.  

What then?  Surely happiness can still be found somewhere.  Happiness only comes, though, when we can live in a way where we can engage and fulfill the values that we hold, the ideals that we see as worthwhile. In this sense, then, progress and achievement are quite simply the wrong things to value, at least if you care at all about being happy. Can we be happy by just valuing something easy and achievable, like potato chips and B-rate comedies on Netflix? Perhaps, if it is something that actually resonates with your basic nature, that satisfies deep needs that you have – and it’s not clear to me that snacks and movies, beer and video games will really do that.

Psychology, anthropology, sociology, and every lonely person anywhere ever can tell you that social connection is a central part of human existence. It in fact turns out to be a useful explanatory mechanism for everything from child development to social awkwardness to the economic analysis of human behavior: we all need to be connected to other people in deep, recurring, and resilient ways. It is, quite simply, a fundamental human need, and a fundamental human motivation in most of our decisions and behaviors. But in this country, at least, we do not value human connection at nearly the level that we value other things.  This is transparently true, evidenced by even the most pedestrian of events—my wife and I moving across the country to take a job. Most of us would agree that it is the right decision to accept the amazing job offer (my only job offer) and move to a new place, even if it means leaving family and friends, because of course.  But the fact that we find those decisions unsurprising simply demonstrates that we share those values. 

But we are running away from ourselves: we have a fundamental human need that we are neglecting for the sake of the self-defeating expectation of achieving achievement.  The only possible result is discontent. I ask myself this question with not small infrequency, “Why do I keep taking on more tasks than there is feasibly time for?”  A student of mine nailed it – because I don’t think it’s OK not to. We may envy the person who is calm and content, who’s done their work and is enjoying life, but we admire the people who get a ton done, who go out and rule the world. I think it betrays something in us – we envy the things we need in some deep sense and miss when we don’t have them. But we admire the things we value, the things we want to live up to. It’s odd to me that those are not always the same things. 

Part 2 continues next week