An endless fascination with learning

If you’ve spent decades trying to understand what in the world you believe, and still can’t quite pin it down, you’re in luck. The world’s institutions are crumbling, one after the other. For over 15000 years, the Church gave people a set of beliefs, requirements, and rules to build their life around. One’s heroic odyssey was part of the whole. Before that, the Romans, and before that the Greeks, and before that the Assyrians, and before that, who knows? Each society had it’s own set of rules. You did not need to strive very much beyond what your station in life as. We now spin, endlessly spin, searching for some capital T truth to tell us, in plain terms, on our timeline, what we should be doing with our lives. What level of morality we should accept as satisfactory. We are undeniably obsessed-I am undeniably obsessed-with what it means to be a good person, and how to hit that level in the game. The Tao tells us to allow; that if we strive we are ruining the whole thing. Our culture says we must strive. What would our ancestors think of us? Can our ancestors think of us? Does time move in a linear fashion? If the Theory of Relativity is correct, it does not. Time always is and always will be. We’re essentially playing out our parts. But, if that’s so, why would I chose a crappy place to eat lunch? Surely that wasn’t somehow predestined in the universe. If you often feel as if you’re plunging down a river, trying your best to hold on to any piece of detritus you can find, just so you have a decent grasp on something solid, welcome to the club.

The problem-the rather big problem- is the more we find ourselves in this state, the less we take action on the things in the world that call to us. We must wake up in our own, unsatisfactory way, and simply do the work, and allow the theoretical to live where it always has and it always will. That is the only certainty there is.

If we were put here but an all knowing being, then there is something to strive for. Some reason. Some meaning behind it all. If we simply arose out of millions of years of evolution, only to be wiped out at some point down the road, then it is meaningless. Small imprints of love are the only things on the path of life that give any of it much sense. So much of the day to day is spent wrestling with this in the background. So much of attaining something is, in reality, a subconscious quest to try and protect ourselves against a looming black void.

People often fail to perceive the rationale behind the choices they make. There is, in the recent lexicon, an idea of a hedonic treadmill. You buy things to make yourself feel better, but then you step feeling better and you have to buy something else. The inverse of this-minimalism-says that to truly feel content, you must get rid of many of your possessions. Both are an attempt to exhale, if only for a moment, all of the breath you’re holding in, staring at that void of yours. In other words, they are distractions. We want to be distracted. We yearn to be distracted. Anything not to stare at mortality. Any voice, any virtue, anything new, any return to old, any step is an attempt to look away from what is in front of us. The all consuming terror of it all.

There is no reason you cannot die right now. Nothing provides you some exquisite safeguard against the instantaneous nature of mortality. And yet, each day of your life, you gamble again. A gamble that you will survive to see tomorrow. And making that gamble gives you license to do all the comparatively meaningless things you’ll do all day. And, every morning, the moment you wake, this gamble is made again and again and again, until, one day, you lose the gamble you made.

This is achingly clear to anyone who has ever experienced profound loss in their lives. You become intimately clear with the finality of it all. The sheer, illogical nature of life. The predicament you face is what to do with this knowledge. What windmills shall you charge now? What do you use your life force for, exactly. How do you make meaning in life? How do you do it every day? Kindness, generosity, love, sure. But those appear as tactics rather than strategy. What, exactly are you to do with this one life?

In a few weeks, I will be 43 years old. Those words are difficult to comprehend. I have no idea how that happened. 43 seems a life lived. Not to suggest the precipice of death “life lived”, but enough to gleam some answers. I have more questions than answers, and the questions seem to multiply and the answers grow distant.

From my 20’s to my late 30’s, I sat on a rocket ship and pointed north career wise. More. More files. More clients. More money. More accolades. Next mountain. I didn’t ask where the ship was going, but I got on, frying my cortisol levels in the process. Equating money (not finance money) with stability. With control. With “optionality.” That no longer works.

I wake up every morning and think “what is being asked of me?” I am a father perplexed that he is a father. I am a husband perplexed that he is a husband. I have many trappings I thought I should have. Every morning, I think: “There is something missing here.” Some level of soulfulness or meaning or reason or goal or point. There must be others out there. Legions of middle aged men that watch the sunrise, horrified of a looming death in the distance or close by, unsure what to do today, let alone 10 years from now. Do I no longer have mountains to scale? Am I done? The best I can do is distract myself until the melancholy dissipates. I have absolutely no answers at 43.

My son’s room is blanketed by lego pieces. Some put together. Others waiting for his growing hands and fingers to construct something from nothing. In the calm silence of the morning, his room bathed in morning light, you can look around and almost feel him. Feel his potentiality in the space.

There is something I can’t quite express about the flatness of time. We’ve come to understand time linearly. This came before that. This comes after that. “In the past..” “Next year, we’re going to…” But there is this feeling that continues to visit me that tells me I’m wrong. Or that perhaps my calibration isn’t up to snuff. That the original sense of time is instead always and never at once. His room seems to be this encapsulation of that. These pieces are on the floor now, but in a few months they’ll be replaced by something else, but, to me, those pieces will always be on the floor. They will always live somewhere else for me for all of time. I find myself speechless quite often when I walk in there. This presence. This potentiality. This formation of a person, A soul coming into being and I am witnessing all of it, all of the time.

What can possibly make you care anything for a career when you live amongst magic? What can bring you down to the dirt to argue over imaginative things when the world is quite literally whispering in your ear “here is magic.”

A fun exercise would be to imagine what you would do if you lived in a socialist country (the good ones). Your children’s education is paid for, throughout college. Health insurance is guaranteed. Not a penny out of pocket. Housing is cheap and your family is able to live close by and support you. Childcare is taken care of. Children are mostly screen free and able to roam, unguarded, and do what children naturally do. You have absolutely no socio-economic worries at all, though it gets pretty cold and pretty dark pretty often. How then, in this imaginative world, do you live? Do you have the same job? Do you continue doing what you do or do you quit on the spot, laughing all the way to your car, or to public transportation?

How much of our lives are shaped by external factors that silently and cumulatively tilt the scales of our decision making. How many to-do lists that you fret over are filled with tasks birthed from the notion that these things must be accomplished. These activities for the children not to be bored or fall behind. These bills to be paid; the surprise presentation of them at your doorstep irrelevant to the creditor you now owe. How many conversations would you have about how your life worth is connected to the interest rate on the debt on your home, which you often do not love in the first place. What forced social disconnection do you endure in order to have your children in a school district who will do what school districts are supposed to do the things you imagine school districts doing in your school district hypothetical fed by someone else? In what ways do you try and hammer in “date nights” with the person you promised your entire life to, when your mind runs with the things that need to be done before the close of business? Is spirituality or religion now an additive to the recipe, rather than the base it was for centuries, and does that make things better or worse? And for whom?

Do you ever step back and thing about who is truly in charge of your life? Truly in charge. Do you ever wonder whether or not you’re part of a big game, and you’re unaware that you’re a contestant? Unclear as to when the game began, and what classifies as completing the game (absent death). What does winning mean? What does losing mean? Do you ever think about whether podcasts are actually teaching you something, or simply distracting you from teaching yourself something? How do you reckon how far out you’re able to swim before you get so far that you don’t have the strength to turn back, and instead float away; unaware of the knowledge that was right in front of you in the first place.

Open your eyes.

Your self is not your self in the same way your gallbladder is your gallbladder. If you said “I’m scared of failure” and someone replied “where are you scared of failure?” you would look at this person as a lunatic. What do you mean “where?” In spite of this, we often fall into the trap of storytelling. We tell ourselves “I am not the type of person who takes career risks” or “I am impulsive and prone to anger.” Where, specifically, do you find these parts in yourself? What if I told you that your self is a totally fluid thing, more based on your inner monologue than anything you’d find in the prefrontal cortex?

In most ways and on most days, we use these narratives about our “true selves” to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world always tilting in favor of entropy. But we’ve become too firm in our characterizations that the self cannot change. We have inadvertently calcified ourselves, and limited our own ability to make choices. We’ve told ourselves a story about ourselves so many times that we’ve actually calcified our ability to change. How to break this?

In meditation, you learn to think of your thoughts as waves and consciousness as the ocean. This is much easier said and understood on a cushion than it is when someone is inviting you to have another glass of wine when you really should be on your way home. You don’t sit at the bar and think “I want to have another glass, but really, this is just a wave of a thought on the ocean of consciousness.” That would be…unworkable. But, if you can take a step back on some days, a genuine step back and wonder “Is there any actual reason why I cannot go to this party other than me constantly telling myself I’m a socially awkward person?” you’ll find that the answer is likely no. And it doesn’t quite follow that you’re going to go to this party and you’ll magically be cured of awkwardness; you’re likely to still be awkward. The point is chiseling the rock down, bit by bit. The point is showing up. This point is taking minute actions, day after day, that unbeknownst to you, slowly compound and allow you to break self-reinforced incorrect ideas about yourself. You’re not ramming the thing head on, you’re taking a detour around the bend to get to where you need to go.

We’re formed by millions of memories and of these memories and perceptions we “make” a version of Danny, or Linda or Gus, or whomever and we say, inside our minds “this is how a Danny that experienced these things would act” but there’s no one really in there. They’re just thoughts that then tell us to do these things. They-we-are pliable. Ever expanding. Ever learning. Ever changing. We are oceans.

Jung once analogized your life to the sun rising in the sky and then falling at night. There is so much promise in the morning. There is so much that can be done. So much life in front of you. You can taste possibility. Around midday, you turn into yourself, and as the remains of the day progress into inevitable night, the hunger you have for the possibilities of the day give morph inward. You bask in what was, and you appreciate things. Things seem to move slower, and you fully realize the conclusion of things is upon you.

Our lives and our careers are no different, and that internal twitch or pull you may feel can directly be tied to forsaking the clock that lives inside you. Hustling in middle age was never something the body was designed for. Climbing mountains and increasing complexity and possessions serves only to poke your thumb at the Gods at nature. This is not hyperbolic. Man breaks in middle age because he has no idea what to do. He has always climbed this mountain. He has always struggled. He has always ascended or attempting to possess, and then these small rips in inside begin accumulating. A humming. Pressure. “What is this?” is unconsciously asked. “Where now?” “What now?” The demands of the day are the same. The taxes and the bills and the kids and the streaming and the upkeep and the ego and the striving. All of it modern. All of it incessant. And yet, physically and mentally, for hundreds of thousands of years the human organism and consciousness itself has programmed something entirely different. They are, now, in all times, in all ways, in conflict. You seek permanence when there is none on offer. You seek ascension when there is none on offer. You were never designed to sit quietly and yet something inside is telling you to do that very thing. You fear stillness. Stillness equates death. It equates tumbling or shuffling down the mountain below. Lower and lower and you know, you very well know, once you make contact with the bottom, there is simply no way up again.

How many millions of Hero’s Journeys end in a disappointment that reverberates through generations. How many children living the un-lived lives of their parents? There is nothing to do but sit and listen to your body and your mind. Humbling though it is, it is the only natural way.

Hotels used to be, many years ago, places where one slept, yes, but also places where one could sit and write. They allowed you to produce. No longer. You are no longer expected to write anything. Much less…do anything. The ubiquitous hotel stationary is now provided more as an afterthought (the last car produced with an ash tray) than as an invitation to jot down thoughts, idea, notes, a letter, a memory, a doodle, etc… Its lonely existence now accessorized by an even lonelier hotel pen. If one is provided a desk, that desk comes with more ports than the Italian riviera. You plug in and face a wall. Like some sort of a punishment from a 1950’s parochial school. A palette of taupe and grey envelope you and make you wonder why the planners of these hotels hate colors. You imagine them screeching in terror at the very sight of a rainbow. This is not a bastion of creative energy, and maybe that’s the point.

We lose things when we do not foster an activity that has accompanied us for thousands of years. We lose a tiny part of ourselves. Our lonely existence in our “suites” highlighted now by thread counts and the ability to stream what we stream at home. It used to be that we brought our neuroses with us when we traveled, yes, but at least the creature comforts were different or non existent. The environment itself was changed, and perhaps, maybe that would change us in small, imperceptible ways. Now, the very shows we watch lying down in our bedrooms are the same shows we watch lying down in our hotel room in Madrid. The very same binging across different time zones. Our comfort neatly packaged and stowed away in our carry ons. We are no longer inspired as desensitized. We are nowhere together, all at once.

The desk and the stationary and the letter writing and the creativity and the production are all parts of the same thing. The inquiry into something greater. The conduit for expression which sits within us, screaming to be released. To question. To inform. To ruminate. To witness. The physical strokes on the pad evidence the fact that in this very moment of human existence on this great globe in this mysterious universe, you made this mark, and this mark shall live forever. The ideas will transmit thoughts of their own and they will change minds for eternity. They are a brutal attack against meaninglessness and unmitigated consumption. The desk allows you to say “I was here once. I walked here. I lived a life that included this very place.” The desk and the letter and the pen makes you immortal. The bed and the streaming and the lying down makes you dead.

When people talk about simplicity and simplifying, I wonder if they’re not looking for the cousin of simplicity instead. Dissolution. Dissolving seems to be a fairly refreshing activity. Dissolving an LLC that you haven’t used. Dissolving a friendship that doesn’t serve either of the former friends.

Nassim Taleeb often uses the phrase: “via negativa” and the Silver Rule, which states: “Do NOT do to me as you would NOT want done to you.” Add by subtracting. If you think about all of this and let it sit with you for a while, it can get you rather excited. It’s like the feeling of seeing the street you were looking for, for some time, finally pop up. You’re not there yet, but you’re on the right way.

Simplification occurs through the act of dissolution. It seems the activity itself is the cathartic part in all of this. Ridding yourself of old possessions. Ridding yourself of bills or a house that no longer suits you. Ridding yourself of commitments and restraints and old judgments latched onto your psyched. Slicing your Shadow in half and banishing him.

Simplifying should take care of itself. Aim to dissolve. Aim to subtract.