Tag: Stoicism

On Ego - A Response to a Comment from Philip

On Ego – A Response to a Comment from Philip

Posted on by jabittan
Philip asked me some thoughts about ego in a recent comment. Several years back I read and wrote about Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy and it has been fundamental in shaping how I see and understand myself within our complex social world. In addition to Ego is the Enemy, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s book The Elephant in the Brain and Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking Fast and Slow dramatically shape the way I understand the idea of the self, how we think, and the role of ego in our lives. Here are some of my thoughts on ego, and some specific responses to questions that Philip asked.
 
 
First, Philip said that he sees, “ego as a closed loop of sort, independent of the acting self.”
 
 
I wouldn’t agree with Philip on this point, but that is because I reject the idea of an independent acting self. Yuval Noah Harari is a great person to read on meditation and the idea of the self. If you ever try meditating, you will quickly learn that you don’t truly have control over your thoughts. This suggests that we don’t have an independent self that is doing the thinking in our minds. “Thoughts think themselves,” Harari has said, and if you meditate, you will understand what he means. Thoughts frequently pop into our head without our control. Ego, and the kinds of thoughts we associate with ego and megalomania, are all just thoughts swirling around in what appears to be a chaos of thoughts. Given the nature of thought, I don’t think we should think of ego as anything independent of the other thoughts within our mind.
 
 
Second, Philip says, “if you are in a state of security, you can choose not to act on ego.”
 
 
I also wouldn’t agree with this point. In his Meditations, Aurelius writes about Epictetus, a slave and a pioneer of stoicism. Epictetus was not exactly secure, but he was able to put aside ego and focus on the present moment. His particular brand of stoicism has resonated with prisoners of war and involves the dissolution of personal ego for survival. We can put aside ego at any point, regardless of how secure we are.
 
 
Also pushing against Philips thoughts is Donald Trump. Certainly, at many points in his life, Trump has been secure in terms of money, fame, power, and influence. Yet Trump is clearly an egomaniac who is unable to set his ego aside and will pursue even the smallest slights and insults against him. I don’t think that a state of security is really an important consideration for whether we act in an egotistical way.
 
 
Philip’s third observation on ego is “as a self preserving mechanism, protecting you and helping you in motivating living the life you do.”
 
 
This is a view on our ego that I would agree with. When we think about how the mind works, I think we should always approach it from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. Very likely, our brains are the way they are because at some point in the history of human evolution it was beneficial for our minds to function in one way over another. There could be some accidents, some mental equivalents to vestigial organs, and some errors in our interpretations, but we probably didn’t develop many psychological traits and maintain them throughout generations if they were not helpful for survival somewhere along the way.
 
 
When we view the ego through this lens, it is not hard to see how the ego could help improve our chances of surviving and passing down our genes. If we are egotistical and think that we deserve the best and that we deserve larger amounts of resources, we will be more likely to advocate for ourselves and fight for a better lot in life. This could help our survival, could help us find a better mate, and could help ensure we pass more genes on to subsequent generations. Without the ego, we may chose to settle, we may be complacent, and we may not strive to pass our genes along or ensure that those subsequent genes have sufficient resources to further pass their genes into the following generation. Ego can push us to strive toward the higher salary, the fancier car, more exclusive golf clubs, and other things that are not really necessary for life, but could help ourselves amass more resources and help our kids have better connections to get into Stanford and ultimately find a spouse and have kids. Ego could certainly be antisocial and harmful for us and society, but it could also be important for genetic survival.
 
 
Philip’s fourth point is about a guy who is hurt because his wife forgot his birthday.
 
 
It is possible that an inflated ego is what made this guy upset when his wife forgot his birthday, but it could also be a number of other psychological or relationship issues between him and his spouse. He may have larger issues of self-worth and value independent of his ego. He may be codependent and perhaps need counseling to better manage his relationships with others. Or his wife could have just been having a bad day. This didn’t seem like a great avenue for discussing and understanding ego to me.
 
 
The fifth point that Philip brings up ties back to his third, by viewing ego as a “fairness calculator.”
 
 
I also think this could be a useful way to view ego and it also seems like it could be understood through a cognitive psychology perspective. We don’t want to feel like we are being cheated, yet we would be happy to bend the rules and cheat a little if we thought we could get away with it. This is a lot of what Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler discuss in The Elephant in the Brain. If we can signal that we are honest and trustworthy, without actually having to be honest and trustworthy, then we are at an advantage. However, if we suspect that another person is all signal and no actual behavior to back up those signals, then we may act in an egotistical way by being defensive and pushing back against the other. Ego does seem to help fuel this mindset and does seem to encourage a type of fairness calculator behavior.
 
 
The final point that Philip makes is that, “ego needs to be controlled in a civilized society.”
 
 
I think here Philip is also correct. We live in very complex social societies and ego helps us individually, but also has negative externalities. Ego certainly helped push Trump to the presidency and the history books, but I’m not sure the world was better for it. By pursuing our own self-interest and acting based on ego, we can damage the world around us.
 
 
Hanson and Simler would argue that much of these harmful effects of ego are moderated by our signaling ability. Hanson has said that his estimate is that up to 90% of what we do as humans is signaling, at least in rich countries like the United States. Signaling both helps us get ahead and tempers our ego. Overt displays are frowned upon, leaving less overt signaling as the way we display how amazing we are. An unchecked ego is going to break the rules for signaling, and unless it is Donald Trump in the 2016 election, such overt egotism will be punished. Ultimately, we do have to control ego because of negative externalities if we want to cooperate and live in complex social communities.
 
 
I hope this helps explain some of how I think about ego!
Yuval Noah Harari on Being Present

Yuval Noah Harari on Being Present

Posted on by jabittan
Toward the end of his book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari begins to ask why humans are moving in a direction of progress. There is an inevitable sense that humans will continue to push toward progress in technology, medicine, social fields, culture, and life in general. There is no stopping this evolution and progress, but Harari wonders if any of it is actually making human life better, happier, or more meaningful. Harari asks what exactly the changes that humans are introducing to the world are doing, and as such, he asks the reader to consider what nebulous ideas like happiness even are and whether such ideas should  be pursued.
 
 
His questions around happiness allow him to introduce ideas and concepts that have been part of stoicism and Buddhism. Stoic thought encourages that we reflect on ourselves in the present moment and attend to what we can control right now. It recommends that we decide not to pursue hedonistic pleasures, but that we try to recognize what we are doing with our mind and body in this moment. Stoicism encourages us to do our best to make the most of our short time on earth. Buddhism is similar, encouraging us to recognize that our individual thoughts and feelings will come and go, sometimes seemingly for no reason. Striving to maintain or be a certain thought, feeling, or emotion is impossible and so we should instead allow our thoughts, feelings, and emotions to come to us and to observe them without being overjoyed at the good emotions, thoughts, and feelings nor too dejected by the bad. When you manage to do so, Harari writes, “you live in the present moment instead of fantasizing about what might have been.”
 
 
I have heard many people over time complain about meditation and being unable to enjoy meditation because they cannot clear their mind. My understanding is that such individuals misunderstand the point of meditation. It is not to sit and focus with a clear mind, but rather to recognize that the mind has thoughts that we cannot seem to control. Meditation allows us to practice returning the mind to a single focus. It helps us see that we are not the random thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flitter through our head on a daily basis. We may be trying our hardest to focus on nothing but the feeling of air moving in and out of our bodies, but our minds can’t help but suddenly think about the thing we forgot at the grocery store, the person we need to call, or the hot person we saw at the gym. We do our best to keep our minds on one topic, but thoughts think themselves, and they pop into our head even when we do not want them. In many ways, we are not our thoughts, our thoughts are simply their own.
 
 
Harari writes that when we recognize that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not inherently the things that define us, we are able to step back and prevent them from controlling our lives. He writes, “the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer.” The more we think it is important that we travel and have novel experiences, the more we will crave those things and be unhappy when we don’t travel and have lots of novel experiences. The more we think that the way we feel in any given moment is important, the more we strive to only experience happy and positive emotional states. When we don’t experience those perfect emotional states, we will become more stressed and put more pressure on ourselves to get back to experiencing those positive emotional states. We won’t be present, we will be distracted by trying to control our emotional valence. We won’t experience the world, we will be too busy worrying about our future and fixating on something in the past. Letting all that go, Harari argues, and living in the present moment will give us a greater sense of peace and calm in our lives, and will help us better experience the world we move through. 
Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Posted on by jabittan
Our bodies and brains seem to always keep us wanting more. A new job, a new house, a new sexual partner all seem to be able to bring us pleasure, excitement, and joy, but those pleasant feelings soon fade and the things we like tend to become our new baseline. The house we loved when we moved in becomes normal and we don’t appreciate it as much after a few years. We settle into our job and can become bored or uninterested. Our love for our partner may go from red hot to cool.
 
 
There are evolutionary explanations for why our brains and bodies seem to respond in this way. If we became complacent in our current lives and living standards, we might not push for more and might not make new discoveries, work for new thing and improved status, and might not try to have more sex with more partners. Failing to make new discoveries means that our entire tribe doesn’t advance and could get wiped out by a neighboring tribe that did make a new discovery. Failing to try to do more and become a more impressive person means we don’t improve our social status, and don’t get as many mates, so our genes don’t get passed along. And settling for just one sexual partner means we have fewer chances to procreate, again decreasing the chance that our genes are successfully passed along.
 
 
“Perhaps it’s not surprising, then,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “that evolution has molded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last forever.”
 
 
Harari is not the first to make such an observation. This observation is part of the core of Stoic thinking. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations wrote about the ways in which we always want more and how we lose our value in the things we have that become ordinary to us. Stoic thinking encourages that we reflect on this reality and work to avoid becoming unhappy with things that are truly great and spectacular. Stoics suggest that we practice focusing on our gratitude at having such things, rather than focus on what more we could have. There will always be more we could strive for, and our brains and bodies will always push us to have more, but that doesn’t mean it will make us any happier. Our biology is destined, thanks to evolution, to keep us from being too miserable and too happy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a valuable place where we accept this reality and enjoy our lives, appreciate what and who we are, and strive to be great, without overreaching and becoming unhappy with what we have.
Advanced Planning - Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens - Joe Abittan - Stoic Thinking Contradictions

Advanced Planning

Posted on by jabittan
Within much of Stoic thinking, which I generally embrace pretty strongly, there is a contradiction between being ready for the future and focusing on the present movement. Stoicism encourages a sense of presence, of living in the present moment, being aware of ones body and ones surroundings right now, and managing and controlling the things under ones control at this moment. We cannot control the future, and cannot predict exactly what will come to pass. Within Stoic thought, all we can control is how our mind reacts to the present moment, so we should focus on how we are using our time and attention in an effort to be our best selves right now.
 
 
What this mindset leaves out, or at best inadvertently omits, is the importance of long-term planning. To get to where we want to get, to achieve goals, and to utilize our resources and energy the most effectively, we have to be able to look ahead and plan for the future. Advanced planning means we have to tie the present moment and our actions to specific steps to help us achieve future desired endpoints and outcomes. We have to form theories of the world and build causal structures to form our own mental models that tell us, “if I do this now, then a certain effect will be produced in the future.”
 
 
There is a paradox in Stoic thinking when it comes to being present. The whole idea of presence is that it enables us to be less stressed, to focus on the tasks at hand, and to bring our best selves to each moment throughout the day. The ultimate end goal of all this, however, is to better achieve future goals. Presence on its own doesn’t matter to much, unless we are ok with living a life where we drift without a long-term plan. This paradox is not limited to Stoic thought, and in some ways ties back to our ancient foraging roots.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about the shift in planning and thinking about the future that occurred with the Agricultural Revolution. Foragers, Harari explains, couldn’t save food for a long period of time. They could bring a handful of nuts or fruits with them, but carrying a large amount of nuts and fruits was cumbersome, and fruit would go bad quickly. Farmers, however, could produce a surplus of crops that could be harvested and saved for a longer period of time. Successful farming rewarded and required an ability to plan ahead, while foraging encouraged more thinking about the present moment. Harari writes, “in the subsistence economy of hunting and gathering, there was an obvious limit to such long-term planning. Paradoxically, it saved foragers a lot of anxieties. There was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence. The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before.”
 
 
Our ancient foraging and farming ancestors seem to highlight the contradiction that we find in Stoic thinking of the present moment. Foragers lived in the present moment and didn’t have anxieties and concerns over the future. They moved where their food sources were and didn’t have to plan ahead too far. But they also didn’t become farmers and set human evolution on a path toward modernity. The farmers who kicked off the Agricultural Revolution were the ones who broke from living in the present moment to push humanity in the eventual direction evolution favored, building small farming communities, then towns, and eventually nations with massive metropolitan areas. Planning ahead was crucial for successful farming, even though it came with stress and anxiety, and broke against the ancient human evolved tradition of living in small foraging bands focused on the present moment. Planning ahead also helped ensure more people could survive and propelled the technological advances that enabled the Agricultural Revolution.
A Navajo Beauty Prayer

A Navajo Beauty Prayer

Posted on by jabittan
In his biography of George Herriman, author Michael Tisserand includes a Navajo Beauty Prayer that Herriman learned in Arizona and found ways to incorporate into his artwork. The poem goes:
“In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk…”
I really like this poem and find it to be a powerful way to find presence, gratitude, and a sense of calmness. The poem reminds me of stoic ideas that I first learned about reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Meditations is a collection of notes that Aurelius wrote to himself, to remind himself to be thoughtful and considerate in all that he did. One of the ideas he returns to throughout the book is the power of being present, of not worrying about a future that hasn’t arrived and not being caught up in regret or sorrow over the past. Focusing on nature, Aurelius notes, can be a powerful way to stay grounded in the present moment and to recognize that much of what troubles us is in our minds, and not in the present world around us.
The Navajo poem focuses our attention in a meditative way on the present, especially if we can be outside in nature to recite the lines of the poem. We can appreciate the beauty of trees, the sky (even if cloudy), and the world around us. What we focus on will become our reality, and looking for beauty no matter where we are will help us see the world through a more positive lens. Our world is defined by how we use our mind and the poem reminds us of the power of our mind as it focuses it on positivity and beauty.
Stoicism in Thinking Fast and Slow

Stoicism in Thinking Fast and Slow

Posted on by jabittan
“We spend much of our day anticipating, and trying to avoid, the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. “How seriously should we take these intangible outcomes, the self-administered punishments (and occasional rewards) that we experience as we score our lives?”

 

Kahneman’s point is that emotions such as regret greatly influence the decisions we make. We are so afraid of loss that we go out of our way to minimize risk, to the point where we may be limiting ourselves so much that we experience costs that are actually greater than the potential loss we wanted to avoid. Kahneman is pointing to something that stoic thinkers, dating back to Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, addressed – our ability to be captured by our emotions and effectively held hostage by fears of the future and pain from the past.

 

In Letters from a Stoic, Seneca writes, “Why, indeed, is it necessary to summon trouble – which must be endured soon enough when it has once arrived, or to anticipate trouble and ruin the present through fear of the future? It is foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.” I think Kahneman would agree with Seneca’s mindset. In his book, Kahneman write that we should accept some level of risk and some level of regret in our lives. We know we will face regret if we experience some type of failure. We can prepare for regret and accept it without having to ruin our lives by taking every possible precaution to try to avoid the potential for failure, pain, and loss. It is inevitable that we are going to lose loved ones and have unfortunate accidents. We can’t prepare and shield ourselves from every danger, unless we want to completely withdrawal from all that makes us human.

 

Ryan Holiday wrote about the importance of feeling and accepting our emotions in his book The Obstacle is the Way. He wrote, “Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.” Kahneman would also agree with Holiday and Taleb. Econs, the term Kahneman and other economists use to refer to theoretical humans who act purely rationally, are not pulled by emotions and cognitive biases. However, Econs are not human. We experience emotions when investments don’t pan out, when bets go the wrong way, and when we face multiple choices and are unsure if we truly made the best decision. We have to live with our emotions and the weight of failure or poor investments. Somehow, we have to work with these emotions and learn to continue even though we know things can go wrong. Holiday would suggest that we must be present, but acknowledge that things wont always go well and learn to recognize and express emotions in a healthy way when things don’t go well.

 

Kahneman continues, “Perhaps the most useful is to be explicit about the anticipation of regret. If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are less likely to experience less of it.” In this way, our emotions can be tools to help us make more thoughtful decisions, rather than anchors we are tethered to and hopelessly unable to escape. A thoughtful consideration of emotions, a return to the present moment, and acceptance of the different emotions we may feel after a decision are all helpful in allowing us to live and exist with some level of risk, some level of uncertainty, and some less of loss. These are ideas that stoic thinkers wrote about frequently, and they show up for Kahneman when he considers how we should live with our mental biases and cognitive errors.
Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Posted on by jabittan
“The evidence is persuasive,” writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, “activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation.”

 

Yesterday I wrote about our misconceptions regarding individual self-control. I wrote about how important it is to structure our environment accordingly for productivity and self-restraint. We are influenced by far more factors in our environment than we like to admit, and we don’t have as much self-control over our behaviors as we believe we do. Being intentional with our environment, shaping the systems, structures, and institutions around us, will enable us to move through life without needing unreasonable (or unattainable) self-control and motivation.

 

Today’s quote from Kahneman gets more detailed with self-control, ego depletion, and our experience of focus, attention, and mental effort. Cognitive load, as mentioned in the quote, is the effort put on our thinking processes. Remembering a 7 digit number is a light cognitive load, while holding 7 digits in your mind and adding one digit to each number to get a new number is a higher cognitive load. At a certain point under cognitive load, our mind simply can’t hold any more information and can’t continue to accurately do more mental weight-lifting. This is the point where ego depletion sets in if we continue to try to push through and maintain the hard work.

 

The more we engage System 2, the part of our brain needed for focus activities and complex problem solving, the quicker we lose motivation for mentally taxing activities. This is the ego depletion that Kahneman writes about. Our brains in theory can keep going, we could keep reading, writing, plugging away at a spreadsheet, but our brains start to get tired, and our motivation to focus and push through with continued mental effort fades. If we continue to exercise self-control, preventing ourselves from a diversion, such as playing a video game, then we are slowly going to wear ourselves out, and we will be more likely to get a cookie, have a drink, or binge watch a whole TV series once we do stop.

 

Just as our brains are not able to continually hold more and more information without making mistakes, our brains are not able to continually do more and more deep work without reaching a breaking point. As Cal Newport writes in his book Deep Work, for most people who are serious about doing their best work, the limit is roughly 4 hours of intense deep work per day. The mind, even a well trained mind, will get tired and lose the motivation to keep pushing through more deep work without making dangerous mistakes and becoming less productive in the long run. We have to keep in mind the twin forces of cognitive load and ego depletion, and focus on doing the right work at the right time, before our cognitive load is overwhelming and before our self-control has been depleted. We can do great work, but we have to be intentional about how we do our deep work, and we have to set up our environment to minimize the pull of distractions and the need for self-control.
Stimuli, Attention, and What We Notice

Stimuli, Attention, and What We Notice

Posted on by jabittan
“Wherever you direct your gaze, you will meet with something that might stand out from the rest, if the context in which you read it were not equally notable,” writes Seneca in Letters From a Stoic.

 

Quite a while back I listened to a podcast interview with the founder of a music streaming service called Focus At Will. The company is different from other streaming services such as Spotify or Pandora in that they don’t provide stations that have your favorite songs from top artists. Instead, they have stations with altered songs and selected tunes that they believe will help you stay on focus. The idea is that our brains are easily distracted by the human voice, by instruments that mimic the human voice, and by lots of changes in our background. Each time we hear a voice, we are distracted for a fraction of second as our brain figures out whether we need to pay attention to that voice or not. And when the sound in the background changes suddenly, like when a song ends, when a car honks its horn, or when a branch snaps, our brains perk up and focus on our surroundings for a second to figure out if we are in danger. Eliminate these background noises and provide a consistent noise, the company argues, and people will be able to focus.

 

Seneca’s quote from above reminded me of Focus At Will and the theories behind their streaming. In particular, one of their stations really aligns with the ideas that Seneca lays out in the quote, but from an audio rather than visual perspective. Focus At Will has a station designed for people with ADHD. Based on neurological studies, they argue that people with ADHD have brains that are too sensitive to background noises. For most of us, when a colleague sneezes from two offices over, the sound is detected by our ears and transmitted to our brain which subconsciously decides the noise was unimportant. Consequentially we don’t even notice the noise because it gets stuck with the unconscious brain, never elevated to the level of conscious awareness. For an individual with ADHD, however, their brain is more sensitive to a sneeze from down the hall, and they consciously recognize that noise and are distracted as they think through whether they need to respond to the stimuli or not. This happens with more than just sneezes, and can be hugely distracting for the individual as they are constantly working through stimuli that are easily ignored and unnoticed for most of us.

 

The solution that most of us would jump to would be to put an individual with ADHD in a completely noise and stimuli reduced environment. The solution of Focus at Will, in line with Seneca’s quote, is to raise the context of other noises to be equally as notable as the disruptions. The streaming service has a station that can be almost overwhelming to individuals without ADHD. There is a flurry of sound (in a musical way – not just random noise) that is somewhere in the neighborhood of heavy metal, demolition derbies, or construction sites. The solution is to raise the level of noise and distraction so that everything is operating at a high distraction level, so that no notable sound stand out.

 

Personally, I listen to stations like the Chilled Cow Lofi Hip Hop Radio Station when I need to focus on important work. But the idea of what stands-out, what we focus on, what we notice among a sea of stimuli is fascinating. Our brains can be overwhelmed by stimuli, and at the same time, an abundance of stimuli can also bring our attention and focus into a single point, drowning out other stimuli. This is just one more example of how reality isn’t. Our brains construct and create the reality we experience, and how we see the world around us is context dependent, with the level of stimuli playing a role in what we observe and experience.
Capitalism and Externalities

Capitalism and Externalities

Posted on by jabittan
Capitalism has come under fire in the recent years in ways that I would not have predicted as I completed my college degree and entered the workforce. For so many years the idea of capitalism has been central to the American story and to American identity. It may not be perfect, but it has always been held above other economic systems as the best option available. However, recently, people have taken a new look at capitalism to ask if it can be maintained without the plundering of others. Can there be a reasonable sense of equity or equality within a system of capitalism? And in the United States, do we really have a meritorious system of capitalism, or is the American system of capitalism overrun with grift and graft?

 

Allowing people to flourish based on their own talents, allowing people to pursue their own interests, and to accumulate wealth can be a good thing, but it can also be done to excess. Like alcohol, chocolate cake, or Netflix, our pursuit of wealth can essentially be an addiction, and the costs can be born on all of society, not just on ourselves. Our actions and the systems and structures within which we operate have unintended consequences. These consequence, or externalities, can be positive or negative. Within capitalism, positive externalities include new technologies that improve our lives, more efficient markets which minimize waste, and hopefully more goods and wealth for everyone. But negative externalities related to capitalism include pollution, corruption, and extractive processes that harm individuals, communities, and environments.

 

In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca writes to his friend Lucilius, “I myself pray rather that you may despise all those things which your parents wished for you in abundance. Their prayers plunder many another person, simply that you may be enriched.”

 

Seneca is acknowledging that when one person gains resources, often times it is at the expense of another person. The goal of capitalism is for our economic system to be positive sum, meaning that everyone is better off in an exchange – a state known as a Pareto Efficiency. However, this is not always the case. Seneca sees exchanges, or maybe more precisely the accumulation of resources and wealth, as zero sum, meaning that there is a fixed amount of stuff, and that anything that one person accumulates is taken away from another person. This, in my opinion, is where so much of our discontent in the United States and across the globe with capitalism lies.

 

Seneca may not always be correct. There may be Pareto Efficiencies out there and there may be situations in which capitalism builds a positive sum economic system. But it does seem like moderation in our approach to capitalism and wealth accumulation is warranted. At a certain point, for us to have more necessarily mean that we are extracting wealth and resources from other places. Mining, logging, and cattle grazing can have damaging effects on local environments and communities, even if they do help develop industry or increase GDP in the places we take resources from. Beyond a certain level, continuing this trend is likely to make our lives marginally better, while potentially making the lives of others much worse. We should constantly ask ourselves if we are nearing that point, and try to limit our need for more stuff and more wealth when we are at sufficient level where the marginal gain for us is meaningless and effectively just plunders others for our own enrichment. It seems reasonable if we should ask whether limitless growth is really possible, or if capitalism ends in a state of plunder, in which nothing is left for a sustainable existence for everyone.
The End is Always Near

The End is Always Near

Posted on by jabittan
The human mind thinks in narratives. Well take in information about the world around us, and we create a story that weaves all of those narratives together in a cohesive manner. The mind creates the reality that it experiences, and it uses narrative to give the story meaning. Unfortunately, sometimes the stories don’t fit the actual world we inhabit very well.

 

One area where the narrative we tell ourselves doesn’t fully match the reality of our lives is with regard to our risk of dying on any given day. As our brains build the narrative of our lives and of who we are, it projects forward into the future of who we will become and the world we will inhabit. My assumption, based on the way I know that I think, is that we project forward a long life with our ending far off in the distant future. I recognize this tendency in myself all the time, and I suspect that even if I do make it to old age, this same tendency will be with me then.  It is hard to imagine that my end is not always going to be far away.

 

The end is always near, however. Or at least, the potential and risk of the end is always near. Our brains believe that we have lots of life left, because that is how the narrative we have crafted in our minds plays out. But the real world doesn’t have to follow the narrative in our minds. The real world is separate from what we think it should be or will be, and it doesn’t much care about how we think about it or understand it (or fail to understand it either).

 

In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca wrote, “who is not near death? It is ready for us in all places and at all times.”

 

It is important to remember that the actual course of our lives could diverge from the narrative path we create at any moment on any day. The possibility of a natural disaster, a clumsy mistake, or the malice of another person resulting in our early departure from life is always greater than zero. This means that whatever narrative we create, however far off death is in the story we tell ourselves, the reality is that the end is always near.

 

The take-away is to make our time meaningful, to be content that we have done our best each day, so that if we die, the narrative we lived out will end with us as a confident, complete individual. This is not an excuse for a YOLO way of life, and it shouldn’t be a reason to bury ourselves in work – effectively enslaving ourselves to a job, a cause, or a relationship. Instead, what we should learn from our always near ending is that we should do our best to fully apply ourselves in a way that meaningfully engages in the world to produce more than our own selfish happiness. We should seek opportunities to live a life where we  can develop a strong and fulfilling narrative that helps to lift up others who are doing the same. The end is always near, so we should make sure we have made of our life a narrative we can be proud of.