The lifelong Pursuit of Life

Thoughts on living more fully while staying grounded in reason

How many of us live. Some beautiful, magnificent moments of grandeur, but mostly moments that feel rough and half-lived

Something that perennially fascinates me is how most people on this big blue pearl (including myself) call our lives generally happy, but spend most waking moments of it dealing with struggles, annoyances, pain, and a general sense that things are not quite as good as we’d like for them to be. It kinda reminds me of a quote by Dostoevsky, from his novel The Brothers Karamazov:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.

Like how Dostoevsky’s character draws a sharp difference between humanity and individual humans by thinking of humanity as inspiring and deeply valuable while thinking of humans as annoying and bothersome, it seems like many of us take the same butcher knife-approach to the definition of “our life”, cleaving it into two separate, distinct entities:

1. The big-L “Life”: Comprised of our hopes, dreams, the things we’ll be doing once we finish with our current task, and the people we think we’ll be once we’re finally rich, beautiful, famous, or otherwise able to “escape” from our current situation
2. The little-l “life”: Comprised of the nearly-infinite number of day-to-day moments that are often either filled with endless discomforts or completely missed through our absorption in thoughts about the past, future, what we’d rather be doing, and literally anything else besides the experience that’s sitting smack-dab in front of us

Almost all of us strive to get from life to Life. We want to stop living and start Living, dammit! So we try to bridge from life to Life in a few different ways:

1. Distraction

Food, Youtube, Netflix, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, sex, booze, weed, hard drugs, etc. Most people in rich countries have access to an absolute smorgasbord of very appealing ways to distract ourselves from the pain, annoyances, struggles, and boredom that exist in this current moment. And sure enough they work, making us laugh, cry, feel less, feel more, and in general allow us to escape from the hum-drum and discomfort of our day-to-day lives.

But as time passes the high we get from these joys starts to taper out. The show we once found delightful and hilarious upon first watch has now become “comfort consumption”, or just something we put on when we can’t think of anything else to do. Social media goes from being a delightful way to connect with people and explore what others are doing to being something we mindlessly scroll at-best, and let diminish our self-esteem at-worst as we’re willingly subjected to endless posts by models and “startup gurus” who seem to have much better friends, sex, adventures, and overall lives than ours. Beer, weed, and other drugs go from taking us down mind-alerting experiences to being something we simply need after (or even during) a long day. And somehow we end up exactly where we mentally started before indulging in our distractions. Still at our core dissatisfied and uncomfortable with day-to-day experience, but now with a raging hangover to boot. So pure distraction usually isn’t the most fruitful approach to getting from life to Life (though it is one we often turn to).

2. Ambition

So let’s say distraction isn’t quite getting is from life to Life, so we try to “make something of ourselves”. We see CEOs, fitness icons, and social media influences who seemingly “have it all”, and we decide that once we have a piece of that pie, we’ll be just as happy as how we image they are (note the word imagine here).

So we start grinding, putting in long hours at the office, obsessing over the angle of our latest #brunch photo, and sometimes even sacrificing our physical and emotional well-being in the pursuit of the next raise, promotion, or social media follower. And sure enough when the grind finally pays off and you finally get what you worked so long and hard for you get a massive buzz off of it. “I did it.”, you say as you look back upon what you’ve accomplished and bask in the glow of your own magnificence.

But just like with distractions, at some point this buzz wears off. That promotion that was supposed to be a “perfect fit” still has points of drudgery to it, and the increase in responsibilities, expectations, and stressors only add to the list of things that keep you awake at night. The new followers that you’ve picked up on your social media account are fickle, and you now spend each night worrying that some new influencer is going to come along and capture the cultural zeitgeist way better than you ever could, making you just as culturally irreverent as the day you signed up for this social media platform. Even self improvement through exercise and healthy eating can loose its buzz over time. The kale smoothies and 6am workouts that once felt novel are now just another part of your daily routine, and each fitness valley or plateau makes you question why you even put yourself through all this in the first place. The amateur bodybuilder, though she’s accomplished a significantly higher muscle to fat ratio than 99.9% of the general population, still feels small and out-of-shape compared to a professional bodybuilder. So although ambition’s not necessarily a bad thing (in fact it can be a very healthy driver when approached correctly), it has many of the same luster-loss issues as distraction, and therefore is probably not going to sweep most of us from life to Life.

3. Spirituality

So earthly pleasures like sex, drugs, money, and social media don’t make most of us feel fulfilled for very long. How about more ethereal pleasures?

As humans we are undeniably drawn towards believing in something bigger than ourselves, usually in the form of something (or someone) watching over us and injecting a sense of broader purpose into both the good and bad events that befall us. Without this the universe can feel massive, cold, and ultimately random, making us in-turn feel like insignificant specks being chucked to-and-fro in a place that couldn’t give two shits about what happens to us, everyone we love, and all other life on planet earth. And our brains do not handle that feeling of uncertainty and inconsequentiality well. We are notoriously bad at accepting fundamental uncertainty, are wired to constantly recognize deeper patterns, and infer underlying intentions behind actions and events wherever possible. These practices may have been key to our species’ success, and continue to serve us well to this day. Our aversion to uncertainty may have driven the curiosity and knowledge-lust that led to untold numbers of society-altering inventions, our pattern recognition allowed us to make split judgement off sometimes subtle environmental cues (like the rustle of bushes possibly forecasting a tiger attack), and our intention reading allowed us to communicate feelings and concepts at a higher fidelity than just language. But this also means we see patterns in things that are most likely random (like the shape of tea lives at the bottom of a cup, or the burn marks on a piece of toast that kinda look like America’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln), and can’t help but to speculate about the bigger message that God/Allah/the universe is trying to send us by yielding two vending machine candy bars for the price of one on the same day that we loose our job (“It must be a sign that God/Allah/the universe will care for and protect me through times of financial hardship!”).

This pattern recognition, hyper-inference, and desire for certainty, permanence, and concreteness gives rise to spirituality, as a deeply fulfilling explanation for the persistent uncertainty unfolding around us. Belief in a religion or other elevated form of consciousness makes us feel secure, and gives us something to hold on to during good times and bad.

But just diving headfirst into faith, something that was (and often still is) required by more traditional religions, isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. The rise of rationality has been one of traditional religion and belief’s greatest challenges, due to their often conflicting modes of thought.

Rationality’s (surprisingly) Radical Rules

Pure rational thinking asks only four things of you, and these four things sound pretty simple at face-value. And yet it can feel very counter-intuitive to origami our thought patterns into these rules, to the point where even the staunchest rationalist will still slip up now and again.

1. Take all evidence into account, regardless of whether it helps or hurts your position — Our egos feed off a three-item diet: being praised, holding status/worth, and being proven right. The latter mixes with the brain’s cognitive overload prevention mechanism of automatically filtering incoming information to produce a nearly perpetual case of confirmation bias, where we automatically trust evidence that supports our existing positions and distrust evidence against them. But valid evidence doesn’t take sides. It just exists as a partial reflection of the reality that we at least claim to try to align our understanding with. So basing our trust of evidence on preexisting views to any reasonable degree means a rejection of reality, and a tacit admission that we’d rather live in the cozy darkness of untested beliefs than step out into the harsh light of truth.
2. Always look to disprove theories (including your own) — It’s shockingly easy to find evidence to support pretty much any theory if you don’t question it too hard. Do superintelligent aliens visit rural Ohio on a monthly basis for the sole purpose of traumatizing some livestock? There are some pretty weird-looking crop circles out there, and crazy farmer Joe seems pretty adamant about the lights flying over his barn not being “of airliner-like origin”… But the odds of an alien race existing with the home planet proximity and intelligence needed to make this journey, the odds of said race going undetected for decades (or the odds of our often-dysfunctional governments somehow succeeding in keeping them under wraps for decades), and the absurdity of said species using untold resources and intelligence just to play practical jokes on some bewildered farmers makes this extremely unlikely. By immediately looking for ways in which any given theory can be picked apart, said theory will either fall apart (meaning it was never that reflective of reality to begin with), or come out stronger like a sword forged through repeated strikes, and ether way you’ll probably have a clearer picture of reality on the other side.
3. Never be 100% certain about anything — Eliezer Yudkowsky put it best when he renamed 100% certainty to infinite certainty. Just like how infinity cannot exist in reality, infinite certainty (and therefore 100% certainty) cannot exist in reality either. We can be really really really really confident in something, but never perfectly certain. The sun is almost guaranteed to rise tomorrow, but there’s a 0.000000000000000001% chance that a black hole develops and swallows it whole, crushing us all in the process. Therefore our confidence should exist on a probability scale, where confirming evidence slides us towards a higher-percentage of belief, and disconfirming evidence slides us towards a lower-percentage of belief. But we should never be 100% certain of anything, since disconfirming evidence may always be right around the corner.
4. After following the above 3 rules, align your beliefs with what seems most probable, even if it doesn’t feel good — The outputs from following the above three rules may leave you with some tough pills to swallow. Core beliefs that you’ve held sacred for decades may start to look less and less likely, moving from “certain”, to “probable”, to the dreaded sub-50% mark where they become “unlikely”. As a rational being you’re expected to accept these evidence-driven shifts in probability, regardless of your feelings on them, with the belief that it’s better to hold less-fun beliefs that align closer to reality than “sunshine and rainbows” beliefs that remain stubbornly disconnected from how things most likely actually are.

Many forms of traditional religious belief break at least one of these rules by hyper-focusing only on evidence that “proves” the beliefs (diminishing any contrary evidence) and/or discouraging any form of open uncertainty as a “lack of faith”. And while one could argue that rationality is just another belief structure (in an attempt to turn the battle between traditional belief and rationality into a he-said/she-said argument), these four rules seem to lead to beliefs that accurately reflect reality (whether that’s determined by basic observation, scientific evidence, or predictions coming true) more often than any other existing belief structure.

And so we’re left with a fundamental question. How do we reconcile the reality-aligning power of rational thought with our core drive for greater meaning? Basically, how do we lead a meaningful life while thinking rationally?

Finding Meaning — Three Approaches

1. When faced with a discrepancy between modern scientific or moral understanding and the teachings of a believed religious text, most people choose one of three choices: persistently side with the religious text regardless of the contrary evidence put forth, abandon the religion entirely, or sweep said discrepancy under the mental rug and simply not think about it. There seems to be a fourth approach some take though, by reconciling their religious or spiritual beliefs with the rules of rationality, and therefore finding meaning in a higher-purpose, order, or entity while openly questioning whatever arises in their journey. To do so, these people often see religious teachings and texts less as intentionally literal fact, and more as allegories meant to help the reader become a better, more fulfilled person. While not a common position, it does help solve the challenge posed by scientific, cultural, and moral progress successfully advancing far beyond the old-world in which most heavily-followed religious texts were written. There’s still challenges within this approach (most traditional organized religions don’t endorse it, recommending either the denial or rug-sweeping approach, and it can be tough to not let one’s personal desire to believe in a higher power tip the scales in the rational decision-making process), but some people seem to have successfully reconciled the spiritual with the rational within their own minds this way, and I respect that.
2. Others take what is known as an optimistic nihilist approach, accepting that our existence has no predefined purpose, that we are but specks in an unfathomably massive, mostly dark universe, that there’s nothing waiting for us on the other side of death, and that there’s no all-powerful being subtly establishing a reality in which we’re unwaveringly seen and protected. And yet in this broadly meaningless universe we can still endeavor to create our own sense of purpose, defiantly carving out our own tiny nook of a meaningful existence from the vast emptiness that surrounds us. This path, though fruitful for many, is hard. The radical freedom inherent in being able to define your own life’s meaning carries the burden that you are the only person who can define said meaning, and not doing so successfully means you carry the sole burden of a bleak, hollow existence. To not truly believe in anything seems to lie fundamentally at-odds with some of our most core instincts, so to escape that awful feeling the optimistic nihilists who have not yet been able to construct a concrete, well-defended sense of purpose either fall back to the distraction or ambition traps described above, or confine these existential doubts to the dark recesses of their mind where they only arise in the dark of the night when there’s nothing else to think about. But some are able to carve out their own personal flame of purpose against the black night sky, and live deeply fulfilling lives as a result.
3. The third option is what I like to call an extremely productive form of “giving up”, which is to take a deep breath, realize all of this talk about universal meaning and purpose is only taking place in ~8 inches of cranial matter between the ears, and open up to the wonder around us while trying not to dilute direct experience with all these questions about “what it all means”. To paraphrase the Buddha, it’s kinda useless to try to find the universe’s origin/first cause, and searching for it only takes you away from more important matters. This approach recommends that you zoom out of all of your spiritual and metaphysical ponderings to observe how your mind simultaneously weaves and gets-caught-up-in these stories, and yet these very same complex webs can be completely cast aside in an instant as soon as you realize the physical feeling of your breath, the wind on your skin, or the sound of the trees rustling in the breeze. By opening up to the physical, mental, and emotional sensations that arise, you begin to realize that tastes of equanimity are achievable even if you don’t know whether there’s a god or not, and while these questions of ultimate vs. local meaning and purpose are interesting, solving them is not a prerequisite to a worthwhile life, and therefore they shouldn’t be taken more seriously than they need to be. This approach seems to shield against a lot of the self-doubt and toil that comes with the above two solutions, and while it’s certainly not for everyone, it’s one that many (including myself) have derived a lot of value from.

At the end of the day I don’t really know how to definitively leap from life to Life, and I’m starting to suspect that:

1. There is no way to fully make this jump, you can only get gradually closer to it
2. Discomfort and other negative emotions cannot be escaped from, but you can slowly open to them more and more with practice
3. The effectiveness of the method ultimately depends on the fundamental psychology of the person who’s trying to apply it

As with most complex questions I think iterative experimentation is key. Try one, see if it fits your fancy, and if it rubs too hard against what you feel is right, try another path. There’s a certain balance point between working through natural difficulties and realizing that a path isn’t right for you, one in which I’m currently far too unwise to consistently define, and you’ll probably have to find for yourself. But know that the winding road of uncertainty and doubt is all part of the process, and by reflecting on these bigger questions you’re making small but impact steps towards living a fulfilling life.