I think that one of the hardest things in the world is to be honest. We all give lip-service to the value of honesty. We all like to think that we don’t lie and that therefore we’re being honest. But there’s a large difference between being honest and refraining from lying. One of the clearest examples of the point is what I think of as the “confrontational masculine style”.

Socialized as we are, men are not to demonstrate weakness. To say that you’re uncertain of the situation you find yourself in and worrying about how you appear is honest, but the “confrontational masculine style” doesn’t allow such displays of “weakness”. So instead we see gestures of fight: threatening words, looks, lunges—caricatures of what society has taught is proper.

Confronted with disorienting facts or opinions, men aren’t trained to say “That’s interesting. I’d never thought of that.” A man will, instead, tend to get angry and accuse the cause of his disorientation of trying to get everyone riled up or pick a fight. Whether or not this impulse rises to the level of physical violence depends a lot on social context.

Similar arguments occur on the John’s Hopkins campus and in the tough parts of Baltimore made famous by The Wire, but the methods and outcomes can be vastly different. At the prestigious university, a man who feels so entitled will stake his claim on a woman by spreading the knowledge through a social sphere large and norm-enfocing enough to protect his reputation from any threat. On streets without law enforcers, a man will likely resort to punches, if not a knife or gun, if he feels that his claim on a woman is inadequately respected.

In either context, what’s missing is honesty. It’s honest to say “I feel threatened by the amount of time you spend hanging out with that guy.” It’s honest to say “Your questions are making me feel angry.” What happens is that we yell, we start fights, and we blame other people.

Fundamental to these dysfunctions is a dishonesty to ourselves. Not only are we unable to express these emotions and feelings to others, but we frequently fail to even articulate them for ourselves. We—males especially, but perhaps the whole culture—are not fluent in the language of emotions. We don’t always know the words that match up to our internal state. They try, when we’re young, to teach us this stuff, but many of us aren’t really educated about until much much later. Some of us never really get it.

It’s so much more common and visible for “I feel hurt” to be expressed as “You’ve hurt me”, or even “You’ve hurt me and now I’m angry”, that we can be given some leniency for thinking the second reading is correct. But this second expression fails to accurately identify the situation as it is first encountered. The personal feeling of hurt is always more primary and accurate than the assigning of blame for that emotion. But more importantly, the second makes it natural to expand into the third, which brings with it a whole new set of emotions which only inflame a situation.

Honesty is hard because of all the ways and reasons—strength, machismo, fear—we’ve learned to favor dishonesty. Dishonestly allows for a pleasing clarity. A nice certainty that I have no responsibility for the current situation because the world is refusing to comply with the way it’s meant to be. Dishonesty allows us to play the easy game, projecting our emotions outward so we can move on from them. But it’s very limiting.

Honesty is hard, scary, and worthy of the energy it takes to find. Honesty is the fundamental basis for all useful knowledge. Deep honesty is the basis for wisdom. Almost everything I find admirable in the world is rooted in this deep difficult honesty. And the fight to live in that deep difficult honestly is probably the most important goal I have on a daily basis.

It’s far too easy to let the worry that you’ll not do it right stop you from doing it at all. As someone who’s spent most of his life avoiding embarrassment at the cost of inaction, I feel rather certain I know what I’m talking about.

Doing is the only way you’ll learn anything. Ten thousand books about how to speak Italian will not stop your first spoken words and sentences from being sputtering conveluted unrecognizable messes. Ten thousand tips about how to write will not make words flow from your fingers pure as a summer rain.

Life exists, mostly, in the doing.

Ten unexecuted million-dollar ideas do not yeild ten million dollars. Fifteen great ideas for books does not make you a prolific author. Twenty great ideas for organizing your life does not organize those junk drawers in your kitchen.

The first thing you learn about doing is that it’s hard. It’s scary. It’s messy. And it’s not always fun. What’s required is a commitment that you’ll make it through the beginning stages until it becomes fun. You’ll keep going through all the hard work that’s required before you’ll get any recognition. Before it’ll start to feel second-nature. Before you’ll realize that maybe you’re overusing the power of repetition to convey your point.

We need more doing and less thinking about doing. And we need more doing without the constant worry that we’re doing it wrong. And most of all, we need fewer people pointing out where someone else is doing it and more people learning for themselves how to do.

It’s easy to watch. And it’s also easy, while watching, to develop opinions about how it’s being done wrong. But sharing those opinions isn’t doing it. And broadcasting mere opinions formed by watching hardly counts as doing it.

I’m no master of doing. I’ve not been doing this for far too long. But I’m begining to realize the value of just doing it. And I really hope to find the time to just do it more frequently.

My war on gift-giving earns just about as much criticism as it does confusion, so I think it makes sense to lay the argument out here. To start: there is a strong economic case against gift giving. It’s based on things like gift-givers routinely paying more for their present than the receiver values it at, that a large percentage of gift cards—the latest way out of the gift giving puzzle—go unredeemed and are inherently inefficient even when they are, that we (in the rich world) frequently want for nothing and so are given things we definitionally do not want, and the fact that people get little enjoyment or economic benefit out of either giving or recieving gifts and yet spend a great deal of time and money doing it. All those arguments are valid, rational, and widely greeted with a “yeah, well, but economics sucks.” So I’ll set that whole area aside, if you’re interested I’d recommend the reasonably short, accessible, and available Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.

To start, I think it’s worth considering the practical symbolism of gift-giving. Like the pre-Medieval tribute, gift-giving is essentially an economic way by which we demonstrate if not good will, then at least a promise not to harm. That description is obviously somewhat inflammatory, but I find it undeniable that there’s a thread of commonality between this archaic demonstration of commitment and this rarely-questioned tradition we still practice today.

Practically speaking, the positive case for gift giving is usually that we’re showing our care for each other by buying the other things they certainly want but wouldn’t indulge so much as to purchase. Setting aside the reality that this is rarely how gift-exchanges shake out, even this idealization seems odd. It posits that the strongest needs that we can satisfy for each other are urges for physical objects that others must help us to realize. Again, accepting that to be true is, to my mind, rather depressing.

We humans have many needs. We need things like shelter, food, water, sanitation, and comfort. We also have deep and seldom-explored psychological needs for belonging, purpose, love, success, acceptance, etc. Gifts almost never satisfy the first set of needs—we’re buying chocolates for each other not because we think the other hungry, but because we figure at least they can eat it—and rarely offer more than a momentary relief from our psychological longings.

When we spend time on other people with the goal of securing a secret physical object to later hand them, we’re excluding them from our time as though the physical object we find will somehow make that time directed toward them (yet without them) worthwhile. Maybe we think that we’re not excluding them from our time, but rather borrowing time from elsewhere to devote to gift giving. Again, even if that were true, it would be a strange and irrationally indirect way to show we care.

There are few greater gifts we can give to one another than our genuine and complete presence with them. This is not an easy gift to give—we have minds built for avoiding being hunted down by predators, not for focused caring attention for another person—but it is the gift that best fulfills our so-frequently-missed psychological needs. Giving someone your genuine presence almost inherently gives them a sense of belonging, love, and acceptance. Those things give them easier access to a sense of purpose and success. Even if you’re not good at demonstrating presence to others, there’s no way for you to get better than spending your time doing it intentionally with a willingness to improve.

It’s time, not money (even proxied through physical goods), that we need to give each other. No gift means as much as a few hours spent genuinely encountering each other with acceptance and care. We can’t give presence without taking the time out of our lives to give to others; the same can not be said for physical presents. Money is unevenly distributed and so a problematic medium through which to demonstrate our caring. But there is nothing more even than time. The fifteen minutes we promise to regularly spend really present with each other represents an equal loss and possibility of gain for both of us, and that seems like the best possible kind of gift-exchange to me.

One of the most novel and under-considered realities of the internet age is the extent to which it has allowed for the creation of heretofore unprecedented types of relationships. Asymmetric intimacy—one of these new types—is about the way that you run across something and think to yourself, “[Person who I’ve never met] would love this.” Or the way that you find yourself reading the words of a person you’ve never said a word to and getting that jolt of someone understands. Or the way that you know that someone who has no idea who you are is really into this television program and probably watching it now. Or the way that you see an object and you think that “[Person I’d love to meet] has one of those”.

Many of those realizations, and a million others like them, would be considered rather creepy to know in any older context. The word “stalker” could reasonably be invoked. Except for the fact that all the information needed to have these thoughts is given freely to anyone on the internet by a large majority of the internet-connected population. This is the new world of asymmetric intimacy.

Today you follow people on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram who don’t follow you back. People who have never even noticed that you took an interest in their relationship status, their random rantings, or mundane photographs. But there you are, getting intimate with those breadcrumbs they’re making public. You lay in bed with this person’s stuff. You use the bathroom while looking at details of strangers’ lives. It’s not technically stalking—you’re only getting the clues they’re making public—but it sure is weird looked at with different eyes. You’ve been amassing an absurd amount of details about their more and less intimate aspects in some of your most private time.

It’s worth saying that it isn’t only the internet that facilitates this type of asymmetric intimacy. Throughout its history celebrity culture (typified by the likes of Entertainment Tonight, People Magazine, and TMZ) has been built around the same basic goal: knowing people you don’t know. But the difference—and somewhat paradoxical part of that as an example—is that celebrity culture frequently gains these glimpses through transgressive means. That is: at best, People Magazine allows me to feel intimate with Tom Hanks by interviewing him and getting him to say novel things about himself. At worst, it allows me to feel intimate with Leonardo DiCaprio by taking photo of him having lunch with his mother or girlfriend or mistress that he’d never want widely distributed.

This need to have outsiders around to document celebrities is lacking from the asymmetric intimacy that the internet enables. We’re thoughtlessly sharing these things freely. Internet-based asymmetric intimacy is so novel because it’s unforced and ubiquitous. These facts are deeply intertwined: if it required coercion it wouldn’t be ubiquitous, and if it wasn’t ubiquitous it would feel forced.

Obviously these traits do lend a slightly different feel to this type of intimacy than one had with its preceding forms. In most forms of internet intimacy one doesn’t gain knowledge that its owner preferred not to share. I don’t know who an internet personality is dating in the way I might with movie stars. Conversely I may get to know that internet person thinks Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is the most brilliantly trashy show on TV, which I’d probably never get to learn about Mr. DiCaprio by reading People.

Another, perhaps more fitting, analogy is that of a 19th century columnist or diarist. Existing on the internet today is somewhat like being a fan of a nineteenth century writer, admiring their work and feeling you know the writer well from what they disclosed of themselves in their works. But this writer would rarely know anything of you who regard them with so much interest.

Obviously this, too, is flawed. Today written words take seconds, not weeks, to go through the process of conception, recording, and dissemination. As a result people can pub­lish such a diver­sity of stuff (essays, notes, quips about the mun­dan­i­ties of their life, pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions, etc) that if someone wants to pay atten­tion, they can get a much fuller pic­ture of who a per­son is than the entire cor­pus of a 19th century author would ever be likely to give.

There’s no scary reality of this asymmetric intimacy I’ll now warn you about. There’s no great positive conclusion I have to make. Instead I just hope you pause, sometimes, while you scroll through Facebook or Twitter and sit for a second with the undeniable thought that “This is weird!”.

One thing that’s been dominant in my experience lately is dissatisfaction. To be clear, it’s not the dissatisfaction is a new, or novel, or rare sensation for me, it’s just been really dominant and prominent in my conscious mind lately.

Dissatisfaction, to risk stating the blindingly obvious, is wishing that things were other than they are. That is to say, it’s seeing things like this but thinking that they’d be better like that. It requires then, a non-trivial bit of imagination to become dissatisfied. One must be able to imagine things being different than they are in order to wish that they were that way. The need for us to jump this imaginative gap is probably the nugget of truth underpinning the constantly repeating phrase “ignorance is bliss”. Truly, if we were unable to concieve of ways that things could be different, we’d meet them without the dissatisfaction so many of us know.

This gets to the point of fate. I have no wish to go deep into the conceptual and logical validity or implications of the idea of fate. I just think it’s interesting to realize that if we truly believed in the right kind of fate, we’d automatically banish the feeling of dissatisfaction from our experience. If the world is as it is meant to be, then there’s nothing to worry over, wish were different, or feel a desire to modestly tweak.

People often marvel at the persistence of the caste system in India, or the notion—common in Europe, the Far East, and elsewhere—of a divine right of kings. But they make a certain amount of sense. If we’re where we’re supposed to be, we’re inherently free from the “status anxiety” that gives rise to so much modern dissatisfaction.

Obviously, as I said, this is to make no claim as to the logical coherence or practical usefulness of fatalism, it’s just to note that one of the easiest ways to free yourself from dissatisfaction is to accept the notion that things should be as they are.

The practical point is not to do whatever you want, because after all things will turn out as they were predetermined to. It’s rather to say that when you can divide clearly in your mind the things that your efforts can change and the things that your efforts can’t you start to get a healthier sense of your role in your universe, and to make a little more rare your expience of dissatisfaction.

Surely there’s use in effort, and the belief in your non-zero ability to have an impact. But surely abandonment of the desire for things that your action will never change to be different than they are is also useful. And understanding that distinction seems to me the foundation of almost all wisdom.