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.

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.

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.

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!”.

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.

This isn’t meant as a mission statement. I just saw recently that I’ve made a series of choices in my 25 years of life, most of which were not well considered, that has led me to a peculiar place and given me a strange sense of certainty about what I want.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be the best person in any discipline, or really even in any discipline. There are already plenty of people doing well-defined things in well-defined ways with varying degree of skill. I don’t want to do that. At the risk of turning this essay into a minefield of cliches, I have no desire to follow anyone’s footsteps or be perfectly good at something many other people do.

While I’m willing to fit myself into such a system for a roof over my head and food in my belly, I have no desire to spend my energy pursuing, enabling, or realizing someone else’s vision. Other people’s visions are always coming from a place of other people’s values. If it’s not for me, I’m not going to spend any more effort on it than I have to.

More than anything else in myself, I seek the most divine state of existence: complete harmony with everything. It’s kind of at odds with the system in which I was raised, but I’m really certain that I don’t get anything from victories over other people, companies, or countries. Any short-term good feelings that come from beating you or someone else has two often-missed downsides: I suffer  when  you win a victory over me, or when I get bored by winning victories over you. Either way, competition cannot satisfy me (or anyone else) in the long term.

The only thing I know that can last long term is peace. The understanding I’ve gained about the world that allows me to take my lumps and keep on going is the only force worth cultivating. Pursuit of this is the only one I have any desire to engage with over the long-term.

If I dare to dream for a second, if I were to realize complete peace within myself I would have the power of understanding deep enough to realize a love that has no match. That would be a great gift to the world, and it is for that reason that I seek, in ways that sometimes appear selfish, to truly come to a complete understanding of the world.

But I also know that that state of complete personal peace isn’t something that does well when hurried or that’s likely to come when tugged with a great deal of force. And so the greatest period of my life will almost certainly be a journey toward that objective. And on the way I hope to do things of value.

I hope, essentially, for the ability to share what I have learned and what I’m working on learning with people who could benefit from those things. I’ve had little luck so far finding such people, and so I’m putting into writing what it is I’m working on.

That, more than anything else, is what this blog is. It’s place I have put and will continue to put things I think are valuable that I know, or am trying to know, or stuggling to understand. Some things may seems only tangentially related to that bigger goal, but I had my reasons.

Before you go telling me that I clearly don’t know fun, I should be clear about that part too. It’s tautologically true that nothing can be more fun than fun, but it’s undeniable that we mean a rather specific subset of things when we typically say “fun.” When your wife, friend, or boss commands you “to go have some fun,” they obviously don’t mean spend time entering data into spreadsheets, even that’s your favorite thing in the whole world. Things that the culture at large considers fun are generally hedonic pleasures that fall into the general categories of social activities and light amusements. TV is fun, video games are fun, watching and playing sports is fun, “partying” is fun, gossiping is fun, (social) eating is fun.

Programming, writing, editing, compiling, even cooking, these things are all generally considered to be outside the category of fun. But they can be. These tasks, which we generally categorize as “work” can be deeply immensely satisfying in a way that almost no activity considered above in the category “fun” are. When you think your work matters, or even if you just regard it as a worthy thing to spend time on, the sense of satisfaction that’s available in accomplishing your work in a way you regard as “well” is a supreme pleasure.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s seminal work on “flow” is essentially about this very point. The Wikipedia article on the topic has this to say about flow:

It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

It is not “work” per se, as the generalized category, that constitutes the type that is “more fun than fun”. Your dull and disappointing job which neither challenges nor can challenge you is probably never going to give you the sense of egoless immersion and accomplishment that really leaves one feeling deeply satisfied and contented with the activity they have just completed. But it’s also undeniable that because work gives you access to the achievement of things far beyond yourself, the possibility for a sense of lasting accomplishment is far greater than even the most successful and flowing “fun” activity.

I don’t believe that work-is-fun flow state is a state itself worthy of pursuit, but I fervently believe that it can be a useful tool in getting done work you care about. That is, unlike deep meditative awareness, I don’t regard flow states as inherently beneficial outside of themselves, but I think they clearly constitute a useful tool if you’re pursuing ends you know to be good and valuable. (See my thoughts on Flow Traps, for why I’m pressing so hard on that.)

The reason to share and explain this rather popular quotation is simply this: too frequently people just ignore the very real possibility it explains. We go around living our lives for the weekends, the whistle, the bell, the time when we’re free to have fun. But doing that is itself to confine yourself to prison during your working hours. You don’t need to be doing activities we define as “fun” to enjoy the way you’re spending your time. If you do your work well, achieve a degree of both mastery and learning, you can make every moment of your life, even the dullest ones, “more fun than fun.”

I think almost everyone has at least some familiarity with the basic beliefs that are needed to make the world a better one than most of us can even imagine. Not only are we at least familiar with them, but many of use even talk of admiring people who demonstrate these beliefs clearly. You can be pretty certain that if everyone who said they admired Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, or Mr. Ghandi was striving at all times to act in a accordance with what they admire about them, the world would look quite different.

To my mind, the most vital part of this values-action gap is the difference between those things we know intellectually and those things we’ve integrated fully into our view of the world. I know—in a diffuse way—that the actions of Jesus were admirable, but when it comes to acting, Jesus is nowhere to be found.

Trying inexpertly to close this gaps is why people wear WWJD bracelets. At least then you can be sure Jesus is somewhere around.

Where a WWJD bracelet is admirable, in my estimation, is where it drives you to think again. By calling you ever again to the question of how a moral exemplar would have handled the situation in which you find yourself, you’re forced to think through your response and be more attentive to the reality before you. What you see on auto-pilot and what a fully awake and enlightened person would do can be too very different things, and a WWJD bracelet can help close the gap. (That’s not to say it will.)

External reminders to look more carefully, and consider the options fully can only get you so far. So long as they stay external they’ll be mere intrusions upon your auto-pilot which is what drives almost all of your actions. Maybe one time in fifty they’ll remind you to turn the other cheek, or understand the minor value of money, but mostly you’ll still be operating with your basic greedy monkey mind.

It’s not easy to integrate new ideas and procedures into your mind’s functioning, but it is both possible and worthwhile. It must inevitably begin as an external thing. Our minds are creatures of habit, which happily funnel us into the well-worn grooves of habitual patterns to simplify their task. We can react faster if don’t have to take the time to wonder if the proper response to seeing a lion is to run.

To make the external internal, then, will take a long time. Years even. If you don a WWJD bracelet today and will beat yourself up over every un-Christ-like action starting tomorrow, I’d encourage you to not even start. This struggle to better emulate our moral ideal is a life-long task, not something we can change in a weekend.

We have few tools we can bring to bear on this quest, but the truly important ones can be counted on one hand. All you need is your goal, your reality, and a method to change. Jesus may be your goal, the fact that you just exchanged blows with your brother because he said your hair looked stupid may be your present reality. Your method of change consists of simply asking yourself why you just got in fight with your brother, what a better response would have been, and how you can close that gap. If you stay attentive to these gaps and how you can close them, you will eventually do it. It may take decades, but I think if you’re honest, dedicated, and attentive, anyone has the potential to get there.

It’s lamentable but true that most people don’t eagerly desire to talk about our purpose in life, why we fail at things, what we truly value, why we exist at all, or what it means that we do. These are the things that really get my engine revving though, and so I struggle to enjoy most conversations.

Broaching these topics when you’ve just met someone, or never talked so intimately, is hard. It takes more perseverance than I have. But talking about extraterrestrials allows for a conversations that easily approximates one about those desirable topics but feels reasonable to broach and comfortable for people to join in on.

One of the big advantages of it is that almost no person alive today has strong and fixed opinions about aliens. About their existence, their nature or their history, almost everyone will reasonably claim ignorance. No major religion says anything about these topics, and neither does science. It’s an area where there are few bits of knowledge and few stones of belief and so we engage with it fully and don’t get sensitive if someone disagrees. Said a different way, conversation killers like “only Ron Paul can save us,” “all people are stupid and secretly racist,” or “now let me tell you how it really works” cannot be executed in such a conversation.

But we can, by proxy, discuss what it means that we humans exist at all. And why alien civilizations might be different from ours. And people’s beliefs about what aliens may do with their civilization reasonably approximate what they desire or fear for ours.

There is more than a little diversion in the technique of using talk about extraterrestrial life as a gateway to talk about our messy terrestrial stuff, but I don’t think it reaches the troubling heights of subterfuge, and so I’m publicly recommending that you try, at least once or twice, to have a conversations about aliens.

It’s worth establishing, to start, what we mean by better. Striving to be better requires being fully aware of difference between the improvable things in your life and those that can’t be. You can’t change your genetics, or the factors that we consider to directly flow from that, nor are you able to change the things outside of yourself. A 5’4” overweight man will never make himself into the most physically attractive mate for a woman who favors skinny men over 6’4” with a different skin tone. Part of getting better is realizing and accepting that reality.

The thoughts, comments, and actions of others are thoroughly beyond our direct control. (It is, however, worth realizing that by changing the way you act, you can in time shape the way you appear to others.) But if you’re going to get angry any time someone disrespects or disagrees with you, you’re going to live a hollow life as other peoples’ rag doll. Thrown around by the impulses of people who rarely think of you at all, you’ll be subject to endless turmoil and frustration, and that’s no way to live.

Essential to this idea of better is this idea that the thing you can control is the way you live. It’s not only within your control, it’s essentially the only thing you control, so why do you think it’s okay you treat it like garbage? There’s a seldom noticed point that I consider relevant: the smaller a person’s area of control the more seriously they take the maintenance of it. Hoarders are generally people who feel they control nothing in the world, or the whole of it. Someone who recognizes that they own their living space and are the sole one responsible for maintenance of it generally treats it quite well.

And so it is with your abilities and mind. They are essentially the only things you have direct control over. Which is different from saying that they’re the only things you think you control. Some people believe their inability to understand mathematics is wired into the system, (barring some rare developmental disabilities) they’re wrong. Some people believe they can exercise complete control over the subservient people in their life (be they family, romantic partners, employees, or even slaves), they too are wrong.

Once one sees fully and exactly what they control and what they don’t, they generally tend to believe in the value of improving it. One of the biggest obstacles people have in understanding the case for better is that they have mistaken beliefs in either their omnipotence or impotence.  The delusions that allow people to believe in either direction are one of the most important obstacles to people living the best life they’re capable of. And they’re far more complex and multifaceted to fit within the purview this essay, so I’ll move on.

If we agree that we control our mind and abilities, we’re left with three basic options: get better, get worse, or stagnate. Getting worse is not easy, but people manage it all the time. When you only learn things because people make you, you’ll forget them quickly and be unable to comprehend facets of the world you once did. This is getting worse. When a boyfriend pushed you to eat better and exercise more, and then left your life, you’re probably going to neglect those things you once did well. That’s getting worse. Generally, we get worse because we were never committed to get better in the first place. We did those things that the wise recognize as good because there was someone pushing us out of the rut, once the pushing stops the rut feels welcoming, like home.

Laziness, habits, and willpower conservation are also the reason we typically stagnate. Without outside pressure to know more about the universe than the model of the solar system you got in grade school, you’ll only have learned of the demotion of Pluto from planetary status because the news was so prevalent as to be unavoidable. Without a school-mandated councilor there to push you to work with your anger in a healthy way, you’ll probably never get any better than the modest extant to which they were able to help you fill in the bottom of your rut.

Without a self-motivation brought on by a belief that you can be better, your life will be controlled by others. By the things you can’t help knowing, the work you can’t help doing, by the mental reactions others evince in you because you’ve never taken the time to try to control your own mind. At the most basic level, I think the case for better comes down to this: who do you want to control your life: yourself or interested strangers? Surely there exist strangers genuinely interested in your improvement (most such people also have a deep interest in their own improvement, it’s worth mentioning), but leaving yourself at the mercy of strangers nets out as an unwise proposition. Even a few people with a truly sinister interests can easily overwhelm those trying to be of help when they can.

All of that gets to sounding a bit “me against the world”, but it’s not. One of the best and most common reasons that people have for being better in their life is so that they’re able to help others better. Taking care of yourself seems selfish until you try a few times you help others and make the whole situation worse. When we’re not in control of ourselves, our attempts to help others will frequently go wrong. Being the best version of yourself also allows you to be the best help possible for other people. So if you don’t want to to try to be better for your own sake, do it for our sake. For the sake of your family, friends, neighbors, and world. If there’s a better reason to do anything I’ve not found it.