A Guide to Significant Living

or why you should live longer

I recently discovered an 8-year-old David Foster Wallace commencement speech given at Kenyon College. This relic, made new by an accompanying viral video, is titled This Is Water and begins with an anecdote about fish.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

The point as seen by David Foster Wallace: “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Now Mr. Wallace was a literary genius and his speech is infinitely more profound than my paraphrasing, but here are a few points made in the speech that stuck with me:

1. We tend towards default-settings in our mindsets. They are unconscious and automatic and if you do not pause to consider them, to decide what you want to think, then you will go through life as a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of thinking that you are the realest, most vivid, center of the universe.
2. There is a whole commonplace side to adult life that no one talks about. It involves banal routine, boredom and petty frustration.
3. Everybody worships something — be it some sort of spiritual being, money, power intelligence, beauty — and it is often an insidious kind of worship in that you unconsciously and gradually slip into it, day after day.
4. The most precious kind of freedom involves a freedom of the mind — attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and caring about others. It involves consciousness and control over what and how we decide to think.

I have found that the most troubling corollary of lapsing into default mindsets and autopilot routine is that time feels like it is moving quicker, hemorrhaging into an amorphous mass of indistinguishable days with no anchor to separate the near past from the medium past. 10 days ago becomes indistinguishable from 20 days ago or 60 days ago. What did I even do 10 days ago? The memory feels like grasping at smoke with fanned fingers. When I look back on my years since graduating college I think “where the hell did that go?” And that bothers me.

Joshua Foer, in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, notes that one way to expand subjective time is to remember more. We remember more by packing our lives with as many chronological landmarks — memorable events — as possible. Summed up in the words of my girlfriend: “diversity is good for the soul.” The more atypical the event the more vivid the recollection. When we are young we can have an absolute new experience every day or every hour. Retentiveness is strong, experiences are visceral and our recollection of that time is of something deep and glorious, multitudinous, drawn out, and distinctly differentiable. But each passing year coverts some of this experience into routine that we hardly notice and time begins to smooth out into a collapsible hollow.

The high paying post-college desk job is especially good at accelerating submergence into the chasm of monotony. And it is this exact job that I and my contemporaries have relaxed into so nicely. I have often ruminated with my peers on the reasons we and others end up in these supposedly attractive, yet hardly intellectual and highly repetitive, service jobs. One reason put forth is that absent a clear career vision or burning passion, and with a perceived societal expectation to “do well”, we pick jobs that are outwardly prestigious and “open doors” to follow-on opportunities. I am particularly fond of so-called societal expectation since it is most often a self-imposed construct — a panopticon — poetic in that it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction. What feels like acute societal pressure to succeed is often just our own projection of what we expect society to expect from us, a prison of our own making. As for lacking a clear vision, these jobs are excellent at funneling in people that are ambitious, but that lack an ambition. This distinction is important since singular ambition — an all-consuming vision — is more powerful than being broadly ambitious. Singular ambition fuels tenacity and perseverance, leads to technological breakthrough, purposeful progression, and hopefully one day the Ironman suit (*fingers crossed*). The paths to these successes are littered with the efforts of ambitious managers and analysts. But they are not shaped by them.

That is not to say that service jobs lack value, nobility, and purpose. In fact they have much to recommend them. Many a man has harnessed these forces to amass financial fortune and personal freedom. My issue, rather, is that doing a job without a vision or working day-to-day without passion results in humdrum unconscious monotony, a speeding up of time with a gnawing sense of “having had, and lost, some infinite thing”.

This brings me back to David Foster Wallace and default mindsets and unconscious routine. You see the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings. It will offer you fear and competition and money and wrap you in a silk veil of myopia so that you focus on finishing work at 7pm or making it to the weekend or getting your bi-monthly paycheck and not on questioning the flimsy constructs that hold it all together. Like why am I still doing this with no clear goal in mind? Why am I working to build someone else’s vision, and one that I don’t even believe in? The so-called real world thrives on ephemeral resolutions, capitalizes on complacency, and pays you for your inertia. It loves your default mindset.

The key then is to strive for mastery over ones consciousness, to (as Holmes puts it) observe rather than just see. This is exceptionally hard. It requires a backdrop of intense optimism about the future. And not optimism in the abstract sense, but rather a fiery recognition of the ways that everything around you can keep getting better, a deliberate choosing to think about specific improvement of things close to you. You need a positive foundation at the core of your psyche to allow you to tackle the more difficult task of conscious awareness.

The alternative is negativity — a fusion of boredom, depression, monotony, exhaustion, and complacency that go hand-in-hand like a little circle of demon children singing Ring-Around-The-Rosie. They reinforce each other, enervating to the point of despair… a mind numbing hopelessness clawing with hooks of Adderall and Modafinil at the brink of the abyss.

You can improve your positivity by choosing to be an active participant in what you pay attention to. Choose to recognize the amazing things you have in your life, the amazing things that make you who you are. Begin your day by actively focusing on your incredible parents and all they have done for you, the unconditional support of your brother whom you love deeply, the sharpness of your mind that can continually adapt, the power of your body that can express your will, the girlfriend who loves you and the world that allows you to exist as you wish. Then institutionalize this positivity in your psyche through repetition. All that’s left is to expand subjective time.

Here’s how I am going to try and enhance my consciousness and live a longer life by expanding subjective time:

1. Create more. I will begin with writing my thoughts in long form pieces such as this. My ideas exist only in my head, frighteningly fleeting until given a form of expression. They require environmental interaction to be real. Writing them down forces me to clarify them in my head and this process of struggle elucidates better than an internal monologue ever could. It also helps one’s memory when chronological landmarks in the mind (i.e.: remembering writing an essay) have a physical manifestation (i.e.: the essay itself). I will also start a business. This is one of the purest forms of intellectual expression realized and a sure way to introduce novelty.
2. Force myself into uncomfortable and unfamiliar social situations. My most fun (most memorable) nights out over the past year are those where I have introduced a little anarchy; put myself out on a limb. Specifically, where I have approached strangers and struck up conversations. This is extremely intimidating as the fear of rejection is irrationally significant. So a friend of mine came up with an incredible innovation to force one’s hand. He calls it Social Chicken. It involves an ever escalating back and forth of dares to go up to strangers and say/do something. The dares start off innocuous but get increasingly bold. It is a liberating experience and important enough that I will write a separate post on the topic. Making a breakthrough in social confidence is like the glorious relief of sucking in air after holding your breath under water. Meeting new people and having “uncomfortable” experiences where I have to overcome the evolutionary fear of rejection will continue to allow me to have differentiable social encounters.
3. Make plans in advance. As my dive instructor said to me when I was 12, “plan your dive, dive your plan.” I think she was misappropriating Churchill (who was quoting Franklin) who said “He who fails to plan is planning to fail.” At any rate, committing to plans in advance will allow me to create grander novelty. Easy examples are trips, vacations, and events — hikes, skiing, weekend getaways, surf excursions, concerts, festivals, etc. Having visceral activity-based landmarks reinforces mental chronological landmarks.
4. Surround myself with people who challenge me and who are smarter than me. Did you know that ideas have sex? When I have a deep conversation about my ideas with somebody who challenges my ideas, adds to them, and makes me rethink them something amazing can happen: our ideas can copulate to create a new idea that never existed in my head before. The smarter the people around me and the more I am challenged by them, the more likely I am to develop new ideas and have novel conversations.
5. Continue developing a vision, supplement it with goals. I will do this for many facets of my life (relationships, physical, mental, spiritual etc.). I will spend additional time on clarifying a career vision since my work permeates all other facets of my life. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, has a good framework for thinking through goals (published in his Principles handbook). I need to clarify what is important to me, find something that can sustain my passion, and dedicate myself to it fervently. This will be difficult.
6. Be more productive. I am happy when I am productive and I am happiest when I am productively working on something I care about. Find this nexus as much as possible. I will write a separate piece on productivity, passion and happiness.
7. Spend a lot of time with people I love. I heard this in a movie once but I refuse to Google around to find the source, “What you are doing is only half the story. The other half is who you are doing it with.” Moments in time are immortalized and given beauty when viewed through the eyes of those I love. Do this as much as possible.
8. Become luckier. Specifically, employ Richard Wiseman’s principles of getting lucky: maximize the number of chance opportunities you have in life, use your intuition to make important decisions, expect good fortune, turn bad luck into good. This links very closely to having optimism as the foundation of your psyche. A good analogue to this is “the harder I work, the luckier I get” (attributed to Jefferson). I am seeking luck because in my experience happiness and luck reinforce each other.
9. Seek out and embrace challenge. Specifically, intellectual challenge. Talents, skills, ideas, muscles — everything really — improve through incrementally more difficult challenges. Challenge breeds depth, familiarity, resilience, and mastery. Mastery, Robert Greene would have you believe, yields power. And not power in the sinister sense but power to control one’s destiny (within the confines relative to the skill at hand). I will seek out challenge as much as possible, become smarter, and endeavor to achieve mastery.

In summary: introduce novelty, avoid monotony.

Here’s an interesting thought: “One of the greatest tragedies of this age of struggle and money madness is that so few people are engaged in the effort that they like best.” Sounds like something Tim Ferris would have written in 2013 to dissuade people from working in jobs they don’t enjoy. In fact it comes from Napoleon Hill’s masterpiece The Law of Success, written in 1928. Abundance has increased exponentially since 1928 yet this problem seems oddly familiar. There is so much out there and I require such a relatively infinitesimal amount that there is no reason I cannot achieve this through pursuing my own vision. Now all I need to do is formulate it.