Note 6: A meta-strategy for life
A compass for navigating a complex existence
For a person who’s pretty good at seeing nuances, I got suck in many dual perspectives. I didn’t just go on a diet or start working out, I went full on bootcamp regimen. When I slipped everything was ruined and I hated myself for being weak. Two steps forward, one step back felt more like one step forward, two steps back. If I didn’t do a thing 100% right, if I didn’t commit 100% to it, if I didn’t get it perfectly right, I might as well not even try. This mindset is problematic from several perspectives, like ethics for example. Try as we might, nobody can experience a 100% ethical life. Life happens, and sometimes when it happens it leaves us between Scylla and Charybdis; damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
I solved it by subscribing to principles. Thinking too deeply about them made me slightly uncomfortable, but finding out why would require thinking deeply about them, so I didn’t. I figured that it’s enough to feel that it’s wrong to kill, and that all humans are equal, and that you should be nice to people. In a dualist world view, where you’re either good or bad, this put me on the good side of the binary. As long as I kept on doing more good things than bad, I was in the clear.
But principles are problematic for the same reasons strategies are problematic: they’re absolute, static, and leave no room for the complexities of life. I believe that one of many triggers of my crisis was reading about the trolley problem. If you have a principle that all human lives are equal, and that it’s wrong to kill a human being, the trolley problem becomes really uncomfortable, because it doesn’t allow for flexibility, and rationality cannot guide you to a clear cut answer. You can make as many rational arguments you want for either way of dealing with this problem, but rationality won’t do much for the emotional consequences of your (in)action. Principles are a small comfort here.
But there are bigger problems with principles than that they lack comfort. Principles set me up to fall in the trap of perfection. If it’s impossible to live an ethical life, why even try? There seem to be plenty of people who eschew ethics and get rich off it. In a material, either/or world, living without ethics seemed much more rewarding than living with them. And it is a material world we are living in, arguably more so today than when Madonna sang about it on the first vinyl record I owned: the Immaculate Collection.
The note here is: During this period, I had to revisit the truths I had been taught as a kid. Truths I never questioned because deep down within, I knew them to be right. I still do. Killing is wrong. All humans have equal worth. But the rational part of me kept questioning that, because the evidence I saw in society and in my own actions were inconsistent with those principles. I started asking myself: why? Why is it wrong to kill? All humans are equal, but what is our value compared to that of sentient animals? This helped me form a philosophy of life. It’s a meta-strategy for life, if you will: it doesn’t deal with specific situations, but it helps me navigate situations that aren’t clear cut. I doesn’t mitigate the cognitive effects of making choices that in a dualist paradigm would fall in the “bad” bucket. But it doesn’t hide those effects either. I make the choices fully taking responsibility for them more often than not, and taking that responsibility helps me deal with the trap of perfection. (This may sound as if I’m done, but either/or thinking infects every aspect of my life, and two years later, I’m still struggling with the integration of this note.)
