Is that all there is?

• Mill: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not a s a means, but as itself an ideal end.
• Rule # 1 preventing midlife crisis: care about something other than yourself. If nothing matters to you but your own well-being, nothing much will make you happy.
• Instrumental value: the value something has a means to an end, like the value of making money or visiting the dentist.
  • The paradox of altruism is that if nothing is important but that which has an effect on others, everything is instrumental; value is perpetually deferred and ends in nonsense since nobody can do anything of value unless it positively affects others, but that continues until there are no people left.
  • W.H. Auden: “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know.”
• Activities of practical virtue – fighting wars, engaging in politics, working for social reform – are sustained by struggle and privation. Their worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve. In an ideal world, there would be no use for them. That is why it would be insane to make enemies of friends in order to create the opportunity for courage in battle.
  • All these values are called into question because it would be better to have a world where such actions were unnecessary
  • Aristotle’s answer is contemplation. “Final without qualification. Desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” You would want to contemplate in any type of world. It is non-instrumental.
• Arthur Schopenhauer: “Work, worry, toil, and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. ANd yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time.” Life can’t only be ameliorative.
• Existential activities – art, swimming, whatever – may respond to difficulties in life, but each can be “a source of inward joy” unconnected with struggle and imperfection; a perennial ground of happiness when “the greater evils of life shall have been removed.”

(more…)

The answer is always 2-5 years younger than the person actually thinks: nobody is trying to get this answer precisely correct.

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

She considers that. In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion – a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’ etre.

What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationships and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change? What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

That’s one of the great things about New YOrk – no one cares about your emotional state as long as there’s no blood involved. Crying on the sidewalk in the middle of the day is no less private than crying in your bedroom in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s because no one cares. Maybe it’s because it’s a brutal city, and they’ve all been there at one time or another.

In the same way that “we filter for people who are like us intellectually and politically,” he wrote, “we also filter for misery,” so that the suffering around us passes unheard and unseen.

To get sick and fail to get better is to realize the harsh truth of this insight. Human beings have a great capacity for kindness, empathy, and help, but we are more likely to rise to the occasion when it is clearly an occasion – a moment of crisis, a time-bound period of stress. In the aftermath of a hurricane, society doesn’t usually fragment; it comes together in solidarity and support. Likewise with families and individuals facing suffering at the moment that it descends, or when a terrible arc finally bottoms out: Not always, but very often, people behave well, with great generosity, in the face of a mortal diagnosis, a mental collapse, an addict’s nadir. Not least because in those circumstances there are things you can clearly do, from the prosaic – making frozen dinners for a suffering family – to the more dramatic and extreme, like flying across the country to help drag a friend into rehab.

But when the crisis simply continues without resolution, when the illness grinds on and on and on – well, then a curtain tends to fall, because there isn’t an obvious way to integrate that kind of struggle into the realm of everyday life. It’s not clear what the healthy person is supposed to give to a friend or family member who isn’t dying, who doesn’t have some need that you can fill with a discrete act of generosity, but who just has the same problems – terrible but also, let’s be a frank, a little boring – day after depressing day.

“Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him,” the 19th-century French writer Alphonse Daudet wrote of his experience of a different spirochetal infection, syphilis, whose pain could be managed ut in his case never cured. “Everyone will get used to it except me.”

Or alternatively, in an age of scattered friendships and virtual connections, everyone will forget about it except me.

–87

But why would you want to when help will make you better?

You don’t need others to survive or even to thrive; you need them to maximally thrive.

Why not take every edge you can? Especially considering that those edges were created by you: nobody would be there to help if you had not done something right such that they want to help.

I don’t remember most days, not even wedding days; I do remember your wedding day, and I imagine I will continue to remember it for the foreseeable future.

Since this is a wedding note, and since we live in a time of grand narratives where everything neatly ties together with whatever you happen to care deeply about, I’ll try to show how your wedding confirmed the narrative I already knew to be true about xxxxxxxxx. See, I have a special fondness for xxxxxxxxx. There’s something about being around him that’s energizing. Truly. I believe he’s excited to see me, to spend time with me, and to further learn the ridiculousness of my character. This may seem like a basic definition of friendship, but it’s not. Other “friends” will genuinely look forward to an encounter only to be silently longing for the plane back home shortly after commencement. I know this because I do it. It never feels like xxxxxxxxx does. Another way to say all of this is to say that xxxxxxxxx helps me live in the moment. And while I can’t, due to lack of experience, honestly say xxxxxxxxx has the same effect on me, I also have enough experience with her to know that I can’t dismiss the possibility. Or at the very least, I think xxxxxxxxx can augment and support xxxxxxxxx’s unique strengths, and he (better) augment and support her strengths (like drawing/painting; keep drawing/painting).

For now, though, our focus shall be on our overarching narrative that forms the backbone of this letter. So just as it’s no surprise that Trump obviously did the awful thing that perfectly fits the narrative you hold about him, it’s no surprise that your wedding was a beautiful exercise in presence.

(more…)

Be honest AF.

Go hard AF.

All the sexually aggressive content – from ads to songs – allow us to pretend that the whole enterprise isn’t rather quite daunting. In a similar way that celebrity depictions play on our wishes that life could be free from suffering (but just make us feel worse about our actual lives), sex ubiquitousness permits belief that there’s a state where sexual nervousness and fears and inadequacies don’t exist (but just make us dislike ourselves more for not being in said state).

The answer, as always, is to speak honestly. The result, as usually, is discovering that you’re less unique than you think.

Give yourself permission to not compete.

He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad.

He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abusing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.

Becky took it as a reminder that her mother was better than her at writing, she herself better at nothing her mother valued.

Simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmering of spirituality.

the risk in risk-taking was stabbing pain

It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power – they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love – oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.” (more…)