There are few things I dislike more than people telling me what to do. So this is not a directive. This is an invitation. You are completely welcome at any point to think/say “Hey, fuck you man,’ close the tab and move on with your life. Okay? Okay.
Now here’s my invitation: stop fussing over things that you cannot control/influence. Stop worrying about vague abstract shit that you have no direct involvement in.
Make an inventory of all the things you have thought about, talked about in the past week. Do a month if you’re bold. How many of these are things that you have no influence over?
Language can be clunky. You could interpret this to be about information diets. I’m saying “stop eating junk food and start eating healthier, goddamn.” Some people have no clue that their bad diet is messing up their life. That’s probably a minority of people who are reading this. Most people who are reading this, I’m guessing, have probably fretted over their information diets but found it difficult to adjust – usually becomes of some deeper underlying issue. Sometimes you know what the issue is, sometimes you don’t.
Suppose you believe that civilization is collapsing, and you’re worried about that, and you want to make a difference. Okay. Be proactive. What’s your plan? Chances are there isn’t very much you can do to turn the tide at a global scale, or even a national scale if you’re in a large country. I’m from the tiny island city-state of Singapore, and even here it’s pretty hard. You have to build an audience, which takes work.
But here’s what you can do. You can be a nourishing, useful, supportive presence in your own life: to yourself, your loved ones, your immediate local community, your extended family – and these days, thanks to social media, your internet tribe.
You might say, “But that’s not enough!” Sure. But are you currently doing that? Because this is a recurring pattern I’ve seen – many people use the insurmountability of large problems to work themselves into a despair which then hinders them from working on smaller problems. As if the smaller problems are beneath them, as if it’s not worth helping one person if you can’t help millions.
But you only get to solve big problems by first solving smaller problems. Amazon started out selling books. Gandhi started out as a lawyer. MLK Jr started out as a Baptist minister. Do your own homework: who are the people in history that you most respect and admire? What did they do to get there? Great things have small beginnings. Sure, sometimes people start with privileges and advantages that others don’t have, but that doesn’t mean you cannot flourish and become the best version of yourself.
I’ve been thinking, writing, and talking about this stuff all my life. I’ve talked with over 1,000 people about this at this point. Not everyone is cut out to be an adventurer. I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture and honestly I don’t even really care all that much. What I care about is finding excellent people and nurturing them. “Isn’t that elitist?” – I’ve thought about this. The problem is limited resources. I’d love to help everyone if I could, but I can’t. So I am seeking excellent people who help other people in turn.
I believe that there is a tremendous amount of energy and potential in the world that goes to waste every single day. Some of the people who agree with this assessment find it depressing, but I find it to be a cause for optimism. It means that a better world is possible. But we should be careful not to overly fixate on the idea of a better world in some vague, abstract sense. It has to be rooted in our personal, everyday lives. There are few things as tragic as sacrificing one’s precious life in service of an outcome that never arrives, without any useful progress having been made along the way.
One of my proudest accomplishments in life so far is that I have persuaded hundreds, if not thousands of people to be kind to each other on Twitter. (It’s hard to know the precise numbers + the extent of the influence, because lots of people are lurkers.) This is not just some wooey superficial shit. To me this is at the heart of the meaning of life itself. Happiness is only real when shared. We are a social species. We are here to lift each other up, entertain each other, soothe and comfort each other, challenge and support each other. There are people who assume that sex or money or prestige will make them happy, and then they achieve it, and find that they still feel empty inside.
“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” ― Carl Sagan, Contact
The thing that brings lasting joy and fulfillment in life is service to others. This is not some mere platitude, it’s a fucking oxygen tank to keep you alive when despair swallows you up None of us might matter in the grand cosmic sense – sometimes that’s existentially a relief, sometimes it’s not, depending on your frame of reference – it’s worth learning to play with both.
You can earn your own respect, even admiration. Once you’ve earned it you will experience a freeing sense of lightness – a liberation from the psychic prison so many people spend their entire lives in. And once you have it, people will be drawn to you. (This can present you with a new set of problems, but that’s a challenge for another essay.)
This is an invitation to let go of the bullshit that you inherited that no longer pleases you, that no longer sparks joy.
This is an invitation to take yourself out on a date, to get to know yourself better, find out what your interests and passions are, what delights you.
This is an invitation to be bold and daring with your one precious, glorious life, to seek excitement and kinship, and also to be soft and vulnerable, nourishing and supportive and kind.
You can do all those things and live a life that you’re proud of. You can do it. I believe in you.