Reality Laughs

Shut and stop complaining. You’re only blaming others for your own shortcomings. And it’s lazy and self-indulgent.

Shut and go do amazing shit.

And don’t be noisy about it. Just do it.

After I came to understand that the Cold War doom-thinking was not going to rule my life.

As a child I was convinced that a nuclear winter was imminent. I didn’t think it was right to have children because why bother.

Then of course there was overpopulation. That was going to be a catastrophe. It was noble to not procreate and add to the problem.

And what’s the point about working hard and planning for the future when you’re likely to be incinerated? Or worse—die a slow, lingering death from radiation poisoning and starvation?

Today’s eco doomers face the same problem.

Today’s patriarchal tyranny doomers face the same problem.

Today’s everyone-except-me-is-racist doomers face the same problem.

Why doesn’t anyone tell them? (In fairness, you couldn’t have told me I would be OK and to pull my intellectual head out of my ass. People probably did tell me. They were certainly visibly living the good life while I was cynical and nihilistic.)

Heed the call of conscience. (You have one, and don’t delude yourself on that point.) Be useful to others and kind to yourself.

Everything’s going to be OK. Clouds are beautiful.

The best response to that statement is to start doing.

Faced with infinite potential, what do I choose? Life is a conjuring trick. We magically create something from nothing.

Because what is tomorrow and next year except nothing? The future isn’t real. Pure potential, pure promise, but poke at it and nothing is there. Just thought. Just ideas.

Humans create reality. And you’re human. You will create reality. You will create your reality by your actions and intentions, or you will have a reality thrust upon you by your inactions and aimlessness. There is no Plan C.

What do I want to create? That’s not an easy question to answer? For most of us, the desire is created as we create the object of desire. Or, in a figure of speech, how would you know that you like going to the beach until you go to the beach? If you set “beach” as your life’s work . . . well, I don’t know how that makes sense.

So you pick an approximation of direction, starting from where you are. Walk towards what you think you might want, or walk away from what you think you don’t like.

Hint: it’s easier to move away from stuff. It’s easier to identify what you don’t like.

Make sure that starting involves doing something, not “getting ready” to do something.

Engage infinity enthusiastically. Start running toward the horizon. It really doesn’t matter which way you go. You’ll be making course corrections.

In fact, life is an endless run toward the horizon with a countless number of course corrections. Then you die.

That sounds grim, you say? No. It’s liberating. Go out there with glee. Strive. Fuck things up cheerfully.

Now. That said, you can save yourself a few detours. Develop deep moral character, and (metaphorically speaking) make sure you’re looking through the windshield instead of into the rear view mirror. A tiny bit of self-reflection is useful. Don’t wallow.

For kicks and giggles I’m going to try this for the next 10 days: a tiny bit of self-reflection. For that purpose I will use use Jordan Peterson’s Future Authoring system. Why should I hack through an uncharted jungle with a blunt machete when he has built a sidewalk for me?

Things are going pretty well in life for me. That makes me nervous. I fear complacency.

Things are going pretty well in life for me. That makes me hungry. I know that there are infinite possibilities open to me.

Current conditions: calm.

Do the work. It pays off.

This is not to say that the world is arrayed before me, exactly as desired. Externals or internals.

Doing. I’m doing. Always into action.

Reading. Taking action (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly). Reducing the amount of irritainment I allow in my life. Building a habit of consistency via 75 Hard.

Each day a new beginning.

I remember driving to an appointment and listening to the radio. (Now I never listen to the radio in my car, and we don’t have one in the house.)

I flipped to hear Jason Bentley on KCRW. He played “Lifeboat.” The song has stuck with me since then, especially this couplet from the chorus:

It’s a bright, sunny morning

Each day a new beginning

Lifeboat, by Miranda Lee Richards

Now, on the back end of reading Jordan Peterson’s two books, I look at each morning as a moment of pure potential. What will I do today to mold, from the potential presented to me, a reality worth living? Or in Peterson-speak, I look forward to creating order from chaos. That, after all, is what we, as humans, do.

Miranda Lee Richards did that. She created the order of a song from a chaos of ideas in her mind.

The melody of Lifeboat pops into my consciousness frequently, especially on my dawn walks around the neighborhood.

What a improbable gift.

Someone I never met (Miranda Lee Richards) wrote a song for her own reasons. This was a significant, difficult task for her, I’m sure. Yet she persisted and produced the lyrics and melody that became Lifeboat.

Against all odds (I’m sure) she recorded the song. The music industry is brutal.

Of all of the songs that could have been played at that moment, Jason Bentley chose Lifeboat. I happened to be driving that day and pushed the button to hear what was on KCRW. The two-second audition I give to songs 🙂 enticed me to stay, and the song I heard is with me today.

My life is permanently better because I remember two lines of a song heard during the course of that tenuous string of events.

The causal chain continues. The ripples of a new way to see the new day continue to spread from that pebble dropped in my mental pond.

I’m listening to a Jordan Peterson speech in which he talks about hierarchies based on competence. “Competence hierarchy” means people or chimpanzees or anything will rank according to competence rather than power or dominance.

I like that word. It’s something to aim for: competence.

The word implies earnest effort, diligence, discipline, humility. It connotes value: above all we strive to be surrounded by competent people. If I’m competent, I am valuable to others. Competence creates a social world for me.

Competence does not mean average or inadequate. Pursuing competence diligently is the path to excellence.

Competence is created by action. So is excellence.

Let’s go be competent today, through diligent, honest effort.

Here’s a thought for me today. Work is currently where I am fighting hand-to-hand combat with self, swallowing some bitter chunks of truth.

Jordan Peterson on Abraham and Isaac:

We’ll start with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more on this in Rule 10). If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you might become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

12 Rules for Life, page 170. Emphasis in original.

What you like (your values, preferences, things you choose to do and own) will influence what you see in the world. This is the reticular activation system so beloved of self-help gurus. Think of “red” for instance, and all of a sudden you will see red things everywhere. (I remember David Allen doing that once.)

What you like (or dislike—it’s the same thing, just in a different direction) not only helps you see what you want to see (or don’t want to see), it motivates you to action in response. And your actions cause a result.

That’s the idea. The universe is not randomly throwing meteors at you (though it might). The universe is not placing people in your life who hate you.

No. It’s much more likely that the ideas you cling to most are affecting your perception (“she hates me” is believed, without evidence, just completely in your head because you have ideas about how lovable you are). This thought in turn motivates your actions (“well, I will reject her first, because she obviously hates me and this relationship is doomed”) and then life develops accordingly (“I am lonely”).

At work. What’s the deep idea that’s holding me back? That’s preventing me from being all that is possible for me?

Hiring. Working with others. Relying on others. It’s in there, somewhere. Cloaked in self-reliance and industriousness, but it’s there—some kind of rugged individualism mode which has served me well but should be balanced with other attributes. Social, communal, cooperative attributes.

Yikes. Assume this thought has some truth. I just let it out of my head and into my thumbs without editing or coaching. All I tried to do was be as precise as possible in articulating the idea.

What will I do about this? And how?

The crows take flight noisily. A peacock reacts.

No music or podcasts. Just the early morning sounds of the neighborhood.

That is what Bob called it.

You start arguing with yourself, in your head. Do this or do that? What is right and what is wrong?

Or you start having imaginary arguments you’ll never have with people you’ll never meet. That’s me. All the time.

Deadly.

It’s not to say that you will not face dilemmas. Of course you will. Life is filled with intractable dilemmas. And then you die.

Most dilemmas, however, are self-generated. Optional. Relatively inconsequential. They’re easy to resolve.

Three ways to stop the debating society in your head:

• Have some fucking principles. Don’t be a squishy moral relativist. “Don’t lie” is a good principle.
• Choose the harder path. Faced with uncertainty, pick the difficult alternative.
• Know that most choices are not fatal and are reversible. Give yourself permission to fail and reverse course. This just requires abandoning the feeling that everyone is looking at you and judging you. They aren’t. They’re thinking about themselves. 😀
• Stop talking to yourself in your head and start having a conversation with God in your head. Or out loud, I’d you feel like it. Break the doom loop.

I stopped writing here because I thought I had nothing to say. I’m nothing special. Others have amazing insights and I’m just a plodder.

All true.

But that’s not the point.

I’m writing for me, to free myself. The fact that others are more eloquent doesn’t matter. Or rather, it is a gift that can make my life better. Other people’s achievements do not subtract from my life—they can only add to my life.

In retrospect I have quit a lot of things by comparing myself to others.

Also. Thanks to a friend for nudging me to keep writing. Thanks Chris.