Tag: Philosophy

Monday to Friday With My Reckless Amygdala

Image from Shutterstock

Every morning, somewhere between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m., my melatonin levels have decreased enough to alert my body to wake up. I open a cautious eye and recall the day of the week. If it’s the weekend, I feel a sense of peace, tinged with an impulse to get up and seize the day with dog walks, books, documentaries, and boxing. It’s almost a feeling of excitement, which sounds weird because I tend to do the same things every weekend, I just really enjoy doing them.

Things are different if it’s a weekday. I open a cautious eye, recall the day of the week, and am disappointed to learn that an 8-hour workday is ahead in which I have to produce thousands of well-researched, well-written, and somewhat entertaining words for my employer. This isn’t a strong feeling. I don’t wrench myself out of bed, hug my schnauzer a little too tight and then weep uncontrollably in the shower. I’m just slightly ruffled by the magnitude of my responsibilities as an employee, which creates a vivid contrast with my weekend mood and nags at me like a hellish mother-in-law.

The problem is confidence, which is weird because I’m good at my job. I know it’s arrogant to say so, but there’s no denying the consistent nods of approval from my boss, which I bathe in like an unapologetic wage whore. But deep in my soul a battle is being fought—an eternal tug-of-war where confidence is pitted against doubt, with my consciousness somewhere in the middle. Troves of spoken or unspoken compliments cannot energise my confidence enough to tug the rope to a decisive and permanent win. My doubt always has just enough energy to stay in the game, and when I’m faced with a challenging piece of work, it looms before me like a fire-breathing Titan, threatening to scorch me with trepidation. So despite proving my abilities before every setting sun, a torrent of verbs, nouns, and adjectives in my wake, I’m doomed to feel slightly apprehensive the next work day, like a perpetual slave to my personality or brain chemistry or whatever the hell it is that constitutes me.

This battle between confidence and doubt appears to be an eternal face-off between two very different portions of my brain: the prefrontal cortex—which makes rational arguments and is about the size of a tennis ball—and the amygdala—which makes me fearful and anxious, and is about 200 times smaller. The prefrontal cortex is like a wise and rickety anthropologist who likes to watch what’s happening and then describe it in the most accurate and rational way possible. It witnesses my achievements and calmly tells me about them, which gives me confidence. The amygdala is like Joseph Stalin on a bad day. It sees danger everywhere, and so when I’m faced with a project that stretches my abilities, accompanied by the scant possibility that I might balls it up beyond reckoning, it releases such a torrent of neurochemicals that my confidence is temporarily battered, and I find myself gnawing at my nails like a troubled beaver. I try to tell myself that I’ve accomplished similar jobs in the past, but there’s no longer any place for rationality; no voice for my prefrontal cortex. It’s been silenced by its nemesis the amygdala, which heaves it into a gulag and spends the next fifteen minutes admiring its moustache.

This cerebrum war has been going on since I was about ten years old, and I assume it won’t cease until I croak, or find some hairbrained solution to the problem. Maybe Buddhist enlightenment is the answer—how do the saffron-clad Tibetan baldies earn their keep? It’s clear how I’m creating value for my employer, but I struggle to understand how a hall filled with silent monks results in vegetables, meats, and repaired roof tiles. I doubt they’re vexed by the idea of fucking up so badly that they’re defrocked and tipped over the mountain. Or maybe they’re just like the rest of us? This trifling anxiety is probably more normal than I realise, and most people are a bit worried they’ll arrive at the office to find their abilities stolen overnight, damned to a month of calamitous cockups that lead to the dole queue—a place where you’re forever tarnished, like you’ve been dipped in the Bog of Eternal Stench.

My fragile confidence could also be a light case of imposter syndrome, where I tell myself that I’m competent but don’t really believe it, and even single-handedly reaching the moon wouldn’t wrench me out of the illusion. But I don’t feel like an intellectual phony, and am well aware that my achievements are a result of hard work, until my erratic amygdala gets going, when every confidence-boosting belief goes up in smoke. Once that happens, no amount of logic can set my head straight, and there’s only one thing for it: put my head down and tackle the challenge head on, in spite of my dismay.

I’ve slowly learned how to handle my nervous side, but it doesn’t stop me from envying carefree people who seem unburdened from worry and charge about like fearless heroes. Then I consider the other end of the scale—the people who need trained animals to stop them bashing their own heads—and realise that being somewhere in the middle isn’t so bad. Perspective has a way of washing the shit out of your eyes. At least I have a functioning amygdala, even if it’s slightly overzealous. My shaky confidence is a quirk of my personality—a neurotic kink that I’ll likely never iron out, which like every other negative thing in my life, would have a lot less sting if it was embraced with open arms (even reluctant ones). Striving for the “perfect” emotional life is starting to feel awfully dull, like scrolling through Netflix for half an hour and still not being able to find anything to watch. The dents and scrapes and kinks are here to stay, snagging my confidence from time to time, but never enough to prevent a quick recovery. I say yes to the whole lot.

Radical Acceptance | The Power Of Welcoming Pain

radical acceptance
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Many of us feel we’re not good enough. We suffer from a pervasive sense of inadequacy that compels us to chase after glittering goods, shiny platinum cards, and nods of respect, to dampen the voice that repeatedly declares our deficiency.

It doesn’t work, of course. The unworthiness that we feel is in our bones, and no amount of fame or fortune can expel it. On the contrary, we can spend a lifetime slipping and straining for greatness, and when we examine our soul after finally achieving the thing that should have rocketed us to bliss, are horrified to discover that we feel exactly the same as before. Unworthiness is nourishment for our inner demons. It’s their primary food source, and as they gorge themselves again and again, their bellies expand and their voices rise to a deafening pitch, blocking out all else.

In Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, she offers us a solution. Tara is a lifelong Buddhist and therapist, and in her sweeping experience of Buddhism and psychology, believes that the only way for us to escape the “trance of unworthiness” is with a pure and thorough acceptance of our experience—what she calls radical acceptance. For Tara, our emotional pain cannot be healed by striving for more. It’s healed by an unadulterated acceptance of our moment to moment experience.

The idea is rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Sankhara-dukkha is the “basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all existence,” with a sense that things never measure up to our expectations.1 The problem is caused by our desire for something better than our current experience, and this addictive striving for the remarkable blinds us to the incredible richness of the present moment. When we’re able to accept each moment exactly as it is, no matter how painful it may be, we relieve ourselves of unnecessary suffering and become participants in our own lives. We’re no longer frustrated spectators existing solely in our own heads. Or as D.H Lawrence put it, we’ve gone from great uprooted trees with our roots in the air, to planting ourselves in the universe again. In Dante’s Inferno, he expressed the idea in a different way, with the way out of hell lying at its very center. Henry Thoreau wrote “dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows,” and The Beatles wrote “when you find yourself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” They’re all saying the same thing: embrace every experience with acceptance, and you’ll be free from suffering.

“Radical Acceptance reverses our habit of living at war with experiences that are unfamiliar, frightening, or intense. It is the necessary antidote to years of neglecting ourselves, years of judging and treating ourselves harshly, years of rejecting this moment’s experience. Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience our life as it is. A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.”

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Fighting painful emotions is like fighting rain clouds—sometimes the sky darkens, and there’s nothing you can about it. Pain isn’t wrong, and reacting to it in this way strengthens our sense of unworthiness, and keeps our life small. As Buddhist Haruki Murakami once said, “pain is inevitable, but suffering optional.”

“Rather than trying to vanquish waves of emotion and rid ourselves of an inherently impure self, we turn around and embrace this life in all its realness—broken, messy, mysterious, and vibrantly alive. By cultivating an unconditional and accepting presence, we are no longer battling against ourselves, keeping our wild and imperfect self in a cage of judgment and mistrust. Instead, we are discovering the freedom of becoming authentic and fully alive.”

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Anyone familiar with Nietzsche’s philosophy will recognise this. It echoes his concept of amor fati—the idea that you should love your fate, whatever it throws at you.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

The concept of radical acceptance can be found in Stoic philosophy too:

“Lead me, O Zeus, and thou, O Destiny.
The way that I am bid by you to go:
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
I make myself a wretch; and still must follow.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion

You cannot avoid all pain, and by trying to, you’re creating more pain for yourself. This idea has echoed throughout history, with the Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jainists, existentialists, stoics, and god knows how many other thinkers coming to the same conclusion. Tara is just one of many proponents, but has written her book with such skill and clarity that it deserves to sit on the same shelf as the greats. And while the point did feel a little laboured by the end of the book, the importance of the message crushes any small criticisms that I have.

“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

Tara Brach,  Radical Acceptance

So how do we practice radical acceptance? There’s two parts—mindfulness, and compassion. We need mindfulness to pause and recognise what we’re feeling from moment to moment, and we need compassion to sympathise with it. It sounds simple, and while most of us want a fix quick for our emotional pain, radical acceptance isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes years of practice through meditation, reflection, and the techniques outlined in the book, which include pausing, naming and saying “yes” to our emotions, listening to our bodies, leaning into fear, widening the lens, offering forgiveness, and having the courage to be vulnerable. But if we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to these practices, the result is a profound sense of peace, contentment, and love.

I’ll admit, I usually find this type of thing a little nauseating. Radical Acceptance was a book filled with this kind of spiritual talk, but because I agree with the author’s message, and the Buddhist philosophy from which it springs, I believed every mushy word. Maybe it’s time we stop listening to the relentless hostility of our internal critic, and start believing that we really are worthy, lovable, and deserving? Maybe it’s time to be brave and face our suffering head on, turn our attention to the vice around our heart, the swell of our throat, and the stiffness in our shoulders. Has ignoring them ever worked? By practising mindfulness and compassion, we learn to recognise and experience everything that arises within us, and rather than labelling them good or bad, we approach them with compassionate friendliness, and allow them to be exactly as they are. It seems a powerful practice with the potential to change our lives dramatically, which sound like the hollow words of a self-improvement guru, but in this instance, might actually work. It offers the prospect of changing from a “bundle of tense muscles defending our existence,” to being able to “walk on, one step at a time,” with a “freedom and peace beyond all imagining.”

“You nights of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
Inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself,
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain,
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
To see if they have an end. Though they are really
Seasons of us, our winter…”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

Each chapter of Radical Acceptance ends with one or more guided meditations, which help to practice the techniques suggested throughout the book. Many of them are long and contain multiple instructions, so I found them difficult to follow, but Tara has hundreds of free meditations that can be accessed through her website, or the handy Insight Timer app. I found these to be much more valuable.

“We may spend our lives seeking something that is actually right inside us, and could be found if we would only stop and deepen our attention.”

Tara Brach,  Radical Acceptance

In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach explores an ancient and powerful idea, expressed by numerous people throughout history—we can forgo suffering, if we accept our moment to moment experience. The book was easy to read, contained priceless practical advice, stories that will probably make you cry, and satisfaction beyond measure.

“Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breath
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.”

David Whyte, The Well of Grief

References

  1. Duḥkha, Wikipedia

The Marvel of Routine | Paterson Movie

Image from Paterson Movie

Put the word “routine” into a thesaurus, and you’ll be presented with dreary synonyms such as unremarkable, plain, and conventional. You might personally conjure adjectives such as ordinary, monotonous, and tedious, and happen to be someone who considers routine as appealing as a turd baguette.

And yet, routine could also be a synonym for human existence. We’re obliged to repeat the same processes day in day out, whether it’s the repetitive tasks of our job, emptying the infernal dishwasher, or mindlessly scrolling through Netflix like a member of the undead. Often, we complete our routines wishing we were doing something else; that some excitement might snatch us away before our final brain cell dissolves with a sad whimper.

In Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, we witness an unconventional character who thinks and behaves in the opposite way. Paterson is a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. He wakes up around 6:15am without the need of an alarm clock, kisses his wife Laura, eats cheerios, walks to work, drives his bus, eats dinner, walks their dog Marvin, has a beer at the local bar, and then goes home to sleep. You may consider Paterson’s existence to be a Sisyphean hell if not for his kindness, his calm demeanour, his enviable relationship with his wife, and the poetry he writes in the quiet moments of the day.

For Paterson, routine isn’t stifling banality to be avoided at all costs, but a wellspring of beauty and creativity. As he quietly eats his cheerios, he picks up a box of blue-tip matches from his kitchen counter, and inspects them closely. Few of us would pay much attention to something as trivial as a box of matches, but as someone who rejects face value, Paterson is able to suffuse them with charm, inspiring a love poem for his wife that talks of “sober and furious and stubbornly ready” matches that are ready to burst into flame, lighting the cigarette of the woman he loves. As he drives his bus, he smiles as school kids talk about the arrest of Hurricane Carter in a Paterson bar, as blue-collar workers reveal their supposed romantic exploits, and as teenagers talk about an Italian anarchist who published his seditious thoughts in his own Paterson paper. As he sits in the same spot at the same bar with the same drink, a fresh round each day, he watches, listens, and chats with the bar’s owner and its patrons, giving every little thing his full attention. He “looks down at his glass and feels glad,” and is only able to do so because of his deliberate absorption in his own life; his embracing of his own routine.

Paterson doesn’t appear to have aspirations of luxurious, far-flung holidays; of rubbing shoulders with dolphins or sea-turtles or celebrities with bulging buttocks. He doesn’t seem troubled by the privacy of his poetry, confined to its “secret notebook” rather than rocketing him to fame. His willingness to engage with his day-to-day experiences provide him with a satiating richness that dispels the need for something “better,” destroying the pervasive idea that life should be grander, more exciting and more spectacular—a dizzying blast of sound, colour, and aroma that fills us until we burst. Far from being a torturous bore, Paterson’s routines are a goldmine of novel curiosities that he can access because he chooses to be fully involved. His unwavering attention gives him perhaps the greatest gift of all—the idea that life isn’t just enough, but more than enough.

Routine forces us to learn. When we go through the same task enough times, it shifts from consciousness to unconsciousness, and becomes entrenched in our long-term memory. We no longer have to think about the necessary steps, allowing us to switch our attention to the world around us, to discover its charms. Like Paterson, we can become absorbed in our city and merge with it—one living, breathing metropolis, exploding with run-of-the-mill spectacle, witnessed by many, but examined by few. 

When routine becomes automatic, our conscious mind is unleashed upon the world; a mental state that we can experience as boredom or fascination, depending on our level of engagement. With the attention dial turned up, routine can be transformed from a pointless and punishing bore to a captivating venture, flush with meaning. Like the Japanese man who inadvertently encourages Paterson to write again after his dog eats his treasured notebook, we might find ourselves saying “a-ha!” at the ordinary and commonplace. And when we regularly recognise beauty in the things that most people would call banal, we too might become poets.

The Wisdom Of Insecurity Book Review | The Futility Of Living For The Future

The Wisdom of Insecurity
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash

When you’re listening to a song, do you skip the middle part because you’re desperate to hear the end? Or when you’re eating a meal, do you wolf it down because you can’t wait to reach the final bite?

Me neither. It’s sacrificing the joy of the experience. Living with the end in mind. But according to British philosopher Alan Watts, this is exactly how many of us live.

In 1951, while Watts was teaching comparative philosophy and psychology in San Francisco, he published a short 150 page book called The Wisdom of Insecurity, which was a distillation of his philosophical views up until that point. As a lifelong lover of Eastern philosophy, Watts’s views are heavily influenced by Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which he eventually helped to popularise in the west, and which form the essence of his wonderful little book.

According to Watts, many of us fail to live in the present moment. We’re constantly focusing on future goals or ruminating about the past, at the expense of the only thing that actually exists—this moment, right now. When we forgo the present moment to brood on a long-dead past, or an ethereal future that doesn’t yet exist, we miss the splendour of the world in front of us. We live with our eyes closed, our ears and noses blocked, our touch numbed, and our taste dulled. The plans that we obsessively make for ourselves are useless, because when they finally arrive, we’re not experiencing them because we’re busy making new plans. As long as we continue to live inside our own heads, always planning and hoping for something better, we’re mere spectators; sitting in the bleachers while our life is played out in front of us, lacking the courage to join the game.

“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”

Alan Watts

Humanity’s obsession with forward-thinking has cheapened the present moment—the only thing that actually exists. To use another of Watts’s genius analogies: it’s like eating the menu instead of the meal. We obsess over concepts, ideas, and plans that we think will make us happy, while forgoing the very thing that will make us happy: the real world.

“If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”

Alan Watts

For Watts, our obsession with the future comes from our sense of insecurity. We know that the universe constantly changes; that nothing lasts forever, including ourselves. And it terrifies us. So to gain a morsel of control, and to make our future feel a little more secure, we plan, plan, plan, desperately trying to stifle a truth that we cannot bear to hear: you have little control, and one day, you’re going to die.

It’s futile, of course. And as with many of life’s troubles, the answer is devilishly simple yet difficult in practice—acceptance. You cannot make yourself secure in a world that is based on insecurity and change. So there’s nothing for you to do but accept your inevitable death, and then start paying attention.

“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”

Alan Watts

At its core, The Wisdom of Insecurity is a book about mindfulness, which is a dime a dozen these days. But Watts is a wordsmith of such exceptional class, that when I chance on such a writer, the ubiquity of the subject no longer bores me into a lull, but instead hypnotises me, having been explained with captivating vigour and lucidity. This is the only book that I’ve finished and then restarted immediately. It was that good. 

Watts teaches us about mindfulness in a way that few other people can, and the result is 150-pages of fascinating, funny, and enriching philosophy.

The Dirty Trick Of Hope, And How The Existentialists Saw Through It

Boy looks through gap
Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

A man is wrongfully imprisoned for murder, and as he descends into his cot for the first time, with the clang of steel echoing in his ears, he hopes.

He hopes that his lawyer will be able to get a retrial. He hopes that his wife will remain faithful to him, and that his daughter will forgive him for leaving. He hopes that he won’t get shanked in the prison yard. Closed in by walls on every side, hope becomes his guiding light—his escape from the horror of a new and unjust reality. But does it do him good? 

Camus, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer didn’t think so. For them, hope is a pair of rose-tinted glasses that warp reality into something pleasant, robbing us of the chance to confront our situation honestly. It’s choosing comfortable delusion over agonising truth, with no valuable lessons unearthed; no wisdom gained. It’s a rejection of the present, and because the present is inescapable, with the past and future nothing but concepts in our heads, it’s nothing less than the rejection of life itself.

For Camus, hope is an evasion of the present moment—a powerful desire for a life that we don’t have, but feel entitled to.

“The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion…is hope. Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.”

Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus

Living in hope is living in illusion. We’re choosing far-fetched fantasy over reality, crippling our ability to appreciate the beauty of the present moment, infinite in richness. Even an innocent man lurking in prison can appreciate the beauty of his experience, choosing not to dampen his senses in favour of a better reality, but accepting his situation with courage. Abandoning hope makes it redundant, replaced by a recognition and appreciation of the only thing that can ever exist—this moment, right now.

For Schopenhauer, hope is not only a rejection of life, but also a failure of prediction. We hope for something grander and finer, but like pitiful dopamine-chasing gamblers, fail to grasp the likelihood of it arriving. We roll the dice again and again, chips diminishing, frown lines forming, and optimism vanished.

“Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

As a former life-term prisoner, Erwin James also saw the futility of hope. In the midst of his prison sentence in the UK, when his minimum term was increased to 25 years, his sense of hope was annihilated. But eventually, he saw it with open eyes.

“The truth is that hope for a lifer is exhausting. It stops you sleeping and can drive you insane—much safer to expect nothing and never to be disappointed. You know your crimes, the grief you have caused, the shame and the guilt you live with—and the amends you can never make.”1

Erwin James

That’s where hope often leads: disappointment, followed by disenchantment, bitterness, and a feeling of rancorous injustice, where we’ve been hard done by and want to stamp our feet and scream about how unfair it is. It’s the inevitable downfall of a perspective based on delusion. Like a needle of Afghanistan’s finest brown sugar, it’s lovely at first, but horrible later.

When Zeus took vengeance on Epimetheus by presenting him with Pandora, and she promptly opened the box that unleashed torrents of evil upon the world, one thing remained inside—hope. For this reason, hope was treasured and considered man’s greatest good. But for Nietzsche, this was Zeus’s most abhorrent act, because no matter how much the other evils would torture us, hope is the thing that “prolongs man’s torment,” as we continue hoping for a better future that will never arrive; for an ultimate reward that doesn’t exist. Nietzsche described hope as a “rainbow over the cascading stream of life,” which we’ll ascend happily until the moment it disappears beneath our feet, like an illusory bridge whose passage was never secured.

Nietzsche was a life-affirming pessimist—he had a hopeless world view, but despite this, he urged us to say “yes” to our lives. Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis also encourages us to forsake hope, and practice this kind of pessimism:

“We ought, therefore, to choose the most hopeless of world views, and if by chance we are deceiving ourselves and hope does exist, so much the better…in this way man’s soul will not be humiliated, and neither God nor the devil will ever be able to ridicule it by saying that it became intoxicated like a hashish-smoker and fashioned an imaginary paradise out of naiveté and cowardice—in order to cover the abyss. The faith most devoid of hope seemed to me not the truest, perhaps, but surely the most valorous. I considered the metaphysical hope an alluring bait which true men do not condescend to nibble.”

Nikos Nazantzakis

Maybe Red was right all along—hope is a dangerous thing; a precarious rose-tinted path liable to vanish from beneath our feet, leaving us plummeting back to reality. With hope forsaken, our fallacious notions can be swapped for something authentic, which exists not only of peaches and cream and fluffy animals and rainbows, but also sexual rejection, stepping barefoot on lego, and a bank account usually in the red. 

When we muster the courage to leave hope at the door, we step into the role of the hero, and can embrace our immediate experience in all its glory.

References

  1. Erwin James, 2013, Hope for a prison lifer is exhausting, The Guardian

What’s Wrong With Virtue Signalling?

Virtue signalling
Photo by Chinh Le Duc on Unsplash

With the Black Lives Matter movement expanding across the world, its opponents have found a convincing and clever-sounding way to discredit them, by drawing our attention to the real reason for their activism: virtue signalling.

Virtue signalling is the suggestion that someone is doing or saying something to elevate themselves, ascending to a delightful moral pedestal, where they’re better than the foul creatures below. But when opponents of political movements tarnish their targets with the “virtue signalling” brush, it can be cynical and misguided, because as social animals, the perceptions of others will always influence human behaviour.

While the phrase is new, there is nothing new about virtue signalling itself. It may have been amplified in the age of social media, but it’s an ancient instinct, born from evolution. In the early 70s, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers created the idea of reciprocal altruism,1 which states that selfless behaviour can improve the evolutionary success of an animal, if the animal who benefits from the behaviour returns the favour. In game theory, the idea is known as “tit-for-tat,” and is an optimal strategy until one of the parties refuses to reciprocate. But where would the trust come from in the first place, if not from virtue signalling? Why would we cooperate with somebody who doesn’t reliably signal their virtues, and risk being cheated?

This is not to say that people should pedantically tally up the good and bad deeds of everyone they meet, and ostracise any poor sod who puts a foot wrong. Instead, it’s keeping a rough mental idea of what every person is like, to better understand whether they can be trusted. When people signal their virtues to others, they’re saying “I’m a good person who won’t swindle you.” What’s wrong with that? Reciprocity has been a fundamental motivation for animal behaviour, and it’s even helped to develop our sense of morality. It can be found in courtship, where people advertise traits such as agreeableness, fidelity, and commitment to potential mates,2 through to friendship, where people exhibit kindness and trustworthiness to win friends.

Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that certain virtues are social in nature. Imagine you’re the only survivor of an apocalypse, hunkering in a soggy bunker all by yourself. How can you be a kind person? Is it possible to be a kind person with no-one else around? Sartre doesn’t think so, because kindness is a virtue that is other-directed. Fellow French philosophers Albert Camus and François de La Rochefoucauld had similar musings about the social motivation behind our behaviour. Society is a voyeur to our action; even when we do something in secret, we may unconsciously feel shame because we compare our actions with society’s morals. The woman of the 1960s who strives for a career at the expense of her “duties” in the home may feel shame even though she’s acting in her own interests. She feels shame because she judges her acts to the standard of her society, whether right or wrong. Virtue-signalling is a natural behaviour born from our species sociability.

A modern Aristotle, sporting flare jeans and a man bun, would agree. One of his virtues includes “righteous indignation in the face of injury,”3 which matches some of the sentiment we’ve seen during the Black Lives Matter protests. His model of ethical behaviour (virtue ethics) also includes the idea of phronesis, which is using practical wisdom and prudence to act well. Phronesis is built on experience—a person can understand virtues intimately, but without having experienced situations that require their use, won’t know the appropriate time to use them. This was demonstrated by some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, who in a show of solidarity on social media, added the hashtag #blacklivesmatter or #BLM to their Blackout Tuesday squares, not realising that the hashtags were created to provide vital information about missing people, helplines, donation sites, and protest movements. The good intention was there, but they ended up muddying the purpose of the hashtags, and weakening their value. They wanted to support the movement, but were missing the experience needed for phronesis.

What about when good intention is absent? Aristotle would deride virtue-signalling if it lacked the intention to back up the virtue. The problem isn’t virtue signalling, it’s acting like a virtuous person merely for the sake of appearances—being high and mighty and then vanishing when real work needs to be done. These are the people who posted their black squares on social media, and then refused to hire someone because of their ethnicity. These are the women who publicly support sexual assault victims, and then privately slut shame them for their choice of clothing. These virtue signallers are moral charlatans, and they damage the reputation of admirable people who say they’re virtuous and then back it up.

Virtue signalling is an important prosocial adaptation—a tool that we use to gauge each other’s trust, friendship, and love. But we must be cautious of airing our morality if we don’t intend to follow through, and if we don’t have the experience to make a difference. Such a moral pedestal has shaky foundations, and when somebody gives it an inevitable bump, everything will come crashing down.

Article written by Lizzie Bestow and Rory Clark

References

  1. Robert L. Trivers, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, The University of Chicago Press
  2. Geoffrey F. Miller, 2007, Sexual Selection for Moral Virtues, The University of Chicago Press
  3. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/aristotle-eudemian_ethics/1935/pb_LCL285.193.xml

Stoicism: a Masterclass in Emotion Regulation

Hands on face illusion
Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash

Consider the girl who, no matter how determined her efforts, or how much she tries to motivate herself to complete the urgent task in front of her, opens up Instagram instead. Such a dire lack of willpower is recognisable by all. I dread to think how much time I’ve wasted on insipid bullshit instead of doing something difficult and valuable. When a challenging task is before me, and I’m taut with anxious doubt, it isn’t a lack of willpower that makes me open Instagram, but my inability to deal with the anxiety. I’d do anything not to feel that emotion, and I have the most distracting and entertaining thing imaginable at my fingertips: the internet.

We don’t procrastinate because we lack self-control, but because we’re in the grip of an unpleasant emotion, and don’t know how to handle it. This is called emotion regulation—the ability to respond to negative emotion in a way that is mentally healthy, and socially acceptable. Instead of having the fortitude to wade through the unpleasant emotion, we reach for the nearest comfort instead—social media, television, drugs, or whatever is easiest. Without the ability to regulate our emotions, we can become depressed, anxious, develop eating disorders, and abuse substances1. We might also have fewer and shallower personal relationships.

The stoics were masters of emotion regulation, which is one of the reasons that their philosophy endured, and continues to grow in popularity. Though the concept of emotion regulation wasn’t clarified until the 20th century, the stoics appeared to practice a method that is now called reappraisal, which is interpreting an event in a way that will reduce its emotional impact. The following example might have been lifted from the journal of a Roman stoic:

“Somebody stole my sandals from outside my door. I needed those sandals to walk across the city for an important meeting at the Senate, which I now won’t be able to attend. At this point, the theft is already done, and there’s nothing I can do to change what has happened, so the only thing to do is carry on with my day.”

A well-practised stoic is able to reappraise the situation and lessen its power, suppressing any negative emotion that might compromise his virtue. Consider the moment that Seneca was ordered to commit suicide by the Roman emperor Nero, who suspected Seneca of being a conspirator in an assassination plot against him. This is the ultimate test of emotion regulation. Upon hearing the news, Seneca made out his will, asked his wife not to grieve, and then opened his veins without fuss. He was so well-practised in reappraisal, so at peace with his lack of control and the fate that had been written for him, that he was able to face his death with courageous equanimity.

The Death of Seneca, by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez 

How did he do it? The stoics have a few reappraisal theories and techniques that they use to regulate their emotions.

Dichotomy of control

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”

Epictetus, The Discourses

The dichotomy of control tells us that some things are in our control, and some things aren’t. This idea is key to a stoic’s ability to regulate his emotions. The vast majority of what happens to us is outside of our control, and when something “bad” happens—a car accident, your mother’s death, buying an all-yellow bag of Starburst—a stoic knows the futility of getting upset. He’s wise enough to make a good calculation of the matter, by understanding the difference between what is controllable, and what is not. For a stoic such as Seneca, this understanding was visceral. He knew that the will of the emperor was beyond his control, and running away wasn’t an option. In such a situation, getting upset is illogical, leaving acceptance as the only remaining answer. 

Genuine acceptance of your fate cannot produce emotional turmoil, even for something as drastic as your death. Stoics such as Seneca understood the dichotomy of control so viscerally that they were able to use it to regulate their emotions, by reappraising the situation from something awful, to something uncontrollable, and therefore to be accepted.

Our transitory nature

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Heraclitus

Everything in our universe obeys an ironclad rule: things must change. The stoics recognised that everything preferable in their lives (what they referred to as “preferred indifferents”) could be taken away from them in an instant, whether it was their children, their home, or their own lives. In the tender moments that you’re kissing your wife, Epictetus advises you to tell yourself that you’re kissing a mortal, as a reminder of their impermanence. By constantly reminding yourself of the transience of people you adore, even going so far as to meditate on their death, you’re practicing for the possibility of their actual death, which you’ll be able to reappraise and remain calm if the moment occurs. This technique is called negative visualisation, and is a form of adversity training; a toughening against the harsh realities of the world. It also makes us more grateful for what we have—a powerful perspective that has proven to make us happier2.

Understanding the changing nature of the universe helps a stoic to remain emotionally stalwart in the face of adversity. Seneca knew that just like every other organic thing in the universe, his mind and body would eventually change into something else. Nero just happened to speed it up.

Impressions

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Stoics recognise that the harm of an insult isn’t from the words themselves, as though the breath of another person carries a debilitating poison, but from our impression of the words. Like everything else in the universe, words don’t have objective meaning. Our species has given them meaning as a way to survive and procreate. If somebody tells you that your nose looks like a pickle that’s been rejected by the local supermarket, you can judge the words to have value, or you can identify them as the bleatings of a man without virtue.

We’re bombarded with impressions and judgments every day, and while we can’t control an initial impression, we can use reason to evaluate its benefit, and change it if necessary. A stoic has the capacity to reappraise her initial impressions of the world, changing the detrimental into the beneficial—a more fitting impression for a judicious philosopher.

Courage

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

Courage is a chief virtue for the stoics, defined as the ability to face misfortune with bravery; in recognising the mental turmoil that an event such as your death can create, and facing it with equanimity because you know it’s outside your control. The courageous man experiences just as much fear as everyone else, but acts in spite of it.

The stoics realised a fundamental truth: life is suffering, and if we want to be happy, we must be courageous enough to face our problems head on. An obstacle isn’t something to be feared, but an opportunity to practice reappraisal; a moment that demands our courage, followed by the use of reason to reappraise the situation into something favourable.

**

Being able to regulate our emotions is critical for our well-being1. The reappraisal technique reduces physiological, subjective, and neural emotional responses. That sentence remains true when swapping the words “reappraisal technique” for “stoic philosophy.” The wonderful philosophy of Stoicism can make us masters of emotion regulation, allowing us to reappraise negative impressions, and transform them into emotions that contribute to our happiness.

References

  1. “Emotional self-regulation“, Wikipedia
  2. 2011, “In Praise of Gratitude“, Harvard Health Publishing

When Philosophers Attack

Concerned man
Photo by Nathan Cowley from Pexels

Dave never much liked philosophy. Hated it, in fact. So when the first philosopher showed up and whispered an aphorism into his ear, he didn’t know what to make of it.

He was lunching at the time, ogling the little butts of the Chinese waitresses who flitted in and out of the kitchen, and gorging on dumplings that singed the roof of his mouth. The Great Wall restaurant had a sign at the entrance saying “wok this way,” which he always grinned at. For Dave, nestling into the cramped wooden chairs with an ice-covered Tsingtao and a plate full of dumplings and a dance of hypnotic rears was pure magic—a stark contrast to the drudgery of everything else in his life.

As he dunked his final dumpling in soy, splattering its periphery with brown, the clinking and shuffling and murmuring of the restaurant was interrupted by a soft but clear Chinese voice, which said “a good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

Dave jolted and the dumpling flew from his chopsticks into his lap, soiling his respectability. He snatched it from his lap and turned to the source of the noise—an ancient and wispy Oriental, who grinned at him with earwax-coloured teeth; teeth that were too close to his face.

He jiggled his chair backward, as much confused by the interruption as by the man’s words and antiquated appearance.

“Excuse me?” Dave said, “do you work here?” The man’s smile dropped, and his eyes bore into Dave’s.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished” the little man said with a yellow flash of teeth. In the distance, a dish of beef exploded into a cacophony of sizzle, creating flurries of garlic-infused smoke as it’s carried past the man to its delighted recipients. The wisps cling to the man’s willowy beard, making it look like the onset of a turbulent fire.

Dave asked the man if he worked at the restaurant, knowing full well that he didn’t, but not sure what else to do about the situation.

“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white,” the man said, “neither need you do anything but be yourself.”

“What’s that about a goose?” Dave replied, losing his patience. He called a waitress over, and asked her if she knew who the man was.

“No, we don’t all know each other” she scoffed.

“He’s talking to me about all kinds of nonsense—travelling geese and whatnot. Can you ask him to leave me alone?”

“Some food, sir?” the waitress asked the old man, motioning to a distant table, “we don’t have goose, but we have duck.”

He refused, bowed to them both, and with a swish of his tunic, left the restaurant. Dave stared at his last dumpling, as if it might be able to explain what had just happened.

The next afternoon, Dave rode his bike along the Brisbane river, delighted by the great swathes of sparkles that lay across the river like blankets of fairies, birthed by the setting sun. Jacarandas peppered the bike track, wearing luscious coats of luminous purple, rising up like noble Australian kings. Dave had forgotten the oddity of yesterday, closing in on the city and working up a good sweat, which always made him self-conscious since that little bitch Gretchen Greenwood from grade fourteen had called him “Heatwave Dave” on account of his sweat patches.

He’d just passed the German Bierhaus, of which he was a fuzzy-headed patron, when another cyclist rode up next to him, so close that the rubber handles of their bikes almost touched. As cyclists feel obligated to correct every infraction that they witness, no matter how trivial, Dave assumed that he was about to be told off, but in fact, found himself side-by-side with a serious man in a serious grey suit, who had the most magnificent moustache he’d ever seen, blasting out of his face like the beginnings of a volcanic eruption. The man paid no attention to what was in front of him, as other cyclists hurtled past. He preferred to stare at Dave.

After a few seconds, over the pitchy whistle of the wind and in a thick German accent, he said “you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

Dave squeezed his brakes, and the German catapulted into the distance. Cyclists with throbbing veins shot past him and swore, the flash of their lycra blinding him, but not enough to stop him witnessing the ominous man circling around to return. He watched with dread as he approached, catching every word of the new maxim that was being yelled at him.

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

Dave took off in the opposite direction. He pedalled as though the German had produced a hatchet rather than a philosophical tenet, rocketing along the jade surface with the air roaring in his ears, muscles burning from the desperation of his escape. After a minute, he looked back over his shoulder, and saw the man’s Krakatoa moustache emerge from a just-passed curve in the track. The gap narrowed with every rotation of the German’s pedals—he had the legs and lungs of an Übermensch!

He arrived at Dave’s side, who tried to kick him off his bike. The German dodged the attack with ease, grinned, and shouted “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster…for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

“What do you mean?!” Dave screeched, but the man was already braking, having said what he came to say. He rode back in the direction of the bierhaus.

Dave pulled over to collect himself. Though the quotes were undoubtedly wise, and the benevolent men who imparted them well-qualified (and well-fit), he’d had quite enough of monsters and chaos and dancing stars. He wanted comfort—a return to miserable normality, where most things made sense.

He went home, showered, and went to his favourite local bar—Stazione di Birra—run by a fat little Roman called Guiseppe who always nudged him and asked him how his mother was. Stazione di Birra was always bright and crammed with people and had more wooden furniture than it needed, which had to be shifted to get anywhere, filling the place with the scraping of wood-on-wood.

Dave drowned himself in beer, thinking that it might tease some sense out of the absurdity of this philosophical assault, or at the very least, suffocate his memory with an impenetrable fog.

As he drained his ninth glass and motioned to Guiseppe for another, a figure appeared in his periphery—a regal man in a white tunic, whose head and face were garnished with a sea of looping curls. Dave’s heart sank.

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”

Dave’s spirit was very much troubled.

“Who are you people?” he demanded, “and what the hell do you want with me?”

“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”

Guiseppe was alerted by Dave’s raised voice, and walked over to them. “Everything alright?” he asked, confused by the man’s tunic and luscious curls. “Drink?”

The regal man gave Guiseppe a sharp look. A passing drunkard bumped into his back, spilling some Guinness, but not making an impression. His eyes returned to Dave.

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

He smiled, touched Dave on the shoulder, and left.

Guiseppe asked what was going on. A flabbergasted Dave recounted his last 24 hours to Guiseppe, who chuckled and combed his moustache as it was told.

“It sounds like they’re trying to teach you something” Guiseppe said.

“Teach me what?”

“Maybe that you’re too stressed?”

Eventually, Dave found their quotes online, bought all of their books, and transformed himself into a cool-headed philosophical superstar. But though he was desperate to thank them personally, they never appeared again.

It Sucks Being Average in a Meritocracy

Dunce cat
Image from Kidkanevil

In 2012, a skinny boy joined the software company that I was working for, ten years my junior, but twenty years smarter. Within a few hours he was suggesting fixes for my lousy code. I felt immediately threatened, resentful but too proud to show it. He probably noticed anyway.

He’s a close friend today. And thank god, such natural forces are better as allies. But I can’t be chums with every clever bastard, and in a meritocracy, where people are rewarded on their intelligence and achievements, the rest of them are my enemies. The office is a carpeted battleground where my disadvantage is apparent. I lose limbs from the skillful feats of my opponents, and my own dismal failures. I’m chopped away bit by bit, reduced to a disabled and bloody stump, little worse than before.

A meritocracy takes the brutal competitiveness of nature and turns the dial up. Perform, or be outperformed. Be smart, or be outsmarted. Was it created by some clever demon who wanted to torment those of average intelligence? I seem destined to struggle in a system that illuminates my mediocrity; abandoned at the foot of a ladder too slippery to climb.

“They are tested again and again … If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”

Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

I’ve worked with some blockheads over the years, their actions a sharp reminder of my own shortcomings. Once, a guy from our sales team received the contact info for a lead, and dialled 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9, believing it to be their real phone number. I can still feel my cheeks burning on his behalf. He’d learned to gloss over his repeated stupidity with roars of laughter, but his eyes brimmed with sorrow. Floundering was his default mode, like he’d been born into an ill-fitting world, where confidence is as durable as a fart in a hurricane.

In a meritocracy, self-esteem is a precious reserve controlled by our leaders, who like gods, release it at their leisure. It might be granted as a smile, a touch on the shoulder, or an awkward thumbs up, at which point we’re thrust skyward, breaching the altitude of the high-achievers, who are visibly aggrieved, but satisfied as we plummet back to inadequacy—our rightful place. Inadequacy is the destiny of the unexceptional. Gold stars aplenty, just not for us. And as we witness the effortless confidence of our glorious colleagues, every accolade received, every favourable look, every round of applause intensifies our jealousy.

Meritocracy is meant to eliminate the luck of feudalism—success purely on merit. But luck wasn’t removed, just altered. With feudalism, luck is status at birth—kings, nobles, nights, and peasants. In a meritocracy, luck is intelligence at birth. Today’s kings are determined by their brain power, not their castle-shuffling parents. Also, the luck of status remains in a meritocracy: being born into a wealthy family leads to better education, and greater intelligence. Though a meritocracy teaches us that we’re entirely responsible for our own success, it’s still highly influenced by luck.

The system makes my head spin. Every fibre of me protests. I want to clothe myself in black and storm Parliament; seize the scheming pollies by the scruff and demand something better. How can the average Joe be confident in a society that rewards intelligence, and scorns the ordinary? We’re commanded to be exceptional, yet unequipped for the job. Like American Beauty’s Angela Hayes, we realise that there’s nothing worse than being ordinary. It’s failure. Ordinary is the rule, not the exception. Most of us have to live with that.

Social media makes things worse, with its curated streams of colourful perfection, stark against the humdrum grey of our own lives. Every post reinforces our pathetic, flawed existence, until our eyes are flooded green, and heads horned. Here’s a video of a Japanese man with eight perfectly obedient Welsh Corgis, and all I have is a wily cockroach with an appetite for bin scraps. The washboard abs plastered across my news feed are cutting reminders of my own burgeoning paunch. Everyone is exceptional except me.

The solution? Break the rules. A meritocracy is just a game invented by a society that values intelligence, with victory counted in cash. There’s other values to live by: kindness, courage, humour, wisdom, fortitude, temperance, compassion, loyalty, and a ton more. Some degree of intelligence is required to earn a living, but it doesn’t have to be priority number one. If the rat race is exhausting, and you’re too fat and slow to win, there’s other races.

Our worth isn’t defined by our IQ, economic rank, or position in a company. It’s defined by whatever we merit. The beauty of Western freedom is that we don’t have to play by society’s rules. We can write our own, creating a place where status anxiety is quieted to a murmur; where the average Joes and Janes of the world can flourish in a game of their choosing, and realise that there’s nothing shameful in having an unexceptional brain.

Quotes About Death That Can Teach You How to Live

Skulls
Photo by Yann Schaub on Unsplash

Imagine a world without death, in which departure is refused, and so everything remains eternal, with nothing fresh permitted to emerge. The living have absolute control over the entry gates of existence, resolutely shut under lock and key, to prevent something new coming along to displace them, or eat them, or whatever it is that the unpredictable unborn might do. The jostle for existence has been halted; the dance of life arrested, its tune silenced so that the living can exist in perpetuity, bereft of competition, having made themselves elves on earth.

The streets are filled with the same old faces, same old names, same old fancies. When the light departs they sip single-malt whiskey with bartenders named Walt or Joey or Jim, who don’t have children. Nobody has children. There’s no brightly-painted playgrounds or baby blue cots; no toddlers on bikes or awkward fumbling teenagers. The creatures on earth have existed since time immemorial, like a captured snapshot, or a stagnant, tepid pool, never at risk of being refreshed by a generation new.

“Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.”

 Alan Watts

Such a world would be tragically dull. Even the most lustrous songbird, warbling its beautiful tune on a crisp Sunday morning, becomes boring after a while. For life to create something new and unique, death must first clear the way. Paradoxically, to refuse death is to refuse life. Change is a requirement of an exciting universe.

“Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.”

Henry Ward Beecher

Death is not a problem to be solved, but a driving force of dynamicity, unreservedly and unapologetically cranking the wheel of change, making way for a delicate yellow-spotted butterfly, a row of scarlett-tipped roses, or a soaring snow-capped mountain. Such beauty wouldn’t exist without the destructive force of death.

“Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”

 John Muir

Our awareness of the delicate evanescence of life makes us grateful for it. To know that soon enough, every living thing that you encounter will be dead, is to make them all the more precious and special, to be revered with shining eyes. Loss is a lens that relieves our shortsightedness, and brings into sharp focus every transitory little thing that begs to be appreciated, before it’s too late. Everything exists just once in a lifetime, never to be witnessed again, its beauty derived from its impermanence. Death is the old friend who taps us on the shoulder and reminds us that soon enough, everything before you will be annihilated, while wearing a t-shirt with the words “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

“Mostly it is loss that teaches us about the worth of things”

  Arthur Schopenhauer

“By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.”

 Robert Greene

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

 Emily Dickinson

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

 Edgar Allan Poe

Without contrast, we cannot appreciate. One can only imagine the joy a Norwegian living in Svalbard might feel when witnessing the sun peek over the glistening mountains for the first time in six months, or the lip-smacking splendour of an ice-cold beer after completing Dry July. Much that we favour is only possible through the unfavourable. By stamping out death, we must also stamp out life.

“What would life be worth if there were no death? Who would enjoy the sun if it never rained? Who would yearn for the day if there were no night?”

 Glenn Ringtved

Breaking us down to our constituent parts, those less-than-specklike atoms that constantly come and go, it becomes clear that our physical essence is transitory, and that the notion of being the same as we were yesterday is nothing but the inability to feel our atoms departing. Who knows where they’ll end up? The toenail of a mischievous spidermonkey, leaping through the Brazilian Amazon; the lungs of the mighty blue whale, cruising through the chilly depths of the Atlantic; or perhaps in the fist of an enraged white nationalist, who plunges it into the cheek of a penniless immigrant. You have no say in the matter. Your atoms connect you to the entire universe, and guarantee your eternity whether you like it or not—atomically subordinate to the never ending cycle of life and death.

“You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”

 Philip Pullman

“I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.”

Horace

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

 Thomas Moore

What is death but a return to the state of pre-birth? A time without pain, botherance, or exertion; when your atoms were splayed across the far reaches of the universe, not yet you, but destined to be so. Though we may picture non-existence as an interminable, torturous blackness, perhaps akin to being buried alive for eternity, we can never comprehend its genuine experience, because one experiences something by being consciously alive. The dead cannot comment on being dead, having been deprived of the ability at the moment of their demise. The sense of dread that we may feel in relation to death is vanquished, made null and void by the nature of our changing universe, as it fashions something fresh and remarkable to take our place. Death is the easiest thing that we’ll ever have to do—it’s all taken care of, after all.

Not a person on earth can teach you how to die, because no-one who died ever lived to tell the tale.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Mark Twain

“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?”

 Epicurus

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”

 Joseph Conrad

“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

 John Updike

“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

 Montaigne

The most biting tragedy of all is allowing death to dull our spark; to restrain us with a short leash, trapping us in a life of grey mediocrity—safe, but colourless, like the frightened young mother who locks her son inside and smothers him with love, cutting off his oxygen, and ensuring a life of retardation. Courage and risk are ingredients of a well-lived life: to put one’s best foot forward with a spirit of adventure, despite the danger. When these things are absent, we exist as frightened spectres, lacking in true substance and already half-dead. Every waking moment carries a choice: affirmation of life, filled with courageous deeds of dedicated participation, or negation, whereby we recoil into our cowardly shells, barely able to peek out at the madness of our unforgiving universe, lest it tramples us into oblivion.

“Death is nothing, but to live defeated is to die every day.”

 Napoleon Bonaparte

“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

 William Saroyan

“A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.”

 Lao Tzu

“I don’t want to die without any scars.”

 Chuck Palahniuk

“Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows.”

 Michael Landon

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

 Mark Twain

Though we spend much of our lives jostling for position, mercilessly chained to our desks in an attempt to climb the ladder of recognition, Death sweeps away the hustle and grind as if it were just another dusty doorstep to be cleaned—as inconsequential as a grain of sand, worn down from the body of a miniscule sea creature. Status isn’t in Death’s vocabulary. Why must it be in ours?

“Death makes equal the high and low.”

 John Heywood

“You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”

 Anton Chekhov

“Everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”

 Thomas Bernhard

“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”

 Seneca

Above all else, death can help us to illuminate the one thing that we all desperately crave and need, something that motivates us beyond measure, pushing us onwards despite the reality of our nihilistic universe: meaning. The ultimate gift from Death, purchased, packaged, and decorated with a silk ribbon, is to encourage us to find something to live for. When we figure out what’s personally meaningful to us, we discover the very reason that we’re alive.

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”

Martin Luther King Jr