When I was a young man, the country singer Tim McGraw had a song called “The Next 30 Years” in which he articulated the lessons he learned during his first 30 years and how he’d make the next 30 better. In my case, being a slow learner, it took me 47 years to start putting some of the pieces together. You see: I turn 47 in a week, on Thursday April 4, 2024. Pixabay In Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ilyich contemplates the famous syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal. But he can’t imagine that it applies to him. I think most of us are like Ilyich: We can’t imagine that we are going to die. Everybody else will, but not us. We’re special. I certainly couldn’t imagine my own death in my twenties or thirties. In fact, it’s only as I approach my 47th birthday that I feel like I’m getting older. The syllogism applies to me – and you – as well.The consolation is that I finally feel as though I’ve learned a few things about life that will serve me in good stead going forward. Youth is wasted on the young, George Bernard Shaw aptly said.Education: A lot of people in America today are obsessed with working out. Many others at least make sure they get to the gym a few times a week. Some do it for health reasons but most do it in order to look physically attractive. Unfortunately, very few people spend any significant time developing their minds – and the mind is more important to a well lived life than the body (though the body is not unimportant. More on that later).When I was in college, I read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In it, Mill argues that no man can consider him an expert in any subject unless he understands the best that can be said on both sides of the issue. If he only knows his side, he doesn’t really understand things. For thousands of years people have thought about life and left written records of their ideas. Education is the study of the best that’s been thought and said. Instead of reinventing the wheel, learn from those who came before you who confronted the same problems and questions. Only then will you understand the different ways of looking at questions and life in general and be able to form an informed opinion. And only then can you go beyond what’s come before you, transcending it to go even further than those who came before you – and adding to the sum of human knowledge and wisdom for those who come after you.Independent Thinking: Humans are very sensitive to what other people think. But each age tends to think the same way about various things. Only by thinking independently can we move beyond conformism and the false assumptions of our time.When I was in college, I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and was influenced by its main character Howard Roark. Roark was a Nietzschean figure who had very independent and strongly held views about things. He didn’t care much what other people thought. He wanted to figure things out for himself.Later I was influenced by one of the most independent thinkers in history, Henry David Thoreau. Just because men have done things a certain way for centuries, tradition, didn’t mean there wasn’t a better way. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”, he famously wrote in Walden. Thoreau moved to Walden pond in his twenties to escape the soul crushing early capitalism of his day. “To be a philosopher is not just to think subtle thoughts, or perhaps even to found a school, but to solve some of life’s problems, not just theoretically but practically”. Thoreau was determined to find a better way to make a living and lead a fulfilling life than what was on offer in the society of his time.Free Will And Self Responsibility: While our ability to shape our lives is limited by circumstances, we do have free will and the choices we make have a huge impact on how our lives go. I was fortunate to read Nathaniel Branden’s Self Responsibility and the Self Accountable Life as a young man. “No one is coming” was Branden’s favorite aphorism. Too many intellectuals deny free will and therefore self responsibility and this does people a huge disservice. Only by embracing your personal power, the things you have control over, can you authentically face life. There are so many people who, through sheer will, overcome enormous obstacles. You can too if you embrace the power of your mind and choices.Exercise: While the development of the mind is more important than the development of the body, the latter is important too. Sound mind, sound body. “I hope that here in America more and more the idea of the well trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike”, wrote the American psychologist and philosopher William James.While I was an athlete as a young man, injuries cut short my athletic career and I didn’t workout regularly for most of my twenties and thirties. When I picked it up again at 37, the difference it made was eye opening. Not only did I feel better and have more energy, but my mind was clearer. I was more centered in myself and therefore made better decisions. Rediscovering exercise was a life changer for me – though I worked out too hard for the first decade back. More on that later.Mindfulness: Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to change. To break bad habits and create good ones in their place. The way you do this is by becoming mindful of your habitual impulses and patterns of behavior in the moment and short circuiting them by mindfully managing your emotions and doing the right thing instead of the habitual thing. Self discipline is the ability to subordinate an impulse to a value. I first understood mindfulness when I read the Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein’s The Trauma of Everyday Life in the wake of struggling to recover from COVID in the middle of 2021. Giovanni Dientsmann’s Mindful Self Discipline was also enormously helpful in this context.Excecution: Mindfulness is important because we can know something and yet continue to do the things we’ve always done even though we know they’re not adaptive. What good is knowing a better way in that case? People like this are like Nietzsche’s “walking encyclopedias” (The Advantages and Disadvantages of History For Life) who know so much and yet it has no effect on how they live their lives. Without execution, all the knowledge in the world isn’t going to help.Never Stop Learning: That said, you never want to stop learning. You will never reach a point where you know it all and can rest satisfied. Life continually throws up new problems and situations and we must continue to learn and grow in order to confront them adaptively. Often you will not know the answers at first and the best you can do is to “live the questions” (Rilke). Education doesn’t stop after school. A college degree doesn’t mean you’re educated.Limits: I have long been an admirer of the late, great basketball legend Kobe Bryant. The sports journalist Mike Sielski titled his book about Kobe’s early years The Rise: Kobe Bryant And The Pursuit of Immortality. Not the pursuit of basketball immortality. The pursuit of immortality. That’s a pretty philosophical title for a book about a basketball player but it’s always struck me as on the money. Kobe was relentlessly and compulsively driven to be the best he could be – and the best ever; better than Michael Jordan. In pursuit of that, I believe he pushed himself beyond what a mere mortal is capable of. This didn’t catch up with him until he tore his Achilles on April 12, 2013 at the age of 34 – cutting short his prime. Refusing to come out of games or rest to heal his aching body as the Lakers tried to earn a playoff birth, Kobe’s Achilles eventually gave way.Plagued by a negative body image as a young man, I also worked out too hard as a young athlete, causing myself many injuries, including permanent damage to my legs in an attempt to increase my explosiveness for basketball and tennis. Even as recently as December 2023, I was doing 3 hour workouts which included pool work, warm up and calisthenics, basketball and weight training. That is too much for a 46 year old with my history and it continued to catch up with me too as my body repeatedly broke down. After a long illness, I realized that I was not a young man anymore and needed to adjust my workouts to something more sustainable.In one scene in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the industrialist Hank Rearden is exhausted. But he has work to do and wills himself back to work. As a young man, I thought this was heroic and I pushed myself through a consulting job after college that permanently damaged my health. I didn’t then understand that there are limits to how hard you can push yourself without your body and/or mind breaking down. In Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book Rest, he pushes back against our culture of overwork and wisely argues for balance, recovery and sustainability, using many examples from prominent figures in history.People: As a young man, I was insecure about myself and extremely sensitive to other people. I gave them all the power in interpersonal interactions as well as how I felt about myself. It was only in my mid-forties that I realized that people’s opinions of you are not objective measures but usually rationalizations in order to make themselves feel better. Many want to put you down in order to put themselves above you. I also learned that, while there is great variety among people, many people are selfish, ignorant and common. When I internalized these things, people’s opinions had much less power over me and I learned to hold my own and even control the narrative in social interactions. While it’s inevitable to get upset when people treat you badly, I have been able to tamp down these feelings dramatically. As the philosopher George Santayana said: “While the waves will not be stilled, they will now beat against a rock.”Friendship and Love: While many people are worthy only of common courtesy, there are some with the potential for deeper relationship. Aristotle famously said that there are three types of friendship: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility and friendships of virtue. The first is between people who simply enjoy being with each other in certain contexts. For example, workout buddies. The second is between people like an accountant and and investment advisor who refer each other business. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Friendships of virtue, the highest form of friendship for Aristotle, are between two people in search of the good life and supporting each other in the quest. They are rare because they require two people of high character who have built a relationship of trust over time.Love is also rare. I learned about love from my mother when she came to my rescue in my mid-thirties. Over the next decade-plus, she made enormous sacrifices – financial, emotional, time and energy, etc… – for me in order to get me on my feet and help me right my life. In my mid-forties, I started to understand how special it was for a person, even a parent, to make those kinds of sacrifices. A card sits on a table in the entrance to my Mom’s house that reads: “Love and you shall be loved”. As I reflected more and more on what she had done for me, I felt enormous gratitude and love. I learned that love is not saying “I love you” but doing the things that show you truly care about another person’s well being.Unfortunately, friendship and love are rare in contemporary society. It’s a “me first” culture that mitigates against the mutuality of true relationship. Only those who understand sacrifice, trust and commitment can build great relationships. Too few do nowadays.A few years ago I was dating a woman named Rachel. At first she was enamored with me, but I was too easy. Eventually she took me for granted and dumped me. When I asked her why she said I lacked “overwhelming charisma”. Overwhelming charisma. What about intelligence? What about character? What about the things that truly matter for building a lasting relationship? Apparently those were not her priorities. In retrospect, it’s not a surprise that she was twice divorced before 40.No Ultimate Answers: When I first started studying philosophy, my goal was a comprehensive system that explained everything. At first, I thought I had found it in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Eventually, I discovered numerous holes in her system. Finally, in my mid-forties, I realized that there are no ultimate answers. Why is there something rather than nothing? No answer is possible. Why is the world like it is? For example, we are likely products of evolution designed to survive and reproduce, not to be happy. In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright makes the fascinating argument that we have to resist our nature in many cases if we want to be happy since we’re not made to be happy but to survive and reproduce. We have to manage our ceaseless and unending desires or they will make us crazy. Even achieving them all probably won’t make us happy. This is not “the best of all possible worlds” Leibniz said it was. And there is no answer to why it is the way it is.Diet: The one area that I probably should have learned by now but have not is the importance of diet. While I eat a salad now and then, I eat In N’ Out and DoorDash on a regular basis. I know many people’s lives have been transformed by changing their diet. Though I workout, I’m a bit overweight and I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t feel better if I ate better. Perhaps this is one of the next lessons I have to learn.In the movie The Natural, based on Bernard Malamud’s novel, there is a fascinating exchange between the baseball slugger Roy Hobbs and his childhood lover. Hobbs had been shot as a young man and though he came back sixteen years later with great success, he regretted his lost potential. “I could have broken every record in the books”, Hobbs – played by Robert Redford – tells her. “And then when I walked down the street, people would have looked and said ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game.’” To which she responds: “I believe we have two lives. The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.” I’m still living with the scars and mistakes of my past but hopefully the next 47 years will be better because of what I’ve learned from them.More By This Author:Participation Broadens As The Equal Weight S&P Rips, WBA Earnings
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