What The Dying Teach The Living - Frank Ostaseski

The good news is we don't have to wait till until our end of life to realize the wisdom death has to offer. 

Meta Values - 29

I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. 

Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right. Have fun. 

- Keanu Reeves

This is probably an extension of my meta value 23 but more easy to remember and brings immense peace to my life. 

Clearly I am not very good at time. Because this is one case where I need to 100% follow this rule. I think I do follow high but one bad move in a few years spoils everything. 

So this is a work in progress. I need to remember this when the moment comes. 

Meta value: Stay out of debates, discussions, and bullshit arguments. It's a useless waste of time and worse, it ruins my health. In the end, no one changes their mind. 

Low Potential Upside Courage

I used to go through a lot of frustration, heart ache, and plain crying alone with Max. 

Overtime, I understood the world a little better but never thought to phrase my longing properly. My longing had no selfish interests, zero upside for me while alive or dead but I knew and know that is the right thing to do. 

Trust me on this, once you drank that honestly shot from a glass of knowledge - there is no turning back. It's an addiction we all should have.  I am still learning to be a master addict of this. 

When talk about crying alone with Max, I am talking about what humans put animals through, destroy ecology, and so much for their sheer pleasure. It is not a necessity and not even a want. but for the pure fun of it. 

This guy captures it brilliantly (in another context) and coins a phrase: 

The two types of courage

It is popular these days for a certain type of anon account to post memes beginning with the sentence: “Men used to go to war and now [insert lame thing that happens in the modern world].” This kind of meme almost takes it for granted that there was a time when people (or in this case, men specifically) were courageous, a time that has irreversibly passed.

But were we ever brave?

It seems to me that there are two types of courage: high potential upside courage and low potential upside courage. Going to war or taking part in any form of physical confrontation, at least for the nobility, was a high potential upside endeavour: one would be showered in glory if they succeeded. Yes, there was a lot of risk involved, but also, much to gain. And what was to be gained was tangible and widely reinforced by society: status, something we all crave. It was not some subjective thing dependent on deep conviction. I think we still have that type of courage in our society. It’s rare, indeed, but not impossible to find. And while it does not manifest itself in people going to war, it shows up in those who take risks to pursue ideas with low probability of success but huge upside in terms of status. If you follow me, you probably recognize that I am talking about the world of start-up founders. Quitting your cushy job to pursue the life of a founder requires a lot of courage, with a lot of comfort to lose, but also with the promise of very tangible rewards for success. Our start-up founders are the warriors and kings of old.

What we do lack though is courage that has low potential upside: that is, not much to be gained from it. And I am increasingly convinced this type of courage has always been even more rare than the high potential upside type. It requires one to not only have high risk tolerance, but also ignore one’s self-interest — two traits are already rare to begin with, and even rarer together. It requires one to be a sort of Joan of Arc of intellectual life.

Being intellectually honest about a topic your academic (or journalistic, or any other type of intellectual) colleagues disagree with falls into the low potential upside courage bracket. There is stuff to be lost but relatively little to be gained. What’s worse, you will most likely not even be awarded the dignity of being openly cancelled: most likely, your career will become a bit shittier with each open disagreement you have, a dreary slog you cannot even wear as a badge of honour. You’ll become that which most ambitious people fear the most: a no-name. And you won’t even be able to tell where this comes from, to point to a culprit. If you are even a tiny bit ambitious the calculus is clear: shut up and agree. You need to be a bit mad to do it.

This makes me think that if we want more intellectual courage we cannot just assume it will spontaneously emerge from nothing. We need to actively incentivize it and nurture it, to nudge towards it looking more like the “high potential upside” type of courage. The question is: how?

 

Making Moral Shit Up

Making moral shit up by both religious and scientific sapiens. When I talk about gratitude for some human's; these are unknown heroes of history who had to put up with a lot of shit so that we can complain about the annoying few minutes waiting time at the dentist. 

Excerpts from the new book It's a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World (A brief history of Nitrous Oxide and Chloroform):

There was also a belief among western surgeons that pain might be important to the success of the surgery. They thought it might be required for nature’s healing powers to be triggered. Thus there was no obvious demand from medical doctors for the development of anaesthetics. So although Davy discovered nitrous oxide to be a fast-acting anaesthetic, the medical profession wasn’t interested.

[---]

In 1844, a dentist called Horace Wells attended a laughing gas show and wondered whether it might work as pain relief during teeth extraction. He tried it on himself while having a wisdom tooth extracted. He giggled while spitting blood, and realised laughing gas really did block pain.

After trying it on more than 10 other patients, he decided to go public, and performed a tooth extraction in Massachusetts general hospital, before a small audience. Unfortunately for Wells, the patient let out a small cry during the procedure, and although afterwards he said he felt very little pain, the conservative medical establishment who had been in attendance pounced on this as proof of frivolous fairground trickery. They dismissed nitrous oxide and ridiculed Wells. He would later fall into addiction, and killed himself in 1848, but he had ignited an interest in anaesthesia.

[---]

Other doctors were outraged, but not about the safety issues. The mostly male medical establishment argued that alleviating the pain of childbirth was morally wrong, and that God had ordained that women should suffer while giving birth. The moral issues around pain relief became a hot public debate until Queen Victoria in 1853 was administered chloroform while giving birth to Prince Leopold, after which it received the royal stamp of approval. The queen later wrote to a friend who had also inhaled chloroform for pain relief: “Very glad to hear Minnie is going on so well & had the inestimable blessing of chloroform w. no one can ever be sufficiently grateful for.”

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

Jane Goodall Interview

Well, I was very lucky. I was born loving animals, and I had a supportive mother. So apparently…when I was one and a half she came into my room and I'd taken a whole handful of earthworms to bed with me. And you know so many mothers would have said’ Oh how dare you,’ you know. She said Jane you were looking at them so intently I think you must have been wondering how do they move without legs. And anyway, she just said they'd die if they stayed in my bed and so we took them back into the garden.

- Listen to interview on Peter Singers Podcast Lives Well Lived

Wow, it's not hard for mothers to be kind. Try. Please, try to be kind to our fellow animals.