The Examined Life Is Not the Optimised Life

That question is the old one about what makes a life worth living, and it is here that the optimising frame seizes up. We tend to imagine meaning as a reward stored behind achievement, a prize handed over once we are finally successful enough, secure enough, healed enough, lean enough. 

Yet almost none of the experiences people actually name as meaningful arrive in that fashion. Sitting up through the night with a dying parent is not pleasant and cannot be hacked, and still the people who have done it will tell you it was among the most meaningful things they ever lived through. Raising a child is the same. So is standing beside someone whose world has fallen in, telling a truth that costs you something, starting again after a loss that levelled you. 

What all of these share is that they refuse to be controlled in the way optimisation needs its objects to behave. Love shrinks into something lesser the instant you try to engineer it. Grief, rushed, sours into something false. The experiences that give a life its weight tend to be precisely the ones that happen to us, that we undergo rather than arrange, and a frame built entirely around tightening our grip will keep sliding straight off them.

This is usually the point at which an old line gets quoted, and generally a little too comfortably. Socrates, on trial for his life and offered his freedom on condition that he give up philosophising, refused, and told the court that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. 

We have flattened that into a fridge magnet, a mild encouragement toward a bit more reflection. He meant something a great deal less soothing. He was claiming that a life run entirely on borrowed assumptions, never once questioned, never brought up hard against the matter of what is actually good, has forfeited the very thing that would have made it a human life rather than a well-managed animal one. And the examined life he had in view is not the optimised life in a toga. 

The optimised life asks how to perform better against goals it has swallowed whole and never inspected. The examined life turns round and inspects the goals, which is a far riskier undertaking, since the inspection may well cost you the goals you have built everything on.

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At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. 

It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. 

You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

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The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. Our own age has produced a remarkable substitute for it, the optimised life, busy and measured and impressive and somehow still thin. Between the warning and the substitute lies that small and unfashionable stretch of ground where philosophy still earns its keep, not as an ornament for people with time to spare, but as the practice of asking, honestly and while it still matters, what a life is for.

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We Know Sleep, Exercise & Diet Are Vital For Health. But Why?

Suddenly, the oldest health advice begins to make much more sense. Exercise doesn’t simply boost muscle mass, it bulks up the hippocampus – a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory. It also encourages mitochondria to become more numerous and more efficient. We often imagine we’re training our bodies; we’re also strengthening the ancient energy system that allows our brains to work.

Sleep performs a different kind of maintenance. While we’re unconscious, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are consolidated and worn-out cellular components – including mitochondria – are repaired or replaced. So rather than thinking of sleep as simply rest, we can conceive of it, at least partly, as a mitochondrial maintenance shift, aimed at preparing the brain for another day of active learning, adapting and imagining.

Then there’s food. Mitochondria rely entirely on what we eat to perform their remarkable chemistry. The quality of that fuel matters. Diets rich in minimally processed foods provide the ingredients for efficient energy transformation, while diets that continually overwhelm the system appear to make that process less efficient over time.

Seen through this lens, sleep, exercise and diet stop looking like three separate pieces of lifestyle advice and become different ways of caring for the same biological inheritance. What fascinates me most is that this new understanding reaches far beyond physical health. Scientists are uncovering intriguing links between mitochondrial function and resilience, mood, personality traits, and even our social lives.

For centuries we’ve tended to separate mind from body, as though thoughts somehow floated free of the flesh that produced them. The reality is that thoughts emerge from living tissue that must constantly capture, transform and use energy simply to exist.

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Cultivating A State Of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

- James Baldwin

One of the easiest things to cultivate but yet most humans never do so. 

An important piece of the year: 

When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. 

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One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.

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There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.

To slip more easily into the state, many develop strict habits around their work, rituals even.

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Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. 

Thinking of the work in religious terms, as a service to, or a search for, God.

Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone.

Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. 

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The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head—the innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions—it did not come from the center, it came from those who ran from it.

 

We’ve Solved Many Medical Mysteries - Saloni Dattani

Happy Birthday Fluffy

Max’s little sister turned 10 today. 

Yes, I sighed after typing the above sentence… life moving so fast… what an amazing life Max and Fluffy gave me :-) 

Happy Birthday my love! I love you! 

My favorite picture of both of them together; I went to get the mail while both were waiting for me at the door.

Both of them were waiting for me outside the laundry room. Fluffy was just a year old!

Sleeping together peacefully 

Meta Values - 51

In the 21st century, the people beside you before you die are most of them you would meet for the first time a few days ago.  

That is not the weirdest thing. 

The people who made you live so long are people who you never heard of leave alone even seen them. 

If you are overfitting time, love and whatever towards your family and friends; you don’t understand gratitude. 

Having a life long awareness and gratitude for millions of living beings (not just humans) who gave you life, enabled you to experience the richness and beauty of life, and little-mudane things that made your life livable.

Darwin’s entangled web is your life. And mine and Max’s too. 

Happy B’day Garphy!

My little Buddha turned 9! 

He came home on July 30th, 2019 after I met him at Max’s vet during Max’s cancer treatment. 

On one of the worst days of my life, a beautiful gift of life, Garphy came into my life :-) 

Life is impossibly surprising - the timeless lesson Max taught me a long time ago: 

Embrace Serendipity!

Happy Birthday Garphy! 

Meta Values - 50

Wilson’s Law, which states that prioritizing the acquisition of knowledge and intelligence will ultimately lead one to financial success.

What Wilson Law doesn’t say is financial success is only a third order effect. 

The primary effect is that one develops a continuous sense of awe and wonder for all things on this planet and beyond. 

The second order effect is natural understanding the preciousness of life and gratitude for every little moment and things. 

That is a gift anyone can inherit!

Meta Values - 49

One’s culture, religion, family,  sex, ethnicity et al., inherently creates a predictable stereotype and traits. These are so easy to observe and catch in the moment as and when they show up. 

It goes without saying most of these stereotypes and traits are bad. 

The value is to understand this is real, biological,  and work towards slowly eliminating them. It takes months or even years but the good news is they can be eradicated. 

And then looking back one day, one would feel an immense sense of freedom.

  

Lichens - Our Ancient Mentor

They blow like green scarves from trees, crust rocks, frost fences, paint bark, and glow on roofs, tombstones, blue tarps — really anything that will stay still for a bit can be a swell home for a lichen.

Lichens delight, confound and inspire. A thing unto themselves on the tree of life, they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are. One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.

Beyond their persistence, lichens are productive: They bind and build soil. Work as bioindicators of air pollution and climate change. Produce nitrogen from thin air that feeds the forest floor and wildlife. Hummingbirds and bushtits gather lichens to wind into their nests. Ungulates, including caribou, elk and deer, subsist on lichens in winter, when other foods are scarce.

Lichens provide dyes, food and medicines for people, too, with their antimicrobial, antifungal and immune-support attributes deployed in traditional herbal medicines. Extracts of lichens also are used in deodorant, toothpaste, salves, extracts, teas and perfume.

Self-sufficient, lichens have no roots, no vascular tissue, make their own food and don’t need pollinators to reproduce.

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Quiet and immobile as they may seem, they are actually articulate storytellers. The presence — or absence — of a lichen species, and changes in either, can indicate a shift in air quality and narrate the march of climate change.

And for all their fixedness — lichens are remarkably slow-growing — they are not passive. Some lichens wage mighty battles to define their boundaries, deploying chemical warfare, visible in a black line around their borders, to keep other lichens or their mortal enemy, moss, from encroaching, and even growing right on top of them, snuffing them out.

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It was Spribille who revealed that lichens are not a twosome at all, but actually a ménage à trois, with a hitherto overlooked partner — for some 140 years.

Spribille and his collaborators shared their discovery in a 2016 scientific paper published in Science. Their genetic analysis found that lichens aren’t just the result of a single fungus and a photosynthesizing partner (be it an alga, a cyanobacteria, or both.) They found there also is a second fungus, a yeast, in the mix. Follow-up DNA analysis by Spribille and his colleagues — of 52 lichen genera from six continents — also detected the second fungus. The initial breakout from the one-lichen-one fungus paradigm was not a one-off.  

Scientists are still exploring whether the yeast is truly a symbiotic contributor, or just along for the ride. But even discovering its presence was a shocker, revealing lichens to be ecosystems unto themselves, with complexities that scientists are still trying to understand.

“We underestimated lichens for a very long time,” Spribille tells me. “It is not so much that people in the past got it wrong, as that they were missing a part of the picture, with the tools they had available to them, before the advent of genomics and modern molecular DNA sequencing.”

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“Why wouldn’t they matter?” Goward says of lichens. “There are animals that feed on them, reindeer and caribou would not exist without them, they are beautiful, they color our world, they grow where other things don’t grow, they can live where nothing else can, they have the capacity to grow everywhere.”

And they are that example in nature in which one plus one equals … three. Perhaps that is why lichens have challenged science for so long.

“Science is reductionist,” Goward said. “The study of biology reduces life to its parts, the whole disappears. Lichens challenge that.”

To him, though, it goes much deeper. Lichens provide a window to see how in life things really work.

“It is still gobsmacking, the idea that lichens are a portal through which you look in one direction, and what you look at is the organism, and you turn around and what you see is the ecosystem, and they are a variation on the same thing.”

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The way forward to a better future is an empathic relationship with the living world, Goward says, a future in which we recognize and honor our connections to the earth, and one another. Lichens, he continues, are our ancient mentors in this, reliable truth tellers about how the world really works.

“You can see the whole world in lichens.”

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