Traits For Success: Confidence/Pride

In my opinion, based on what I’ve observed through my own life and the lives of others, one of the most important character traits for a happy life is confidence. When I was a young child, the culture around me was somewhat ascetic in nature and abhorred pride as some sort of sin. I personally think that this attitude impaired and delayed my personal development, although I suppose it did teach me to question my environment eventually. Toward the end of my middle school years, I decided that I was absolutely sick of this disgust for pride, even pride that is earned. When people criticize pride, they often talk about pride that is unfounded or based on lies (like the Dunning-Kruger effect, where pride is unearned because it is not backed by sufficient knowledge), but pride can be legitimately earned.

Furthermore, I think rationally-derived pride is great because it naturally encourages us to better ourselves and rewards us for doing so. When I thought that I was not supposed to be prideful, I had low self-esteem even though there was no reason not to be happy with myself, because I thought that was the way things are supposed to be. The result of that was an unwillingness to challenge myself, thinking that I could not handle what was in front of me, and a lack of improvement in the areas that I now care about.

On the other hand, once I learned to embrace and earn pride, I was able to take on far more challenges, conquer them through a mix of hard work and talent, and develop more pride. It is a built-in reward system that people are actively and irrationally denying themselves. 

And to be clear, I mean deriving pride from achievements. Deriving pride from doing nothing is better known as complacency, and complacency won’t lead you to become better at anything. Some people get by through insecurity telling them that they need to be better, but I think it’s a more pleasant experience to work toward actualizing your potential, and when you put your pride on the line, try not to take the hit too hard when things don’t work out.

I don’t think that humility is worthless, but humility needs to be rational as well. The ultimate Stoic goal is self-awareness, being the understanding of what you can and cannot do. Pride represents a pleasure derived from understanding what you can do. On the other hand, rational humility represents an aware, potentially goal-seeking attitude toward what you currently cannot do. In areas that you care about developing in, the goal is to turn more and more things that you currently can’t do into things that you can do, developing more pride.

In addition, pride and confidence shine through in interactions with other people. Some natural aspects of body language show confidence, like having more open posture instead of more closed posture, or standing tall and strong. In the working world, you want your employer or people who rely on you to be confident that you can deliver, so if you know you can succeed and you can use some of those same reasons to convince others that you can succeed, it’s a recipe for greatness.

I still look back fondly on most of the challenges I’ve accepted, even if I didn’t always succeed. I really enjoy working to improve my skills in areas that I appreciate. I’m not necessarily saying that everyone should enjoy the same thing, but what I am saying is that in this society, there is a massive payoff for those who enjoy improving themselves, both monetary and mental, especially given the myriad of different challenges you can take on in the developed world without putting your life on the line. Don’t forget, you lose 100% of the opportunities you don’t take.

History

As I started to mention earlier, there are many limitations on our understanding of history. There are the simpler problems with compiling evidence or understanding what occurred in the past, and then there are additional problems with presenting history, or educating about it. I’ll try to focus on the latter.

To start, when I have conflicting accounts of an event, how would I teach people about the event at school or college? Do I just teach the account I believe to be correct, thus not allowing my students to learn any counter argument (how you would actually determine which account is correct at all is a topic for another time)? I would argue that teaching this way would be quite a shame, as I think it’s important that we are all reminded of challenges to established or popular ideas. This motivates people to develop and understand their own stances, as well as criticize other opinions. Yet this is usually the way younger children are taught history because it’s simpler to understand.

You might say that the obvious solution is to feature both accounts, but if I try to feature all critical accounts of a situation, learning history would be very confusing and it would be difficult to progress anywhere. Meeting every statement with a series of oppositional remarks would make this process extremely time-consuming and inconclusive, but maybe this method is better because maybe that’s how history should be or really is. I’m not sure.

There’s also an additional conflict in that people are educated in history by the government (for the most part). There is reasonable concern that the state will force people to learn misinformation or narratives that suit its best interests. Some philosophers have suggested that it would be more desirable to have many different private schools, where the government merely funds the ability of all children to go to these schools. This would attempt to separate history from the country where that history is being taught.

So these are some of the realities of how history is presented in schools. Some perspectives inevitably have to be omitted for the sake of time (and convenience in some cases), so we’ll never get a complete picture. My greatest advice on interpreting history is this: be suspicious of stories where there are only good guys vs bad guys. The truth is most likely more complicated than that; there are likely good and bad guys on both sides, and someone may be trying to manipulate the narrative in post. As I said in my book, other people’s interests often don’t align with yours, so you’ll want to ask good questions in service of your goals, because other people won’t be asking them for you. This applies to history as much as anything else: try to ask yourself who was right, because the government or your teacher may have an incentive to promote a simpler or alternate explanation than the real truth.

Temporal Balance: The Past

The past is a useful source of information, but it can also be a dangerous distraction at times. While we can learn about our world and how to better work towards our goals, what works and doesn’t, we also sometimes ruminate on moments that are long gone where there is nothing new to learn, imagining how things could have been different.

In my last entry, I talked about the present and future, so here I’ll be looking at the past. The way we experience the past is limited by the fallibility of our memories, both their inaccuracy and incompleteness. Additionally, as with the present and future, there is a danger of only looking at things from our perspective. For example, maybe there was an awkward social situation that you ruminate on, imagining how much better you could have handled things when, in reality, everyone else is too busy with their own lives to really care. We also may look at situations based on immediate outcomes, without seeing the bigger picture. Maybe you think about how you could have been promoted if your boss liked you a bit more, when the extra wealth you would have gained wouldn’t have been very useful. Not that either of these examples are always how those situations play out of course, but it’s worth looking at past mistakes that you think about and ask yourself which ones they are: were they really of consequence in the first place?

This is why it’s essential to constantly ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing as much as possible, so that you can move efficiently toward your goals. With the past, as with other experiences, try to take from it what you can and disregard what you can’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t judge events in your past, but try not to waste too much energy deviating from a fixed reality, especially when the present is right there in front of you. There’s only so much energy in all of us, and even if there wasn’t, there’s only so much time in each day, and in our lives for that matter. It would be a shame to spend large quantities of time remembering painful memories with no benefit in sight.

Also, it may be a good idea to question what you’re told about the past. We don’t learn all of human history, and all that we know about human history is limited by our own fallible memories, conflicting sources, lack of understanding of context, etc. But I’ll be covering the past in more detail in the next entry.

A central theme of this blog is that asking questions without being told to do so is an invaluable skill. Other people do not have the same interests for you, and that’s why you have to question them so you can obtain knowledge that allows you to effectively look out for yourself. But sometimes, your mind can become your own worst enemy, if you give in to irrational impulses. That’s why it’s actually important to question yourself as well, so you can make yourself act in yourself’s best interests, which it sometimes does not.

Temporal Balance: Youth

As with many aspects of human nature, there are two conflicting goals in terms of time management for many of us: prioritizing the short term and the long term. It’s not easy to balance the two, and although I have only lived for 16 years, it seems to me like there is a steep price to pay for failure. If you prioritize having fun in the short term and let your grades slip away, it may impact your ability to maintain a financially stable life and be able to afford the items that you want. There’s also a powerful materialistic culture that motivates people to think that they need more items to be happy. Personally, I think the goal of making money is to earn freedom, to not be dependent on pleasing others to make a living and to be able to live your life in any style you wish. But either way makes use of wealth, and prioritizing the short term too much can irreparably damage your prospects of wealth, especially if you lack the creativity necessary for some kind of startup that can make money without the credentials offered by an advanced college education or good grades.

When you prioritize the short term, you can also damage your physical health. This obviously includes eating junk food and not working out, but it’s not such that you can make up one year of not working out next year. The issue is that our brains become more set in their ways as we grow older, and we become less adaptable and more reliant on established routines. So if the routines we use in our youth are insufficient, we can’t simply make it up later because it will be harder to change them.

Although it’s less often talked about, it seems to me like there is a remarkable danger in only thinking about the long term as well. As humans, we have the capacity to conceptualize the past and the future, but we only really know the present, and if you are always looking into the future, you might be missing out on a lot. Youth comes into the picture again here, because if you spend all of your youth optimizing for later, you might find out that you missed out on a lot. For example, your chance to bond with easily-made friends through school or become an amazing athlete might disappear with your youth, in spite of everything you’ve done to prepare for the future.

So it’s clear that a balance is needed, but what kind of balance? Well, I try to manage both in the present by mixing both working hard and playing hard. I also try to take advantage of my youth to a small degree by devoting more free time to, for example, playing difficult video games (which I’ve talked about before) instead of more passive activities like watching movies that can still be intellectually engaging, but which don’t require any sort of youth to participate in. And to be clear, I still think that there are some active hobbies that are suited to older people as well, like having philosophical conversations, where people benefit from experience rather than liveliness and vigor.

To me, the goal of all of this is to figure out how to not waste youth. Youth is a gift, and a temporary one at that; trying to make the best use of it seems like a worthy use of energy. But by trying to optimize youth, are you wasting your youth? I wonder…

When writing this, I am briefly reminded of the Greek gods, who I enjoyed learning much about when I was younger. Many gods and goddesses are often pictured as eternally young, both through their appearance and their liveliness. However, that youth can sometimes show through their flaws, like Zeus’ immature affairs with other women that he knows put them on Hera’s naughty list. Youth might be a gift in some respects, but it has tradeoffs in experience, naivete and wisdom that are worth remembering. Maybe the real goal, especially in this information age, is to take advantage of the knowledge of other human beings to try and embrace the advantages of youth while using their experience to help combat the lack of your own. After all, when I become an old man, no one will be able to give me the ability to become the best athlete in the world, but even as a boy, I can learn far more than I could ever experience myself in my own lifetime and apply that knowledge to my daily life.

Admitting That You Don’t Know

Sometimes, when I hear people arguing about something, especially something political, one party gets put on the defensive and makes some wildly assertive claim that they definitely cannot verify. Unfortunately, sometimes I make some claim that I definitely don’t know the truth value of as well. But, especially when it’s just an argument between friends, I think responses like “I don’t know” or “I need to think about that” are really valuable if you want to really find some sort of deeper understanding. After all, are any of us going to claim that we know everything we could ever be asked about in an argument?

There’s a need for intellectual honesty to actually understand the world better. Not all questions have easy answers; that’s why philosophy exists! But it becomes drastically more difficult to reach hidden conclusions when we spend more effort grasping for straws to try and instantly have an answer. And yes, this admission of not knowing can stifle the pace of the conversation; but what’s the alternative, talking without thinking?

All of us have to confront the reality that there are a great many things we will never know if we want to effectively work toward success, as I talked about previously. For example, we will likely never know the personalities of celebrities outside the spotlight (unless they get caught in some sort of scandal), so we shouldn’t assert that they are good people if we haven’t met them in person. Furthermore, we will never know everything about any of the people we love, even children, parents, friends or partners; it may be because they are hiding something or simply because they never had a reason to tell us. The point is that, when you think about it, we don’t know all that much. This fact is what Socrates tried to point out when he questioned the Athenian officials, and he was executed for exposing all that they didn’t know.

Here, a combination of open-mindedness and a fixation on what we know best, ourselves, is key. In my opinion, although we may advise others, we should not force them to do what we think they should do, even if it is in their best interests, because they know themselves better than we do. In addition, geniuses of the past have often been considered eccentric and strange in some respects, a sure sign that permitting people to live many different lifestyles allows us to cultivate greater wisdom than otherwise. So I advise you to do your best to learn how you want to live your life, and if it’s different from most, that’s completely okay. Those differences may lead to hurdles you may have to face, but it might just be worth it in the end. It’s up to you to decide whether or not that will be the case. And if you don’t yet know what needs to be done, try to find out! There’s so much information at our fingertips online, but a lot of it is noise, so it takes experience to figure out which information is good and which is not worth thinking about. But if you’re willing to put the work in, you can learn a lot more than most people could throughout most of human history. And knowledge is power, so if you know you don’t know, try to know! Sometimes all you need to know is that you don’t know to know more than most people ever will.

Do We Know Anything?

Do we know anything? That’s a question I sometimes find myself asking that I find very difficult to answer. There are so many ways that our knowledge is limited that it’s practically impossible to keep track of them all and prevent ourselves from making irrational conclusions. To start off simple, we know through science that our senses are flawed in many different ways. For example, we have far too many cognitive biases to count, including confirmation bias (we’ll come back to this one a bit later), availability bias (where we give priority to information that is easily available to us over that which isn’t), and hindsight bias (saying “I knew it along” when you really didn’t, thinking things were more predictable than they were now that you know the result). Plus, our brain can block out some of the stimuli we received according to certain goals. For instance, we don’t notice our own smell nearly as well as that of others because our brains get tired of smelling ourselves constantly and dismiss that information as lower priority than new stimuli, such as the scents of other people. Our hearing is also logarithmic, so a quiet sound can seem extremely loud when it breaks complete silence, but the same sound doesn’t seem as loud at a party with music.

These are some of the simpler problems with how we experience reality, and we try to use items like tools to try and bypass these bodily limitations. But there are also many problems with what we would consider even as scientific reasoning. For example, a renowned Scottish philosopher named David Hume posed the famous problem of induction. This problem is targeted at inductive reasoning, or the idea that we can transfer our knowledge of past experiences to future experiences. Hume points out that, logically speaking, there is no logical way to justify this idea. For example, say that I see 10 white swans and conclude that all of the swans are white. Well, those two statements aren’t really causally linked. You could say that my sample size was too small. You could tell me to look at all of the swans in the world. But even if I did see every single swan in the world and confirm that they are all white, I still can’t know that the next swan I see will be white. This is because of one fundamental problem; the patterns we have observed in the past might change. We can’t rule out that possibility; they could change for a reason completely unbeknownst to us. What if all of the swans turned purple when I wasn’t looking? Our use of past experiences to understand the future rely on the assumption that the patterns we use won’t change, but there is no rational justification for that idea. We simply hope that is the case.

So, you might be tempted to ask: is there a way to know anything? Well, a scientist and philosopher named Karl Popper had an interesting idea: the only true science amounts to conclusions that can be disproven. How did he come up with this idea? Popper observed both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. He found that, no matter what the results of an experiment were, Freud could somehow use the results to justify his principles. To Popper, these conclusions were merely pseudoscience: they may be correct, but we’ll never know because the data we can collect wouldn’t ever be able to disprove his conclusions. On the other hand, Popper admired Einstein for his willingness to truly put his theory of general relativity to the test by measuring the positions of stars during a solar eclipse. The result would be binary: either the positions of the stars would support his theory for now, or they would disprove it immediately and they would have to go back to the drawing board. Popper claimed that this was real science: conclusions that could be disproven, or as he put it, falsified.

In my opinion, Popper’s theory provides an excellent mechanism to test our own knowledge. It may not be enough to predict the future, but it is enough to predict the future as accurately as we can. If you really want to know something, the best way to do so is to 1) make sure the idea can be disproven and 2) go to great lengths to disprove it. This is true with both objective facts and opinions in the sense that you can feel most confident about a particular stance when you have heard the strongest objections and decided that they don’t hold up. Popper’s view of Freud is somewhat linked to confirmation bias, where Freud could “confirm” his theories no matter what data was presented to him. To know something as best as you can, you must do the opposite; look for ways to conclude that you are wrong. It isn’t easy, but knowing isn’t easy either.

The Glory Of Competition

I was watching a sports game and reflecting on the nature of competition. For every winner, there must be a loser. And for all participants (or teams) except one, their run must end in defeat. It seems tragic, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “winning is good” and “losing is bad”.

I’ve written before about having an effective competitive mentality, but here I want to write about what makes competition so great. I’m sure I’m not the first to express this idea, but I think competition is about so much more than winning. So where to start?

Well, first, there’s the struggle of taking up a task and facing off against someone else, knowing that you may not succeed. I find that struggle to be incredibly enjoyable, of taking up a challenge of your own volition (that part is important) and committing yourself to performing at the highest level that you can. I think that video games are an excellent space for individual struggles, where you can largely customize a puzzle of sorts to complete and make the rules yourself. There is a great diversity of different challenges and skills to be honed in video games, and the obstacles you are up against will usually comply with the difficulty you set up. 

But in a competition with another human, you often won’t be able to choose all the rules. This is especially true of competitions involving large numbers of people, and this rule applies to video games as well. If you pick a ruleset for playing a multiplayer game, you may be able to control your actions, but you won’t have influence over the rules your opponent uses. Self-imposed challenges will often not be reciprocated by another human. But if you can find a game with a series of rules that you are willing to operate within, you will often find a far greater diversity of experiences than you could without other people, albeit within the rules that you both have agreed to.

I think there’s something beautiful about two or more people putting all of their effort into a task, knowing that victory is uncertain, but having decided that either the possibility of victory or everything that comes with the experience regardless of victory are worth the effort. But it isn’t just about the moment; there’s also something amazing about the preparation that precedes the moment. For people of varying levels of talent and ambition, they may spend only an hour a week or longer than a full-time job’s worth of effort leading up to that game, but either way, that preparation will speak for itself when it’s time to enter the field of battle.

I also want to emphasize the varying levels of ambition in particular, as it’s an aspect of competition that is often implicitly relevant, but is not always mentioned explicitly. People compete with so many different goals in mind. For some, the goal is the challenge in the moment. For others, it’s watching the fruits of their preparation beforehand bloom. Still others are there to be part of a community and form some social bond or reach a particular level of skill. And of course, there’s those who want to become the absolute best they can be. Which one motivates me? Most of them (did you expect me to say all?). 

These differences in motivation manifest in the way players perform: for example, those who want to be challenged may handicap themselves, perhaps by adding extra limitations, like playing a tennis game with only their weaker hand or intentionally picking a weaker team to try to carry that team to victory. Those who want to actualize their preparation may discover new tactics that other players haven’t explored yet. Those who want to be part of a community may try to perform in a way that will make them popular, appealing to exciting performances that the crowd respects or showmanship, even potentially at the expense of an easier victory. Those who want to reach a particular level of skill may use strategies that stop working above that level in order to take the path of least resistance, like lobbing the ball repeatedly in tennis against players who aren’t good enough to spike it back. Finally, those who want to be the best they can be may attempt difficult strategies and mentally prepare themselves to suffer short-term failures in order to reach perfection and ascend to the top of the Pantheon in due time. Try watching a favorite player or team of yours while thinking about this and you just might learn more about why they stepped onto the proverbial court.

Sunken Cost Fallacy

As humans, we have many different tendencies that lead us to be irrational and make it more difficult for us to achieve our goals. If we want to be goal-oriented, we should root out those tendencies, not only in the arguments of others but also in our own decisions. That might sound fairly obvious, but it isn’t that easy to do. Philosophy is all about self-awareness, at least according to the Stoics, and just doing a quick Google search about logical fallacies gives you access to a whole host of different rhetorical tricks. However, I have a feeling that some people focus on the attempts of others to try and convince them with fallacies, and they don’t think enough about how they might be using these arguments on themselves.

I think one of the most dangerous and common logical fallacies is the Sunk Cost Fallacy. If you don’t know what this fallacy is, it’s essentially the argument that, because I put a large amount of x (x can be almost anything, like time, energy, money, etc) into a particular decision, I need to stick to that decision. In some situations, this line of thinking isn’t so wrong; for example, let’s say I am almost finished rewriting a paper for school because I disliked the first version and then, when I am about to finish, I realize that the first version was better than I thought. In fact, it’s only slightly worse than my second version. Well, my second version is almost done, so I might as well finish it, since it is at least slightly better, and submit it so I can end up with a slightly better submission. After all, since I already spent all of that effort writing most of it, it won’t cost me much effort to finish it and the reward justifies the effort I will spend from this point on, even if it doesn’t justify writing the second version as a whole.

You might say, what’s wrong with that example? You would be correct for asking, because that was a very logical decision! But let me change that example a little bit. Now, I have finished writing my second version and realize that the first version is actually better! Well, I don’t want that second version to go to waste. Since I worked so hard on that second version, I might as well submit it. Now you might ask, why would you do that? The second version is worse, why submit it? But some of you may be reminded of a similar decision that you’ve made in the past. We humans generally like to retroactively justify our past actions because we often do not like to admit that we are wrong, at least sometimes. Since I am unwilling to admit that I was wrong to spend all that time on the second version, I submit it to try and justify my efforts and I am rewarded with a worse grade.

I have to say, it really concerns me how often this fallacy shows up in fictional media involving battles and war-style conflicts. In particular, characters often argue that since their allies died for a cause, they have to see it through. This isn’t overtly irrational, but it is ambiguous in terms of how logical it is. On the one hand, if the argument is that they believe that carrying out the will of their fallen is morally good in spite of the fact that they died for the cause, that would accurately follow the morals that they set forth. Whether or not that kind of morality is correct is a far more complicated question, so I won’t address that here. However, this statement could also be saying, “I have to retroactively justify the effort of my fallen allies”, which would be an instance of the sunk cost fallacy, because there is no need to justify that effort, there is only a need to reach a specific outcome, while following certain rules depending on what morality you subscribe to.

To improve your decision-making (and I’m not saying this is easy), it’s almost always a good idea to ask yourself, Why am I taking this course of action? Is it morally good, or does it lead me to some desirable outcome? Does it make me a good person (these are all references to specific types of moral philosophy)? If the answer to all of these questions is no, then you should really figure out why you are doing something and decide whether it’s a good idea or not. If there’s any lesson to be learned from this particular fallacy, it’s this: at least internally, don’t be afraid to admit when you are wrong. Logically think through your decisions, and if a decision doesn’t make sense, be ready to switch things up. You won’t regret it, both in the immediate and distant future.

Social Dynamics of Criticism Cont.

There was a lot I didn’t get to talk about in the last entry because this is quite the complicated issue. I explained how social media becomes an echo chamber, even if it isn’t necessarily one from the start, and I talked briefly about the danger of seeing people as members of groups. The greatest danger here is that it can be easier to dehumanize members of groups based on their group allegiance. Social media often becomes an echo chamber because many people frequently demonize their enemy and mobilize their supporters against those who disagree. If we think of people as individuals, I think it is much more difficult to dehumanize them and justify treating them horribly.

I understand that people are sensitive about matters concerning their own freedom and how they interact with the world. Nevertheless, I think real knowledge comes from seeking criticism from others, as I’ve mentioned before. Not everyone will offer fair or helpful criticism, so you’ll have to pick someone who you think understands their perspective decently well and is not out to get you. It’s important to remember that someone disagreeing with you DOES NOT automatically mean they are out to get you! That kind of thinking is what prevents us from learning about new perspectives. Is someone going to kill you with their thoughts or their single vote? And of course, it’s far better practice to have your conversation in person, because anonymity brings out the worst in us. I’ll have to talk about that later too!

In order to not be too emotional, it’s important to try and detach yourself from the argument you are making. Think about an opinion in terms of the material reality if possible and not in terms of your own mind. That’s obviously difficult, because we live our entire lives through one perspective, and I’m not saying anyone is perfect at doing it, but I think it is at least possible to be more detached than our default setting.

I’ve been quite fortunate to have someone who disagrees with me as one of my best friends, and we talk about contentious issues quite often. Even if I don’t agree, I can at least understand their perspective, and more often than not, I think they make good arguments. I think we’ve both learned a lot from each other, and we never could have done that if we weren’t willing to hear opposing arguments. This process helps to allow us to bypass the restriction of only being able to see through our lives, but it takes some willingness to be vulnerable to accomplish that.

This kind of resilience will be useful throughout all of our lives. On social media, you can ignore people you don’t like or opposing “teams” (although I think we really shouldn’t think of them that way), but it’s more likely than not that at some point, in the corporate world especially, people will have to decide whether or not to tell you the hard truth or just not tell you at all, about how you appear to others, your performance, or anything else that they perceive. And make no mistake, just because they don’t tell you, doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking about it and it isn’t affecting the way they see you, whether or not they promote you, etc. Their criticism isn’t always fair, of course; it might never be fair, but either way, it’s relevant to your success. And if you make people think that you can’t handle the truth, you will always be at a power disadvantage because knowledge is power. I know it’s a cheesy phrase that people recite often, but if that doesn’t mean a lot to you, then try flipping it around: if you don’t know, you are powerless. It has more gravity now, right?

Some aspects of the social climate I observe around me motivate people to assume that others are sensitive, and even if I’m not, there isn’t much I can do about that. But, I can try to show that I am open-minded when presented with the opportunity. If people think they can tell me the truth, I will have more information to work with, so I will have more control over my life. If they think they can’t tell me, then I will be forced to do my best to win a game when I don’t understand the rules, and that’s not the optimal way to play.

Social Dynamics Of Criticism

I’ve recently received some constructive criticism from someone new about the ideas I’ve espoused with regards to philosophy. While I won’t go into the specifics, it did make me think about the nature of that kind of criticism and how those interactions go. In particular, there was a dynamic that I picked up on that I thought was quite interesting. When she gave me criticism, she spoke to me in a respectful and friendly manner, so I have no complaints there. However, it did make me realize that nowadays, it’s quite rare for me to receive that kind of criticism, which I do mind. I talk frequently with one of my friends about political philosophy where we often disagree, but I realized that outside of the context of close friends, these fundamental disagreements don’t occur often.

When I talked to her, I felt an intense pressure to agree with at least some of what she was saying. I wouldn’t feel that pressure if someone was talking to me in a more harsh and condescending manner. I actually think that the less aggressive way she presented her ideas put more pressure on me to agree in some respect, because otherwise I convey the message that she wasted her time talking to me. However, I think this is a very dangerous way for discussions to go, because agreeing for that reason would essentially be conformity to please someone else, and if that’s why you change your mind, I think it’s hard to argue that you’ve learned anything, since that pressure exists completely separately from the argument being made.

When I talked with her, I said that I agreed with some of her criticism, but when I thought about it on my own, I realized that I really don’t agree! Again, the specifics are not that important, but I do think I was motivated to agree by social pressure despite the kind presentation. I think this is a danger with all but close friends, because with close friends, I’m not worried that I’m wasting their time by disagreeing with them. It seems there are many human mechanisms that try to obscure our path to knowledge!

I’ve talked already about the fallibility of our senses, so I won’t go into that again. But I do think that one of the reasons that I felt that pressure to agree was that these kinds of conversations do not occur often anymore. Political polarization comes to mind, but I think this sort of exclusion can come with many different opinions, as long as people place value on them. People have the opportunity to hear from an innumerable number of perspectives through the internet and social media, but I’m not so sure that people are designed to experience that many opinions. Many refer to social media as an echo chamber, and it certainly can be, but it is often also a place of furious argumentation! I think these constant arguments and discussion wars wear people down, and it really doesn’t help that most social media is designed in a way that favors unintellectual and fallacious arguments. A simple example is the character limit, making it so that long and complicated arguments are very difficult to present.

I think that this confusing mix of reasonable and unreasonable arguments might be too complicated for some people to handle, so they try to make the situation easier to process by putting everyone on teams and dismissing or approving based on which team someone is on. This is where social media truly becomes an echo chamber, when people voluntarily and instantaneously dismiss arguments that they perceive as being from a different team or find a way to block all of those people from their feed. Somewhere along the process, they also become incredibly sensitive and cannot handle having their opinions violated.

Thinking of people as being part of groups is certainly a simpler way of identifying people, but personally, I think that we should do our absolute best to think of people as individuals when we have the chance. If we do, we can embrace the fact that each one of us is very complicated, and we can’t be summarized through allegiance to one, or even a few groups. It seems I’ve run out of space, so I’ll be sure to talk about this more in the future.

Purpose

I want to dedicate this “blog” of sorts to show the practicality of philosophy, and I think a great place to start would be purpose. “What is the meaning of life?” seems like such an obviously important question, and yet many people (some of whom I know) do not try to find an answer, to their own detriment. I personally don’t like the idea of just drifting around through time, following the expectations of others and not understanding why I’m here.

Currently, since I obviously love philosophy, I’m enjoying the process of learning more about philosophy and the world. Besides that, I enjoy the process of challenging myself to be the best I can be in various areas, such as video games (both competitive and solo) and academics. I also like writing about fictional media to understand what philosophies are involved in it and to have a greater appreciation of good stories, and I may want to write one eventually. I also enjoy learning about political philosophy within my local community and questioning how it can be improved, if at all.

These might just sound like passions, so it might sound like I subscribe to hedonism, where the primary goal is personal happiness. I don’t yet know if that is or isn’t the way for me. I haven’t decided on my purpose yet, but I enjoy learning about the world and I know that I need to savor the process. I advise my readers to do the same; try to enjoy the process of life and don’t let it pass you by, because I imagine you will spend more time trying to accomplish your goals than you will being in the moment of success.

I know what I enjoy and I’m trying to continue in that direction, because to an extent, I do agree with John Stuart Mill, at least in the context of my own mind. J.S. Mill was a utilitarian, so he believed that the moral good is to pursue maximizing happiness, but he believed that intellectual pleasures had greater highs and were more worth pursuing than any other. I personally enjoy challenging myself, but I’m not here to demonize those who don’t. I just advise that you make sure you set yourself up for the long term, rather than getting caught up in the short term.

You might see that I’ve set up a difficult balance: I’m trying to both optimize for the long term and enjoy the journey. Those might seem like they oppose each other, but I think there are some ways to make them go together successfully. For example, you can take pride in making decisions you believe to be correct, even if the more obvious reward lies later. It can be hard not to ruminate on challenging moments in life and wish we could have tackled them differently, but I think it's beneficial to put a similar emphasis on remembering the good times and the amazing things we’ve accomplished. I think I’ll have to explore that more another time.

The most important advice I want to give about purpose is this: if you want to not be miserable, I strongly advise you to acknowledge reality as setting the rules for the game and then succeed within those rules. I’m not saying there is no room for idealism, but I think a great way to set yourself up for success is to defer to reality and try to achieve the best outcome that you can visualize within those rules. People (including myself at times, even though I’m aware of this) frequently waste time being frustrated at the injustices of the world, but I would focus on trying to work within the rules and get the best outcome. I’m not saying you should settle for mediocrity, but you should settle for reality. At least in my opinion, reality offers opportunities to exceed mediocrity in so many different ways, and I try to live with reality as my guide, not my foe.

The Spirit Of Adventure

In many fictional pieces, there are intrepid heroes who go on what we think of as “adventures”, where they brave many threats to their own life in search of something that varies from story. It can be compelling to think about our own lives as boring in comparison to theirs, but I don’t think it has to be that way. There are many obstacles we face in our own lives, so why do they have to be “boring” in comparison to the obstacles that fictional characters face? And why shouldn’t we glorify overcoming these smaller, more frequent challenges?

Maybe it’s because I’m a very imaginative person, but I like to view any unfortunate events as challenges to overcome. Somehow, I manage to view the rain as a challenge to overcome! I at least find amusement in the twists and turns I’m presented with. For example, two days ago, my teacher gave us an assignment that was quite long and expected us to finish it in two days. I’m confident that most of the people in my class will not finish because this wasn’t a high-stakes situation; you won’t fail the assignment if you don’t do it by then. But, I decided to make it a personal challenge to myself to finish it within the allotted two days. And, lo and behold, I did it! Small achievements like that are worth being proud of, because the larger achievements don’t come around that often and I think it’s motivating to savor our smaller successes.

I’m not saying that we should be complacent with small successes without striving to be better; I personally value trying to improve my skills in various areas. But I also think that without embracing those small successes, our daily lives are at risk of devolving into either monotony, interrupted by small failures that will only hurt more without success to balance it, or they become pure uninvolved entertainment cycles. The former is a massive risk for competitors in anything that increases as they get better and better. The more they win, the less winning might mean to them if they don’t reinforce it in their minds, and the losses will only hurt more and more when winning becomes the expectation. Even if winning is the expected result, it’s important to remember that winning still requires effort and is still an achievement in of itself. The latter is a possibility when we become unwilling to challenge ourselves and confront the dual possibilities of success and failure. After all, without challenges, is there anything we can really be proud of?

If we can embrace these challenges and learn to understand both success and failure, I think we will find that we aren’t quite as far away from those intrepid heroes as it might seem. If we use our imaginations and put challenges in front of ourselves, we can find greater meaning in life, at least for certain types of people. For example, I like to attempt difficult challenges in video games, as I think that environment is extremely conducive to exposing me to new challenges and learning new types of skills, such as pattern recognition, strategic thinking, managing probabilities (although that is one of my least favorite parts to tell the truth), training physical execution, patience and more.

I personally find great value in these challenges, but there are other ways to challenge yourself. Some basic examples include:

• Working out, where challenging yourself is basically the entire point and the most efficient way to become healthier by far

• Challenging your discipline, perhaps by training focus on one thing, like committing yourself to read a book and not quit until it is done

• Any competition where you don’t exclusively play against people that are much worse than you

• Even challenging yourself to think about something from a new perspective; for example, thinking about a sitcom from the perspective of a particular type of teenager, then a young adult, then an older adult with a partner and children; you might learn something new about the different stages of life and how they affect our thinking from these examples

The way learning is presented in school or academic settings can often come up as monotonous or boring, but really, learning is about overcoming intellectual challenges in memory, logical thinking, creativity, etc. I think living life with the spirit of an adventurer in the ways I’ve described adds great meaning to our time on this Earth, and even if it doesn’t work for everyone, I advise you to give it a try.

Recent Crime

Recently, multiple students at my school were assaulted, not far from the school itself, and one of them was sent to the hospital. Our instinct in this situation is to be afraid for others and ourselves and react by playing it safe, but we can do better than instinct here. For example: should we have been playing it safe in the first place? Should we look to statistics for crime in a greater area, ideally the entire area that we traverse daily, to make our decisions, rather than scary anecdotes? These are good questions to ask in order to reach an optimal outcome.

A good place to start would be to ask, Does this tell me anything that I didn’t know before? Is there anything new about this? Often, we react to intimidating news like this as if everything about it tells us something new, but that might not actually be the case. In my case, my parents and I knew that this area wasn’t completely safe, and a student has been assaulted near the area in the past. However, this was a group of many students, which tells us that numbers may not give you an advantage.

Now, we can ask: can this data really be extrapolated for the sake of a greater decision? For now, we don’t know because the school and NYPD do not know everything about the perpetrators or the motive for the assault. Again, if I play the situation too reactively and just stop staying out late and come home immediately until it's been a while since a crime has been reported in this very specific area, there’s a good chance that I could be the next one to get hit. That is always a possibility, but you have to pull on a decent sample size to really evaluate the risk, rather than reacting to the most emotional anecdotes. This kind of analytical approach is a good way to take control of the situation. We can try to learn from emotional anecdotes, but we shouldn’t be reliant on them as rare reminders of more common events that could be absent when we need them most; thinking that way, you are not really in control of the situation.

Of course, it’s difficult to think this way because there are so many decisions we make in a single day without even thinking twice that have large implications. So, we have to have priorities: where should I invest the most time into thinking about an optimal outcome? Because I can’t necessarily repeat this process for every decision. Obvious first answers include risk of major physical accidents, like where and when to cross the street or stay outside longer than we need to for school. There are also major life decisions like choosing a school, a college or a job where we have to think about the implications that each choice might have. For example, if I choose the highest-paying job where I am accepted and start working there, am I willing to sacrifice major extra time for that money, and am I willing to accept the responsibilities that may come along with that role for potential years of my life?

There is some value to going with the flow. You might be tempted to ask how I could say that without contradicting what I’ve said before. But I don’t think going with the flow means being completely reactive and instinctive in all circumstances; I think the most important, most Stoic aspect of going with the flow is to accept any and all outcomes that are out of your control (at the most fundamental level, you don’t have to be completely happy with every outcome) and focus on what you can control. If you’ve ever watched the movie Forrest Gump, that is the main takeaway I got from that movie. Because of the unfortunate circumstances of the real world, any of us who live in even a mildly dangerous area could get attacked one day. We don’t necessarily get to decide when and where that could happen. But we do get to decide where we can be attacked each day. I’m not saying that it is right to always take the most cautious approach with always staying inside, as there are problems with that as well, such as missing out on opportunities to form bonds with other people or understand the environment that you will have to occupy some of the time. Then of course, there are ways to do those things without going outside, and those have their own complexities, etc. You get the point. In my opinion, it’s up to each of us to decide how careful we want to be, because we all own our lives. This kind of logical framework will help you to make the choice that has the highest probability of success. If it doesn’t work out, then either you didn’t understand the world correctly, which you should try to correct if possible, or you should rest easy knowing that you did the best you could. The world and the probabilities may betray you, but the framework will not.

Approaching Challenge

I’m sure we all have our challenges in life, although they may differ in severity. I find the Stoics to be incredible in terms of the way they approached challenges. Many of their methodologies to enjoying life were so simple, yet so effective.

Let’s start with a simple example: say you are afraid of losing money. Or you find that you can’t appreciate what you currently have. Seneca, an ancient Roman philosopher, was an incredibly wealthy figure, but he knew of the dangers of not being able to appreciate that wealth. He only wanted the upside of wealth, without any of the downsides, like dependence upon it. In order to fulfill that desire, every so often he would force himself to be away from his wealth by staging a shipwreck, and when he came back, he gained a greater appreciation of his wealth. He emphasized the importance of making wealth the slave and not the master of your life. Although he was not a Stoic, Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, followed a similar process; he lived on essentially bread and water alone, and every so often he would have a piece of cheese and could savor it fully.

You can do something similar without taking major risks: for a few weeks or a month, try eating only the cheapest food (you could optimize for health here), wearing the cheapest clothing, being away from your devices, etc. You can ask yourself, Should I fear this? If the answer is generally no, then you can gain a greater appreciation of what you have and purge one of your fears.

That’s not the easiest example, so let’s look at another: people often worry about the outcomes of events that are not within their control. It’s difficult not to, but it seems irrational: why do I agonize so much over what I can’t control? Couldn’t I better spend that effort on what I can control? Marcus Aurelius, a famed Stoic and emperor of Rome put it simply: think of all the events you have no influence over as “divine happenstance”. This wording should make it very clear to you that these events are not worth worrying about. By separating these events of divine happenstance from what you can control, you can more effectively achieve your goals.

For example, say you want a specific political figure to win an election, and say that the result is very significant to you. Do your best not to worry yourself about the final result and worry only about what you can do to help achieve your goal. For example, this could mean trying to convince other people to change their vote, campaigning, etc. Whether or not they win in the end is largely out of your control, so only focus on handling the aspects of this outcome that are within your control as well as possible. If you generally apply this to life, you can both be content with giving your all toward the things that matter most and get the best results you can get. If you are competing in a sport, do not think, “I wish I was born as strong or tall as my opponents!” Rather than that, ask yourself, “Is there a way I can use the differences between me and my opponent to my advantage? And if not, what can I do to be the best player I can be, regardless of the hand I was dealt at birth?” And of course, the most difficult question: “Given my circumstances, is it wise for me to pursue this cause? Should I focus my efforts elsewhere?” 

All of these questions are incredibly productive because they affect your decisions in the future and they allow you to best work within the constraints of reality. It’s easy to slip into irrational thoughts like, “I only won that game because I got lucky. My opponent will beat me next time.” However, you can temper that thought and make slight changes to turn a waste of energy into a useful question: “If I did get lucky this time, then I have to improve. How can I best do that, if at all?” These thoughts will take you very far, and you will be content even when divine happenstance lets you down. Remember, even whether you win a game at all is likely divine happenstance in many respects: how well your opponent is playing, weather conditions, previous events before the game, etc, so I would actually advise not to even stake value on the victories themselves: it’s the preparation and the progression that truly counts. If my opponent was born 10 times stronger than me, but we both become 100 times stronger by virtue of practice, he may be stronger than me in the end, but I can still hold great pride in how far I have come through my own efforts.