Change Your Life (or Die Drying)
George Carlin joked that life is a near-death experience. But what if this clever wit is actually concealing the meaning of life itself? If you could access this truth and change your life by completely resetting everything, would you have the guts to do it?
Life is a Near Death Experience
You wake up tomorrow to three large reset buttons on your nightstand. These are different from your standard alarm clock buttons of OFF, SNOOZE, or F THIS, I’M NOT GETTING UP TODAY. These buttons, instead, are labeled MIND, LIFE, and SOUL. You somehow know they’re legit and will immediately do a “format and reset” of the system in question.
You furthermore know that MIND means resetting and starting fresh with your brain, LIFE means starting over with society, and SOUL involves a reset of … well, everything. A total existential reboot to begin evolution over from the Big Bang (if, in fact, that’s what came first).
If you were to slam down on this SOUL button, it would be in the hope that a restart of everything might take things in an entirely different direction and enable us to collectively answer that nagging why in the hell are we here? question more effectively than can today.
Or, if these big picture reset concepts are too overwhelming to start with, what might pushing any of these buttons mean for you personally? We’ll come back around to personalizing these buttons later. But if you’ll bear with me, I think it’s important to consider them as a global metaphors for resetting our human nature, and creating meaning in life, first.
So which, if any, would you push? Well maybe you need a little more context—after all, you didn’t even know this bizarre thought experiment was going to slap you in your exhausted face before even a drop of caffeine came your way.
Confused and just wanting to go back to sleep, your favorite George Carlin quote pops into your head: “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.” You laugh because you feel like very little in the face of this daunting challenge at 7 am. But then you pause and shake it off as you take in what you somehow know about each of these strange buttons.
What if You Could Reset Everything?
First, the MIND reset button. It’s fairly known even outside scientific circles that our brain suffers from a massive evolutionary hangover. Some of the root causes for this chronic, migraine-level headache are tribal behaviors, hidden biases, emotional short-circuiting, an inability to separate real stress from fabricated stress, challenges to being creative and much more. But what if you could start over before birth when about 250,000 nerve cells per minute are forming, but this time… you get to choose the influences and path they take. You’d have absolute control over your brain and could even choose for it to be immune from external influences of media, politics…and maybe even your family, if you wanted!
Next, that daunting LIFE button. As if starting your mind over fresh wasn’t enough. What if you could purposely rewire not only your mind’s billions of neural connections…but also the trillions of interactive ones you have with the rest of humanity?
Resetting your life and restarting civilization might be tempting, but you might wonder if anything would get any better. Sure, chance might push things in different directions. Maybe Hitler, Confucius or Jesus is never born. Or perhaps Ghengus Khan gets killed by his brother instead of the other way around. Considering his DNA passed down through raping and pillaging still exists 9 centuries later in 8% of men across a large swath of the entire Asian continent, him dying as a child might change a few things for the better! These are the what-ifs of humanity’s pivotal figures and moments that keep historians up at night. If, in fact, you’re wondering what keeps historians up at night.
Finally, is that potentially devastating, or possibly awesome, SOUL button to reset … everything. And in this context you know soul to mean not some immaterial part of your being theorized by the world’s religions. But instead, to simply mean existential purpose and meaning in life. Or as the late, great Christopher Hitchens quipped, “soul, because there is no better metaphor.”
So if we assume the big bang is the best explanation that we’ve got, then this would suggest taking the chance that if we did things more intelligently… might we end up with better or different answers to the ultimate questions of life? You’d have to have a severe gambling problem to risk pushing this one, don’t you think? Considering what we think we know about the randomness of the universe, the spontaneous inception of everything and the progression of evolution, to start over and hope for the best seems tenuous, at best.
Imagine for a second if everything could restart entirely differently. The entire arc of evolution has been about adaptation for survival, and therefore, reproduction. And so both the mental and cultural wiring that resulted from this process which has taken millennia caused a collective search for meaning.
So to summarize the power of what these three buttons represent… your mind evolved for survival. Your life in society evolved for having more sex. And by our meaning, your soul evolved to find some sense of purpose once these primal urges for survival and reproduction were satisfied.
Each of these three metaphors — mind, life and soul — forms within layers of evolutionary, societal and mental baggage. In other words, a very complex human nature evolved to attempt to deal with this mess.
Without a change to the core of our human nature, however, does it seem frivolous to even bother? Meaning, if you pushed any of them without a guarantee that human nature might change drastically, what’s the point? But what if you could enact the purposeful setting of new premises before you push the button? Meaning, a framework of new rules that it rebuilds within. Hmm, perhaps, now we’re getting somewhere.
So now what? You’re still in bed, not yet caffeinated, but you might have finally scratched the surface of something practical and useful. And although this gets forgotten, this is supposed to be the point of philosophy in the first place. Let’s try to map out a path to build on this progress.
First, let’s investigate why you should care about this at all…in case that still isn’t clear to you! Then we’ll see how these buttons could be applied to you instead. After that, we’ll look at a psychological tendency that might make it difficult for you to take on the challenge of pushing any of these buttons. And finally, we’ll discuss some things you can start experimenting with today. So buckle in if you’re game for a little mental adventure…
Are You Happy With Your Life?
So why should you care? And why would you even want to push any of them? Well, let’s take stock of the potential impact of the buttons, starting with your mind.
Are you using your mind well? Are you in control of your biases, emotions and creative potential? Would your life be on a better path with a mind that was more powerful and flexible?
And how about your life? Is your work life productive and inspiring? Are your personal relationships in great order? How is your ability to cope with the rapid change on the horizon? Are you happy with where you’ve been and where you’re heading?
What about your soul, again, for lack of a better word? Beyond how you use your mind and live your life…do you act with purpose? Do you know why you’re here? Can you face yourself in the mirror every morning with an evolving answer to the nagging question: What am I supposed to do?
If you’re in good shape on all those fronts, then I’d toss the reset buttons into the trash and maybe hit the snooze button instead to catch a few more zzz’s. Because brother or sister, you’ve got it all figured out. Or at least you’ve convinced yourself that you do. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about self-delusion in another article …
But whether you’re a perfect human — or just think you are — in either case, this article and the Mind Habits platform isn’t going to be for you. But if you’re like me and most of the rest of humanity, living day to day presents ongoing struggles with these questions of mind, life and soul. How many times have you replied “I’m fine” when asked how you’re doing, knowing deep down you’re not fine at all? Being human isn’t that easy. And being a notably good human — adding value to the world and living with a purpose every single day after day — seems about as possible as a unicorn turning water into wine while pigs fly overhead. You know, fairly unlikely.
But back to the question. Why would we want to push any of these buttons? Is it better to reset any of these three things than just to hope things will improve on their own? Does change just naturally happen on it’s own?
Well, the world doesn’t seem to be in a great place, for one thing. So a reset of one—or all three–might be a huge improvement. And I’m fairly sure humans are to blame. Let’s face it. The squirrels aren’t the ones driving cars into groups of innocent people on sidewalks. Nor are koala bears collectively causing climate change. And it’s certainly not the iguanas causing derision in politics to the point where some experts think the US is 35% likely to end up in another civil war of some sort.
Although, there is, in fact, a bizarre and well-documented conspiracy theory that a race of alien lizards camouflaged as humans are behind the scenes of all the political and powerful movements on earth. They’re called the Reptilians and — I can’t make this up — at least 12M Americans claim to believe it’s true. Google it, and then, attempt to not see Trump or as a camouflaged human-lizard with an alien agenda the next time you he’ speaking or Tweeting in strangely-formed English. I’m serious, whether you love him or hate him, do it. It’s worth the effort because crazy theories like this lift the darkness of it all just enough to let you laugh — a medicine that’s good for all. I suppose it’s the political equivalent of the public speaking trick to picture your audience in their underwear to break the stress.
Or skip Trump and pick your least favorite politician, it doesn’t matter. This exercise, and this article and website, is not about politics. Nor is it about religion, science, or any other specific divisive issue, though these are all topics we will investigate. Instead, it’s about something much more fundamental that might just make you change the way you think and react to all of those types of issues. It’s about learning to use your mind better, living a life you actually designed for yourself and building a practice to regularly find meaning in all of it.
But I digress. So the world is messy and things aren’t great which might mean some sort of magical button that could effectively reset human nature or more might be awesome. Got it. Let’s dissect this just a little more to see if we can get at some of the root issues causing the most damage and see if our reset buttons might help.
Are We Living in an Episode of Black Mirror?
I first wrote this article back in December of 2016 as part of an introduction to my podcast, Evolve Faster. At the time, there were all kinds of ridiculous discussions online about whether or not 2016 was the “worst year ever.” Because of course, if it’s not sensational, people won’t look.
But a google search of “2016 worst year ever” reveals that, in sort-of fact, a highly reliable Gallup poll now says no, wait! 2017 was worse! Worse than the worst year ever! Wow. And it’s now 2020 … I can’t even imagine what’s worse than worse than the worst, which also means that 2021 is somehow going to have to top the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic and resultant global recession. So just for a quick break from all this heavy “resetting the world” thinking, let’s go back to this root of all evils year of 2016 and dissect it, if only for a quick laugh.
Now, to be fair, 2016 hadn’t been great. It was the year of a spike in fake news that led to a slow death—or at least a challenged existence–of facts. Bad ideology was growing steadily. Terrorism. Zika virus. Renewed racial tension. Drastically polarizing politics that was further amplified by the election of Trump. Game of Thrones announced there were only two seasons left on HBO. I mean, some seriously depressing news …
Bad trends, to be sure. But the Cubs finally won the World Series, and as a Chicago native, that was something positive at least. And I’m not a Cubs, or even a baseball, fan. I was just sick of hearing all the forlorn Cubs fans complain about never winning a title. Yeah, I’m talking to you, dad…
Anyway, all of this led to the doomsday clock to be moved to its most dire level ever at 2.5 minutes to midnight. If you’re not familiar with this soul-crushing concept, it’s a metaphorical visualization of how close humanity is to imploding published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It’s like the mother of all metaphors–the grim reaper at our collective doorstep and humanity is for whom its bell tolls!
And 2016 rolled right into 2017 with all kinds of nonsense happening that seemed like a bad dystopian b-movie or a real life episode of Black Mirror. The conversations and scenarios going on don’t even seem real. Russia hacking the US election? The US president getting into ego-battles and regularly posting well-known mistruths on Twitter? And at one point in 2018 literally defending his own sanity on social media? Cars driven by both US neo-Nazis and radical Islamic terrorists into crowds of pedestrians? I mean, it all sounds like an overblown Hollywood plot that makes you groan at the ridiculousness of it all.
But sadly, it’s true, whatever “true” means anymore, considering 80% of kids in a recent Stanford study can’t tell real news from fake. I’d venture to say the cosmic writers of this surreal circus are going to need to smoke a lot of weed to come up with the next round of unbelievable storylines for 2021 if they want to top all of this nonsense. Good luck, my friends.
And to plant a quick flag, this will lead us to a discussion here today about cognitive dissonance. This psychological reality is causing a growing inability to separate ourselves from our entrenched views and a worldview that is shrinking in concert with our availability biases. If you don’t understand cognitive dissonance, you will never change your life.
But come on, people of the interwebs, 2016 as the worst year ever? And by now, probably claims of 2017 being even worse. I’m not the first person to highlight just how ridiculous this is, of course… but let’s run through a few examples for fun. Tell the people of the mid-14th century, when the black plague decimated 1/3 of the population of Europe, that 2016 was worse. Dogs were feasting on the carcasses of your neighbors in the streets!
Or tell that to the people bordering the Mongolian Steppe in the early 13th century when Ghengis Khan was systematically slaughtering millions of people. WWI? WWII? 1918 Spanish Flu? The Black Plague? Russian Revolution? Stalin? Hitler? Did anyone hear of these people and events which killed tens of millions of people in very short spans of years? Need I go on? Will Durant, one of the great historians of the last century once quipped that “Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.” Amen, brother.
Ok, so 2016 … probably not the “worst year ever” when it comes to the realities of life/death mayhem. Nevertheless, I’ll give the internet wizards who started these sensational rumors this—from the standpoint of root issues beginning to dissolve humanity’s cohesive tissue, 2016 was indeed a bad seed year. But what’s the cause for creating this sensationalism in the first place? Most likely, philosophical and psychological issues beneath the surfaces of our collective mind, life, and soul are the ones producing these types of things in the world. 2016 and now 2017 HAVE been vintage years for continuing to lose our defenses against bad ideas.
Critical thinking is on the decline and seems absent from most education the world around. We are distracted by a zillion self-inflicted interruptions. As an example, a Dutch city recently installed pedestrian “stop/walk” signals on the ground to protect their smartphone-addicted zombie residents from getting killed at crosswalks.
The Atlantic ran an article about how smartphones might have destroyed the social potential of the current generation — and it’s a compelling argument worth reading. Happiness is declining as we get richer and people are getting lonelier even as social media explodes in usage.
Creativity is on the decline and tribalism is amped way up in one of the more negative political climates, well, who knows; possibly since Roman times! Artificial intelligence is finally out-thinking its masters. And emotional intelligence is declining in a world of social media where most don’t listen or even read more than the headline before re-posting opinions they barely have enough context to understand on a surface level. But this is easier so as to avoid the Cognitive dissonance which comes from trying to have ideas that oppose your life’s internal narrative. But we’ll come back to that later.
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Time For a Change
So let’s run with this a second. You might want to push one or all of these reset buttons because the world isn’t all shiny happy people…and you aren’t either. So let’s say you realize that the root issues within our human nature became so bad that you think everything needs a reset. Do you have the guts? What might get fixed if you push any of these three buttons? But what if you looked at this another way? For now, let’s overlook the greater issue of human nature. So while I initially framed these as being global resets, what if you instead took these reset buttons as personal reset buttons? Let’s re-look at each of them in this new light.
First, Mind. Do you think critical and creative thinking would relieve you of tribalism, egoism, and susceptibility to emotional manipulation? Would you be more creative and enjoy life more if you didn’t have these hindrances? If you pushed it, how would you like your mind to rebuild? The same way it is now? Or with an evolved critical and creative thinking, coupled with far better tools to manage your emotions, biases and self-delusions?
Next, Life. Go to the mirror in the bathroom and look at that person in the eye. Are you really living a life you desire and one you designed for yourself? Do you see how deep the roots of society and your culture go towards shaping who and what you’re able to become? If you could shed some of the thornier parts of our human nature at your own volition, would you learn to live better? If you could reset all your relationships with different foundations of your choosing, how would that enhance your life? If you could opt out of parts of your culture or societal norms that aren’t serving you without guilt or fear of reprisal, would you be happier? If you could embrace the rapid evolution that’s coming as a creative renaissance instead of fearing the change, would you be better off?
Finally, Soul. While you’re still in the bathroom, ask that person in the mirror if they know why you’re here. If Jean-Paul Sartre were able to tap into your Nest cam via cosmic feed, would he say you’re living in “bad faith?” In other words, are you wearing the masks that society or your culture, job, religion or family want you to wear that don’t necessarily represent your true self? Are you challenging yourself every day to step across the bridge that Kierkegaard called anguish? Are you aspiring to be Nietzsche’s Superman and putting in the work it takes to ascend the mountain? If you were in Victor Frankl’s deathbed looking back, would you feel like you had found meaning in your life, or even bothered to look? Have you had enough of my existentialism what-ifs that try to shed light on the person you can aspire to be? I hope not because I have dozens of these. And, as far as writers go, ‘I’ll be here all week, so tip your waitresses…’
At this point, you might be asking yourself why is being human so hard? For one, because evolution strapped us with wiring that helped us survive that we no longer need for the most part. So one fundamental that seems relevant at this very root level of the first podcast is cognitive dissonance. In our context here, we’re referring to the internal battle to change our own minds because it is mentally challenging to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind.
And it is especially challenging to evolve away from what we’ve been culturally programmed to think and what our social tribes expect us to believe. Cognitive dissonance is really just Psychology 101 stuff that you likely read and may have forgotten after the test. Still, I’m not sure people process just how relevant or prevalent of an issue this is becoming in a social media world. A world where your mental heuristics and implicit biases must kick in all the time because you literally don’t have time to think anymore. Let’s dissect this internal civil war that more people need to be fighting, but aren’t.
Why You’re Struggling To Change Your Life
The American mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “A clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.” But what if that clashing is within your mind? Is a civil war around a core topic a survivable event inside the skull of one person? Who fires the first shot? And who raises the flag of surrender to end the conflict?
Let’s raise the stakes. What if the doctrine in question is something ideologically critical, like a belief in God or religion? You might think that’s nearly impossible. But the Indian neuroscientist VS Ramachandran has proved it is possible. Anyway, he has done studies on split-brain patients where this exact scenario has occurred—one half of a person’s brain was an atheist and the other half believed in God. I want to have that guy — well, both of those guys, I suppose! — over for a dinner party and hear the one-man-theological debate. In fact, the theological issues alone raised by this situation may have to be the topic of an entirely different article …
But back to the point. This is obviously an extreme example. But the mental civil war does apply to you. Everyone knows they get conflicted about things in life. The psychological mechanics of it, however, may be unknown to you and could be causing problems. The internal struggle itself is a mental condition called cognitive dissonance. Any human being with a brain will suffer from this—some more than others—because it’s simply an everyday reality of the human experience.
The question is, how well do you cope with it? And do you acknowledge the discord about the issues that matter? Or do you ignore them because of the discomfort this condition makes you experience? And where does that leave you on important issues that you’re choosing not to face? Are you avoiding critically essential topics dear to the person you aspire to be and possibly don’t even know it?
But first, why does it even matter? Simply put, feeling torn about issues causes anxiety and angst. What happens next with most people suffering from cognitive dissonance is they make a wrong decision, no decision or come up with justifications for the simplest opinion there is. Most people don’t know this even happens. It’s completely automatic.
So what happens when the stakes are high, and the dissonance you’re hiding from is religion, politics, sexuality or some other major issue? You may be hiding from who you really are because of this psychological tendency to avoid letting in some conflicting viewpoint to your current worldview. You might be drastically self-censoring your life because you’ve trained yourself to avoid the very unpleasant feeling of cognitive dissonance.
This isn’t some new discovery. Humans have known about cognitive dissonance for at least two and a half millennia in the writing of the ancient Greeks. Aesop’s fable The Fox and The Grapes has a hungry fox decide the grapes are sour to resolve in his mind the conflict between hunger and his inability to get to them. He adopted a worldview of “sour grapes” to make himself comfortable with the fact that he failed in reaching his goal. So how might this mindset have changed your life for the worse? What have small twists like this shaped your world?
But you don’t even need a fable. Just find the nearest child and tell them that a particular toy they’re excited about cannot be played with anymore. Then, ask them later what they think of it. It’s likely that it will have dropped in status significantly! This has been proved and retested with a lot of variation.
Another problem is this leads to a cascade of other psychological traps. For example, once you have started to justify or convince yourself of a position to dissipate the cognitive dissonance, you’ll then continue to build a case. Let’s say you’re in a family of staunch Republicans, but you’re having challenged feelings about their positions. This dissonance will start to cause conflicts for you in your life with your family.
Most people will lessen the conflict probably by going along and then justifying their positions. Because you don’t want to fight with them, you’ll subconsciously flood your inputs with data to support those views.
This is called confirmation bias—the gathering of data that makes you feel good about a dishonest position. This is why Republicans watch Fox News and Democrats watch MSNBC. These biased, one-sided inputs make your brain feel safe because of the continual reconfirmation of the position you’ve decided upon to ease the dissonance. It will also lead to bandwagon or herd mentality and potentially towards a spiral of other biases.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t all bad. It’s likely that we’re still here and at the top of the food chain at least in part because of it. It seems likely that it is a psychological development from evolution that formed to protect us in one way or another. The group cohesion that may result from not following dissonant instincts to go against the grain might have been a powerful survival mechanism selected for over centuries of evolution.
So what are the “sour grapes” you’ve made in your life? What decisions and stances have you ignored, justified or been hypocritical about merely to avoid the unpleasant nature of the feeling? In the movie The Matrix, the character Morpheus calls it like the feeling of having a splinter in your mind. It’s a discomfort you’re trying to ignore.
Will Durant also once wrote that “inquiry is fatal to certainty.” If you think about it, overcoming the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is as simple as those five words. If you honestly question the discomfort — and the issues causing it — it will lead to firing the first shots in your mental civil war on this issue. The only way to reach a cease-fire is to expose the dissonance and work hard to dissipate it. It won’t happen quickly or easily.
Actually, if I’ve said things that challenge your worldview a little too much here, your cognitive dissonance might try to persuade you that this podcast is a bunch of crap. And perhaps it is! But maybe — just maybe — the conflict you’re feeling is the start of an internal war. Have you been afraid of the conflict because you can’t handle the work it would take to fight through it?
But ask yourself, how might your life look if you endured the civil war? Isn’t it better to be true than compliant? Are you hiding your head in the sand like an ostrich … even though ostriches don’t do actually that? Maybe the Hollywood metaphor is better; get that splinter out of your mind, lest it sinks even deeper.
Only You Can Change Your Life
So how do you change? Changing yourself with lasting effect is not easy. These challenges, traps, and hindrances have been baked into our human nature for hundreds of thousands of years. I’ve barely sketched out a framework of some of this for myself after spending over a decade — well, a whole life, really— trying to figure out what I needed to work on the most. Even after all the time I’ve invested writing and thinking about this, I’m still barely an expert in my own psychosis. And as Socrates said, “I cannot teach anyone anything” anyway. I can try to invent thought experiments and metaphors like the reset buttons, but only you can decide to hit them … and what it means when you do.
It’s time to fire the first shot in your own internal civil war. If you view pushing one–or all three–of these buttons as a nuclear option, it might finally threaten to blow away the walls you may have up around some of your unchallenged ideas and outdated modes of thinking. So ask yourself: What are you hiding from? What conflict have you sensed recently and overcome by justifying a potentially bad decision for yourself? What will you do instead the next time you think you might be conflicted on something?
If your brain is comfortable with all of its positions, you’re probably not challenging yourself. Which means you’ll never really commit to fighting the critical, internal battle required to change your life. You should feel conflict; it is very hard, but very necessary, to ask better questions. Answers are a dime a dozen. You want to be armed with more and better questions that defy answers by forcing deeper investigation.
Now that you have a clearer view of your mind, can you manage it interacting with other minds in society and all of the culture’s influence? And will it lead you to the better footing on which to stand with the big existential questions of life? The only questions that really matter?
How to Change Your Life
Here’s a first life experiment to try out right now to see if you’re ready to commit to making change in your life. Pick a big picture issue in your life that you haven’t questioned in a long time (maybe religion? politics? relationships? social life?). Or, pick something that you know you’ve been conflicted on before, and force yourself to question it. Write down the position you think you’ve settled on — in fact, you may even find this hard to do if you don’t really believe in your position. Now google for about ten articles or videos on the opposite view. Review that research without judgment and take notes. Now, reread your position. How do you feel? First shots of the civil war fired?
But besides this specific life experiment, I’d like to leave you with a more general challenge. What are the new premises you’d set for a reset of your mind? Meaning, what if you wiped the hard drive of your mind clean and started to rethink how you think entirely? Or what about a complete reset of society which, for you individually, might mean shredding the social contract you’ve metaphorically signed and rewriting your own? And what about a reset of everything — a complete existential restart as to how you tackle the big questions of life?
Change is Hard; but Change is good
We fear change because change is hard. And we fear hard things because we might fail. But what if change is good? What if certain kinds of fear are good? And what if failing is actually really, really good?
In a way, don’t you have this ability every morning? Every day of your life, you can begin to reset yourself by resetting the premises upon which you live your life. It’s not easy — in fact, it takes a lot of practice — but it is possible. And one reason it’s not easy is that to enact your newly reset premises; you’ll likely be at odds with those that society has arbitrarily set for you. But even though you can’t reset Society itself, you can rewrite what Edmund Burke called your social contract. And even though you can’t reset evolution itself, you can reboot your approach to your search for meaning day to day. What if just taking on this challenge was enough to change everything for you?
All three of the reset buttons are just metaphors, of course. But the reset button is hope. The reset button is empowerment. The reset button is an enlightened call for change. But the reset button is only available if you own up to needing a reset to your mind, life soul; or, all of the above. If you know you can reset things, it puts the onus back to you. And it belongs on you. Just as for your friend or neighbor, it belongs on them. You have to fire the first shot in your civil war, because your internal opposition will be the most likely reason you’ll never attempt to push any of these reset buttons in the first place.
So, which one will you push? Do you have the guts to push any of them? And what is the narrative of the new reality will you replace it with? George Carlin also once joked that “life is a near-death experience.” It’s brilliant because, like all great humor, it reveals a painful truth that most of us refuse to accept or even acknowledge. Each day brings you — like it or not — one step closer to being dead. So basically, I’m ending on a high note. But think about it; your outlook on that statement is everything. Do you see being one step closer to death as something to fear? Or a challenge to overcome?
Do you see being ‘one step closer to death‘ as something to fear? Or as a challenge to overcome?
While you ponder that, I’ll leave you with some profound, philosophical wisdom from the lead singer of the band Tool, a one-of-a-kind artist named Maynard James Keenan. I saw them a few months ago in Chicago. At the beginning their song Opiate, and after some political commentary about the depressing up state of the world, he reassured the crowd by saying: “Everything’s going to be ok … or not. Good luck.”
Now … Start Changing your Life
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Notes
Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from the introduction episode of my philosophy podcast Evolve Faster, and has been edited to make it stand alone. The original audio version can be found here, which is an exploration of how to create meaning in life.
Change Your Life (Or Die Trying) Was Inspired by:
Inspirations: Maynard James Keenan Musician best known as lead singer for bands like Tool, A Perfect Circle & Puscifer. Because really … Everything might be ok. Charlie Brooker Creator of the famous TV show Black Mirror. No matter if his stories do come true, they provide us a lot to worry about while keeping it highly entertaining. Christopher Hitchens For such a hardcore realist to provide us with one of the best definitions of the unknown entity – soul, because there’s no better metaphor. Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher whose attempt to provide the definition of best what a human can be ended up falsely defining the worst a human can be. Episode EF2 was further inspired by The Reptilians, Viktor Frankl, VS Ramachandran, Aesop, Donald Trump, and Genghis Khan. For a full list of data and references please see the Intro Episode Show Notes.
references and Footnotes
Bill Vallicella, Cognitive Dissonance or Doxastic Dissonance?. maverickphilosopher.typepad.com, https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2014/06/cognitive-dissonance-or-doxastic-dissonance.html (accessed: 2 December, 2017)
Brooke Donald, Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online. ed.stanford.edu, https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online (accessed: 2 December, 2017)
Hannah Keyser, Why Do Ostriches Stick Their Heads in the Sand?. mentalfloss.com, http://mentalfloss.com/article/56176/why-do-ostriches-stick-their-heads-sand (accessed: 1 December, 2017)
Leonid Perlovsky, A challenge to human evolution—cognitive dissonance. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3622034/ (accessed: 1 December, 2017)
Pasko Rakic, The Development and Shaping of the Brain. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234146/ (accessed: 2 December, 2017)
Robin Wright, Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war (accessed: 28 February, 2017)
Saul McLeod, Cognitive Dissonance?. www.simplypsychology.org, https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html (accessed: 5 December, 2017)
Thea Buckley, What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?. www.scientificamerican.com, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1/ (accessed: 1 December, 2017)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/10/gallup-study-confirms-that-2017-really-is-worse-than-2016/?utm_term=.19988e7f0f37 “Study” confirms 2017 really is worse than 2016. Hmm.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234146/ : “To arrive at the more than 100 billion neurons that are the normal complement of a newborn baby, the brain must grow at the rate of about 250,000 nerve cells per minute, on average, throughout the course of pregnancy.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war – “In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/26/the-doomsday-clock-just-moved-again-its-now-two-and-a-half-minutes-to-midnight/ – “In announcing that the Doomsday Clock was moving 30 seconds closer to the end of humanity, the group noted that in 2016, “the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change. But the organization also cited the election of President Trump in changing the symbolic clock.”
http://mentalfloss.com/article/56176/why-do-ostriches-stick-their-heads-sand – “During the incubation period, both mom and dad ostrich take turns rotating the eggs with their beaks, a task that requires them to submerge their heads into the nest, thereby creating the illusion that their heads are buried in the sand.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26792-lizard-penises-evolve-super-fast/ “This fast evolution could be explained by female preferences for new male shapes that better fit or stimulate them, or by a gendered arms race.”
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=170433
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? – The Atlantic – We are becoming less well-armed to defeat the dragon of chaos. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
People won’t stop staring at their phones, so this Dutch town put traffic lights on the ground — Quartz – https://qz.com/942104/people-wont-stop-staring-at-their-phones-so-this-dutch-town-put-traffic-lights-on-the-ground/